by Michael Malone
FICTION
Painting the Roses Red
The Delectable Mountains
Dingley Falls
Handling Sin
Foolscap
Uncivil Seasons
Time's Witness
First Lady
Red Clay, Blue Cadillac
The Last Noel
NONFICTION
Psychetypes
Heroes of Eros
Copyright © 2002 by Michael Malone
Cover and internal design © 2002 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover image by Photodisc
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
FAX: (630) 961-2168
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Malone, Michael.
The last noel : a novel / by Michael Malone.
p. cm.
1. Man-woman—Fiction. 2. Race relations—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A43244 L37 2002
813’.54—dc21
2002003853
Printed and bound in the United States of America
LSI 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
For Dr. Virginia Hill
…Always there
Contents
Acknowledgments
The First Day of Christmas
The Second Day of Christmas
The Third Day of Christmas
The Fourth Day of Christmas
The Fifth Day of Christmas
The Sixth Day of Christmas
The Seventh Day of Christmas
The Eighth Day of Christmas
The Ninth Day of Christmas
The Tenth Day of Christmas
The Eleventh Day of Christmas
The Twelfth Day of Christmas
About the Author
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Jennifer Fusco and Hillel Black for wise editorial counsel, to Judith Kelly for her indefatigable, invaluable support, and to Megan Dempster for her elegant designs. Thanks as well to Peter Matson and to Todd Stocke, Alex Lubertozzi, Peter Lynch, Bill Osterman, Chris Pierik, Heidi Kent, Maggy Tinucci, Sean Murray, Jeff Tegge, Tom Murphy, Wayne Donnell, and George Carroll. For musical advice, my thanks for Nancy Goodwin and Kelsey Weir.
As ever, my gratitude to Dominique Raccah for her remarkable vision as a publisher. And to Maureen, always my first and fiercest and favorite reader, thank you.
The First Day of Christmas
December 25, 1963
The Sled
“Come on,” a voice said. “Come look at this snow.”
From the foot of her four-poster bed she peered into the night. Then with a yawn, she asked the strange dark-skinned boy across the room in her window, “How did you get all the way up here?”
“Climbed,” he said, pulling himself over the ledge to lean into her bedroom. “Wake up and come on outside with me.”
For more than thirty years they were to quarrel about who had said what when they met, and whether she’d been frightened when he scrambled through her second-floor bedroom window, whether taking the sled from under the Christmas tree had been her idea or his, whether she had kissed him when they fell into the snow bank at the bottom of Heaven's Hill, or he had kissed her, or the kiss had never happened.
He always claimed that when she first heard her window open, she cried out, “What do you want?” and hid under the coverlet on her high tulipwood bed, the white blankets like the great drifts of snow falling on all the holly and boxwood outside.
But she said he had not scared her at all. She had just turned seven that day, and it wasn’t until long afterwards, not until her teens, that somehow her courage began to fail her. Besides, she insisted, she’d known from the first glance that this late-night intruder was only, like herself, a child, and would do her no harm. What had awakened her was not the rasp of the window rising, but rather the cold sharp air and the fresh wet unfamiliar smell of snow blowing into her room. At the smell of the snow, she had come fully awake, shaking off her dream with a shiver. She saw at once that this night was different, filled with soft whirling light. It was the unexpected snow that first drew her attention, not the strange child who’d come so surprisingly to tell her about it.
They were the same age, born within hours of one another, but because she had arrived first, late on Christmas Eve, and his birth was not until the early dawn of Christmas Day, she would sometimes fight against his dominance with claims of her own seniority. It was a battle waged for years and never won.
Their names were Noni and Kaye.
Before her birth her parents had already named her Noelle, because she was expected at Christmas. Noelle Katherine Tilden. Her godfather, head of obstetrics at the southern university where her father had once played basketball, the university whose library bore her mother's family name, had delivered the baby girl without complication at nine in the evening on the 24th of December. He gave her to some nurses and went home. Her mother was unconscious at the time, designedly so. Several hours afterwards, slightly intoxicated, her father drove to the hospital from a holiday party, late to his daughter's birth. The party had been at the bank where he held with a lovely indifference a position as his father-in-law's loan manager. When Bud Tilden first held his daughter, so pink and gold, so solemn and poised and earnest in his arms, he christened her “Princess.” And Princess he always called her until his death years later, when, again slightly intoxicated, he died with the same careless nonchalance that in his youth had been so charming.
That first night as he kissed the infant girl, her perfect nose wrinkled in displeasure and she turned away from the woody smell of his cigarettes and bourbon. Her father laughed in his sweet easy way. “The princess doesn’t like it, do you, honey?” And he tapped her nose with a tan finger.
