Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Mr. Ives' Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos (©1995 by Oscar Hijuelos).

Although Edward Ives had never been the most talented of artists, as he'd tell his son, Robert, years later, he had a highly developed work ethic. A conscientious and self-effacing laborer, ever humble before his craft, he never thought he'd have any money and figured out, as a young man, that he would always live humbly, "without means," practicing his illustrative and painterly skills into his old age. And if he was lucky, getting along on numerous fleeting jobs, he might one day have a show of beautiful portraits. Perhaps he would make enough money to see something more of the world than just the view from his window or where the trains and subways of the mass transit system would take him. Paris, Tahiti, Rome—names that he associated with artists and adventure. That was all he wanted.

Before the war, as a teenager just trying to figure out a little more about the world, when he was not working in his father's printing plant, Edward Ives had also held other jobs. For a time he has been an usher in a big movie house on Ocean Avenue several days a week. It was a job he did not mind because he loved gangster stories and Westerns and animated cartoons. And he enjoyed wearing a velvet-buttoned dark gray outfit and escorting the perfumed pretty girls down to their seats. He fell in love every week but was too shy to do anything about it. He also painted window displays and made special signs for local Brooklyn merchants, and worked in stores like Macy's doing the same. He picked up a little extra money working as an occasional messenger boy, and sometimes worked as a temporary mail sorter in the post office. Every so often he had gone to work for the Steichman brothers, whose animation studio was down on Lafayette Street.

(For his part, Ives had most enjoyed his on-and-off job with the Steichmans. It was an obscure studio, the big animation houses being out in California—Disney, Lantz, Warner Bros.—and it produced mainly kiddie melodramas, its characters bugs and tender animals with cute names like "Mike and Moth," "Zippy the Squirrel," or "Trinket the Tomcat," creations that never really made it with the public.)

Then World War II had come. He did his bit as a civilian employee with a unit of the Army Information Service out in Secaucus, New Jersey, where he worked for three years during the war, churning out instructional comics with titles like "Hygiene at Sea," pamphlets, and posters about everything from malaria to dental hygiene.

Sometimes while resting, traffic noise would take him back to his early days in Manhattan, after the war, when he lived in a walk-up on Fiftieth Street, as a plodding, ever slow but first-rate freelancer, who fell in love with Annie MacGuire. He would see his old radio, which he'd hauled up out of the street and fixed with some new tubes from the corner store; and next to that their rust-bladed electric fan, which used to make the living room, an oven in the summers, a little more bearable; and then his old drawing board and the little cuckoo clock, in which they'd stash their savings , five and ten-dollar bills. A Chinese screen, and then, later on, the crib in which his son, Robert, or Roberto as he'd call him, would sleep. Adorable and ever so tender, on his back, little feet up, his face would go into delighted contortions when Ives, the shyest and most reticent father in the world, would stand over him and touch his belly.

Thinking about Robert, Ives would always fondly remember those evenings he spent in 1948, at the Art Students League. After a day freelancing, he'd walk in and sit in the back, his sketchbook, charcoals, and pencils set out before him. And often enough he'd notice that among the twenty or so students there sat the quiet Annie MacGuire, whose intensity and concentration had always impressed him. The few times he had spied her work he had been struck by the simplicity and elegance of her drawing. He did not know much about her, other than what he'd once overheard her saying during one of the breaks, when the artists would congregate out in the hall. That she was an art and English teacher at a school on the Upper East Side, her pay lousy. She liked books, he'd noticed, and was probably taking a night course in literature, because she always walked in with thick novels, PROPERTY OF HUNTER COLLEGE stamped on them.

When she'd walk into the studio, he portfolio in hand, she'd barely acknowledge the presence of others. Ives couldn't tell if she was a snob or simply private.