On either side of the choir stall the four small Christmas trees, completely bare of any decoration, looked perfect. The violins and trumpets were playing Purcell, and every pew was happily filled, everyone a sharer in today's love.
Except Kaye, who would not smile at her.
In the vestibule, Dr. Fisher was telling Noni that they had had some sad times together at St. John's. Nodding, Noni looked into the church. At the end of the center aisle was the gold-filigreed rail in front of which she had seen the coffins of the dead, most recently that of her maternal grandfather, the bank president R.W. Gordon, who had died of a stroke back in May. But this man had been so bad-tempered that Noni had cried at his funeral only because her mother had been crying; certainly not because she was going to miss a horrible old bigot who’d yanked at her hair and pinched her arms in an excess of affection whenever he went past her and who’d told her she was his favorite grandchild and that her brothers ought to be drowned, as if he’d thought she would happily agree that they should do away with her brothers.
For Noni, the only unbearable coffin had been the one draped with the American flag, her brother Gordon's, that rainy February afternoon eight long years ago. Gordon's coffin, that had buried so much of their family with it in the wet red ground.
Reverend Fisher was squeezing her hands. “But happy times, too, Noni?” Pointing at the worn white marble baptism font near the doors, he recounted once again how as a baby Noni had grabbed the baptismal candle right out of his hand when he’d held it up to her, telling her to behold the light of Christ. She didn’t remember the moment, of course, but had always liked that adventurous image of herself snatching greedily for illumination.
Now she looked up the length of the church at that familiar nave, at the altar cushions on which she would soon kneel. When they were confirmed, she and her friend Bunny Breck-enridge had knelt there, struggling not to giggle as the bishop pressed his hands fiercely onto their heads, crushing their garlands of daisies and pink sweetheart roses. Today, Bunny, the maid of honor, and all the bridesmaids made a bouquet of red roses in their crimson taffeta dresses. Today, Noni felt that she was like a white camellia at their center.
“Today,” Dr. Fisher was saying as he kissed her on the head, “today will be the happiest day of all. I wouldn’t have missed this day for the world. Now I can retire.” Dr. Fisher was in fact retiring in the spring, to be replaced by a younger priest (practically handpicked by Judy Tilden, chair of the calling committee). But Dr. Fisher's step was bouncy today as he left Noni to join the groom.
A few minutes later he hurried out from the side vestry door to the front of the altar. Beside him stood the best man, a Haver University Kappa Delta whom Noni had never much liked. And then, into a paradise of red roses, stepped Roland Hurd, smiling, his eyes as blue as heaven, waiting for Noelle Katherine Tilden to come walking with her father up this aisle to him.
Today, two days after her birthday, the day after Christmas (Boxing Day, Mrs. Tilden liked to call it), St. John's was still festive with its holiday decorations and was now also luminous with hundreds of white candles glowing on banks of red roses and white camellias. Flowers and evergreens were heaped upon window ledges and choir stalls and edged along both sides of the aisle up which Noni was just about to walk with her father. Noni's mother had designed the wedding and chosen the day as an especially good date, not only for a wedding but also for a large wedding reception to follow, for everyone was home for the holidays and almost everyone at leisure. All Noni had picked was the music, and even then Mrs. Tilden had insisted on Mendelssohn's “Wedding March,” which she felt was really the only appropriate piece of music to which a young woman should walk down a church aisle. The violin and cello were playing Fauré's Pavane as the last guests found their seats, and Noni was wondering if Kaye were listening to the violin, wondering if he ever wished he hadn’t so long ago stopped playing that instrument himself.
Bud Tilden smiled at her. He was handsome in his gray cutaway and his smile was sweet, although a little sad. Noni's father lived alone now, in Algonquin Village, the new stucco condominiums near the new shopping mall. He and Noni's mother had separated. Last August, Mrs. Tilden had asked for the separation, after she’d found out about her husband's (actually long-ended) affair with his secretary, whom she’d mistaken for an ally, or at least a nonentity: the woman hadn’t even been that attractive; her only asset was kindness. Or maybe, Noni thought, her mother had known all along about her father's affair, but had been waiting until after the woman had moved away from Moors (as the woman had done), or she’d been waiting for R.W. Gordon to die before taking any public step, fearing to risk his disapproval. She certainly had not told her father, or anyone else in Moors, about the affair, and in fact almost no one knew.
