The Christmas Kid (4 page)

HUGO BOARDED THE D
train in Brooklyn one winter morning in 1951 and his life changed forever, although he didn’t know it at the time. He was squashed against the door of the conductor’s booth, reading a newspaper, when his eyes briefly wandered and came to rest on the face of a young woman. She was sitting facing him, reading a book called
And Quiet Flows the Don
. In his twenty-two winters on the earth, Hugo had never seen anyone quite like her.

“It wasn’t just her face,” he told me when I went to visit him many years later. “I mean, her face was amazing. Shaped like an oval, high cheekbones, clear skin, a great straight perfect nose… It was more than that. She had, like…like an
aura
.”

Possessed by the force of the aura, Hugo remained on the D train past his stop. He noticed that she had a portfolio of some kind beside her, and what seemed to be a toolbox on her lap; a model, he thought, or an artist. The aura pulsed with force, penetrating Hugo, and he suddenly knew, recklessly and intuitively, that this woman embodied everything he wanted: beauty, intelligence, warmth, humor, sensuality. He must have her. Not for a day or a week, but forever.

“She never noticed me looking at her,” he told me. “But finally she folded down a corner of the page in her book, looked around as we pulled into a station, picked up the portfolio and the toolbox, and got off. I followed her. The aura…”

He walked after her through the crisp winter morning. She turned onto 57th Street, and he noticed now that she had a perfectly proportioned body, good legs, a rhythmic, confident walk. He wanted to call her, touch her arm, ask for directions or a match. He did nothing. Without breaking stride, she hurried up the stairs of a large stone building and was gone. The Art Students League. His heart thumping, late for work, Hugo hurried back to the subway.

All that day, grinding away in the financial advertising agency on lower Broadway where he worked as a copywriter, Hugo brooded about the astonishing young woman. She dominated his night thoughts in the furnished room in Brooklyn, and the next morning he waited for the same D train, didn’t see the woman, let three more go by, and felt lost and disconnected when there was no sight of her. The same thing happened the next morning. The following day was a Friday; he told his boss he would be late, and went uptown and waited in front of the Art Students League. Dozens of young women entered the building, and a few young men, but he didn’t see the woman with the aura. At twenty past nine, he started back to the subway. And saw her hurrying around the corner, head bent into the winter wind.

“Miss?”

She looked up, blinking. “Yes?”

“I, uh, well, I wondered if, uh, well, if you’d like to have a cup of coffee with me sometime.”

She shook her head, an amused smile curling her mouth.

“Are you a lunatic or something?”

“No, no, I swear. I just…You were on the subway the other day, and you were reading that book
And Quiet Flows the Don,
and I…it’s hard to explain. Maybe I am a lunatic. I’d just like to have coffee with you, that’s all.”

That evening, they sat in a booth in a coffee shop on Broadway. She told him her name was Daria Stark, and her parents were from Russia, and she lived in Coney Island. Hugo told her about his life, his job, his time in the navy; he talked in great torrents about life and death and love. She listened to him in an enigmatic way, offering little comment, laughing out loud at some of his more extravagant flights, her amber eyes turning glassy when he fumbled for the Meaning of It All. Then it was time for her to go. Not home. To meet friends. In the Village.

“Can I go with you?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, and then, as if to ease the blow, added, “but—”

He rushed into the opening. Coffee again? She shrugged. Why not? Monday? Okay. Here? Sure. All the way home to Brooklyn, Hugo felt like singing. Daria Stark, he thought; my Russian. He went to the library, borrowed
And Quiet Flows the Don,
and spent the weekend in the Soviet Union, in heroic encounters with Whites and Reds, Cossacks and Separatists. He felt the aura of Daria Stark on every page. He heard her whisper the words to him: “Blinding and irresistible shines the feather grass along the steppe.…” He identified with the protagonist, Gregory Melekhov, as he groped from one incomplete collision with history to another; Daria would make him complete. They would forge a union based on intelligence, art, generosity, the heroic ideal.…

She didn’t show up on Monday. She wasn’t at the Art Students League, either. She wasn’t there that week or the following week or even after that. He looked for her in the subway, he called everyone named Stark in the Brooklyn phone book, he walked along Surf and Neptune Avenues, looking for her; he wandered the Village, haunted art galleries and museums, never seeing art, simply looking at faces. He never found Daria Stark.

