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CHRISTIAN SHORT STORY COMPETITION:

THIRD PLACE WINNER

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"A Descant For St. Simeon"

by Fred McGavran, Cincinnatti, OH, USA

From Advent until Easter, the Rector was wracked with cold. As gray November gripped the Downtown Church of Our Savior, the Reverend Charles Spears huddled beside the space heater in his study listening to the window glass shudder against the brittle caulk. Parishioners talked happily of condominiums in Naples and Caribbean cruises, but the sixty-four year old priest fantasized about wrapping himself in a blanket to supplement the steam heat and uninsulated brick walls. He had nearly convinced himself that his chills were the symptom of a circulatory disorder, when Dorothy Ames opened the door without knocking and sat down in his frayed Chippendale guest chair.

"Louise isn't getting any better," the septuagenarian widow of the city's most ruthless industrialist said. "She's never going to leave that place."

"That place" was assisted living at the Episcopal Retirement Home, whose once mauve halls now enclosed her sister in their air of tainted despair. Spears had thought Mrs. Ames wanted to talk about casting the Christmas pageant or her plans for a Caribbean cruise. She had chartered a yacht for her five adult dependent children and their spouses or significant others plus twenty-three grandchildren produced by her children or their present partners in earlier, impermanent relationships.

"I see her there every Thursday for Bible study," the priest said, imagining the matriarch sweeping across a sun bleached deck in a flowing linen wrap, displaying an occasional red toe or gnarled shoulder to her coconut oiled descendants. "She's getting the best possible care."

"There isn't anything they can do for her, Charles," she said bitterly.

The Rector was silent as he was silent whenever the Psalmist or Dorothy Ames railed against God. Her beautician had insulated her against age with the subtly colored hair and make up of a woman thirty years younger, and her couturier concealed her wasted figure under the wiring of a tailored silk suit, but her thin hands trembled.

"She'll miss the Christmas pageant," Mrs. Ames continued. "She hasn't missed a Christmas pageant in sixty years."

Now it's coming, Spears thought. Dorothy Ames had not manipulated her marauding husband and domineered her children into their thirties and forties without having a solution for every problem she created. Younger sister Louise, however, lacked Dorothy's sense for the vulnerability of others. Instead of a rich marriage, she had spent her life convinced that the man she was destined to marry had been killed in the Korean War. To dramatize her loss, she would hand trifles from her purse to her nieces and nephews, and then look away at her own lost happiness. Only her sister appreciated the show.

Within a week of the administration's announcement of an agreement with North Korea to dismantle its nuclear arsenal, a stroke released her from her morbid self-pity. Now her sister wanted to bring it all back with images of the grandchildren she would never have.

"But I've been thinking," Mrs. Ames said. "After the pageant at the church, we could bring the grandchildren to the Retirement Home, and they could put it on again for Louise." She paused, studying the Rector's face for some sign of approval. "Of course the other residents could attend too, I suppose."

"I'm sure the residents would love to see the Christmas pageant," Spears said.

"Then you'll have to give my grandchildren all the speaking parts, so there won't be any confusion about who has which part at the Church and the Retirement Home."

"I'm sure there won't be any confusion at all about who is playing whom," the Rector agreed.

"I've been here longer than anyone else," Alan Sims greeted the priest as he greeted everyone else for Bible study in the activities room, the one with the large screen TV.

"Is that so," Spears said as he always said.

Wearing a shirt and trousers that had not been pressed in years, a call button around his neck, sweat pants and white athletic shoes, Sims had forgotten that there was a time when he was not. Nevertheless, he was one of the Rector's few scholars who could still talk, who could do anything besides slump against the rails of his wheelchair and snore or stare at the television after the priest had turned off the sound. Spears had tried turning the set off altogether, but the residents found that too disorienting. In this hopeless routine, even the priest had forgotten that neither intrigue nor angels spared the aged or the insane.

"I was here first," Alan cried to each new arrival as the nurse's aides deposited them around the table.

Eldred Morgan, once president of a major bank, was next to Sims. He patted the arm of his wheelchair when an aide rolled in Louise Hollingsworth. She wore a bright yellow sweater her sister Dorothy had provided, and a Navaho blanket from the finest catalogue was draped across her knees.

"Here, Louise, sit beside me," he said.

"When did you get here?" Alan Sims asked him.

Awakened by feelings he had not experienced in decades, the banker ignored Sims' question. Unlike most residents, Morgan had been enabled by his illness to shed all the strictures of his adult life. Without benefit of Viagra® or Cialis®, he lusted after Louise with a passion he had not felt since he had necked with her in the back seat of a 1940 Chevrolet before his wartime marriage to a stranger. Louise Hollingsworth, however, could not remember anything except her terrible sense of loss.

"When did you get here?" Alan asked Clair Duncan, last to be wheeled into place. Clair wore an old sweater with so many knobs of wool streaming from it that the Rector feared it would catch on something and unravel completely. Widow of a long deceased clergyman, she was so lost in her visions of angels and celestial cities that she never bothered to answer.

