Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

“Now, hold on, man,” Charlie Chan said. “You know what you’re saying? You know what it means, man? It means you gonna go to school, gotta learn to read, gotta learn harmony and composition. Not just play. You gotta create, man. You gotta know everything . Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky, Mahler, Bessie Smith, everything, man. You gotta see if you got it here, ” he said, tapping his heart, “even more than up here, ” he added, tapping his head. “You gotta have the other thing, too. You gotta have…I dunno, man. It’s mysterious. It ain’t got a name. Max got it. Dizzy got it. I got it. It don’t have a name. But you gotta have it, man. You gotta have it.” He looked sad. “It ain’t easy, man.”

The next day, while he was working at the grocery store, Dwight Roberts heard the sound of the fire engines. They were screaming up Gates Avenue. Dwight went out to look, and saw in the distance that smoke was pouring from his own house. He ran all the way. The street was a wilderness of hoses, engines, a pumper, three police cars. Kids were clambering on the apparatus or watching from across the street. Then he saw his mother against the fence, shaking and sobbing. The horn man was beside her, his arm on her shoulder.

“You be quiet now,” he was saying to her in a crooning, singsong voice. “You jus’ be calm, you jus’ be quiet.…”

And Dwight ran over and heard the story, about the fire in the kitchen, and his sisters screaming, and the wall of flame, and how the horn man was suddenly coming through the rooms, a blanket over him, grabbing kids, shoving his mother into the hall, the great large man knocking over furniture, shouting for them to get low, and then banging on all the doors on the way to the street. The apartment was ruined. But they were alive. And now the horn man was asking about the subway, his clothes gone, his horn in the rubble. He kissed Dwight’s mother, hugged Dwight, and started walking. Dwight shouted after him: “Where you goin’, Charlie Chan?”

“I’ll be around,” the horn man said, and walked out of the neighborhood, and out of Dwight’s life. Dwight turned to his mother, who was sobbing and praying, waiting for a chance to inspect the ruins. She glanced at the corner where Charlie Chan had disappeared.

“He was just like a bird,” she said. “Come here in the spring, and then flown away. Just like a bird.”

MISS FLANAGAN WAS FORTY-ONE when Mr. Macias came knocking at her door. He had a newspaper under his arm and a tentative look in his eyes. Did she have a room to rent? The words stumbled, then broke; his English was not good. But she understood. Yes, she had a room to rent.

“Well,” he said. “I can see it, please?”

She looked down at him; he was a small man with a neat mustache, a cheap brown suit wrinkling at elbow and knee, black-and-white shoes. On the stoop beside him there was a battered suitcase. His eyes convinced her to let him into the hall; they were filled with rejection, and on that subject Miss Flanagan was an expert.

“Yes, of course.”

The room was at the back of the parlor floor, directly off the stoop. When her parents were alive, they’d used it for a bedroom; her mother liked the view of the garden, the fireplace in winter, the parquet floors, the elegant molding that was popular when the old craftsmen built the brownstones in this part of Brooklyn. But Miss Flanagan could never sleep there; she felt as if she were usurping part of her own past. It was all right for strangers; it simply wasn’t for her. When she opened the oak door, with its solid-brass fittings, and showed the room to Mr. Macias, he issued an involuntary little breath of surprise.

“Oh,” he said. “Is so beautiful.”

“Yes,” Miss Flanagan said. “It is beautiful.”

He ran a hand over the polished wood mantelpiece. He gazed through the windows at the garden, white with winter, the tree as precise as calligraphy. He turned to her, and his mouth trembled, and rejection washed through his eyes.

“How much it is?” he said.

She thought: a Hispanic man, the neighbors will be alarmed, I don’t know him, I don’t know where he came from, I don’t know what he might have done in his past. And then: to hell with it. He has sad eyes.

“Thirty dollars a week,” she said.

The sum must have been enormous to him. He inhaled, placed a hand in his pocket, took out some bills, and handed three tens to Miss Flanagan. He gazed again around the large, bright room and said: “I can move in now?”

And so it began. Every morning at nine, Mr. Macias left for work; every evening he arrived back at precisely seven; every Friday morning, the envelope with thirty dollars in cash was in her mailbox. Gradually, he bought himself new shoes, another suit, and a guitar. And the guitar changed everything. Miss Flanagan would lie alone at night in her bed on the third floor, trying to read or watch television, tired from the day’s work at the hospital, and she would hear Mr. Macias playing softly and singing in his own language.

She didn’t understand the words, but she knew their meaning. They were full of heartbreak, loss, exile; and she remembered her father when she was a little girl, when the uncles would come over for dinner, and the house would be loud with laughter and argument, and then, as night arrived, the mood would change, and her father would stand at the kitchen table and sing the old ballads of a lost home across a sea, of heartbreak, of exile.

She met him in the hall one Saturday morning and said: “Oh, Mr. Macias, you sing so beautifully.”

“Oh, sank you, sank you,” he said, and his eyes sparkled, and he smiled for the first time since coming to the room on the parlor floor. Miss Flanagan thought he had the most wonderful smile. “I’d love to hear you sing more,” she said. “And maybe you could teach me the words?”

“Oh, yes, okay. And maybe you teach me English better?”

Spring came and then the summer. She began to cook for Mr. Macias, to anticipate his arrivals, to sit with him at the kitchen table after dinner, and show him the meaning of the words in the newspapers, and give him books, and correct his pronunciation; and then he would sing the songs of Mexico. She loved a song called “La Cama de Piedra,” about a man who lies on a bed of stone, awaiting execution; she was moved by a song called “¿Dónde Estás?” and its line that said “Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada,” which meant “I, without your love, I am nothing.” He explained where Guadalajara was, Jalisco, and where the revolutionary heroes fought the battles mentioned in some of the songs, and he smiled his wonderful smile and she thought, Yo, sin tu amor, yo soy nada.

One night he took her to Roseland, and Miss Flanagan, who had considered herself too plain for most men, who was heavier than the fashion, whose clumsiness was a family joke when her parents were alive, Miss Flanagan began to dance. Mr. Macias showed her the simplest steps, in the shadows along the wall, and then led her into the crowd while a Latin band played a bolero. She was almost a foot taller than Mr. Macias, but he guided her firmly, and calmed her trembling, and held her closer than a man had held her in almost twenty years. That night, she moved to the room on the parlor floor.

There was no talk of marriage. That idea had died in her long ago; she would be what they used to call an old maid, she was certain of that. Certainly she could never propose such a thing to Mr. Macias. If she did, he might panic, flee; he might even have some buried secret, some wife in the old country, someone in his life whose existence Miss Flanagan didn’t want to know about. If Mr. Macias did not raise the question, then neither would Miss Flanagan. She would just enjoy this time for as long as it might last, this sudden, rich, and lovely interlude, this delayed portion of her youth, this gift.