Zanna's Gift- a Life in Christmases Read online

  The truth was, they all saw Ernie’s face in Zanna’s picture now. Just not with their eyes.

  8

  Zanna took the picture with her when she married Hal and moved to the coast. Why shouldn’t she? It was her picture.

  But as their first Christmas together approached, she was shy about bringing out the picture. He had seen her recent artwork, of course—they had met in a figure drawing class, where he sometimes modeled to pay his way through college. She knew that he’d be delighted to see that she had kept a drawing from her childhood.

  But he was bound to wonder why it was so cheaply framed and why it had to come out and sit on the top of a bookshelf on Christmas Day, as if it presided over the gift-giving. She would have to explain.

  What if he didn’t get it? What if he thought it was something cute, and teased her about it? She fell in love with him partly because he was such a tease—but what if he didn’t understand that this wasn’t something she could bear to be teased about?

  Without meaning to, she was setting him up to be tested. That wouldn’t be fair to him, and if he failed the test it would create a barrier between them.

  She began to wish she had left the picture home. Mother and Father would have brought the picture out for her, and even though she wouldn’t be there, it was the house, the very room where Ernie had celebrated all his Christmases. It belonged there, not here in this city of strangers.

  And from there it was a short step to realizing that she belonged there—at home for Christmas, with her parents. What was she doing here in an apartment, a building, a city where she was the only one who knew that Ernie had even existed?

  Hal came into the bedroom and found her crying and at first he quietly kept his distance. Then he sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulder and said, “Miss your folks?”

  She nodded.

  “I miss mine too,” he said. Then he gently squeezed her shoulder. “You’re my folks now, Zanna.”

  She gave one big sob and threw her arms around him. “You’re my folks, too, Hal. Really! I was only missing them because . . .”

  When she didn’t finish her sentence, he made a stab at it himself. “Because it’s Christmas and it doesn’t feel right without being home with all the—”

  “No, no, it feels absolutely right to be here with you.”

  He accepted that for a few silent moments. Then: “But you were crying, and I may be crazy, but they didn’t seem like tears of joy to me.”

  “It wasn’t my folks I was missing, really. I mean, not my parents. Or Davy or Bug—Davy and Lucy and their kids are the only ones going to be there with Mom and Dad anyway, Bug’s away, too and . . .” And again, she couldn’t think how to even begin.

  “So you were missing somebody else.”

  She was stunned. “How did you know?”

  “Because you said it wasn’t your folks you were missing. So it had to be somebody else.”

  “Oh, of course.” Her laugh was only the tiniest bit hysterical. “I thought maybe Mom or Dad had told you. Or Bug—he’s the big talker, he—”

  “Zanna, baby, you never left me alone with any of them long enough to have a private conversation.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “I was never quite sure if you were afraid I’d say something wrong, or they would, but both times we visited them before the wedding and all through the whole wedding weekend itself, you were right there making sure somebody didn’t make an idiot of themselves. I just assumed it was me. But now it appears there’s something you haven’t told me. So let’s have it. I know you don’t have a wooden leg and both your eyes are real, so—”

  “Please don’t tease me about this,” she said.

  “I don’t even know what it is I’m not teasing you about,” said Hal.

  She pulled the picture out of the box she kept under the bed and gave it to him.

  “Is this a new style you’re working with, or an old one?”

  “I was four years old when I made it. It was a Christmas gift. In 1938. It’s a picture of my brother Ernie reading to me.”

  He studied the picture. She waited for him to make some comment about how he couldn’t see any such thing. Instead he said, very softly, “I didn’t know you had a brother who died.”

  “I was halfway through drawing this when he died, and I was so young and understood so little about death that I went ahead and finished it because I thought I could still give it to him somehow, but when I found out I couldn’t, I kept it, and Davy bought the frame for me, and that Christmas Bug even finished reading me the book that Ernie was reading, so in a way they’re both here in this picture, so it’s all my brothers. And in a way, it’s my sister, too.”

  He looked at her with tears in his eyes. “Of course you were afraid to show it to me,” he said. “What if I teased you about it?”

  “No, I know you’d never do that!”

  “Are you kidding?” said Hal. “If you’d just shown me this picture and said it was something you did as a kid, I’d have teased you up one side and down the other, and then when you told me what it meant I’d have felt like the lousiest husband they ever invented.”

  “But you didn’t tease me, Hal.”

  He grazed his fingers across the glass. “This isn’t art anymore, Zanna. It’s magic. Your family has saved up all kinds of love in here. But what I can’t figure out is, how could they bear to let you take it away?”

  She shook her head. “That’s what I was crying about, really. Because the picture belongs in my parents’ house at Christmas. But it also belongs with me. I couldn’t stand it if I let it go. It would be like telling Ernie I don’t love him anymore. And I do still love him. He was the best person in my life. Till you, of course.”

  Hal kissed the top of her head. “I hope someday to earn that. But remember that Ernie had a whole four years, and I’ve only known you for just over one year, so it’ll take me a while to catch up. It helps a lot that you told me this. And now I know why I got you the gift I got you for Christmas.”

