Keeper of Dreams (46 page)

“Hey!” says I. “Hey, Santa!”

He turns around and there we are, face to face, and I say, “What are you so happy about?”

“It was a good Christmas,” he says, all innocentlike, and I know he’s not lying because you can’t, but he’s also not exactly answering me.

“How come you didn’t make it this year?” I demanded.

“I don’t think you get a list,” he says.

“Bull,” says I. “I came out of that light knowing every little sin I ever committed. You got the whole inventory, Nick. And I want to know what it is that keeps you out.”

He turns around slowly, indicating the street around him. All the Christmas decorations are still up, of course, and there in every window, there’s his face, Santa Claus, grinning and selling stuff. “It’s all that,” he says.

“What, the Christmas decorations?”

“The fact that it’s my face and not his.”

“
You
don’t paint those pictures!
You
don’t hang them up!”

“Yeah, but I like it that they’re there. I like being famous. He never did.”

“And that’s it? That’s all?”

“I don’t even know if that’s the reason,” he says. “Because they don’t give me a list of sins. But it’s a story. Better than nothing, right?”

And off he goes, this time for real, and it’s time to get back on the bully patrol, but a thought crosses my mind. Maybe the reason they don’t give him a list of sins is because there isn’t one. Not for him. Because there aren’t any sins. He was in the light an awfully long time before he bounced out. What if he didn’t get bounced at all? What if, every year, he chooses to come back even though he doesn’t have to? Because he’d rather be here, homeless in hell, doing the work he does, than to be happy in heaven. In fact, maybe heaven would be hell to him, knowing that he
could
be leading us in helping kids, only there he is with a harp or whatever. So the only way for him to be in heaven is not to be in heaven. He’s got work to do, and he’s doing it, and
that’s
heaven for him.

And then this really strange thought comes to me. What if that’s all heaven is for anybody? What if everybody gets bounced down to the streets of hell, but if you find the right things to do, it becomes heaven for you? Look what I’ve got: A job to do that matters in the world. Good friends to work with. Nick leading me, a man I can look up to. Tell me what heaven’s got that’s any better than that.

Hey, it can’t be true. I mean, if it
were
true, wouldn’t Saint Francis and Saint Peter and all those guys be down here, working alongside us? No, heaven’s heaven, and I’m in hell. Maybe Nick’s an angel in disguise, and maybe he’s just what he seems to be—another homeless dead guy desperate to figure out a way to get off the streets. What difference does it make?

I’m not in torment. In fact, I had a pretty merry Christmas. I saw a lot of sad things, but I saw some good things, and a few of those good things, I made them happen.

And then I thought, maybe I could make even more good things happen if I could just tell the living about how it is here, about how it works. I can’t do it like an angel with a trumpet, so that everybody would have to believe. But I can tell it like a story. Making letters appear on a computer
screen, that’s a piece of cake compared to getting a five-dollar bill out of a wallet and onto the street. So I found a guy who leaves his computer on day and night, and I wrote all this down, and now you’re reading it, and you can take it as fiction or you can take it as truth, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care what you believe. I just care what you do.

Well, I’ve taken just about as much time off as I can spare. Like the old joke says, “Back on your heads!” I’m up to my neck in it and there’s only a few of us to shovel. Merry Christmas. God bless us every one. Suffer little children to come unto me. All that stuff.

Here’s how it started. Somebody said, “Have a hell of a happy Christmas” and I was off and running.

See, we Mormons don’t actually believe in the traditional Protestant or Catholic version of Hell. To us, that’s as realistic as the Greek Hades or the River Styx. Just a myth, ripe to be used for entertainment. So when somebody said—or maybe I read it on a Christmas card—“Have a hell of a happy Christmas,” I naturally thought it would be a cool joke to turn “hell” into a place where you really could have a merry Christmas.

I posted the story on
Hatrack.com
as a freebie for anybody who might get a kick out of it. Here’s the irony. “Dust,” which I actually took seriously, never raised much of a stir. But I heard back from a lot of people about “Homeless in Hell.” Apparently there’s a large contingent of people who are comfortable with the idea of Santa Claus as the devil, or vice versa, or something.

In a fit of romantic excess, the builder of the house at 22 Adams gave this lovely street of grand Victorian mansions its one mark of distinction—a gothic cathedral of a house, complete with turrets, crenellated battlements, steep-pitched roofs, and even gargoyles at the downspouts.

One of the gargoyles—the one most easily visible to those who approached the front door—was a fierce dragon’s head. In a thunderstorm the beast spewed great gouts of water, for it collected from the largest expanse of roofs. But this wet wyrm was no less to be avoided than its mythical fire-breathing forebears.

Inside the house, however, there was no attempt to be archaic or fey. Electricity was in the house from the beginning. In fact, it was the first house in Mayfield to be fully wired during construction, and the owner spared no expense. Knobs and wires were concealed behind the laths, and every room of any size had, not just one electric outlet, but four—one in each wall. A shameless extravagance. What would anyone ever need so many outlets
for
?

As the house was going up, passersby were known to tut-tut that the house was doomed to burn, having so much fire running up and down inside the walls. But the house did not burn, while others, less well-wired, sometimes did, as their owners overloaded circuits with multipliers and extension cords to make up for the electrical deficiency.

Between the gargoyle and the rumors of future fire, it was inevitable that the neighbors would call it “the dragon house.” During the 1920s,
the moniker changed a little, becoming “the Old Dragon’s house,” for during that time the owner was an old widower—the son of the original builder—who valued his privacy and had no concern for what the neighbors thought. He let the small garden surrounding the house go utterly to seed, so it was soon a jungle of tall weeds that offended the eye and endlessly seeded the neighbors’ gardens.

