A Christmas Blizzard (4 page)

It was cold in the house. The African violets died and the cactus, some ferns survived and a funereal rubber plant. Daddy believed that if you couldn’t see your breath when you talked, then the furnace was turned up too high, not that their family talked—they did not need to talk—they knew each other well enough without conversing, but they did respirate as they sat around the kitchen table under the Praying Hands plaque and ate their wieners and cheesy potatoes and clouds of steam came out of their mouths. It was like a prison camp. Any sort of playfulness or jokiness was discouraged. No reading at the table. Daddy talked. He said things like, “I don’t know how I am going to make it through this week.” And the statement sat there, a general lament at the state of things, and nobody said a word. The tyranny of complaint. It trumps everything else.

After supper Daddy listened to
Friendly Neighbors
on WLT as Mother washed the dishes and James curled up with his
World Almanac
which he’d read so many times he knew the major exports of all nations by heart, the state capitols and every member of the U.S. Senate and the top batters in the American and National leagues, but it was a ten-year-old almanac, Daddy refused to buy a new one, and some of the batters had retired. Bedtime was early. (What else was there to do?) Mother and Daddy slept in the downstairs bedroom in a double bed with deep grooves and James and Elaine and Benny slept in the cold attic on narrow hard beds and wore woolen long underwear to bed and there was no thought of bedwetting—it simply wasn’t an option. They slept in the cold sheets and awoke with full bladders and pulled on layers of clothing—there was no lightweight thermal wear back then—you kept warm by the exertion of carrying heavy clothing: an eighty-pound child might wear thirty pounds of clothing, a little Sherpa going forth into the blizzard. It was a world of whiteness. Blazing white. It hurt your eyes. And school was never cancelled. Never. (Once you start canceling school, where do you draw the line?) So the children trudged through the blizzard to the road where the boys had made a snow fort and the girls huddled together and the boys peed in the snow as a defense against coyote and wolves and the girls crouched, shivering, whimpering, waiting for the bus to come and it was a long wait because the schoolbuses were frozen solid.

All of those memories—the grim mornings, the bowl of Hot Ralston cereal, the giant icicles, the frozen car—came back to him every December, and he felt
trapped
like a man in a deep cave, gripped by solid rock, and he felt a skittery panic though he was one of the richest men in Chicago. His heart fluttered at the first snowfall. Snow fell on the terrace on the 55th floor and though hot-water pipes embedded in the decking melted it, he felt constriction in his chest and as Christmas approached, he felt a sort of quiet terror.

It was due to a childhood trauma that he’d never told Mrs. Sparrow about. Which filled him with shame and self-loathing.

It was the Tongue On The Pump Handle Syndrome which he had tried to describe to his current shrink Dr. Boemer but he was from California and couldn’t possibly understand.

His mother used to warn him about frostbite—
wear warm socks and mittens—
and she warned him to always breathe through his nose, not his mouth, so the air would be warmed before it reached the lungs—
you don’t want to frost your lungs,
that was the phrase she used, “frost your lungs”—but the big thing she warned against was putting your tongue on a pump handle. Your tongue would freeze to it and there you’d be, stuck, and somebody would have to come and either warm up the handle with a blowtorch or else tear your tongue off it.

The tongue on the pump handle. Why did this loom so large in his mind? Pump handles were a rarity. He had never heard of an actual case of pump-handle-tongue freezing. Years later, after Daddy died, when Mother was opening up a little, he had asked her, “Why did you make such a big thing about not putting our tongues on pump handles?” and Mother said she had no idea what he was talking about and he said, “You warned me against putting my tongue on a pump handle because it would freeze to it and it’s become a very big thing in my life.” And his sister Elaine said he was being stupid. “Mother always was worried about you because you were sickly and difficult and didn’t get along with other children,” she said. “Someday they would have programs for special-needs kids like you but they didn’t then. There was only your mom. And now you blame her for your weirdness?”

