The Christmas Tree Read online

  “As you have probably gathered, this is no ordinary convent,” said Sister Frances. “Most of the nuns who come here don’t live here. They work with children all over the world, usually in places that are far away, in every possible sense.”

  Though Sister Frances moved and talked with the peppy enthusiasm of a natural organizer, I began to realize that her vigor was deceptive. Sister Frances had been around a long time.

  We chatted a bit more about the convent, and about the small group of nuns who lived there all year round. I noticed that we weren’t alone, though it was very quiet. There were nuns reading or talking in small groups in almost every room.

  But it didn’t take Sister Frances long to get down to business.

  “So you’re interested in one of our trees?” she said.

  I told her I was and tried to describe its location as best I could.

  She listened carefully, then smiled. “I thought so,” she said.

  She began to get up from her chair, rather cautiously. I jumped to help her, but she waved me away, laughing.

  “No, no. I’ve gotten around this earth for seventy-some years with God’s help alone and I’m too old to change my ways now.”

  Sister Frances made her way to the window and pointed. “Go down there and you’ll see a path that will take you to your tree,” she said. “But the decision isn’t mine. It’s Sister Anthony’s.”

  I was heartened by her words. She did say “your tree,” didn’t she?

  “Where can I find Sister Anthony?” I asked her.

  “Just go on down to the tree,” she said. “I suspect you’ll find her.”

  Chapter Two

  Sister Anthony

  The air was rich with the smell of spring. At first I walked with my brisk city steps, aimed toward my destination. But I slowed down to admire a fine orchard, and then, finding myself surrounded by so much beauty, began stopping every few yards.

  It felt strange. Stopping. I’m always working a tight schedule—the big spring Flower Show at one end of the year, Christmas at the other and all of the ongoing plant exhibits in between.

  Finally I arrived at a big stand of evergreens, just as Sister Frances said I would. My heart was beating fast, as I was about to go on a blind date. I couldn’t believe my own foolishness.

  I walked through the trees into a clearing. It took my eyes a second to adjust from the shadows to the light. I blinked, and there it was! The tree I’d seen from the sky, looking exactly as I hoped it would. It had the weight of majesty, the delicacy of grace.

  “Hello there!”

  I jumped a little. I’d been so mesmerized by the tree I hadn’t even noticed the small figure in black standing at the far side of the clearing.

  She walked over briskly and stuck out her hand.

  “You must be the man from Rockefeller Center,” she said.

  It took me a few seconds to respond. She had a surprisingly strong grip.

  “Yes,” I said. “And you are …”

  “I’m Sister Anthony,” she said.

  Then she turned toward the tree.

  “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” she said.

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  “Well, young man,” she said, “come and talk to me.” She crossed over to the tree and sat down, with her habit spread around her like a tent that had collapsed.

  There was something unnerving about this nun. She had the manner and the voice of a mature woman—she was well into her fifties—but the restless energy of a child. She moved faster than I did. Her face was small yet arresting, but it was her eyes that really caught me, so dark they were almost black, but very bright.

  I sat down next to her feeling tongue-tied, like a kid. And, while I may have seemed young to Sister Anthony, I was no kid.

  Since I didn’t say anything, she began for me.

  “So you want Tree,” she said.

  “Tree?” I repeated blankly.

  She laughed. “I’m sorry. It must sound strange to you, to hear an old thing like me talk that way. But I’ve known Tree since I was a little girl—and he was a sapling, for that matter. We grew up together.”

  I was feeling like Dorothy must have felt when she landed in Oz. Weirder still, I liked it there, but I still had a job to do. I put on my doing-business voice. “So, I imagine you’d be thrilled to see your tree become the most famous tree in the world.”

  Sister Anthony looked at me as though I was crazy.

  “Why?” she asked.

  I began to mumble something about making millions of children all over the world feel happy, but I already knew it was over. I didn’t have my Christmas tree after all. It was May and in a minute it would be December and now, instead of cruising through the summer I’d be on the road looking for a tree that couldn’t possibly be as good as this one.

  She must have seen the misery on my face.

  “Oh, I think it must be wonderful!” she said. “It’s just not the thing for Tree. He has a lot of work to do here.”

  Then she told me how the nuns would come to the clearing for special services, and have picnics under her tree in the summer, because his branches provided such lovely shade. She told me how she been teaching nature classes here in the clearing to children from town for so long that some of them had even brought their grandchildren to visit Tree.

  All of this emerged in one long, cheery burst of words. Finally, she stopped and looked directly into my eyes.

  “I haven’t told you the entire truth,” she said softly. “Sister Frances told me why you were coming and said it was up to me. But there are many trees for you to choose from. I have only one Tree.”

  My disappointment faded after I heard the intensity in her voice. There was a depth of feeling there I could only guess at.

  I stretched my legs and started to pull myself to my feet.

