The Last Noel (27 page)

“Thank you.” She curtsied.

“So what was the second thing I told you?”

“How to run my life. Oh, I don't know.”

“I told you I can do anything. And that includes cook.” Kaye pushed past her into the kitchen, placed the pot on the stovetop.

She took the lid off the pot and the smell of hot delicious soup floated up. “Oh, you didn't make this. This is Aunt Ma's she-crab soup.”

“This is
Kaye's
she-crab soup.” He crossed his arms in the old flamboyant way. “You don't say those were Rockefeller's oysters you and I ate last night. You say those were your damn oysters. Well, this is Amma Fairley's recipe and it's
my
soup. 'Course Grandpa Tat says,” and Kaye lowered his voice to his Tatlock rumble, “‘If I'd just had my chance, I'd of proved I invented she-crab soup and
he-
crab soup both, and every other kind of soup Campbell's stole from me, and I'd of been the richest Indian in America, if I'd just had my chance to prove I was an Indian.' Okay, Noni, stop that laughing, you're going to pee.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Nope, it's not going to work this time. I'm over it.”

“Oh, no, you're not.”

After she poured the soup into the tureen, Kaye brought it to the dining room table. Both were suddenly made strangely formal by the setting. “Madame,” he smiled and pulled back her chair for her and she sat. She could feel his breath near her hair as he pushed the chair in.

She toasted them with the wine. “To us. To Christmas past and present…”

“And future.” He handed her a bright red ribboned box. “Happy Birthday.” In the box was another charm. This one a little gold telephone. “You remember that silver dime shaped like a heart I gave you a long time ago?”

She gestured out to the foyer. “It's upstairs in my jewelry box.”

“Well, you can't call anybody for a dime anymore, no matter how bad you need them.” He held up a quarter.

Noni reached across the table, touched his hand, then took the quarter from him. “‘When you feel lost and about to give up, / Cause your life just ain't good enough,' reach out for me too.” She smiled back at him. “'Course, Kaye King, I know you never would be about to give up and you never would feel life just wasn't good enough, but just in the remote, remote, remote possibility—”

“You like the soup?”

“The soup is delicious.”

Back in the kitchen, Noni watched Kaye's long fingers cut precisely and perfectly through the melon, then carefully drape prosciutto over it. His hands had always been beautiful to her.

As they ate the melon, they talked about Parker, who'd been fired for insubordination from the job Kaye had helped him find at University Hospital. Kaye feared that Parker might be back on drugs that he'd gotten addicted to in prison. Parker and Kaye were drifting apart. Parker had accused Kaye of
thinking he was too good for him, but Kaye said it wasn't personal. He really had no time these days for anyone or anything but medicine. His life was his work.

Noni rolled her eyes. “Of course it's personal. It's about drugs, it's about what happened to your mother. It's too painful for you to be around Parker. So you avoid him.”

“Sure sure sure.”

“Well, why can you have theories about me and my mother, but I can't have theories about you and yours?”

Kaye watched Noni squeezing lemon into olive oil. “You've got wonderful hands,” he said. “It's in your hands that you can see how strong you are.”

She smiled, wiggling her fingers. “Fingers of steel. All that Chopin. Thank you.”

As they ate the sautéed shrimp, they talked about Bunny, who, despite her professional success—she was the youngest full professor in her department at Columbia—was unhappy because she still couldn't find the right man, or even—as she joked—“the wrong man.” Noni said that Bunny was thinking of having a baby by herself.

Kaye gave his parodic eyebrow bounce. “That'll be a first. Didn't even Jesus's mother need an angel or a bird or something to help her out?”

“Don't even try, you're not getting my goat tonight.”

He grinned at her. “Okay, not your goat. How 'bout your lamb of God?”

“That is so bad. That is really wretched, even for one of your jokes. And don't start in on St. John's.”

“Did I say anything?”

“I could see it in your eyes.” Noni told him that the truth was, sitting in church brought out the best in her—it was the place where she felt at peace.

