The night before Christmas Eve. Bert watched the taillights of the Amtrak ‘Banker’ fade up the tracks toward Springfield. No one had gotten off in Hartford except him. It was clear and still and cold.

            Union Station was deserted. He was disappointed Trudy hadn’t surprised him and walked eight blocks to meet the train. In a way he was glad, too – still to be alone, still moving toward her.

            He carried his suitcase down Railroad Street to Asylum. A liquor store was open and he bought a pint of Jack Daniels. Tomorrow they would drive to Troy for Christmas. He was looking forward to seeing Mom and Pop Steiner.

            After a block he opened the whiskey and took a drink.

            Bert watched Trudy through the plate glass door descend the long flight of wooden stairs. She hugged a cardigan to her. She looked thinner. Trudy unlocked the door, entrance to both the Asylum Art Gallery and her studio, on the second floor.

            “Hello,” she said, kissing him quickly. She bent to relock the door. A cab went by, reflecting in the mirrored sides of the Civic Center across the street.

            “How’ve you been?” asked Bert.

            “Okay. Pretty busy.”

            “I brought Pop a kielbasa from the Polish butcher around the corner.” Bert tapped his suitcase. “I guess I didn’t think – everything’s gonna smell like garlic.”

            Trudy smiled. “He’ll appreciate it.”

            Bert followed her up the stairs. He wanted to stay easy, keep the good feeling of the train ride.

            As they passed through the darkened gallery, Trudy hesitated and said, “It’s a beautiful show, almost pure color. In the light—”

            He knew she was talking about Mario’s paintings. His show had opened the week before.

            They passed into a long darkened hallway; at the far end a rectangle of light falling in from an open door.

            How many times has Mario stood here before going down to her?

            The bank of windows looked out across a flat roof and parking lot to Bushnell Park. Dark woods on a winter night. Bert could make out the hatbox shape of the new carousel. On the far side of the park a few houses were decorated with colored Christmas lights.

            “Sorry it’s cold,” said Trudy. “it’s a commercial space; they cut the heat at night.”

            “So, you go to bed early, right? I brought some stuff.” Bert opened his suitcase, taking out half a broccoli quiche, pecan tarts, pears.

            “Left-overs from the bakery,” he said. “Everything’s either overbaked or stepped on or something. But basically good.”

            Bert laid the food out on the rug, the old blue oriental with the dog-chewed corner. They’d splurged – thirty-five dollars – to ‘furnish’ their living room in New Haven.

            He took a fat green candle from his suitcase, lit it and set it on the rug. Then he turned out the lights.

            Trudy had put a record on and an Indian raga was playing, just the sitar. She sat opposite him and began to roll a joint.

            “Look what Santa brought.” Bert held out the whiskey.

            “You go ahead.”

            He drank and then she took the bottle and drank.

            When Trudy offered the joint, Bert said he’d stick with the whiskey.

            The tempo of the raga had been increasing; abruptly a tabla entered, ticking and gurgling like a hookah.

            “You look good,” said Bert. He lay on his side, arm over one of the big pillows. Trudy wore sweatpants and had put Bert’s old red and black wool shirt on over her sweater. Her hair was in a single braid.

            The candle glowed green; the flame burning deep inside looked like a little campfire in the dark room.

            Trudy dragged on the joint and grimaced as smoke went into her eyes.

            She looks oriental. Who is she?

            “I’ve been working kind of hard,” said Trudy. “A new show comes in after the First.”

            Bert cut the quiche and put wedges on napkins. “Did the gallery get that NEA grant?”

            “No.”

            “That mean you’re out a job?”

            Trudy shrugged. She took a bite of quiche.

            Bert got up and lifted the needle off the raga. The music seemed to be racing headlong. He switched to FM radio and Nat King Cole in the middle of ‘Oh, Holy Night’.

            Bert felt the whiskey warm in him. “You know,” he said, “I heard a dog bark ‘Jingle Bells’ on the bakery radio the other night?”

            Trudy had stretched out on the other side of the food, almost his mirror image.

            Nat King Cole sang ‘I Saw Three Ships’. When ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’ began, Bert stood and held out his hand.

            He didn’t try and hold her close as they danced, and Trudy began to relax. Bert felt better and better. He kissed her neck and she stiffened – he tried to go on dancing but she pulled away, went to the window.

            “Mario didn’t think I ought to stay here tonight.”

            After a moment, after letting his anger subside, Bert asked why – or what that had to do with anything.

            Trudy shook her head.

            “Do you want to be with him?”

            “He’s with his family.”