  “I guess I should go,” I said, as gently as I knew how.

  “No, don’t go,” said Sister Anthony. “I brought lunch.” She nodded at an old satchel lying on the ground. “When Sister Frances said you were a horticulturist I was hoping we might have a chance to talk. I’m considered the expert around here and it isn’t easy being the one expected to have all the answers.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said, plopping right back on the ground.

  She handed me a sandwich.

  “So tell me,” she said. “What does it mean to be the chief gardener at Rockefeller Center?”

  I liked talking to her. Her knowledge was impressive. It was nice to find someone who knew the difference between an azalea and a rhododendron. But inevitably, the talk turned to the Christmas tree and what a pain in the neck it was.

  “It sounds like you hate Christmas!” she said.

  I hesitated, then decided to tell the truth. It was that kind of day.

  “I’m a horticulturist plain and simple. Christmas is a duty I didn’t ask for.”

  I knew I sounded like a curmudgeon, but I was tired of putting on a happy face about it, and she seemed willing to listen.

  “You start dreading Christmas. It’s the pressure. I live Christmas all year round. Before one Christmas comes, I’m working on the next. What’s worse, you spend so much time trying to find this great tree and then people don’t even understand what they’re looking at. They’ve gotten so used to artificial trees or real trees sheared to ‘perfection’ they think the individuality of a real tree is a kind of imperfection.”

  She looked perplexed.

  “Look up there, Sister,” I said. “See how your tree’s branches go this way and that?”

  She replied, a little defensive. “Why, that’s what gives him character.”

  I stopped and stared at her.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing.
I was just surprised to hear you use that word.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Once,” I said, “a reporter was interviewing me about how we get the tree and she asked, ‘What makes one tree different from the other?’ I tried to explain it to her. I talked about shading and triangles and density but I could see she wasn’t satisfied. I was getting annoyed. I didn’t have time for this. How do you explain a feeling you have for something to somebody who hasn’t experienced it?”

  Then Sister Anthony said gently, “Well, what did you tell her?”

  “Character,” I said. “I told her it’s character. Like if you met Jackie Onassis or Katharine Hepburn. Some have more beauty but none have their presence. They hold the room.”

  We sat in silence for a while, eating our sandwiches.

  Sister Anthony spoke, with a teasing note in her voice. “Well, perhaps you don’t hate Christmas so much after all.”

  I was a little embarrassed at having let my guard down. I generally like to play it cool.

  I shrugged. “For me it’s like theater. We build the set, light the tree and pull the curtain! The show begins.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s pretty poetic if you’re a visitor. Especially when it snows. The ice skaters out on the rink below the tree, the bushes, they all sparkle, like they’re trying to outdo the tree. You know what I mean?”

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  I was incredulous.

  “Haven’t you ever seen the tree at Rockefeller Center? On television, at least?”

  She shook her head again, smiling. “I don’t venture far from Brush Creek and we don’t have a television. We try to keep things quiet for our visiting nuns. They need a rest from the troubles they see in the outside world.”

  It was one of those times when you realize there are always limits on the kinship you may feel for someone. Sister Anthony might know a lot about nature, but what did she know of the real world? I felt like a jerk for having opened myself up to her, for thinking that she would understand.

  She looked upset, as though she, too, sensed that the moment between us had been lost. Hoping to make a polite exit, I launched into my standardized riff on the tree.

  “I see the tree as the crown jewel of Rockefeller Center,” I was saying in a monotone, when Sister Anthony seemed to drift off to some other place.

  “The city is our jewel,” she murmured.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  She repeated herself. “Anna, the city is our jewel.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  When she didn’t reply I reached over and tapped her on the shoulder.

  Now it was her turn to look surprised. She shook her head and started to get up. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she said. “Something you said took me back to another time.”

  “Who was Anna?” I asked her.

  She settled back on the grass. “I don’t think she would be of much interest to you.”

  “Too late for that,” I said. “Tell me.”

  Suddenly the sense of camaraderie I’d felt before returned, as quickly as it had vanished. Sister Anthony seemed as she had been, vigorous and full of humor.

  “It’s no great mystery,” she said. “I was Anna, many many years ago.”

  She looked mischievous. “It may surprise you, but we nuns don’t arrive on this earth wearing habits, you know. I was a little girl once. And I was born in New York City.”

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “So you’d like to hear a story, would you? All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you how a girl named Anna from New York came to Brush Creek.”

  A change came over her then, and I realized that she was either a born storyteller or a practiced one. It came as no surprise to hear her begin with “once upon a time.”

  Chapter Three

  Anna

  Once upon a time I was a girl named Anna, after a grandmother I never knew. I had no brothers and sisters, not even a pet, though I used to pretend the cat that yowled in the alley behind our building was mine.

