A Christmas Sonata (2 page)

And jerked again.

And then it started to roll out of the station, and I had my eyes on the window and couldn’t think of speaking.

It started slowly, but in a few minutes it was going so fast that the city seemed to stream past the window like running water. I would look ahead and try to see something,
catch it as it went by and try to see what it was, but I couldn’t. There were backsides of buildings with signs on them, and warehouses with pictures on the side showing big smiling faces and letters as big as houses, but I couldn’t see any of them—everything moved so fast it was all a blur and then the city was gone.

Gone. We were out in the country and everything slowed down into rolling hills covered with snow. There were trees, but no leaves, and I could not remember seeing anything so white and clean. Winter in the city was gray and the snow was dirty, but out here it was so bright it hurt my eyes and I had to turn away.

“Isn’t it pretty, punkin?” Mother smiled, the tears gone. “Christmas in the country is always prettier.”

We went faster and faster, the train wheels clacking. I did not know or understand time then, but I heard the conductor
tell Mother it would take eight hours and I knew that Mother worked eight hours a day at the laundry, so I knew how long that was.

All day.

All day on the train. In a little time I turned away from the window. We sat in a seat in the middle of the car and the car was full of people. Each person had a different face and a different set of eyes and different clothes and I wanted to see them all, each and every one, so I ran up and down the car and tried to look at each one.

Mother stamped her foot and made a face at me and I came back and sat down before I’d finished.

“They’re all different,” I said to her. “I just wanted to see them—”

“It’s rude to stare at people.”

“They all smiled at me. And I smiled back.”

“Still, it’s rude. Stay here now.”

So I sat next to her and drew pictures with my fingers on the ice around the edges of the train window until she went to sleep. When her head was back and her eyes closed, I slipped away again and went up and down the car because it was impossible to sit still. I met different people and talked to them. One was a soldier and I asked him if he knew my dad and he got a sad look in his eye that I did not understand and shook his head. Before I could tell him that my dad was tall and had dark, curly hair and was in a place called Europe the conductor came into the car.

He was a large black man who smiled at me and said: “Where are you supposed to be sitting?”

I pointed to my sleeping mother and he shook his head.

“I’ll bet she doesn’t know you’re running around, does she?”

“No. She wouldn’t let me run in the
car when she was awake. She said it was rude, but I don’t know if it is or not when people smile at you.”

“If she doesn’t want you to run maybe you’d better sit next to her.”

His smile was wider but I knew he was right and there was the thing with Santa Claus again. What if it was Mr. Henderson and he heard I had been bad on the train?

I went back to the seat and sat next to Mother for what seemed like years until I couldn’t wait for her to wake up anymore and my eyes closed and I fell asleep.

“Wake up, punkin, it’s time to eat.” Mother was shaking my shoulder and when I woke up I found I was stretched out on the seat across from her. I didn’t remember her moving me.

“We have to go to the dining car.” She stood and led me to the bathrooms at the end of the car, where she let me go into the
one the men used, and I felt good because she usually made me go into the other one. When I came out she looked at me.

“Did you wash your hands?”

“Twice.”

And it was the truth, too, although it was partly because it was fun to use the little sink and hear the water whoosh out and not because I felt dirty.

The dining car made me want to whisper.

“Everything is so clean and white,” I said to Mother as we came in the end of the car. The tables each had a white tablecloth and smooth wooden chairs, and there was a water pitcher in the center of each table with beautiful silver knives and forks and spoons and a napkin so white that it seemed to take light from the snow outside the window and it hurt my eyes.

A man with deep black skin, wearing a bright white coat, came to our table and
looked down. He was smiling and had hair the same color as the silverware and he put a little glass vase with a flower in it on the table.

“For good boys,” he said. “Are you a good boy?”

His voice was deep and rolling and made me think of the church bells that rang in the Catholic church each Sunday at the end of the block and I nodded even if it wasn’t always true.

“Then your table gets a flower.”

He asked Mother what we wanted and she looked at the menu and made the face she makes when something costs too much. I did not understand much—or anything—about money then, but knew when something was too expensive from watching her face; but she smiled at me over the top of the menu.

“We would like the special.”

I picked up my menu, but, of course, it
didn’t make any sense to me because along with money I didn’t understand words yet, although I knew all the letters.

The man left and Mother leaned across the table. “The special is liver and onions with mashed potatoes, and before you make that face I’ll tell you that I had to do it because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu.”

But I didn’t make a face. It was all so exciting that even liver and onions didn’t sound bad and the man brought them on plates with little silver domes on them that he took off with his finger in a hole at the top so the steam rolled out in a cloud and I didn’t care what it was—it looked good.

I ate all of it, even the onions and the little roll made like a cross with the small squares of the white stuff that was supposed to be butter, but wasn’t, with the tiny pictures of a flower stamped in them, and thought it didn’t taste at all like the liver
and onions we sometimes had at home. I decided that sometimes how it came changed the taste, and also decided to ask Mother to make train liver and onions instead of city liver and onions when we got back.

