A Christmas Sonata (3 page)

Matthew was still not awake because they gave him medicine to sleep, so after we ate the oatmeal Mother sat talking with Marilyn over coffee and Ben went to open the store and I followed him out from the back.

I had only been to the store once before, in the summer, when I was very small. I caught a fish with a yellow stomach and
blue eyes off the dock, but I couldn’t remember much of the store.

Now that I was older I could see things I hadn’t seen when I was small and I thought how full everything looked. Full and more full.

I walked along the glass case and looked at the candy and thought how it would be fun to be in the case, just be in the case with all that candy. I wouldn’t even have to eat any of it, I thought, just be with it.

Mother had told me not to ask Ben for things because of the war and how everything was hard to get, but Ben saw me looking at the candy and opened the back of the counter.

There was a bowl of white candy made to look like ribbons with green and red stripes in it, and he handed me one. It was colored so that the colors went all through the candy and I almost hated to eat it, but I
put it in my mouth and sucked on it and would take it out and look to make sure the colors were still there.

The candy lasted a long time because I kept taking it out and looking at it, long enough for me to go around the store and see all the things I had missed the night before and in the summer when I was so small.

I thought Ben and Marilyn must be very rich to have so many things in their store. There were boxes and boxes of food and blankets and snowshoes on the shelves, and guns hung shiny and new in racks. The head of an animal stuck so far out from the wall I could get under it.

“What is that?” I asked Ben, pointing up at the head.

“It’s a moose head.”

“Is it live?”

Ben was putting wood in the stove, split chunks that smelled like paint thinner,
and he stopped to look at me. He smiled and shook his head. “No. They stuff them like that after they shoot them. It’s full of cotton.”

“Who does that?”

“The people who shoot them.”

“Why do they do that?”

“So they can keep seeing it after they kill it,” Ben said.

I thought, if they wanted to keep seeing it why do they kill the moose in the first place, but I didn’t say it. I went the rest of the way around the store, seeing the things to see and smelling the smells that made me think of spices Mother had in our apartment in Minneapolis, and finally I came to the tree.

Standing by the tree made it seem bigger.

It went up and up to the ceiling, and the pictures in the squares on the ceiling were puffy and painted white, so they
looked like clouds, and it made the tree look like it went up into the sky.

There were so many decorations. We had a tree in Minneapolis, but it was not like this tree—nothing was like this tree. There were silver balls and red balls, with dented-in sides so that they made all the light in the room seem to come out of them; and tinsel hung, each strand separate and straight, but so many that they were like water falling; and there were lights, lights that went around and around and up. While I was watching Ben plugged them in.

“Oh.…”

Each light had a little star around it, so when the lights came on the stars made them seem bigger and glow out in streaks of light that mixed with the streaks from the other lights.

Red and blue and yellow and green and white, all shining in the tinsel and the colored balls, so no matter where you
looked there was some new light and color to see and if you lived to be forever you could not see them all. And on top, on the very top, was an angel with long white hair and a pink face and she was so beautiful, smiling down from the top of the tree, so beautiful.

“Merry Christmas,” Ben said, even though it wouldn’t be Christmas for two more fingers on one hand, which is how Mother had me count the days until Christmas.

“I’ve never seen a tree like this,” I said.

“It’s a special Christmas,” Ben said, but his voice was breaking. When I looked at him I could see a tear, just one, come out of the corner of his left eye and run down along his nose into his beard. I couldn’t see how anything as pretty as the tree could make him cry, and I was going to say that to him, but Marilyn and Mother came out of the back room.

“Come and see Matthew,” Marilyn said. “He’s awake and wants to see you.”

They took me to Matthew’s room, which was all made up like the hospital room I stayed in when I was sick and Mother thought I was going to die in a tent you could see through, except that Matthew didn’t have a clear tent over his bed.

The room was all flowers and pictures of dogs and cats and pretty places on the walls, with the bed against one wall surrounded by tables and tubes and bottles and hoses.

Matthew was on the bed.

I had only seen Matthew once before, in the summer when I came up, and he didn’t look different now except for his color. He was more yellow, almost as yellow as some of the lights on the tree, and so puffy-looking that it seemed if you poked him it wouldn’t come back out. His eyes looked more red, and as soon as Mother
and Marilyn left he waved me closer to the bed.

“I’m dying.”

“I know,” I said, because I did. “Except that I haven’t been able to figure it out yet.”

“Oh, hell, I thought it was my secret.” He smiled and I saw that even his teeth seemed yellow.

“I heard Mother say it to Marilyn.” I had forgotten about Matthew’s swearing. He was two years older than me and had learned lots of swear words and used them all the time and was really good with them. Or bad, if you were thinking of Santa Claus. “I wasn’t supposed to, but I did.”

