The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  In the vestibule of St. John's Church, Noni was thinking about that Thanksgiving scene, first the fight with Kaye, then the exchange with her mother. She was thinking that she hadn’t practiced the piano much lately. No doubt the birthday present that Kaye had left at the house yesterday, a record set of Rubenstein playing piano concertos, was just his sarcastic way of scoring another point about how she’d sacrificed her music to Roland. Although she’d sent a note thanking Kaye for the gift, he hadn’t acknowledged the cashmere sweater she’d given him. He hadn’t spoken to her since the fight after the bridal shower.

  The day of the shower had certainly not been the first time Kaye had claimed to know more about her than she knew herself. He’d done it from the first moment they’d met when he’d told her her own parents’ first names and her own brother Wade's secret vices, when he’d told her that she was getting the red sled for Christmas. Kaye always claimed to know more.

  Their other really bad fight about Roland had taken place years earlier, the August of the year she’d graduated from Moors High. The fight had ended with Kaye's talking her out of her spur-of-the-moment decision to elope with Roland.

  It was a day heavy with a wet heat that clung to her skin as she and Roland had sat by the pool at Heaven's Hill on a weekend when her parents were away in the mountains trying to save their own marriage. Finally he had worn her down with his persistence and she’d agreed to elope now so they could live together up at Princeton in the fall. As soon as he’d left to go home to pack, Noni had called Bunny Breckenridge and told her that she was driving to South Carolina with Roland, that they’d go to a justice of the peace and get married. Would Bunny come along on the drive and be her witness?

  Bunny had shouted no, she would not, and had immediately called Kaye with the news, and Kaye had immediately come pounding on the door of Noni's bedroom at Heaven's Hill. It was the first time he’d been inside her bedroom since, as a child, he’d crawled through the window the night of the big snow. The room hadn’t changed much in the decade since. The four-poster was still piled high with white-laced linen pillows and coverlets, and the vanity table was still crowded with framed photos, though now many of them were of Roland. Noni was sitting on her hope chest by the window looking out at the sycamore tree, fearing (although she would never admit this to Kaye) that she’d made a terrible mistake by letting Roland talk her into driving to Myrtle Beach to marry him. What was the matter with her that she couldn’t bear to say “no” to anybody she cared about?

  Kaye flung himself down on her little pink couch at the foot of her bed, shoving her suitcase aside, and yelling at her without any preamble that she was about to do a very stupid thing. Marrying Roland at all ever would be a stupid thing. But marrying him before she’d even started college, marrying him by running off to a cheap beach motel on a whim was monumentally, disgustingly, self-destructively idiotic!

  There were only three possible reasons for Noni's moronic behavior, he said.

  One, she was pregnant.

  Two, she was trying to wiggle out of going to the Curtis Institute the following month because she was scared that she’d fail there.

  Three, she was trying to spite her mother by frustrating Mrs. Tilden's dreams of a big wedding for her only daughter.

  Emphatically, Noni denied these charges. She didn’t at all think she’d fail at Curtis; she’d gotten over the worst of her stage fright about playing the piano in front of people when she’d realized (at her audition) that no one, not judges, not audiences, could ever make her feel any less adequate about her musical ability than her mother had.

  Nor was she pregnant. Although she didn’t tell Kaye this, she’d briefly thought she might be, but she wasn’t.

  Arms crossed, ironic, Kaye nodded at her. “So it's three. You’re just eloping to spite your mama? Don’t give her a big wedding? Show her you’re not scared of her?”

  She yelled back, “I’m not scared of my mother.”

  “You’re scared of letting her down. Just like you’re scared of letting Jack Hurd down and letting Roland down.” Kaye reached over to the vanity and grabbed a picture of Roland and his father taken with Noni and her parents; they were all wearing tennis clothes and having lunch outside by the courts. “If they asked you to jump off a building for them, would you do it?”

  Noni was startled because she’d just been asking herself why it was so hard not to do what people asked her to do. She didn’t want to admit this, so she said, “Why are you turning on Doctor Jack after he's been so good to you?”

