The Last Noel (24 page)

“You've got to call 911! Now! Hurry!”

Noni ran, slipped in the snow, fell to her knees, ran again, up the porch stairs and inside Heaven's Hill.

Kaye blew again and again into Bud Tilden's mouth, hit again and again on Bud Tilden's chest. After a while he was pretty sure there was no use, but he didn't stop.

Even when the ambulance wailed in through the gates of Heaven's Hill, even when the medics tried to pull him away
from the body while his grandmother Amma shouted at them, “He's a doctor!”—even then he wouldn't stop trying to make Bud Tilden breathe again.

Kaye wouldn't stop until Noni knelt down in the snow beside him as he pushed against her father's still heart and breathed into her father's still mouth. She put her arms tightly around Kaye, telling him, “It's all right. It's all right. You can stop. It's all right.”

December 24, 1984
The Wedding Band China

 

 

 

It was Christmas Eve, and Noni had invited Kaye to have dinner with her at Heaven's Hill to celebrate their birthdays. Just the two of them.

In its slow indifferent turning, the world had changed seasons, changed lives, and five long years had passed since the death of Bud Tilden.

The first year was hardest. It took Noni months to forgive her mother, whose public widowhood, modeled on Jackie Kennedy's, had begun with ostentatious weeping behind a black veil at the funeral. Watching Mrs. Tilden receiving the condolences of friends, as if she'd never thrown her husband away, so upset Noni that she had refused to join her in greeting guests at the open house at Heaven's Hill after the burial.

But in the end she could not stiffen herself against her mother's uneasy solitude, her desperate busyness, and they reconciled.

It had taken longer for Noni to reconcile with her brother Wade, who had rushed home from Cancun and blamed her for allowing his daughter Michelle to spend time
with her grandfather and as a result to be grief-stricken by his sudden death. Wade had also raged at Amma Fairley for letting Michelle run out of the house and so see her grandfather's dead body. (It was to this disturbing experience that Wade was later to attribute his daughter's refusal to become a social star at her elementary school.)

According to Wade, Noni and Amma had acted irresponsibly, first for allowing Tilden ever to visit Heaven's Hill; second, for “abandoning the man to his own wacko devices.” While for years Wade had shown little interest in whether his father lived or died, and was persuaded that his father felt the same about him, Bud Tilden's death, shooting hoops in the snow after forty years of heavy smoking and drinking, had so incensed Wade that he tried to evict the Fairleys from Clay-home for causing it. Only his mother's distress (how could she manage without Aunt Ma?) stopped him. He then demanded that she at least charge the Fairleys “the going rent for a house that size in the best neighborhood in Moors.”

Noni told her mother that it would be indecent to ask her lifelong maid for rent on a house that Clays had been living in since 1850. Mrs. Tilden agreed that people might think ill of her if she did it.

Wade told Noni her priorities were screwed up. Noni told Wade that all her life she had tried hard to love him but that it was no longer possible for her to like him.

His response was, “You always liked black people better than whites anyhow.”

At the funeral reception itself, Wade had accused Kaye of killing Bud Tilden by performing “voodoo mouth-to-mouth” on him. An enraged Kaye flung him against the wall in the foyer. When Wade covered his face with his hands, Kaye told him he was too contemptible to hit, and he walked out of the house with Wade yelling after him that he was going to call the cops. Kaye knew he wouldn't. It would embarrass the family.

Kaye tried hard to talk his grandmother into moving off the Heaven's Hill property, but Amma refused. Clayhome was her home, as it had been her daddy's home, her granddaddy's, her great-great-great-granddaddy's, and she would stay as long as she was able.

As for Roland Hurd, he had immediately flown back to Moors from Houston as soon as he'd heard of Noni's father's death. At the graveside he'd pleaded with her to salvage their marriage “for Bud's sake.” It was a low but effective strategy. So was Roland's claim that he couldn't live without her, that he needed her to get through life.

Doctor Jack also begged Noni to return to Roland. “Noni, you've got to give love a second chance. Roland'll fold without you. It was when your mom quit on him that your dad folded.” This was also a low blow, but very effective, for not only did Noni love Doctor Jack, she believed deeply that what he'd said was true. You should never give up on love.

So she agreed to think about a reconciliation with her husband, although in truth she couldn't think about anything yet. She asked for time. Roland returned to Texas for three months. When he came back to Moors, he brought with him a promise. He would quit drinking. He didn't know why Noni thought his social drinking was such a problem; nevertheless, to please her, he'd quit. Noni accepted this promise, one that her father had never made. Maybe her father hadn't been as strong as her husband. After all, Roland had quit smoking (which her father had never done). Why shouldn't he quit drinking, too?

Part of Noni's decision to try to save her marriage was her great desire, after her miscarriage and now that she'd lost her father, to have a child. She wanted to be pregnant with new life before the anniversary of Bud Tilden's death the following Christmas. Having a baby growing would help, she hoped, fill the awful emptiness that his death had left inside her.

“I have to try to make
something
last,” she'd told Kaye the morning she left Heaven's Hill. “Don't make it worse.”

Kaye pressed his fist hard against the living room mantel. “Jack's talked you into this. Jack and your damn mother. He's using you to prop up his drunk of a son. And your mother's doing what she spends her whole life doing, polishing the family name—”

“Please, Kaye.” Noni took his hands, squeezed them tightly. “Please.”

“—So why are you turning your life over to other people?”

“Don't tell me I'm stupid or wrong or dreaming or throwing my life away. Just tell me, ‘Good luck.' Please.”

Kaye stared at her a long while. Then with his forefinger, he tapped the heart made of a dime that he'd given her and that she was wearing on the silver chain around her neck. “Good luck.” Then he walked out of the room. He didn't look back. He never did.

