The Christmas Kid

“How do I know?” Tommy said. “All I know is, while he was here on earth he was a Jew.”

“Ridiculous!” Ralphie Boy said.

If Lev had any doubts about the essential craziness of the goyim, they were not resolved by this version of the Council of Trent.

VI

Then Barney Augstein got sick and was taken to Methodist Hospital. There were whispered conversations about what was wrong with him, and then plans were made by Bridget and my mother and Charlie Flanagan. Bridget moved into Barney’s house, and my mother and Tommy and I came over every night to help Lev with his homework, and the women decided they could give a Christmas party anyway. They would combine Hanukkah and Christmas, get a Christmas tree, hang pictures of Santa Claus around the house, but leave out all the mangers and statues of Jesus. Barney was part of the planning; he called each night from the hospital and talked to Lev and then Bridget, and later Bridget would talk to my mother.

“He wants to get the lad everything,” Bridget would say. “Train sets, and chemistry sets, and a big easel so he can paint. A camera. A radio. And I have to keep stopping him, because he’s gonna spoil that kid rotten.”

Then on December 19, the first snowfall arrived in the city. Lev was in our house and we took him up to the roof and we stood there while the snow fell on the pigeon coops and the backyards, and obscured the skyline and the harbor, and clung to the trees, all of it pure and white and blinding. We scooped a handful from the roof of our pigeon coop, explained to Lev that it was “good packing,” and started dropping snowballs into the street, hoping that we would see Nora the Nose. She wasn’t there but others were, and soon Ralphie Boy was with us, too, and Eddie Waits, and Cheech, and we were all firing snowballs from the rooftops, as skillful as dive-bombers, and Lev was with us, joining in, one of the crowd at last.

“Good packing,” he shouted. “Good packing!”

That night, while we all slept, Barney Augstein died.

VII

They took Lev away two days later. A man and a woman in a dirty Chevy arrived at Barney’s house at eight in the morning, showed Bridget their credentials, and took Lev to the children’s shelter. Somewhere downtown. Where the courthouses were. And the jails. Bridget swore that she looked across the street and saw Nora McCarthy at her window, smiling. We learned all this that afternoon, when Ralphie Boy told us that Lev wasn’t at school. We went up to Barney’s and Charlie Flanagan was there with Bridget.

“He didn’t have papers,” Charlie said. “Barney got him in through Canada. The kid never had papers.”

“So what’ll they do?”

“Ship him back.”

“To the concentration camp?”

“No,” Charlie said. “To Poland.”

“Well, maybe not,” Bridget said. “Maybe he’ll just go to an orphanage.”

“An orphanage?”

We were filled with horror. Poland was bad enough, over there between Germany and Russia. But an orphanage was right out of Oliver Twist. I could see Lev, like Oliver on the H-O Oats box, holding a wooden bowl, his clothes in rags, asking for more gruel. That’s what the book said. Gruel. Some kind of gray paste, what they always fed orphans, and I thought it was awful that Lev would have to spend all his years until he was eighteen eating the stuff. Worse, he could be adopted by some ham-fisted jerk who beat him every night. Or, even worse, someone who hated Jews. And all of us, in that moment, seemed to agree on the same thing.

“We gotta get him outta there,” Ralphie Boy whispered. “Fast.”

The phone rang and Charlie answered it. He talked cop talk for a while, and mentioned the State Department, shook his head, and said he couldn’t adopt a kid because he was single. He hung up the phone, lit a cigar, cursed, and stared at the wall. Then he turned on us.

“All right, you bozos,” he said. “Beat it.”

I was halfway down the block when I realized I’d left my gloves on the kitchen table. I went back. Bridget answered the door and I hurried past her to get the gloves. Charlie was on the phone again.

“Hello, Meyer?” he said. “This is Charlie…”

He glowered at me until I left.

That night it snowed, and kept snowing the next day, and on the day after that, they closed the public schools, and we listened in the morning to “Rambling with Gambling,” praying for more snow and the closing of the Catholic schools, too. The snow piled up in the streets, and we burrowed tunnels through it, and made huge boulders that blocked the cars in the side streets. The park was like a wonderland, pure and innocent and white, the leafless trees like the handwriting Lev used when he showed us his own language, and kids were everywhere — on sleighs, barrel staves, sliding down the snow-packed hills. All the kids except Lev. He was in the children’s shelter, eating gruel.