The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

—It's the damn press. I’m telling you, Roland, buy the press. That's where we ought to be putting our campaign money. Buy the press.—

  —Everybody, everybody! Noni's going to dance with her Daddy now. Trisha, where's that photographer? Get him over here. Honey, be careful that Daddy's shoe doesn’t catch in your hem.—

  —God rest you merry, gentlemen! Peace on Earth, ladies!—

  The reception at Heaven's Hill was hosted by Bud Tilden, even though he no longer officially lived here—a fact that was not generally known beyond the inner circle of Moors society. Mrs. Tilden felt that since her (presumably soon to be ex-) husband (although she had taken no steps to divorce him) would be necessarily a part of Noni's wedding, he might as well serve the punch as he had always done at their Christmas Open House, which a dinner reception for two hundred was replacing this year.

  Heaven's Hill looked as if a Renaissance war was about to start on its lawn, where three enormous white tents flew red banners. The tents were resplendent with holly balls and pine garlands and each tent had its own dazzling Christmas tree. Fortunately the tents were heated, since the temperature—guaranteed by the weather report to be in the sixties—had plunged thirty degrees, a breach of promise that had incensed Mrs. Tilden against both God and the local news. But the special heaters worked wonders; so did the fifty cases of champagne and the twenty tables of hot catered food and the band that made up in tempo what it lacked in skill. Drinking, dancing, eating, everyone stayed warm.

  Noni's father was trying to keep up a cheerful appearance. He joked that, thanks to the speed of the band, their father-daughter dance had been more of a fox-gallop than a fox-trot. As he returned her to Roland, he joked that the song they’d danced to, “Love Will Keep Us Together,” had said the opposite of what was going to happen, hadn’t it? Love—her marriage to Roland—was going to keep the Princess and her father apart.

  “No it's not, Daddy. I’ll come see you all the time.”

  “Oh sure.” He kissed her cheek and that was the last time she saw him at the party.

  After Bud Tilden (hoping for the best) watched his daughter dance with her new husband, he walked over to find the Fairleys, to offer to roll Tatlock across the lawn in his wheelchair whenever he and Amma were ready to go.

  Tatlock had been having a wonderful time drinking champagne, eating jumbo shrimp by the dozen, and having conversations with a variety of guests, including two lawyers with whom he had discussed possible legal cases against the V.A. hospital (for amputating his leg) and against Algonquin Village Condos (for stealing his ancestral home). But Amma was tired. The Fairleys and Kaye had been the only black guests at the reception, and that hadn’t felt very comfortable. Plus, it had been wearing to worry about Noni, about Kaye, about Bud and Judy Tilden, about the mess the caterers were making of her kitchen at Heaven's Hill and the slowness of their service and the mediocrity of their cooking. She wanted to go home and go to bed.

  —Kaye, you avoiding me?—

  —Kind of am, Dr. Hurd. Sorry.—

  —What's the problem?—

  —It's a little personal.—

  —Everybody, everybody! Noni and Roland are going to cut the cake now. No, honey, cut from here first.—

  —Peace on Earth, Bunny! Hey, listen, you’re the economist. How can we be in a recession and an inflation at the same time? —

  —I’d tell you, Mister Tilden, but if I don’t go take off these shoes, they’ll have to use a blowtorch on them.—

  Bud Tilden was about to leave too, when he saw Noni walk over to where Kaye was standing alone beside one of the Christmas trees decorating the tent. Noni was clearly asking him to dance with her—a fast dance. At first Kaye appeared to resist her, but finally Noni pulled him by the hand onto the floor. They spun and turned faster and faster, beautifully together, so smoothly together that they might have been dancing on ice. Noni was smiling and then she was laughing the way she had once laughed as a little baby; Tilden remembered how Noni's baby smile had turned the whole world to sunshine.

  He noticed that Kaye almost never looked back at Noni as they turned and stepped in the complicated patterns they seemed to know so well. And then when the song ended, Kaye simply walked away from her and she stood there alone in the beautiful white satin dress, watching him go. Tilden stepped forward to go to her, but then his little granddaughter Michelle ran over to her, and Noni leaned sweetly down and picked up her niece and danced her around the floor.

