The End of It

Crane was in his own bedroom. He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions that his voice cracked and would not obey him. He had been lying in the dark of his own grave, and now he was in his bathrobe on the landing, and the church bells were ringing, hammering, all of them, out of control, ding-dong, ding-dong, and he heard children laughing on the sidewalk below and could not remember the last time a sound had been aimed at him with any feeling but fear. He put his hands up to his shoulders, and there was nothing there, and no chain dragging behind him on the stairs, link by link or otherwise; whatever weight Kline had promised him, he had been let out of it, and this morning he meant to stay out.

"What's today?" he cried, running downstairs with his phone in his fist. "What's to-day, what's to-day? I haven't missed it — the spirits did it all in one night, of course they did, they can do anything they like — what's to-day?"

"Christmas Day," said the phone, in the flat voice he had set himself, and Crane laughed, the biggest, loudest, most ridiculous laugh ever manufactured in that brownstone, the laugh of a man being released from a lien he had put on himself. "I haven't missed it. I have the whole day. The whole day!" He ran to the window. The snow was still falling, and the street was still there, and the inflatables were inflated, and a kid was sledding down the hill on a trash can lid, and it was all true, and he was alive, and the bed curtains were his, and the curtains were not torn down, ring and all, and he was happy. He was happy.

Then his eyes caught a prize turkey in the window of the corner market across the street — the one the whole block had been betting on all week, the big one, the one the butcher had hung a sign on — and his heart, which had done no work all night but the good kind, said one word: Teller.

He dressed all in haste, and called the courier before he called anyone else, and paid the surge pricing without reading it, twice, and gave the address on Ohio City, and the note: "Not from Crane. From the turkey." And then he was out the door, into it, mittens on, laughing at nothing, down the street to the clinic fundraiser women's number, which he had, of course, kept, filed under C, and he called it, and the woman who answered said, "Mr. Crane?," in the voice of a form timing out, and Crane said, "I want to pledge. A great many back rents. A great many. And I want you to come to my office, and I want to talk about the eviction defense fund, and I want to buy the debts that would otherwise be sold to someone worse, and I want to talk about Gus Teller's surgery, and I want to talk today, while I am me, before the interest comes back."

He went to his nephew's. He went at four, when the door would be answered by whoever answered, and he went in, and the door was opened by Nate's kids — the ones who asked about him — and behind them Nate, who had been mid-sentence, stopped talking, and the whole hallway stopped talking, and Crane said, "Nate. It's your uncle. I've come to dinner, if you'll have me. Will you have me, Nate?" And Nate — Nate did the bravest, cheapest, most expensive thing anyone in that hallway had ever seen, which was to say, "Of course," as if it were nothing, and shake his hand, and mean it, and the niece who played the guitar started laughing before anyone else, and the room closed over Crane like water over a stone, and he was in.

Crane was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Gus Teller, whose surgery he paid for before the New Year, and who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a boss, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, as the two fundraisers did, the first time they came to his office and found the thermostat at seventy and the archive folder renamed OPEN and a hiring freeze lifted, and the old CRANE & KLINE sign on Superior Avenue finally coming down, the letters boxed for the recycler, and Teller's quarterly report, delivered a day early, the best the firm had ever run; but he let them laugh, and little heeded them, for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happens in this world that somebody does not laugh at from the outset. His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Gus Teller observed, God bless Us, Every One.