Mr. Ives' Christmas

by Oscar Hijuelos

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Hailed “the deepest and the best” of Pulitzer-Prize winning author Oscar Hijuelos’s novels, this acclaimed national bestseller examines faith lost and regained after a businessman’s son violently dies at Christmas (New York TimesBook Review).

In 1960s New York, Edward Ives is a picture of the American dream. Adopted as a child by a widowed print shop manager, who helped him cultivate a love of drawing, he now has a successful career as an illustrator in advertising, a beautiful home with his wife and muse, Annie, and two loving children. But this idyllic life is brutally wrenched away when Ives’s 17-year-old son, Robert—who has just decided to commit his life to the priesthood—is murdered by another teenage boy just before Christmas, a crime of opportunity that proves to be as random as it is senseless.

Consumed by grief, Ives withdraws from the world. Grappling with a loss of faith—a force that has guided him steadfastly since childhood—he starts to question every aspect of human existence, contemplating what it really means to live an emotionally and spiritually fulfilling life. This mourning consumes him—until he takes on the monumental task of working through his suffering, and ultimately faces his son's killer.

Mr. Ives' Christmas is a tender, passionate story of a man working to rediscover what it means to love, forgive, and live after unspeakable tragedy. It is another tremendous achievement from one of America’s most talented writers.

Includes a Reading Group Guide.

Release date: January 1, 1995

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

Years ago, in the 1950s, as a young man working for a Madison Avenue advertising agency, Ives always looked forward to the holiday season and would head out during his lunch hours, visiting churches, to think and meditate, and, if he was lucky, to hear the choirs as they practiced their hymns and sacred songs. Often enough, he walked along the burgeoning sidewalks, crowded with shoppers and tourists, and made his way to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, where he’d become lost in a kind of euphoric longing—why he did not know. And in a moment, he would find himself, as a child, attending Mass with his adoptive family again, so many memories coming back to him: of standing beside his father during the services and noticing, as he looked up at his father’s kindly face, just how moved he seemed to be by the prayers, and the Latin incantations, and the reverential chants; so moved, especially during the raising of the host, that he almost seemed on the verge of tears.

Each time he entered a sanctuary, Ives himself nearly wept, especially at Christmas, when the image of one particular church on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, whose choir was very good and the worshipers devout, came back to him, its interior smelling mightily of evergreen boughs, candle wax, and pots of red and white blossoms set against the columns. Dignified Irishmen, with greatly slicked heads of hair, dockworkers for the most part, turned up in ties and jackets, their wives and children by their sides. And there were bootleggers and policemen and carpenters and street sweepers in attendance as well. And a blind man whom Ives sometimes helped down the marble stairs; a few Negroes, as they were called in those days, all, Ives was convinced, believing in the majesty of the child. The old Italian ladies, their heads wrapped in black scarves and their violet lips kissing their scapular medals, and crucifixes and rosaries, kneeling, nearly weeping before the altar and the statues of Christ and His mother; and at Christmas, the beginning of His story, sweetly invoked by the rustic and somehow ancient-looking crèche.

The fact was that Ives, uncertain of many things, could at that time of year sit rather effortlessly within the incense- and candle-wax-scented confines of a church, like Saint Patrick’s, thinking about the images, ever present and timeless, that seemed to speak especially to him. Not about the cheery wreaths, the boughs of pine branches, the decorative ivy and flowers set out here and there, but rather about the Christ child, whose meaning evoked for him a feeling for “the beginning of things,” a feeling that time and all its sufferings had fallen away.

Of course, while contemplating the idea of the baby Jesus, perhaps the most wanted child in the history of the world, Ives would feel a little sad, remembering that years ago someone had left him, an unwanted child, in a foundling home. (To that day, to all the days into the future, there remained within him the shadowy memory of the dark-halled building in which he lived for nearly two years, a place as cavernous and haunted as a cathedral.) A kind of fantasy would overtake him, a glorious vision of angels and kings and shepherds worshiping a baby: nothing could please him more, nothing could leave him feeling a deeper despair.

