The Last Noel (13 page)

Asked whether he also worried about Kaye and Noni's relationship, her husband Bud replied, “We should be so lucky,” which was scarcely any comfort. Then he added as he wandered away, “Kaye's Noni's only brother.” She wasn't sure exactly what he meant by that, except that it was a slap at Wade, which was scarcely any comfort either.

Noni and Roland Hurd had been dating off and on for two years but now was one of the off times. Last month they had had a fight about Roland's possessiveness, how he constantly wanted to know where she was and what she was doing. He said everything he did just meant he loved her. Noni assumed she was in love with Roland, too, but sometimes she wasn't sure she wanted to be. Although she felt her future floating inextricably into his in a slow strong relentless tide, there was a way in which over the past two years she hadn't altogether minded his long absences from her daily life.

Everyone at Moors High knew she was going steady with a sophomore at Princeton, and as a result she had both status and freedom from the dating competition that so pressured her friends. Admittedly she had applied to Curtis Institute of Music mostly because Philadelphia was less than an hour from Princeton. She knew that the proximity of the Institute to Roland also made it a more appealing college possibility to her mother—who otherwise (terrified by memories of Noni's illness in her boarding school, coming so soon after the loss of Gordon) had opposed all choices beyond the borders of North Carolina.

Noni had also, like Kaye, applied to Haver University, only an hour away from Moors. As she was not merely a double legacy but a Gordon legacy, it was inconceivable that she wouldn't be admitted. But she thought it would be easier to keep her independence living an hour away from Roland in Princeton than an hour away from her mother in Moors. She had already flown to Philadelphia to audition at Curtis; she had played the hardest Liszt her teacher could find and on her
own had added some little Bartok songs. It had been nauseating to perform under the terror that she would fail her mother, but she got through it and one of the judges even told her she played the Bartok beautifully, and that nobody should try a Liszt
Transcendental
Etude unless he or she had to, because there was too much else in the world to play and most of it was a hell of a lot easier. For the first time Noni began to think studying music could be fun.

“Noni, move those candlesticks a little to the right.” Mrs. Tilden rearranged the centerpiece of fruits so that a tapered bunch of black grapes spilled over the edge of the silver plate just as she had seen in a photograph of a painting in the Prado. Mrs. Tilden loved to look at paintings in museums, or even pictures of paintings. Despite her family's wealth, she hadn't traveled much (except for trips to New York City as a child) because extensive foreign travel wasn't something Southern girls like her had done at the time. They'd gone to college, found husbands, and had children, just as Judy Gordon had done. But she had always tried to make her home a museum and to turn its furnishings into the kinds of paintings she might have seen if she had traveled.

The table was now perfect with red candles surrounded by evergreens and special Christmas china. When she looked at the table, the tight bands that were always around her chest slightly loosened. It wasn't much, a beautiful table setting, but it was something. A stand, even only for a moment, against the world's continual collapsing.

She turned her attention to Noni, who was wearing a black velvet pantsuit with a tuxedo jacket that had wide satin lapels. Under the jacket was a shirt with huge white ruffles. Noni's hair was long now and fell in two straight blonde parts over her shoulders. Mrs. Tilden smoothed the hair and fluffed the ruffles on the blouse, her hand tensing as she saw the little silver heart on the silver chain.

Later, at 6:45, the doorbell rang. “Please get that,” Mrs. Tilden called to Noni, who jumped from the piano where she was playing for her father, and closed her sheet music inside the black leather folder embossed with her name, “Noelle Katherine Tilden.” Kaye had given her the folder for her birthday. She hurried into the hall, thinking about Kaye, wondering what he was doing tonight. Behind her she heard her mother say, “Damn it, why is he always early?” as Noni opened the door to Roland's father, Dr. Jack Hurd, hoping he hadn't heard her mother's remark too.

The porch was garlanded in swags of ribboned pine; there were holly balls and wreaths hanging everywhere, and a large fanlight over the door was decorated with fruits and nuts. Dr. Hurd stood there shaking his head at the display. “You know your mom's a little compulsive?” He smiled at Noni.

