John Cheever, the fiction writer, worked for many years as a short story writer for The New Yorker. He is remembered for stories about WASP life like, "The Sorrows of Gin", a classic "Cheever story". It is the tale of a Connecticut couple whose missing liquor they mistakenly chalk up to bibulous housekeepers rather than the real culprit, their young daughter: She has been pouring the gin down the sink for their own good.
The Cheever story I remember this time of year, though, is "Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor", the tale of Charlie Leary, a Park Avenue elevator operator working Christmas. Charlie replies to every "Merry Christmas!" from his charges with, "Christmas is a sad season when you're poor. I live alone and don't have any family." Which he embellishes to six children in all, "four living...two in the grave...Mrs. Leary's a cripple", with predictably generous responses from the hearers of his sad tale.
Late in the day, after too many egg nogs, Charlie plays "feel the elevator drop" with an elderly resident who panics, and complains to the superintendent on duty. The super fires Charlie, who loads his haul into bags and takes it to his furnished room, where he indeed lives alone, as he said originally. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, however, he feels expansive: he takes the presents he doesn't want for himself and the extra food to his landlady, a single mother with three young children.
The family has feasted on a turkey supplied by the local Democratic organization and they have already gotten many presents; but Charlie's landlady plays along with the tipsy Charlie until he departs. She then tells her kids to wrap up the presents Charlie just brought: they're going to take them to the Dekkers on Hudson Street, a family even poorer than they are. As the story ends, the landlady's apprehension of the spiritual strength conferred by acts of charity is layered with another, equally, trenchant insight:
Now you kids help me get this stuff together. "Hurry, hurry, hurry", she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence only for a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn't rest, she couldn't rest.
Of course, the window of opportunity for acts of charity never closes, although at Christmas we may take better to being reminded of the fact. For me, the difference between my own situation and that of those less fortunate was brought home to me today by the visit of my cleaning lady of twenty years, "Savi".
Savi (her family was originally from India) came to New York from British Guyana not too much before she began working for me. I enjoy her company and listening to her lilting English. She will often begin a sentence with "Hear now--" a Guyanese idiom for getting a listener's attention --then tell me what's on her mind --"Could we have an earthquake here?" "When will the next election be?" Savi became a U.S. citizen recently, and she wants to be up on current events.
Today she told me she had pains in her right foot, pains so bad she could only walk on the side of her foot. She had been to the public hospital in Elmhurst, Queens twice in the last month for tests, but she had no idea what the tests were for, because she could not understand her doctor, a Chinese physician with the last name "Chung".
She showed me the MRI requisition, which suggested a concern that Savi's pains might be due to a deep-vein thrombosis, potentially fatal, if untreated. When I asked her whether she had been given a prescription for a blood thinner, she told me she hadn't, that she had only been told to take two tablets of aspirin. She had, however, been told to come back for a third MRI the following week.
I called the hospital's radiology department and was quickly told the law protecting the confidentiality of patient information, HIPAA, meant no information could be given over the telephone if I was not the patient. With Savi's consent I impersonated her. I got the sense that some of the hospital personnel I spoke with were suspicious of the ruse, but as Savi supplied me with her medical identification number, I was able to get closer and closer to identifying which "Dr. Chung" was Savi's treating physician. (There are several on staff at Elmuhurst Hospital.) He was, of course, not there, but the receptionist took both my number and Savi's, to provide the maximum number of opportunities for Dr. Chung to reach Savi.
The message I left with the receptionist, "If you are worried I may have a deep-vein thrombosis, why am I not on a blood thinner?", hopefully got the doctor's attention. Hopefully, he and Savi have been able to speak over the telephone about what the test results actually show and whether she is at risk for deep-vein thrombosis. And hopefully, they will understand each other's versions of English.
Christmas is a sad season for the poor.
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