The Christmas Kid

“My husband, Danny, is in the army,” she said softly. “In Japan.” She turned her head and stared at the darkening harbor. “I’m real worried now,” she said. “Korea’s right up the block.”

She turned away from the harbor, looking now at nothing.

“I can’t call him,” she said. “He can’t call me. We write every day, but the letters take forever.… I told him not to go in the army, but no, he knew better. He wanted to go to college, get the GI Bill, get a degree. Like I did. That was a year ago. He—”

She turned to Shawn and smiled in a thin way. “Why am I telling you all this? Don’t worry. I’m okay.” A pause. “I just hope my husband’s okay.”

That evening she invited him down to her place for a cup of tea. They sat facing each other at the kitchen table, and in the muted light he thought she looked beautiful. Her husband watched them from the photographs on the walls. His name was Danny Carter. Blond and handsome in the photographs from civilian life. Looking like a soldier in the photographs from Fort Dix, where he did his basic training. Marilyn saw Shawn stealing looks at the photographs.

“Danny’s such a wonderful man,” she said. “A man with a good heart. A very good heart. My parents wanted me to marry, oh, I don’t know, a doctor, a lawyer, a school principal, at least. They barely talk to me anymore.” She looked again at Danny Carter in his soldier’s uniform. “I can’t imagine him killing anyone.”

She stood up and started into the other rooms, flicking on lights as Shawn followed her. There were paintings and photographs on most walls. One room had two walls packed with books. He had never seen so many books in a person’s house.

“Let me find you another book,” she said.

Two days later, on a Saturday morning, a pair of uniformed soldiers came to her building.

Shawn was in the basement of the grocery store, unpacking cans of Del Monte peaches, when he heard her screaming.

He didn’t see her leave, and didn’t see her, or hear her voice, for five more days. He rang her bell. No reply. He tried the roof door. Locked from the inside. At night, no lights ever burned in her top-floor apartment. As he worked at the grocery store, leaving with deliveries, then returning, he watched her front door. Other tenants came and went. But there was no sign of Marilyn Carter.

On the sixth day, Shawn brought Uncle Jimmy two slices of pizza for dinner, and then went up the roof with his hand weights. He worked out with a kind of fury. Then, his bare hands gripping his knees, facing the sunset, breathless, he heard a door creaking open. When he turned, she was there. She looked forlorn. She gestured for him to come to her.

He did. An hour later, they were in bed. She was his teacher, helping him to do what he had never done before. He entered her wet, gasping warmth, into a kind of grieving heat and closeness he had never known until then. And then she rose to a pitch, gripping him tightly, digging fingers into his flesh, erupting into a deep, aching moan. One prolonged name.

Daaaaaaannnnnyyyy…

After that night, and for a dozen nights afterward, Sean was there with her. She cooked him small meals, even preparing food for him to bring to Uncle Jimmy. She told him about books he must read and gave him copies from her own library. She told him he should never drop out of high school and should try to get into City College, where there was no tuition. She urged him to buy a notebook and when he saw a word he didn’t understand, he should look it up in a dictionary and write it down. “Just writing it down,” she said, “will help you remember it.” She even gave him an extra dictionary. And he started writing down many words from the newspapers. Mortars. Casualties. Shrapnel.

She never mentioned her own future. When he told her the latest jokes he’d heard at the grocery store, she laughed out loud. Sometimes, lying in bed, they watched a movie on her television set, but never looked at the news. She said nothing at all about Danny and how he had been killed in Korea.

Above all, their time was devoted to the joys of the flesh. They pleasured each other in every part of the flat, in darkness or lamplight. In bed. In the bathtub. On hard wooden kitchen chairs and the soft couch and armchair in the living room. On a dark blue exercise mat on the floor beneath the cliffs of books.

Each fleshy embrace ended the same way: with the moaning of her dead husband’s name. Full of regret, longing, desire, and memory.

Then one Saturday afternoon in late August, as the skies darkened with the threat of a storm, Shawn arrived from the roof. Marilyn was in her pink bathrobe. The exercise mat was draped over a chair. There was an urgency in her eyes, and then in her voice.

“Let’s go up the roof,” she said.

“It’s blowing hard up there,” he said. “Someone at the store said there might even be a hurricane.”

“I know,” she said, and grabbed the mat and led the way to the roof.

She laid the mat on the roof and told him to get undressed.

“Here? What if—”