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  “Now, at twenty, one is willing to put up with anything for a while—which is why wars are possible.

  “However, after days of this back and forth I aged to the point where I realized there were no grown-ups in these trenches, no one very old at all, no politicians, statesmen, church leaders, captains of industry or officers over the age of twenty-five. There were none of that generation who staunchly had erected the issues, drawn the lines of contention, given the speeches of denouncement and uttered the challenges. In those trenches were youth whose faces had been shot off before being permitted to say anything.

  “So, one morning, in a lovely acrid fog, in a comparative silence, with no one pushing me forward or back at the moment, the we became I. I climbed out of my trench and, hands in pocket, head down to avoid stumbling on felled youth, I walked north.

  “After only two or three hours of walking there was a puff of wind, enough to raise the fog like a lady’s dress, and I saw a small, stone village. I entered it. The windows of the houses and stores were shuttered. The village appeared abandoned. But I smelled food cooking. I followed my nose to a red plank door, and knocked on it.

  “A voice from inside said, ‘Entrez! Willkommen! Ich dien! Come in!’ Deciding that anyone who could issue such an invitation, in those languages, under those circumstances, was a man who had made similar peace with himself, I entered without hesitation.

  “Inside this cottage, there was a tall, skinny Englishman in an apron standing between a stove and a kitchen table. He gave my muddy uniform a perfunctory eyeing, and said, ‘I’ve just basted the lamb. About to attack the potatoes and onions. Do you know what to do with turnips? Here, a glass of this will make you a more amiable dinner companion.’

  “He poured me out a cognac, and brought it to me. I said, ‘Mort a guerre,’ and drank it down.

  “‘Mort a guerre,’ he said.

  “We had lamb basted in rosé, potatoes and onions basted in blanc, turnips basted in cognac. A meal to remember. You can have no idea how great that meal tasted.”

  “Are there more biscuits, sir?”

  “We kept a fire going on the grate. We ate until we could eat no more, slept, ate some more, rested. We didn’t talk much—left the fighting to the soldiers and the talking to the politicians. Ah, you can’t imagine what a time that was.”

  “There’s Mr. Solomon now, sir. He might have some more biscuits.”

  “We spent three or four days there, eating, sleeping, being warm. Death to the war.”

  “It sounds a very good supper, sir.”

  Rousing himself slightly from his nostalgia for past comforts, Thadeus Lowry said, “Within three or four days our own British and American armies caught up with us and were most pleased at our having pacified this village ahead of their advance. We were each sent back to our general headquarters, highly decorated, and sent home to heroes’ welcomes.” Thadeus Lowry laughed. “To answer your earlier question, young Robby Burnes: Armies have a far greater need to acknowledge heroes than deserters.”

  “My father was decorated during World War One,” Robby said. “For capturing a forward village almost single-handedly.”

  “That was the only Englishman I ever really knew,” Thadeus Lowry continued. “If you can say spending a few days with someone eating, drinking, resting, makes for true acquaintance. For obvious reasons, we did not correspond. We both accepted our decorations, I expect, with the silence of due modesty.”

  His glass of whiskey finished, Thadeus Lowry sat back in the booth, and said, “A tale as good as any other, sufficiently ironic and spotted with proper moral instruction for the young—but I don’t see the connection between that Englishman in France, and you. He had sort of an Italian name, as I remember, Romani, or Something-Roman…”

  “Pladroman?”

  “Yes,” Thadeus Lowry said, his voice still somewhat absent. “That was it. Pladroman.”

  “My father’s the Duke of Pladroman,” Robby Burnes said.

  On the table, Thadeus Lowry’s hand jerked and knocked over an empty beer glass.

  “That’s all right,” Robby rushed to say. “We’re not royal. Just noble.”

  He set the glass upright.

  “What the hell’s the son of a duke?” Thadeus Lowry shouted. “A count? A baron? A marquis? What’s the son of a dead duke?”

  Robby lowered his eyes. Regulars at the bar had turned to stare at them. “An S.Nob., sir.”

