The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (4 page)

Chapter 6

O
ur last rehearsal
happened to be the night before the pot-luck supper, and when we got there the kitchen was full of ladies in aprons, counting out dishes and silverware and making applesauce cake for the dessert.

“I'm sorry about this,” one of the ladies told Mother, “but with so much to do at this time of year, the committee decided to come in this evening and set up the tables and all. I just hope we won't bother you.”

“Oh, you won't,” Mother said. “We won't be in the kitchen. You won't even know we're here.”

Mother was wrong—everybody in that end of town knew we were there before the evening was over.

“Now, this is going to be a dress rehearsal,” Mother told us all, and right away three or four baby angels began hollering that they forgot their wings. Half the angel choir had forgotten their robes, and Hobie Carmichael said he didn't have any kind of a costume.

“Wear your father's bathrobe,” Charlie told him. “That's what I do.”

“He doesn't have a bathrobe.”

“What does he hang around the house in?”

“His underwear,” Hobie said.

I looked at Alice Wendleken to see if she was going to write that down on her pad of paper, but Alice was standing all by herself in a corner, patting her hair. Her hair was all washed and curled, and her robe was clean and pressed. She had even put vaseline on her eyelids, so they would shine in the candlelight and everyone would say “Who is that lovely girl in the angel choir? Why isn't she Mary?” I guess Alice was afraid to move, for fear she might spoil herself.

“Don't worry about your wings,” Mother said. “The main point of a dress rehearsal isn't the costumes. The main point is to go right straight through without stopping. And that's what we're going to do, just as if we were doing it for the whole congregation. I'm going to sit in the back of the church and be the audience.”

But it didn't work that way. The baby angels came in at the wrong place and had to go back out again, and a whole gang of shepherds didn't come in at all, for fear of Gladys. Imogene couldn't find the baby Jesus doll, and wrapped up a great big memorial flower urn in the blanket, and then dropped it on Ralph's foot. And half the angel choir sang “Away in a Manger” while the other half sang “O, Little Town of Bethlehem.”

So we had to start over a lot.

“I've got the baby here,” Imogene barked at the Wise Men. “Don't touch him! I named him Jesus.”

“No, no, no.” Mother came flying up the aisle. “Now, Imogene, you know you're not supposed to say anything. Nobody says anything in our pageant, except the Angel of the Lord and the choir singing carols. Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men make a lovely picture for us to look at while we think about Christmas and what it means.”

I guess Mother had to say things like that, even though everybody knew it was a big lie. The Herdmans didn't look like anything out of the Bible—more like trick-or-treat. Imogene even had on great big gold earrings, and she wouldn't take them off.

“Now, Imogene,” Mother said. “You know Mary didn't wear earrings.”

“I have to wear these,” Imogene said.

“Why is that?”

“I got my ears pierced, and if I don't keep something in 'em, they'll grow together.”

“Well, they won't grow together in an hour and a half,” Mother said.

“No . . . but I better leave 'em in.” Imogene pulled on her earrings, which made you shudder—it was like looking at the pictures in National Geographic of natives with their ears stretched all the way to their shoulders.

“What did the doctor say about leaving something in them?” Mother said.

“What doctor?”

“Well, who pierced your ears?”

“Gladys,” Imogene said.

That really made you shudder—the thought of Gladys Herdman piercing ears. I thought she probably used an ice pick, and for the next six months I kept watching Imogene, to see her ears turn black and fall off.

“All right,” Mother said, “but we'll try to find something smaller and more appropriate for you to wear in the pageant. Now we'll start again and go right straight through, and—”

“I think I ought to tell them what his name is,” Imogene said.

“No. Besides, you remember it wasn't Mary who named the baby.”

“I told you!” Ralph whacked Imogene on the back. “I named him.”

“Joseph didn't name the baby either,” Mother said. “God sent an angel to tell Mary what his name should be.”

Imogene sniffed. “I would have named him Bill.”

Alice Wendleken sucked in her breath, and I could hear her scratching down on her pad of paper that Imogene Herdman would have called the baby Bill instead of Jesus.

“What angel was that?” Ralph wanted to know. “Was that Gladys?”

“No,” Mother said. “Gladys is the angel who comes to the shepherds with the news.”

“Yeh,” Gladys said. “Unto you a child is born!” she yelled at the shepherds.

“Unto me!” Imogene yelled back at her. “Not them, me! I'm the one that had the baby!”

