Open Before Christmas

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Three weeks before Christmas Benjamin West made a policy decision, not without argument from the other Wests. He was wearing his favorite and disreputable Sunday afternoon costume of baggy gray slacks and the wool shirt with the big green and black checks. He sat in the living-room chair, looking as if he had been dropped there casually from some great height. Helen, his pretty and durable and intuitive wife, had been aware of the intensity of his long silence and it had made her uneasy. She had looked where he was looking — out the picture window at a soggy, gray snowfall, at the other trim homes in the Riverbanks section — and found no clue.

George was following his twelve-year-old Sunday routine, cutting, fitting and shaping balsa on the worktable in his bedroom, emerging astench with airplane glue to catch an occasional television program.

Kathy was down the street doing fifteen-year-old homework with a girl friend with, no doubt, the usual full quota of telephone interruptions.

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