Christmas Bells (16 page)

As she approached her gate, the strap of her carry-on bag pressing uncomfortably against her shoulder, the passenger at the counter finished speaking with the agent and turned, boarding pass in hand. When his eyes met hers, Laurie felt a surge of unexpected delight.

“Hey, Laurie,” said Jason. “Late Friday final?”

“Of course. Every semester.” She glanced past him to the board behind the agents' counter. “Oh, no. An hour delay? Really? The monitor in ticketing said it was only fifteen minutes.”

“I think even an hour is optimistic.” Jason sighed. “I've already been here three hours. My flight to O'Hare was supposed to leave at nine, but it was canceled, so everyone's been scrambling for seats on the next flight.” He held up his boarding pass, and Laurie glimpsed the same flight number as her own. “I'm one of the lucky ones.”

At that moment he spotted a pair of empty seats and suggested they claim them. As they awaited the boarding announcement and braced themselves for more delays, their complaints about the weather and travel soon turned to more interesting topics. Laurie learned that Jason was the second eldest of four children, and that his hometown was Hartford, Connecticut, and that he had applied to graduate school in mechanical engineering but would probably have to defer admission until he served out his ROTC commitment. He had no plans for a lifelong career in the military, he confided. Although he was proud to serve his country, he had only joined ROTC to pay for college.

When Laurie told him about her hopes to attend graduate school, his brow furrowed in surprise. “I thought you were going into journalism.”

“No,” she replied. “Social work. You know, for the wealth and glamour.”

He smiled, but he also shook his head. “But you're such a good writer. I've read your work in the
Observer
. I just assumed, since you've worked on the paper for four years, that you wanted to make it your career.”

“Oh, no. That's just for fun.” She couldn't help feeling flattered. “You've read my work? And . . . you like it?”

He assured her he did, and she was impressed when he mentioned a few particular articles to prove it. Another delay was
announced, and then another, but they scarcely noticed, so engrossed were they in their conversation. And then came the news they had been expecting and dreading all along—their flight had been canceled.

A chorus of groans and a smattering of expletives nearly drowned out a second announcement: Since conditions were not expected to improve, the airline had arranged for a bus to carry them all to Chicago O'Hare in hopes that they would either make their original connections or they could be transferred to later flights.

“If it's too dangerous to fly, how is it any safer to drive?” Laurie asked worriedly as they hurried off to collect their checked luggage and board the coach. As they stowed their luggage and found seats together, Jason described, as only a mechanical engineer could, why they would be perfectly safe. They talked, and shared snacks, and confessed to each other that as satisfied as they were with their post-college plans, they were not looking forward to leaving Notre Dame.

More than two hours later, the coach reached the airport, and it had barely halted before everyone bolted from their seats, grabbed their carry-on bags, and scrambled to claim their luggage stowed below, recheck it, endure a security screening, and race off to departure gates or customer service.

Laurie lost sight of Jason in the chaos, though she searched the crowds for him. After she passed through security, she checked the overhead monitors and discovered that their flights departed from entirely different concourses, and that Jason's was already boarding.

Her heart sank as she hurried off to her gate. She had wanted to say goodbye, to wish him a merry Christmas, to ask him if he was seeing anyone, because in all their time together that day he had not mentioned his girlfriend even once. January would be soon enough to ask, she consoled herself as she stepped onto the
escalator leading to the underground walkway. She knew his name and how to find him.

“Laurie!”

She glanced over her shoulder and spotted Jason above her on the landing.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Do you want to go to the ROTC ball with me next month?”

“Yes,” she called back as the escalator carried her away.

“You don't even know when it is!”

“It doesn't matter! I'll be there!”

The escalator had descended too low for her to see him any longer, but she knew he understood.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that it was a mistake to begin a relationship in the last semester of senior year, but Laurie and Jason ignored conventional wisdom. And so Laurie's last months of college were happier than any that had come before, and in May, even her reluctant departure from the campus and friends she dearly loved was more sweet than bitter.

