In the weeks before Christmas, wild and frantic were the words Vera most often employed. “That old man is driving me absolutely wild,” she could be heard muttering under her breath. Or, “They are goddamn driving me frantic,” they meaning the scabby crew of buzzards who tracked in and out of the house morning, noon, and night, eating and drinking them out of house and home. What really irked Vera was that her father assumed it was her duty to feed and water these old hogs. “Vera, could you make another plate of ham sandwiches for the boys?” he was always asking. “Is there another pan of date squares?” The last time her father had ordered up sandwiches she had told him where the bear shit in the buckwheat. “You want sandwiches, make them yourself. I don’t see any piano tied to your ass.”
She was surprised when that was what he did. He hadn’t made a scrap of fuss, just meekly left his rummy game and started slicing up a loaf of bread crooked as a dog’s hind leg, so crooked she couldn’t bear to watch and finally took the knife away from him and tackled the job herself.
This was supposed to be Christmas? A collection of derelict old farts cluttering up her kitchen, tracking in snow and leaving puddles on the floor wherever they stood or sat, the door swinging open every five seconds so that the day was one long continual draught, all of them eating as if it were their last meal and drinking up the rye and beer as if it were their last chance for a drink. The house getting dim and blue with cigarette smoke and loud with accusations of cheating and arguments over who played what card in the games of poker and rummy that went on most of the day and night. Daniel and she having their home (in fairness it was theirs, too) disrupted by a bunch of dirty old men, who shouted in their deaf-men’s voices, laughed wet, gargly laughs that rumbled into coughing fits, hawking and spitting, and generally conducted themselves in a pleasant and attractive fashion.
And the feeble excuse her father offered for this holiday invasion was that every merchant in Connaught is obliged to dispense Christmas cheer to his customers. Yes, yes, said Vera, she knew that. But every other merchant in town invites his best customers to step into the storeroom for a quick nip out of the bottle kept there for that purpose. None of the other businessmen turns the family residence into a Sally Ann or Harbour Light where every moocher feels free to camp out for as long as the fancy takes him.
Well, countered her father, he couldn’t really offer drinks out of the businesses because Mr. Stutz doesn’t approve of alcohol and won’t have any part in distributing it. And he can’t be expected to be everywhere, can he? One minute pouring drinks at the garage, the next at the hotel? So really the most sensible arrangement is to have the boys drop by the house.
It suits him but not Vera. As the lady of the house she’s responsible for keeping it cleaned and the larder stocked, tasks which are endless when you’re faced with guests the likes of them. As she’s pointed out to her father any number of times, there might be some reason for tolerating these nuisances if any of them had ever spent a nickel in any of his enterprises but she is willing to bet dollars to doughnuts they never had. They couldn’t rustle up a nickel among them if they went shares. So what was the percentage?
Besides, they were a rebuke and an insult to family pride. Of the half dozen or so regulars which were underfoot, not one of them would have been permitted to darken the door of any of Connaught’s respectable citizens. They were taking advantage of the Monkmans, turning them into laughing-stocks.
All scrubs and good for nothings of one description or other. A couple of serious drunks, a suspected dog poisoner, a pair of shiftless bachelor brothers, aged sixty-five and sixty-seven, who’ve whiled away the decades telling each other smutty stories and signing social assistance cheques until they shifted to signing old-age pension cheques. The leading light of this peerless band was Huff Driesen, the man with the sugar diabetes who comes to her father to get his needle whenever he’s been drinking and doesn’t dare show up at his daughter’s for his injection. Of all the renegades and reprobates it’s Driesen that Vera dislikes the most. He fancies himself God’s gift to women, a lady-slayer. Whenever he finds himself in Vera’s vicinity he makes calf eyes and says, “I care for nobody, not I/If no one cares for me.” This is supposed to be witty or charming, or something. Vera would like to play a tune on him with the cast-iron frying pan.
Whenever she draws the dreadful behaviour of his guests to her father’s attention he just shrugs and says, “I don’t see the harm.” “They only get a chance to have a good time but once a year. I can hardly begrudge them that.”
Vera can.
There’s more. Daniel, now that he’s on Christmas holidays, spends all his time playing cards with this sorry testament to humanity. That began when they were short a player for rummy and his grandfather staked him in the game. He soon got the hang of it and proved himself a natural, instinctive player, quick-witted, attentive to the cards, blessed with more than his share of luck, patient as Job. In the course of that first afternoon he won more money than was good for him. He was hooked on cards.
