The Last Noel (2 page)

Alarmed at his noise, she shushed him with a finger to her lips, pointing at her open bedroom door. But the truth was, it was unlikely anyone would hear him: her parents' room was in the other large gable, too far to be bothered. Their old dog, an English setter called Royal Charlie, slept in that room with them, and was practically deaf anyhow. Her brother Gordon, a sophomore at the nearby university, had driven off to Chicago with his friends to hear Bob Dylan, upsetting their mother who thought it was wrong for children to abandon their families at Christmas. Her brother Wade was home from his military academy, but he was sleeping out in the brick guest cottage, and Wade wouldn't awaken if she jumped up and down on his back, banging pans. But “Be quiet!” she told the boy anyhow, to assert her authority in her own home.

“Aunt Ma's my grandmama, don't you know that?” replied her strange guest.

“Why should I know it?” she countered.

He tapped the shiny brim of his red plaid cap and held out his mittens to her. “I got these for my birthday. And this.” He tugged a huge shiny metal flashlight from his pocket, then shoved it back inside.

“Are you visiting Aunt Ma for Christmas?”

He didn't answer her but wandered over to her small pink sofa stacked neatly with unopened toys and white tissuey boxes of new clothes, presents from her birthday, which had been celebrated that morning at breakfast, in order to put as much distance as possible between the day of her birth and, as her mother said, the more important birth of Christ. The boy looked at the gifts without touching them and without much enthusiasm for the large stuffed animals and small adult dolls behind cellophane, the pink vinyl record player, the Puff the Magic Dragon schoolbag, the silver brush, and all the rest.

He pulled back his sleeve to show her a huge flat watch on a black plastic band that swung loosely on his small wrist. “My mama gave me this. You and me were born the exact same time. My birthday's Christmas, too,” he informed her. “And that's what it is, Christmas, 'cause it's on the one and that's after midnight.”

“My birthday's Christmas Eve,” she said. “That's sooner than yours.”

He ignored this. “You got a brother out in that little brick house.” He pointed at the window. “He's smoking like a chimney and drinking from a whiskey bottle.”

“Wade?” She was astonished. “How do you know?”

“'Cause he went to sleep and left the door open. All the heat just flying out. I shut it. He's dead to the world. So's your daddy and mama. Bud and Judy Tilden.” He took out the flashlight again, aimed it right at her face, and clicked it on and off as he added, “My grandmama was baby-sitting you 'til they got home from their party up the street. I don't need a baby-sitter.”

This amazing recital of facts put her at a terrible disadvantage. He seemed to know everything about her when she knew nothing at all about him, not even—until he had appeared in her window—that he existed. She'd never seen him before, and yet, no older than she, here he was strolling around Heaven's Hill just as he pleased, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm, opening and closing doors and windows as if he owned the place and were checking it over to be sure that all was well.

She struggled for leverage. “I bet Aunt Ma doesn't even know you're over here.”

He ignored this challenge as well and took her hand, tugging with his scratchy red mitten. “Come look. It's snowing.”

“I know!” She saw from the beginning that he would try to take control of the relationship if she didn't resist.

His floppy black rubber galoshes, the tops wrapped twice around his ankles, left rippled white treads on the floor as he herded her to the window and gestured outside, past the gray mottled branches of the old sycamore that reached long arms toward her room, arms made even more ghostly because of their cape of snow. “Grandpa Tat knows when snow's coming,” he said. “He feels it in his cut-off leg. And look at it come!”

Despite her huffy “I know!” Noni had never before seen this much snow. When her father had kissed her goodnight, the lightest flurries had just started and he had predicted they would never stick, but now there was at least a foot on the ground and snow was still falling. Whiteness everywhere made the dark brighter than moonlight. White sparkles floated, flying in all directions, up into the night and down to settle on the lawn and fields and woods of Heaven's Hill as far as she could see. Everything familiar to her—shrubbery, urns and fences, cars, brick garden walls and rows of outbuildings—all were changed by the snow into a wonderful strangeness.

Under the window she and the boy kneeled on the hope chest that had been her mother's and her grandmother's. Side by side they looked silently at the snow falling. After a while, he stood on the chest to lean out the window. “Be careful,” she said. “That's my hope chest.”

