Brooklyn, New York, 1952
Gabriel put a hand on Owen’s shoulder, urging him to leave the pew. Flustered, Owen both genuflected and bowed so that he would have tumbled into the aisle had Gabriel not seized his coat.
Even in grief, the boy was awkward.
Wearily, he nodded Owen forward, as if the priest and Grace’s casket might get so far ahead they’d never be caught. Gabriel wished for cold water in a shot glass. To make himself believe it was whiskey, that’d be a neat trick but he still had it in him.
The church was decorated for Christmas, only two weeks away. The crèche
was set up beside the altar, and the figures of Mary and Joseph knelt beside the empty trough. When he was a kid, they’d dropped the baby Jesus in when setting up, none of this pretending a trip to Bethlehem was actually underway. Red bows and holly sprigs adorned each pew, and a wreath was suspended from the choir loft.
The double doors were open and the procession headed towards the square of gray morning. Owen kept his eyes on his feet. Those who’d come to his mother’s funeral mass already pitied him for being the target of every bully coming and going. Gabriel himself had pummeled dozens of Owens in his time. Those skinny, owl-eyed boys, they were all the same. Owen was only ten. He had years to go before he figured out he didn’t deserve it.
The mourners got this. There was Grace’s boss, Mr. Smithwick, his wife, and their trio of round daughters. The Smithwicks owned a dessert restaurant over on Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was no bakery but a real sit-down place. The Linzer Torte baker had come and the two waitresses who could not stop crying for Grace, one of their own.
Only the cluster of old ladies who attended morning Mass every day of the week might think that it was Owen’s grief that turned him clumsy. And they probably figured Gabriel was his father. But a son of his would be blonde and quick, easily matched to the man he was now: tall, his light hair fading gently to white, still holding on to something of the athlete he’d once been. The drinking years had somehow not caved him in or carved him up.
Grace used to laugh about this. How come you’re not ruined? God knows, I will be when I’m forty, she’d said. Gabriel had disagreed to be polite. He recalled his first impression of her, perched on a folding chair in the cold church basement. The chair’s legs were uneven and each time she moved, the chair tipped, as if she, the only woman there, were on the deck of a listing ship. She shifted often, nervous, and the chair embarrassed her. Finally, she slid over to perch on the far left, and this brought her closer to him. She was skinny with sharp elbows and hips, still young, (twenty-seven, he’d learn) but already worn around the eyes.
Yet she’d put on pink lipstick, and tried to curl her brown hair. Gabriel had smiled at this and she’d smiled shyly back. Her angular face, not pretty, turned almost sweet. Some of the men grumbled, but after the evening she told her story with downcast eyes, they stopped. She belonged.
Later, Gabriel heard her story again, unedited, even though group members were discouraged from socializing in the world above the basement. But she was the one who suggested coffee, sensing that Gabriel got that the whole business was harder for a woman. She did not have a war as cover.
Grace had Owen when she was seventeen. She’d planned to give him up for adoption but figured she’d never stop looking for him on the street. One night as the three of them, Gabriel, Grace, and Owen ate dinner together, spaghetti, cooked by Gabriel, she’d joked that she kept Owen to save herself this aggravation and that she named him after the hospital bill. Owen laughed like a rabbit. Gabriel always meant to tell her to knock it off. He figured she used to scream these things at the kid but had lost the memories.
When Gabriel, privately, asked where the boy’s father was, Grace said, “Purgatory, near the exit to Hell.”
He wasn’t sure if Grace meant he was dead or if she wished he was.
“He from Brooklyn?” Gabriel asked.
Grace had turned over in bed, letting her back answer the question. She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if he was a Brooklyn boy, or who he even was.
Gabriel spent much of that night staring at the ceiling. He’d come out of blackouts covered in vomit and blood, not sure where he even was, but fuck, he’d never woken up pregnant.
When the priest halted at the end of the aisle to do the final blessing, Owen nearly bumped into the casket. Gabriel grabbed his coat and decided this one was his fault. He should have at least held the kid’s hand.
* *
When Grace collapsed at work, one of the waitresses called Gabriel at the grammar school where he worked as a janitor. He’d been thinking about disabling the boiler. Nothing that would require an expensive repair. Just a tweak that would shut it down for a bit. No heat would mean no school tomorrow, and it was going to snow. The kids would remember it forever, though they’d never know it was his Christmas gift to them.
When he first heard the tumble of words, the only sense in it was Grace’s name and hospital, Gabriel expected an accident caused by rum, which she used to drink disguised as plain Coca-Cola. A tumble down the restaurant’s basement stairs. Struck by a car while crossing the street.
“Aneurysm.” The jowled doctor shut his eyes, exhausted by a day of pronouncing long words.
