Pete Hamill: The Christmas Kid

“Oh, Eddie,” Mrs. Vittorino said as he passed. “That was a wonderful thing that you did.”

“Thanks, Eddie,” Jimmie Barrows whispered.

“There was nothing else ya coulda done, Eddie Boy,” Bruno Pilser said. “Godspeed.”

Eddie Devlin smiled and said nothing and kept walking steadily until he reached the subway. There was a police car in front of the bakery on the corner. A cop waved. Eddie waved back. And then went down into the station without looking back.

DAVIS PARKED NEAR THE corner of Gates Avenue and looked behind him at the tenement in the middle of the block. The old red brick was dark with the rain, the building’s somber face relieved by scattered Christmas decorations in the windows. There were no decorations in the windows of the apartment at the top floor right, where his Uncle Roy lived alone. Uncle Roy: the old one, the lost one, the brother of Davis’s mother. It had taken Davis two days, but now he’d tracked him down. The visit would not be pleasant. The only way to do it was quickly. He got out of the car, shielded by an umbrella, locked the door, and hurried through the rain to the building.

“Who is it?” the hoarse voice said from the other side of the door on the top floor.

“Your nephew, Uncle Roy,” he said. “Tyrone Davis.”

“Go away.”

“I gotta talk to you, Uncle Roy. About my mother.”

“I don’t want to talk about her, or about nothin’ else, boy.”

Davis tried the doorknob. Locked. He made a fist and thumped on the door. “Come on, Uncle Roy.…”

“Get lost.”

“She’s dead, Uncle Roy. My mother’s dead.” A pause. “We buried her last week.”

Davis waited while Christmas music drifted up from the floors below. There was movement in the apartment, and then the door opened. God, Davis thought, he’s old. The picture that Davis had grown up with, the picture leaning on the mantelpiece at home, was of a handsome young man in paratrooper jump boots, smiling, confident, bursting with life. This was a wasted, legless, gray-haired man in a wheelchair, staring at him with angry eyes.

“What happened?” the old man said quietly. Davis closed the door behind him, glancing around the small, spare, two-room apartment, with its TV set, bed, and stacked books, and tried to explain to Uncle Roy what had happened to his sister. He told him about the first heart attack, and how full of hope they’d been when she seemed all right for a year, and then how, when she was Christmas shopping the week before on Fulton Street, she’d pitched forward on her face and was gone.

“Damn,” the old man said softly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But I wanted you to know something, Uncle Roy,” the younger man said. “She wanted to make it up with you. She wanted to be friends. She wanted you over for a visit this Christmas, and so did my wife, all of us, and all the kids. She wanted that.”

“That never woulda happened,” he said, bitterness suddenly in his tone.

“Maybe not. But that’s what she wanted. She was sorry for what happened, Uncle Roy. Every day of her life. You must know that.”

“She ruined my damned life,” he said. “Her and that damned drunk boyfriend of hers…”

“She didn’t run you over!” Davis shouted. “ He did!”

“She brung him around! I told her he was no damn good and she wouldn’t hear it! He came around, drunk, lookin’ for trouble, and…”

The old man turned his head, his eyes welling with old angers, and wheeled himself into the second room, where the bed was neatly made. He looked out at the gray rain.

“It was a long time ago, Uncle Roy.”

The old man’s voice was hoarse and distant. “It was yesterday, boy.”

Davis sighed. “Well, we still want you to come over to Christmas dinner, Uncle Roy. Two days from now. My house.”

“Shoot. Just go away, boy.”

Davis walked to the door. “Suit yourself,” he said, angry now. “I’ll see you sometime, Uncle Roy.”

Then Uncle Roy said, “It cold out there?”

“Thirty degrees. They say the rain might turn to snow.”

“Hell, it don’t snow anymore the way it used to, you know. Used to be ten, twelve feet out there. We’d build forts and tunnels, tall as a house. It’d snow for days when I was a boy. Prospect Park’d look like Russia…”

“What happened?”

“Some folks say it was that Panamanian canal. You know, it changed the Gulf Stream and whatnot, and the weather with it. All the way up here, fifty years after the canal opened. Lots of folks blame the atom bomb, too. Who knows.…You want some coffee?”

And so it began. The old man talked about the great stickball games after the war, and the gang fights between the Bishops and Robins, and the music, always the music; the great times he had at jump school in the army and coming home and seeing Max Roach, who was from right there on Gates Avenue, playing at Birdland, and feeling so proud, seeing a tough smart black man playing better than anyone in the world. He talked about women, and came finally to The Woman, the beautiful one, the one he thought was so sweet, the one who left him after the accident. He talked about a lot of things.

“What do you want for Christmas, Uncle Roy?”

“What do I want for Christmas?” he said, and laughed. Then he turned away, and his face seemed oddly younger. “Get me Ben Webster for Christmas. Or Dinah Washington. Or Willie Mays. Yeah. Let me watch Jackie take a lead off third with the Duke at bat and Campy in the on-deck circle.…” His face was lost in reverie now. The light in the apartment was grayer. “I want to stand at the bar of the Baby Grand and look at the pretty girls come in. I want to go to the Apollo on a Friday night. I want the Cardinals to come to Ebbets Field in September, Musial and Slaughter, all of ’em, and we win three out of four, and then we go for the goddamn Yankees. I want to go down to Bay Twelve and eat dogs at Nathan’s and find a pretty girl and swim out to the third barrel and tell her we can keep goin’, all the way to Spain. I wanna stay up late with Nat Cole on the jukebox and eat eggs in Monroe’s.…”

The old man paused. “Or jump out of an airplane. Or run in Prospect Park, in the morning, you know? When it’s hot and the grass is wet and there’s like a fog there. I’d like to see California. Or Florida. I’d like my woman to come up them stairs and tell me she’s sorry and she’s stayin’ for the last innings, know what I mean? I want to walk into the old Garden on a Friday night, with my friends, all of us laughin’, and excitement in the air, just standin’ in the lobby, where the statue of Joe Gans was, and we go in, and the place is packed and it’s Robinson, it’s Robinson, it’s always Ray Robinson. That’s what I want for Christmas.…”

Then he simply ran down. The words wouldn’t come. He stared off at the rain, his hands gripping the arms of the wheelchair. Davis came over, put an arm around the old man’s shoulders, and squeezed his chilly brown hand.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Roy. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Ah, the hell with it.”

“Want another coffee?”

“No. No more coffee. I’d never get to sleep later.”

He moved the chair away from Davis and looked down at the street. He was quiet for a long moment.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said finally. “I truly am.” He fumbled in his pocket, brought out a pack of Viceroys, lit one. “Listen…I mean, how’d you get me over your house, anyway?”

Davis said, “I’ve got two teenager sons, Uncle Roy. Big strong kids. Between us, we’d get you down the stairs, and the chair, too, get you back up, too. No sweat.”

The old man considered this. Davis could hear Christmas music drifting from the hall again, and down in the street he saw two kids lugging a tree through the rain. Then the old man said, “Ah, the hell with it. One thing I can’t stand is bein’ a bother to someone. Forget it, boy. I can’t stand pity, you know what I’m sayin’ to you? I don’t want nobody feelin’ sorry for poor ol’ Uncle Roy. Forget it.”