Another episode in the continuing adventures of Clarence, the It’s a Wonderful Life angel.
As Ebenezer Scrooge polished the knocker on his door, using
the freshly gravy-daubed sleeve of his day coat as a Handi-wipeTM,
Clarence beamed stupidly at the cloudstreaming vision of this oft-told tale.
“Oh, I just love it in high-def,” Clarence chirped as he
stood up and stretched, “especially that little wink the knocker gives old
Ebbie after he’s gone in and shut the door again. Tell me, Joseph, what’s your
favorite part?”
Joseph was getting used to his doddering companion’s chronic
cluelessness and patiently explained that effecting a miser’s spiritual
resuscitation by loosening his purse strings for a day really wasn’t such a hard
trick.
“It’s quite the roasted chestnut, really, as you can tell by
all the versions there are,” said Joseph, helping Clarence tug down on his
ivory fit-and-flare AngelwearTM to cover his fuzzy ankles. “Goes to
show you what happens when you let your copyright expire. I’ve never understood
the message, though,” he confessed.
“If I may,” Clarence offered, “it’s that you can buy love,
am I right?” He delicately fingered the satiny fabric crisscrossing his
clavicle. “Oh, I don’t like the sweetheart neckline so much, but it’s all they
had when I got my promotion.”
Thunder clapped, as godly thunder does, not in applause but
in appalled approbation.
“Oh-oh,” Clarence whimpered. “Um, I am in trouble again, am
I not? Here Comes Mr. Jordan©.”
Jordan lightly pirouetted (a quadruple, no less) before
presenting himself before his airy intern.
“Ah, dear Clara, how comely you are in ivory,” Jordan sighed
with a merry purr.
“Clarence!” cried
the intern. “Clara’s that Nutcracker© girl.”
“Ah, yes,” Jordan said, squinting at the odd bridal form
before him. “It’s that Magoo© version, you know. I empathize a
little too much. [In his best Jim Backus]
Ah, Jordan, you’ve done it again!”
Joseph struggled to retain his relevance in the plot, for he
usually has little to do or say at this point in the Jordan viz. Clarence
proceedings. With a wiggle and an ahem,
he succeeded in catching his supervisor’s squinting eye.
“We were just discussing the moral of the story, Mr. Jordan.
I’m afraid that Clarence, here, was under the impression that Mr. Scrooge lived
happily ever after.”
Mr. Jordan’s twinkly eyes grayed with sadness as he replayed
on the Sony® CloudstreamTM the scene of our dear hero,
having emptied his personal cash boxes to treat the neighborhood to Christmas
dinner, returning to an empty home.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Mr. Jordan tutted. “It’s a shame that you
never got past Tom Sawyer in your
literature assignments, my dear Clarence. You really should have stuck with
Dickens all the way. There’s Bleak House
and Oliver Twist, for instance—so
much more to say on capitalism and social inequality and its consequences. But
no, you left it to Piketty and such to have to show where things in the
nineteenth century all went hoo-hah.”
“But Tom Sawyer did show picketty fences and how to
whitewash them,” Clarence protested.
“That little Machiavellian fool,” Jordan sneered. “His
friend Huckleberry was the true moral touchstone in Twain.”
Joseph helpfully wiggled and ahemed again to rein the plot that threatened to gallop away.
“Thank you, Joseph,” Mr. Jordan said, adjusting his own
posture to something more professorial and Mr. Chips©-like.
“Clarence, my good fellow, I am sending you on another assignment. Now, tell
me, whose soul has been left behind in this Carol?
What lives were omitted when, thanks to the protocols of serial publication, narrative
momentum prevailed over backstory?”
Clarence sat down again, hiking up the tulle poofery around
his ankles, and scratched his shaggy head. These actions in no way facilitated
his imagination.
“Let me think, now,” he thought aloud. “That poor clerk,
Cratchit, got a raise, check. Tiny
Tim, affordable health-care subsidy, check.
