Читать книгу Seeking Rapture: A Memoir - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 7

Long after my friends and schoolmates had outgrown Santa Claus, I still believed in him. It was a secret, potentially embarrassing faith, one encouraged by my grandparents who beieved that, in other ways, I’d been forced to grow up too quickly. My parents’ marriage ended when I was six months old, in 1961, in a community where divorce was still more scandal than commonplace. My mother’s mother and father raised me in the house where she herself had been raised and where she lived until I was six. As I grew up, I saw my father only twice, and my mother’s leaving was something I precipitated, unwittingly, one Christmas morning.

I’d woken up too early. Hours before dawn, I crept down the hall to the fireplace to see if my stocking had been filled. Outside, the winter sky was still black; wind rattled the windows in their frames. The stocking was heavy, stuffed with promise. Having touched it, I found I couldn’t let go, and I lifted it from the nail and carried it to my mother’s bedroom, next door to my own. Her room was utterly quiet; there was no sound of her breathing. Her bed, when I felt it, was cool, flat, empty.

Filled with dread – where could she be in the dark, wide night? – I went to my grandparents and woke them up.

‘Mommy’s not here,’ I said. ‘Mommy’s gone.’

As soon as my grandmother turned on the light, as soon as I saw her face, I knew that I had made a mistake. I hadn’t saved my mother from whatever I was afraid might have befallen her. Instead, I had betrayed her.

She returned at seven, slipping through the kitchen door, her white Christmas Eve dress looking rumpled and dingy in the gray light of morning. The ensuing fight was spectacular, even for old enemies like my mother and grandmother. Loud enough to be heard through two sets of closed doors, it featured words I didn’t know, words that rang with complex menace. Assignation. Promiscuity.

Each Christmas Eve, after I was asleep, my grandfather would take off his shoes and dip them in the ashes left from the fire. He carefully made footprints that led from the hearth across the beige carpet to the tree and back, then wiped the soles clean. He ate the cookies I’d set out on Santa’s plate, shook crumbs on the tabletop, crumpled the napkin, drank the cold cocoa. In the morning, I noted all these signs and believed in them.

My stocking brimmed with gifts wrapped meticulously in marbled Florentine paper tied with narrow ribbons. I opened them slowly, with unnatural, unchildlike care. Inside were tiny carved bears, sets of colored pencils too small to sharpen, books the size of postage stamps. Always, the guiding aesthetic was of a life made as small as possible: an electric lamp complete with three-volt bulbs the size of apple seeds. It didn’t matter that I had no dollhouse to plug it into. I didn’t want, ever, to test it.

Adults find it difficult to reconcile the simultaneous knowing and unknowing that is inherent in faith. Children rarely try. I had many opportunities, even invitations, to conclude that it was my mother who filled my stocking. And I was old enough to have heard for years the playground challenge: You don’t believe in Santa, do you? Well, no, I didn’t, and yes, I did. What I believed in was some thing I identified as Santa Claus, having no more sophisticated language to articulate what I now understand as a longing for the ideal home. To me, this platonic space was so far away that it appeared as small as a dollhouse, but it was the place where my mother and I would someday live: a home too small and controlled to contain quarrels or tears.

The Christmas I was nine, my dark-haired, white-skinned mother went to Jamaica with a man I didn’t know and came home on New Year’s Day, her hair streaked blond, her white skin brown and peeling. In her absence, for which she tried to apologize with brightly painted maracas and pink shell bracelets, my grandmother had filled my stocking. On Christmas morning I saw right away that something was wrong. It was too lumpy, the things it contained too big: hair bands and candy, perfume, a matching pen and pencil set – nothing I wanted.

‘How was Christmas?’ my mother asked, sitting on the couch, scratching her sunburned arms. ‘What did Santa bring you?’

‘Who?’ I said disdainfully. ‘Santa? Why would I believe in something as stupid as Santa?’

The surprise and hurt on her face and on my grandmother’s was what I wanted, and yet I felt their quick intake of breath as if it were my own. I felt the air leave the room as if I’d struck the house itself, punishing it for being what it was, outsized and filled with mistakes lit by the glare of hundred-watt bulbs.

Now I live in the big city of New York, and my children are subjected each holiday season to a barrage of Santas – Santas ringing bells and asking for money, Santas sitting in department stores and posing for pictures, Santas doing the cancan in sync with the Rockettes. At five and seven, already they exchanged knowing looks with each other, having, I think, decided to spare me the truth.

So much of the holiday ritual – exhausting, essential – is about creating perfect moments, picturesque gatherings that cannot be sustained longer than a night, if that long. Years after the deaths of my mother and grandparents, I’m the stocking stuffer of the family, the one who travels hours to a store that sells small-scale horses with real horsehair manes and tails. I keep a bag hidden in a closet in my study and fill it with things I know my children will love. As early as June I am gathering little toys, things I won’t allow myself to give them until the occasion – Christmas – presents the excuse I need. I can’t face their father’s accusations: You spoil them. You buy them too much.

And more damning: These things aren’t for them, they’re for you. They’re for a little girl who doesn’t exist anymore.

Except that she does, of course. We’re all burdened by ourselves. This is what makes the holidays the celebrated trial we bemoan. There are so many hopes and longings, so many pasts and futures, all jostling and confused, that the present can seem as thin and flimsy as the discarded wrappings scattered around the tree. Just at that point when we’re confronted by the remains of it all, we find ourselves asking, Was it worth it? Did it work? Were we all as happy together as we thought?