  “God love a goose!” Thadeus Lowry’s eyes were suddenly as tall and wide as if he were seeing heaven open before him. “You’re a story!”

  5

  Advent

  “We have plenty of time to catch the first edition,” Thadeus Lowry announced after glancing at his pocket watch, which he did after he had put on his hat and his overcoat and picked up his walking stick.

  Outside The Three Balls, the wind had increased its bluster. There were two inches of snow on the sidewalks and streets.

  “A brisk walk ’round to the office,” Thadeus Lowry said, “will help settle lunch.”

  However, even with the aid of his walking stick, Thadeus Lowry fell against the wall of the recessed doorway when the wind blew the door against him. He grabbed his hat and almost lost his footing.

  “You must be tired,” he said to Robby, once he had collected himself.

  Robby hung onto his suitcase so he wouldn’t blow away in the wind.

  “There’s a cab, now.” Thadeus Lowry raised his walking stick to an approaching taxi as if anointing it.

  Robby walked into the backseat, dragging his suitcase with him, and sat in the far corner. Through the open door, he watched Thadeus Lowry apparently proceeding to sit down in the street. He was holding his hat on his head against the wind with one hand, his walking stick into the wind with the other. At a certain point in his crouching, when his hat was below roof level, he backed up suddenly and landed cater-cornered on his back on the seat of the taxi.

  “The offices of The New York Star,” Thadeus Lowry spoke up to the driver. “I have a story to write.”

  “Close the door, willya, Mac?”

  “My feet are still out.”

  “You’re in charge of ’em, arncha?” the driver asked.

  Thadeus Lowry finally got himself upright on the seat, his hat deeply in place, scrunching his ears, his walking stick between his knees.

  Thinking that somewhere in the world there might actually be melted cheddar cheese over crackers, a mug of chowder, and a warm egg sandwich—that such images had not risen entirely from Thadeus Lowry’s imagination—Robby tried to complete the image by confirming, “You have a wife, Mr. Lowry?”

  “I have,” said Thadeus Lowry. “But you won’t like her.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “She drinks too much,” opined Thadeus Lowry, “and cooks too little.”

  The taxi began to pass department stores with large, brightly lit windows. Robby looked at the Christmas displays. In one window was a manger with Mary and Joseph and the infant, Jesus, and the three adoring Magi. In the next was a lady in a red bathing suit trimmed with white fur.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Robby?”

  “Will I grow up in America?”

  “No.”

  “I won’t, sir?”

  “No one grows up in America.”

  “What, sir?”

  “In America people don’t grow up. They just get bigger.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The air of Thadeus Lowry’s belch made the atmosphere of the taxi similar to that of The Three Balls Tavern.

  “Well,” Thadeus Lowry said with contentment. “That was the best interview I’ve had since this blasted war started. We’ll get a good story out of it, never fear. Need a photographer. Put your hat on straight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The taxi slid sideways to a stop at a red light.

  “How does the driver know which red lights to stop at?” Robby enquired. “He drives past most of them.”
>
  “Like everyone else in America,” intoned Thadeus Lowry, “our driver is an executive. He makes executive decisions instead of doing his job.”

  On the sidewalk, a Salvation Army band was playing “O, Little Town of Bethlehem.”

  “Now that,” said Thadeus Lowry, nodding through the window toward the band, “is a perfect example of an exception that proves a rule. No matter how much a Salvation Army band plays, it never, never gets better. Practice, in their case, does not make perfect. In fact, it appears to do no good whatsoever. Perhaps if they would take their minds off the serenity of God, and demonstrate mercy for the ears of the general populace, we would all smile more benignly upon them.”

  The taxi slid forward again.

  The sidewalks, and most of the street, were clogged with people carrying gaily wrapped Christmas packages.

  “Goddamned people,” said the driver. “Why don’t they all fall down the sewer?”

  “Some of us,” sniffed Thadeus Lowry, “apparently already have.”

