Once Upon a Christmas Read online

  Mary Louise delighted in Purdy’s Christmas Eve birth and declared to all who admired him that he was the best Christmas present ever. Leo was less enthusiastic. He was eighteen, a bridegroom of six months, and doing odd jobs while waiting for something to open at the paper mill. Those were the depression years, and a baby to feed was, well, a baby to feed. Purdy’s hungry gulps soon depleted Mary Louise’s meager supply of mother’s milk, and Leo had to buy cartons of Carnation evaporated milk from the corner grocer on credit. Purdy was the only baby Doc Wimmer ever delivered who never lost any of his birth weight. “A strapping boy, Mrs. Boville,” he described the “pitcher of health” on his examining table. “Gonna eat you outta house and home. How’s Leo’s nervous stomach?”

  Now seventy-two years old, Purdy lay on his father’s bed, comparing its regular size to that of the king size in his small apartment near the theater district in Manhattan. It was Christmas Eve and another birthday. Leaving his sixties had been a difficult passage, and three birthdays later, he still thought of himself as a much younger man than he was. The passage of time mystified him. “When you get old, the clock speeds up,” Leo once told him. Purdy’s personal metaphor was that life is like riding his sled down Swanson’s hill used to be. The closer he got to the bottom, the faster he went.

  After graduating from high school, Purdy disappointed his parents and dismayed the foreman of the pulp mill by turning down an offer to work on the log piles “… until something better opens up. Follow in your dad’s tracks.” Bert Madden offered, “A year or two on the logs should be just the ticket for a big fella like you.”

  Instead, at his English teacher’s urging, Purdy went off to college to become a teacher. To pay his expenses, he took a job assisting the college janitors, doing just about anything that needed doing, especially the heavy work. The drama director discovered him moving stage equipment and, needing a big man for the role of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, auditioned him. Purdy played the part, received high praise, changed his major to drama, and married the stage. He went from little theater to bigger theater to Broadway, with some movie and television work along the way. And now, on his seventy-second birthday, he was about to play a role he had never played before, on an unfamiliar stage, for an audience he wanted very much to please. He was nervous and shifted his position on Leo’s too-small bed.

  “… a beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight, walkin’ in a winter wonderland.” The music came from the living room where Andy Williams was singing carols from the Bose radio and CD player Purdy had given Leo on his eighty-ninth birthday. Leo wanted the player on a small table next to his La-Z-Boy recliner. Purdy had explained the stereo effect would be better from across the room, but Leo insisted a radio belongs next to a chair. The Andy Williams Merry Christmas CD was also a gift from Purdy, and he suspected the CD player had not been used before.

  “… In the meadow we will build a snowman…” A lot of memories in that song. He had never married, but he had come close a few times. The theater was wife enough for him.

  “… and pretend that he is Parson Brown.” Just for fun, Purdy listened through the music for the thump of Santa’s sleigh on the roof as he had done as a boy, trying to recapture the childhood magic of Christmas.

  The magic of Christmas. That’s what Christmas was, magic.

  Purdy opened his file of Christmas memories and selected one from his fourth birthday. There he was, lying in bed trying to fall asleep so Santa could come. He remembered the slow grind of the weeks, days, and hours before Christmas mornings. “Backward, turn backward, O Time in your flight, Make me a child just for tonight.”

  “Mama, make the twins shut up. They’re carryin’ on in their room, and I can’t sleep.” Peggy and Billy were three and shared the bedroom next to Purdy’s. Then suddenly it was morning. He had slept. Santa had come and gone.

  The three children were not allowed to see the tree until Leo turned the lights on and shouted to their trembling bodies in the half-light, “He’s been here!” Only then could they dash for their treasures arranged in three neat piles under the tree.

  “Remember,” Mary Louise always cued them, “Purdy’s are wrapped in red, Billy’s in green, and Peggy, honey, yours are in the white tissue paper.”

  He remembered there were few surprises in the gifts under the Boville tree. The guidelines for preparing children to take their places in the adult world had been in place for many generations. Boys were headed for the mill, girls for marriage.

  So every Christmas morning, Peggy tore white tissue paper off a new Sunday-go-to-church dress, a doll, hair ribbons, underwear, and a refurbished doll buggy or garment Santa had mysteriously whisked away to his North Pole workshop weeks earlier. Purdy and Billy unwrapped new corduroy knickers, knee socks, long underwear, and a toy truck, six-shooter in a holster, or metal soldiers, toys the brothers were expected to share with each other. The family received oranges and chocolate-covered cherries in a box, as well as decks of playing cards and board games to replace the old ones that had been grimy and missing pieces since the previous New Year’s Day.

  When the kids started first grade at Saint Joseph’s, new prayer books, rosaries, and Saint Christopher medals on neck chains, all blessed by Father Champlain, were added to their Christmas piles. “Your old ones was a disgrace to the church,” Mary Louise proclaimed. “Santa seen that way up at the North Pole.”

  His mother’s words, as he remembered them, returned Purdy to 2002. He checked the time. Only a few minutes had passed, and Andy Williams was still singing, “…better not cry, Santa Claus is coming to town.”

  How real Santa Claus was to Purdy sixty-three years ago when he was in third grade at Saint Joe’s. Santa was not held in high regard by The Teaching Sisters of Saint Francis. For three weeks before Christmas vacation, Sister Thomasina reminded her third graders several times daily that,“Christmas is to celebrate the coming of Jesus, not Santa Claus.” She stopped short of denouncing the tradition in so many words, but she tried now and then to shake her students’ faith in Santa. “How can it be,” she asked the class one day, “that his whiskers don’t burn off sliding down all those fiery chimneys?” Sister Thomasina had a way of exposing fraud.

  The question seemed reasonable to Purdy and, therefore, disturbing. Sister had a point. How could a fat man with a white beard carrying presents wrapped in tissue paper slide down chimneys with black coal smoke headed in the other direction and keep his whiskers intact? Purdy’s faith was being tested.

  But Larry Burns saved the day. “I’ll betcha he carries a big jug of water in his sleigh and waters ‘em down.” This explanation relieved the class, and Sister Thomasina resisted pressing the point by asking why it was that water in a jug didn’t freeze in twenty-below-zero weather.

  Purdy wondered whatever happened to Larry Burns. Probably followed in his dad’s tracks and worked on the logs until something better opened up at the mill.

  Dads, Purdy thought, are probably more responsible for perpetuating the Santa Claus myth than mothers. At least that was true in his family. It was Leo, not Mary Louise, who loved the magic of Christmas as much as the kids did. Purdy remembered a conversation he and his dad had in the kitchen several days before Christmas.

  “We gonna leave him milk and cookies like the other kids, Dad?”

  “Don’t you think he must get awful sick of the same old milk and cookies all the time?”

  “Ain’t we gonna leave him nothin’, Dad?”

  “Sure. But we always leave him somethin’ a little different.”

  “A little different, Dad?”

  “Sure. Somethin’ he don’t get so much of, like he does milk and cookies.”

  “Like what, Dad?”

  “Well, son, when your old dad comes home from the mill all tired out from workin’ the night shift, what’s the first thing he goes for?”

  Purdy recalled searching his mind for the answer to Leo’s question, then the flush of embarrassment he felt when he foun
d it.

  “Oh, Dad! Please, Dad. Dad, you can’t mean … not a cold beer!”

  “Bingo! Nothin’ goes better when you’re hot and tired from slidin’ down chimneys than a cold beer … and a pickled Polish sausage!”

  “But Santa don’t drink beer and eat pickled Polish sausages!”

  “He does at our house.”

  “How do you know, Dad?”

  “I set ‘em out Christmas Eve and they’re always gone Christmas morning.”

  And they always were.

  “… It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old …” The music removed that particular Christmas ghost from Purdy’s reveries. Maybe he should get his clothes changed. Again, he looked at his watch. Still plenty of time. “Time,” he said aloud, “that thief of life.” Peggy and Billy were gone now, and Mary Louise. Did they and all those Christmases really happen, or were they dreams? Perhaps they were all still here. Of course they were. He couldn’t shake them from his head if he tried. Peggy and Billy and Mama; the big, decorated spruce in the corner of the living room; Sister Thomasina; the wrapped packages he opened expectantly, already knowing what was in them; The Lone Ranger, Our Gang, Charlie Chan, Fibber McGee and Molly, George and Gracie, Eddie Cantor and Harry Vonzel. All still here, and all a part of him. Nothing’s ever really gone, he reasoned. As long as I am here, they will be with me.

