Once Around the Square

One Christmas Eve, when I was eleven, Mom worried about Midnight Mass, the snowstorm, and whether I would make it to sing in the choir. She called another Choir Mom. All during the day, they went back and forth about what to do. Should we just pile in the car and risk it? Or stay home and miss Mass on one of the most important days of the year? At the last minute, Mom decided.

“You take her, Bob,” she decided. “I’ll stay home with the little ones.”

Dad doesn’t go to church.

An hour before midnight, Dad slid me onto the front seat of our Impala convertible. The interior blasted hot air in the already warmed-up car. Still, I pulled my coat tighter around me as I watched my father scrape ice off the windshield. There was no point in clearing off the rear window, because a few seasons in the New Jersey weather had discolored the plastic into a murky yellow, and you couldn’t see out the back anyway.

Dad took a final drag off his cigarette, threw it into the snowbank, and got into the car. For once, it was just me and Dad.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready!”

After firing up another Kent with the car lighter, Dad backed out of the icy driveway, and stopped. He pushed up on the column gearshift. He tapped on the gas pedal. The Impala fish-tailed a bit. Oh no! Are we stuck?! But Dad took his foot off the gas, then tapped it again, and we moved forward. Dad drove even slower than usual, past the Gallagher’s house down the street, then the Clark’s house and the Rainey’s. He turned left onto Woodland Avenue and headed straight. Above us and ahead, as far as we could see, the streetlamps lit up bright white snowflakes, all glowy as they danced around in twirling circles. I saw a painting like that in a library book, only it had swirls around the stars in the night sky. I wondered why the snowflakes twirled in circles, instead of falling right to the ground in a straight line. Why was that?

“It’s really coming down,” Dad said.

All the way up Woodland Avenue, Dad fishtailed here and there, then stopped and started again, like an expert. He always knew what to do.

“You turn into the skid,” he said. “Don’t fight it.”

Safe inside the Impala, I looked out at the snow. All along the way, every house was trimmed with a neat line of multi-colored Christmas lights at the eave. On the evergreen bushes, more lights followed the natural curves and lumps, creating a soft, pastoral feeling. Already, snow covered the lights, causing the colors to become muted and blurred, like a watercolor painting. In almost every front picture window, a fat Christmas tree stood, draped in silvery tinsel, the kind Dad used to bring home from the Woolworth store.

Once we got uptown, Dad guided the Impala onto black roads, already plowed and salted. Dad turned to me. “Once around the square?”

“Yes!”

Dad drove around the Morristown Green, lit up and decorated every year with giant candy canes and toy soldiers and a little house in the center, where you could visit Santa. We went around once, then headed over to Maple. Dad pulled up to the red brick facade of Assumption Church.

“You go ahead on in,” he said, “I’ll park out back.”

As the bells of the old church rang out, I walked through the big heavy wooden doors, across the mosaic tiles in the vestibule, and up the creaky spiral staircase to the choir loft. As I peeled off my wool coat, wet with melted snow, I looked down at the church, decked out in red velvet and pine boughs and candles. Taking a seat on the hard bench with the other sopranos, I shivered in my sleeveless linen shift, a bright cranberry color, inherited from my Aunt Patsy.

“Here,” Mom had said, holding up the summery dress from a box in the cellar.

“We’re supposed to wear a red velvet dress,’” I said. “Something ‘Christmassy.’”

“This’ll do you fine,” Mom said over her shoulder as she headed back up the cellar stairs to get dinner on.

Before Mass began, we sang familiar carols with the whole congregation. O Come All Ye Faithful. Little Drummer Boy. O Little Town of Bethlehem. Then, during Mass, just before communion, we filed down from the loft, each holding a candle, and walked toward the altar, singing the showstopper, the carol that ended on an impossible G over High C.

O, Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining

It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth

Sister Maura had timed it. We got to the main aisle of the church and paused just as we reached the most dramatic moment, the refrain after Fall on your knees! when we would crescendo up to that celestial note. Facing the altar from my spot in the main aisle, I gripped my candle. I took a breath.

Oh night when Christ was born

I took another, deeper breath. I dug my fingernails into the candle wax. Then, I pushed as hard as I could.

O Night, Di - VINE!

Sad to say, we didn’t quite make it. We did, however, commit ourselves with force to whatever note we thought could reach. We sang out and pierced the eardrums of all the worshippers with a screechy flat F. I couldn’t help but turn and look at Sister, up in the loft, shaking her head, but shrugging and smiling in defeat.

“God loves us in spite of ours flaws,” she said. Sister Maura never yelled at us, no matter what. Patient and kind, she always made us feel we were good enough.

After Mass, I got my coat back on and headed downstairs to find Dad emerging from the crowd, beaming at me. “Did you like it, Dad?”

“Beautiful!” he exclaimed. He looked at me with pride. Didn’t he even notice the sour note? “Bundle up, now,” Dad said as he pulled my coat together. As we headed out to the parking lot and trudged through the soft snow, Dad held my arm so I wouldn’t slip. Together we walked, kicking the fresh snowfall with each footstep. I got clumps of it in my red rubber boots, and my socks turned freezing and wet, but I didn’t care. Dad kept praising the Christmas service. Dad, who wasn’t a Catholic, and didn’t go to church, ever, said, “That was the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Did you really like it, Dad?”

“Beautiful!” he cried out, shaking his head. “Christ! That was goddamn beautiful!”

He opened the car door for me and slid me onto the seat again, just as he did before.

I often wonder if on that Christmas Eve, he already had one foot out the door. Like so many questions, this is unknowable. I don’t know why he left us and started a new life for himself. I spent many years in a silent rage, asking the unanswerable. How could he leave us behind? I thought about the day he left for good. The time he believed his new wife’s lies about me. The time he promised to help me, then died.

I can put those memories, my father’s flaws, aside now, dusty like last year’s Christmas tree decorations. They’re still there, up in the attic in a plastic bin, and I can visit them when I feel the need. That need is abating over the passing years, though.

I visit this memory every December, on Christmas Eve, when my soon-to-be absent father drove me to Midnight Mass in a snowstorm.