Silver certificate bills

Coughing, I blink my eyes awake. To see ... Is this reality?

On my night table, three tissue boxes to select from and cough into. This might be reality because I remember them from last night--mentholated tissue, rose-scented tissue, plain tissue, all three encased in skyblue velvet patterned with golden fleurs-de-lis. Next to them, this morning's papers--Le Figaro, International Herald Tribune, London Times. The door opens and in pads barefoot this pretty one in tapered slacks and slim-tailored jacket, sunburst of hair still voluptously unkempt, waving a pair of boots.

"Think I can wear these in a Rolls?"

I stare at her. Marcia, my wife, discussing Rolls-Royce attire. This is indeed reality. Chateau Mouton. We Mortons are spending Christmas 1960 with the Rothschilds.

"I mean, mud boots on that Persian rug Site's got in the car? He said we'd be tramping through the vineyard in the rain."

God! The Christmas wine tasting! The thought makes me grasp for clothes. "I completely forgot!"

She stops my hand. "You're going nowhere. Not in this freezing rain. You're still coughing."

"But it's a great experience, for the book--"

"So I'm going for you. Got to get ready for Sire."

"Sire" is our code word for Baron Philippe de Rothschild. When we're by ourselves we play duh--two punks in the palace. We're resolutely (if covertly) irreverent in order not to be thrilled by the deluge of opulence here.

She bends down to kiss.

"You'll catch my cold."

"Your common cold, peasant?

Classy broad like me in a swank joint like this, I don't stoop to such bugs."

"Yeah, but you're embarrassed about the boots."

"Just for that I'm gonna wear them. Let 'em ruin that carpet! Oh, and since i'm going, you'll have to wrap our gifts."

"Me? I'm so inept at these things."

"So make it charmingly inept. And drink lots of fluids!"

Like a good boy I drink up all the juice on my breakfast tray, butler-borne (how else?) to my bed. Then off to my bathroom, to use a select few of its myriad marmoreal facilities. Then I walk into Marcia's room, bonjour the two maids implausibly ironing the fresh silk sheets spread on her bed, find the blue gift box in her big suitcase, return to my room of our guest apartment where another pair of implausible maids ply irons on my bed. I bonjour them, stutter in my pitiable mongrel French (its New Yawk twang on top of an Austrian accent always breaks up Marcia) to assure said maids that they are not disturbing me, do carry on, s'il vous plait.

They do carry on, undisturbingly, their very vacuum muffled pianissimo. To that discreet sibilance I sit down at the empire desk, red lacquer and gold scrolls. The gifts are our attempt to cope with a brute problem: what can one possibly bring a Rothschild for Christmas?

Well, one brings a seven-franc gift certificate from Les Halles, good for a blue-plate special of pot-au-feu. That's for Sire: he once mentioned that as a child he'd been tantalized by the smell of pot-au-feu coming from the gatekeeper's house but never tasted even a spoonful since no Rothschild chef would condescend to such a plebeian stew. And as mother Christmas present one brings to Chateau Mouton the Upper East Side section of" the Manhattan subway map, laminated and framed like a historic plaque. That's for the baroness because she'd let it drop that during her New York years as Hattie Carnegie's top designer she'd always meant "to adventure" into the subway but never managed to encounter a station when she had the time.

Joke presents for people who already own everything serious. Presents with an egalitarian innuendo; a bow, however subtle, to one's social conscience. Important, because of this queer turn in my career. Who would have thought that national magazine editors would be just fascinated when I ask for a Lipton tea bag to go with the rarefied Brie at La Cote Basque? Would suspect that my frayed pants cuffs might be an esoteric fashion statement? Would overlook my pinko novels together with all other expressions of a prole soul? It's the combination of continental background and fancy prose style that hornswoggles them. Suddenly I've become the man to unlock the mysteries of raffine high life for their readers. The dear idiots have been throwing champagne jobs at seltzer me, which seltzer me has fielded, baroque expense accounts and all, as a sort of wicked joke. As a silken lucrative peccadillo to fund my return to seriousness.

