# Tidings

William Wharton

In Tidings, one of America’s best-loved authors paints a vivid scene of an unusual family Christmas.At an old mill in the French countryside, philosophy teacher Will and his wife Loretta await the return of their four adult children for the Christmas holidays. The house is swept, the fire is lit, and the scene is set. Will is determined to make this a Christmas to remember; however, he is unprepared for the personal troubles each family member will bring to the festivities. Unsatisfied desires, affairs, and the shadow of divorce threaten the Yuletide cheer.As they struggle to resolve their issues, the family and their holiday celebrations come alive in a heart-warming evocation of the traditions, magic, and unseen labour for a family Christmas.

## WILLIAM WHARTON. Tidings


To Saint Nicholas

I swept and slept

Through promise

Not kept.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

1. A Partridge in a Pear Tree

2. Two Turtle Doves

3. Three French Hens

4. Four Calling Birds

5. Five Golden Rings

6. Six Geese A-Laying

7. Seven Swans A-Swimming

Also by William Wharton

Copyright

About the Publisher

## 1. A Partridge in a Pear Tree

There aren’t many holly berries this year; the leaves are dark viridian green, deeply dented, sharp-pointed; but virtually no berries.

The damp, cold air shifts between fog and mist. Drifting, light, incipient snowflakes float from the darkening sky.

I have my arms full of berryless holly now, so I start down toward our heavy stone and wood ancient water mill at the bottom of this French Morvandeau valley. The streams are gushing with water; a thick, black thrust; tumbling, rounded, moss-covered stones roiling in rocky streambeds.

There’s no one up and about in our village. Those who are there sit huddled in oldness and cold, alone, beside wood fires. Even at four thirty, all shutters are closed.

This is the year’s shortest day; the sun’s declined to its nadir. Tomorrow we can watch it be born again, redeeming life for a new year.

Rounding the downhill curve, I see our own light at the mill; pink, inviting. It gleams through a small west window incised in a two-foot-thick, rough-cut, three-hundred-year-old stone wall. It’s a great window for watching late sunsets in July, also a good window to be coming home to on a near-freezing, earliest winter evening.

I go in through our cellar which opens directly onto the road. This cellar has damp, dark, cold, humid, hand-hewn granite floors.

It houses the giant cogs, shafts and flywheels of the defunct mill machinery. It’s now pungent with birch sawdust from this morning’s work; sawing wood, piling it by the fireplace upstairs in a probably futile effort to heat this mausoleum for our family Christmas celebrations.

This year, our two daughters are coming from America to join us. Our youngest child, a boy, still lives at home. Our older son is spending Christmas this year with his French girlfriend; she riding on the back of his motorcycle; the two of them eating miles of desert dust in far-off Arizona and New Mexico.

But then, after all, the first Christmas was in a desert. Our Michael-cum-Joseph guides his 500-cc Yamaha donkey, with, I hope, a not-too-pregnant Genevieve-cum-Mary in postillion. There will be room at some inn, no doubt.

Our older daughter and oldest child, Maggie, hasn’t been in France for seven years. She has left behind her five-year-old son, our only grandchild, with her husband in Arizona. She’s also considering leaving her husband.

Our other daughter, Nicole, spent a Christmas with us here at the mill three years ago. She froze, missed hot water, showers, rock music, a place to wash her hair, and a man. This time she brings a man with her. All the rest remains practically the same – easy to miss.

Our youngest, Ben, will be fifteen on the eve of Christmas Eve. He’s our only child who seems to share our atavistic, pagan Christmas feelings. For us, just being here is fulfilling. We revel in the confines of this closed valley. We are happy encircled by rolling, wooded hills, rounded sometimes with slanted pastures for hardy sheep.

Ben doesn’t particularly like to shower, wash his hair or listen to rock music. He far prefers animals to people, and animals outnumber humans by at least a hundred to one in this valley.

In a vain effort to approximate somewhat the ease and comfort of Western-states American living, and because I had no classes after I gave midterms at ACP, the American College of Paris, the school where I teach, I came down here from Paris three days early. Lor, my wife, who also teaches and has problems of her own, insisted it was probably the best thing after all, considering everything.

With me, I transported an additional heater – that should help with the freezing part. I’d also hoped to haul down a water heater and install it but there was no more room in my car. This car’s a small sports Fiat with thirteen hundred cubic centimeters of power. One might well fit it in the back of an American station wagon. It’s the only sporty thing I own; that is, if you don’t count my underwear or jogging shoes.

I transported down with me thirty meters of two-meter-wide material purchased at the Marché Aligre in Paris. Ten meters of it are bright red. With this I hope to camouflage some of the more rugged, ragged, crude aspects of the mill.

I spent the first day sweeping, dusting, knocking down cobwebs, washing windows, wiping, mopping; nailing down or supporting various idiosyncratic elements which might offend.

I swept up a fair mound of rat, or dormouse, shit and two wheelbarrow loads of general dirt, mostly chaum, fallen from chinks in the walls. These walls are slowly disintegrating; very slowly though; with help they’re good for another two or three centuries.

I also cleaned out about ten years of accumulated ash from our fireplace, the remains of perhaps one medium-sized forest.

I then, using my red cloth, made drapes for our windows. To be honest, I only stapled them to the heavy oaken lintels over each window. I used strips cut from the ends and made tie-backs to let in what little daylight there is. I even used a remnant of red cloth as cover for our eating table in the center of the room.

Now, it all looks very Christmasy, will be even more so with my dark green, although berryless, holly.

The second day, again with my trusty stapler, I climbed up to the loft where our girls, plus the imported man, will be sleeping.

There’s fiberglass insulation up there; more or less in place, but hanging somewhat indiscriminately. For reasons I don’t quite understand, our dormice like to hibernate in this fiberglass; perhaps some remnant ‘looking glass’ memory. They shred it, shape tiny nests. Probably they’ll all die of silicosis – no great loss.

I stapled twenty meters of my brown material, rafter-to-rafter, right over the fiberglass, dormice included. They won’t notice till spring (the dormice that is).

Not a creature was stirring, not even a dormouse.

With the rest of the material, I gussied up our tiny toilet room, considered by our neighbors a marvel of American ingenuity, and probably unhygienic. Our toilet was the first in town. I also braced this toilet so it won’t rock when one tips to wipe. The john’s now jammed tight by a small electric heater. This gives some solidity and welcome warmth where it counts.

Unfortunately, one needs to turn off a heater in the main room before one turns on the toilet heater, or a fuse will blow. There’s only fifteen amps of 220 volts coming into the mill. This is mostly a summer place for us.

The flushing system is much too complicated to describe; also ‘less used’ toilet paper is saved to be burned in the fireplace. This is not an energy conservation measure; although, normally, I’m a great energy conserver; could be part of my problem; which seems to be at the base of all our problems. It’s just that our septic tank can only handle so much; it’s almost thirteen years old now.

I trim and arrange my holly in vases. Then cook up for myself a quick meal with cassoulet from a can. I soak this up with bread, wash it down with red wine. When I’m alone, that’s about the extent of my culinary effort.

Next, I’ll be going out to cut a few branches from a nearby planted pine forest. This part requires the total darkness now upon us. The past twelve years we’ve stolen our whole celebration Christmas tree from this forest. Daytime, we’d hunt till we’d found the perfect tree, then mark it. In the night we’d sneak out, saw at ground level, cover the stump with dirt, drag our tree from the forest, through this sleeping town, and into our mill. There’s nothing quite so soul-satisfying as a stolen Christmas tree.

In general, it’s a good trick putting together the precepts of Christianity with the ordinary American way of celebrating Christmas. It’s even more difficult with our particular family celebrations. We concentrate on the fantasy, the wonderful drama of Santa Claus and Christmas tree; yule log and gift giving, emphasis on star, snow and domestic animals; pure paganism. And, to top it all off, we steal our Christmas tree.

But now those trees, our old Christmas trees, in this planted forest, are tall and thick around as telephone poles. No one in the family will help me with the cutting, sawing, dragging home and hiding. That wonderful forest outgrew us. So, this year, we’ll probably be reduced to buying our tree in Nevers. We’ll be there, with hordes of others, pawing through tree cadavers looking for just the right size, and fullness.

I dress in my duffle coat and woolen hat again, pick up the saw and flashlight, drop down through our trap door carefully feeling in the dark with my feet. Before I’m even in the cellar, I’m met by a breathtaking blast of cold. I know cold air can’t flow up. Maybe the molecules are so cramped in this freezer of a cellar they’re forced up by sheer pressure of numbers into the light, airy, open space of the warm upstairs room. I pull shut the loose, swinging, hingeless trap door, stumble down the last steps and walk out into the blackness of night. There should be a crescent piece of moon up there somewhere, I think, but I move in virtual total blindness.

Does the road seem to glow? I don’t know if the paleness I see is wet road or only something I want to see. The mind is a powerful force. I feel the hard surface through my rubber boots so I should sense if I wander left or right off the road. I can always flash my light, but then I lose what little night vision I have. Also, I don’t want the villagers to know I’m out stealing pine branches.

Ahead is a halo around our next town, a ghostly haze of whiteness fills the misty air from the single town street lamp. I watch as forms loom out of the all-surrounding gloom. The light creates visions different from ordinary daylight scenes; it’s like snow, muffling, at the same time defining new shapes. I stare, entranced, at stone buildings standing bare in the night.

I pass through the other side of this light and my shadow stretches ahead. I finger my flashlight briefly walking along, waiting for the road to curve. At the turn I step off into the forest, wading through broken branches. They’re so rotted, so damp, they don’t crack when I step on them.

I begin cutting pine branches with my small handsaw till both arms are full. I stumble out onto the road, and scurry downhill through the dark wet air, back to my nest.

Inside, I take off my coat and hat, staple my branches across beams and over windows to hide those staples in the drapes.

Tomorrow I’ll drive into Nevers to pick up Loretta and Ben. They’re taking the seven A.M. train down from Paris. We’ll do our Christmas and food shopping there in Nevers then come back here to the mill. I hope we can make the trip home before dark. French country roads at night are treacherous, especially if this weather turns to snow.

The girls and guest arrive the day after tomorrow, Ben’s birthday. Ben was our Christmas surprise baby, born the eve of Christmas Eve. In a certain way, each of our babies was a surprise, a minor miracle. Maybe that’s why Christmas means so much to us.

Next morning, I wake at six. Whorls and swirls of snow spin through the path of my flashlight out our window. The ‘powers that be’ have miscalculated; snow was supposed to hold off at least one more day. So now I’m in for a sixty-kilometer drive in the snow, in the dark; driving a car with no snow tires, no chains, a malfunctioning heater and a driver’s-side window that won’t really close. Also, there’s no third gear on this four-speed, all slow, car, and the clutch started slipping irrevocably on the way from Paris. Fancy new sports car, my car is not.

Then again, perhaps I won’t need to drive my wreck to Nevers. The battery has been failing. There are white encrustations on the zinc plates when I look through its translucent sides. Maybe if I shake it I’ll have a miniature snowstorm in there, the way it snowed with the tip-toys I loved so when a child.

As a precaution, I brought down my battery charger. This is based upon several frustrating, Herculean, early morning efforts in Paris. Ben and I pushing the car with Loretta steering; she throwing it into gear then chug-churring down to nothingness. Finally, we’d have a frantic dashing off to the metro, book bags flying, tempers fraying, while I’d unhook the dead battery, haul it upstairs to the apartment and charge it. Gradually, morning’s cold grip would let up some and after two hours’ dialysis, I’d reinstall the battery and drive off to my ten-o’clock class. Normally, Loretta and Ben drive the car while I take the metro.

So now I dress hurriedly in the clothes I’d set out on a chair the night before. I pull on gloves and hat, check my flashlight, lower myself carefully through the trap door into our granite tomb of a cellar. Mill machinery looms mute and massive in the dense molecule-packed darkness. I press the door latch, go up the few stone steps into wild, twisting whiteness. The street already has four inches of fresh, untrammeled snow. Icicles hang over the opening to our lower grange where I keep our car. Inside spread the remains of at least six motorbikes surrounding our car like an escort. These represent Mike’s progress from 50-cc pedal bikes to his current 500-cc love. Here in dusty, rusting machinery is revealed the remnants of one man’s personal passage through mechanized puberty displacement.

In the car, I check that the lights and heater fan are off before turning the key. I pull the choke out a finger length, press down hard on the accelerator slowly, twice, following carefully the instructions of the man from whom I bought this car, a Mr Diamant.

Then I turn the key. The starter motor sings in merry glee: ‘Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!’ The engine remains stone deaf (maybe that’s steel deaf), hearing nothing, not responding.

I switch off, wait, in quietly surging panic, despair. I try again. Again: ‘Here we go! Here we go!’ But we don’t.