Laurie and Jason kept in touch while she began her graduate studies in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA and he fulfilled his obligation to the army in Afghanistan. She was tremendously relieved when he was safely stateside again, and when he enlisted with the Massachusetts National Guard to help pay for graduate school at MIT, she was less than thrilled, but she understood. As soon as she earned her degree, she found a job in the Boston public school system and moved there to be near him.

When they returned to Notre Dame for their fifth-year reunion—Notre Dame alumni loved their alma mater too much to celebrate reunions only once a decade—Jason proposed at the bookstore, where they had first met. They married a year later at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, too soon for Jason's friend Ryan, a seminarian at that point, to officiate, although he did serve as best man.

The years passed happily and with dizzying swiftness, full of newlywed joys and work and, before long, children. When Charlotte was born Laurie resigned her job to stay home with her, and with Alex too when he came along two years later. When Alex entered first grade, Laurie found herself restless at home, and yet she was reluctant to resume her career in social work. She wanted nothing to distract her from her first priority, her family, and she had discovered that social work was more than a full-time vocation, and she could never learn to leave her work at the workplace.

“Why don't you get a job with the
Boston Globe
?” Jason suggested. “You always loved to write, and you were brilliant at the
Observer
.”

Many of her fondest memories of college involved the newspaper, but she had no professional experience, and her student experience was years out of date. Newspapers everywhere were cutting staff, not taking chances on long-dormant reporters. Then, miraculously, Ryan—who by then had taken holy orders and had been appointed to St. Margaret's—gave her a lead on a job with a local progressive weekly. It paid poorly, but Laurie liked her coworkers and found it enormously fulfilling to be writing again.

Jason had kept up his commitment with the Massachusetts National Guard, assuming it would mean a couple of weekends a month training and the rare local deployment in case of a natural disaster. He enjoyed the camaraderie and was proud of his service, but when word came that his unit was going to be deployed to Afghanistan, he was thunderstruck.

Laurie was staggered and angry—and terrified that Jason's position supervising a behind-the-lines machine shop would prove far more dangerous than he said. She had scarcely come to terms with that when he was assigned—only temporarily, he was assured—to a forward operating base, still relatively safe behind barbed wire and concrete barriers, but less so than the other.

When Jason missed his first video chat, she blamed technical difficulties. Then came the phone call from his superior officer, and the foreboding news that a transport had broken down while returning from an intelligence mission, and that Jason had volunteered to go with the team to fix it, knowing that he could do it better and more swiftly than anyone. On their return to base, one of the trucks in the convoy had hit a roadside bomb, and insurgents had attacked. Most of the soldiers escaped with only minor cuts and bruises, but some were killed, and Jason had gone missing.

That was what in her terror and anger Laurie could not understand. How could they lose track of a soldier? Laurie's imagination ran wild with terrifying possibilities—all manner of terrible fates that she absolutely must not allow the children to contemplate.

Tears filled her eyes as she listened to the choir, as she listened to her children sing so beautifully, so innocently, untouched by the grief and terror that clutched her and squeezed with an icy grip. She would protect them from worry as long as she could. If she held out long enough, perhaps good news would come. Perhaps she would learn that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that Jason had been found, safe and well, and that she had spared the children needless worry. And if the news was not good, then at least she had delayed the inevitable blow—

“God is not dead, nor does He sleep.”

Startled from her reverie, Laurie turned in the direction of Sister Winifred's voice. “What? What did you say?”

“From the carol.” Sister Winifred indicated the choir with a nod. “It's not scripture, of course, but poetry, and nonetheless true. God is listening, my dear. He knows your troubles and he hears your prayers.”

Laurie fought back tears. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“I suppose we all do, sometimes.” The elderly nun's wrinkled
features curved in a compassionate smile. “Everything's going to be all right, my dear. Have faith.”

