The Last Noel (19 page)

There, in a red silk suit jacket open to the red lace of her bra, was Noni's mother's cousin Becky Van Buehling, who was no longer dating Doctor Jack but was engaged to her estate planner.

There was Wade with his wife Trisha, both tense because their four-year-old daughter Michelle was throwing rose petals at the guests in their pews.

There sat Aunt Ma and Uncle Tatlock, even though Wade had tried to stop Noni from inviting them. “I don't see why we have to have the maid's family at your wedding.”

Noni had actually wanted to respond, “I don't see why we have to have
you”
But she hadn't said it. When she was a
baby, Wade had played with her. When she was a toddler, he had let her follow him around. He had been in her world from her birth. If she couldn't love her own brother, her only surviving brother, how, she thought, was she going to come anywhere near doing those hard, those impossible, acts of love Christ asked of us, remarkably proposing that we be as perfect as God? “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?” When Dr. Fisher had read that passage out in church, Noni had felt a shiver of guilt about Wade. Not that she could honestly say that she had ever felt much love coming from him in the last ten years or so, but maybe it was her own failure, maybe she shut him out. When she'd been five, he had pulled her around the driveway in his wagon. That must have been love.

Noni glanced over at the new stained glass window, purchased to replace the one that had been broken last summer by vandals; Mrs. Tilden had just given it to St. John's in simultaneous honor of her son Gordon Tilden and her father R.W. Gordon. The window showed Christ benevolently patting on the head a small boy, one of the little children suffered to come unto Him. Noni found the choice ironic, since Gordon had to be physically forced anywhere near the vicinity of his grandfather, and had once told her that as a child he'd always worn a baseball cap around the old bank president to forestall the man's rubbing his knuckles into his grandson's crewcut hair.

Walking down the aisle, Noni glanced over at Kaye. His eyes were on her and she looked straight at him, kept looking, slowed down as she passed, pulling back slightly on her father's arm, so that she could keep seeing Kaye, keep willing him to look at the love in her face, keep willing him to show her that he wanted her to be happy.

“Come on, Kaye,” her father startled her by whispering. Looking up, Noni saw that her father was staring straight at Kaye, too.

Noni kept smiling at Kaye. And then suddenly she crossed her eyes at him. And just before Kaye passed out of her view, suddenly, undeniably, she saw that he couldn't stop himself and was grinning back at her.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this Man and this Woman in Holy Matrimony.

Noni and her father stood in the nave with the flower girls and bridesmaids, the best man and groom. Noni felt her father loosening his hand over hers and suddenly she wanted everything to stop, to reverse steps like a waltz he had taught her, to go backwards into the vestibule, back in time to last month, last year, back to her childhood when she was only a Princess. She held tighter to her father's arm. Everything was floating quietly in a bank of red roses. Dr. Fisher was talking, and then Roland said, “I will.”

Now the minister was calling her name “Noelle,” and she rushed back into the present. “…Comfort him, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

“I will.”

“Who giveth this Woman to be married to this Man?” Dr. Fisher looked around the church as if he didn't already know the answer. Bud Tilden placed Noni's right hand in Roland's. Then he kissed her cheek, and then he was gone.

And then Noni was making a vow, trembling with its solemnity, her unguarded earnest eyes searching Roland's blue ones, pledging all that she was to him. “I, Noelle, take thee Roland to be my wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, 'til death us do part….”

Bunny handed her the gold ring and it slid perfectly, just as they'd rehearsed, onto Roland's fourth finger. His fingers were
big and square, and it was very disconcerting to Noni that looking at Roland's hands in the middle of her wedding she should suddenly think of her hand touching Kaye's fingers as he pressed in place the blue pieces of the broken Chinese jar, his long brown slender precise fingers trying to help her gather the pieces and put the jar back together.

