The Last Noel (17 page)

This house, named Abbotsford by Mr. Gordon (a fan of Sir Walter Scott), was a huge, ugly fake chateau with conical towers, mansard roofs, and Greek Revival porches; he had built it in 1950 for his wife, who hadn't liked it. But then, Judy Tilden's mother hadn't liked much of anything subsequent to the night when she'd danced with Charles Lindbergh at her debutante's ball. Wade Tilden had immediately moved into the house with his family and begun making something of it, by turning it into the centerpiece of a gated community he christened Gordon's Landing. With his new partner (Trisha's brother), Wade began dredging the river behind the house to build a marine landing for the luxury homes he planned to cluster about the two hundred acres. Wade's earlier subdivision, on which investors had lost a great deal of money when lawsuits forced them into bankruptcy, consisted of two streets of small cheap houses that looked as if they were going to fall apart, and which had done so. Gordon's Landing would be big, expensive houses that wouldn't look that way.

Wade had not spoken to his father since a fight in which he'd blamed Bud Tilden for breaking his mother's heart—to which charge Tilden had replied, “I don't want to be unfair to your mom. Why don't we say Life did the breaking? To both of us.”

“Just shut up, Dad. You don't make sense.”

“I have the same feeling, son. I'm sorry.”

“Calling me son is a joke. You had one son, Gordon, and he's dead. Unless you're counting Kaye Wonder Boy King as number two.”

“I'm sorry, Wade. I haven't been much help to you.”

“You want to help? Stay out of our lives.”

And Tilden had pretty much done that. For example, he no longer worked at the bank. The new president, from Dallas, had never watched Bud Tilden winning basketball games for Haver, much less been his father-in-law; he fired him after a few months of watching him wander around the new building, quietly talking to himself. But Tilden had always had many friends in Moors, recipients of his hospitality at Heaven's Hill. Three of those friends owned Algonquin Village. They had made him sales manager there and given him a very nice model condominium in which to live. Although he didn't like the condos, he actually did very well selling them. Not only were his manners lovely and his athletic fame lingering, but he seemed to care so little whether people bought the units or not that they assumed they would be getting fantastic deals if they did so.

Noni's father and her brother were both standing in the vestibule with her waiting to enter the church, but Wade was acting as if he'd never met Bud Tilden and never wanted to.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here…”

As she waited, Noni kept saying these words like a prayer, over and over. “Dearly beloved. Gathered together.” All her life it had felt as if she were trying to gather her beloveds together, trying to lift them all in her arms at once, as she'd done with her dolls when a child. That was the family story, this picture of little Noni struggling to carry all her dolls at once from place to place, leaving none behind, clutching a dozen or more under her arms and chin and to her chest. But her family had never seemed to realize that she was always trying to do the same thing with them—gather them together. All her life, she had been tugging on their hands to join them, pressing on their faces to make them smile. All her life, trying to please her mother, hiding the empty glasses that set her mother against
her father. All her life, hiding Wade's lies, healing the loss of Gordon, making Kaye a sharer in her unearned bounty and privileges (beginning with the night that she'd written his name with hers, NOELLE AND KAYE, on her new sled).

The prayers she had prayed in this church, year by year, kneeling on these cushions, seated in these wood pews, came back to her now. Prayers to be of use, to be good, to be brave, to meet her mother's expectations, prayers for her father, for Gordon's life, for Wade's soul, prayers that Doctor Jack was right and that she could “save” Roland, prayers for the world to give Kaye all he deserved and didn't trust the world to give him.

If only Kaye smiled at her now, even if just for this one moment, then Noni could feel that she had finally managed it, that she had gathered all her dearly beloveds in her arms and had brought them together here, to this church, to this wedding on this day when she had finally, finally, succeeded in making her mother happy.

Noni peeked out from the vestibule and saw Aunt Ma on the bride's side, in a bright green dress, bent over the pew's back, praying. Nearby, a beaming Tatlock had stationed his wheelchair under the Tiffany stained-glass window of a blue angel welcoming Noni's great-grandmother into heaven. Beside Uncle Tat, Kaye looked anything but welcoming. Dressed in black, head to foot, black tie, black shirt, black suit, Kaye was like a monument to grief in the midst of this celebration of love.

Noni and Kaye—of this she had no doubt—had been from the beginning of their relationship so attuned to each other that she knew that if she stared long and hard enough right now at the back of his head, he would turn around and look at her. She had done it before, had made him turn to her across the width of the Gordon Junior High auditorium, when they had announced the votes for the class presidency, when she had wanted Kaye to see in her face that she knew they had cheated him out of the election.

Finally Kaye did turn around in his pew at St. John's, but when he saw her, the coldness of his face was chilling. It was the same cold face he'd shown her a month ago, the night after her bridal shower, when she had asked him, in tears, “Why are you saying such horrible things?” And he'd told her.

The wedding shower had been on Thanksgiving weekend. Kaye was at Heaven's Hill that afternoon carrying away a half-dozen boxes of food left over from the party. His grandmother Amma had been helping him pack the surplus to take to the soup kitchen at her church, but she had left Kaye to finish alone, out of patience with his sarcasm about the wasted cheeses, crudités, dips, patés, pastries, and cakes. Sarcasm like “Who did those twelve skinny women expect to show up here and help them wolf down all this junk—Bangladesh?” And “Those two homeless potheads y'all are putting up at Redeemer A.M.E. gonna love these little quiche Lorraines.” And so on until finally, pulling on her coat, Amma told him to load all the boxes in his car himself and drive them to Redeemer because she wasn't going to listen to any more of his mess.

