A Christmas Sonata (4 page)

Which didn’t make any sense to me and wouldn’t work with why Marilyn cooked, because Ben was home, not over in Europe fighting in the war, because of his feet, Mother said, but that didn’t make any sense either, so I stopped asking.

They had been cooking all day and that
night for supper we had dumplings with butter on them and some soup and fresh bread and an apple pie and I ate until I couldn’t move.

Matthew woke up for a little time and I went in to sit with him, but the medicine made him not talk or see right, so it wasn’t the same as the afternoon and in a little while Mother pulled the couch out and I went to bed.

She and Ben and Marilyn sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee and talked, and their words all mixed until it was like a song and I was almost asleep when I heard them say Santa Claus and Matthew, but nothing else. Nothing that made sense because by then I was dreaming of Father and Europe, and wondering if when Matthew died would he be with Father if Father died, and could I go and see them?

·     ·     ·

Christmas Eve day.

In the morning Mother and Marilyn made cinnamon rolls and I got to eat two of them before I went in to play with Matthew.

But he wasn’t feeling very well and was more yellow than he’d been the day before, so we didn’t scout or report, but just sat and looked at magazines and picture books and worked in some coloring books except that I couldn’t stay in the lines so well and he made fun of me.

But after a little time he put his coloring book down and looked at me and was crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“It won’t be so bad.” I was coloring a pig jumping in flowers and I put my crayon down. “Mother says it just means you go to sleep and don’t come home from Europe.”

“I still don’t want to die.”

He turned away from me and faced the wall and I thought it was wrong for him to be sad on Christmas Eve day, so I made a face with my fingers in my mouth, and when that didn’t work I said, “Maybe I was wrong and there is a Santa Claus and he’ll come and bring us lots of presents—”

“Oh, hell, there isn’t any old Santa Claus.”

And I turned and saw that Ben had been coming through the door and had heard it, all of it, and that his face was white and his eyes pinched and he wiped his nose and coughed.

“Maybe he’s right,” Ben said to Matthew, but his voice was scratchy and he was having trouble talking. “Maybe there is a Santa and he’ll come and bring wonderful things, wonderful things, wonderful things.…”

He rubbed his hand on Matthew’s cheek and pushed his hair back the way
Mother pushed my hair back sometimes, the same touch, and I thought how white and red Ben’s skin looked where his hand touched Matthew against the yellow. How white and clean. And then I thought how they were the same, how Ben looked at Matthew the way Mother looked at me when I was in the clear tent in the hospital and the minister was there and how soft that look was, how soft his touch was, and saw that Ben was crying. I sat with the picture of the pig on my lap and wondered why everybody felt so bad.

And even when Ben left and I stayed and Matthew started to color again it wasn’t the same as before. Something was gone.

Gone from him.

I said let’s play Germans and he said no.

I said let’s make faces and he said no.

Whatever I said, he said no and then he
looked at me and swore, a really good word, and said, “Santa is just a big old fat liar.”

I stared at him.

“He says he’s something and he’ll come, but it’s all a big lie and he’s a big old fat liar.”

It was too much to say at once. Even if Santa turned out not to be real, it was too dangerous to say all that on the night before Christmas day. “But we don’t know …” And I was going to say we don’t know anything about him, about any of it, but it didn’t come out.

“He won’t come. He won’t come. He won’t come.”

And he swore some more, but I had covered my ears and hoped that nobody had heard, and when he turned to the wall again I left the room and went to where Mother was sitting at the table talking to
Marilyn and leaned against her leg and put my head on her arm.

“What’s the matter, punkin? Don’t you feel good?”

“I’m okay.”

“Did Matthew go back to sleep?”

“Sort of.” I thought for a little time and then I asked, “If there isn’t a Santa Claus, do you still have to be good like if there is a Santa Claus?”

“Don’t worry about it—there is a Santa Claus if you want there to be a Santa Claus.”

“There is?”

She nodded. “That’s how it works. If you think hard about it and want it enough there will be a Santa.”

I went back into Matthew’s room and sat by his bed. For a minute I thought he had gone to sleep and I looked at my coloring book and the picture of the pig and then Matthew moved.

“You’re back.”

“Mother says it’s up to us if there’s a Santa Claus or not.”

“What do you mean?”

“She says if we want him, if we want him hard enough, there will be a Santa; and if we don’t want him there won’t be one.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I thought he was thinking of something smart to say and that maybe he was going to swear. I thought if he swore about Mother I would leave the room again and not come back, and I didn’t care if he was sick and dying or not, but he didn’t.

He didn’t say anything about Mother, and he didn’t swear.

He looked at me, right into my eyes, and he said, “I want him to be.”

And I said, “I want him to be too.”

And he said, “No. I mean I want him to be, more than anything else in the whole world, more than all the things I’ve ever
wanted, more than I want to live, I want him to be.”

And his voice was soft and hissing and I knew he meant it, meant it really; and I meant it, too, only maybe not as strong as Matthew, and it scared me. The tight part of how he looked scared me because I didn’t know how that could be, how that look could be.

“Let’s think all day,” he said. “Let’s think there is a Santa all day and maybe it will be and he will come.”

So we thought it all day and when I would not be thinking it Matthew would remind me and when he was not thinking of it I would remind him until it was late afternoon and Matthew took his medicine and could not think right anymore and turned to face the wall. But he kept saying right along, until the words rolled into each other:

“Think it, think it, think it …”

And I went back into the kitchen to watch Mother and Marilyn cook. They were making
lefse
, cooking the big flat pieces of dough on the griddle on the stove and Mother sprinkled sugar on one and rolled it up and let me eat it.

