The Polish Death Rule (and Other Holiday Delights)
“Go ahead,” said my mother. “Look.” And there it was: written verification of the Death Rule.
It was December 24th, 1990. I was sitting in mom’s kitchen, drinking a Gibley’s gin and tonic as mom wrapped tin foil over the pierogie plates. The Death Rule was plain as day—albeit flecked with grease and decades-old flour—in that red and white checkered cookbook1.
“I still don’t believe it,” I said, as if my words could change the text.
“Well you’d better,” my mom said, almost ready to cry. “And you’d better hope that old man doesn’t show up and send somebody...” Then, without missing a beat: “You want to help put these in the oven, or what?”
Of course, my real verification of the Death Rule had come years before, in 1980. That was when my cousin Stan pounded beers with the Flyers crowd at Ashley’s Tavern instead of coming home for Christmas Eve dinner. “Listen,” he’d said to my father. “I ain’t playing Granpop’s game. Me and Julianne are going to watch some hockey and drink beers. Fuck it.”
Stan was singing a different tune two months later. On February 23, 1981, Eve Lewalski—his mother—had her spine snapped in a car crash.
The Death Rule is this: Only immediate family—by blood or marriage—can partake of the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. If an outsider sits down to feast on pierogies2, pickled herring3 and smelts4 (skinny fish cooked without heads but breaded, complete with soft edible spines within the thin folds of meat)—or if an immediate family member chooses not to attend, then...how does the cookbook put it?...
“...some of the feasters may not live to see another Christmas!”
Exclamation point theirs.
I know, I know, Polish voodoo mumbo-jumbo, you’re saying to yourself. For years I said the same thing to myself. After all, I was only eight back when Stan’s mom, my aunt Eve, cracked up her Datsun on I-95. But the Death Rule has borne out time after time. When I went back and created a conscious record during one horrible weekend in the summer of 1991, the evidence was staggering:
Christmas Eve 1983. My cousin Tim says fuck it. Flyers.
January 14, 1984. Aunt Maggie falls from a stepstool, cracks her head on a kerosene heater, dies.
Christmas Eve 1985. Uncle Rich insists on bringing his new girlfriend Tanya—later dubbed the Round Mounds of Rebound—to dinner. My maternal grandpop has a fit, walks away from table.
March 10, 1986. Nina and Iona Lewalski are killed by their blind dates, in two separate incidents, on the same night.
Christmas Eve 1990. My paternal grandfather, hopelessly senile and alcoholic—and not a Lewalski by blood nor marriage—shows up for dinner. The “old man” my mother was raving about the night I first read about the Death Rule. My maternal grandpa has a fit, walks away from table.
June 6, 1991. My mother dies.
It was my mother who believed in the Death Rule the most among her siblings. She taught me tradition, manner and how to overdo it in the emotion department. Which, I believe, kept me unerringly attentive. Just the boy to follow an old Polish rule that not many other people bothered with anymore.
But I have the cookbook. The Rule is there; the words sit behind crusty flecks of fried dough.
And I don’t have my mother anymore.5
After 1991, things get hazy. I was only 19, not even legal drinking age, yet drowning my sorrows in bottles of Jack Daniels. I was away at college, and—like every other college student seeking to avoid personal tragedy—numbing myself with booze, the occasional sloppy sniff of cheap cocaine, and, if I remember correctly, The Doors’ greatest hits double album.
But even after I graduated and moved to another city to work as a magazine journalist, the horrible Lewalski family curse continued.
There was my cousin Susanna, who got herself mixed up with dirty lawyers and ended up with a bullet in her face in some house on the Main Line6. Susie was one of the few family members to strike it rich. I only really got to know her at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and I would have never thought that she would be the one to make it. She ran with the kind of boys who used hairspray and drove Corvettes. She took all of the cottage cheese pierogies before the rest of us kids got to the plate.
When I read the newspaper clips, I checked my journal. Christmas Eve, 1993. Christ—Uncle Rich. I didn’t note the excuse, but I assume it was a good one.
