Zanna's Gift- a Life in Christmases Read online

  Oh, there were times.

  Zanna remembered coming into the parlor that first Christmas after the iron lung, and seeing Betty standing at the window, looking out at the other kids up to their knees—or higher—in snow. It was such a day as had once been Betty’s glory. She should have been up a tree raining snowballs down like the wrath of God on Sodom and Gomorrah.

  But she and her leg braces were stuck inside, and Zanna stood in the doorway, her heart breaking for this beautiful child. Breaking twice: in grief for what she had lost, and in joy for how Bug’s and Sylvia’s prayers had been answered.

  For she could see another face—Bug’s haggard expression when he brought the little kids to stay with her and Hal. He was facing the death of his own child, as Betty lay struggling just to breathe in a far-off hospital.

  “I thought I knew,” he told her then, quietly, when Hal was showing the kids where they’d be sleeping. “What it was like for Mom and Dad to lose Ernie. I mean, we lost him too, didn’t we?”

  Then suddenly his face crumpled and tears burst from his clenched eyes and he clung to her. “Oh, Zan. I pray to God you never know for yourself. It’s the worst thing in the world.”

  But seeing him like that, and thinking of her own Patty and Lyle and baby Colleen, she could imagine. “They hold us hostage,” said Zan. “We make these children and we love them so much and the world holds them for ransom and any time it wants to, it gives us the note and demands that we pay.”

  He pulled away from her then. “Anything. Just so she lives.”

  She wanted to ask him then, Even crippled? But she knew the answer already—yes, even crippled, just don’t take her.

  Then Bug got control of himself before his two younger kids came crashing back into the room. It wouldn’t do for them to catch their papa crying, would it?

  So as she stood at that window, several years later, and watched Betty watching the other children outside in the snow, she could just imagine what yearning the girl must be feeling—and how bittersweet it was for her parents to see her like this, still alive, but now held by such heavy chains to the earth. Now she knew more about gravity than anyone else.

  Yet when Betty felt her presence and turned to face Aunt Zanna, she didn’t look wistful or heartbroken. Quite the contrary, she looked a little disgusted. “I’m gonna have to teach Todd how to make a snowball. His always fly apart in midair. You got to pack ’em!” She socked one hand into the palm of the other. “Pack ’em!”

  For a moment, she was her old self, fierce and vigorous.

  Then she took a step toward Zanna and once again she was in the midst of that constant war with gravity, keeping precarious balance as she perched on those unreliable legs.

  That’s when Zanna realized: She’s still the same child. Whatever it was that sent her climbing trees and treating death with such despite, it wasn’t killed by the polio, it’s still in her as much as ever. It isn’t really courage—courage is overcoming fear, and she never felt any. It’s more like determination. Not grim determination, just a kind of headlong rush toward life, and if her feet couldn’t keep up, that wouldn’t stop her heart or her mind.

  That’s why Zanna went ahead and finished the painting.

  10

  Zanna had taken a Polaroid, once, of Betty walking along the top of a picket fence—an incredible balancing act, actually, but she was so good at it that she was still going even after Zanna rushed into the house to get the camera. And then, just as Zanna was about to snap the picture, a neighbor boy taunted Betty from what he thought was a safe refuge in his yard, two doors down.

  Incredibly, Betty reached into her pocket, pulled out a stone—and not a small one—and from the top of the fence, with the best pitching form, hurled that rock at a speed only slightly less than David’s must have had when it killed Goliath.

  Oh, the wailing from that boy, hit square in the chest with a stone by a nine-year-old girl.

  And Betty’s fury at herself—as she lay sprawled in the petunias—for having missed. “I was aiming at his big fat mouth!” she insisted as her mother dragged her inside amid a flurry of Come with me young lady I will not have you throwing rocks and trying to kill other children even if they deserve it.

  Zanna didn’t bother following her inside. She was busy with the Polaroid, waiting all atremble to see the exact moment that the camera—which wasn’t all that good at action shots—might have captured.

  It could not have been better. The photo had caught her at the exact moment when the stone released from her hand. And Zanna had been in exactly the right place to get Betty’s profile—the curl of her lip, the fire in her eyes. Of course, the fire, now, that wasn’t exactly in the picture. But it would be in the painting!

  Zanna had worked on that painting, whenever she could, what with the morning sickness—much worse than with the first two—and then, after Colleen was born, the endless feedings and the perpetual exhaustion.

  She had already captured Betty’s face on the canvas, along with the yard and the street and Betty’s mother and grandmother—Zanna always roughed in the background first, painting inward toward the heart of the piece—when she got the call from Mother, telling her that little Betty had polio, and could Bug bring the older children to her, since she lived closest of all the family right then?

  Zanna put the painting away almost that moment, faced it to the wall, stacked other canvases in front of it. She had a vague idea that if Betty died, then she would finish the painting, so that Bug and Sylvia would have it to remember their marvelous daughter.

  Then, when it was clear that Betty would live, but might never walk again, Zanna realized that this painting would be the cruelest thing she could give them. A constant reminder of what they had lost inside that iron lung. Better for them to love and rejoice in the child who eventually escaped that dire machine, and let the other be a distant memory.

