The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  “Oh my god, Parker.” She moved forward and hugged him, shocked by the frail feel of bones thrusting from his ice-cold skin. He wore a wool skullcap but only the T-shirt and jeans, no coat. He weighed less than she did. “What are you doing out here? You’re freezing. Let's go inside.”

  Flicking the cigarette off the rail, Parker shrugged. “Naw. That's not really my scene in there. I don’t know those folks. Kaye just feels like…” He stopped, shrugged. “I don’t exactly fit in, see what I mean?”

  She nodded slowly. “You know what? I don’t either.”

  “How you doing, Noni? Where you been so long?”

  As she told him briefly of traveling with her invalid mother and of her divorce and her baby son, she took in more details of his appearance. There were deep hollows under his eyes, and there were small dark sores on his face and on his arms. Her heart struck hard against her breast. In all those hospitals with her mother, she’d seen patients with AIDS. This was what they looked like.

  Parker gestured at the crowd inside. “Kaye's marrying another doctor.” He chuckled. “Maybe I shoulda done that, least I coulda got an appointment every now and then.” He tilted his head at her. “So how come you letting Kaye marry somebody else?”

  She blushed. “What have I got to say about it?”

  Parker frowned, shook his head. “Okay, never mind.” And he shuddered in the cold. “I’m to the point where lying to yourself is hard to do, but you go ahead.”

  “Stay here.”

  “Where am I gonna go?” He gestured out at the black night of stars.

  Noni stepped back inside the noisy cheerful room, found the mink coat she’d taken from her mother's closet because of the surprising cold. She filled a large cup with the hot mulled wine on the table.

  Back on the deck, she put the long mink coat around Parker's shoulders and then handed him the warm cup of wine. “Or are you still a teetotaler?”

  He smiled at her, his eyes bright and glittering in his sunken face. “A man's smoking on the way to the electric chair, you gonna tell him cigarettes are bad for his health? Man, this coat is warm. I love it. You see me in mink?”

  Noni stepped closer, took his hands in hers. “What's the matter with you, Parker?”

  He looked at her with his old silly sweet smile. “Besides dying, Duchess, nothing much…”

  “Is it AIDS?”

  “Well everybody's gotta die of something.”

  They looked at each other for a long quiet while. Then she leaned forward, kissed him on the forehead.

  “You got a car?” When she nodded, he asked, “How’d you like to take me to the Indigo now? You, me, night fever?”

  Noni squeezed his thin trembling hands. “I’d love to take you to the Indigo if you promise we’ll dance.”

  “You’re a good lady, Disco Queen.”

  “Merry Christmas, Parker.”

  The stars in the sky looked down where he lay,

  The little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay.

  Amma had known as soon as she took the baby from Noni's arms and lifted him to her face. Maybe nobody else would see it in him, probably not, he was so fair and gold-skinned, curly haired but blonde, but then Amma herself had been blonde as a baby.

  Amma had seen it, and she’d seen Noni watching her see it. Johnny Tilden had those same pretty little ears that Deborah had passed onto Kaye and the same soft full lips.

  Maybe not even Judy knew the baby was Kaye's, and Judy would never admit it if she did know, she’d fight it forever. She’d say he was Roland's. And Roland had that black curly hair and olive skin. Folks would believe it. Maybe Roland believed it, but maybe not.

  “This is my son, Johnny,” Noni said. “Johnny, say hello to your Aunt Ma.”

  And in Amma's arms, the little boy had smiled in a way that was part Noni's sunshine smile and part that irrepressible grin Kaye had always had, and then Johnny had kissed her right on the lips, knowing she would love him. And Amma had loved him, right then and there, her old heart had opened to him and he’d looked right in it and claimed a place.

  The rest of it came clear too, later on that same night.

  Judy must have thought Amma was downstairs, or gone home. Dionne was sound asleep in the room next to hers. But Amma was in the other upstairs wing, the old children's wing, sitting in the dark in Gordon's room, sitting in the little cane-seated Hitchcock rocker, watching Johnny sleep in the old wooden crib where so long ago, just a girl herself, she had watched Judy sleep and then a generation later had watched Judy's children sleep. The boy lay on the bed just the way Noni had when she was a baby, with his fat pretty cheek resting on both his little hands. He moved his lips in his sleep, making that soft noise like he was looking for more people to kiss.

