The Last Noel (25 page)

Wade said he was sorry to have to suggest that Bunny didn't know what she was talking about.

Kaye said he was sorry to ask why—since Bunny taught economic theory at Columbia University—Wade assumed he knew as much about economic theory as Bunny did.

“Excuse me, I was talking to
Ms.
Breckenridge here,” Wade snapped.

Kaye folded his napkin. “Actually, I believe it's Dr. Breckenridge, right, Bunny?”

“I don't care what she calls herself, or you either. I'm a businessman, I know business.”

Kaye slid his napkin back through its silver ring. “I guess so. You bankrupted two. That must prove something.”

“Whoaaa,” said Roland. And then the table fell silent.

Finally, at Trisha's indignant prodding, Wade stood up and said, “I think you ought to leave now. Tell you the truth, King, I'll never understand why you even get invited.”

Roland laughed. “Wade, come on, Jesus!”

Noni stood up and said that she was sorry; it wasn't Wade's house, it was their mother's house, and that she (Noni) was hostess here in her mother's absence and that Kaye was her guest and that she trusted her brother to be polite to him.

Wade told his sister that if she didn't ask Kaye to leave, he and Trisha and Trisha's brother were all walking out right this minute.

“Are you really sure that's how you feel, Wade?” asked Noni quietly.

“Honey.” Roland reached for Noni's arm to sit her down but she shook him off. He shrugged and poured himself
another glass of wine.

Trisha said, “It's exactly how Wade feels.”

“I'm so sorry to hear it.” Noni held out her hand to Trisha's brother. “Good night, Chadwick. I apologize, but Wade feels he has to leave now. Thank you so much for coming. It was a pleasure to see you again. Merry Christmas.”

And that was the end of the peace party.

By New Year's, everyone had calmed down and Trisha even invited Roland and Noni to their home at Gordon's Landing. They all tried but it was hard work. Roland vowed he'd rather drink jug wine from a cardboard box than spend another holiday at Heaven's Hill. He didn't like what it did to his wife. “One day here, and your family turns you into a stress case, baby. They don't deserve you. And I know Bunny and King are your buds—”

“They're my best friends.”

“Okay, but I mean, give me a break from the left-wing soapbox. Plus your brother's a cheap son of a bitch. No way I'm ever eating flank steak and drinking rotgut at his house again.”

In Noni's view, the serving of “rotgut” wine to Roland was the least of her brother's sins. But he was right that Wade was as stingy as he was narrow-minded. Investing in real estate and the stock market, he had grown rich, but he didn't feel that way. Sometimes Noni despaired of ever reaching the heart she had been sure Wade had. Could she be wrong that everyone had the same heart, deep down?

She sat in the kitchen with Amma Fairley, and told her how guilty she felt to stay so angry with her brother.

Amma told her, “Honey, you can't forgive somebody if he don't think he's done a damn thing wrong.”

Still the failure hurt. She and Wade almost never saw each other anymore.

 

Above the place mat, a silver dessert spoon, a dessert fork.

 

The following Christmas, 1982, Noni stayed in Houston. She sent Kaye a new machine called a CD player, and with it she sent a CD set,
Twenty-Five Years of Motown Hits
, that included the song by the Four Tops, “Reach Out, I'll Be There.”

She didn't hear back from him.

That year she and her husband celebrated her birthday and their anniversary by going skiing at Squaw Valley with Doctor Jack and his new family. Doctor Jack had recently married a widow with three teenaged children and moved them out to California, which he loved. He was dean of another medical school, lived in a big house with a hot tub overlooking the Pacific, and was an expert on Napa Valley wines.

At the lodge restaurant, Roland drank too much champagne (a special reserve estate California vintage chosen by his father for their celebration). Then he started sarcastically teasing his young step-brother, despite Noni's whispers that he was upsetting the boy. Then he accidentally bruised Noni's wrist by squeezing it when she tried to leave their table. In their room the next morning he confessed that he didn't remember the events of the previous night. He was profoundly apologetic about her wrist. All right, he hadn't quit drinking, but the truth was, he didn't see why he should have to go cold turkey. But he would cut back. He promised “never again” would anything happen like the accident at the restaurant. He also spontaneously offered to go get tests done to see if he might be the reason they weren't getting pregnant. Noni was his angel, she knew that, didn't she?