The following dawn, in Montgomery, Alabama, the boy John Montgomery King was born prematurely in an emergency room. His mother gave him her family name, which was King, and the middle name Montgomery, because of the bus boycott in that city, led by a young Baptist minister not much older than she was, and with the same last name. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t Deborah King's kin—her people lived in North Carolina, his in Atlanta—but whenever she saw Dr. King she felt so proudly related to him that her heart beat like a great drum against her breast, and a wordless shout rushed uncontrollably out of her, so loudly that it frightened people.
Before Deborah King's son was taken off to the ICU, a nurse let her hold him. As the infant stared up at his mother, his cloudy eyes almost crossed in their fierce fight against confusion, she told him in an angry whisper, “Fight for me,” and she pressed her lips over his tiny lips and blew air hard into his tiny mouth. Then she kissed his hands, which were so diminutive they could not reach around the thin finger they clung to. So small was he that more than a month would pass before his aunt was allowed to bring him home. By then his mother had been transferred to a different ward in the hospital, where, fed Thorazine and Milltown, she sat listlessly in a chair by the window, unless the pills wore off, when she’d shout and flail at anyone who came near her.
> The boy's aunt made an effort to call him Montgomery, but the syllables came out stiffly, like a reprimand, so in the end, by the time they moved to Philadelphia, everyone was calling him Kaye.
Everyone in Noelle's hometown of Moors, North Carolina, except the girl's father, called her Noni.
“Come on,” the stranger said from across the room. “Come look at this snow.”
Leaning out from the foot of her bed, she stared across at the boy who crouched in her opened window, snow flying in around him, the shiny bill of his red plaid cap turning from side to side as he looked into the large gabled bedroom, his arms braced over the sill.
“How did you get all the way up here?” she demanded. Not—she would point out over the years—not “Who are you?” or “What do you want?” Just a practical question, “How did you get up on the second floor?” That's how unafraid she was.
“Climbed,” he said, thrusting head and snowy shoulders into her room. “Come on outside with me. It's Christmas.”
“Climbed what?” For Heaven's Hill was a large house, both tall and wide, with a Palladian center and two gabled wings. And while there was a full balcony with white columns running along the second floor to match the porch with white columns below, there were no outside stairs leading from one to the other. “You couldn’t climb those columns.”
“Climbed your tree,” he said. “I can climb anything.”
Annoyed by his vaunt (as, all of their lives, she would be exasperated by his impenetrable confidence), the girl slid off the side of the high antique bed, and in her long nightgown hurried, chilled, across the cold pine floor. She could see that, inside his shambly brown wool car coat, the boy was even smaller than she was. And she could see that he was, as she’d been carefully taught to say rather than “colored,” a Negro. That realization immediately identified him for her, placed him in the world the way she knew it to be, a world in which there was only one possibility whereby a Negro child could be inside the gates of Heaven's Hill in the middle of the night. He’d come across from “Clayhome,” the white-frame house across the lawn where her mother's maid lived with her invalid husband. The maid's family had lived there for generations, and their name was Clay, so at some point during the last hundred years their home had come to be called Clays’ Home and then, as if it were one word, “Clayhome.”
“You live at Clayhome,” she told him. “You belong to Aunt Ma and Uncle Tatlock.”
Flinging himself over the sill and hopping down into her room, the boy threw back his thin chest and comically placed both red-mittened fists at his sides. “You know what? I belong to me, myself, and I.” He said it loudly, his grin so wide and infectious that she giggled herself, then quickly hid her face behind her hands because her mother had often told her that laughing with her mouth open was unbecoming and gave a poor impression of the laugher's background.
Pleased with her response, the boy strode into the room with long exaggerated steps and repeated in an even louder voice, “I belong to me, myself, and I.”
Alarmed at his noise, she shushed him with a finger to her lips, pointing at her open bedroom door. But the truth was, it was unlikely anyone would hear him: her parents’ room was in the other large gable, too far to be bothered. Their old dog, an English setter called Royal Charlie, slept in that room with them, and was practically deaf anyhow. Her brother Gordon, a sophomore at the nearby university, had driven off to Chicago with his friends to hear Bob Dylan, upsetting their mother who thought it was wrong for children to abandon their families at Christmas. Her brother Wade was home from his military academy, but he was sleeping out in the brick guest cottage, and Wade wouldn’t awaken if she jumped up and down on his back, banging pans. But “Be quiet!” she told the boy anyhow, to assert her authority in her own home.
“Aunt Ma's my grandmama, don’t you know that?” replied her strange guest.
“Why should I know it?” she countered.
He tapped the shiny brim of his red plaid cap and held out his mittens to her. “I got these for my birthday. And this.” He tugged a huge shiny metal flashlight from his pocket, then shoved it back inside.
“Are you visiting Aunt Ma for Christmas?”
