Neil reflected that if these intimates were here, he would be able to discuss such personal puzzles as why he had recently enjoyed hating Belfreda. Then he admitted that all three of them had shied away from any subject more spiritual than the legs of their stenographers, any topic more embarrassing than the Republican Party. Only once in his life had Neil possessed a friend with whom he could talk about fear and love and God, and that friend he had known for only two weeks.

He had been young Captain Ellerton, whom Neil had met on the transport to Italy. All day, all night, they had talked. Ellerton was a designer of machinery, with a taste for Mozart and Eugene O’Neill and Toulouse-Lautrec and Veblen, and he had not seemed to be impertinent when he had asked, “Do you ever think about personal immortality?” and “Do you love your Vestal out of love or out of loyalty?”

Ellerton was killed by a sniper, forty-two minutes after they had landed in Italy.

Neil had forgotten, by now, just what he had answered when, under the Mediterranean stars, Tony Ellerton had speculated, “Since you have only one life that you know of, do you enjoy devoting most of it to banking?”

Chapter 7

“We’ll have an honest-to-God traditional Christmas, carols and bellyaches and everything. We’ll celebrate, because the war will be over by next year, and the boys will be coming home… and we’ll get more butter,” Vestal rejoiced.

Their tree was a tall spruce from a northern swamp, but when she came to decorate it she protested that the war was indeed terrible, for in the Five-and-Tens and Tarr’s Emporium there were only a few silver balls and twisted sticks of colored glass.

She resolutely explored her father-in-law’s attic and in a lurching pasteboard carton, like Captain Kidd’s treasure in a shoe-box, she found the trinkets remaining from the good old days of 1940: a great silver star, a silver-and-gold angel, glass oranges and grapes and cherries, a handful of tinsel rain, and a jocose little plaster statue of Santa Claus with a red coat and a red nose and a lighted pipe.

She came home like a walking Christmas van, and that evening the tree was ridden from the garage into the living-room on Neil’s stout back, and Vestal, Neil, Biddy, Prince, and Shirley danced round it, squealing.

It was Neil’s turn, this year, to entertain the whole Kingsblood tribe on Christmas Day. So, with all of her womanly genius raging, Vestal coursed through Tarr’s, allowing herself a strict budget of seven presents to every ten dollars, and she accomplished a fabulous wonder by finding, at Bozard’s, a four-strand almost-real pearl necklace for Mother Kingsblood for eleven dollars. With a not-even-almost-real diamond pendant attached to it.

It was at Tarr’s that Vestal snatched up the gifts for Biddy: the lovely, old-fashioned, starry-eyed, flaxen-headed doll which resembled a plumper Biddy, and the lovely, new-fashioned machine gun which, in the 1940’s, had become just the right token of the Christchild for a nice little girl. And at Tarr’s she got the new collar and the rubber bone for Prince, the scarf for Shirley, and the rosewood pipe for Neil’s father, which the good dentist would admire extravagantly and never use.