 

Above and to the right, her mother's mother's Hawk crystal. Water glass, red wine glass, white wine glass, dessert wine glass.

 

In 1983, Noni received a Federal Express package from Clayhome: a Christmas wreath made by Amma Fairley of
Heaven's Hill holly, ivy, mistletoe, and magnolia leaves. To the wreath was tied a gold box. Inside the box was a gold charm bracelet. On the bracelet was a single charm, a tiny gold grand piano. The gift was from Kaye, she knew that, but there was no note.

For weeks Noni found herself touching the charm on her wrist like a bead on a rosary. Finally she sat down with the Yellow Pages, found a music store, and rented a spinet piano, which she moved into the undecorated room called “hers.” She put nothing in the room but the piano and Tatlock's painting, “HOME ON A NICE DAY.”

At a local college she found a teacher and started taking lessons again.

It turned out that the problem wasn't specifically with Roland's sperm count. There just seemed to be an incompatibility between his sperm and her eggs. The doctor started Noni on a rigorous graphing of her ovulation, which proved to be remarkably regular. She became so sensitive to her body temperature that she could often identify the rise of a few degrees.

 

Napkins, Irish linen soft with age, pulled through old silver napkin rings with a baroque G for Gordon ornately engraved.

 

In June of 1984, Noni flew home to Moors at her brother Wade's request. He'd had several phone calls from Amma Fairley about “Grandma Judy,” who was having “a bad patch.” According to Amma, it was little things: Mrs. Tilden had forgotten to turn off a burner of the gas stovetop, which had burned all night, although luckily there'd been no damage done. She had lost two sets of her keys and accused Amma of taking them. She had left her purse out on the St. John's altar after finishing her floral arrangement for the altar guild. When the handbag was brought over to Heaven's Hill by the new rector, she
tearfully told him that her daughter-in-law Trisha had stolen it. She'd called Amma from the Moors Library and said someone had taken her car. It was right there in the parking lot.

Mrs. Tilden's family doctor said she was suffering from depression, a delayed “and all things considered, natural mini-nervous-breakdown.” This was more of a problem than Wade, with his busy business, and Trisha, with the heavy schedules of their two children (they had a little boy now), could deal with. They needed Noni to come take care of her mother.

Over Roland's objections, Noni flew to North Carolina. A week at Heaven's Hill was enough to make it clear that her once purposeful mother was growing at times (though not at all times) strangely distracted and forgetful, as if she were much older than her sixty years. She would buy new clothes identical to clothes she'd already bought and never worn; a third of the articles in her closet still had their price tags on them. She would buy new sheets and towels, put them in the kitchen pantry with the canned goods, and then burst into tears because she couldn't find them in the linen closet. Often she accused people (usually Amma) of stealing things. She would drive off in her large Mercedes sedan, forget where she was going, turn around, and drive back to Heaven's Hill.

But if Mrs. Tilden periodically lost focus, at those times she also lost the angry tension, the endless criticism that had made it so painful to be around her when Noni was growing up. Occasionally there was now a vague softness to her. Noni noticed that in these gentle moods her mother wanted to be near her or near Amma, accompanying them through the house as they worked. She also spent long afternoons with her granddaughter Michelle and was more patient with this child than she'd been with her own.

Noni studied her mother as she stood looking at objects in her hand as if she couldn't imagine what one did with them, as she sat for hours in the den on the red leather couch, listening
to her mechanical music boxes. The little machines she collected were all toy pianos: uprights, spinets, embellished harpsichords, black enamel concert grands. Once when Noni came upon her mother in one of the gentle moods, listening to a Chopin
Nocturne
phrase repetitively played on a music box, she asked if she would like her to play the whole piece on the piano for her.

“Oh, yes, please,” said Mrs. Tilden. “I wish I could play like you. You have such a beautiful touch.”

Noni had to leave the room she was so moved. It was the first unqualified compliment she could remember her mother ever giving her.

