The Last Noel (16 page)

“Can't do that. Can't cheat.” For a few years now, in addition to assembling photo albums, Bud Tilden had taken up the hobby of making his way methodically and alphabetically and daily through a comprehensive bartender's guide, drink by drink.

They sat together a while. Over the rise of Heaven's Hill, somebody set off fireworks. Clusters of blue and red sparks flew up into the night, then spilled away. Tilden took a bottle of aspirin from his pants pocket. “Kind of an early start on the New Year.” He called out to the darkness, “What's your rush?!” He opened the cap of the pills with his teeth and almost choked on it. Kaye jumped from his rocker to help him just as the inebriated man spat out the plastic cap.

“You okay, Mr. T? Don't scare me like that.”

“Fine. I'm fine. But if I wasn't, you'd be the guy I'd want.” In a while, to his surprise Tilden added, “Got a girlfriend, Kaye?”

“Two or three,” he answered. It was true.

Tilden shook a finger solemnly. “Two or three's the same as none. Take it from me.”

Kaye worried that Bud Tilden was referring to his extramarital affair with his secretary at the bank, about which Kaye had overheard his grandmother fretting to Grandpa Tat. His grandmother had said Mrs. Tilden and Noni had no idea about it.

To forestall any unwanted confession, Kaye took one of the tennis balls from the basket and tossed it at the silver bowl. It missed. Tilden put another ball in Kaye's hand, showed him carefully how to hold it, how to release it. Kaye tried again, still missed. Tilden showed him once more. This time Kaye's ball bounced into the silver trophy. “So, what you doing out here on the porch so late, Mr. Tilden?”

“Listening to the rain. Rain on a metal roof sounds pretty.” The tall man pointed across the lawn at the copper roof of Clayhome.

Kaye did a loud drum roll with his fingers on the rocker's arm. “Not if your bed's less than a foot away from that metal.”

Tilden leaned forward to look at Kaye, nodded apologetically about this unconsidered drawback. He tipped the rocker so far that he would have fallen out had Kaye not caught him and settled him back in the chair. “Birds too. Lot of night birds calling to each other out here if you just listen.”

“Like owls?”

“Sure, owls. All kinds. Talking to each other, working things out.”

“I saw this really nice letter in the Moors paper about birds working things out and why can't the human race. It was signed ‘Night Owl.' Was that you?”

“That was me. You didn't think it was dumb?”

“It was great. I loved the way it ended with that Gandhi quote. ‘Somebody asked Gandhi, “What do you think of Western Civilization?” And Gandhi said, “I think it would be a good idea.”' Why didn't you sign your name to it?”

“You know who owns the
Moors Mercury Gazette?
My father-in-law.”

“So what? What would he care?”

“Mr. R.W Gordon likes Western Civilization just as it is. Well, just as it
was.
I think he really resents them freeing the slaves.” Tilden tried to light a cigarette; his hands were shaking.

Kaye asked where Mrs. Tilden was, worried that she ought to get her husband out of the cold.

“Gone to sleep. Oh, about ten years ago. This'll amaze you, Kaye. When we got married we were in love. I sure was. First time I saw her she was swimming in a race at the Haver pool. She won. Beautiful stroke, just beautiful. But now she doesn't like me much. You notice that?”

Kaye felt uncomfortable with such personal talk. He offered his great news as a distraction. “I'm going to get a Roanoke Scholarship to Haver, Mr. T.”

“You are? That's wonderful!” The man beside him reached over, pulled Kaye's head close, and surprisingly kissed him on the side of his face. “That's wonderful! Congratulations, Kaye. Jack'll go nuts! Noni too. You tell Noni?”

Kaye just nodded, not wanting to expose her, or Doctor Jack either, for releasing the news too soon, or for excluding Tilden from their happiness.

The tall man patted his knee. “Well, son, that's a start. That's a real start. You keep going.”

“I'm going to.”

