John D. MacDonald

The Cardboard Star

Paul Wyath left the fireside and walked out onto the flagstone terrace. He left the terrace door open behind him. The wind swung it shut with a clattering smash.

“Break, damn you! Break!” he muttered. The wind was something that fled in mock panic out of the black northern sky — a wind that hurt his teeth, pasted his shirt coldly against him. fingered through the brandy-thickness behind his eyes.

Lights shone through the cedar hedge. The Turbells were having their annual Christmas Eve binge. Paul and Martha Wyath were not attending this year, nor would they ever again.

Joe Turbell had crunched over through the ice at dusk wearing a five highball grin. “Come on, boy! The festivities are about to begin. I’ll send Alice down after Martha. Christmas always softens them up, boy. You know that.”

“Not this time, Joe.”

“Hell!” Joe said. “Hate to see it. Nice neighbors, you two. Had a lot of laughs together. Like to fix it up for you two.”

And then Paul had said, without the smile, “Drop it, Joe. Just drop it.”

“No need to get in an uproar,” Joe had said, but he had gone peaceably back to his party. Now, at ten o'clock, Paul could tell with an almost mathematical precision how far along the party was. A dogged few would be down in the playroom, yanking the handles on the bandits. One of the bedrooms would be full of carolers. A few couples, always married to two other people, would be dancing in dreamy closeness in the darkened living room. The few casualties so far would be planted in the downstairs bedrooms where they could do no harm.

He winced as he remembered that he had been a casualty the year before — trying to put bourbon on a big case of Tom and Jerry's. And on Christmas Day, complete with hangover, there had been the big brawl about Sylvia Bradey, the redhead. He couldn’t remember much about Sylvia, but all he could remember had been bad.

That was the starting point of the trouble. Or maybe buying the house on Arden Lane had been the start. It was a poor time, he decided, to start thinking in holier-than-thou terms. But the standards of the people who lived on Arden Lane had not been the standards of the Paul and Martha Wyath of other, less-affluent neighborhoods.

The cold high laugh of a woman, like something torn, was whipped across the terrace by the wind. He shivered, chilled through, and went back into the house. Odd how alien and empty a house could get. How... inimical.

Paul turned his back to the fire and looked around the paneled room sourly. “You couldn’t take it, boy,” he said aloud. “You and Martha in a sixty dollar apartment. Fine. Wonderful. But give you five or six promotions and put you in a forty thousand dollar ranch-type arrangement, completely surrounded by other similar edifices filled with neurotic wives and hospitable liquor, and you end up as a cheap 1950 edition of something out of Scott Fitzgerald, complete even to making scenes at the country club and snarling at your kids. Paulie, you’re a great guy, you are.”

He sat down again. Maybe the thing to do was head for the Turbells and try to catch up. Merry, merry Christmas Eve. Get out of this place where the mortgage makes creaking sounds and you stare at the backs of all the books you were going to read. And never got around to.

Something had to be decided about the house. And the furniture. And the bonds, the kids, the cars, the joint checking account.

A God-awful mess, but other people had been through it. Others seemed to survive. Joe had been through it, and Sylvia, and both the Eklunds. In fact, you could almost say that divorce was a prime indoor sport on Arden Lane.

He suddenly realized that he could neither stay in the house overnight, nor could he join the party next door. The roads would be bad, but a hotel in town was the right answer. A hotel has a nice anonymity.

He was three steps up the stairs when he heard a sound like frozen gravel breaking under car tires. He paused, his hand on the rail, and listened. A car door thudded and the side door buzzer sounded seconds later. Friends usually came to the side door.

When he pulled the door open, Martha stood there, the green scarf out of the glove compartment tied under her chin. A gust of wind pushed her off balance and she had to speak loudly to be heard above it. “Paul, I don’t want to be a bother, bur...”

“Come in, come right in,” he said heartily. He slammed the door against the tumult, a tremulous hope in his heart. “You're looking well,” he said inanely.

“Paul, we’re in a mess. Mother got the tree and she thought I got the decorations. I thought she got them when she got the tree. I waited until the kids got to sleep and now the places where you can buy good things are closed. So I thought you wouldn’t mind if I came out and got the stuff that’s here.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” he said dully. He looked into her eyes and saw no other motive there. No other chance there, for him. All the ugly, unforgettable things had been said. It was finished and done — beyond repair. “Where's the stuff?” he asked. “I'll get it.”

“I don’t think you can find it, but come along because there’s a lot of it.”

