“He liked you a lot.”
“I liked him too. So, I guess you heard…” Kaye made a face, pointed at Clayhome.
All of a sudden Noni wasn’t sure if she should mention Kaye's mother's hospitalization. His loss was oddly more complicated, more private, than hers. Anxiety heated her hands and face as she fought to find the right words. “Aunt Ma told me you were going to stay down in Moors and go to school here and you probably wish you weren’t but maybe it won’t be so bad.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, it will.”
She felt for a moment defeated by his certainty. Then affection rushed through her. “Kaye, I’m so sorry about what happened to your mother.”
He nodded, looking away until he gained control, then he spoke in the tone that Noni came to think of as his Philadelphia voice, the voice of the alien place called “the Street,” the place that excluded her. “Well, my mama always said, ‘You fight Whitey, he’ll take you out. Jail you, shoot you, bomb you, drug you.’ That's how they got her.”
Noni wanted to protest that all whites wouldn’t do those things, but she thought she might offend him. Instead she asked, “Don’t they think your mother’ll get better?”
He shrugged again. “¿Qué se?” Then he shook himself, literally shook himself free of memory, and smiled ironically, holding out the candy. “Well, I’m not here empty-handed.”
She took the tissue-wrapped bag. “Thank you.”
For a while they both looked at the porch floor. He noticed that she wore boots and it occurred to him that maybe they added to her height. High white boots with white tights on her thin legs and a lime green miniskirt as short as summer shorts, and over it a bulky red sweater that had Christmas trees knitted across the front. To his surprise, she had cut her blonde hair short, like the girl in Rosemary's Baby, and she was wearing makeup, at least black eyeliner and black mascara.
Finally, with a trace of his old flamboyance, he pointed at her head. “What happened to your hair? Get caught in a lawn mower?”
She looked at him for a minute, and then suddenly relaxing, grinned back. “What happened to yours?” She felt happy that he’d challenged her in that aggravating manner. “Your hair's as big as…as…a beach ball.”
He twisted the psychedelic peace symbol pinned on his headband. “A beachball? You think Philly's on the beach? You think I even know what a beachball is?”
“It's a big round rubber ball as big as your hair.”
“You ever see a black beach ball?” He crossed his arms and grinned at her with that irrepressible ebullience. “You ever hear a beachball say, ‘Shout it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!’? You ever hear that?”
“No.” Her smile widened.
“Who are you suppose to be anyhow—Twiggy?”
She mimicked his comic exaggeration, crossing her own arms as she said, “I am supposed to be me, myself, and I!”
All at once they both burst into laughter in the old way, as they’d laughed on the sled the night they’d first met.
It was at this moment that Noni's seventeen-year-old brother Wade, wearing his gray cadet's uniform from his military school, slammed out of the front door and, shoving his way between them, snarled, “I’m getting the hell out of Munster Lodge.”
Wade Tilden looked like his mother; he had her milky skin dotted everywhere with red freckles and her strawberry blond hair—although his was almost shaved. He was tall with dangling arms and his tight gray jacket was covered with gold braid and brass buttons sticking out from his thin chest in flat straight rows. Ignoring Kaye completely, he added with a casual belligerence, “Noni, you don’t want to wake up dead, tell Mom I went to see 2001. They’re just looking for any excuse to treat me like a dumb baby.” Wade was pretending to be going to the local movie theater, when in fact he and his friends were driving his new Mustang to Charlotte three hours away to attend a rock concert.
Alarmed, Noni pleaded with her brother. “Mom said you couldn’t go to Charlotte. Please, Wade, don’t upset her.”
“If she doesn’t get off my back, I’m joining the fuckin’ Army! Maybe I can get myself killed like perfect old Gordon. Maybe if I’m dead I can catch a break from those two!” Wade shouted this at the closed front door.
Mrs. Tilden, having lost her older son Gordon to friendly fire in the Tet Offensive, lived in terror that freakish violence would rob her of her younger boy as well. Had it been possible, she would have kept Wade by her side waking and sleeping, locked away from the risks of life. Nothing frightened her more than his new driver's license. Their embattled negotiations over the Mustang that Judy's father, the bank president R.W. Gordon, had ridiculously bought his grandson (as a bribe to finish school) were as prolonged and labyrinthine as a war treaty, with peace never coming closer.