“I bet.” Noni's father sat silent for a while, drinking his cocktail. Finally he said, “She's the one thing in the world makes sense to me. Sometimes I think we're the only ones that get her, Kaye.”

Kaye knew he meant his daughter Noni. “Um hm.”

“The thing about Noni, if you thought of any situation and you imagined her in it, you could count on what she'd do. She'd do the good. Know what I mean by that?”

Kaye nodded. “But you got to include the good for yourself. You think she does that?”

Another long silence before Tilden asked, “You like Roland?”

Kaye thought about lying but decided not to. “No.”

“He's probably okay. Don't you think?”

Kaye didn't reply.

“I want someone to love her who knows who she is, knows what they're getting.”

Kaye didn't reply.

Finally Tilden sighed. “Sure. It's none of my business.… You play golf, Kaye?”

“Nope.”

“This spring we'll play some, all right? I'll teach you. I'm not bad.”

“That'd be great, Mr. T.”

“Isn't your name John really?”

“John Montgomery King.”

“That's what I thought. We've got the same name. You know my name's John, too? John Fitzgerald Tilden. But nobody ever called me anything but Bud.”

“You're kidding? John Fitzgerald, like Kennedy?”

Tilden laughed. “Right, Fitzgerald was my mother's name. But, hell, maybe that's why Judy's stuck with me as long as she has. She was crazy about JFK.”

Side by side on the dark porch the two rocked slowly back and forth, listening to the screek of their chairs, the soft fall of cold rain on the distant metal roof.

December 26, 1976
The Hope Chest

 

 

 

Noni was twenty years old and everyone said she was beautiful. The old rector, Dr. Fisher, said she was the most beautiful bride in the history of St. John's Episcopal, a history that was longer by ten years than that of the nation itself. And although Kaye would not smile at her, and although Noni's mother, on her knees arranging the train of the wedding gown (itself half-a-century old), quickly demurred that all brides were beautiful, Noni felt on this day that Dr. Fisher was absolutely right. She was beautiful in her grandmother's satin gown with its French lace and beaded pearls.

On either side of the choir stall the four small Christmas trees, completely bare of any decoration, looked perfect. The violins and trumpets were playing Purcell, and every pew was happily filled, everyone a sharer in today's love.

Except Kaye, who would not smile at her.

In the vestibule, Dr. Fisher was telling Noni that they had had some sad times together at St. John's. Nodding, Noni looked into the church. At the end of the center aisle was the gold-filigreed rail in front of which she had seen the coffins of the dead, most recently that of her maternal grandfather, the
bank president R.W. Gordon, who had died of a stroke back in May. But this man had been so bad-tempered that Noni had cried at his funeral only because her mother had been crying; certainly not because she was going to miss a horrible old bigot who'd yanked at her hair and pinched her arms in an excess of affection whenever he went past her and who'd told her she was his favorite grandchild and that her brothers ought to be drowned, as if he'd thought she would happily agree that they should do away with her brothers.

For Noni, the only unbearable coffin had been the one draped with the American flag, her brother Gordon's, that rainy February afternoon eight long years ago. Gordon's coffin, that had buried so much of their family with it in the wet red ground.

Reverend Fisher was squeezing her hands. “But happy times, too, Noni?” Pointing at the worn white marble baptism font near the doors, he recounted once again how as a baby Noni had grabbed the baptismal candle right out of his hand when he'd held it up to her, telling her to behold the light of Christ. She didn't remember the moment, of course, but had always liked that adventurous image of herself snatching greedily for illumination.

Now she looked up the length of the church at that familiar nave, at the altar cushions on which she would soon kneel. When they were confirmed, she and her friend Bunny Breck-enridge had knelt there, struggling not to giggle as the bishop pressed his hands fiercely onto their heads, crushing their garlands of daisies and pink sweetheart roses. Today, Bunny, the maid of honor, and all the bridesmaids made a bouquet of red roses in their crimson taffeta dresses. Today, Noni felt that she was like a white camellia at their center.

