The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  “Merry Christmas!” she shouted.

  He pointed at the sky. “Snow!” He tilted his head back, stuck his tongue out, and caught snowflakes as they flurried around him. “Free and snow! Life is good!”

  Last week, the week before Christmas, it had snowed four inches and hadn’t melted. Now it had started snowing again, on Christmas Day, for the first time since 1963. But this wasn’t the soft wet thick snow of that memorable storm when drifts had reached two feet high. These were sharp icy little mean snowflakes that bit at the face and lay in a thin sheet on the ground. Noni was outside, with her long scarf wrapped to her nose, pulling the bundled seven-year-old Michelle across the driveway on her old sled, which she’d found behind some stored porch windows. Noni was baby-sitting Michelle for a week and they were going to take a sled ride down the hill. An ardent aunt, she was happy to care for the child. Nor did she have any other particular plans that would interfere.

  Noni had promised Roland and her mother not to file for divorce quickly but to “think about it” a while. In fact, she was trying not to think about it.

  “Please, please, please listen to Judy,” Roland had begged; “Judy” was what he called Mrs. Tilden, his best ally. “Promise me you won’t do anything crazy, Noni. You know I love you.” Then Roland had flown off to Houston to train with a large commercial real estate corporation there.

  Their marriage had lasted only twenty-seven months before the separation—long enough to put an end to Noni's graduating from Haver: complications from the miscarriage had kept her in the hospital during her spring senior term. But not nearly long enough, according to Noni's mother, before her daughter had decided to abandon “a commitment to God made in a church in front of everybody we ever met.” Mrs. Tilden frequently pointed out that she herself “stuck with” her husband Bud for twenty-seven years, not twenty-seven months, and that she herself still hadn’t rushed into a divorce even after three full years of separation.

  Mrs. Tilden had no patience with Noni's plans for divorcing Roland; indeed, she became quite exercised when discussing the matter: “Noelle Hurd, don’t you dare talk to me about your husband's so-called drinking problem after I watched my whole life get poured down the drain with a glass of Kentucky's finest bourbon. Did your husband dive into your swimming pool in a tuxedo at your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and crack his head open in front of everybody you ever met?”

  Noni never answered these outbursts by saying that she’d rather not watch her own life be thrown down the same drain as her mother's, if in fact that's what had happened to her mother's life. She didn’t want to explain how her case might be even worse than her mother's, for her father was a sweet and gentle man, drunk or sober (if she’d ever seen him sober), whereas on the (admittedly infrequent) occasions when Roland drank too much, he changed as abruptly and as roughly as a werewolf in a movie. Noni had often thought back to when she’d told Kaye that werewolves didn’t scare her, because she now knew better.

  The best Mrs. Tilden would ever say was that if Noni had to leave her husband, maybe it was better she’d done it sooner rather than later since sooner she might still be attractive enough to find somebody else.

  And Noni, a tall slender young woman, was attractive. Just turned twenty-three-years old the day before, she had large wide quiet gray-blue eyes and silvery straight blonde hair that she wore pulled back with a ribbon or barrette. Despite two decades of her mother's commands to stand up straight, there was a slight bow to her back, a curving in toward others as she listened or spoke. She had a kind mouth that she thought too wide, just as she thought her nose too long, her breasts too small, her flesh too pale. Noni had been taught to be hard on herself. But in fact people had always thought she was “pretty,” although they were more likely to talk about her “goodness” than her looks. They had always said there was not a mean bone in Noni Tilden's body, that she was always thinking of others, that she was the sweetest soul.

  That was exactly what her sister-in-law Trisha, Wade's wife, had said early this Christmas afternoon, when dropping off Michelle with her suitcase. “Noni, honey, you are the sweetest soul and Michelle that little bitch loves you more than she loves me anyhow, I’m just teasing.”