“It tastes like potatoes with sugar on them,” I said, and she laughed.

“That’s because they’re made out of potato flour.”

“We have been thinking about Santa all afternoon,” I said. “Matthew and me. And we thought hard that he was real. Do you think it was enough?”

She smiled at Marilyn and then down at me. “If you thought it right, then he is real.”

“And he’ll come? He’ll come and find us and bring presents?”

“If you were good.”

But it was such a long time to wait. All that afternoon and all that night. Such a
long time that I started to think wrong again and remembered Mr. Henderson and the wine and thought it didn’t matter what I thought—Mr. Henderson had been there and there must not be a Santa Claus and it was all just grown-up talk about believing in him.

I went out by the tree where there were still no presents and sat looking up at the angel with the white hair and thought of Santa, but it only made me sad. I could not think of Santa without thinking of Matthew and how it would be sad for him that there wasn’t a Santa when he didn’t come home from Europe, when he died—he would never have seen Santa because there wasn’t a Santa.

And finally it was dark.

Outside the store windows it was dark, and Ben turned off the main store lights, so the tree seemed to grow, the lights seemed to grow and was so pretty it was hard to
breathe, just looking at it. I went into the kitchen and took Mother’s hand to come and see the tree and she followed me out.

“See the angel,” I said, pointing. “Doesn’t she have pretty hair?”

Mother nodded and picked me up and hugged me, and Ben and Marilyn came out of the apartment then, pulling the couch.

“Help us,” they said, and we moved the table and chairs out into the store by the tree.

Ben set the table and Marilyn and Mother brought food and I brought a lamp out and put it on the table. When it was done and ready, Ben carried Matthew out and put him in blankets on the couch. The little sleep had made the medicine wear off, and he smiled at us.

Then we ate some soup with dumplings, and potato sausage that made me burp, and some smelly fish called
lutefisk
that I had never tasted before and would
not want to taste again, and some dough folded over something sweet, and milk.

We ate and ate by the tree with the angel looking down, and when we were done Ben sat on the couch by Matthew’s feet and Mother and I sat on the floor and the stove was warm and it was hard to stay awake. But Ben opened a book and read a poem about Santa Claus and the night before Christmas, and I looked at Matthew, who listened to each word of the book, every and each word; and so did I, and I thought, it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter if there was a Santa Claus or there wasn’t a Santa Claus. It would not make the food different or the tree different or the angel different or how it felt to lean against Mother and listen to the story as it named the reindeer and told how they came in the night. I looked at Matthew, who was seeing them the way I was seeing them all.

In the tree.

When it was done and Ben closed the book because all the words had been said and all the pictures had been seen and it was time to close the book we all sat quietly, just sat and felt the heat from the stove. I thought of Christmas and how it was and what it must be like in the war for Father, and hoped he had a tree and somebody to read to him out of a book.

“Merry Christmas,” Matthew said in a whisper to me, and I shook my head.

“It’s not Christmas yet. We have to go to bed and wait and then it will be Christmas.”

But we didn’t go to bed, even though it was late and warm and we were sleepy. I saw that Matthew’s eyes were closing and I couldn’t keep my eyes open either and closed them, closed them just a little.

“What’s that?”

Ben stood up and I didn’t know if I
was asleep or not, but I opened my eyes and Matthew did the same and I felt Mother move next to me.

“What?” Matthew asked.

“I thought I heard bells,” Ben said, holding up his hand. “Outside. I thought I heard sleigh bells.”

And he made the face grown-ups make when they are making things up so they think you’ll believe them, and Matthew looked at me and I saw he didn’t believe it either.

“No. Listen.”

And I heard them. Heard the bells. Ringing low, and somehow coming from all around.

“Let’s see, let’s see.…”

Ben motioned with his hands and picked Matthew up, wrapped in his blankets, and we all followed him through the store to the front door, where he stood aside and let Marilyn open it.

Cold air came in along the floor and I went up next to Ben’s legs and looked out.

I didn’t see anything at first. There was a moon that made all the snow white, and the moonlight mixed with the light coming from the front of the store to make puddles of light places on the snow, but I didn’t see anything.

Then something moved.

“What—”

I heard Matthew. He was higher than me because Ben was holding him up and he could see better, and I heard him start to say something and then nothing. Just his breath sucking in.

But something moved and I heard the bells again and it came then, came into the moonlight and store light, into the puddles of light, and I saw it as plain as anything.

It was a reindeer and then another reindeer and two more, and they were walking, and they had harnesses on and they
were pulling a sleigh and it came, too, came with them and pulled up right in front of the door.

Right there.

Right there in front of the store. And I know they weren’t flying and I know there weren’t a whole bunch of them, but there were four and they pulled the sleigh and it stopped, stopped there in front of the door and there he sat in the sleigh.

Santa Claus.

With his white beard and red suit and hat, he sat in the sleigh; with his glasses and big stomach and bag of toys, he sat in the sleigh and looked at us and smiled.

Santa Claus.

And I was so scared I stopped breathing.

“It’s him,” I thought I heard somebody say, but it was me, and I said it like I was talking to the angel at the top of the tree.

“Touch it.”

It was Matthew, and he was talking to me and I knew it, but I couldn’t move. The grown-ups stood and watched and I thought it was funny because they were watching us and not Santa and I couldn’t move. “What?”

“Go touch it. Make sure it’s real.”