Poppy hadn’t always seen eye to eye with Troy (he had suggested more than once that a timely stint in the Army would have set him straight), but he seemed pleased when he unwrapped the CD. “Oh, one of my favorites,” he said. “The Military Symphony!”
Rebecca shot Troy a suspicious look, but he just smiled at her. “Why don’t I put it on,” he said, and he took the CD from Poppy and went over to the stereo.
Then Patch and her family arrived, and then Min Foo and hers. For several minutes, the foyer was wall-to-wall people. Children were struggling out of jackets; Abdul was cooing in his infant seat; Patch was having a tantrum over something insulting Min Foo had just said. (How had Min Foo had time, even?) “Come wish Poppy a happy birthday,” Rebecca told them. “Emmy! Are you wearing heels? Hakim, let me take the baby while you… Patch, please, come on in and tell Poppy happy birthday. I’m sure Min Foo didn’t mean whatever it was.”
“Min Fool, is more like it,” Patch snapped, but she trailed the others into the parlor, where Biddy had started circulating a platter of petits fours and Dixon was passing macaroons.
The party had changed to the stand-up kind, now that there was a crowd. Only the older ones stayed seated — Poppy receiving greetings benignly from his wing chair. Mr. Ames was telling Aunt Ida that he was choosing Poppy’s birth date for his next lottery number. Mr. Hardesty was asking the room at large who on earth all these people were.
Patch handed Poppy a gift so heavy he almost dropped it. And no wonder: he unwrapped it to find ankle weights, shaped like big blue doughnuts. “For your daily walk,” Patch explained. “They’ve just completed a study that proves…”
Then Dixon hauled in the keg, which turned out to contain the children’s present — a giant collection of horehound drops, Jujubes, Allsorts, Good & Plentys, and other candies, some of which Rebecca had assumed to be obsolete. Dixon pried off the lid and held up various samples while Poppy made appreciative remarks. “You helped buy me this? And you?” he asked various youngsters, skillfully avoiding the use of any names. “Oh, my, sassafras balls. How did you know I love sassafras?” In fact, his enthusiasm was probably genuine; this may have been the most successful gift yet.
Hakim’s videotape, on the other hand, bewildered him. He unwrapped it and peered at it doubtfully. “Paul P. Davitch,” he read out, “1954–1967. What? I don’t understand.”
“Those are the years covered by the videotape,” Rebecca told him. “Hakim took all our home movies to a shop where they turn reels into tapes. Remember Uncle Buddy’s home movies?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed,” Poppy said.
Uncle Buddy was Mother Davitch’s brother, the one technically minded member of the family, and when he died, in 1968, the movie camera might as well have been buried with him. Nobody had been certain how to work the projector, either; so this tape caused considerable interest. Children were called together and arranged on the floor, and chairs were dragged in from the dining room, and Mr. Hardesty’s walker was placed to one side. Zeb, Dixon, and Troy — the three tallest — retreated to the back of the group. Then Rebecca started the VCR.
First there were the usual hurdles — a black-and-white snowstorm, a duel between the two remote controls until the snowstorm disappeared, a pause while a child was sent off to silence Haydn. Eventually a white calling card came into focus with Paul P. Davitch, 1954–1967 engraved in flowing script. The next card read Photography: William R. “Buddy” Brand, and the next, Produced by Big Bob’s Production Service—all of these accompanied by a piano playing “Stardust.” October or November, 1954, the last card read.
Whatever scientific advances had restored Poppy’s engagement photo were evidently not available to Big Bob, because the people who filled the screen were bleached nearly white and shot through with darting white lines like slants of rain. Poppy stood on a brownish lawn with a plumper, dowdier Aunt Joyce, her knees like two underbaked biscuits below the cuffs of her long Bermudas. In front of them, hunched over the handlebar of a tricycle, was a small black-haired boy who would have to be Zeb. All three of them had their faces screwed up against the sunlight. “Would you look?” Poppy murmured, but he was the only one who seemed affected by this oddly unmovie-like shot. The younger children stirred restlessly, and a woman — perhaps Miss Nancy — was heard to ask, “Was there ever a less attractive fashion era than the fifties?”
A new card flashed on the screen: Christmas 1956. By now Uncle Buddy must have grasped the capabilities of his medium, for the scene was almost too animated. An electric train whizzed soundlessly around the base of a Christmas tree before it was obliterated by somebody’s swirling plaid skirt. An out-of-focus child (Zeb again, suddenly taller) lunged gleefully toward the camera with a red metal dump truck in one hand. Then Joe (Joe! so young and graceless that Rebecca almost didn’t know him, with his hair too short and his neck too thin) plucked Zeb up and removed him, and Mother Davitch advanced displaying a velvet-boxed bottle of perfume as if she were in a commercial, smiling a determined smile that was almost scary. She was followed, as if in a conga line, by Aunt Joyce vampishly modeling a pink angora sweater with a tag dangling from the top button, and then by Poppy holding a cellophane-wrapped bow tie in front of the bow tie he was already wearing. Last, a hairy arm was tugged into view by someone else’s hand, and a shirtfront loomed up, and then a man’s widely laughing, protesting mouth. “Uncle Buddy himself, in his one and only film appearance,” Zeb had time to announce before the whole scene vanished.
The children were asking, “Where were you, Mom?” and their mothers were saying, “Just wait a minute. I wasn’t even born yet.” Poppy was telling Mr. Ames to take his word for it: this was not really the way things had been. More Christmases swam by—Christmas 1957 and Christmas 1958. “Uncle Buddy lived in Delaware,” Zeb explained. “He didn’t get to visit more than once or twice a year.” The train beneath the tree acquired more cars; Poppy acquired more bow ties; Zeb grew another six inches. “Stardust” went on playing languorously, although Mr. Hardesty pointed out that some sort of Christmas carol might have been more in keeping. As if to prove him wrong, the next card read Spring 1961, and when it was removed, Joe and a glamorous, cross-looking Tina were standing on the front stoop with a cylinder of pastel blankets. “That’s me!” Biddy told the children, although she would have known that only because of the date. The clearest part of the picture was an arching bough of pink blossoms extending from the side of the screen where the front-parlor window would have been, and for some reason, this evidence of a long-dead, long-forgotten tree that Rebecca herself had never laid eyes on made her sadder than anything else. Poppy, too, gave a sigh. “Ah, me,” he said, and he gently stroked his mustache.
Christmas 1962, Christmas 1964. Easter 1965 and Christmas 1965 and Easter 1966. Biddy pushed a doll buggy and Patch learned to roller-skate and NoNo shook the bars of her playpen. Joe turned into the man Rebecca had married. Poppy’s hair was gray but Aunt Joyce’s was a yellower blond than ever. Mother Davitch’s mouth started blurring around the edges.