JOHN: In the middle of the night, I think we will have more to do than to give you the tiniest, meanest pinch to find out.
MOLLIE: Still—
JOHN: Still. I still love the ocean and scenery on the shore. I could still make shore dinners of lobsters and clams and seaweed.
MOLLIE: What did Paris mean? The square root of wonderful?
JOHN: Just something I told him in another context.
MOLLIE: But what is the square root of wonderful?
JOHN: You.
MOLLIE: Me? Arithmetic isn’t it?
JOHN: That’s right, Mollie.
MOLLIE: Does it multiply?
JOHN: No. More like divide.
MOLLIE: Me divide? To me love multiplies. When I fell in love with Phillip I loved everybody.
JOHN: Everybody?
MOLLIE: The manager of the Peach Festival, Tootsie Johnson and Billie Little.
JOHN: Who’s Billie Little?
MOLLIE: Just somebody I knew in those far-off days of love. Luminous, you might say, like this table . . . this chair.
JOHN: This table, this chair?
MOLLIE: . . . and when I fell in love with you, John, I loved everybody.
JOHN: Everybody again?
MOLLIE: Phillip. The yardman, Sister, Mother Lovejoy . . .
JOHN: The yardman and Sister are all right. But I would have drawn the line at Mother Lovejoy.
MOLLIE: But don’t you understand . . . if I had not loved so much, John, could I love you as I do?
THE CURTAIN FALLS
ESSAYS AND OTHER WRITINGS
CHRISTMAS
Home for Christmas
SOMETIMES IN AUGUST, weary of the vacant, broiling after noon, my younger brother and sister and I would gather in the dense shade under the oak tree in the back yard and talk of Christmas and sing carols. Once after such a conclave, when the tunes of the carols still lingered in the heat-shimmered air, I remember climbing up into the tree-house and sitting there alone for a long time.
Brother called up: “What are you doing?”
“Thinking,” I answered.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, how can you be thinking when you don’t know what you are thinking about?”
I did not want to talk with my brother. I was experiencing the first wonder about the mystery of Time. Here I was, on this August afternoon, in the tree-house, in the burnt, jaded yard, sick and tired of all our summer ways. (I had read Little Women for the second time, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Little Men, and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. I had read movie magazines and even tried to read love stories in the Woman’s Home Companion—I was so sick of everything.) How could it be that I was I and now was now when in four months it would be Christmas, wintertime, cold weather, twilight and the glory of the Christmas tree? I puzzled about the now and later and rubbed the inside of my elbow until there was a little roll of dirt between my forefinger and thumb. Would the now I of the tree-house and the August afternoon be the same I of winter, firelight and the Christmas tree? I wondered.
My brother repeated: “You say you are thinking but you don’t know what you are thinking about. What are you really doing up there? Have you got some secret candy?”
September came, and my mother opened the cedar chest and we tried on winter coats and last year’s sweaters to see if they would do again. She took the three of us downtown and bought us new shoes and school clothes.
Christmas was nearer on the September Sunday that Daddy rounded us up in the car and drove us out on dusty country roads to pick elderberry blooms. Daddy made wine from elderberry blossoms—it was a yellow-white wine, the color of weak winter sun. The wine was dry to the wry side—indeed, some years it turned to vinegar. The wine was served at Christmastime with slices of fruitcake when company came. On November Sundays we went to the woods with a big basket of fried chicken dinner, thermos jug and coffee-pot. We hunted partridge berries in the pine woods near our town. These scarlet berries grew hidden underneath the glossy brown pine needles that lay in a slick carpet beneath the tall wind-singing trees. The bright berries were a Christmas decoration, lasting in water through the whole season.
In December the windows downtown were filled with toys, and my brother and sister and I were given two dollars apiece to buy our Christmas presents. We patronized the ten-cent stores, choosing between jackstones, pencil boxes, water colors and satin handkerchief holders. We would each buy a nickel’s worth of lump milk chocolate at the candy counter to mouth as we trudged from counter to counter, choice to choice. It was exacting and final—taking several afternoons—for the dime stores would not take back or exchange.
Mother made fruitcakes, and for weeks ahead the family picked out the nut meats of pecans and walnuts, careful of the bitter layer of the pecans that lined your mouth with nasty fur. At the last I was allowed to blanch the almonds, pinching the scalded nuts so that they sometimes hit the ceiling or bounced across the room. Mother cut slices of citron and crystallized pineapple, figs and dates, and candied cherries were added whole. We cut rounds of brown paper to line the pans. Usually the cakes were mixed and put into the oven when we were in school. Late in the afternoon the cakes would be finished, wrapped in white napkins on the breakfast-room table. Later they would be soaked in brandy. These fruitcakes were famous in our town, and Mother gave them often as Christmas gifts. When company came thin slices of fruitcake, wine and coffee were always served. When you held a slice of fruitcake to the window or the firelight the slice was translucent, pale citron green and yellow and red, with the glow and richness of our church windows.
Daddy was a jeweler, and his store was kept open until midnight all Christmas week. I, as the eldest child, was allowed to stay up late with Mother until Daddy came home. Mother was always nervous without a “man in the house.” (On those rare occasions when Daddy had to stay overnight on business in Atlanta, the children were armed with a hammer, saw and a monkey wrench. When pressed about her anxieties Mother claimed she was afraid of “escaped convicts or crazy people.” I never saw an escaped convict, but once a “crazy” person did come to see us. She was an old, old lady dressed in elegant black taffeta, my mother’s second cousin once removed, and came on a tranquil Sunday morning and announced that she had always liked our house and she intended to stay with us until she died. Her sons and daughters and grandchildren gathered around to plead with her as she sat rocking in our front porch rocking chair and she left not unwillingly when they promised a car ride and ice cream.) Nothing ever happened on those evenings in Christmas week, but I felt grown, aged suddenly by trust and dignity. Mother confided in secrecy what the younger children were getting from Santa Claus. I knew where the Santa Claus things were hidden, and was appointed to see that my brother and sister did not go into the back-room closet or the wardrobe in our parents’ room.
Christmas Eve was the longest day, but it was lined with the glory of tomorrow. The sitting-room smelled of floor wax and the clean, cold odor of the spruce tree. The Christmas tree stood in a corner of the front room, tall as the ceiling, majestic, undecorated. It was our family custom that the tree was not decorated until after we children were in bed on Christmas Eve night. We went to bed very early, as soon as it was winter dark. I lay in the bed beside my sister and tried to keep her awake.
“You want to guess again about your Santa Claus?”
“We’ve already done that so much,” she said.
My sister slept. And there again was another puzzle. How could it be that when she opened her eyes it would be Christmas while I lay awake in the dark for hours and hours? The time was the same for both of us, and yet not at all the same. What was it? How? I thought of Bethlehem and cherry candy, Jesus and skyrockets. It was dark when I awoke. We were allowed to get up on Christmas at five o’clock. Later I found out that Daddy juggled the clock Christmas Eve so that five o’clock was actually six. Anyway it was always still dark when w
e rushed in to dress by the kitchen stove. The rule was that we dress and eat breakfast before we could go in to the Christmas tree. On Christmas morning we always had fish roe, bacon and grits for breakfast. I grudged every mouthful—for who wanted to fill up on breakfast when there in the sitting-room was candy, at least three whole boxes? After breakfast we lined up, and carols were started. Our voices rose naked and mysterious as we filed through the door to the sitting-room. The carol, unfinished, ended in raw yells of joy.
