Pete Hamill: The Christmas Kid

He looked up at a thick-bodied, white-haired woman walking across the park, stepping tenderly, as if her feet hurt. Her head was down. She went to the curb at Fourth Avenue, waited for the light to change, and then hurried across the street to get on a bus. And then Hugo knew that it was Daria Stark. This lumpy middle-aged woman. It was her. And suddenly he was up, rushing to the corner, seeing the bus wheeze into the distance, heading uptown for Grand Central. He jumped into traffic, and a cab stopped with a squeal of brakes, and a cop turned to face him from the opposite corner, and a truck pulled around him, and Hugo began to run. Uptown. Calling her name. Through traffic. And never saw the taxi running the red light on 20th Street.

When I went to see him at Bellevue, his voice was an injured croak. His left leg was broken, his pelvis smashed, his skull fractured; there were tubes in his arms.

“I saw her,” he whispered. And started to cry. “She’s old. Like me.…”

The pelvis healed, and the leg, and the skull, but Hugo didn’t. He left Bellevue, but he couldn’t learn again how to live in the world. He gazed out windows; he avoided the bars, and the company of men. He couldn’t walk and didn’t eat. The cops found him one afternoon, standing alone on a subway platform in Brooklyn, watching D trains arrive and depart. Someone reported him as a possible degenerate. The cops were gentle and took him to a hospital. His condition was simple; he was inconsolable. He likes it where he is now.

“There’s trees,” he said one day. “And feather grass, blinding and irresistible, like the steppes…”

MITCHELL SAT IN THE corner of the old couch, fingering the worn armrest, looking out past the metal window gate at the gray winter sky. He heard his wife, Sybil, stacking the dishes beside the sink, and soon she came to join him, sitting heavily in her favorite armchair. They were separated by the round mahogany table they’d bought the day they moved in, back in 1946. There was a lamp on the table, and a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and a dish with some pills.

“It’ll be dark soon,” she said.

“Yes, it will,” Mitchell said. “But tonight we don’t have to worry anymore. Ever.”

“We’ll be safe, won’t we, Mitch?”

“Yes,” he said, pouring the wine into the glasses. “We’ll be safe.”

He always loved this time of the New York day, when the sun faded and the light turned a warm gray, softening the hard edges of the world. It reminded him of the old Warner Bros. movies they’d seen together before the war; the blacks were really black in those movies, the grays all silvery. They’d held hands in the dark, in the Sanders, in the RKO Prospect, in Loew’s Metropolitan, in the RKO Albee. Held hands, with the future spread out before them. Safe. In Europe, darkness had fallen; Hitler was killing Jews, but he and Sybil were together in the safe darkness of movie theaters. Back then. It would be a long time before fear entered his heart to stay.

“You mailed the letters?” Mitchell said.

“Yes, dear,” she said. “They should have them Monday.”

Mitchell sipped the wine. “You think they’ll get them at the same time? I mean, one goes to Florida and one to California. I wouldn’t want one of the kids to get one before the other.”

“They go on airplanes, dear. They’ll be there the same day.”

She was quiet for a long time, then sipped her wine, and gazed at the crowded bookcase beside the window. It even held textbooks she’d used at Columbia Teachers College, before the war, when Mitchell was at CCNY. It held everything else she’d ever cared for: Chekhov and Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol, all of Dickens, all of Stevenson. They’d come through life together, she and those books; they were her treasures. Now the girl would have them; the boy never did care for reading.

“Do you think they’ll be upset?” Sybil said.

“Of course,” Mitchell said. “But the girl will come. She’s always been responsible.”

“He was, too,” she said. “But he always had these other things to live for. His job, his children, the two wives.”

“The first wife was the better one,” Mitchell said.

“How would you know, dear? You never met the second wife.”

“True,” he said. “But I liked the first one. She had…what’s the word? Spirit?”

Sybil smiled. “Well, she was certainly wild.”

Mitchell was quiet then, remembering the children when they were small, running around this apartment like puppies. That was after the war. He was teaching at Brooklyn Tech then, Sybil at Julia Richmond. He remembered the girl, learning how to read when she was three, explaining the comics to her older brother, then reading books to him. The books about the elephant. Babar. Yes. Babar. They were around here somewhere, those books. Still here.

“You don’t have to do it,” she said abruptly.

“No, my mind is made up,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” he said. “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be afraid.”

“All right.”

“Sybil?”

“Yes.”

“Come and sit beside me.”

She got up slowly, exhaling hard, and sat beside him. The gray was deeper now. There were no lights on in the apartment. She sat beside him, and he put his arm around her.

“Tell me about the old places,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Please,” he said. “Then we’ll have them forever.”

She snuggled against him, her eyes unfocused. And she began to name the places of their life together.

“Sea Gate,” she said. “Kiamesha Lake. Luna Park.”

“Luna Park…”

“The dances at Prospect Hall. Union Square on a Saturday afternoon, and Fulton Street at Christmastime. Joe’s on Myrtle Avenue…”

“We had dinner there the first night we ever slept together. I had four dollars in my pocket, and you had two, and we left a dime tip.”

She smiled. “And the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. And the old Madison Square Garden. Remember how you took me to see CCNY play basketball there? And we walked through Times Square and looked at the giant waterfall, the Bond sign, and the big one for Camels, with the man blowing smoke rings, and everybody looked so glamorous, and we went to Lindy’s and waited for a long time, and saw Milton Berle sitting in a booth.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember that.”

“We bought the News and Mirror, they were two cents each, and we took the subway home to Brooklyn, and you read me Pushkin that night in bed.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“And then in the summer, we both had two months off, and the kids went to camp that time, and we went to Penn Station, the old Penn Station, and we took a Pullman to Florida, the two of us sleeping in the train, and it made clackety-clack sounds all through the night, and soon we could smell the oranges. We couldn’t see them, but it was morning, and the train was still moving, and we could smell oranges everywhere, a million of them, a billion, the air full of oranges, and the heat was damp and wet when we walked to the dining car, and we still couldn’t see the orange trees, but we were in Florida. We knew it. The oranges told us.”

“I remember.”

“And one New Year’s Eve we went to the Waldorf,” she said. “You’d saved all year to surprise me, and Guy Lombardo was there, and we saw Mayor O’Dwyer in the lobby, with that beautiful wife of his. You kissed me at midnight. And we stayed that night in the Waldorf, and you made love to me, and we looked out the window in the morning, and New York was the most beautiful place we’d ever seen.”

“Yes.”