  What she hadn’t understood was Betty herself. The child whose face Zanna had put onto the canvas was still there. That rock was not flung by an arm, it was flung by a person. The painting was not a reminder of what was lost, it was the perfect image of something that was very much alive in that girl.

  So she went home from that Christmas visit to her parents’ house and, despite the fact that Patty was at the “why” age, Lyle was proving that age three can be more terrible than two, and Colleen thought that it was great sport to clamp down on Mama’s nipple as hard as she could (this was one child that would not be allowed to continue nursing once the first tooth appeared), Zanna found time to finish that painting of Betty before the first of February.

  And then did nothing with it.

  What could she do with it? Whom could she show it to, besides Hal? She knew it was perfect—it was Betty. The Polaroid had captured the physical shape of the moment, but the soul of the girl in the painting and the love of the mother looking on came from Zanna’s love and admiration for the child and from her artist’s eye and from her own experience of new motherhood and, yes, from her memory of a lost brother and of a sister she had only seen in dreams.

  But just because a painting is perfect does not necessarily mean that it is right to afflict others with the burden of so much emotional freight. If this were a ship, she thought, it would sink under the weight of all that I’ve stowed below.

  So, finished now, the canvas was once again placed against the wall. Hal asked about it only once, sometime during the summer, as they contemplated going to the family picnic back at Mom’s and Dad’s. “You going to take that painting?”

  And it honestly didn’t occur to Zanna for a long moment what painting he meant.

  “I mean, Sylvia writes that she and Bug are coming and I just wondered.”

  “No,” said Zanna. “They’ve got a little girl in leg braces. I don’t think they want a reminder of how she used to be.”

  “Your call,” he said.

  “You think I’m wrong?”

  “I think it’s your call. Your brother, your
painting.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “I think it’s your second best painting so far, but I’m no judge of art, you know that.”

  “Second best?”

  His eyes suddenly sparkled from getting a little teary. “Your portrait of you and Ernie will always be my favorite,” he said. “Though your technique wasn’t yet as strong as it is now.” He smiled.

  “You sentimental fool, you’ll never be an art critic.”

  “And I know you always wanted to be married to one.”

  “Is it really a good painting, Hal?”

  “It’s her to the life. When a painting like that is possible, it just makes me sad for all the people paying so much attention to splashes of paint or geometric figures on canvas.”

  “So you are an art critic.”

  “I’m saying that even if I didn’t already know and love Betty, I would from your painting.”

  “So maybe someday it’ll be seen. But not this year.”

  11

  Zanna was right. Not that year. And not the next. They changed apartments when Colleen needed a bed of her own. And then, after a few more years and Bonnie was born, it was time to pack up and move for real, not just across town. They were joining the vast American pilgrimage to the Next Great Job.

  Zanna hadn’t looked at the painting in years. When they moved to this apartment she had put it in the back of a stack of canvases that she knew would never be seen, not in this age of modern art, and then she’d gotten busy with momming her way through Patty’s first year of school and Lyle’s habit of catching the worst case of every childhood disease and Colleen’s belief that a silent house was perfect for testing her screaming ability every night.

  So when Bug came over to help them box things up for the move—as much to mourn for the fact that he’d be the only one of his family in California now, as to help—Zanna didn’t think to steer him away from the painting of Betty pitching that stone.

  When she realized that he’d been gone from the living room—or “Boxing Central,” as Hal had dubbed it—for a very long time, she got up to go looking for him, and found him in her “studio,” sitting in front of a painting, his cheeks streaked with tears. He wasn’t even looking at the painting any more. Just looking nowhere, staring into himself, or into the past.

  Then she knew at once which painting he was looking at, and she was stricken with remorse.

  “Oh, Bug, I never meant you to see that.”

  He shook his head and held up a hand to stop her.

  She came over and took his hand and sank down beside him and put her head on his shoulder. “I took a Polaroid of that moment,” she said. “I had to finish it because . . .”

  “Because it’s Betty,” said Bug.

  “Is it? It’s certainly the way I see her.”

  Bug nodded. “She’s still like that, you know.”

  “I do know. I finished it after she was in leg braces, Bug. Because I saw she still had that . . .”

  “Fire,” said Bug.

  “But I never meant to make you face her that way, before the polio.”

  “Are you kidding?” He looked at her in wonderment. “No, of course—you didn’t want to bring back—but don’t you see? We thought we were the only ones who still saw this Betty. The girl behind the leg armor. Can I show it to Sylvia?”

  “Are you sure she’ll feel the way you do?”

  “She’ll feel the way she does, whatever that is, but she should know this painting exists.”

  “If you want it, Bug, it’s yours. It was always for you.”

  He started sobbing and turned and held on to her.

  “I take it that’s a yes?” she said.

  He nodded into her shoulder.

  Later, when the painting was wrapped in brown paper for the long drive back home, Bug rested his hand on it and said, “She’s not beat yet, you know. She moves around the house without the braces as much as she can—leaning on walls and furniture and whoever’s nearby, but without the metal on her legs. She’ll never run, but she’ll walk. And she can’t throw a fastball like a big leaguer any more, but whatever she throws hits what she was aiming at.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I’m just saying that she won’t be beat. That’s why this is still a portrait of our little girl as she is, and not just as she was.”

