The Last Noel (26 page)

 

One day Noni's mother handed her a half-dozen envelopes, asking her to mail them. But two of the people to whom they were addressed Noni knew to be already dead.

So she went herself to talk with Dr. Schillings, who (being of the old school) was thoroughly unaccustomed to being questioned, much less advised, by a younger doctor, much less a black one, much less by his patient's daughter at the instigation of that young black doctor. Somewhat petulantly, Dr. Schillings told Noni that if he'd thought an ultrasound or angiography or an EEG or a CAT scan would serve any purpose other than enriching the people who'd performed the tests, he'd have ordered them. Judy Tilden was depressed and why shouldn't she be? She'd lost her son, her father, and her husband. That was enough to depress any decent woman. There was nothing else wrong with her.

When Noni asked Mrs. Tilden to go with her to see another physician recommended by Kaye, her mother refused; even the suggestion agitated her. She blamed Kaye for “stirring Noni up for no reason.” When Dr. Schillings told her that Kaye was questioning his treatment of her, she flew into a tantrum. Why, Doctor Schillings had treated her all her life! Hysterical, Mrs. Tilden begged Noni to keep Kaye away from Heaven's Hill.

At a loss, Noni called Jack Hurd out in California; Doctor Jack called Schillings and persuaded him to put Mrs. Tilden on blood-pressure medication and on antidepressants. Noni was able to get her mother to take the drugs by having Doctor Jack telephone her. After a few days, she did in fact appear to be responding to them.

Kaye and Noni were having dinner at the new sushi restaurant in nearby Hillston (the first in the area) when Noni
told him happily of Doctor Jack's intervention. She was surprised by how deeply the news upset him. He grew quiet and withdrawn. It took her half an hour to prod out of him why he was angry. His answer came out in an intense low voice that she almost couldn't hear: her choice to rely on Jack Hurd's medical advice rather than Kaye's own, her decision to trust some older white authority rather than someone who was supposedly her closest friend, meant that in the last analysis she didn't trust him any more than her mother did. Noni was always turning to Doctor Jack, Doctor Jack practically ran her life, Doctor Jack had guilt-tripped her into marrying Roland and into going back to Roland and…

And at that point Kaye abruptly stopped, carefully, precisely, crossed his chopsticks on his plate, and shrugged. “Sorry, it's your business, not mine. Ready to go?”

Noni grabbed his hand and shook it furiously. “It's not that I
won't
listen to you. It's that she
will
listen to him. Jack got her to take the pills. You want me to just let her die?”

“Let's drop it.”

“Kaye, come on!”

“Fine. She's your mother. Let's go.”

And so they left it at that.

It was ironic to Noni that when she returned home that night after such a bad fight with Kaye, she'd had a phone call from an indignant Roland, his third—he said—in as many hours. She was supposed to be taking care of her sick mother, not be out partying all night with her “quote best friend unquote” Kaye King. She'd been gone for a month and Roland needed her back in Houston. It wasn't fair for him to have to do without her.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked him.

“I just want to know what the fuck is going on,” he replied, and Noni hung up on him.

He called back an hour later and apologized, assuring her that everything he said was because he loved her so much.

During the next week, her mother looked to be feeling better—she said she was her old self again—so much so that Noni made plans to return to Houston. Wade agreed to hire a niece of Amma Fairley's to sleep at Heaven's Hill every night to keep an eye on Mrs. Tilden while Amma was at Clayhome. Yolanda (Tatlock's daughter) already did the cleaning for the Tildens, Lanie King (Amma's sister-in-law from her first marriage) did the ironing, and McKinley Clay (Amma's baby brother) took care of the yard. Amma still cooked, and still did what she called “watched over” Judy Tilden. Amma told Noni, “Honey, you either get out of that marriage or you go be with your husband. I watched over your mama since the day she was born and I guess I can keep on.”

“Get out? You always say marriage is for better or worse, Aunt Ma.”

“Noni, everybody's got a different better, got a different worse. You figure out yours.”

 

In the center of the place mat, her father's mother's Limoges wedding band china, white bordered in gold. Dinner plate beneath salad plate beneath fish plate beneath soup bowl.

 

After her return, life in the Houston Dutch Colonial on the cul de sac felt smaller and tighter and sadder. Whenever Roland drank too much and lost his temper, he apologized with an excuse: he was under a lot of stress, this wasn't an easy time, the pressure was on. The problem was always just this particular deal, this individual meeting, this specific boss. When Noni suggested that maybe the problem was the way Roland reacted to the problem, he said she had no idea what the real world was like “out there.”

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.