“Did they say when?”

I tried to remember and then shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Not too long after Christmas,” he said, raising up. “Maybe in January or the next month, I can’t remember the name of
it.” He was proud that he knew something I didn’t, but it didn’t make any difference, because I didn’t know about months yet and was still trying to figure out how he would get to Europe so he could die and not get home.

“Now you have to tell me something,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I told you something you didn’t know—now you have to tell me something.”

“We rode on the train all day yesterday to get here and I ate liver and onions that didn’t taste like liver and onions—”

He shook his head. “Not like that. Not just stuff. It has to be something important—something only you know.”

And of course I thought of Mr. Henderson.

“There isn’t any Santa Claus,” I said. “I saw Mr. Henderson in a Santa suit, only
without a beard, and he was drinking red wine with his wife.”

Matthew waited.

“So. That’s it. I saw him, so there can’t be a Santa Claus.”

Matthew shook his head. “Is that all? I knew that last year and maybe even the year before—I can’t be sure because the medicine they give me makes me remember things funny. But I knew it. It’s just something they make up.”

So I didn’t have any secrets to tell Matthew like he had to tell me, especially not one where I was dying like him. But it didn’t matter so much because we started to play then and we forgot secrets.

Matthew had me scout for him.

He couldn’t leave the bed unless somebody was carrying him a certain way, so he would send me out in the store to see things and come back to report to him.

“Like soldiers,” he said. “You report to me like a soldier.”

I felt bad because I didn’t have a uniform or gun or helmet like I’d seen the soldiers wearing in the newsreel when Mother took me to a Roy Rogers movie. But Matthew sent me just the same and I would sneak out to the store and watch and come back to tell Matthew what I saw.

“A fat woman bought some bread.”

“An old man bought some pipe tobacco.”

“Three boys came in and bought a bag of candy.”

“Germans,” he said. “They’re all Germans and you must report to me that they’re Germans.”

So I did.

“A skinny German bought a little box of candy.”

“Two Germans bought bottles of Coca-Cola.”

Each time Matthew would salute and pretend to write down what I said on a piece of paper with a pencil, but I saw that he was just making marks. Because of the medicine he had to take, he didn’t know letters any better than I did, except that he made some
A
’s that looked pretty good.

And finally, after lunch, I came in to get orders and Matthew’s eyes were closed and he was asleep, and Ben said he could not play anymore until the next day because it took him down so. I couldn’t see that he was down, but that’s what Ben said, it took him down so.

The rest of that day I sat in the store and watched people come in and go out and ran around the aisles without knocking anything down and played under the tree until I noticed that there weren’t any packages under it. We had brought some presents for Marilyn and Ben and Matthew
and even those weren’t under the tree and I asked Ben about it.

“Santa puts them there.” He was cutting meat with a slicer that he had to turn by hand and he stopped to look at me. “He puts all the presents there on Christmas Eve.”

“Even ours? That we brought?”

He nodded. “All of them.”

“But there isn’t a Santa Claus.”

“Of course there is.”

“But I saw. I saw Mr. Henderson. And he doesn’t live at the North Pole and he doesn’t have a sled or reindeer and hates me, so there isn’t a Santa Claus.”

“We’ll see,” Ben said, smiling, only when grown-ups said that it was the same as saying nothing. Or at least it was when Mother said it. “We’ll see” meant the same as “nothing.”

But Ben stopped cutting meat then and gave me a bottle of 7Up, which I took
to the corner by the tree to sit and drink. In the summer I had seen a plane making smoke all over the sky, and I ran in to get Mother, and she said it was a smoke writer writing the name of 7Up to make people buy it.

I watched it until the plane was all done and gone and all the smoke had blown away and saw the 7 and the
U
and the
P
and knew what they were, letters across the sky, and the same letters were on the green bottle with the girl diving and the bubbles.

I thought the green was the prettiest green in the world because you could see through it, hold it up and see through it, and I sat in the corner and looked at things through the bottle. Ben and the tree and the stove and the store and people who came to buy things from the store—looked at them all through the green bottle even
after the 7Up was gone, until it was time for dinner.

Mother and Marilyn laughed all the time when they were together, laughed so hard that Mother, and Marilyn, too, had to squat and hold herself sometimes not to pee, but they laughed while they cooked.

They cooked all the time.

I asked Mother once why she cooked so much, because sometimes she cooked at night after working all day in the laundry, made soup and cookies and cake and all so good that I would sneak and eat them when she wasn’t looking, and she said, “Because your father isn’t here.”