She couldn’t argue. Her world inside the Dutch Colonial felt very unreal; the very knobs on the closet doors felt unreal.
Then one morning in early December, Wade called to say that their mother was in the hospital. She’d apparently had a stroke. Noni immediately bought a ticket to North Carolina on a flight leaving late that same night. When after dinner she told Roland that she was flying home, he exploded. “This is your fucking home,” he told her. “Wade says she's fine. Let somebody else handle it. Let Wade and Trisha. You’re two thousand miles away, for Christ sake. Why do you have to take care of everything and everybody?”
All of a sudden Noni had the strangest sensation that she was walking quickly down a long corridor at the end of which someone whom she couldn’t identify stood waiting for her. On the sides of this corridor, tall old doors and broken wooden shutters, of the kind stacked in a smokehouse at Heaven's Hill, swung slapping loudly shut.
Carefully she put down on the table the dirty dinner plates that she had started to clear. She looked at her husband, sitting across from her, pouring another glass of wine, until he looked up. His eyes were still as blue, his hair as glossy black, his shoulders as broad as the day he’d called up to her in the stands of the Moors High stadium. But Noni realized that even when Roland looked right at her, he wasn’t looking at her at all.
Collecting their napkins, she dropped them onto the plates. “I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right, Roland. I don’t have to take care of everything and everybody.”
Walking to their perfectly coordinated bedroom, Noni picked up her already packed suitcase from their king-sized bed and took it to their perfectly appointed country kitchen where she put on her raincoat. She checked that her ticket was in her purse. From the dining room she could hear Roland still talking. “We aren’t even going to discuss this. Just call Wade and tell him you’re not coming.”
The kitchen opened into the two-car garage. Noni took the BMW convertible, not because she liked it but because Roland had always referred to it as “hers.”
She was a mile away, headed to the airport, before Roland stormed into the kitchen to see why she wasn’t answering him. She waited until just before her plane left before she called the house to tell him where she’d parked the car. He wasn’t there. He was driving around and around the winding roads of their subdivision looking for her. She left a message.
Arriving at Heaven's Hill, Noni moved into her old childhood room and made the house beautiful for her mother's homecoming. Mrs. Tilden's time in the hospital hadn’t been so bad. Everyone had come to see her, filled her room with flowers and balloons and baskets of fruits. The retired rector Dr. Fisher brought her communion and said she looked ten years younger. But it would take a while, everyone warned, for her “old stamina” to return. Noni said it was all right; she wasn’t going anywhere.
The sound of the phone ringing became to her the sound of Roland's voice. His angry calls insisting that she return to him finally led her to install an answering machine.
A week after her return, in a bookstore, she ran into Lucas Miller, the man she’d known at Moors High who was now a lawyer, the man she’d danced with at Bunny's party years ago. He said he was still unmarried and still had a crush on her. She told him that she didn’t want him to ask her out but she did want him to help her file papers of separation from her husband.
Beeswax candles in four tall silver Georgian candle-sticks. Candles in two candelabra on the mantle. Candles in sconces on all four walls.
And now it was Christmas Eve. The French clock on the Heaven's Hill mantel chimed eight o’clock and Kaye would be coming at any minute. Noni was setting the dining room table for two. She moved the place settings to each end of the long polished table. Then she moved them to the middle of the table across from each other. She had red wine decanted, white wine chilling.
There was no illumination in the dining room but candlelight. In the center of the table a silver Tiffany platter was held aloft by two silver mermaids. On the platter sat red apples and green pears, red and green grapes.
“Oh my god,” whispered Noni, shaking her head as she adjusted the grapes. “I am my mother's daughter.”
At this moment, her mother, she hoped, was upstairs asleep. Mrs. Tilden slept at odd times, and ate, when she did eat, at odd times too. After dark she usually went upstairs and ate her dinner in the sitting room next to her bedroom. She hadn’t been told that Kaye was coming over, but she wouldn’t come down even if he weren’t.