I jam the accelerator once more to the floorboards, against Mr Diamant’s explicit instructions.

This starter motor has no working relationship with the engine, lives a liberated, futile life of its own. Or maybe it’s the engine’s fault; it might not want to be turned on by this particular little starter motor. Gradually we move from ‘Here we go!’ to ‘I’m not making it’ to ‘I can’t make it’ to ‘I give up, quit’, the last in the slurred, tired tones of a staggering drunk or perennially discouraged lover.

I’m ready to quit myself; at the same time my mind’s spinning. I have an hour to recharge the battery. I’ll move the new butane heater down here in the grange to heat the car. I also have jumper cables. Maybe I’ll wait till Philippe, our neighbor, gets up, then cable-jump from his battery.

I give it one more turnover and there’s an embarrassed sniggle from the motor, a flirting response, a hobbling hopscotch skipping of almost going, then nothing.

I wait two full minutes in the dark, exercising my pagan excuse for prayer; creating appropriate expletives against fate, humbling myself with beseechments and benedictions to the engine. I promise I’ll give it an oil change a thousand kilometers early; I’ll give it winter oil, maybe even have the transmission repaired.

No, that doesn’t make sense, it’d cost more than the value of the car. I suppress for a moment the treacherous, wonderful, obvious truth; I’m going to junk this car and get another. In fact, I’m already courting several possibilities.

Get thee from me, Satan!

I clear my mind. I twist the key as if it’s a July day and this is a new car. It turns over, starts, roars, before I even hear the starter motor! What’s the secret? I sit there in the dark, glowing, floating, freezing, listening, as all four cylinders begin to synchronize, mutually warming each other. I pull back the throttle and climb out to swing open the huge grange doors before I asphyxiate myself with carbon monoxide. It’d probably go down as just another unexpected Christmas suicide.

‘None of us noticed anything, but then he was always secretive. It was hard getting close to him, even his wife was very reserved. Philosophers are a weird bunch. You know, he wasn’t even sure the world was real. Can you imagine that?’

Now I leave the car running, my effort at Christmas suicide self-aborted. I dash back through our cellar to the still warm room. I make the bed, unplug the transformer for our American electric blanket, quickly brush my teeth, wash up; listening, always listening, to hear if the car’s still running. I clean out the fireplace ashes, body warm; set up twists of paper, faggots, thin twigs, dry branches, all overlaid carefully with two split logs for an easy fire start when we get back. I’m listening; the car’s still running.

I leave matches by the fire, turn the butane heater down to minimum; butane bottles cost seventy-eight francs each and it means a five-mile drive into Chatin to buy them. I check wallet, checkbook, car papers. I pack expansion wrench, screwdriver, pliers. I pick up a coal scoop in case I get stuck in the snow. I’ll shovel gravel under my wheels from the piles along the road, if I can find gravel under snow in the dark.

I’m ready as I’ll ever be. I leave the single light on over our table. I hate leaving; it all looks, feels, so cozy, just right for a long winter’s day before a fire, sipping frozen vodka, thinking, pondering, speculating along my usual well-worn tracks; what’s it all about? Why am I here? How can one actually know anything? What would make Lor happy? I think I know, but am I really ready? Boy, the heart and the mind are hard to compromise. Just what the hell is love? How much of it is respect, admiration, how much passion? How can I hold it together, or keep it apart? One or the other.

Down in the grange, my car’s still purring. There’s even some interior heat. I push in both choke and throttle. At the entrance to our grange, outside the door, just under snow, it’s deep frozen mud. In reverse, I power my way out and onto the road, frontwheel-drive spinning. I brake skiddingly, stop just before crashing into Madame Le Moine’s snow-bedecked blackberry patch, where the old stable used to be.

I get out, and, from inside, close the large interlocking grange doors, pull down and engage a huge hasp; there’s a small hobbit kind of hatchway cut in the left door for mere humans. I go out, pull the latch to, and step out softly, trying, ineffectively, to avoid cracking through the new snow and thin ice into thick mud.

The first two kilometers of my journey will be the test. Since we are at the bottom of a bowl into which three streams flow forming the mill pond, there is no way out but up, rather steeply up. In each direction there’s an unrelenting slope of at least two kilometers. Summer jogging here calls for a reserve of foolhardy courage.

I’m back in the car, auto heater more or less keeping ahead of steam condensation, snow and ice on the windshield slowly melting. I lean out and brush the side-view mirror; look at my watch. It’s seven ten. They’ll arrive two hours from now; I’m obviously postponing the obvious. I force the clutch, get into unsynchronized first, then start grinding up the steep hill to Vauchot.

I make it fine up the first tough pitch, the part where I enjoy making my brave downhill finishing sprint, summers. I stay in first, rounding the banked curve, past where Monsieur Pinson has a gate to his lower field. The back end of my car tends to veer left and right samba-style.

I slalom up the hill, knowing if I stop I’ll never make it. Finally, I arrive at the top in Vauchot. It should be really exciting going downhill.

I glide-slide through Vauchot.

Now there’s a long curving downgrade twisting toward the town of Corbeau. Going up this hill on a motorcycle is where our Mike would practice speed-shifting while slanting his machine at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. That desert trip of Mike’s begins to seem like a quiet, sane and peaceful way to spend Christmas.

I stay in first gear. The car slips twice but holds and I’m on the straight stretch to Corbeau. I shift up to second for the first time. The next ten kilometers are twisting ascending and descending curves but none worse than the five I’ve just negotiated. I begin to hope I shall actually make it to Nevers; never-never land of the Bourgogne.

The first light is beginning to glow gray through the falling white when I intersect Route Nationale 978 toward Nevers. I see that, on this well-traveled road, the snow has been squeezed to slush on the sides so the dark road surface is visible. I ease out carefully, speed-shift from second to fourth, past that nonexistent third, switch my lights to low, fight down the window and wipe off my side-view mirror. The rear window is fogged from the steam of anxiety.

The French have a bumper sticker saying AU VOLANT LA VUE C’EST LA VIE. I was never sure if it meant ‘While stealing, visibility can mean your life’, or ‘While driving (actually steering) vision is life’, This gives some idea of my high-quality French. Even though I did my master’s thesis on Albert Camus’ concept of ‘cherish your illusions’, my French is weak, to say the least.

I wrestle my window up again to half-mast and wipe mist from the windshield. The snow seems to be slowing down some. I sneak a peek at my watch in the rising light. I have almost an hour left and only forty-five kilometers to go.

It’s five till nine when I roll through Nevers. The medieval stone buildings, crisscrossed with half-timber wooden beams, lean over narrow cobbled roads. I work my way to the train station; park and check the station clock. I’m fifteen minutes early, my watch is five minutes fast.

I go into the station restaurant; order a black coffee and a croissant at the bar. I pay and sit down at a table. There’s clatter all around me as a French boys’ school group, wearing school ties and school jackets, struggles with skis and ski equipment, preparing to board the train from which I hope to see Loretta and Ben descend.

The smell of my coffee, the first sip, sends me on a search for the restaurant toilet. I find it, a shared sink and mirror with separate bisex johns. It’s a sitter not a squatter. There’s no light and I assume it’s one of those French logique affairs where the light comes on when you turn the latch. There is the right kind of latch but when I turn it tight nothing happens. I reopen the door to locate: seat, toilet paper, flusher (chain), paper (individual-sheet, slippery). I grab a handful of the paper, get all my angles, vectors and locations set, then prepare to shut the door.

A woman in a fur coat comes out from the other john and is fluffing her well-cut hair. I wonder if there’s a light in that one, consider dashing in behind her, instead, elect for gallantry, maybe modesty, close my door and settle down in the dark.

When I’m finished, after some dark fumbling with buttons, hooks, snaps, I grope for the latch. I’m wearing long johns over regular underwear, then black ski pants, two long-sleeved undershirts, one waffled, guaranteed against Arctic cold (but not too effective against Morvanic), a sweater and my jacket. I never do quite manage my jacket zipper in the dark.

I come out, gratefully, to an empty room. According to my reset watch, there’s still five minutes till the train arrives. In the bright neon light over the sink, I can see all the mill dirt I’ve hauled with me. I use a dirty handkerchief to brush off the worst. My new L. L. Bean crepe-soled shoes are covered with goop from in front of our garage. I run trembling fingers through my crazy looking shock of white hair. I hate being nervous, so nervous my hands shake. It seems to happen more often lately.

I started graying seriously at thirty-five, had a white streak in front when I was only in my twenties. There’s something about those of us with a premature white streak, gray or white hair which causes other people to distrust us. I think they feel we’re crazy or have had some terrible trauma which has permanently disabled us. Maybe that’s how I became a philosophy major. I look like someone who worries about things. I am.

Now I’m fifty-two it isn’t so bad, white hair is more appropriate but none of it will fall out. They’ll bury me still looking like a slowly fading, washed-out boy. That’s not far off the mark either. I’ve been waiting over fifty years to feel like a man. I might as well get used to it, it’s probably never going to happen.

I stare ten seconds at unsure cerulean blue eyes surrounded by somewhat bluish flesh, as I wash my hands. It’s really weird, as I get older, my eyelids keep drooping so now my eyes look as if they’re peering out from the ends of side-by-side pup tents.

I should have shaved this morning but there wasn’t time; also, I didn’t think of it. My beard, strangely enough, is still dark, at least the stubbles are. Once I let it grow a little to see how it would look. I looked as if I had my head on upside down.

The train is five minutes late so I have time to make a momentous discovery, for me, that is. It’s far from original, this insight, but it’s creative within my personal limits. I discover why croissants are made that way, wrapped as thin layers into a crescent form. It’s so they can be dunked in coffee, easily, with virtually no crumbs dropping in the cup. I luxuriate over my croissant, my lukewarm coffee and my idea, feeling genial and very cosmopolitan. The anxiety of the trip is dropping off like that slush from the Nevers road.

Coffee usually makes me hyper, but this time I’m soothed, perhaps because it’s almost cold, or perhaps something chemical happens when it combines with a dunked croissant; or probably this is only a letdown after the mad, desperate rush. I don’t know which, but I’m mellow, very Santa Claus-Christmasish, wishing I had a bell and sleigh. It would be great fun to really be Santa Claus. Maybe next life.

So, when I hear the train from Paris come into the station, and I go out onto the quai, I’m the international man meeting his loved ones at the start of some story in a book. Probably a book by John O’Hara or J. P. Marquand about unrequited love. Better not to think about that; not now anyway. I’m still not ready.

## 2. Two Turtle Doves

Out on the quai, I’ve just about given up, I’m beginning to think of phoning Paris. My mind’s spinning wildly through all the bleak alternatives; then I see them, the last ones off the train.

I should have known. It’s not Loretta’s way to fight through a crowd just to be first or tenth or thirtieth, or three hundredth. She’ll sit unruffled till everyone’s struggled, fought, scrambled themselves away with their luggage; then, unhurriedly, graciously, as if it’s her private car, as if there were no such thing as time, she’ll dismount, nice smile for the conductor on the way out. Ben’s the same, I’m not. I’m a pusher-shover. The two of them drive me nuts; I hate to imagine what they think of me.

So there they are, lightly luggaged, drifting dreamily along behind the crush. They find me and I think we’re all glad to see each other. Christmas is actually beginning. I sneak some looks at Lor to see how she’s holding up, but she has her ‘isn’t the world lovely’ smile pasted on her face so I can’t tell anything. Mike has a smile like that, too; but his is amateurish and childlike compared to Lor’s.

First we drive out to a large market, two kilometers from town, called Carrefour, French for intersection. It’s almost like an American supermarket, huge parking lots, grocery carts, Christmas music playing. We’ll stock in the bulk of our perishable groceries here and perhaps buy some gifts for our neighbors.

The big purchase will be the turkey. It needs to be large enough for six with enough left over for turkey soup and a hot turkey sandwich meal.

I’ve already bought all the nonperishables in Paris and carried them down in the car, extra goodies such as Nova Scotia smoked salmon, chocolate bars, several cookies: Russian cigarette, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin. Also a bottle of Cointreau, some Poire William, Cognac and Champagne. These are the superlatives. There are also eight hundred francs’ worth of the necessities, apples, flour, rice, cheeses, sugar, butter, canned goods, onions, matches.

Lor, Ben and I push our cart through the aisles, agreeing, disagreeing, picking, weighing, gradually filling up. We buy more tangerines, oranges; walnuts for the Christmas cookies. A sack of peanuts in the shell, endive, lettuce, tomatoes; celery, stalk and root, for the turkey stuffing. That turkey isn’t the only one who’s going to be stuffed.

I also buy a ten-liter can of spar varnish and a new paint brush. This costs over three hundred francs right there. My mind glistens just thinking about that varnish.