  Then, after hurrying through their Christmas presents, barely ahead of the snow, Wade and Trisha had flown off to Cancun and taken Mrs. Tilden with them. According to Wade, she (his mother, not his wife) had needed a break. Wade and his mother were very close now and worried all the time about each other's well-being; each thought the other “took on too much.” Mother and son had always looked alike, with their curly strawberry-blonde hair and milky red-freckled skin, but now that Wade had “gotten it together,” they thought and acted alike as well. “Mom's overdoing it,” Wade bragged. It was true that, with her planning board, altar guild, preservation society, garden club, book club, investment club, and yoga, Judy Tilden did keep busy. So busy in fact that she didn’t seem to have time to find a replacement for her husband Bud, or, despite a three-year separation, to find a lawyer to divorce him.

  Both Mrs. Tilden and Wade would have been upset if they’d known that Noni had invited her father over to babysit for Michelle at Heaven's Hill. While he did so, she would make an appearance at a Christmas party that her friend Bunny Breckenridge was giving that evening. Although Noni had presented the baby-sitting to her father as his favor to her, her motive was actually to make it possible for him to spend a little time with Michelle, his only grandchild, for Wade never invited him over to their home in Gordon's Landing.

  This wasn’t the first time Noni had made these secret arrangements for her father to see Michelle. As it happened, the little girl was crazy about her grandfather, who appeared to have all the time in the world for her and, unusual for an adult, absolutely no preoccupations. Sometimes when Tilden visited with Michelle at Heaven's Hill, Noni found them together in Gordon's room. Her father would be sitting in the black Hitchcock rocking chair with the little girl on his lap, reading to her from one of Gordon's children's books that still filled the shelf above his dresser.

  Michelle shrieked with pleasure as she flew on the sled alone down a short, shallow slope. Noni knew that Wade and Trisha would be upset about this sledding too, for life appeared to strike them as a risky business and they tried on their daughter's behalf to avoid as much of it as possible. Also, if Wade and Trisha hadn’t been standing right there beside their Land Rover when Amma Fairley had walked over to invite Noni and Michelle to share Kaye's birthday cake, Noni would have taken her niece to the party at Clayhome. But Wade had said that Michelle couldn’t go—adding, after Amma left, “Don’t you think that's a little much, the maid inviting you to a birthday party?”

  Noni had said only, “Jesus, Wade.”

  But Trisha had told her husband briskly, “Babe, don’t get me started. That old woman's been taking advantage of Grandma Judy forever. But what can we do? Go put her bags in the trunk.” While Wade did so, Trisha had given Noni a long list of instructions about their seven-year-old's diet, clothing needs, sleep schedule, allergies. Then Trisha had made such a production of their departure that Michelle was sobbing by the time they drove away.

  Now, halfway down the hill, the child, swaddled from head to toe in padded clothing, tumbled off the sled, rolled into a fallen tree, and started crying again. She was surprised when her bawling did not bring Noni running. Instead, her aunt called cheerfully down to her, “Come on, Michelle, my turn, bring that sled up here! Go go go go go go go!”

  Michelle was so surprised that she started to do as asked. But she stopped suddenly and pointed. “Somebody's here.” Noni turned to look. It was Kaye.

  The sudden sight of him made a pulse leap in Noni's neck and her cheeks flush. He looked different. Had he always been so good-looking or had he changed? His cinnamon-colored face was thinner, so the soft full lips and gold-flecked joking eyes seemed to stand out more. Snow looked very white in his short tight black hair and on his long curled eyelashes. />
  She had missed him. She hadn’t known how much she’d missed him, but she had. He smiled the old smile, walking toward her in sweater and slacks, no coat, ignoring as usual the bitter cold. He was leaner now than in his football days and Noni couldn’t believe that he wasn’t freezing.

  She shivered herself. “Kaye! Aren’t you cold? You’ve got to be cold.”

  “Where's your coat?” Michelle echoed.

  “Hey, you two sound like my grandmama.” Kaye helped the child pull the sled back to the hilltop. “Y’all having fun on my sled?”

  Michelle was indignant. “It's not your sled, it's my Aunt Noni's sled. She's had it since she was a little girl.”

  With a grin for Noni, Kaye brushed the icy crust from the red paint, pointed. “See what that says? ‘Noelle and Kaye.’ I’m the Kaye part.”

  Pushing her hat up and pulling her scarf down from her eyes, Michelle studied the tall young man; she had seen him before but not often, and she was puzzled that a black person should share a sled with her aunt. She dropped into the snow to study the crayon letters. “K-A-Y-E” she spelled aloud.

