Too Close to the Falls (17 page)

Roy had time for everyone. Work got done but it didn't always seem to come first. If Mrs. Glish, who ran a bakery out of her back kitchen, invited us in for warm pastry, Roy and I always had the time to sit at her table for a chat and a slice of hot kugel. We just pushed our delivery schedule ahead, and watched her flabby
triceps quiver as she rolled out pastry dough. If Roy was invited in for life-sustaining libations — for “Christmas cheer,” a shot for “the damned cold,” a cool beer on a hot day, or a patriotic toast to the “I Like Ike” campaign — we relished the hospitality of others. As Roy said, quoting the great Seneca, “Nothing is ours except time.” (Although I could “tell time,” I hadn't quite figured out exactly what I was measuring since my father's approach was to quote Ben Franklin's line “Time is money” whenever I was “lolly-gagging.”)

Christmas was my favourite delivery season because of all the outdoor decorations and the festive atmosphere. In our customers' homes I was always warmed by the wafting scents of ginger and cloves that met me at the door. I basked in all the kitchen bustling, the stoves heating the rooms to the point that condensation dripped from the windows. It seemed strange yet magical to me that cookies could be made in a home kitchen of all places, and that so many people seemed to do it really amazed me. When I told my mother about what I'd seen, she seemed equally amazed, pointing out that I hadn't even witnessed the shopping or the cleaning up!

Roy and I were frequently given gifts of assorted homemade cookies and candied fruit squares that had exotic names like “conga bars,” “grumble bars,” “Hello Dollies,” or “fly catchers.” They were placed in neat layers of waxed paper in Currier and Ives covered tins. We devoured our favourites en route, the ones with the frosting, the coloured sprinkles, and silver beads, and then took our daily leftovers into Shim-Shacks Tavern and placed them on the bar, where everyone eagerly congregated to poke through layers of Santas, snowmen, bells, and stars of Bethlehem.

I took it upon myself to hand out the type of cookie that I thought each patron would enjoy. Roy suggested we simply leave the canisters open on the bar, but I told him they were
our
cookies, so I could decide who got what. I matched the personality of Buzz, the bartender, with Rudolph, because they both had red noses, Black Cloud got Grumble bars because he never talked, and on it went. Roy warned everybody, “Careful! In this bar you can always tell a man by his cookie.” While we ate our bounty, Buzz gave us all Irish coffees on the house as a Christmas treat and proposed a toast to “wash down the holy wafers of Christ's birthday” and we all clinked glasses. Buzz taught me to dip my ginger snap into my coffee until, as he said, “the
exact
second when it loses its snappiness, but still isn't mushy.”

Roy laughingly told Buzz he should
never
tell me to do anything
exactly
, or he would be unleashing a monster. Tapping the side of my head, he continued, “She'll be hell-bent to get it done
exactly
right.” Roy assured the chuckling bar patrons that he had not heard the end of the
exact
moment when you should dip your ginger snap into your Irish coffee. No one could do imitations better than Roy. He caught every nuance and blew it out of proportion until you were forced to laugh at yourself. This time it was of an evangelical tent preacher: “
Lord, Lord,
save me, please,” he said looking heavenward. “Do you know how many ideas, then theories, and finally rules —
yes rules, Lord
— I'm goin' to hear? Why, they'll be more
rules
than McClure's Drugs got pills. You think I'm not goin' to have to learn from Catherine McClure, the archangel of exactitude, as to how long the whole world should dip their ginger snap into their Irish coffee?” Roy's arms lifted heavenward and his voice went up a full octave. “You miss
that moment, Buzz my son, and you is dammed
exactly
to the wrong side of the river of Jordan.” Even the Indians laughed, as they had seen me gauging angles off the boards in the electronic bowling game and measuring to make sure my opponents' steel puck was not touching the red line. After all, things looked different from different angles and we had money on every game.

There were several reasons why that episode stands out in my mind. It was fun and relaxed. I must have had some premonition that life doesn't have that many warm, wonderful moments when everyone is having a good time, so I squirreled that one away. No one asked if
I
should have an Irish coffee — it just got poured. I had no idea it had liquor in it (boy, did I warm up quickly and the saying “a shot for the cold” suddenly came alive for me), but I knew I was doing something that made me totally acceptable as an equal, as I sat with my short legs swinging on the impossibly high bar stool. I realize, in retrospect, that those people had a bit too much Irish in their coffee, but still it is a freeze frame of perfection in my mind.

I also loved ritual. We did the Irish coffee toast every year (I got mad at Buzz if he changed even one word of his testimonial) and I shared the cookies and felt as though everyone knew me and accepted me along with my cookie-matching and my “bossiness” (a word originally introduced by Dolores that made me cringe, but was echoed by Irene and on rare occasions my mother, who whispered to me as she dropped me off at kindergarten, “Don't forget to take small bites at snack time and don't be too bossy”).

