The Last Noel
Page 6
Near her, a silk couch was crowded with shiny rolls of wrapping paper, boxes of ribbons. Beneath the tree there were already dozens of beautifully wrapped presents spilling out across the floor. Among them was Noni's gift for Kaye, a fountain pen she’d bought at the Moors jewelry store with money from her savings account.
Tightening her tortoise-shell barrettes, Mrs. Tilden sat down at the piano bench and carefully studied her daughter. She turned Noni, arranged the fabric in her dress, coiled an elaborate curl in her hair. Then with her unhappy smile she said that Noni looked very nice but that she might want to consider not wearing those clunky shoes and she might try just a little more lift to her bodice, by which she meant the rubber pads she’d left on Noni's bed, and that a little less eye shadow might make a nicer impression. She pinched Noni's cheeks, told her to pinch them again from time to time to give herself “a little more color.”
These suggestions, which carried far more weight than her father's compliments, sent Noni back up the stairs, on the verge of tears, and caused a fight between her parents. Their argument—Noni's father's charge that her mother was judgmental; Noni's mother's charge that her father was passive and weak and gave their daughter none of the guidance necessary to help her make her way in life—was a battle carried on in the hallway in complete silence through facial expressions that they both understood.
Upstairs, Noni passed Gordon's bedroom where the door was always open, his childhood books were always dusted, his khaki pants and ironed blue shirts were hanging in the closet and his old loafers with their crushed heels were under the Hitchcock rocking chair with the cane seat. Even his cherrywood baby crib that had belonged to the Gordons forever still sat there against the wall. Sometimes Noni would find her father in Gordon's room, sitting in the little rocking chair, quietly looking out at the night.
Thinking of Gordon, Noni could no longer hold back her tears, and she ran into her bedroom, where she stared sobbing at herself in the mirror of her vanity table and agreed with her mother that everything was wrong and nothing would ever be right. Then she told Gordon's silver-framed photograph that she hated her mother and that she hated herself as well; she told him she felt as if the floor were cracking open underneath her and that she was falling down through nothingness forever. In the old days, Kaye would have listened to how she felt, but now Kaye never seemed to want even to be around her, much less talk about anything that really mattered. Noni flung herself onto her four-poster bed, threw the rubber breast pads on the floor, and crushed her face into the pillow. Finally when the tears did stop, she moved over to sit on her hope chest and stare out the window at the moonlit sycamore boughs. She tried to make the tree look like a ghost again, the way it had transformed itself in her childhood, but now it only looked like a tree.
After a while, she heard the doorbell ring downstairs. Changing into the satin shoes that her mother had left in a box of gold tissue papers on the little pink couch, she washed her face in her bathroom, applied less eye shadow than before, and hurried the length of the hall to her parents’ room.
On her mother's bedside table, beside the Tab can and the Kleenex and hand cream and the bottles of Vitamin C and sleeping pills and amphetamine diet pills (to which Wade had no doubt helped himself), and the stacked hardcover library books—Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Love Story, Watership Down—there was a Christmas photograph of the three-year-old Noni in a green velvet dress; she was sitting on her mother's lap, with Gordon and Wade, both in green velvet jackets with plaid bow-ties, on either side of them. Noni had a fleeting urge to smash the picture on the corner of the table, but the impulse faded before she even touched the frame.
On her father's side of the bed sat his perennial aspirin bottle and Rolaids, an empty crystal glass, a leather tray strewn with loose coins, cuff links, wooden golf tees, and the wallet where he always kept at least a dozen ten-dollar bills. The wallet was empty.
Noni stormed back along the wide hall to the “children's” wing of the house. She didn’t knock on Wade's door because Wade only locked it when he was in there, talking on the phone to his idiot girlfriend or looking at Playboy and playing with himself under the covers so hard that Noni had heard the bed thump. His room was freezing now because he left the windows open while he was gone, to get rid of the smell of all the pot he smoked. Noni went straight to the huge poster on the far wall of the Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz in his tiny bikini trunks with gold medals strung around his neck. She slipped her hand behind the poster and pulled out four of the stolen ten-dollar bills.
Three of these bills she had just returned to her father's wallet when Bud Tilden himself wandered into the room looking for her, holding her new floor-length fitted wool coat. “Doctor Jack Jr.'s downstairs. The Princeton man. You look like a Christmas dream come true, the first Noelle, the last Noelle, the best Noelle.”
Noni didn’t tell her father that Wade was robbing him, but showed him that she had placed the ten dollars in her small velvet purse.
He smiled. “That's right, Princess. Powder room.” She wasn’t sure what he meant.
As they started back down the stairs together, she took Tilden's arm and turned him so that he would be next to the banister but so that it would look as if he were escorting her, rather than she guiding him. It was a trick she’d seen her mother use.