Noni was in the yellow living room when she saw Kaye walk through the front hall with a cardboard crate of soft-drink bottles. She was sorting through her shower presents and storing some in the hope chest that had been carried down from her bedroom. Friends and relations and friends of relations had given her a great many pieces of china, crystal, gold, silver, and linens, all of which had been suggested to them on a list prepared by Noni's mother and registered at the best department stores. There was far too much for the small one-bedroom apartment in which Roland and Noni would be living in Princeton, so she was going to leave most of the gifts at home until they moved into their first house.

Kaye stopped in the doorway. “Why don't you just pack yourself up in that hope chest too, lock it and throw away the key?”

On her knees on the Persian rug, surrounded by lingerie, sheets and tablecloths, candlesticks and coffeemakers, Noni looked up at his hostile face, then turned back to wrapping silver salt and pepper shakers in their gray velvet bags.

“Why don't you stuff that piano—” He pointed at the black grand Steinway in front of the tall windows. “—In your hope chest too, 'cause you can bet your butt you can kiss that piano good-bye.” (Because of her marriage, Noni had decided to take the spring term off from Curtis Institute of Music, where she had already completed almost half of her four-year program.) “Kiss that B.M. good-bye too. 'Cause B.M.'s exactly what that Bachelor of Music degree's turning into.”

Noni stared at Kaye. He stared back, anger in his face, and she felt a tear on her cheek. Furious at herself for crying, she suddenly shouted at the top of her voice. “Why are you saying such horrible things?”

“'Cause I don't like what you're doing to my friend. And I don't like why you're doing it. Your mother's manipulated you, and Jack Hurd and his asshole son have manipulated you into this whole thing, and you don't even know it!”

She shouted again. “I'm just taking a goddamn term off! Two years ago you were
telling
me to go to Haver. That's where I'm going after I take one goddamn term off!”

“Oh sure,” he nodded, juggling the crate onto his shoulder to open the front door. It was Noni's father's phrase, but in Kaye's mouth its irony was much sharper, quick and hurtful like a paper cut. “Maybe you'll graduate in time for your fiftieth birthday,” he called over his shoulder.

She yelled after him, “We can't all be king-shit from turd-ville genius Roanoke Scholars like you!” (By adding to his courses and going during the summers, Kaye had sped so quickly through Haver that he was already a senior and taking a graduate
course at the medical school.) She ran after him into the hall. “We can't all grow up in ghettos and never know our dads.”

“Right. That was so easy. Fuck you.” He slammed the door.

She opened the door behind him and shouted. “Go to hell, you conceited asshole!”

Noni's mother came running downstairs, expecting—she didn't know what—but some cataclysmic disaster, for Noni had never been known to scream curses in her life. Noni was the one in the family who didn't shout or fume; she was the peacemaker. So out of the ordinary was the shout that Mrs. Tilden feared that her daughter had for some horrible reason suddenly broken off her engagement to Roland Hurd, less than a month before their very large wedding. Or that Roland Hurd had broken it off for some embarrassing cause, maybe because of Mrs. Tilden's separation from her husband. The news that it was only a quarrel with Kaye King was a great relief.

In fact, despite the shock, it was a relief to Judy Tilden that Noni, in tears of rage,
was
quarreling with Kaye and had called him a “conceited asshole.” For Mrs. Tilden had never stopped having those awful nightmares of a romance between her daughter and her maid's grandson. Indeed, her fear had actually been intensified by Kaye's academic accomplishments, in which she perversely also took a kind of family pride. So it was satisfying to hear that Noni was no longer blind to the young man's insufferable self-assurance. The way Kaye King behaved around Judy Tilden was not the way black people of any age had ever acted around her, much less one so young, and it was, to say the least, discomfiting.

For example, Mrs. Tilden had once gone out of her way to praise Kaye at the Moors High commencement, where he'd won so many plaques, cups, medals, and letters that the Fair-leys were having to carry them home in shopping bags. When she'd walked across the gym lobby to offer her congratulations, Kaye had actually grinned at her with unmistakable mockery
and said, “Yep, I'm Sidney Poitier all right and I guess if I get the Nobel Prize, you'll be Katherine Hepburn.” She wasn't exactly sure what he meant, but she knew it wasn't flattering and, having seen
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, she was briefly and irrationally panicked that he meant he'd already secretly married Noni.

So, on this Thanksgiving occasion, having heard Noni curse Kaye, Mrs. Tilden offered up to her daughter the young man's earlier quote about Sidney Poitier, as a way of agreeing that Kaye was a, well, an a-hole, only to have Noni burst out, “Oh, Mom, he's giving you too much credit. I don't think even the Nobel Prize would do it for you.”

And Noni had then run upstairs, leaving Mrs. Tilden to hope the next month would pass quickly, after which these strange volatile moods of her daughter's would be Roland's problem, not her own.

In the vestibule of St. John's Church, Noni was thinking about that Thanksgiving scene, first the fight with Kaye, then the exchange with her mother. She was thinking that she hadn't practiced the piano much lately. No doubt the birthday present that Kaye had left at the house yesterday, a record set of Rubenstein playing piano concertos, was just his sarcastic way of scoring another point about how she'd sacrificed her music to Roland. Although she'd sent a note thanking Kaye for the gift, he hadn't acknowledged the cashmere sweater she'd given him. He hadn't spoken to her since the fight after the bridal shower.