Tears came to Gabriel’s eyes, which were taken for sorrow but were, in fact, relief that something inside Grace had simply broken. She would be glad, for Owen’s sake that he wouldn’t be ashamed to tell how his mother died. Yet, she’d be frustrated that she never got to explain herself, as she always swore to Gabriel she someday would. Someday, when Owen was old enough to understand, she would say sorry for the slaps across the face, her shrill voice. She’d tell how she loved him, and never, ever meant it.
* * *
The Smithwicks provided the after-funeral lunch, held at Grace’s apartment. They’d wanted to hold it at their restaurant but Gabriel had held firm. Owen would be better off at home. He didn’t add that this way, the boy could slip off into his bedroom and get away from the questions about how he was holding up.
Gabriel and Grace lived in the same building. When the apartment opened up, he’d hesitated for a day and then told her about it. She understood that this was as far as he’d go. He told her from the start that he could not marry again. It was his penance.
Grace’s place was a floor down from his. A kitchen, living room, bathroom. She’d given the bedroom to Owen and slept on the couch.
The mourners from the church were there and some of the building’s other tenants wandered in, hungry. When everyone had gone and the dishes had been carried to the kitchen, Mr. Smithwick told Gabriel that they would be taking Owen. Gabriel stared. Taking him where? he started to ask. but Mr. Smithwick continued talking. They had the brownstone on Cranberry street, across from the restaurant. Owen would have his own room. He’d have a home.
“A nice home,” Mrs. Smithwick said, who had always been kind to Grace through pursed lips.
They would legally adopt him. It would all be on the up and up. There would be no chances, in case the father turned up.
Gabriel nearly snapped that Owen’s father didn’t know he had a son.
“Have you asked him if he wants—” Gabriel said.
“We told him. He’s still in shock, poor thing, but he seemed glad.”
Owen prowled the apartment, ignoring the Smithwick girls as they asked him questions about school, his friends, and did he like dogs? The youngest pressed a plastic cup of ginger ale in his hand and he thanked her but did not drink it.
When they were finally alone, Gabriel asked, his fists deep in his pockets, “You want to?”
Owen shrugged. “I’ll be alright.”
Gabriel tried not to think about the itch in his throat. It’d be simple to talk himself into a bout of self-pity, and binge on it. So far, he’d held off but with Owen gone too, Gabriel knew the fight would draw him all the way in and it drained him to even think about it.
He had not been Grace’s husband. He had no money. Besides, a lawyer would laugh in his face. An ex-con drunk, (reformed, but so what?) wants to raise a kid he’s not related to?
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “It’ll be good, with them.”
Owen gazed at him with his mother’s sad blue eyes.
* * *
Mrs. Smithwick decided Owen should stay with Gabriel until Christmas Eve. She believed she was being generous, giving the boy more time. But Mrs. Smithwick, even if she didn’t realize it, wanted to get Owen on Christmas Eve because it would turn the day magical--a real live orphan arriving.
On the 23rd, Gabriel helped Owen pack. Only once did Owen ask why he couldn’t stay here. He got that he couldn’t move in with Gabriel since Gabriel wasn’t his stepfather. But he’d be fine. He already got himself up for school. He could even kind of cook.
“Anyway, you’d be right upstairs?” Owen said tentatively.
“Yeah, but kids can’t live alone,” Gabriel said.
Owen turned away, but not before Gabriel caught the smile, one of pity for him, Gabriel. Gabriel got it. When your mother is passed out on the bathroom floor, that’s alone.
Owen would do fine with the Smithwicks. The boys might be nicer at his new school, or at least not hit as hard. He’d have three sisters competing to spoil him. The Smithwicks would get him a bike. Braces. College.
Yet, Gabriel worried. And so, though Owen was due to be delivered to the Smithwicks at three o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Gabriel first brought Owen to see Kring the King.
Since sunrise, the day had been growing steadily colder and by 4 o’clock, it was bitter. As they walked, Gabriel spoke. The frost in front of his face seemed, not his breath but his words, freezing and falling away.
Kring the King had once been a magician. A vaudevillian, the very best of his kind. Based on his eyes, his age was put close to one hundred. He lived on the third floor of an apartment building on the very edge of the neighborhood.
Kring the King met his wife on Christmas Eve. Before he knew her name, he’d told her he loved her. A week later, he dropped a handkerchief over her left hand and pulled it away to reveal a diamond ring on her finger. She became his wife and his assistant.
Years and years ago, during a Christmas Eve show in a Flatbush theater, he made her disappear with a flick of his cape. He pretended to be astonished. He called her name, then flicked his cape again. This was the routine. She’d reappear and together, they’d bow. It was their warm-up trick, popular with the audience, damn easy. But that night, he could not bring her back.
The tale got told so many times, grew so many different endings, nobody could say anymore what had happened. Some believed that the wife’s weak heart gave out and she died right there on stage. Others said it was not a weak heart but a broken one. In the nether-space between her disappearance and reappearance, she began to see their lost child, and one night chose to join him. Cynical versions had her running at the moment Kring’s eyes were not on her.