  He got up and went into the front room. She almost got up to follow him, but before she could decide, he was back, holding the red-wrapped gift he had set there proudly two nights before.

  “Open it,” he said.

  “But Christmas is day after tomorrow.”

  “Has to be right now. Has to be before the post office closes this evening.”

  She tore open the wrapping paper and opened the box and there was a complicated looking camera. “I don’t know how to use these things.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I do. The camera isn’t so much for you to use it yourself, though I hope you learn how, because it isn’t hard. It’s because so many times you’ve said how you wish you could paint something but you just don’t have the time even to sketch it. Well, this is a Polaroid Land camera. It doesn’t just take the picture, it develops it, too. In about a minute, there it is.”

  “That must have been expensive.”

  “Very,” said Hal. “I’m sorry, but I had to pawn our firstborn child. It was a fellow named Rumpelstiltskin, I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  “But this is wonderful. Of course it means you have to go with me when I look for scenes to paint.”

  “Whenever you ask, if I can get away from work, you know I’ll be there. But that’s not why I had you open it early.”

  In a few minutes, they had Zanna’s picture of her and Ernie propped up atop a bookshelf, and Hal took three photographs of it. He had obviously studied the instructions in advance, because he knew every step of what seemed to Zanna to be a pretty complicated procedure. All three pictures turned out—a good sepia-toned rendition of the picture, frame and all.

  Then they put the photographs into envelopes and sent them by Airmail Special Delivery to Bug in Kansas City and to her parents and Davy back home.

  “They might not make it to everybody before Christmas,” said Hal. “But they’ll know we tried. And next year they’ll have th
em for sure.”

  At the post office, as she watched Hal slide the two envelopes through the slot, she felt herself almost overwhelmed by relief and love and happiness. “I think I married the most wonderful man who ever lived,” said Zanna.

  “You just keep thinking that,” he said as he hugged her. “Do you know who I married?”

  “Just me, I hope,” she said.

  “I married the kind of girl who can love somebody forever.” He kissed her. “I’m that same kind of man.”

  9

  The Pullmans were an American family and their grown-up children did what Americans were doing in the 1950s: They moved, not from neighborhood to neighborhood or town to town, but from state to state, and Bug even had a stint in Germany working for a company that was trying to redesign its product to appeal to American consumers.

  Most Christmases, though, one or another of the kids would come home, so Mr. and Mrs. Pullman were rarely without company during the holidays. And on the mantel, presiding over Christmas, there was always a photograph of Zanna’s gift—at first the sepia-toned Polaroid, and later a framed color photograph. Each of the brothers had their own, just like it.

  There were also a couple of family reunions, with Davy, Bug, and Zanna bringing all their kids back to the family home—usually in the summer, though, because the house was too small and the parents too old to have so many kids cooped up inside. The cousins all knew each other, and by any standard the family stayed close no matter how farflung their residences were.

  The best part about family reunions, Zanna thought, was getting to know her brothers’ kids. It was also, unfortunately, the worst part. At first Zanna tried to find, in each child, whatever aspect of them came from a particular parent. Oh, that’s how Bug was at that age—but this other trait must come from Bug’s wife Sylvia.

  Only it didn’t hold up, not really. Each girl was her own self, each boy found his own way. You couldn’t look at children and hope to see much of their parents beyond their physical appearance, and not always that. They came, as Wordsworth said, “trailing clouds of glory.” Along with a few clouds of other things not quite so glorious. The adventure was to find out who they were.

  Bug’s third child and oldest boy, Todd—not named Ernest because Davy had already taken the name for his first son—he was a problem. What was it that made a perfectly normal, healthy boy with parents who doted on him into a such a lying little sneak?

  That was a horrible thing to think of him, Zanna knew, but she had never actually heard him say anything that didn’t have some kind of lie hidden in it somewhere. Though it hadn’t become obvious until her own children were involved and she had to sort out the difference between her own child’s version of events and Todd’s. The first few times it happened, she had actually taken Todd’s word over her own children’s. Todd was so convincing, and her kids’ versions were so outrageous.

  Until the family reunion when she was coming back from the public restroom at the park where they were having their big family picnic, and she actually saw Todd drop to his knees in a patch of mud. There was no one around him; he just plopped in it and then used his hands to get back up and wiped them on his pants.

  Strange boy, that’s what Zanna thought. She even mentioned it to Hal and Davy when she joined them by the fire where the hot dogs were being burnt in stripes.

  When she went looking for her kids to eat the franks before they were pure ash, she ran across Bug lecturing her two oldest, Patty and Lyle, about how some pranks weren’t funny, they were mean.

  “What did they do this time?” asked Zanna. “I thought things were going too smoothly.”

  “Oh, they shoved my Todd down in the mud over there. It’s all over his pants.”

  This was illuminating. She waited for Patty to wail about how she didn’t do it, and Lyle to get belligerent. But they just hung their heads in shame. It almost made her believe that they were guilty.

