Sure enough, a few weeks later when Fitzy appeared at her party with his bowl full of jelly and rattled off The Night Before Christmas, the crowd brimmed over with the joys of the season. The Irish in Fitzy tended to make him thirsty for a dram whenever he had to be on his feet, a fact that proved something of a liability in the theater world. But the Irish in him also made his cheeks go red when he drank, which turned out to be an asset at Mrs. Skinner’s soirée because it provided the perfect polish to his Old Saint Nick.
The day after Mrs. Skinner’s, the phone on the desk of Ned Mosely—Fitzy’s booking agent—rang from dawn till dusk. The Van Whozens, Van Whyzens, and Van Whatsits were all planning holiday parties and they all just had to have Fitzy. Mosely may have been a third-rate agent, but he knew a golden goose when he was sitting on one. With only three weeks left until Christmas, he priced access to Fitzy on an accelerating scale. It was three hundred dollars for an appearance on the tenth of December and fifty bucks more for every day that followed. So if you wanted him to come down your chimney on Christmas Eve, it would cost an even grand. But if you threw in an extra fifty, the children were allowed to tug on his beard just to put their pesky suspicions to rest.
Needless to say, when it came to celebrating the birth of Jesus in this circle, money was no object. Fitzy was often booked for three appearances on a single night. Walt Whitman was sent to the showers, and Fitzy went ho-ho-ho-ing all the way to the bank.
Fitzy’s stature as the uptown Santa grew from year to year, such that by the end of the war—despite working only for the month of December—he lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment, wore three-piece suits, and carried a cane that was topped with the silver head of a reindeer. What’s more, it turned out that there was a whole class of young socialites whose pulse would quicken whenever they saw Saint Nick. So it wasn’t particularly surprising to Fitzy when after performing at a Park Avenue party, the shapely daughter of an industrialist asked if she could call on him a few nights hence.
When she appeared at Fitzy’s apartment, she was wearing a dress that was as provocative as it was elegant. But it turned out that romance was not on her mind. Declining a drink, she explained that she was a member of the Greenwich Village Progressive Society and that they were planning a large event for the first of May. When she had seen Fitzy’s performance, it had occurred to her that with his big white beard, he would be the perfect man to open the gathering by reciting a few passages from the works of Karl Marx.
No doubt Fitzy was taken by the young woman’s allure, swayed by her flattery, and influenced by the promise of a significant fee. But he was also an artist through and through, and he was game to take on the challenge of bringing the old philosopher to life.
When the first of May rolled around and Fitzy was standing backstage, it felt like any other night on the boards. That is, until he peeked from behind the curtain. For not only was the room packed to capacity, it was filled with hardworking men and women. Here were the plumbers and welders and longshoremen, the seamstresses and housemaids who in that dingy hall in Brooklyn Heights all those years ago had given Fitzy his first standing ovation. With a deep sense of gratitude and a surge of populist affection, Fitzy stepped through the gap in the curtain, assumed his place on the podium, and gave the performance of his life.
His monologue was drawn straight from The Communist Manifesto, and as he spoke he had that audience stirred to the soul. So much so, when he reached his fiery conclusion, they would have leapt to their feet and broken into thunderous applause—had not every door of the auditorium suddenly burst open to admit a small battalion of police officers blowing whistles and wielding billy clubs under the pretext of a fire code violation.
On the following morning, the headline in the Daily News read:
PARK AVENUE SANTA DOUBLES AS COMMIE PROVOCATEUR
And that was the end of the high life for Fitzy FitzWilliams.
Having tripped over the end of his own beard, Fitzy tumbled down the stairs of good fortune. The Irish whiskey that had once put the jovial blush in his yuletide cheeks assumed command over his general welfare by emptying his coffers and severing his connections to clean clothes and polite society. By 1949, Fitzy was reciting dirty limericks on the subways with his hat in his hand and living in room 43 of the Sunshine Hotel—right across the hall from me and my old man.
I was looking forward to seeing him.
Emmett
In the late afternoon as the train began to slow, Ulysses raised his head briefly out of the hatch, then came back down the ladder.