For a long time after she’d gone, Kring drank, Gabriel whispered. Bad, for decades. But eventually, he made it back to his kind, the living.
“He gets through every other day of the year. Christmas Eves, though…” Gabriel shook his head and Owen bowed his head.
Gabriel and Owen were the second to arrive at the stoop of the building directly across the street. A woman, maybe forty, stood shivering, even though she wore a blue wool coat and matching hat and gloves. She and Gabriel exchanged brief nods. Soon, others assembled. Two men in their twenties who might have been twins but were at least brothers. A skinny girl of twenty trembled in a thin coat. A gray couple stood perfectly still, their shoulders touching.
The third-floor window opened and Kring the King climbed out onto his fire escape, uniformed in a black cape over a white nightshirt and black pants with a rip in one knee. His gray hair looked as though violent hands had just run through it. He wore red mittens.
Kring held up a whiskey bottle and squinted before he settled it beneath his arm. He went back inside and came out first with a potted spruce, undecorated. He propped it up against the brick building. Next time, he reappeared with six flat-bottomed candles, white and red, which he lined up on the railing of the fire escape, hands nimble in spite of the mittens.
“They’ll fall,” Owen said, disapprovingly.
Gabriel put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, spindly even through the layers of clothes he wore.
On the railing, in between the candles, Kring hung two stars made of silver wire and two bells of red. Then he took the whiskey bottle in both hands and stood still as the afternoon finished. Christmas lights came on in the windows above and below him, and then up and down the street.
Gabriel shifted his gaze from Kring’s to Owen’s. The boy’s brow furrowed.
Kring raised the bottle and turned it upside down. It was empty.
The thin girl chewed her fingernails.
“Alright,” whispered one of the brothers.
The woman in the blue folded her hands as if in prayer. The couple joined hands. When Kring the King lowered the bottle, Owen looked at Gabriel, quizzically.
Gabriel whispered. “Don’t look away.”
Kring twisted the cap back on. He took the bottle by the neck and flung it off the fire escape. Halfway down, it disappeared.
Owen gave a startled, “Oh!”
Gabriel didn’t breathe. If this was the one year he couldn’t…
The candles…the Christmas tree…the bells, the stars…
Kring the King made it happen. When it was over, a sigh went through the watchers that sounded like the final note of a carol or a hymn, perhaps something from a century ago.
Owen turned to Gabriel. “Who was she?” His voice trembled.
Gabriel gently asked, “What did she look like?”
They drew closer, the brothers, the woman in blue, the thin girl and the couple.
Owen looked at each of them and then spoke without shyness.
“She was a kid, I don’t know, five or six, and her hair was in a long braid that was over her shoulder. Her dress was maybe blue or green.”
The candlelight, Gabriel thought, would have made it hard to tell.
“Josephine,” one of the brothers breathed.
“Our sister,” the other added. “What’d it look like, where she was?”
Owen told them what he saw and heard and when he’d finished, they thanked him and one clapped him on the shoulder. Josey, they said, drowned at Rockaway when she was seven.
“Who’d you see?” Owen asked them eagerly and Gabriel was proud that he understood.
“A soldier. Young guy, dark hair,” One brother said, and the other nodded.
The woman in blue raised her hand as though she’d been called on in school. “Nico? Nico was killed in France. He was my husband.”
The brothers told her in turns. One took her hand as he spoke.
When they’d finished, she hugged one and then the other. After she let go, she said, “Mine was a girl with long blonde hair. So pretty!”
“Clara,” the couple said together.
Their daughter, taken by polio in a day and a half when she was eighteen.
Together, they had seen a man near their own age, with kind eyes and a stoop to his shoulders.
The thin girl shoved her hands in her pockets. “My grandfather.”
She had no questions. “I saw a lady with brown hair, not too tall.”
Owen stepped forward to listen, rapt.
As they walked home, Gabriel and Owen were silent until Owen stopped on the corner of their block.
“I thought,” Owen whispered. “he’d just make the lights by light and that’d be it.”
“No,” Gabriel said.
“Did you ever see anyone?”
“My wife,” Gabriel answered.
“She died too?”
“A long time ago. When I was away, at the war,” Gabriel knew he made it sound like he’d gone on a trip without her but it was all he could muster.
“What was her name?”
“Katie Rose,” Gabriel said. “And that’s what I called her, both names.”
“How come he let you see her once, but not tonight?”
“I wasn’t there for me tonight. They know, see.”
Owen looked up at him, his lips parted as if to ask his hundred questions.
But slowly, he started walking again.
Gabriel smiled, almost laughed out loud. Owen got it. When you receive a gift, you don’t ask why, or how much it cost. You said thanks. For the rest of his life, Owen would recognize magic when he saw it. Even if he couldn’t put it into words yet–even if he never could–he got it. The one you love the most, you’ll see again.
Gabriel was all at once at peace.