Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (3 page)

“So rev up those engines,” he concluded, “stoke the fires of your enthusiasm, and let us bring smiles to the faces of good little children everywhere next Christmas.”

For months, Santa’s life was bliss. Wendy helped keep his elves focused. His wives enriched his life, both in the bedroom and out of it. And he maintained a healthy balance between work and play. He especially cherished walks in the woods, by himself in the hours before dawn, and with Rachel, Wendy, Anya, or all three, at other times of the day. But his favorite pastime was reading to Wendy, snuggled against him on his lap or, more often, tucked in and listening enthralled.

The community, as always, dove joyously into the task of restocking their shelves, for it took precisely a year of diligent effort to prepare for the next Christmas delivery.

Still, undercurrents of unease flowed within him that winter, spring, and far into the summer. In all that time, Santa’s feeling that something had gone awry never quite lifted. Lately it had returned in full force. Many were the nights he lay abed between Rachel and Anya, wide awake under moonlight, trying to seize by the arms the elusive problem and stare it full in the face.

One August night in his workshop office, with his helpers tucked snug in their beds and midnight long fled, Santa removed a Coke bottle from the squat red dispenser in the far corner of his office and sat down to focus on what had changed since Rachel and Wendy’s arrival.

“Must take stock,” he murmured.

To be sure, they had brought an abundance of grace and joy into his life. How splendid it had been to befriend and grow to love these mortals, how satisfying to overcome his Pan-inspired lust for the Tooth Fairy, to beat back her attack against them, and to see them resurrect, through miracle, from horrendous deaths unto immortality. How beyond the blessings one could wish, to be wedded by God Almighty himself to Rachel and Anya in the forest, as the elves marveled and sang and made merry.

Santa set these wonders aside. “If I’m to address the Problem That Resists Detection, I’ve got to focus on what must be accepted—here in this private sanctum—as my failings.

“First,” he said, ticking the issues off on his fingers, “I’ve been drinking far too much Coke. It’s become a mindless habit.” He lifted the bottle to his lips, stared at it, and set it aside. One a day had become half a dozen. Sometimes he could not recall retrieving the bottle from the dispenser, so automatic had the habit grown. “I’ll wean myself, go gradual into diminishment.”

This simple resolve pleased him. “Second, I’ve been giving my helpers far less guidance than they’re used to. Not that they’re not completely competent without it. They simply need more engagement than I’ve afforded them lately. A wink, a nod. There’s a childishness about me these days, a tendency to avoid the serious, even when it would be appropriate.” Was that where the problem lay? He pondered in his heart, shook his head, and ticked off another finger.

“Third, Rachel and Anya.” Santa smiled. Simply grand having two such loving helpmates. No problems there. “I’ve never been happier. And I know they’re happy too, because they tell me so, often, in many ways.” Was he tempted by the Tooth Fairy, once the fierce ash nymph Adrasteia, who had been willingly ravaged by Pan more frequently and with greater gusto than her sister nymphs? Not in the least. “She’s monstrous.” He wondered what he had ever seen in her. As far as he was concerned, their trysts were ancient history.

“Ah yes, fourth, Pan.” He put a hand to his lips, dreading that having uttered the name might once more summon that side of him, might awaken that voice of savagery and disrespect for all civilized norms. “I fear him, a dark rumbling terror that never quite leaves me.” Hmm, could that be it? He didn’t think so, but it would reward revisiting. Though God had tucked his Pan self deep inside his psyche, Santa sensed the goat god lurking.

He shuddered and went on.

“Fifth, my own intolerance.”

Ooh, warm indeed. He glanced at the thick book resting on its special podium in one corner of the office. Bound in black leather, it shifted and changed during his weekly survey of the globe, editing or deleting entries when naughtiness, adulthood, or death claimed a child. The niceness section of the book had grown noticeably slimmer, in number of pages yes, but also in commentary. “And the annotations on my naughty list have become more acerbic these past many years. Used to be simply a name and a phrase.” Talks back to her mom. Cheats on tests. Thinks mean thoughts about his little sister. Torments the cat.

