The Last Noel (36 page)

“Kaye King!” Someone was calling to him in the crowded foyer of Heaven's Hill. Finally he saw Bunny Breckenridge, in another of her perennial black caftans, squeezing her way toward him through the guests, holding over her head a little silver cup of punch. “It's like the Tildens' old Open House, isn't it?”

“Sort of.”

She glanced into the living room with him. “I know what you mean. It's different.”

“Yeah. Nobody's smoking. It used to look like a rain forest in here.”

“No, here's what it is. Everything's…easy now. I hated those stuffy parties of Judy's. Except for the eclairs.” She squeezed Kaye's arm. “So hi, gorgeous. Are you cast in amber, or what?”

“You're looking good yourself, Bunny.”

“Seven pounds. How 'bout cutting a foot or so off my intestine, Dr. King? I hear that works. I could come in any time this spring. I'm on leave all year.”

He kissed the plump cheek haloed by wild frizzy hair that was now cut shorter and turning an early gray. “How 'bout exercising? I run five miles every evening.”

She swung her broad hip sharply into his side. “I bet you hang your laptop from your neck and write articles while you do it.”

Kaye laughed, dropping his cashmere coat down on the other wraps that had been thrown onto the green leather bench in the hallway. Under the bench, he saw a skateboard and a dog's toy. On the console, beside the malachite pear tree with its jeweled partridge, he set the gold wrapped present that he'd brought for Noni. It was another charm, this one a tiny gold state of North Carolina. Every year he gave her a charm now.

The blue Chinese jar was filled with camellias. He ran his fingers over the cracks in the porcelain that he'd glued back together that night so long ago in the kitchen. “We can fix this good as new,” he had boasted, not knowing how much more valuable the jar's oldness made it. He smiled. Early Ming Dynasty. Now he knew. Thank god, the young had no idea how ignorant they were, or they could never risk so much, never be so brave.

A chaos of incredibly loud barks and shrieks was quickly followed by a stampede into the foyer of two large dogs and ten little boys, among them the curly-haired Johnny Tilden. He was the smallest, Kaye noticed, but the fastest of the group. Guests frantically backed away, protecting their drinks, as the boys chased each other out the door and down the steps onto the lawn where they ran off skimming Frisbees in air and leaping after them.

“Holy shit,” gasped Bunny. “Is that what ten-year-olds are like? No wonder they call Noni the Angel of Moors Elementary. In college, the students just sit there and sleep.” She was looking around the hall. “Where's Shani? She keeps promising she's going to find me a husband. I don't necessarily mean somebody else's. But straight, single, and self-supporting is my wish list. Maybe I'm being too picky. I could let a couple of those go. What do you think?”

Kaye explained that his wife and daughters were in New York with Shani's family. Kaye would have gone too but this morning he'd had to perform an emergency triple-bypass surgery on a long-time patient. “So, what you up to on your leave, Bunny? Rabble-rousing? Or are you resting on your laurels? Give it a rest. We've got a Democrat in there, got eternal peace and prosperity, right?”

Bunny shook the little silver cup at him. “I'm not the one who needs to exit the Garden, Kaye. You're a babe in Eden if you don't think those creeps aren't still out there, figuring out
how to buy and bully their way back in. But what do you care, you'll get the tax breaks.”

“Whoaa, babe.” Kaye held out both hands in surrender. “I pay my dues.”

She spluttered her lips at him. “I sure didn't see you out hustling on election day. I saw Shani. I saw Noni. I saw me. I didn't see you.”

“Is this going to be
Crossfire
, or where is Noni?”

Bunny pointed through the doorway into the living room. Kaye saw Noni standing near the piano in the center of a circle of elderly couples, some of whom he recognized from the parties long ago. They looked amazingly small and fragile to him now, when once they'd seemed so formidable in their loud laughter.

Noni wore a plain silk dress that was as black as the enamel of the grand piano beside her; the black made her luminous skin even whiter by contrast. Her silver blonde hair was loosely gathered atop her head and her neck and shoulders were bare. A shaft of afternoon light slanted through the tall windows on the pale yellow wall. Frowning, Noni closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temple. Then she turned back, smiling to her guests. Kaye could see the gold charm bracelet on her wrist as she reached to include in the group an old stooped woman whom he suddenly recognized as Miss Clooney, the Moors High music teacher from all those decades ago. Looking past Miss Clooney, Noni suddenly saw him and smiled widely, waving. He crossed his eyes at her and she burst out laughing.