  “He's not being good to you, conning you into thinking you’re going to save his son for him.”

  Noni jumped up from the hope chest and snatched the picture back from Kaye. “You’re crazy.”

  “You’re chicken.”

  Noni started to argue with him but suddenly fell silent. Kaye was annoyingly right. She was scared. In fact, in the last year nearly everything had begun to feel scary to her. Except, strangely enough, Kaye himself. Kaye didn’t scare her. Despite his boasts of how he’d frightened her that first night of the snowstorm, he hadn’t scared her then, he didn’t scare her now.

  Then, as Noni looked at him, sitting there on her pink couch, suddenly he grinned at her and crossed his eyes. And despite herself, she started laughing.

  Everything but the laughter left her body—the tension, anger, dread. That was it. She could laugh with Kaye. And she could shout at him, too. And he was the only one. She trusted Kaye with her laugh and her anger, and she always had.

  Noni told Kaye that maybe he was right; maybe she had wanted to thwart her mother's chance for a big wedding. Maybe, if her mother wasn’t even going to keep her own marriage together, Noni had asked herself why she should have to fulfill her mother's social dreams?

  Kaye nodded. Then he suggested that maybe she’d had the exact opposite hope. Maybe her eloping was a weird way of trying to make her parents’ marriage hold together because she couldn’t stand the thought of her dad's being unhappy.

  As Noni was absorbing this idea, tears starting again, the young black man suddenly stood up in the middle of her bedroom, grabbed her suitcase off the couch, and flung it over his head so that all her clothes flew out in the air. Brushing off underwear and nightgowns that had landed on him, he started to laugh, and his laughter started her laughing again. Then Noni ran to Kaye and hugged him, and then she started to cry with her head pressed into his shoulder.

  “You are such a crybaby.” He patted her mockingly on the top of the head. “Poor, poor little crybaby.”

  “Oh, shut up, Kaye.”

  He handed her the box of tissues on her vanity table. “Blow your nose. So tell me ten things you’re scared of.” And he sat down on her hope chest to listen. “I bet you’re scared of ten things for every one that I’m scared of.”

  She said she was scared of what people said to her or didn’t, of what she said or didn’t, of her own body, the cars around her on the road, standard tests, the weather, ghosts, noises, animals, Roland's moods, everyone's anger and unhappiness, of the way her mother treated her father and the way her father ignored it and poured another drink.

  “Stop, that's more than ten.”

  “Tell me one thing you’re scared of, Mr. Perfect.”

  “Werewolves. You scared of werewolves?”

  She laughed. “No.”

  “You’re scared of ghosts but you’re not scared of werewolves? Man, there's a full moon, I want you to walk me home. Deal?”

  Noni wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You think about it.”

  Then Kaye, with his typical, outrageous appropriation of control, closed her empty suitcase and slid it under her bed. Passing her vanity, he saw the old silver chain with its dime heart that he’d given her long ago (the heart with its message, “Reach out, I’ll be there”) now hung from a knob of the mirror.

  He tapped the chain so the little silver heart swung back and forth. “You should
have called me. That's the point. Reach out, I’ll be there.”

  “I should have.”

  “But I figured you called Bunny to get her to get me to come over here and stop you. Now, go eat some spinach. You’re so pale, if you were lying around naked in the snow, you’d be hard to find.”

  “Yeah, right, I’m going to be lying around naked in the snow.”

  “It wouldn’t be any dumber than eloping with Roland Hurd.”

  An hour later when the phone rang, Noni told Roland that she’d changed her mind and didn’t want to elope.

  On her wedding day, Noni wore Kaye's silver heart around her neck. It was the something old she wore. Her shoes were new. Her prayer book was one she had borrowed from Bunny. Her little sapphire earrings, her birthday gift from her father, were blue.

