Miracle and Other Christmas Stories Part 35

"I should call my sister," Ca.s.sie said, "and tell her I've changed my mind."

"We'll stop at a gas station," B.T. said, opening the door fully and looking both ways again. "Okay," he said, and they went down the hall, through the emergency exit door, and onto the fire escape.

"You go bring the car around," B.T. said, and Mel clattered down the metal mesh steps and ducked across the parking lot to the car.

The emergency-room door opened and two men stood in its light for a moment, talking to someone.

Mel jammed the key into the ignition, switched it on, and pulled the car around to the side of the hospital, where B.T. and Ca.s.sie were working their way down the last steps.

"Come on," he said, grabbing Ca.s.sie under the arm, "hurry," and hustled her across to the car.

A siren blared. "Hurry," Mel said, yanking the door open and pushing her into the backseat, slamming the door shut. B.T. ran around to the other side.

The siren came abruptly closer and then cut off, and Mel, reaching for the door handle, looked back toward the entrance. An ambulance pulled in, red and yellow lights flashing, and the two men in the door reached forward and took a stretcher off the back.

And this is crazy, Mel thought. n.o.body's after us. But they would be, as soon as the nurse saw Ca.s.sie was missing, and if not then, as soon as Ca.s.sie's sister got there. "I saw two men push a woman into a car and then go peeling out of here," one of the interns unloading that stretcher would say. "It looked like they were kidnapping her." And how would they explain to the police that they were looking for the City of G.o.d?

"This is insane," Mel started to say, reaching for the door handle.

There was a flyer wedged in it. Mel unrolled it and read it by the parking lot's vapor light. "Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up to the Greatest Show on Earth!" it read in letters of gold. "Wonders, Marvels, Mysteries Revealed!"

Mel got into the car and handed the flyer to B.T. "Ready?" he asked.

"Let's go," Ca.s.sie said, and leaned forward to point at the front door. Two men in navy-blue suits were running down the front steps.

"Keep down," Mel said, and peeled out of the parking lot. He turned south, drove a block, turned onto a side street, pulled up to the curb, switched off the lights, and waited, watching in his rearview mirror until a navy-blue car roared past them going south.He started the car and drove two blocks without lights on and then circled back to the highway and headed north. Five miles out of town, he turned east on a gravel road, drove till it ended, turned south, and then east again, and north onto a dirt road. There was no one behind them.

"Okay," he said, and B.T. and Ca.s.sie sat up.

"Where are we?" Ca.s.sie asked.

"I have no idea," Mel said. He turned east again and then south on the first paved road he came to.

"Where are we going?" B.T. asked.

"I don't know that either. But I know what we're looking for." He waited till a beat-up pickup truck full of kids pa.s.sed them and then pulled over to the side of the road and switched on the dome light.

"Where's your laptop?" he asked B.T.

"Right here," B.T. said, opening it up and switching it on.

"All right," Mel said, holding the flyer up to the light. "They were in Omaha on January fourth, Palmyra on the ninth, and Beatrice on the tenth." He concentrated, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital.

"Beatrice," Ca.s.sie murmured. "That's in Dante, too."

"The carnival was in Crown Point on December fourteenth," Mel went on, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital, "and Gresham on January twelfth."

"The carnival?" B.T. said. "We're looking for a carnival?"

"Yes," Mel said. "Ca.s.sie, have you got your Bartlett's Quotations'?"

"Yes," she said, and began rummaging in the emerald-green tote bag.

"I saw them between Pittsburgh and Youngstown on Sunday," Mel said to B.T., who had started typing, "and in Wayside, Iowa, on Monday."

"And the truck spill was at Seward," B.T. said, tapping keys.

"What have you got, Ca.s.sie?" Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror.

She had her finger on an open page. "It's Christina Rossetti," she said." 'Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.'"

"They're skipping all over the map," B.T. said, turning the laptop so Mel could see the screen. It was a maze of connecting lines.

"Can you tell what general direction they're headed?" Mel asked.

"Yes," B.T. said. "West."

"West," Mel repeated. Of course. He started the car again and turned west on the first road they came to.

There were no cars at all, and only a few scattered lights, a farm and a grain elevator, and a radio tower. Mel drove steadily west across the flat, snowy landscape, looking for the distant glittering lights of the carnival.

The sky turned navy blue and then gray, and they stopped to get gas and call Ca.s.sie's sister.