“Bull,” said Kaye. “It's the place where that fine old glorious Gordon past falls bong on your head with big gold
thunks—
the altar rail dedicated to devoted wife Martha McAllister Gordon,
thunk;
the pulpit stand in loving memory of Shelby W. Gordon Jr.,
thunk;
collection plate, stained glass,
thunk, thunk, thunk.
You need to get out.”

“I got out. You don't think Houston is a long way from Moors?”

“No, I don't.”

“You think you have such a life? You just told me you had no life at all.”

“I didn't say that. I said my work was my life.”

Noni raised her shoulders, held them arched and ironical.

“Don't get sarcastic with your shoulders,” he told her.

“What? You don't like my shoulders as much as my wonderful hands?”

“Your shoulders are wonderful, too,” he smiled. And then suddenly they were both embarrassed. “I'll tell you whose life is his work these days.” Kaye changed the subject. “Tatlock Fairley, the African-American Van Gogh.”

It had been only a few years since his grandfather Tatlock had started setting up his pictures beside Amma's sales table outside the bank. The first pictures he'd sold were paintings of vanished Moors landmarks, all with himself prominent in them: there was one of Tat and R.W. Gordon in front of the old Moors Savings Bank that had been torn down. One of Tat and Dr. Fisher in front of St. John's Church before they'd added the modern annex. One of Tat and a crowd of car buffs at the old filling station, another of Tat and shoppers at the dime store that was now a parking lot, another of Tat and the owner at a fruit stand that was now the site of the town's first ATM kiosk.

Not only had passersby immediately begun to purchase these paintings for twenty-five dollars each, one day a woman who owned a fancy art gallery over in Hillston had come to call on Tat at Clayhome. She'd picked out ten of his works, all kinds, big pictures on old doors, little pictures on tin boxes,
telling him she'd give him fifty percent of what she sold them for, and that if this lot sold, she'd buy more. At first Tat had been indignant; why should the gallery owner keep half of his money? But when the woman had told him what she planned to charge for his pictures, “that old man signed so fast he smoked the paper.”

“He's going to do a painting of me,” Noni said. “‘Noni at the Piano.'”

Kaye tossed the salad he'd brought. “I guess you'll be playing a duet then, 'cause you can bet that old man'll paint himself right beside you on the bench.” He served Noni's plate. “Spinach salad. Eat some. Anemic.”

“You don't know that.”

“I know—”

“Everything.”

“Right.”

They took their coffee to the living room where violin music was softly playing through the speakers. The only illumination was the fire in the fireplace and the delicate shimmer of the white lights on the Christmas tree. Noni, not her mother, had put up the tree this year and it was the most perfectly shaped one that Kaye had ever seen there, a white pine beautifully tapered. It was also the least decorated tree he'd ever seen at Heaven's Hill. “So your Christmas trees
are
green,” he grinned.

Some things had stayed the same. As always the five big red stockings embroidered BUD, JUDY, GORDON, WADE, NOELLE, hung from the mantel. Noni's suggestion that they leave the stockings packed away this Christmas had so distressed Mrs. Tilden that she'd withdrawn it. The stockings were only decorative now; there was no pretense of a Santa filling them.

But there were presents under the tree. Kaye's from Noni was in a large box wrapped in green. When he opened it, he saw a violin in a case, its beautiful reddish wood gleaming in the firelight. He was surprised into silence.

While Kaye had played violin in elementary school in Philadelphia, and again in the string orchestra at Gordon Junior High, he had never owned an instrument of his own, nor ever wanted to. “I'm not really into it,” he'd told Miss Clooney when he'd reached high school.

“You're right about that, Kaye,” the music teacher had replied. “You just don't want to feel what that violin makes you feel.”

“You think you know me, Miss Clooney?”

Kaye had liked Miss Clooney, who called herself “the last of the burnt-out hippies” and who was the teacher who years ago had organized the student council into the honor guard for the first black students to integrate Moors High. Still, he had returned the rented violin and quit the program.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said to Noni now. “Hang it on the wall? I can't play this.”

Noni threw up her arms. “I swear to god, Kaye, you are the absolute worst receiver of gifts I have ever met in my life. The absolute worst.”

