The Last Noel (20 page)

“It's nothing to do with me,” he'd told Bunny. “Okay, it's a little worrying our friend just married a jerk, that's all, no big deal.”

“Talk about jerks,” Bunny had said and left him standing at the center of the tent, staring at the sparkling Christmas tree.

Now he heard the motor and the tires of the limousine on the pebbled drive as Noni was driven away with Roland. Suddenly, that wave that Kaye dreaded came out of nowhere and knocked him down and he couldn't pretend everything was fine.

Mrs. Tilden suddenly appeared beside him and put her hand on his arm. It struck him that she had never touched him before. Kaye noticed that she still wore both her engagement diamond and her wedding ring although she had moved Bud Tilden out of her house. “Merry Christmas,” she told him. “And thank you for coming, Montgomery. You've always been a special friend to Noni and you must be so glad to see her looking so happy and so in love.”

“I hope so.” Kaye kept looking down at the woman's hand until she removed it.

“Hope so? We are all just crazy about Roland.”

“Are you?” He said this in that unsettling matter-of-fact way that so infuriated Mrs. Tilden—as if he were deliberately but unprovably accusing her of lying. Once, years ago, she had told him to take down an antiwar banner he'd hung from a Clayhome window—which was, after all, her property— because the banner was an insult to her son Gordon who had chosen to fight for his country. In just the same way, Kaye had responded, “Did he?”

He said it again now. “Are you? All of you are crazy about Roland?” And he walked away from her.

But, a flush rising in her pale freckled face, Mrs. Tilden followed Kaye to the edge of the tent where she silently handed him the small piece of wedding cake she carried. Then she smiled. “Would you like some wedding cake? To remember the day.”

He looked into her eyes and kept looking. Mrs. Tilden's pale blue eyes were at the same time desperate and triumphant and cruel.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I'll remember the day.”

Kaye walked off into the dark with the walk Noni used to call his “Philly strut,” walked out of the heated wedding tent and across the cold winter lawn of Heaven's Hill.

December 25, 1979
The Silver Trophy

 

 

 

Nineteen seventy-nine was a hard year for everyone.

Hard on Noni's mother. Only three years since their wedding and Noni had already left Roland Hurd. That was a shock to Mrs. Tilden, although she remained confident that she and Doctor Jack could persuade her daughter to return to her husband.

Bud Tilden's recent heart attack was also a shock, especially hearing about it not from Bud himself but from Kaye King, who'd happened to see Noni's father being discharged from the hospital. Kaye drove him home to Algonquin Village, and then came to Heaven's Hill to tell them about it.

The heart attack was apparently mild, but Mrs. Tilden nevertheless was flooded with the commiseration of her friends, who emphasized how easily she might have lost Bud forever. While it could be said that, having evicted him from their home three years earlier, Bud Tilden was already lost to her, he was still legally and socially her husband, and all the public sympathy she received actually made Mrs. Tilden feel as if his death would have been a devastating blow. She didn't ask him to move back in, but she didn't proceed with the divorce either.

Having left Roland, Noni was staying at Heaven's Hill, which never seemed to change, no matter who came or went. The married Noni's room looked much the same as it had when she was a child there. So did the married Wade's room (of course the hidden drug paraphernalia and pornographic magazines were gone). Even the long dead Gordon's room hadn't changed. Nor had Bud Tilden's den, except that all his records of the old timers singing sadly about love had been replaced on the shelves by his wife's collection of mechanical music boxes, and all his matched sets of the Great Books were also gone. But his vinyl photo albums were still there—thirty-five of them—as if he'd done an album for each year of his and his wife's married life, except that every album was as randomly helter-skelter as the first had been.

Sometimes Mrs. Tilden thought she would make it her project to tear out all the photos, programs, tickets, and souvenirs, and put them in chronological order, beginning with the old sepia daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century Gordons picnicking in Tuscany in top hats and lace umbrellas, and ending with little Michelle's seventh birthday party at Disney world.

But the task overwhelmed her; each page was like a disjointed nightmare into which it exhausted her to try to read meaning. For example, on the last page of the last album her husband had glued all the photos of Judy Tilden herself, had pasted her life into a chaotic jumble—Judy in a wedding dress, Brownies uniform, baby-doll pajamas, cap and gown, poodle skirt, horse-show outfit, swimsuit with a racing number, Givenchy strapless formal, bathrobe when she'd been too depressed after Gordon died even to put her clothes on, and in the middle of them all, her earliest naked baby picture, lying helpless on her back like a turtle.

Bud Tilden had taken only books and records with him when he left, not these albums nor his basketball trophies, which still filled the same shelves, just as the same family
Christmas ornaments crowded the branches of the enormous spruce tree. Just as the same five red stockings hung by brass holders on the living room mantle and were still beautifully embroidered with the words BUD, JUDY, GORDON, WADE, NOELLE.

Judy Tilden had never discussed tough times with her maid, but 1979 had been hard on Amma Fairley, too.

Amma's daughter Deborah, Kaye's mother, had died the previous summer from a rapidly critical pneumonia. On Kaye's last visit, shortly before her death, his mother had been well but tired and withdrawn; he couldn't persuade her even to discuss leaving her sister Hope's house and moving down to North Carolina where Kaye could help care for her. Two months later she was in the hospital; after three days there she was dead.