Vera doesn’t like him to gamble. It’s not that she worries about the money he might lose, or even win. It’s the way he behaves when he plays, cold-blooded, like a reptile. Most kids his age are restless and impulsive playing for stakes. The young are optimists inclined to trust that luck, fortune, is principally concerned about them and unlikely to let them down. So they lose. Not Daniel. He is a twelve-year-old crocodile who is content to lie disguised as a log until one of the old boys forgets himself and splashes down into the shallows during a poker game. Then the jaws snap shut. Vera’s seen it. Watching him gamble she can’t help thinking that he’s years and years older than twelve. How did he get so old? The old fellows he plays with sense this unnaturalness also and it shows in the way they treat him – sometimes like a boy, sometimes like a man. They’re not entirely sure which he is, or what is due him. They get mad as hell when Vera hauls him away from the table and sends him upstairs to bed at a decent hour. Winners don’t walk away from a table, the old men grumble and complain.
Another thing, Vera knows they’ve been giving Daniel whisky to drink. She’s smelled it on his breath. And she doesn’t care if it’s mixed nine-tenths water to one-tenth whisky, which was her father’s justification when she cornered him on it. “He’s not getting enough to hurt,” he said, “and it’s Christmas. Anyway, getting it at home spoils the novelty and takes the curiosity out of a boy his age.” Whatever he says, it’s just plain wrong to give a kid Daniel’s age whisky. Of any amount.
What a shit of a Christmas it’s turning out to be. And her father hasn’t done one single, solitary thing to make it better, as Christmas ought to be. The other day she asked him when he was going to pick up a tree and he acted as if the thought of a tree hadn’t even occurred to him. “Christmas tree?” he said. “What do we want bothering with a Christmas tree? I mean to say there’s no little kids here who believes in Santa Claus, is there? And they’re nothing but a goddamn fire hazard. You weren’t really wanting a Christmas tree were you, Vera?”
No, not really.
Learning that he was intending to give Daniel money for a Christmas present was the last straw.
“Well, why not?” he wanted to know. “I’ll just pop ten or twenty bucks into an envelope. Thirty, if you think that would be better. What’s wrong with that?”
What was wrong was that that was the sort of Christmas present cleaning ladies got at Christmas, bills in an envelope. She had no doubt that he planned the same for her.
“It’s not very personal is all,” she said. “It doesn’t show much care and consideration, much thought, you ask me. Money stuck in an envelope.”
“That way he can get what he wants,” said her father. “How the hell am I supposed to guess what a kid his age wants for Christmas? I got no idea. If I give him thirty bucks, forty bucks, he can buy himself whatever he wants. Something real nice.” He hesitated. “You think forty bucks is enough, Vera?”
“Maybe,” said Vera, her voice laced with sarcasm, “you don’t have time to shop for your grandson what with entertaining your charming friends full time. You’d rather throw a lot of money at him, it’s easier.”
This is Christmas? A twelve-year-old boy playing cards on a kitchen table covered in a ratty tablecloth, drinking whisky, watered or not. A houseful of vultures diving onto whatever appears to eat and drink, squabbling and farting and picking their teeth with matchbook covers, if they’ve got any teeth to pick. No tree. Money in envelopes. And roast pork for Christmas dinner. When she asked him what he’d like for Christmas dinner, meaning what sort of trimmings to accompany the bird, her father had squinted up sideways at the ceiling and allowed that a roast pork would be nice. He hadn’t had a roast pork for a while. Suffering Jesus. How could you get into the spirit of the thing when people requested roast pork for Christmas dinner?
If nobody else knows what Christmas is supposed to be, Vera knows. She sees it everywhere, mocking her. Sees it on the television, in the magazines, even the pictures in the Eaton’s and Simpsons-Sears catalogues. There’s a wreath of holly nailed to the door, a sprig of mistletoe, a tree decorated with strings of popcorn, and an angel perched on its tip. There’s oranges and nuts in a bowl on a sideboard and a punch bowl full of eggnog and nutmeg. There are plenty of presents done up in silver paper and big red bows and the men relax in white shirts, ties, and their favourite comfortable sweaters as the women pass around Christmas cake and mince pie. Everybody laughs and conducts themselves properly, in a Christmas spirit.
What she would like to say to her father is this: My husband made me a Christmas a thousand times better than this is and he was a Jew. She hadn’t asked him to either. Their first Christmas together he’d gone out and bought a tree, along with the decorations which, quite naturally, he didn’t have. Christmas was her right, Stanley explained.
But what, Vera had wanted to know, about him? How had he felt carrying a tree home past all the shops of his Jewish neighbours?
“I had an answer prepared in case anyone said anything,” Stanley told her with a wry smile.
“And what was that?”
“That the star on the top of the tree would be the Star of David.”
Nevertheless, despite his jokes, Vera knew it had not been an easy thing for Stanley to do. What made the gesture even grander for her in retrospect was that there had been only one Christmas tree and one Christmas for them to share. It was the year Vera was pregnant with Daniel, already six months gone when December rolled around. By then the episodes of morning sickness had passed and although she was as big as a house, Vera had never felt better. Or looked better, according to Stanley, who appreciated his wife big-breasted and moon-faced with new, healthy flesh. Each morning Stanley served her her favourite breakfast in bed, a large glass of milk and two peach jam and bacon sandwiches. This weight’ll come off nursing the baby, she told herself, licking her fingers.
Most of Vera’s days in the weeks preceding Christmas were given over to preparations – making cranberry sauce, candy, shortbread, mincemeat pies and tarts, light and dark fruit cake, puddings. When she wasn’t cleaning the apartment and polishing the silver which had belonged to her mother-in-law, she sat in a kitchen full of the warm, spicy smells of baking and the sharp, tart smells of grated orange and lemon rinds, studying recipes, and rubbing the bowl of the expensive English pipe she had bought Stanley for Christmas against the side of her nose. The proprietor of the smokeshop had said there was nothing better to shine and condition a good brier than nose oil.
Whenever she felt lonesome and needed to hear the faint, comforting sounds of life below in the shop – the murmur of voices, the front door swinging shut – she turned down the Christmas music on the radio and listened intently, keeping absolutely still. Then, smiling enigmatically, she turned Bing back up and returned to thinking.
In some fashion, Vera felt herself to be a pioneer, a trailblazer. Stanley brought no Christmas baggage with him, so it fell to her, the one with experience, to invent a family tradition, to set the tone for all the Christmases that they and their children would celebrate in all the years to come. Santa Claus but no Jesus, Vera decided, turning over the pages of the cookbook. A bowl of eggnog standing near to hand when the tree was trimmed. Gifts opened Christmas Eve, not Christmas morning, so everybody could get a decent night’s sleep. Turkey for dinner, not goose, because Stanley preferred white meat.
In the end, Christmas turned out perfectly, exactly as Vera had planned. The candlelight flickered on her mother-in-law’s pieces of crystal and silver, Stanley praised every bite he took, her cheeks flushed warmly with wine and pride.
After the steamed pudding, at Stanley’s suggestion they went into the living room to listen to music as he liked to, in a completely darkened room. He even unplugged the Christmas tree lights.
The record he chose was Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. Stanley settled in his armchair, the special blend of Irish tobacco Vera had bought him glowing red in the bowl of his new pipe and wafting its aroma to where she sat on the sofa holding the pearl earrings he had given her, one in each hand. Stanley hadn’t realized her ears weren’t pierced.
When the haunting music commenced, Vera felt the child stir within her. With each measure, these movements grew stronger and stronger until the ferocity of them came near to frightening her. Of course, the baby had kicked before, but never like this.
Before she knew it, Vera had called out to Stanley. “Come here,” she said.
He crossed the room to the sofa. At once Vera felt foolish. Really, it was nothing after all.
“What do you think of this?” she asked, fumbling for his hand in the dark, pressing it to her belly.
For a time neither of them spoke.
“I believe he’s conducting,” said Stanley, breaking their silence.
“What?” Vera had not caught his meaning.
“Conducting.” In the meagre light she could just make him out, illustrating what he meant, flailing his arm about more or less in time with the music.
At that moment she could not stop herself from reaching out and seizing the hand moulding and carving the dim, shadowy air, carrying it to her mouth and kissing it passionately.
“Why, Vera,” said Stanley, surprised. She was not given to such displays, even in darkness.
“Never mind,” said Vera, recovering. “Go on back to your music.”
That, she told herself, had been a proper Christmas. Not this. This was Hallowe’en, a Grey Cup drunk, an all-night poker game rolled into one, but it sure as hell wasn’t Christmas. Where had decency, gentleness, kindness gone? Sometimes she doubted she could stop here any longer in this desert, in this absence of love.
