Bunny said it was not only the last picture that Tatlock had completed before his death, it was unique—the only painting, out of the more than a thousand that he’d done, in which he himself did not appear. As Kaye and Bunny looked up at it, she speculated about whether Tatlock had abruptly excised his own image from his artistic vision or if he had simply passed away before having the chance to paint his self-portrait into the scene.
The title of the painting, “Noni Plays Her Piano for Me,” written in gold across the bottom of the canvas, suggested to Kaye that the latter was more probable.
“Yes, I see him,” said Bunny, “leaning against the piano, dressed like Count Basie maybe.”
Back in April, Tatlock had died peacefully, painlessly, and in great splendor, like a French king, propped up in bed on big soft pillows, surrounded by dozens of loved ones, calling them to him to make bequests of his innumerable gadgets and to offer final words of wisdom. According to Austin Fairley, Tat's last words before drifting off to sleep and so to death were to advise his sons to sue his New York rep, who had proved to be a savage but careless embezzler of his client's profits—understating by thousands of dollars the prices he was getting for the fashionable folk art.
The Fairley sons had in fact sued this agent. And they had actually won; Tatlock's only real lawsuit had been posthumous, and successful. But, as Kaye told Bunny, they were lucky that they did win, considering what Tatlock's estate owed the IRS, after it became evident that the old man had never bothered paying any income tax on the sale of his paintings, being of the opinion that the government would just waste the money on foolishness.
“I couldn’t agree with him more,” Bunny said. “But I’m telling you, Kaye, two guys from Atlanta offered me five thousand each for my Tatlocks! Great-looking guys. Just my luck they were gay. Oh, shit, there's Wade.”
Kaye looked into the foyer and saw Wade Tilden angrily stopping his wife Trisha from embracing her daughter Michelle. Still red-haired and freckled, Wade was now bald and had a potbelly that hung strangely on his skinny frame.
Bunny grabbed two chocolates from a silver bowl, then threw them back. “God, I can’t stand that man. Noni said he's the reason why Michelle ran off and married Corey. Just to get out of that McMansion. Gordon's Landing, Jesus, I bet Wade's got “Gordon's Landing” monogrammed on his balls, just like on his towels and sheets. I mean, of course, his golf balls, but who knows? I can’t stand him.”
They watched Wade rapidly making the rounds, glad-handing guests as if he were running for reelection and didn’t have much time at this stop.
Bunny asked Kaye if he’d heard how, right after Judy died, Wade had tried to get R.W Gordon's will overturned in court, although Judy's own will had reproduced her father's bequests word for word. Kaye said he’d never heard anything about any of the Gordon inheritance and could care less.
“Well, this will was very specific.” It left Heaven's Hill to Noni if and only if she married and had a child. She had the use of the place in her lifetime and after her death the entire property would go to the oldest male child of her body. “Married and of her body.” Bunny made a face. “Guess the old Repub didn’t think much of single moms or adoption. On the other hand, he had the brains to pick Noni over Wade to leave the old family jewels to.”
However, were there no such male heir, then Heaven's Hill would go to Wade and his children. Or at least to his son, for Wade had “disowned” Michelle for marrying Corey. “Right, who’d want to be ‘owned’ by him anyhow?”
On what basis, Kaye asked, did Wade think he could break such a will? “We all know Noni got married, we all know she had a male heir.”
With a disgusted glance at Wade, Bunny lowered her voice. “According to Bible Boy over there, right before Judy died, she confided in him that she wanted to change her will to negate R.W.'s—”
“And leave everything to Wade?”
“You got it.”
“And why would she do such a thing? Just for love of Wade?”
Bunny moved Kaye away from the couple next to them so that she couldn’t be overheard. “It's a doozy. Wade claims that Judy told him that when Noni's marriage to Roland was breaking up, Noni’d had an affair. Wade had this lawyer arguing that the clear intent of R.W.'s will was that only a male heir of Noni's marriage could inherit and that Johnny wasn’t legitimate.”
Kaye stared at her. “You’re kidding?”