“No, no, no.” Mother sat down on a front pew. “That just means that Jesus belongs to everybody. Unto all of us a child is born. Now,” she sighed. “Let's start again, and—”

“Why didn't they let Mary name her own baby?” Imogene demanded. “What did that angel do, just walk up and say, ‘Name him Jesus'?”

“Yes,” Mother said, because she was in a hurry to get finished.

But Alice Wendleken had to open her big mouth. “I know what the angel said,” Alice piped up. “She said, ‘His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.'”

I could have hit her.

“My God!” Imogene said. “He'd never get out of the first grade if he had to write all that!”

There was a big crash at the back of the church, as if somebody dropped all the collection plates. But it wasn't the collection plates—it was Mrs. Hopkins, the minister's wife, dropping a whole tray of silverware.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I was just passing by, and I thought I'd take a peek . . .”

“Would you like to sit down and watch the rehearsal?” Mother asked.

“No-o-o.” Mrs. Hopkins couldn't seem to take her eyes off Imogene. “I'd better go check on the applesauce cake.”

“You didn't have to say that,” I told Alice. “All that about Wonderful, Everlasting Father, and all.”

“Why not?” Alice said, patting her hair. “I thought Imogene wanted to know.”

By that time everyone was hot and tired, and most of the baby angels had to go to the bathroom, so Mother said we would take a five-minute recess. “And then we'll start over,” she said, looking sort of hopeless, “and go right straight through without stopping, won't we?”

Well, we never did go right straight through. The five-minute recess was a big mistake, because it stretched to fifteen minutes, and Imogene spent the whole time smoking cigars in one of the johns in the ladies' room. Then Mrs. Homer McCarthy went to the ladies' room and opened the door and smelled something funny and saw some smoke—and she ran right to the church office and called the fire department.

We were singing “Angels We Have Heard on High” when what we heard was the fire engine, pulling up on the lawn of the church, with the siren blaring and the red lights flashing. The firemen hurried in and made us all go outside, and they dragged a big hose in the front door and went looking for a fire to put out.

The street was full of baby angels crying, and shepherds climbing all over the fire truck, and firemen, and all the ladies on the pot-luck committee, and neighbors who came to see what was going on, and Reverend Hopkins who ran over from the parsonage in his pajamas and his woolly bathrobe.

Nobody knew what had happened, including the Herdmans, but I guess they figured that whatever it was, they had done it, so they left.

“Why in the world did you call the fire department?” Mother asked Mrs. McCarthy, when she finally heard the whole story.

“Because the ladies' room was full of thick smoke!”

“It couldn't have been,” Mother said. “You just got excited. Didn't you know it was cigar smoke?”

Mrs. McCarthy stared at her. “No, I didn't. I don't expect to find cigar smoke in the ladies' room of the church!” She whirled around and marched back to the kitchen.

But by that time the kitchen was fuller of smoke than the ladies' room, because, while everybody was milling around in the street, all the applesauce cake burned up.

Of course the ladies on the pot-luck committee were mad about that. Mrs. McCarthy was mad, and Alice said her mother would be good and mad when she heard about it. Most of the baby angels' mothers were mad because they couldn't find out what had happened—and somebody said Mrs. Hopkins was mad because Reverend Hopkins was running around the streets in his pajamas.

It turned out to be the one great big sinful thing Alice kept hoping for.

Mrs. Wendleken read Alice's notes, got on the telephone that very night and called up everybody she could think of in the Ladies' Aid and the Women's Society. And she called most of the flower committee, and all the Sunday-school teachers, and Reverend Hopkins.

And Reverend Hopkins came to see Mother. “I can't make head or tail of it,” he said. “Some people say they set fire to the ladies' room. Some people say they set fire to the kitchen. One lady told me that Imogene threw a flower pot at Ralph. Mrs. Wendleken says all they do is talk about sex and underwear.”

“That was Hobie Carmichael,” Mother said, “talking about underwear. And they didn't set fire to anything. The only fire was in the kitchen, where the pot-luck committee let their applesauce cake burn up.”

“Well . . .” Reverend Hopkins looked unhappy. “The whole church is in an uproar. Do you think we should call off the pageant?”

“Certainly not!” Mother said. By that time she was mad, too. “Why, it's going to be the best Christmas pageant we've ever had!”

Of all the lies she'd told so far, that was the biggest, but you had to admire her. It was like General Custer saying, “Bring on the Indians!”

“Maybe so,” Reverend Hopkins said. “I'm just afraid that no one will come to see it.”

But he was wrong.

