The Christmas Kid

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said finally. “I truly am.” He fumbled in his pocket, brought out a pack of Viceroys, lit one. “Listen…I mean, how’d you get me over your house, anyway?”

Davis said, “I’ve got two teenager sons, Uncle Roy. Big strong kids. Between us, we’d get you down the stairs, and the chair, too, get you back up, too. No sweat.”

The old man considered this. Davis could hear Christmas music drifting from the hall again, and down in the street he saw two kids lugging a tree through the rain. Then the old man said, “Ah, the hell with it. One thing I can’t stand is bein’ a bother to someone. Forget it, boy. I can’t stand pity, you know what I’m sayin’ to you? I don’t want nobody feelin’ sorry for poor ol’ Uncle Roy. Forget it.”

Davis said, “Okay, we’ll pick you up Christmas Day, at eleven. Case closed.”

“No, wait a minute, I don’t want to—”

“You got no choice, Uncle Roy. We’re comin’ to get you.”

Davis started for the door, and the old man turned in the wheelchair, the cigarette burning between his fingers.

“I ain’t gettin’ dressed up,” he said. “Not for nothin’.”

“Okay with me.”

Davis was at the door now. The old man was silent.

“What do you really want for Christmas, Uncle Roy?”

The old man’s eyes blinked a few times, and he ran a hand on the hidden stump of a ruined leg.

“Nineteen forty-nine,” he said. “Nineteen forty-nine.”

The Love of His Life

HUGO BOARDED THE D train in Brooklyn one winter morning in 1951 and his life changed forever, although he didn’t know it at the time. He was squashed against the door of the conductor’s booth, reading a newspaper, when his eyes briefly wandered and came to rest on the face of a young woman. She was sitting facing him, reading a book called And Quiet Flows the Don. In his twenty-two winters on the earth, Hugo had never seen anyone quite like her.

“It wasn’t just her face,” he told me when I went to visit him many years later. “I mean, her face was amazing. Shaped like an oval, high cheekbones, clear skin, a great straight perfect nose… It was more than that. She had, like…like an aura.”

Possessed by the force of the aura, Hugo remained on the D train past his stop. He noticed that she had a portfolio of some kind beside her, and what seemed to be a toolbox on her lap; a model, he thought, or an artist. The aura pulsed with force, penetrating Hugo, and he suddenly knew, recklessly and intuitively, that this woman embodied everything he wanted: beauty, intelligence, warmth, humor, sensuality. He must have her. Not for a day or a week, but forever.

“She never noticed me looking at her,” he told me. “But finally she folded down a corner of the page in her book, looked around as we pulled into a station, picked up the portfolio and the toolbox, and got off. I followed her. The aura…”

He walked after her through the crisp winter morning. She turned onto 57th Street, and he noticed now that she had a perfectly proportioned body, good legs, a rhythmic, confident walk. He wanted to call her, touch her arm, ask for directions or a match. He did nothing. Without breaking stride, she hurried up the stairs of a large stone building and was gone. The Art Students League. His heart thumping, late for work, Hugo hurried back to the subway.

All that day, grinding away in the financial advertising agency on lower Broadway where he worked as a copywriter, Hugo brooded about the astonishing young woman. She dominated his night thoughts in the furnished room in Brooklyn, and the next morning he waited for the same D train, didn’t see the woman, let three more go by, and felt lost and disconnected when there was no sight of her. The same thing happened the next morning. The following day was a Friday; he told his boss he would be late, and went uptown and waited in front of the Art Students League. Dozens of young women entered the building, and a few young men, but he didn’t see the woman with the aura. At twenty past nine, he started back to the subway. And saw her hurrying around the corner, head bent into the winter wind.

“Miss?”

She looked up, blinking. “Yes?”

“I, uh, well, I wondered if, uh, well, if you’d like to have a cup of coffee with me sometime.”

She shook her head, an amused smile curling her mouth.

“Are you a lunatic or something?”

“No, no, I swear. I just…You were on the subway the other day, and you were reading that book And Quiet Flows the Don, and I…it’s hard to explain. Maybe I am a lunatic. I’d just like to have coffee with you, that’s all.”