Let Me Finish by Roger Angell Page A

sauce. Now Nancy and I exchange a glance and get up and leave the others; upstairs we take our stuffed shopping bags and tiptoe back down and grab our coats. Goodbye, goodbye. Merry Christmas, everybody.
    Out on the empty, sunlit street, there's a stripy blue taxi just coming by. We jump in and fly downtown. There's no Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza, because there's no Rockefeller Plaza yet—no Radio City at all. Maybe there's a tree at the far end of Madison Square, but it's not lit up or anything. Never mind. I look at Nancy—she's just turned fifteen—whose brown eyes are glittering, the way they do when she's excited. Yay, Christmas!
    Back to our own tree, earlier that day. My father had kept the Victorian ornaments of his childhood—the fragile and now tarnished brownish-crimson or dark-green balls, the glass icicles, a bent-velvet Santa with an ancient bit of rippled peppermint candy undetachably stuck inside his pack. Also the snap-on candleholders, which we fitted with fresh little candles and affixed carefully to the outer balsam branches, pinching the springy snap until the thing stood upright on the swaying branch, with nothing above it to catch fire and bring on disaster and the Fire Department. Three or four of the candles had interesting counterweights below and could be hooked over the smaller branches, where they balanced magically upright, staunch against the swayings of your touch. Father had filled a white enamel
kitchen pail with water and put it down, with the invariable short-handled dish mop beside it, next to the tree. Then we lit the candles, one by one. We started opening presents, but soon my father broke off to pick up the little mop and begin putting out the candles, one by one, as they burned low. Already, I thought—I
think
I thought—he looked grave at what was to come.
    Downtown, a left onto Eighth Street and ring the bell. Christmas is starting all over again—my mother and stepfather's Christmas, in their little apartment looking down (from the back) onto Washington Mews. There are more presents here than uptown, and they're better wrapped. This tree has lights, not candles. Everything is new and young, even the Christmas-tree balls: I can't get over that. There's the Scottie named Daisy. A one-year-old brother, Joe, just up from his nap. The rubber plant named Hattie. My stepfather, Andy, mixing a Manhattan and offering one to Joe's slim young nurse, Eleanor McCluskey, who laughs and blushes at the idea. Happy Christmas, everyone. Shall we start the presents?
    When it was over, after our second Christmas and second Christmas dinner, Nancy and I drove back uptown to Ninety-third Street in mid-evening—this was the plan: it was all written into the divorce agreement—in another cab, with our different presents in other shopping bags propped on the seat beside us, and by the time we hit Park Avenue, with only the low ranks of green and red traffic lights up ahead for decoration, we'd fallen silent at the thought of Father again, and the quiet house waiting, and the put-aside stories about our Eighth Street Christmas,
which we'd learned not to talk about, ever. Nancy had Father's long face, with a natural shadowing under her brown eyes, and at times like this, I later came to realize, she bore the look of a chorus member from a Greek play; because she was older I studied her expression with care and wondered if my own face would some day carry this important seriousness.
    This, in one form or another, is a particularly American sort of Christmas for perhaps millions of us—right up there with Clement C. Moore and "It's a Wonderful Life." Even then, well before I'd grown up, I swore to myself that such a thing would never be done to my own kids, when they came along. Only it was.
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    Is it this cut-rate Dickens tale that makes me glum in the middle of Christmas every year? No, not really. Is it the Christmas deodorant and electric-razor