This aroused his curiosity and he bent to examine the highly varnished wood. “What you do? Write your hopes down and stick them in there?”

She giggled. While she'd never questioned why the chest was called “hope,” she knew it wasn't for as vivid a reason as he imagined. “No! You save sheets and tablecloths and things for when a girl gets married.”

“Oh.” All interest vanished. He tilted upside down and scooped a handful of snow from the porch roof, deftly squeezed it into a small round ball, and instructed her to take a bite. It was like ice cream but not sweet.

“What's your name?” she asked him as she ate, politely offering her own name first. “I'm Noelle Katherine Tilden, but everybody calls me Noni except my daddy. He calls me Princess. Noelle means Christmas.”

He made a huge show of raising his eyebrows. “My uncle got a cocker spaniel and he named her Princess. That's a dog's name.”

“No it's not.”

He pulled off his red cap, shaking snow into her room. “That's a dog's name.”

Frustrated, she scooped up the ridged snow prints left on the floor by his galoshes and threw them out the opened window, then she jumped up at the window sash, pulling it down, for cold air had filled her room. “You ever heard about Princess Grace?” she asked. She suspected he hadn't, but he nodded his head indifferently. “Well, she's a movie star and she married a prince. She's my mama's ‘beau ideal.' That means somebody you think is great. Jackie Kennedy's her other one. My mama's
a Gordon. This is my house.”

“I know it. 'Cause my people worked here before you were even born, before your mama was even born. I'm a King. You want to ride on that sled?”

She was outraged by this claim. “King? King of what?”

“You don't know anything. That's my name, John Montgomery King, but they call me Kaye.”

She felt she had him back now and quickly said that she knew a girl in school named Kay. Kay was a girl's name.

“That's a different kind of Kay,” he told her blandly, with another of his immense insufferable grins. “I'm named K-A-Y-E for King. That was my grandmama's name, King, 'fore she married Grandpa Tat.”

“Now her name's Fairley, Mrs. Tatlock Fairley. And her real name's Amma.” She was glad to display at least some knowledge.

“Why you call her Aunt Ma and call him Uncle Tatlock? They're not your family.”

With a frown, she answered him carefully, with the answer she'd been given when, last year, she had asked the same question herself. “It's what my mother told me to call them, it's what she calls them because when Aunt Ma was young she helped raise my mother and when my mother was a baby she heard
her
mother calling for ‘Amma,' and she thought it was ‘Mama' and tried to call her ‘Mama,' but she wasn't her mother and they changed it to ‘Aunt Ma,' and now everybody calls her Aunt Ma.”

This complex explanation seemed to satisfy the boy for he nodded, then returned to his earlier question. “You want to ride that sled?”

“Did you get a sled for Christmas?”

He snorted with derision. “Me? No sir re bob.” (She had noticed that he frequently used expressions that she had heard Uncle Tatlock use—like “no sir re bob,” and “dead to the
world,” and “smoking like a chimney”—as the old man sat in his wheelchair telling her stories. Maybe that's why the phrases sounded so funny; she was accustomed to hearing them in a rumbling low grandfather's voice, not this sharp young one.) “I don't need a sled,” the boy added, hopping up on her bed, bouncing as he talked. “I keep on asking for a puppy but I can't have one 'cause I got to go back to Philadelphia with my mama and we can't have any dogs or cats in our apartment. Plus my mama's not feeling too good and she can't be taking care of any dog. So I got to get something little from Santy so I can carry it back on the train.” He jumped down from the high four-poster.

The boy had given her a great deal of information, and as she moved backwards to absorb it, she stepped into one of his snow prints. Shocked by the feel of ice on her bare foot, she fell against his shoulder; the brown scratchy car coat still held the smell of the cold caught in its big collar.

He elbowed her away impatiently. “Let's go ride your sled.”

“How come you think I've got any sled?”

He gave the girl a bossy nudge toward the door. “'Cause Santy Claus is come,” he told her with conspiratorial glee, “and left you a red sled with your name on it under the tree, left you a lot
more
presents too, a whole shithouse full of presents, all over your living room floor.”