Laurie pressed her lips together to hold back a sob. Ryan must have told her about Jason, or the nun had overheard them speaking. Laurie had sobbed out her worries to the sympathetic priest on more than one occasion, for the burden of her secret had proven too much to carry alone. She had told Ryan what she could not bear to tell the children, her friends, her family. “Thank you,” she managed to say. “You're very kind.”

“Oh, that's not mere kindness.” Sister Winifred paused and tilted her head as if listening intently, and then she nodded. “And I know for a fact that Charlotte wrote every word of her Christmas story. I don't think you ever would have doubted that, but it's nice to know for certain, isn't it?”

Bewildered, Laurie nodded. “Yes,” she murmured, fighting back tears. “It's best to know.”

Except when the truth would break her heart, her children's hearts. She would put herself between her children and the devastating truth until the last possible moment. Only when all hope was proven futile would she capitulate—then, and not one hour before.

January 1862–March 1863

The days passed in dull monotony. The effort of accepting calls from Cambridge neighbors and acquaintances passing through Boston exhausted Henry, and it was more difficult still to focus his thoughts enough to write to friends afar like Sumner. And yet it pained him not to write, to shut himself away in Craigie House with the children and pretend the outside world had passed away with his beloved wife. Fanny would not have wanted him to become a recluse, and he knew he would inevitably fail as a father if he isolated himself. So he forced himself to write letters, to see friends, to attend to household business with what fortitude and patience he could muster, heavy in heart and head.

He felt himself adrift upon bitter waters, and as the winter passed, he struggled to drop an anchor, to chart a course. Poetry eluded him, his spirits too overwhelmed and crushed to sustain any spark of inspiration. Each day upon waking he found himself daunted by the task of building up again his shattered life, the remnants of which crumbled like sand between his fingers whenever he tried to grasp it.

Since words would not flow from his pen except by force, he sought escape in other poets' verse. The beautiful musicality of the great Italian works drew him, freeing him from his anguish for brief, blessed interludes of complete absorption. In late February, stirred by a memory of how he and Fanny, when first they met in Switzerland, had found solace from their separate griefs by translating poems of the German romantics, Henry translated the beautiful Canto XXV of Dante's
Paradiso
.

Unexpectedly pleased with the result, and struck by how unfamiliar the sensation of pleasure had become, Henry invited a few friends for dinner one evening, and afterward, he read aloud his translation. To his relief, his friends did not shower him with fulsome praise out of sheer thankfulness that he was taking an interest in literature again, but rather expressed sincere approval for his efforts and offered suggestions for alternative interpretations of the Italian here and there.

“I've contemplated translating all of Dante's
The Divine Comedy
into English,” Henry confided. “I've long admired Dante, as you know. I included his work in many of the classes I taught at Harvard, and although I'm no longer a professor, introducing Americans to great works of European literature is still a sort of mission for me.”

“
The Divine Comedy
is essential to the literary canon,” mused his friend James Russell Howell. “A fresh translation is long overdue.”

The others agreed that Henry was just the man to undertake the task. More gratifyingly still, no one pressed him to admit that he did not feel equal to the creation of any original work, and that he desperately needed some engrossing distraction from his heart's desolation. No words he could frame could adequately describe the ceaseless agony of his life. How his heart continued to beat he knew not, and sometimes he did indeed feel as if he were dying. The earth seemed to sink beneath him, and if it were not
that the children held him fast, he should lose his grasp on life altogether, it had all become so shadowy and insubstantial.

The steady labor of translation gave shape to his days, offered him purpose, distraction. As his work progressed, once a week, several learned friends would meet at Craigie House to hear Henry read aloud from whatever canto he had recently completed, following along with the original Italian text and offering critiques and suggestions. Afterward, they would adjourn to the dining room for supper—oysters, carved cold turkey, venison, or duck, accompanied by excellent wine from Henry's esteemed cellars. The gatherings often lasted into the early hours of the morning, but eventually his companions departed for their own homes, and although Henry knew the children slept soundly upstairs, in those quiet moonlight hours, his solitude oppressed him.

•   •   •

As Henry immersed himself in Dante's
Divine Comedy
, the war that most authorities had predicted would be over in nine months entered its second year.

