Bah! Humbug! Page 3

  DICKENS: When it had said these words, the specter went to the window and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.

  “Marvelous, marvelous! All of you!” Miss Cavani said in a loud whisper. “First Stave?” she asked, and everyone replied in silent mime, by making the victory sign with their parted fingers. “Shona, just watch that your mustache doesn’t slip into your mouth, sweetheart. Come here, I can glue it down just a teeny bit more.”

  Miss Cavani attended to Shona. Harry wished he could attend to Shona instead. Stefan and Désol’é were doing mirror faces: one made a face and the other had to copy. It was one of Miss Cavani’s exercises. The basketball trio were arguing in fierce whispers whether a three-point shot they had all seen in a game a few days earlier was after the buzzer or not.

  Harry sat looking at his Scrooge shoes. They pinched his feet. That felt right. “Pinch” was one of the words he had written in his “Scrooge Journal” that Miss Cavani asked him to keep. The word sat alongside “One-track mind” and “Power.” At the top of the page, he had written the question that Miss Cavani had fed him: “Is Scrooge content?” Content? Content? What does it even mean? “CON-tent” was one of Dad’s words. “Online content,” he would say. “I’ve got to head out and put up some more content,” he had said in the middle of his cousin’s wedding, Harry remembered, and slipped off to be with this “content.”

  He realized that as he was mulling over these thoughts, he was staring at classroom G29’s clock. During school, as it hit the hour, that evil buzzer would sound out across the whole building, but, thankfully, it was switched off after regular school hours. He imagined Dad, thinking of how long it would take him to get to the office, and he found himself wondering if Dad had always been like that.

  Had he always been “there” rather than “here”? Content to be with his content?

  Ray and François sat in the dark. For some reason the park’s relay substation was vulnerable to electric storms.

  “We’re talking to Mumbai and we can’t even get electricity from down the road into our unit,” Ray muttered, hoping to make up with François with a bit of enjoyable grumbling.

  “This is normal where my father lived in the countryside,” François said, laughing. “Every summer, when I was a boy, always the escapes of water.”

  “Hm?”

  “Coming through the roofs.”

  “Oh, yes, leaks,” Ray added helpfully. It had worked. They were friends again. He continued talking: “Playing out late one time with my friend Stinker, there was one hell of a storm, and we stood under the big chestnut tree at the end of my road. At first, it was perfect. We looked up into the huge green umbrella above our heads, and we were so safe from the rain that we laughed. It wasn’t because it was funny, though. We laughed . . . because . . . it was . . .”

  “Nice?”

  “Yeah . . . and then, this is the point . . . the leaves started leaking! Plop, plop, plop, on the tops of our heads and on our noses . . . and we laughed even more. That’s something. When you’re a kid, you laugh at things even though they’re not funny. I haven’t thought of that before.”

  DICKENS: When Scrooge awoke, the chimes of a neighboring church struck the four quarters. So he listened for the hour.

  SCROOGE: Six? Seven! Eight? Nine! Ten! Eleven! Twelve! Twelve? It was past two when I went to bed. The clock’s wrong. An icicle must have got into the works. Twelve! (Checks his pocket watch.) Why, it isn’t possible that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night. It isn’t possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon!

  DICKENS: The idea being an alarming one, Scrooge scrambled out of bed and groped his way to the window. He had to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing gown before he could see anything, and could see very little then.

  SCROOGE: There is no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there would be if night had beaten off bright day and taken possession of the world.

  DICKENS: Sighing with relief, Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he tried not to think, the more he thought of Marley’s Ghost. Every time he resolved within himself that it was all a dream, his mind flew back, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked through:

  SCROOGE: Was it a dream or not?

  DICKENS: Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters more, when he remembered, all of a sudden, that the Ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He promised himself to lie awake until the hour was past; and, considering that he could no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this wasn’t a difficult task.

  (Ding, dong!)

  SCROOGE: A quarter past.

  (Ding, dong!)

  Half past!

  (Ding, dong!)

  A quarter to it.

  (Ding, dong!)

  The hour itself and nothing else!

  DICKENS: Scrooge spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, and Scrooge found himself face-to-face with the unearthly visitor who drew them. It was a strange figure, like a child — yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium. Its hair was white as if with age, and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it. The arms were very long and muscular, the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white, and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand, and had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. From the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light.

  SCROOGE: Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?

  GHOST: I am!

  SCROOGE: Who and what are you?

