“Come on,” cried Fletcher, “it’s almost done.”
Even as a little boy Fletcher liked to assemble the crèche. In the early years Grandpa had assisted him. First they put together the barn, then carefully unwrapped each Hummel from its tissue paper. They had been bought by my mother’s friends Florence and Bethany, one by one each year, and given to Fletcher and me as Christmas presents. It was only last Christmas, with the youngest shepherd taking his place far left, that the scene completed itself.
“The wise men,” my grandfather said, his eyes shining. “These, children, are the wise men.” We stared at the kings, purple robed, dark skinned, holding wisdom in their eyes and gifts for the baby in their hands. I looked at the baby, just a regular baby really, then back to the wise men, then to the baby again, then up to Mary. Her bowing head, her glowing face seemed happy and sad at the same time. Her open hands were shaped like hearts. I turned to Joseph. My eye lingered longest on Joseph usually, standing off to one side. I studied every wrinkle in his rough robe, touched his face. He was so lonely, I thought, so separate from the rest — lonely as faith itself. I touched his sandaled feet with my thumb. He faltered. His pain was unspoken, difficult to name, his carpenter’s hand raised in front of him as if he could not view this scene, could not view his wife and child except in this way. He never moved. I have thought of him many times throughout the year in that large box in the basement labeled “crèche.” Wrapped in tissue paper, his one hand raised, slightly open, he looks through his fingers in awe.
Fletcher put the young shepherd next to the elderly man who bends over with balding head, and the scene was complete. We looked at the assemblage quietly, knowing already the rest of the story: the afternoon of agony still to come, the betrayal, the rising up on the third day.
I would like to believe that Fletcher carries inside him now into the center of the country the whole of this scene. But it is only Joseph’s uncertain position, somewhere between hope and despair, belief and disbelief that I have been able to keep.
There were times when I had gone off with Grandma, that skeptic, to Mass, where weekly I could witness miracles, babble in Latin, denounce Satan, chant to the dead. Blood flowed down those aisles. God was a white bird called the Holy Ghost and a baby and a man and a father, all at the same time. Trees sang. Bushes burned. There was a living water, an eternal fountain inside us that we thirsted for. There were Barnabus and Ignatius, Perpetua and Agnes, Anastasia. I grew dizzy in the sound of it alclass="underline" the strange songs, the bells, the incense, the wailing for forgiveness, the cross, the apostles and all the martyrs, the saints, Felicity and Cecilia, the blood no doors could hold back.
But slowly, as I sat there with my doubting grandmother beside me, the church changed: the bells became faint and then were gone. We did not beat our breasts, we did not chant ourselves, in another language, into knowledge. Things were explained, reduced. Some of the saints were demoted. The huge pipe organ became a guitar. The words relevant and rational were murmured like prayers. And the Holy Ghost became the Holy Spirit because it was supposed to be less scary.
Leave them alone, the rivers of blood, the bread from the sky, the wine at the wedding, the saints. Leave Him, the man on the cross dying for love. The church puts words in His sweet mouth, simple feelings in His complex heart. I will not listen; its English is as flat as unrisen bread.
Leave Him alone, the man on the cross dying for love. The church has Him turn his face away from Natalie. The church has Him disown Marta. The church makes Him say He cannot love Florence or Bethany; he cannot love Sabine — ever.
In Italy, Florence and Bethany say there are steep steps that seem to go to heaven itself, leading up to an altar that you must climb up on your knees in devotion. I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling you can walk up those steps now on your feet.
Each Christmas Florence and Bethany told me stories as we grated the various cheeses for the soup or for the brussels sprouts or whatever it was that year. Invariably I would get my fingers caught in the sharp grids of the metal grater, my flesh becoming more and more mangled and bloodied as I continued my task. What was I trying to feel? Whom was I punishing?
Just last year Bethany held my shredded hand under water and shook her head. She talked to me softly as she wrapped my hand up, then hugged me to her as if I were a child. How fond I am of them, my mother’s friends, Florence and Bethany, companions for life, generous and kind, unchanging year after year, not even aging, it seems. How I miss them now — those gentle, large-hearted women, those solid citizens, satisfied, intelligent, calm, like no one I have ever known. I cannot remember a Christmas without them — flown in from Italy or Spain or Greece, wherever they had spent the year before, with gemlike stories from an exotic world and news of Sabine.
They blend together finally, each Christmas one spirit, one great sensual procession of friends and family. My grandmother and grandfather sit at one end of the large lacy table. My brother is next to my grandfather, then my aunt, my uncle. My cousin Denise, an insurance salesman like her father, raises a glass of white wine to her lips. Florence brushes the hair from Bethany’s forehead. My Aunt Lucy sings for the turkey stuffing in her bird voice, smiling her mischievous smile, so happy. Sing on, Aunt Lucy. Sing now, louder than you ever have. Continue to believe in the life of the family. We need your faith, the faith that turned you from a girl into a nurse as you worked night after night to save your mother’s lost life. We need your faith now, your pressed white faith, your bedpan faith, your practical love.
Each Christmas my mother and Aunt Lucy made the same call on the upstairs phone. Their voices were always the same: hushed, excited, childlike. “Sarkis Wingarian,” they whispered, all hope. “We’d like to speak with Sarkis Wingarian.” He was the only one in our family missing from the Christmas celebration.
“There is no one here who calls himself that,” a voice on the other end always said.
Without ever knowing him I missed him. I missed him for them, for those two sisters who turned to one another each time and said, “But Christmas was Mother’s favorite season. She loved it so. Surely he doesn’t forget that, too.”
I would never see him, I thought: Grandpa Sarkis, three hundred pounds; Grandpa Sarkis who read to them from the travel section on Sundays; Grandpa Sarkis who worked so hard, who left his daughters, when they were grown, for the old country and who never came back. “In the old country you are worth your weight in gold. In the old country you can grow silk on trees.” In the old country his people were slaughtered like sheep.
Grandpa Sarkis’s voice rises from the warm, moist body of the duck in front of us. “Musa Dagh,” it says. “Never forget.” Fletcher hears it, too. “We will not forget, Grandfather,” he says under his breath. Fletcher cannot forget anything. He includes Grandpa Sarkis in his grace, with the hungry and the lonely, with all the world’s pain, with the Christmas bombings in Cambodia, with the thousand deaths in Central America. The only grandfather I know nods his head. He is with us every Christmas, even the ones after his death. “God bless you, Sarkis,” my grandfather says, lifting his glass.
My mother is decorating the enormous Christmas tree. My father has just put up the colored lights and now lies on the floor watching her. To me this tree seems darker than usual, and I consider that perhaps a few sets of lights have been sacrificed to some project of Fletcher’s during the year. My father gets up and moves to the living room where he resumes his playing at the grand piano.