  Noni's bridesmaids gathered around her with their bouquets of roses and camellias floating red silk ribbons over their white-gloved hands, and she was glad that she could no longer see Kaye's angry face. Wade's wife Trisha hurried to part the bridesmaids so that Wade could escort Mrs. Tilden to her seat in the front pew. “Let's go, Grandma Judy,” Trisha said.

  Mrs. Tilden didn’t really like being called a grandmother, but she was too happy today to let it bother her. She looked beautiful in pale rose silk and dark rose hat and ropes of perfect pearls that would come to Noni someday, just as the wedding gown had come to her. Noni's mother kissed her daughter and told her how happy Noni had made her; she even kissed Noni's father on the cheek, but she didn’t look at him when she did it.

  Suddenly Wade snarled at his father, whom he had ignored until now. “Just try to keep it together, okay?” Actually Bud Tilden looked so perfectly together that he could have been the handsome mannequin in the window of a formal shop.

  The music changed, and it was time to begin. Wade's wife gathered the ring bearer and flower girls. And although Noni's mother (even at the moment when Wade was trying to walk her down the aisle) whispered to his four-year-old daughter Michelle, “Now make a good impression, honey,” as she straightened the child's sashes and fluffed the rose petals in her basket—even that phrase, echoing down Noni's own childhood, could not ruin this day.

  With hushed giggles, two by two the bridesmaids streamed like flowers from the vestibule into the aisle behind the ring bearer, Roland's sister's son. Wade's wife hastened those in the procession who were too slow, held back the too eager. Two by two the bridesmaids floated into the church. Noni quickly retied the undone sash on the gown that was almost too small for Bunny, her still plump maid of honor.

  Bunny embraced her. “You look so beautiful,” she whispered and for once Noni accepted that it was true. “I’m going to miss you so much.”

  Miss me? Noni didn’t know what Bunny meant. In fact, by marrying Roland she would soon be much closer to home than Bunny herself, who went to college at Mount Holyoke, all the way up in Massachusetts, whereas Noni would be back in Moors, or at least in the next town over, by the following summer. For Roland was a senior at Princeton, and they would be coming home so that he could attend business school at nearby Haver University in the fall. Noni, midway through her sophomore year at the Curtis Institute of Music, would transfer to Haver herself. But was that so horrible? Wouldn’t she still be studying music when she returned to Moors, wouldn’t she finish her degree? What did Bunny mean, I’ll miss you? How could Kaye tell her, I don’t like what you’re doing to my friend? Shouldn’t they have faith in her, hope for her?

  Now the trumpet and the organ played the opening chords of the Mendelssohn “Wedding March.”

  “Ms. Tilden, I love you.” Her father held out his arm. “May I have the honor?” He kissed her nose, the old familiar woody smell of his bourbon absent today, his gift to her, for his face was pale, his hand trembling as he touched the hand she placed on his arm. Ms. Tilden? Not Princess. He had never called her Ms. Tilden before. For the first time he had called her by a name she would give away when they reached the altar.

  Together they started down the aisle, her arms chilled, her face warm. Everyone was standing, everyone was gathered together. Her mother was smiling. At the front of the church, next to Dr. Fisher, Roland shifted from foot to foot, like a bored handsome thoroughbred. But he smiled too, urging her forward.

  There on the groom's side was Noni's godfather, Dr. Jack Hurd, Roland's father, who had wanted for so long that she should marry Roland. He was seated next to his ex-wife and her new husband the dentist. Doctor Jack wore a blue velvet embroidered waistcoat with his suit and still kept his silvery hair in a short ponytail, although he was now Dean of the Medical School.

  There, in a red silk suit jacket open to the red lace of her bra, was Noni's mother's cousin Becky Van Buehling, who was no longer dating Doctor Jack but was engaged to her estate planner.

  There was Wade with his wife Trisha, both tense because their four-year-old daughter Michelle was throwing rose petals at the guests in their pews.

  There sat Aunt Ma and Uncle Tatlock, even though Wade had tried to stop Noni from inviting them. “I don’t see why we have to have the maid's family at your wedding.”

