Roger Director
Every Christmas, thousands of wealthy Americans open their houses to some of the country’s most ragged, foul-smelling scum—their child’s college friends. These are individuals who, if they even got past the security gate would normally have been torn to bits by guard dogs, and yet they must be housed and dined simply because they share a bathroom or a classroom or a sexually transmitted disease with Junior.
If you’re the friend being invited, you’ve spent at least a semester hearing how screwed-up your friend’s parents are, and telling your friend how screwed-up yours are, and now you get to see for yourself. What better time than Christmas to watch a family at its most dysfunctional? This is when all Christians torture themselves trying to have a Christmas just like one they never had in the first place. What is that, if not mass delusion?
But this doesn’t befall everybody. Some escape. Being Jewish helps.
I didn’t know whether or not Penelope Gund was devout about Christmas when I was invited to spend the holiday at her home, but I knew she was the most un-Jewish person I’d met in two years at college.
The reason I was going was simple. I had a car; Penelope was taking her girlfriend Ryan back home for Christmas, and neither had wheels.
Ryan was a vivid freshman from Seattle whom Penelope had encountered at her first Bryn Mawr tea. Penelope was tall and tapered as a carrot and looked out over her granny glasses as if she didn’t care about a thing, whereas Ryan counted any day as bad during which for one second she had ceased pursuing her ambition to make an original contribution to mankind. She wanted to create so many new vaccines they’d have to invent new diseases.
I’d had Ryan in my sights since I met her. Now was my chance. I had a car. I would achieve a singular ascent in her esteem by making myself impossible to avoid. Lately, Ryan had been ingeniously evasive. For the past week, she’d begun altering her schedule and her movements—never in her library carrel after dinner; taking the West exit from the dining hall instead of the East—ever since, during a late-night study session for an art history test, I’d said, “If I have to look at any more of these fat, little Jesus babies, I’ll stab myself in the head.” She looked at me with one of those frowns that said I carelessly just had.
My nineteen-year-old logic dictated that the inability to avoid me would result in Ryan wanting to have sex. My plan had this working for it: Penelope had said she lived in “a small place” in Tunbridge, Vermont, and I pictured overloaded, haphazard sleeping arrangements that might induce Ryan to get a little less chilly.
Penelope’s boyfriend was coming, too. Jim. He was the biggest Christian I’d ever met. Literally. He weighed about 375 pounds. And he was an African from the West Indies. He was about six feet two inches square, with wavy hair that fell down way below his shoulders and an unkempt black goatee. He looked like a giant walking groin. Watching Penelope’s parents and four sisters meet Jim was going to be great theater. Ryan and I could only bond over that spectacle.
Penelope’s house stood at the end of a long drive between rows of sugar maples. “Small” turned out to be what folks of Penelope’s ilk called “a pile”—three stories’ worth. There were outbuildings. Real outbuildings. The only building I’d ever been in that started with the word out had no plumbing. Penelope’s “little” home in Vermont was, in fact, a compound.
James, Ryan, and I stretched and rubbed our arms and squinted at our own frosty breath and gaped at the tree-spired horizon while Penelope rapped on the red front door and glanced down at a heap of her younger sisters’ L.L.Bean snow boots.
Mrs. Gund turned out to be a stale-looking smaller version of Penelope. Her eyes rounded with cheer at the sight of her eldest daughter. The four younger sisters floated like sylphs toward the entrance, as if carried on a waft of cinnamon and clove spice and Christmas cookie baking.
In other words, this was the Christmas tableau you’d see spinning around on the metal greeting card carousel at the local pharmacy while you were waiting on line to buy a condom.
“Are you ready for the shit to hit the fan?” I asked James.
“For what?” James said. He was drawing a blank. Which is why I loved James so much. No matter his appearance, he walked with innocence.
Mrs. Gund had never greeted anyone at her red front door who was wearing a dashiki, not to mention one the size of a termite tarp. Maybe that’s why she held out her hand to me and said, “I’ve heard so much about you, James.”