In the foyer, her mother was telling Roland Hurd that the orchid corsage he’d brought Noni would go perfectly with her dress. Looking nothing at all like his homely father, Roland was tall with black shiny curls and skin that always looked tan. He was—she was amazed to see—larger than her slender father. Over his tuxedo he wore a gray wool coat that made him appear completely grown-up. His eyes were as blue as the under glaze of the Chinese jar on the console. The first time she’d seen those blue eyes burning into her, last August at Pinky Mann's pool party, she’d felt as if her legs were melting. To avoid his stare, she had abruptly dived into the pool and then had swum underwater until she had stopped feeling as if she had been stung by bees. The second time, he was holding in the crook of his arm his white football helmet and when he called, “Hi Noni,” up into the stands, she saw that his eyes were the color of the blue hawk on his helmet. Roland Hurd was so handsome and so popular that when Noni had phoned to tell her friend Bunny that he had asked her, although she was only a sophomore, to the Senior Christmas dance, Bunny had said, “No way.” And another friend had screamed so loudly into the phone at the news that it had hurt Noni's ear.
“Look here at my princess,” her father told Roland, handing her over at the foot of the stairs. “Have you ever seen anyone so beautiful in your whole life?”
Roland, whose perfections she could read in her mother's eyes, politely said that he never had.
Each night when Amma Fairley left Heaven's Hill, she walked through its galleries and hallways and up and down its stairs and turned off all the lights in its empty rooms. Each night, an hour or two later, when she looked out across the lawn from Clayhome as she was looking now, all the lights were back on and the big white house was blazing out at her as if the people living inside it had set it on fire. All these years and she couldn’t teach the Tildens to stop wasting electricity. They were careless, or they were scared of the dark, or maybe they were both. Even when Judy and her husband had been living alone in the house, when Wade was off in college and they’d sent little Noni up North to that boarding school after Judy’d said she didn’t think much of the Moors schools anymore; even then the two of them had kept the lights on in almost every one of the seventeen rooms in Heaven's Hill, even the children's rooms.
Amma sat by the lamp at her kitchen window sewing her sunflowers onto the aprons she’d made. Pulling off her glasses, she threaded the needle with yellow thread. From the next room came the bland murmur of television voices, Tat listening to his programs with the Labrador dog, Philly, lying on the floor by his wheelchair. Amma had her old radio on beside her, Mahalia Jackson singing “Go tell it on the mountain.”
It was Mr. Tilden who took the call, three years back now, from that school up North about how they’d had to rush Noni to the hospital with pneumonia just a few months after she’d gotten there. Twelve years old, up North by herself, alone in that hospital. Now Noni's mama Judy had been sick all the time when she was little, but Amma hadn’t even believed all those illnesses of Judy's were real; they were just a way for Judy to get attention from her busy daddy and mama. But Noni had been truly sick; she had almost died. The Tildens had brought her home to Moors from the airport in an ambulance bed. And then it had taken the child another month lying in her room before she could start back to school at Gordon Junior.
Amma would say this for her grandson Kaye, back then he’d brought over his books and helped Noni with her homework evening after evening that whole spring. Every day before he hurried off to his job dispatching at the taxi company, he was over there at Heaven's Hill helping Noni. Bud Tilden had treated him like his own son, he was there so much. Kaye had been a good friend to Noni.
And Noni had been a good friend to him. When her health got better, the two of them started spending every evening here at Clayhome, laughing, listening to those rock and roll records, learning some new dance or other that they’d seen on television. Back in Philadelphia, Deborah had taught Kaye to love to dance, and he and Noni got to be really good at all their fast steps and combinations, though they never did seem to do any dancing anywhere except here in Amma's house.
Funny, Kaye loved to dance but he wouldn’t have a thing to do with music any other way, even though he had a nice voice, tenor like Amma's daddy Grover King. Noni had found out how Kaye had played violin in Philadelphia back in the fourth and fifth grades, and she’d kept at him and gotten Amma to keep at him to join that little school orchestra she was in at Gordon Junior. Amma had taken Tatlock to one of their concerts where Noni had the solo on the piano. But it wasn’t too long before Kaye quit his violin. And not too much longer before it seemed like he’d just about quit Noni, too.
Now all Kaye could talk about was how the Tildens were the problem with America and how everybody else was the problem, except for the people he had pictures of covering the walls of his room. Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and such. These last few years Kaye had stopped making new Popsicle stick cemeteries for his mama and instead had started taping up all these newspaper photographs on his walls until his room finally looked to Amma like the shotgun house Tatlock had grown up in out in the country, wallpapered with tin signs and pictures cut out of store catalogues. After Kaye taped the pictures to the wall, he wrote things in black marker on them, just like Deborah had written on her little crosses. Soledad Brothers, ACQUITTED. Angela Davis, ACQUITTED. George Jackson, KILLED. ATTICA.
A few months ago Noni had told Amma that she never saw Kaye much at school anymore; somehow both of them had started running with their own crowds and had drifted apart. Noni said that their friendship had gotten harder to keep up anyhow: Kaye acted so angry with her every time he told her about something he’d seen on the news. But how was Noni supposed to make up to him for the last four hundred years of American history? Why was he taking it out on her?
Amma had hugged Noni and told her that the past was a heavy thing, too heavy to lift unless everybody lifted together. It would all work out in the Lord's good time. “The Lord's too slow for Kaye,” Noni told her.