“Just keep Mom off my back before I kill her and you both.” Wade repeated the warning without affect or without elaborating on how his twelve-year-old sister was supposed to accomplish this urgent task.
Kaye stood there, still invisible to Wade. He could tell that the way Wade ignored him was embarrassing Noni. So he walked away, over to one of the green rockers on the porch, and sat down in it. Kaye had always felt a physical dislike of Wade; it was as instinctive as the affection he’d felt toward Noni's other brother, the older Gordon. While over the years he’d encountered Gordon no more than half-a-dozen times, his memories of him were warm and rich.
Gordon had once told Kaye he “was taking a slow soul train to freedom,” and by his last year at college had quit his fraternity, grown his blond hair down to his shoulders, started playing the harmonica, and stopped wearing shoes. Kaye could remember seeing Gordon's long dirty white feet hopping warily over the icy lawn to untangle the Tildens’ old setter Royal Charlie from a prickly holly bush. He could remember the wry sweetness with which Gordon had winked at him once, making him feel grown-up and smart, as the college senior had been arguing about the Vietnam War with his nasty-tempered grandfather, R.W. Gordon, in the Tildens’ driveway. The old man had shouted at him, with his typical coarseness, “Don’t shit where you sleep, boy. You know how rich I am?”
Gordon had smiled, winking at Kaye. “Depends on what you mean by rich, Grandpa. Martin Luther King's the richest man I know.”
Listening now to Wade whining at Noni, Kaye was thinking that it was Wade, not Gordon, they should have named after the bank president, for Wade far more resembled R.W. Gordon in both his irascible personality and rigid politics than his gentle older brother ever had.
Two years ago, Kaye had heard from Noni about how Gordon had gone off to fight a war he didn’t believe in because Mrs. Tilden had made it clear that serving his country was expected of someone with the Gordon name. It was too bad, Kaye was thinking, it was a real shame that it had been Gordon and not Wade on whom a bomb had landed out of the Asian sky back in February.
As if Wade had overheard this thought, he abruptly wheeled around in Kaye's direction. “Hey, Sly,” he said, “why don’t you just make yourself at home on my porch?”
Noni said, “Wade!”
Kaye rocked with exaggerated contentment in the green rocker. “Thanks, I will.”
“If you’re looking for your Aunt Yolanda, she's inside serving our guests.”
Noni said, “Wade, stop it!”
Kaye stood up, staring at Wade, grinned as he extended his middle finger, and then slowly turned his hand and formed the peace sign. “Mustang Sally, I’m just here to date your sister.”
Noni said, “Kaye!”
Fists tight, Wade lunged toward him. Kaye raised his own fists and grinned, “Come on.”
But just then the door opened and Judy Tilden's head leaned out, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back by a burgundy velvet headband that matched her short burgundy velvet dress and burgundy satin pumps. She ignored Kaye and Noni both. “Wade, I need to speak to you for just a minute, sweetheart, right now.” Her head disappeared. The military cadet spun around, his face enflamed with rage as he slammed
into the hall after her. “Great! What did I do wrong this time?!”
A little while later Wade stormed back outside and bolted down the porch stairs. Noni now sat in the swing that was hung by chains from a high bough on a huge oak near the driveway. Standing behind her, Kaye pushed on the wooden seat. Noni was laughing with her hands over her mouth.
Wade growled, “What's so funny?”
She shook her head, laughed harder and harder.
Wade picked up river pebbles from the driveway and gratuitously hurled them at the two doves sitting, as usual, in the dogwood near the house. Then Noni and Kaye watched as he flung himself into his Mustang and went squealing away fishtailing, tires spitting gravel behind him, unaware of the stickers on either side of his front bumper—IMPEACH NIXON and STOP THE WAR.
Noni couldn’t stop laughing. “Asshole,” Kaye said, mimicking Wade's furious stomping around the yard flinging pebbles.
“Don’t make me laugh, or I’ll, I’ll…”
“Pee?”