  “You bein’ wise, mister?” Driving forward, the taxi at an angle to more sedate traffic, the driver fixed Thadeus Lowry, through the rear-view mirror, with a hard stare. “You don’t like my cab? You can walk.”

  “I don’t like your cab,” said Thadeus Lowry. “And I shall not walk.”

  “Any more your lip,” screamed the driver, “I’ll give you a shot in the mouth.”

  “‘Don’t Tread On Me,’” said Thadeus Lowry, fluttering one gloved hand in the air.

  A line of nine Christmas shoppers jumped in sequence back onto the sidewalk as the taxi ran through a red light and sprayed their knees with slush.

  “Stupid sonsabitches,” said the driver.

  “Driver?” Thadeus Lowry began enquiringly. “Why aren’t you at The Front?”

  “I am in the front. What are you, stupid?”

  “I said at The Front. Where the war is.”

  “Why aren’t you at The Front, you lousy sonofabitch,” the driver yelled at his rear-view mirror, “instead of running around in the snow with a little boy in short pants?”

  “I’ll have you know,” announced Thadeus Lowry, with firmness and dignity, “I am a highly decorated veteran of World War One.”

  “Yeah?” The driver took a more comprehensive look at Thadeus Lowry through the rear-view mirror.

  “Yeah.”

  “Whacha do?”

  “I, together with the father of this lad here beside me, went behind enemy lines and held an entire town—just the two of us, mind you—for three days and three nights.”

  The driver whistled appreciatively through his teeth. “Wow.”

  “Therefore, I have every right, as a citizen, a taxpayer, and as a highly decorated war veteran, to ask you, an aggressive youth, why you are not at The Front.”

  “Aw,” said the driver. “I have a bad knee.”

  He rubbed it.

  “A bad knee, is it?”

  “Terrible right knee. Hurt it when some clown ran his Ford into me just before the war.”

  “Then,” said Thadeus Lowry conclusively, “be apprised that if it is, was, or becomes your intention to assault me once I get out of this cab, it is my intention to kick you in the right knee.”

  While the driver was staring at Thadeus Lowry through the rear-view mirror, his mouth slightly open, the taxi slid against the curb and bumped to a stop.

  Through the windshield Robby saw a Santa Claus, who had been ringing a brass hand-bell on the sidewalk, look at the approaching taxi with alarm. He jumped back out of the way. The taxi’s bumper nudged one leg of the tripod holding Santa’s charity bucket. Dropping his bell on the sidewalk, Santa tried to catch his bucket. All the coins spilled out of the bucket and scattered in the slush of the gutter.

  Santa Claus waved his fist at the taxi driver. “You sonofabitch!” yelled Santa Claus.

  “What’s that sonofabitch shouting at me for?” asked the taxi driver indignantly, his left hand going for the doorknob.

  “That son of a bitch,” said Thadeus Lowry, “is the Spirit of Christmas.”

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t give a shit who he is. Nobody’s gonna call me a sonofabitch!”

  Through the snow-streaked windshield, Robby watched the taxi driver approach Santa Claus and hit him in the mouth.

  “Thadeus Lowry!” Robby Burnes shouted. “The sonofabitch hit Santa Claus!”

  Santa Claus was sitting on the sidewalk, feeling his mouth with a gloved hand.

  “He did,” agreed Thadeus Lowry.

  The driver had turned back to get into the taxi when Santa Claus rose up from the sidewalk with murder in his eye. Blood dripped from his mouth onto his white beard. He took a long step and belted the taxi driver on the back of his head.

  “Never,” clucked Thadeus Lowry, shaking his head, “turn your back on the Spirit of Christmas.”

  The driver bounced off the hood of the taxi. He went after Santa Claus with both fists. Never, in Robby’s peaceful weeks at Wolsley School, had he seen fists fly so fast.

  “Thadeus Lowry, our driver is beating up Santa Claus! Do something!”

  “You must be drunk,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Otherwise you wouldn’t want to get into it.”