  Tilden felt suddenly so tired he had to sit down in one of the little white wooden chairs with their white satin bows. He wanted to go home and listen to his old records. Today, for Noni's sake, he had been without alcohol longer than at any time in the past twenty years, and he didn’t like the feeling.

  He was terrified that his daughter had married the wrong man. Why hadn’t he helped her say no, why hadn’t he done more? How sad to think he had failed her, failed them all, would go on failing them, how sad. Tilden lit a cigarette, reached for an opened bottle of champagne on the table beside him, poured himself a glass.

  —Hey, I’m with you, Wade. Why bomb Cambodia, why bomb Laos, whoever heard of them? Let's bomb the damn Arabs next time they cut off our oil! Thirty-five cents a gallon one day and it doubles the next!—

  —You being sarcastic, Dr. Hurd? Because I seriously don’t want a fifty-five mile-an-hour speed limit.—

  —No, I’m seriously with you, Wade! Hell, I go fifty-five miles an hour in my own driveway!—

  —Everybody, everybody! Noni's going to throw her garter now. No, honey, turn around and throw it over your shoulder. —

  Wade and his wife Trisha wanted to go home because they’d been insulted. Their exhausted, over-stimulated daughter had had a temper tantrum, and Trisha had heard Bunny Breckenridge say that the child looked like something out of The Exorcist.

  —Oh, Judy, I thought that was a sex thing, the Peter Principle, like fear of flying. You know, you keep getting guys with bigger and bigger ones until you can’t—

  —Becky, if I ever thought you meant a word you say, I’d, well, I just don’t know what I’d do.—

  —Roland, do you know how lucky you are?—

  —’Course I do, Dad. Take it easy.—

  —Everybody, everybody! Noni's going to throw the bouquet now. No, honey, wait, let the girls get in position. Where in the world is Bunny, doesn’t she want to get married next?!—

  Roland wanted to go, not home, but to the airport so that he and his new bride could fly to St. John's, to the Bitter End Yacht Club, and sit on the beach and drink champagne. (Drinking champagne was what Roland was doing at the moment, in fact he could barely walk, and Noni could scarcely understand what he was saying about how they would soon be drinking champagne on the patio of their tropical honeymoon cottage.) He hummed in Noni's ear as they danced in the huge heated tent: “They long to be dah dah de de close to you.”

  She was thinking that all she had to do was figure out how to make Roland so happy that he wouldn’t need that extra drink. Her mother hadn’t figured it out because she hadn’t loved Bud Tilden enough. But Noni had enough love to save Roland, didn’t she?

  —Everybody! Everybody! Noni and Roland are leaving now!—

  —Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!—

  —Congratulations!—

  Kaye didn’t want to go home because he didn’t want to think about the day, didn’t want to sort out his feelings about Noni's marrying Roland. He decided that instead he would go back to campus, to the medical school where he had a friend who worked nights in one of the autopsy labs. Dissecting bodies didn’t bother Kaye at all; he liked it. But dissecting his response to Noni's marriage, pulling back layers of his emotional skin and muscle, probing nerves, that prospect was so daunting that, rather than begin it, he told himself, as he’d told Bunny Breckenridge a few minutes earlier, that he didn’t care.

  “It's nothing to do with me,” he’d told Bunny. “Okay, it's a little worrying our friend just married a jerk,
that's all, no big deal.”

  “Talk about jerks,” Bunny had said and left him standing at the center of the tent, staring at the sparkling Christmas tree.

  Now he heard the motor and the tires of the limousine on the pebbled drive as Noni was driven away with Roland. Suddenly, that wave that Kaye dreaded came out of nowhere and knocked him down and he couldn’t pretend everything was fine.

  Mrs. Tilden suddenly appeared beside him and put her hand on his arm. It struck him that she had never touched him before. Kaye noticed that she still wore both her engagement diamond and her wedding ring although she had moved Bud Tilden out of her house. “Merry Christmas,” she told him. “And thank you for coming, Montgomery. You’ve always been a special friend to Noni and you must be so glad to see her looking so happy and so in love.”