            Bert pressed his fingers against his whiskey-numbed temples. “If you want to be with him—”

            Trudy touched his arm, pleadingly. “I didn’t think it was such a good idea, either, your coming here.”

            Pop Steiner was framed in the kitchen window slicing a ham. He pinched a fatty scrap between his thick fingers and put it in his mouth.

            “Save the bone for soup!” called Bert as they came up the stairs into the kitchen.

            Pop turned, carrying the refrigerator’s reflection across his glasses: “Well, for God’s sake.”

            Trudy kissed her father on the cheek.

            “We’d about give up on you for lunch,” said Pop.

            “Please, no,” said Bert, “We caught a bite in Great Barrington.”

            “Your  mother’s in the parlor,” Pop said to Trudy. “I’ll set the table.”

            Mom Steiner was slightly breathless as Bert pecked her on the cheek.

            “I’ve had the runs all day,” she said. “I wonder if it’s that darn bacon?”

            She was more top heavy and greyer than Bert remembered from last Christmas. The last time he’d seen her.

            Pop took beers out of the refrigerator and popped them open. Mom got water. They ate ham sandwiches with bread and butter pickles, and a lettuce salad Mom drowned in oil and vinegar.

            “I didn’t see a Christmas tree on the front porch,” said Bert.

            Pop accidentally set his beer can down on the edge of the ham plate – and grabbed it before it tipped over.

            “Two Guys had a sale,” he said. “I bought an artificial tree.”

            “We always had a real tree,” said Trudy.

            “You can’t tell the difference. They’re very believable.”

            Trudy started to say something, but Pop cut her off: “Who vacuums up when the goddamn thing sheds? You can build it in four, six feet – whatever you want.”

            “It packs away in a tube,” said Mom.

            “You can grow a tree in your house,” said Pop, screwing the lid back on the pickle jar. “By the way, when are you and him gonna start acting like you’re married – you in Hartford, him in New York?”

            Bert took their luggage up to Trudy’s old room. Mom Steiner kept it as her daughter had left it: high school snapshots under the vanity glass, crucifix over the bed, graduation tassel hanging from the mirror knob, nursing books in the pine bookcase Pop built. There was a framed picture of him, around twenty, on the vanity. He stands with a foot up on the running board of an old truck with wooden spoke wheels. A sign on the open slats of the body reads: EDWARD STEINER, FREIGHT. Pop has a hard, glassy look. He wears a bow tie and white shirt with a black mourning band around the left sleeve. His father had died two days before. Pop will let you know how he’d bought the truck that morning, Ed Senior no longer there to stop him. The first truck in Troy, New York.

            He woke in the dark, Trudy sleeping curled away from him. It was impossible not to touch in the standard size, hammocking mattress.

            Mom Steiner was asleep, breathing heavily as Bert passed her bedroom at the head of the stairs. He caught a whiff of damp potting soil from her house plants in the dormer window.

            Down in the parlor, Bert plugged in the Christmas lights. Trudy and he had erected the new tree, to six feet, and trimmed it. The presents lay open in their boxes. Bert ran the back of his hand over his gift of flannel pajamas. Mom had sewed either pajamas or a shirt for him every Christmas. He picked out one of the hammered gold earrings he’d given Trudy; on her card he had written out the Donne quote:

            Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

             Though I must go, endure not yet a breach,

             But an expansion

            Like gold to airy thinness beat.

            The three bubble-lights, having warmed up, began to bubble.

            Bert lay with his head under the tree, staring up at the lights, the little double-sided mirrors, an old hand-blown Santa Claus, his own face looking down at him in a large golden globe.

            What was he feeling? As though there were some lost emotion to be found in these old ornaments.

            Pop was watching ‘Donahue’ when Bert came into the parlor from breakfast.

            “Parade’s on at one,” the old man said. “They have elegant floats, elegant.”

            Bert sat on the sofa, balancing a cup of coffee on his knee. Mom’s Hummel creche took up the coffee table. There was a basket of Christmas cards on the television and a white poinsettia from Buddy and Stephie.

            Pop snorted when a woman in the tv audience said that she suffered from toxic shock syndrome contracted from a tampon.

            “It’s all they talk about,” he said. “A priest was on the other day telling how he was attracted to women. I’ll give them credit, though, they didn’t show his face.”

            Trudy passed through on her way upstairs.

            “I’ll be ready in five minutes,” she said to Bert.

            Mom’s sewing machine could be heard from her nook in the kitchen. She was making aprons for Sacred Heart’s January bazaar.

            “Looks like one of your maples lost a big limb,” said Bert.