Weeks passed, and then months, and finally years. Hugo left the advertising agency, went to work for a magazine, moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. He dated other women, of course, and even entered into a few serious affairs. But each time he began to make that mysterious leap into total commitment, he would pass a coffee shop or come out of Carnegie Hall and look left to the Art Students League or hear a fragment of conversation about Russian novels or see a woman with a portfolio, and Daria Stark would force her way again into his consciousness, filling it completely with her enigmatic smile and her dark presence. He couldn’t ever explain this to the wounded and baffled women in his life; he couldn’t make clear the extraordinary moment of connection on the D train long ago; he couldn’t describe the…aura.

After a while, he stopped going out with women altogether. He became a Village character; his beard grew out, a rich brown at first, and then scratched with gray. His eyes, weakened by endless copywriting, were soon masked by thick glasses. He was a steady, controlled drinker, but every once in a while, on clear days in winter, he would sometimes drink too much. I met him on one such day in the Lion’s Head. His voice was choked, slurred, guttural. “She had the aura,” he said, trying to tell me the story. “Her name was Daria Stark and she had the aura.…”

At such times, he would get drunk for a few weeks, and lose his job, and then suddenly stop at the edge of the abyss, and go for a haircut, have his suit pressed, move to another magazine, and resume the routine of his life. He was often embarrassed after such binges, as if uncertain about how much he had revealed of himself while drunk. But most of the time he was just another one of those quiet wounded men who live out their lives in bars.

Then one humid summer afternoon, Hugo was sitting on a bench in Union Square Park. He tried to read a paper, but the day was too hot. He watched the junkies and winos for a while, and the pair of cops who moved through them like pedestrians feeding pigeons. Then he dozed, dreamy with summer exhaustion, and then was snapped awake by the backfiring of a truck.

He looked up at a thick-bodied, white-haired woman walking across the park, stepping tenderly, as if her feet hurt. Her head was down. She went to the curb at Fourth Avenue, waited for the light to change, and then hurried across the street to get on a bus. And then Hugo knew that it was Daria Stark. This lumpy middle-aged woman. It was her. And suddenly he was up, rushing to the corner, seeing the bus wheeze into the distance, heading uptown for Grand Central. He jumped into traffic, and a cab stopped with a squeal of brakes, and a cop turned to face him from the opposite corner, and a truck pulled around him, and Hugo began to run. Uptown. Calling her name. Through traffic. And never saw the taxi running the red light on 20th Street.

When I went to see him at Bellevue, his voice was an injured croak. His left leg was broken, his pelvis smashed, his skull fractured; there were tubes in his arms.

“I saw her,” he whispered. And started to cry. “She’s old. Like me.…”

The pelvis healed, and the leg, and the skull, but Hugo didn’t. He left Bellevue, but he couldn’t learn again how to live in the world. He gazed out windows; he avoided the bars, and the company of men. He couldn’t walk and didn’t eat. The cops found him one afternoon, standing alone on a subway platform in Brooklyn, watching D trains arrive and depart. Someone reported him as a possible degenerate. The cops were gentle and took him to a hospital. His condition was simple; he was inconsolable. He likes it where he is now.

“There’s trees,” he said one day. “And feather grass, blinding and irresistible, like the steppes…”

MITCHELL SAT IN THE
corner of the old couch, fingering the worn armrest, looking out past the metal window gate at the gray winter sky. He heard his wife, Sybil, stacking the dishes beside the sink, and soon she came to join him, sitting heavily in her favorite armchair. They were separated by the round mahogany table they’d bought the day they moved in, back in 1946. There was a lamp on the table, and a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and a dish with some pills.

“It’ll be dark soon,” she said.

“Yes, it will,” Mitchell said. “But tonight we don’t have to worry anymore. Ever.”

“We’ll be safe, won’t we, Mitch?”

“Yes,” he said, pouring the wine into the glasses. “We’ll be safe.”

He always loved this time of the New York day, when the sun faded and the light turned a warm gray, softening the hard edges of the world. It reminded him of the old Warner Bros. movies they’d seen together before the war; the blacks were really black in those movies, the grays all silvery. They’d held hands in the dark, in the Sanders, in the RKO Prospect, in Loew’s Metropolitan, in the RKO Albee. Held hands, with the future spread out before them. Safe. In Europe, darkness had fallen; Hitler was killing Jews, but he and Sybil were together in the safe darkness of movie theaters. Back then. It would be a long time before fear entered his heart to stay.

“You mailed the letters?” Mitchell said.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “They should have them Monday.”

Mitchell sipped the wine. “You think they’ll get them at the same time? I mean, one goes to Florida and one to California. I wouldn’t want one of the kids to get one before the other.”