  “That's me. Me, myself, and I.” Kaye winked at Noni. “Dr. Kaye King.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Amazing, hunh?”

  Kaye had been over at Heaven's Hill, talking with Bud Tilden, and he had come to tell Noni that her father was looking for her.

  Michelle ran forward, saw the tall blond man waving from the porch of the big house. “Grandpoppy!” she screamed and raced slipping through the sleety snow toward the big white house.

  Kaye picked up the sled's towline. “He says he's babysitting for her and you’re going to Bunny's. Want a ride? Oh and happy birthday.”

  “Happy birthday. Welcome to twenty-three. Better late than…”

  “It's pitiful you have to gloat about being a few lousy hours older.”

  “Face it. I’m older. I’ll always be older. How have you been? Where have you been?” It was the first time she’d seen Kaye in a month. Aunt Ma said she never saw him either these days because he was always at the hospital, always told her he had no time for anything but work. “Aunt Ma thought you weren’t going to be able to come over here even on Christmas.”

  Kaye shrugged. “She made such a big deal about it, I did a trade with somebody.”

  “Well, it made her very happy.” Noni stepped closer, studied the shadows under his eyes. “You look so tired, Kaye.”

  “Tired?” He playfully slapped himself on both cheeks. “Come on! You’re supposed to say I look so battle-fatigued and burned out that after a few years of this I deserve to charge you ten thousand dollars for an hour of my time. I’m in a macho rite of passage here. ’Course I look tired.”

  Kaye had just sped his way through medical school at the university and was beginning an internship in cardiac surgery, living in a rented room close to campus. To supplement his income, he did research late at night for a book his advisor was writing. Although Kaye was accustomed to staying up late because of his years as night dispatcher for his Uncle Austin's cab company, lately he had been working so hard and sleeping so little that sometimes walls seemed to him to move, colors to change, words to turn into senseless squiggles on the page. Sometimes in class or over his cafeteria tray his head dropped into sleep, jerked out. He knew other last-year medical school students and interns who used pills or cocaine to keep alert, but he had a horror of drugs, of how they’d been used to control his mother.

  Noni and Kaye reached the porch of Heaven's Hill and he pointed across at his car, a rebuilt cherry-red 1967 Thunder-bird Landau with whose engine he had once endlessly tinkered. “You want a ride to Bunny's? I’m not too tired to party.”

  “I’d love a ride to Bunny's.”

  He looked at her, struck by the warmth of her voice. He had always loved her voice, which was low and soft and Southern in its long slow vowels. It struck Kaye now that everything about Noni was like her voice; her generous mouth and blushed cheeks, even her clothes, all were perfectly Noni— gentle and warm and fine. The gray-blue cashmere scarf curling around her shoulders was the color of her eyes, the soft silvery blonde fur-collared ski jacket she wore was the color of her hair. Suddenly he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

  Her face brightened. “What was that for?”

  “For thanks.” Suddenly embarrassed, Kaye retreated to his mocking grin. “Thanks for that present you gave Grandpa Tat. He loved it!”

  Noni touched her cheek as if to keep the kiss there. Then she looked over to Clayhome, smiling. “I thought he would.” This year Noni's Christmas present to the cranky legless Tat-lock Fairley had been a large assortment of art supplies: oil paints, brushes, canvas, and easel.

  Kaye laughed. “That old man's already got all that stuff out all over the kitchen table and he's already painting a canvas. He calls it Tatlock Fairley at Home,’ and it shows him looking at the whole town of Moors, like he owned it. What in the world made you think of paints?”

  Noni's enthusiasm flushed her face into the look that had made Amma call her “Sunshine” as a baby. “Well, you know how Uncle Tat's always doodled all over things and how he loves colors. But one night I saw him watching Lust for Life on TV, that movie with Kirk Douglas about Van Gogh? And he was going on about how he could paint just as well as Van Gogh if only—”

  “He had his legs?”

  Noni laughed. “No! His ‘chance.’ You know, his chance.”

