On the way back home they passed the Civitan lot again just in time to meet Norma and Macky Warren coming out with the pink Christmas tree. “Hi,” Norma said cheerfully. “Look what we just got. Isn’t it the cutest thing you have ever seen?”
Mother Smith was speechless for the moment but Dorothy jumped in. “Oh, it is. We were looking at it earlier this evening ourselves,” she said, not telling a lie.
Norma said, “Please tell Anna Lee to call me when she gets home.”
“We will.”
After they had gone on, Mother Smith remarked, “I’d give a million dollars to see Ida Jenkins’s face when she sees that thing in Norma’s living room.”
When they got home everyone was tired and went straight to bed and Bobby dreamed about the Christmas window all night. He was inside ice-skating on the mirror pond, twirling around and around, with the pretty little girl in the short red skirt and white skates, but in his dreams she looked a lot like Claudia Albetta, the little girl that sat in front of him in class.
Three days before, Jimmy had wandered around Morgan Brothers department store looking for last-minute presents but had found that he was having trouble. A saleswoman watched him as he picked up one thing after another and put it back down. Finally, she went over to him. “Jimmy, why don’t you tell me what you are looking for,” she said. “Maybe I can help you.”
“Well . . .”
“Who are you trying to buy something for?”
Jimmy was too embarrassed to tell her but did manage to say that he needed the help. “It’s for a lady.”
“I see. Well, how about a nice scarf?” she said. “A scarf is always nice. What color hair does she have?”
“Brown,” he murmured as he followed her over to the scarf counter.
The Christmas Show
After school the next day, Betty Raye and Bobby started unwrapping the Christmas ornaments and Doc came home with three new strings of glass candle lights that bubbled. He thought bubbling ones would look nice with the blinking lights they already had.
When Jimmy came in, he and Doc hung on the front door the splendid fresh holly Christmas wreath that one of Dorothy’s sponsors, Cecil Figgs, had sent. After dinner they all went into the living room and started to decorate—all except Mother Smith. It was her job to sit on the sofa and point out what was needed and where. By nine o’clock that night, cream-colored cardboard candleholders with blue lights were in every window, with strings of red cutout paper letters that said MERRY CHRISTMAS hung over all the doors, and the tree in the corner was covered with green and red satin balls, and shiny red and dark blue ones with white frosted strips around them. They finished it off with silver tinsel, strings of popcorn, and, on top, a cocker spaniel angel with wings, which one of Dorothy’s listeners had sent her in honor of Princess Mary Margaret.
The next morning at 8:54 A.M. Dixie Cahill led all sixteen of her dance students in full costume and makeup down the stairs of the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl and out onto the sidewalk. She lined them up single file, blew her whistle, and marched them through town and over to The Neighbor Dorothy Show to make their annual Christmas appearance. Since they were all wearing bells on their tap shoes, they made quite a racket as they marched down the street. Ed the barber said they sounded like a herd of reindeer going by. A few minutes later they marched up the porch stairs and into Neighbor Dorothy’s house and lined up in the back of the living room to wait until it was time for their number.
The house was packed with people. The handbell choir was lined up down the hall, waiting to go on after them, and Ernest Koonitz was smashed in a corner in the dining room ready to be called for his annual tuba solo. Neighbor Dorothy, in a wonderful mood, came down the hall wearing her green Christmas dress and a silver-bells corsage. It was a doubly festive day for her. She loved doing her Christmas show and Anna Lee was coming home today. After she greeted everyone, she squeezed through the crowd and stepped over children who were sitting on the floor; then she sat down, gathered her commercials, and the show started with a big “Good morning, everybody, and happy December twenty-third! We have so many wonderful surprises for you and so much fine entertainment on our show today I can hardly wait to get started.