  GHOST: I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.

  SCROOGE: Long past?

  GHOST: No. Your past.

  SCROOGE: What brings you here?

  GHOST: Your welfare! Rise, and walk with me!

  DICKENS: The grasp was not to be resisted. Scrooge rose, but finding that the Spirit made toward the window, he clasped its robe.

  SCROOGE: I am mortal, and liable to fall.

  GHOST: Bear but a touch of my hand there, on your heart, and you shall be upheld in more than this!

  DICKENS: The pair passed through the wall, and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either side. The city had entirely vanished. The darkness and the mist had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon the ground.

  SCROOGE: Good Heaven! I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!

  DICKENS: Scrooge was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten.

  GHOST: Your lip is trembling. And what is that upon your cheek?

  SCROOGE: It’s . . . it’s a pimple . . .

  Laughter rose up from the audience. Eva thought of how angry Harry had been when a zit appeared on his face.

  “It’s just a zit,” she had said to him.

  “I hate it, I hate it,” he had shouted at the mirror.

  “Maybe shouting at it will scare it away,” Eva had said, which, even in the midst of his rage, had made him laugh.

  “You think Shona won’t like you,” Eva had said teasingly.

  “That has nothing to do with it,” he said.

  “Everything to do with it,” Eva had replied.

  And now, in the show, Harry was making everyone laugh with his “pimple.”

  No, not Harry, she reminded herself. Scrooge. Mr. Scrooge.

  SCROOGE: You may lead me wherever you wish.

  GHOST: You recollect the way?

  SCROOGE: Remember it! I could walk it blindfolded.

  GHOST: St
range to have forgotten it for so many years! Let us go on.

  After a long silence in the dark, François asked, “Why was he called Stinker?”

  “Not for the reason you might think.” Ray laughed. “I used to go over to their place evenings, weekends, and have a great time. Once their tub was blocked and I was there when a plumber was over, under the tub. My friend asked the plumber how he was doing, and the plumber said, ‘Well, sonny, it’s a real stinker.’ Anyway, my friend came back into the room, and his mom asked him how the plumber was doing, and my friend said, in front of all of us, ‘Well, sonny, it’s a real stinker.’ He sounded so much like the plumber we fell over laughing and laughing. We were only around seven. Imagine that, all you have to do when you’re that young is say something like that, and the whole world seems hilarious. ‘Ha! Well, sonny, it’s a real stinker.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

  SCROOGE: Walking along this road, I recognize every gate, and post, and tree. That little market town in the distance, with its bridge, its church and winding river. And these boys coming by in great spirits, these merry travelers — I knew them, every one.

  GHOST: These are but shadows of the things that have been. They do not know we are here.

  DICKENS: Why was Scrooge overjoyed beyond all bounds to see them? Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past? Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at crossroads and byways, for their several homes? What was Merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon Merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him? The pair soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little dome, with a weather vane on the top, and a bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken fortunes: for the spacious offices were little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed. Entering the dreary hall, they found the house to be cold and vast. They went across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened to a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain wooden benches and desks. At one of these a lonely boy, neglected by his friends, was reading near a feeble fire.

  SCROOGE: Poor boy! That’s me, sitting there. I wish . . . but it’s too late now.

  GHOST: What is the matter?

  SCROOGE: Nothing. Nothing.

  DICKENS: The Ghost smiled thoughtfully and waved its hand.

  A drip landed on the table in front of them. The rain was so heavy that it even found a way to get in around the edge of the skylight above them.

  Ray groped his way over to the garbage can in the corner, took out an empty paper coffee cup, and brought it back to the table. He placed it where the drop of rainwater had fallen on the table.

  “Ha! When Lisa and I got together, you know, we were in an apartment on the top floor of an old tenement building. We took the leaks for everyone below us. We would lie in bed listening to the music of the drips falling into the pots and pans we had laid on the floor to catch them . . . Ping, pong, pong, ping. She said it was jazz . . . our jazz.”

  They listened to the sound of the drips falling into the cup.

  More like “bock” than “pong” or “ping,” Ray thought. “Do you know what my kids like hearing about most, François?”

  “How you and Lisa got together, I suppose.”

