Parallel Again

The box came at seven, as it came every morning, and on Christmas Day there were two of them.

Kessler brought them up. He had crossed the road at five to seven, in the dark suit, as he had every morning of the break, and signed at the empty desk in the lobby for the grey box with the red seal that came by courier from the consulate in Phoenix, because the paragraph said so; and he came along the third floor with it under one arm and, under the other, held level, as he had held boxes on the stairs in August, a second box. It was round, and dark green, and tied with a cream ribbon, and it had come from Potsdam.

He stopped in the doorway of 312.

“Frohe Weihnachten, Majestät,” said Kessler, to the desk by the door. And then, turning a quarter of an inch towards the window: “Sir. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Kessler.”

Kessler put the round box down on the end of the bed by the door, exactly in the middle. Then he stood holding the grey one, as he had stood holding it every morning for six weeks, waiting to take it away again across the road unopened, as the programme said.

Alexander held out his hands.

Kessler looked at the programme on the desk, once. Then he looked at Frederick, by the window, perhaps a quarter of an inch, which in Kessler was a sentence; and then he gave the grey box to Alexander, in both hands, the way a man hands over something that has never been late, and went; and Frederick heard his tread go along the corridor and down the stairs, and the lobby door, and nothing.

Alexander untied the ribbon.

Inside, in tissue paper, there was a hat. It was a soft grey felt, the grey of a pigeon’s wing, with a narrow black band and a small grey feather tucked into the band at the side, and it sat in the tissue paper the way a cat sits in a box it has chosen. There was a card on top of it, in English, in a hand Frederick had known all his life from the inside of birthday cards, upright and quick.

For lunch. As agreed. Mama.

Alexander lifted the hat out of the box and looked at it for some time.

“It is a very good hat,” he said.

“Are you going to wear it?”

“I am going to carry it,” said Alexander, “to lunch,” and put it on the desk beside the programme, crown down, and laid the card in it.

The programme was on the cream paper with the eagle at the top, in his own hand, and it was short again.

06.00. Wake. 06.15. Water. 07.00. Box. One hour. 09.00. London (F.). 12.00. Lunch (lounge). Hat. 22.00. Mr Luna. 22.30. Light off.

He ticked 07.00. Then he put the hat aside and broke the red seal on the grey box, and took out the first paper, and read it all the way to the end, including the small type at the bottom, and initialled it at the top, small, in pencil; and at eight o’clock exactly he closed the box, though there were papers left in it, and put it on the floor by the desk, and did not look at it again.

Frederick did not say anything. It was not his to say.

---

Tyler’s message had come at a quarter past seven, under a photograph of the driveway in Parma and the white hump and the small figure in the pink hat with the yardstick, a little further down it than last year.

9, it said. merry xmas fred. merry xmas alex. grandma says the plate was empty but it was still both of yours. she says thats allowed. brayden is going to call alex today i am so sorry

Frederick read it out.

“Nine,” said Alexander. “Last year it was sixteen.”

“How do you know?”

“You wrote to me,” said Alexander, and ticked nothing, because it was not on the programme.

---

Sam went to church at nine.

He went with his mother’s list, as he had last year, and chose by the distance in minutes on foot the brick church of 1889 on the rise south of the butte, and came back at half past ten with the order of service folded into four in his top pocket, and stood in the doorway of 312 in the grey quarter-zip.

“They prayed for you,” said Sam, to Frederick.

“It’s in the book.”

“I know it’s in the book. The King, and the Governor-General, and the Lord Marcher, and the Diet. In that order.” Sam took the order of service out and looked at it, as though checking. “And then the vicar said and for all who are far from home this Christmas, and I said amen louder than the others, like last year. A woman in front turned round. It was the same woman.” He folded the paper. “And then they did the prayers for the sick, and there was a space, where you can say a name, quietly. So I put him in.”

He looked at Alexander, at the desk by the door, with the hat beside him.

“You,” said Sam. “Quietly. After the space.”

Alexander looked at him for a moment.

“It is not in the book,” he said.