“We are so excited over here in Elmwood Springs this morning. . . . We have our students here from the Dixie Cahill School of Tap and Twirl to do a wonderful tap number to ‘Jingle Bells’ and I know we are going to enjoy that. Also the handbell choir from the First Methodist Church is here to play ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’ for you. We have lots of bells this morning but I guess you can never have too many bells at Christmastime, can you. And Ernest Koonitz is here to do another solo entitled . . .” She paused. “Somebody stick your head in the dining room and ask him.” Dixie called out the title and Dorothy relayed it to her listeners. “He’s playing ‘Joy to the World’ but before we get to our entertainment I have another reminder for you. . . .” Mother Smith played a chord or two of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” “That’s right, Mother Smith, Santa Claus is coming to town and he will be in the back of Morgan Brothers department store today and all day tomorrow, so be sure and go down and have your photograph made with him. I’m taking Princess Mary Margaret down right after the show to have her picture made with Santa and don’t forget, all proceeds go to benefit the Salvation Army, who do so much good, not just at Christmas but all year long.” Suddenly everybody in the audience started to laugh at something behind her and she turned around to see Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus standing on the porch at the living room window and waving. Dorothy said, “Well, as I live and breathe, here are the Santa Clauses now.”
She opened the window and Santa leaned in and said to Dorothy in a deep voice, “Merry Christmas, little girl!”
Dorothy had to laugh; she had not expected this surprise visit from Santa, especially one who sounded a lot like Bess Goodnight.
Ada and Bess, who had been up at the grammar school earlier this morning handing out presents, had stopped by the barbershop for a little Christmas cheer on the way home and were feeling no pain. As modern women of the world, they often joined the boys in a friendly drink or two and had brought Mother Smith, who also enjoyed a little nip now and then, a paper cup of eggnog.
Anna Lee arrived at the train station looking wonderful and full of news about all the new boyfriends she had. No surprise there. And of course Doc was happy to have the apple of his eye home, looking so beautiful on the platform, and so was everyone. Dorothy couldn’t wait to get her home. She told Anna Lee that no matter how old or grown-up they were, she just did not sleep well unless both her children were home in their own beds and she knew they were safe and sound.
That night, by the time Dorothy finished up in the kitchen, Doc was already in bed. She cleaned her face with cold cream and turned off the light and got in beside him. After a moment, she said, “Doc, are you still awake?”
“Just barely.”
“Hasn’t this just been the loveliest day? Practically perfect?”
“Yes.”
After another moment, she said, “Doc, ask me what I would wish for if I could only have one wish come true.”
He did not have to ask.
“He would have been twenty-six this year, Doc.”
He reached over and patted her hand. “I know, honey.”
No matter how many years had passed since their first son, Michael, died, every holiday had always been tinged with a secret sadness. For the first ten years every Christmas morning the two of them had gone out to his grave and decorated it with a small tree and little toys, and every Easter an Easter basket had been placed there. Every year on his birthday and on the anniversary of the day he died they missed him more. Rarely did a day go by when one or the other did not think to themselves Michael would be six or twelve or whatever the age he would be that year. Although they never discussed it with anyone, donations made in memory of Michael Smith had paid for beds and wallpaper for an entire wing of the Children?
??s Hospital. Most of the money to buy a Seeing Eye dog for Beatrice Woods came from a large donation to the Princess Mary Margaret Fund in his name.
Now twenty-two years had gone by. Dorothy wondered what kind of man he would have been. What young girl would have loved him and maybe even married him by now? What would his children be like, and would they look like him? Although he had been gone for many years, a picture of him as a child was always alive in Dorothy’s mind. She continued to see him standing there and waving at her, the little boy that did not live. She often thought about the bud that never bloomed, the egg that never hatched, and wondered what happened to them. Did they just disappear, never to exist, lost forever, or would they come back again some spring? For years she looked for her little boy in every small child she saw, looked for him in the eyes of every blond boy with blue eyes like his. But she never found him again.