R.W. Gordon finally had died of a stroke, as everyone had impatiently predicted he would for decades, because of his apoplectic tirades. Most of his fits had been against blacks who didn’t know their place—presumably slavery—and against the Supreme Court justices who had stirred them up, against hippies’ hair and the draft-dodging socialists who’d destroyed Nixon, against women's-righters. (When Noni had first heard him use this phrase she had thought that it was women writers who had so enraged her grandfather, and she had asked him if he realized that George Eliot—whose Silas Marner he’d so preferred to “the crap being written today”—was a woman.)
In any case, three months after his father-in-law's death, Bud Tilden quietly moved out of Heaven's Hill, which Judy had inherited (conditionally). She had also acquired (conditionally) a great deal of bank stock (Moors Bank was now a branch of a large chain), and newspaper stock and rental properties and her mother's jewelry and her mother's trust fund. Judy Tilden was now a wealthy woman.
To Wade's dismay, the real surprise of the will had been how much Grandpa Gordon had left Noni. On Judy Tilden's death, Noni would inherit the furnishings of Heaven's Hill, as well as the use of the house and land itself during her lifetime, after which Heaven's Hill would go to any living male heir of her body. If Noni never married, the house and land would go to Noni's brother Wade or to any sons of his. As for Mr. Gordon's own house in the country, and its two hundred acres of rolling fields and riverbank, the bank president did leave that to Wade, with the terse instruction in his will, “Make something of it.”
This house, named Abbotsford by Mr. Gordon (a fan of Sir Walter Scott), was a huge, ugly fake chateau with conical towers, mansard roofs, and Greek Revival porches; he had built it in 1950 for his wife, who hadn’t liked it. But then, Judy Tilden's mother hadn’t liked much of anything subsequent to the night when she’d danced with Charles Lindbergh at her debutante's ball. Wade Tilden had immediately moved into the house with his family and begun making something of it, by turning it into the centerpiece of a gated community he christened Gordon's Landing. With his new partner (Trisha's brother), Wade began dredging the river behind the house to build a marine landing for the luxury homes he planned to cluster about the two hundred acres. Wade's earlier subdivision, on which investors had lost a great deal of money when lawsuits forced them into bankruptcy, consisted of two streets of small cheap houses that looked as if they were going to fall apart, and which had done so. Gordon's Landing would be big, expensive houses that wouldn’t look that way.
Wade had not spoken to his father since a fight in which he’d blamed Bud Tilden for breaking his mother's heart—to which charge Tilden had replied, “I don’t want to be unfair to your mom. Why don’t we say Life did the breaking? To both of us.”
“Just shut up, Dad. You don’t make sense.”
“I have the same feeling, son. I’m sorry.”
“Calling me son is a joke. You had one son, Gordon, and he's dead. Unless you’re counting Kaye Wonder Boy King as number two.”
“I’m sorry, Wade. I haven’t been much help to you.”
“You want to help? Stay out of our lives.”
And Tilden had pretty much done that. For
example, he no longer worked at the bank. The new president, from Dallas, had never watched Bud Tilden winning basketball games for Haver, much less been his father-in-law; he fired him after a few months of watching him wander around the new building, quietly talking to himself. But Tilden had always had many friends in Moors, recipients of his hospitality at Heaven's Hill. Three of those friends owned Algonquin Village. They had made him sales manager there and given him a very nice model condominium in which to live. Although he didn’t like the condos, he actually did very well selling them. Not only were his manners lovely and his athletic fame lingering, but he seemed to care so little whether people bought the units or not that they assumed they would be getting fantastic deals if they did so.
