Corpus Christmas

Sigrid was silent. She rather doubted if Francesca Leeds had seen any more in her face than the redhead expected-or wanted?-to see; and she had never felt comfortable exchanging girlish confidences.

Evidently Francesca felt differently. “What Oscar and I had was wonderful while it lasted, but it’s been over for more than a year.”

And what, Sigrid wondered mutely, was the proper response to that? I’m sorry? I’m glad? Were you glad when it ended? Was Nauman?

“Ah! There’s the door I came in,” she said, pulling on her gloves and raising the hood of her coat. “I think I can find my way out from here.”

And beat a coward’s quick exit.

It was after nine when Sigrid got home. She’d stopped off at a bookstore along the way to begin her Christmas shopping. This was a young cousin’s first Christmas and she couldn’t decide whether to get him a traditional Mother Goose or a lavish pop-up book, so she bought both. Baby Lars had been named for her favorite great-uncle, but she couldn’t neglect the other five in Hilda’s brood, especially when one stop could take care of the whole Carmichael family so simply.

She had spent a happy hour browsing through Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Watership Down, Treasure Island and Charlotte’s Web, leafing through dozens more before adding a newly published and beautifully illustrated book of fairy tales for Hilda, who collected them.

A book for Hilda’s husband wasn’t quite as simple. What does one give a CPA who has everything? Impulsively she chose a book on building Chinese kites. A man with six children might find that diverting.

Laden with bundles, she arrived at number 42½, a sturdy green wooden gate set into a high nondescript wall on an equally nondescript street full of rundown buildings at the western edge of Greenwich Village. She unlocked the gate and found Roman Tramegra stringing lights on the dogwood tree that stood in the center of their small garden. He was bundled against the icy December night in a bizarre white ski mask, multicolored scarves, and three layers of sweaters and he greeted her gaily in his deep booming voice as she piled her packages on a stone bench.

“Ah, there you are, dear Sigrid! Had I realized you’d be home so soon, I would have waited. No matter. I shall be the president and you can be the little child that leads us.”

It had been almost a year since this late-blooming flower child, to use Nauman’s phrase, had wandered into her life and, by an odd set of circumstances, wound up sharing with her an apartment he’d acquired through arcane family co

Although only a few years older than she, he had adopted an avuncular ma

He was tall and portly and there was just enough light in their tiny courtyard to make him look like a cross between a Halloween ghost and Frosty the Snowman. The eye and mouth holes of his white ski mask were outlined in black and the dark toggles of his bulky white cardigan marched down his rounded torso like buttons of coal on a tubby snowman as he positioned the last light and held out to Sigrid the plug end of the tree lights and the receptacle end of an extension cord that he’d snaked from the house.

“Everything’s ready,” he caroled. “Come along, my dear. No speeches, though I really should hum something appropriate. What did the Marine Band play the other night when they lit the White House tree?”

In his deep basso profundo, he began to hum the national anthem.

Laughing, Sigrid stepped up to the tree and, in a Monty Python imitation of ribbon-cutting royalty, plugged the two electric cords together and said, “I now declare this Christmas season officially opened.”

A blaze of colorful lights twinkled through the bare twigs of the dogwood.

“God bless us, every one!” said Roman.

Although Mr. Breul never summarily disregarded expert opinion, he had no use for pedantry. Being well-educated and well-informed, he preferred to trust his own eye to pick out the one good thing from a gallery full of old pictures and to leave the bad behind and he had no need to lean upon the advice of others in so doing. So secure was he in his own taste, that he was never disturbed when, as it occasionally happened, an attribution of his purchase was afterward discredited.

“It matters not who actually painted it. The picture still retains the lofty qualities for which I chose it,” he would say as he continued to give it high place within the collection.

Erich Breul-The Man and His Dream, privately published 1924 by The Friends and Trustees of the Erich Breul House

VIII

Friday, December 18

Sigrid moved the morning session briskly through the usual update on current cases. Matt Eberstadt brushed powdered sugar from his dark green shirt and maroon tie and reported a conviction in the drug-related homicide trial that finally went to the jury yesterday. “They were only out twenty minutes.”

The neighborhood canvass around the house that held those infant remains had turned up no one else who could remember the Jurczyks or their tenants from the thirties, but Bernie Peters had already been on the phone to the nursing home in Staten Island, where a staff doctor confirmed Mrs. Palka’s fears about her former East Village friend.

“Mrs. Barbara Jurczyk Zajdowicz has had a series of small strokes this past year,” Peters said as he tore open a packet of dry creamer and added it to his coffee. “She’s in a wheelchair now and the doctor says some days she’s cogent, most days she’s not. He suggests that we try her immediately after Saturday morning confession.”

“Who’s her next of kin?” asked Sigrid.

“None listed.”

“Who pays the bills then?”

“I talked to an individual in their business office, and the way it works is that she paid into something like an a

Elaine Albee shivered and pushed aside her jelly doughnut. She hated the whole idea of growing old, especially here in New York City, and tried not to think about it any more than she could help. It kept getting shoved in her face, though: bag ladies homeless on every street corner; women who once ran but now hobbled down subway platforms, fearfully clutching their lumpy shopping bags as they moved arthritically through doors that closed too fast; women like Barbara Zajdowicz, who’d outlived brothers and sisters and husbands and were now warehoused in nursing homes with no one to watchdog their interests or-

Lieutenant Harald’s cool voice cut across her private nightmare. “Are you with us, Albee?”

“Ma’am?”

“Your interview with the Reinickes,” the lieutenant prodded.

Feeling like a third-grade schoolkid caught goofing off by a strict teacher, a likeness subliminally underlined by the lieutenant’s no-nonsense gray pantsuit and severe white blouse, Albee sat up straight and summarized what she and Lowry had learned from Winston and Marie Reinicke.

“So there’s no alibi for Reinicke but his wife doesn’t use a cane either,” she finished, wadding up the scrap of paper Jim Lowry had slipped her under the table with P-S??!! scrawled on it in bold block letters.