We ran down the hall into the master bedroom with its canopied twin beds. “Merry Christmas!” we shouted together. My father groaned, rolled over and pulled the covers further up over his head. He was suffering the aftereffects of the studio’s annual all-day Christmas party from which he hadn’t returned until after we had gone to sleep. I climbed up on the bed, crawling over him, and bounced up and down, chanting, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. …”
“Oh-h-h …” Father said, and flipped over on his belly. Mother shook his shoulder gently. “Sol, I hate to wake you, but the children won’t go down without you.”
Father sat up slowly, muttering something about its being still dark outside and demanding to know who had taken his bathrobe. Mother picked it up where he had dropped it and brought it to him. It was black and white silk with an elegant embroidered monogram.
“The kids’ll be opening presents for the next twelve hours,” my father said. “It seems God-damn silly to start opening them at five o’clock in the morning.”
Downstairs there were enough toys, it seemed, to fill all the windows of a department store. The red car was a perfect model of a Pierce-Arrow, and probably only slightly less expensive, with a green leather seat wide enough for Sandra to sit beside me, and real headlights that turned on and off. There was a German electric train that passed through an elaborate Bavarian village in miniature. And a big scooter with rubber wheels and a gear shift just like our Cadillac’s. And dozens more that I’ve forgotten. Sandra had a doll that was a life-size replica of Baby Peggy, which was Early Twenties for Margaret O’Brien, an imported silk Hungarian peasant costume from Lord & Taylor, a six-ounce bottle of French toilet water, and so many other things that we all had to help her unwrap them.
Just when we were reaching the end of this supply, people started arriving with more presents. That’s the way it had been every Christmas since I could remember, men and women all dressed up dropping in all day long with packages containing wonderful things that they’d wait for us to unwrap. They’d sit around a while, laughing with my mother and father and lifting from James the butler’s tray a cold yellow drink that I wasn’t allowed to have, and then they’d pick us up and kiss us and tell us we were as pretty as my mother or as intelligent as my father and then there would be more laughing and hugging and hand-shaking and God bless you and then they’d be gone, and others would arrive to take their place. Sometimes there must have been ten or twenty all there at once and Sandra and I would be sort of sorry in a way because Mother and Father would be too busy with their guests to play with us. But it was nice to get all those presents.
I remember one tall dark man with a little pointed mustache who kissed Mother’s hand when he came in. His present was wrapped in beautiful silvery paper and the blue ribbon around it felt thick and soft like one of Mother’s evening dresses. Inside was a second layer of thin white tissue paper and inside of that was a handsome silver comb-and-brush set, just like my father’s. Tied to it was a little card that I could read because it was printed and I could read almost anything then as long as it wasn’t handwriting: “Merry Christmas to my future boss from Uncle Norman.”
“Mommy,” I said, “is Uncle Norman my uncle? You never told me I had an Uncle Norman. I have an Uncle Dave and an Uncle Joe and an Uncle Sam, but I never knew I had an Uncle Norman.”
I can still remember how white and even Norman’s teeth looked when he smiled at me. “I’m a new uncle,” he said. “Don’t you remember the day your daddy brought you on my set and I signed your autograph book and I told you to call me Uncle Norman?”
I combed my hair with his silver comb suspiciously. “Did you give me this comb and brush … Uncle Norman?”
Norman drank down the last of the foamy yellow stuff and carefully wiped off his mustaches with his pale-blue breast-pocket handkerchief. “Yes, I did, sonny,” he said.
I turned on my mother accusingly. “But you said Santa Claus gives us all these presents.”
This all took place, as I found out later, at a crucial moment in my relationship with S. Claus, when a child’s faith was beginning to crumble under the pressure of suspicions. Mother was trying to keep Santa Claus alive for us as long as possible, I learned subsequently, so that Christmas would mean something more to us than a display of sycophancy on the part of Father’s stars, directors, writers and job-seekers.