Dr. Fisher tied her hand to Roland's in the white silk stole and said to everyone that she and her husband could not be put asunder, that he could not be left behind, that she could not fall like a doll from the gathering arms of the beloved, who now kissed her, and Noni hoped that everything Dr. Fisher said turned out to be true.

—No, you throw them away. Disposable. Wait, it won't be long, everything'll be disposable. Just like my last husband.—

—Oh Becky, stop it!…Wasn't Noni beautiful?—

 

—Okay, Wade, you tell me how we can walk around on the moon but we can't make eighteen-and-a-half minutes disappear off a damn tape machine without the whole country finding out about it.—

—It's the damn press. I'm telling you, Roland, buy the press. That's where we ought to be putting our campaign money. Buy the press.—

 

—Everybody, everybody! Noni's going to dance with her Daddy now. Trisha, where's that photographer? Get him over here. Honey, be careful that Daddy's shoe doesn't catch in your hem.—

—God rest you merry, gentlemen! Peace on Earth, ladies!—

The reception at Heaven's Hill was hosted by Bud Tilden, even though he no longer officially lived here—a fact that was not generally known beyond the inner circle of Moors society. Mrs. Tilden felt that since her (presumably soon to be ex-) husband (although she had taken no steps to divorce him) would be necessarily a part of Noni's wedding, he might as well serve the punch as he had always done at their Christmas Open House, which a dinner reception for two hundred was replacing this year.

Heaven's Hill looked as if a Renaissance war was about to start on its lawn, where three enormous white tents flew red banners. The tents were resplendent with holly balls and pine garlands and each tent had its own dazzling Christmas tree. Fortunately the tents were heated, since the temperature—guaranteed by the weather report to be in the sixties—had plunged thirty degrees, a breach of promise that had incensed Mrs. Tilden against both God and the local news. But the special heaters worked wonders; so did the fifty cases of champagne and the twenty tables of hot catered food and the band that made up in tempo what it lacked in skill. Drinking, dancing, eating, everyone stayed warm.

Noni's father was trying to keep up a cheerful appearance. He joked that, thanks to the speed of the band, their father-daughter dance had been more of a fox-gallop than a fox-trot. As he returned her to Roland, he joked that the song they'd danced to, “Love Will Keep Us Together,” had said the opposite of what was going to happen, hadn't it? Love—her marriage to Roland—was going to keep the Princess and her father apart.

“No it's not, Daddy. I'll come see you all the time.”

“Oh sure.” He kissed her cheek and that was the last time she saw him at the party.

After Bud Tilden (hoping for the best) watched his daughter dance with her new husband, he walked over to find the Fairleys, to offer to roll Tatlock across the lawn in his wheelchair whenever he and Amma were ready to go.

Tatlock had been having a wonderful time drinking champagne, eating jumbo shrimp by the dozen, and having conversations with a variety of guests, including two lawyers with whom he had discussed possible legal cases against the V.A. hospital (for amputating his leg) and against Algonquin Village Condos (for stealing his ancestral home). But Amma was tired. The Fairleys and Kaye had been the only black guests at the reception, and that hadn't felt very comfortable. Plus, it had been wearing to worry about Noni, about Kaye, about Bud and Judy Tilden, about the mess the caterers were making of her kitchen at Heaven's Hill and the slowness of their service and the mediocrity of their cooking. She wanted to go home and go to bed.

 

—Kaye, you avoiding me?—

—Kind of am, Dr. Hurd. Sorry.—

—What's the problem?—

—It's a little personal.—

 

—Everybody, everybody! Noni and Roland are going to cut the cake now. No, honey, cut from here first.—

 

—Peace on Earth, Bunny! Hey, listen, you're the economist. How can we be in a recession and an inflation at the same time? —

—I'd tell you, Mister Tilden, but if I don't go take off these shoes, they'll have to use a blowtorch on them.—

Bud Tilden was about to leave too, when he saw Noni walk over to where Kaye was standing alone beside one of the Christmas trees decorating the tent. Noni was clearly asking him to dance with her—a fast dance. At first Kaye appeared to resist her, but finally Noni pulled him by the hand onto the floor. They spun and turned faster and faster, beautifully together, so smoothly together that they might have been dancing on ice. Noni was smiling and then she was laughing the way she had once laughed as a little baby; Tilden remembered how Noni's baby smile had turned the whole world to sunshine.