"Use my calling card," B.T. said, handing it to Ca.s.sie. "They're not looking for me yet. How much cash do we have?"

Ca.s.sie had sixty and another two hundred in traveler's checks. Mel had a hundred sixty-eight. "What did you do?" B.T. asked. "Rob the collection plate?"

Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. "I won't be back in time for the services on Sunday," he told her. "Call Reverend Davidson and ask if he'll fill in. And tell the ec.u.menical meeting to read John 3: 16-18 for a devotion."

"Are you sure you're all right?" Mrs. Bilderbeck asked. "There were some men here looking for you yesterday."

Mel gripped the receiver. "What did you tell them?"

"I didn't like the looks of them, so I told them you were at a ministerial alliance meeting in Boston."

"You're wonderful" Mel said, and started to hang up.

"Oh, wait, what about the furnace?" Mrs. Bilderbeck said. "What if the pilot light goes out again?"

"It won't," Mel said. "Nothing can put it out."

He hung up and handed the phone and the calling card to Ca.s.sie. She called her sister, who had a car phone, and told her not to come, that she was fine, her knee hadn't been sprained after all, just twisted.

"And I think it must have been," she said to Mel, walking back to the car. "See? I'm not limping at all."

B.T. had bought juice and doughnuts and a large bag of potato chips. They ate them while Mel drove, goingsouth across the interstate and down to Highway 34.

The sun came up and glittered off metal silos and onto the star-shaped crack in the windshield. Mel squinted against its brilliance. They drove slowly through McCook and Sharon Springs and Maranatha, looking for flyers on telephone poles and in store windows, calling out the towns and dates to B.T, who added them to the ones on his laptop.

Trucks pa.s.sed them, none of them carrying Tilt-a-Whirls or concession stands, and Ca.s.sie consulted Bartlett's again. "A cold coming we had of it," it said. "Just the worst time of the year."

"T. S. Eliot," Ca.s.sie said wonderingly." 'Journey of the Magi.'"

They stopped for gas again, and B.T. drove while Mel napped. It began to get dark. B.T. and Mel changed places, and Ca.s.sie got in front, moving stiffly.

"Is your knee hurting again?" Mel asked.

"No," Ca.s.sie said. "It doesn't hurt at all. I've just been sitting in the car too long," she said. "At least its not camels. Can you imagine what that must have been like?"

Yes, Mel thought, I can. I'll bet everyone thought they were crazy. Including them.

It got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.

And the star went before them.

A Final Word.

by Connie WIllis.

The giving (and getting) of gifts is inextricably bound up with Christmas and the Christmas story-from the Magis' gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the partridge in the pear tree, from the turkey "bigger than a boy" that the formerly stingy Scrooge sends the Cratchits to the small bottle of cologne the still- stingy Amy buys for Marmee so she'll have enough money to buy some drawing pencils. From heart's desires like Ralphie's "Red Ryder repeating carbine with a compa.s.s mounted in the stock" and Susan's "a real house," to the more symbolic, like Amahl's crutch and the ham the Herdmans brought the Holy Family.

So it seemed fitting to end this book by giving some sort of gift. This is easier said than done. I can't get you a BB gun. You'd shoot your eye out. And I don't know what size you wear or what color you like, whether you have long hair or have sold it to buy a watch fob or the money for a train ticket for Marmee. I don't know anything about you, really, except that you like reading Christmas stories.

When I was a kid, one of my chief joys was finding a wonderful new book or author, especially if the place I found it was in the pages of a book. When the little women read The Pickwick Papers, and played Pilgrim's Progress, it was as if Jo was personally recommending them to me.

Kip's father in Robert A. Heinlein's Have s.p.a.ce Suit Will Travel wasn't listening to Kip, because he was reading Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, and the three men in the boat were singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Anne of Green Gables acted out "The Lady of Shalott" by Tennyson, who wrote "Le Morte d'Arthur,"

which led me to T. H. White's The Once and Future King, which was right next to Charles Williams's All Hallow's Eve on the library bookshelf, and Williams had been friends with J. R. R. Tolkien, who led me to Middle Earth, which led me to ...

I've plugged some favorites in these stories-A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett in "Adaptation," Miracle on 34th Street in "Miracle"-but there are lots of Christmas stories and movies I couldn't manage to fit in, stories and movies I love and that my family reads out loud and watches together every Christmas.