I sneak in a Cuisinart food processor for Loretta. We also fulfill Ben’s greatest Christmas wish: a Russian-built, clip-loaded 22-caliber rifle with a seven-power telescopic sight. Rifles are a minor mania with this peaceful, shy, almost fifteen-year-old last child of ours. He, through his Guns & Ammo magazine, is our only contact with a whole world to which neither of us relates. Lor is concerned about the appropriateness of a rifle on a festival of peace. But it’s also a festival of love. A good part of love, to me, is respecting the uniqueness of another, especially when his preferences are different from yours. God, I’m a great one to talk about love!

Ben is as much concerned with trajectory, accuracy, optics as anything. A rifle to him is a magnificent tool for projecting an object at high speed over a considerable distance with accuracy. It isn’t far removed from his passion for model airplanes and gliders. He has a horror and fear of actual hunting, or flying in a real plane. Hang glider, or hunter, or soldier he’ll most likely never be.

We also buy log cabin logs, two dolls, baby doll carriers, a spinning top with a tiny train inside which goes around and whistles when the top spins, plus a sack of grain to feed the ducks on the pond. For Madame Le Moine we buy a potpourri of plants all in one pot. For her son, Philippe, thirty-seven years old and unmarried, a set of small glasses, each with a different fruit sealed in eau de vie, also one of those dogs which wags its head when you put it on the back shelf of an automobile.

On the way out of the market we see some Christmas trees. These trees are small, none taller than six feet, but they’re cheap, only eighteen francs. They’re unloading the truck with a new supply. We choose the bushiest, tallest tree. Ben’s in a state of shock as I tie it to the roof of our car.

‘Gosh, Dad, that’s not a Christmas tree, it’s a branch.’

I assure him I’ve found a stand of most beautiful trees in the woods near Mike’s cabin. Philippe told me this part of the forest is owned by Monsieur Boudine and I can probably make a deal with him to cut down one of the trees for us. All year we let him pasture his donkey. Pom Pom, in our field when we aren’t there, so we should come to some arrangement. Paying to have someone cut down a tree for us in plain daylight is a long way from stealing one in the secret of night but a sight better than what we’re hauling on our car.

We drive into central Nevers, it’s almost two o’clock and the traffic is a muddle. By sheer luck we see a woman with two kids coming out of a parking place on a one-way street behind the post office. We’re on the wrong end of the street. I gallantly let the woman out, then wildly start backing up the narrow passage between close-parked cars. I am notoriously one of the world’s worst backer-uppers. I’ve always considered it a special skill like juggling or tightrope walking and I don’t have it. Some people can safely back up at full speed using only the rear-view mirror. I need to twist all the way around and look directly back to have even half a chance.

Loretta’s up on her knees, rubbing the rear-view window clean, trying to give directions in a calm but clear tone of voice so she won’t spook me. Ben is scrunched down in the seat beside me, avoiding flying glass. I’m going fast as I can, twisting my bad back, rushing to get to that place before a car entering the correct direction gets there. We just beat out a Peugeot 505; the driver smiles grimly and waits while I make a messy four-swing park, then he zooms down the street past us. We sit a moment while I recoup my calm.

Shopping in Nevers is always fun. The old streets are decorated, but nothing too gaudy. There are no loudspeakers playing Christmas carols. The main streets are blocked so there are no cars. The stores are old-fashioned, mostly with creaky, shined hardwood floors. The elevators are wire cages which jiggle, then bounce when they stop. They only take people up; you walk down.

We go our separate ways, agreeing to meet by the car at three. That way we can hope to get home before dark. At this latitude, this time of year, with clouded skies, five is almost night. I find a good, practically prebuilt but put-it-together-yourself, rubber-band model of a Sopwith Camel World War I airplane. I buy a waffle iron for the family, and an electronic game of Battleship for Ben. We’ll leave the waffle iron at the mill where there’s always time for leisurely breakfasts. I find an easy-to-operate Polaroid camera for Lor and buy two packs of film. I buy some holders and candles for the Christmas tree.

I’ve arranged with a painter friend in Paris to paint portraits of the girls. He’s good, they’re the right age to be painted and he could use the money; a triple-threat Christmas present.

Ever since the girls reached thirteen, I’ve had no chance at all of buying them a present they like. Buying any clothing is catastrophic, witness the orange raincoat I bought Maggie for her fifteenth birthday, the knee-length boots for Nicole on her fourteenth Christmas. Apparently I’m the same problem for them. I’d hate to be buying anything for me, I can’t think of one thing I want; at least anything someone could buy. Nobody can buy time, or love, or understanding. They’re too perishable, difficult to transport.

We congregate at the car. Even Ben’s bought a few things so we’re almost as packed as I was coming down from Paris. Loretta climbs in the back seat and we pile packages on her; Ben with his long legs can’t fit back there and Lor’s afraid of the suicide seat in a car.

When we turn off the main Nevers road into the back country it’s past four o’clock, darkness is coming on and although the fields and trees around us are still covered with snow, the narrow roads are relatively clear. I switch up to my high beams, not because it’s that dark yet, but to compensate for my lack of horn going around curves. The local driver in this area still thinks he’s the only automobile within fifty kilometers and hogs the crown of the road. Death by deux chevaux is far more common than impalement by wild boar around here.

We happily come down the icy Vauchot hill and pull up in front of our place. The mill is unique in that it’s built into the dam forming the pond; this road on which we’re arriving is about fifteen feet below dam level. The grange-cum-garage and the cellar open onto the road. The portion of the mill we’ve converted for living, where I’ve spent the past three days hustling, trying to get it into living order, opens onto the top of the dam. Our door up there is only ten feet from the pond itself, practically level with it.

We start unloading. Ben helps me untie our mini-Christmas tree. I delay putting our car in the grange so I can be inside the mill when they first see all my refurbishments, drapes, rehung cabinets, general cleanup, holly, pine boughs, decorations.

Loretta and Ben walk around to the damside door with some of the provisions. I dash through the cellar, up those steps through our hingeless trap door, into the main room. I turn on the lights, put a match to my preset fire and turn up the new butane heater before they arrive. I open the damside door from the inside and step back without comment.

Ben moves to his guns which I’ve hung beside the fireplace.

Lor is wonderfully appreciative; makes it all worthwhile, remarks on the drapes, the clean windows, ‘even in the dark they glisten’. She exclaims over the decorations, comments on the general order and cleanliness. I was lucky enough to marry a woman who has good nesting feelings. But I still have the uneasy feeling she’s only going through the motions, play-acting, pretending, trying to make me happy. I hope I can hold onto her somehow. I hate to think of life without her.

The fire took on perfectly with one match and isn’t smoking. Lor even notices I cleared out those damned ashes.

Ben and I haul the rest of our things from the car while Loretta puts them away. I make my mad, sliding run through the snow and slushy mud, maneuvering our car into the garage without hitting any motorcycles or motorcycle gas tanks, carburetors, extra wheels or rusting tools. I manage to match and close the interlocking device securing the big doors, wiggle through the small door and miss the greater part of the mud. On my way through the cellar, I gather an armful of dry tinder to start our fire next morning.

It’s a strong, good feeling having the nucleus of our family together again. Stone walls, heavy wooden beams, even a glowing fire, a shimmering pond and a splashing waterfall, can never replace or compensate for feelings of love and loving. I know my sleep tonight will be different than it’s been these past three nights. When I sleep alone, I sleep deeply, dreamlessly; the night seems to just disappear. Sleeping with Lor, I dream, I wake for brief periods. I know I’m sleeping and I don’t feel alone.

After dinner, we light the red candles in a silver candle holder I found and shined. They look beautiful on top of our new red remnant tablecloth. Lor and I sing Christmas carols; Ben listens. I’ve jammed the small Nevers tree into the center hole to one of the reserve millstones. This stone is flat on the floor just to the left of the door as you come in from the dam. Once there were two stones in that place, one on top of the other; but I moved the upper stone as a base for our fireplace.

It took three automobile jacks, two levels, several inclined planes and half a heart attack moving that stone against the wall, then constructing our fireplace on it. The fireplace is heavy, more or less squared-off stone, rounded, projecting into the room, sort of a Dutch oven, with a throat resembling the entrance to a cave.

The smell of the fire, our mini-tree, the pine boughs, burning candles fills everything. The second night of Christmas is upon us. And I still don’t know what to do. I’ve got to tell Lor, it isn’t fair to just let it go on like this.

Later, when we’re tucked in bed listening to the roar of the waterfall from the pond, the crackling of our fire, the deep breathing of Ben sleeping on a cot in front of the fire, Lor does her usual just-before-going-to-sleep ‘sigh’ and says ‘I guess we’ll hear from the girls tomorrow; they should be in Paris today.’

I think to myself that in less than an hour Ben will be fifteen. It won’t be long before we’ll be having all our Christmases alone, if we’re lucky enough to stay together. Right then, for the first time, I realize I’ve lived with Lor almost twice as long as I’ve lived with anybody else in my life. Since my parents are dead, and I’m an only child, I’ve known her longer than anybody else. She’s the closest thing to a ‘reality’ I know.

The day after Christmas will be our thirtieth anniversary.

Next morning, while we’re having breakfast, Madame Le Moine peers into the damside door and knocks. She’s come all the way around up onto the dam and down our narrow, slippery, stone steps. I’d made arrangements for her to get the number if anyone phoned and tie a dish towel on her door handle. I can see her door easily from our west window and I’ve been checking regularly for it the past few days.

Madame Le Moine recently celebrated her eightieth birthday. Five months ago, she had a stroke which left her partially paralyzed and with failing memory. She’s almost completely recovered now, but definitely shouldn’t be running around delivering phone messages in this mud and snow.

We’re bullheaded about not having a phone. We dislike the invasion of privacy a phone, a TV or a radio allows. We were the first to have a toilet but are now the only ones without a TV, a phone or a radio. We’ve given Madame Le Moine’s phone number exclusively to our kids and a few friends. I know it has to be one of ten people when Madame Le Moine stutters out – ‘Tell-ey-phon.’

I invite her in. Loretta skims along the dam to Madame Le Moine’s house. It almost has to be Nicole just as Nicole knows it’s Lor who will answer. I could go into my aversion to answering phones here, but I won’t. I think it has to do with voices from anywhere out of nowhere.

I seat Madame Le Moine in the rocker before the fireplace beside our miniature tree. I give her a cup of tea with two lumps of sugar, whip out my cuff and take her blood pressure. Madame Le Moine is rocking and smiling.

Lor introduced tea into this village. Before we arrived, it was coffee, strong, or, un canon, a glass of wine, also strong, or naöle, super-strong one-hundred-proof alcohol made from fallen fruit; a regional version of marc de Bourgogne.

When the villagers did get hooked on tea, only the women, I should say: that is, Madame Calvet, Madame Le Moine and Madame Rousseau; Lor was shocked to find they were pouring her Christmas gifts of Twining’s Earl Grey breakfast tea into the bottom of a teakettle, and boiling it. They’d all be dead in a few years from tannic acid poisoning.

After that, Lor initiated the village women into the entire routine: start with cold water, stop just as it comes to boil, rinse out pot with hot water, dry pot, the correct amount of tea, three minutes steeping. She’s even got them drinking it straight, without sugar or cream, something she hasn’t even seduced me to, a very seductive woman in many ways, but not that seductive. Next thing she’ll have them knitting tea cozies.

My contribution to the village, besides toilets and septic tanks, has been ‘blood pressure’. Every day, whenever we’re here, I have informal morning clinic, taking blood pressure, pulse, listening to old hearts rattling along behind shriveled titties. Once in a while, one of the men, Pierre Rousseau, Claude or Philippe, will sit for me. I think they feel it’s good for them, healing; therapeutic blood-pressure measuring.

Madame Le Moine is convinced she wouldn’t have had her stroke if I’d been around that summer instead of off in America. I do feel somewhat guilty.

Whenever she’d be more than eighteen over ten (the French measure in centimeters not millimeters) I’d pop her with a fivemilligram Valium and a diuretic. It’d usually bring things around in a day or two. It’d also bring around other things: eggs, a fresh-killed rabbit, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, string beans. It’s hardly worth our running a garden. Pumping a rubber blood pressure machine bulb’s a hell of a lot easier than hoeing hard earth and hauling water.

I roll down Madame Le Moine’s sleeve, give her the good news – dix-sept sur huit, 170 over 80 (maybe the stroke helped), look up and see Lor come smiling through the door, humming and singing.

Anyone who didn’t know Lor would assume she is the bearer of good tidings. After years of experience I’m reserving judgment. Loretta could interrupt a little song to announce the fall of Rome, the death of the president, the onset of terminal cancer or the end of a marriage. She tends to sing when she’s scared, depressed or confused, to buck up flagging emotions. The trouble is, she also sings, hums, skips when she’s happy about something. It can be very disconcerting. It’s skipping which gives the real clue; she came down those stairs rather light-footedly for a woman in her late forties, so I’m not expecting the worst.

‘It was Nicole. They’re all fine. But Nicole’s luggage got lost in the transfer at Frankfurt so they won’t be down until tomorrow morning.’

I’m sorry they won’t be here for Ben’s birthday but perhaps it’s better this way. We can give all our attention to him.

Actually, at the functional level, Ben is an only child; he has practically no remembrance of the other kids living at home. They’re more in the order of distant aunts or uncles.

It’s tough for Ben having his birthday jammed up so hard against Christmas, especially with our anniversary the day after.

Also, it’s good they’ll be late because I want to varnish; I feel a strong varnish mania coming on. I varnish the way some people clean out garages or attics, wash cars or windows, shine shoes or silverware. It’s a way to smooth life, straighten raging emotions out when I’m mixed up.

And I know I’m really confused. Right up to lately, I thought I was handling things okay, that it was going to be all right, but now I’m not so sure.

I keep telling myself it’s only because I don’t want to hurt Lor. But it’s more than that. I don’t even want to think what my life would be like without her.

At bottom, I’m very selfish. I’m afraid of the words, the words that will be said. I know they can never be taken back. I’m not sure I can trust myself and I don’t really know what Lor has on her mind, what she’s thinking.

Something in me just doesn’t want to close in on the reality of what’s happening. I hate to think of myself as a coward but I guess I am. Lor seems to be taking all this so much more easily than I; I’m sure she’s suffering, it’s more than I can bear, just watching her. It would be so much better if she’d bring it out, talk about things with me. That’s more the way she usually is. I’m the one who’s usually evasive, who can’t bite the bullet, or whatever you’re supposed to do.

I pry open the lid on the varnish can. The thick, virtually clear varnish is like concentrated glass. I’ll be spreading it, making the surfaces seem permanently wet, as if it were all new, not old and crumbling.

I sweep and clear out the area by our beds and the wash table. I begin brushing away. The varnish sinks into the dull, dry, roughened wood and brings out the warm colors, the natural grain. My soul glows again; I stroke with the length of the boards, long even sweeps.

I’ll only be doing a portion of the floor at a time. This is a fast-drying varnish; I might finish in one day.

As I carefully brush varnish into the corners, I realize varnishing is much like my personal ethic and aesthetic. It’s a way of taking what’s there, or seems to be there, and making it more visible. I don’t know how this fits into the Camus theme of ‘cherish your illusions’, but somehow I feel it does, in an American sort of way. I’m protecting the surface of things, preserving; at the same time making things look better than they really are. That can’t be all bad, can it?

I work my way around the room in bliss. I varnish the ragged dish cupboard I built a dozen years ago from wood salvaged while tearing down an old shed beside the mill. I varnish our bread holder, the barometer, the millstone boom. Long ago it was used to lift and move the millstones, and is now supporting a suspended five-light chandelier.

I do the mantel over our fireplace. I varnish the huge table we built across the original millstones, still in place. I varnish our food cabinet; the door to the upper grange and, of course, all the floor; putting down planks so we can go from one part of the room to the other. I’m varnishing one of the supporting beams when Ben taps me on the shoulder.

‘Hey, Dad, look here, you forgot the firewood.’

That does it. The knot in my psyche is loosened up a little; also I’ve run out of varnish. We’ll have one half-shiny beam for Christmas.

Now, the mill smells like one of the ateliers around our place in Paris, where they fake original Louis Quinze and Louis Seize furniture.

After we eat lunch we give Ben his airplane. He’s thrilled. Together, we get it constructed by three o’clock. He says he wants his birthday dinner at Madame Le Page’s, the local restaurant up on the hill, but his dessert must be a real mother-baked cake down here in the mill. His preference for the main dish, if it’s possible, is pintade, French guinea hen. Lor goes across to Madame Le Moine’s to phone and see if it’s possible. She comes back smiling, humming, singing and skipping so I don’t even ask.

‘They’re also going to have french fries and jambon du Morvan for him. Madame Le Page is so considerate.’

Ben and I are up on Maggie’s hill adjusting angles of wings, turning ailerons and finger-winding the rubber-band-driven propeller, when Monsieur Boudine comes along the path up to us.

Actually, at that moment, I’m on a ladder trying to detach Ben’s airplane carefully from the high branches of an oak tree. As a result of bitter experience we always have a ladder and long stick up there with us. The stick has a forked V on the end of it to push gently up under the airplane and dislodge it. Trying to shake a fragile model plane out of a tree or pull it down through the branches can have disastrous effects.

In summer, we design and build our own, both gliders and power-driven. We’ve experimented with motor-driven planes, free-flight and U-control, but the noise, the smell of the gasoline, the thrust and speed of the machines weren’t what we wanted; our planes must be as much like birds as possible.

I’m up on our ladder with the stick, nudging the plane loose when Monsieur Boudine arrives. Ben is afraid of heights, so the really high hang-ups are usually for me. Finally I get just the right leverage and the plane comes fluttering down. Ben starts to run after it.

‘Wait a minute, Ben; let me down off this ladder first.’

Ben’s been holding the foot of our ladder so it won’t slip from the tree crotch where it’s wedged. I’m not too crazy about heights myself. I jump the last two rungs, walk over and shake hands with Monsieur Boudine.

I’m always uncomfortable with this man. Loretta is afraid of him and I understand why. There’s something wild there, something untamed, a slyness, secretiveness like a hunting animal. Loretta told me once he’s the archetype of what all women fear in all men, a genealogical throwback to a maleness which can’t be conditioned to society.

His family lives in the next village. He’s fathered nine children; seven girls and two sons. One of the sons, a really likable boy, would, every summer, give Ben and other children of the village, rides in an old-fashioned donkey cart. His name was Thierry but he was killed six months ago in a motorcycle accident.

When I first contacted Monsieur Boudine about our Christmas tree, I tried commiserating with him. The worst thing in the world I can think of is outliving any of our children. It’s ten times worse than what’s probably about to happen to us now.

Monsieur Boudine lifted his hat, a weather-beaten old-time brown felt hat with a light part where there was once a silk band. He wears it brim down, all the way round, so you can scarcely see his soft, deep-sunken, yellow-brown eyes. It’s as if he’s perpetually protecting himself from either the sun or a rainstorm.

He ran his hand over his full head of wavy gray hair and shook his head once, the way Pom Pom, his donkey, would shake off a single fly in his eye. Sometimes I think Monsieur Boudine’s feeble-minded, a fecund throwback of some kind. Lor might be right, she usually is. This head shake was his only response.

Mike claims Monsieur Boudine’s the original nature boy, knows every bush, tree, root, mushroom along all the paths through all the woods in the area. He spends entire days tromping alone through deserted countryside.

At this point, I can see Monsieur Boudine might know his plants, but he doesn’t have much idea what a Christmas tree’s all about. He’s dragging behind him a two-foot-high spindly pine spine that wouldn’t make a proper table ornament. He’s all smiles, for him. Most times his face is set in a passive, resistant mope, like a mule. He and Pom Pom are a natural pair.

I take the Christmas tree branch and try to act enthusiastic; Ben has turned away in total disgust. I try to give him some money but he declines because Pom Pom uses our fields. Uses is right. He ate the only sweet corn crop I’ve ever been able to grow and nibbled to bare sticks three young apple trees, two peach trees, an apricot and a cherry tree.

I take his olive branch of a tip to a pine tree. After all it is Christmas. But my mind is racing. Where can I get a genuine eight-to-ten-foot Christmas tree at this last moment? Can I con poor Ben on his birthday eve into a treenapping? It doesn’t seem fair, also he’s deathly afraid of the dark.

But, can I present a bush, a branch, a twig, as Christmas tree to our two daughters after transporting them six thousand miles, away from California and Arizona sunshine, their parties, their friends, their comfort and ease; dragging them unwillingly into this cold, winter-dark, lonesome valley in a stone-hard, wood-heavy, primitive mill beside a pond?

Something must be done! Monsieur Boudine clumps off into the woods, self-satisfied with his gift. I decide tonight’s the night and it’s probably best if I do it alone.

We are about a thousand feet above sea level here in the Morvan. About two-thirds of the hardwood forests, birch, ash, beech, has been cleared for pasturage; the rest, in steeper, less accessible sections, has been left intact. Formerly these woods were used as a source of wood for burning. Now, however, most of the people in the valley have shifted to oil for heat, very few still burn wood, even in the kitchen stove.

Recently, entrepreneurs, mostly Parisians, have been buying up the woods, bulldozing out the hardwood, selling it off to paper mills, or as firewood, then planting these woods with Douglas fir for Christmas trees. This had been going on for over fifteen years now.

Five years ago, to protect the area from this and other depredations, one of the first large parks in France was established. Le Parc Régionale du Morvan. Our mill is just included on the western edge. West of us, the forests are still being massacred. Young pines, five to ten years old, abound. The Morvan is becoming known as the Christmas-tree capital of France.

I’ve decided to snitch my tree from one of the Christmas-tree farms outside the protected park. I’ve worked up a whole rationale to defend my action; however, I don’t think it would hold in a French court.

But I’m desperate.

When I show our Monsieur Boudine ‘Christmas Tree’ to Lor she’s as disgusted as Ben and I are. Already we’d decided to trim our wings from the usual fourteen-foot monster we’ve always had jammed in the corner on the right side of the fireplace. It was impossible to trim, blocked the food cabinet, and overlapped the steps up to the toilet. This year we’ll have a smaller tree, maybe ten feet, and set it in the millstone on the other side. Right now, we’re not even close to ten feet.

Loretta says she’ll drive into Château Chinon and look for a tree. She also has some shopping to do. Fat chance, the French idea of a large tree almost reaches the navel. While she’s gone, Ben and I get out the decorations, wipe off the balls, unwind garlands, untangle electric lights. We’re preparing to decorate a giant tree no matter what. Irrational persistence can be a powerful force.

We also clean off and set up our crèche on the sill of the west window. I string one set of lights around it. Ben goes out to gather moss from trees and rocks for the inside and roof of the stable.

What we’re doing doesn’t have much to do with religion in a Christian sense. We’re playing dolls, acting out our husbanding, parenting impulse, making sure that baby is cozy and warm, surrounded by father and mother, warm breathing animals, the steam of urine and manure-soaked hay giving off the heat of fermentation. We live with it, this is not too far removed from the life all around us here.

When Lor comes back, no singing, humming; no skipping. No tree. There wasn’t a tree over three feet tall in the whole town. She says she almost stopped and gnawed down a tree beaver-style on the way home. I tell her I’m going out tonight to liberate a tree for us. She isn’t fighting me too hard. Loretta for all her seeming airs of gentility is a practical, pragmatic person when the going gets tough. It’s what makes her an effective first-grade teacher. It would also make her a good president or chairman of the Ford Motor Company.

That night we walk up to Madame Le Page’s for Ben’s dinner. It’s dark as it was when I went out to cut pine branches. All the better. On the way out from the mill our thermometer shows three degrees and there’s moisture in the air. I tell Ben it could easily snow again. He wants snow more than anything else for Christmas. I’m hoping it will hold off till the girls get down here. They’re driving our other car, a 1969 Ford Capri. This wreck makes my failing Fiat seem like a new Cadillac.

The meal is terrific; the pintade cooked perfectly. Ben has an entire liter of lemonade to himself while Loretta and I splurge with a 1976 Pouilly Fumé. The dining room is all ours; heads of deer, sanglier mounted around us. The restaurant is called La Fin de la Chasse and its main clientele are local hunters.

We walk down in the overwhelming dark and get home at about nine o’clock. I push the wood around in our fire to get it burning again, throw in another log, slip on my boots and prepare myself for the great adventure. Ben knows what I’m about to do but doesn’t volunteer. I don’t press; who wants to spend the evening of his fifteenth birthday in a French jail, and besides he’d probably spook me with his jumpiness. I’m bad enough, myself. With Ben along we’d probably wind up jumping into each other’s laps simultaneously.

I take our car key from the nail over the mantel, pick up a flashlight, let myself down into our cellar through the trap door, grab the saw from where I’ve hung it over the wood pile. I go out the door and slush my way through mud to open the door into our garage.

This time I wouldn’t mind too much if the car doesn’t turn over; but that engine has its ear tuned directly to the starter motor and coughs into life on the second try. The engine has become as easy to arouse as a nymphomaniac. But how would I know? My sexual experience so far indicates that even a certified nymph would just ho-hum me into insignificance. But I can get that Fiat going now, maybe it’s a good sign of things to come. That’s an accidental joke.

I get out to open the big doors, hoping the motor will conk while I’m doing this, but it keeps humming away. I back out slowly, maybe I’ll get stuck in the mud, but those tires grip like tractor wheels. All the omens say I’m in for it.

