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tree ornaments, like your mama used to. We’ll bake them and then you can paint them.”
    But either they couldn’t hear him or they preferred to watch the snowy screen.

    One Christmas was much like the next at the Harrington house, just as in the Dylan Thomas story
A Child’s Christmas in Wales,
and one of the things that was always the same was that one of the girls would give Rudy a copy of A
Child’s Christmas in Wales
— a record in a red and white jacket with a little booklet with the text. There were half a dozen of them in the record cabinet.
     On the other side of the record was a poem called “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” and sometimes Rudy wondered if maybe
that
was the real message they were sending him. He liked to think so.
    For supper they ate pizzas, which Rudy had made, instead of the
spaghetti alle vongole
that Helen had always insisted on because that’s what they eat on Christmas Eve in Florence. Helen had liked traditions,
     especially Italian ones.
    After supper they left the dishes to soak in the sink while they put the lights on the tree and decorated it with strings of cranberries and popcorn and the old baker’s-clay ornaments. They must have had three or four hundred of these ornaments in the attic, enough for several trees. Daniel and Philip had not forgotten about the TV, which could not be coaxed into working,
     much to Rudy’s satisfaction. But without a TV the boys were restless, soRudy and TJ, who was an amateur magician, went back up to the attic and brought down a metal footlocker that held Rudy’s dads old magic tricks, many of them still packed in their original boxes. TJ entertained the boys with coins that materialized out of nowhere and silks that disappeared into nowhere, magic rings that passed through each other, ropes that mended themselves when cut in half, and Rudy fooled everyone, including TJ, with a trick he’d learned from his dad involving two hats and little wads of paper that he passed back and forth through the solid surface of the dining room table. Instead of calming the boys down, Rudy and TJ got them even more worked up, but TJ was able to reverse the process by demonstrating several yoga positions that the boys were eager to imitate: the Lotus, the Fish, the Bird, and finally the Dead Man’s Posture, which, he said, was the most difficult of all. The boys lay quietly on their backs.
    “Not even your toe must twitch,” TJ warned. “Not even the tip of your finger must move.”
    Rudy helped them write a note to Santa. Dan wanted a G.I. Joe, and Philip wanted an Erector set so he could build a Ferris wheel, and a magic set, and an electric train, and it struck Rudy that his life would have been totally different if he and Helen had had three sons instead of three daughters. Maybe, in a parallel universe …
    The boys sat on either side of him on the living room sofa while Rudy hunched over the coffee table and wrote out their lists with Helen’s fountain pen. They left them in front of the fireplace along with a glass of milk and a plate of cookies. At first Rudy hadn’t been as excited as he felt he ought to be at having grandchildren, but now it was a pleasure to read them the stories that his mother had read to him, and that he’d read to his daughters. They were a little young for
The Wind in the Willows,
but not for Winnie the Pooh.
    The boys brushed their teeth at the little sink in Margot’s room. Rudy located
The House at Pooh Corner
on the bookshelves, next to one of the Italian schoolbooks Margot had brought back from the year she’d spent in Italy with Helen, and read the story about Owls house blowing down, and then the one about Pooh and Piglet taking a pile of sticks that turned out to be Eeyore’s house. The boys fell asleep halfway through the second story, but he kept on reading till he got to the end. He put the book back on the shelf next to Margot’s Italian geography book,
Il nuovo libro Garzanti della