The Mortgaged Heart (33 page)

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.

[
Mademoiselle,
December 1949]

T
HE
C
HRISTMAS
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
until 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 scarletfever 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."

For the first time I knew my mother was telling me stories and I was thinking. "Is Jesus real? Santa Claus and Jesus are close kin, I know."

Mamma put down her knitting. "Santa Claus is toys and stores and Jesus is church."

This mention of church brought to me thoughts of boredom, colored windows, organ music, restlessness. I hated church and Jesus if church was Jesus. I loved only Santa Claus and he was not real.

Mother tried again: "Jesus is as the holy infant—like Bonny. The Christ child."

This was the worst of all. I squatted on the floor and bawled in the baby's face, "Santa Claus is only parents! Jesus is—"

The baby began to cry and Mother picked her up and cuddled her in her lap. "Now you behave yourself, young lady; you're making Bonny cry."

"I hate that old ugly Bonny," I wailed and went to the hall to cry.

Christmas Day was like a twice-done happening. I played with the monkey under the tree and helped Budge lay the tracks for the train. The baby had blocks and a rubber doll and she cried and didn't play. Budge and I ate a whole layer of our box of Treasure Island chocolates and by afternoon we were jaded by play and candy.

Later I was sitting on the floor alone in the Christmasy room except for the baby in her play pen. The bright tree glowed in the winter light. Suddenly I thought of Rosa Henderson and the baby who was burned on Christmas Day. I looked at Bonny and glanced around the room. Mother and Daddy had gone to visit my Uncle Will, and Mary was in the kitchen. I was alone. Carefully I lifted the baby and put her on the hearth. In the unclear conscious of five years old I did not feel that I was doing wrong. I wondered if the fire would pop and went to the back room with my brother, sad and troubled.

It was our family custom to have fireworks on Christmas night. Daddy would light a bonfire after dark and we would shoot Roman candles and skyrockets. I remembered. The box of fireworks was on the mantlepiece of the back room and I opened it and selected two Roman candles. I asked Budge, "Do you want to do something fun?" I knew clearly this was wrong. But, angry and sad, I wanted to do wrong. I held the Roman candles to the fire and gave one to Budge. "Watch here."

I thought I remembered the fireworks, but I had never seen anything like this. After a hiss and sputter the Roman candles, violent and alive, shot in streams of yellow and red. We stood on opposite sides of the room and the blazing fireworks ricocheted from wall to wall in an arch of splendor and terror. It lasted a long time and we stood transfixed in the radiant, fearful room. When finally it was finished, my hostile feelings had disappeared. I was quiet in the very silent room.

I thought I heard the baby cry, but when I ran to the living room I knew she was not crying nor had she been burned and gone up the chimney. She had turned over and was crawling toward the Christmas tree. Her little-fingered hands were on the floor, her nightgown was hiked over her diapers. I had never seen Bonny crawl before and I watched her with the first feelings of love and pride, the old hostility gone forever.

I played with Bonny with a heart cleansed of jealousy and joyful for
the first time in many months. I was reconciled that Santa Claus was only family but with this new tranquility, I felt maybe my family and Jesus were somehow kin. Soon afterward, when we moved to a new house in the suburbs, I taught Bonny how to walk and even let her hold the monkey while I played the organ grinder.

[
Mademoiselle,
December 1953]

I
MET
C
AROL
a few days before the Christmas when we were both patients in the hospital for physical therapy. Carol was a very busy girl; she painted in watercolors, drew with crayons, and most of all she planned for her future. At that time, she was planning for a Christmas Eve party, for it was to be the first time in her life that she was going to walk with her new prosthetic legs to a party.

Carol was an amputee. She had been born with legs so twisted that when she was nineteen years old, she had them amputated.

On this Christmas Eve, there were loads of visitors in the ward, families and friends of the patients' and parties organized by the hospital. But for Carol it was a catastrophe. The party she had yearned to go to was denied her because one of the legs was being repaired. It was going to ruin her Christmas Eve, and when I looked at her, I saw that silently, bitterly, she was weeping.

I asked her to come over to see me. She was very adept at her wheelchair and came over, still crying.

"Of all the times in the year this leg had to be fixed—just when I was so looking forward to walking to the party and showing my friends my new legs."

We talked for a while, and I read to her the most living piece of literature, except for the Bible, that I know. James Joyce's "The Dead."

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.