Oh, and I saw that old Jacob Marley was brought up the other day, thanks to his
brilliant Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future® thingy.
Good job, well done. I should go and pay him my compliments, should I not?”
Joseph glanced back over his shoulder to the holding room
and reminded Mr. Jordan that Marley’s new hearing date had yet to be
determined. As even Clarence now understood, spiritual missions are rarely so
black-and-white, cut-and-dried as the storytellers would have us believe.
“Marley, then?” Clarence attempted. Joseph bowed his head in
silent prayer for Clarence’s wit.
“Old Jacob Marley,” Jordan explained wistfully, “was not
just Mr. Scrooge’s partner; he was his role model. And for that, he has much to
account. However, though this episode shall retain his services, he is not our
particular interest. Please, darling Clarence, think a little harder. Why are
you wearing the bridal AngelwearTM?”
“Maybe if we’re dropping hints, we need more than some lacy
tulle,” Joseph joked feebly.
Clarence began to feel the hint clamoring to his beaded
bodice, and an expression not unlike a bride’s glow spread across his crinkly
eyes.
“Oh my, my, we forgot the leading lady, didn’t we?” Clarence
said at last. “Scrooge was in love, engaged to be married. What happened? I
hardly remember that part. She said he fell in love with a golden idol, and then
she dumped him. What happened to her? And how come he became so miserly in the
first place?”
“Great questions, very astute,” Mr. Jordan praised. “Why
don’t you go and find out.” As rhetorical questions often are, Jordan’s last
was answered with a scene-changing wave of his wings, accompanied by his
cherubic, Crest White Strip®-enhanced smile and a little less-aggressive
thunderous fanfare.
Stepping out of the Wayback Machine®, Clarence
instantly recognized the scene of Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas Past, the
schoolroom from which his beloved younger sister, Fanny, had once fetched him
home.
“Didn’t we go too far back on this?” Clarence muttered
upwardly to Joseph, whom he knew was watching over his progress. “Fan is the
sister, not the fiancée, right?”
“Hush, now, and just watch,” Joseph responded in a
voice-over. “Follow them when they
go, instead of following Ghost of Christmas Past and the old man.”
Clarence felt a bit proud with this discovery of the powers
that angels have versus simple post-mortal ghosts. Sure enough, as GoCP left
the scene, with the nightgowned, sleepwalking Mr. Scrooge in tow, Clarence was
able to follow the younger schoolboy, Ebbie, who hopped into a one-horse open
sleigh©-hey with Fanny and
headed home.
With a Quantum Leap©-like wave of his bedazzled
AngelwearTM Wing-a-Ding WingTM, Clarence accelerated time
and place to the Scrooge family homestead, finding the patriarch pacing
gloomily in his shabby study. The cold room and its furnishings, books and all,
were coated in a thin gray veneer, which could have been either dust or
hoarfrost, or both at once. The elder Scrooge welcomed his darling daughter
with a warm embrace, burying his own tear-stained cheek on her Killer Rabbit®-trimmed
cloak.
“Don’t cry, dear Papa, I’ve brought our Ebbie back home!
He’ll cheer us with a song and a story, and he tells King Arthur’s Tales of
Spamalot© so awfully funny! We’ll laugh and laugh and be oh so merry
again!”
To his only son and heir, Scrooge Sr. offered a dignified
but chilled and chapped handshake.
“Ni!” Ebbie
offered feebly, to his father’s indifferent confusion. There was a generally
awkward clearing of throats among the room’s population of Scrooges.
“Fan,” the father said to the merry child, “please go and
tend the Jell-O® pudding. There’s a good dolly. We men have business
to attend to.” Though wincing at the belittling epithet, Fan obeyed.
When the young female was safely removed from the scene of
manly business, Father Scrooge grabbed a threadbare blanket off the back of a side
chair and dusted off a spot for Ebbie to sit upon. The chill that met the boy
in the seat of his pants moved rapidly through his heart and fed broken ice
chips to his very soul.