“Think so?”

Under his Burberry raincoat, Dr. Hurd had on almost the same velvet pantsuit Noni did—except instead of ruffles he wore a claret-colored shirt. “Wow,” he said as they went into the hall. “You look great. Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday. Don't you hate them dumped together?”

She hugged her godfather. “Yes, I do.”

“Looks like Santa came in an Italian sportscar.” He pointed outside.

“Oh, you know my dad.”

He hung his coat on the Victorian hat rack. “You know what I think it is? Bud can't spoil you so he just keeps trying…. Still mad at Roland?”

“Is that what he told you?”

“Please forgive him. Please! I know he's a jerk but I'm counting on you to change all that. Don't forget, you owe me. Who delivered yah, baby?”

“You did. You're my Deliverer.” She took his armful of presents, put them on the console by the mended blue Chinese
jar and the jeweled metal pear tree. “So I'm warning you. Mom's setting you up with a blind date tonight.”

“Who? Farrah Fawcett?”

“Close. Mom's cousin Becky. Becky Van Buehling.” (Becky had big streaked blonde hair rather like the actress Farrah Fawcett.)

“Oh lord, her. I'm too old. Maybe I'm too young. You know she married Bob Van Buehling for his name? Her name was Becky Nutt. That's true, that's what your mom told me, Becky Nutt, and now it's like she's got a castle on the Rhine. Rebeccccaaaa Vannn Buehlllingkkk.” He turned Noni's face from side to side, examined her pale skin.

She smiled. “I know. Eat more spinach.”

“Liver. Eat somebody's liver every other day.”

Noni had always loved her godfather, with his thin homely face and his gray ironic eyes, so unlike Roland's cool blue ones. And although she thought Doctor Jack a little silly in his youthful faddishness, and naïve in his effervescent good will, she also thought him a smart, generous man. She tried not to wonder whether she didn't see, and love, more of the father in his son Roland than was actually there.

In the hall that smelled festively of pine garlands, Hurd pulled her down beside him onto the green leather bench. “Have I got some great news for Kaye! Hubba hubba.”

One of the things Noni liked most about Doctor Jack was the interest he had taken these past years in Kaye; the time he had spent talking with him about his going to medical school. Now he whispered dramatically. “Quick, before everybody shows up. I got a call from a guy on the Roanoke committee. It's not official and I'm not supposed to say anything.”

Noni leapt to her feet. “Tell me! Did Kaye get it? Did Kaye get it?”

Jack Hurd laughed, kissed both her hands, his gray pony-tail flopping over the wide collar. “He got it. The first black ever.”

Noni was so happy she bounced up and down as she corrected her godfather. “Afro-American, we're supposed to say Afro-American.”

“Christ, I can't keep up.”

They heard Judy Tilden as she closed the door from the dining room with a swirling full turn copied from her mother who had gotten it from Loretta Young. “Keep up with what?” she called.

“Shhh,” whispered Noni. “Don't tell her about Kaye.”

“Kaye who?” grinned Doctor Jack.

By ten o'clock, across the lawn from Heaven's Hill, Kaye and his grandmother had almost finished the dishes. Amma returned bowls and platters to their places on her shelves. Kaye took back the chairs he'd brought to the dining room table for the big family meal. Most of the chairs, discarded, donated, forgotten, had come over from Heaven's Hill sometime in the last century and a half. Whenever the big house had redecorated, so did Clayhome. The chairs were all different. There was an eighteenth-century Windsor chair whose spokes sometimes fell out, a 1940s metal chair, a black lacquer Depression Modern chair with three burled legs and one makeshift pine leg, and a Victorian throne-chair with a plush purple seat into which Tatlock Fairley was transferred from his wheelchair for the special meal.

This afternoon, Amma had served Christmas Day dinner to her three brothers, their two living wives, three of their grown children, those children's children, as well as Tatlock, his daughter-in-law Yolanda, his son Austin, Kaye, and herself.