His casual curse stunned Noni. While she'd heard the word before, it always came in a hiss or a shout, came when her mother was tense as hot wires, or when something annoyed her brother Wade, which was most of the time. But this boy said it without aggression, said it for a joke.

“You sure the sled's for me?”

He didn't reply as he picked up from her dresser a blue bankbook with Moors Savings Bank stamped on it in gold. “Grandmama's got one of these,” he said.

“It's my savings book, it's where I keep my money.”

He shook the passbook as if he expected cash to fall out; it was clear to her that he didn't know what savings even meant, but while she was still thinking how to confront him with his ignorance, he passed on to study the photographs of her parents and her brothers and herself in silver frames. He examined not the pictures but their frames. “I'm giving my mama a picture of JFK in a
gold
frame,” he said. “Me and my grandmama got it at Woolworth's. You ever heard of him? The president? He's my mama's…” He scrunched his face searching for the new phrase. “He's my mama's ‘beau idea.'”

Of course she'd heard of JFK. Just last month, someone had shot President Kennedy while he was riding in a convertible. Miss Pratt had run out of the classroom and then come back sobbing out loud, which no one had ever seen a teacher do; she told them that a man had killed the president and it was a national tragedy. But that night some friends of Noni's older brother Gordon had driven him home from the nearby university, blowing their car horn, weaving onto the grass and shouting, “The son of a bitch is dead!” Gordon was in the back seat and looked upset; he said these boys had had a beer party in the front yard of his new fraternity house to celebrate getting rid of JFK. He'd whispered to Noni that he'd had it with his frat brothers and, indeed, the “whole establishment.”

“President Kennedy,” Noni nodded. “He's dead.”

Suddenly the boy put down one of the pictures (her family in front of their Christmas tree last year, when Gordon hadn't abandoned them but looked from his scowl as if he wished he had). Pulling his metal flashlight back out of the baggy pocket, he raced with it into the hallway. She hurried after him, for he was already trotting along the wide shadowy second-floor hall, shining his bouncy light at the tall white closed doors of unused guest rooms. Running quickly, she passed in front of him and sped down the slender steps of the staircase, swung around the walnut ball atop the newel post, and skidded into the foyer.

Her father's still damp hat and coat lay where he had tossed them on the green leather bench when he and her mother had come home late from their party. She saw that he'd thrown his kid gloves into the huge blue Chinese jar on the console, knocking over the little Christmas sculpture of a jeweled partridge in a malachite pear tree that he'd given her mother before they were married. His cigarettes and lighter and car keys had fallen out of the long camel-hair coat onto the parquet floor. The boy picked up the silver lighter, flicked it inquisitively on and off, and placed it back on the floor.

The Heaven's Hill living room had windows as tall as doors on two of its pale yellow walls, and through their panes the snow threw light onto an enormous Christmas tree whose angel stretched her red velvet wings to touch the ceiling and whose large colored lights winked brightly. Noni's father had forgotten to turn them off, and they shone glittering red, green, blue, and amber on the tinsel and glass balls and beaded garlands that crowded every bending branch.

The boy had not exaggerated. Presents of all sizes, some of them in gold paper with gold bows, more of them unwrapped, lay thickly piled everywhere, arranged on brocaded chairs and stacked against the tall Sheraton breakfront, so many gifts that they spilled all the way across the old Persian carpet, and under the black grand piano that no one played but Noni herself, and over to the edge of the fireplace where five fat red stockings hung bulging from the high mantel.

Instantly Noni took in the particulars of her own presents; most of them she had expected—the immense wooden dollhouse, the pink bicycle, the metronome for the piano, the Easy Bake Oven, the white leather roller skates: things she'd asked for in her obligatory letter to Santa. But the sled, the red wooden sled scrolled with her name NOELLE in gold, she had not known to ask for that, never suspecting a world of snow. And so it seemed magical that a sled should be waiting under
the tree, just when for the first time she'd needed one. Noni didn't imagine a bearded Santa Claus had climbed down the chimney with this sled. She knew the magician was the father whose Princess she was, for it was already clear to the girl that he would deny her nothing, unless he'd forgotten that she wanted it.