Enflamed by the sacred music and soft chanting, his heart lifted out of his body and winged its way through the heavens of the church. Supernatural presences, invisible to the world, seemed thick in that place, as if between the image of Christ who is newly born and the image of the Christ who would die on the cross and, resurrected, return as the light of this world, there flowed a powerful, mystical energy. And his sense of that energy would leave Ives, his head momentarily empty of washing machine and automobile advertisements, convinced that, for all his shortcomings as a man, he once had a small, if imperfect, spiritual gift.

That, long ago, at Christmas.

More sentimental than he would let on to others, Ives, in his later years, was the kind of fellow who saved just about everything, a practice that had something to do with his foundling beginning. In his study, he had file cabinets filled with letters, postcards, and Christmas greetings. He kept funeral cards, Jesus Christ with His burning heart welcoming the sanctified into heaven, the glorious place. He had autographed drawings from Winsor McKay, Walter Lantz, Otto Messmer, Lee Falk, Dick Caulkins, and dozens of other cartoon artists. And piles of cards and correspondence from commercial artists like himself, many of them friends with whom he had collaborated over the years. A curiosity: somehow and somewhere, he had acquired an autographed publicity shot of the actor Ray Milland. And there was also his collection of affectionately kept handwritten notes from fellow artists much more famous than himself. His favorite, because it took him back to a happier time during his childhood, was the note Walt Disney had sent him back in 1935, when, at the age of thirteen, he submitted some funny-animal drawings and gag ideas on the chance that he could go to work for the Disney studio, then making a new kind of animated, feature-length film called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A form letter turned him down, but a few lines had been added, which said, “Keep in touch and keep it up, your work is swell! Walt Disney.” Ives showed the note to all his friends and passersby, as they walked by his stoop, the mild praise had him floating for weeks.

(He even had a crinkly-edged black-and-white photograph taken of him back then—Ives in a tie and jacket posed on the steps of his building in Brooklyn, just after he’d come back from Mass, with the letter held up before him, for all to see. His expression was happy. Ives with his long dagger nose, dark eyes, and wavy hair did not look like someone named Ives but rather a Spinelli or a Martinez or a Jacobs, though that had not mattered to the man who had adopted him. The picture was taken by his older adoptive brother, Johnny, in his pinstriped suit, a toothpick in his mouth, his handsome face gnarled from concentration as he took the shot, his pretty flapper-looking date by his side. “Smile, Eddie,” and click… He sat there, his shoes and hair shiny, a missal on his lap, his coat by his side, a goofy grin on his face, nothing of his sad feelings about life showing in that moment. A friend, Butch, a tough alley cat of a street kid, stood off to the right and stared into the camera, a menacing smirk across his freckled mug. Then the doorway, the hall, a second door and, if you squinted, Ives’ adoptive sister, Katherine, about his age and pretty but thin and lost and not the brightest kid in the world. In a straw hat with flowers in its brim and opened coat with three of its buttons torn off, she seemed to be looking sadly out through the shadows.)

He had portfolios with hundreds of drawings in them, none of which he ever looked at anymore. And comic-strip ideas that had never quite cut it, for all the times he had tried: “Cosmo the Ghost,” “Nicky Steele, Private Eye,” “Lord Lightning” were the titles he remembered. He kept oil paintings and watercolors that he had done over the years, and many early nudes of his wife, and studies, done casually and nearly effortlessly, of his two children, during certain moments of rest or play or prayer when they were small.