He turned on the attic lights and she went up ahead of him. Her step was an achingly familiar thing in the house, quick and light. He helped pull the old desk out of the way. “In those two boxes,” she said. “Sure you can carry both of them?”

“Of course,” he said, with a trace of irritability.

They were heavy and awkward. As he followed her down he wondered why tinsel and ornaments should weigh so much. In the lower hallway she turned, her finger on her chin, her head tilted.

“I just thought, Paul. We're having just a little tree and there’s no point in my lugging all that stuff around. I think I’d better just pick out what we can use. Put them right in there on the floor.”

He put them down, straightened up, dusting his hands together. “Did the stuff come for the kids?”

“Day before yesterday. You spent too much, Paul. I opened them to check for duplications. Good thing I did, too. I got Budge an erector set too, but the next smaller size, without the motor, you know. So I took mine back.”

She knelt on the floor and untied the cord on the first box. Without looking up she said, “I was afraid you might be next door. I guess we weren’t invited this year.”

“Joe came over and asked me. I was going over in a few minutes. You just caught me in time.” He wondered why he lied.

“Oh,” she said. “Then I was lucky to get here when I did.”

“You still have a key.”

She lifted the lid off the box. “I think-two strings of lights will be enough for that little tree. This one and this one.”

He knelt across the box from her and held his hand out. “Let me see that one, Martha. I thought so. You don't want this one. It’s the kind where if one light goes out, they all go out. Drive you crazy.”

“Heavens, yes! Remember that Christmas? The apartment on Taylor Place, wasn't it? When Anne said she had been sneaking up and untwisting bulbs because your face kept getting so red?”

They laughed then, but the laughter died at once, as though it had been choked. He picked out another string and said, “These two will be all right. Better let me check them.”

He took them over to a wall plug, glad of the chance to be, for a moment, where he could not detect the fragrance of her hair, see the long young lines of her body, the play of firelight on her face. Both strings were complete.

She worked in silence over the ornaments for a few minutes, sorting them out. She picked up a plastic reindeer with one horn.

“That’s broken, isn’t it?”

“But, Paul! Don't you remember? Budgie would never forgive me if that wasn’t on the tree! It’s been on every tree he can remember. He even forgave Anne for chewing off that horn.”

He nodded. “And you were in a panic because you thought she swallowed it?”

“And Budgie found it in his stocking where she spit it out?”

She looked up at him for a moment and then looked away. “That was when we were in the rented house at the corner of Castle and Prine.”

She took the lid from a box of ornaments inside the bigger box. They were clever and rather beautiful ornaments. She clapped the lid back on.

“Taking those?” he asked.

“No.”

“Those were new last year.”

“Not last year, Paul. The year before. We bought them for the first Christmas in this house. I'm afraid they’re too... big for the tree Mother bought.”

“Why didn’t you say what you started to say, Martha?”

“Please, Paul. There’s not much point in it, is there?”

“I... guess not. Sorry.”

“Let me see now. Lights. Two boxes of ornaments. Another box, I guess. I can’t undo this knot. Would you cur it for me, please?”

He took out his pocket knife and cut the cord. She opened the box. She had thrown the scarf aside. A sheaf of the blonde hair, lightly threaded with grey, swung forward as she dug around in the box. There had always been an odd quality of eagerness about her. A very young eagerness. But this past year had killed that beyond recovery. He wanted to turn and smash his fist against the stone of the fireplace.

Instead he merely turned and looked into the fire.

He heard the small sound in her throat and turned quickly. She tried to put the object she was holding into a box very quickly.

“What’s that?”

She held it so he could see it. He remembered it, and wondered how on this night he could ever have forgotten it.

“We forgot to buy one, until the stores were closed,” he said.

“And it was our first tree and we didn’t know at first what was missing,” she said in a far-off voice.

“You thought of it first and then I helped you,” he said.

“Yes, you drew the star and cut out the cardboard.”

“The tinfoil came from cigarette packs,”

“And then we were so proud, Paul, because it looked lovely on top of the tree.”

“A table tree. Fifty cents at the grocery store on the corner.”

And then they were both standing, somehow, and he was holding her by the wrists, very tightly. Firelight glittered on the tear paths on her cheeks. He was not such a fool as to think that one close moment would wipe out all the pain of an endless year, or take the scar tissue from her heart. But he did hope that in this moment they had turned about and taken the first hesitant step that might one day lead them back to what they had been before.

“Merry Christmas, darling,” she said, and in her voice was the ghost of the eagerness of Christmases before.

He held her close and saw on the rug behind her, the cardboard star. He marveled that the tinfoil was as shining bright as on that night twelve years before.

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Cardboard Star