“I mean, thank you, it's beautiful, but I'm just saying I can't play it. I haven't played since ninth grade and I was terrible.”

She took the violin from its case, strummed the strings, started tuning them. It was a gift of hers, perfect pitch; she had always had the burden of hearing disharmony and the gift of setting it right. After she tuned the violin, she plucked a melody on it as if it were a guitar, a simple melancholy Bach melody that they had played in the school orchestra. Bach's “Air on a G String.”

Then she handed the instrument to Kaye, who held it uncomfortably. “Well, Dr. King, why don't you learn to play better? You're always telling me what to do with my life, so I'm going to tell you something. They call it
playing
music.”

He looked at her quizzically. “So?”

“So you don't play anymore. I bet you don't dance. You
don't play golf even. Amma says all you do is make money.”

“I fix hearts.”

She smiled. “I used to love to play with you.” Her face flushed. She closed the violin back in its case. “You think about it.”

He followed her back through the dining room, looked at her, couldn't move his eyes away. The only lighting was the candles on the table, and in the wall sconces, and leaping from gas flames in the fireplace. From the living room softly came the violin music.

In the kitchen with its hanging lights and copper pans, side by side at the large gray limestone sinks they washed and dried china and silverware too old and fragile for dishwashers.

Washing soap from his hands, Kaye passed Noni the soup tureen to dry. “Have you worried enough tonight about everybody but yourself? Is it time yet for me to ask you what
you're
going to do? Can I nag you like you nagged me?”

Carefully she placed the china lid on the tureen. “Isn't that all you've ever done? What I'm going to do when?”

“From now on. I'll make it easy. Here're a few choices. One. I'm going back to Texas and chuck the rest of my life away on Roland. Wait, there's Two. I'm going to stay here at Heaven's Hill, even though my mother may be perfectly okay, or even if she's not, somebody could be hired to take care of her, or even if they can't, she could be placed in a facility, I'm going to personally be her nurse 'til one of us dies, preferably her.

“Or Three. Now listen carefully to Three. I'm going back to Haver University and finish my degree and do something with a talent I happen to have, that I just said was damn important, and that's a talent that not everybody's got.” He handed her a platter. “You want some advice? Don't pick One or Two.”

“What do you mean, ‘do with it'? Like what, play in the lounge at the Pine Hills Inn?”

“Sure, why not? I don't know. You figure it out.” Kaye
opened the door to the walk-in utilities closet. “Any matches in here? I need to light my pudding.” He turned the light on. “Noni, look!”

Against the pantry wall, where Michelle had left it, stood the old red sled inscribed “NOELLE AND KAYE.” The writing was faded, the paint chipped, the runners rusty.

“It's our sled.” He brought it out to show her, held it up to his side. “It looks so small. Don't you remember it being a lot bigger?”

The sled reached no higher than Kaye's waist, rested against the soft fabric on his thigh.

Noni ran her hand along the runner's curve. “It was taller than we were, remember? We could both sit on it.”

Kaye set the sled down on the kitchen floor and straddled it, his long legs stretching out on either side. “That was a long time ago.”

She nodded. The room got quieter as he looked up at her, at the deep shine of the black silk against her slender collarbone. It was so quiet that Noni could hear her own heart.

Then suddenly, loudly, the oven buzzer blared at them and Noni jumped to turn it off.

Kaye put the sled back where he'd found it. Then at the green pine table, he stuck a holly twig atop his plum pudding and poured brandy over the mounded cake. “Now go sit down.”

“Could you ever ask, instead of bossing me around?”

He put his hands on her shoulders, gently pushed her forward.

Noni was seated in the dining room when Kaye carried in the blazing Christmas pudding. He began singing as he held it out to her. “God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.”

He was shocked when her eyes welled with tears and she began to cry. Then instantly he remembered her father singing that carol, remembered how Tilden would sing that line festively at his guests, year after year, as he served them his holiday punch in the silver cups. “Oh, I'm sorry, Noni. I'm so
sorry. I forgot. Forgive me.”