“Right! That's our Noni, the whore of Houston, recognize her? Lucas Miller told me that old Judge Hilliardson scorched Wade into ashes and blew them on the floor. Said he couldn’t believe a gentleman would come into his courtroom and insult his own sister. So the will stands, and Johnny inherits.”
“Do you think Mrs. Tilden actually believed that? According to Grandma, she got pretty delusional the last couple of years.”
Bunny shrugged. “I didn’t like Judy when she wasn’t delusional. But, hey, I guess it was pretty rough, a woman like that, not able to walk.”
Kaye confessed that there’d been a time when he’d suspected that Noni's mother's prolonged paralysis might have been psychosomatic.
Startled, Bunny walked him over to the dining room mantel, further away from other guests. “Psychosomatic? I thought she kept having some weird kind of strokes that they couldn’t get a fix on? I thought that's why Noni had to keep taking her to new doctors?”
Slowly, Kaye shrugged. “Oh, Bunny, who knows? I sure don’t. She's dead. It's over.” Opening the glass face of the old French clock that sat in the middle of the white mantel, gently he moved the longer filigreed iron hand a few minutes ahead so that the clock would strike the hour. It began chiming its lovely bell sounds, six of them. He looked down at the antique Persian rug in front of the hearth. He had lain here with Noni that night. He had heard the chiming of the twelve bells just before her mother had come rushing along the upstairs hall, screaming “Fire.”
Bunny was looking at him oddly. “What's the matter with you?”
Kaye pulled himself back. “Nothing.”
“What's ‘over’?”
“Nothing.” He walked Bunny back into the room. “Listen, Amma told me she's worried about Noni. You notice anything odd about her lately, like maybe she's sick?”
“I should be so sick.” Bunny shrugged dismissively. “I was here all day yesterday helping her get this thing ready and she looked fine to me.”
“Does she see a doctor?”
“I don’t know, but if you’re worried, talk to Jack Hurd.”
Exasperated, Kaye flung up his arms. “Why does everybody think that old man is God?” He looked across into the living room to where Hurd, stooped like a great heron over Johnny Tilden, was helping him move the carved music stand into place beside the grand piano. Guests were gathering around it.
The ten-year-old now wore a small blue blazer over a fresh white polo shirt. He solemnly opened his sheet music on the stand, then picked up his violin and bow. Lucas Miller walked around ringing a large bell until everyone was quiet. Then Noni joined her son at the piano. She leaned down and whispered something to him, then she kissed him.
“Johnny tells me,” she said to the gathered guests, “that you very sweet and very kind and very patient friends want us to play something for you again this year.”
“They do, Mom, stop worrying!” The boy tugged her by her hand over to the piano bench as adults laughed fondly.
She sat on the bench and opened the keyboard. “Okay.” She nodded at him. “Take it away, Maestro.”
The boy announced to the small crowd that he and his mother would now play a special arrangement that they had written—“Well, mostly my mom did it”—for piano and violin. It was in memory of Bud Tilden and it was one of his favorite pieces of music. “Bud Tilden's my grandfather,” Johnny stopped to explain. “It's the Warsaw Concerto and it's nine minutes long and then you can go home.” Again people laughed with affection.
Then the boy tucked the violin under his chin, bit down on h
is full soft lip, and nodded at his mother. She began to play the grand opening chords.
Kaye moved to the side of the piano and studied Noni watching Johnny as she played, accompanying the sweet sad line of his violin, her notes under and around his, following him, smiling at him with that wonderful smile that Tatlock had known to paint as gold sunlight.
Then all of a sudden Noni's hands stumbled and came off the keys. Johnny kept playing. Kaye saw that she had tightly squeezed her eyes shut and that her fingers were moving erratically above the keys like a blind person searching for something that was unexpectedly not where it was supposed to be. Kaye moved closer as Johnny abruptly turned toward his mother, puzzled, alarmed, but still playing on alone, his small bow sawing back and forth.