  Noni had actually wanted to respond, “I don’t see why we have to have you” But she hadn’t said it. When she was a baby, Wade had played with her. When she was a toddler, he had let her follow him around. He had been in her world from her birth. If she couldn’t love her own brother, her only surviving brother, how, she thought, was she going to come anywhere near doing those hard, those impossible, acts of love Christ asked of us, remarkably proposing that we be as perfect as God? “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?” When Dr. Fisher had read that passage out in church, Noni had felt a shiver of guilt about Wade. Not that she could honestly say that she had ever felt much love coming from him in the last ten years or so, but maybe it was her own failure, maybe she shut him out. When she’d been five, he had pulled her around the driveway in his wagon. That must have been love.

  Noni glanced over at the new stained glass window, purchased to replace the one that had been broken last summer by vandals; Mrs. Tilden had just given it to St. John's in simultaneous honor of her son Gordon Tilden and her father R.W. Gordon. The window showed Christ benevolently patting on the head a small boy, one of the little children suffered to come unto Him. Noni found the choice ironic, since Gordon had to be physically forced anywhere near the vicinity of his grandfather, and had once told her that as a child he’d always worn a baseball cap around the old bank president to forestall the man's rubbing his knuckles into his grandson's crewcut hair.

  Walking down the aisle, Noni glanced over at Kaye. His eyes were on her and she looked straight at him, kept looking, slowed down as she passed, pulling back slightly on her father's arm, so that she could keep seeing Kaye, keep willing him to look at the love in her face, keep willing him to show her that he wanted her to be happy.

  “Come on, Kaye,” her father startled her by whispering. Looking up, Noni saw that her father was staring straight at Kaye, too.

  Noni kept smiling at Kaye. And then suddenly she crossed her eyes at him. And just before Kaye passed out of her view, suddenly, undeniably, she saw that he couldn’t stop himself and was grinning back at her.

  Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this Man and this Woman in Holy Matrimony.

  Noni and her father stood in the nave with the flower girls and bridesmaids, the best man and groom. Noni felt her father loosening his hand over hers and suddenly she wanted everything to stop, to reverse steps like a waltz he had taught her, to go backwards into the vestibule, back in time to last month, last year, back to her childhood when she was only a Princess. She held tighter to her father's arm. Everything was floating quietly in a bank of red roses. Dr. Fisher was talking, and then Roland said, “I will.”

  Now the minister was calling her name “Noelle,” and she rushed back into the present. “…Comfort him, honor, and ke
ep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

  “I will.”

  “Who giveth this Woman to be married to this Man?” Dr. Fisher looked around the church as if he didn’t already know the answer. Bud Tilden placed Noni's right hand in Roland's. Then he kissed her cheek, and then he was gone.

  And then Noni was making a vow, trembling with its solemnity, her unguarded earnest eyes searching Roland's blue ones, pledging all that she was to him. “I, Noelle, take thee Roland to be my wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, ’til death us do part….”

  Bunny handed her the gold ring and it slid perfectly, just as they’d rehearsed, onto Roland's fourth finger. His fingers were big and square, and it was very disconcerting to Noni that looking at Roland's hands in the middle of her wedding she should suddenly think of her hand touching Kaye's fingers as he pressed in place the blue pieces of the broken Chinese jar, his long brown slender precise fingers trying to help her gather the pieces and put the jar back together.

  Dr. Fisher tied her hand to Roland's in the white silk stole and said to everyone that she and her husband could not be put asunder, that he could not be left behind, that she could not fall like a doll from the gathering arms of the beloved, who now kissed her, and Noni hoped that everything Dr. Fisher said turned out to be true.

  —No, you throw them away. Disposable. Wait, it won’t be long, everything’ll be disposable. Just like my last husband.—

  —Oh Becky, stop it!…Wasn’t Noni beautiful?—

  —Okay, Wade, you tell me how we can walk around on the moon but we can’t make eighteen-and-a-half minutes disappear off a damn tape machine without the whole country finding out about it.—