So it seems like a perfect Christmas present to introduce you to them, the way Anne Shirley introduced me to Ben Hur and Kip Russell introduced me to The Tempest.

So here they are, twelve of them, in honor of the Twelve Days of Christmas, Twelfth Night, and Epiphany.Merry Christmas!

Twelve Terrific Things to Read at Christmas.

1. THE ORIGINAL (Matthew Chapter 1:18-25, 2:1-18, Luke Chapter 1:5-80, 2:1-52): The best Christmas story ever. This one's got everything you could ask for in a story: adventure, excitement, love, betrayal, special effects. Good guys, bad guys, narrow escapes, reversals, mysterious strangers, and a great chase scene. And the promise of a great sequel.

2. A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles d.i.c.kens: The perfect Christmas story, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only way to begin a Christmas story is with, "Marley was dead: to begin with." And just because you know it all by heart-Scrooge and Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past, "I forged these chains in life," and the bedcurtains and the turkey and "G.o.d bless us, one and all!"-is no reason not to read it again.

3. THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER by Barbara Robinson: This modest children's story of a church Nativity pageant invaded by the horrible Herdman kids, who steal and swear and smoke cigars (even the girls), accomplishes the nearly impossible-the creation of a new cla.s.sic-and makes the reader look at the story of Mary and Joseph and the baby "wrapped in wadded-up clothes," as the Herdmans do, with new eyes.

4. "JOURNEY OF THE MAGI" by T. S. Eliot: The Bible doesn't tell us anything about what the wise men's journey to Bethlehem was like, or how much it must have cost them to make it. Or what happened to them afterwards, when it was time to go back home.

5. "THE TREE THAT DIDN'T GET TRIMMED" by Christopher Morley: Obviously inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's sickeningly sentimental "The Fir Tree," this story of a tree that doesn't get bought by anyone and instead gets thrown away not only avoids all the sins of its antecedent, but ends by telling a touching parable of those ultimate Christmas themes, suffering and redemption.

6. "THE STAR" by Arthur C. Clarke: One of the cla.s.sics of science fiction by one of the masters in the field, this tells the troubling story behind the star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem.

7. "DANCING DAN'S CHRISTMAS" by Damon Runyon: When the dust settles on the twentieth century, it's my belief that Damon Runyon will finally be appreciated for his clever plots, his unerring ear for language, and his cast of guys, dolls, gangsters, bookies, chorus girls, c.r.a.pshooters, Salvation Army soul-savers, high rollers, lowlifes, louts, and lovable losers. I chose "Dancing Dan's Christmas," a story involving a mean mobster, a Santa Claus suit, a diamond vanity case, and a few too many Tom and Jerrys, but it was a tough call.

"Palm Beach Santa Claus" and "The Three Wise Guys" were both a close second.

8. "THE GIFT OF THE MAGI" by O. Henry: O. Henry is anotherunderappreciated author, as witness the fact that dozens of stories, screenplays, and sitcoms have copied the plot of this story. But none of them have ever managed to copy the charm or the style of this simple little tale of a watch fob and a set of tortoisesh.e.l.l combs.

9. "RUMPOLE AND THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS" by John Mortimer: If you've encountered the irascible Old Bailey hack, Horace Rumpole, on PBS's Mystery, he seems like the last person to have any Christmas spirit. And he is. Which is why this story works so well. Leave it to John Mortimer to teach us a new meaning of "the Christmas spirit."

10. "THE SANTA CLAUS COMPROMISE" by Thomas Disch: This story of a future in which six- and seven-year-olds have finally gotten their political rights and have exercised them by exposing the Santa scandal could have been written in today's group-rights-activism climate. The fact that it was written back in 1975, when satire was still possible, makes it chilling as well as funny.

11. "ANOTHER CHRISTMAS CAROL" by P. G. Wodehouse: There's no way to describe a P. G. Wodehouse story, so I won't even try. I'll just say that this is the only Christmas story I know of that involves the bubonic plague and tofu, and that, if you've never read him, there could be no better Christmas gift than discovering P. G. Wodehouse.

12. "FOR THE TIME BEING: A CHRISTMAS ORATORIO" by W. H. Auden : Part play, part poem, part masterpiece, this long work is what you should read in January, when you're taking down the Christmas decorations and your sense of goodwill toward men and putting them away for another year, and then facing the bleak post-Bethlehem world we all find ourselves living in And 12 to Watch 1. MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET: The best Christmas movie ever made. (See Introduction.) I am of course talking about the original, with Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn. In black-and-white. Don't even think about either of the wretched remakes.

