Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

“Hey!” Soldier shouted. “You think I’m standing here for my health?”

Jack removed the headset and sat up. “What is it, Dad? The Russians invade or something?”

“Don’t be a wise guy,” the father said. “I want to talk to you.”

“Shoot.”

“Look,” the father said. “You’re almost eighteen. You gotta start thinking about the rest of your life.”

“Yeah.”

“And I think I know what you gotta do. Nex’ June, when you graduate, go right in the army. They’re giving great deals now to high school graduates. You can pick a career. Electronics. Computers. All kinds of things. The money’s great. It’ll be the bes’ thing ever happened to you, believe me.”

He opened the manila envelope and took out a batch of brochures; the army, navy, and marines were all represented.

“Where’s the air force?” the young man said, smiling.

“Ah, hell, that’s not for you,” he said. “That’s not like the real service. But if you want, why don’t you…”

“Forget it, Dad,” Jack said. “I’m not going in the service.”

The father stood very erect. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’re a man, ain’t you?” the father said, his voice rising. “A real man serves his country if he has the chance. I didn’t have the chance. They turned me down. But you got nothin’ wrong with you. They won’t turn you down. They…”

“I’m going to college, Dad.”

“College?”

The word fell between them like a sword. Soldier Dunne turned abruptly on his heel and walked out of the room and out of the house. At the bar across the street, he drank a beer in silence. College. Not even West Point, or Annapolis. Just college. It wasn’t as if he had already served his country and was going on the GI Bill. He was just going to college. That’s why the country was going to seed; these kids were soft; they had no discipline; they didn’t know what it was like to fight, to bleed, to die for your country. No wonder the Russians were pushing us around everywhere. They had infantry, planes, bombs, tanks, trained killers, spies; we had college boys!

“You all right, Soldier?” said Loftus, the bartender. “You look like yer gonna cry.”

“It’s a sad day for this country,” Soldier said.

“What happened?” Loftus said. “I miss the news?”

“My kid’s going to college.”

Loftus laughed out loud. “That’s great. Soldier. Why’re you sayin’ it’s sad?”

Soldier snapped to attention and said: “You’d never understand.”

He walked out of the bar and marched through the dark streets of the neighborhood for hours, until his legs grew heavy and his hands cold and he headed home. As he crossed the avenue, he saw a figure standing in the vestibule of his building. He tensed, ready for combat. But when he came closer, he saw that the shadowy figure was only his wife. Good old Marge. Waiting up for me. He smiled and opened the outer door.

She stepped forward and slapped him hard across the face.

“You dumb son of a bitch,” she said.

Soldier stepped back, a hand to his stinging face, and said: “What is this? What’s going on? What’s this about?”

“Your son’s upstairs bawling his eyes out,” she said. “That’s what this is about!” Then, her face furious, she slapped him again. “I took your crap for a long time, Mr. Dunne. All this soldier-boy gobbledygook, all this yes-sir-no-sir baloney. Well, you drove the girls out with it. But you’re not gonna do it to Jack. I’m not gonna let you, Mr. Dunne.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I want you out of the house,” she said in a cold voice. “Tonight. Pack your bags and go. Get a room at the Y. Sleep on the subway. I don’t care. But get the hell out.”

Soldier backed up against the wall, stunned, riddled with words that came at him like bullets. He tried to speak, but nothing came out of his mouth. His legs were gone, his head ringing. He slid down the wall to a squatting position. His post had been overrun.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. She looked down at him, as if prepared to shoot the wounded.

“Save it for the boy,” she said, doing an about-face and hurrying up the stairs. Soldier squatted there for a long time, listening to the wind blow down the avenue. After a while, he thought: Maybe he’ll at least join the ROTC. And then slowly, he rose to his feet and started up the stairs, hoping the enemy would accept his unconditional surrender.

THE HADDAMS WERE SYRIANS and they ran a small grocery store on the corner of Eddie Leonard’s block. It was not unusual to be a Syrian in that neighborhood in Brooklyn; there were Syrians at Holy Virgin School, and Syrians running other shops. Most of them were Catholics, and many of them had moved to the neighborhood after the war, when Little Syria in Lower Manhattan had been cleared to make way for the Brooklyn — Battery Tunnel. But some, like the Haddams, had come directly from Syria.

To Eddie Leonard and his friends, Syria was itself a mysterious place; they knew that if you went to Ireland and Italy and kept going east, you’d find it. But it was not clearly defined on the old roll-down prewar maps. It was like Lithuania, where Eddie Waivada came from. A lost country. Atlantis.

Eddie Leonard always felt this mystery when he went into the Haddams’ dark, cramped store. The father was a gray, bony man, with desolate eyes; he spoke in his own language to his small, gray wife, and sometimes in another language, which Eddie Leonard later realized was French. Mr. Haddam’s weariness infected his older daughter, a thin, pale young woman named Victoria. She had a large nose, large hands and feet, and seemed always to be chewing the inside of her mouth.

Dotty Haddam was her opposite, and when Eddie Leonard was fourteen, she started making him feel strange. She was two years younger and a foot shorter than Victoria, with clean straight features, hard white teeth, small hands, and the blackest hair Eddie Leonard had even seen. She rode a bicycle everywhere, pedaling furiously on a shiny blue Schwinn, and as a result, she had legs like a man’s legs: hard and defined, with a ball of muscle at the calf. Those legs added to Eddie Leonard’s uneasiness when she waited on him diffidently in the store. She was a year behind him at Holy Virgin School, but she seemed much older.

Through the winter of his first year in high school, Eddie Leonard didn’t see much of Dotty Haddam. He was trying to translate Caesar’s Gallic Wars into English and deal with the baffling abstractions of algebra. From time to time, he saw her moving through the snow, bundled up against the cold, head down, legs encased in boots. He saw her in the back of the store, watching a small black-and-white television set, or studying for school. But he didn’t truly see her again until spring, when the stirring of the earth in the park and the broadcast of the Dodger games from Florida combined to tell him that the winter was over. Suddenly Dotty Haddam was back on her bicycle, taller now, her breasts fuller, her black hair longer. She smiled at him when he came into the store, and then he met her at a party in Betty Kayata’s house, and asked her to go to a movie, and she said yes, and after that they were inseparable.

Across the thick, ripe summer, he explained Latin to her; warned her about algebra; taught her some Irish songs. She told him she wanted to be a poet, although her father objected; she showed him her poems, shyly at first, then with greater confidence. She had discovered Keats and Byron, and made him read them out loud to her in Prospect Park. She showed him where Syria was, too, pointing to maps that showed Damascus and Beirut. She had a postcard from her cousin Frankie, who lived in Beirut; it showed a lovely city on green hills, spread in a semicircle, facing the sea. Eddie Leonard pointed out that the map called the place Lebanon. She said it was really all Syria. Her father said so. The French had decided the borders, but it was all really Syria, although her father said that Damascus was an ugly city.