Kaye flew with Amma to Philadelphia where he caused a scene at the hospital, accusing the staff of homicidal negligence and threatening a lawsuit. But in his heart he thought his mother had just given up fighting. And fighting had always been her reason for living.

He brought her ashes back South and put some in a small alabaster case in the shoebox called “The Promised Land.” The rest he drove to Alabama where he sprinkled them off the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma; it was from that city that Deborah King had been so proud to march with Dr. King to Montgomery. Kaye watched her ashes float down into the river from the middle of the bridge where Alabama state troopers had long ago beaten Selma marchers with clubs and the world had seen them do it. Kaye let himself cry because no one could hear him. People in cars rushing by stared at the man on the bridge, but they couldn't see his tears.

While in Alabama, Kaye attempted to locate his father through the one photograph he had of the young protest marcher. He wasn't successful, but he hired a private investigator to continue the search.

In the autumn, Kaye had a call from the investigator telling him that his father's name was Joe Wesley, that he'd been drafted and that he had died in an ambush in the Mekong Delta. He'd been twenty-five, which meant he'd been only seventeen or eighteen when he'd fathered Kaye. The man returned the photograph, which Kaye put with his mother's ashes in the shoebox.

Amma's other daughter Hope and Hope's family left Philadelphia and moved to California, looking for work. Amma never saw them.

At home, Amma had been having troubles with Tatlock as well. Warned by his V.A. doctor for years about the dangers of his diet, he still blamed that doctor when he lost his other leg to diabetes. His convalescence was long and cantankerous. Amma's own medical bills, for she had to have cataract surgery, had forced her to borrow from Kaye's savings. (It had never occurred to Judy Tilden to provide Amma—who had worked for her family for almost half a century—with health insurance or social security or even a week's paid vacation.)

When the Fairleys' old Dodge gave out for good, Amma said she was starting to feel about the same. Even with the furnace heat in Clayhome turned down to fifty-two, she couldn't pay the bills. In a single year, oil prices had gone up 50 percent and inflation in the U.S. was high. For warmth, Amma kept a fire going with wood that two of her brothers had split for her from fallen oak and pine trees in the forests of Heaven's Hill. When Wade Tilden heard what they were doing, he told his mother that she ought to charge Amma for the wood—firewood cost a hundred fifty dollars a cord—but Mrs. Tilden wondered what people would think if she did that to her Aunt Ma after all these years. Noni said she was stunned that Wade would even
think
of it, much less say it.

Noni had had a miscarriage in the spring.

Nineteen seventy-nine was a hard year on everyone.

On Christmas Day, smoke floated up out of the chimney of Clayhome and mixed with snow floating down.

From Tatlock's bass to a grandchild's treble, a dozen voices sang “Happy Birthday, dear Kayyy-yuh, Happy Birthday to you.”

When the Clayhome door opened, the song reached Noni as she crossed the white lawn, pulling her niece Michelle on the red sled. She saw Kaye's old friend Parker retrieving an ice cooler from under the house's eaves. It was the first she'd known that Parker had been released from Dollard Prison. This had been his second stay there in seven years; he'd been sent back for violating parole after his first incarceration. Parker was a Muslim now and wore an embroidered fez. Years of weightlifting in prison had changed his once skinny body into bulky, oddly bunched muscles as if he'd been injected with plastic that had hardened in clumps.

Noni waved at Parker and he shouted back, “Hey there, Disco Lady!” (Years ago, she had gone to a party that Kaye had given at the Indigo Club. There she'd done the Hustle with Parker, who ever since had called her Disco Lady, or Disco Duchess, or some variation thereof.)

“Merry Christmas!” she shouted.

He pointed at the sky. “Snow!” He tilted his head back, stuck his tongue out, and caught snowflakes as they flurried around him. “Free and snow! Life is good!”

Last week, the week before Christmas, it had snowed four inches and hadn't melted. Now it had started snowing again, on Christmas Day, for the first time since 1963. But this wasn't the soft wet thick snow of that memorable storm when drifts had reached two feet high. These were sharp icy little mean snowflakes that bit at the face and lay in a thin sheet on the ground. Noni was outside, with her long scarf wrapped to her nose, pulling the bundled seven-year-old Michelle across
the driveway on her old sled, which she'd found behind some stored porch windows. Noni was baby-sitting Michelle for a week and they were going to take a sled ride down the hill. An ardent aunt, she was happy to care for the child. Nor did she have any other particular plans that would interfere.

Noni had promised Roland and her mother not to file for divorce quickly but to “think about it” a while. In fact, she was trying not to think about it.

“Please, please, please listen to Judy,” Roland had begged; “Judy” was what he called Mrs. Tilden, his best ally. “Promise me you won't do anything crazy, Noni. You know I love you.” Then Roland had flown off to Houston to train with a large commercial real estate corporation there.

Their marriage had lasted only twenty-seven months before the separation—long enough to put an end to Noni's graduating from Haver: complications from the miscarriage had kept her in the hospital during her spring senior term. But not nearly long enough, according to Noni's mother, before her daughter had decided to abandon “a commitment to God made in a church in front of everybody we ever met.” Mrs. Tilden frequently pointed out that she herself “stuck with” her husband Bud for twenty-seven
years
, not twenty-seven months, and that she herself still hadn't rushed into a divorce even after three full years of separation.