Carol for Another Christmas (10 page)

She had been back only a moment when Wayne excused himself to use the rest room, and his mother asked Doug if he would use his long arms to put away the mixing bowls that went on the top shelf.

Wayne made a great show of going into the bathroom and turning on the water; then, with the posture of a soldier fleeing the enemy, with many commando-like glances over his shoulders, dived into the corner of the room he shared with his mother where he kept his special cache of equipment and projects. His mother asked many questions of Doug in the kitchen while Wayne made his selection and wrapped it in a bit of used paper and ribbon from that his mother had carefully saved from the wastepaper baskets of her employers, Scrooge guessed, by the way the creases were smoothed. Then, with more duckings and evasions of imaginary enemies, he concealed his secret dispatch from the enemy in the forest that happily was planted there in his living room. Then, whistling the Three Kings carol, he rejoined his mother and Doug in the kitchen with every appearance of wide-eyed innocence.

“Time for presents now, Ma!” he said.

Monica roused herself. “We should be going. I have to go to work again tomorrow.”

“Nonsense, dear. Do stay while we open gifts. Wayne, you be Santa.”

Wayne delivered Mrs. Reilly's gift first. It was a bracelet woven from brightly colored electrical wires. Mrs. Reilly reacted as if the red wires were strings of rubies, the blue were sapphires, and the yellow were rare canary diamonds. Wayne got handmade mittens and a scarf that was made out of many colors and stretched a full three yards long. He wound it around his neck so many times his head disappeared, then tried to tie Monica and Doug together in it, until his mother told him to get the other gifts.

He shoved a package at Doug. “Here. I thought this would go with, you know, what we were talking about.”

Doug unwrapped it. “What is it?” Scrooge asked.

“I don't know,” Monica answered. “Never did. Doug liked it, though.” He was describing in great technical length to Wayne how it could be used when Wayne handed a package to the young Monica.

This was wrapped in the best of the creased paper, with poinsettias, and had tissue inside. The girl lifted from it a collar made of lace.

“I know the girls don't wear those much these days, but you have such a lovely, slender neck—like I used to. I thought it would suit you,” Mrs. Reilly said.

Young Monica put it on over the argyle bathrobe and stroked it flat. “It's beautiful.”

“It's from Ireland. My mother-in-law gave it to me when Reilly and I first started going together. Her mother made it.”

Young Monica smiled rather shyly before she stiffened her shoulders and said, “I think my clothes will be dry now, and I need to get to bed so I'll be ready for work in the morning. Thank you for a lovely eve ning. Come along, Doug.”

“Later, Sis. I wanna talk some more with Wayne.”

“You can do that tomorrow, Douglas,” Mrs. Reilly said. “I have to go to work tomorrow, too, you know. Every day can't be like Christmas, I'm afraid. But you must come back whenever you wish.”

They saw another Christmas in that same apartment, and now it had a television Wayne had earned at his job in an appliance store. He and Doug were still as talkative as ever, but Mrs. Reilly looked a bit older and Monica left sooner.

Throughout the building, rock-and-roll music blared from Christmas parties elsewhere and on the television screens, with the sound off, scenes of war were interspersed with those of entertainers singing carols.

“It seems a strange thing to watch a war, however faraway, at Christmas,” Scrooge said.

“Mrs. Reilly was a little peculiar,” Monica said. “She said that she sort of felt that, by keeping the set on and remembering the boys, they'd be sharing our Christmas in some way. She got stranger as she got older. Once Wayne and Doug got the company running, Wayne sent her to some fancy home in Florida, I think.”

“You look as if you're about to cry,” Scrooge suggested wistfully. He had seen very little emotion from her, if truth be told, and by this stage in his own haunting, he had been already in tears.

“No way,” she said, blowing her nose hard and turning away from the image of Mrs. Reilly beaming over the fudge cake log. “It was just so silly, her giving me that lace collar like that. I never wore the thing, of course. Anyone could tell you I'm not the lacy type”

“Of course not,” Scrooge said hastily.

“It just seems a waste, is all.”

“You could give it to charity, I suppose,” Scrooge said. “If you didn't think that was too much, along with the fruitcake.”

“Some people
like
fruitcake,” she said. “I just don't happen to be one of them.”

The apartment building was fading back into the tax office again, and Christmas after Christmas rushed past, always with Monica on the telephone, making threats, ruining people's holidays. Waiting for her at home were Doug and, usually, Wayne, who sometimes brought a special treat his mother had made. The boys were always working on a project.

“This is getting monotonous, young lady,” Scrooge said. “Had you no private life?”

“Boyfriends, you mean?”

“Suitors, certainly.”

“You'd be surprised how quickly guys lose interest when they find out you work for the IRS, and personnel aren't allowed to date within the department.” She shrugged. “It's different now, but I'm not exactly jailbait anymore. Once Doug got a bit older, I stopped coming home for Christmas altogether and just stayed at the office and collected my double time. He and Wayne were usually too engrossed in their technical stuff to pay me any mind.”

But once more they were standing in the cramped apartment and Monica came up the stairs, opened the door, threw down her purse, and sprawled in the broken-springed easy chair sitting near the door. Her eyes closed wearily and didn't see that now the two young men were indeed paying rapt attention to her.

Wayne nudged Doug. “Go on. You tell her. She's your sister.”

