The Last Noel (32 page)

“Yes. A little boy. Johnny.”

“Oh. That was your dad's real name, right?”

“…Right.”

“So. You and Roland working things out?”

“No, we're divorced.”

“How 'bout your kid?”

“Johnny is just…mine.”

Noni touched her breastbone with her fingers to press back her feelings. Tears welled in her eyes but didn't fall. “Kaye, you deserve all the happiness in the world.”

He studied her seriously, started to say something, but didn't. Noni wiped her eyes with her hand. The bracelet he
had given her with its gold charms, the piano, the telephone, slid up her wrist. She gathered herself, smiled, pointed over at the tiered cake on the table. “Your birthday isn't until tomorrow.” Fighting hard, she folded her arms in an imitation of Kaye's old comic way. “It's my birthday. I'm older.”

After a moment, a small smile flickered across his face.

“Well, you could offer to show me your house,” she added. “How about a tour?”

And so he took her around the place, pointing out the unusual architecture. Everything blurred as she smiled and nodded.

As they came down the stairs, Bunny saw them and hurried over. “Noni, you did come! Excuse us—” She bumped at Kaye with her hip, and pulled Noni aside into the crowd. “I swear, I had no idea he was getting engaged tonight. I would have told you at the airport.”

“It's okay.” Noni felt flushed and heated. “Excuse me a second. It's jet lag. I want to get some air.”

“Are you all right?”

“Bunny, please, I'm fine.”
City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in holiday style…

 

—Get over it? Kaye, they indicted Poindexter!—

—Bunny, time to exit the Garden. People forget. Kurt Waldheim is now president of Austria.—

 

I'll-uh have-uh a bluuuuue Christmas without you.

I'll-uh be so bluuuuue thinkin' about you….

 

It was cold out on the deck, but the night was clear and brilliant. The air cooled her, made her shiver. Noni leaned over the rail to look at the stars; they shimmered in the black lake below as if someone in heaven were tossing them there like pennies in a well. Breathing deeply, she held open the
collar of her white silk blouse. All at once she smelled cigarette smoke.

From the dark end of the long deck she heard someone singing to her.

Noelle, Noelle. Noelle, Noelle
,

Born is the Queen of Heaven's Hill.

Parker Jones stepped out of the shadows, skinny and hunched in the chilly air. “Hey there, Disco Lady.”

“Parker! Oh, I'm sorry, Kareem.”

“Naw, it's Parker again. Allah and me split up. I'm riding with Jesus all the way to the finish line.” He pointed with his cigarette at his chest where a baggy T-shirt was in fact stenciled with the face of Christ.

“You're not a Muslim anymore?”

“You go to Dollard Prison and get picked for a girlfriend by enough brothers calling themselves Mohammed, it can make a Christian of you, and that's a fact.”

“Oh my god, Parker.” She moved forward and hugged him, shocked by the frail feel of bones thrusting from his ice-cold skin. He wore a wool skullcap but only the T-shirt and jeans, no coat. He weighed less than she did. “What are you doing out here? You're freezing. Let's go inside.”

Flicking the cigarette off the rail, Parker shrugged. “Naw. That's not really my scene in there. I don't know those folks. Kaye just feels like…” He stopped, shrugged. “I don't exactly fit in, see what I mean?”

She nodded slowly. “You know what? I don't either.”

“How you doing, Noni? Where you been so long?”

As she told him briefly of traveling with her invalid mother and of her divorce and her baby son, she took in more details of his appearance. There were deep hollows under his eyes, and there were small dark sores on his face and on his arms. Her heart struck hard against her breast. In all those hospitals with her mother, she'd seen patients with AIDS. This
was what they looked like.

Parker gestured at the crowd inside. “Kaye's marrying another doctor.” He chuckled. “Maybe I shoulda done that, least I coulda got an appointment every now and then.” He tilted his head at her. “So how come you letting Kaye marry somebody else?”

She blushed. “What have I got to say about it?”

Parker frowned, shook his head. “Okay, never mind.” And he shuddered in the cold. “I'm to the point where lying to yourself is hard to do, but you go ahead.”

“Stay here.”

“Where am I gonna go?” He gestured out at the black night of stars.

Noni stepped back inside the noisy cheerful room, found the mink coat she'd taken from her mother's closet because of the surprising cold. She filled a large cup with the hot mulled wine on the table.

Back on the deck, she put the long mink coat around Parker's shoulders and then handed him the warm cup of wine. “Or are you still a teetotaler?”

He smiled at her, his eyes bright and glittering in his sunken face. “A man's smoking on the way to the electric chair, you gonna tell him cigarettes are bad for his health? Man, this coat is warm. I love it. You see me in mink?”

Noni stepped closer, took his hands in hers. “What's the matter with you, Parker?”

He looked at her with his old silly sweet smile. “Besides dying, Duchess, nothing much…”

“Is it AIDS?”

“Well everybody's gotta die of something.”

They looked at each other for a long quiet while. Then she leaned forward, kissed him on the forehead.

“You got a car?” When she nodded, he asked, “How'd you like to take me to the Indigo now? You, me, night fever?”

Noni squeezed his thin trembling hands. “I'd love to take you to the Indigo if you promise we'll dance.”

“You're a good lady, Disco Queen.”

“Merry Christmas, Parker.”

