Now was predicted for Lincoln, and there was every reason to think it would be a really fine Christmas.
Having recently received the remarkable gift of puberty with its attendant wonders, I had my hopes up for another great present, not exactly comparable: a longed-for piece of magical apparatus I had reason to believe would be under the tree on Christmas Eve. We always opened packages then instead of on Christmas Day, and in a sort of Norman Rockwellian tableau: nice warm house, a Nebraska snowfall settling outside and relatives of varying ages and beloved Sandy, my big, manly spaniel, all semi-circled around the gifts arrayed under the tree.
It’s sad to think how cozy such Midwestern family Christmases were when you were that age, and how odiously I now view the allegedly jolly season, with its trampling crowds and extorted gifts. But let that pass.
Back then, in that far-off happier time, Christmas was magical when it finally arrived with excruciating slowness. Nobody, when you’re that age, could ever convince you that there would come a day when all those chatty, friendly uncles, aunts, parents and grandparents in that comfy circle, contentedly digesting dinner around the tree, would be . . . gone. That you yourself would someday be the sole surviving link in that warm family circle. Unthinkable.
Without even shutting my eyes I can summon an aural montage of the pleasant chatter and those unvarying phrases used every year: The “Oh, how beautifuls” and “Oh, you shouldn’t haves” and “Where on earth did you find it?” The sometimes mendacious “How did you know I wanted one?” and the well-worn “It’s a shame to spoil the wrapping.” (I could never see why.) Every one of those Christmas Eves is interchangeable and identical in memory, and they usually ended with, “Well, we’d better be getting home before the snow gets any deeper” and the hugs and kisses goodnight and confessions of having eaten too much.
All interchangeable, that is, except for one.
My step-grandparents lived next door. The father of my college-professor, former-Marine-captain stepmother was known by his first initials, T. R., and was a book salesman for Scott, Foresman, the publisher who gave us Dick and Jane. He sired six offspring; three of each. He was a huge and imposing man and I always thought he looked just like a local statue of William Jennings Bryan. He had a voice so deep it made Orson Welles sound like Truman Capote. When booming “You big bum!” at referees at Nebraska football games, it caused everybody in the stadium who wasn’t deaf to jump, turn around and look.
On this particular Christmas Eve, T. R. seemed uncharacteristically nervous. My beloved Aunt Harriet had assumed the job of picking up presents from under the tree and handing them to the recipients. After a while T. R., exuding growing anxiety, urged her to “take some from this side of the tree.” “Hold your horses,” said Harriet, being a daughter of some independence. His agitation increased. “Give Mom one” only produced, from Harriet, further refusal to be directed.
T. R.’s agitation and uneasiness began to assume health-issue proportions. I worried that we were going to have a Christmas remembered for T. R.’s clutching his chest, pitching forward and expiring among the gifts and Christmas frippery. A couple more “Give Mom ones” finally became an exasperated “Give Mom that little blue package right there.” Harriet relented. It was given.
What happened next is remembered almost as something out of fiction. Like something that happens in a certain kind of harmless-seeming short story that contains a jolt. Mrs. Crawford — an overweight yet handsome woman — unwrapped what it became instantly clear was a jewelry box. T. R. hovered nearby, breathing audibly in anticipation.
She flipped open the lid, revealing a ring with a good-sized diamond that shot sparks into the room.
Without removing the ring — and while emitting a sort of low growl — with a backhand swing of the arm, she flung box and ring away. The innocent box and contents flew about six feet, smacked the wall and bounced to the floor. She spat out, “That doesn’t make up!”
The whole scene seemed to freeze-frame into a still picture. T. R. began to cry and tried to put a hand on her shoulder. It too was flung away. I didn’t know where to look. Somehow the evening ended.
How does memory edit such happenings? The moment was so vivid that I have no recall of the next, inevitable attempted comfortings and awkward departures. Did we open the rest of the presents in the poisoned atmosphere? Probably someone with aplomb suggested we were all tired and should finish Christmas on Christmas Day. It seems as if days went by before I had whatever minimal courage it took to ask my stepmother about the shocking thing.
“Mom had a pretty tough time with Dad,” she said. “Living in little western Nebraska towns. He was the principal at Chadron, not making much. He was gone a lot. Mom had wanted to teach school. She was quickly saddled with kids, starting with me. The last thing in the world I think Mom wanted was the six of us. Two, maybe. Mom was an intelligent woman and felt that a woman’s life should consist of something more than pushing the next generation around in baby carriages. Being the oldest, I had to take care of the two youngest because by then Mom had simply had it with motherhood.” I’d gotten old enough to be able to ask why she had to have so many kids. Did she, um, not know what was causing them?
“That’s not the sort of thing you spoke to your mother about then, but I wondered, too. I shouldn’t say this, but I sometimes think Dad insisted. I hate to think it, but maybe even — how can I put this — forced himself on her.” All this was a bit over my head. My image of these two kindly old folks living next door on our elm-lined street — I thought contentedly — was now murky. Did everybody I thought liked each other not like each other? And why had the accumulated rage come out just then? In front of everybody? For maximum embarrassing revenge?
How many other people in my world were not what they seemed? It’s safe to say that the moment that ring hit the wall, my notion of the adult world altered. There must be a lot of things in it I didn’t understand. The incident submerged from memory until, home from college years later, I found an old album with a picture of a young, handsome and smiling couple on a long-ago wedding day, beaming before the camera. They were the (youthful) purchaser and rejecter of the Christmas ring. It brought to mind those pictures in the paper of a grinning couple or family, taken before one of them committed murder.
I know it sounds a bit contrived but on that same trip, if not the same day, brushing up on some assigned Congreve, I came across the eternally misquoted couplet that ends with, “Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.” But it’s the preceding line that brought that grinning young couple in the old wedding photo — T. R. and Bertha — to mind: “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d.”
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