“I'll be eighteen in June,” Charley reminded his father one afternoon as spring approached. “The Union needs good, steady men in the ranks.”

“The Union may search elsewhere for them.”

Charley frowned. “Massachusetts needs to fill her quota of recruits. When I come of age, I want to enlist, and I'd like to have your blessing.”

“I cannot give it to you.” Unable to bear the stark disappointment in his eldest son's eyes, Henry turned away and busied himself sorting papers on his desk. “Think of your brother and your sisters.”
Think of me
, he added silently. “This house has seen enough grief and mourning. You're too young to know what it means to risk your life.”

“I'd have to be a fool not to understand what serving my country means, what sacrifice may be required of me,” said Charley. “I read the names of the killed and missing in the papers. I've seen the wounded soldiers suffering in hospitals, and I've seen the veterans too maimed to fight again. At this very moment, men younger than myself are marching on battlefields—”

“Young men who don't have your prospects,” Henry interrupted. “You haven't yet completed your studies at Harvard.”

Charley shook his head, impatient. “I'm not interested in my studies at Harvard, or in any position you might have the Appletons arrange for me. It is because I have such prospects, that I've enjoyed such privilege, that I should fight for my country. Everything I have I owe to you, to your accomplishments, to your genius. I want to earn my own position of honor and respect, not inherit it.”

For a moment, Henry was struck speechless. Always before Charley had spoken of enlisting because he sought adventure, because he was eager to prove himself daring and heroic. He had never spoken of duty.

“You could not join the army even if I gave you my blessing,” Henry said when he found his voice, gesturing to his son's maimed left hand. When he was but eleven years old, Charley had shot off his left thumb when his hunting rifle misfired. Henry never would have imagined he would one day be thankful for that accident.

“I can hold a gun. You know that.”

“Well enough to hunt quail, perhaps, but not well enough to join the infantry on the battlefield, where enemies would be firing upon you and your fumbling would endanger not only yourself but your fellow soldiers.”

Charley set his jaw, stubborn. “There must be some honorable way I can serve. I'm an excellent sailor. I could join the navy.”

“You're a fine yachtsman. That does not make you fit to
confront Confederate frigates or privateers.” Henry rose and shook his head, signifying that the discussion was over. “No, son. We've known too much tragedy in this household for you to expose yourself to mortal danger unnecessarily.”

“How can you call my service unnecessary?” Charley countered. “The Union needs every able man. You support the Union and President Lincoln. How can you ask me to sit idly at home when my friends are marching off to fight a war you've said the Union absolutely must win?”

“You shall not enlist,” Henry insisted, wishing he had a better answer, one that would persuade his son to be content to sit out the war at home, one that did not ring with hypocrisy and fear.

•   •   •

Henry's admonitions did nothing to quell Charley's restlessness. With each passing day Henry became more anxious, knowing that he had only until Charley's eighteenth birthday, when Henry would no longer have the power to forbid it, to convince his son that he should not enlist.

Quietly, he made inquiries with reliable acquaintances, and in early March, his efforts bore fruit when Charley was presented with opportunity to see something of the war without being drawn into it. Charley's friend William Fay invited him along on an excursion aboard a supply vessel bound for Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico twelve miles off the coast of Mississippi, the staging ground for the anticipated Union assault upon New Orleans. Upon their arrival at the barrier island, Charley and the rest of the crew would live in the soldiers' camp while their ship was unloaded. Henry hoped the journey would allow his son to experience the adventure of war without the danger, and perhaps a taste of the hardships and deprivations soldiers endured, far from the glamour of parades and parties, would be enough to dissuade him from joining their ranks.

On March 6, Henry saw Charley off in Boston. His heart constricted as he shook his eldest child's hand, heartily wished him Godspeed, and watched from the pier as his son boarded the
Parliament
, his bag slung upon his back, his smile broad and proud, his eyes bright with excitement. “I'll write to you as often as I can,” he called to his father, waving.