Just as Kaye reached her, Noni's eyes fought open; she leaned out from the piano and smiled at her son, nodding reassurances at him, and gesturing with her hand a backward circle. He seemed to understand what she meant, for finishing a phrase, he started back at the beginning of the section of music that he’d just played alone.
Noni's fingers found their place on the keys; the piano joined the violin and together they played to the dramatic end of the piece. Enthusiastic applause burst through the room. Kaye had the feeling that people might not even have noticed the pause and then the repetition. Standing, Noni took Johnny's small hand and together they bowed again and again to the warm applause. With her other hand, she held tightly to the side of the piano.
As the applause ended, Kaye was close enough to hear Johnny questioning her. “What happened, Mommy, why did you stop? Did you forget?”
She looked down at him confused. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just a stupid old mommy. I’ve got to go upstairs now and get some aspirin, okay? You were just wonderful!”
Noni thanked everyone for listening and urged them now to join Lucas Miller around the piano to sing a last few Christmas carols before they left. At the motion of her hand, the lawyer came quickly forward. She said something hurriedly to him as he took his seat at the piano, pushing carefully at the sides of his glasses, watching her until she’d passed through the doorway into the hall.
In the hall Kaye took a penlight and his cell phone from his coat pockets before he made his way upstairs and along the corridor to Noni's room. He found her kneeling on the floor of her bathroom, beside the toilet. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“How bad is that headache?”
“Bad.”
“So bad it made you throw up?”
“Maybe I’ve got the flu.”
He helped her to the tall four-poster bed and lifted her onto it, propped her against all the white lace and linen.
“Noni, can you see me?”
“Of course I can see you.”
He told her to follow his finger with her eyes. She couldn’t do it. He checked her eyes with the penlight. He asked her questions about dates and facts. They confused her.
“Okay.” He looked at his watch, Bud Tilden's watch that he’d found again the night before. “Okay, Noni, I want you to pack a robe and a nightgown.”
Pulling herself up on the pillows, she tried to joke. “Why? Are we eloping? I thought you were married.”
His face frozen, he opened her closet door, pulled an overnight bag down from the shelf, and tossed it onto the pink couch at the foot of her bed. Then, yanking out her dresser drawers, he began throwing lingerie onto the bag.
“Are you crazy? What are you doing!” Noni twisted herself off her bed and staggered toward him.
Grabbing her arms, he held her in front of him, stared at her. “Listen to me. We’re going to University Hospital. I’m checking you in tonight. I’m going to get somebody to do a CAT scan and an MRI on you as soon as they can schedule it.”
“Kaye, you’re crazy. I’ve got a headache! I’m going downstairs to my guests.”
“Fine, you go downstairs and tell your guests good-bye while I make these phone calls. Then you tell Bunny you’re going with me to the hospital and that you want her to stay here with Johnny.”
She struggled with him. “I’m not going to do any such goddamn thing!”
“You want to cause a scene, you want to ruin everybody's good time, you want to scare Johnny?” He knew that would stop her.
“You’re scaring me!” She fought loose, staring at him. “What do you think's wrong with me? Look at me, Kaye, look at me.”
He spoke to her fiercely, his hands tight on her arms. “There's nothing wrong with you. We’re just going to do these tests. There's nothing wrong. If anything's wrong, I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.”
Amma was sitting in the dark by the kitchen window at Clayhome, sitting in the quiet, listening. She wasn’t playing the radio, which she rarely had on anymore. Her own thoughts were enough to keep her occupied. Thinking through the past, getting ready to leave it in order, that's what her time needed to go to now. For instance, she had to get her mind right about what she’d done that early morning at the swimming pool the day Judy died. Four years ago or more, and it was still troubling her. If you knew what was good, why wouldn’t you do it? Isn’t that what Amma had said so long ago to that poor man Bud Tilden? But what if, in a particular case, you lost your certainty about what was good? There was nothing worse in the world.
To Amma, the hard question was whether she’d have acted differently that morning when she’d found Judy swimming out in the pool if she hadn’t heard her talking to Wade about Johnny just the day before. If Judy hadn’t said what she’d said then, and what she’d said in that pool.