 

On the right of the old lace-bordered place mat, a silver meat knife, fish knife, teaspoon, soup spoon.

 

It was April of 1980 when Noni moved to Houston. Roland bought them a brand new Dutch Colonial with a pool on a cul de sac.

That year Noni sent Kaye a signed first edition of Martin Luther King's
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.
The birthday card said, “From one Dr. King to another, with love, Noni.”

Kaye sent Noni one of Tatlock's oil paintings, with a card saying that Noni had unleashed the Afro-American Van Gogh. In the year since receiving her gift of art supplies, Tat-lock had taken up painting with a gusto he'd shown for nothing else—except food and imaginary litigation—in his entire life. He painted at least eight hours every day in his wheel-chair,
painted on canvas, cardboard and siding, on old doors and pieces of tin. All his paintings were blazing with bright clean colors, straight out of the tubes and mixed with linseed oil to make them shinier.

The picture Kaye sent Noni was called (they all had their titles painted on them) “HOME ON A NICE DAY.” It was a colorful canvas showing Tatlock himself, with his legs restored, standing beside (and the same height as) Clayhome, wearing one of Amma's sunflower T-shirts and drinking an old-fashioned green soda bottle labeled “The Real Thing.” The lawn stretched away from him in a flat sheet of green, with camellias, red bud and apple trees, asters, peonies, petunias, and rose bushes all in simultaneous bloom. Across the lawn, but no taller than the sunflowers that surrounded it like a gate, stood Heaven's Hill. The painting, said Kaye's note, was to remind Noni of home.

She hung it in the empty room off the den that Roland called “hers,” the room they hadn't gotten around to decorating yet.

Heaven's Hill felt far away from Houston, where Noni was trying hard to make a good life for Roland, who worked all the time brokering real estate deals. She studied fashionable recipes and served them to his colleagues and their wives, she planted bulbs, pickled walls, made duvet covers, joined a gym and a church and a book club. But Kaye was right. Heaven's Hill was home and she missed it. She even missed that hard first winter she'd spent there after her father's death, the winter when she couldn't believe in spring, the winter eased only by her playing her piano and by the long chilly walks she took with Kaye in the countryside around Moors. She missed Kaye.

 

On the left of the place mat, a silver salad fork, dinner fork, fish fork.

 

In March, Noni had a second miscarriage, a girl. Reassuringly, the doctor told Roland there was no reason for them not to try again with every expectation of success. Roland's pledge to quit drinking lapsed, but he promised that he didn't have a problem. It was only social, only relaxation.

That year, 1981, the Hurds flew home to Moors for the holidays. Against Roland's advice, Noni decided to give what she called a reconciliation dinner at Heaven's Hill. She did it while her mother was away in New York City with her granddaughter Michelle. They'd gone to stay at the Plaza and to see the Fifth Avenue Christmas windows, just as Mrs. Tilden had once done with Noni, just as her own mother had once done with her.

During her mother's absence, Noni invited Wade and Trisha to come “bury the hatchet” on her birthday, Christmas Eve. They accepted and brought with them Trisha's unmarried brother, Chadwick, Wade's business partner. Noni had also invited Kaye and Bunny Breckenridge. Roland drove Noni's old Alfa Romeo over to Hillston and bought some excellent wine for the meal.

Gathering everyone at the table that night, Noni said she did not like making speeches but that it was important to her to have her family, her husband, and her best friends together here. These were the people she loved most, in the place she loved most, here at Christmas time, when both the happiest things (her wedding, Kaye's and her birthdays) and the saddest (her father's death) had happened. She hoped that they could all try to be kind to one another, to forgive one another, to give one another a chance.

Despite Noni's plea, the peace party was not a success. Roland did not resist the impulse to say ‘I told you so.'

Both Bunny and Trisha's brother thought they were being set up for a date and both resented it.

Wade hugged his sister as if nothing had ever gone wrong between them, but he completely ignored Kaye, even when Kaye, trying hard, asked him a direct question. And when
Noni inquired about Parker (for whom Kaye had found a job at the hospital ER), Wade was snide: “I thought your friend Mohammed was back in Dollard Prison, Noni.”

“His name isn't Mohammed, Wade, stop it.”

“Sorry.”

“More wine, anybody? It's a nice white Burgundy.” Roland poured himself another glass.

Wade's wife Trisha asked Kaye an endless stream of questions, but they were all about Afro-Americans; her eyes widened in bafflement when he didn't know details about Diana Ross's relationship to Michael Jackson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's real name, the actors who played the Jeffersons on television. And Kaye's response to her query about whether he counted Indian doctors at University Hospital as blacks was to ask her, “Do you count Italians as Chinese?”

To which Trisha replied, “Wade, could I have a little more of that whatyoucallit, ratatootie? Noni, you have certainly turned into some kind of cook here, all these strange-tasting things. But good! Wade won't eat a thing but meat and potatoes, will you, Wade? I don't think he ever ate duck before.” Trisha went on to ask if Noni had read
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
, which Trisha had given Grandma Judy to take with her to New York. “It really will help her,” she assured Noni.

Noni said she found it curious that people continued to think of Judy Tilden as a widow tragically bereft of a cherished spouse, forgetting that she had evicted her husband from the house years before he died.

Wade muttered that he didn't want to hear Noni start insulting their mother.

“It's just the truth, Wade.”

“Let's change the subject,” Roland said. “More wine?” He began a long account of how his Houston corporation had been “cutting the fat off the staff” by firing a third of its low-level employees.

Bunny, next to Kaye, interrupted to ask Roland to listen to himself. We were in a recession, she said, a severe recession caused by President Reagan's idiotic trickle-down theory, because what was trickling down was a national deficit of hundreds of billion of dollars, a deficit landing on the heads of the poor.