Game’s End

For some reason the music that year made everyone cry more than usual. Especially that new song that wasn’t even a Christmas carol, which Uncle Freddy was playing on the old baby grand and Aunt Elena was singing in her angel’s voice. The grown-ups, anyway, were dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs or smiling in that brave churchy way adults smiled after funerals. Of course they had always gotten moist-eyed at the Christmas house party when Uncle Freddy played carols and the family sang. He was chief musical arranger for one of the big radio networks in New York, and Mom, his sister, said he made old songs sound fresh and surprising in ways that gave her lovely shivers. This song, though, we had never heard: “The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay. I heard the laughter of her heart . . .”

Sixty-two years later I looked up the lyrics—it turned out I’d retained them word for word. But, whether other recollections of that last house party at Murdock’s Lodge are strictly accurate, or long since garbled in transmission from childhood, I’ll never know. Eight is a great age for seeing things but not the best age for making sense of them. So it may be that the simplest memories, of the things that confused me least, are closest to what really happened.

When the song about Paris was over, I asked my favorite aunt, Aunt Torry, why they’d all cried. She smiled down at me, speaking in that special Aunt Torry voice, the words low and oddly drawn out at the end. “It’s Paris, Craigie. The way we still see it in our minds. The cafes. The trees dressed for spring. The same old taxicabs. The lovers strolling. They’ve taken it from us, honey, the damn German brutes.”

I almost asked—then thought better of it—if Aunt Torry was afraid that her five-year-old’s German nurse, Fräulein, might be a Nazi spy. I wished the dreaded Fräulein were a spy so they would have to fire her. But nothing at this year’s party was really changed, not even by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor three Sundays ago. Mom and Dad had said they weren’t going to let the war spoil Christmas. The party at Murdock’s Lodge would go on as it had for every one of my eight years. And here we all were two nights before Christmas, the whole clan of Tattersalls in the big sitting room, with Uncle Freddy at the piano, and with whiskey highballs or glasses of ginger ale being poured by Uncle Tedd Bates’s Negro houseboy, Clarence.

Uncle Tedd and Aunt Torry had come up from Dallas by train, while Clarence had chauffeured their three kids and Fräulein in the back of their LaSalle limousine. My own family, the Chiltons—the poor relations, Mom called us—had driven from Kansas City in Dad’s Dodge. The New Yorkers, Uncle Freddy and Aunt Elena, had whisked in by streamliner and arrived from the railway depot in a taxi jammed with white luggage. Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle Jack had only a few minutes’ drive from town, where they lived in the big gray house that all Tattersalls still thought of as the mother hive, the place everybody was from—everybody except Dad and Uncle Tedd and Aunt Elena, who were only married to Tattersalls, which wasn’t quite the same as being one.

Uncle Jack Tattersall, by common consent the organizer and social director of parties at Murdock’s Lodge, had also invited some local friends, the Littletons and the Carroways, to spend the evening. Mom didn’t care for the Carroways, whom she called shameless climbers. But you needed all the players you could get for the after-dinner game we’d be playing tonight. You also needed lots of room, which Murdock’s Lodge had plenty of.

Old Mr. Murdock, who’d practiced law with Grandpa’s father, had the place built high on a craggy hill using...