“Ebenezer,” the father began hesitantly, “are you prepared
to leave the fantasies and games of schoolboys behind?”
“Yes, Father,” said our heroic young liar.
“Remarkable boy,” old Scrooge mumbled thoughtlessly to
himself. “Eb. Ebbie. Ebenezer. The truth is, you and your cherished sister are
my only remaining … assets.”
Clarence could feel his face mirroring the confusion he saw
on young Ebenezer’s countenance, a mix of disbelief and dismay, with a touch of
sullen foreboding. The father continued, his melancholy voice leaving frosty echoes
in the silent room.
“I find I must sell you both, and for a price unworthy of
either of you.”
“What do you mean, sell,
Father? What can you mean?”
“You are a clever boy, er, man, my son, and quite accomplished with your ciphering, your
masters tell me. Here,” the elder Scrooge said, handing a ledger to his
incredulous son. “Look through these pages, and tell me what you see.”
Young Scrooge did, indeed, have a gift for numbers and could
see at a glance that his father was a financial moron. The red ink spewed like
blood from dagger wounds, up and down the debit columns, on page after page.
“Father,” young Ebenezer said with an authority beyond his
years. “You fatheadTM!” The patriarch dropped his head down
remorsefully, surrendering his right to the respect due from one’s own
offspring. “You humbug! I care not
for my own fate; sell me to your highest bidder, if you will. I am prepared to
be apprenticed anywhere. But what about Fan!!
You monster, you fiend, you … humbug!”
As little Fan sprang back into the doorway to report good
progress with the Jell-O®, she could not avoid infection from the room’s
chill. “What’s this?” she cried. “What monstrous humbug hubbub could there be
to do with me?” Scrooges pere and fil froze, not knowing how to hand the
poor girl her fate.
“Don’t worry, little Fan,” Clarence called out to the vision
of the child he could not interact with, she being but a phantom in the backstory
of, well, a fictional character, after all. It’s hard not to want to get
involved, admit it. “D’ohTM!” he exclaimed to himself, lightly slapping
his own angelic forehead.
Recalling his mission, Clarence reassured himself that,
however Fan was “sold” into the arrangement, her future marriage was written to
be a reasonably contented one. Fast-forwarding himself in the Wayback Machine®,
he learned that young Fanny Scrooge’s marriage would in fact last a satisfying
10 years into the life of her only child, to wit, Fred, the nephew she left for
her beloved brother as a legacy of family happiness, should he have no other
opportunities to attain such on his own.
Clarence joyfully clapped his hands together. “Opportunity!
Family happiness! Finally, we get to the heart of the matter! What was her name
again, the fiancée?”
“Belle,” Joseph responded authoritatively in his rich,
baritone voice-over voice.
“Are you catching cold up there, Joseph? Never mind. What’s
this place? Oh, Fezziwig’s warehouse. What did they actually keep in that
place, anyway? I always wondered.”
Clarence took the liberty of scouting around the premises
and was thrilled by the fabrics and garments he discovered stowed neatly away
in cedar-lined crates: Satins, silks, velvets, crepes, laces, taffetas, organdies,
and yes, yards and yards of tulle! Oh, my! And if that carton in the corner
didn’t contain a shipment of ostrich feathers, Clarence would have cheerfully
surrendered his own Wing-a-DingsTM on the bet.
But we digress. The Fezziwig House of Brides® was,
in its day, a popular destination for young ladies with budgets compromised by
general hard times. All mothers of the middle classes knew where to send their
daughters, and the management’s cheerful temperament (and notorious
carelessness with the placement of decimal points when totaling the bill)
warranted no criticism. It was to this happy but soon-to-be bankrupt
establishment that Ebenezer Scrooge found himself sold into apprenticeship, the
principal complaint of his position being that it brought only
already-spoken-for brides into his narrow society.