  “Not really. They’re more interested in the time just after that. What it was like when it was just us two without them. It’s like they think it’s some kind of time we’re not entitled to have. I tell them about that jazz with the drips. I tell them, and it’s true, I couldn’t believe my luck. All through my teens, I was the geek kid. Girls used to use me to hide behind, so that they could peek around me to get a view of some other guy. At college, everyone would go off in pairs apart from me. But then, hey! I got with someone who wanted ME! I tell the kids that. And they laugh. Eva says, ‘Mom must have been crazy. Why would you want HIM?’”

  Bock!

  Another drip landed in the coffee cup.

  GHOST: Let us see another Christmas!

  DICKENS: Scrooge’s former self grew larger at the words, and there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

  (A little girl, much younger than the boy, comes darting in, puts her arms about his neck, kisses him . . .)

  GIRL: Dear, dear brother! I have come to bring you home, dear brother! To bring you home, home, home!

  BOY: Home, little Fan?

  GIRL: Yes! Home, for good and all. Home, forever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home, and he said, “Yes, you should,” and sent me in a coach to bring you. And you’re to be a man and are never to come back here; but first, we’re to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.

  BOY: You are quite a woman, little Fan!

  DICKENS: She clapped her hands and laughed, and began to drag him, in her childish eagerness, toward the door.

  GHOST: Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered. But she had a large heart!

  SCROOGE: So she had.

  GHOST: She died a woman, and had, I think, children.

  SCROOGE: One child.

  GHOST: True. Your nephew!

  SCROOGE: Yes.

  DICKENS: They were now in a busy thoroughfare, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed, where shadowy carts and coaches battled for the way, and all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by the dressing of the shops, that here, too, it was Christmastime again; but it was evening, and the streets were lighted up.

  GHOST: Do you know this place?

  SCROOGE: Know it? It’s old Fezziwig’s! I was apprenticed here!

  Ray looked at the paper cup. If the rain went on long enough, it would fill up. That’s what saving is like. You collect what you get: bock, bock, bock!

  He nodded to himself in a satisfied way, and yet he remembered Lisa asking him, Is there going to be a moment, Ray, when you have enough?

  Enough. She had made the word sound a tiny bit longer than usual.

  Ray turned to François. “Tell me straight,” he said, gripping François’s arm. “Do you think I’m greedy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ray dropped his head down onto his fist as it sat on the table. “I’ve never told anyone this before. I was about ten and my mom’s brother was over, Uncle Phil, and they sent me out of the room. I did as I was told. They thought I had gone to my room. I did, but then I crept back and listened through the door. They were begging Uncle Phil for money. And he was saying they hadn’t paid him back for some other time. They were pleading with him. Like I say, begging. I had never heard them talk like that. They were like . . . like . . . little kids begging for presents. Then I heard Uncle Phil get up, and I scampered back to my room. When I heard the front door slam, I came out and they were crying. Both of them. I remember looking up at them and Mom saying, ‘It’s your uncle Phil, he’s not well.’ They were lying. They were lying to cover up for being so poor they had to beg for money.

  “I’ve never told anyone that, François. I can’t bear it. Everything that happened to me after that comes from that moment. I see their faces, looking down at me, saying, ‘Uncle Phil, he’s not well,’ and in my head I hear them pleading with Phil for cash. Money. This stuff!”

  Ray put his hand in his pocket, pulled out some folded bills, and threw them into the air. They disappeared into the dark on the floor.

  “Imagine, if you could turn back time and I could be Uncle Phil and when they stand there saying, ‘Pleeeeeeease, pleeeeease,’ I just hand them a wad of cash.”

  They went on sitting in the dark, listening to Ray breathing deeply.

  “Why don’t you go back to the show?” François said. “Go back.”

  SCROOGE: Why, it’s old Fezziwig! Bless his heart, it’s
Fezziwig alive again!

  (Old Fezziwig lays down his pen and looks up at the clock, which is pointing to the hour of seven.)

  FEZZIWIG: Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!

  SCROOGE: There am I! And Dick Wilkins, to be sure! Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Dear, dear!

  FEZZIWIG: Yo ho, my boys! No more work tonight. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let’s have the shutters up, before a man can say, Jack Robinson! Clear away, my lads, and let’s have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!

  DICKENS: Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn’t have cleared away, or couldn’t have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, the floor was swept, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire, and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ballroom as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night. In came a fiddler and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother’s particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door. In they all came, one after another. There were dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was a great piece of cold roast, and there was a great piece of cold boiled, and there were mince pies, and plenty of beer. When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas. Thus the cheerful voices died away, and the lads were left to their beds, which were under a counter in the back shop.

  GHOST: A small matter, to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.