  Andy Williams was still with him also, “… how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep …” Purdy rose from the bed, stepped to the small closet, opened the folding doors, and peered inside, visually checking off the items he would soon need. Satisfied, he returned to Leo’s bed.

  “… the hopes and fears of all the years …” When did his maturing mind force him to move Sana Claus from the real to the make believe? He thought back and replayed a scene from third grade.

  A small group of “Saint Josephites” huddled together for warmth on the school playground—recess, he supposed. They were hunched into their mackinaws and neck scarves to shield themselves from the December weather. From their chatter through steamy puffs of breath, a serious issue emerged. What is Santa’s motivation for being so nice to kids who, as the nuns often reminded them, were riddled with imperfection and well-advised to make frequent acts of contrition, as well as weekly visits to Father Champlain’s confessional?

  Punky Rastall thought Santa Claus was a millionaire and just liked spending money on kids, whether they were good or not. Nobody, Punky claimed, ever got a piece of coal in his stocking, or, as his father had changed the threat to make it more fearful, a “horse’s apple.” Petey Peterson begged to differ. He was certain some kid somewhere, at some time, had found something rotten in his stocking—maybe no girl had, but a boy for sure.

  Becky Brown said it was just like the Easter Bunny. “Some of God’s creatures are a lot like angels, only they have reindeer instead of wings.” Ronald Smith said she was nuts, because only a nut would believe in the Easter Bunny. That remark made Becky cry, and she stomped away to tell Sister Mary Rose.

  Allen Remington figured Santa was a lot like nuns. “They don’t get paid like the publics do.” Finally, the consensus was that Santa did it for the milk and cookies he got at every house. “He really likes eatin’ cookies and dippin’ ’em in milk. That’s why he’s so fat,” Bobby Schneider concluded, a conclusion that made Purdy uneasy.

  Suppose his father was wrong about Santa’s tastes! What if Santa wasn’t drinking the beer, but pouring it out in the sink? What if he was insulted by the Polish sausage, or he ate it and it made him sick? What if he would choose this year to get even and skip the Boville house altogether? These and other terrible possibilities raced through Purdy’s mind. He would ask his dad to change their offering to the standard milk and cookies.

  “I want to give him what the other kids do, Dad.”

  “Okay, son, if that’s the way you want it. But I still say old Santa must get awful sick of all them milk and cookies.”

  “Thanks, Dad… Dad?”

  “What, son?”

  “How can Santa get to every house in the world in one night?”

  “He just does, that’s all.”

  “But, Dad, why?”

  “Listen, Purdy, son. Sometimes there ain’t no answers for the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions you and me can dream up. Nobody knows for sure. But we can see the ‘whats’ that happen, and it’s the ‘whats’ that count. It don’t matter so much how or why Santa comes. We just know he does. And until you know for sure he don’t, he’ll be here every Christmas.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “Good. So milk and cookies it is. I’ll keep the beer and sausage for myself.”

  Purdy knew then there was no Santa Claus.

  “… May your days be merry and bright, and may all your Christmases be white.”

  Purdy’s favorite carol drifted in from the living room, and he hummed along. It was the last selection on the Andy Williams disc. Purdy listened until the next disc dropped and Anne Murray opened with Joy to the World. Then he swung his long legs to the floor, walked past the still-open closet, through the living room, and to the door that opened to the hallway.

  He opened the door and looked to the left and to the right. The hallway was empty, as he knew it would be. All the other doors opening to the hallway were closed and probably locked, protecting the contents of the small apartments from neighbors who had no use for them and had never stolen anything.

  Purdy counted eight doors between Leo’s apartment and the intersecting hallway leading to the dining room and commons area. He stepped into the hallway and listened. Edna Thompson was playing Jingle Bells on the old piano Purdy knew was next to the Christmas tree for tonight’s program. Edna had been playing Jingle Bells forever, first as the public school’s elementary music teacher, then as the music director for the Methodist Church, and now as the resident musician for Northland Acres Retirement Village, located in the middle of Adolph Schmeling’s former cornfield. Time marches on!