The stars in the sky looked down where he lay
,

The little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay.

Amma had known as soon as she took the baby from Noni's arms and lifted him to her face. Maybe nobody else would see it in him, probably not, he was so fair and gold-skinned, curly haired but blonde, but then Amma herself had been blonde as a baby.

Amma had seen it, and she'd seen Noni watching her see it. Johnny Tilden had those same pretty little ears that Deborah had passed onto Kaye and the same soft full lips.

Maybe not even Judy knew the baby was Kaye's, and Judy would never admit it if she did know, she'd fight it forever. She'd say he was Roland's. And Roland had that black curly hair and olive skin. Folks would believe it. Maybe Roland believed it, but maybe not.

“This is my son, Johnny,” Noni said. “Johnny, say hello to your Aunt Ma.”

And in Amma's arms, the little boy had smiled in a way that was part Noni's sunshine smile and part that irrepressible grin Kaye had always had, and then Johnny had kissed her right on the lips, knowing she would love him. And Amma had loved him, right then and there, her old heart had opened to him and he'd looked right in it and claimed a place.

The rest of it came clear too, later on that same night.

Judy must have thought Amma was downstairs, or gone home. Dionne was sound asleep in the room next to hers. But Amma was in the other upstairs wing, the old children's wing,
sitting in the dark in Gordon's room, sitting in the little cane-seated Hitchcock rocker, watching Johnny sleep in the old wooden crib where so long ago, just a girl herself, she had watched Judy sleep and then a generation later had watched Judy's children sleep. The boy lay on the bed just the way Noni had when she was a baby, with his fat pretty cheek resting on both his little hands. He moved his lips in his sleep, making that soft noise like he was looking for more people to kiss.

Amma heard the creak of the floorboard outside the open door and then heard footsteps hurrying away. Startled, she rocked herself out of the black cane chair and shuffled quickly to the door. And there, walking away from her, walking fast down the shadowy hall was Judy Tilden in her nightgown. No wheelchair anywhere around, no cane even. Judy Tilden walking the long length of that hall in her white nightgown.

Amma clapped her hands together. “Judy! What you doing?”

The woman turned, screamed once, her hand to her mouth. Then violently she shook her head and hurried along the hall. But Amma, breathing hard, caught up with her outside her bedroom and grabbed at her arms.

Sobbing, Judy threw herself against the old woman. “Don't tell her, Aunt Ma, please don't tell Noni and Wade. What good would it do now?”

Amma was so angry that she shook the woman. “What good! What good! How long you been able to walk, lying to everybody!?”

Judy pulled loose, then her face changed, hardened, and she stared at Amma like a nasty child. “Don't you tell her. Don't tell her or I'll kill myself and she'll think it's her fault.” Then she pushed past Amma into her bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

Amma stood outside the door, breathing hard. “You go on and do it, you just go on.”

December 28, 1992
The Music Stand

 

 

 

Year by year the clichés had proved mostly true. Time had healed some wounds and at least eased others. Around Noni in Moors, people did what they had always done—were born, grew up happily or unhappily; fell in love or didn't; made friends, families, careers, money, or didn't; grew old or didn't; died.

Year by year the seasons had sped more quickly by her, hurrying through six Christmases since she had come home with her mother and her baby from London to find herself unexpectedly at Kaye's engagement party.

Noni had been living those six years at home in Heaven's Hill. She rarely traveled anymore, except for occasional trips to New York; she felt no need to travel. Her life was in Moors and she was happy with it. Her son Johnny was the center of the circle, but the circle was large. Everyone invited her to their dinners and parties. Lucas Miller, the lawyer who had been in love with her since high school, and who had proved a good and loyal friend—and a very kind presence in Johnny's life—played piano duets with her and took her to concerts and out to the new restaurants. She worked hard as a teacher at the elementary school, she worked hard as a volunteer for causes
that mattered to her. She was professionally and politically and socially active. In a small town, it was not a small life.

A few days after her thirty-sixth birthday, Noni knelt among the tombstones and marble orbs and granite obelisks in the Gordon plot of St. John's cemetery, next door to her home, where since her return she had visited her family's graves every Sunday after church. She kept the grounds of their graves, the old dogwood and apple trees, the azaleas and laurel bushes, beautifully tended. Two springs ago, she had planted hellebores, which Amma called Christmas-roses, in the plot, and she was worried about them, for an ice storm had swept through Moors the night before. But today the sun blazed out, hurting her eyes, bringing back one of the recent headaches, dazzling all the trees into boughs of bright glass.

Somehow the hellebores had survived, stronger than they looked, stronger than the couple who lay beneath the newest marble stone. Noni brushed ice from a white flower above her mother's grave. Judy Tilden had died a year and a half ago and was buried here with her husband, Bud. They lay together now under one headstone. It was what Mrs. Tilden had requested in her will, to the surprise of some (although most people seemed to have forgotten that they'd been apart for years when he'd died back in 1979).

JOHN FITZGERALD TILDEN
JUDITH GORDON TILDEN

“At least she didn't want it to read, Together forever,' or ‘Devoted wife of,'” Noni said to her brother Wade.

“I don't see why you're taking that tone. Frankly, they shouldn't have been buried together. Lying there beside Mom is more than Bud Tilden deserves.”