Winter Birds (20 page)

My father, having grown up with people who had conflicting feelings about Christmas, was never one for holiday merriment. His Jewish mother had met his father in New York City and had believed him when he said he was interested in converting to Judaism. After she married him, his interest in Judaism was revealed for the lie that it was. Within a year he was interested in agnosticism. Having been disowned for marrying outside her faith, his mother threw over all her Jewish heritage. I have often wondered if, as time wore on, my grandmother ever regretted the trade—her Jewish family for Gentile freedom.

Daddy’s father went from agnostic to atheist and after ten years left his wife, the Jewish girl he had liberated from her strict religion, with three little gaping mouths in the nest.

These were shadowy grandparents I never knew, born and bred in New York City, over a thousand miles from the delta of Mississippi, where my father eventually settled with my mother, a native daughter of Methuselah, Mississippi.

My father, afflicted with wanderlust as a young man, had left his mother in New York City in the year 1914 and over the next two years made his way southward to Atlanta, taking whatever odd jobs he could find to earn his keep. In the summer of 1916 he decided to seek his fortune in the West. He didn’t make it very far, however. He hitched rides on the backs of wagons through Alabama and Mississippi, and when the last driver, a drunk farmer, passed out and turned his wagon over in a ditch somewhere near Kosciusko, Daddy got out and walked, arriving early the next morning in the little town of Methuselah, so named because the first family of settlers were supposedly very long-lived.

The first house Daddy came to, on the edge of town, bore a hand-painted wooden sign on the front gate that read
Wiggins’ Boarding House
. Hungry and exhausted, Daddy turned in. Fatigue won out. He paid for a room, washed up, and slept for ten straight hours. When he woke up, he heard a bell and went downstairs to find supper on the table and an empty chair beside a girl with two dark brown braids tightly wound and pinned around her ears—“curled up like skinny rattlesnakes” is how Daddy described it the only time I heard him talk about first meeting my mother.

She was only sixteen, and her name was Penelope Wiggins. Saul Langham, weary sojourner and man of the world at twenty-two, sat beside Penelope Wiggins, only daughter and youngest child of the owners of the Wiggins’ Boarding House, and asked her to pass the platters of stewed chicken and fried squash.

According to the story, she was so shy she wouldn’t even look at him, and when he asked her a question, she bit her lip and looked the other direction. Her father first scowled at her from the head of the table, then tried a lighter approach by leaning down to ask the family cat, which was lying in his usual post under the table, what he had done with Penelope’s tongue, and then finally rebuked her outright for displaying to a guest a “shameful want of southern hospitality.”

Daddy, who wasn’t used to shy girls, thought Penelope Wiggins’ southern hospitality was just fine the way it was. He stayed on in Methuselah, lodging at the boardinghouse and working at a new enterprise in town, a small printshop, until Penelope was finally able to look at him when he asked her a question. After he asked the big question and she said yes, they were married, and when Grandpa Wiggins died suddenly a year later after being kicked in the head by a horse, Saul and Penelope moved from the room in the rear of the printshop back to the boardinghouse as the proprietors.

Daddy, whose penmanship looked like Thomas Jefferson’s, painted a new sign for the front gate:
Langhams’ Boarding House
. Grandma Wiggins took the big room off the kitchen for hers and gave the rest of the house to my parents. She was done with cooking and washing and collecting rent, she said. She was ready for a rest now that she was a widow.

Mother’s four brothers all scattered to other parts of the state, evidently wanting no share in the running of the family business. Two of them went off to fight in World War I, but only one came home. The boardinghouse was a huge edifice with two wrap-around porches—one for each floor. My parents, and eventually my two sisters and I, occupied most of the first floor except for Grandma’s room and another small bedroom rented for many years to Mrs. Beadle, whom my father referred to as “Methuselah’s grandmother.” As mentioned earlier, it was from Mrs. Beadle that I learned I was not a pretty child. She and Grandma Wiggins didn’t like each other. They called each other names not befitting their status as southern ladies.

It is early Christmas morning now. Grandma Wiggins and Mrs. Beadle are long dead. Saul and Penelope have likewise recited their lines and exited life’s stage, along with two of their daughters. Their middle daughter is now an old woman sitting alone in the dark on Christmas Day.

