Ralph merely tended the stoker and sipped his bourbon in the basement. His pacifism galled her, but Annabel’s efforts increased in intensity. She glutted the mails with greeting cards and handkerchiefs and mufflers. She prepared envelopes with two-dollar tokens for the mailman, the milkman, the breadman, and the newsboy. The newsboy’s nose was always running that winter: Annabel noticed this and included in his envelope a box of Four-Way Cold Tablets and a note:

DEAR LITTLE BOY,

Season’s Greetings. Take these faithfully and that head will clear right up. Best wishes.

MRS. WILLIAMS

She packed Berry-berry’s share of fruitcake and cookies and gifts in a large cardboard box. When it was all wrapped and tied and ready for the post office, she placed it under the tree with the address sticker left blank. But Clinton knew that she believed privately the box would never be posted: Berry-berry would be there in person to open it in the Williams living room.

Now, in a Christian country not even a professed atheist can be totally indifferent to the advent of Christmas; and Ralph Williams was to make his own peculiar contribution to the holiday. It had been a month of bitter cold, and through many of these long evenings, in which he listened to the cruel winds that beat upon his basement windows, the old man was besieged with memories of his own earlier Decembers. He told Clinton of a Christmas Eve he had spent in Grand Island, Nebraska, hungry and cold, in the back seat of a parked car whose owner had left it unlocked; another, in a Salvation Army place in Cincinnati, Ohio; and one year he and two companions broke into a tomb in a Dearborn, Michigan, graveyard, where they passed a sleepless Christmas night huddled together against its marble walls. These thoughts of his own hard times, now long past, caused him to ponder the present situation of millions of others. He told Clinton of the hungry Chinese, the Eskimos, the Navajo Indians, the Negroes, the homeless refugees everywhere, and of all the wanderers of the world.

“But you know what we are?” At this, he raised his voice and projected it toward the laundry chute: “We’re the fat-asses of the world. We just sit here and think about it, and stuff all the cupboards full of fruitcake!” In his heart, he laid all the blame for the world’s wretchedness upon Annabel’s indifference to it. The more she baked and laid by for the stomachs of the Williamses, the deeper his bitterness grew.

But suddenly, on the morning of the day before Christmas, this sullenness disappeared, mysteriously to Annabel, altogether. Indeed, Ralph became so remarkably cheerful that she looked for an opportunity to sniff his breath: there was bourbon on it, but since she couldn’t remember a time when there had not been, the clue was useless to her. When he left the house in mid-afternoon, with spirits so exalted that he kissed her on the mouth, Annabel was forced to conclude that by some miracle Ralph had been so touched by the contagion of her own Christmas zeal that he had actually gone out to buy a present for her. If this were true, she might even hope that another miracle would see him standing next to her in church, flanked by his sons, on Christmas morning.