So here I am in the chateau, wrapping our Christmas presents to the Rothschilds, struggling with Santa Claus paper, not even too ineptly. But not too happily either. Why? A pang in the prole soul? Yes, but there's also something else. There's a longing, a downright pining for my parents. Curiously, not the Vienna Papa und Mutti of my dreams but my current parents in New York, in fact, my precisely current parents on Christmas Eve.

Or maybe that's not too curious after all. Wrapping presents now in Mouton naturally conjures last Christmas Eve when I was also wrapping presents, not for any Rothschilds but, on tray parents' behalf, for Ramona, Juanita, Anna, Ophelia, Carmen, et alia--Papa's Hispanic crew in his workshop at 800 Eighth Avenue. Bur why this sudden yen to be there with them now? I didn't enjoy it all that much at the time. In fact, I remember that I resented being shanghaied into this wrapping thing by my brother. Usually that's his Christmas Eve chore, Henry being junior to me and much handier. But last year he called, please, big favor, sub for him at 800 Eighth, force majeure, Christmas party invitation from his Queens College dean, as fledgling instructor he couldn't ignore the summons.

I also had better things to do with my time than cover gewgaws with gaudy paper. My summons was to my daily labors, which haven't gone entirely unrecognized in the world of letters. But Henry is such a damnably nice bright guy. Hard to pull rank on him, nor could I last year. So, instead of refining nuances in my manuscript, I was squirming behind Papa's desk embroiled with scissors and tape. And to me, now similarly occupied at Chateau Mouton, those hours last year take on such a wistful warmth. What I was wrapping then, gifts for Papa's senoritas--those things were really jokes nicer and better than the subway map or the seven-franc gift certificate. Those things were napkin rings shipped to Papa from Vienna--part of the decimated inventory of his factory commandeered by the Nazis and restituted in shambles after the war. Of course napkin rings are not optimal presents for barrio girls innocent of dinner parties. But exile has taught Papa to improvise. Buying, on top of nine Christmas bonuses, nine Christmas gifts substantial enough to come from the boss--viel zu teuer. Much too expensive. Yet each Christmas his paternalism demands a gesture beyond extra bills in the pay envelope. So last year he reinvented the napkin rings as nice bracelets for the girls. By day's end nine bright braided brass hoops gleamed on nine dusky wrists. And the fact that all hoops were identical made nine faces glow with a sense of privileged membership in an exclusive club.

And now, twelve months later, I find myself wishing I'd be part of all that again, in Room 211 of 800 Eighth Avenue, wrapping away at Papa's current reinventions; hearing from across the narrow hall, muted, mystically obscure, the German of my parents' voices as they fix up the stockroom for the big Christmas lunch; hearing behind me, on the other side of the workshop partition, the girls whispering in Spanish while they thread nylon filaments through the little holes in fake pearls. And if, say, Juanita would come out from behind the partition on her way to the rest room (the only excuse Papa accepts) what fun to slam shut the open desk drawer on which I work to hide the nature of this year's gift, And how I'd love to see again today the other objects rattling in the desk drawer, those buttons declaring I LOVE ELVIS or SINATRA FOREVER or TITO PUENTE! all confiscated by Papa every morning to be returned at the end of the workday: Papa's precaution against fan arguments disrupting attention to the job.

This year my brother will once more sit at that desk. And me, four thousand miles away at Chateau Mouton, I wonder what in hell is now rattling in the desk drawer of Room 211, what new Elvis buttons Henry will be guarding, what Christmas ingenuities of Papa's he might be wrapping. But at least I do know exactly what other largesse he'll dispense in Papa's name: those little bundles of silver-foiled Belgian pralines in gold nets, heaped on Papa's desk. This never changes from year to year, having become a tradition: sweets to be handed out to a rather prodigious parade of neighbors. Nothing like Christmas in this New York-nutty, marvelously dissolute building where Papa runs his correct little Middle European boot camp.