Merry Christmas
ON THE MORNING of December twenty-fourth, Bobby could hardly wait for the night to come. Ever since Jimmy had become their boarder and lived with them, the Smiths had started to open their presents on Christmas Eve. Jimmy had to catch the 11:45 P.M. bus to Kansas City to spend Christmas Day visiting his friends at the veterans hospital. And it was a good thing, because by that time Bobby and Mother Smith, both too curious for their own good, had usually poked, shook, and rattled their presents almost to death and the gifts might not have lasted until Christmas morning. Still, it was a long wait. Once Dorothy had seen a newsreel of Joan Crawford, her favorite movie star, and her children gathered around a piano singing carols on Christmas Eve, they had to do the same thing. Now, every year after dinner she made them all go in and gather around the organ and sing. Bobby hated the custom with a passion. As far as he was concerned, it just delayed the real meaning of Christmas: presents. At around 9:30 that night, when they finally sat down to open them, the phone rang. Dorothy said, before picking up the phone, “Wait a minute . . . let me see who this is. . . . Don’t open anything yet.” Oh, rats! thought Bobby, who was just about to tear into the big box with his name on it.
They could hear Dorothy saying to someone on the phone, “Oh no . . . oh, you poor thing. . . . Oh . . . well, bless your heart. . . . Yes . . . I’m sure he will. . . . Oh, you poor dear.” She came back in and looked at Doc. “That was Poor Tot. Her mother stole all the presents she had wrapped and hid them in the backyard and now she can’t find them and she wondered if you would go down and open up the drugstore for her so she could get a few things for the kids to have in the morning. I told her you would.”
“All right,” said Doc and got up to get his coat. “You all go ahead and open the presents. I’ll be back in a little while.”
Dorothy said, “We will do no such thing. We are not going to open anything until you get back.”
Bobby asked his mother, “Can’t we open just one?”
“No, Bobby, put that back down.”
Mother Smith sighed. “Poor Tot, to have to work all day and then to have to put up with that crazy mother of hers and try to raise those two children at the same time. I don’t know how she puts up with it all myself.”
“I don’t either, and to make matters worse,” Dorothy said, “James fell into the tree and broke everything again.”
When Doc got downtown he went in and turned on the lights in the drugstore and Poor Tot came in right behind him wearing her aqua chenille robe and house shoes, looking as frazzled as she had the last time this had happened. They went through and picked out a Sparkle Plenty doll and some hair barrettes for Darlene, who was seven, and a few stuffed toys for Dwayne Jr., who was two and a half. As they walked around looking, she picked up a little plastic see-through purse and said, “I just don’t know what to do next, Doc, scream or jump off a building. James is spending my money faster than I can make it. I’m fixing hair all day, and he’s out all night drinking it up.”
Doc told her what he had been telling her for years. “Honey, what you need to do is throw the bum out.”
Tot looked up at him and said what she always said. “I know I should but if I don’t take care of things, who will? God knows nobody else is going to put up with him.”
After Tot left, with profuse thanks, Doc had to wait on several other people who’d come in and wanted to get things as well. But he did not charge them. Everything was free on Christmas Eve, he said.
It was an hour later by the time he could get home. Finally, Bobby was able to rip open the big box from his parents. Inside was a great record player, and his grandmother gave him the two records he wanted most, Mule Train and Ghost Riders in the Sky.
And underwear.
He received money from Jimmy, a Rover Boy book from Betty Raye, and Anna Lee surprised him with a genuine Jungle Jim pith helmet.
Dorothy got a robe, a cameo, and new curtains, Doc a new pipe and pajamas and slippers and, from Bobby, a fishing-tackle box. Mother Smith’s presents were handkerchiefs, perfume, and a beautiful new boxed set of playing cards. Jimmy got his yearly twelve cartons of Camel cigarettes and, from Bobby, a toenail clipper. The girls got perfume, clothes, and cash money, toenail clippers from Bobby, and Dorothy had bought them both scrapbooks. Minnie and Ferris Oatman, who were doing a Christmas-week gospel sing in North Carolina, sent Betty Raye a white leather Bible with her name embossed in gold on the front. And she unwrapped a lovely silk scarf that had her name on the name tag but not the name of who it was from. Later they all went out on the porch and waited for the bus with Jimmy and at 11:45 it pulled up in front and he got on.