After the liver and onions and little rolls and potatoes, Mother ordered me a small bowl of green ice cream that she called sherbet. The green taste stayed with me all the way back to the seats, where we sat for the rest of the day, except for going to the bathroom and running up and down the aisles when Mother took another nap.

We went by many frozen lakes, and they all had little houses on them, and I asked Mother about the small huts out on the ice.

“Those are fish houses. People sit in there with little stoves to keep them warm while they fish.”

“All day?”

She nodded. “And sometimes at night too. When it gets very cold and still at night the smoke from the chimneys goes straight up to the moon, and it looks so pretty. I used to love to go fishing with Papa.”

Not all the lakes had the small houses, but most of them did. There were many, many lakes and each time I saw the houses, smoke was coming out of the chimneys, only it was blowing around. I couldn’t wait until night to see if it really went up to the moon, but by the time it was dark I had put my face against Mother’s arm and could not stay awake and missed it. Missed all of it. I spread out on the seat again and slept, the train rolling and clacking, and did not know anything until Mother shook me awake and the train was stopped.

“We’re here, punkin,” she said, and dressed me in all the warm clothes she had taken off me, so I looked like a blue marsh-mallow again. She took our suitcase and my
hand and we moved out the end of the car into the open place between the cars. Then we turned and stepped off the steps outside, where the conductor yelled:

“Wedding Rapids!”

It was very cold. So cold, my nose seemed to stop and not let me get air, and I had to breathe through my mouth as Mother took me by the hand down in front of the depot. I saw Uncle Ben and Aunt Marilyn standing by the door waiting for us.

They both hugged Mother and hugged me and Marilyn took Mother’s suitcase and was crying and Mother was crying and Ben picked me up and carried me to his car.

“Thirty below,” he said to Mother. “I wasn’t sure the car would start. I’ll have to drain the radiator when we get to the store.” Then he turned to me and smiled,
holding me out. “Do you think Santa will be able to get his reindeer going?”

“There isn’t a Santa Claus,” I said. “I saw Mr. Henderson drinking red wine.”

“Ohhhh.” Ben shook his head. “Are we so old then that we have outgrown Santa Claus?”

But before I could answer, we came to the car and Mother and I climbed into the backseat.

“I’ve had to keep her running,” Ben said, getting in. “It was hard to do, what with the gas rationing—but I was afraid to let her stop. If the oil stiffened we’d never get her going again.”

“Why is the car a girl?” I asked Mother, but she didn’t hear me and was too busy talking to Marilyn, leaning over the front seat and laughing, to notice anything else.

It wasn’t a long drive to the store, but I fell asleep again. Bundled in my snowsuit
and coat and scarf, which Mother had left on because it was cool in the backseat when I fell asleep, I didn’t move except to fall forward when we stopped.

Mother helped me upright and out of the car, and Ben picked me up again and carried me into the store.

It was in a large wooden building made of white boards. The store was downstairs in the front part, and there was a place for living in the back. The store was built right on the edge of a huge lake—Winnipah Lake—and went out over the water on posts. In the summer, part of the lake was under part of the store, and there was a big dock that went out into the lake still farther.

I only got one or two whiffs of icy air through my scarf, then Ben had me in the store along with Mother and Marilyn and our suitcase, with the door shut tight to stop the cold.

There was so much in the store that I
couldn’t see it all. It was a large, long room, open all the way, and the ceiling was very high and made of squares with pictures of flowers and things in them.

Down the left side of the store there was a long wooden counter with a glass front, full of all sorts of things—candy and caps and knives and small cards with flowers on them. The rest of the store was all shelves, except for the back, where there was a big black stove with a fat face that looked like a smiling monster on the door blowing smoke. And back in the corner away from the stove was a Christmas tree that went all the way to the ceiling, but it was all dark.

As Ben carried me down the length of the store, I saw all of this the way I saw things out the train window, moving and blurred; and then we were through the store and into the back, where there were rooms for living.

The back was very small and very bright after the dark of the store out front.

There was a room with a couch and a kitchen table. It looked a lot like our apartment in Minneapolis, except that there were two other rooms off to the side. These were bedrooms and one was for Marilyn and Ben and the other was for Matthew.

“Matthew is asleep,” Ben whispered. “You can see him in the morning.”

Marilyn and Ben pulled the couch out into a bed for Mother and me, and Mother helped me undress and use the bathroom next to Ben and Marilyn’s bedroom, which was smaller than the bathroom on the train. We went to bed, all whispering, so as not to wake Matthew. I felt like we were still moving on the train and stayed awake a little trying to make the couch quit moving.

It’s easy to miss things in the mornings.

I often sleep and sleep through things, and Mother has to wake me up, but this first morning at Uncle Ben’s store I was awake almost as soon as the grown-ups.

Mother got out of bed, and I opened my eyes and it was still dark outside the window over the sink. Ben and Marilyn were up and Marilyn was making oatmeal on the stove and Mother helped her. They put cinnamon in the oatmeal and the smell was somehow part of Christmas the way the store was part of Christmas and the train ride was part of Christmas.