A Christmas Sonata Read online

  And even when Ben left and I stayed and Matthew started to color again it wasn’t the same as before. Something was gone.

  Gone from him.

  I said let’s play Germans and he said no.

  I said let’s make faces and he said no.

  Whatever I said, he said no and then he looked at me and swore, a really good word, and said, “Santa is just a big old fat liar.”

  I stared at him.

  “He says he’s something and he’ll come, but it’s all a big lie and he’s a big old fat liar.”

  It was too much to say at once. Even if Santa turned out not to be real, it was too dangerous to say all that on the night before Christmas day. “But we don’t know …” And I was going to say we don’t know anything about him, about any of it, but it didn’t come out.

  “He won’t come. He won’t come. He won’t come.”

  And he swore some more, but I had covered my ears and hoped that nobody had heard, and when he turned to the wall again I left the room and went to where Mother was sitting at the table talking to Marilyn and leaned against her leg and put my head on her arm.

  “What’s the matter, punkin? Don’t you feel good?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Did Matthew go back to sleep?”

  “Sort of.” I thought for a little time and then I asked, “If there isn’t a Santa Claus, do you still have to be good like if there is a Santa Claus?”

  “Don’t worry about it—there is a Santa Claus if you want there to be a Santa Claus.”

  “There is?”

  She nodded. “That’s how it works. If you think hard about it and want it enough there will be a Santa.”

  I went back into Matthew’s room and sat by his bed. For a minute I thought he had gone to sleep and I looked at my coloring book and the picture of the pig and then Matthew moved.

  “You’re back.”

  “Mother says it’s up to us if there’s a Santa Claus or not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She says if we want him, if we want him hard enough, there will be a Santa; and if we don’t want him there won’t be one.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, and I thought he was thinking of something smart to say and that maybe he was going to swear. I thought if he swore about Mother I would leave the room again and not come back, and I didn’t care if he was sick and dying or not, but he didn’t.

  He didn’t say anything about Mother, and he didn’t swear.

  He looked at me, right into my eyes, and he said, “I want him to be.”

  And I said, “I want him to be too.”

  And he said, “No. I mean I want him to be, more than anything else in the whole world, more than all the things I’ve ever wanted, more than I want to live, I want him to be.”

  And his voice was soft and hissing and I knew he meant it, meant it really; and I meant it, too, only maybe not as strong as Matthew, and it scared me. The tight part of how he looked scared me because I didn’t know how that could be, how that look could be.

  “Let’s think all day,” he said. “Let’s think there is a Santa all day and maybe it will be and he will come.”

  So we thought it all day and when I would not be thinking it Matthew would remind me and when he was not thinking of it I would remind him until it was late afternoon and Matthew took his medicine and could not think right anymore and turned to face the wall. But he kept saying right along, until the words rolled into each other:

  “Think it, think it, think it …”

  And I went back into the kitchen to watch Mother and Marilyn cook. They were making lefse, cooking the big flat pieces of dough on the griddle on the stove and Mother sprinkled sugar on one and rolled it up and let me eat it.

  “It tastes like potatoes with sugar on them,” I said, and she laughed.

  “That’s because they’re made out of potato flour.”

  “We have been thinking about Santa all afternoon,” I said. “Matthew and me. And we thought hard that he was real. Do you think it was enough?”

  She smiled at Marilyn and then down at me. “If you thought it right, then he is real.”

  “And he’ll come? He’ll come and find us and bring presents?”

  “If you were good.”

  But it was such a long time to wait. All that afternoon and all that night. Such a long time that I started to think wrong again and remembered Mr. Henderson and the wine and thought it didn’t matter what I thought—Mr. Henderson had been there and there must not be a Santa Claus and it was all just grown-up talk about believing in him.

  I went out by the tree where there were still no presents and sat looking up at the angel with the white hair and thought of Santa, but it only made me sad. I could not think of Santa without thinking of Matthew and how it would be sad for him that there wasn’t a Santa when he didn’t come home from Europe, when he died—he would never have seen Santa because there wasn’t a Santa.

  And finally it was dark.

  Outside the store windows it was dark, and Ben turned off the main store lights, so the tree seemed to grow, the lights seemed to grow and was so pretty it was hard to breathe, just looking at it. I went into the kitchen and took Mother’s hand to come and see the tree and she followed me out.

  “See the angel,” I said, pointing. “Doesn’t she have pretty hair?”

  Mother nodded and picked me up and hugged me, and Ben and Marilyn came out of the apartment then, pulling the couch.

  “Help us,” they said, and we moved the table and chairs out into the store by the tree.

  Ben set the table and Marilyn and Mother brought food and I brought a lamp out and put it on the table. When it was done and ready, Ben carried Matthew out and put him in blankets on the couch. The little sleep had made the medicine wear off, and he smiled at us.

  Then we ate some soup with dumplings, and potato sausage that made me burp, and some smelly fish called lutefisk that I had never tasted before and would not want to taste again, and some dough folded over something sweet, and milk.

  We ate and ate by the tree with the angel looking down, and when we were done Ben sat on the couch by Matthew’s feet and Mother and I sat on the floor and the stove was warm and it was hard to stay awake. But Ben opened a book and read a poem about Santa Claus and the night before Christmas, and I looked at Matthew, who listened to each word of the book, every and each word; and so did I, and I thought, it didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter if there was a Santa Claus or there wasn’t a Santa Claus. It would not make the food different or the tree different or the angel different or how it felt to lean against Mother and listen to the story as it named the reindeer and told how they came in the night. I looked at Matthew, who was seeing them the way I was seeing them all.

  In the tree.

  When it was done and Ben closed the book because all the words had been said and all the pictures had been seen and it was time to close the book we all sat quietly, just sat and felt the heat from the stove. I thought of Christmas and how it was and what it must be like in the war for Father, and hoped he had a tree and somebody to read to him out of a book.

  “Merry Christmas,” Matthew said in a whisper to me, and I shook my head.

  “It’s not Christmas yet. We have to go to bed and wait and then it will be Christmas.”

  But we didn’t go to bed, even though it was late and warm and we were sleepy. I saw that Matthew’s eyes were closing and I couldn’t keep my eyes open either and closed them, closed them just a little.

  “What’s that?”

  Ben stood up and I didn’t know if I was asleep or not, but I opened my eyes and Matthew did the same and I felt Mother move next to me.

  “What?” Matthew asked.

  “I thought I heard bells,” Ben said, holding up his hand. “Outside. I thought I heard sleigh bells.”

  And he made the face grown-ups make when they are making things up so they think you’ll believe them, and Matthew looked
at me and I saw he didn’t believe it either.

  “No. Listen.”

  And I heard them. Heard the bells. Ringing low, and somehow coming from all around.

  “Let’s see, let’s see.…”

  Ben motioned with his hands and picked Matthew up, wrapped in his blankets, and we all followed him through the store to the front door, where he stood aside and let Marilyn open it.

  Cold air came in along the floor and I went up next to Ben’s legs and looked out.

  I didn’t see anything at first. There was a moon that made all the snow white, and the moonlight mixed with the light coming from the front of the store to make puddles of light places on the snow, but I didn’t see anything.

  Then something moved.

  “What—”

  I heard Matthew. He was higher than me because Ben was holding him up and he could see better, and I heard him start to say something and then nothing. Just his breath sucking in.

  But something moved and I heard the bells again and it came then, came into the moonlight and store light, into the puddles of light, and I saw it as plain as anything.

  It was a reindeer and then another reindeer and two more, and they were walking, and they had harnesses on and they were pulling a sleigh and it came, too, came with them and pulled up right in front of the door.

  Right there.

  Right there in front of the store. And I know they weren’t flying and I know there weren’t a whole bunch of them, but there were four and they pulled the sleigh and it stopped, stopped there in front of the door and there he sat in the sleigh.

  Santa Claus.

  With his white beard and red suit and hat, he sat in the sleigh; with his glasses and big stomach and bag of toys, he sat in the sleigh and looked at us and smiled.

  Santa Claus.

  And I was so scared I stopped breathing.

  “It’s him,” I thought I heard somebody say, but it was me, and I said it like I was talking to the angel at the top of the tree.

  “Touch it.”

  It was Matthew, and he was talking to me and I knew it, but I couldn’t move. The grown-ups stood and watched and I thought it was funny because they were watching us and not Santa and I couldn’t move. “What?”

  “Go touch it. Make sure it’s real.”

  His voice was soft the way it had been in the room when we were thinking of Santa and he had wanted it so much, and I heard it and my feet moved.

  They moved me out the door, and I hated them because the other parts of me didn’t want to move, but they moved me and I walked across the snow by the door and to the first reindeer and looked up and it was real.

  The antlers crossed the moon the way Mother said the smoke from the little houses on the lake crossed the moon, went up and up to the moon, and they were real and his eye was so big I could see myself in it, big and brown and round, and there I was, standing next to him.

  He shook his head and the antlers moved in big swings and I turned to run, but Matthew was looking at me.

  “Touch it!”

  So I did.

  I reached out and touched the reindeer on the leg and felt the hair, the warm hair, and the leg moved and I turned to Matthew and said, “It’s real.”

  “For real real?”

  “For real.”

  “Pull his beard.”

  “What?”

  “Get into the sleigh and pull his beard.”

  And I would not, could not have been able to do that except that my legs moved, kept moving, and I walked past the reindeer and to the sleigh and looked up and knew he was real, knew he was real and he smiled and I stood on the side of the sleigh and touched his beard, pulled on it.

  And it was real.

  “It’s real.”

  “For real real?”

  “Real.”

  “It’s him.” His voice was soft, a whisper.

  “Yes. It’s him.”

  And I jumped down and ran then, ran to stand with Mother, and we stood away from the door and watched him come in with his sack, come right in the door and put presents all around under the tree until the sack was empty and the tree was full. Then he turned and looked at us, looked at Matthew, and still without saying a word went out of the door and we watched him move away into the darkness, the reindeer trotting and the bells jingling softly until we could not see him or the sleigh or the deer, could not hear him and Matthew sighed once more and said, “It’s him.”

  And it was him.

  It was him for that Christmas and all the Christmases since; it was him later when Matthew did not come home again and I went to the funeral and tried to tell Mother he was just sleeping and not to cry; it was him when Father did come home from Europe and we had Christmases together; it was him for each and every Christmas of each and every year that I have lived since then, and will still be him for each and every Christmas of each and every year that I have yet remaining.

  It was him.