  Kaye imitated Tatlock's grumbling bass. “I bet it was the V.A. hospital cut off that painter Go's ear and they covered it up to keep the law off’em and told the world the man was crazy. I sure wouldn’t cut off my ear or my legs either, ’less I was crazy, and I’m not, no sir re bob. I am the Six Million Dollar Man. Anybody can paint some old pot of flowers like Go did. Me? I could of carved the Venus de Milo if I’d just had my chance, and she would have had the full use of her arms too—”

  Noni covered her mouth. “Stop, Kaye, stop, don’t make me laugh.”

  “Why, you got to pee?”

  “Yes!” She ran away, pulling the sled behind her.

  At six that evening, when Kaye came back to collect Noni, he heard piano music and stopped on the porch to listen before ringing the bell. He recognized the melody as one of those sad pretty Romantic pieces that her dad liked so much.

  Noni was in fact playing Ravel's “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” although she hadn’t told her father the name of the piece, knowing its title would bother him. Beside the huge Christmas tree, Bud Tilden lay on the living room floor listening to the music, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the twinkling lights (they were no longer different colors but all tiny and white), while Michelle marched her new model horses across his chest. The five red stockings hung from the mantel behind him. There was a cocktail glass on the Persian carpet beside his ashtray.

  “Brava, brava!” Tilden clapped when Noni finished the pavane. Michelle clapped too, then leapt up and raced to the door at the sound of the old-fashioned bell. She returned with Kaye behind her. Bud's lovely smile welcomed Kaye as it always had since the boy had met him.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Kaye said, holding up his wrist to show the digital watch. “Damn thing's battery died.”

  Bud Tilden sat up, cross-legged on the rug like a boy, and unbuckled the leather band of the old beautiful gold watch he wore. “Here, take this.” He held it up to Kaye. “You’re young, you care about time. I don’t have—” He smiled. “—the slightest interest. But, Kaye, if time matters to you, don’t turn it over to a battery. Pay attention. Wind it.”

  Kaye backed away. “I’m not taking your watch.”

  Noni said, “Forget it, Daddy, Kaye's a nightmare to give a present to.”

  Tilden kept holding out the watch, looking up at the young black man, smiling. “Kaye's not going to hurt my feelings. He knows it means a lot to me to give him something when he's given me so much. He knows that.”

  Finally Kaye moved forward, bent, an
d took the watch. “Thank you.” He nodded at the man.

  “Thank you.”

  “Well, Daddy, how’d you manage that?”

  Tilden rolled back down onto the rug. “I’m a night owl, right, Kaye?”

  “Right.” Kaye took off his plastic watch and replaced it with Tilden's. “A wise old night owl.”

  Noni picked up her coat and gloves from the couch. “Kaye and I are going to Bunny's now, all right? I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Michelle goes to bed at eight. Eight, no later.”

  “Oh sure sure sure.”

  “Oh sure sure sure,” repeated Michelle.

  “And Daddy, if you do get hungry, the refrigerator's stuffed. Mom’ll never notice.”

  “I remember.” Tilden propped his still blond head on one elbow, looked at Noni and Kaye with the old lovely hapless smile. “You two,” he nodded to one, then the other. “You two are my favorite people—did you know that?—in the whole wide world.”

  Michelle bounced a plastic black stallion up Tilden's chest and poked his chin with it. “What about me, Grandpoppy?”

  “You’re my favorite little girl.” He made no effort to stop her from dancing the little horse's hooves across his face. “You and the Princess.”

  “Who's the Princess?”

  Tilden pointed at Noni. “She is.”

  Noni crossed to her father, knelt, brushed his hair back from his forehead, and kissed the familiar scent of alcohol and tobacco. His skin felt cool and smooth as marble. She picked up the drink from the rug. “Please eat some food, Daddy. Do you want me to make you a sandwich?”

  “Hey, I was making sandwiches before you were born. Taste that, Kaye,” he pointed up at the glass Noni held. “That's a Zombie.”

  Kaye took the drink from Noni, sipped it. “Zombie. You’re getting to the end of the list here. You gonna start over?”

  Tilden shook his head. “No, I think I’ll call it quits. Zombie sounds like a good place to stop.” He rolled onto his stomach and Michelle crawled onto his back. “Kaye, soon as spring gets here, let's play some more golf. Take care of my Princess in this snow.”