PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : The Years With Ross: Failure, Success & Christmas (Not in That Order)

Ross Thomas, the novelist, was a figure of mystery and delight to his Washington friends in the 1970s, before he moved to California. He had a colorful and slightly mysterious past, connected to politics, international intrigue and CIA-type operators. He had a promising present with brilliantly reviewed novels coming out each year. And in the future, Hollywood beckoned.

So it was no surprise, exactly, when Ross called me one morning at 3 to announce a great windfall from movie options on two books--and a consequent invitation to the hottest spot in Washington for lunch the next day. Fine French food and his dry cosmopolitan wit were the order of the day after he showed up in a limousine he had hired, it turned out, for the entire week.

Thomas had a rich bass voice, much given to ironies about the human condition, and this day fueled by a steady, but never excessive, ration of smooth whiskey. He was the most considerate of hosts at lunch, marveling at his good luck, and pleasantly blasphemous of the ways of Hollywood. He later recalled meeting one producer who asked him to pitch his idea for a movie. Thomas adopted pitch-speak and said, shrewdly: “Action. Suspense. Romance.” The producer thought this over for a while, then brightened and said, “How about: Suspense, Romance, Action?” “Better, much better,” said Thomas, clinching the deal.

On the way home in the limousine, after the feast, Ross said he had talked to his analyst, “He told me I was having trouble handling success.” Ross stared out the window at the street full of huddled, work-a-day bureaucrats whose number he had once been in. “Doc, I told him, you should have known me when I was a failure.”

Ross Thomas, a frequent contributor to Opinion, died Monday. The following is from his “By Christmas Repossessed,” a story of a Christmas Eve in the novelist’s early years--before the success that so became him.

*

At 931 Chartres Street the weather remained warm and fair so Bert and I set out the chess pieces on the table in the courtyard. He beat me two quick games before he said, “You haven’t got any money, have you?”

“Not till the 1st,” I said. “It’s the 24th.”

“Christmas Eve,” Bert said.

“Uh-huh.’

“Why don’t you go see the doctor tonight?” Bert said. “She’s a nice kid.”

“She’s on duty tonight at Charity.”

“Oh,” Bert said, and then after a pause: “Well, you’re 23 and I’m 50 and that makes a combined age of 73 and if you’re 73, you oughta be old enough and smart enough to figure out how to raise money enough for a goddamn Christmas Eve dinner.’

I went over his logic in my mind, found in flawless, and said, “I hocked the typewriter last week.”

“I know,” he said. “How much you got left?”

I counted it. “Eighty-seven cents.”

“That’s enough,” Bert said. “Gimme a dime and go put on your suit. You haven’t hocked your suit, have you.?”

“Somebody might offer me a job some day and when they offer you a job, they like you to wear a suit, or so I’ve been told. What do you want the dime for, a phone call?”

“Yeah. A phone call.”

“A repo,” I said. “You don’t want to do a repo. Bert. When you do that you yell at night wake everybody up.”

“A repo’s worth $15 cash money and there’s nobody here but you. Did I ever tell you how I made my living in 1933?”

I nodded. “You told me.”

Bert decided that he had time to tell me again. “I repossessed baby cribs. That’s what I did in ’33 and, by God, I was snake mean. I’d go in there, mother crying, baby bawling, father cursing, hand ‘em the papers, rip the covers off the kid, hand the kid to somebody, and then I’d take the crib out just like that--covers and all, if they owed for them, too. That’s what I did in ’33.”

“It was a job,” I said.

“Go put on your suit.”

“All right,” I said.

The Desire bus cost us seven cents each and after about a three-mile ride we got off and walked a block until we arrived at the house we were looking for. It was what I had expected: a paintless, wooden shotgun design resting on a foundation of mortarless brick piles. It was the house of somebody without much money, or perhaps without any money at all.

Bert gave the place what I took to be a cool, professional appraisal. The shades were drawn and the front door was closed. Bert smoothed his carefully clipped, grey guard’s mustache with a knuckle. “It looks a little quiet in there,” he said.

“Too quiet,” I said, just as a veteran Indian scout gazing out over Apache land might say it.”

