Chapter 2 Consequential Christmas
Consequential Christmas
Walt said she was going overboard. Maybe she was. But it was their first Christmas in the new house, and she wanted to make
it memorable. Was that so terrible?
“It’s a day like all the rest of them, Maggie,” Walt reminded her when she brought home kits to make needlepoint Christmas
stockings for all three kids. “Don’t you think it might be a mistake, getting yourself worked up like this?”
His concerns were not unfounded.
The things Margaret set her heart on almost never came to pass. And if they did, they turned out to be less satisfying or
meaningful or lasting than she’d imagined. Just less. Building up expectations was almost always a prescription for being
let down, and never more so than at Christmas.
But it didn’t have to be that way.
Christmas of 1945, the celebration of which her mother had postponed until January 11, 1946, the day Dad mustered out of the
military, lived in Margaret’s memory as a perfect day, a singular happiness. Had she been forced to choose one day to live
over and over, that would have been it.
They didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
Mom had been laid off from her job at National Cash Register, which had retooled to make fuses, gunsights, and airplane parts during the war.
But everybody was strapped in those days; the postwar economic boom didn’t really get rolling until the 1950s.
Sugar was still being rationed in ’46, but had it been otherwise, they wouldn’t have had money to buy it or much of anything else.
There were a few presents, the kind that prove it really is the thought that counts, but nothing expensive.
Her gift from Dad—a wooden bird whistle he’d carved from the branch of a German linden tree—still sat on Margaret’s dressing table.
And even after all this time, the scent of freshly cut spruce still summoned memories of the fresh garlands and Christmas wreaths her mother had twisted together by hand on that one perfect day.
How that Christmas felt, how they felt about one another, was what mattered most. For four uncertain, troubled years, everybody had done their job
and their share, pulling in the same direction even when they were apart, and had come out on the other side, united in purpose
and together again, a family.
It didn’t last, of course. How could it?
When Margaret sat down to brush her hair at night, her fingers would light upon the touchstone of her father’s gift. Looking
into the mirror, she’d see the earnest eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl who was certain she could recapture the moment once
more and hold on to it forever if only she worked hard enough, did enough, was enough.
That was why, two days before Christmas, when driving home from the poultry farm with a special-order turkey stowed in the
passenger side footwell and spotting a stand of spruce trees fifty yards from the road, Margaret had slammed on the brakes,
bailed out of the station wagon, and climbed over a barbed wire fence to cut some branches. Her sweater snagged on the fence
and her shoes were coated with mud, but the car being filled with evergreens was worth it. Christmas was going to be magical.
A holiday they would always remember.
Turning right onto Laurel Lane, Margaret spotted their house, a center-hall Colonial with white siding, forest-green shutters, and two scrawny birch trees in the front yard.
She would have preferred blue shutters and flowering dogwood trees, but Concordia had covenants for everything, which meant no blue shutters and no dogwoods, nothing that wasn’t preapproved in the master plan.
Still, in so many ways, it was a dream neighborhood and a dream home.
Margaret loved her house. After a decade of run-down rentals with water-stained ceilings, what she most loved was the newness of it—the fact that she’d been the first one ever to put a bottle of milk in the refrigerator, and that the wall-to-wall
carpet gave off a faint chemical scent, like Pine-Sol and motor oil, when she ran the vacuum.
When crossing the threshold for the very first time, footsteps echoing through bare rooms that smelled of paint, Margaret
had been filled with a bright, breathless anticipation. She envisioned the house that could be, how the naked living room would look furnished with new sofas and chairs, imagined sparkling conversation with interesting
friends taking place around a teak dining table she’d seen in a magazine. Mentally she had already papered walls and accessorized
rooms, creating a warm, welcoming, and stylish home.
It wouldn’t happen overnight, but that was all right. She could be patient.
She worked with what she had—painting bedrooms herself and placing potted plants by the windows. She built shelves from cinderblocks
and boards, filled them with borrowed library books and shopworn volumes purchased from the discount table in Babcock’s Best
Books, as well as one pristine copy of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea that she bought on her first visit to the bookstore, the same week they moved in. It was a splurge, but Margaret couldn’t
resist. Buying that book felt like making a down payment on the life she hoped to have.