As soon as Kaye joined them, Miss Clooney wagged a crooked finger at him. “John Montgomery King. You wouldn't join the orchestra. No patience.”

“No talent. How are you, Miss Clooney?”

She gestured at herself as if nothing more needed to be said. Kaye excused them both and led Noni over to the Christmas tree, where the lights were once again red, green, amber,
blue. “Amma sends her regrets. She just isn't feeling up to walking over here for the Open House this year.”

“Oh bull. Zaki and Johnny told her they'd bring her over in Uncle Tat's space-age van and then wheel her up the ramp in his wheelchair. She just didn't want to come. She's stubborn. I guess that's where you get it.”

“I'm not stubborn.”

Noni just smiled.

“Thanks for the microscope,” he told her. “It's as good as old.” She grinned at the familiar joke. “Your charm's out by the blue bowl.”

“Don't tell me it's a charm, it's supposed to be a surprise!”

“How can it be a surprise when I give you the same thing every year?”

“Oh, Kaye. I give up on you.”

“No, you don't.” Then, feeling awkward, he looked past her through the tall windows to the rose dusk falling outside. He sighed. “Anyhow, I wanted to give you something else. I found this over at Clayhome last night.” He felt in his pocket for the necklace. “I asked for it back by mistake a long time ago.” He opened his hand. In his palm she saw the silver heart on its broken chain. “I shouldn't have. And I apologize.”

Slowly, by the heart, she lifted the chain from his hand. “Thank you.” She looked up at him. “I've been wondering what had happened to my heart.”

He smiled at her. Then she turned away and hung the necklace on a bough of the tree.

Abruptly, Kaye added, “Amma says you're not well.”

Noni turned back to him. “Ah.
That's
why you're here today. She sent you to check me out.” When he kept studying her face earnestly, she held out her hand, palm up. All the tiny gold charms slid below her wrist. “Want to take my pulse?”

“Don't think I won't.” He held his fingers to her wrist. Her pulse was fast but it was strong and steady.

“Mom!” Tousled and grass-stained, a leaf in dark bronze curls, Johnny rushed over to Noni and pulled her hand away from Kaye. “Mom, it's time! Come on!”

“Can you say hi to Kaye?”

The boy muttered a preoccupied “Hi,” as he thrust his slender tan arm up at his mother, showing her his large wrist-watch. “If we don't play now, everybody'll start leaving.”

Noni gestured at her dress, then at his disheveled clothes. “Hey, guy, I'm ready whenever you are. You want to play right this second, that's fine with me.” But Johnny scowled and spun away through the crowd. “That kid's a total clothes horse,” Noni explained to Kaye. “Excuse me.”

Her niece Michelle had passed near them with her shy young husband, both serving pastries on trays. Noni introduced Kaye and Kaye congratulated them on their marriage. “You mean,” scowled Michelle, “you don't think we ruined our lives and damned ourselves to the lower middle class forever?”

“What are you, fourteen?” Kaye asked.

She scoffed. “We're, like, twenty-three, excuse me. In the Middle Ages, we'd be middle-aged.”

Kaye laughed and her husband quietly smiled and they passed on, serving the guests.

Before the performance, Bunny wanted Kaye to see the large painting of Noni that was hanging over the dining room mantel. It was the final portrait in a series of paintings of Noni that Tatlock had done since her return to Moors. This one showed her alone in the yellow living room. She was seated at the black grand piano on whose top sat a vase of sunflowers. The old man had tried to capture Noni's smile by surrounding her face with rays of gold that led to the sunflowers and by placing at the tip of each ray the tiny gold word LOVE.

Bunny said it was not only the last picture that Tatlock had completed before his death, it was unique—the only painting, out of the more than a thousand that he'd done, in which he himself did not appear. As Kaye and Bunny looked up at it, she speculated about whether Tatlock had abruptly excised his own image from his artistic vision or if he had simply passed away before having the chance to paint his self-portrait into the scene.

