The Last Noel (33 page)

“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.

Noni spent a lot of Roland's money on Parker, and gave the rest to AIDS research. The fact that Roland's settlement had paid Parker Jones's substantial medical bills was to Noni one of God's quiet ironies. She had heard Roland on the subject of AIDS victims and convicts and drug addicts and African-Americans, although the accusation that he was a bigot would have surprised him. (His rebuttal would have been, she knew, to point out that his lawyer in Houston was African-American, and that his new wife's brother had married a Mexican.)

She had seen Roland since their divorce only once, at her mother's very crowded and elaborate funeral. On the church steps after the service, Noni was receiving the condolences of her mother's friends who were telling her that Judy was now reunited with Bud in heaven at last. They told her that Noni was the daughter every mother dreamed of. “Thank you,” Noni said, again and again.

Judy's cousin Becky Van Buehling (as she was once more calling herself, following the death of her second husband the estate planner), hugged Noni to her still partially exposed bosom and told her that Judy's funeral couldn't have been more like her. Becky hoped Noni would do
her
funeral if she ever died, Noni was so good at it.

Becky, who now had startling white hair, said it was probably for the best that Judy had gone so suddenly—even though it had been weird that she should have drowned in her own pool when she'd been a state champion swimmer as a girl, and even though it had been even weirder that she could have gotten out
to the pool in her wheelchair and somehow rolled into it. And even though seventy-two years old was too early to go (Becky sure didn't want to go anytime soon), still, after all the personal tragedy Judy had suffered and all the years of pain in that wheelchair, death had to be some sort of a blessing.

As Noni was extracting herself from Becky's fleshy embrace, she saw her ex-husband, who had attended the funeral only because he was in town visiting his father and it had seemed the polite thing to do. Noni said hello. Everything about Roland had gotten thicker, she noticed, his waist, his fingers, his nose, his sarcasm.

“I don't think I have anything to say to you,” he replied when she asked how he was.

“You ‘don't think'? Gee Roland, don't you know whether you do or not?”

With a sneer, Roland had walked away without answering, leaving her standing on the steps with Doctor Jack. “What a jerk,” said Roland's father.

Stooped and thin, with his bald crown and tufted white ponytail, Doctor Jack looked more and more like a strange old tall heron or crane. He pointed at his son talking to Wade Tilden; they seemed to be admiring Wade's Lexus. “Noni, can you ever forgive me?”

“For what?”

“Instead of telling you to save Roland, why didn't I tell you to save yourself? Some Deliverer, hunh?”

She rubbed his bony back. “You loved him. I loved him. He just got smaller instead of bigger.”

“Yeah. Your mom would have admired that funeral, honey.”

“I guess so. She left instructions in her will and I followed every detail.”

Doctor Jack laughed. “You know, in the middle of the eulogy I actually thought I heard Judy's voice telling me that I ought to marry Becky Van Buehling. I hear she's roaming loose again.”

“I've got a rule. I don't give marital advice.”

“Don't rub it in.”

Noni was staring into the grove of trees that separated St. John's from Heaven's Hill. “Jack, how do you think Mom could have fallen into our pool?”