  Then he shook hands with Hal (because that was after men forgot how to hug each other and before they remembered again) and gave a kiss to Zanna, and then he was gone.

  So were they, a few days later, the moving truck taking all their worldly possessions, including her paintings, across the country, while Hal and Zanna took turns driving a ’56 Buick full of squirming poking whining laughing singing children along the two-lane highways that linked the cities of America, a frail web dotted with Burma Shave signs and one-pump gas stations and motor courts that you inspected for fleas before you paid the night’s rent. It was a glorious trip that the older children never forgot. The kind of trip that in later years would make Zanna turn to Hal and say, “Wouldn’t you like to pile the kids into the car and go somewhere?”

  To which Hal would say, “Why not just put the iron on high and press my head? That’ll be much cheaper and faster.” But he knew what she meant, and hugged her for the memory.

  Bug didn’t make it back home for the next summer’s reunion, or Christmas either. And the next few reunions were darkened by Todd’s accusations against Patty and Lyle, and then by Zanna’s accusation against Todd, so the subject of Betty’s painting didn’t come up.

  Betty was there herself, anyway, so who needed the painting? No one saw leg braces by then. In fact, Hal once speculated that Bug had stayed away from family gatherings for that year or so because Betty didn’t want to go until she had the braces off for good.

  She was vivacious and full of talk, and she happily tended the littlest kids while the older, more athletic ones took off on adventures she could no longer keep up with. But she was sturdy enough on her legs to chase after toddlers who were trying to make their getaway, and she had a gentle hand with the little ones.

  Zanna wondered sometimes about her painting of Betty—wondered mostly if Betty herself had ever seen it, and if she remembered being that girl. But then, she couldn’t wish for Betty to see it, because despite her cheerfulness, it was impossible to know what grief the girl might still suffer, hidden from all eyes except, perhaps, those fierce eyes in the painting.

  Then came the invitation to Betty’s wedding. She was nineteen, which was older than many girls, but still young enough to suggest that her physical frailty, those impossibly skinny legs, had not been much of an obstacle to her finding a boy who’d value her. And to Zanna’s delight, Betty had asked to have her wedding in the same church where her parents had gotten married.

  Which meant that the big family picnic was held in June that year instead of August, for this was the first wedding in the generation and, except for Davy’s oldest, who was clerking for a state supreme court justice and couldn’t get away, they were all there.

  Zanna was the last one into the chapel, it seemed—so many last-minute things to attend to, getting her own kids ready and respectable—and Hal already had them inside before she was done with her last primping in the rear-view mirror and came up the steps into the church.

  There in the foyer, on an easel behind the guest book, was her painting of Betty, in an ornate wooden frame with a small brass plaque engraved with the title: “Betty Silencing the Neighbor Boy.”

  It was just about the last thing Zanna expected to see.

  “I think this painting constitutes fair warning to the bridegroom, about what he’s getting into, don’t you think?” Hal’s arm slipped around her shoulders.

  “You’re supposed to be sitting on the kids to keep them quiet.”

  “Let ’em scream,” said Hal. “Hollering children—that’s the proper prelude to a marriage, not that stupid wedding march.”

&nbs
p; “I can’t believe they used this painting,” said Zanna. “The portrait of the bride is supposed to be a beautiful color photo in her wedding dress with a blurred background. Like a goddess.”

  “Oh, this is a goddess all right,” said Hal. “Or at least one of the Furies.”

  And then, completely to her own surprise, Zanna turned to her husband and clutched his lapels and pressed her face into his tie and tried very, very hard not to cry.

  “You’re getting face powder on my tie.”

  “The only makeup I wear is lipstick,” said Zanna. “But I’ll kiss your tie if you want something to complain about.”

  “Are you kidding? I could hold you like this all day. Let ’em bury us in rice.”

  “We really should go in,” said Zanna.

  “You first.”

  She pushed against him even harder, and he held her tighter, and then at the same moment they each let go. She was smiling now. “They liked the painting,” she said.

  “More to the point,” said Hal, “Betty likes the painting.”

  “You think so?”

  “Nothing is displayed at the wedding without the bride’s consent, or she might stamp her pretty little foot and the world will end.”

  “I wonder what the groom thinks of it.”

  “From the look in Betty’s eye, I’d say he should keep his objections, should he have any, to himself.”

  At that moment, Bug and Betty rushed into the foyer from one of the waiting rooms, with several local women herding the flower girls and the ring-bearer, who were the most solemn people. Not one of them spared even a glance at Hal and Zanna, standing near the door. Zanna looked from the woman holding her father’s arm to the girl in the painting and, yes, even at that age, Betty had already been the woman she would grow up to be; and even after polio, Betty was still the girl she had been back then.

  “They already knew,” whispered Zanna.

  “Who knew what?” asked Hal.

  “My parents—they already knew the man that Ernie would grow up to be. Because they knew the boy.” Then she glanced at the painting and Hal nodded.