He noticed that Kaye almost never looked back at Noni as they turned and stepped in the complicated patterns they seemed to know so well. And then when the song ended, Kaye simply walked away from her and she stood there alone in the beautiful white satin dress, watching him go. Tilden stepped forward to go to her, but then his little granddaughter Michelle ran over to her, and Noni leaned sweetly down and picked up her niece and danced her around the floor.

Tilden felt suddenly so tired he had to sit down in one of the little white wooden chairs with their white satin bows. He wanted to go home and listen to his old records. Today, for Noni's sake, he had been without alcohol longer than at any time in the past twenty years, and he didn't like the feeling.

He was terrified that his daughter had married the wrong man. Why hadn't he helped her say no, why hadn't he done more? How sad to think he had failed her, failed them all, would go on failing them, how sad. Tilden lit a cigarette, reached for an opened bottle of champagne on the table beside him, poured himself a glass.

 

—Hey, I'm with you, Wade. Why bomb Cambodia, why bomb Laos, whoever heard of them? Let's bomb the damn Arabs next time they cut off
our oil! Thirty-five cents a gallon one day and it doubles the next!—

—You being sarcastic, Dr. Hurd? Because I seriously don't want a fifty-five mile-an-hour speed limit.—

—No, I'm seriously with you, Wade! Hell, I go fifty-five miles an hour in my own driveway!—

 

—Everybody, everybody! Noni's going to throw her garter now. No, honey, turn around and throw it over your shoulder. —

 

Wade and his wife Trisha wanted to go home because they'd been insulted. Their exhausted, over-stimulated daughter had had a temper tantrum, and Trisha had heard Bunny Breckenridge say that the child looked like something out of
The Exorcist.

 

—Oh, Judy, I thought that was a sex thing, the Peter Principle, like fear of flying. You know, you keep getting guys with bigger and bigger ones until you can't—

—Becky, if I ever thought you meant a word you say, I'd, well, I just don't know what I'd do.—

 

—Roland, do you know how lucky you are?—

—'Course I do, Dad. Take it easy.—

 

—Everybody, everybody! Noni's going to throw the bouquet now. No, honey, wait, let the girls get in position. Where in the world is Bunny, doesn't she want to get married next?!—

 

Roland wanted to go, not home, but to the airport so that
he and his new bride could fly to St. John's, to the Bitter End Yacht Club, and sit on the beach and drink champagne. (Drinking champagne was what Roland was doing at the moment, in fact he could barely walk, and Noni could scarcely understand what he was saying about how they would soon be drinking champagne on the patio of their tropical honeymoon cottage.) He hummed in Noni's ear as they danced in the huge heated tent: “They long to be dah dah de de close to you.”

She was thinking that all she had to do was figure out how to make Roland so happy that he wouldn't need that extra drink. Her mother hadn't figured it out because she hadn't loved Bud Tilden enough. But Noni had enough love to save Roland, didn't she?

 

—Everybody! Everybody! Noni and Roland are leaving now!—

—Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!—

—Congratulations!—

 

Kaye didn't want to go home because he didn't want to think about the day, didn't want to sort out his feelings about Noni's marrying Roland. He decided that instead he would go back to campus, to the medical school where he had a friend who worked nights in one of the autopsy labs. Dissecting bodies didn't bother Kaye at all; he liked it. But dissecting his response to Noni's marriage, pulling back layers of his emotional skin and muscle, probing nerves, that prospect was so daunting that, rather than begin it, he told himself, as he'd told Bunny Breckenridge a few minutes earlier, that he didn't care.