  “Did you do it?” asked Zanna.

  Lyle just stared at the ground, and Patty’s head-shake was almost imperceptible.

  “Lyle, Patty, I know you didn’t do it,” said Zanna.

  They looked up at her with such surprise and hope in their faces that she was almost appalled.

  “What are you saying?” said Bug. “Todd doesn’t lie.”

  “Then I’d have him checked out with a shrink, because he’s hallucinating,” said Zanna. “I came out of the john and saw him, clean pants, standing all by himself at the edge of the mud patch, and then he plunked himself down right on his knees, got up and wiped his hands on his pants. Does that sound like what he looked like when you saw him?”

  “But Zan, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would he make it up?”

  “Bug, that’s between you and Todd,” said Zanna. “I’m not even interested. I just know that my kids are not going to get blamed for something they didn’t do.”

  “Are you so sure they didn’t do it?” demanded Bug.

  Zanna just laughed at him. “Bug, before you accuse me of lying, maybe you’d better consider the possibility that Todd’s got a little tiny streak of aimless malice in him.”

  “What are you saying about my son?” Bug demanded.

  “I’m saying that I love you dearly, Bug, and I trust you to take care of your own children however you choose. But I’m not going to let Todd ruin this reunion for Lyle and Patty by getting them in trouble for something that I know for a fact Todd did all by himself.” Then, kids in tow, she headed off toward the food.

  “What I want to know,” said Zanna, “is why you weren’t even bothering to defend yourselves, even when I asked.”

  “What good would it do?” asked Patty.

  “You never believe us,” said Lyle.

  That’s when she remembered why she had asked Bug “What did they do this time?” Every reunion, her two oldest got in trouble—but only now did she make the connection that they got in trouble for something they did to Todd.

  “This has happened before,” said Zanna.

  “Last year we told you and told you we didn’t push his face in the cake,” said Lyle. “He’s taller than me anyway, how could I? And Patty wasn’t even there. But you didn’t believe us, and so we didn’t get any cake.”

  “And you made us apologize to him in front of everybody,” said Patty.

  “That’s why we hate coming to reunions. Because he always does stupid stuff and says we did it and nobody believes us.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Zanna. “I’m just sick about it, just . . . sick. You poor things. But to me it just . . . it made no sense for him to . . . I mean, how could I know until I saw it for myself that he just . . . he must have just pushed his own face into the cake last year and—”

  “Tell us something we don’t know,” said Lyle snidely.

  She couldn’t even rebuke him for being snippy with his mother.

  “Well, now I know what Todd is like,” said Zanna, “I’ll believe you. I should have believed you all along. I mean, I’m so stupid. You never do things like that at home. Not to each other, not at school. Why would I think you’d . . . but it was so impossible that he’d be making it up.” She shook herself. “Oh this could make a person insane. Listen, I was wrong. And I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about Todd—”

  “You mean Toad,” said Patty under her breath.

  “Yes, I mean Toad,” said Zanna. “That’s between his parents and him. But I’ll never take his word over yours again.”

  The two kids glanced at each other.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I saw that look. So let me rephrase. I will never take his word over yours at first. But don’t take that as permission to do any mean thing to him that you want and I’ll stick up for you.”

  Lyle grinned at her.

  Patty was miffed. “I wouldn’t and you know it.”

  “But Lyle was thinking of it, weren’t you, Lyle?”

  “I was just wondering if somebody was dumb enough to bring another cake t
his year and leave it lying around.”

  So that was Todd, whose malicious lying was not some hereditary trait—Bug and Sylvia were so honest they couldn’t conceive of having a lying child. It was just something he brought with him. Along with the clouds of glory.

  But there were other nieces and nephews. Like Bug’s oldest daughter, Betty. She was such a tomboy, right from her knack for practically vaulting out of the crib so that you had to stay with her and watch her every second. She could throw a ball harder than most boys—which meant stones and snowballs, too, and with deadly aim. There wasn’t a tree whose loftiest branches she hadn’t climbed until Grandma yelled herself hoarse about how they had to get the child down and why doesn’t somebody do something and won’t somebody please tell her that she’s a girl?

  “Girl schmirl,” said Grandpa. “Somebody needs to tell her about gravity.”

  It wasn’t a fall from a tree or fence or roof that ended Betty’s daredevil days. It was polio.

  Todd was almost five, then, showing no sign of the malice that surfaced later—and Bug’s other girl, Cindy, was only seven when they came to live with Zanna and Hal while Bug and Sylvia stayed with Betty around the clock as she struggled for life.

  When she finally emerged from the iron lung, she had little use of her legs. It was a milestone when she finally got on her feet. It almost broke Zanna’s heart to see her that Christmas, a ten-year-old clunking around the house with two heavy leg braces, and still having to lean on walls and the table to keep from falling over.

  But Bug still swung her up into his arms, leg braces and all, and she still knew how to whoop with delight when he did it.

  That was almost the most heartbreaking thing about it. A girl who had been so active—polio should have made her glum, surly, even angry, but it didn’t.