I sometimes wonder how they came to be ghosts. We’ve had them every Christmas Eve since we moved in, almost fourteen years now. I have no idea who they are, or who they were, but they’re always here for Christmas night.
It’s a big brick house, Second Empire style, on Orange Street in Saint John. My mother left it to me. It has more floors and rooms than anyone would ever need. It even has a mansard roof with a widow’s walk we sometimes use because the view of the city is so grand.
In the winter, we keep a lot of doors shut because of heating costs. Closed doors don’t bother ghosts and I don’t think they feel the cold.
They begin arriving about a week ahead of time, incrementally, and unobtrusively. It’s as if they’re polite vacationers arriving at a hotel, one this day, a few more the next, and so on as the week builds to the big night. I counted them one year and they came to twelve.
We’re used to them now, so it doesn’t surprise us when we find Mr. Foster wandering the halls looking for something. Miriam no longer gives us the shivers when we find her weeping in a closet.
I sometimes wonder why Miriam weeps, as I also wonder why Mr. Foster is looking for something. What could it be? He seems so lost.
As the night approaches, they start to get mischievous. I think Christmas is a brief reprieve for them, though I don’t know from what.
I still laugh when I think of that Christmas Eve when I was with Andy, and he decided to play Santa Claus and come down the flue. It was for the kids, of course.
The ghosts encouraged him, the devils!
He didn’t actually come down the flue. He dressed up like Santa and then climbed inside the fireplace to create the appearance of coming down. “The kids’ll love it!” he said. He always had a child’s enthusiasm and was easily swayed, and the fireplace was so big he thought it would be easy.
Andy came after my first husband, Gerald. I got the house in the divorce. I had insisted because it was my mother’s.
Despite having lived in the house for six years, including six Christmases, Gerald never saw the ghosts. I think he simply lacked the imagination. He was always too serious, too humourless.
Not so with Andy. He was with me and the kids at the house that year. He’d been living with us for over two months by then. He was my first effort at a relationship since the marriage went to pieces.
In many ways, he was the opposite of Gerald. He thought coming down the chimney as Santa Claus, or seeming to, was a great idea, particularly with the ghosts egging him on. Gerald would have sneered at the idea.
Of course, Andy didn’t fit, despite being slender. And he had that silly Santa costume on.
“It’s for the children and it’s easy to do,” Mr. Foster urged. There was a twinkle in his eye. “It will be their best Christmas yet!”
So Andy dressed up like Santa and tried to climb up the fireplace. The soot was incredible! He made a huge mess, which I had to sweep up. Andy was never the brightest boy. Oh, but he was a looker!
As might have been expected, he got stuck in the chimney. We had all come into the family room, Christmas tree bright and sparkling in the corner, and all of us starry-eyed as we waited for Santa to come down the flue. Like the kids, the ghosts were having a fine time.
And then Andy said, from within the fireplace and with a falling voice, “I think I’m stuck.” We could see his legs dangling in the opening, over the grate. They were looking for solid ground and not finding it.
Mr. Foster said, “It’s the clothes. They make you too big. Get out of them.”
“What?” Andy sounded worried.
“Get out of your clothes. That’s the problem. Start with the pants.”
We heard a very quiet, unsure voice say, “Okay.” The kids were enthralled by the scene, as if it was a video game.
Kicking his legs in a manic way, Andy eventually managed to get his boots off. This was followed by more kicking and wiggling, accompanied by painful groans, as he tried to wriggle out of his pants. Surprisingly, he was successful. The pants descended as if dropped from the heavens.
“Oh my God! Andy!!!” I cried.
The children were giggling. The ghosts were laughing. Andy’s bare, skinny legs were dangling like denuded birch trees. But that wasn’t all.
“That’s Santa’s pee-pee!” one of the kids yelled.
Choking with laughter, Mr. Foster shouted, “The family jewels!”
Andy’s genitals were on full display. It was not the Christmas Eve I’d planned.
Brewster, yet another ghost, said with his craggy voice, “If you’d like, I could get some scissors and snip the things off. Not the kind of thing you want to be seeing. Not at Christmas.” He was smiling wickedly. “They might work as ornaments, though. For the tree.”
Andy let out a wail and cried, “No! No scissors!”
Then his legs got busy again. Mr. Foster, drinking a rum and smoking a cigar, kept chuckling. He was very entertained, as were all the ghosts. They were having a grand old time.
The same couldn’t be said for Andy.
“Somebody do something,” he bawled. “I’m stuck!”
Mr. Foster suggested starting a fire. “That’ll scoot him out like a squirrel!”
You don’t expect a ghost to chortle, but that’s what Mr. Foster did. He even gave me a wink. I think he planned the whole thing!
As usual, I had to be the responsible one. I called the emergency line and explained we needed help with an absurdity. It wasn’t easy. How do you make a call like that and not laugh?
Serious men and women eventually arrived to save the day. When the situation was made clear to them, they started laughing too. Andy’s dignity took a beating that Christmas.
He and I eventually broke up. Despite being a looker, the charm fades and you’re left with a person as they are. With Andy, that didn’t really amount to much. But he’s not to be blamed. It’s just who he was.
That Christmas Eve, I’d finally put the kids to bed and was walking down the hall when I ran into Mr. Foster again. I knew he’d be leaving soon. Christmas had arrived. The time for ghosts had gone.
Seeing him, I smiled and said, “Till next year.”
He smiled back and repeated, “Till next year.” Then he paused a moment, and looked at me directly, in the eye, and said, “He’s not for you. But you know that. He’s a good boy. But he’ll always be a boy.”
I nodded because, although I didn’t realize it until he said it, I knew he was right. Andy would never be the partner I needed. He’d never be the man my children needed. It broke my heart because, for all his failings, he loved. He really did love.
Mr. Foster, looking at my face, saw all these thoughts passing through me. He said, “Now you understand how we came to be ghosts.”
October 2021