  Fists and fur flying, the combatants sank out of sight below the hood of the taxicab.

  “I suppose we ought to do something,” said Thadeus Lowry. He began to get out of the cab. “Leave the meter running.”

  Robby ran around to the front of the taxi.

  The taxi driver was sitting astride Santa Claus, snapping his head up and down on the street. Each time Santa Claus’ head hit the street there was a splash of blood and slush. People were standing on the sidewalk, clutching their Christmas packages, watching.

  In the middle of the street, Thadeus Lowry flagged another taxi with his walking stick.

  “Somebody, please!” Robby cried. “Somebody please stop him! He’s killing Santa Claus!”

  “Robby! Robby Burnes!” In the middle of the street Thadeus Lowry held open the back door of another taxi. “Come on! I’m on deadline!”

  Near blind with tears, Robby walked into the backseat of the taxi.

  Thadeus Lowry entered as before, that is, after making his lap in the street.

  “The New York Star,” he announced loudly. “I have a story to write.”

  “Close the door,” the driver said.

  “My feet are still out.”

  Immediately the door was closed and Thadeus Lowry had regained his balance in general, he rolled down the window and shouted through it, “Kick him in the right knee!”

  He rolled up the window and settled back in his seat, his walking stick once again between his knees. The taxi started off, at first sliding sideways through the snow.

  “Ah, this is a cruel world,” Thadeus Lowry observed. “A violent, heartless, indifferent orb.” He handed Robby his handkerchief. “Hard it is, to keep childish illusions for long, in this indifferent world.”

  6

  Thadeus Lowry Does a Day’s Work

  “I’ll be ready to take you home in a minute,” said Thadeus Lowry, “as soon as I write my story.”

  Being in the city room of The New York Star was rather like still being outside in the street. It was cold. It was dark. And it was noisy. It was a huge room with wet stone walls and a linoleum floor. The windows in the walls were as filthy gray as the snowing sky outside. The floor was strewn with crumpled balls of paper, through which paths had been trampled.

  Men in green eyeshades were sitting at desks placed in no discernible order, banging on typewriters hard enough, one would think, to quell them for good. On each desk was a telephone. At any given moment, half the telephones were ringing. About half the ringing phones were being answered. Much noise came from teletypes and police radios along one wall, clattering and squawking like an unpaid chorus line.

  In the front of the room, standing in the middle of a U-shaped desk, stood a white-haired, red-faced man shouting hu
skily at the room at large.

  “O’Brien,” he shouted. “Fire! Thirty-fourth and Seventh.”

  “Sanders! B and E, A and B at Sixth and Eighth!”

  “Carson! Murder one male Caucasian at Central Park Zoo!”

  The news did not disturb the men beating on their typewriters. Buffeted by fire and murder, the journalists’ equanimity remained intact.

  Thadeus Lowry sat at one of the light metal desks in the middle of the room.

  “Are you going to write about the taxi driver beating up Santa Claus?” Robby asked.

  “Fist fights aren’t news,” answered Thadeus Lowry, “unless people pay to see them. That’s news.”

  Rapidly, he typed a line halfway down a sheet of paper.

  “What is news, sir?”

  “News is what sells newspapers. You’re news.”

  “I, sir?”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll show you. Go find the men’s room, wash your face and brush your hair. By the time you get back, I’ll have a photographer here.”

  By the time Robby returned from the men’s room, Thadeus Lowry had typed five pages.

  “Sit down,” he said. “A photographer will be right up.”

  So Robby again sat on his suitcase.

  Thadeus Lowry was banging on his typewriter awfully hard, and awfully fast. Watching him, Robby realized shortly that Thadeus Lowry’s desk was creeping forward. The bouncing of the typewriter, when struck, was making his desk move. Apparently unaware he was doing so, Thadeus Lowry kept hitching his chair forward in pursuit of his story and his desk. Robby looked around at where a man was working at a desk behind him. The space around his suitcase was getting narrower. Robby saw he was about to be squeezed between the two desks.