I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek

Author:Stuart Dybek
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

When, in her composition, Camille Estrada told how she’d seen Charles Dickens standing on Washtenaw, I too saw him, a familiar face among the crowd watching Tito Guízar ride by. Camille might have argued that if Tito Guizar could actually appear parading through Little Village behind the miraculous Virgin, then why not Charles Dickens? The appearance of the Mexican cowboy star, complete with stallion, sombrero, a guitar strapped across his back, was barely less remarkable than that of an old British writer would have been. Dickens was the man in a starched collar with a blue cravat that matched his worn, serious eyes; his auburn hair was thinning, his flowing beard was the kind one saw on hoboes who lived by the railroad tracks. That was how Dickens was pictured on the card in Authors, a game our family played. Dickens shared the deck with Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Tennyson, Louisa May Alcott, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne. At bedtime, our mother would read from those authors to Mick and me.

“No wild stuff,” she’d caution, “this is reading time.”

It was the closest thing Mick and I had to sacred time.

On the Dickens card, beneath his likeness, four books were listed: Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol. Of those, Moms read Oliver Twist. We owned a set of 78 rpm records of a dramatized reading of A Christmas Carol starring Basil Rathbone, who was also Sherlock Holmes. My father had gotten a good deal on it at Maxwell Street.

Camille had tried to summon up the authority of Dickens’s fiction to justify the true story of Ralphie she wanted to tell, a story destined to end with the hopelessly pathetic fact of a boy dying on Christmas Eve. On some level she must have asked herself, who would read A Christmas Carol a second time if Tiny Tim died at the end? She needed a rebirth, a resurrection. A year had passed without a single miracle. Although parishioners had prayed for the Blue Boy so long that it had become a habit, they were bound to give up praying to him. It would occur to them, as it had to me the one shameful time I prayed to Ralphie and asked him to help me make the basketball team, that if Ralphie’s wish to make his First Holy Communion hadn’t been granted, why would he have the clout to intercede for anyone else? Gradually, but sooner than had ever seemed possible, he would be forgotten.

Camille needed to summon the timeless power of Dickens’s story in order to superimpose what remained of Ralphie’s spirit on the streets of Little Village. Her borrowing of images from Dickens wasn’t so different from the local spray-can artists who painted murals on the crumbling walls, as if Diego Rivera—like visions might shore up what urban renewal had not. There was a permanence to Dickens’s story that Camille aspired to. And in that, her tribute was not unlike the tributes of

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