“They go on airplanes, dear. They’ll be there the same day.”

She was quiet for a long time, then sipped her wine, and gazed at the crowded bookcase beside the window. It even held textbooks she’d used at Columbia Teachers College, before the war, when Mitchell was at CCNY. It held everything else she’d ever cared for: Chekhov and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, all of Dickens, all of Stevenson. They’d come through life together, she and those books; they were her treasures. Now the girl would have them; the boy never did care for reading.

“Do you think they’ll be upset?” Sybil said.

“Of course,” Mitchell said. “But the girl will come. She’s always been responsible.”

“He was, too,” she said. “But he always had these other things to live for. His job, his children, the two wives.”

“The first wife was the better one,” Mitchell said.

“How would you know, dear? You never met the second wife.”

“True,” he said. “But I liked the first one. She had…what’s the word? Spirit?”

Sybil smiled. “Well, she was certainly wild.”

Mitchell was quiet then, remembering the children when they were small, running around this apartment like puppies. That was after the war. He was teaching at Brooklyn Tech then, Sybil at Julia Richmond. He remembered the girl, learning how to read when she was three, explaining the comics to her older brother, then reading books to him. The books about the elephant. Babar. Yes. Babar. They were around here somewhere, those books. Still here.

“You don’t have to do it,” she said abruptly.

“No, my mind is made up,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” he said. “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be afraid.”

“All right.”

“Sybil?”

“Yes.”

“Come and sit beside me.”

She got up slowly, exhaling hard, and sat beside him. The gray was deeper now. There were no lights on in the apartment. She sat beside him, and he put his arm around her.

“Tell me about the old places,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Please,” he said. “Then we’ll have them forever.”

She snuggled against him, her eyes unfocused. And she began to name the places of their life together.

“Sea Gate,” she said. “Kiamesha Lake. Luna Park.”

“Luna Park…”

“The dances at Prospect Hall. Union Square on a Saturday afternoon, and Fulton Street at Christmastime. Joe’s on Myrtle Avenue…”

“We had dinner there the first night we ever slept together. I had four dollars in my pocket, and you had two, and we left a dime tip.”

She smiled. “And the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. And the old Madison Square Garden. Remember how you took me to see CCNY play basketball there? And we walked through Times Square and looked at the giant waterfall, the Bond sign, and the big one for Camels, with the man blowing smoke rings, and everybody looked so glamorous, and we went to Lindy’s and waited for a long time, and saw Milton Berle sitting in a booth.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember that.”

“We bought the
News
and
Mirror,
they were two cents each, and we took the subway home to Brooklyn, and you read me Pushkin that night in bed.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And then in the summer, we both had two months off, and the kids went to camp that time, and we went to Penn Station, the old Penn Station, and we took a Pullman to Florida, the two of us sleeping in the train, and it made clackety-clack sounds all through the night, and soon we could smell the oranges. We couldn’t see them, but it was morning, and the train was still moving, and we could smell oranges everywhere, a million of them, a billion, the air full of oranges, and the heat was damp and wet when we walked to the dining car, and we still couldn’t see the orange trees, but we were in Florida. We knew it. The oranges told us.”

“I remember.”

“And one New Year’s Eve we went to the Waldorf,” she said. “You’d saved all year to surprise me, and Guy Lombardo was there, and we saw Mayor O’Dwyer in the lobby, with that beautiful wife of his. You kissed me at midnight. And we stayed that night in the Waldorf, and you made love to me, and we looked out the window in the morning, and New York was the most beautiful place we’d ever seen.”

“Yes.”

“That summer we went to Lewisohn Stadium and heard Beethoven under the stars. We walked all the way downtown that night, through the streets, through Harlem, into the park, and the Tavern on the Green was still open, and we had cake and coffee and the waiter gave us a look and you laughed and left a dime tip, just for old times’ sake.”

“We could walk everywhere.…”

“We walked around the Battery on a Sunday morning, and you bought some flowers from a flower seller and laid them on the steps of the Custom House, because Melville once worked there. And we took three round trips on the Staten Island Ferry….”

“We were very tired, we were very merry….”

“The poem was terrible, but it seemed to fit.”

“Yes. It seemed to fit.…”

She was quiet then. They sat very still. Mitchell picked up the bottle of wine and filled their glasses again. Then he looked into her face.

“We can’t go to any of those places anymore,” he said.

She shook her head, her eyes brimming.

He kissed her on the mouth, and then he reached for the pills.