In many ways we were strangers in Methuselah. Though the bloodline was diluted and the religious beliefs held in contempt, we were labeled Jews. Daddy spoke out for equality of the races in a day when it never occurred to most white men to do so. He printed flyers expressing his beliefs and exposing certain outrages conducted by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Daddy’s was a well-known name in Mississippi but not a popular one among those in high places.

My father’s Jewish mother and atheist father left Daddy with troubled memories of Christmas, which he recycled and passed on to his three daughters. The Methodist church in Methuselah staged an outdoor nativity play each Christmas, but Daddy forbade us to go. “Silly theatrics,” he called it. It didn’t matter that the whole town turned out for it; in Daddy’s opinion, this was only more reason for the Langhams to stay home. Daddy never argued against Christmas on religious grounds, however. It was simply a mindless tradition and a waste of good money—this is what he told us over and over.

My mother eventually found it easier to be silent than to argue with him. Besides, by the time Christmas rolled around each year, the last thing she wanted to do was take on anything extra in the way of baking or decorating. Any charms to be found in housewifery lose their luster quickly for women who run boardinghouses. Holidays mean very little for those whose daily duties never cease.

Not being in the habit of celebrating Christmas, I continued to pass the season quietly after I left home and began teaching. My students gave me small gifts, of course—a benefit of teaching I had not expected. These were a great joy to me. I would arrange them on a table at home and marvel over the sight: all these gifts for me! I recall a green velvet pincushion and a red sachet pouch among my favorites. Though I allowed my students to decorate the classroom and sing carols, and though I presented each child with a candy cane the day school let out for Christmas vacation, this was the extent of my festivity.

Aside from the candy canes, I had never bought a Christmas gift for anyone until I married Eliot at the age of forty-two. And having received very few that I could remember, I looked forward to what the season might hold. As I had happily embraced marriage, so was I ready to embrace Christmas, especially the tradition of exchanging gifts. Though Eliot and I had not talked about how we would spend our Christmas break that year, I began laying my plans in early December. I bought a charcoal gray cardigan sweater and a pair of leather gloves for Eliot, wrapped them up, and hid them in my closet. We had no tree, a fact I laid to Eliot’s preoccupation that December with a new Shakespeare textbook for which he was serving as a contributing editor.

On Christmas morning I served cinnamon rolls and gave the gifts to him at the breakfast table. He opened them with polite surprise, then went to his study and came back with a small box that might have held a necklace. It didn’t. I opened it and found a pen and pencil set. Taped to the underside of the lid was a card he must have overlooked: “To Eliot Hess, For Ten Years of Service at South Wesleyan College.” Evidently the box had been in his study for some time, for the ink in the pen had dried up.

Too intellectual to be religious, Eliot at last voiced his opinion, very gently in hopes that I would not be offended, that Christmas was a commercial trap he preferred to avoid. He did appreciate the gifts, he said, but I needn’t think I had to do this each year. He didn’t expect personal gifts. If I liked, he said, we could use the holiday in years to come as an excuse to buy some small item for the house. And so on our second Christmas together we bought a new coffeepot, a suggestion that Eliot put forth with his usual courtesy. Perhaps he had forgotten that I rarely drank coffee.

I suppose it should seem highly unlikely that the two most influential men in my life, my father and my husband, both scorned the most important American holiday. I had learned, however, that one takes whatever he is given. Never having celebrated Christmas before my marriage, it was no sacrifice, I told myself, to forgo it after my marriage. And yet the next time December 25 arrived, I felt a tightness in my throat.

As the years passed, the sensation gradually subsided to only a general restlessness to have the season over and done. Gifts are not practical, I often reminded myself. The gray sweater I had given Eliot, for instance—it remained folded in his drawer, unworn. The gloves were too large and had to be exchanged. Then one was dropped in a muddy puddle, after which both were laid aside and finally discarded.

I have heard other old people, their minds afflicted with the fog of sentimentality, speak about the Christmases of their childhood. “We didn’t get much,” I have heard them say, “but we were happy!” They go on to talk of stringing popcorn and berries to decorate a tree, of finding oranges and stick candy in old socks hung by the chimney, of homemade toys and shiny pennies. As for me, I have a single memory: the storybook I received from my grandmother Wiggins when I was four, the year before she had a stroke and lost all concept of time and place. Lit-tle Soph-ie had no pa-per dolls, no pep-per-mint sticks, no black-board with chalk, no yo-yo in her stock-ing.