Her brothers had never felt about Clayhome the way Amma did, so hers was the first generation since 1840 when a male Clay hadn't made the place his home, when the house hadn't had a “Clay” in it to pass along its name. “The end of
our line on this land,” Amma said every year. But her brothers and their children and Kaye didn't share her love of Heaven's Hill. “Clayhome was never ours anyhow,” they told her. “It's just where the hired help lives.”

Amma had always felt the land
was
hers, or maybe more just that she and the land belonged together. She felt it today as her family crowded round the dining room table, with the children at a card table nearer the living room so they could see the tree twinkling with the ornaments they'd made. Everyone had been given a place mat and napkin with Amma's signature sunflowers on them. As he had every year, Tatlock presided with his customary
noblesse oblige
over a holiday feast he had neither prepared nor paid for, passing around roasted chicken and buttered yams, collard greens and mincemeat pie with a garrulous sovereignty, talking mostly about the case he planned to bring to court to reclaim land where his Algonquin Indian ancestors on his mother's side had once lived and where developers were now building condominiums they called Algonquin Village.

Everyone told him, “You're right,” and, “You do that,” and, “Is that so?” But none of Tatlock's “cases” had ever ventured beyond the walls of Clayhome and the family didn't expect this one to either.

Now the dishes were cleared and the Fairley relatives had all gone home. It was dark and drizzly outside; Tatlock was asleep in his wheelchair with his long arms around the big portable radio that Kaye had given him for Christmas, a “boom box” Kaye had told his grandfather to call it, but Tatlock had said he wasn't going to. He liked it though. He was glad to have the kind of radio he could take with him when he rolled his wheelchair outside and slept in the sun of the yard. Gently, Kaye eased the boom box out of the old man's arms and brought it into the kitchen, turned it on to the quiet jazz station from the university. Finally, he and his
grandmother had found a station they could agree on. She liked the jazz station because it featured so many natives of North Carolina, like John Coltrane—whom she had met once at a picnic.

Amma was sealing with wax paper the last of the scalloped oysters, a dish she had first cooked on Christmas Eve for the Tildens. “That was a sweet thing, Kaye, helping Yolanda's kids make something special for the tree.” Their tree in the living room was decorated with ornaments Kaye had created over the years out of pieces of tin, old buttons, parts of toys, and empty thread spools. Today he had organized his small cousins into an assembly line producing dried cranberry garlands and strings of paper angels. “They look up to you and you can be an influence on—”

He interrupted her. “Don't you ever get tired of Tilden leftovers?” Annoyed, he gestured at the oysters, then around the house filled with Tilden furniture and thrown-away Tilden clothes and uneaten Tilden food—here was a gift box of grapefruits sent to Bud Tilden, here were fur-lined gloves that had once been Judy Tilden's. The American Empire dining-room table with its matching sideboard was a castoff of Judy's mother's, who'd given it to Amma's mother in 1927 so she could replace it with something more modern. “This whole house is nothing but their throw-aways.”

Amma kept patiently wrapping leftovers for the refrigerator. “What you rather do with good food, son, toss it in the garbage? You rather chop up that nice old table for firewood?”

“Hey, they just tore down Moors Savings Bank and it wasn't as old as that table.”

“Too much wasting in this world. And too much of it over there across that yard, and I'm not adding more. Now let's sit down. ”As if to symbolize her refusal to waste, Amma pulled on a long cardigan sweater that years ago she'd knitted for Tatlock but which he'd outgrown (“out-eaten,” she called it). Amma
Fairley's own weight hadn't changed in twenty years. In fact, to Kaye, everything about his grandmother looked exactly as it had on his first Christmas trip to Moors eleven years earlier, except that her then peppery hair was now white. Firm and sturdily built, with her smooth long-fingered hands and strong-muscled arms and her braided coils of hair, Amma Fairley seemed to have rushed early to a certain place in her life and then stopped there forever.