“Oh, it’s a bookmark I’ve had for years now,” Aldine said, a bare-faced lie, and she slid the marker into The Merchant of Venice at the front of the volume, eight hundred pages and several climate sectors from Venus and Adonis.
Neva was holding out the chenille robe that Aldine had worn the night before for a bit of extra warmth while she read in her room.
“Hurry!” Neva said. “Wear this.”
Aldine gave a laugh. “I’ll freeze, Neva.”
“You won’t, though! It’s ever so much warmer downstairs. Clare has the fire raging.”
So Aldine slipped into the robe, cinched the ropy belt tight at her waist, and followed Neva downstairs, where Mr. Price sat binding a package with twine. Aldine pulled the lapels of her robe together at the collar, but Mr. Price seemed pleasantly surprised by her informal entrance, and when in his low, gravelly voice he said, “Merry Christmas, Miss McKenna,” the earnestness of it affected her.
“And Happy Christmas to you, Mr. Price,” she said. She glanced at the lively fire beyond the stone hearth. Neva had been right about that—it was warm as toast in the room.
“Did you fall out of bed?” Mr. Price asked pleasantly.
Aldine turned, patted at her hair, and wondered what kind of sight she was presenting. “Sir?”
“The alarming thump I heard a minute ago.” He was using a serious voice, but there was the smallest smile on his lips. “I thought maybe someone had fallen out of bed.”
“Oh, that then,” Aldine said and while wondering what mad concoction she might next speak, Neva interceded.
“It was just the book Aldine was reading before she went to sleep, Daddy. It fell on the floor when I woke her up.”
And with that, Neva was again pulling her by the hand and as Aldine happily allowed it, she cast an I-must-be-going smile back over her shoulder toward Mr. Price.
In the kitchen, Charlotte and Mrs. Price were busily gathering plates, slicing oranges, sliding hotcakes from skillet to platter, and shooing Clare away from the sausages warming on the stovetop.
“Out! Out!” Mrs. Price said to Clare, but her tone was jovial, and Clare, grinning happily at Aldine, grabbed a last sausage before escaping. Aldine joined the women in their work. A festive element had infected them all, none, to Aldine’s surprise, less than Mrs. Price. It was nearly too strange to accommodate—Aldine kept watching her from the corner of her eye. Was this what happened to her on Christmas Day but no other? The bounty of food doubtless had something to do with it, but there seemed to be something else as well, an almost eager element to her contentment, as if she were sitting on the pleasantest kind of secret, one that might soon be revealed.
After so many frugal meals, their breakfast felt like a banquet: small cobalt-blue bowls crowded with wedges of seedless oranges, shallow dishes full of jelly and marmalade. One platter packed with small sausages, another with hotcakes. Aldine followed the method of Clare and Neva, who spread their hotcakes with strawberry jelly (though Aldine chose orange marmalade), then wrapped each one around a sausage and ate it without aid of fork or knife.
“Heavenly,” she said, and Mrs. Price actually smiled at her compliment.
Mr. Price said, “Nice that”—he gave his wife a mysterious look—“Santa found us this year.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Mrs. Price said, very coylike, it seemed.
“I think it was a red-haired Santa,” Charlotte said, a notion that Aldine couldn’t fathom. Nor could Neva, who said, “There’s only one and he’s got white hair.”
They all ate then and for a time no one spoke. Finally Charlotte said, “Do you suppose you could eat like this every morning if you lived in California?”
“You could if you’re Tom Mix,” Clare said.
“Or William Randolph Hearst,” Mr. Price added, and even as Aldine was wondering who this William Somebody Hearst might be, he said to her, “This Hearst fellow’s a big newspaper tycoon.”
Neva was the first to finish eating, and thereafter sat monitoring the progress of others. Mr. and Mrs. Price were the most deliberate, but when at last they had put down their forks, Neva shouted, “Presents!”
Aldine expected Mrs. Price to insist that the dishes be washed first, but she didn’t. She merely nodded and followed the others into the front room. The gifts were simple and various, and of the type, Aldine understood, that were given and received each year. Several ball-in-the-hole games. Found arrowheads. A rubber-band gun. A homemade Parcheesi board. Walnuts for cookies. Tangerines for all (Aldine received two). Aldine gave Neva a knitted long-legged frog and sang the first line of “Froggy went a courtin’ Oh” (and wanted, truly, to sing more but felt it would redirect too much attention). As a finale, Clare distributed propeller toys he had made and soon he, Neva, and Aldine were spinning their shafts between flattened hands and gleefully watching them twirl up into the air while Mr. Price stood at the hearth to prevent any wayward toys from a fiery ending.
When everything had settled again, Mr. Price began picking at his dulcimer, and soon was singing “Silent Night,” which teased a voice from everyone, even Mrs. Price. A few more carols followed and then a melody that sent a tremor through Aldine.
“Anyone know that one?” Mr. Price asked, and it took Aldine a moment to come to her senses. “It’s the ‘Carol of the Birds’ then, isn’t it?”
Mr. Price nodded and kept his eyes on the dulcimer. “I’m afraid I only know the melody,” he said. “I was hoping you would know the words.”
And so she sang, and she soon had everyone coming in on the beautiful, lilting chorus of “Curoo, Curoo, Curoo.”
Mr. Price didn’t stop after the last verse, so they went through it again, and this time when it was finished, the room fell into serene silence except for the occasional pop and snap from the fire.
Clare suggested a Parcheesi tournament and Mrs. Price said pleasantly, “Not before we have dishes done and dishes made.” She addressed the room as a whole. “We have two plump pheasant cocks that Ansel brought home,” she said, giving her husband the quickest nod, “and for that we’ll have a nice kumquat glaze.”
Her eyes were almost unnaturally bright with pleasure.
“It’s the most perfect Christmas ever!” Neva said, and Mrs. Price, nodding, said, “Yes, and there’s more to come.”
Mr. Price, who had just laid his dulcimer into its case, lifted his eyes. “More to come, Ellie?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded.
“More than pheasant for dinner?”
Again she nodded.
He took this in. “Well, don’t keep us from it then,” he said, and Aldine sensed that his mild tone was wrapped about something harder. “Not on Christmas morning.”