Noni's father and her brother were both standing in the vestibule with her waiting to enter the church, but Wade was acting as if he’d never met Bud Tilden and never wanted to.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here…”
As she waited, Noni kept saying these words like a prayer, over and over. “Dearly beloved. Gathered together.” All her life it had felt as if she were trying to gather her beloveds together, trying to lift them all in her arms at once, as she’d done with her dolls when a child. That was the family story, this picture of little Noni struggling to carry all her dolls at once from place to place, leaving none behind, clutching a dozen or more under her arms and chin and to her chest. But her family had never seemed to realize that she was always trying to do the same thing with them—gather them together. All her life, she had been tugging on their hands to join them, pressing on their faces to make them smile. All her life, trying to please her mother, hiding the empty glasses that set her mother against her father. All her life, hiding Wade's lies, healing the loss of Gordon, making Kaye a sharer in her unearned bounty and privileges (beginning with the night that she’d written his name with hers, NOELLE AND KAYE, on her new sled).
The prayers she had prayed in this church, year by year, kneeling on these cushions, seated in these wood pews, came back to her now. Prayers to be of use, to be good, to be brave, to meet her mother's expectations, prayers for her father, for Gordon's life, for Wade's soul, prayers that Doctor Jack was right and that she could “save” Roland, prayers for the world to give Kaye all he deserved and didn’t trust the world to give him.
If only Kaye smiled at her now, even if just for this one moment, then Noni could feel that she had finally managed it, that she had gathered all her dearly beloveds in her arms and had brought them together here, to this church, to this wedding on this day when she had finally, finally, succeeded in making her mother happy.
Noni peeked out from the vestibule and saw Aunt Ma on the bride's side, in a bright green dress, bent over the pew's back, praying. Nearby, a beaming Tatlock had stationed his wheelchair under the Tiffany stained-glass window of a blue angel welcoming Noni's great-grandmother into heaven. Beside Uncle Tat, Kaye looked anything but welcoming. Dressed in black, head to foot, black tie, black shirt, black suit, Kaye was like a monument to grief in the midst of this celebration of love.
Noni and Kaye—of this she had no doubt—had been from the beginning of their relationship so attuned to each other that she knew that if she stared long and hard enough right now at the back of his head, he would turn around and look at her. She had done it before, had made him turn to her across the width of the Gordon Junior High auditorium, when they had announced the votes for the class presidency, when she had wanted Kaye to see in her face that she knew they had cheated him out of the election.
Finally Kaye did turn around in his pew at St. John's, but when he saw her, the coldness of his face was chilling. It was the same cold face he’d shown her a month ago, the night after her bridal shower, when she had asked him, in tears, “Why are you saying such horrible things?” And he’d told her.
The wedding shower had been on Thanksgiving weekend. Kaye was at Heaven's Hill that afternoon carrying away a half-dozen boxes of food left over from the party. His grandmother Amma had been helping him pack the surplus to take to the soup kitchen at her church, but she had left Kaye to finish alone, out of patience with his sarcasm about the wasted cheeses, crudités, dips, patés, pastries, and cakes. Sarcasm like “Who did those twelve skinny women expect to show up here and help them wolf down all this junk—Bangladesh?” And “Those two homeless potheads y’all are putting up at Redeemer A.M.E. gonna love these little quiche Lorraines.” And so on until finally, pulling on her coat, Amma told him to load all the boxes in his car himself and drive them to Redeemer because she wasn’t going to listen to any more of his mess.
Noni was in the yellow living room when she saw Kaye walk through the front hall with a cardboard crate of soft-drink bottles. She was sorting through her shower presents and storing some in the hope chest that had been carried down from her bedroom. Friends and relations and friends of relations had given her a great many pieces of china, crystal, gold, silver, and linens, all of which had been suggested to them on a list prepared by Noni's mother and registered at the best department stores. There was far too much for the small one-bedroom apartment in which Roland and Noni would be living in Princeton, so she was going to leave most of the gifts at home until they moved into their first house.
Kaye stopped in the doorway. “Why don’t you just pack yourself up in that hope chest too, lock it and throw away the key?”
On her knees on the Persian rug, surrounded by lingerie, sheets and tablecloths, candlesticks and coffeemakers, Noni looked up at his hostile face, then turned back to wrapping silver salt and pepper shakers in their gray velvet bags.