“No,” said Sam. “It’s in mine.” He put the order of service back in his pocket. “Three churches,” he said. “Today. Counting my mother’s two.”

“Thank you, Sam.”

“You’re welcome,” said Sam, and went away along the corridor to the kitchen, where Lena’s list on the wall said 25.12: Potatoes (A.). Eggs (F., boiled, 7 min, DO NOT ATTEMPT OMELETTE ON CHRISTMAS). Salad (S.). Pie (R.’s mother). NO FIRE.

---

London rang at nine, which was four in the afternoon there.

He took it on the step under the narrow window, on the landing, where he took all her calls, with the thermometer on the wall above him saying seventy-nine.

“Where are you?” he said.

“In a chair,” said his mother, in Swedish. “In the drawing room. An ordinary chair, with arms, by the fire. Like a person.” He heard her settle in it. “Not on the stairs. I have not sat on the stairs since February. Ebba says the green chair is lonely. I have told her that she may sit on it herself.”

“How was lunch?”

“A turkey,” said his mother, “which is still a bird I do not believe should be eaten, and crackers, and your father read the joke out of every cracker aloud, one word at a time, as he does; and this year they were shorter.” A pause. “He has been practising. He did a whole joke about a snowman in under a minute. Brannigan timed it.” He heard her smile. “Brannigan has a stopwatch now. I do not ask.”

“Is he there?”

“He is holding out his hand,” said his mother, “like a man at a bus stop.”

The telephone went across, with a small sound.

“Fredde,” said his father, in English, at once.

“Hello, Dad. Happy Christmas.”

“Christmas.” A breath. Frederick waited. He waited the way he had learned to wait since the September he was fifteen, without filling the space. He heard his father shift in his chair, and the stick laid against the arm of it, and the fire.

“Two,” said his father.

Frederick sat on the step.

“Two?”

“Two,” said his father, with enormous satisfaction, as though it were the best word he had found all year, and then the telephone went back across.

“He means the two of you,” said his mother. “He has been saying it since Tuesday. He says it at breakfast. He says it to Brannigan. He said it to the vicar on Sunday at the door of the church, and the vicar said yes, sir, and I do not think the vicar had the least idea.” She laughed, the low sudden one, the one the room heard. “He means you and Alexander, in one room, in Arizona. He thinks it is the funniest thing that has happened in the family since 1866.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“It is very funny, Fredde,” said his mother. “And it is also the other thing. Both. Your father has always been able to hold two things in one word. It is why the word takes so long to come.” A pause. “Is he there? Alexander?”

“He’s in the room.”

“Go and get him. I would like to wish him a happy Christmas, and I would like to do it properly, and not through you, because you will leave out the important part.”

---

He went up and fetched him, and Alexander came down to the landing with the telephone held at his ear, and stood for a moment looking at the step under the narrow window, and then, after a visible deliberation, sat on it.

Frederick stood against the wall under the thermometer.

He could not hear what his mother said. He could hear that she said a good deal of it, and that she said it in English, and that Alexander listened to all of it, upright, on the step, with his free hand on his knee, as he listened to Brennan.

“Yes, Aunt Christina,” he said.

He listened.

“Thank you. Yes. Thursdays.” He listened again, for longer. “Yes. I know. He wrote me one. In very bad handwriting.” A pause. “Yes. I kept it.” Another, shorter. “I will. God jul.”

He held the telephone out to Frederick without getting up.

Frederick took it.

“He is a very polite young man,” said his mother, in Swedish, “and he has told me nothing whatever, which is how I know he is better.” She was quiet for a moment. “Go and have your lunch. Ring me tomorrow, because tomorrow is not Christmas, and I want to hear about the pie.”

“How do you know about the pie?”

“Because you are going to tell me,” said his mother. “Tomorrow. Slowly. Puss, Fredde.”

---

Brayden called at eleven.

Alexander’s telephone rang on the desk by the door, a number in Mesa that it did not know, and Alexander looked at it, and at Frederick, and picked it up.