  Amma heard the creak of the floorboard outside the open door and then heard footsteps hurrying away. Startled, she rocked herself out of the black cane chair and shuffled quickly to the door. And there, walking away from her, walking fast down the shadowy hall was Judy Tilden in her nightgown. No wheelchair anywhere around, no cane even. Judy Tilden walking the long length of that hall in her white nightgown.

  Amma clapped her hands together. “Judy! What you doing?”

  The woman turned, screamed once, her hand to her mouth. Then violently she shook her head and hurried along the hall. But Amma, breathing hard, caught up with her outside her bedroom and grabbed at her arms.

  Sobbing, Judy threw herself against the old woman. “Don’t tell her, Aunt Ma, please don’t tell Noni and Wade. What good would it do now?”

  Amma was so angry that she shook the woman. “What good! What good! How long you been able to walk, lying to everybody!?”

  Judy pulled loose, then her face changed, hardened, and she stared at Amma like a nasty child. “Don’t you tell her. Don’t tell her or I’ll kill myself and she’ll think it's her fault.” Then she pushed past Amma into her bedroom, slammed the door, and locked it.

  Amma stood outside the door, breathing hard. “You go on and do it, you just go on.”

  The Ninth Day of Christmas

  December 28, 1992

  The Music Stand

  Year by year the clichés had proved mostly true. Time had healed some wounds and at least eased others. Around Noni in Moors, people did what they had always done—were born, grew up happily or unhappily; fell in love or didn’t; made friends, families, careers, money, or didn’t; grew old or didn’t; died.

  Year by year the seasons had sped more quickly by her, hurrying through six Christmases since she had come home with her mother and her baby from London to find herself unexpectedly at Kaye's engagement party.

  Noni had been living those six years at home in Heaven's Hill. She rarely traveled anymore, except for occasional trips to New York; she felt no need to travel. Her life was in Moors and she was happy with it. Her son Johnny was the center of the circle, but the circle was large. Everyone invited her to their dinners and parties. Lucas Miller, the lawyer who had been in love with her since high school, and who had proved a good and loyal friend—and a very kind presence in Johnny's life—played piano duets with her and took her to concerts and out to the new restaurants. She worked hard as a teacher at the elementary school, she worked hard as a volunteer for causes that mattered to her. She was professionally and politically and socially active. In a small town, it was not a small life.

  A few days after her thirty-sixth birthday, Noni knelt among the tombstones and marble orbs and granite obelisks in the Gordon plot of St. John's cemetery, next door to her home, where since her return she had visited her family's graves every Sunday after church. She kept the grounds of their graves, the old dogwood and apple trees, the azaleas and laurel bushes, beautifully tended. Two springs ago, she had planted hellebores, which Amma called Christmas-roses, in the plot, and she was worried about them, for an ice storm had swept through Moors the night before. But today the sun blazed out, hurting her eyes, bringing back one of the recent headaches, dazzling all the tre
es into boughs of bright glass.

  Somehow the hellebores had survived, stronger than they looked, stronger than the couple who lay beneath the newest marble stone. Noni brushed ice from a white flower above her mother's grave. Judy Tilden had died a year and a half ago and was buried here with her husband, Bud. They lay together now under one headstone. It was what Mrs. Tilden had requested in her will, to the surprise of some (although most people seemed to have forgotten that they’d been apart for years when he’d died back in 1979).

  JOHN FITZGERALD TILDEN

  JUDITH GORDON TILDEN

  “At least she didn’t want it to read, Together forever,’ or ‘Devoted wife of,’” Noni said to her brother Wade.

  “I don’t see why you’re taking that tone. Frankly, they shouldn’t have been buried together. Lying there beside Mom is more than Bud Tilden deserves.”

  “Wade, for once we agree.”