The title of the painting, “Noni Plays Her Piano for Me,” written in gold across the bottom of the canvas, suggested to Kaye that the latter was more probable.

“Yes, I see him,” said Bunny, “leaning against the piano, dressed like Count Basie maybe.”

Back in April, Tatlock had died peacefully, painlessly, and in great splendor, like a French king, propped up in bed on big soft pillows, surrounded by dozens of loved ones, calling them to him to make bequests of his innumerable gadgets and to offer final words of wisdom. According to Austin Fairley, Tat's last words before drifting off to sleep and so to death were to advise his sons to sue his New York rep, who had proved to be a savage but careless embezzler of his client's profits—understating by thousands of dollars the prices he was getting for the fashionable folk art.

The Fairley sons had in fact sued this agent. And they had actually won; Tatlock's only real lawsuit had been posthumous, and successful. But, as Kaye told Bunny, they were lucky that they did win, considering what Tatlock's estate owed the IRS, after it became evident that the old man had never bothered paying any income tax on the sale of his paintings, being of the opinion that the government would just waste the money on foolishness.

“I couldn't agree with him more,” Bunny said. “But I'm telling you, Kaye, two guys from Atlanta offered me five thousand each for my Tatlocks! Great-looking guys. Just my luck they were gay. Oh, shit, there's Wade.”

Kaye looked into the foyer and saw Wade Tilden angrily stopping his wife Trisha from embracing her daughter Michelle. Still red-haired and freckled, Wade was now bald and had a potbelly that hung strangely on his skinny frame.

Bunny grabbed two chocolates from a silver bowl, then threw them back. “God, I can't stand that man. Noni said he's the reason why Michelle ran off and married Corey. Just to get out of that McMansion. Gordon's Landing, Jesus, I bet Wade's got “Gordon's Landing” monogrammed on his balls, just like on his towels and sheets. I mean, of course, his golf balls, but who knows? I can't stand him.”

They watched Wade rapidly making the rounds, glad-handing guests as if he were running for reelection and didn't have much time at this stop.

Bunny asked Kaye if he'd heard how, right after Judy died, Wade had tried to get R.W Gordon's will overturned in court, although Judy's own will had reproduced her father's bequests word for word. Kaye said he'd never heard anything about any of the Gordon inheritance and could care less.

“Well, this will was very specific.” It left Heaven's Hill to Noni if and only if she married and had a child. She had the use of the place in her lifetime and after her death the entire property would go to the oldest male child of her body. “Married and of her body.” Bunny made a face. “Guess the old Repub didn't think much of single moms or adoption. On the other hand, he had the brains to pick Noni over Wade to leave the old family jewels to.”

However, were there no such male heir, then Heaven's Hill would go to Wade and his children. Or at least to his son, for Wade had “disowned” Michelle for marrying Corey. “Right, who'd want to be ‘owned' by him anyhow?”

On what basis, Kaye asked, did Wade think he could break such a will? “We all know Noni got married, we all know she had a male heir.”

With a disgusted glance at Wade, Bunny lowered her voice. “According to Bible Boy over there, right before Judy died, she confided in him that she wanted to change her will to negate R.W.'s—”

“And leave everything to Wade?”

“You got it.”

“And why would she do such a thing? Just for love of Wade?”

Bunny moved Kaye away from the couple next to them so that she couldn't be overheard. “It's a doozy. Wade claims that Judy told him that when Noni's marriage to Roland was breaking up, Noni'd had an affair. Wade had this lawyer arguing that the clear intent of R.W.'s will was that only a male heir of Noni's marriage could inherit and that Johnny wasn't legitimate.”

Kaye stared at her. “You're kidding?”

“Right! That's our Noni, the whore of Houston, recognize her? Lucas Miller told me that old Judge Hilliardson scorched Wade into ashes and blew them on the floor. Said he couldn't believe a gentleman would come into his courtroom and insult his own sister. So the will stands, and Johnny inherits.”

“Do you think Mrs. Tilden actually believed that? According to Grandma, she got pretty delusional the last couple of years.”

Bunny shrugged. “I didn't like Judy when she wasn't delusional. But, hey, I guess it was pretty rough, a woman like that, not able to walk.”

Kaye confessed that there'd been a time when he'd suspected that Noni's mother's prolonged paralysis might have been psychosomatic.