I drive up through Vauchot and out toward Corbeau. Five miles along I turn toward Monçaron. On my left looms a young pine forest, trees planted about two feet apart, mostly only about twice the size of the tree we already have, but several approach my ideal. I turn down the car lights to just parking indicators. It’s dark. I can scarcely see the road. I shut off my motor and coast the last fifty yards or so. This is a road with practically no traffic. Just ahead is a bridge so narrow one car can barely pass over it.

I sit there in the dark. I roll down both windows and listen; nothing but wind in the trees, the dripping of water from branches, and, now and then, the mew of a night hawk or the whoo-whoo of an owl. Maybe we should just use that Nevers tree, tie Monsieur Boudine’s tree to the top for extra height.

I reach back and get the saw. I let myself quietly out the car door, gently easing it closed.

I have Ben’s flashlight in one hand. It’s still so dark I can’t see anything. I’ll need to do everything by feel. I stumble, creep, crawl, crouch, my way off the road between trees. I try not to step on the smaller ones, while feeling left and right for high trees, higher than my head. I can’t be sure of anything.

I stop and listen. Would anybody actually be hiding in these woods in this wetness, in the dark, just to stop a failed philosopher from snitching a tree? I believe it! But I’ve got to flash my light. I should have come out earlier and marked a tree as usual, but with that damned Monsieur Boudine and his branch there wasn’t time.

I put my hand over the flashlight so just a beam escapes through my fingers. I spin slowly around, carefully scanning for a proper tree. I see one, just the right size, and bushy, twenty yards to the right. I switch off my light, expecting a voice from the dark, or the sound and feel of buckshot. I work my way over, doing the last ten yards on all fours. I hand gauge the thickness of the trunk, give one quick flash to make sure. It’s the right one, over ten feet tall. I scrape and clear away pine needles, dirt from the base of the tree, till I’m below ground level. When I’m finished cutting, I’ll spread dirt, pine needles, leaves over the ground-level stump, expert testimony to years of experience in knavery.

I pull out my saw, then lie on my back quietly, listening, looking up into the gloomy night. There’s nothing to be heard but those hawks, owls and the wind. I start sawing. It’s soft pine and not more than four inches in diameter; I saw through in less than a minute. Nothing like when we took down the last one, a veritable ship’s mast. That time, Mike and I took turns cutting and leaning back on the tree to keep our saw from binding. We were definitely pushing our luck. When we got home, Mike, vehemently, almost in tears, swore he’d never go treenapping at Christmas again.

As the tree starts to wobble, I steady it with my left hand and take the last two strokes one-handed. It falls over easily – right onto me. I lie back and smell greenness, feel cold drops of water, ice and snow drip onto my face. I’m totally sweated up, not so much from exertion but from nervousness. I’m also experiencing a sudden, deep sense of depression. Why am I here, what fear of life drives me on with this ritualistic fantasy? Where did I lose contact with reality as others perceive it? What can I do to make things right or, at least, learn some tolerance when they seem wrong to me? I drift back to my real situation under the tree. I’m trying not to cry.

I’m not even sure just which way it is to the road. I think it’s slightly downhill but I’m not positive. I can’t make out anything in the dark. How am I going to stuff this monster tree into my tiny car and drive home without anyone seeing me? I’ll take the back roads, past where Mike’s Geneviève and her family have their home.

I start crawling through the small trees, dragging my tree behind me like Little Bo Peep’s sheep’s tails. I flash my light once to make sure I’m going downhill. I’m totally lost and am convinced I’m going deeper into the forest.

Finally, I feel a strong decline and know I’m coming onto a road, some road at least. But the car isn’t there! I must’ve come out at a different angle from the one I went in. I can’t imagine anybody stealing that car without my hearing them start the motor. Yes, right, I even have that thought. I might be the world’s biggest worrier, the least effective one too. Or maybe I don’t worry enough. I know Lor is convinced I don’t pay enough attention to things; I probably don’t.

Is the car to the left or right? Is it even on this road? I peer into darkness. I stash my tree in a ditch. It’s most likely getting smeared with mud but I’ll wash it off later.

I peer and think I can make out a dim shape to my right. I walk along the road in that direction till I’m sure it is the car. Then I come back for my tree. I can’t find it. Right here is when I make my final decision never to go in for bank robbery, or murder, or anything serious.

But, I do finally find the tree, a bulge in the ditch, without flashing my light. I drag it and the saw behind me in a low crouching rush to the car. Now I’m vulnerable. If a car comes along, or anybody turns a flash on me, there’s no excuse I can think of for being out here running to my car along a road with a fresh-cut tree in one hand and a saw in the other.

I have no rope for tying this tree onto the car roof; that’s my kind of careful planning. I open the offside door and push the butt of my tree back in; over the seats, as far as I can into the back. I bend the top of the tree so it sticks out through the window and I can close the door. I carefully squeeze all the branches in, then ease the door shut. I lean the door tight closed and the inside floor light of the car goes out. I’m in the dark again.

By feel, I know the tip of the tree sticks out three feet past the windshield. I start edging around the other side to get in; I trip over my saw where I’ve left it leaning against the car. If I hadn’t tripped over it, I’d have left it there, driven off without it. Two wrongs do sometimes make a right, like negative numbers in algebra; that is, if stealing a Christmas tree can ever be considered a right.

I start the car, no problem, thank God, or whomever. I drive a hundred meters with just my parking lights on, then turn up my highs before I get to the narrow bridge. Now I’m away from the scene of the crime. I’ll just blind anybody who gets in the way with my highs. Ruthless, that I’ll be.

I cross the bridge, turn off onto the back roads, only slightly more than paths; twist, turn, up and down through what we used to call the enchanted forest, a veritable fairyland of ancient, hoary, moss-covered oaks, now a barren wasteland of three- or four-year-old Christmas trees. The shutters at Geneviève’s house are closed as I go by; but the grange door is open and some light seems to be coming from one shutter. Geneviève’s mother must be there; it’s going to be a tough Christmas for her. I just don’t have the guts to do what she did; I hope Lor doesn’t either. Maybe continuity means too much to me. I’m too inertial, not courageous, creative. It explains a lot.

I speed by and promise myself I’ll walk over the hill soon to wish her a Merry Christmas. I power my way in first gear up to Vauchot. There’s almost no snow on the road but some places are icy. I stay in first and glide down those last two kilometers to the mill. I’ve left the grange doors open; I’ll swing the car straight on in.

I get into town without seeing anyone. I twist and slither through mud into the grange; stop, turn off the motor, turn out the lights and sit a moment, quiet in the dark, giving my blood pressure a chance to arrange itself.

Then I get out, close the grange doors. Using my flashlight, I wend my way through motorcycles past and present, to the other side of the car, open the door; free the top of my tree from the window, and carefully work the bushy part from inside the car. I stomp the stump on the grange floor, holding it by the middle.

I open the little door-in-a-door to see if anybody’s out in the street. No one. I skip over the sill, through the mud, clutching the tree under my arm like a bride. I get through the cellar door and start pushing the tree backward up our steps ahead of me. I don’t want to break any branches going through the trap door. Lor holds the trap and pulls the lower end of our tree, helping me through. I come along behind and take it from her; the pillaging, rampaging, returned, conquering hero; crumpled, dripping, bristled, tousled, white hair in a flying mane.

I lift that mini-Nevers tree from the millstone, push it out the damside door onto our porch, then jam my newly cut tree into the millstone hole. It fits perfectly, tightly, stands straight up, buttoned-top tip almost touching the log ceiling under the loft; branches, glistening wet, spread to fill the space. It’s not too bushy and hasn’t a bare part; somehow there’s no mud either. Ben stares, he flashes his pulled-together squint which serves for a smile.

‘Now that’s a real Christmas tree, Dad. It makes me want to believe in Santa Claus again.’

Lor puts her arm around me, gives me a hard hug.

‘It’s okay with us if you want to, Ben, there probably is anyhow you know. Just ask your father; he’s the expert.’

‘No, I don’t think I could do it any more, it’s too hard. People don’t really want fifteen-year-old boys to keep believing in things like Santa Claus. It isn’t fitting.’

Lor pours me a small glass of Poire William. We light the candles on our table and turn off all the other lights. There’s only a glow from the two butane heaters and the light from our fireplace. It’s warm enough so we don’t need the electric heaters any more. Our inside thermometer on the newly varnished barometer says twenty degrees. The outside thermometer registers two above, still snow temperature. In my varnishing mania, I varnished the plastic match holder by the sink, including the striking surface on one side, so now we have a hard time striking matches. But we do get the candles lit.

Slowly, softly, Lor and I begin singing Christmas carols. Ben hums along with us. He has a deep melodious voice, perfect pitch, but it’s the first time he’s actually joined with us in singing. Only last year, he would’ve quietly absented himself, going out in the grange, or for a walk. Ben has a horror, an intense dislike for overt performance. It’s a feeling I understand, appreciate. There’s something sad, hard to be around, when people perform in a desperate attempt to prove that they are. I often cry at concerts or in a theater. It has nothing to do with the music or the play. I’m feeling sorry for the musicians, the actors, all those for whom that public performance of private fantasy is a way of life.

The temptation is strong to comment, congratulate, thank Ben for his participation on these, the last moments of his fifteenth birthday. But I don’t, it would be a violation. Not doing those things is most of what I’m trying to learn. I seem to lack a certain sensitivity, respect, for the inner needs of others; Lor always seems to know just what to do. It might be a part of what makes me a piss-poor philosopher and her an outstanding first-grade teacher. She almost always seems to do the right thing without trying.

We continue through the carols, very low-key, whispering, and I’m surprised how many of the words Ben knows, as he begins to sing with us; convinced it isn’t a competition or a command performance, but a mutual expression of good will. The tree stands mute, deep, dark green, mysterious; our representative from the great outdoors; an unwilling martyr to our desire for expression of oneness with the world, with all living things.

I feel calm inside. I resolve to hold tight the promise I made Loretta and keep my mouth shut when our daughters start working their thing off. Both our girls are heavily committed to the emancipation of womankind. Brothers and fathers are automatically guilty and are expected to absorb the brunt of the assault. Assault I can usually handle but directed insult triggers me if I’m not careful. The problem is, after twenty-five years of philosophical nit-picking, I’m a veritable demon at dispute, and it’s frustrating for the girls, especially Nicole.

This is what happened two Christmases ago in California. Loretta walked away and went to bed, she refuses to let herself get involved in nonproductive, noncommunicative conflict situations. I wish I could be so smart, I think it’s the contentious Irish in me. Nicole gets especially hostile after she’s had too much white wine. She’s so much like Nora, Loretta’s late sister, it can be frightening.

That Christmas, Nicole started insisting we’d ‘fucked up’ her life. I guess all parents are shocked, concerned when one of their children comes to feel this. But having evolved from difficult backgrounds ourselves, Lor and I’d convinced each other we’d honestly tried not to do just that. It’s so hard to show love, especially when you really love, respect and admire the loved one. It’s almost as if they want you to violate them, force them to behave by some standard of your own not related to their desires. Maybe they want a chance to manifest their love for you by submission. I don’t know. It’s beyond me.

So, there, in the pleasant dark, I reaffirm my determination to listen, not to be provoked, to make the most of this which, I’m convinced, will be our last Christmas together. I feel a pang again because Mike won’t make it, but then again, we can’t have everything.

Before going to bed, I heat some water and scrub myself thoroughly in the washbowl. I stink from nervous perspiration and it’d be no fun for Lor sleeping beside someone who smells like an escapee from a metro or a zoo. I even shave. Ben sets up his bed before the fire, then when everybody’s settled in, I blow out the candles and crawl into bed.

As I’m going off to sleep, wrapped close to Loretta’s back, I think again what a big mistake our species made when we started building houses with sleeping, eating, cooking, washing, all separated into different compartments. Virtually everybody in this village lives as we do, in one room. It’s surprising how comforting this can be. I won’t try to defend that one with the girls. There’s no reason to.

I wake at about seven thirty for a pressing morning piss. I don’t usually take a diuretic before sleeping, but last night I did, along with my usual Valium. I could feel signs of elevated blood pressure, a slight tightness under my left arm, a throbbing in the temples.

Two good things came of my medicating. One, I got up twice during the night and each time threw a good-sized log on the fire to keep it going, so now it’s burning merrily. Starting a new fire in the ashes on a freezing morning with cold, damp wood is not my idea of a great way to begin a winter day.

I let my eyes drift around the room, enjoying peace and the coming dawn.

The second good thing is the blood pressure is down and I’m feeling very content, undisturbed inside, in tune with the world. I run through again what has to be done, as I see it, and my only concern is for Lor. But it’s a concern, not an anxiety.