By 1994 it dawned on me that the Death Rule was sexist. A female relative never missed dinner. My own mother, for instance, not only faithfully attended, but cooked dinner for a majority of the holidays. It was always the males who skipped out. And guess which gender paid the price?
When Christmas Eve 1996 rolled around—when I crawled through banks of New England snowdrift to get me to the puddle-jumper to get me to Newark to get me to Philadelphia International to a cab ride that cost me more than I care to think about—I heard from Grandpop that my cousin Frank wasn’t going to be there.
I sat the dinner table and looked my female relatives. Which one of you was it going to be? I looked at Laura, my cousin, a freshman at Villanova. Or could it be Dierdre, my unmarried aunt who was finally dating an interesting guy—a mild-mannered, darkly funny Polish actuary? (Too bad he couldn’t be here.) Or my niece Jenny, Aunt Helene, cousin Katie...? I excused myself a number of times to refill my gin and tonic.
Only Grandpa Lewalski kept up with me in the alcohol department. We wound up finishing dinner in the kitchen, picking over pierogies and refilling drinks and not saying a word. We knew what to expect. I felt for him. His wife, my grandma Lewalski, had passed away in 1976, four months after Uncle Rob went disco dancing.
We thought we were safe through 1997—nary an accident nor death through September. And the Death Curse usually struck by spring. But it was false security. By October things went to hell once again.
The Death Rule got my niece Jenny—sweet 17-year-old Jenny Bordwell, daughter of Patricia Lewalski, senior at Champaign-Urbana High in the Illinois ‘burbs, intended English major and poet—was shot to death by a senile detective named Hilly Palmer who thought she was trying to rob his house (instead of delivering Meals on Wheels). Jenny died the last weekend in October, which set the tone for the holidays to come.
I met Tricia Haberman a few weeks later—just before Thanksgiving, 1997. We were set up by a co-worker of mine. “You’ll like her, man—she’s screwed up, just like you.” Please, I’d thought at the time. Even the name “Trish” conjured images of a Budweiser-swilling blonde-from-a-bottle bimbo.
Sure, she turned out to be blonde, and yes from a bottle. Turned out to be the only fake thing about her. Now you may shake your head when I tell you this stuff—I’m really not good at expressing myself in the emotional department, despite what I inherited from my mom—but here goes.
I knew everything that Tricia wanted me to say, and I knew how to make her laugh. And she had the same radar-like intuition about me. We progressed through that first date like actors who’d never met suddenly performing a memorized, and—unbeknownst to both—well-loved text. Tricia Haberman, damn it, was the one. I just knew in the narrow band of time just before I finished my first glass of Fullers and right after she’d ordered her second.
So you try to explain it to her about Christmas Eve dinner.7
“What do you mean, ‘curse’?” she said, her face crinkled up. It was many, many dates after our first. “Listen, if you don’t want me to meet... wait. Is this one of those Jewish-Catholic things?”
“No, no, no,” I said, trying to muster the right words to:
a.) explain this without her thinking I was a few beers short a sixpack
b.) make her think that, despite this weird rule, it didn’t matter she was Jewish; and
c.) well, make sure she doesn’t think I’m a few beers short a sixpack.
“Okay, sweetie,” I said. “Here goes.” And I explained it to her. In careful, exacting detail. I produced Death Rule notes. I drew a Death Rule timeline. I was serious, rational, and a bit solemn. This story, after all, involved the deaths of many relatives. You ever tell somebody at work that a relative died? Now multiply that about fourteen times.
She looked at me. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
I worked up an expression of complete sincerity.
“You are probably one of the most disturbed people I’ve ever met,” she said. “In all sincerity, I think that you should seek out someone to talk to. Professionally. I shudder to think that you and I were alone in a car at various times in the last month.”
Tricia eventually came around.
But she didn’t come to Christmas Eve dinner—not that year, 1997, or 1998, or even 1999. It took me that long to get up the nerve to ask her to marry me. Not that I didn’t know. I knew back in ‘97. But on September, 2000, I finally descended upon one knee and did it.
She—fortunately, thank the heavens and its inhabitants—said yes.