But the pump-handle obsession was stuck up there in his head. A sense of doom, a feeling that, one cold winter day, he would walk along and see a pump handle and be caught in its force field and stick his tongue to it and suffer horrible pain and his tongue would never recover. He would talk with a lisp afterward. No amount of speech therapy would help. And that was the basis of his horror of Christmas: the painful memory of a childhood fear that only grew stronger with the years. A fear of pump handles and also iron railings, iron poles, chains, clasps, shafts, masts, cast-iron pillars, pilasters, parapets, pipes, pegs, pins, pans, plates, panels, pommels, planks, pivots—once in a science museum in Poughkeepsie he stood enthralled by a pendulum, his tongue extended—knobs, rings, ribs, hoops, chucks, bolts, shells, spikes, sockets, shanks, tanks, trays, discs, hinges, hoods, hubcaps, gussets, cages, coils, cleats, caps, cups, couplings, capstans and davits, ductwork, trusses, bumpers, brackets, ratchets, switches, swivels, handles, spindles and sprockets, rockers, spacers, spools, screws, skirts, strips, stirrups, springs, manifolds—once, boarding a small plane in Pittsburgh he had felt powerfully drawn toward the propeller—hammers, housings, levers, louvers, vents, valves, bearings, beams, blades, clamps—once in Pomona he was photographed looking at an iron plinth and his tongue was hanging out. To strangers James was a big-shot and a tycoon and a handy target of abuse, but in fact he was a human being suffering from an obsession with iron and freezing weather and his tongue, clearly from a need for self-abasement and humiliation. Someday his dirty little secret would come out into the open . . .

It was coming. If not this year, then next.

His only hope of escape?

Hawaii. It does not freeze in Hawaii. Not like you’d notice it.

 

 

H
e had tried yoga and the teacher Julie Ramanandra thought a position called the Blissful Rutabaga might be helpful. “Place the top of your head flat against the floor between your feet and then raise your legs very very high and straight in the air, keeping your hands in your pockets,” she said. As she did this very thing. He got up and bowed and left the room.

A behavioral psychologist named Smucker told him to tie bells around his ankles so they jingled when he walked and to sing a calypso number, “Mon, I Go To De Market Now An’ Mak Much Mazuma.” He said, “If you act happy, you will become happy. It actually works.” James thanked him for the idea.

He went to an ill-tempered psychiatrist named Walters who dashed off a prescription for something called Mist On The Mountains and told him to take two right away and then one a day in the morning with food (but not with celery).

“What is this?” James said.

“Antidepressant.”

“But which one?”

“What’s the problem?”

“You can’t tell me what it is?”

“What do you want? The chemical formula? A seminar on reuptake inhibitors? In a week you’ll feel terrific. Have a nice day.” The shrink went to the door and opened it.

“What does it do?” said James.

“What do you mean, ‘what does it do?’ It’s an anti-depressant. It makes you happy. It induces amnesia and it snip-snip-snips the thread of memory and all those bad memories go drifting away like dirty bathwater and you’ll be boyish and ebullient again.”

“Will I still be able to read and write?”

“Probably.”

“
There are trade-offs,” said the psychiatrist. “But listen—you don’t want it? Fine. I’ll save it for somebody else. And
good luck.”
And presented a bill for $220 for consultation.

Pump Handle Syndrome. Ever since childhood, when the temperature dropped below twenty below, he got painful stomach cramps and nausea and felt listless lassitude and modern medicine couldn’t do a thing for him, and then in Zurich once, at a party, he met a Nobel Prize-winning psycho-physiologist named Dr. Heinrich Hertz who had done interesting work in the field of polar obsessions at the
Zentral Kontor zie Ordnung Zuzammenschluss Medizinisch Forschung Verbindung Geschloss
and who put a blue slip of paper to Mr. Sparrow’s tongue and examined it under a microscope and murmured to himself,
Gespruchen zee daskompenforshnittgennocktvairbruggendeehompen
and he told Mr. Sparrow he should move to a warm climate and avoid freezing weather—
Eis und Schnee—nicht! Nein!—
and he recommended spending winters in Hawaii and Mr. Sparrow bought Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau. And his pump-handle problem was solved.

Instant success! Exactly how modern science is supposed to work.

Problems that people used to struggle their whole lives with, pushing the boulder up the hill and then it overwhelms them and rolls back down and they have to push it back up—modern science can fix this with one wave of its beautiful hand. A little man with pince-nez glasses puts blue paper on your tongue (
Ahhhhh
) and looks up and says, “I vill tell you two tinks: you must komm in out of ze coldt! Undt you must shtay out of ze coldt!”

But he had to run a big corporation in Chicago, so he couldn’t live full time at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau and Mrs. Sparrow was active in the arts in Chicago and not ready to give up theater and dance and music and painting for a life of collecting seashells and making necklaces of hibiscus blossoms so Mr. Sparrow stayed Chicago-bound. Meanwhile his pump-handle problem only got worse. In cold weather, he had to force himself to keep his tongue in his mouth and not put it on car door handles or the bronze busts of Studs Terkel and Ernie Banks outside the library or the railing going up the front stairs of the Bunyan Club.

