Eddie Pepper was then 14, a few years older than those of us who wandered the neighborhood together, talking of girls and movies and Jackie Robinson. He was tall, a shy gentle guy who spoke little, but often joined in our summer games. He had two sisters: one was eight, the other an infant. His mother, in memory, was heavy-set with dark red hair and a pretty face. His father had two fingers missing from his right hand, which kept him out of the war, but was among the unemployed men who still had money for drinking at Rattigan’s or Diamond’s or Unbeatable Joe’s.

On Christmas Eve, the prices of trees hit bottom, and the poorest among us waited until the last possible hour to search through the scrawny remainders. Eddie Pepper told me later that after an early dinner that night, his father pulled on extra socks, two sweaters, a cloth cap. and a surplus Navy peajacket. He grunted to his wife, and lumbered out the door.

They waited together in the kitchen until almost 10 o’clock. A whining wind blew hard off the harbor and they could see their breaths in the second floor railroad flat. Embers guttered in the coal stove. Bing Crosby and Dennis Day were singing cheerfully on the radio, but Eddie Pepper could tell from his mother’s taut, sad face that something awful had happened. She dressed then, and went down to the street with Eddie, hurrying towards the place three blocks away, where trees were sold beside Diamond’s bar. Along the way she glanced through the steamy windows of the packed saloons, but there was no sign of Eddie Pepper’s father.

She paid 75 cents for a tree with almost no branches on one side, and back in the flat she and Eddie jammed it in a metal base and dressed it with old Christmas bulbs. “It looks swell,” Eddie said, as they pushed it against a living room wall to hide its bad side.”It does, Ma.” The girl and the infant were now asleep. The windows were rimed with frost. Eddie’s mother produced gaily-wrapped presents from the corner of a closet, laid them under the scrawny tree, then sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a cigarette. Bing Crosby now urged various merry gentlemen to let nothing them dismay. When Eddie at last fell exhausted to the couch, staring at the silhouette of the skeletal tree against the wall, he could hear his mother weeping in the dark.

On Christmas Day, we saw nothing of Eddie, and not much of each other. There was mass to attend and relatives to visit and a dinner to consume. We didn’t see him the day after Christmas either. Instead, from the windows facing the harbor, we saw an immense whiteness, as the world turned suddenly wild and magical. All of us, from every flat, from every house, ran down the stairs and into the Great Blizzard of 1947.

All that day, the wind howled and roared, coming from Canada, we said, coming from Siberia. Snow fell in icy horizontal sheets, then paused as the wind eased, and kept falling steadily from the clouds, then twisted abruptly in the wind and roared again. We didn’t watch this on a screen. We plunged into it, feeling the snowflakes on our tongues, allowing ourselves to be hurled and tossed by the driving wind, laughing, falling, rolling deliriously in the rising drifts. Trolley cars ding-dinged for passage, and then gave up. The few cars were covered with snow and looked like ice cream sculptures, carved by the wind.

We wandered to Prospect Park, but Eddie Pepper was not with us. Along the parkside, we saw one giant elm on its side, sprawled across the trolley tracks. Inside the park, dozens of huge trees were lying on their sides, like casualties in a war. We walked across the Big Meadow, where we played ball in summer, all of it now an eye-hurting white, and I remember feeling that we were marching on the North Pole. The snow kept falling, wetter now and heavier without the icing wind. In the foothills of the Quaker Cemetery we heard a cracking sound, and down came three blackened branches, heavy with snow and ice, and a few yards away, here came a tree falling a sudden jagged angle, and we shouted and ran and tumbled. We were wet and cold and had never been happier.

At home for supper, the radio told us that the BMT and IRT had stopped running. Power lines were down. Stores were closed. Mayor O’Dwyer was hurrying home from vacation, and at least a dozen people were already dead. My father said that the men from Rattigan’s were going door to door to make certain that no old people were freezing in the flats (for there was no steam heat then, either). The snow suddenly stopped around 7:30, and my brother and I, warmed and fed, ran downstairs again. And saw the snow start falling with even more immense blind power. The snow would fall all through the night.

It must have been the next night, while the city struggled back into life, that I heard my father tell my mother that Eddie Pepper’s father was gone.

“Nobody can find him,” he said. “They called the cops and the hospitals. No Eddie.”

“That poor woman,” my mother said. “We’d better pray for her.”

I’m sure she prayed, but she also offered theories. After all, a man who left a wife was a tale of shame in that neighborhood, in that year after the war. Nobody ever got divorced, for divorce was a sin, and men did not just walk away from wives and children. Eddie might have fallen (my mother said) and hit his head and couldn’t remember who he was (there were a lot of amnesia movies in the theaters that year). Or maybe he got stuck in the storm. Or just got drunk and was ashamed to go home and was staying with a brother somewhere..

“And maybe he got on a bus to Florida,” my father said, and laughed.

I didn’t see Eddie or his mother or the two small children until the holidays were over and the trolleys were back in service, and the mountains of snow were porous with our hand-cut tunnels. The Peppers were going to church. Without Eddie’s father. The mother’s mouth was a bitter slash. Eddie turned his eyes from me. Their lives were utterly changed, and shame oozed off them like fog.

That spring Eddie started hanging out with young men a few years older than he was, for he was now in high school. He was soon a tough guy. By summer, he had pegged pants, and walked in a defiant rolling gait. He became a lean, dangerous street fighter, and an apprentice hoodlum. We all started going different ways. He always nodded hello, but didn’t talk much. On the second Christmas Eve after his father left, I saw him reeling along the avenue with two other tough guys, all of them drunk..

In the summer of 1951, two of his friends were shot in a gang war with the South Brooklyn Boys, and Eddie joined the army. He came home for Christmas leave, looking sharp in his uniform. That’s when I started talking to him again, about the army, and baseball, and after a while, he told me a few of the details of what had happened on that Christmas Eve when he was 14. “He didn’t even say goodbye,” he said. “Not a single word.”

On Christmas Eve that year, I took a girl to a movie at the RKO Prospect, then dropped her off and walked home alone to our house. It was a bitterly cold night without snow. The streets were empty. As I crossed Sixth Av., I saw a man standing against the wall. He was wearing a gray fedora pulled low, and a dark topcoat, but I knew his face. It was Eddie’s father.

He was staring across the street at the building where he once had lived with his wife and children. There was a wreath hanging on the door to the vestibule, and Christmas lights blinked in many windows. Eddie’s father glanced at me, but said nothing. In his bad hand, he held a shopping bag. In the other a Christmas tree.

I started to say something, and then kept walking. When I looked back, he was crossing the street.

On Christmas Day, I set off for mass at St. Stanislaus. The sky was gray. There were rumors of snow. Then, a block ahead, I saw them: Eddie, his sisters, his mother, his father. Outside the church, a few people nodded in uneasy greeting. The Pepper family sat together near the front, with the father’s head bent in prayer, and left together, with Eddie’s mother showing us a kind of triumphant pride. Out on the steps, there was a flurry of snowflakes. Eddie nodded at me, glanced at the sky, then smiled in a rueful way. He looked satisfied to take whatever gift he could get from the world that had gone bleak and empty, once upon a Christmas Eve.