On October 31, 2000, she became Tricia Lewalski. (Normally, Aunt Patricia would have probably been a little miffed to have had to share her name, but she wasn’t around anymore; cousin Timothy skipped in ‘98.) Now, finally, my longtime girlfriend was part of the family. She couldn’t stop talking about Christmas Eve dinner.
“Finally, I get to explore the mysterious deep of the Lewalski family,” she said with relish. “Are all of the family skeletons ushered out of the closet for a song and dance? Stag films of your grandparents? Hallocinogenics? What?”
“No,” I said. “Just pierogies and smelts, pretty much.”
“Come on. You gave me that business before. And you still haven’t fully explained what ‘smelts’ are.”
“I’m serious, sweetie. Now eat some of your wedding cake.”
A strange calm washed over my life after our wedding. I had stopped drinking when I’d met Tricia, and memories of how I spent college embarrassed me. (Only so many times you can listen to a Doors album, if you know what I mean.) I looked forward to the holidays with a feeling of... oh, all right, I’ll say it: promise. Ex-boozing journalists aren’t supposed to be a cheery lot, but things change. What can I say.
I looked forward to Thanksgiving like a boy who just graduated from the kids’ table. Tricia and I hosted it ourselves, having friends over from the staff of New England Travel magazine (where I worked) and the Boston Weekly (where she worked). We played a lot of good music on the stereo, had vaguely-intellectual conversations over dinner, and everybody went home at appropriate times. My boozed-up wife waited until the last friend departed, grabbed my shoulders, then took me—sexually—on the still slightly turkey-greased kitchen table.
December was a rush of presents and preparations. Funny enough, we didn’t talk much about the Christmas Eve dinner, even though it was a running joke throughout our relationship. “Well, it’s Christmas Eve, sweetie,” she’d say. “Guess I’ll be heading out to the bars while you eat smelts and try to escape the jaws of death. Again.”
As the day approached, and my Grandpa Lewalski called to tell me the time and what to bring, and Tricia called for a rental car for us to drive down to Philadelphia, and I was starting to regret being away from our lovely New England town for the holidays.
That’s why I wasn’t as outraged as I probably should have been when I was handed the assignment: Puerto Rico8, 4 days, December 20-24. Maybe this is all in retrospect, but I think I knew even then: Part of me was ready to inherit the male Lewalski legacy.
“You should turn that down,” said Tricia.
“This is my job,” I said. “I’ll be back in plenty of time for dinner. I’ll fly into Philly, meet you at the house.”
“You want me to drive there alone?”
“Fly.”
“That’s not the point. Don’t you remember what you told about this dinner? Why are you acting it doesn’t matter?”
Because I didn’t want it to matter. I wanted to fly, all-expenses paid, to an unincorporated U.S. territory, conveniently overstay a few hours, and fly back to my new home with my new wife, and be able to say, Fuck the cookbook, the Death Rule isn’t real.
She said nothing. Since she was saying nothing, I said nothing. This continued for longer than I care to remember. It was the first Cold War of our married life.
On the night of the 19th, I was packing when Tricia came up behind me and kissed me on my neck. “Be safe. I’ll see you at your mother’s house.”
I lost myself in Puerto Rico. For four days, I didn’t call. I drank. Typically, press junkets lube journalists with great food and unlimited drink. This junket went beyond the call of duty on the latter account, so much so that I fail to remember if I indeed ate great food. I mean, these crafty bastards served you rum on the hotel bus.
I didn’t call Tricia once. Don’t get me wrong—I thought about her endlessly. But I pushed her memory away with drink. I imagined that she was getting ready for the trip, packing and fuming. And the more I imagined her fuming, the more I wanted to rebel.
Only now do I recognize that this anger was horribly misdirected. My need to flip the Death Rule the bird made me a vigilante, of sorts. In my mind, Tricia was now part of the institution that I wanted crush under my hob-nailed boot; she was its representative. Her enthusiasm had triggered my disgust.
On the long ride cab ride back to my hotel room, early, early Christmas Eve morning, I finally realized what I was doing.
I realize now that most of us don’t wait for some nameless, faceless evil to come screaming from the shadows to chop us apart.
Mostly, we undo ourselves.
You must realize that I’ve glossed over a large part of this narrative. My mother’s funeral radically altered the chemicals in my brain. There she was, in the gleaming, smooth coffin, purchased by my father from a department store. (They have that department, believe me.) And there were these photographs of her, affixed to a red-felt panel on an easel. One of her with me and my brother, both poised on her lap, all of us in summer outfits. Another of her and my father, ex-hippies, peering from behind a tree, litter from a long-defunct fast-food joint spread out on the grass in front of them. And another of her, as a little school girl, cloaked in Catholic standard-issue uniform, maybe 13 years old, and that tore me apart.9
There was an entire life in front of that little girl. Odds were she didn’t know that it would end because an ethnic superstition would sweep down from the skies and pounce. Because the father of her future husband—an aging wetbrain coming down from a 30-year lost weekend—would decide to show up at a forbidden in-law dinner. That little girl didn’t know a damn thing, except that she that was she supposed to put on her uniform before she walked to school.
As the undertakers lowered the panel on which supported my mother’s body, and as they tucked in the lining and began to lower the lid, I decided that I was going to take out the Death Rule, once and for all.
I just forgot for ten years.
The plane took off with little delay—if by “little delay” you mean waiting for 14 other planes to take off first. And calling Philadelphia International Airport a “mob scene” would be a gross understatement. Lobbies of bomb shelters during a thermonuclear war would have been less crazed. The rental car was low on oil, and a blinking light reminded me of that fact the entire forty-five minute drive to my grandfather’s house in Northeast Philadelphia. I opened the door and stepped into an ice-water filled pothole.
But I was on time, damn it. Dinner had yet to begin.
I walked up the three concrete porch steps, then rang the doorbell. My grandfather’s face appeared behind the glass. He nodded silently, frowning, then unlocked the storm door.
Oh no, I thought. Who’d rebelled now? Uncle Rich, that selfish prick? I mean, if I can get my ass from the Caribbean to Philly in one day, that asshole can take a 10 minute drive across a neighborhood, can’t he?
I walked into the living room and scanned faces. Uncle Rich. Stan. Frank. Tim. My grandfather. My brother, Jim. Cousin Bob. My cousin Danny.
Which guy missed? What was going on?
Then I realized: not one female Lewalski family member was seated at the table.
For the next two hours we guys sat around, drinking beers, blinking in stunned silence at each other.
Later, I called home. Tricia told me the whole story: she’d received the call from Jenny’s mother two days before. The boycot had been planned, after all. Tricia told me she went along with it because she’d doubted I’d be there, anyway. I apologized. In the back of my mind, though, I started thinking about the repercussions.
Would the Death Rule twist, and claim a guy this year? Or would it just go away, with the lack of female belief—which, of course, seemed to fuel it anyway?
“I forgive you,” she said. “Just come home for Christmas.”
I’d never thought I’d spent my first married year under the specter of death. I got into the habit of calling and e-mailing my male relatives with alarming regularity. Would the Rule work this way? Every day after the New Year I found myself asking this question. Would the Rule come my way?
Turns out, it wasn’t going to be suspense that killed us. From an e-mail from Uncle Rich in late January:
Well today sucked. I found cat hair all over my coat—from ex-girlfriend Kate’s fucking cat—took it to the cleaners in the morning. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Kate.
So tonight I called her for her birthday. “You’re old,” I say.
“Yes, I’m 28,” she says with about as much enthusiasm as a root canal patient.
“I would have thought I’d missed you. Figured you’d be out getting drunk by now.”
“Well, no, my man is here with me.”
“Huh? Who?”
“Jonathan. I was in the middle of giving him a blow job.”
“Uh, I’ll let you go then.”
I am a waste of protoplasm.
You are all good people.
Uncle Rich overdosed on white wine and 40 allergy pills not long after sending this e-mail to every male member of the Lewalski clan.
On the way to the February 6th funeral, Stan flipped his car over the guard rail of I-95, smashing, upside down, into a trash receptacle outside a McDonald’s parking lot.