He had a favorite possession: an authentic etching by Albrecht Dürer, bought at the height of the depression from a down-and-out art dealer in Greenwich Village, a man with a mad Russian face and trembling hands, as kindly as his adoptive father, who’d sold him the work for ten dollars. He had a pencil sketch by George Bridgeman, with whom he had once studied, another by Burne Hogarth. He had a lacquered, souvenir-shop, postcard-sized reproduction of Raphael’s “La Madonna del Granduca,” a heartbreakingly beautiful portrait, done in the tondo or circular format, of a young Florentine noblewoman in white, a Christmas gift from his daughter, Caroline. She’d bought it for him when she was a teenager and knew him well enough to remember that, in his opinion, it was the finest portrait, ever, by any artist. He loved it because it was an exquisite work by a true genius, and because the first time he’d laid eyes upon it, hanging on a cluttered wall in a second-floor gallery in the Pitti Palace in Florence, it was 1960, and they were on their first European vacation as a family and his son, Robert, was still alive.

WHAT ELSE DID HE HAVE? THE BETTER QUESTION, WHAT DIDN’T HE keep? In boxes that sat in the attic study of their little country house there remained a half-dozen two-tone erasers, some worn more than others, from the days when he was an in-betweener for the Steichman Brothers animation studio of New York. And there were some old No. 2 pencils, still in their boxes, from that period, and in a manila envelope, wrapped in a thick rubber band, several dozen 1939 wallet calendars that he’d knocked out for a plumber’s outfit, which gave them away by the entrance to the World’s Fair. In his closet, he had pads and sketchbooks and samples of artwork from the time he was a teenager: a few of the hand-drawn Christmas cards that he peddled from door to door and sold for a nickel apiece, and everything else from matchbook covers to beer coasters, girly posters, horror comics, religious drawings, and book illustrations and mounds and mounds of mechanicals and studies for print ads, some of which had been highly regarded in their time by fellow professionals. He had a dozen old course certificates from the Advertising Club of New York. And dozens of promotional pens and paperweights put out by his agency on behalf of tobacco companies, foundation-garment manufacturers, and just about anything else from gentle laxatives to pipe cleaners. And reams of old stationery from the place where he’d worked for thirty years, with the coolly scripted company logo saying: THE MANNIS AGENCY, 10 EAST 40TH STREET, NEW YORK 16, N.Y. NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO, LONDON, MEXICO CITY.

But most sorrowfully, there were a few items kept hidden in a closet that related to his son—a white leatherbound New Testament, a baptismal card, a pile of paperbacks, and a new watch, never used, that had been purchased as his Christmas present at Macy’s the afternoon before his death.

THAT SAD EVENT TOOK PLACE ONE EVENING, A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas 1967, some six months before Robert was to enter the Franciscan order as a young seminarian; just a few minutes after attending a late-afternoon choir practice at the Church of the Holy Ascension, his life had ended. He was seventeen at the time of his death, and not an hour passed when Ives did not calculate his son’s age were he still alive. Now he would have been in his early forties and working as a pastor somewhere, maybe as a priest for the Church of Saint Francis downtown, or teaching seminarians upstate near Albany. Ives liked to think that they would have remained close over the years. In one of the dreams that he had long stopped having, he’d find himself sitting in a church and watching his son raise the Host at the altar. Then the time would come, and he’d kneel by the communion railing, his wife by his side, and, with his eyes closed, his head lifted toward his son, he would wait to hear the words “Body of Christ” and for his priestly hands to slip the consecrated wafer upon his tongue.…

In his retirement and much slowed down, Ives still had days when he blamed his son’s death on God’s “will.” God had timed things so that his murderer, his face scowling, came walking down the street just as his son and a friend were standing around talking. Pop, pop, pop, three shots in the belly because his son had simply turned his head to watch his murderer’s exaggerated and comic gait as he went by. A fourteen-year-old kid, who’d reeled around asking, “What chew looking at?” his gun out before an answer. A kid, now a man, whom Ives should have forgiven, but couldn’t, even when he tried to—Lord, that was impossible—so filled was his heart with a bitterness and confusion of spirit that had never gone completely away.

Since his retirement from the agency in 1982, Ives and his wife divided their time between Manhattan and their small getaway home near Hudson, New York. There wasn’t much around their tract of land other than a pretty view, magnificent and blooming with flowers and trees in the spring and summer, frigid and desolate in the colder months, which drove his lively wife, Annie, crazy. They had some moody younger neighbors about a quarter mile up the road, and there were a few deserted summer houses further on, so that on some days they hardly saw anyone, an isolation that made his wife eager for their flat in the city, on Ninety-third Street off Columbus.