  Three months after the engagement party, Kaye had married Shani Bouchard in the living room of their home, disappointing Amma Fairley who’d wanted a church wedding in Holy Redeemer. There’d been no bridesmaids, no ring bearer, no minister, no Mendelssohn. Friends and family had sat on folding chairs in the large open living room and heard Kaye and Shani exchange vows of their own composition in front of a woman justice of the peace whom nobody knew. The Fairleys had all been there with an assortment of Kings and Clays with whom Kaye never socialized. The Bouchards had come down from New York. But most of the guests had been the couple's young medical friends from Haver Medical School or University Hospital, where they both spent most of their time, busy with their flourishing careers.

  To Noni's shock, Kaye hadn’t even invited Parker to the wedding. The two old friends had had a bad argument about Parker's refusal to “fight hard enough”—as Kaye called it— against his disease until science could figure out how to cure it. Kaye appeared to take as a personal affront Parker's “abuse of his body” (his smoking, misuse of medication, erratic trips to doctors), and had told him he was not about to sit around and watch Parker kill himself. Parker had yelled at his friend, “Hand me the cure for AIDS, King God, and I’ll suck it down like a baby at his mama's tit. Come on, hand me the cure, God.” They hadn’t spoken since, and although Shani had sent Parker an invitation to the wedding on her own, he hadn’t come.

  At the reception, Noni had sat beside Bunny Brecken-ridge, who kept solicitously patting her until Noni finally had gotten up and said she had to get home.

  On her way out, she had told Kaye, “Be happy. Please be happy.”

  And she’d meant it, hoped for his happiness even in the midst of a loss so deep that it felt, she was sure, like Tatlock's sense of his missing limbs. For in these six years she’d seen Kaye only occasionally and only in large groups, usually at a celebration or a funeral. Their old way of talking and laughing together seemed to be forever lost. He’d met Johnny at a gathering at Clayhome but he seemed to pay no particular attention to the toddler. And then, a year after his wedding, Amma had told Noni that Shani was having a baby.

  Less and less did it feel right to throw everything into disorder by telling Kaye that their unplanned lovemaking had produced a child. Or was she being selfish not to? She wanted to do the right thing. But this time she wasn’t sure what the right thing was. There was no doubt that Kaye was the father, but did that mean she should intrude herself, and Johnny, into a life he’d made without them? Often Noni thought of talking over her dilemma with Amma. Amma knew about Johnny, she was sure of that. But she kept putting off the conversation. Why place the burden on Amma?

  The only person she’d told had been her mother, and she’d told her in England, the night Johnny was born. Mrs. Tilden had refused to believe the truth of the paternity. She had accused Noni of not really knowing the truth, or possibly even of deliberately lying just to hurt her. She begged Noni not to tell Roland. In the end, Noni had decided to tell Roland only that the child wasn’t his. After Noni's divorce, she and her mother had never discussed the matter again.

  The fall following her return, Noni had reentered Haver University. By the end of the next year she’d graduated, earned a certificate, and had begun teaching music at Moors Elementary School. The children she taught there called her Ms. Tilden and, as one of the parents told her, they played their hearts out to see her smile. By her second year at the school, she had a recorder group started for the first graders; by her third year, there was a little string orchestra playing a Christmas concert at St. John's.

  By teaching children to play music with none of the dread she’d been made to feel as a child, Noni had hoped to find work that was as real to her as her son. That was how she’d first phrased it to Parker just before she’d started teaching.

  Noni was sitting with Parker on one of her evening visits to his room at Moors County Hospital where he was slowly, “too damn slowly for a fast man,” he’d said, dying of AIDS.

  She was telling him that she’d been offered a job teaching music to first through sixth grades and that she was going to take it. “I want something,” she said, “as real as Johnny feels, like I used to be when I was little, playing with Kaye. I want to feel real.”

  “Don’t pick this,” whispered Parker hoarsely from his white tilted hospital bed, pointing a thin bruised finger at the I.V. needle in his hand, the oxygen tube in his nose, “but Lady D., this here is about as real as it gets.”

  Noni sat quietly, her hand resting softly on his thin arm. “You’re doing better than anybody I ever knew.”