This episode has stayed with me because I had a revelation in Shim-Shacks that Christmas Eve of 1952, as the jukebox played Bing Crosby's “White Christmas.” I understood for the first time
that not all the world shared the values of my family. I thought it was
inherently
good to be exacting. Everyone in my home and environs seemed to revere punctiliousness as a trait approaching godliness. It would not have been strange to say, for example, “He or she is a good person, very meticulous, precise, religious, and honest.” For the first time I saw that Roy, the Indians, and the other people at Shim-Shacks didn't value exactness or precision, at least not in the way I had learned it. In fact, they thought it was a neurotic manifestation that they tolerated because they liked me, but in itself,
exactly
measuring and labelling things was about as useful as flying a plane into the sky to try to see Jesus. Up until this point I had realized that some people were lacking in precision, but felt they knew they were falling short of the mark. I suddenly realized that something I thought was inherently good was really only a trait peddled by a relatively small, albeit powerful, circle of people in my life.

I guess we all remember moments in time when we realize some truth about the world, something much bigger than what is happening to us at the moment. My small town suddenly fell into perspective and became a dot on the globe. Alas, Lewiston was a town that for me was showing its first signs of shrinking.

Roy and I drove around in the dreary snowbelt that seemed to get slushier and dirtier every day as winter wore on, but in December there was a spectacular transformation. The once austere lines of white clapboard colonials, or stolid Germanic brick homes, were softened by leafy cedars which waved to us in the winter wind and welcomed us wherever we went. The homes were bedecked in ruby and emerald enchantment which came alive at sunset.
When I read the story of Sleeping Beauty, the part where she woke up and all the overgrown courtyard turned into lush blossoms, it reminded me of sleepy Lewiston that awoke at Christmastime. Even nature cooperated and offered a fresh snowfall as a clean backdrop.

There was a contest in Lewiston for the top three outdoor Christmas decorations, and nearly everyone participated. The only notable exception were the Wolfsons, where the father was a physicist for Bell labs. My father shook his head when their lack of participation was mentioned. He said he thought their behaviour had “un-American leanings.” This was a particularly scary bit of information since Mr. Wolfson had worked on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos before moving to Lewiston. I assumed that the U.S. government didn't know the Wolfsons would be the type who wouldn't participate in Christmas decorations, or he never would have had security clearance. I told my father at The Horseshoe Restaurant, in front of the other businessmen who always ate breakfast there, that mother had said the Wolfsons were Jewish, and may not feel comfortable putting up Christmas decorations. My father said, “Well, they had no trouble eating a turkey on Thanksgiving or coming to the Fourth of July fireworks, now did they?” And Abe Wallins, my father's buddy, who had a clothing store close by the pharmacy, said, “Jewish, bluish, it's a national holiday. We're all Americans, for Christ's sake.”

One prize was for the best Nativity, one was for beauty (I guess the judges thought Nativity and beauty couldn't go together), and the last was for originality. Roy and I considered ourselves local experts, since we drove around all day and were conversant with decorations in the hinterlands of nearly all of Niagara County. The
only thing we loved more than the decorations was gambling, or as Roy referred to it, “the science of risk.” We placed wagers on the best decorations and then again on who we thought would win the prizes. Of course we had to take handicaps into consideration, such as the politics of choice, who won last year and couldn't win two years in a row, who were the judges, etc. Roy was very good at predicting what
others
would choose, and he knew that Seymour Knox, a benefactor of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and an aficionado of modern art, would be one of the judges. Roy was sure that the other members of the committee would kowtow to him and something “way-out” would be chosen. Over the years I came to understand a more sophisticated minimalist aesthetic through Knox's choices, after getting burned the first few years by choosing “tinsel flash” or old-fashioned ‘Twas-the-Night-Before-Christmas stuff. When you're staking a week's wages you can learn anything quickly. The contest took up all kinds of time at Mom's Hamburger Shoppe and at The Horseshoe, although no one seemed to care at Shim-Shacks. I had placed heavy odds on the traditional Duponts of nylon fame, and Roy had bets on the more unusual Hookers of Hooker Chemical.

I still remember entering the circular drive of the Dupont home (actually, the wife was said to be the Dupont; although the family had another surname, the family home was always referred to as “the Duponts'”) on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment overlooking the frozen village and the Niagara River, winding along below the American and Canadian escarpments like an albino snake. I loved seeing the Christmas boughs held up by twenty-foot red-ribbon bows which festooned the eaves of the Tudor mansion. All the huge conifers were covered with coloured lights
that peeked through a blanket of snow. It took two men to hoist the wreath onto the wrought-iron hooks on the studded double doors with the big black handles. The keyhole was so huge that a matching black cover swung over it when the key was not in use. A spotlight shone on the doors, catching the glitter of the gold-sprayed foot-long pine cones from the coulter pine trees of the west coast. The Duponts' dog, a black boxer named Holly (whom Roy addressed as Joe Louis), had her own doghouse with a stained-glass window depicting St. Peter holding the keys to heaven, and her own little wreath made of — you guessed it — holly, and tiny white lights on her swinging door. She sat outside her mini-mansion barking until Roy and I came over and made a big fuss over her decorations, and Roy shadow-boxed with her.

I dreaded going to the Duponts' door alone to deliver the Dilantin, phenobarbital, syringes, and other paraphernalia for their daughter, so I usually made Roy accompany me. No one I knew had ever seen her, but Dolores said that her sister-in-law from the Falls, who had cleaned house for the Duponts, told her the daughter wore a harness, and there was a house rule that no one could look her in the eye or she'd go after your peepers like a hungry buzzard on the Kalahari. Roy said that if he had to wear a harness, he wouldn't want anyone, least of all Dolores's loose-lipped sister-in-law, gawkin' at him either.