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perhaps my whole life not believing in Santa Claus.
    But the next day mother came home from work and sat at the kitchen table. She put me in her lap and opened an envelope.
    “We got a letter today from Marilyn. She wants us to come up and spend Christmas with them at the store in Winnipah. You’ll get to see Matthew and everything. Won’t that be fun?”
    I had mixed feelings about going north. My uncle Ben and aunt Marilyn owned a store in the town of Winnipah. The store was right on the lake, with a dock that went out over the water. I had only been there in the summer, when we lay onthe dock and watched the large green fish swim down in the cool shadows.
    I had never seen it in the winter and didn’t think it would be as much fun as it had been in the summer.
    And Matthew was a problem as well. He had something wrong with him so that everybody said he was dying. I wasn’t supposed to know it, but I had heard the grown-ups talking about it more than once, sitting and crying and talking about it. Dying didn’t mean the things to me then that it did later. All I really knew was that Matthew had to stay in a bed in the back room of the store and was all puffy and yellow-looking. Dying to me meant what Mother worried about all the time—that Father would die in Europe and not come home. I did not think of it as an end so much as somebody just not coming home, and had not worked out how Matthew could die when he was already home.
    And then there was Santa Claus. When you are young it is necessary to be more practical than it is when the years have you. I was convinced that there was not a Santa Claus, but what if I was wrong? Would he be able to find us if we were not home?
    This was, of course, a crucial issue, as well as the fact that if indeed Santa Claus
was
Mr. Henderson, I only had about a week to be nice to him and get him to like me. Judging by the way he treated me it would be a difficult job, and so when Mother said how much fun it would be to visit Uncle Ben for Christmas there were too many factors involved to give a quick answer.
    I thought about it and thought about it and was still thinking about it when Mother dressed me in my coat and snowsuit so I looked like a blue marshmallow, and we rode the bus down to the train station two days later.
    I loved trains. They were like huge, friendly monsters, and in the station Mother took me close to the engine so I could look at it. The wheels seemed to reach to the ceiling, and even though there was an engineer up in the little cabin, I did not think trains were run by people. I thought they were alive somehow and carried us because they liked us and were just resting in the station, letting out puffs of steam and rumbling, and that the engineers were just there to take care of things and feed the engine.
    It was morning when we left, and the car was warm and had soft seats. Mother took off all my winter clothes and put them in the racks over the seats and let me sit next to the window.
    The glass had frost all around but was clear in the middle, and it was like looking through a telescope at the world. People came and went, and on another platform Isaw a soldier come off a train and run to meet a woman who almost jumped on him and hugged him. When I turned to Mother, she had seen it as well and was crying.

    “Aren’t they lucky to be together for Christmas?” She wiped her eyes and pushed my hair out of my face. “I miss your father, punkin. So much.”
    I was going to tell her that it wouldn’t be so bad because we were going to the store, and she liked to be with Aunt Marilyn because they laughed together all the time, but before I could speak the train jerked.
    And jerked again.
    And then it started to roll out of the station, and I had my eyes on the window and couldn’t think of speaking.
    It started slowly, but in a few minutes it was going so fast that the city seemed to stream past the window like running water. I would look ahead and try to see