In March, Frank, a Philadelphia Police Officer, was killed in the line of duty. Shot in the head by a vigilante wearing a rubber suit. Thought he was Batman, or something10.
In April, my grandfather suffered the first stroke. Lost his ability to speak.
“What’s going on?” Tricia asked me, the fear sharp in her eyes. I couldn’t answer her any better than my grandfather.
On April 20th, my brother was killed loading a kerosene tank into the back of somebody’s truck. No one could figure out how it sparked and combusted.
In May my grandfather died. I don’t remember the last words he spoke to me.
In June, Danny drank a chipped bottle of Budweiser. The glass shards ripped his throat and lungs. Like Uncle Rich, he had a bad case of allergies. He coughed and sneezed up most of his blood supply before he reached the hospital.
In July we moved.
I kept telling myself that we didn’t move to Philadelphia to be near the dwindling remnants of my family. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t because we were in Philadelphia every month for a funeral, anyway. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t mind working for a crappy in-house travel agency. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t jealous that Tricia got a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer, sight unseen.
Most of all, I tried to tell myself that I didn’t go to Philadelphia to die.
Tricia told me that I wasn’t going to die, too. She said it had no bearing on our lives. That everything was coincidence, chance, a fluke, perhaps self-fulfilling prophecy, but certainly not a curse.
She told me this was going to work, moving home.
Alas, Death found me on July 12th.
I was taking the Market-Frankford Blue Line, an elevated train that travels to Center City Philadelphia, where I worked. I heard a horrible screeching sound—like metal underwear chafing a robot’s ass. I looked up from the magazine I was reading.
Then, it was quiet. I had to get used to these noises, I thought to myself. These old trains have been running since the 1960s.
Well, forty years after its maiden voyage, this old train decided to jump its track. Suddenly, there was a bone-rattling jolt, then a weightless feeling. I felt myself fling forward out of my seat and through a plate glass window. I felt my body encounter many solid objects.
The next thing I knew, I was on the wooden tracks of the elevated train, ready to die. And I knew I was dying, because I felt that my back was warm and wet with my own blood. I could feel the fire from the burning train on my face.11
“Gotcha,” someone said.
I turned my eyes and, for the first time, saw Him. He was an older, Slavic-looking guy, wearing a tight-fitting fabric suit of deep blue. There was machinery fitted over different parts of his body, kind of like armor. Tight thin tubes ran from the those pieces into his body, and dark fluid squirted through the tubes. He held a dark navy helmet in his hand.
“You’re a tricky one,” he said, walking around me.
“Please,” I said, my voice thick with fluid. “P-please...”
“Please what?” he said? “Were you going to say, Please help me?”
I nodded.
Then the man started to laugh. “Why should I help you? I’m the one who did this to you.”
I stared at him, and directed my remaining strength to my face, so that I could raise my eyebrows as if to question him.
“Why?” he said. “You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Because some feasters may not live to see another Christmas!”
I managed to say: “What?”
“There were a great many people absent from last year’s Christmas feast, weren’t there? You Lewalskis gave me an incredibly busy year. Sorry I took so long to get to you, but there are rules about these things.”
I coughed and turned my head. I felt a huge dollop of blood slip out of my mouth and down onto the tracks. But at least it cleared my throat.
“Who are you?”
He stopped pacing, and knelt down beside me.
“I am who you think I am.”
“You’re part of the Death Rule.”
He smiled, then took a long needle out of a machine on his arm. “I’ll make this easier for you. No lingering.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Why can’t I live? Why can’t I just learn a lesson... and teach everyone else?”
“Didn’t twenty-odd years of dead relatives teach you Lewalskis anything?”
I shook my head. “No. No one believes.”
“See.”
“But I do,” I pleaded. “I do now.”
“Too late.”
“You haven’t given me a chance. My generation. If you kill me, the family will die.” And it was true. I was the last one who’d be able to pass on the Lewalski name.
He sighed. “I should just jab this piece of steel into your eye and move on to the Jablonskis, you know.”
“Please,” I said, nearly crying blood.
“Well, something must replace this,” he said.