The exceptions among Ebenezer’s potential female companions
were the assortment of daughters provided by the Fezziwigs, the top two of
which were of age to become customers of the bridal house in which they had
grown up playing make-believe Housewives of Victorian England©. It
was the second of the two eldest Fezziwig offspring, the lovely Belle, who took
the notion of allowing Ebenezer the opportunity to realize her fantasy. It was
an opportunity in which Ebenezer, naturally, delighted.
As Clarence soon observed, the bridal warehouse
apprenticeship brought one other odd character into Ebenezer’s narrow society:
Jacob Marley, a rival warehouseman anxious to poach not the inventory but the
talent so undeservedly devoted to Fezziwig and his infuriatingly fuzzy business
practices. Marley entered the Fezziwig warehouse just now, slamming the old oak
door behind him and bringing much of the winter air in with him.
“Marley,” Clarence muttered to himself when he saw the
already-old man of business skulk into the establishment that promised only
future joy. “I never did know what to make of him. Friend of Scrooge, business
partner with Scrooge, during Scrooge’s scroogiest era. Mentor, eh? Why? You can
see already he’s got not an ounce of human kindness coursing through his veins.
Still, he did save Scrooge’s soul later on, didn’t he?”
“Hush, now, and just listen,” Joseph voice-overed patiently.
“I know, I know. No more spoilers.” Clarence trained his
eyes on Ebenezer as the young Apprentice® watched Marley’s dealings
with Mr. Fezziwig. With his angelic powers (and dramatic license), Clarence was
able to hear what Ebenezer could not:
Fezziwig: “Please,
my good Sir, Mr. Marley, it is Christmas Eve, after all! Shall we not put off
this dour business until after we have all made merry? Join us this night, do,
for we’ll have Cold BoiledTM and plenty of beer, and our favorite
game of forfeits.”
Marley: “If it be
forfeits you’re wanting, Sir, ye shall have your wish with the additional two
days’ interest above what ye owe me now. I have your marker, same as I had old
man Scrooge’s before you swooped in on my bounty.”
Fezziwig: “Oh,
please. You were paid in full out of the bounty of the sale of Scrooge’s own
flesh and blood. It is a tragedy when a man is reduced to selling his own
children, and I have taken good care to treat young Ebenezer as my own. In
fact, my dear wife and I have hopes of soon welcoming him as an honored
son-in-law. My fair Belle has this very morning confessed a secret engagement,
and—”
Marley:
“AaaarrrrghTM!”
Fezziwig: “Well,
don’t blame me if the football keeps getting snatched away before you get
around to kicking it. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, Jacob Marley,
you’re the Charlie Browniest©.”
Marley: “Then you
leave me no choice, Fezziwig. Surrender your apprentice to me, and I’ll expunge
your debt.”
Fezziwig: “He
won’t go. He’ll not have you for an employer, if I know young Ebenezer’s
incorruptible heart.”
Marley: “Nothing
so simple; I shall make him an offer he can’t refuse©. I shall make
him my partner.”
The rest of this story line was as familiar to Clarence as
Tom Sawyer’s fence-painting scheme. The only blank to be filled was how Marley
got Scrooge to paint his fences. Our angelic project observerTM
continued on his quantum leaping through time and space, observing the
following not incidental (but egregiously edited out) plot point: Marley taking
Scrooge on a tour of the ramshackle dwellings of the most indigent of debtors
on the company ledgers, and Marley subsequently showing Scrooge the bitter
Family Feuds© among these impoverished masses, by way of illustrating
that, whether or not money buys happiness is not so relevant as whether the
lack of it purchases misery, which, of course, it invariably did, at least in
the anecdotal evidence Marley chose to present.
Indeed, Scrooge vowed never to go hungry again, No, nor any
of his folks! If he had to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God was his witness,
he’d never go hungry again©!
Sobbing helplessly, Clarence dabbed the tears from his
craggy cheeks with the fleecy ends of his Wing-a-DingsTM. “I always
cry when the Tara© theme plays.”