  Jingle Bells was the processional music for the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades carolers from Saint Joseph’s Elementary School, the chorus Purdy had sung in six decades earlier. The carolers, Purdy had been informed, would sing for the assembled residents for thirty minutes, just enough time for his preparations.

  He returned to the bedroom, transferred his trappings from the closet to the bed, and began his transformation. He was as nervous as he had been any time he waited backstage on Broadway. He was afflicted with what he and his fellow professional thespians termed “the dressing-room shakes.” He licked the sweat from his upper lip and recognized the familiar salty taste.

  First the wig, the beard, and the bushy white eyebrows, then the red suit and boots, and finally the floppy hat. Purdy moved quickly to face himself in the dresser mirror. A little lipstick, now some rouge on his cheeks. His hands were shaking. Just about ready. From habit he vocalized his cue and his opening line.

  Returning the few steps to the closet, he retrieved the sack holding thirty-seven gifts, all purchased and wrapped in tissue paper by Saint Joseph’s Altar Society. There were boxes of chocolate-covered cherries, jars of hand lotion, neck scarves, decks of playing cards, flannel shirts, ballpoint pens, socks, aprons, calendars, and other useful items.

  Purdy prepared to lift the sack to his shoulder. Fortunately, he was a large and still-strong Santa. The sack found his shoulder easily and rested there comfortably. He carried it out of the bedroom, through the apartment door, and into the hallway he knew would be empty. There he lowered it to the floor and listened.

  He could hear the children singing in the commons area, accompanied by Edna Thompson. “… joyful and triumphant, O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.” Purdy had been given the program in advance. The final carol, Silent Night, would be next. Then the recessional, Jingle Bells, applause from the appreciative audience, a moment or two for Edna to rub some flexibility into her arthritic fingers, and then his cue. Purdy lifted the sack
again and walked gingerly to the intersecting hallway. His nervousness had been replaced with excitement and anticipation.

  As he passed the closed apartment doors, he mentally visualized what was behind them. Each small apartment had its own special signature: antique vases filled with artificial flowers, La-Z-Boys pulled close to television sets, a hand-knitted afghan over the back of a couch, a wall overloaded with family pictures, a dining table and chairs crammed into a too-small eating area, a floor lamp moved from the old farm house to the house in town and now here, in Adolph Schmeling’s old cornfield. All stents keeping lifelines to the past open for the flow of memories.

  At the intersection Purdy stopped and cleared his throat. The applause for the children was replaced by a murmur of voices. Then his cue: Leo’s still-strong voice rising above those of his family of neighbors. “I hear someone coming.” Quickly, Edna Thompson unleashed “Here Comes Santa Claus,” Purdy’s cue, and Purdy sang out, “Ho, Ho, Ho!”

  His “Ho, Ho, Ho,” even from the distance he delivered it, was clearly audible in the commons area; and he sang out again, “Ho, Ho, Ho!” This gave life to Edna’s fingers, and she thumped the piano keys with such feeling and exuberance that she might have been playing The Star Spangled Banner, God Save the Queen or Onward Christian Soldiers. Several in the audience had to adjust their hearing aids.

  In he bounded, sack on his shoulder, still shouting, “Ho, Ho, Ho!” And Edna played louder still, “… right down Santa Claus Lane…” There was magic in her fingers, the magic of Christmas. And that same magic was in the eyes and ears and hearts of her listeners who had celebrated that magic for so many years.

  Purdy looked his audience over as he lowered the sack from his shoulder, Edna’s cue to stop the music. There was Curly Archambeau, now bald as a billiard ball; Marjorie Nettleton, once the best polka dancer in town, in her wheelchair; Chet Doyle, the town barber until his brain and tongue lost their harmony and he began taking gibberish to his customers; Bert Madden in plaid pants and a plaid shirt, still wondering why Purdy turned down his job offer; Emmaline Arthur, from the richest family in town, sitting right next to Henry Brickbauer, from the poorest. The great equalizer, age, had done its work.