As the nurse's aides retreated to the snack machines for an hour of near peace, Spears opened his Bible to begin the lesson.

"We're going to study Christmas story the next few weeks so we can be ready for the pageant."

"A Christmas pageant?" Morgan exclaimed, titillated by a sudden memory of Louise singing "Oh, Holy Night" and actually hitting the high C in their high school Christmas concert. "I want to be in it."

"I get to be Jesus," Alan Sims said. "I was here first."

"I'm afraid all the parts are taken," Spears said.

"That's not fair," Morgan said. "I'm going back to my room"

As he fumbled for his call button, Louise Hollingsworth said, "Why don't you act your age?"

The Rector was stunned. It was the first time since her stroke that he had heard her speak.

"That's a great idea, Louise," he said. "There are parts for people your age in Luke's Gospel."

"Let me see," Morgan said, dropping the call button and reaching for Spears' Bible. "Who do I get to be?"

"I can see you as Zacharias."

"What about me?" Sims cried. "I was here first."

"You will make a perfect Simeon," Sims said.

Christmas Eve, the Ames children and grandchildren processed from the Church to the Retirement Home in the largest Mercedes and BMWs on the market, plus a bright orange Hummer and a Maibach® for the matriarch. Frenetic children streamed through the halls, startling nurses' aides and wheel-chaired residents, while sulking teenagers leered at each other across the requisite degrees of consanguinity.

Chauffeured by her oldest son, Dorothy Ames arrived in mink clad splendor a stylish fifteen minutes late to find the Rector huddled with the narrator, an eleven-year-old granddaughter. While shepherds chased Wise Men and angels around the activity room with their staffs, Spears was showing the preteen the lines he had added at the beginning and the end of the Christmas story.

"Isn't this a little much?" the matriarch said to the priest.

"Not if you want Louise to have a part."

Two aids wheeled Louise and Eldred Morgan to the front of the room, each clutching a paper with their lines.

"Louise?" Dorothy said, but her sister, focused on her lost happiness, did not reply.

"I think we're ready," Spears called, and Ames daughters and daughters in law herded the cast through a circle of wheel chairs and sat them on the floor at the front of the room.

The Rector turned off the television to signal the beginning of the pageant. When the narrator picked up the microphone, it groaned and shrilled, imposing a metallic silence on the audience. The Rector took his assigned seat beside the matriarch.

"In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest name Zechariah, of the division of Abijah, and he had a wife of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth."

Eldred Morgan, resplendent in a red bathrobe and Christmas tie, wheeled himself forward and leered at the audience. Louise Hollingsworth clutched her large print script and stared at the floor, as if she feared her Navaho blanket was about to slide off.

"Where did this come from?" Dorothy Ames demanded.

"It is frequently omitted," Spears said, as the narrator continued the story of the last prophet's birth.

"But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years."

A diminutive angel approached Morgan and announced: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John."

"I wish!" Eldred Morgan cried as Zechariah had cried, greeting the announcement of John the Baptist's birth with ridicule and disbelief.

The room exploded with laughter.

"Elder sex," a teenage voice said.

"Aunt Louise is pregnant!" another voice piped.

Furious, Dorothy Ames arose and stared down her roiling descendents. "That's enough!" she said in the voice that had terrified two generations into submission.

Even Eldred Morgan was hushed. In the sudden silence, the angel began reading his new lines.

"I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God; and I was sent to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time."

Anxious to avoid Dorothy Ames' stare, the muted Morgan wheeled himself to the side, leaving the stage clear for the angel to announce an unexpected pregnancy to a fiveyear-old Mary. Louise Hollingsworth watched in shocked silence. The narrator told how Mary went into the hill country to the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth; how Elizabeth's baby leapt in her womb when Mary entered; how Elizabeth then exclaimed with a loud cry.

Silence.

Spears tried to catch the narrator's eye to signal her to read Elizabeth's most famous lines, when Louise's blanket finally slid to the floor. She was wearing a long red skirt, the same skirt she had worn at countless Christmas Eve dinners in her sister's mansion as the children grew up and the grandchildren appeared, while her life slipped away in frustration and regret.

"Louise," her sister whispered. "Are you all right?"

The tiny Mary stepped between Louise's line of sight and the floor, turning her face to look up at the old woman. For the first time in decades, Louise looked into a sympathetic human face.

"Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb," she said out of some ancient memory. "And why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?"

Spears had never seen Dorothy Ames weep; even at her husband's funeral, she had maintained a Roman composure. Now she sobbed so deeply that even her son asked if she were all right. She couldn't answer, but Mary was beginning the Magnificat, and all the room heard it as if for the first time.

Then a nurse's aid retrieved Eldred Morgan from the corner, and the scene shifted to the circumcision of the infant John the Baptist in the Temple.

"I need a baby," Louise said.