“Hohenzollern,” he said.

Frederick could hear Brayden from the window. It was not possible not to. It was a voice that came out of the telephone at the volume and speed of a man who has been saving it up since Thursday, and it said dude and Merry Christmas and so Tyler said I could, and then it said Mesa, and then it went on.

It went on for twenty-two minutes. Alexander timed it, on the clock on the desk. He sat upright in the chair by the door with the telephone at his ear and listened to the whole of it with great attention, and at intervals, when the voice went up at the end, he said “Yes,” gravely; and once he said “No, I have not,” and once, with real interest, “How many?”; and at the end he said “Thank you, Brayden. Merry Christmas,” and put it down.

“What was it about?” said Frederick.

Alexander considered it.

“Mesa,” he said. “There is a temple, and a great many roads, and his uncle has a boat that he keeps on a lake which is not a lake but a reservoir, and he would like us to come out on it in the spring.” He looked at the telephone. “Thirty-one feet. That was the how many.”

“Are we going?”

“I said yes in the right places,” said Alexander. “I think that I may have said yes to the boat.”

---

Lunch was at twelve, in the lounge, under the poster about scorpions, at the card table, with a cloth on it that Rhys had found in the cupboard where Callum kept his supplies, which was white, and paper, and had a pattern of small maroon pitchforks round the edge.

There were the potatoes, which Alexander had cut the same size and boiled for twenty minutes exactly. There were eggs, boiled, seven minutes, by Frederick, which was within his powers, and which Sam had checked by cutting one open before he would let them be served. There was Sam’s salad, in a bowl, by weight. And in the middle of the table, on a plate, out of its parcel from Wilmington, there was the pie.

It was round, and orange, and smooth on top, with a pattern of little leaves cut out of pastry round the edge and laid on, and Rhys’s mother’s card had been tucked under the string of the parcel, in her large hand that leaned forward as though it were hurrying to catch something.

Warm it 30 SECONDS in a microwave if you have one. NOT ON A RING. NOTHING ON FIRE THIS YEAR, RHYS. Love Mum xxx

And under it, smaller, as though added at the post office:

Love to Fred. And to the other one. I read about him.

Rhys read it out, and went pink, from the ears inwards, and did not finish the last line aloud; and Frederick read it over his shoulder, and did not say anything.

Sam had his mother’s card beside his plate. He had kept it in its envelope since it came, unopened, as he did every year until the day. Now he opened it with his knife, along the top, exactly, and took it out and read it, and read it again, and then, after a moment, held it across the table to Alexander without a word.

Alexander took it.

Frederick could see it from where he sat. It was a white card with a star on it, and inside, in a small upright careful hand, there was a verse, and the date, and under the date, as Sam had said it always was, To Samuel and the boys. And under that, this year, one more line.

And for the young man who has been unwell, we are praying, in both churches.

Alexander read it twice. He gave it back.

“Please thank your mother,” he said.

“She’ll want to know which church,” said Sam. “She always wants to know.”

“Both,” said Alexander.

---

They warmed the pie for thirty seconds in the microwave, because the card said so, and nothing caught fire, and the building did not shriek, and Rhys stood beside the microwave for the whole thirty seconds with the oven gloves on, which said PROPERTY OF RESIDENCE LIFE on the backs, just in case.

At ten past twelve Rhys’s phone went. He looked at it, and showed it round.

Pie?

Sam carried a slice across the road on a paper plate, with a plastic fork, under a napkin, and two slices, because there were two of them across the road; and Frederick watched from the window of the lounge as he crossed in the sun and went up the outside stair beside the dentist’s and knocked, and the door opened about a foot, and the plate went into the gap, and the door shut; and Sam came back down and across the road with exactly the face he had gone with.

“She said thank you,” said Sam.

“Anything else?”

Sam considered.

“She said it wasn’t dry,” he said.

Rhys looked at him.

“That’s new,” said Rhys.

“She said it wasn’t dry,” said Sam, “and that Kessler had had two slices of the first one before she noticed, and that we were to tell Rhys’s mother it was perfect.” He sat down. “So I think the first one was for both of them and the second one was for him.”