“Today,” Dr. Fisher was saying as he kissed her on the head, “today will be the happiest day of all. I wouldn't have missed this day for the world. Now I can retire.” Dr. Fisher was in fact
retiring in the spring, to be replaced by a younger priest (practically handpicked by Judy Tilden, chair of the calling committee). But Dr. Fisher's step was bouncy today as he left Noni to join the groom.

A few minutes later he hurried out from the side vestry door to the front of the altar. Beside him stood the best man, a Haver University Kappa Delta whom Noni had never much liked. And then, into a paradise of red roses, stepped Roland Hurd, smiling, his eyes as blue as heaven, waiting for Noelle Katherine Tilden to come walking with her father up this aisle to him.

Today, two days after her birthday, the day after Christmas (Boxing Day, Mrs. Tilden liked to call it), St. John's was still festive with its holiday decorations and was now also luminous with hundreds of white candles glowing on banks of red roses and white camellias. Flowers and evergreens were heaped upon window ledges and choir stalls and edged along both sides of the aisle up which Noni was just about to walk with her father. Noni's mother had designed the wedding and chosen the day as an especially good date, not only for a wedding but also for a large wedding reception to follow, for everyone was home for the holidays and almost everyone at leisure. All Noni had picked was the music, and even then Mrs. Tilden had insisted on Mendelssohn's “Wedding March,” which she felt was really the only appropriate piece of music to which a young woman should walk down a church aisle. The violin and cello were playing Fauré's Pavane as the last guests found their seats, and Noni was wondering if Kaye were listening to the violin, wondering if he ever wished he hadn't so long ago stopped playing that instrument himself.

Bud Tilden smiled at her. He was handsome in his gray cutaway and his smile was sweet, although a little sad. Noni's father lived alone now, in Algonquin Village, the new stucco condominiums near the new shopping mall. He and Noni's mother had separated. Last August, Mrs. Tilden had asked for
the separation, after she'd found out about her husband's (actually long-ended) affair with his secretary, whom she'd mistaken for an ally, or at least a nonentity: the woman hadn't even been that attractive; her only asset was kindness. Or maybe, Noni thought, her mother had known all along about her father's affair, but had been waiting until after the woman had moved away from Moors (as the woman had done), or she'd been waiting for R.W. Gordon to die before taking any public step, fearing to risk his disapproval. She certainly had not told her father, or anyone else in Moors, about the affair, and in fact almost no one knew.

R.W. Gordon finally had died of a stroke, as everyone had impatiently predicted he would for decades, because of his apoplectic tirades. Most of his fits had been against blacks who didn't know their place—presumably slavery—and against the Supreme Court justices who had stirred them up, against hippies' hair and the draft-dodging socialists who'd destroyed Nixon, against women's-righters. (When Noni had first heard him use this phrase she had thought that it was women writers who had so enraged her grandfather, and she had asked him if he realized that George Eliot—whose
Silas Marner
he'd so preferred to “the crap being written today”—was a woman.)

In any case, three months after his father-in-law's death, Bud Tilden quietly moved out of Heaven's Hill, which Judy had inherited (conditionally). She had also acquired (conditionally) a great deal of bank stock (Moors Bank was now a branch of a large chain), and newspaper stock and rental properties and her mother's jewelry and her mother's trust fund. Judy Tilden was now a wealthy woman.

To Wade's dismay, the real surprise of the will had been how much Grandpa Gordon had left Noni. On Judy Tilden's death, Noni would inherit the furnishings of Heaven's Hill, as well as the use of the house and land itself during her lifetime, after which Heaven's Hill would go to any living male heir of
her body. If Noni never married, the house and land would go to Noni's brother Wade or to any sons of his. As for Mr. Gordon's own house in the country, and its two hundred acres of rolling fields and riverbank, the bank president did leave that to Wade, with the terse instruction in his will, “Make something of it.”