His father grinned at him when he came into the kitchen dripping and barefoot, hoping to coax him into the same hearty good humor by example. His mother was levering red-and-beige cookies off a metal sheet with a spatula. He rubbed his arm dry, his wet hair stiff and cold on his neck.
“Look at him. He’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders,” his father teased.
“Your clothes are laid out upstairs,” his mother said. “What time did Sister say to be over there?” He could sense their anxiety in the tone of her voice: what if he refused to respond and continued to refuse to respond? He had an unpleasant feeling of power. “Eleven-thirty,” he said, and headed obediently for the stairs.
Rose arrived a few minutes later in a welter of greetings and warnings about icy steps. She leaned on Michael’s arm, and one by one they kissed her. Biddy still didn’t look good, Kristi was getting bigger and bigger, and what had Judy done to her hair?
“I cut it, Rosie,” his mother said. “I want it off the face. I don’t want to have to worry about it for a while.”
Rose suggested she looked like a feminist.
Michael and Sandy brought the presents into the living room and piled them under the tree. They’d driven Rosie down the day before, and were now taking her from relative to relative on her Christmas tour. They looked tired already.
She was led into the living room and settled into a chair near the tree while his father put on his Mario Lanza record, a Christmas tradition when she visited. It was not a Christmas album, but Rose didn’t have a stereo and Mario Lanza held a place in her personal pantheon, his father said, just a notch or two below the Holy Ghost. Her hearing was still sharp. She’d just have a little of the homemade white wine she’d brought, they shouldn’t bother over her, sit down, relax. Mario Lanza sang “My Buddy.” To Biddy it always sounded like “My Body.”
“What about this one?” Rosie asked, gesturing toward Kristi, who was edging her present back and forth on the rug with her toe as if movement might reveal its nature. “How’s she been?”
His mother sipped her drink, which was a rich honey color in the warm lights of the lamp and tree. “She’s been okay. You know. Stubborn as ever.”
“She’s the scourge of the nuns,” his father said. “She has them living in fear.” Michael and Sandy chuckled, and Kristi rocked back and forth, pleased with the attention.
“What about Biddy?” Rose said. “Has he been behaving?”
Both his parents hesitated and his father set down his drink. “We had a little excitement yesterday.” He gestured toward her with his head. “Tell Rosie what you did yesterday.”
Biddy looked into her eyes.
“He sat down over on Ryegate Terrace over here last night and—”
“Where?”
“Over here on Ryegate Terrace, where the Lirianos live, and he decided he wouldn’t get up.”
“He couldn’t get up?”
“He wouldn’t get up.”
It took some additional discussion to make it clear to her what they meant. Once she had it clear in her mind, she looked at him, baffled. “Why wouldn’t he get up?”
“He won’t tell us. Maybe the world grew too heavy on his shoulders. I had to pick him up in my car.”
“What’re you, cuckoo?” Rose said, concerned.
Biddy managed a smile.
“You’re cuckoo sometimes,” she decided.
“I think he saw another hurt dog,” his father said. “Is that what it was?”
“I didn’t see any dog.”
“Are you going to be able to go to midnight Mass with us?” his mother asked. “Biddy’s in the choir this year.”
“I heard,” Rose said. “Sandy and Michael told me.”
“Sister said his voice is just like an angel’s.”
“It’s pretty icy out, Rose,” Michael said.
“I’m going to go,” she said. “If Sandy and Michael can wait around.”
Sandy and Michael, sagging noticeably, said that would be fine.
She requested that Biddy sit next to her at dinner, whether to show he was favored or to keep a closer eye on him he wasn’t sure. She tried a bit of everything that was put on the table: fennel and black olives, prosciutto and melon, turkey and turnips, mashed potatoes, stuffing, yams in syrup, broccoli. She spooned out his portions besides, claiming if he’d mangia a little more he wouldn’t look like such a ghost. She waved her hand slightly and shook her head, chewing. “Yesterday on Mervin Griffin they got two women in love,” she said. “Two women in love. You believe that?”
“No, Rose, they were kidding you,” Michael said. “They were just friends.”
“Two women in love.” She gave up, appalled either way.
Dessert was anisette cookies and coffee, of which he had two cups since he was singing in the choir.
Afterward they returned to the living room and the tree, all of them directing Michael as he resat Rosie. His mother talked with Sandy about the President, whom they considered a fool. Michael asked his father what the heating bills had been like that winter. Kristi lay with her head under the tree, inert. He was left with Rose, who watched him every so often as if, sitting at her feet in front of the Christmas tree, he might betray what had prompted him to refuse to get off an icy street the evening before.
“You looking forward to singing tonight?” she asked. Her hair was white and uneven and her skin hung in soft folds beneath her neck. “You nervous?”
He shrugged.
“What are you gonna sing?”
He went back over his songs, remembering bits of the practice sessions: “‘Joy to the World!’ ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful,’ ‘Silent Night,’ and ‘Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.’”
She fidgeted and asked if he’d had enough to eat.
He assured her that he had. He’d never had so much mashed potatoes, he added as proof.
She smiled. “You know who used to love mashed potatoes? Your grandfather. We used to fight over the mashed potatoes when he’d come over for dinner. You know what he’d do? He’d take his false teeth out, like a cavone, right there at the table, and throw them into the bowl, and ask, ‘Anybody want any potatoes?’”
Biddy laughed.
“Of course we didn’t. We just learned, that’s all. Make two bowls when your grandfather came over.” She smiled again and rubbed the top of his head. “You going to come up and see me in Albany?”
He agreed to if his parents came up. “Are you okay? They said you were sick around Thanksgiving.”
“They worry too much. I tell them, I’m ninety-two. Very few people die at ninety-two.” She gave him a sip of her anisette.
At eleven he went upstairs to change. His mother had laid out a white shirt, black tie, and black pants on the bed. His father had polished his black shoes to a high gloss. He put everything on and combed his hair in the upstairs bathroom, wetting down one area that stuck up stubbornly and holding his hand over it.
When he returned there was a good deal of talk concerning how sharp he looked, Rose remarking on it three or four times. His father dug the choir robe out of the hall closet, and he tried it on for the benefit of those assembled. It was scarlet and pleated at the shoulders, billowing out at the arms. The fit was perfect, the hem brushing his shoe tops. He took it off and stuffed it back in the box. As he left, they called “Good luck” from the kitchen and the living room.