“Now I go on for paragraphs, berating them for falling away from the innocence of toddlerdom.” Maybe that’s why he had been overdoing the jolly old elf, to counterbalance his increased outrage at the sorry state of modern children. Still, that wasn’t based on misperception. The world had indeed grown grimmer. Grown-ups and wicked kids hurtling tail-over-teakettle toward adulthood
deserved
his scorn. “Hmm,” he said, stopping himself from getting worked up. “Perhaps Pan isn’t so dead in me, after all.”

Another issue to revisit.

He turned down his fifth finger and raised his other thumb.

“Sixth and last, there's Wendy.” A high soft chime sounded in his brain. “My dear, darling girl. All seems to be well with her. But oh, that...hesitation as we flew in.” In his mind’s eye, he sat in his sleigh, looking over at her, asking about her visits.

Surely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, that momentary pause. But he saw now, eight months after the fact, that it was anything
but
inconsequential. “There was a certain tonal shift when she mentioned—what was the boy’s name?—Jamie Stratton.”

He hunched forward in his chair. “That’s it. I minimized the signs. Wendy hesitates to speak of uncomfortable things, not wanting to deflate my buoyancy. But if I can’t—”

He choked up. If he couldn’t get right with his own little girl, how could he hope to get right with all the world’s children? That was the most pressing problem. The others would wait.

“Tomorrow, when I tuck the covers about her, I’ll assure her I’m okay with whatever discomfort she throws at me. Like the caring dad I am. Not some silly jokester who holds off sorrows with a jest.”

That was it.

He replayed the moments in the sleigh and kicked himself for not seeing it sooner. “But I see it now.” And he would address it, give comfort to his child who looked nine but was seventeen inside. It was time to grow up, take the reins of parental responsibility firmly in hand, and offer his counsel or condolence for whatever was troubling her. For he saw now, replaying the months since Christmas, how many other signs there had been, looks, sighs, shrugs. How could he have missed them all?

“No need to berate or browbeat.” He took a deep swig of Coke, the bittersweet bubbles gassy in his belly. “I recognize them now. Must lay my cards on the table and ask her to do the same. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”

* * *

Eight years had elapsed since Wendy’s mom had passed horrendously through the guts of the Tooth Fairy into the likeness of a huge coin and, by God’s grace, become Santa and Anya’s immortal mate; eight years since Wendy herself had been blessed with immortality. She took delight in helping Anya cook and sew, in learning elfin crafts, in being read bedtime stories as her eyelids grew heavy and an invisible Sandman made his nightly visit to sprinkle sleepy dust into her eyes.

But she took special delight in choosing one hundred deserving boys and girls to visit on Christmas Eve. These she woke one by one, giving them world-revealing rides in her sleigh, projecting into their bedrooms highlights of their futures, and leaving them with a kiss on the forehead and memories which, though they faded into dream, helped keep their destinies focused ever after.

Earlier on the day Santa agonized in his study, Wendy took Fritz and Herbert aside and posed the question.

“Why are they so mean?” Fritz repeated between wee nibbles on a hollyberry croissant. “Maybe they convince themselves they know best; and so great are their convictions, that they force things, bad things that seem good to them, upon others. Ooh, this croissant is delicious. Take a bite. No a bigger bite! Truth to tell, I have no idea. Other than you and Rachel, I’ve never seen a mortal, up close in real life. And you two are as far from meanness as a smile is from a frown. What about you, Herbert? Any ideas?”

His companion looked blank, shrugged, and said nothing as usual, though his mouth moved in half-hearted guppy puckers and his wide eyes begged pardon for his ignorance.

“Herbert doesn’t know either. Have you asked Santa? I’ll bet he’d have an answer right off.”

Wendy said she hadn’t, but would definitely consider it. Then she thanked them. “Hey, Herbert,” she said, “Don’t look so glum. No one can know everything. And I think you make the bestest cameras in the whole wide world.”

Herbert brightened at that, which cheered Wendy too.

Months before, she had posed the question to her mommies, tossing it off as casual as could be. “Don’t you go fretting,” Anya had said. “Mortals are just that way.”

Which was no help at all.

Rachel had been a little better. “Some people,” she said, “are drawn to be selfish or hurtful, to play power games that one-up themselves and one-down everybody else.”

Wendy had asked
why
they were drawn that way and Rachel danced around the issue in a tone more suited to a nine-year-old.