“Yes!” She couldn’t believe she’d admitted that. She ran off and left him. When she returned, he got off the swing and sat her back down in it. Pushing hard with her feet, she began to pull herself back and forth.
Kaye grabbed both chains. “Hang on!” He hauled the swing back, further and further, high over his head, as high as it could go, until Noni was almost tilted out of the seat. “Kaye, stop!”
“Hang on!”
Then Kaye pushed hard, running forward as fast as he could. Noni felt his shoulder against her back, and suddenly her body remembered the sharp feel of his bone as he’d raced her down the hill on the red sled so long ago.
Now he was running all the way beneath her swing, pushing her as hard as he could when he ducked beneath. She arced skyward, legs pumping, laughing, free.
In the wide front hall of Heaven's Hill there were willow baskets of poinsettias lining the parquet floor and holly wreaths with plaid bows on the doors. Christmas cards hung from swags of white pine on the banister. Presents from guests had piled up on the green leather bench and on the cherry console. Chocolates in gold boxes, champagne in silver boxes, a camellia in red foil. Noni placed Kaye's candies among the gifts between the little pear tree and the blue antique Chinese jar.
As they moved together toward the living room, Kaye felt himself pulling inward, making himself completely still in the way he had always tried to do whenever confronted with something he wasn’t sure of. He felt Noni sense this tightening as she took his arm. At first he resisted her, but then his muscles relaxed beneath her hand.
Gently she squeezed his arm. “Don’t worry about it if you don’t know anybody. They’re mostly jerks anyhow.”
He mugged in his cocky way. “You’re the worrier. You’re the one hid under the covers the night I met you.”
“I did not.”
“You’re the one was scared to sled down the hill.”
She smiled, happy to feel close to him again in their old joking way. “I was not. You wanted to quit before I did.”
Kaye looked into the living room of Heaven's Hill, smoky and crowded with white people, mostly middle-aged. He wagged his eyebrows, grinning, and spoke again with the bravado of that alien Philadelphia “street” voice. “Hey, long as they don’t sic their dogs on me, long as they don’t call in the Fuzz, they don’t worry me at all.”
“Most people aren’t like you say.” She felt she had to protest. “My parents’ friends aren’t like you say.”
“Sure they are.”
Swarming out of the living room with its tall windows and old Persian rugs rushed a loud hum of laughing voices. Two small children sat at the grand piano banging on the keys until a woman in taffeta bell-bottom pants ran over, slapped them on the hands, and pulled them crying away. Another woman sat down and with one finger began to play “Scarborough Fair.” A man with a plate of little biscuits leaned over and sang in her face, “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.” His red tie said, “Ho Ho Ho,” all over it.
Another man in a shiny plaid jacket ran at a woman shouting, “Here come the judge!”
Kaye noticed that the red velvet wings on the angel atop the fourteen-foot Christmas tree were the same color as Mrs. Tilden's dress. He noticed that hanging from the mantel above the fireplace were five now empty red stockings, five—even though Gordon had been dead for almost a year. He wondered if they had filled Gordon's stocking this year, and if so, who had taken out all his gifts?
Behind a table with curved legs stood Noni's father with his handsome blond head and his son Gordon's soft sweet smile. He sang, “God rest you merry, gentlemen!” and called out “Peace on Earth, Ladies!” over and over as he poured eggnog from a huge scalloped silver bowl into small silver cups and handed them to the men and women buzzing around him. He wore a beautiful dark green jacket, and the color of the jacket matched his soft silk tie. Kaye noticed that Mr. Tilden filled his own cup with bourbon whenever he added more to the punch bowl.
“Hey there, Princess. It's been a hard day's night.”
“I know, Daddy.”
Noni's father pulled her under his arm and kissed her hair as he reached to shake Kaye's hand. “Hey there, Kaye! Peace and brotherhood, man.”
“Peace and brotherhood, Mr. T.” The boy noticed the beautiful gold wristwatch Tilden always wore and then saw a swollen scab on his wrist; there was a red streak running from the sore up under his shirt cuff. Kaye pointed at it. “Something looks bad on your hand.”