---

Alexander had carried the hat to lunch.

It was on the chair beside him, the fifth chair, the one Rhys had brought from the lounge doorway out of habit, crown down, with the card from Potsdam inside it, where everybody could see it. Nobody had said anything about it. It had been carried, as agreed.

He had brought the programme too. He took it out of the pocket of the linen jacket when they sat down, and unfolded it on the cloth beside his plate, and ticked 12.00. Lunch (lounge). Hat., and then he put the pencil down.

Frederick was reaching for the potatoes.

He stopped.

The pencil lay on the white paper cloth beside Alexander’s plate, between the plate and the edge of the card table, with the little maroon pitchforks running along under it; and it was exactly parallel to the edge of the table.

Not nearly. Not roughly, the way a pencil falls when it is put down by somebody thinking about something else, the way it had fallen on the desk by the door every day since November and in the minibus at Tucson and at the night desk at midnight. Exactly. Its whole length was the same distance from the edge at the end by the plate as at the end by the point, the width of a finger, so that the line of the pencil and the line of the table ran beside each other across the cloth like two rails, and would never meet.

Alexander had not looked at it. He was taking the potatoes from Frederick’s hand, because Frederick had stopped with the dish in the air, and saying “Thank you,” and passing them on to Sam.

Frederick stood up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be a minute.”

Nobody asked. Rhys looked at him and then very quickly at the pie. Sam looked at the pencil, once, and then at his plate, and Frederick saw him see it, and saw him decide, the way a man decides about a column of figures that has just come right, to say nothing at all.

---

He went out of the lounge and through the lobby and up the stairs, two flights, to the landing between the second floor and the third.

The thermometer on the wall said seventy-nine. It always said seventy-nine. It had said seventy-nine in August at a hundred and eight, and on the evening in November when he had rung Hamburg at three in the morning, Hamburg time, and it said seventy-nine now, on Christmas Day, at sixty-four degrees, which was a lie, and had always been a lie, and he had never in his life been so glad to see a thing tell the same lie again.

He stood under it.

He did not sit on the step. He stood with his back against the wall, under the narrow window, with his hands flat against the concrete behind him, and looked at the opposite wall, where there was nothing, and breathed.

It was a minute. He did not time it. Sam would have, and Alexander would have, and he did not.

Through the narrow window, between the concrete fins, the road was empty in the sun, and across it, over the dentist’s, the blind on the one window was halfway down, and while he looked at it, it moved, an inch, and was still.

---

When he came back into the lounge they were eating the pie.

Rhys had cut it into six, by eye, and Sam had looked at the six and said nothing, which for Sam was a great concession at Christmas. There was a slice on Frederick’s plate. Nobody looked up when he came in, which was a thing they had done on purpose, all three of them, and which he understood.

He sat down.

Alexander looked at him across the card table, past the hat on the chair, with his fork in his hand.

“Frederick?”

“Nothing,” said Frederick. “I needed the landing.”

“It says seventy-nine.”

“It always says seventy-nine.”

Alexander considered this, with great seriousness, as he considered everything.

“Yes,” he said. “I have noticed that. It is one of the things I like about it.”

He went back to the pie. Frederick picked up his fork.

The pie was very good. It was sweet and soft and tasted of cinnamon and something he did not know, and Rhys said that it was nutmeg, and that his mother put in more than the recipe said and had done since before he was born, and that his father said every Thanksgiving that it was too much nutmeg and every Thanksgiving had a second slice. Sam ate his slice in seven exact forkfuls and wrote nothing down. The sun came in through the window of the lounge onto the paper cloth and the little maroon pitchforks, and the hat on the chair, and the plates.

And beside Alexander’s plate, through the pie, and the coffee that Rhys made strong afterwards, and the whole of the long gold afternoon, while they played whist and nobody won, the pencil stayed where it had been put, exactly parallel to the edge of the table, and nobody touched it, and nobody said a word.