Pete Hamill - The Christmas Kid

Then on December 19, the first snowfall arrived in the city. Lev was in our house and we took him up to the roof and we stood there while the snow fell on the pigeon coops and the backyards, and obscured the skyline and the harbor, and clung to the trees, all of it pure and white and blinding. We scooped a handful from the roof of our pigeon coop, explained to Lev that it was “good packing,” and started dropping snowballs into the street, hoping that we would see Nora the Nose. She wasn’t there but others were, and soon Ralphie Boy was with us, too, and Eddie Waits, and Cheech, and we were all firing snowballs from the rooftops, as skillful as dive-bombers, and Lev was with us, joining in, one of the crowd at last.

“Good packing,” he shouted. “Good packing!”

That night, while we all slept, Barney Augstein died.

They took Lev away two days later. A man and a woman in a dirty Chevy arrived at Barney’s house at eight in the morning, showed Bridget their credentials, and took Lev to the children’s shelter. Somewhere downtown. Where the courthouses were. And the jails. Bridget swore that she looked across the street and saw Nora McCarthy at her window, smiling. We learned all this that afternoon, when Ralphie Boy told us that Lev wasn’t at school. We went up to Barney’s and Charlie Flanagan was there with Bridget.

“He didn’t have papers,” Charlie said. “Barney got him in through Canada. The kid never had papers.”

“So what’ll they do?”

“Ship him back.”

“To the concentration camp?”

“No,” Charlie said. “To Poland.”

“Well, maybe not,” Bridget said. “Maybe he’ll just go to an orphanage.”

“An orphanage?”

We were filled with horror. Poland was bad enough, over there between Germany and Russia. But an orphanage was right out of Oliver Twist . I could see Lev, like Oliver on the H-O Oats box, holding a wooden bowl, his clothes in rags, asking for more gruel. That’s what the book said. Gruel. Some kind of gray paste, what they always fed orphans, and I thought it was awful that Lev would have to spend all his years until he was eighteen eating the stuff. Worse, he could be adopted by some ham-fisted jerk who beat him every night. Or, even worse, someone who hated Jews. And all of us, in that moment, seemed to agree on the same thing.

“We gotta get him outta there,” Ralphie Boy whispered. “Fast.”

The phone rang and Charlie answered it. He talked cop talk for a while, and mentioned the State Department, shook his head, and said he couldn’t adopt a kid because he was single. He hung up the phone, lit a cigar, cursed, and stared at the wall. Then he turned on us.

“All right, you bozos,” he said. “Beat it.”

I was halfway down the block when I realized I’d left my gloves on the kitchen table. I went back. Bridget answered the door and I hurried past her to get the gloves. Charlie was on the phone again.

“Hello, Meyer?” he said. “This is Charlie…”

He glowered at me until I left.

That night it snowed, and kept snowing the next day, and on the day after that, they closed the public schools, and we listened in the morning to “Rambling with Gambling,” praying for more snow and the closing of the Catholic schools, too. The snow piled up in the streets, and we burrowed tunnels through it, and made huge boulders that blocked the cars in the side streets. The park was like a wonderland, pure and innocent and white, the leafless trees like the handwriting Lev used when he showed us his own language, and kids were everywhere — on sleighs, barrel staves, sliding down the snow-packed hills. All the kids except Lev. He was in the children’s shelter, eating gruel.

Then on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Charlie Flanagan rang our bell. My mother went out to the hall and met Charlie halfway down the stairs. There was a murmured conversation. Then she came up and told us to get dressed.

“Charlie’s taking you to see Lev,” she said. She gave us a present she had bought for him, a picture book about Thomas Jefferson, and down we went to the street. Ralphie Boy, Eddie Waits, and Cheech were already in Charlie’s Plymouth, each carrying a present.

“Now, listen, you bozos,” he said, “Don’t do anything ridiculous when we see him. Got it straight? Just do what the hell we tell you to do.”

We drove to downtown Brooklyn, where the government buildings rose in their mean, gaunt style from the snow-packed streets. Charlie pulled the car down a side street and parked. And in a few minutes, a Cadillac parked in front of him. He looked at his watch.

“The party for the orphans is already started,” he said. “So you bozos just come in with us.”

Two men dressed like Arabs got out of the Cadillac. They had headdresses on and mustaches, and shoes that curled up, and pantaloons, and flowing green-and-orange capes. One of them was the largest human being I ever saw. The other one was Meyer.

“Hello, sports,” Meyer said, pulling a drag on a cigar. “Hello, Charlie.”

He handed Charlie a box, and Charlie opened it and took out an Arab costume, and put it on over his suit. In a minute he, too, was a Wise Man from the East, his face covered with a false beard and mustache. We followed the three of them around the corner and into the children’s shelter. There was a scrawny Christmas tree in the lobby, and windows smeared with Bon Ami cleanser to look like they were covered with snow, and cutouts of Santa Claus on the walls, and a few dying pieces of holly. A guard looked up when we walked in, his eyes widening at the sight of the three wild-looking Arabs.

“We’re here for a Christmas party,” the big guy said.

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” the guard said. “Second floor.”

We walked up a flight of stairs. The three Arabs glanced at each other, and Meyer chuckled and opened a door. They stepped into a room crowded with forlorn children, and then started to sing:

“We t’ree kings of Orient are…”

Everybody cheered and they kept on singing and patting the kids on the head, and looking angelic, and then Lev came running from a corner, right to Ralphie Boy, and hugged him and started to cry and then Ralphie Boy started to cry and then everybody was crying and the three Wise Men kept right on singing. They did “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” and “White Christmas.” The two guards cheered, and the other kids sang along with them, and then Meyer couldn’t stand it any longer and he lit a cigar, and then the other two lit up, and they were singing “Mairzy Doats,” and the big guy slipped a bottle of whiskey to one of the guards and a cigar to the other, and they went into “Jingle Bells” again, and moved closer to Lev, and after a little while, we couldn’t see Lev anymore. The singing went on. The guards were drinking. And then it was time to go. Meyer, Charlie, and the big guy backed out, doing one final chorus of “We t’ree kings of Orient are…” We followed them outside, waved good-bye, wished all the other kids a merry Christmas, came into the lobby, wished the guard a merry Christmas, too, and headed into the empty street.

Around the corner, Meyer stopped, lifted his whirling Arab costume, and let Lev out.

“Merry Christmas, sport,” Meyer said to the kid. “Merry Christmas.”

For the first time, Lev Augstein smiled.

That night, we sneaked Lev into our house, far from the eyes of Nora the Nose, and said our tearful good-byes. Then we all went down to Meyer’s car. The trunk was packed with suitcases, but they wedged in a few more packages, and then Lev was driven out of our neighborhood, heading into Christmas Day, never to return. A few weeks later, Charlie Flanagan put in his papers, retired from the cops, married Bridget Moynihan, and moved to Florida to live on his pension and serve as a security boss in a certain hotel in Miami Beach. It’s said that he and Bridget adopted a young boy soon after, and raised him as a Jew out of respect for the boy’s uncle. Christmas was a big event in their house, but then so was Hanukkah.