2. A CHRISTMAS STORY: A close second, this Jean Shepherd story of a kid who desperately wants a BB gun ("You'll shoot your eye out!") for Christmas is that rarest of things-nostalgic without a trace of sentimentality. It has a number of hilarious scenes-the tongue stuck to the flagpole, the b.u.mpus dogs and the turkey, the trip to see the department-store Santa. (Pick your favorite. Mine is the Major Award, no, wait, the Ovaltine magic decoder ring, no, wait . . .) But it's not just a series of comic set pieces. More than any other Christmas story, A Christmas Story captures just how badly you want things when you're a kid and how central Christmas is to the kid's year.

3. THE SURE THING: I almost didn't go see this movie. The previews (and the t.i.tle) made it look like a beery remake of Porky's. But then I noticed that certain scenes looked anawful lot like It Happened One Night and decided to take a chance. Now, every year we watch this great road picture about Allison, who's going to visit her boyfriend for Christmas, and Gibb, who's trying to get to California for "a sure thing" and who happens to hitch a ride in the same car with Allison.

4. MEET JOHN DOE: Frank Capra's other Christmas movie-you know the one I mean-is a lot more famous than this one (and shown approximately 987 times a day through the entire month of December), but this one, which stars Gary Cooper as a down-and-out hobo and Barbara Stanwyck as an enterprising reporter, is really interesting, especially in these days of religious cults, hungry-for-power politicians, a rampant press, and even more rampant cynicism.

5. THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK: Most movies made during World War II were about brave soldiers and the girls who waited faithfully for them on the home front. Preston Sturges instead decided to tell the story of a girl who goes to an army dance and ends up getting married (maybe) and pregnant (definitely), and of her 4-F boyfriend, Norville, who tries to help her out of her predicament. But everything they attempt only makes things worse, till nothing short of a miracle can save them, and you can't even imagine a miracle that would do any good.

6. AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS: This one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti about the wise men stopping at a poor widow's on their way to Bethlehem was originally produced for television. It's out on video, but, even better, it's often performed at Christmas by churches, colleges, and community theater groups, and I definitely recommend seeing it live. The story is haunting, the music is heartbreaking, and every production adds something to the simple story of the crippled shepherd boy, his embittered mother, and their distinguished visitors.

7. A CHRISTMAS CAROL (THE MOVIES): There are a jillion versions of this, starring everybody from Alastair Sim to Captain Picard to Bill Murray. My two favorites are The Muppets' and Mr. Magoo's. Not only are they the most literarily faithful (okay, okay, the Muppet one has two Marleys, but it also has Charles d.i.c.kens as a character-and Rizzo the Bat), but they're the most fun. And they have wonderful scores. The Muppets' songs were written by Paul Williams. Mr. Magoo's were done by the Broadway team of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, and include the wonderful "When You're Alone in the World."

8. WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING: This sweet and romantic comedy with Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman is about the loony complications that can result from being all alone at Christmastime and wishing you were part of a family.

9. THE THREE G.o.dFATHERS: A Christmas story in the last place you'd ever expect to find one-a John Ford Western starring John Wayne-The Three G.o.dfathers tells the story of three bank robbers who find a pioneer woman in a G.o.dforsaken place and about to give birth. This is the perfect movie to watch when you've overdosed on mistletoe and Santas and snow, and it may introduce you to John Ford's Westerns, which are all wonderful, and convince you to go on to The Searchers and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

10.THE LEMON DROP KID: Not only is this based on a Damon Runyon story (see comments on Runyon under "Dancing Dan's Christmas"), but it has BobHope. And the song "Silver Bells."

11.WHITE CHRISTMAS: This wasn't the movie that intro duced the song, but who cares? It's got Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Vera-Ellen, Rosemary Clooney, fifteen Irving Berlin songs, soldiers, snow, sentiment, and killer costumes.

12.LITTLE WOMEN: This isn't really a Christmas movie, but it starts out at Christmas, and the book has one of the great Christmas-story first lines ever: " 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug." And I watched it every Christmas when I was a kid. There are three versions to choose from: the one I grew up on was the June Allyson one (with Elizabeth Taylor per fectly cast as snotty Amy), the Katharine Hepburn version is generally acknowledged to be a cla.s.sic, and my personal favorite is the new one with Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst.