The frazzled mother, who is the lesser piece of bread to this family sandwich—and who is holding down that part of the pew from which the most unflattering view of the preacher in the pulpit is possible (directly under the preacher’s jowls)—is trying to keep her hand off her daughter’s lap. If she smooths out her daughter’s skirt only one more time, both of them know that the daughter will start to cry.
The son takes from his suit jacket pocket a tiny, purple truck; the father snatches this away—with considerable bending and crushing of the boy’s fingers in the process. “Just one more obnoxious bit of behavior from you,” the father whispers harshly, “and you will be grounded—for the rest of the day.”
“The whole rest of the day?” the boy says, incredulous. The apparent impossibility of sustaining unobnoxious behavior for even part of the day weighs heavily on the lad, and overwhelms him with a claustrophobia as impenetrable as the claustrophobia of church itself.
The daughter has begun to cry.
“Why is she crying?” the boy asks his father, who doesn’t answer. “Are you having your period?” the boy asks his sister, and the mother leans across the daughter’s lap and pinches the son’s thigh—a prolonged, twisting sort of pinch. Now he is crying, too. Time to pray! The kneeling pads flop down, the family flops forward. The son manages the old hymnal trick; he slides a hymnal along the pew, placing it where his sister will sit when she’s through praying.
“Just one more thing,” the father mutters in his prayers.
But how can you pray, thinking about the daughter’s period? She looks old enough to be having her period, and young enough for it to be the first time. Should you move the hymnal before she’s through praying and sits on it? Should you pick up the hymnal and bash the boy with it? But the father is the one you’d like to hit; and you’d like to pinch the mother’s thigh, exactly as she pinched her son. How can you pray?
It is time to be critical of Canon Mackie’s cassock; it is the color of pea soup. It is time to be critical of Warden Harding’s wart. And Deputy Warden Holt is a racist; he is always complaining that “the West Indians have taken over Bathurst Street”; he tells a terrible story about standing in line in the copying-machine store—two young black men are having the entire contents of a pornographic magazine duplicated. For this offense, Deputy Warden Holt wants to have the young men arrested. How can you pray?
The weekday services are almost unattended—quiet, serene. The drumming wing-whir of the slowly moving overhead fan is metronomic, enhancing to the concentration—and from the fourth and fifth rows of pews, you can feel the air moving regularly against your face. In the Canadian climate, the fan is supposed to push the warm, rising air down—back over the chilly congregation. But it is possible to imagine you’re in a missionary church, in the tropics.
Some say that Grace Church is overly lighted. The dark-stained, wooden buttresses against the high, vaulted, white-plaster ceiling accentuate how well lit the church is; despite the edifice’s predominance of stone and stained glass, there are no corners lost to darkness or to gloom. Critics say the light is too artificial, and too contemporary for such an old building; but surely the overhead fan is contemporary, too—and not propelled by Mother Nature—and no one complains about the fan.
The wooden buttresses are quite elaborate—they are wainscoted, and even the lines of the wainscoting
are visible on the buttresses, despite their height; that’s how brightly lit the church is. Harold Crosby, or any other Announcing Angel, could never be concealed in these buttresses. Any angel-lowering or angel-raising apparatus would be most visible. The miracle of the Nativity would seem less of a miracle here—indeed, I have never watched a Christmas pageant at Grace Church. I have already seen that miracle; once was enough. The Nativity of ’53 is all the Nativity I need.
That Christmas, the evenings were long; dinners with Dan, or with my grandmother, were slow and solemn. My enduring perception of those nights is that Lydia’s wheelchair needed to be oiled and that Dan complained, with uncharacteristic bitterness, about what a mess amateurs could make of A Christmas Carol. Dan’s mood was not improved by the frequent presence of our neighbor—and Dan’s most veteran amateur—Mr. Fish.
“I’d so looked forward to being Scrooge,” Mr. Fish would say, pretending to stop by 80 Front Street, after dinner, for some other reason—whenever he saw Dan’s car in the driveway. Sometimes it was to once again agree with my grandmother about Gravesend’s pending leash law; Mr. Fish and my grandmother were in favor of leashing dogs. Mr. Fish gave no indication that he was even slightly troubled by his hypocrisy on this issue—for surely old Sagamore would roll over in his grave to hear his former master espousing canine restraints of any kind; Sagamore had run free, to the end.
But it was not the leash law Mr. Fish really cared about; it was Scrooge—a plum part, ruined (in Mr. Fish’s view) by amateur ghosts.
“The ghosts are only the beginning of what’s wrong,” Dan said. “By the end of the play, the audience is going to be rooting for Tiny Tim to die—someone might even rush the stage and kill that brat with his crutch.” Dan was still disappointed that he could not entice Owen to play the plucky cripple, but the little Lord Jesus was unmoved by Dan’s pleas.
“What wretched ghosts!” Mr. Fish whined.
The first ghost, Marley’s Ghost, was a terrible ham from the Gravesend Academy English Department; Mr. Early embraced every part that Dan gave him as if he were King Lear—madness and tragedy fueled his every action, a wild melancholy spilled from him in disgusting fits and seizures. “‘I am here tonight to warn you,’” Mr. Early tells Mr. Fish, “‘that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate …’” all the while unwrapping the bandage that dead men wear to keep their lower jaws from dropping on their chests.
“‘You were always a good friend to me,’” Mr. Fish tells Mr. Early, but Mr. Early has become entangled in his jaw bandage, the unwinding of which has caused him to forget his lines.
“‘You will be haunted by … Four Spirits,’” Mr. Early says; Mr. Fish shuts his eyes.
“Three, not Four!” Dan cries.
“But aren’t I the fourth?” Mr. Early asks.
“You’re the first!” Mr. Fish tells him.
“But there are three others,” Mr. Early says.
“Jesus Christ!” Dan says.
But Marley’s Ghost was not as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Past, an irritating young woman who was a member of the Town Library Board and who wore men’s clothes and chain-smoked, aggressively; and she was not as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Mr. Kenmore, a butcher at our local A&P, who (Mr. Fish said) smelled like raw chicken and shut his eyes whenever Mr. Fish spoke—Mr. Kenmore needed to concentrate with such fervor on his own role that he found Scrooge’s presence a distraction. And none of them was as bad as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—Mr. Morrison, our mailman, who had looked so perfect for the part. He was a tall, thin, lugubrious presence; a sourness radiated from him—dogs not only refrained from biting him, they slunk away from him; they must have known that the taste of him was as toxic as a toad’s. He had a gloomy, detached quality that Dan had imagined would be perfect for the grim, final phantom—but when Mr. Morrison discovered that he had no lines, that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come never speaks, he became contemptuous of the part; he threatened to quit, but then remained in the role with a vengeance, sneering and scoffing at poor Scrooge’s questions, and leering at the audience, attempting to seize their attention from Mr. Fish (as if to accuse Dan, and Dickens, of idiocy—for denying this most important spirit the power of speech).
No one could remember Mr. Morrison ever speaking—as a mailman—and yet, as a harbinger of doom, the poor man clearly felt he had much to say. But the deepest failure was that none of these ghosts was frightening. “How can I be Scrooge if I’m not frightened?” Mr. Fish asked Dan.
“You’re an actor, you gotta fake it,” Dan said. To my thinking, which was silent, Mrs. Walker’s legs were again wasted—in the part of Tiny Tim’s mother.
Poor Mr. Fish. I never knew what he did for a living. He was Sagamore’s master, he was the good guy in Angel Street—at the end, he took my mother by the arm—he was the unfaithful husband in The Constant Wife, he was Scrooge. But what did he do? I never knew. I could have asked Dan; I still could. But Mr. Fish was the quintessential neighbor; he was all neighbors—all dog owners, all the friendly faces from familiar backyards, all the hands on your shoulders at your mother’s funeral. I don’t remember if he had a wife. I don’t even remember what he looked like, but he manifested the fussy concentration of a man about to pick up a fallen leaf; he was all rakers of all lawns, all snow-shovelers of all sidewalks. And although he began the Christmas season as an unfrightened Scrooge, I saw Mr. Fish when he was frightened, too.
I also saw him when he was young and carefree, which is how he appeared to me before the death of Sagamore. I remember a brilliant September afternoon when the maples on Front Street were starting to turn yellow and red; above the crisp, white clapboards and the slate rooflines of the houses, the redder maples appeared to be drawing blood from the ground. Mr. Fish had no children but he enjoyed throwing and kicking a football, and on those blue-sky, fall afternoons, he cajoled Owen and me to play football with him; Owen and I didn’t care for the sport—except for those times when we could include Sagamore in the game. Sagamore, like many a Labrador, was a mindless retriever of balls, and it was fun to watch him try to pick up the football in his mouth; he would straddle the ball with his forepaws, pin it to the ground with his chest, but he never quite succeeded in fitting the ball in his mouth. He would coat the ball with slobber, making it exceedingly difficult to pass and catch, and ruining what Mr. Fish referred to as the aesthetics of the game. But the game had no aesthetics that were available to Owen Meany and me; I could not master the spiral pass, and Owen’s hand was so small that he refused to throw the ball at all—he only kicked it. The ferocity with which Sagamore tried to contain the ball in his mouth and the efforts we made to keep the ball away from him were the most interesting aspects of the sport to Owen and me—but Mr. Fish took the perfection of passing and catching quite seriously.