The Ghost of Christmas Past

Memories of a dad at Christmas are like Polaroid snapshots of growing up in mid-century suburbia

Gary Gately

There he is, hunched over the wires of the train garden in our living room, sparks flying while he hooks up the transformer so we can make the trains go fast and slow, belching steam as they lumber over and through the mountains, past the post office, the Texaco station, the church, and the tiny houses surrounded by felt green grass. Lights shine in the windows of the houses along the trolley line and inside the passenger cars of the trains. My father’s ever-present Winston glows, and his opalescent blue eyes twinkle, at least in part due to the consumption of significant quantities of National Bohemian beer. This is back in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Hoffbergers of Baltimore brewed the beer, and Jerry Hoffberger owned the Orioles and had “10-cent-beer nights” at the old Memorial Stadium.

For us, each Christmas season began after dinner on Thanksgiving evening with our annual trip to Edmondson Village Shopping Center in West Baltimore. When the thousands of clear white lights on the trees and storefronts flashed on all at once, my father could hardly contain his excitement. His face would grow flush, his eyes glistening.

“Look, Pal! Look at those lights! Can you believe it? I’m telling you. Have you ever seen anything like it?” He would put his arm around me as I sat on the fold-down armrest of a brand-new Buick LeSabre from Brooks Buick in suburban Baltimore, where he was sales manager. That year had been a good one in the car business.

Then, early on Christmas morning, three of Dad’s five children would process down the steps of our house, one cradling the baby Jesus in a blanket for the trip to the stable under the tree, and the others holding lit candles. I suspect the “Jesus Parade” goes back to at least my father’s childhood home in the West Baltimore community of Irvington, but nobody is sure. Whatever its origins, I never saw the old man more content than during our annual family ritual. He would film it all with a two-foot-wide movie camera that had two blinding spotlights, and just seeing those lights made you believe in miracles. What else could explain all those stars dancing in your eyes as the colored Christmas-tree lights reflected off the gaudy silver garland?

We then indulged in American consumerism on a grand scale, for Bernard Patrick Gately Jr. was nothing if not Madison Avenue’s dream come true. Christmastime was and always would be his favorite time at 7202 Barlow Court, the house with a backyard bordering a field full of dairy cows in Chadwick, the new suburb in Woodlawn, where he’d moved us from a West Baltimore rowhouse when I was still an infant.

On Christmas, we always found piles of gifts stacked at least a few feet deep: a talking football game, a fire helmet with built-in microphone, Sizzler racing car sets with loop-to-loops, a drivable fire truck, a catcher’s mitt, a baseball pitch-back, hockey sticks and pucks and skates. One year, my mother, Margaret Donohue Gately, got a new yellow Buick convertible with a black leather interior as a Christmas gift.

The money in the family seemed to have flowed as freely as the alcohol had since my father’s grandfather, Thomas James Gately, came to Baltimore from Ireland’s County Roscommon in 1866 and promptly opened a pub on West York Street, about three blocks west of where the Maryland Science Center now stands in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. But even when the money stopped coming, even when he was between jobs, my father would rack up obscene credit-card debt, and the stacks of gifts would still magically appear.

As I got older, I loved Christmastime for all it was and for all it wasn’t. At Christmastime, I felt like we were a real family. Christmastime meant none of the screaming matches between my mother and father, which came more frequently as his drunken rages worsened and he began suffering the slow drowning alive that happens with emphysema. For if Barlow Court at Christmastime could resemble scenes in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, we saw our angry and heartbroken George Bailey show up more than occasionally during the rest of the year.

He would sit in the back pew of church alone, and I would hear him coughing loudly. By then, Our Lady of Perpetual Help had moved into a modern brick building, and my father couldn’t get over the fact that it had no large crucifix, as the old chapel it replaced had, and that hippies played “Let It Be” on acoustic guitars at the post-Vatican II Masses.

In the years after Mom began sleeping upstairs, my little brother and I slept in a twin bed next to my father in the first-floor master bedroom, and he prayed aloud with us every night. During prayers, he would take a break from puffing on Winstons, but he could still cough for half an hour straight after years of chain-smoking in a business where smoking and drinking were as endemic as on Mad Men.

We always began with, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…”  before asking for God’s blessings and mercy for our family and praying for the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the victims of war, and the suffering souls in purgatory.

Some nights after prayers, my father would start talking dreamily, and his voice would get a little higher pitched. The Winston glowing when he dragged on it would light up his face, and he’d speak of going back to Ocean City, Maryland, and the whole family staying together again at the Westward Ho or the Yankee Clipper, catching the waves, riding the boardwalk train, crabbing at dawn, eating at Phillips Crab House. When I was a baby, my family still went “downy-oshin” (in Baltimore parlance) every summer. But I had only faint memories of those beach trips, and I knew about them mostly because I had seen the home movies, the black-and-white snapshots, and the early color Polaroid pictures.

When we prayed with my father, he would tell us that God listens especially closely to the prayers of young children, and he’d ask us to please pray hard for him because he was “in the doghouse.” This usually meant too many bills and no work. Even then, I knew that he was suffering an earthly purgatory long before his death. Often, during hard times, he would utter one of his favorite prayers, by turns an act of faith or a plaintive plea, that began, “With the help of the Lord….”

When we buried him on a gray April day in 1979, I felt like I hardly knew the father whom my older brothers and my mother had known. By the time he died at fifty-nine, he and my mother had been divorced for five years. In those last years, he’d show up on Christmas at our tiny townhouse where my mother shared one bedroom with my sister and my little brother and I shared the other. Nobody ever suggested continuing the Jesus Parade here at 6 Balset Court. It could never be the same. Already by then, my father had become the Ghost of Christmas Past, the twinkle in his eyes replaced by a sad gaze looking out from a hollow, gaunt face.

Sometimes, I feel guilty that I didn’t try to imagine how much it must have hurt him, seeing it all fall apart. But, looking back, I think it took me decades to even begin to try to grasp what it could have felt like. I couldn’t see past my childhood anger and heartbreak and tears. In some ways, I realize now, we all inevitably come to know our parents better in death than in life.

When I gaze at the old photos and the Polaroids of my father in his prime, a familiar pang gnaws at me: How I wish I had known the hulking, dashing man from Irvington. It is said that, in his younger days, before he got sick, he could hold his own with the best of them on the ball fields of his alma mater, Mount St. Joseph High School. And, later, he could work a party or an auto showroom floor with equal panache and polish. He was also known to express inappropriate delight in espousing contrarian views. His Irish kin, among others, would try to fathom the unthinkable: how my father, an Irish Catholic, could publicly proclaim that this new president, Jack Kennedy, was greatly overrated.

If he had the Irish tendency to drink to his detriment—he was an on-again, off-again member of AA, though never a fall-down drunk (and sober his last three or four years)—he also had the Irish talent for talking with anyone about anything. He had a knack for convincing everyone he spoke to that almost nothing else in the world mattered at that moment but what they were saying. He knew many of the old Baltimore Colts, who bought vehicles from him, and he had advised Gino Marchetti to stick to football, what he knew best, and stay away from this new hamburger venture with Colts teammate Alan “The Horse” Ameche, which became the Baltimore-based fast-food fixture Gino’s. For the record and progeny’s sake, my father also predicted (correctly, it seems) that if somebody could bottle that new-car scent—the smell of success in post-World War II America—a lot of people would buy it.

As the years go by, and so much of who my father was slips from memory, I cling to, and try to pass along to my sons, stories of the grandfather they never knew. I tell Joseph, twenty-two, and Paul, eighteen, about my dad’s infectious joy during the Christmas season and about his faith, which was a childlike faith in the end, as all real faith must be.

I tell them about sitting in his new car in Edmondson Village, where the white lights magically turned nighttime into day and created an instantaneous wonderland that now makes me think wistfully of the line from Baltimorean Barry Levinson’s movie Avalon: “If I knew things would no longer be, I would have tried to remember better.” I tell my sons about the annual Jesus Parades at Barlow Court and about their grandfather in heaven, a man I never saw happier than he was at this time of year.

I see him, my father, on Christmas Day. He’s sitting with his legs crossed, the blue plaid robe over his pajamas, pointing a long, bony finger at the steam pouring from a model train engine, dragging on a Winston.

There is this faraway look in his Irish eyes that shine right through to his soul. And he is smiling, for it is Christmastime. A

Gary Gately is the founder and editor of The Catholic Observer, a subscription-based newsletter. Gately, a lifelong Catholic, is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the National Catholic Reporter, America: The Jesuit Review, Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, the Center for Public Integrity, CNBC.com, and United Press International.