As usual, Dorothy was the last one up and when she finished doing a few final things in the kitchen she went into the living room to turn off all the Christmas lights. She stood there for a moment and looked at them glowing, blinking, and bubbling in the dark and they looked so pretty she decided to leave them on all night.
Uncle Floyd Has a Fit
TWO DAYS after Christmas, Dorothy was on the air when the phone rang. Betty Raye, walking by, picked up and to her surprise it was her mother. Minnie Oatman was on the other end, calling long distance from the office of the Talladega, Alabama, Primitive Baptist Church and she was hysterical.
“Oh, Betty Raye, honey, something terrible has happened, brace yourself for bad news.”
“Momma, what is it?”
“Honey,” Minnie sobbed, “we lost Chester last night. Chester’s gone and your Uncle Floyd is locked hisself in the men’s room, blaspheming the Lord, and he won’t come out.”
“What men’s room?” said Betty Raye.
“Over at the seafood place. One minute we was happy without a care in the world eating fried shrimp and the next thing we knowed Floyd was running around the parking lot, screaming like a banshee. In the time it took to eat twelve fried shrimp Chester had been snatched right out of his little suitcase in broad daylight and was gonded . . . kidnapped just like the Lindberger baby. And the next thing we knowed Floyd run in the men’s room and locked the door and threatened to drown hisself. We all tried to pry him out, Beatrice and everybody there, but he won’t budge. The boys tried to get in the window to him but he throwed water on them and wouldn’t let them in. We had to leave him at the restaurant and come over here to do our show last night. Floyd’s still holed up over there and your daddy is besides hisself. We’ve got bookings all this week.”
“Oh, Momma, what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got the highway police looking for him right now. If we don’t find Chester your uncle is liable to never come out of that bathroom.” Then she wailed, “Poor little Chester, who would steal a poor little dummy? I got to go, your daddy’s waiting. . . . Pray for us, baby,” she said and hung up.
Later, Minnie and Ferris went over and formed an emergency prayer circle at the restaurant while an eight-point missing-person bulletin was being released across the state. Missing: One ventriloquist’s dummy known professionally as Chester the Scripture-quoting dummy. Blond wig, blue eyes, and freckles. Last seen in a car parked in the parking l
ot of Wentzel’s Sea Food on Highway 21 wearing a cowboy suit and small cowboy hat.
Ferris was convinced that Chester’s disappearance was the work of the devil, while some of the hard core of the congregation wondered if he had been taken up in the Rapture. Bervin, Vernon, and Beatrice did not know what to make of it but Minnie just kept praying and holding on to her faith that he would come back. Floyd stayed in the men’s room at Wentzel’s Sea Food Restaurant for seventy-two hours until finally Chester was returned safe and sound.
As it turned out, it had all been a harmless prank. Another gospel group passing by saw the Oatman car and, knowing how much Floyd loved that dummy, one of them had snuck in the back and grabbed it. Chester had ridden all the way to Marianna, Florida, where they bought him a child’s ticket on the Greyhound bus and sent him back.
That night in Loxley, Alabama, Chester returned to the stage and sang “Riding the Range for Jesus” and “When It’s Roundup Time Up Yonder.”
“Thank the Lord he’s back with us,” said a much-relieved Minnie to Dorothy on the phone. “I just knowed He wasn’t gonna desert us in our time of need. . . . I tell you, Dorothy, when I saw little Chester come off that bus, oh, it touched my heart so. It was just like the Bible says . . . once’t he was lost but now he’s been found. . . .”
Later that night Dorothy confided to Mother Smith, “She may be loud and she may mangle the English language to a fare-thee-well, but I’ll tell you the truth—if I ever really needed someone to pray for me, or someone I loved, Minnie Oatman would be the first person I would call.”