“I will, I will, I will....,” I said, mumbling, spitting blood.
“Or your feasters may not live...”
“I KNOW! I KNOW!” I screamed, and then saw a flash of white, and somebody hands on me, and somebody saying something about a survivor, and....
As irksome as family traditions can be, they have to live on. And if they can’t live on, they must evolve to suit the needs of future generations.
I realize that now.
Tricia came right to the hospital. She brought my Death Rule scrapbook. She said that when she heard about me, she started to finally believe. She resisted it every inch, she said. But then she realized she had to believe. I told her we had some planning to do. And some cooking.
I started a mental list of family members to invite. There weren’t many, really. Mostly women. Many asked me, Why then? Why that holiday, of all holidays? I didn’t tell them that the Death Rule Squad member gave me a time limit. Only 60 days. Otherwise, the needle returns. But I really don’t care what they think12. I just hope that future generations of the Lewalski family will understand how imperative that they—and only they—attend the new holiday dinner.
Merry Arbor Day to all, and to all a good night.
# # #
This is a slightly edited (and annotated) version of my short story, “Eve of Destruction,” which first appeared at FrightNet.Com in November 1998. Even though it’s fiction, there’s a whole lot of autobiography in here, too. (And probably not the parts you think.)
You’ve signed up for this newsletter from writer Duane Swierczynski, who has written a dozen novels, hundreds of comic books, a fistful of screenplays and audio dramas, and other assorted nonsense. Born and raised in the City of Brotherly Love, he now lives with his family near the City of Angels. You can find more right here.
I have a copy of this cookbook on my desk right now: Treasured Polish Recipes For Americans (1948, Polanie Publishing Company). The Death Rule, in full: “The Supper itself differs from other evening meals in that the number of courses is fixed at seven, nine or eleven; and in no case must there be an odd number of people at the table. Otherwise, some of the feasters would not live to see another Christmas!”
Super tough to find here in Los Angeles, by the way. The frozen versions don’t cut it.
For a few years, out of some weird sense of obligation, I bought jars of pickled herring for Christmas. But I couldn’t bring myself to eat any of it.
I still aspire to make these. Fish decapitation, I can handle.
When I wrote this story in late December 1997, while newly married and living in Brooklyn. I was feel nostalgic for childhood holiday traditions, I guess. But I was also still very much grieving my grandmother Bernice, who died the day after Christmas 1990. I was never one to talk about grief; instead I’d let a little out in stories like this.
This is a reference my novel-in-progress, Secret Dead Men, which I would complete the following summer. Even back then, I was planting seeds for a “Swierczy-verse.”
This was the inspiration for this story, by the way: explaining to my then-girlfriend why she technically wasn’t allowed to attend Christmas Eve dinner. It’s always easier to explain something weird and/or supernatural using a piece of fiction. (Why do you think Christ spoke in parables?)
Based on a real-life press junket to Puerto Rico I took back in December 1995. They really did serve you rum on the bus. Also, I saw Linda “Wonder Woman” Carter during this trip! This has no relation to the story; I just wanted to brag.
When I read passages like this, I realize how much my younger self was incapable of dealing with grief.
Another reference to a novel-in-progress, only this one never saw the light of day.
Anyone who has ridden the Frankford El has fantasized about dying on the Frankford El.
This is the point of this story (for me, anyway). Sure, traditions are important. But at some point, you have to grow up and make them your own. Which is what we’ve tried to do here in L.A. Though let me tell you, finding authentic smoked kielbasa for Christmas Day was absurdly difficult (don’t even speak the words “Hillshire Farm” to me) until my friend Nicole Yates clued me in to Pacific Foods in North Hollywood, which sells it by the bag. Pierogies are another story. Solidarity in Santa Monica makes ‘em from scratch, but I couldn’t bring myself to drive all the way out there this year.
This is gripping from start to finish. Great use of first person POV to drive a short narrative through a long history - the asides and peripheral characters all popped.
Fuck man. You can write. Scared the piss out of me with a Christmas story. I'm calling mom right now to make sure she knows I'm coming to dinner.