Dr. Boemer told him that he was exhibiting obsessive-compulsive behavior and that there was a medical device that might help him, but then Dr. Boemer got to talking about other OCD cases he’d seen—obsessive hand-wringing, obsessive counting of ceiling tiles, obsessive ironing and pacing and talking, obsessive Facebook updating and friending, a male patient who went to a gym three times a day to shoot free-throws, exactly three hundred each time, and how Dr. Boemer had gotten him down to one hundred. Dr. Boemer was fascinated by OCD and he told about case after case. Obsessive-compulsive piano practicing. Guitar tuning. Making of lists. Clipping articles from newspapers and filing them. Nose picking. E-mailing jokes. One of his patients obsessively brushed her teeth down to tiny stumps. Another made bomb threats, hundreds a day, but always honking an ooga-ooga horn so they’d know it wasn’t for real.

Dr. Boemer went on and on, his voice like a cold engine trying to start. The hour was up and Mr. Sparrow was standing with his hand on the doorknob and Dr. Boemer could not stop telling about yet one more interesting OCD case. Being from California, frozen pump handles had no reality for him, but obsessive treadmill running did, and obsessive copyediting and grammar correcting, solitaire playing, throat clearing, belly itching, Web surfing, folk dancing, digital photographing, pants adjusting, geyser gazing, apologizing. He had a client named Mrs. Sanderson who could not speak a simple sentence without prefacing it with a “I’m so sorry but—” or “Begging your pardon—.” Mr. Sparrow said, “Excuse me but I’m fairly certain that it’s a violation of medical ethics to disclose these details,” and Dr. Boemer went on telling about OCDs he had known, as Mr. Sparrow left the office and stood at the elevator (“There was this one guy I recall who hummed to himself. Boy that was a case. We worked on him for almost two years.”) and the elevator doors closed and Mr. Sparrow never went back. But the tongue-on-the-pump-handle fear remained strong.

Except if he went to Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau.

 

 

H
e stood under the hot shower listening to Bach’s
Brandenburg Concerto No. 6
and, without thinking, pressed his tongue against a pipe, which was hot, and he recoiled and slipped slightly and joggled something in his lower back.
Call Nicole the shiatsu therapist
, he thought. He put on a pair of chinos and a white shirt and sandals and slipped into the kitchen where Simon had the breakfast made, two poached eggs (slightly runny) on rye toast, OJ, a latte, a sliced pear.

“Have you decided what time you wish to leave, sir?” Simon said. “All is in high readiness on all fronts. The troops are at attention, awaiting your command. The plane is fueled, the pilots rested, the snacks replenished—”

“I know, I know. First I have to find out when Mrs. Sparrow wants to go and then we’re all set.”

Joyce returned from her walk at 10:44 A.M. and said it was brisk and bracing outdoors and good for her ailment. She took off her wire-rim glasses and stood across the table and he was struck with a rush of dumb love for her. The great question of his life (Who do you love?) resolved in this tall broad-shouldered woman with mahogany hair tied back in a copper clip, grinning at him, crinkling her Roman nose, in her cowboy shirt and gray sweatpants, the sheer elegance of her, and he stood up and put his arms around her, tears in his eyes.

He met her the same year Coyote Corp. got off the ground when he judged a Christmas Gift-Wrap Contest at Marshall Field, which she won in the final round, the globular round, wrapping a basketball in golden paper, and hers had not a wrinkle or crinkle or rip in it. And he sat next to her at the awards luncheon and she talked about her aspirations in theater and he about coyote grass and he proposed a weekend at Mackinac Island and she told him that she would feel terrible guilt about such a thing because during her acting-school days in New York she had, in order to protect her cheap sublet of an apartment on West 86th and Broadway, dressed up in a black silk dress and a mantilla and attended early morning mass, impersonating the old lady from whom she’d sublet and who had died, and after eight months in the role of Mrs. Manicotti she came to feel a true religious devotion she had not felt in her upbringing as a Methodist in Wauwatosa, which caused a rift with her family who were willing to accept agnosticism but Catholicism was another matter. “Whatever we are, we are not Catholic,” said her mother. “We stand. We do not kneel.” But Joyce loved the kneeling part especially at midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when her faith was renewed, if only for a few days, and so she was not sure she could make love with him at Mackinac Island, but by the time she had told him the whole long story, they were in his apartment on a couch in front of a gas fireplace and unwrapping each other and they made tender and languorous love and fell asleep in each other’s arms and from that perfect night came eleven years of pleasant marriage, except for the Christmas holidays, of which this one was shaping up (he thought) to be the worst.