Doug raised his eyebrow and shook his head. He was trying for a disdainful look, but to Scrooge, he looked uncustomarily daunted.

He cleared his throat, and his Adam's apple bounced up and down. He turned away.

“Go
on
,” Wayne urged.

Doug shook his head. “You.”

Wayne sighed. “Monica, Doug and I have something to tell you.”

The woman in the chair half opened one eye. “What?” she asked, as if expecting the answer to be that they'd broken or ruined something costly and irreplaceable.

“We're going into business together. We have a great idea, and it'll make us bigger than IBM, and—”

“And what about school?”

“We didn't either of us go back for spring semester. Our math prof is supplying some of the capital we need, but we plan to buy him out when we start showing a profit.”

“What does your mother say to this?”

Wayne developed a fascination with the laces of his shoes. “It's partly for her sake I want to move out and get this going. She can't go on working much longer, Moni. Her arthritis has really been bothering her this winter, and she's too tired to do anything after work anymore. If we're all together, and she's where Doug and I are working all day, I can look after her better.”

“Oh, sure. Like you and Doug ever notice anything that's going on around you while you're working. What's wrong with you working in your apartment? I suppose you like the Cheetos better up here?”

“It's inadequate, Monica,” Doug put in abruptly. “Surely you can see that. Wayne is oversimplifying a bit. We're going to need staff—a manufacturing facility, as well as idea people and work space, in addition to living quarters. We've actually pretty much moved in there now, but we didn't want to say anything to you about it until we had our feet on the ground.”

“Doug didn't want you to worry,” Wayne said.

“Doug didn't want to have to listen to my reasons why it's a silly idea and I think he's suddenly got delusions of grandeur. What do you boys know about running a business? Do you know how many great ideas are sold for nothing to someone with the capital to realize them? Do you know how many businesses go under in the first year? How many expand too rapidly and overextend themselves? Do you even know the sort of tax liability you'll be looking at with these people you're speaking of hiring—social security, health benefits, unemployment . . . ?”

“We thought we'd hire people on contract and make up to them in stock options what the job lacks in benefits,” Doug said as if he were talking about the merits of different television channels.

“We also thought maybe you'd like to come in with us and help us manage the business,” Wayne said.

“That would be a conflict of interest,” she told them. “And besides, if I did that, and gave up my job, who would you turn to when you fail?”

“Thanks, Sis,” Doug said. He surprised her by giving her a kiss on the cheek as the two of them left.

“Apparently they only stayed around long enough to ask me,” Monica Banks, now CEO of the company she'd predicted would fail, told Scrooge. “I never actually noticed that before.”

“You apparently failed to notice a great many things,” he said.

At their feet, more letters lit up. The heading was “Program Manager” and the box checked said “Review.”

Whether or not it did Monica any good, Scrooge could not have said, but it was a revelation to him.

The sixties involved loud music and strangely cos tumed people called hippies campaigning for everything from the rights of the descendants of the former African slaves to free love, which Scrooge supposed had something to do with being opposed to streetwalkers. Monica's comments were terse. “They pretended to be poor to avoid paying taxes because they didn't approve of one thing or another. As if the government could consult every citizen on every decision before taxing them for it!”

“What a sensible attitude, my dear. I take it you disagree strongly with those early colonials who dumped valuable tea in one of your eastern harbors then?”

There was more about the war they had seen briefly on television. “A very costly mistake,” she said, and Scrooge, seeing the corpses of young men being zipped into body bags, once more regretted a remark he had made in the old days about diminishing the excess population. “But it is over with,” Monica continued, “a good twenty years ago now, and I don't know why people don't just get over it and get on with life.”

Scrooge was still looking at the body bags.

There was also something called the sexual revolution, which Scrooge found rather shocking. Monica was a bit wistful over that one. “One reason you never saw me with a boyfriend is that they never lasted till Christmas. Either I broke up with him because I didn't think he was worth buying a gift for, or he broke up with me to avoid buying a gift. I don't want you to think I never . . .”

“My dear, that is your own affair—sorry, bad choice of words—your own private matter entirely,” Scrooge hastily assured her. “My own ghosts and I went into courtship with one significant young lady, but it never strayed beyond the bounds of decorum.”

The bluestockings had apparently been successful with putting forward their agenda in this time also, and something called women's liberation had taken hold. Monica was skeptical of that. “There's still a glass ceiling, you know,” she said with a sniff. “The only good thing about it is that it came along in time for the current economy, where it takes both members of a marriage working to support themselves. And some women have used it for every sort of cry babyishness. Demanding maternity leaves and paid child care, for instance, and those silly girls who get themselves knocked up and then want the government to pay for it.”

“Are there no workhouses? Are there no jails?” Scrooge asked with a ruefulness lost on her.

And then, suddenly, there was a grave, and afterward, in a tastefully appointed room, a young woman with a sonorous voice began reading a will. “ ‘I, Douglas Banks, being of sound mind and body . . . ' ”

“Get me out of here, Scrooge. I don't want to go through this again,” Monica said, and then she was gone. Through the frame that customarily separated his rather peculiar spirit world from Monica's corporeal one, Scrooge could see her once more curled up on her couch, the pillow held before her protectively.

Ten

Scrooge was wondering what to do next when the frame was suddenly filled with a collection of faces.

“Do me next,” Curtis said.

“Me, too,” Melody added. “I've always wanted to do that.”