The Christmas tree glittered in the glorious, candlelit room. There were bicycles and bundles wrapped in tissue paper. Our stockings hanging from the mantelpiece bulged with oranges, nuts and smaller presents. The next hours were paradise. The blue dawn at the window brightened, and the candles were blown out. By nine o’clock we had ridden the wheel presents and dressed in the clothes gifts. We visited the neighborhood children and were visited in turn. Our cousins came and grown relatives from distant neighborhoods. All through the morning we ate chocolates. At two or three o’clock the Christmas dinner was served. The dining-room table had been let out with extra leaves and the very best linen was laid—satin damask with a rose design. Daddy asked the blessing, then stood up to carve the turkey. Dressing, rice and giblet gravy were served. There were cut-glass dishes of sparkling jellies and stateliness of festal wine. For dessert there was always sillabub or charlotte and fruitcake. The afternoon was almost over when dinner was done.
At twilight I sat on the front steps, jaded by too much pleasure, sick at the stomach and worn out. The boy next door skated down the street in his new Indian suit. A girl spun around on a crackling son-of-a-gun. My brother waved sparklers. Christmas was over. I thought of the monotony of Time ahead, unsolaced by the distant glow of paler festivals, the year that stretched before another Christmas—eternity.
The Discovery of Christmas
THE CHRISTMAS of my fifth year, when we still lived in the old downtown Georgia home, I had just recovered from scarlet fever, and that Christmas Day I overcame a rivalry that like the fever had mottled and blanched my sickened heart. This rivalry that changed to love overshadowed my discovery that Santa Claus and Jesus were not the kin I had supposed.
The scarlet fever came first. In November my brother Budge and I were quarantined in the back room and for six weeks’ time hovered over thermometers, potties, alcohol rubs and Rosa Henderson. Rosa was the practical nurse who cared for us, as Mother had deserted me for my hated rival—the new baby sister. Mother would half-open the door and pass the presents that came to the house to Rosa, calling out some words before she shut the door. She did not bring the baby and I was glad of that. There were many presents and Rosa put them in a big soapbox between the beds of my brother and me. There were games, modeling clay, paint sets, cutting-out scissors and engines.
Budge was much littler than I was. He was too little to count straight, to play Parcheesi, to wipe himself. He could only model squashed balls and cut out easy, big round things like magazine pictures of Santa Claus. Then his tongue would wiggle out of the corner of his mouth because of the difficulty. I cut out the hard things and paper dolls. When he played the harp it made a sickening shriek. I played Dixie and Christmas carols.
Toward dark Rosa read aloud to us. She read Child Life, storybooks or a True Confessions magazine. Her soft, stumbling voice would rise and fall in the quiet room as firelit shadows staggered gold and gray upon the walls. At that time there were only the changing tones of her colored voice and the changing walls in the firelight. Except sometimes the baby cried and I felt as if a worm crawled inside me and played the harp to drown out the sound.
It was late fall when the quarantine began and through the closed windows we could see the autumn leaves falling against the blue sky and sunlight. We sang:
Come, little leaves, said the wind one day,
Come o’er the meadows with me and play . . .
Then suddenly one morning Jack Frost silvered the grass and roof tops. Rosa mentioned that Christmas was not long away.
“How long?”
“About as long as that settlelord chain, I reckon.” Toward the end of the quarantine we had been making a Celluloid chain of many different colors. I puzzled about the answer and Budge thought and put his tongue on the corner of his mouth. Rosa added, “Christmas is on the twenty-fifth of December—directly I will count the days. If you listen you can hear the reindeers come galloping from the North Pole. It’s not long.”
“Will we be loose from this old room by then?”
“I trust the Lord.”
A sudden terrible thought came to me. “Are people ever sick on Christmas?”
“Yes, Baby.” Rosa was making supper toast by the fire, turning it carefully with a long toast fork. Her voice was like torn paper when she said again, “My little son died on Christmas Day.”
“Died! Sherman died!”
“You know it isn’t Sherman,” she said sternly. “Sherman comes to our winder every day and you know it.” Sherman was a big boy and after school he would stand by our window and Rosa would open it from the bottom and talk with him a long time and sometimes give him a dime to go to the store. Sherman held his nose all the time he was at the window so that his voice twanged, like a ukulele string. “It was Sherman’s little brother—a long time ago.”
