At home in San Francisco, they’d always exchanged gifts before going to Midnight Mass, so Christmas Eve was the big day in Reuben’s mind. Christmas Day had always been informal and a time for leisure, with Phil going off to watch films of Dickens’s Christmas Carol in his room, and Grace having an informal buffet for her hospital friends, especially the personnel who were far from home and family.
Phil was up and writing, and immediately poured a mug of Italian roast coffee for Reuben. The little guesthouse was the epitome of the word “cozy.” Sheer white ruffled curtains had been put over the windows, a remarkably feminine touch, Reuben thought, but they were pretty, and they softened the stark vision of the endless sea, which was something unsettling to Reuben.
They sat by the fire together, Phil presenting Reuben with one small book wrapped in foil, which Reuben opened first. Phil had made it himself, illustrating it with his own freehand drawings, “in the style of William Blake,” he said with a self-mocking laugh. And Reuben saw that it was a collection of the poems Phil had written over the years expressly for his sons, some of which had been published before, and most of which had never been read by anybody.
For My Sons was the simple title.
Reuben was deeply touched. Phil’s spidery drawings surrounded each page, weaving images together rather like the illuminations in medieval manuscripts, and often amounted to frames of foliage with simple domestic objects embedded in them. Here and there in the dense, squiggly drawings was a coffee mug or a bicycle, or a little typewriter or a basketball. Sometimes there were impish faces, crude but kindly caricatures of Jim and Reuben and Grace and Phil himself. There was one primitive whole-page drawing of the Russian Hill house and all its many crowded little rooms filled with cherished furniture and objects.
Never had Phil put together anything like this before. Reuben loved it.
“Now your brother has his own copy coming to him by FedEx today. And I sent your mother one too,” said Phil. “You mustn’t read a word of it now. You take that up to the castle, and you read it when you want to read it. Poetry should be taken in small doses. Nobody needs poetry. Nobody needs to make himself read it.”
There were two other gifts, and Phil assured Reuben that Jim was receiving identical ones. The first was a book Phil had written called simply Our Ancestors in San Francisco—Dedicated to My Sons. Reuben couldn’t have been happier. For the first time in his life, he really wanted to know all about Phil’s family. He’d grown up under the gargantuan shadow of his Spangler grandfather, the real estate entrepreneur who had founded the Spangler fortune, but had heard little or nothing of the Goldings, and this was not typed, this book, it was written in Phil’s old-fashioned and beautifully readable cursive. There were old photographs reproduced here that Reuben had never seen before.
“You take your time with that, too,” said Phil. “You take the rest of your life, if you like, to read it. And you pass it on to your boy, of course, though I intend to tell that child some of the stories I never told you and your brother.”
The last gift was a soft tweed flat cap, or ivy cap, which had belonged to Grandfather O’Connell—just like the cap Phil had been wearing on his walks. “Your brother got the very same thing,” said Phil. “My grandfather never went out without one of these caps. And I have another couple in my trunk for that boy who’s coming.”
“Well, Dad, these are the best presents anyone’s ever given me,” said Reuben. “This is an extraordinary Christmas. It just keeps getting better and better.” He concealed the low burning pain he felt—that he’d had to lose his life to really understand the value of it, that he’d had to leave the realm of human family to want to know and embrace his antecedents.
Phil looked at him gravely. “You know, Reuben,” he said. “Your brother Jim is lost. He’d buried himself alive in the Catholic priesthood for all the wrong reasons. The world in which he struggles is shrunken and dark. There’s no magic in it, no wonder, no mysticism. But you have the universe waiting for you.”
If only I could tell you the smallest part of it, if only I could confide and seek your guidance. If only …
“Here, Dad, my presents,” Reuben said. And he brought in the big box of carefully wrapped little volumes and set it before Phil.
Phil was in tears when he opened the first one, seeing the little Ginn and Company hardcover of Hamlet, the very textbook version he’d cherished as an undergraduate. And as he came to see that the complete plays were here, every single one of them, he was overwhelmed. This was something he hadn’t even dreamed of—the entire collection. These books had been out of print even when he first came upon them in secondhand shops in his student days.
He choked back the tears, talking softly of his time at Berkeley as the richest period of his life, when he was reading Shakespeare, acting Shakespeare, living Shakespeare every day, spending hours under the trees of the beautiful old campus, wandering the Telegraph Avenue bookstores for scholarly works on the Bard, thrilled every time some piercing critic gave him a new insight, or brought the plays to life for him in some new way. He’d thought then he would love the academic world always. He wanted nothing more than to stay in the atmosphere of books and poetry forever.
Then had come teaching, and repeating the same words year after year, and the endless committee meetings, and tiresome faculty parties, and the relentless pressure to publish critical theories or ideas that he didn’t even have in him. Then had come weariness of it all, and hatred even, and his conviction of his own utter insignificance and mediocrity. But these little volumes took him back to the sweetest part of it—when it had been new, and filled with hope, before it had become a racket for him.
About that time, Lisa appeared with a full breakfast for both of them—scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon, pancakes, syrup, butter, toast, and jam. She had it set up quickly at the little dining table, and put on fresh coffee. Jean Pierre appeared with the carafe of orange juice, and a plate of the gingerbread cookies which Phil couldn’t resist.
After they’d demolished the meal, Phil stood for a long time at the large rectangular window looking out at the sea, at the dark blue horizon lying beneath the brighter cobalt of the clear sky. Then he said how he had never dreamed he could be this happy, never dreamed he had this much life left in him.
“Why don’t people do what they really want to do, Reuben?” he asked. “Why do we so often settle for what makes us devoutly unhappy! Why do we accept that happiness just isn’t possible? Look what’s happened. I’m ten years younger now than I was a week ago, and your mother? Your mother’s perfectly fine with it. Perfectly fine. I was always too old for your mother, Reuben. Too old in here, in my heart, and just plain too old in every other way. When I get the slightest doubt about her being happier, I call and I talk to her and I listen to the timbre of her voice, you know, the cadence of her speech. She’s so relieved to be on her own.”