Over Roland's escalating protest, Noni stayed at Heaven's Hill almost a month. The most pleasant time of the day was early evening when Mrs. Tilden would sit with her chamomile tea on the yellow couch in the living room and listen to Noni play the piano. It was the closest she was ever to feel to her mother, who in the long gold light of those summer evenings never told her what to play, nor corrected how she played it, but just listened.

During that month, Mrs. Tilden began again to work on the photo albums that her husband had left behind when he'd moved out. But when Noni looked at the albums, she saw that all her mother had done was cut her own face out of all the photographs in which she'd appeared. Noni found all the small circles of faces floating like confetti in the swimming pool behind the house. She cleaned them out before Michelle arrived for Mrs. Tilden to give her her swimming lesson there the next morning.

During Noni's long visit, Kaye would occasionally drop in to see how she was doing. A few times, she walked with him while he played golf, as she had done long ago with her father. When he had an evening off, he took her out somewhere to give her a break; once they drove Kaye's vintage Thunderbird
to a jazz concert at Haver, once they went out with Parker to the Indigo Club. Mrs. Tilden became very upset whenever Noni left her alone to go off with Kaye, so much so that Noni would sometimes wait until her mother was asleep before leaving the house.

Nor did Kaye come to the house often to visit, not only because he kept very busy at the hospital, but also because Mrs. Tilden appeared to be frightened of him and would nervously leave the room whenever he'd ask her things about her health, like whether she had headaches (“All my life”), whether she had dizzy spells (“All my life”), had trouble seeing, had trouble swallowing. Instead of her old patronizing attitude toward Kaye, there was now an uneasy dread, as if she were scared he would find out something about her.

One night Kaye watched her teaching Noni how to play bridge, a game in which Noni had never had any interest. Once a ruthless and formidable contract bridge tournament player, Mrs. Tilden grew flustered at her inability to remember the rules of the game, and finally ran from the room, screaming at Kaye that he was deliberately making her confused by staring at her.

“Her doctor says she's depressed,” Noni explained.

“What's this doctor's name?” Kaye asked.

The following week he dropped by to tell Noni that he'd spoken with Dr. Schillings and that he was concerned that the elderly family physician was not treating Mrs. Tilden adequately. Even if her problem were in fact depression, she needed medication for it. But frankly Kaye didn't think depression was the cause of her behavior. He had begun to suspect that Mrs. Tilden was showing symptoms of either early-onset Alzheimer's or of some other dementia caused by neurological necrosis.

It was also possible, he warned Noni, that her mother had suffered a stroke (both her parents had died of strokes), and if
so, the sooner they knew the facts, the better her chances for avoiding or surviving a second stroke. At the very least, she needed treatment for what he was sure was high blood pressure.

Noni said she'd talk to Dr. Schillings.

Mrs. Tilden began to spend most of her time in her sitting room. She had a pretty little writing desk there and a television hidden in a painted armoire. She liked to sit at the desk with its view from a bay window over the Heaven's Hill woods to the meadows and river that had all once been Gordon property. Sometimes two swans, wild descendants of swans brought there by Noni's great-grandmother, floated past together on the river, and whenever Mrs. Tilden saw them, she always commented on how swans mated for life and then she started to cry, lamenting that Bud had died and she was all alone.

At her little desk she wrote endless thank-you notes, some for recent gifts, but more of them acknowledging occasions from the distant past. Noni would find these notes addressed but never stamped and sometimes not even finished before Mrs. Tilden placed them inside the thick creamy envelopes engraved:

 

JUDITH GORDON TILDEN
HEAVEN'S HILL
MOORS, NORTH CAROLINA

 

Dear Mrs. Hadlemeyer,

My husband and I acknowledge with gratitude your donation to the Gordon Tilden Memorial Children's Library at Moors Elementary in memory of our son. Gordon often spoke of his hope to teach the young children of…

 

Dear Sunny and Derek,

What a wonderful time Bud and I had at your Halloween costume ball. It was a great idea for a party—
come as your favorite song—and you two looked adorable as “Mister Sandman” and “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”…