Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

Whenever she draws the dreadful behaviour of his guests to her father’s attention he just shrugs and says, “I don’t see the harm.” “They only get a chance to have a good time but once a year. I can hardly begrudge them that.”

Vera can.

There’s more. Daniel, now that he’s on Christmas holidays, spends all his time playing cards with this sorry testament to humanity. That began when they were short a player for rummy and his grandfather staked him in the game. He soon got the hang of it and proved himself a natural, instinctive player, quick-witted, attentive to the cards, blessed with more than his share of luck, patient as Job. In the course of that first afternoon he won more money than was good for him. He was hooked on cards.

Vera doesn’t like him to gamble. It’s not that she worries about the money he might lose, or even win. It’s the way he behaves when he plays, cold-blooded, like a reptile. Most kids his age are restless and impulsive playing for stakes. The young are optimists inclined to trust that luck, fortune, is principally concerned about them and unlikely to let them down. So they lose. Not Daniel. He is a twelve-year-old crocodile who is content to lie disguised as a log until one of the old boys forgets himself and splashes down into the shallows during a poker game. Then the jaws snap shut. Vera’s seen it. Watching him gamble she can’t help thinking that he’s years and years older than twelve. How did he get so old? The old fellows he plays with sense this unnaturalness also and it shows in the way they treat him – sometimes like a boy, sometimes like a man. They’re not entirely sure which he is, or what is due him. They get mad as hell when Vera hauls him away from the table and sends him upstairs to bed at a decent hour. Winners don’t walk away from a table, the old men grumble and complain.

Another thing, Vera knows they’ve been giving Daniel whisky to drink. She’s smelled it on his breath. And she doesn’t care if it’s mixed nine-tenths water to one-tenth whisky, which was her father’s justification when she cornered him on it. “He’s not getting enough to hurt,” he said, “and it’s Christmas. Anyway, getting it at home spoils the novelty and takes the curiosity out of a boy his age.” Whatever he says, it’s just plain wrong to give a kid Daniel’s age whisky. Of any amount.

What a shit of a Christmas it’s turning out to be. And her father hasn’t done one single, solitary thing to make it better, as Christmas ought to be. The other day she asked him when he was going to pick up a tree and he acted as if the thought of a tree hadn’t even occurred to him. “Christmas tree?” he said. “What do we want bothering with a Christmas tree? I mean to say there’s no little kids here who believes in Santa Claus, is there? And they’re nothing but a goddamn fire hazard. You weren’t really wanting a Christmas tree were you, Vera?”

No, not really.

Learning that he was intending to give Daniel money for a Christmas present was the last straw.

“Well, why not?” he wanted to know. “I’ll just pop ten or twenty bucks into an envelope. Thirty, if you think that would be better. What’s wrong with that?”

What was wrong was that that was the sort of Christmas present cleaning ladies got at Christmas, bills in an envelope. She had no doubt that he planned the same for her.

“It’s not very personal is all,” she said. “It doesn’t show much care and consideration, much thought, you ask me. Money stuck in an envelope.”

“That way he can get what he wants,” said her father. “How the hell am I supposed to guess what a kid his age wants for Christmas? I got no idea. If I give him thirty bucks, forty bucks, he can buy himself whatever he wants. Something real nice.” He hesitated. “You think forty bucks is enough, Vera?”

“Maybe,” said Vera, her voice laced with sarcasm, “you don’t have time to shop for your grandson what with entertaining your charming friends full time. You’d rather throw a lot of money at him, it’s easier.”

This is Christmas? A twelve-year-old boy playing cards on a kitchen table covered in a ratty tablecloth, drinking whisky, watered or not. A houseful of vultures diving onto whatever appears to eat and drink, squabbling and farting and picking their teeth with matchbook covers, if they’ve got any teeth to pick. No tree. Money in envelopes. And roast pork for Christmas dinner. When she asked him what he’d like for Christmas dinner, meaning what sort of trimmings to accompany the bird, her father had squinted up sideways at the ceiling and allowed that a roast pork would be nice. He hadn’t had a roast pork for a while. Suffering Jesus. How could you get into the spirit of the thing when people requested roast pork for Christmas dinner?

If nobody else knows what Christmas is supposed to be, Vera knows. She sees it everywhere, mocking her. Sees it on the television, in the magazines, even the pictures in the Eaton’s and Simpsons-Sears catalogues. There’s a wreath of holly nailed to the door, a sprig of mistletoe, a tree decorated with strings of popcorn, and an angel perched on its tip. There’s oranges and nuts in a bowl on a sideboard and a punch bowl full of eggnog and nutmeg. There are plenty of presents done up in silver paper and big red bows and the men relax in white shirts, ties, and their favourite comfortable sweaters as the women pass around Christmas cake and mince pie. Everybody laughs and conducts themselves properly, in a Christmas spirit.

What she would like to say to her father is this: My husband made me a Christmas a thousand times better than this is and he was a Jew. She hadn’t asked him to either. Their first Christmas together he’d gone out and bought a tree, along with the decorations which, quite naturally, he didn’t have. Christmas was her right, Stanley explained.

But what, Vera had wanted to know, about him? How had he felt carrying a tree home past all the shops of his Jewish neighbours?

“I had an answer prepared in case anyone said anything,” Stanley told her with a wry smile.

“And what was that?”

“That the star on the top of the tree would be the Star of David.”

Nevertheless, despite his jokes, Vera knew it had not been an easy thing for Stanley to do. What made the gesture even grander for her in retrospect was that there had been only one Christmas tree and one Christmas for them to share. It was the year Vera was pregnant with Daniel, already six months gone when December rolled around. By then the episodes of morning sickness had passed and although she was as big as a house, Vera had never felt better. Or looked better, according to Stanley, who appreciated his wife big-breasted and moon-faced with new, healthy flesh. Each morning Stanley served her her favourite breakfast in bed, a large glass of milk and two peach jam and bacon sandwiches. This weight’ll come off nursing the baby, she told herself, licking her fingers.

Most of Vera’s days in the weeks preceding Christmas were given over to preparations – making cranberry sauce, candy, shortbread, mincemeat pies and tarts, light and dark fruit cake, puddings. When she wasn’t cleaning the apartment and polishing the silver which had belonged to her mother-in-law, she sat in a kitchen full of the warm, spicy smells of baking and the sharp, tart smells of grated orange and lemon rinds, studying recipes, and rubbing the bowl of the expensive English pipe she had bought Stanley for Christmas against the side of her nose. The proprietor of the smokeshop had said there was nothing better to shine and condition a good brier than nose oil.

Whenever she felt lonesome and needed to hear the faint, comforting sounds of life below in the shop – the murmur of voices, the front door swinging shut – she turned down the Christmas music on the radio and listened intently, keeping absolutely still. Then, smiling enigmatically, she turned Bing back up and returned to thinking.