The Last Noel (12 page)

“You used to keep them in the Promised Land shoebox?”

“I still do. I still got 'em. Well, those folks she made the crosses for? They're the ones, she said, that went up to heaven and got to be the angels with swords. And you know what? I always did used to feel like they had their eye on things for me.”

Only one more piece and the jar would be whole again.

Noni watched Kaye working. “Sometimes I'm jealous of everything you've been through. I know that's awful, but it's like if you wake up on a grate and it's morning and you're alive and see how you can go ahead with your life, well, then I bet it stops things from being so scary.”

“Noni, I wouldn't waste much time wishing you were homeless.” He shrugged. “Poor people know about being poor. Rich people know about being rich.” He turned the jar slowly, smiling at her. “Good as old.”

“You like to put things that get broken back together. Like Uncle Tatlock's bones.”

“Oh lord, those bones of his.” Kaye laughed. Noni laughed too. She touched the jar and as she did so, her fingers touched
his. Neither moved. Then softly his hand slid over hers. She looked into his eyes. Again his eyes stopped laughing but this time he didn't look away. She looked at him, kept looking and deep at her heart's core she felt something lock into place. She felt that the Noni she was seeing reflected in his eyes was the truest part of herself.

Kaye looked back at her, kept looking until he felt a wave of feeling that was big enough to knock him down, coming closer, too high, too close. He had never wanted to feel so big a wave of feeling, one too high to beat back. But in Noni's eyes he suddenly saw that the wave would do him only good. The moment lengthened.

Then the beautiful old French clock off on the dining room mantel chimed midnight, echoing through the house. Kaye looked at his watch. His voice was thick. “I better go.”

Noni felt she had to say something. “Anybody who likes to put bones together would probably make a good doctor. You ever think about that?”

“Yeah. I have.” He glued the last piece into the rim of the blue jar.

“I can see you doing that.”

In fact, Doctor Jack had told him several times to “think about medicine,” and his chemistry teacher had once said that she bet Kaye would do very well in med school, and once, seeing the movie
M*A*S*H
, he had thought that being a surgeon would be a cool thing to do. And while he hadn't focused yet on a career, still, as soon as Noni had said he'd be a good doctor, Kaye thought that maybe she was right. Suddenly he saw a whole possible future to consider.

“Well, think about it,” she said.

He went to the sink, washed his hands. “I'll think about it.”

Noni was wondering, as she kept trying to come up with something to say, that maybe she'd been wrong to believe Kaye had been looking at her in a different way just a few minutes
ago. He seemed so preoccupied now. “So, say you were a doctor, what kind of doctor would you be?”

Kaye was still shaking off the surge of feeling about Noni that had taken him by surprise. He was pulling himself back as fast as he could into the safety of his bravado. “I could be any type of doctor. Okay, the richest type. A surgeon.”

“What kind of surgeon?”

“A heart surgeon. How's that?” As he dried his hands, he looked over at her with his irresistible grin. “You get your heart broken, Noni Tilden, you come see me.”

Three days later, on Christmas Eve, when Kaye was back in Philadelphia visiting his mother at the hospital, Noni opened her gift from him. The box held a silver heart.

Noni's mother frowned seeing it, biting on her lip when Noni told her the gift had come from Kaye. But Mrs. Tilden said nothing as her daughter put the small silver heart hanging from its silver chain around her neck.

On the card, Kaye had written that he'd made the heart from a dime, the cost of a phone call. There was a quote on the card, “Come on girl, reach out for me. I'll be there,” from the Four Tops song. It had been one of the records with which in his grandmother's kitchen they had taught each other to dance so well together.

December 25, 1974
The Porch Rocker

 

 

 

The Tildens were having Noni's godfather, Dr. Jack Hurd, for Christmas dinner this evening. Noni, just turned eighteen, and her mother were setting the table with the holiday china. Mrs. Tilden had invited him, she said, because she felt sorry for Doctor Jack, whose wife had left him for a dentist.

“That's a real come down all right,” agreed Bud Tilden, passing by on his way to the den where he was pasting photographs and souvenirs—invitations, programs, ticket stubs—into enormous vinyl photo albums. Because he and his wife were the last of their two families, he had whole generations of Tilden and Gordon photographs stored in large boxes beside him, and he now spent his evenings filling book after book with their pasts. But to his wife's distress, there was no organizing principle behind the way he pasted together the family story. In fact, she couldn't bear to look at the chaos he was making of their history. On one double page, for example, he had glued a Hilton Head golf scorecard, the puppy Philly sleeping on the now deceased Royal Charlie's neck, R.W. Gordon on a camel in front of the pyramids, thirteen-year-old Noni and Kaye dressed like the Mod Squad at Halloween, his great-aunt's wedding announcement,
Gordon's baby footprint, nametags from Parents Day at Wade's military school, and a daguerreotype of his wife's twice-great grandfather on the porch of Heaven's Hill in 1860, a baby held in the arms of a black slave wearing starched white clothes.

While Mr. Tilden worked on the albums or read his Great Books, often until the early hours of the morning, he listened to classical music like the Warsaw Concerto or what he called “the old-timers”—like Nat King Cole and Doris Day—sing sad songs, or he listened to Noni playing the piano across the hall. What he liked most was romantic piano music that had been turned into the kind of songs Frank Sinatra sang—like Rachmaninoff's “Full Moon and Empty Arms” or Chopin's “I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.” Noni was happy to play for him; she practiced the piano three hours a day now. Her teachers thought she had a very good chance of being accepted at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She would find out in April.