“Norman signed his name to your comb and brush because he is one of Santa Claus’s helpers,” Mother said. “Santa has so much work to do taking care of all the good little children in the world that he needs lots and lots of helpers.”
My father offered one of his long, fat cigars to “Uncle” Norman and bit off the end of another one for himself.
“Daddy, is that true, what Mommy says?” I asked.
“You must always believe your mother, boy,” my father said.
“I’ve got twenty-eleven presents already,” Sandra said.
“You mean thirty-one,” I said. “I’ve got thirty-two.”
Sandra tore open a box that held an exquisite little gold ring, inlaid with amethyst, her birthstone.
“Let me read the card,” I said. “‘Merry Christmas, Sandra darling, from your biggest fan, Aunt Ruth.’”
Ruth was the pretty lady who played opposite Uncle Norman in one of my father’s recent pictures. I hadn’t been allowed to see it, but I used to boast to that Warner Brothers kid about how much better it was than anything Warners’ could make.
Sandra, being very young, tossed Aunt Ruth’s gold ring away and turned slowly in her hand the little box it had come in. “Look, it says numbers on it,” she said. “Why are the numbers, Chris?”
I studied it carefully. “Ninety-five. That looks like dollars,” I said. “Ninety-five dollars. Where does Santa Claus get all his money, Daddy?”
My father gave my mother a questioning look. “Er … what’s that, son?” I had to repeat the question. “Oh … those aren’t dollars, no … That’s just the number Santa puts on his toys to keep them from getting all mixed up before he sends them down from the North Pole,” my father said, and then he took a deep breath and another gulp of that yellow drink.
More people kept coming in all afternoon. More presents. More uncles and aunts. More Santa Claus’s helpers. I never realized he had so many helpers. All afternoon the phone kept ringing, too. “Sol, you might as well answer it, it must be for you,” my mother would say, and then I could hear my father laughing on the phone: “Thanks, L.B., and a merry Christmas to you … Thanks, Joe … Thanks, Mary … Thanks, Doug … Merry Christmas, Pola …” Gifts kept arriving late into the day, sometimes in big limousines and town cars, carried in by chauffeurs in snappy uniforms. No matter how my father explained it, it seemed to me that Santa must be as rich as Mr. Zukor.
Just before supper, one of the biggest stars in Father’s pictures drove up in a Rolls Royce roadster, the first one I had ever seen. She came in with a tall, broad-shouldered, sunburned man who laughed at anything anybody said. She was a very small lady and she wore her hair tight around her head like a boy’s. She had on a tight yellow dress that only came down to the top of her knees. She and the man she was with had three presents for me and four for Sandra. She looked down at me and said, “Merry Christmas, you little darling,” and before I could get away, she had picked me up and was kissing me. She smelled all funny, with perfumy sweetness mixed up with the way Father smelled when he came home from that Christmas party at the studio and leaned over my bed to kiss me when I was half asleep.
I didn’t like people to kiss me, especially strangers. “Lemme go,” I said.
“That’s no way to act, Sonny,” the strange man said.
“Why, right this minute every man in America would like to be in your shoes.”
All the grownups laughed, but I kept squirming, trying to get away. “Aw, don’t be that way, honey,” the movie star said. “Why, I love men!”
They all laughed again. I didn’t understand it so I starte
d to cry. Then she put me down. “All right for you,” she said, “if you don’t want to be my boy friend.”
After she left, when I was unwrapping her presents, I asked my father, “Who is she? Is she one of Santa Claus’s helpers, too?” Father winked at Mother, turned his head away, put his hand to his mouth and laughed into it, but I saw him. Mother looked at him the way she did when she caught me taking a piece of candy just before supper. “Her name is Clara, dear,” she said. “She’s one of Santa Claus’s helpers, too.”
