Burning the Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

game of the grown-up world.
    ——
    Then as now, the best weeks of the year were at Christmas. In the corner of the living room was the dark tree beneath which, early in the morning, the presents could be found, unhoped-for things, a green electric train, huge and perfect, with doors to the long passenger cars that could be pushed open and a massive engine exactly like ones dwarfing the people on the platform at Penn Station.
    When I was older, thirteen and fourteen, we went to Washington at Christmas. There were the great vaults, filled with icy breath, of Union Station, the stone columns of the long façade, the wide avenues, and the Capitol swimming in light. My older cousin, who was a chess champion, and my uncle, large, broad-featured, and bald, were there to meet us. The house, in a modest neighborhood, was small but it was a house —there was a basement, a yard—which alone made it exciting. Snow was falling, the lawns were white, the brows and shoulders of statues, the roofs of snug homes. Snow was slanting through the air, the snow of theholidays with their many parties, at which I would be the youngest but somehow accepted by being an out-of-town visitor.
    Harold, my cousin, was sixteen, a thrilling age: it meant that he could drive. The family car was a Plymouth. Off we went in the night to exciting addresses on streets he knew. We were from ordinary families but his schoolmates were from wealthy ones, some of them at least: boys who would be taken into large family businesses, and ravishing girls. There was one velvet-skirted brunette with whom I was infatuated. Gloria was her name. That first night she smiled at me. I could not believe I was talking to her or that a night or two later she remembered. I finally gave in to my cousin’s taunts and telephoned her. I was meant to ask her out. In a warm voice, No, she couldn’t, she said, she had already been asked, but would I call her again? I was ecstatic. I felt it was a triumph.
    There was sledding on a hill near the house, where we fell in with the just-blooming daughter of a Marine officer who lived nearby. Soon we were sharing a sled. I sat behind her, arms around her waist as we sped down to crash in the snowbanks, my hands having moved higher as if by accident and the two of us lying there for a minute before rising to hurry back up. Delirious rides, repeated again and again.
    Do you think she …? I asked my cousin uncertainly. Yes, he said, but seduction, despite the plans we made, proved beyond me. Instead, she and I drank hot chocolate in the kitchen, and when it was revealed there was no one else in the house, suddenly become cautious, she fled.
    The pleasure one might, all innocent, have had. The bare, chilly bedrooms of those years, the nights of aching in darkness. Was it meant to be otherwise? Not really.
    Colored by those Christmases, perhaps, others have all seemed to me exciting, like some glamorous invitation. It is romantic Christmas that seems to reign, Fifth Avenue Christmas with all the stores, faces shining in the cold, office-party Christmas withits abandon, Christmas in Paris in a postage-stamp hotel near Notre Dame, Christmas in Chamonix and the brightly lit casino, all of them somehow descended from the crowded young parties of 1938 and 1939.
    ——
    My teachers had all been women. In prep school they were men, born towards the end of the nineteenth century and graduates, largely, of Eastern colleges and universities. They were men of strong principles and prejudices. The Latin teacher, he and his subject both feared, was Mr. Nagle, a demanding, wry bachelor with gingery hair, inflexible habits, and a green fountain pen the cap of which he would ceremoniously unscrew to make a note. His humor, laced with scorn, and lofty standards made him a favorite. Automatic failure, he warned, for mispelling Nagle.
    History was a required course for all six years, and the American history teacher was a Mr. Martin, another titan, white-haired,