It had been a warm afternoon, the middle of June, and Amma’d told Dionne to take the Tildens some iced tea out to the side porch where they were sitting, the two of them looking so alike with their milky skin and pale red hair, Judy in her wheelchair and Wade on the steps, talking on and on about how they were going to redo Judy's will so Johnny would never inherit Heaven's Hill.
They hadn’t known Amma could hear them from the kitchen window. Or they hadn’t cared. Ever since Amma was a little girl, owners of Heaven's Hill had been talking in front of her like she was a piece of furniture. The things she’d heard in that house would freeze your blood. Or boil it.
Wade was red in the face, just steaming, telling his mother how R.W. Gordon never in a million years would have wanted Johnny to inherit his ancestral home if he’d known that Johnny wasn’t Roland's baby. The very idea would have torn the old man out of his grave like robbers had dug him up.
Judy was in a state, asking Wade what could they do about it?
“Get your lawyer over here, Mom, that's what we can do about it. We can change your will.”
“But it's Daddy's will that controls everything!”
“Then we’ll go to court. Grandpa's clear intent, clear intent, that's what we’re dealing with here!” Wade kept slapping one of his hands down on the other, as loud as a horsewhip. “You think Grandpa intended for some nigger bastard of Noni's to get his hands on Heaven's Hill? Come on!”
Judy had burst into tears. “I shouldn’t have told you! Wade, don’t say anything to Noni, please. You know what? I think she was lying to me, just to upset me. I don’t think Johnny is…Kaye's.”
“Oh bullshit!” Wade had thrown his tea glass right off the porch onto the brick walkway where it smashed into broken bits that somebody was going to have to clean up.
The next morning, earlier than usual, five o’clock and already light—what did Shani call it, summer solstice?— Amma had walked over from Clayhome and made her way around to the back of Heaven's Hill. She had to take her time nowadays, especially on that flagstone path. Her balance wasn’t so good, and the last thing she wanted was to break her hip and have Kaye use it as an excuse to move her out of Clay-home. And there sat Judy's wheelchair, all the way at the top of that path, up on the patio. There was Judy down swimming in that swimming pool, swimming back and forth, back and forth, like somebody had wound her up too tight, like she used to swim when she was a school girl, trying to win thos
e races that her daddy R.W. Gordon was always yelling at her to win. Leaning over the side of the pool, yelling at her: “Gordons win gold, Gordons don’t win silver, they win gold!”
There Judy was, seventy-two years old, naked as the day she was born, swimming in a straight line like the hounds of hell were chasing after her.
And Amma knew it wasn’t the first time Judy’d been in that pool; she’d seen the wet nightgowns hanging in the bathroom. Poor Dionne had showed them to her, wondering how they’d gotten that way, scared to ask Mrs. Tilden. Well, now they knew.
Not until she’d made her way down to the edge of the pool had Judy seen her there. Amma’d clapped her hands. “Judy! You get out of that pool before something happens to you. At your age! And weak as you are, too.”
Judy spat water out like a mean child. “You can’t tell me what to do.” And she’d kicked her feet faster.
“Judy! You’re having one of your spells and you don’t even know what you’re doing. You come over here to the side of this pool right now and let me help you out. You hear me, come on!”
“Get away from me, you stupid old nigger. Stop spying on me. This is my house.”
Judy had never called her that before, never used the word as far as Amma knew. It showed what Wade was doing to her, showed how she’d come under his influence. Amma watched Judy swim faster and faster, churning the water, but not in a straight line anymore, and she knew something wasn’t right, but all she said was, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Get away from me!”
Amma had walked on back up the flagstone path, hearing the sound of the water slopping against the sides of the pool.
And the question, the question Amma still couldn’t settle in her mind, was, when she’d reached the patio, hadn’t she heard, “Aunt Ma! Aunt Ma!” called up to her? Or had it only been in her mind, or had it been the splashing water?
She hadn’t come back out to cut her flowers until after seven. She’d just sat at the green pine table in the kitchen at Heaven's Hill, just sat listening to the house sleeping.
The Last Noel Page 26