And that’s the way Christmas was, until one Christmas when a funny thing happened. The big Firmament-Famous Artists-Lewin truck never showed up. I kept looking for it all afternoon, but it never came. When it got dark and it was time for me to have my supper and go to bed and still no truck, I got pretty worried. My mind ran back through the year trying to remember some bad thing I might have done that Santa was going to punish me for. I had done lots of bad things, like slapping my sister and breaking my father’s fountain pen, but they were no worse than the stuff I had pulled the year before. Yet what other reason could there possibly be for that truck not showing up?
Another thing that seemed funny about that Christmas Eve was that my father didn’t bother to go to his studio Christmas party. He stayed home all morning and read aloud to me from a Christmas present he let me open a day early, a big blue book called Typee. And late that night when I tiptoed halfway down the stairs to watch my mother trim the tree that Santa was supposed to decorate, my father was helping her string the colored lights. Another thing different about that Christmas was that when Sandra and I ran in shouting and laughing at five, as we always did, my father got up just as soon as my mother.
When we went downstairs, we found almost as many presents as on other Christmas mornings. There was a nice fire engine from Uncle Norman, a cowboy suit from Aunt Ruth, a Meccano set from Uncle Adolph, something, in fact, from every one of Santa Claus’s helpers. No, it wasn’t the presents that made this Christmas seem so different, it was how quiet everything was. Pierce-Arrows and Packards and Cadillacs didn’t keep stopping by all day long with new presents for us. And none of the people like Norman and Ruth and Uncle Edgar, the famous director, and Aunt Betty, the rising ingénue, and Uncle Dick, the young star, and the scenario writer, Uncle Bill, none of them dropped in at all. James the butler was gone, too. For the first Christmas since I could remember, we had Father all to ourselves. Even the phone was quiet for a change. Except for a couple of real relatives, the only one who showed up at all was Clara. She came in around supper time with an old man whose hair was yellow at the temples and gray on top. Her face was very red and when she picked me up to kiss me, her breath reminded me of the Christmas before, only stronger. My father poured her and her friend the foamy yellow drink I wasn’t allowed to have.
She held up her drink and said, “Merry Christmas, Sol. And may next Christmas be even merrier.”
My father’s voice sounded kind of funny, not laughing as he usually did. “Thanks, Clara,” he said. “You’re a pal.”
“Nerts,” Clara said. “Just because I don’t wanna be a fair-weather friend like some of these other Hollywood bas—”
“Shhh, the children,” my mother reminded her.
“Oh hell, I’m sorry,” Clara said. “But anyway, you know what I mean.”
My mother looked from us to Clara and back to us again. “Chris, Sandra,” she said. “Why don’t you take your toys up to your own room and play? We’ll be up later.”
In three trips I carried up to my room all the important presents. I also took up a box full of cards that had been attached to the presents. As a bit of holiday homework, our penmanship teacher Miss Whitehead had suggested that we separate all Christmas-card signatures into those of Spencerian grace and those of cramp-fingered illegibility. I played with my Meccano set for a while, I practiced twirling my lasso and I made believe Sandra was an Indian, captured her and tied her to the bedstead as my hero Art Acord did in the movies. I captured Sandra three or four times and then I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I spread all the Christmas cards out on the floor and began sorting them just as Miss Whitehead had asked.
I sorted half a dozen, all quite definitely non-Spencerian, but it wasn’t until I had sorted ten or twelve that I began to notice something funny. It was all the same handwriting. Then I came to a card of my father’s. I was just beginning to learn how to read handwriting, and I wasn’t very good at it yet, but I could recognize the three little bunched-together letters that spelled Dad. I held my father’s card close to my eyes and compared it with the one from Uncle Norman. It was the same handwriting. Then I compared them with the one from Uncle Adolph. All the same handwriting. Then I picked up one of Sandra’s cards, from Aunt Ruth, and held that one up against my father’s. I couldn’t understand it. My father seemed to have written them all.
I didn’t say anything to Sandra about this, or to the nurse when she gave us our supper and put us to bed. But when my mother came in to kiss me good night I asked her why my father’s handwriting was on all the cards. My mother turned on the light and sat on the edge of the bed.