But now, nearly a year after the move, those hopes were still frustratingly unrealized.
Every time Margaret hinted about replacing the secondhand furniture they’d inherited from his parents, Walt shook his head. “Buying the house wiped out our savings. We shouldn’t undertake any unnecessary expenditures until we build it up again.”
She knew he wasn’t wrong. And it wasn’t as if they were the only family in Concordia who had emptied their bank account to
buy a house they couldn’t afford to furnish. But she and Walt hadn’t always had such different ideas about what was and wasn’t
necessary.
They’d met during her freshman year at Ohio State. Margaret and Walt were enrolled in a class titled Great American Novels,
along with seventy-plus former servicemen.
When the war ended, men like Margaret’s father, who was thirty-one when he was drafted and had been working at the factory
for years before Pearl Harbor, went back to their old jobs. Younger veterans had a harder time finding work. Thanks to the
GI Bill, ex-soldiers flooded college campuses to earn degrees in lucrative fields they hoped would support a family.
They were an impatient generation. War had interrupted their lives, so they were anxious to make up for lost time and eager
to tick off the courses required for graduation, including a mandatory 200-level literature class. They were good men, hardworking
and focused, but most of them didn’t give a fig about great American novels, or any novels.
Walter Ryan was the exception.
He had questions, so many questions. His hand was always the first to go up, so often that other soldiers-turned-students would groan at the sight
of Walt’s waving arm. He had observations too. Some were more insightful than others, and not all of them related to the material
at hand. Sometimes he tried the professor’s patience. But no one could doubt that Walt was curious about literature, and life
in general.
Margaret didn’t really notice him until she walked into the cafeteria one day and spotted him alone at a table, surrounded by books and about fifty packets of saltines, which were free for the taking from the condiment table.
He opened the packets one by one, dipping the crackers into a shallow paper cup of tomato ketchup, munching as he pored over a copy of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa.
He must have felt her eyes on him because he lifted his head.
“Sorry,” Margaret said, feeling the color rise in her cheeks when his slate-blue eyes met hers. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.
I can see you’re cramming.”
“Cramming?” He blinked, then closed the book. “Oh no. This is just for fun.”
“You’re not an anthropology major?”
“Was. Then I switched to philosophy, but only for a semester. After that it was political science. At the moment, I’m undeclared,
but I’m thinking about English literature. Or maybe European history. I can’t decide. Do you want to sit down?”
Margaret wasn’t sure. He was such an odd young man but better-looking than she’d realized at first glance.
In an era when tall, dark, and handsome was considered the ideal, Walt was middling of height and slender of frame, muscular
but lithe, and had fair skin and reddish-blond hair. He was handsome, she decided—when he smiled, he reminded her of the actor Van Johnson, his face lit up with a kind of joyous, boy-next-door
charisma—and undeniably intriguing.
Margaret set down her cafeteria tray and took a seat. Walt brushed cracker crumbs from the table, as if trying to make things
more presentable.
“What’s your major?” he asked.
“I haven’t declared yet, but probably English. Not sure what I’ll do with it. Teach, I suppose, unless I happen to—”
Margaret took a quick drink of milk to mask her near fumble, grateful she’d stopped herself from saying that teaching would
be her fallback position if she didn’t meet her husband before graduation. Even if she’d been interested in him, which she
absolutely wasn’t, a girl didn’t want to look too eager. Margaret put down her milk carton.
“What year are you?”
“Sophomore. I should be a junior. But . . .”
“You keep changing majors,” Margaret said, laughing and finishing his sentence for him. “But you’ll decide eventually, won’t
you? I mean, you can’t just be a student forever.”
“No, you’re right,” he said, ducking his head in a way that made Margaret wish she hadn’t laughed. “I’ll have to graduate
and go to work eventually, but when will I ever have another opportunity like this? The chance to think and study and explore
ideas and . . . well, live. Really live.”
There it was again, that earnest, boy-next-door sincerity and enthusiasm. But Walt Ryan was a boy who had already seen a lot.