It was December 22, nine-thirty in the morning, and Vera was struggling to raise the tree she had bought and carted home herself the day before. Flushed and tight-lipped with determination she battled to hold the spruce upright while attempting to tighten the screws in the stand to lock it into position. In the kitchen her father was hosting the day’s first arrivals, Huff Driesen, the McIlwraith brothers, Adolf Romanski. Daniel was finishing his breakfast, lounging against the kitchen counter with his plate under his chin. The visitors had begun the morning with coffee and rummy, a warm-up for beer and poker by eleven o’clock. Right at the moment, the first argument of the day was in full spate. Whose turn was it to deal?
The tree swayed, toppled. Vera sprang off her haunches, caught it with a jerk, shaking loose a shower of dry needles into her hair and down onto the floor. The evidence of earlier crashes lay thickly all about her, crackling under the soles of her shoes, and making her feet skid with every step she took. She had been wrestling the tree unassisted for the past half-hour but had no intention of planting the suggestion that she needed help.
Just then her father eased into the living room and, blind to her difficulties, inquired whether she had noticed his spectacles lying around.
“No,” said Vera, teeth clenched as she shoved the tree upright in the stand again.
“I can’t think where they could’ve got to,” he said helplessly, looking about vaguely. When it became clear she had no intention of joining the search he wandered off, with a forlorn, neglected air.
Five minutes later he was back. The tree was now standing, or rather leaning, in the corner of the room, and Vera was asking herself why she hadn’t thought to attach the star to its tip before she got it completely vertical. Now she was going to have to risk her neck standing on a chair, fending off branches as she leaned out precariously to fix the star.
The missing glasses had made Monkman as peevish and frustrated as his daughter. “I’ve lost my reading glasses,” he announced in a loud, slightly belligerent voice. “I can’t find them anywhere.”
Vera kept her eyes fastened on the top of the tree, like a bird judging a perch. “So what’ve you got to read that can’t wait?” she said. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m busy here.”
“It’s not reading. It’s for Huff. He wants his sugar diabetes shot and I can’t do it without my glasses. It’s close work.”
“It’s just about time you stopped babying Huff Driesen. He’s a big boy. Let him do it himself.”
“Vera, you know he can’t. He’s squeamish about needles.”
“So let one of his other bosom buddies in the kitchen do it. If he hurries he can get one while they’re still sober.”
“He don’t trust them,” said her father, dropping his voice.
“Neither do J,” Vera whispered back theatrically.
Her sarcasm appeared to be lost on her father, who hesitated before revealing his proposal. Still speaking in an undertone, he said: “As a matter of fact, Huff was wondering if I didn’t find my glasses… could you maybe do it, Vera?”
Vera laughed in his face. “Driesen’s got to be out of his mind. Not a chance.”
“It isn’t hard,” said her father. “Really it isn’t. Huff’ll load the needle for you. All you got to do is stick it in and push down the plunger.”
“Dream on. Push down the plunger. You make it sound like the French Resistance blowing up bridges in the movies. If I could blow that old sonofabitch sky high, then I’d press down the plunger.”
“Now don’t make jokes, Vera. This is serious business. He’s got to have his shot. And if you won’t do it, I’ll have to get Daniel to.”
Vera was aghast. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t ask Daniel to give him a needle.”
“I did already. He says, ‘If Mom can’t do it – I will.’ ”
“Use your head. Where’s your sense? Nobody lets twelve-year-old kids give old men needles. It’s just not proper.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t,” said Alec, feeling she was ready to give ground, “but if there’s nobody else to do it, what can I do?”
“Oh, Christ!” cried Vera. “All right, all right, I’ll give him his bloody needle. Get him in here and let’s get it over with. Jesus.”
Moments later her father returned, escorting a shuffling, grinning Huff. For the sake of privacy, Vera led him off to her bedroom. The notion of administering a needle made her feel slightly queasy and she was afraid that an audience might cause her to botch the job completely.
Once inside the bedroom Huff sniffed the air appreciatively. “Smells all perfumy,” he remarked. “Smells like a garden.”
Vera had no time for pleasantries. She wanted this done with, before she lost any more of her nerve. “Okay, okay,” she said brusquely, “let’s get this show on the road. That thing loaded?” she asked, pointing to the syringe in Driesen’s left hand. In his right he clutched a bottle of alcohol and some cotton balls.
“Loaded and ready to fire,” said Huff agreeably. “Loaded and ready to fire.”
“Fine,” said Vera, betraying gathering apprehension as she gnawed her bottom lip. “Get your sleeve rolled up.”
“Oh, not in my arm,” said Huff smoothly. “I don’t take my needle in my arm, Vera.”
“Where do you take it then?”
“Here,” said Driesen, striking his flank with his palm. “Here, where I got some meat.”