Everyone froze; this was not a cast that could handle improvisation well. Spears wondered how he could have forgotten that they needed two babies for the nativities of John and Jesus. Then Mary, waiting for her next big scene, grabbed the doll that would soon be Jesus and handed it to her great aunt. Louise Hollingsworth stared at it as if she were looking into the face of God.

Another Ames grandchild in a bathrobe, playing the priest, asked Elizabeth the baby's name.

"He shall be called John," she said.

Surprised, the priest asked Zechariah to confirm his son's name. Morgan held up a shirt board that said: "His name is John." Then, his speech miraculously restored, he said: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people ...."

Charles Spears looked at the trembling woman beside him, and wondered if, for once, God had.

Then the narrator began the familiar lines about Caesar Augustus' census, and the matriarch relaxed. Mary and Joseph pantomimed the journey to Nazareth and their rejection at the inn, before Mary remembered that she had given her baby to her great aunt. She tiptoed over to the old woman.

"Here," Louise Hollingsworth said. "You can have him now."

Then the angels appeared, startling the shepherds, and the pageant reached its traditional climax. Instead of ending with the Wise Men, however, an aid wheeled Alan Sims and Clair Duncan to the front. Mary picked up the doll, and followed by Joseph,

entered the Temple for her son's circumcision.

"Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon

him," the narrator continued.

"I was here first," said Alan Sims.

"That's not what you're supposed to say," Louise Hollingsworth said.

"And it was revealed to him by the holy spirit, that he should not see death before he saw the Lord's anointed," the narrator concluded.

Louise reached over and touched the paper in Sims' hands. He held it up and read: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word ...

Sims paused, and everyone in the audience held their breath. Instead of praying to see the end of the story, the old man was asking to die. Prodded by some long ago memory, Louise and Eldred Morgan continued Simeon's song like singers in an ancient rondo.

"For mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, A light for the revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel."

Everyone waited as an audience waits after the final movement of an unfamiliar piece, not knowing whether to applaud. Then a new voice began the song all over again in the high, almost silent soprano of the angels. Clair Duncan as Anna, the ancient who had worshipped every night in the Temple with fasting and prayer waiting for this moment, was repeating the most perfect prayer for death ever uttered. When she finished her descant, Dorothy Ames rushed forward to embrace her sister, and the children and grandchildren clapped.

Spears congratulated each of the octogenarian cast while the audience reached for Christmas cookies and a ginger ale based punch. Dorothy was standing beside Louise, holding her hand.

"Charles, I've changed my mind. I'm not going."

"Not going," he repeated.

"The children and grandchildren can take the cruise without me. I'm staying with Dorothy."

"Isn't that a wonderful present, Charles?" Louise Hollingsworth asked.

"Yes," the Rector agreed, not knowing yet that the best of all Christmas presents, the one most earnestly prayed for by the residents of the Episcopal Retirement Home, was about to arrive.

Clair Duncan died New Years Day. With her sister beside her, Dorothy Hollingsworth followed her on Epiphany, just as her nieces and nephews returned stylishly sunburned from their cruise. Eldred Morgan died Ash Wednesday; Alan Sims lasted until the third week of Lent. Charles Spears never knew who would be in the activity room when he arrived for Thursday Bible study, nor did he mourn their happy absences.

JUDGES' COMMENTS:

Lucy McCarraher: "Nice start but descended into chaos with too many characters for a short story and too reliant on the mechanics of a nativity play/bible quotes. The end was just like documentary credits, not a well written story closure."

Jo Holloway: "My own dealings with the elderly and frail have given me an appreciation of this type of story, and the characters in it - the way the elderly often think and react. I found the telling gently insightful, with a good dash of humour, and on the whole well done. It did however start out better than it finished, with the structure gradually dissolving as it went along. Great Christmas appeal, but as with so many stories, the end is the weakest link. The final paragraph could have been left out altogether, with a more revealing last sentence of the previous paragraph implemented, for more impact."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Fred McGavran: "I was an English major at Kenyon College, served as an officer in the United States Navy, graduated from Harvard Law School, and have practiced with Frost Brown Todd LLC in Cincinnati for most of my career. I concentrate my practice on business cases and defending psychiatric malpractice claims.
My practice gave me the background to write about lawyers reacting, often poorly, to financial and personal pressures, plus the vocabulary to reflect sardonically about psychiatry, sometimes through demented characters. My wife, Liz, is a decorator, our older daughter Sarah is working on a Ph.D in Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, and our younger daughter Marian is a realtor in San Diego.
Although I have always been driven to write fiction, it took a long time to find the right voice and tone. I started writing Vietnam stories, then lawyer stories, then satires, then more whimsical stories like "A Descant for St. Simeon," where grace occasionally intervenes. I won the Raymond Carver Award from Humboldt State University and the Tom Howard./John Reid Prize, and have placed in a number of other contests. My stories have appeared in Dreams and Visions, Gray's Sporting Digest, and other print media and on line in www.storygolssia.com and www.thirdorder.org. You can find two of my online stories by Googling 'Fred McGavran.' I have also written a number of screenplays, some with a collaborator, that we are actively marketing."

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