He didn’t answer her but wandered over to her small pink sofa stacked neatly with unopened toys and white tissuey boxes of new clothes, presents from her birthday, which had been celebrated that morning at breakfast, in order to put as much distance as possible between the day of her birth and, as her mother said, the more important birth of Christ. The boy looked at the gifts without touching them and without much enthusiasm for the large stuffed animals and small adult dolls behind cellophane, the pink vinyl record player, the Puff the Magic Dragon schoolbag, the silver brush, and all the rest.
He pulled back his sleeve to show her a huge flat watch on a black plastic band that swung loosely on his small wrist. “My mama gave me this. You and me were born the exact same time. My birthday's Christmas, too,” he informed her. “And that's what it is, Christmas, ’cause it's on the one and that's after midnight.”
“My birthday's Christmas Eve,” she said. “That's sooner than yours.”
He ignored this. “You got a brother out in that little brick house.” He pointed at the window. “He's smoking like a chimney and drinking from a whiskey bottle.”
“Wade?” She was astonished. “How do you know?”
“’Cause he went to sleep and left the door open. All the heat just flying out. I shut it. He's dead to the world. So's your daddy and mama. Bud and Judy Tilden.” He took out the flashlight again, aimed it right at her face, and clicked it on and off as he added, “My grandmama was baby-sitting you ’til they got home from their party up the street. I don’t need a baby-sitter.”
This amazing recital of facts put her at a terrible disadvantage. He seemed to know everything about her when she knew nothing at all about him, not even—until he had appeared in her window—that he existed. She’d never seen him before, and yet, no older than she, here he was strolling around Heaven's Hill just as he pleased, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm, opening and closing doors and windows as if he owned the place and were checking it over to be sure that all was well.
She struggled for leverage. “I bet Aunt Ma doesn’t even know you’re over here.”
He ignored this challenge as well and took her hand, tugging with his scratchy red mitten. “Come look. It's snowing.”
“I know!” She saw from the beginning that he would try to take control of the relationship if she didn’t resist.
His floppy black rubber galoshes, the tops wrapped twice around his ankles, left rippled white treads on the floor as he herded her to the window and gestured outside, past the gray mottled branches of the old sycamore that reached long arms toward her room, arms made even more ghostly because of their cape of snow. “Grandpa Tat knows when snow's coming,” he said. “He feels it in his cut-off leg. And look at it come!”
Despite her huffy “I know!” Noni had never before seen this much snow. When her father had kissed her goodnight, the lightest flurries had just started and he had predicted they would never stick, but now there was at least a foot on the ground and snow was still falling. Whiteness everywhere made the dark brighter than moonlight. White sparkles floated, flying in all directions, up into the night and down to settle on the lawn and fields and woods of Heaven's Hill as far as she could see. Everything familiar to her—shrubbery, urns and fences, cars, brick garden walls and rows of outbuildings—all were changed by the snow into a wonderful strangeness.
Under the window she and the boy kneeled on the hope chest that had been her mother's and her grandmother's. Side by side they looked silently at the snow falling. After a while, he stood on the chest to lean out the window. “Be careful,” she said. “That's my hope chest.”
This aroused his curiosity and he bent to examine the highly varnished wood. “What you do? Write your hopes down and stick them in there?”
She giggl
ed. While she’d never questioned why the chest was called “hope,” she knew it wasn’t for as vivid a reason as he imagined. “No! You save sheets and tablecloths and things for when a girl gets married.”
“Oh.” All interest vanished. He tilted upside down and scooped a handful of snow from the porch roof, deftly squeezed it into a small round ball, and instructed her to take a bite. It was like ice cream but not sweet.
“What's your name?” she asked him as she ate, politely offering her own name first. “I’m Noelle Katherine Tilden, but everybody calls me Noni except my daddy. He calls me Princess. Noelle means Christmas.”
He made a huge show of raising his eyebrows. “My uncle got a cocker spaniel and he named her Princess. That's a dog's name.”
“No it's not.”
He pulled off his red cap, shaking snow into her room. “That's a dog's name.”
Frustrated, she scooped up the ridged snow prints left on the floor by his galoshes and threw them out the opened window, then she jumped up at the window sash, pulling it down, for cold air had filled her room. “You ever heard about Princess Grace?” she asked. She suspected he hadn’t, but he nodded his head indifferently. “Well, she's a movie star and she married a prince. She's my mama's ‘beau ideal.’ That means somebody you think is great. Jackie Kennedy's her other one. My mama's a Gordon. This is my house.”
“I know it. ’Cause my people worked here before you were even born, before your mama was even born. I’m a King. You want to ride on that sled?”
She was outraged by this claim. “King? King of what?”
“You don’t know anything. That's my name, John Montgomery King, but they call me Kaye.”
She felt she had him back now and quickly said that she knew a girl in school named Kay. Kay was a girl's name.
The Last Noel Page 1