Vera looked doubtful. On the other hand, she didn’t want to prolong the ordeal with argument and questions. “All right,” she said, “what do I do?”
“You wipe me down with alcohol, pinch up some skin and fat, shove in the needle, and push down the plunger. You do it right, Vera, you got yourself a full-time job as my nurse.”
“Don’t tempt me to injury, Driesen.”
“Oh, don’t give me none of that, Vera. You wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I don’t hurt flies,” said Vera. “I kill them.”
Driesen chuckled. “ ‘I kill them,’ ” he repeated to himself. “ ‘I kill them.’ ”
“Come on,” said Vera, “I haven’t got all day. Get your pants down.”
Huff was eager to comply. He turned his back on her, unbuckled his belt, and dragged down trousers and underpants all at once, exposing saggy, creased buttocks to view.
Vera swore to herself she wouldn’t get rattled. Concentrating, she gingerly swabbed down a patch of skin, then pinched up a roll of flesh and skin. It felt queer and rubbery to the touch and left her with a distasteful sensation.
“My,” said Huff, “aren’t your fingers cool? But you know what they say. Cool hands, warm heart. That’s what they say. Is that true, Vera?”
“Shut up and hold still,” ordered Vera, taking aim with the syringe. It wasn’t easy because Driesen seemed to be fumbling and fidgeting with something in front, shirt buttons perhaps.
“You know,” he said, his voice suddenly grown harsh, “it’s what you want at a time like this – a woman’s gentle touch. I could get used to this. How about it? Would Vera like to be Huff’s private nurse?”
Vera’s answer was to stick him. The sight of the needle buried in the old man’s tensed buttock came as such a shock to her that she lost all recollection of what the next step was. Several seconds ticked by before she recovered, eased down the plunger with shaking fingers, and snatched out the syringe. There, it was done.
Huff turned and faced her. He smiled as he lifted up his shirt. “Look what Vera done. Pretty good for an old fellow, eh?” He smirked proudly, displaying a mangy nest of pubic hair from which a limply swollen member dangled, making fitful attempts to lift a head drooling a drop of liquid the colour and consistency of egg white.
“Oh yes,” he said, looking down at himself approvingly as he began to roughly pull and stretch his penis, “just give the old fellows half a chance and they’re sure to satisfy.”
It was with the broom near to hand in the corner that Vera knocked him down. The jars of face cream and hand lotion which he dragged down from the dresser as he fell were still rattling like hail on the floor when she burst out of the bedroom, across the living room, and blew wild-eyed and raving into the kitchen.
“Out!”
Driesen’s cronies had time only to pop open their mouths before the broom slashed the tabletop and sent cards and money flying, glasses skittering, and beer spraying into the air.
“Out!”
Chairs were overturned in the scramble to escape her, cries of consternation and alarm arose as Vera’s broom descended on heads and upraised hands, left, right, and centre. A panicked Huff, hands clutching his waistband, bolted past her and flung himself out the door. They all followed, one of them trailing the tablecloth knotted in his fist. Vera landed her final blow cleanly between a pair of shoulder blades and heard the handle snap with a pistol-shot crack. It made her feel wonderful.
“And don’t come back!” she shouted, pitching coats and overshoes into the snow after them, disregarding her father’s beseeching cries of “Vera! Vera!” from the open door behind her.
The last of their belongings were finally loaded and they were ready to leave. Daniel clutched the tow rope of a sleigh piled high with suitcases and cardboard boxes and, like a dog straining on a leash, leaned abruptly into the thickening darkness of five o’clock on a winter’s afternoon. One sharp tug, two sharp tugs. The sleigh jerked stickily under its load, then relaxed into a smooth, flowing glide, its runners squeaking over the dry snow gone pewter in the failing light. Vera hoisted the handles of the wheelbarrow and rattled her cargo of dishes into the icy, rutted road.
Her father called out to her one last time from the doorway where he stood coatless in the cold. “If you have to go – all right. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Let me put your things in the truck and take you there. Please, Vera, listen to me. Will you listen to me? Vera!”
Vera pushed on, shoulders bouncing as the wheel of the barrow jumped in the ruts and tire tracks. She knew this was how she must go – with a sleigh and wheelbarrow borrowed from a neighbour, striking out across town for a three-room shack on the other side of Connaught, the only house to be rented on such short notice just before Christmas. The owner, who had inherited the house from his mother when she had died six months before, had been delighted to get a tenant. Nobody was willing to rent such places any more. It was too small, the thin, uninsulated walls made it impossible to heat, and it lacked running water. Mindful of its disadvantages, he had struck a deal with Vera, selling her whatever of his mother’s furniture remained in the house for next to nothing. For fifty bucks she got a woodstove in good condition, two cots, a table and four chairs, and a woodpile of seasoned poplar out back to boot.
Her father had made the last two days hell, pestering her with questions. What was wrong? Why was she leaving?
“What exactly did Huff do?” The big question.
“I told you I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter now what he did. What’s done is done. Let’s just say I don’t want any more of this atmosphere for Daniel and leave it at that.”
“I’ll be sorry ten times over as soon as you tell me what I’m supposed to be sorry for. But how do you expect me to apologize until then? And, Vera, forget all this foolishness about moving out. It’s crazy. What did I do that you’ve got to move out?”
“Isn’t this typical? Isn’t this typical you’d have to ask?”
What had worried Vera most was that Daniel might mutiny. So far he had only sulked and applied the cold shoulder. At present he was stepping out so briskly that she couldn’t keep pace pushing the wheelbarrow. A show of anger, she supposed. Yesterday they had fought.
He’d been upset about the move. “Why do we have to go? We just moved this summer. Why again so soon?”
“It’s not a big move, Daniel. It’s just across town, and it’s not as if you have to change schools or anything like that. That’s why I ruled out leaving Connaught right now, so you can finish the year in the same school. When school’s over then we’ll see what we’ll do.”
“I hate that new house. It’s a shit hole.”
“It’s no palace, I grant you. But it’ll do until we can find better.”
“Three crappy little rooms. An outdoor toilet. It doesn’t even have a TV.”
“Woe is Daniel, no TV. Tragedy of tragedies. Aren’t you hard done by? Maybe a weekend in India would teach you what hardship is. It’s not missing TV.”
“You better be prepared to miss me, then,” Daniel announced. “Because I’m going to be over here with him – watching TV.”
“If I were you I’d be careful of declarations about what ‘I am and I am not going to do,’ including where you’re going to watch television. All your decisions aren’t yours to make until you’re twenty-one and that’s some time off yet, sunshine. For your information what you don’t do is watch TV over here with him. I don’t want to catch you hanging around here – ever.” Her rage was the weak, jealous, tainted rage of a child and it often drove her into thoughtless, shameful declarations. She consoled herself that Daniel knew better than to take seriously, literally, what was said in the heat of the moment. Nobody ever meant exactly what they said, did they?
“Why not? Why shouldn’t I?” Vera could see he was fighting back tears. She could only guess at their meaning. Anger?
“Don’t trot that tone of voice out with me, young man. Understand?” Mother and son stared challengingly into one another’s eyes. Daniel was the first to look away. His yielding allowed her to speak more softly to him. “I think it’s time we both had a break from your grandfather, and the company he keeps. He and his cronies are having a bad effect on you – I see it more and more every day. Those old men aren’t company for a boy your age. It’s unhealthy, you ask me.”
“If that’s what it is – he already said you don’t want them coming around he’ll keep them away. He already promised you that -I heard him!”
“When you get to be as old as I am, maybe then you’ll have learned what your grandfather’s promises are worth.”
“Well, so what? Those guys won’t be coming around again anyway. Not after what you did. So who’s going to corrupt me?”
“You’re wasting your breath,” she said grimly. “It’s decided.”
Yet saying it was decided didn’t make it so. That was the sudden lurch of hot anger speaking, not really her. Vera knew better than to bank on anything ever being decided.
Snow had begun to fall. Vera felt flakes tickling and melting on her hot face. Pushing a wheelbarrow was hard, awkward work. She halted, set down the wheelbarrow, and took a breather, lifting her eyes to the blue corona of the streetlight. It resembled a fish-bowl, the flying snow tiny darting creatures which flashed briefly and brightly before settling, extinguished, dead-white and numb on roofs and roads, empty yards, and stripped gardens. It settled on Vera, too, on her coat, her scarf, the moon of her uplifted face. She was looking back in the midst of flight, back to that night so many years ago, the night of the snow, the night of the recital, the night of their unspoken understanding.
She started, wiped the moisture from her face, coming back to Daniel. There he was, far ahead of her, at the very end of the street. The snow was falling thicker and faster with every passing minute, but still not so thick as to rub out the distinctive stoop to his shoulders and the peculiar toed-out walk he had been bequeathed by his father. At this distance, and in the midst of a blizzard, one could easily have been mistaken for the other.