For me, Christmas Eve day is even more important, more exciting, than Christmas Day itself. The sense of anticipation, of expectant readiness, is magic. I hear, feel, Lor breathing beside me. Ben is stretched out, overlapping his cot by the fire, arms hanging over the sides. He sleeps deeply, calmly, no tossing, no teeth grinding, no startled nightmares, no thumb or finger sucking. We like to think it’s because we never let him cry himself to sleep, never left him alone in the dark when he wanted to be with us. Until he was seven, he spent at least half of each night in our bed, usually cuddling with me. I didn’t mind, I liked it; I don’t think sleeping alone is natural. With our first three we were young and foolish enough, vulnerable to rigid conditioning theories then prevalent, to insist they stay in their own beds, so now each is an erratic sleeper. I myself only became capable of deep, full, refreshing sleep when I was about forty. I can’t always manage it, now, even with meditation or Valium, but then things have been hard lately.

The skylights in the ceiling are beginning to lighten. It almost looks like blue sky, clear, behind tree branches hanging over our roof. The room is starting to quicken with light.

I ease myself out of bed, slide my feet into cool slippers, adjust for the failing clasp on my pajamas, turn the butane heater up to high, fill the tea kettle with water. I love filling this kettle through the spout, might even be a sexual thing, some compensation for my failure as a lover to my loved one.

I light the stove and put on water for washing. I sneak past Ben, turn over the log burning in the fire and jam another log next to it. I check the inside temperature, fourteen Celsius, we should have that back up to twenty within the next hour. I go to the door and pull back my thick red drapes so I can look at the outside thermometer.

I’m startled by a white, just lightening sky over the frosted trees, blending to a fragile, transparent white-blue overhead. I’m transfixed in wonder.

I break my eyes away enough to look at the outside thermometer through the frosted window. Twenty-two degrees below freezing. The sun still hasn’t risen. I’m torn between waking Lor and Ben or enjoying this special moment to myself. They’ll be up late tonight with the Reveillon at Madame Calvet’s, plus all the excitement of the girls arriving; they need their sleep, so I take the selfish decision.

I dress quietly, turn off the stove under the hot water, slip on boots, jacket, gloves, wool knit cap. I carefully open the door, let myself out, then pull firmly so it latches behind me.

I look left and there is magnificent ice sculpture from the falls. Every splash, every flowing current is frozen in twisting glossy forms like transparent, clear toy candy. The ivy growing along the sides of the sluice gate is wrapped in ice, inches thick, drooping gracefully with the weight of each leaf captured green in transparent ice cages. There are giant icicles, four feet long, three inches thick hanging from the stone, temporary stalactites. I walk across the frozen, ice-creaking wooden porch, up the slippery steps onto the dam to look out over the pond.

It’s frozen absolutely clear without a ripple. If you didn’t know it was winter, if there were green leaves to reflect on its perfectly calm surface, you’d think it was five thirty in the morning of a June dawn; halfway around the calendar from now.

The glow of the sun is still hidden by the eastern edge of our valley-bowl. There are no clouds. It’s so empty, one could easily wonder if there ever had been, ever would be a breath, a breeze again.

I do my usual thing, the summer ritual, standing on tiptoe, reaching up high as I can, pulling myself out of myself, trying to let some of that glorious empty sky come into me. In the interest of my sleeping family and the neighbors, I repress the desire for a grunting howl.

With one boot toe I kick loose three small, flat stones from the dam surface, two smooth, one ragged. I pick them up; they feel like ice even through my leather gloves. The first, the ragged one, I throw full-force directly down at the ice. I’m standing now on the small wooden platform from which, in summers, I slip quietly into the water for my after-run-before-breakfast swim.

Those summer mornings, I slide in quietly so as not to disturb the fishermen halfway around the pond. This morning, the platform glistens with ice crystals, but doesn’t seem slippery under my boots. The stone glances from the ice, making a small crazed dent, then bounces and skims another thirty or forty feet. The entire pond surface screeches and echoes from edge to edge, hallowed, hollow, deep-throated. A scientist friend told me once how the crackling howling sound is due to ice cracking along the surface faster than the speed of sound, so it causes a minisonic boom. That’s hard to believe, but it is a magic sound.

Holding onto an overhanging tree branch, I ease one foot over the edge from my platform to test the ice. It cracks slightly, the cracks spread crazily in all directions away from my toe. The ice appears to be about an inch or so thick. I take one of the smooth stones, cock my arm and skim it underhand across the incredibly water-clear ice. It bounces, slides; almost without friction, seemingly endlessly, accompanied by echoing reverberations of the ice. It continues, until, almost out of sight, it enters the cattails, marshland and reeds at the far end of the pond, then stops against one of the domed muskrat dens out there.

I’m about ready to skim the last stone, feeling it icy cold, smooth, sucking heat through my gloves, when the sun begins to glow white fire over the eastern edge of our valley. It shines almost pure white, like a communion wafer painted by a Spanish eighteenth-century painter.

This is time, happening. I can feel it passing through me. When one thinks about time, and I do too much; it’s part of what makes me a philosopher I guess; but when one thinks about it, it’s the most mysterious phenomenon we know.

We try to define it with clocks and calendars which are, more or less, based on movements of sun, earth and moon, but that’s only measuring. All we can really guess about time is it’s probably related to space and matter, whatever they are. If space and matter just became, it’s when time began. But time can’t begin because ‘begin’ is a time word, beginning-ending.

But this sun seeming to come over those hills, time or not, is practically pure light, cutting through ninety-three million miles, the source of virtually all earth’s energy.

I feel it already warm on my cold face before it’s halfway over the hill. It lights my soul. I put the last stone back in my pocket, take off my gloves, allowing my hands to be healed by these magic rays. I close my eyes, face the sun directly. I can feel, see, the red insides of my eyelids lighten; redden; warm with the blush of life. I want to hold my breath or sing; dance; something, some way to say thanks.

Instead I put my gloves back on, open my eyes and watch till the sun is finally detached from the earth, free-floating, a heavenly body again, giving us all for nothing. I vow to express my thanks by showing love for my loved ones. I wish I could somehow transmit to Lor, to the kids, my intense joy in them, the way they are. But dumb events, happenings, keep getting in the way, blocking my true feelings. But I’m going to try.

But first I want to walk, to hear, feel the crunch of frozen grasses under my feet. I walk around the pond toward the Rousseaus’. The trees are coated with ice, thick, clear, natural varnish, crackling in the sunlight as rounded prisms, a myriad of colors reflected from hoarfrost on the ground.

Last year’s blackberries, most still unpicked, now dried, hardened on the frozen bushes, are, each one, surrounded, enveloped in an irregular-shaped, perfectly clear ball of ice, like insects caught in amber. They hang their heads the same as they did in summer when filled with sun-sweetened purple juices.

I turn and look back over the pond to see our mill reflected, frozen, in the still ice. Even on a perfectly breezeless day in spring or summer it is never so completely mirrored. It has the look of someone in a tintype, long dead.

I stare transfixed by this temporal transmutation, then stamp my chilling feet and start back, jogging lumpishly along the top of the dam to our mill. I’m ready for this year’s Christmas Eve washup. I’m having my two daughters arrive today, I want to look my best, which isn’t much, but what I’ve got, what I am. Oh how I wish I could be different, be what Lor wants, what the kids want. It’s a terrible feeling inside when you’re seen as a ‘flake’, a ‘wimp’ by others when you’re personally convinced you’re not one.

Everybody’s still asleep. I turn up the water to heat again. I strip down to my long johns. The water, already warm, heats quickly. The room temperature is now seventeen degrees. I pull back the drapes on our east window to let in the sunlight. I pour hot water into the washbowl, regulate it to just right with cold water from the pitcher. I wash my face, scrub soap into my hair. I hang my head over the sink, pour the rest of the cold water from the pitcher over my hair to rinse it. If I weren’t completely awake, aware, before, I am now.

Then I strip off the top part of my long johns and do a good soaping and rinsing off of my whole upper body, not just under the arms. I scrub up a good lather in the hair on my chest, arms and back.

I dry vigorously with a towel, then strip off the bottoms to the long johns, scrub all my vital parts. I actually lean over the bowl on our table to let them float in the water so I can do the job properly. I think this part of a man has less density, floats more easily, than other parts. It should, there are no bones, despite romantic claims to the contrary. I stare at these complicated organs of mine and wonder what music they should play to be heard. I rinse and towel myself off again, pull the long johns back on, mostly for Ben’s sake. He’s at an age where nudity bothers him. He even goes into the cold toilet room to dress. The new heater in there might save him from pneumonia.

Now I put the bowl on the floor and the towel beside it. One at a time, I carefully wash my toes. No wonder the washing of feet is such an intrinsic symbol for so many religions. There’s such comfort in it.

I resist overstimulating a minor case of athlete’s foot on my left foot between the little and next toe. No sense starting something.

I carefully dry each foot and slide on the socks, the ones I washed last night, along with my underpants. I’d hung them on the mantel to dry. They’re somewhat crinkly stiff, but still soft and warm. There are some small luxuries in life, hard to describe, but which give it texture, and for me, having washed the socks and underwear by hand, myself, drying them by a fire I kept burning all night, makes it a better, deeper experience. I’ve got to be careful not to try forcing the ones I love to love the things, the ways of living, I love. It’s an easy mistake to make. It might be called the philosopher’s folly, or maybe everybody’s folly. It would be so great if we could show our love by enjoying those we love for what they are, not what we want them to be. It would be the ultimate mutual emancipation.

I’m just exploring that thought, pulling my dark blue Shetland wool sweater over my head when I hear Lor waking up; yawning, mmmning, lip sucking. She gave me this sweater for my birthday, she knows the kinds of things I like. She should, after thirty years, but some women wouldn’t. I don’t really know what she wants sometimes; I hope she really wants the girls here for Christmas. I hope she even wants to be here herself. She has every right, every reason to want to be somewhere else right now. But it all came about so fast.

‘What time is it, dear?’

I look at my watch tipped sideways on the table, beside the bowl of dirty water.

‘Quarter to nine. Wow, is it ever beautiful outside, Lor. Look at that sunshine, and it’s twenty-two below! Everything’s frozen. Except for the sun coming up, it’s almost as if time’s stopped.’

Lor rolls over on her stomach, props her chin on her elbows, looks past me out the new washed window into the icy world. I think there are tears on the outsides of her eyes. It could only be from sleep or the strong light from the window. She quickly wipes them away with the backs of her wrists.

‘You should have wakened me. What a beautiful day. Happy Christmas Eve day, darling.’

‘Happy day to you too, Lor. There’s still plenty of hot water to wash up if you want.’

I look at the inside thermometer.

‘It’s between eighteen and nineteen now, practically like California.’

She’s turned over and is sitting up; spreading covers, making the bed as she slides out. She’s wearing a dark blue flannel nightgown. Sexy sleeping gowns are not her thing. Lately Lor has been much more sexy in the clothes she wears and the way she makes up and does her hair, but she still sleeps in old-fashioned flannel, usually dark blue.

‘Not quite California, dear. I’m not complaining; I think it’s wonderful how you keep this place warm but for a Californian this is Arctic hardship. Gosh, I wonder how the girls are going to manage? I did tell them to bring plenty of warm clothes.’

I dump my bowl of dirty water into the sink, wipe it out with a paper towel, fill it with steaming hot water and some cold, while Loretta makes the freezing trip up to the toilet. I stretch out on the made bed. She doesn’t have time to unplug and plug heaters, just one quick morning piss, or maybe with a woman that’s pee. I know a man’s piss and a woman’s pee sound different; in a toilet bowl anyhow. It’s amazing how much stronger piss smells in the cold. I wonder if she notices that too, probably it’s in the great area of things too vulgar to discuss.

When she comes back, she walks past me, pulls her nightgown up over her head, splashes water over herself, toweling dry as she goes. I try not to let her know I’m watching, but this is one of the best parts about being at the mill. Her skin is still smooth as when we married, transparent pink, no moles nor warts, her stomach bulges slightly under the belly button from four kids but her body is odalisque, especially her back. Ingres, Matisse, Cézanne would love to paint her. Our relationship is such that I find myself more aesthetically pleased than sexually aroused. I don’t know why. I don’t really think either of us wants to rock our boat; broad-beamed, slow-moving, hard to tip over, or at least I always thought it would be hard to tip.

I’ve come to believe nothing fouls up a successful long-term man-woman relationship more thoroughly than rampant sex. One or the other, or sometimes both, sooner or later, get to using withheld intimacy, physical satisfaction, as a weapon; sexual blackmail. Even now, with everything that’s happened, I still feel that way. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with me.

At school, over the years, I’ve had many chances at flirtations with students and fellow teachers. I always back off, the rewards don’t seem to match the involvements, the complications, the expectations. I just don’t seem to have the sexual drive needed. I’m much more the romantic than the stud.