They moved downtown from Claremont Avenue some ten years before, in ’84, after their apartment had been burglarized and because Annie had thought the change would do her husband some good. His stubborn inability to stop mourning their son, to keep his sorrow hidden from others but to let it flourish around her, had tempted Annie to leave him several times over the years. But she loved him too much. Again and again, she told him, “You have to put it behind you, my love,” but as the years passed, nearly thirty of them, with their thousands of days and hundreds of thousands of hours, he still could not get a certain image out of his head: his righteous and good son, stretched out on the sidewalk, eyes glazed and looking upward, suddenly aware and saddened that his physical life was ending, that image coming to Ives again and again.

Trying to make sense of what had happened, he awaited a revelation but over the years had been let down often enough so that, after so many years, Mr. Ives, formerly of Brooklyn, New York, and Madison Avenue, had gradually turned into stone: a civil, good-hearted man, but one made of stone all the same.

There had been his bad dreams and his bad skin, tormenting maladies that had come about after the death of his son and had gotten gradually worse, not better, with time, Ives keeping Annie up on many a night with his twisting about and endless scratching. There had been his daylong silences and his overwhelming solemnity toward the most ordinary things, like going to a movie, and the way he would sometimes stand by the window at night for hours, as if waiting for someone. Though she loved him, all this sometimes made her feel a little boxed in, and she would fall into her own state of gloom. That’s when she would ship him off to Hudson, so that she could work in the city on her various educational projects in peace.

Every so often he would catch an Amtrak train north and spend a week at a time in that house, drawing, reading, and taking care of his mutty hounds, Rex and Alice. And while doing so, he would think of just how much his son had loved his life and had loved God, and Ives would doubt that God existed.

Then the holidays would come and the past would hit Ives like a chill wind. Memories of his son plaguing him, there came many a day, around Christmas, when Ives would plaintively wait for a sign that his son, who’d deserved so much more than what he had been given, was somewhere safe and beloved by God. Each day he awaited a slick of light to enter the darkness. And when life went on as usual, without any revelation, he’d await his own death and the new life or—as he often suspected—the new oblivion to begin.

In the years just after his son’s death, when he’d become a somber man, Mr. Ives would walk over from Claremont Avenue, in upper Manhattan, toward the subway on 125th Street on Broadway, on his way to work, with a black portfolio or a briefcase in hand, unable to look at anyone, his head down, a hand in his coat pocket. And when he did make contact, his eyes were as wide open and filled with as much pain and disappointment as any eyes had ever been. Everyone who knew him in the neighborhood, for his righteousness and mellow demeanor—the way people had thought about his adoptive father in Brooklyn—felt saddened by that event, but the shooting had been a source of particular disgrace for the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the neighborhood. As an important enough Madison Avenue executive who had helped many of the local Hispanic families with jobs and whose best friend was a Cuban man, named Luis Ramirez, Ives watched his love and admiration for the culture diminish; for a long time he would not forget—though he had tried—the fact that his son’s murderer was Puerto Rican.

It wasn’t easy or pleasurable for Ives to have such feelings: Ives himself, over the years, was sometimes taken to be a person of mixed blood, in looks if not manner, and therefore had been the victim of prejudice himself. Looking in the mirror, as if at a map, certain of his features revealed a bit of ethnic identity, startling him. His almond eyes and the darkness of his own countenance were such that different people often took Ives to be one of their own. With his unknown beginnings he might well have had Spanish blood; perhaps his mother was Puerto Rican, Cuban, or from the Dominican Republic. But even without knowing the truth, he had gravitated toward that culture simply out of curiosity and affection.