At last we turn our attention to the second-eldest Fezziwig
daughter, Belle (or Isabelle, in some versions). A rarely reenacted episode
from our original history shows Belle many years after she has abandoned Mr.
Scrooge to his misunderstood pursuit of material well-being. She is a contented
matron surrounded by a rambunctious brood of children. The brood’s father comes
home on a Christmas Eve and tells this matron of spying her old friend, Mr.
Scrooge, alone in his shabby office on the night that his partner, old Jacob
Marley, lay dying. The couple have a good laugh over Scrooge’s self-imposed
loneliness.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Clarence complained aloud. “No
wonder they always leave that scene out.” He scrunched his scraggy brow down
over his eyes, as though the repositioning provided more thinking room for his
overtaxed brain. “The oldest daughter in that household does indeed resemble
the young Belle who jilted poor Ebenezer. Clearly, Belle produced this daughter
at some point. But how could she have found happiness with another husband when
she had been so devoted to Ebenezer Scrooge? Does a bride Say Yes©
to every Dress in the shop?”
A clap of heavenly thunder announced a swift scene change,
and Clarence found himself returned to his home in the Celestial CloudSphere®,
now ensconced in the Department of Rewrites and Redemptions. Mr. Jordan himself
greeted him with that famously warm, twinkling squint. At a tall, wobbly
clerk’s desk sat the Ghost of Marley, bent over an open script, scratching out
unsuitable passages and replacing scene after scene in the old Carol.
“You see what happens to the poorer writers of Life’s
stories,” said Mr. Jordan in a tone of gentle warning. “They are condemned to
edit other people’s stories.” Turning his attention to Marley, he cried out,
“How’s it coming, there, now? Are you up to Nephew Fred’s Christmas party in
Stave Three?”
“Yes, Mr. Jordan, I’m just finishing up the second rewrite
now,” Marley obsequiously lied.
“Now, Biff©, don’t try and con me,” Mr. Jordan
responded suspiciously.
“I mean, I’m just starting
that scene now.” Marley shrugged sheepishly and bent back down over the script.
“Oh, that Biff Marley,” Mr. Jordan sighed, “always trying to
get away with something.”
“‘Biff’?”
Mr. Jordan sensed Clarence’s confusion—indeed, anticipated
it—and volunteered to escort our friend through the proposed new backstory of Belle,
the Neglected Love Interest. He waved his splendid custom AngelwearTM
Wings-of-ZingTM and transported himself and his guileless pupil back
to the room with the rambunctious brood.
“A minor adjustment, but a significant one,” Jordan preluded
the scene before them.
The matronly Belle, seated by the fire with the daughter
whose countenance mirrored her younger self, blushed with shame after laughing
at the image of her lonely old friend entombing himself in a drab and desolate
office.
“Uncle Billy was wrong to laugh at Mr. Scrooge so, wasn’t
he, Mummy?” the younger female spoke quietly, drying her mother’s tears with a coarse
flannel handkerchief. “We shouldn’t make fun of poor people, should we.”
Belle looked into her wise daughter’s bright emerald eyes.
“Poor? Do you imagine Mr. Scrooge to be so poor, my love?”
“Yes, of course. A man is never rich who has no friends.”
Belle laughed at her darling girl’s fumbling logic and
hugged her tenderly. “Then shall we make a pact to enrich this poor man one
day?”
“Oh, yes, Mummy, let’s!” The two charitable females
pinky-swore their allegiance to Mr. Scrooge’s future happiness.
The patriarch of the household lumbered back into the room
to warm his McDonald®’s Mug-o-GrogTM by the fire, his
rambunctious brood in tow. Even above the noise and caterwauling, he could hear
the two ladies’ surreptitious plotting.
“Now, no surreptitious plotting, you two,” said this Uncle
Billy, “or it’ll be back to the agency with the pair of you. Governesses and
their daughters need to know their places, and their places are back into the
schoolroom. These young geniuses of mine need discipline. I’ll not have them
dream away their holidays©.”