Laughing, Noni's father pulled up his cuff and showed a red streak following the veins of his arm. “Unscrewing a light bulb and it broke off.” He handed eggnog to a tall thin homely faced man in a pearl gray Nehru jacket listening to their conversation with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. “Hey, Jack, let me light your fire.”
Tilden reached toward him with his silver lighter but the skinny man brushed it aside, then took the swollen hand and pulled it close to his face. Tilden winced when he poked at the sore and told him, “Bud, this kid's right. You got blood poisoning here that’ll be headed straight for your heart if you don’t look after it. I’m giving you a prescription for antibiotics. Start taking them tomorrow.”
“Oh sure.”
The homely man turned to Noni. “And you, kid, you’re anemic. Eat more spinach.” Grinning, he pulled forward a tall, well-built teenaged boy standing bored beside him in a blue blazer and striped tie. “And will you tell my son the jock here to treat me with a little more respect? I’m a doctor, for Christ sake!”
Noni smiled shyly at the older teenager. “Hi, Roland.”
“Tell him,” nudged the thin man.
“Treat your dad with a little more respect. He's a doctor.”
The handsome boy grinned, brushing back his black curls, looking her over. “Sure thing, whatever you say, Noni.”
Noni explained as she and Kaye moved on through the crowd. “That was my godfather, Jack Hurd.”
“And his son the jock.”
“Roland's okay. Doctor Jack delivered me. He calls himself my ‘Deliverer.’ He's nice. He runs OB/GYN at the medical school.”
Kaye wasn’t precisely sure what the letters OB/GYN stood for, and would be certain to check them out later. “Infections can go straight to your heart,” he told her. “Your daddy better be careful.”
“I know.” Noni led Kaye into the crowd. “My mom met Doctor Jack in college before she met my dad. She said Doctor Jack wasn’t her type. He was a Roanoke Scholar; that's the best thing you can be at that university. They pay everything for you.”
“Who, your dad?”
“No, Doctor Jack. My dad played basketball. That's the real best thing you can be. You’re not tall, or you could try it.”
“I’m planning to be tall, lot taller than you,” he told her. “But not so I can jump around swatting at orange rubber balls.” Kaye took a handful of peanuts from a silver bowl. “I’m not gonna sing, I’m not gonna jump, run, grin, Watusi, I’m not gonna jive.”
A girl near them said, “Right on. Me either.”
Noni introduced Kaye to the girl, her school friend Bunny Breckenridge, plump and colorful in a yellow muumuu with six strings of bright beads around her neck and ostrich feathers hanging awkwardly from her wild frizzy light brown hair. Bunny felt the braid on Kaye's embroidered vest. “Holy shit, Jimi Hendrix, hunh? Cool.”
“You too,” Kaye pointed at the girl's feathers, thinking she looked a little like Mama Cass and that she had smart eyes and that she at least had recognized a Jimi Hendrix record cover when she met one. “Bunny, hunh? Is that your real name?”
“I know, isn’t it stupid? But my real name is Bernice and that's not any better. So, Kaye, Noni talks about you all the time.”
“I do not!’
While the three stood there, Kaye saw his Aunt Yolanda in a white uniform making her way through the room, holding out to guests her tray of deviled eggs with their tiny Christmasy bits of red and green peppers on top. Yolanda noticed but did not acknowledge Kaye. Embarrassed for them both, he led Noni away from Bunny, across the room toward the blazing lights of the extravagant tree.
Some of the guests, he saw, were looking askance at a black youngster moving through the crowd with his Afro and red embroidered vest, arm in arm with Noni Tilden. But most were too busy trying to talk to each other over the noise to pay much attention. Their conversations floated past him.
—Who is that boy with Noni? —
—His folks work here. You know, Judy's Aunt Ma?—
—The one that does those pretty things with the sunflowers? I love those.—
—Don’t let Bud Tilden tell you anything except how to make a good martini.—
—God rest you merry, gentlemen!—
Talk on the silk couches and brocaded chairs drifted by:
—Judy's doing it. It's called aerobics.—
—Well, that little Bunny Breckenridge ought to try it. How can her mother let her eat those eclairs, look at her! Is it the same as jogging?—
—Sort of, but you don’t go anywhere.—
The Last Noel Page 4
