Chapter 23: Christmas in the Brownstone
The tree was too big for the hall, which Marcus said four times and Maisie overruled four times, on the grounds that the house had grown.
It took Shay, the gardener, and a delivery boy with the expression of a man reconsidering his career to get it through the door, and when it stood at last in the hall โ a foot of it bent against the ceiling like a guest ducking โ the whole household came to look at it the way people look at weather. Mrs. K said something in Polish that Nora had learned enough to know was not a compliment to the tree, and then went and fetched the good boxes from the attic herself, the ones that had not been opened in two years, and set them down in the hall with the air of a woman defusing something.
Eleanor's ornaments came out of their tissue one by one. Jack hung the glass birds with both hands, tongue in the corner of his mouth, a surgeon of nine. Maisie hung everything she was given at the exact height of Maisie, so that the tree wore a dense, glittering belt and bare ankles. Nobody corrected her. Marcus stood in the study doorway with a bauble in his hand for a full minute, forgotten, watching his wife's Christmas come out of its boxes into his children's hands, and then he hung it, high up, where it caught the light.
Frankie came home on the Saturday before Christmas, up the brownstone steps on a cane, furious about the cane, the fussing, and the number of pillows the household had apparently been saving for this occasion. Maisie's drawing was taped to his cast where a signature would go on a lesser man's โ the house, the garden, five stick figures holding hands across the whole width of the paper, and across the top in letters that leaned with effort: EVERYBODY. He sat at the kitchen counter and ate three of Mrs. K's mince pies with the concentration of a man passing an examination, and when Maisie informed him that he was in the drawing, he looked at it for a while and said that was the first true thing anybody had printed about him in years.
The feast happened at the dining table โ the whole of it, in courses, with the good china that had spent two years in a cupboard like a held breath. Frankie carved, one-handed, badly, refusing all help with the serenity of a saint. The children were loud. Mrs. K, presented by Jack with a paper crown and a formal address of thanks composed by committee, cried into the gravy and denied it at volume. And Marcus Doyle sat at the head of his own table in his own house and ate Christmas dinner with his family, at the hour families eat it, and thought about a night not long past when he had signed his name to becoming nobody in particular, and how it had not felt, not once since, like a loss.
It was after, in the lull โ the children conscripted to the music room to give the grown-ups' coffee room to happen, Frankie's cane hooked over his chair, the tree holding its bent head over the hall โ that Marcus said, "Nora. A moment," and produced an envelope from his breast pocket.
It was not a Christmas envelope. It was a lawyer's envelope, thick, cream, unhurried. She knew its species the way you know a knock.
"Open it," he said.
Inside: a deed, a discharge, a solicitor's letter of almost insulting brevity, and a key โ an ordinary, unglamorous front-door key, its bow worn smooth. The deed named a house in South Boston. The deed named Nora Bennett.
She read the letter twice. The debt on her mother's house โ the debt that had eaten the house in the spring, the debt she had signed away at a desk with a bunch of her mother's keys in her hand and nowhere, afterward, to put them โ had been bought up in June. Quietly. Through two law firms and a holding company with no name worth remembering. Bought, and held, and now discharged, and the house โ rented these past months by the estate agent to strangers who had no idea โ was hers.
"June," she said. "You did this in June."
"You'd been in the house three weeks." He said it as if that were an explanation of timing and not, as it was, an explanation of everything. "Mrs. K mentioned the โ circumstances. I made enquiries. It seemedโ" he stopped. She watched the most feared man in Boston search his vocabulary like a man in a dark room, and she made a decision, out of a mercy that was mostly stubbornness.
"No," she said.
He looked up.
"You don't get to say 'it seemed' and put a house in an envelope, Marcus. Not to me. Not in this kitchen." She held the key like evidence. "I have run this house for a year on one rule: we say the true thing at the table. So say it. Why?"
The refrigerator hummed. From the music room came the sound of Maisie instructing Frankie, at the piano, in the correct tempo of a carol, and Frankie โ Boston's second most feared man โ obeying.
"Because you came into this house with a suitcase," Marcus said at last, "and built my children a home out of nothing but rules about soup and bedtime, and all the while you had no door of your own in the world. Becauseโ" the sentence cost him; he paid it "โbecause I wanted you to have one. So that staying here would be a choice. A person shouldn't stay because there's nowhere else. Not in my house. Not anymore."
"Say it plainer," Nora said, gently, because she was not a cruel woman, only a thorough one.
He looked at the envelope, at the key, at her. "We wanted you to be free to leave," he said, "so that we'd know what it meant if you didn't. I wanted it. Say it plainer than that, I can't."
Nora turned the key over in her hand โ her mother's key, in effect: the spare, she realised, the one that had lived under the mat, its bow worn by her mother's thumb.
"Then hear the plain thing back," she said. "I'll keep the house. I'll rent it to someone who needs a door โ there's a young teacher at the children's school sleeping on her sister's sofa, and she'll do. But I'm not moving out of this one, Marcus. You don't give a woman back her door in December and expect her to walk out of yours at Christmas."