“You don’t really believe in Santa Claus any more, do you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Fred and Clyde told me all about it at school.”
“Then I don’t think it will hurt you to know the rest,” my mother said. “Sooner or later you will have to know these things.”
Then she told me what had happened. Between last Christmas and this one, my father had lost his job. He was trying to start his own company now. Lots of stars and directors had promised to go with him. But when the time had come to make good on their promises, they had backed out. Though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, even in the simplified way my mother tried to explain it, I would say now that for most of those people the security of a major-company payroll had outweighed an adventure on Poverty Row—the name for the group of little studios where the independent producers struggled to survive.
So this had been a lean year for my father. We had sold one of the cars, let the butler go, and lived on a budget. As Christmas approached, Mother had cut our presents to a minimum.
“Anyway, the children will be taken care of,” my father said. “The old gang will see to that.” The afternoon of Christmas Eve my father had had a business appointment, to see a banker about more financing for his program of pictures. When he came home, Sandra and I had just gone to bed, and Mother was arranging the presents around the tree. There weren’t many presents to arrange, just the few they themselves had bought. There were no presents at all from my so-called aunts and uncles.
“My pals,” Father said. “My admirers. My loyal employees.”
Even though he had the intelligence to understand why these people had always sent us those expensive presents, his vanity, or perhaps I can call it his good nature, had led him to believe they did it because they liked him and because they genuinely were fond of Sandra and me.
“I’m afraid the kids will wonder what happened to all those Santa Claus’s helpers,” my mother said.
“Wait a minute,” my father said. “I’ve got an idea. Those bastards are going to be Santa Claus’s helpers whether they know it or not.”
Then he had rushed out to a toy store on Hollywood Boulevard and bought a gift for every one of the aunts and uncles who were so conspicuously absent.
I remember, when my mother finished explaining, how I bawled. I don’t know whether it was out of belated gratitude to my old man or whether I was feeling sorry for myself because all those famous people didn’t like me as much as I thought they did. Maybe I was only crying because that first, wonderful and ridiculous part of childhood was over. From now on I would have to face a world in which there was not only no Santa Claus, but very, very few on-the-level Santa Claus’s helpers.
ENSIGN WEASEL
THOSE FIRST DAYS OF naval training, no one, to use a landlubber phrase, could see the trees for the forest. The o
nly impression any of us had was of a new, overwhelming environment. I don’t think any of us would have even remembered each other’s faces if we had left there after forty-eight hours. It was something like being run down by an eight-wheel truck. You may get a quick look at the front end of the truck, but you’re darned if you could ever recognize the face of the driver.
Except for a few Chiefs temporarily elevated to the level of Navy privilege and responsibility (as our new commission status was described to us), we were all erstwhile civilians who did not know enough to differentiate between “parade rest” and “at ease,” or to translate three bells into our old Eastern Standard Time, or to explain the different functions of a stream anchor and a boat anchor. For nearly all of us those first hours were like the moment after the plunge from the high board into the pool when the diver is still going down, before he can begin to open his eyes and orient himself toward the surface. Unfamiliar subjects and unfamiliar systems of behavior were being thrown at us so fast that we had no chance to bring our surroundings into focus. We were still going down, but somehow, even in that dark confusion, we managed to respond to bells, bugles, commands and orders (we had just been told the distinction), for man, like his brother, the white rat, is highly susceptible to habit-suggestion.
Among us were men who turned out to be clever, men who proved slow, men who were quick to laugh, men who were sullen, men who had been college professors in sheltered academic communities and were shy among worldly men, and men who had been whiskey salesmen and knew how to make a Pullman washroom roar with laughter. But in the haze of strangeness that enveloped us those first days, we were all indistinguishable parts of one great beast that hit the deck at reveille, performed its calisthenics, went to chow, answered muster, attended class, formed for drill, marched, studied, fed, grew weary, shed its uniform, polished its shoes, doused its face and fell into its sack at taps.