The Christmas Kid

Barney Augstein’s living room was packed. Charlie Flanagan was mixing drinks in the kitchen. A woman named Bridget Moynihan was cooking a beef stew. In the living room, seated in a large chair, there was a lean, suntanned, dark-haired man with an amused look on his face. Lev brought me over and said something in Yiddish to this man, and the man shook my hand politely, while Lev told me that the man was his Uncle Meyer.

“Nice to meet you, sport,” Meyer said to me. “You take care of this kid, okay? He’s been through a lot.” He looked down at a diamond pinkie ring. “His mother, his father, the whole goddamn family, except him. They all got it. Know what I mean?”

Then he turned his attention to the TV, talking about Willie Pep with Charlie Flanagan, and about Ray Robinson with Barney Augstein, and then about baseball, and somehow the talk got around to Pete Reiser.

“Pete Reiser,” Lev said. “Like Christmas every day.”

“Now, there’s a smart kid,” said Meyer, and they all laughed. Meyer and Barney argued for a while about the fight on TV, and then Meyer produced the fattest roll of bills I’d ever seen. “Put your money where your mouth is,” Meyer said, and smiled.

“Come,” Lev said, and led me to his room. It was very small — a bed, a bureau, a chair. But it felt like a library. There were stacks of comic books everywhere, grammar books, two fat dictionaries. And drawings that Lev had made: Batman, the Green Lantern, Captain America, Donald Duck. There were other drawings, too; buildings with spirals of black cloud issuing from chimneys; barefoot men with shaved heads and gray pajamas; watchtowers; barbed wire.

“You’re an artist,” I said.

“An artist?”

“Yeah, an artist.”

“Pete Reiser is an artist?”

“Yeah,” I said. “In a way.”

“Like Christmas every day,” Lev said. “An artist.”

IV

Fall arrived. The days shortened. Most of us went to the Catholic school, but Lev enrolled in public school, where Ralphie Boy became his protector. Ralphie Boy had been kicked out of Catholic school.

“The kid is scared all the time,” Ralphie Boy told me. “I gotta teach him how to fight.”

Every day now, the woman named Bridget Moynihan was coming to Barney’s house. She was about forty and lived with her mother and had a plain, sweet face. Barney hired her as a housekeeper, to make sure Lev ate properly and washed himself and always had clean clothes.

“I tried,” Barney said to my father one day. “But I just got no talent for being a mother. This kid is family, you know. I’m his only living relative. But a mother I’m not.”

They started to go to the movies together: Barney and Charlie and Bridget and Lev. They took walks, and went shopping together, too. Then at Thanksgiving, Barney prepared a big dinner. He asked us to come over after our own dinner and make Lev feel like he had a home. But Lev was in his room when we got there, and he was crying. Barney asked me to talk to him.

“Go ’way,” Lev said, turning his back on me, sobbing into his pillow.

“What’s the matter, Lev?”

“Go ’way, go ’way.”

“You don’t like turkey, Lev?” I said.

He whirled around, full of anger. “Too much! Is too much! All food, food, food. Too much!”

I was a kid then, but looking into the eyes of a boy who had survived a death camp, even I understood.

V

After Thanksgiving, the Christmas season began. Down on Fifth Avenue, store windows magically filled with toys and train sets and red stockings. Christmas banners stretched across the downtown streets, painted with the slogans of Christmas, about peace on earth and good will toward men. Christmas music played from the loudspeakers, and there were Salvation Army bands outside Abraham & Straus and men selling chestnuts and rummies dressed in Santa Claus costumes, ringing little bells. We took Lev with us as we wandered these streets, and he was full of amazement and wonder.

“But what is?” he said. “What is they mean, Christmas?”

“Hey, Lev, fig-get it,” Ralphie Boy said. “You’re a Jew. Christmas is for Catlicks.”

“Explain, please.”

A theological discussion of extraordinary complexity then took place. Was Santa Claus a saint? Did they have Christmas bells in the stable in Bethlehem, and who made them? Did Joseph and Mary put stockings over the mantelpiece, and was there a mantelpiece in that stable? How come the Three Wise Men didn’t come on reindeer instead of camels, and, by the way, where did they come from? If Jesus was the son of God, why didn’t God just show up in person? It got even worse as we roamed around. But Lev stayed with it, almost burning with intensity, as if torn between the images in those store windows and the fact that he was a Jew.

“Why is not for Jews?” he said.

“Because Jesus was a Catlick, Lev,” Ralphie Boy explained.

“No, he wasn’t,” my brother, Tommy, said. “Jesus was a Jew.”

“Come on,” Ralphie Boy said. “Stop kiddin’ around.”

“I ain’t kiddin’,” Tommy said. “Jesus was a Jew. So was his mother and father.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You could look it up.”

“Well, when did he become a Catlick? After he died?”