            Pop had dug the two trees out in the fields in the twenties and planted them in the tiny front yard. Their roots had buckled the sidewalk and made a familiar bump when you drove in the driveway.

            “I’m cutting the damn things down,” said Pop.

            “That’ll be the day. Summers you have it twenty degrees cooler than anyone on the block.”

            “I had a fella in the end of summer – Holy Christ!” Pop laughed as Donahue lifted a woman by the elbow and said, ‘What if I was the family doctor – delivered you – still care for your children – and I say you can use this tampon?’

            “Toilet kept backing up,” Pop went on. “This fella sends a long cable in – next thing I’ve got a six foot trench in the front yard and a four hundred dollar bill. Roots. It’s the old sewer pipes – roots grow right in, attracted to the shit.”

            “Did he solve the problem?”

            Pop looked over: “Those damn things are alive.”

            It was cold with snow predicted, the bare ground frozen solid. Bert and Trudy walked down Pauling Avenue toward the city.

            “Ma wants us to pick up half a pint of heavy cream,” said Trudy. She wore her maroon parka and the old yellow Vermont ski hat. Her face looked puffy and stern.

            “Want to stop at the Old Rubber?” Bert asked. “Have a couple for auld lang syne?”

            Trudy didn’t smile at their name for the Trojan Hotel. “I just feel like walking.”

            They waited for the light to change at the Point, where Spring crossed Pauling.

            “So, what’s happening with you and Mario?”

            Trudy toed a piece of frozen slush. “We’re not seeing one another. His wife threatened to take their little girl.”

            They crossed and walked along beside the iron fence that encloses Emma Willard School.

            “Were you . . . were you planning to . . .”

            Trudy glanced at Bert. “We didn’t think about anything. It happened. It was impossible, we both knew that. We had no expectations.”

            The creche looked like a piece of abandoned furniture on the bleached lawn of the school. The foremost Wise Man tilted back from the cradle, as if surprised, the work of a frost heave.

            “Come to New York,”

            Trudy shook her head.

            “We were good together.”

            Suddenly she gestured angrily: “Why did we come back here!”

            “it was always good coming back.”

            “For you.”

            They overtook and passed a woman in a tweed coat carrying a booted chihuahua under her arm.

            “The only way I can bear them is with you between us.”

            Bert stopped, facing Trudy: “The why did you agree to come here?”

            “Part of me wants things to be the way they were – familiar, safe. But we stopped living together almost a year ago. Things have changed – no matter how much you want them to be the same.”

            “I don’t want them to be the same! I’ve changed, too, you know?”

            They were facing each other across the sidewalk, breath-clouds mingling.

            “Are you in love with this guy, for Chrissake?”

            Trudy looked at him sadly.

            “Do you love him – just answer me that!”

            “Mario was a small part of it. For the first time in my life I’m free. I have my own place, job, friends—”

            “Lover. Sounds like you’ve been sprung.”

            “I . . . don’t think we’re right for each other now.”

            “You kill me when you say that.” Bert jammed his gloved hands deep into his pockets. “It just gives you an idea what it cost our parents to stay together.”

            “Was it worth it?” Trudy asked gently.

            Skaters were out on Mount Ida pond. Far below where Bert and Trudy stood, a kids’ hockey game was in progress. A man swooped around the perimeter on racing skates, hands clasped behind his back. They’d skated here. The sound of whacking sticks ratcheted up. Bert gazed at Trudy’s profile as she watched a girl in pink tights and short pink skirt practicing spins. Cassiopeia would have been ten, about her age. If their daughter had lived, who knows. . . All at once she clasped her arms, whirling like a drill.

            They walked up a side street to where it dead-ended at a cast iron cemetery gate.

            Pop’s mother and father were buried near an old marble angel; their marker a flat granite slab.

            “The thought of being with you again – in that tiny apartment in New York—” Trudy pulled her hand out of her mitten and touched her cheek as though it were hot. “I wouldn’t blame you if you left me!”

            He could hear water trickling under the ice. They had gone into the woods behind the cemetery, down a steep ravine, and were following along the frozen stream in its bottom. A mattress of dead leaves underfoot. Trudy followed twenty feet behind Bert. It had started to snow, he couldn’t remember when, cold round balls, like tiny camphor balls.

            They walked until a fallen tree blocked their way.

            He heard her come up, felt her touch his sleeve.

            They lay down in the leaves beside the frozen stream and he made love to her.

            They lay for a long while after, warm in their heavy coats, snow rattling around them filling the cups of dead leaves.

– Richard Ploetz