Lor squirts herself with deodorant and starts dressing. I get up, push logs around on the fire, then snuggle another one in. We have enough logs cut to get through the day but not enough for tonight. It’s probably time for me to induct Ben into the art of hauling and cutting wood. It’s a very Christmasy thing to do. I hope he’ll see it that way.

Behind me, Ben has wakened. He reaches for his glasses on the table beside him and looks at his digital watch, also on the table. He’s very nearsighted. When we go back to Illinois next time we’ll try fitting him with soft contact lenses.

He’s weird with his watch and his sense of time. He has a flat credit-card size combination computer-watch. He can’t even tell time with a regular handed analog watch. Don’t ever tell him it’s quarter to three instead of 2:45. That’s sacrilege.

Ben swings his feet out of bed and slides them into his slippers. These slippers are the largest size made in France. He stares into the fire. He’s a slow waker, coming from some deep place of rich, imaginative dreams which he’ll sometimes share with us at breakfast, but not now. We all know better than to try much communication with Ben at this point. He told me once he doesn’t mind getting up but he hates to stop dreaming.

‘Morning Ben, have a good sleep?’

‘Uh uh.’

‘It’s a beautiful day out, clear and cold. The pond’s frozen.’

‘That’s good. Did it snow?’

‘No. It’s too cold to snow now.’

‘Uh huh.’

Ben’s a bit of an old man in his ways. Each night he carefully folds his clothes and stacks them on a chair beside him. It’s hard getting him to surrender clothes for washing. He’s not enthusiastic about change of any kind, even changing his socks. If happiness is being satisfied with what you have, then Ben’s the happiest person I’ve ever met.

He gets up, stretches, pokes the fire with his favorite stick poker, gathers together his pile of clothes and heads up the small, steep, four-step stairway toward the bathroom.

‘Ben, you can turn on the heater in there if you want, I’ll turn this one off here.’

‘Thanks. That’s all right. I don’t get cold.’

But I turn off the heater anyway. With the fire blazing away, we’re almost up to twenty. Lor’s dressed. She dumps her water into the sink, wipes out the bowl, puts the bowl and pitcher on the dresser.

‘Dearest? I wish Ben would wash in the morning. He’s beginning to smell like a dog kennel from playing with all those dogs in the village. That, combined with his own smell, it’s enough to turn anybody’s stomach.

‘I snuck in new socks last night. It was one of the times you got up and went to the toilet. What’d you do, take a diuretic and your Valium? Is it that bad?’

‘Not really, just getting ready for the onslaught; bracing myself, packing in reserves of passivity, nonresistance, paternal permissiveness, mellowness, coolness. I’m okay. What’re we having for breakfast?’

‘How about pancakes? I have syrup already made and there’s Roland’s honey. How’s that sound?’

‘Great. I’ll straighten things up and sweep while you’re whipping them together.’

I’m tempted right here to reveal the Christmas waffle iron. Waffles would be great this morning. I roll up Ben’s sleeping bag and spread it at the bottom of our bed. I haul his mattress up the stairs and tuck it in his old toy corner out in the upper grange. I come back and fold his cot, store it under the stairs going up to where the girls will sleep. I guess I should wait for Ben to come back. He always puts his bed away, carefully, slowly, but I’d like things cleared away for breakfast.

Actually, the stairs are more a ship’s ladder than a staircase and not so sturdy at that, but they’ve lasted almost fifteen years now.

I built the first step two feet off the floor so Ben couldn’t climb up it when he was little. I’ve been meaning for the last seven years to put in this missing step but never have. It’s little things like that I tend to let get by, or maybe it’s because putting in that step will be one more proof we don’t have a baby any more, aren’t going to have any, any more.

The grandchildren thing doesn’t look so hot either; both Mike and Nicole say they’re not going to have kids and Maggie seems in the process of terminating the father of the one she does have. I’m not about to wait for Ben to come through; although he’s physically precocious in his sexual development, he doesn’t show much interest at the functional level. The things young girls do to attract young boys all seem silly to him. He told me once he’d really like having an interesting girl to talk with but the girls at school are only boy crazy.

‘They aren’t dumb, Dad, they just act that way.’

Could be in his genes. Maybe we’ll have a sequel, ‘Son of the Vanishing Man’. This is one of Nicole’s inventions that caught on. She claims I’m really invisible sometimes, that when things get tough, I turn off my mind and vanish inside myself. She could be right. I don’t know.

But I’d probably better nail in that missing step anyway; the girls would appreciate it since they’ll be sleeping up there.

Lately, I’ve been trying to work out some semantic progression through all the steps, conditions, below satisfaction. Right now it goes something like: acceptance, tolerance, accommodation, acquiescence, resignation, resentment, surrender, revolt. I’ve been practicing, trying to figure out just where I am.

I’m not sure that last one belongs there, but building that step on the stairs fits pretty well with accommodation or maybe acquiescence. I do actually have to build the step, find the wood, nails, hammer, saw; cut the wood, fit it, hammer it in place. Accommodation. Yes, we have accommodations. Or, ‘No, we have no accommodations, you may sleep in the stable.’

I find our broom and start sweeping over by the firewood corner to the right of the fireplace. Loretta’s pouring pancakes on the griddle, the smell of them fills the room. She talks to me over her shoulder.

‘Dear, could you hold off sweeping until after breakfast?’

‘Honest, Lor, I promise I’ll just take little six-inch strokes; I won’t raise any dust at all. Promise. Besides, Maggie’s even worse than you are about dust; if I don’t get it done now, we’ll be walking around in dust up to our ankles before they leave.’

‘Peg, dear; remember it’s Peg. You know how upset she gets. Anyway I don’t think she’ll stay more than three or four days at most. She’s always hated the mill.’

Lor turns over the pancakes, puts syrup and butter on the table. I continue sweeping with mini-strokes trying to keep the dust down. I sweep off the front of the millstone in front of the fireplace, sweep up my first pile, throw it into the fire.

Ben comes down the steps from the toilet, his pajamas carefully folded. He goes over and tucks them under his sleeping bag.

‘Oh boy, pancakes. That’s one of the best things I like about the mill, we always have time for a real breakfast.’

He stops, pauses.

‘Thanks for putting away my bed, Dad. I would have done it though.’

He goes to the dish closet and pulls out dishes to set the table.

‘Ben, dear, I’ve got the dishes there warming on the heater. Be careful you don’t burn yourself.’

Lor pushes another batch of pancakes into the oven to stay hot. Ben fastidiously lifts the dishes off the heater, spreads them on the table each to our accustomed spot, me facing the fireplace, Loretta on the side with best access to the kitchen, Ben, his back to the fireplace. I wonder how it will work out when the other three arrive. I can take any place and Lor can move over a place to make room, but Ben will be immutable.

Generally he doesn’t even like to eat with other people; says it’s hard to concentrate on the taste of the food, and he doesn’t like the sounds of people chewing, swallowing, banging forks and spoons against their teeth.

Normally, on non-school days, Ben finishes two or three books a day. I say finishes because he’s often reading four to five books at a time, something like Nero Wolfe. He told me once he likes to be reading one funny book such as Mad or Mash, one violence book like an Executioner series or MacDonald, one science fiction and one serious book, a technical book on airplanes, or automobiles or geology, botany, anything. He’s also usually reading or rereading one of the perhaps five-hundred old National Geographic magazines we have stacked around the mill, or the apartment. Oh yes, I forgot, he’s also a dedicated reader of the wonderful French hardcover comic books, bandes dessinées, Tin Tin, Astérix and Obélix, Lucky Luke. He says that’s where he really learned French, not at school. I believe it. Ben’s one of those wonderful people who doesn’t need school. He’s a natural learner-thinker.

But he does generally accommodate and share meals at the same table with Lor and me. We accommodate, too. I’ve learned to eat the way I’ve learned to sweep; small, short, inconspicuous bites and swallows. Actually the food does taste better that way and I don’t eat so much. I can be a real gulper if I’m not careful, and it is amazing how many times a fork bangs against the teeth if one doesn’t make an effort.

Then, also, Loretta and I are great chatterers during a meal and Ben’s made us very self-conscious about speaking with food in our mouths. Tucking it over to the side, hamsterlike, is out. I must say, all the careful chewing, swallowing, mouth clearing, slows down conversation; but then, it’ll probably keep our digestive systems functioning properly a little while longer.

I look out the window at a car going past. It’s still incredibly beautiful, blue sky – white, icy trees drawn against the heavens. Except for the cold, the girls certainly can’t complain about the weather, not today anyhow. I notice Loretta looking out the window, too. We’re both nervous. Even if they started at eight in the morning, which is well within the range of the impossible, and drove the entire trip in only three hours, which is within the range of the possible, but not in that old Ford, not if it’s driven by anyone with two cents worth of common sense. But then, the friend might be driving, so who knows.

No, we’ll have time for our breakfast. I don’t think the girls are exactly breaking their necks to get down here in a hurry. After all, they’ve already missed Ben’s birthday. Maybe they’ll only come down for Christmas Day. Who knows? It could be better that way. Then they can have fun in the apartment up in Paris while Lor and I try to work things out. Ben will stay out of the way or not pay attention. War could be being declared right beside him and he most likely wouldn’t even notice.

## 3. Three French Hens

I’m just finishing my second pancake when I hear the unmistakable front left brake squeal of the Capri. I stand up, straddling my chair and it’s them all right.

‘Here they are, Lor, safe and sound.’

We both move to the west window, Ben leaning over behind us. Nicole’s out first from the passenger side. She’s wearing a padded eiderdown vest and a long, wraparound red wool scarf. I have unwelcome thoughts of Isadora Duncan, one of Nicole’s all-around favorite people. Nicole has a wool hat pulled down low over her forehead and ears, the jacket and scarf across her mouth. She’s waving her arms wildly, although she probably can’t see us through the curtained narrow window. The boyfriend climbs out the other side. He shocks me. He looks like an older, balding, bearded version of Mike. I never thought this was the kind of man Nicole would hook up with. Her other men have tended either toward the emaciated-kook-musician, dirty, smelly type or the unbelievably handsome aspiring moviestar variety; nothing in the middle.

‘Geez, Lor. That guy sure looks a lot like Mike.’

Loretta’s dashing past me pulling at the trap door.

‘Who else do you think it is, dummy? Of course it’s Mike. What a wonderful surprise; we’ll all have Christmas together after all.’

I can see now she’s right. It’s so wonderful to hear the excitement in her voice. Mike’s doing his after-a-long-drive stretch, very similar to my morning sunlight reach. Then he slightly cocks his left leg to let off a Jack-Kerouac-on-the-road fart. I wonder where Geneviève is. Maybe they got their signals crossed and she’s in California waiting to be picked up at LAX.

I hurry down the cellar steps behind Loretta. Madame Le Moine has opened her door and stands with hands clasped, radiating pure joy at our joy. Mike has Loretta in a big bear hug. I go over and hug Nicole. We exchange French style cheek-to-cheek kissing. She feels, looks heavy even discounting the padded jacket. But she looks healthy, bright-eyed, good color, better than I remember her two years ago.

‘Did we surprise you?’

‘You sure did. What happened? Where’s Geneviève?’

‘Mike will tell you. It’s his story. Let me get inside, I’m freezing.’

Now Maggie is working her way out from the back seat. She’s even more bundled up than Nicole and looks truly miserably cold. She’s been covered by all kinds of packages and luggage. I give her a hand to help her out over the lowered back of the front passenger seat. We share a good, hard hug. She’s exactly the same height as Loretta but thinner. She’s been working at keeping slim and looks wonderful. After Seth was born she took on weight, but now she looks like a girl again, younger than Nicole, although she’s five years older. She’s wearing the afghan alpaca-type coat she left with us in Paris.

‘Hi, Dad. Holy mackerel, your hair is practically pure white and are your eyebrows naturally that dark, or do you dye them?’

‘White in the head only, Maggie. Getting older’s just as bad as I thought it would be.’

She hugs herself, tucks her mouth under the neck of her sweater.

‘God, I’m freezing. Mike had to keep the window open so he could signal. The left turning signal wouldn’t work.’

‘I know.’

Mike shouts over the car.

‘Really, Dad, you ought to get a real car for a change; this thing’s a menace; it starts shimmying at eighty kilometers an hour so it almost shakes your teeth out. My arms are still vibrating.’

‘I know. The frame’s bent; was that way when I bought it, makes a good automatic governor, but it wears out tires. How are you, Mike, other than being tired?’

‘I’m pooped. I’d like to sleep for about three days.’

Maggie reaches in to get her stuff from the back. Lor is hugging Nicole. Mike comes around front of the car through the bumpy, frozen mud to me. His eyes look red-rimmed as if he’s been smoking pot for three days. Probably it’s all the sleep loss flying over, then driving down. Coming this direction is deadly. Mike’s shaking my hand, has his other hand on my shoulder.

‘Did we surprise you?’