When helpful or impatient neighbors from time to time came over and mowed the garden, the old man met them with hostility. As he grew older and more isolated, he threatened violence, first with a broom, then with a rake, and finally with a cane that might have been pathetic in the hands of such an old man. But he was so fiery in his wrath that even the boldest man quailed before him, and he soon became known among the neighbors as the Old Dragon. It was from him as much as the gargoyle that the house seemed to derive its name.

Finally, the neighbors went to court and got an injunction compelling the man to control the weeds on his property. The Old Dragon responded by hiring workmen to come and pave the entire garden, front and back, with bricks and cobblestones so that the only living things in the yard were the insects that wandered across it in search of likelier foraging grounds.

The old man lived out his days and when he died, the house went to a great niece who called it, not “the Old Dragon’s House” but “the Albatross,” and put it on the market the moment it was certified as hers.

That was when Michael’s great-grandparents bought the place and turned it into the home he grew up in.

Normal Schwarzhelm had owned a chain of vaudeville theaters and had married his favorite headliner, Lolly Poppins. Just before vaudeville’s collapse, Normal sold his theaters to a developer who was turning them all into movie houses, then invested the money and retired to Mayfield, the smallest and most charming of the towns on his little circuit.

Buying the Old Dragon’s House was not Normal’s idea, it was Lolly’s. To her, it carried all the magic and romance of the legitimate stage, to which she had always aspired; her twenty years of doing slightly naughty comic songs followed by one tragic tear-jerking ballad had never been more than a stopgap until she got her “break.”

Her break had turned out to be Normal, who adored her and
indulged her and had a wagonload of money. Of course he hadn’t the power to get her into legitimate theatre now—he was out of the business, and she was too old and too well known for her shtick, which was looking surprised and confused at the double entendres in her own songs, followed by a whooping laugh when she finally got her own joke. Nobody in legitimate theatre would give her the roles she coveted.

But the Dragon’s House had a copious cellar and, with a little excavation and remodeling and an additional dose of heavy-duty wiring for the lights, she fitted out a little underground theater where she could mount amateur productions to her heart’s content. Which she did. She became the producer, the director, and a beloved character actress in a lively community theatre company that did everything from
Trojan Women
to
Macbeth
, from
The Importance of Being Earnest
to
The Women
. It should not be hard to guess which parts she played.

She also brought in old friends from vaudeville to take part in her shows, putting them up in her house and feeding them generously while they were there—a way to help out those in need without it looking like charity. “You’re doing
me
a favor,” she would insist. “These local amateurs need to see what a professional looks like!” To fit all her guests, she had workmen divide most of the bedrooms into small but cozy chambers, and as she did, she had the plumbing and wiring brought up to code, so that despite its age and ancient look, the Dragon’s House had all the modern amenities.

While Lolly rehearsed and performed in the cellar, Normal climbed the stairs to the attic, where he, too, had a plethora of new wiring installed to support his passion—electric trains. The walls of the windowless room were lined with tables, and from the south wall a huge table projected into the middle, leaving only a narrow corridor. All the tables were covered with train tracks, trestles, bridges, hills, villages, and cities, with the walls expertly painted as mountains and farmland and, on one side, a river flowing into the sea.

Lolly invited all comers to the basement to watch her plays, but no one ever saw Normal’s trains except the family, and then only a glimpse now and then, when calling him down to meals or to meet with his lawyer or broker. His hobby was not for display. It was a world where he alone could live. And over the years his fantasy life in the attic became
quite an eccentricity, for now and then he would come downstairs and remark, “The dragon was lively today,” or, “We had quite a thunderstorm in the attic,” as if the train layout had its own weather and the occasional mythical beast to liven things up.

“Next thing you’ll tell us,” Lolly would say, “the little tiny people will start packing their little tiny clothes in little tiny suitcases and buy teensy-weensy tickets so they can ride the train.”

He would look at her like she was crazy and say, “They’re not
real
, Lolly.” And she would roll her eyes heavenward as if to ask God to judge which of them was mad.

Lolly’s first three children, fathered by her first three husbands, had been born during her vaudeville days and therefore loathed the theatre, absolutely refusing to take part in her plays. But her two children by Normal, their son Herrick and their daughter Bernhardt—Herry and Harty—had no bad memories of backstage life, and so they happily threw themselves into every play. They were the princes murdered in the tower, they were Hansel and Gretel, they were young Ebenezer Scrooge and his beloved sister. When they weren’t in rehearsal they were romping among the costumes and props and old set pieces stored on the north side of the cellar.

When Normal and Lolly died, no one minded that they left the house and all its contents to Herry and Harty. After all, they were Normal’s only children, and it was generous of him to leave a bit over a hundred thousand dollars to each of Lolly’s other three children—a lot of money in those days. Most of the money, though, went to Herry and Harty, who kept up the tradition of theatricals in the basement until the city inspectors told them that the public safety laws had changed and there was no way to bring the cellar theater up to code without demolishing the building.

It was a sad day in the Old Dragon’s House when the public performances ended, and while they still had guests over and put on shows from time to time, the regular community theater company moved to the local high school auditorium and Herry and Harty were no longer the heart and soul of it as they had been. They still contributed financially from time to time, but by the 1970s they had turned inward—not recluses, but focused on the life of their house.

With all those bedrooms, and no more retired vaudevillians to sleep in them and few plays to occupy their time, Herry and Harty cast about for something useful to do. The idea they hit upon was to take in strays.