  My mother died when I was born and my father died not many years later, when I was five. So I had a feeling more than a memory of my parents. It was a very good feeling, from a mixture of pictures and words that came to me when I wasn’t expecting them, most often in the middle of the night.

  The pictures were made up of the most beautiful colors, a series of bright lights, reflected from above and below. And I would always hear the same words, spoken in Father’s warm, gravelly voice: “The city is our jewel.”

  We had a neighbor, Mrs. Ellis, who had always been kind to me. She lived on the ground floor of our building and always kept her door open. Whenever she saw me come in she would call me over for some bread hot from the oven or a piece of yarn to make something with. In the good times, when Father had work, Mrs. Ellis would watch me—or rather, I would watch her. She took in ironing from the ladies who lived in fine houses on Washington Square. I remember spending hours watching her heat her heavy black iron on the stove, then carefully return wrinkled shirts to their original crispness. She could even do lace sleeves.

  When Father died I stayed with Mrs. Ellis, but one morning, not long after the funeral, she looked up from her ironing and said, “I wish I could take care of you Anna, but I’m too old to start raising children again. Since there’s no one else to tend to it, I’ll have to take you there until they find your aunt.”

  I didn’t know anything about my aunt, or where “there” was, but I was excited at the prospect of an outing, after so many days and weeks of stillness, watching Father get sicker and sicker. Though I missed him, I was too young to comprehend that I would never see him again and I thought he would be pleased for me to be out and about.

  “We’re great roamers, you and I,” he would say to me. We used to take long walks together, sometimes all the way to Central Park from our little apartment in Greenwich Village.

  I packed my few things into a bag, as Mrs. Ellis told me to and we were about to leave when I spotted my father’s old satchel hanging on a hook by the stove. After he died it became my most prized possession—it was all that I had left of him.

  “Oh, wait just a minute,” I asked Mrs. Ellis, who was always patient with me. “I mustn’t forget my satchel for collecting things.”

  I heard Mrs. Ellis sniffle and mutter under her breath, “Poor little thing. All she’s collected so far has been trouble.”

  When I asked her what she meant, Mrs. Ellis patted my face. “Nothing, dear,” she said. “Nothing at all. Now let’s hurry along.”

  I had only recently learned how to skip and as I skipped alongside Mrs. Ellis I felt happy, especially when I heard we were going to a Children’s Home. Much as I’d loved Father, I didn’t have any friends my age and I yearned to play games and whisper secrets like the children in the books Father used to read to me.

  So when we arrived at the home and Mrs. Ellis asked me if I’d like her to stay awhile I said no. I do remember how hard she hugged me before she left and how eager I was to go inside.

  Until that day, I had always been a happy child. How could I not have been with a father who used to greet every morning by peering out the window and asking: “What lies out there for us today?”

  We were almost never disappointed. We always found something I had never seen before, something new and wonderful.

  Unfortunately, at the Children’s Home I found something I’d never experienced before—something I wish I hadn’t.

  Gloom.

  It wasn’t just the darkness. Our apartment had gotten sun only in the late afternoon, when the sun moved across the sky to the west. Father had explained that to me one day when I asked how one place could be both light and dark.

  Nor was I put off by the home
’s cavernous appearance, or the noise of so many children. I was a city child and a poor one at that. Comfort and quiet were things I’d read about but not experienced. And the home was well-maintained, under the circumstances.

  No, the gloomy feeling came from something that happened just after I arrived.

  A soft-spoken lady showed me to my bed, which was the fifth in a long line of beds with their corners neatly tucked in. “You can put your things away and then get to know the other girls,” said the lady, who seemed to be in a great hurry. At the time I took her briskness for coldness. In retrospect I realize the poor thing must have been overworked. There simply weren’t enough adults to take care of all the children.

  I placed my bag and satchel underneath the bed and waited. Soon a girl with pretty dark hair came along. She was much taller than I was and seemed older, but I had always been small for my age. Father used to call me Sparrow.

  “Hello!” I said, probably too brightly. I think I just assumed that she would be glad to see me. I had always been surrounded by loving people.

  “What’s in the funny bag with the straps?”

  That’s how she introduced herself. I learned later that her name was Doreen.

  I held out my hand like Father had taught me. “My name is Anna,” I said.

  “Is that what I asked you?” she replied in an angry voice.

  Though I suppose it should have been obvious, I still didn’t understand that she didn’t want to be friends. I opened my satchel and gently spilled out my precious collection onto my bed. It had belonged to my father and was made up of twigs and leaves and nuts from trees, and pieces of bark. There were also four carefully folded pieces of paper which contained drawings of the various parts of trees. They were labeled across the top, in my father’s careful handwriting: Sycamore. Maple. Gingko. Oak. While Doreen watched, I made little piles on each piece of paper. The sycamore leaves, twig, nuts and bark went on the scamore drawing, the oak on the oak, and so on.

  “There,” I said, proudly when I was finished.