“Was he sick with scarlet fever?”
“No. He burned to death on Christmas morning. He was just a baby and Sherman put him down on the hearth to play with him. Then—childlike—Sherman forgot about him and left him alone on the hearth. The fire popped and a spark caught his little nightgown, and by the time I knew about it my baby was—that was how come I got this here wrinkled white scar on my neck.”
“Was your baby like our new baby?”
“Near ’bout the same age.”
I thought about it a long time before I said: “Was Sherman glad?”
“Why, what shape of thoughts is in your head, Sister?”
“I don’t like babies,” I said.
“You will like the baby later on. Just like you love your brother now.”
“Bonny smells bad,” I said.
“Most every child don’t like the new baby until they get used to it.”
“Are every and ever the same?” I asked.
Those were the days when we were peeling. Every day Budge and I peeled strips and patches of skin and saved them in a pillbox.
“I wonder what we’re going to do with all this skin we’ve saved?”
“Face that when the time comes, Sister. Enjoy it while you can.”
“I wonder what we’re going to do with this long chain we’ve made.” I looked at the chain that was piled in the box between the beds of my brother and me. It covered all the other toys—the dolls, engines and all.
The quarantine ended and the joy of our release battled with a sudden, inexplicable grief: all our toys were going to be burned. Every toy, the chain, even the peeled skin, which seemed the most terrible loss of all.
“It’s on account of the germs,” Rosa said. “Everything burned and the beds and mattresses will go to the germ disinfectory man. And the room scoured with Lysol.”
I stood on the threshold of the room after the germ man had gone. There were no echoes of toys—no beds, no furniture. The room was bitter cold, and the damp floor was sharp-smelling, the windows wet. My heart shut with the closing door.
Mother had sewed me a red dress for the Christmas season. Budge and I were free to walk in all the rooms and go out of the yard. But I was not happy. The baby was always in my mother’s lap. Mary, the cook, would say, “Goosa-goosa-ga,” and Daddy would throw the baby in the air.
There was a terrible song that Christmas:
Hang up the baby’s stocking;
Be sure you don’t forget—
The dear little dimpled darling!
She ne’er saw Christmas yet . . .
I hated the whining tune and the words so much that I put my fingers in my ears and hummed Dixie u
ntil the talk changed to Santa’s reindeer, the North Pole and the magic of Christmas.
Three days before Christmas the real and the magic collided so suddenly that my world of understanding was instantly scattered. For some reason I don’t remember now, I opened the door of the scarlet-fever room and stopped on the threshold, spellbound and trembling. The room rioted before my unbelieving eyes. Nothing familiar was there and the space was filled with everything Budge and I had written on the Santa Claus list and sent up the chimney. All that and even more—so that the room was like a Santa Claus room in a department store. There were a tricycle, a doll, a train with tracks and a child’s table and four chairs. I doubted the reality of what I saw and looked at the familiar tree outside the window and at a crack on the ceiling I knew well. Then I moved around with the light, secret way of a child who meddles. I touched the table, the toys with a careful forefinger. They were touchable, real. Then I saw a wonderful, unasked-for thing—a green monkey with an organ grinder. The monkey wore a scarlet coat and looked very real with his monkey-anxious face and worried eyes. I loved the monkey but did not dare touch him. I looked around the Santa Claus room a last time. There was a hush, a stasis in my heart that follows the shock of revelation. I closed the door and walked away slowly, weighed by too much wisdom.
Mother was knitting in the front room and the baby was there in her play pen.
I took a big breath and said in a demanding voice: “Why are the Santa Claus things in the back room?”
Mother had the stumbling look of someone who is telling a story. “Why, Sister, Santa Claus asked your father if he could store some things in the back room.”
I didn’t believe it and said: “I think that Santa Claus is only parents.”
“Why, Sister, darling!”
“I wondered about chimneys. Butch doesn’t even have a chimney but Santa Claus always comes to him.”
“Sometimes he walks in the door.”