The Christmas Kid by Pete Hamill Read Free Book Online Page A

children, the two wives.”
    “The first wife was the better one,” Mitchell said.
    “How would you know, dear? You never met the second wife.”
    “True,” he said. “But I liked the first one. She had…what’s the word? Spirit?”
    Sybil smiled. “Well, she was certainly wild.”
    Mitchell was quiet then, remembering the children when they were small, running around this apartment like puppies. That was after the war. He was teaching at Brooklyn Tech then, Sybil at Julia Richmond. He remembered the girl, learning how to read when she was three, explaining the comics to her older brother, then reading books to him. The books about the elephant. Babar. Yes. Babar. They were around here somewhere, those books. Still here.
    “You don’t have to do it,” she said abruptly.
    “No, my mind is made up,” he said.
    “You’re sure?”
    “I don’t want to go back to the hospital,” he said. “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be afraid.”
    “All right.”
    “Sybil?”
    “Yes.”
    “Come and sit beside me.”
    She got up slowly, exhaling hard, and sat beside him. The gray was deeper now. There were no lights on in the apartment. She sat beside him, and he put his arm around her.
    “Tell me about the old places,” he said.
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Please,” he said. “Then we’ll have them forever.”
    She snuggled against him, her eyes unfocused. And she began to name the places of their life together.
    “Sea Gate,” she said. “Kiamesha Lake. Luna Park.”
    “Luna Park…”
    “The dances at Prospect Hall. Union Square on a Saturday afternoon, and Fulton Street at Christmastime. Joe’s on Myrtle Avenue…”
    “We had dinner there the first night we ever slept together. I had four dollars in my pocket, and you had two, and we left a dime tip.”
    She smiled. “And the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. And the old Madison Square Garden. Remember how you took me to see CCNY play basketball there? And we walked through Times Square and looked at the giant waterfall, the Bond sign, and the big one for Camels, with the man blowing smoke rings, and everybody looked so glamorous, and we went to Lindy’s and waited for a long time, and saw Milton Berle sitting in a booth.”
    “Yes,” he said. “I remember that.”
    “We bought the News and Mirror, they were two cents each, and we took the subway home to Brooklyn, and you read me Pushkin that night in bed.”
    “Yes, I remember.”
    “And then in the summer, we both had two months off, and the kids went to camp that time, and we went to Penn Station, the old Penn Station, and we took a Pullman to Florida, the two of us sleeping in the train, and it made clackety-clack sounds all through the night, and soon we could smell the oranges. We couldn’t see them, but it was morning, and the train was still moving, and we could smell oranges everywhere, a million of them, a billion, the air full of oranges, and the heat was damp and wet when we walked to the dining car, and we still couldn’t see the orange trees, but we were in Florida. We knew it. The oranges told us.”
    “I remember.”
    “And one New Year’s Eve we went to the Waldorf,” she said. “You’d saved all year to surprise me, and Guy Lombardo was there, and we saw Mayor O’Dwyer in the lobby, with that beautiful wife of his. You kissed me at midnight. And we stayed that night in the Waldorf, and you made love to me, and we looked out the window in the morning, and New York was the most beautiful place we’d ever seen.”
    “Yes.”
    “That summer we went to Lewisohn Stadium and heard Beethoven under the stars. We walked all the way downtown that night, through the streets, through Harlem, into the park, and the Tavern on the Green was still open, and we had cake and coffee and the waiter gave us a look and you laughed and left a dime tip, just for old times’ sake.”
    “We could walk everywhere.…”
    “We walked around the Battery on a Sunday morning, and