Daniel, happy in the discovery of his own life-task, could follow the book easily up to this point, but not beyond. For the notion that all this seemed to be leading up to was that the world was coming to an end. Not God’s world — that would always go rolling along — but the world of man, Caesar’s world. Van Dyke, like some bearded prophet in a cartoon, was announcing the end of Western Civilization — or as he styled it, “the Civilization of the Business Man.” (“Biz. Civ.” for short.)
Van Dyke seemed to face this prospect with his usual cold-blooded equanimity. “How much better,” he wrote, “to live at the end of such a civilization than at its heights! Now, with half the faulty mechanism in ruins and the other half grinding to a halt for want of lubrication, its power over our souls and our imaginations is so much less than it would have been if we’d lived a hundred or two hundred years ago, when the whole capitalist contraption was just getting its first head of steam. We see now, as our forebears never could, where this overweening enterprise was leading — to the ruin of humankind, or of as much of humankind, at least, as has cast its lot with Biz. Civ. But a ruin, let us admit it, that is altogether fitting and proper, a thoroughly merited ruin, which we are obliged to inhabit as becomes decaying gentry. That is to say, with as much style as we can muster, with whatever pride we can still pretend to, and with, most importantly, a perfect nonchalance.”
Daniel was not about to admit that his world was coming to an end, much less that it ought to. This particular corner of it was nothing to write home about, certainly, but it would be a hard thing for any lad freshly come to a sense of his own high purpose to be told that the firm is going out of business. Who was Reverend Van Dyke to be making such pronouncements? Just because he’d spent a few weeks traveling to such places as Cairo and Bombay for the National Council of Churches’ Triage Committee didn’t give him the authority to write off the whole damned world! Things might be as bad as he said in the places he’d been to, but he hadn’t been everywhere. He hadn’t, for one thing, been to Iowa (Unless the pages the prison censor had torn from the back of the book were about the Farm Belt, which didn’t seem likely from the title of the missing chapter as printed on the contents page — “Where Peace Prevails”). Iowa, for all its faults, was not about to run into an iceberg and sink, like Van Dyke’s favorite example of the fate of Biz. Civ., the lost city of Brasilia.
It was an infuriating book. Daniel was glad to be done with it. If that was the way people thought in New York he could almost understand undergoders wanting to send in the National Guard and take the city over. Almost but not quite.
The next day was Christmas Eve, and when Daniel got back from work a ratty old tree was going up in the dorm under Warden Shiel’s personal supervision. Once the limbs were slotted into the trunk and the ornaments had been hung up and, for a final glory, a tinsely angel had been tied to the top, the prisoners were assembled around the tree (Daniel stood in the last row, with the tallest) and Warden Shiel took their picture, copies of which would later be mailed out to relevant relatives.
Then they sang carols. “Silent Night” first, then “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” then “Faith of Our Fathers,” and finally “Silent Night” again. Three or four clear strong voices rose above the muddy generality, but strangely Gus’s was not among these. Daniel screwed up his courage — he’d never liked singing in public (or anywhere else, for that matter) — and sang. Really sang. The man directly in front of him turned his head round briefly to see who was making such a noise, and even Warden Shiel, sitting there on his folding chair, with his right hand resting benignly on the P-W module, seemed to take approving notice. It was embarrassing in the same way and to the same degree as getting undressed in front of other kids in a locker room. The worst of it was in the imagining. By the time you were doing it, so was everybody else.
After the carols, presents were distributed to the prisoners who had families and friends on the outside thinking of them, following which the Warden went on to the next dorm to repeat these holiday procedures. The presents, as many as were edible, were further portioned out. Daniel bolted one slice of his mother’s fruitcake and put aside another in his mattress. As long as you assumed some part of the burden towards the dorm’s have-nots you could choose whom you were nice to, and the next slice of the fruitcake went, as a matter of course, to Bob Lundgren. The Lundgrens had sent their son a packet of Polaroids taken at their last Thanksgiving dinner, which Bob was studying with baleful incredulity. The banked fires of his inner rage glowed at that intensity. It was all he could do to say thank you.
Gus was in the farthest corner of the room, doling out crumbled cookies from a large tin box. Somehow Daniel hadn’t been expecting that. For some reason, perhaps the slow-healing scar, he’d imagined Gus as utterly bereft and friendless, unless Daniel himself were to become his friend. Daniel made his way over to Gus’s corner and, with what diffidence he could summon up, offered him a piece of cake.
Gus smiled. This close, Daniel, who had a developed judgement of dental work, could see that his perfect upper incisors were actually caps, and of the first quality at that. The lower incisors, as well. All in all, a couple thousand dollars worth of work, and that was only what showed when he smiled.
“The other night,” Daniel said, taking the plunge, “when you sang… I really enjoyed that.”
Gus nodded, swallowing. “Right,” he said. And then, taking another bite. “This is terrific cake.”
“My mother made it.”
Daniel stood there, watching him eat, not knowing what else to say. Even as he ate, Gus went on smiling at him, a smile that encompassed the compliment to his singing, his pleasure in the good, and something else besides. A recognition, it seemed to Daniel, of some common bond.
“Here,” Gus said, holding out the box of crumbs, “have some of mine, Danny-boy.”
Danny-boy? That was several degrees worse than just ‘Danny,’ and even that he’d always resisted as a nickname. Still, it showed that Gus — without their ever talking to each other before — was aware of him, was even curious about him perhaps.
He took a couple broken cookies and nodded his thanks. Then, with an uneasy sense of having done the wrong thing, he moved off, bearing the ever-diminishing cake.
Soon enough the goodies were gone and the party was over. The dorm became very quiet. Over intermittent blasts of wind you could hear the prisoners singing the same carols in the next dorm. Mrs. Gruber, with her mattress wrapped around her where she sat in front of the Franklin stove, began to croon along wordlessly, but when no one else showed any Christmas spirit, she gave up.
In the next dorm the caroling stopped, and a short while later there was the sound of the pickup’s motor turning over. As if he’d been waiting for this signal, Gus got up and went over to where the Christmas tree had been. Someone sounded a note on a harmonica, and Gus hummed the same note, rumblingly.
The hush of the room, from having been a hush of gloom, became the hush of fixed attention. Some people went and formed a ring around the singer, while others stayed where they were. But all of them listened as if the song were a newscast announcing a major worldwide disaster.
These were the words of the song Gus sang: