The Christmas Tree

Where I grew up in New York City—a neighborhood we'll call Northvale—hasn't changed a whole lot over the past fifty years. I can attest to that because I find myself in the old neighborhood on occasion. Not for any particular reason. I'm usually passing through on my way from one place to another, infrequently enough that I would readily notice changes. There are a few new apartment buildings. The Masonic Hall has been replaced by a school building. Brick two-family row houses have sprung up in what were empty lots. There's a teenage hangout just about where it's always been, but it's a pizzeria now instead of an ice cream parlor. Sometimes something will strike me, and I will park the car and walk a bit through the older, quiet streets banked with tight little houses with their patches of green in front and narrow driveways leading to detached one-car garages and surprisingly generous backyards.

Those houses were there when my family first came to Northvale in the late twenties. Of course, Northvale is not the real name of that tiny enclave of respectability. If you know New York City at all, or the Bronx specifically, you'll probably guess the exact location, and you might even have lived there and remember some of what will follow. But most of the principals are gone now, dead or moved away. I'm pretty sure that there is no person still in Northvale who would have direct knowledge of or involvement in the matter of Jimmy Swift and Patrick James McCaffrey and a magnificent Christmas tree. At least I hope that's the case.

My uncle Martin used to say that in a place like Northvale—and I'm not happy with that name, but it will have to do—there were three main religious faiths: Jewish, Christian, and Roman Catholic. The Jews were undeniably not Christian. But the Catholics seemed to believe that a baptized Catholic was also not a Christian, and vice versa. There was and is no Jewish house of worship in Northvale, although there have always been Jewish families. There were four churches: the Catholic church and school of St. Michael the Archangel (another alias), and three churches of the Protestant persuasion. But Northvale was predominantly Catholic—Irish and Italian mostly with loose change of other European origins. It was also a blue uniform community, so many of the families were headed by police or firemen. There were railroaders as well, and ironworkers and bus and trolley drivers and letter carriers. There were also teachers and shopkeepers and doctors and lawyers and office workers. It was a place where married women stayed home and single girls "went to business" with the telephone company or an insurance company.

There were some in Northvale who were considered poor. But that was more a matter of perception than reality. It would be a misrepresentation, especially in the depths of the Depression, to say that no families were receiving public assistance or gifts of food and clothing collected and distributed at Easter and Christmas by St. Michael the Archangel or the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Even the Protestants "lent a hand" to their own distressed.

We didn't really know what "rich" meant. The people who lived in the large brick homes with lush shrubbery and glorious oak and elm trees, carefully tended lawns with wrought-iron lawn furniture painted white were not considered rich but well-off or well-to-do.

One of those families was the Patrick James McCaffreys, or The McCaffrey, as P.J. preferred to be called. They lived in a huge Victorian home on a corner plot that was