Category: Thanksgiving

By O. Henry (1862-1910)

There is one day that is ours. There is one day when we Americans go back to the old home to eat biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk of the Puritans, but don’t remember who they were. Bet we can lick ’em, anyhow, if they try to land again. Plymouth Rocks? Well, that sounds more familiar.

And now for the story to prove that our traditions on this side of the ocean are becoming older at a faster pace than those of England, thanks to our git-up and enterprise.

Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you entered Union Square from the east.  Every Thanksgiving for nine years he had taken his seat there at 1 o’clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him, things that swelled his waistcoat.

Pete was not hungry. He had come from a feast that had nearly depleted his powers of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries imbedded in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes.  Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers a week before flew like popcorn. But the November breeze, carrying fine snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner. It began with oysters and ended with plum pudding. It included all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with after-dinner contempt.

The meal was a surprise. He was passing a red brick mansion near the beginning of Fifth avenue, in which lived two old ladies of an ancient family who possessed a reverence for traditions. One of their traditional habits was to station a servant at the postern gate with orders to admit the first hungry wayfarer that came along after the hour of noon. Stuffy Pete happened to pass on his way to the park, and the seneschals gathered him in and upheld the custom of the castle.

After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten minutes, he desired a more varied field of vision. With tremendous effort he moved his head to the left. And then his eyes bulged from fear. His breath ceased. His short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel. For the Old Gentleman was coming across Fourth avenue toward his bench.

Every Thanksgiving for nine years the Old Gentleman had come there and found Stuffy Pete.  The Old Gentleman was trying to make a tradition. Every Thanksgiving for nine years he had found Stuffy there and had led him to a restaurant for a big dinner. The Old Gentleman was a staunch American patriot and considered himself a pioneer in American tradition. To become picturesque, we must keep on doing one thing for a long time without ever letting it get away from us. Something like collecting the weekly dimes in industrial insurance. .

The Old Gentleman moved, straight and stately, toward the Institution that he was rearing. He was thin and tall and sixty. He wore a black suit and old-fashioned glasses that won’t stay on your nose. His hair was whiter and thinner than it had been last year. He seemed to make more use of his big, knobby cane with the crooked handle.

As his established benefactor approached Stuffy wheezed and shuddered like some woman’s over-fat pug when a street dog bristles up at him. “Good morning,” said the Old Gentleman. “I am glad to perceive that the vicissitudes of another year have spared you to move in health about the world. If you will come with me, my man, I will provide you with a dinner that should make your physical being accord with the mental.”

That is what the Old Gentleman said every Thanksgiving for nine years. The words themselves almost formed an Institution. Nothing could be compared with them except the Declaration of Independence. Always before they had been music in Stuffy’s ears. But now he looked up at the Old Gentleman’s face with tearful agony in his own. The fine snow almost sizzled when it fell upon his perspiring brow.

Stuffy had always wondered why the Old Gentleman spoke in sad tones. He did not know the Old Gentleman wished he had a son to succeed him. A son who would come there after he was gone. A son who would stand proud and strong before some later Stuffy and say, “In memory of my father.” Then it would be an Institution.

But the Old Gentleman had no relatives. He lived in rented rooms in one of the decayed old family brownstone mansions in one of the quiet streets east of the park. In the winter he raised fuchsias in a little conservatory the size of a steamer trunk. In the spring he walked in the Easter parade. In the summer he lived at a farmhouse in the New Jersey hills, and sat in a wicker armchair, speaking of a butterfly, the ornithoptera amphrisius, that he hoped to find some day. In the autumn he fed Stuffy a dinner. These were the Old Gentleman’s occupations.

Stuffy Pete looked up at him for a half minute, stewing and helpless in his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman’s eyes were bright with the giving-pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year. He had knotted his little black necktie into a jaunty a bow. His linen was beautiful and white. His gray mustache curled at the ends. And then Stuffy made a noise that sounded like peas bubbling in a pot. He intened to speak; as the Old Gentleman had heard the sounds nine times before, he construed them for Stuffy’s old formula of acceptance.

“Thankee, sir. I’ll go with ye, and much obliged. I’m very hungry, sir.”

The Old Gentleman led his annual protege to the restaurant where the feast had always occurred. The staff recognized the pair.

“Here comes de old guy,” said a waiter, “dat blows dat same bum to a meal every Thanksgiving.”

The Old Gentleman sat across the table glowing like a smoked pearl at his cornerstone of future ancient Tradition. The waiters heaped the table with holiday food, and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for hunger’s expression, raised knife and fork, and carved a crown of imperishable bay.

No more valiant hero ever fought his way through the ranks of an enemy. Turkey, chops, soups, vegetables, pies, disappeared before him as fast as they could be served. Gorged to the uttermost when he entered the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused him to lose his honor as a gentleman. But he rallied like a true knight. He saw the look of beneficent happiness on the Old Gentleman’s face, happier than even the fuchsias had ever brought to it, and he had not the heart to see it wane.

In an hour Stuffy leaned back with a battle won. “Thankee kindly, sir,” he puffed like a leaky steam pipe, “thankee kindly for a hearty meal.” Then he arose with a groan and glazed eyes and started toward the kitchen. A waiter turned him about like a top and pointed him toward the door. The Old Gentleman counted out $1.30 in silver change, leaving three nickels for the waiter.

They parted as they did each year at the door, the Old Gentleman going south, Stuffy north.

Around the first corner Stuffy turned and stood for one minute. Then he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers and fell to the sidewalk like a sun-stricken horse.

When the ambulance came the young surgeon and the driver cursed under their breaths at his weight. There was no smell of whiskey to justify a transfer to the patrol wagon; Stuffy and his two dinners went to the hospital. There they stretched him on a bed and began to test him for strange diseases.

 And lo! an hour later another ambulance brought the Old Gentleman. And they laid him on another bed and spoke of appendicitis, for he looked good for the bill.

But soon one of the young doctors met one of the young nurses whose eyes he liked and stopped to chat about the cases.

“That nice old gentleman over there, now,” he said, “you wouldn’t think that was a case of almost starvation. Proud old family, I guess. He told me he hadn’t eaten for three days.”