Today Noni was twenty-eight while Kaye was still twenty-seven. She had a surprise gift for his birthday tomorrow that she was eager to give him. There was soft Mozart music playing on the speakers in living room. Violin music. That was a part of her plan.
The doorbell rang. Noni felt oddly warm, and she glanced in the mirror above the Sheraton sideboard, but she didn’t look flushed, in fact she looked pale. She was slender in her favorite black dress; her hair was up, a silvery blonde twist. She wore the tiny gold grand-piano charm on the same wrist as the bracelet of sapphires that her father had given her, with the small sapphire earrings, on her wedding day.
Noni bit her lips, rubbed hard at her cheeks, then laughed at herself. What was she doing, dressing up for Kaye? Kaye who’d known her forever, who knew how her mother would pinch her cheeks when she was young to give her “a little more color.” Kaye who once when she’d come back from a beach trip boasting “Look how much color I got,” had teased her: “Better watch it, Noni. My people started out white as you, just went to that beach too much, trying to get a little more color.”
The doorbell rang again and she hurried into the foyer.
“Hey there, Dr. King. Merry Christmas. Don’t you look nice.”
Holding two of Amma's large wicker baskets, he stepped inside. “Merry Christmas. Happy Birthday. You look nice too, Mrs. Hurd.”
“Stop it.”
Beneath his long flowing cashmere coat, Kaye also wore black, a black linen shirt, black pleated trousers of thin Italian wool, black woven leather slippers. Amma had told Noni that it sent a shiver through her how much money Kaye spent on his clothes. But all of a sudden he had the money to spend. In his first two years in his private cardiology practice he had made more, Amma speculated, than Tatlock Fairley had made in two decades on the grounds crew of Haver University.
Of course, as Amma complained, what was the good of Kaye's having money when he wouldn’t give himself a life to have it in. Her grandson performed heart surgery on eight or ten people a week and charged them thousands of dollars each for doing it. But it was all he did. Nothing but work. So who was he to tell Amma to quit working and let him buy her and Tatlock a nice new house somewhere? Of course Tatlock was all for the plan but Amma would not leave Clayhome where she’d been born and had lived all her life. Not unless the Tildens threw her out. And that, Noni swore, would never happen in her lifetime.
In the doorway by the console where the old blue Chinese jar sat beside the metal pear tree, Kaye leaned over, kissed Noni's cheek. “Been pinching your cheeks again?”
She ignored him, took one of the baskets; there was a covered cake stand and a covered salad bowl in it. In the other basket there was a large enamel cooking pot. “So what's this? Did you really make this?”
Their agreement about their birthday dinner tonight was that they would each contribute half the meal. He followed her along the front hall. “What was the first thing I told you the night we met?”
She placed the basket on the sideboard in the dining room. “That it was snowing, which was obvious.”
“What was the second thing?” He stopped and looked around the candlelit room at the gleaming crystal and silver of the table setting, the red tapers and green pears, the low leaping flames of the gas fire in the fireplace. With a bow, he applauded her.
“Thank you.” She curtsied.
“So what was the second thing I told you?”
“How to run my life. Oh, I don’t know.”
/> “I told you I can do anything. And that includes cook.” Kaye pushed past her into the kitchen, placed the pot on the stovetop.
She took the lid off the pot and the smell of hot delicious soup floated up. “Oh, you didn’t make this. This is Aunt Ma's she-crab soup.”
“This is Kaye's she-crab soup.” He crossed his arms in the old flamboyant way. “You don’t say those were Rockefeller's oysters you and I ate last night. You say those were your damn oysters. Well, this is Amma Fairley's recipe and it's my soup. ’Course Grandpa Tat says,” and Kaye lowered his voice to his Tatlock rumble, “‘If I’d just had my chance, I’d of proved I invented she-crab soup and he-crab soup both, and every other kind of soup Campbell's stole from me, and I’d of been the richest Indian in America, if I’d just had my chance to prove I was an Indian.’ Okay, Noni, stop that laughing, you’re going to pee.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Nope, it's not going to work this time. I’m over it.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.”