“Mother, this is James,” Penelope quickly corrected, redirecting her mother’s attention.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Gund,” James said, like the proper Groton grad he was.
Mrs. Gund was soon back in the kitchen looking even staler than before, marinating her holiday specialty—bunny rabbit. Hopping had always been a disqualifier for me when I got to noodling the merits of food I loved. But this was Christmas. Mrs. Gund was also rolling out “rum balls” according to the recipe of an old aunt Audrey in Auburn, Alabama.
Meanwhile, James engaged the sisters, Avery, Anthea, Sally, and Jen. When he sat, his thighs became park benches. They took turns. Ten-year-old Avery perched on James’s vast lap, and he joked, “What do you want for Christmas, little girl?” and we all laughed because he was the perfect Santa.
Penelope’s father, Errol, was away at “the kingdom,” which, Penelope explained, was a swatch of hillside ten miles away where he intended to build a new Valhalla.
“Everyone’s got to see ‘the kingdom,’” she said. “Dad stands there and takes a deep breath and looks out. ‘Nothing but splendor. Far as the eye can see,’ he says.” Penelope used her dad’s deep voice and imitated the majestic wave of his arm.
Since retiring from the State Department, Errol Gund spent most of his time at “the kingdom.” Even though (as I instantly saw after, when we emerged from the woods) there was nothing there. At least, nothing visible to maintain. There was just Mr. Gund standing at the northwest corner of a stony, fifty-acre meadow that faced the Connecticut River Valley. Mr. Gund had a barrel chest and a chalky face and a noticeable overbite. He held a coffee mug, but the twist he gave his mouth every time he took a sip seemed to say he was experiencing something other than caffeine. A series of unfinished wood pegs were driven into the ground near his feet. Slender red string wound around them.
Errol Gund was standing in what would one day be his living room when Mrs. Gund said, “This is James.” Mr. Gund blinked and looked down at his pegs.
“Welcome to the kingdom, James,” Mr. Gund said.
“Thank you, Mr. Gund. It’s quite beautiful,” James said like the proper doctor’s son he was.
Everyone thought it was beautiful. Ryan shouted, “Merry Christmas!” and bounded downhill into the wind, in a gleeful, free-spirited gambol. She glanced over her shoulder, straight back at me. I realized maybe she expected me to take off with her, to gambol downhill alongside in ecstatic, liberated communion.
I didn’t. I wasn’t much of a gamboler.
Before dinner, Mr. Gund lifted his glass and, from memory, chanted in Old English what he said was a thousand-year-old wassail toast, something straight out of Beowulf:
“Wealhoeo malpelode, heo fore paem werede spraec…”
After rabbit stew, we sat by the fire, Penelope’s father in a pale yellow, button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and tan cuffed pants. He’d brought his glass from the table. And a tray of Mrs. Gund’s special holiday rum balls.
I tried one of them. Mainly out of politeness. I gagged. It was all I could do to keep the eyeballs in my head. On my list of favorite spherical foods, they’d go way below matzah balls and meatballs. Mr. Gund popped them like Raisinets.
Two white sofas flanked the mantel, from which Christmas stockings hung. Mr. Gund and James sat opposite each other. Penelope involved herself in prodding and poking the logs. Her mother sat at the end of the couch closest to her. Mrs. Gund clasped some creased, stained song sheets for carols she intended for us all to sing. “I’m so happy you made it home for Christmas,” she told Penelope with tears in her eyes.
Ryan examined the Christmas tree, taken right off the kingdom’s own land. Ryan admired the ornaments, old and handmade.
“We have one back home in Seattle. It’s this hollowed-out sort of giant acorn with the Magi in it. It’s been in my mother’s family for generations. It was on her mother’s tree. It was on her grandmother’s tree. And it was on her great-grandmother’s tree.”