Clarence grinned brightly. “Ah, so they are not married to
each other after all! So, Belle is what, a widow or something?”
Mr. Jordan patted Clarence’s shoulder gently. “No, my dear
Clarence. You are such a child, you understand so little of the human heart. In
the accurate version of Miss Fezziwig’s
backstory, she is what was once referred to as a ‘sadder but wiser girl©.’
Her daughter—if you’ll be so tolerant as to hear us out—her daughter is in fact
the product of a post-betrothal, prenuptial moment of irrepressible passion.”
“Not Mr. Scrooge?” Clarence’s emotions teeter-tottered
between shock and elation. He at last chose to stick it out on the elation side
of the board.
“As sometimes happens with humans, their hearts got the
better of them,” Mr. Jordan continued. He revealed the gist of the story
quickly: Belle released Ebenezer from their engagement before learning she was
bearing their child. Rather than returning to the fantasy world of her father’s
then-crumbling House of Brides®, she enrolled in the Jane Eyre
Academy of GovernessesTM in hopes of finding a respectable position
in a liberal household. She was fortunate, as few in her situation were, to
receive good references among several households, the last of which we have
seen with this jovial but stern widower, “Uncle Billy.”
“That’s still Stave Two, though,” Clarence observed. “That’s
Christmas Past territory, that.”
“True enough,” Mr. Jordan said. “I believe we will now have
to switch the narrative to a present tense. Please bear with me.”
With a graceful sweep of the good old AngelwearTM,
Mr. Jordan returns us to that exalted Christmas Day following Scrooge’s
encounter with the three Ghosts bearing gifts of self-observant insight.
We scurry through Stave Five as our redeemed hero knows not
how to control his impulse to overcompensate for an adulthood of miserly habits
by handing out sacks and sacks of cash. It is dizzying to see the delight in
the eyes of hungry children tasting Christmas candies while their tummies
grumble for beef or fish. Their hearts are warmed fleetingly with fanciful toy
soldiers and hobby horses, which they understand shall be stacked away in cold
corners the rest of the winter, waiting to be broken up for kindling in the old
wood stove.
Drunk with this spurious charity, Scrooge totters into his
nephew’s humble home and is welcomed with surprised amusement among the party
guests. He eats, he drinks, he plays games, he laughs until he cries. And all
cry with him, pitying the loss of the man’s senses, even if they are despicable
senses, indeed.
“Shall we call for the doctor?” asks Mrs. Fred, deeply
concerned by the brightening redness in her uncle-in-law’s cheeks.
“He shall be fine in a moment,” responds a soft, lilting
voice from a corner of the room. “He just has to learn how to live again.”
All eyes turn to the matronly governess quietly observing her
old friend’s hijinks. She wrings out a cotton cloth in cool water, folds it in
thirds, and carefully places it on the exhausted Mr. Scrooge’s forehead. His
eyes glisten with recognition.
“Belle,” he sighs, finally surrendering to his exhaustion
and falling into a deep, contented sleep.
And, true to their pinky-swear, Belle and her daughter would
from thenceforth devote their lives to showing old Mr. Scrooge how to live
again, with the purest love from the truest hearts.
“Now, about Jacob Marley, or Biff, or whatever you’re
calling him now,” protested Clarence.
“Another year, dear Clarence,” Mr. Jordan replied. “We’ll
give him another year or so. That one needs a lot of work.”
The End
Author’s note: Use of copyright, trademark, and registration
symbols is largely ironic. Product placements are gratuitous and gratis,
representing neither paid content nor endorsements. This story is copyrighted
inasmuch as I claim to have written it, but sharing it beyond this post (with
appropriate credit and linking) is okay by me. Screen or stage rights are
available for Writers Guild minimum, some cookies, and a reasonable percentage
of gross receipts, in perpetuity; negotiable.