After she poured the soup into the tureen, Kaye brought it to the dining room table. Both were suddenly made strangely formal by the setting. “Madame,” he smiled and pulled back her chair for her and she sat. She could feel his breath near her hair as he pushed the chair in.
She toasted them with the wine. “To us. To Christmas past and present…”
“And future.” He handed her a bright red ribboned box. “Happy Birthday.” In the box was another charm. This one a little gold telephone. “You remember that silver dime shaped like a heart I gave you a long time ago?”
She gestured out to the foyer. “It's upstairs in my jewelry box.”
“Well, you can’t call anybody for a dime anymore, no matter how bad you need them.” He held up a quarter.
Noni reached across the table, touched his hand, then took the quarter from him. “‘When you feel lost and about to give up, / Cause your life just ain’t good enough,’ reach out for me too.” She smiled back at him. “’Course, Kaye King, I know you never would be about to give up and you never would feel life just wasn’t good enough, but just in the remote, remote, remote possibility—”
“You like the soup?”
“The soup is delicious.”
Back in the kitchen, Noni watched Kaye's long fingers cut precisely and perfectly through the melon, then carefully drape prosciutto over it. His hands had always been beautiful to her.
As they ate the melon, they talked about Parker, who’d been fired for insubordination from the job Kaye had helped him find at University Hospital. Kaye feared that Parker might be back on drugs that he’d gotten addicted to in prison. Parker and Kaye were drifting apart. Parker had accused Kaye of thinking he was too good for him, but Kaye said it wasn’t personal. He really had no time these days for anyone or anything but medicine. His life was his work.
Noni rolled her eyes. “Of course it's personal. It's about drugs, it's about what happened to your mother. It's too painful for you to be around Parker. So you avoid him.”
“Sure sure sure.”
“Well, why can you have theories about me and my mother, but I can’t have theories about you and yours?”
Kaye watched Noni squeezing lemon into olive oil. “You’ve got wonderful hands,” he said. “It's in your hands that you can see how strong you are.”
She smiled, wiggling her fingers. “Fingers of steel. All that Chopin. Thank you.”
As they ate the sautéed shrimp, they talked about Bunny, who, despite her professional success—she was the youngest full professor in her department at Columbia—was unhappy because she still couldn’t find the right man, or even—as she joked—“the wrong man.” Noni said that Bunny was thinking of having a baby by herself.
Kaye gave his parodic eyebrow bounce. “That’ll be a first. Didn’t even Jesus's mother need an angel or a bird or something to help her out?”
“Don’t even try, you’re not getting my goat tonight.”
He grinned at her. “Okay, not your goat. How ’bout your lamb of God?”
“That is so bad. That is really wretched, even for one of your jokes. And don’t start in on St. John's.”
“Did I say anything?”
“I could see it in your eyes.” Noni told him that the truth was, sitting in church brought out the best in her—it was the place where she felt at peace.
“Bull,” said Kaye. “It's the place where that fine old glorious Gordon past falls bong on your head with big gold thunks— the altar rail dedicated to devoted wife Martha McAllister Gordon, thunk; the pulpit stand in loving memory of Shelby W. Gordon Jr., thunk; collection plate, stained glass, thunk, thunk, thunk. You need to get out.”
“I got out. You don’t think Houston is a long way from Moors?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You think you have such a life? You just told me you had no life at all.”
“I didn’t say that. I said my work was my life.”
Noni raised her shoulders, held them arched and ironical.
“Don’t get sarcastic with your shoulders,” he told her.
“What? You don’t like my shoulders as much as my wonderful hands?”
“Your shoulders are wonderful, too,” he smiled. And then suddenly they were both embarrassed. “I’ll tell you whose life is his work these days.” Kaye changed the subject. “Tatlock Fairley, the African-American Van Gogh.”