In the dining room, arranging the silver flatware at each place setting, three forks, two knives, three spoons, Judy Tilden told their daughter Noni that she didn't know what her husband meant by “a real come down.” Did he mean that Doctor Jack was a better person than the dentist even though the dentist was better looking? Or that Jack (head of OB/GYN at the university medical school) had a better job than the dentist and made more money? If the latter, then did Bud really mean that she, Judy, was a snob? She suspected that's what he did mean, although she wasn't sure what he meant by it.

Mrs. Tilden corrected her daughter's positioning of the three glasses at each setting as she confessed that she almost never knew what her husband meant anymore, if indeed he meant anything. He sat in the den reading from the matched sets of famous books of poetry and philosophy, writing down passages from them on scraps of paper that she found rolled into little balls in his pockets or on his dresser. He wandered
the house for hours as if he were looking for something he could never find, talking softly to himself, smiling. She suspected that somewhere along the years he'd decided that life was a joke it would be inappropriate for him to share.

Nor did Judy Tilden imagine her father the bank president would think the joke were funny if he'd happened to overhear it at Moors Savings. Judy's father was losing patience with Bud. Not only was his son-in-law making odd remarks to wealthy customers, he was giving loans to people who had no collateral. Fortunately, Bud's secretary was devoted to him and Judy had taken this woman to lunch to ask her to keep an eye on her husband, to check his desk drawers for bourbon bottles and report back. The secretary had been so noncommittal that Judy had felt obliged to point out that if Bud were forced to leave the bank, the secretary would also be out of a job.

There would only be five for dinner at Heaven's Hill tonight—Noni and Doctor Jack, as well as Mrs. Tilden, her husband Bud, and her cousin Becky—whose attempts to seduce her husband Bud had escaped Judy's notice. (Bud had noticed the overtures but had politely sidestepped them.) Since Becky and Jack Hurd were both divorced, Mrs. Tilden planned to play cupid, she told Noni, and bring the couple together in a non-dating venue to see if they had chemistry.

Wandering back through the dining room with his chinkling bourbon, Bud murmured, “Sure, why not?” He was wearing his sunglasses in the house, which he had taken to doing lately, as if there were nothing he cared to see and no one he wanted seeing him.

“Bud, let's make this a fun evening for Jack and Becky,” his wife called after him.

“Why not?” he said again.

The Tildens' son Wade was having Christmas with his wife's family and had invited his grandfather R.W. Gordon to join them. A few days earlier, in a “blow out,” as Noni had
described it to Kaye, Wade told them he would rather be with his wife's family than his own because he was sick of everybody's sitting around wishing Gordon were alive, or wishing Wade were Gordon. (Everybody told him it wasn't true, but in a way it was.) Wade then called his father a loser and a drunk, an assessment with which Bud Tilden declined to argue— although Noni had done so, and had added that Wade made her sick when he advised their mother to “wise up and get rid of Dad.”

Wade was twenty-three now and his red hair was once again very short. He wore three-piece suits and wide paisley ties and played golf all the time with his grandfather. He already had not only a wife (Trisha), but a new business (the first two had failed despite his grandfather's friends) and a baby—a little girl with whom Trisha had been pregnant when they married.

Noni didn't think her mother knew that Trisha had been pregnant at her wedding. But maybe she did; maybe she also knew that until a few years ago Wade was popping pills, smoking pot, sniffing cocaine, and stealing from his parents to pay for it all. But Noni didn't think so. She didn't think her mother knew that Gordon had only gone to Vietnam because she had made such a big deal about how the men in her family had always served their country and how she would be ashamed of him if he dodged the draft. Noni doubted her mother knew that Wade had bullied his first fiancée into having an abortion and had cheated his way through two mediocre colleges (the first expelled him), or that Noni had lost her virginity last summer to Roland Hurd.

But maybe Mrs. Tilden did know all these things and just pretended she didn't in order not to crack the smooth mirror in which she needed to view their tranquil lives in order to keep herself from going to pieces. She said she could stop worrying about Wade now that Trisha had him firmly in hand. She was confident (using current lingo like a tourist with a phrasebook)
that “Wade has his act together and Trisha's the chick to thank.” Bud Tilden thought it was not so much marrying Trisha that had turned Wade around as the failing health of R.W Gordon, who'd bluntly told his grandson to “get his ass in gear in a goddamn hurry” or he could expect to inherit from him “a big fat goose egg.”

“Trish,” said Bud Tilden, “you nabbed Wade on the rebound from R.W. Gordon.”

“Oh Poppy,” smiled Trisha but it was not really a smile. “Don't tease Wade.”

“I'm teasing
you
,” he told her, but she knew better.

In many ways, thought Noni, Trisha was very much like Mrs. Tilden, both of them piling sandbags of rules and amenities against a rising, flooding chaos, both at war against imperfection, their faces composed, their eyes desperate.

Noni's mother had wanted to invite Jack's son Roland to this Christmas dinner tonight as well but Noni had stopped her by threatening to “talk politics” at the table. Mrs. Tilden was unhappy because Noni had once again broken up with Roland, but she didn't want to risk her dinner party. She had no patience for “things nobody cares to hear about”—like the resignations of Agnew and Nixon or the disastrous war in Vietnam—and she was horrified when she learned that Noni had been going to peace marches and civil rights meetings and was in a high school “women's lib group.” She blamed Noni's friends Kaye and Bunny for her daughter's even knowing the words Wounded Knee, Karen Silkwood, and Rap Brown.

But there was a deeper, blacker terror in Mrs. Tilden than even a child's liberal activism. It bubbled up like oil in her sleep, churning and spuming at her the word “Kaye.” What if her daughter and Kaye should fall in love? What if they already were in love but didn't know it? What if they did know it? What if that silver heart that Noni still wore on a chain around her neck were a secret token of a love all too requited?