‘Sure did. With your new beard, and not expecting you, I thought you were Nicole’s boyfriend. By the way, where is he?’

‘He decided not to come after all. We finally convinced Nickie the mill isn’t big enough for six people in the winter time, especially if one of them’s a complete stranger. Remember, I lived down here through one winter. Boy, am I ever strung out; driving that car wore me right down; you know the left front brake is grabbing.’

‘I know. Where’s Geneviève?’

Do I imagine it, or does he give me one of those quick looks; the look I’ve learned to live with, when quite by accident, I start mucking too much in my kids’ lives.

‘She decided she had to stay here, couldn’t come to the good old U.S. of A. after all. Her mom would be down for Christmas by herself most of the time. Her dad’s coming down too, for a few days, so they can divide things up. It’ll be tough for both of them and Geneviève felt she couldn’t leave now. Besides I didn’t want to pass up the chance for a Christmas with us all together at the mill, like old times.’

He stares at me closely again, almost as if he’s looking to see if I believe him. It’s uncomfortable and I can’t figure it. Mike’s one of those people who give off vibrations. I can usually feel them but I’ll be damned if I can interpret them. He leans close.

‘I had to spend my school tuition money on a plane ticket. Is that okay?’

‘Sure, no problem. I’ll write a new check and we’ll get it right off. The deadline is January fourth, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t worry about that, Dad. I’ll work it out.’

How’s he going to work it out? Does he have a job? Hidden resources, computer access? Maybe he’ll explain later.

I wish either I didn’t have antennae or I had better ones. Mine work just well enough to let me know when something is wrong, but not what’s wrong. I spend too much time in an emotional dusk. With Christmas mail and all; with the holidays, January fourth seems like cutting things close.

‘Is it okay if I borrow your one-twenty-five, Dad? Geneviève’s over there now and I want her to know I’m here. First we can unpack all this crap, then I’ll buzz over.’

‘Sure. Does she know you’re coming?’

‘No. It’ll be a surprise for her, too. To be honest, I didn’t know I was coming till just the day Peg and Nickie were leaving. It was only luck I had that blank signed check for the tuition. I packed my stuff in about half an hour.’

‘Well, whatever the reason, it’s great you’re here. This might be our last chance for a big Christmas get-together.’

I know I’m not with it somehow. But then I never am. I also know better than to ask why he just doesn’t drive over in the Capri. I’ll wait till Lor can do some investigation and translating.

Lor’s still on the other side of the car gabbing with Nicole and Maggie. Maggie’s definitely jumpy; I can feel it right over the car roof. She’s probably expecting me to talk about her leaving George and Seth. Not me; what good does it do? Besides, I have to live with my wife. There’s no use explaining those things; Kelly’s first law: when it comes to emotions, everybody’s wrong.

We start unloading. They all only have sleeping bags and banana bags. The girls say they left their big suitcases up in Paris at the apartment. Mike’s even more careless with clothes than I am. All his stuff is in the smallest of those banana bags, nothing in Paris. He’s the one who should be freezing. He’s only wearing that blue sweater Geneviève knitted him last Christmas. Unless he has some magic collapsible down coat in that little bag, no socks, no underwear, no change of shirts, shoes, he’s going to need clothes. I search through my mind for whatever extra warm clothes we might have stored in the upper grange. We’ll find something. Actually, I have the duffle coat I haven’t been using much. With my Bean catalogue long underwear I don’t get cold.

Finally Ben comes down and drifts around the groupings. He’s trying to see everybody, participate without being seen. I’m worried how he’ll react when the girls greet him. He’s only this year gotten up his nerve, his tolerance, enough so Madame Le Moine can kiss him on the cheeks when we arrive. Mike’s the first to see him.

‘Holy Jesus, Ben! You’ve grown another six inches since I last saw you. Now I’m your little brother. How tall are you anyway? And that’s some beard you’ve got there.’

He goes over and puts his hand out for Ben to shake. Ben, hands to match his feet, long thin fingers, strong hands, gives a good shake; but he can’t get himself to look into the eyes of any person with whom he’s shaking hands. It’s too personal, too intimate. He tends to look down, or at an oblique, about two feet beside and three feet behind the other person. Mike knows Ben enough to respect this.

‘He’s somewhere over six-two now, Mike. I had to stand on a chair to cut his mark on the post for the millstone boom. He passed both of us last summer.’

Nicole and Maggie see Ben. Nicole comes over, she swings the dangling end of her scarf across her neck, shakes her head to get her hair over her ears and behind her shoulders.

‘My God, Ben; you’re a giant. You can’t be my little brother. Holy cow, I’m the baby in this family again, for sure. What happened?’

She closes in on Ben with her arms out. She doesn’t even come up to Ben’s shoulder. He lets himself be hugged, hands limp at his sides and his head too high up for her to try a kiss. She steps back, staring at him from head to toe.

‘My God, I can’t believe it; he even has the beginnings of a straggly beard there. Maybe you’ll be the new Santa, you and your hairy brother can fight it out for first elf.’

Maggie’s standing behind Nicole. She puts down her banana bags on a snow spot, all the rest is mud.

‘Hi, Ben. You’re getting so handsome, I almost wouldn’t recognize you. I’ll bet the girls at school chase you all the time.’

She gives him a brief hug. She doesn’t try to kiss him although she’s tall enough. With a valiant effort, she might manage a shot at his beard. But from the way Ben leans out from her hug, she gets the message.

Ben takes the banana bags from Maggie and Nicole. They carry the sleeping bags. Mike has his stuff under his arms. There’s nothing left for Loretta and me to carry except some wrapped Christmas presents from in back of the car and a duffel bag full of something, maybe extra warm clothes, I hope. We pack them under our arms; I’m praying the Atari set is there and that the cassettes are the ones Ben wants, Combat and Space Invaders. He definitely doesn’t want any of the sport ones, soccer, Ping-Pong, tennis. I’m sure it’s okay.

We decide to go around onto the dam. With all this junk it’d be hard to get up the narrow stairs and through our trap door. Besides, I want them to see how beautiful the pond is; also, how I’ve cleaned the ivy from the roof, swept the leaves off the porch, tied the roses to the wall.

On the dam side, it almost looks like a real French country house, with French doors opening from the upper grange onto the dam and a stone terrace along its length. The other side, the road side, where the car is parked, looks square, hard, high and cold. Nicole and Maggie are still rattling away a mile a minute with Loretta. Just before they go down the stairs, Lor stops and turns.

‘Look at this, girls, have you ever seen anything more beautiful?’

The two of them hug their sleeping bags to their chests and look out over the pond. For some reason there are small crystalline outgrowths, growing in tiny clumps like butterflies all over the surface of the pond. There must have been some condensation that froze. Each crystal reflects like snow and refracts so it’s almost blinding with the direct white light, sprinkled with tiny spots of blue, red, purple, even yellow.

‘Good God. It’s like Disneyland or Fantasia or some kind of sci-fi flick. It’s practically psychedelic.’

That’s Nicole, I mean Nickie. Maggie stares entranced.

‘It’s so beautiful. We used to have it like this up in Idlewild, California; in the mornings sometimes. But let’s get inside, I’m freezing.’

Ben and Mike behind me stand as if hypnotized. Both of them have bare hands and both hands loaded. They don’t put down their loads, only stand there.

‘My God, Dad! I forgot how beautiful it is. It’s so easy to let things get out of your mind. I’ve been sort of afraid to come. What with Thierry having his accident and Henry Carron dying of cancer and then Madame Le Moine almost dying with a stroke. I was worried if I could handle all those changes, if it would ever be the same.

‘But look at this.’

‘Madame Le Moine’s fine now, Mike. She has her memory back and most of her strength. She’s been asking about you. She was just over to see us yesterday. She was even out there watching when you all came in, but didn’t want to interfere. She’s still the same wonderful woman.’

‘You mean she was there and we didn’t even say hello?’

He stares into my eyes, then starts as if going right over to make up for it. Ben steps forward.

‘It’s all right, Mike. She understands. You can go see her later.’

Ben walks past Mike.

‘Don’t worry. I looked up at her and made a sign with my hand to show I saw her and she pushed down with both her hands as if she were shushing me, didn’t want to interfere. Madame Le Moine understands things, Mike.’

Ben goes past me and down the steps. Mike comes close. ‘Jesus, Dad, he’s so serious. Is he always this way?’

‘Most of the time. He’s a very serious person, Mike. He’s so conscientious he makes me, the mad compulsive, feel like a blithe spirit.’

We step carefully down the cracked steps into the mill. I’m sorry I missed the girls’ first reaction when they went in, but I’m glad to’ve had a moment somewhat alone with Ben and Mike. For some reason I’m a better father for boys than for girls. At least it seems that way to me. It’s hard to know if this is true, but I get more complaints from the girls, or maybe girls complain more than boys.

Lor’s expert in the way she complains, no whines no bitches; just a constant niggling; reminding me about things that need to be done, keeping me in line, watching over; like automatic drive. She’s always saying ‘Let’s do this’, or ‘I think we ought to do that’, but mostly these are projects for me. Maybe that’s the way it is in all marriages, I don’t know, I probably don’t care. God, I wish I had a better grip on things. Mostly, I wish I had a better grip on my marriage.

When I come in the door, I can barely close it behind me. There’s a fairly narrow gap between the table built over the millstones still in place, and the millstone with the Christmas tree jammed in its center. Three sleeping bags and three banana bags have been straight dropped, plugging the gap. I don’t know whether they walked through and dropped the bags behind them or dropped, then stepped over. Actually it’s as good a place as any. They’ll need to take the bags upstairs sooner or later and the bottom of the stairs is right there.

I think for a minute before I say it, the idea seems so natural, so logical.

‘Okay if I put your bags and things upstairs?’

There’s a two-second beat of silence; they look at each other, then all, all three of them, begin laughing. Lor glances at me. Ben is confused as to what’s so funny; what’s wrong, what was said that he didn’t hear, didn’t understand. Nicole steps, trips over the bags, falling toward me.

I know why they’re laughing and it is funny. Nicole gives me a daughterly kiss on the nose, a child-love equivalent to ‘Good boy, Rover, well done.’

‘Dad, you wouldn’t believe it. We were talking about this on the way down in the car. It’s so weird having an old maid for a father. We were in hysterics about how you were always sweeping here at the mill or vacuuming up in Paris or even helping old Frau Berger scrub on Saturdays in Bavaria. Remember how you’d lock us out of our rooms if we didn’t make our beds or hang up our clothes?’

She’s having a hard time talking, between laughing and giggling. I have a strange feeling the laughing isn’t real, only some kind of cover-up for deep feeling. Maybe neatness isn’t something daughters want in fathers. The other kids are quiet; I sneak a quick look at them, they seem as uncomfortable as I feel. Lor is frozen. Here it is, just inside the door, Christmas Eve and we’re already on the edge of a scene.

‘I don’t know, Nickie, maybe I’m just a garden-variety anal compulsive. You know the story of how my mother trained me. Every time I dirtied my diapers she wouldn’t breast-feed me. Then, I was strapped onto a training potty before I could sit up straight; used to keep slipping through the hole. I was seven years old before I managed a turd that didn’t look like rabbit pellets.’

Maggie puts her fingers in her ears.

‘Come on, Dad. Don’t start grossing me out in the first five minutes. I thought you’d at least wait till we were eating. Between you and Mike; him with his burps, belches and farts, and you with your gross stories I’ll swear I almost starved to death as a kid.’

‘I’m sorry Maggie. I was only trying to explain. I’ll shut up.’

The interesting thing is I’m only neat, not clean, and I’m definitely not a classy dresser, distinctly sloppy. But I’m not comfortable in a disordered environment. I feel insecure and I’ve never been quite sure if my mother did it to me, or the U.S. Army, or it’s some deep personal fault. I tend to live my life as if there’s a Saturday inspection always just around the corner. It must be a drag for others to live with but I don’t think it is for me. Some of my most pleasant, joy-filled, anxiety-free hours are after I’ve cleaned the apartment, everybody’s off somewhere and I have it alone to myself, neat and quiet. It could be part of the ‘Vanishing Man’ thing again. Maybe I’m trying to make everything around me vanish into nothingness.

Mike breaks the spell.

‘You’re right, Dad. That’s a dumb place for us to drop the bags. We were just so glad to be here, to see it all clean and beautiful, so much like home should be, we didn’t think. Let me give you a hand with that stuff. You go halfway up and I’ll pass them to you.’

I go up four steps so I can push the bags onto the floor. Mike and Nicole hand them up to me. I’m glad my head’s out of sight. Lately, the smallest things can make me fill up. I guess if daughters don’t want an ‘old maid father’ they sure as hell don’t want a ‘crybaby’. Maybe it’s only the strain of waiting, wondering, preparing things, preparing myself. The strain of not knowing what’s going to happen.