Behind Mr. Sturgis stood Miles Howland and Mary Perkins, who would be married in the spring but who had been lovers since last summer, although no one knew. He had first undone her clothes in the pine copse behind Parson’s Pond during a thunderstorm, and after this they had thought mostly of how, where, when next—moving, on the other hand, through a world lit by the intelligent and trusting faces of their parents, whom they loved. They took a picnic lunch to Bascom’s Island and didn’t put their clothing on the whole day long. Lovely, it was lovely. Was this sinful? Would they burn in Hell, suffer agues and strokes? Would he be killed by a bolt of lightning during a baseball game? Later that same Christmas Eve, he would serve on the altar at Holy Communion, wearing fresh white and scarlet and raking the dark church, as he appeared to pray, for the shape of her face. In the light of all the vows he had taken, that was heinous, but how could it be, since if his flesh had not informed his spirit he would never have known this sense of strength and lightness in his bones, this fullness of heart, this absolute belief in the glad tidings of Christmas, the star and the kings? If he walked her home from church in the storm her kind parents might ask him to spend the night and she might come to him. In his mind he heard the creaking of the stairs, saw the color of her instep, and he thought, in his innocence, how wonderful was his nature that he could at the same moment praise his Saviour and see the shape of his lady’s foot. Beside Mary stood Charlie Anderson, who had the gift of an unusually sweet tenor voice, and beside him were the Basset twins.
In the dark, mixed clothing they had put on for the storm, the carolers looked uncommonly forlorn, but the moment they began to sing they were transformed. The Negress looked like an angel, and dumpy Lucille lifted her head gracefully and seemed to cast off her misspent youth in the rainy streets around Carnegie Hall. This instantaneous transformation of the company was thrilling, and Mr. Applegate felt his faith renewed, felt that an infinity of unrealized possibilities lay ahead of them, a tremendous richness of peace, a renaissance without brigands, an ecstasy of light and color, a kingdom! Or was this gin? The carolers seemed absolved and purified as long as the music lasted, but when the final note was broken off they were just as suddenly themselves. Mr. Applegate thanked them, and they started for his front door. He drew old Mr. Sturgis aside and said tactfully, “I know you enjoy very good health, but don’t you think this snowstorm might be a little too severe for you to go out in? It said on the radio that there hasn’t been such a snowstorm in a hundred years.”
“Oh, no, thank you,” said Mr. Sturgis, who was deaf. “I had a bowl of crackers and milk before I came out.”
The carol singers left the rectory for the village green.
The music could be heard in the feed store, where Barry Freeman was closing up. Barry had graduated from Andover Academy, and during Christmas vacation of his senior year he had worn his new tuxedo to the Eastern Star Dance. There was general laughter as soon as he appeared. He approached one girl and then another, and when they all refused to dance with him he tried to cut in, but he was laughed off the floor. He stood against the wall for nearly half an hour before he put on his coat and walked home through the snow. His appearance in a tuxedo had not been forgotten. “My oldest daughter,” a woman might say, “was born two years after Barry Freeman wore his monkey suit to the Eastern Star Dance.” It was a turning point in his life. It may have accounted for the fact that he had never married and would go home on Christmas Eve to an empty house.
The music could be heard in Bryant’s General Store (“Rock Bottom Prices”), where old Lucy Markham was talking on the telephone. “Do you have Prince Albert in the can, Miss Markham?” a child’s voice asked.
“Yes, dear,” Miss Markham said.
“Now, you stop hectoring Miss Markham,” said Althea Sweeney, the telephone operator. “You’re not supposed to use the telephone for hectoring people on Christmas Eve.”
“It’s against the law,” said the child, “to interfere in private telephone conversations. I’m just asking Miss Markham if she has Prince Albert in the can.”
“Yes, dear,” said Miss Markham.
“Then let him out,” said the child, her voice breaking with laughter. Althea turned her attention to a more interesting conversation—an eighty-five-cent call to New Jersey, made from Prescott’s drugstore.
“It’s Dolores, Mama,” a strange voice said. “It’s Dolores. I’m in a place called St. Botolphs. . . . No, I’m not drunk, Mama. I’m not drunk. I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas, Mama. . . . I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas. And a Merry Christmas to Uncle Pete and Aunt Mildred. A Merry Christmas to all of them . . .” She was crying.
“‘. . . on the Feast of Stephen,’” sang the carolers, “‘when the snow lay round about . . .’” But the voice of Dolores, with its prophecy of gas stations and motels, freeways and all-night supermarkets, had more to do with the world to come than the singing on the green.
The singers turned down Boat Street to the Williamses’ house. They would not be offered any hospitality here, they knew—not because Mr. Williams was mean but because he felt that hospitality might reflect on the probity of the bank of which he was president. A conservative man, he kept in his study a portrait photograph of Woodrow Wilson framed in an old mahogany toilet seat. His daughter, home from Miss Winsor’s and his son, home from St. Mark’s, stood with their father and mother in the doorway and called “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” Next to the Williamses’ was the Brattles’, where they were asked in for a cup of cocoa. Jack Brattle had married the Davenport girl from Travertine. It had not been a happy marriage, and, having heard somewhere that parsley was an aphrodisiac, Jack had planted eight or ten rows of parsley in his garden. As soon as the parsley matured, rabbits began to raid it, and, going into his garden one night with a shotgun, Jack blew an irreparable hole in the stomach of a Portuguese fisherman named Manuel Fada, who had been his wife’s lover for years. He stood trial on a manslaughter charge in the county court and was acquitted, but his wife ran off with a yard-goods salesman, and now Jack lived with his mother.
Next to the Brattles were the Dummers, where the carol singers were passed dandelion wine and sweet cookies. Mr. Dummer was a frail man who sometimes did needlework and who was the father of eight. His enormous children ranged behind him in the living room, like some excessive authentication of his vigor. Mrs. Dummer seemed pregnant again, although it wasn’t easy to tell. In the hallway was a photograph of her as a pretty young woman, posed beside a cast-iron deer. Mr. Dummer had labeled the picture “Two Dears.” The singers pointed this out to one another as they left the house for the storm.
Next to the Dummers were the Bretaignes, who ten years ago had been to Europe, where they had bought a crèche, which everyone admired. Their only daughter, Hazel, was there with her husband and children. During Hazel’s marriage ceremony, when Mr. Applegate asked who gave the girl away, Mrs. Bretaigne got up from her pew and said, “I do. She’s mine, she’s not his. I took care of her when she was sick. I made her clothes. I helped her with her homework. He never did anything. She’s mine, and I’m the one to give her away.” This unconventional behavior did not seem to have affected Hazel’s married happiness. Her husband looked prosperous and her children were pretty and well behaved.
At the foot of the street was old Honora Wapshot’s house, where they knew they would get buttered rum, and in the storm the old house, with all its fires burning, all its chimneys smoking, seemed like a fine work of man, the kind of homestead some greeting-card artist or desperately lonely sailor sweating out a hangover in a furnished room might have drawn, brick by brick, room by room, on Christmas Eve. Maggie, the maid, let them in and passed the rum. Honora stood at the end of her parlor, an old lady in a black dress that was sprinkled liberally with either flour or talcum powder. Mr. Sturgis did the honors. “Say us the poem, Honora,” he asked.