Nevertheless, my sisters and I spent hours with the Sears catalog, dreaming of the gifts we would find under the tree on Christmas morning. We made lists of our dreams, wrote letters to Santa that went nowhere. Not only were there no gifts under the tree, there was no tree. My father claimed to be allergic to evergreens of all kinds. His allergy spared him the effort of cutting, hauling, setting up, and decorating a tree, along with the troublesome hopes that would be raised once a tree was installed in the front parlor.

I have no warm, inspiring stories to tell of weathering the deprivations of the Depression. It was a dark time of wishing. I was only three years old in December of 1929 when, in a daring moment, Daddy, possessor of liquid cash, took advantage of his employer’s despair and offered to buy the shop where he worked. The offer was readily accepted, his employer being eager to leave Methuselah and move to Tennessee, where his wife’s family lived.

So at the age of thirty-five, Daddy sank all his cash into the printshop, which left him the last four decades of his life to regret his purchase. He would have sold the shop hundreds of times, even at a loss, had anyone wanted to buy such an albatross during a time when newspapers were folding and printed advertisements were considered a luxury. With no head for business, Daddy hired a young assistant named Woodrow Carper and gave him more liberty than the man’s character could sustain. When Woodrow left town in the middle of the night two years later with all the cash Daddy had hidden in a metal box behind the coal bin, Daddy’s view of mankind, which had never been very high anyway, hit rock bottom.

The boardinghouse revenue became the flimsiest of shields between the Langham family and poverty. Most of the work fell to Mother, of course, since Daddy continued to spend his days at the printshop trying to “drum up business,” as he said. From what I could tell, Mother worked harder than Daddy. This gave Daddy ample time to be the family complainer and worrier, a role which he perfected.

Even when the printshop business picked up during the 1940s, my mother’s workday always began earlier and ended later than my father’s. She was remarkably efficient around the house, inside and out. She could wield a hammer as well as a mixing spoon, a garden hoe as well as a broom, a paintbrush as well as a feather duster. My sisters and I were regularly called upon to help my mother. When I was five, I was setting the dining room table three times a day for a dozen people.

It is quiet in my apartment. The television is off. I have no desire to see the Christmas specials and commercials that are on every channel this time of year. I hear the ticking of the clock as the day comes on, the marching feet and beating drums of time. I sit by my window waiting for the first light, wondering which species of bird will be the first to visit my feeder on Christmas morning. One day I tried to keep a tally of the birds that came to the feeder, but after the tenth mark on my paper I realized the stupidity of the endeavor. How could I keep from counting the same birds twice? And even if my count could be accurate, of what benefit was such a tally?

One’s days are made up of a little of this and a little of that, all of it best forgotten. I have read that certain birds are known for the odd things they weave into their nests, some of them bright and shiny, some not. It is said that the great crested flycatcher sometimes weaves an old snakeskin into its nest. At the end of eighty years, I find no scavenged scraps of brightness in my nest. It is dull, dry, unadorned.

Memories are often touted among the aged as rescuers from loneliness, but the effort of recalling the good ones is too great. The best ones are elusive. The ones I remember offer no affirmation that my life has justified itself. So much of my eighty years is unaccounted for. The ivy of time has covered the neglected little house of my life. At no time of year is this more evident than on Christmas Day.

I knew a woman once, a fellow teacher at the last elementary school I taught in, who kept a record of her days in leather-bound diaries. I have observed that it is often not enough for such people to keep their accounts quietly; they must instead talk about their diaries constantly, citing the benefits of “living life thrice,” as this woman was fond of saying—once in real time, once in writing it down, and again in reading it. She frequently referred to earlier events recorded in her diaries from past months and years, as if to demonstrate that her life was richer and fuller than anyone else’s because she had
written proof
that she had lived and breathed. See here, she could say, pointing to her diary, the record says that I have gone to the supermarket, planted tomatoes, and baked cookies. I have painted my porch railing, wept over the Holocaust, and watched Neil Armstrong’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind on my television set.