“Why don’t you stuff that piano—” He pointed at the black grand Steinway in front of the tall windows. “—In your hope chest too, ’cause you can bet your butt you can kiss that piano good-bye.” (Because of her marriage, Noni had decided to take the spring term off from Curtis Institute of Music, where she had already completed almost half of her four-year program.) “Kiss that B.M. good-bye too. ’Cause B.M.'s exactly what that Bachelor of Music degree's turning into.”
Noni stared at Kaye. He stared back, anger in his face, and she felt a tear on her cheek. Furious at herself for crying, she suddenly shouted at the top of her voice. “Why are you saying such horrible things?”
“’Cause I don’t like what you’re doing to my friend. And I don’t like why you’re doing it. Your mother's manipulated you, and Jack Hurd and his asshole son have manipulated you into this whole thing, and you don’t even know it!”
She shouted again. “I’m just taking a goddamn term off! Two years ago you were telling me to go to Haver. That's where I’m going after I take one goddamn term off!”
“Oh sure,” he nodded, juggling the crate onto his shoulder to open the front door. It was Noni's father's phrase, but in Kaye's mouth its irony was much sharper, quick and hurtful like a paper cut. “Maybe you’ll graduate in time for your fiftieth birthday,” he called over his shoulder.
She yelled after him, “We can’t all be king-shit from turd-ville genius Roanoke Scholars like you!” (By adding to his courses and going during the summers, Kaye had sped so quickly through Haver that he was already a senior and taking a graduate course at the medical school.) She ran after him into the hall. “We can’t all grow up in ghettos and never know our dads.”
“Right. That was so easy. Fuck you.” He slammed the door.
She opened the door behind him and shouted. “Go to hell, you conceited asshole!”
Noni's mother came running downstairs, expecting—she didn’t know what—but some cataclysmic disaster, for Noni had never been known to scream curses in her life. Noni was the one in the family who didn’t shout or fume; she was the peacemaker. So out of the ordinary was the shout that Mrs. Tilden feared that her daughter had for some horrible reason suddenly broken off her engagement to Roland Hurd, less than a month before their very large wedding. Or that Roland Hurd had broken it off for some embarrassing cause, maybe because of Mrs. Tilden'
s separation from her husband. The news that it was only a quarrel with Kaye King was a great relief.
In fact, despite the shock, it was a relief to Judy Tilden that Noni, in tears of rage, was quarreling with Kaye and had called him a “conceited asshole.” For Mrs. Tilden had never stopped having those awful nightmares of a romance between her daughter and her maid's grandson. Indeed, her fear had actually been intensified by Kaye's academic accomplishments, in which she perversely also took a kind of family pride. So it was satisfying to hear that Noni was no longer blind to the young man's insufferable self-assurance. The way Kaye King behaved around Judy Tilden was not the way black people of any age had ever acted around her, much less one so young, and it was, to say the least, discomfiting.
For example, Mrs. Tilden had once gone out of her way to praise Kaye at the Moors High commencement, where he’d won so many plaques, cups, medals, and letters that the Fair-leys were having to carry them home in shopping bags. When she’d walked across the gym lobby to offer her congratulations, Kaye had actually grinned at her with unmistakable mockery and said, “Yep, I’m Sidney Poitier all right and I guess if I get the Nobel Prize, you’ll be Katherine Hepburn.” She wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but she knew it wasn’t flattering and, having seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, she was briefly and irrationally panicked that he meant he’d already secretly married Noni.
So, on this Thanksgiving occasion, having heard Noni curse Kaye, Mrs. Tilden offered up to her daughter the young man's earlier quote about Sidney Poitier, as a way of agreeing that Kaye was a, well, an a-hole, only to have Noni burst out, “Oh, Mom, he's giving you too much credit. I don’t think even the Nobel Prize would do it for you.”
And Noni had then run upstairs, leaving Mrs. Tilden to hope the next month would pass quickly, after which these strange volatile moods of her daughter's would be Roland's problem, not her own.
The Last Noel Page 12