Deep down, Kaye's grandmother had thought maybe it was just as well that he’d stopped spending so much time with Noni. She had always wondered if the real reason Judy had sent Noni up to that New England school hadn’t been to get her away from Kaye. And if the child hadn’t gotten so sick up there that first semester, Judy could have kept them apart, too, that way. But if that had been her plan, it had backfired. Noni came home and the teenagers had gotten closer than ever. It was clear to Amma that Judy didn’t like her daughter's friendship with Kaye, or her husband's affection for him either, not one bit.
Of course, if those children did fall in love, the world wouldn’t be easy on them. Love was hard enough without adding in other people's nastiness about race. It was probably all for the best. And both of them were too busy to get serious anyhow; children didn’t used to keep so busy. Kaye had two jobs and a dozen or more after-school projects on top of his sports programs. And Judy kept Noni wound up tight enough to snap a watch spring. She couldn’t have worked her harder if she’d been planning to enter her in a pet show. It had been just the same with Judy's parents pushing her when she was little: Judy had to come in first in every swim meet, win the blue at every horse show.
Noni was a sweeter child than her mother had ever been. Sometimes Amma felt like she could see Noni's heart right there in her face. She could see Noni's heart filling up with all this love she wanted to give folks. But folks wouldn’t take enough of it to give her ease. Noni was all feelings, always had been. She was like her brother Gordon that way.
Wade now, he was a different story. Ever since Gordon died, it was like Wade had joined hands with the devil, like he’d decided that if the Good get killed, he’d better be as bad as he could be. He’d flunked out of one military school and got himself thrown out of another one. Then the university here turned him down, in spite of how they still had Bud Tilden's shirt hanging from the rafters of their stadium, in spite of how some Gordon or other had even built them their library. Now Wade was home for the holidays from the pokey little college in Atlanta where they’d had to send him. Home and up to worse than his mama knew. Vodka bottles in the trash and old marijuana butts in ashtrays under his bed with a bunch of filthy magazines. Pills of every color rolling around in his sock drawer.
Getting into college, thought Amma, that's not something I’ll have to worry about with Kaye. Not with his good grades at Moors High, not the way he’d scored on that test they’d had to drive to Raleigh for. Plus, once Kaye had gotten his height—just like she’d told him he would—once he’d shot up all that way—Kaye had sports going for him, too. Or could have going for him, if he’d cared anything about it and could learn to stop his back-talking the coach.
“Your boy's got an attitude problem,” the coach came over to Clayhome to tell her and Tatlock. “And he's got a motivation problem. We need to motivate that boy's passion for the game of football.” Well, all the man had heard in reply was a long speech from Tatlock about how, back in his teens, he’d played the best football, baseball, and basketball the town of Moors, North Carolina, had ever seen, but because of his color he’d never a chance to show what he could do. Which was possibly even true, for Amma could remember to this day, even in love with Bill King as she’d been at the time, how that Fourth of July at the town park the muscles ruffled in Tat's big back and arms, and how his skinny bat slung around and how the baseball flew like a white bird off into the blue cloudless sky.
But none of Tat's horn-blowing about the past was any use to Kaye, who might need a push from that football coach if Amma's savings wouldn’t stretch far enough to get him through college. Bills were high, money hard to come by. And her daughter Hope, with six kids, Hope and her husband both working, a good man, but they could always use a little extra help. Plus, Amma was still trying to catch up to what she’d put away three years ago that she’d had to use traveling with Kaye by plane to Philadelphia. But after Deb
orah had got hold of those pills in the hospital, Amma wasn’t about to stay home; she had to be there at Deborah's side to pull her through, even if it broke her heart when she saw she might as well have been a stranger off the street to her own daughter.
Yes, Amma thought, I sure do worry more about Kaye since I lost my poor child Deborah, because I’ve lost her sure as if I’d lowered her into the ground. And a child's a child, in their thirties, their twenties, or even a baby taken from you before you gave birth, like she’d lost two before Deborah came. A child's a child.
Amma finished stitching the sunflower to the third apron. Well, Noni looked so pretty tonight and let's hope she has a happy time at that school dance—even if Kaye and his friend Parker put it down the way they did. Tat asked them why they weren’t going to the dance, and of course, the truth was they couldn’t have gone anyhow because they weren’t seniors and they weren’t dating seniors, but Kaye started in on Tat about how this was no time to be dancing.
“You think they’re ‘dancing’ in Hanoi with those B-52s carpet-bombing them day and night?! You think Vietnamese children are ‘dancing’ down the roads on fire with napalm?! You think with the world blowing up I want to go boogaloo with a gym full of bubblehead crackers like Roland Turd?”
Tat told him, “Boy, I’d boogaloo with Mrs. George Wallace I had my legs. And old George Wallace would cut in and grab his wife back, he had the use of his. And look at us both stuck in these wheelchairs. You don’t know what life's going to do to you, Kaye King.” Then Tat just wheeled himself over to the TV and turned on the news, while Kaye muttered at his back, “Life's not gonna do anything to me, old man, I’m gonna do things to life.”