  “I hope so.” Kaye kept looking down at the woman's hand until she removed it.

  “Hope so? We are all just crazy about Roland.”

  “Are you?” He said this in that unsettling matter-of-fact way that so infuriated Mrs. Tilden—as if he were deliberately but unprovably accusing her of lying. Once, years ago, she had told him to take down an antiwar banner he’d hung from a Clayhome window—which was, after all, her property— because the banner was an insult to her son Gordon who had chosen to fight for his country. In just the same way, Kaye had responded, “Did he?”

  He said it again now. “Are you? All of you are crazy about Roland?” And he walked away from her.

  But, a flush rising in her pale freckled face, Mrs. Tilden followed Kaye to the edge of the tent where she silently handed him the small piece of wedding cake she carried. Then she smiled. “Would you like some wedding cake? To remember the day.”

  He looked into her eyes and kept looking. Mrs. Tilden's pale blue eyes were at the same time desperate and triumphant and cruel.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I’ll remember the day.”

  Kaye walked off into the dark with the walk Noni used to call his “Philly strut,” walked out of the heated wedding tent and across the cold winter lawn of Heaven's Hill.

  The Sixth Day of Christmas

  December 25, 1979

  The Silver Trophy

  Nineteen seventy-nine was a hard year for everyone.

  Hard on Noni's mother. Only three years since their wedding and Noni had already left Roland Hurd. That was a shock to Mrs. Tilden, although she remained confident that she and Doctor Jack could persuade her daughter to return to her husband.

  Bud Tilden's recent heart attack was also a shock, especially hearing about it not from Bud himself but from Kaye King, who’d happened to see Noni's father being discharged from the hospital. Kaye drove him home to Algonquin Village, and then came to Heaven's Hill to tell them about it.

  The heart attack was apparently mild, but Mrs. Tilden nevertheless was flooded with the commiseration of her friends, who emphasized how easily she might have lost Bud forever. While it could be said that, having evicted him from their home three years earlier, Bud Tilden was already lost to her, he was still legally and socially her husband, and all the public sympathy she received actually made Mrs. Tilden feel as if his death would have been a devastating blow. She didn’t ask him to move back in, but she didn’t proceed with the divorce either.

  Having left Roland, Noni was staying at Heaven's Hill, which never seemed to change, no matter who came or went. The married Noni's room looked much the same as it had when she was a child there. So did the married Wade's room (of course the hidden drug paraphernalia and pornographic magazines were gone). Even the long dead Gordon's room hadn’t changed. Nor had Bud Tilden's den, except that all his records of the old timers singing sadly about love had been replaced on the shelves by his wife's collection of mechanical music boxes, and all his matched sets of the Great Books were also gone. But his vinyl photo albums were still there—thirty-five of them—as if he’d done an album for each year of his and his wife's married life, except that every album was as randomly helter-skelter as the first had been.

  Sometimes Mrs. Tilden thought she would make it her project to tear out all the photos, programs, tickets, and souvenirs, and put them in chronological order, beginning with the old sepia daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century Gordons picnicking in Tuscany in top hats and lace umbrellas, and ending with little Michelle's seventh birthday party at Disney world.

  But the task overwhelmed her; each page was like a disjointed nightmare into which it exhausted her to try to read meaning. For example, on the last page of the last album her husband had glued all the photos of Judy Tilden herself, had pasted her life into a chaotic jumble—Judy in a wedding dress, Brownies uniform, baby-doll pajamas, cap and gown, poodle skirt, horse-show outfit, swimsuit with a racing number, Givenchy strapless formal, bathrobe when she’d been too depressed after Gordon died even to put her clothes on, and in the middle of them all, her earliest naked baby picture, lying helpless on her back like a turtle.

  Bud Tilden had taken only books and records with him when he left, not these albums nor his basketball trophies, which still filled the same shelves, just as the same family Christmas ornaments crowded the branches of the enormous spruce tree. Just as the same five red stockings hung by brass holders on the living room mantle and were still beautifully embroidered with the words BUD, JUDY, GORDON, WADE, NOELLE.

