One Christmas, the choir was scheduled to give a concert for inner-city children in Harlem. In the predawn hours of December 24, 1967, my mother boarded a bus with her fellow students and headed north. It began to snow on the East Coast that morning and kept up all through the afternoon. “Lift Jesus Higher,” “The Lord Is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want,” “Amazing Grace”—with those songs and so many others, the girls sang away the miles until the choir director—out of genuine concern or, more likely, boredom—suggested it would be wise to save their voices. Except for the rumble of snowplows and rattle of salt trucks rolling past on the highway, the bus grew quiet. Soon, the girls had fallen asleep. My mother slept too, though she woke before the others with what she first experienced as a headache. Those “feelings” she sometimes got about the world didn’t normally come to her in the form of physical pain, but the sensation was so intense she couldn’t help but wonder if it was a sign.
By the time they reached D.C., snow spit frantically from the sky, blotting out the world outside my mother’s window as pain crept to the side of her face and bloomed in her jaw. Despite the agony, my mother (being my mother) kept quiet. Nothing anyone could do until they reached New York City, she told herself. Besides, if she did say something, those girls might lay hands on her. Not only did my mother dislike being the center of attention, she did not believe they had the kind of faith to make that sort of healing possible.
Late in the afternoon on that same day, my father finished work and got ready to leave the clinic. In truth, he had seen his last patient hours before, though for once he felt no urgency to leave, since he faced the prospect of his first holiday alone. His final patient, a blowsy, red-haired woman doused with lilac perfume, whose oddly fanglike teeth he’d been capping and crowning for months, brought a Christmas gift to thank him for all his work. The gesture touched my father more deeply than he might have guessed, because it would be the only gift he’d be receiving that holiday. He peeled away the reindeer wrapping paper to find a leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
The fang-toothed woman hugged him too long, leaving him smelling of lilacs. After she walked out, my father allowed himself to lounge in a dental chair. Page after page he turned until the Ghost of Christmas Future appeared and he glanced out the window to see the sky had grown dark. He decided to finish the story at home.
On the slippery drive back to his apartment, my father’s thoughts turned to the ghosts of his past. Not the ones that appeared to him as apparitions, but rather his family. His mother had passed from lung cancer a few years before. (Hadn’t he always warned her about all those cigarettes?) Since she’d been gone, his father and brother had done away with even the skimpy holiday traditions she once maintained and instead spent hour upon hour drinking from their freezer-chilled glass tumblers—getting good and sloshed in front of the TV. The year before, my father, who always shared one glass with them, had felt so gloomy during the visit that he vowed never to return. Even though he kept that promise, there he was on Christmas Eve, allowing those same old ghosts to haunt him anyway.
Your parents are never gone from you. . .
Perhaps those words flickered in his mind as he carefully navigated the slick roads that night. He’d already gone to an early mass—to his way of thinking, Christmas Eve mass was a candle-lit tourist trap, not meant for serious believers like himself—and now there was only dinner to think about. But he wasn’t much of a cook and all the decent restaurants he passed were closed. That must have been what led him to pull into a Howard Johnson’s off the highway.
Once he stepped inside, his eyes caught sight of a row of pay phones. Would he regret the call? Probably. But he walked to a phone anyway, fished out a fistful of change from his pockets, punched in the 215 area code and number he knew by heart. The phone rang and rang and he was about to give up when a craggy voice came on the line. “Hi, Dad,” my father said. “It’s me, Sylvester. I just called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”
After a silence, “Same to you, son. Same to you.”
“Some storm, huh?”
“Guess so. But it’ll melt. Always does. Nothing to get upset about.”
“I’m not getting up—” My father stopped, took a breath. “So I imagine you and Howie are spending the night together?”
“Nope. Howie’s gone off. Here with Lloyd having a drink.”
“Howie’s gone off where?”
“Joined the navy. You know that.”
“Well, how would I know that, Dad? I never hear from either of you.”
“Phone rings both ways, son. Phone rings both ways.”
Perhaps that was the moment my father first shifted his gaze toward the window and saw the idling bus in the parking lot. Emergency flashers blazed, turning the snow red then white then red again. Perhaps that was when a matronly, gray-haired woman stepped inside and approached the row of pay phones, opening the phone book and flipping pages. “I’ll try to call more often in the New Year,” my father said, putting his back to the woman since he didn’t like people knowing his business. “But, well, there never seems to be anything to say.”
Silence. More silence.
“Dad? Are you there?”