“Round in back,” Bert said.

Round in back was a 1941 Mercury sedan. A lean, dark-haired man in his 40s was loading cardboard boxes wrapped with twine into its trunk. A woman of about 35 sat in the front seat holding a baby. In the back seat were four or five or possibly even six children, none more than 10 years old. The man finished putting the box into the trunk and turned toward Bert. He didn’t say anything.

“You Mr. Broussard?” Bert said.

The man nodded, saying nothing.

“We’re from the finance company,” Bert said and I wondered how many times he had said it just like that with that same note of dead finality. The man turned back to his car and looked at it for a while. Then he turned back to Bert.

“I got a job in Lafayette starting day after Christmas,” he said. “We was gonna stay with her folks. I aimed to send in a payment.” He said it all without any hope. He could have been reciting a list of things to do that would never get done.

“You’re three payments behind,” Bert said.

“I got this job in Lafayette starting day after Christmas,” the man said. It was a fact, one he could cling to.

“We’ve gotta take the car,” Bert said.

“The man nodded, reached into his pocket, brought out the car keys, and extended them to Bert. “Not much of a Christmas Eve for you either, is it mister?” he said.

I’m still not sure whether Bert actually reached for the keys. I remember there was a long pause and than Bert turned to me and said, “Let’s go kid.” Over his shoulder he used his gruffest repossession tone to issue what he must have hoped was a warning, the dire kind. “Make sure you send in that payment, Broussard.”

“Yeah, I will,” the man said. “Thanks, mister.”

We walked to the bus stop in silence. Just before the bus arrived, Bert once more turned to me and said, “If that Cajun bastard had wished me a merry Christmas, I’d have taken his goddamn car.”

“That’s because, you’re snake mean, Bert,” I said.

Back once more at 931 Chartres Street, fortune smiled on us in true Micawber fashion. A Christmas card had arrived from my aged aunt containing a check for $20. That night I took Bert, the man of good will, to dinner. He grew a little sentimental over the Dixie Belle gin that he favored and made me promise him something.

“When you get tired of screwing around down here in the quarter and get squared away and get your own family and all, do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure,” I said. “What?”

“Have a real Christmas like the one I had, in Winnipeg in 1908.”

When you were seven.”

“Yeah, when I was seven, and it snowed ass deep to a giraffe and we sang carols and we had this big damn tree and you know what that tree had on it? Candles. Real wax candles. Do me a favor, kid; when you get squared away and all, have a tree with real wax candles.”

“When I get squared away, Bert, I will.”

Not quite 10 years later I wasn’t exactly squared away, but I was in another country and it was Christmas Eve again. I was staying in a Gasthaus in a small village on the River Weser not too far from the town of Hamelin of Pied Piper fame. The Gasthaus proprietor and I were idly discussing West German politics when Ilse came in to tell me that it was time.

Even though it had snowed heavily that day we decided to leave the Porsche and walk to her mother’s house. We both agreed that the snow made the village look like a Christmas card although I thought that it may have been not quite deep enough.

“How deep should it be?” she said and I remember replying that according to one American expert on Christmas whom I knew it should be about ass deep to a giraffe, which she didn’t find particularly amusing.

We climbed the stairs in her mother’s house and then had to wait, sitting there together on the stairs like two very small children. “It takes a while,” Ilse explained.

Finally, Ilse’s mother, flushed and beaming, opened the door and we went in and there it was, the first I’d ever seen: a Christmas tree with candles. Real wax candles. We admired the tree and exchanged presents and then gathered around the piano and sang carols such as “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” After the carols there were the cakes with a ton of whipped cream and the sweet liqueurs and the toasts. I proposed a simple one that went: “Merry Christmas, Bert,” and both mother and daughter drank to it because they were polite and I was their guest and, after all, it may have been some weird American custom.

Later, Ilse asked, “Who is Bert?”

“He’s the American Christmas expert I mentioned earlier.”

“Did he keep Christmas like this--like Mutti and I do?”

“No, but he thought everybody should.”

“Maybe he kept it in his heart,” Ilse said.

“He’d have to keep it there,” I said. “It was the only place he could afford.”