A West Side Christmas
Story
by Pat Sullivan
My husband, Chuck, and my sister , Lee are
partners in a heating company in Chicago. Lee is the buyer, hirer,
firer, phone answerer, typist, bookkeeper, and office girl. She will
bring hot soup and sandwiches to a crew in an icy basement at three
o'clock in the morning, but she is Hard-Hearted Hannah when it comes
to spending company money.
When she says "No" to an expense account item, or
something she thinks is a luxury, her eyes shoot fire.....and Chuck,
who is usually a very verbal man, starts to tiptoe around her
desk.
One day about a week before Christmas, all the
phones in the office seemed to start ringing at once. There were more
broken boilers, burned out fire pots, and stuck stack switches that
there had ever been before, and the men were working around the
clock. I went into the office to help out on the phones, and it was
all I could do just to write down the names and addresses of the
people without heat. Worst of all, it seemed that everyone who called
either had a new baby, and old grandmother, or had just gotten out of
the hospital themselves.
One woman called in tears. She lived in a section
of Chicago where rioting, looting, and burning had taken place a few
months earlier. She had been phoning for several hours, one heating
company after another , trying in vain to get a serviceman to work in
a black neighborhood. I took the order and promised that a man would
be there within the hour. Then, she asked if she could pay a little
money each week for the service call, and I looked at Lee and
repeated the question. She nodded, "Okay", and when I told the
customer, Mrs. Jenkins, not to worry, she said "God bless you, miss,
" and hung up.
Lee turned the call over to Chuck, as all the
other men were out. "Bump that other call I gae you; they only have a
noisy burner. This one is a no-heat. Better get right on it." Chuck
left and was gone for several hours.
When he came back, he told Lee, "Forget the
billing on that one."
She looked at him. "Since when are we in the
charity business?"
Then Chuck told us that Mrs. Jenkins was a widow
with seven little children. Her house was clean and bare with very
few furnishings. The children were thin and hungry eyed, wearing worn
and much patched clothes. After Chuck had gotten the heat going, one
of the smaller boys had shyly come over to watch him pick up his
tools, and Chuck patted him on the head and asked, "What did you tell
Santa Claus you wanted for Christmas?"
The child looked him right in the eye and
answered, "Ain't no more Santa Claus. Mama says he died. No use to
ask him for any toys, cause he is dead, and we ain't gonna get
nothing anyways."
Lee never said a word, but brusquely handed Chuck
another call and told him to get going. We worked, all three of us,
most of the night. The next morning Lee called to tell us that she
hadn't heard her alarm and would be late. Chuck seemed strangely
happy to hear this and asked one of the men to watch the phones for a
while, then hustled me into my coat. "Can't spend a dime with that
woman looking over my shoulder," he grumbled.
When we pulled up in front of a large toy store, I
knew what he was up to. He hummed and whistled while he loaded the
shopping cart with dolls, games, trucks, and space ships. Then we
headed to the candy store for filled stockings, striped red-and-white
peppermint canes and sugar figures of pigs, soldiers, and ballerinas
We drove through thick snowflakes, bumper to bumper, all the way to
the West Side, unloaded the piles of presents and rang Mrs. Jenkins'
doorbell.
In we trotted, behind the whooping children, to
find a red-cheeked Lee pinning a Christmas star of Bethlehem on top
of a fragrant pine tree. Nearby was Mrs. Jenkins, smiling through her
tears, as she carefully unpacked a Nativity scene and reverently
placed the figures of the holy family in the middle of her dining
room table.
"Well, don't just stand there.....get busy!" said
Lee, tossing a box of tinsel to my open mouthed husband. "What took
you so long?"
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