Everybody came . . . to see what the Herdmans would do.

Chapter 7

O
n the night of the pageant
we didn't have any supper because Mother forgot to fix it. My father said that was all right. Between Mrs. Armstrong's telephone calls and the pageant rehearsals, he didn't expect supper anymore.

“When it's all over,” he said, “we'll go someplace and have hamburgers.” But Mother said when it was all over she might want to go someplace and hide.

“We've never once gone through the whole thing,” she said. “I don't know what's going to happen. It may be the first Christmas pageant in history where Joseph and the Wise Men get in a fight, and Mary runs away with the baby.”

She might be right, I thought, and I wondered what all of us in the angel choir ought to do in case that happened. It would be dumb for us just to stand there singing about the Holy Infant if Mary had run off with him.

But nothing seemed very different at first.

There was the usual big mess all over the place—baby angels getting poked in the eye by other baby angels' wings and grumpy shepherds stumbling over their bathrobes. The spotlight swooped back and forth and up and down till it made you sick at your stomach to look at it and, as usual, whoever was playing the piano pitched “Away in a Manger” so high we could hardly hear it, let alone sing it. My father says “Away in a Manger” always starts out sounding like a closetful of mice.

But everything settled down, and at 7:30 the pageant began.

While we sang “Away in a Manger,” the ushers lit candles all around the church, and the spotlight came on to be the star. So you really had to know the words to “Away in a Manger” because you couldn't see anything—not even Alice Wendleken's vaseline eyelids.

After that we sang two verses of “O, Little Town of Bethlehem,” and then we were supposed to hum some more “O, Little Town of Bethlehem” while Mary and Joseph came in from a side door. Only they didn't come right away. So we hummed and hummed and hummed, which is boring and also very hard, and before long doesn't sound like any song at all—more like an old refrigerator.

“I knew something like this would happen,” Alice Wendleken whispered to me. “They didn't come at all! We won't have any Mary and Joseph—and now what are we supposed to do?”

I guess we would have gone on humming till we all turned blue, but we didn't have to. Ralph and Imogene were there all right, only for once they didn't come through the door pushing each other out of the way. They just stood there for a minute as if they weren't sure they were in the right place—because of the candles, I guess, and the church being full of people. They looked like the people you see on the six o'clock news—refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them.

It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn't much care what happened to them. They couldn't have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph (Imogene's veil was cockeyed as usual, and Ralph's hair stuck out all around his ears). Imogene had the baby doll but she wasn't carrying it the way she was supposed to, cradled in her arms. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back.

I heard Alice gasp and she poked me. “I don't think it's very nice to burp the baby Jesus,” she whispered, “as if he had colic.” Then she poked me again. “Do you suppose he could have had colic?”

I said, “I don't know why not,” and I didn't. He could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the whole point of Jesus—that he didn't come down on a cloud like something out of “Amazing Comics,” but that he was born and lived . . . a real person.

Right away we had to sing “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night”—and we had to sing very loud, because there were more shepherds than there were anything else, and they made so much noise, banging their crooks around like a lot of hockey sticks.

Next came Gladys, from behind the angel choir, pushing people out of the way and stepping on everyone's feet. Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say she made the most of it: “Hey! Unto you a child is born!” she hollered, as if it was, for sure, the best news in the world. And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid—of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.

Then came three carols about angels. It took that long to get the angels in because they were all primary kids and they got nervous and cried and forgot where they were supposed to go and bent their wings in the door and things like that.

We got a little rest then, while the boys sang “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” and everybody in the audience shifted around to watch the Wise Men march up the aisle.

“What have they got?” Alice whispered.

I didn't know, but whatever it was, it was heavy—Leroy almost dropped it. He didn't have his frankincense jar either, and Claude and Ollie didn't have anything although they were supposed to bring the gold and the myrrh.

“I knew this would happen,” Alice said for the second time. “I bet it's something awful.”

“Like what?”

“Like . . . a burnt offering. You know the Herdmans.”

Well, they did burn things, but they hadn't burned this yet. It was a ham—and right away I knew where it came from. My father was on the church charitable works committee—they give away food baskets at Christmas, and this was the Herdman's food-basket ham. It still had the ribbon around it, saying Merry Christmas.

“I'll bet they stole that!” Alice said.

“They did not. It came from their food basket, and if they want to give away their own ham I guess they can do it.” But even if the Herdmans didn't like ham (that was Alice's next idea) they had never before in their lives given anything away except lumps on the head. So you had to be impressed.