For years he would stop by Juanito’s barbershop and speak a Spanish that, while imperfect, was affable and diverse; the Spanish of a man who had never formally studied but had related to and loved the language. For years he had read El Diario and the Deportes columns, just so he could participate in conversations about baseball and boxing; and he used to enjoy leaning back in the barber’s chair and listening to the Spanish-language radio and its sweet canciones. He used to go there every couple of weeks for a trim, and always waved and flashed a smile at his friends, as he walked by. But one day he had not bothered to even look over and refrained from going in, his contemplative face and sad expression something they now viewed from afar, through a stencilled sunlit window.

Even in his youth, he had a pensive disposition. But he was not especially bright (or at least he never thought so), and though he was not a wildly funny young man, he loved people and things that were amusing: humorous illustrations from old books, illustrators like Soglow of “Little King” fame and George “Krazy Kat” Herriman, satirical cartoons, newspaper comics, screwball comedies, animated cartoons, and, going back, certain silent-screen comedians like Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd (the latter to whom he thought he bore some kind of resemblance). Having to wear glasses as a teenager, Ives chose round tortoiseshell frames like Mr. Lloyd’s and wore a black-ribboned straw boater, which gave him a jaunty air.

Outwardly lighthearted and ever courteous, Ives had lived with a notion that he was worthless. The first three years of his life were largely a blank; his fourth and fifth years were spent in Saint Stephen’s in Brooklyn. Not a day passed when certain thoughts about that place and the circumstances that led him there did not fail to depress him. As he walked down the avenue, or made his way along the busy halls of his agency to show sketches to his art director, certain remembrances weakened his knees and stopped him in his tracks. Ives would suddenly pause by a water cooler or mimeograph machine or by a pretty secretary’s desk, to look off into the distance, his mind lost in some sad dream. To those coworkers who found him staring out the window, with its grand view of the avenue stretching northward toward Fifty-seventh Street, he’d seemed to be musing about life or the weather—how dainty the clouds looked on certain days—or about the spectacular beauty of the Art Deco edifices, office towers with their ziggurat tops and black marble-slab walls. Yet what he really saw instead, in some dark place, was another view from another window: a dingy tenement somewhere in Brooklyn in the early 1920s. In his thoughts, it was always night with snow on the ground, and he was cold and lost and peering out desperately, furtively toward the other windows and rooftops and wishing he could run away. A memory, passing in a flash, of his mother, a pretty woman with olive skin, dark hair, and frightened eyes, huddling in a corner and calling to him in a language that he could not identify or remember; and of a man, immense and beastly, shouting and breaking things; and his mother breaking up inside herself and weeping; and a hard slap to his face and a strap of a belt against his legs and the room turning.

He believed that his father had been a man of foreign extraction who’d had something to do with the sea—a fisherman or a sailor, who’d perhaps met his mother on a night’s leave in Brooklyn, ravishing her on a pile of coiled ropes or burlap bags by the harbor or in some flea-bitten hotel. In all likelihood, his mother was typical of the kind of women who abandoned children: young, very poor, and scared for her life. She was probably a factory worker, or a prostitute, he sometimes thought, the latter notion both tormenting and fascinating him.

(One day, when he was in midtown on his way back from a job, he wandered into the Forty-second Street library. Although he wanted to find some art books, he somehow found himself sitting at a table reading an archaic book of statistics, put out by the New York City Department of Child Welfare, which had information about the number of orphans and abandoned children in New York in the 1920s, the period of Ives’ tenure in his foundling home. The book contained many confusing charts and tables, statistics with miniature citations in their upper right-hand corner that he carefully studied and tried to comprehend. There were statistics about the occurrences of tuberculosis, pneumonia, rheumatic fever, blindness, and deafness “per ward” in a given calendar year—columns and columns of numbers that referred to the many unwanted children, but told nothing of their stories, Ives daydreaming about the very home where he had stayed as he read over the lists.)

The good nuns had found some of their children waiting hungry and exhausted on the steps of the home, before its thick double doors, and some were delivered like laundry by the city, whose own agencies and wards were always jammed to bursting; and some were carried in the arms of softhearted cops who’d discovered the runts, tots, and abandoned infan. . .