It had been only a few years since his grandfather Tatlock had started setting up his pictures beside Amma's sales table outside the bank. The first pictures he’d sold were paintings of vanished Moors landmarks, all with himself prominent in them: there was one of Tat and R.W. Gordon in front of the old Moors Savings Bank that had been torn down. One of Tat and Dr. Fisher in front of St. John's Church before they’d added the modern annex. One of Tat and a crowd of car buffs at the old filling station, another of Tat and shoppers at the dime store that was now a parking lot, another of Tat and the owner at a fruit stand that was now the site of the town's first ATM kiosk.
Not only had passersby immediately begun to purchase these paintings for twenty-five dollars each, one day a woman who owned a fancy art gallery over in Hillston had come to call on Tat at Clayhome. She’d picked out ten of his works, all kinds, big pictures on old doors, little pictures on tin boxes, telling him she’d give him fifty percent of what she sold them for, and that if this lot sold, she’d buy more. At first Tat had been indignant; why should the gallery owner keep half of his money? But when the woman had told him what she planned to charge for his pictures, “that old man signed so fast he smoked the paper.”
“He's going to do a painting of me,” Noni said. “‘Noni at the Piano.’”
Kaye tossed the salad he’d brought. “I guess you’ll be playing a duet then, ’cause you can bet that old man’ll paint himself right beside you on the bench.” He served Noni's plate. “Spinach salad. Eat some. Anemic.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know—”
“Everything.”
“Right.”
They took their coffee to the living room where violin music was softly playing through the speakers. The only illumination was the fire in the fireplace and the delicate shimmer of the white lights on the Christmas tree. Noni, not her mother, had put up the tree this year and it was the most perfectly shaped one that Kaye had ever seen there, a white pine beautifully tapered. It was also the least decorated tree he’d ever seen at Heaven's Hill. “So your Christmas trees are green,” he grinned.
Some things had stayed the same. As always the five big red stockings embroidered BUD, JUDY, GORDON, WADE, NOELLE, hung from the mantel. Noni's suggestion that they leave the stockings packed away this Christmas had so distressed Mrs. Tilden that she’d withdrawn it. The stockings were only decorative now; there was no pretense of a Santa filling them.
But there were presents under the tree. Kaye's from Noni was in a large box wrapped in green. Wh
en he opened it, he saw a violin in a case, its beautiful reddish wood gleaming in the firelight. He was surprised into silence.
While Kaye had played violin in elementary school in Philadelphia, and again in the string orchestra at Gordon Junior High, he had never owned an instrument of his own, nor ever wanted to. “I’m not really into it,” he’d told Miss Clooney when he’d reached high school.
“You’re right about that, Kaye,” the music teacher had replied. “You just don’t want to feel what that violin makes you feel.”
“You think you know me, Miss Clooney?”
Kaye had liked Miss Clooney, who called herself “the last of the burnt-out hippies” and who was the teacher who years ago had organized the student council into the honor guard for the first black students to integrate Moors High. Still, he had returned the rented violin and quit the program.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said to Noni now. “Hang it on the wall? I can’t play this.”
Noni threw up her arms. “I swear to god, Kaye, you are the absolute worst receiver of gifts I have ever met in my life. The absolute worst.”
“I mean, thank you, it's beautiful, but I’m just saying I can’t play it. I haven’t played since ninth grade and I was terrible.”
She took the violin from its case, strummed the strings, started tuning them. It was a gift of hers, perfect pitch; she had always had the burden of hearing disharmony and the gift of setting it right. After she tuned the violin, she plucked a melody on it as if it were a guitar, a simple melancholy Bach melody that they had played in the school orchestra. Bach's “Air on a G String.”
Then she handed the instrument to Kaye, who held it uncomfortably. “Well, Dr. King, why don’t you learn to play better? You’re always telling me what to do with my life, so I’m going to tell you something. They call it playing music.”
He looked at her quizzically. “So?”
“So you don’t play anymore. I bet you don’t dance. You don’t play golf even. Amma says all you do is make money.”
The Last Noel Page 19