“There’s something about a beautiful old ornament like that,” I said, realizing I had no idea, yet hoping I didn’t sound too much that way. But Ryan didn’t seem to mind. She was warming to me. She liked telling me about her old Christmas tree ornaments. We paused to appreciate the crackling fire.
“Did you see him this afternoon at ‘the kingdom’?” I whispered to Ryan.
“Who?”
“Mr. Gund.”
“What about him?”
“When he saw James he looked like he wanted to yank those stakes from the ground,” I said.
I was trying to sound familiar, but Ryan looked put off.
“Don’t you see, James is his worst nightmare,” I said.
“You’re so immature,” Ryan said, and she moved away.
Mr. Gund slapped his knees, rose, and showed us some of the things he had amassed in embassies overseas. He finished off a couple more rum balls, then took a carved wooden African mask down from the wall and let his hands play along its smooth finish and knobby cheeks. This was a special tribal mask, he said. He explained that it was a fertility god, and it had been presented to him as a gift for helping out in a disagreement between one tribe and an adversary who threatened to consume their livers if not given enough sacred parrot feathers.
“Mind if I examine that, sir?” James asked.
“Be my guest,” Mr. Gund said, handing over the mask and, on the way back to his seat, dispatching the remaining rum balls. Mr. Gund’s face was beginning to look red. Beads of perspiration appeared along his forehead. You could see how his hair was thinning, because the redder he got, the more his scalp shined through.
Avery came over. She sat on James’s knee and looked at the mask as if for the first time. Her sudden, intense interest seemed to prompt James. He saw how intrigued she was. He lifted the mask and put it over his face and playfully growled, “Tell me what you want for Christmas, little girl,” for maybe the twentieth time, which never failed to crack them both up.
Mr. Gund looked distracted. He muttered something and retired to the bedroom. Mrs. Gund said, “I guess we’ll sing these tomorrow,” and then told everyone where to find the bedroom they’d been assigned. This organizational chore seemed to brighten her increasingly pale cheeks.
James snored. Nothing could sound so loud. The flight deck of an aircraft carrier in full battle operation, maybe. My bones rattled from the sonic waves.
I hadn’t wound up bunking anywhere near Ryan. Mrs. Gund had secured her and the other girls in their own wing and sentenced me to bunking in the same room as James. I thought to myself abjectly, “Some Christmas Eve this is,” before remembering I didn’t celebrate the holiday.
I tried every mental trick I knew to get to sleep. Counting was no good. I imagined I was homeless, sleeping on a street grate on a frigid night in the dead of winter—a sort of reverse-psychological ploy to relish what comfort I had. But that didn’t work.
I decided not to recoil from James’s snoring, but to welcome it, accept it, treat it like part of the environment. I mentally catalogued his fascinating assortment of snores. A series of harsh, booming exhales, sort of like surfacing whales clearing their blowholes. Punctuated by raspy bleats like a bugler’s call to charge. Then a long, excruciating tearing wail that sounded like a torso being fed through a mill saw.
Nothing worked. I laughed to myself. James, the Santa, snoring next to me, dead to the world, while he ought to be off on his sleigh like a whirlwind.
The inability to sleep inevitably focuses your mind on one of the most profound questions of human existence: “What am I doing here?” That’s what I asked myself finally, in the dark of that Christmas Eve. “What am I doing here? In this house? For Christmas? Chasing a girl who looks at me as if I were a bowl of soggy corn flakes? What am I doing here?”
My last resort was to combat noise with noise itself. There was a turntable on the nightstand beside my bed. A pair of headphones was plugged into it. I snagged them from the floor and snapped them over my ears. For a moment, there was silence. But the headphones proved no barrier to James. I could have predicted that. Now I turned on the phonograph. The record spun. I dropped the arm at the end of the album in the smooth, black, grooveless inner ring where the needle could glide and drift endlessly, like a raft bobbing on the waves. A gentle, sensuous tropical wind spilled out of the headphones and into my brain. I turned up the volume. My head bobbed back onto the pillow.
Shhhhhhhsssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhsssss-ssssshhhhhhhhhhhh.
I was asleep in seconds.
ONLY TO BE WOKEN UP BY A TERRIBLE NOISE. Errol Gund was standing in the doorway screaming and waving a gun. He’s here to shoot James, I thought.
I couldn’t hear distinctly what Mr. Gund was saying. I jacked myself up on my elbows, blinking and realizing there was something on my head—oh, the headphones. I tugged them off and immediately heard the deafening roar of accumulating hell blasting from the phonograph speakers out into the room and the rest of the house.
“TALK ABOUT THE MIDNIGHT RAMBLER…”
At that moment, Mr. Gund’s revolver muzzle spat red. The phonograph exploded in pieces.
That stopped the music. Mr. Gund lurked for a moment in the half-dark of the hallway before he turned away to address approaching expressions of alarm from upstairs.
My heart was pounding. My ears felt wronged. I saw that my headphones were no longer connected to the phonograph. That might explain why the music had begun blasting from the record player speakers. I must have rolled over and yanked the headphones out… and the needle must have automatically begun playing the record again. What album was it? “Midnight Rambler” was on Let It Bleed. Or was it Beggars Banquet?
None of this woke James. He continued snoring. He was oblivious. And then I realized: Mr. Gund hadn’t come downstairs in a rum ball–fueled rage to silence his daughter’s freakish boyfriend and take a potshot at Satan’s version of a potential son-in-law. He’d been enraged by me.
I got out of bed and snuck a look. The sisters and Ryan were arrayed along the landing in their nightclothes sniffing at the greasy cloud of gunpowder that overcame the scent of baked sugar from the kitchen.
“I heard an intruder, all right?” Mr. Gund was telling them in a gruff voice that sounded more irritated than reassuring. He had already laid the gun aside on a table among some pocket change and mail, as if hoping it might be camouflaged in the scatter. He tried to move things along. “Nobody’s hurt. Go back to sleep.”
Aunt Audrey’s rum balls can do that to you.
The next morning there was a pot of coffee on the kitchen counter. Some mugs had been put out. Also a pint of mocha-flavored creamer and a small wicker basket holding a blue-and-pink rank of sugar packets. People moved about in hushed tones, but I couldn’t tell if it was any more quiet than usual.
Then Penelope’s mother said, “That certainly gave me a fright last night.” She held a cup of coffee between her hands and looked down and away, her eyes wistful and sorrowful.
“What happened, Mrs. Gund?” James said. He hadn’t seen anyone yet. He was returning from a run, wearing a boysenberry-colored sweat suit. He had knotted a yellow bandanna around his forehead. He looked like a costumed advertisement for some store or another, the kind you see holding an arrow and telling people to come in and pick up a bargain.
“I woke up to go running and I saw the record player was all…” James went, “Pssssh.” A mini-explosion. Then he laughed. And all the girls laughed.
“You slept through it,” I told him.
“Slept through what?” James said, and everyone howled. Mrs. Gund, Penelope, all her sisters, and Ryan. Absolutely howled, all the more because James didn’t get why they were laughing.
“Mr. Gund took a shot at me last night,” I said for James’s benefit. He looked really puzzled and seemed to be owed an explanation of some sort about the sudden raucous laughter.
“No kidding?” James said.
“But he missed,” said Mrs. Gund, making a joke. She had evidently gained a better mood. There were carols playing on the radio. All eyes turned to the Christmas tree and the mounds of colorfully wrapped gifts beneath it.
“Your father’s already left for ‘the kingdom,’” Mrs. Gund said. She seemed pleased that he was gone. “Let’s open the presents now.”
The Gund sisters bolted for the tree. Ryan beamed at the sight. I beamed, too. I felt comforted, as if watching a calamity from a safe distance. But I knew I’d never understand these people.