Christmas Belle, or: Saving Miss Fezziwig

Another episode in the continuing adventures of Clarence, the It’s a Wonderful Life angel.

[Related reading: Saving Mr. Potter]

As Ebenezer Scrooge polished the knocker on his door, using the freshly gravy-daubed sleeve of his day coat as a Handi-wipe^TM, 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 Angelwear^TM 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^® Cloudstream^TM 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 Angelwear^TM?”

“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 Angelwear^TM Wing-a-Ding Wing^TM, 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 fathead^TM!” 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’oh^TM!” 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-Dings^TM 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 Boiled^TM 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: “Aaaarrrrgh^TM!”

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 observer^TM 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-Dings^TM. “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 Angelwear^TM Wings-of-Zing^TM 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-Grog^TM 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 Governesses^TM 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 Angelwear^TM, 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.

Love, hosaa

wondering who needs saving next year