Wendy thanked her and went her way.

On the very day they returned, as she brushed Galatea in the stables, she had asked Gregor. Harrumphing in the grand Gregor manner, he said, “By ‘mean,’ you’re referring no doubt to the wars, the lies, the cheating, the posturing, the violence, the twisted warps of their minds down countless rat holes of rottenness, all that nonsense.”

And when she said yes: “They’re no damned good, that’s why.” He gave a sharp nod and a hmmph, as though he had solved the riddle of the Sphinx. “Your good little girls and boys? They’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Relax the whip hand and they stray. You’ve heard of gravity? As they bulk up, gravity drags them down into mischief. Babies are light as feathers, more angel than beast. Ah, but put on flesh, let hormones flow, and excess carnality moves them to crime and lies, backbiting and bad habits, just like certain elves I could name. Tight rein must be kept on the lot of them!”

Gregor had amused but not enlightened.

Why
not
ask Santa Claus? When matters took on great urgency, one had to speak or explode. But her stepfather was such a wonderful grown-up little boy, beaming with mirth at good little children, but so disappointed with the bad ones that he never spoke of them. How could he possibly help with poor Jamie and the mean people in his life? How could she think to wound her father’s spirit by bringing them up?

Wendy reached the gingerbread house where she often went to ponder weighty matters. It was quiet here, bright with gingham and bone china and flowered wallpaper and a gold-and-rosewood grandfather clock that gently knocked aside every other second.

She sat in the rocking chair by the picture window and gazed out at a peaceful blanket of snow upon the commons and fresh drifts on the roofs across the way. So peaceful up here, so needlessly stressful the world of mortals. It was the height of satisfaction to assist the elves when she was able, to track toys she had helped with into the homes of good little children, seeing their faces light up at their caregivers’ generosity. Such was the true spirit of Christmas. Selfless giving. And Santa Claus, above all, epitomized that abundant spirit of generosity—toward her, his helpers, his wives, and all the world’s youngsters.

He was a cornucopia of giving, an outpouring that never let up, not for one moment. How could she ask him for more? She grew aware of frown lines on her forehead. Her shoulders were tense. Her hands gripped the lacquered dragonheads at the ends of the rocker’s arms as her pinkies slipped into their sharp-toothed mouths and dared them to bite down.

“I’ll ask him, though,” she said with conviction. He’s
got
to help, even if he just listens and consoles and admits he’s helpless to do anything. But maybe he isn’t so helpless after all. Santa was always surprising her, even after eight years of growing in the generous soil of his nurturing. Perhaps there were surprises still, even ones that would surprise
him.

Wendy pushed off with her feet and slid back into the big rocker’s rollicking bucket. The snowscape suddenly climbed on board, cradled in the clumsy arms of a vast sea. “Hey, I can hope,” she said. “And where there’s hope, there’s fire. That’s what Santa says, and I intend to hold him to it!”

She giggled at that, then stopped and felt anew her frown lines, growing very solemn indeed and choking back tears at her memories of Jamie Stratton and what lay, not so very far ahead, in his future.

Chapter 3. Confiding in Santa Claus

THAT NIGHT, after reading Wendy a chapter of
Les Miserables,
Santa closed the book and set it on her nightstand. But instead of bending to kiss her cheek, he sat back and sighed and looked straight at her. “Sweetheart,” he said, “Rachel and Anya and I have noticed that all is not right with you. Please don’t deny it. Something’s bothering you. Something big.”

Relief appeared on her face. “Yes.”

“I’ve minimized the signs,” said Santa. “But I won’t do that any longer. You’re growing up inside, and your concerns, I’ll wager, are growing up too.”

Once he had begun, it felt good to be leveling, good to give up his absurd little-girl wish about her and let her be who she was. She seemed to blossom. Where he had seen only the innocence of the child, now he saw maturity informing the precious intelligence before him.

“The last boy I visited Christmas Eve?” she said, sitting up and tenting the blankets with her knees. “Jamie Stratton?” She threatened to choke up, but kept her emotions in check. Only the moistness of her eyes and a catch in her voice betrayed her. “I show the kids scenes from their futures, skipping over childhood cruelties, scrapes, shin barks, bee stings, all of that. And so I did with Jamie.