  Judy Tilden had never discussed tough times with her maid, but 1979 had been hard on Amma Fairley, too.

  Amma's daughter Deborah, Kaye's mother, had died the previous summer from a rapidly critical pneumonia. On Kaye's last visit, shortly before her death, his mother had been well but tired and withdrawn; he couldn’t persuade her even to discuss leaving her sister Hope's house and moving down to North Carolina where Kaye could help care for her. Two months later she was in the hospital; after three days there she was dead.

  Kaye flew with Amma to Philadelphia where he caused a scene at the hospital, accusing the staff of homicidal negligence and threatening a lawsuit. But in his heart he thought his mother had just given up fighting. And fighting had always been her reason for living.

  He brought her ashes back South and put some in a small alabaster case in the shoebox called “The Promised Land.” The rest he drove to Alabama where he sprinkled them off the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma; it was from that city that Deborah King had been so proud to march with Dr. King to Montgomery. Kaye watched her ashes float down into the river from the middle of the bridge where Alabama state troopers had long ago beaten Selma marchers with clubs and the world had seen them do it. Kaye let himself cry because no one could hear him. People in cars rushing by stared at the man on the bridge, but they couldn’t see his tears.

  While in Alabama, Kaye attempted to locate his father through the one photograph he had of the young protest marcher. He wasn’t successful, but he hired a private investigator to continue the search.

  In the autumn, Kaye had a call from the investigator telling him that his father's name was Joe Wesley, that he’d been drafted and that he had died in an ambush in the Mekong Delta. He’d been twenty-five, which meant he’d been only seventeen or eighteen when he’d fathered Kaye. The man returned the photograph, which Kaye put with his mother's ashes in the shoebox.

  Amma's other daughter Hope and Hope's family left Philadelphia and moved to California, looking for work. Amma never saw them.

  At home, Amma had been having troubles with Tatlock as well. Warned by his V.A. doctor for years about the dangers of his diet, he still blamed that doctor when he lost his other leg to diabetes. His convalescence was long and cantankerous. Amma's own medical bills, for she had to have cataract surgery, had forced her to borrow from Kaye's savings. (It had never occurred to Judy Tilden to provide Amma—who had worked for her family for almost half a century—with health insurance or social security or even a week's paid vacation.)

  When the Fairleys’ old Dodge gave out for good, Amma said she was starting to feel about the same. Even with the furnace heat in Clayhome tur
ned down to fifty-two, she couldn’t pay the bills. In a single year, oil prices had gone up 50 percent and inflation in the U.S. was high. For warmth, Amma kept a fire going with wood that two of her brothers had split for her from fallen oak and pine trees in the forests of Heaven's Hill. When Wade Tilden heard what they were doing, he told his mother that she ought to charge Amma for the wood—firewood cost a hundred fifty dollars a cord—but Mrs. Tilden wondered what people would think if she did that to her Aunt Ma after all these years. Noni said she was stunned that Wade would even think of it, much less say it.

  Noni had had a miscarriage in the spring.

  Nineteen seventy-nine was a hard year on everyone.

  On Christmas Day, smoke floated up out of the chimney of Clayhome and mixed with snow floating down.

  From Tatlock's bass to a grandchild's treble, a dozen voices sang “Happy Birthday, dear Kayyy-yuh, Happy Birthday to you.”

  When the Clayhome door opened, the song reached Noni as she crossed the white lawn, pulling her niece Michelle on the red sled. She saw Kaye's old friend Parker retrieving an ice cooler from under the house's eaves. It was the first she’d known that Parker had been released from Dollard Prison. This had been his second stay there in seven years; he’d been sent back for violating parole after his first incarceration. Parker was a Muslim now and wore an embroidered fez. Years of weightlifting in prison had changed his once skinny body into bulky, oddly bunched muscles as if he’d been injected with plastic that had hardened in clumps.

  Noni waved at Parker and he shouted back, “Hey there, Disco Lady!” (Years ago, she had gone to a party that Kaye had given at the Indigo Club. There she’d done the Hustle with Parker, who ever since had called her Disco Lady, or Disco Duchess, or some variation thereof.)