Leroy dropped the ham in front of the manger. It looked funny to see a ham there instead of the fancy bath-salts jars we always used for the myrrh and the frankincense. And then they went and sat down in the only space that was left.

While we sang “What Child Is This?” the Wise Men were supposed to confer among themselves and then leave by a different door, so everyone would understand that they were going home another way. But the Herdmans forgot, or didn't want to, or something, because they didn't confer and they didn't leave either. They just sat there, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

“They're ruining the whole thing!” Alice whispered, but they weren't at all. As a matter of fact, it made perfect sense for the Wise Men to sit down and rest, and I said so.

“They're supposed to have come a long way. You wouldn't expect them just to show up, hand over the ham, and leave!”

As for ruining the whole thing, it seemed to me that the Herdmans had improved the pageant a lot, just by doing what came naturally—like burping the baby, for instance, or thinking a ham would make a better present than a lot of perfumed oil.

Usually, by the time we got to “Silent Night,” which was always the last carol, I was fed up with the whole thing and couldn't wait for it to be over. But I didn't feel that way this time. I almost wished for the pageant to go on, with the Herdmans in charge, to see what else they would do that was different.

Maybe the Wise Men would tell Mary about their problem with Herod, and she would tell them to go back and lie their heads off. Or Joseph might go with them and get rid of Herod once and for all. Or Joseph and Mary might ask the Wise Men to take the Christ Child with them, figuring that no one would think to look there.

I was so busy planning new ways to save the baby Jesus that I missed the beginning of “Silent Night,” but it was all right because everyone sang “Silent Night,” including the audience. We sang all the verses too, and when we got to “Son of God, Love's pure light” I happened to look at Imogene and I almost dropped my hymn book on a baby angel.

Everyone had been waiting all this time for the Herdmans to do something absolutely unexpected. And sure enough, that was what happened.

Imogene Herdman was crying.

In the candlelight her face was all shiny with tears and she didn't even bother to wipe them away. She just sat there—awful old Imogene—in her crookedy veil, crying and crying and crying.

Well. It was the best Christmas pageant we ever had.

Everybody said so, but nobody seemed to know why. When it was over people stood around the lobby of the church talking about what was different this year. There was something special, everyone said—they couldn't put their finger on what.

Mrs. Wendleken said, “Well, Mary the mother of Jesus had a black eye; that was something special. But only what you might expect,” she added.

She meant that it was the most natural thing in the world for a Herdman to have a black eye. But actually nobody hit Imogene and she didn't hit anyone else. Her eye wasn't really black either, just all puffy and swollen. She had walked into the corner of the choir-robe cabinet, in a kind of daze—as if she had just caught onto the idea of God, and the wonder of Christmas.

And this was the funny thing about it all. For years, I'd thought about the wonder of Christmas, and the mystery of Jesus' birth, and never really understood it. But now, because of the Herdmans, it didn't seem so mysterious after all.

When Imogene had asked me what the pageant was about, I told her it was about Jesus, but that was just part of it. It was about a new baby, and his mother and father who were in a lot of trouble—no money, no place to go, no doctor, nobody they knew. And then, arriving from the East (like my uncle from New Jersey) some rich friends.

But Imogene, I guess, didn't see it that way. Christmas just came over her all at once, like a case of chills and fever. And so she was crying, and walking into the furniture.

Afterward there were candy canes and little tiny Testaments for everyone, and a poinsettia plant for my mother from the whole Sunday school. We put the costumes away and folded up the collapsible manger, and just before we left, my father snuffed out the last of the tall white candles.

“I guess that's everything,” he said as we stood at the back of the church. “All over now. It was quite a pageant.” Then he looked at my mother. “What's that you've got?”

“It's the ham,” she said. “They wouldn't take it back. They wouldn't take any candy either, or any of the little Bibles. But Imogene did ask me for a set of the Bible-story pictures, and she took out the Mary picture and said it was exactly right, whatever that means.”

I think it meant that no matter how she herself was, Imogene liked the idea of the Mary in the picture—all pink and white and pure-looking, as if she never washed the dishes or cooked supper or did anything at all except have Jesus on Christmas Eve.

But as far as I'm concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman—sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby. And the Wise Men are always going to be Leroy and his brothers, bearing ham.

When we came out of the church that night it was cold and clear, with crunchy snow underfoot and bright, bright stars overhead. And I thought about the Angel of the Lord—Gladys, with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us, everywhere:

“Hey! Unto you a child is born!”