Jack knows it’s a test. “Oh? Why not?”
She presents the case against Santa: one sled could not hold all those presents, one person could never cover the globe in a single night. Jack responds by asking her to speculate as to the nature of time. Perhaps what we think is the present is really the past. Perhaps we can only perceive reality after it has happened, and in this way we are like the stars: reflections of what has already been. “That’s why some people are clairvoyant — able to see the future. And it’s why others are able to time-travel. Like Santa.”
“So … we could be already dead now?” asks Madeleine.
Jack laughs. “No, nothing like that, what I mean is….” He looks down at her. She’s got him. He is suddenly pierced by the memory of a day long in the future — or perhaps already in the past — when she will grow up and leave him. No longer his little girl — the one who believes he has all the answers. Moisture gathers in the corner of his bad eye; he blinks it away and says, “I think we have to conclude that anything is possible. But that, if there isn’t a Santa Claus, we should make one up anyway, and enjoy the idea.”
“Do you believe in him?”
“I believe in the idea.”
“Me too,” she says, relieved — Christmas still intact, no need for her to lie.
At the clang of a bell nearby, they turn from the window to see a Salvation Army man. Jack reaches into his pocket for change just as Oskar Fried comes out of the market building, a newspaper under his arm, smoking his pipe. So the son of a gun does go out, he just prefers not to carry his own groceries. Jack is about to call out a greeting when his wife and son arrive—“No one is to look in any bags from now till Christmas,” Mimi says, pretending to be stern, and he smiles. “How’d you fellas make out? Mission accomplished?”
Fried is crossing the street, he sees Jack and looks away. Jack is surprised by his own flush of anger. It feels like a slap, this rejection of Jack’s goodwill, his entire family here on the Christmas sidewalk. It’s an unreasonable reaction, Jack knows, but he is tempted to call out, “Merry Christmas, Oskar, Fröhliche Weihnachten!” forcing the man to respond. Fried walks right past him, so close Jack can see his newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, bought at the German deli. Jack says nothing. He allows Fried to disappear into the crowd.
Mimi says, “What is it, Jack?”
“Oh nothing. Thought I saw someone, but I didn’t.”
At home the four of them begin their tree-trimming party. The spruce has stood for a week with its lights strung and now it’s time to dress it up. Mimi has brought the boxes up from the basement, and they sit open on the coffee table, their contents glittering. The decorations are like a core sample of McCarthy family history — old tinsel from three postings ago that the kids refuse to part with; delicate birds with feathered crests from the first year Jack and Mimi were married, bulbs with skiers etched in frost.
Jack is fixing an eggnog for Mimi when the phone rings. She answers it. “Another hang-up.”
“Some crank.” He hands her the drink. He makes no move to “go for a quick walk” and phone Fried back, but as he reaches for a decoration, he feels his wife looking at him. More of a glance, really. It’s fleeting — his sense that she is waiting to see whether he will find a reason to leave the house. He feels himself colour and avoids turning around, saying to his son, “Flip the record, eh Mike?”
Jack selects a bulb in the shape of an acorn and repairs its tin hook. That miserable bastard has phoned again, despite Jack’s request, his clear explanation, regarding using the home number only in an emergency. If he is lonely, facing a blue Christmas, all he has to do is agree to come home with Jack and meet the family. No, he prefers to behave like a thief in the night, a pervert skulking in the shadows. “Ouch!” Jack manages not to swear, but he is bleeding, a shard of the fragile acorn wedged in the tip of his thumb.
Mimi runs upstairs for a bandage, and Madeleine hands him one of the unbreakable snowballs to which she and Mike were restricted when they were little. “These are my favourite,” she says, and he rubs her head.
Bing Crosby dreams of a white Christmas and soothes away the dregs of Jack’s anger.
The next day, Jack calls from his office to find that Fried is out of pipe tobacco. “That’s why you called my home?”
Silence.
“But you were at the market yesterday, Oskar, why didn’t you pick some up?”
Fried says nothing and Jack can almost see him shrug. What’s he playing at? Last week Jack found himself carting the guy’s laundry down to the basement of the apartment building — Fried claimed not to understand how to use the coin-op washer. “It’s not rocket science, Oskar.” Jack had to time his shopping for Mimi’s gift to coincide with the rinse cycle.
“I’ll bring some by tomorrow,” he says, and hangs up. He has to go into town anyway — for an honest-to-goodness meeting with an actual guest lecturer — he’ll drop off the tobacco on the way.
The phone rings again. He grabs it, irritated. “McCarthy.”
“Jack.”
“Hi, sweetheart.”
She asks him if he is going into London and at first he says no, then maybe, then “Do you need me to pick something up?” She needs marzipan for a torte she is baking for the Wives’ Club charity bazaar, but it can wait. She asks him what he wants for supper and he responds genially, “Macht nichts.” It’s a normal conversation, but he can’t help wondering if she has called to check up on him. How many times has she phoned when he has been away from the office? How many times has she told his admin clerk, “It’s not important, no need to tell him I called”? How many times has his admin clerk said, “I believe he’s in London this afternoon, Mrs. McCarthy”?
He tries to focus on a stack of course reports. He will be taking work home again tonight. This is not what he’s getting paid for. He has begun to feel as though he is cheating the government, not working for it.
Jack’s Christmas leave starts next week. It has been a logistical nightmare tending to Fried under the cover of office hours; it will be virtually impossible during the holiday week. Something has to give. He doesn’t bother to slip on his rubbers over his shoes. He walks out over a fresh dusting of snow, across the parade square toward the phone booth.
The last day of school before the Christmas holidays. The classroom is gaily decorated, windows are stencilled with aerosol frost, Rudolph’s nose gleams at the head of Santa’s sleigh, and cut-outs of children celebrating Christmas in other lands adorn the wall above the blackboard. Mexican children flail blindfolded at a piñata. Dutch children overturn their wooden shoes in search of gifts. German children in lederhosen and dirndls light candles on a pine tree, normal-looking British children decorate a yule log and, somewhere in Canada, Indian children kneel reverently over a luminous manger in the forest.
Mr. March conducts with his pointer as the class sings “The Huron Carol.” “‘’Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled, the mighty Gitchee Manitou sent angel choirs instead….’”
The song is beautiful, haunting, and happily Madeleine will not have to sing it with the school band. She prevailed over her mother in the battle about joining the Christmas choir, explaining that they practised with the band on Wednesday afternoons, thereby adding to the burden of Brownies in the evening as well as taking valuable time away from her accordion. She backed this up by practising tirelessly three days in a row. The result is that she is slated to play “Jingle Bells” in the Christmas concert, but it’s a small price to pay.