Henry was too overcome with misgivings to reply, but he managed to smile and wave his hat as the ship set off, carrying his boy far from home.

True to his word, Charley wrote often. His vivid, amusing descriptions of the ocean journey, the lively crew, the chronic inefficiencies of the military, and a few rare glimpses of “Johnny Reb” entertained and enthralled his siblings but did little to relieve Henry's worries. From Ship Island, which turned out to be little more than a wind-battered, sand fly–infested, disease-ridden sandbar, Charley wrote of meeting the wife of their commanding general, Massachusetts's own Benjamin Butler, “in her little ten foot house which is furnished with rebel furniture captured on its way to New Orleans.” The floor was covered with sand, Charley wrote, the air thick with flies, “and there Mrs. B. sits in her glory and black silk dress languidly fanning herself and making rather flat remarks.”

Perhaps it was because Charley saw so few ladies on his adventure that he was especially observant of those he did meet. In a letter written April 10, the staccato lines of his pen revealed his delight when he and some of his shipmates “were introduced to a real live woman and it was very pleasant to see one after a month's voyage. I feel half in love with her although she is married, as she is very pretty and only nineteen. Her history is this: She enlisted as a private in the 15 Maine with her husband and she was not discovered until she had nearly got here. When they did find her out they made her put on her own clothes and took her to the cabin where she is now staying.”

“A lady soldier,” Alice exclaimed as Henry read the letter aloud. “I never knew there could be such a creature.”

“There wasn't for long,” Ernest pointed out. “She's already in a dress again.”

“What will become of her, I wonder?” piped up Edith. “Will they send her home to Maine or keep her on the island as a punishment?”

“If the Fifteenth Maine is encamped on Ship Island,” mused Alice, “I suppose she would rather stay there to be near her husband, despite the dirt and disease and sand flies.”

Quickly Henry cleared his throat and resumed reading Charley's letter rather than let his daughters dwell too long on the romantic notion of a devoted wife turned lady soldier. He had enough to worry about keeping Charley and Ernest out of the army than to fear for his daughters too. To his dismay, it was evident that rather than giving Charley his fill of the military life, the adventure had only whetted his appetite, and Ernest's too.

At the end of May, Charley returned home, more determined than ever to enlist in the army as soon as he wore down his father's resistance or turned eighteen, whichever came first. Determined to leave him no opportunity, Henry decided to take him and Ernest to see Niagara Falls, leaving the little girls at Craigie House in the care of his sister Anne. The journey was pleasant, the scenery sublime, and it offered Henry great relief that Charley spent his birthday sketching the falls with his brother and several charming young ladies rather than signing away three years of his life—and possibly his life itself—to the army. And yet Henry suffered pangs of grief, for the inspiring panorama reminded him constantly of his European travels with Fanny, and he found himself often thinking how she would have enjoyed the magnificent rush and crash of the falls. He missed his sweet daughters so intensely that the sight of another little girl holding her father's hand as they strolled along a forest path moved him
to tears. He was all too glad to return home with his sons, and soon thereafter, determined to forestall Charley's enlistment, he quickly arranged for Charley and his friend William Fay to embark upon a European tour, which Henry fervently hoped would outlast the war.

He was thankful an ocean separated Charley from the war when tales of fresh horrors from the battlefield filled the newspapers. He could not deny—as his eldest son knew he could not—that the war must be fought and won, not only to preserve the Union but to destroy slavery once and for all throughout the land. The Civil War was not a revolution, as the rebels boasted, but a Catilinarian conspiracy, a plot devised by disaffected aristocrats to overthrow the legitimate government. It pit slavery against freedom, the strong, freshening north wind against the southern pestilence. One day while walking in Boston, Henry observed on display in a jeweler's window a slave collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon to cram into the slave's mouth. Every drop of blood in his veins quivered at the sight. The world forgot, or never knew, what slavery truly was, if it could turn away from such cruelty, indifferent to the plight of millions of suffering men, women, and children throughout the benighted South.