  Parker struggled to swallow. “Lucky I didn’t go crazy, get myself strapped down. That's no way to die. Like having a fly on the end of your nose.”

  “You want some water?” She held up a paper cup.

  “I want a big ole rum and coke, double Whopper, and some fries.”

  She smiled. “I could sneak them in tomorrow.”

  Parker looked up toward the ceiling where Cheers played silently on the small television. “Yeah, I’d like to hang in a place like Cheers where everybody knows my name and I’ll be drinking a big ole rum and coke.”

  “I know.”

  “Least I got a bed. Lucky I had those comic books to sell or I’d of been dumped down a ditch like road kill. You tell Johnny, save those comics I gave him. Comic books are good as gold.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “That's a cute kid you got but a smartass.”

  “He is that.”

  “Tell him, save those comics.”

  “It's good you did.”

  Six months earlier, having read somewhere that a copy of Superman's first comic book had sold for over eighty thousand dollars, Parker had asked Noni to put his extensive collection of Action Comics up for sale. With no family left, no money, and no health insurance, he had a terror of dying uncared for, and hoped this one asset, his rare comics, would pay his medical expenses. But when Noni had shown the hundreds of old comic books to the dealers she’d located, she’d learned that Parker's worn and tattered collection was worth only a few thousand dollars. Those big prices he’d read about were only for the very earliest comics, most of them published before Parker was born, and only if the copies were still in mint condition. She sold the collection for what she could get and paid his first bills.

  She never told him when his money ran out. He always believed that his long months of expensive hospital bills were paid, not by her, but by his carefully saved Batmans and Super-boys and Amazing Spider-Mans.

  Two days before Parker died, he motioned for Noni to bring her head close, and he whispered that he needed a favor. He wondered if she could get Dr. King to come say good-bye to somebody he used to know.

  “He’ll be here,” Noni said.

  Parker held up his index finger, moved it weakly in a circle, the way he once had when they had danced together.

  And she’d brought Kaye. He was there in Parker's room the next morning, because Noni wouldn’t let him not be there, because when he hadn’t returned her phone calls and
when his nurses and secretaries had told her that he couldn’t be disturbed, Noni had walked right into the middle of the seminar he was teaching at the medical school and had told him that he had to come with her right that minute. A block away from him, his oldest friend was dying. And even if Kaye didn’t want to see Parker because he couldn’t stop him from dying, he could goddamn well come say good-bye to him.

  Noni had stood there, red-faced and breathing hard, until Kaye had shut off his slides and dismissed the startled students.

  By that morning Parker could no longer talk, but when Noni kissed his hand, he lifted his fingers against her lips and she knew what he was saying.

  Years earlier, when Noni had divorced Roland Hurd on the vague but profoundly accurate grounds of incompatibility, all she’d wanted back was what she’d brought with her from Heaven's Hill: her clothes and books and music, her china and silver and hope chest of linens. Her name and her child.

  Of course, her lawyer and Roland himself had pressed on her a generous settlement. Roland had a horror of not appearing generous, and he wanted his largesse on the record. Besides, he had made a great deal of money in the eighties through his corporate real estate dealings, and although many of the Texas high rises that he’d brokered now stood almost empty, Roland's fees had gone into technology stocks, where they’d multiplied like dangerous cells, very fast.

  Of course Roland could have gotten ugly about the divorce, and no one would have blamed him; he’d certainly gotten ugly in private once she’d said that he wasn’t Johnny's father, and that she wouldn’t tell him who was. In the end, as she’d known, the last thing Roland had wanted was for that news to become public. No more than Judy Tilden had wanted the news to become public.

  Roland's father, Dr. Jack Hurd, had been baffled by Roland's complete disinterest in the baby and by his scathing animus toward Noni. Roland told him, “Maybe she's not the saint you think she is,” but Doctor Jack decided not to ask him what he meant. Jack was divorced again himself (his second wife had left him for someone she’d met in her yoga class), and had recently returned to Moors and to Haver Medical School. He thought of Johnny as his grandson and visited him often.