The Blank Receipt
Fair warning, this summary spoils the whole story, ending included. But the story is only about two thousand words.
Here is the idea. O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi is short enough to itemize. Almost every dollar in it is on the page, so we can add it up. Today I fill in the receipt line by line, and I show you the one line the narrator leaves empty.
The irony in one sentence: a wife sells her hair to buy a chain for her husband’s watch, and he sells the watch to buy combs for her hair. We read the text from Project Gutenberg, ebook number seven thousand two hundred fifty-six, and every figure you see comes from it.
Line One: Starting Cash
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That is the first sentence, and the story gives the figure five times in all, counting the spelled out ones. Sixty cents of it is pennies, saved by hard bargaining with the grocer, the vegetable man and the butcher. Three times, Della counts it. And the next day is Christmas.
Now look at the home around that number. The furnished flat costs eight dollars a week. Jim was once paid thirty dollars a week, and now the income has shrunk to twenty. My arithmetic, not the story’s: rent takes two fifths of that income, which leaves twelve dollars a week for everything else.
Jim is twenty-two. The narrator tells us he needs a new overcoat and has no gloves. Keep that picture in mind, because it is what these gifts cost. Della has been saving for months, and she has less than two dollars to show for it.
Line Two: The Hair
The narrator says the couple takes mighty pride in two possessions. One is Jim’s gold watch, which was his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other is Della’s hair. It reaches below her knee and is almost a garment. The story jokes that the queen of Sheba would envy it, and King Solomon would envy the watch.
So Della does it. She puts on her old brown jacket and goes to Madame Sofronie, whose shop sells hair goods of all kinds. Madame lifts the brown cascade and names a price at once: twenty dollars. Della says, give it to me quick. That is the whole negotiation.
Notice the contrast. For months, she squeezed pennies out of shopkeepers. In a few lines she gives away her best possession and does not argue at all. In the receipt, that is a plus line of twenty dollars. It is also exactly one week of Jim’s pay, which is my sum, from two numbers in the text.
Line Three: The Chain
Then comes the shopping, which the story says lasts two hours. She turns every store inside out and finds it: a platinum fob chain, simple in design, and valuable by substance alone. The narrator says it is like Jim, quietness and value. The price is twenty-one dollars.
Do the sum with me. She started with one dollar and eighty-seven cents. The hair adds twenty. That makes twenty-one dollars and eighty-seven cents. The chain takes twenty-one. She hurries home with eighty-seven cents, and the story says exactly that. The chain costs one dollar more than a week of Jim’s pay.
Why a chain? Because the watch is grand, but the narrator says Jim sometimes looks at it on the sly, since he uses an old leather strap in place of a chain. In my reading, that small detail is why this gift is love and not just a purchase.
The Forty Minutes
At home, her intoxication gives way to prudence. She lights the gas, takes out her curling irons, and spends forty minutes on the ravages made by generosity added to love. The result is tiny curls that make her look like a truant schoolboy. She is sure Jim will say she looks like a Coney Island chorus girl.
At seven o’clock the coffee is made and the frying pan is hot and ready for the chops. Jim is never late. Della sits on the corner of the table by the door, holding the chain, and whispers a prayer: please God, make him think I am still pretty.
Jim walks in and stops, as still as a setter at the scent of quail. The narrator says it is not anger, surprise, disapproval or horror, the four things she was ready for. He asks twice about her hair, like a man who cannot take it in. Her answer is, in my view, her best line: nobody could ever count my love for you.
The Blank Line
Then Jim hands her a package. Inside are the combs, side and back, pure tortoise shell with jeweled rims, the set she had worshipped in a Broadway window. The text calls them expensive. She had craved them without hope. And now they are hers, and the hair they were made for is gone.
She hugs them and says, my hair grows so fast, Jim. Then she holds out the chain, and Jim sits on the couch, smiles, and says the line that finishes the joke: I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs.
Now look at the receipt. Della’s side is priced to the cent. Jim’s side has no price at all, not for the watch and not for the combs. I checked every dollar figure in the story, and none belongs to either one. In my reading, that blank is the point. We can never tell whose sacrifice was bigger, so the two gifts simply match.
The Magi Paragraph
Earlier, the narrator promised that a dark assertion about the magi would be explained later. The last paragraph is the explanation. The magi, he says, were wise men who brought gifts to the babe in the manger, and they invented the art of giving Christmas presents.
Then he does something odd. He calls Della and Jim two foolish children who most unwisely gave up the greatest treasures of their house. And in the next breath he says that, of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest. The words wise or wisest appear eight times in the story, and every one of them is in this last paragraph. The last four words are, they are the magi.
In my reading, the story is saying that a wise gift is not the useful one. The narrator says the magi’s gifts were wise ones, possibly with the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. Della and Jim’s gifts come with no such privilege, and in my reading that is why the narrator thinks they win.
The Closing Balance
So here is the closing balance. In money, eighty-seven cents. In objects, the hair is gone and the watch is gone. The chain and the combs are sitting in the flat, each made for the one thing the other person no longer has.
Jim says to put the presents away and keep them a while, because they are too nice to use just now. Della has already said twice that her hair grows fast. The story never says how long it will take. Its last practical words are about dinner: put the chops on.
If you want to read it yourself, the text is free on Project Gutenberg, ebook seven thousand two hundred fifty-six, and it takes about ten minutes. My question for you: who gave up more, Della or Jim? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more books, one clear angle at a time, and tap like if the receipt helped.
