The Last Noel (28 page)

Kaye set down the dessert in front of her and leaned over to embrace her as she sat with her head in her hands. He kissed her hair, then the side of her face, then he pressed his cheek to hers, wetting his skin with her tears.

For a long time he stayed there, their faces touching, neither of them moving.

Then slowly he reached across her, took the silver cake cutter, placed her hand on it beneath his. Slowly together they cut down a piece of the dark spongy dessert, then another piece.

Still neither of them spoke. The only sound was the violin music playing from the next room and the ticking of the old-fashioned French clock on the mantel. It chimed softly. Eleven times. Kaye listened to them, not moving away from her.

Then Noni stood and stepped back from her chair. Slowly she turned to him.

To Kaye as he looked at her suddenly the candle flames on the walls and on the table seemed to grow brighter and to lighten until the room glowed with golden halos, as if angels stood all around them.

They kissed. In his eyes Noni saw the walls of the room float backwards. She saw the walls turn to gold like the domed ceiling of a great church. The walls opened into a long empty corridor and at the end of it the person she saw was Kaye.

She moved into his arms. They kissed again and then they stepped back to look at each other. And what they saw was that they had left all questions behind.

Above them, the gold and red flames of the candles burned lower in the beautiful room.

Kaye and Noni heard the quick racing footsteps above them on the second floor. The mantel clock was chiming
again, over and over.

As they leapt to their feet, hurrying their clothes together, they heard the screaming. “Nonnniiii!”

Above them the footsteps rushed flying along the upstairs hall.

Together they ran into the foyer, smelling the smoke as they opened the door from the dining room. On the landing of the stairs above them they saw Mrs. Tilden spinning wildly, fluttering her arms at her sides as if trying to fly away from the flames that leapt up at her from the hem of her bathrobe. Her eyes were frenzied, the terror huge in them.
“Nonnniiii!”

Kaye rushed ahead of Noni up the stairs, threw his arms about Mrs. Tilden, and pulled her with him down to the floor. He covered her with his body, and although she fought him frantically, he smothered the fire, beat it down until it was out. “Go check her room! She's okay,” he kept shouting at Noni.

But as Noni struggled to move past them, her mother grabbed at her dress. “Noni, don't leave me, Noni!”

Below them the front door slammed open and Kaye heard his grandmother Amma running into the house gasping out,
“Fire!”

“Up here!” Kaye pulled Noni down to hold her mother, who kept sobbing about how she'd only tried to do something nice. He raced up the stairs and along the second-floor hall. Pulling two quilts from an antique rack, he rushed with them to the wing where smoke was pouring from Mrs. Tilden's sitting room.

Below him as he ran, he could hear his grandmother on the hall phone calling for help. He could hear Noni's mother chattering hysterically about how she'd forgotten that she'd lit the candles for Noni's cake, that the curtain had caught fire and then everything was catching fire and she was sorry, she was so sorry. “Please don't be angry at me, Noni.”

And down below him on the stairs he could hear Noni saying over and over, “Mom, I'm not angry, I love you. I'm not leaving, I love you.”

December 24, 1986
The Hitchcock Chair

 

 

 

On a cold December night, starlight glimmered on the lawn and the sky was silvery with a big full moon that looked more like an autumn moon than a winter one. Amma Fairley paused in her preparations for her Christmas dinner the next day and wiped off her thick glasses. She put them back on and looked out the window of the Clayhome kitchen over to Heaven's Hill where she had left a light burning in the window for Judy and Noni Tilden's return home with Noni's baby. Amma couldn't wait to see that little boy. Poor thing, not even getting born in America. Well, they'd be here tonight from England in an hour or so, depending on traffic from the airport. For two whole years they'd hardly been home at all—not since the fire.

That fire.

The night of that fire it had been all they could do to keep Judy Tilden in one piece 'til the ambulance got there; the fire trucks had set her off screaming louder than the sirens. But those firemen had saved Heaven's Hill, no doubt about it. They'd hosed down the roof, beat back those flames 'til nothing was lost but the upstairs right wing. Things could have been worse. Somebody could have lost a life.

Where in the world had Judy hidden any cake after Amma had checked her sitting room that same afternoon? Lighting a bunch of candles on a birthday cake right next to some chiffon curtains, it was a miracle Judy hadn't burned herself worse than she did. Even so, she'd lost the use of her legs, not from the burns, but they thought maybe from a stroke, though the doctors couldn't seem to agree on anything.

Some of them thought Judy had maybe had two or three little strokes even before she'd caught the house on fire—TIAs Kaye called the little strokes—that nobody had noticed. The doctors said how she might even have had a stroke before the one that had put her in the hospital the year before that. Kaye explained how those little strokes were probably the reason why Judy had gotten so scattered and so raw in her feelings that year before the fire, to where one day she'd burst into tears if you said something nice to her, and the next, start screaming at you that you were robbing her.

But not walking was nothing compared to what that fire had done to Judy's spirits. Judy had turned into a child clinging to her mother night and day, and Noni was like that mother, never losing patience with her. Carting her all over everywhere, one doctor after another.

Well, it'd be good to have them home again. Amma and her niece Dionne and a few of the grandchildren had gotten the place all aired out and decorated. Amma had the heat on, and a little supper waiting to go in the microwave oven, although nothing would persuade her that any natural taste wasn't ruined by all that microwaving. Bad enough the way things tasted bought at the grocery store, not like in the old days when they'd grown everything they needed right here at Heaven's Hill. Raised all they needed too, her grandpa and grandma, her daddy and mama when they'd been working here. Chickens, pigs, cows, lambs, home-bred and home-eaten. Long after nobody else bothered.

Every day when Amma was little she would go off with her cousins May and Seka down the hill with their buckets to milk the cows, so early in the morning the grass was like walking through silky water. And in the summer they'd take the nickels they'd earned to Harmon's Drugs for ice cream. Amma would have to go in and buy for all three of them because when she was young she was light enough to pass. Even though Mr. Harmon knew who she was, he'd let her buy from his soda fountain counter because she was that light-skinned.

Back then you ate things in their proper time, fresh-killed, or ripe from the vine or the earth. Nothing tasted that good anymore, especially not coming out of some radiation machine like a microwave. Plus her eyes had gotten so bad, she couldn't read all the buttons and numbers anyhow.

But nothing ever changed in her kitchens, so she didn't need to use her eyes. Everything stayed right where it ought to be. Sewing, though, was too hard now; lately she'd had to give up her sewing. Still, like Kaye said, hadn't she sewn enough damn sunflowers on enough damn mats and napkins for one woman's lifetime?

Amma hummed along with Whitney Houston on the radio as she pushed her apple stuffing into the huge white turkey.

O come, let us adore Him
,

Christ the Lord.

On the porch of Heaven's Hill, her grandchildren had wrapped evergreen garlands around the columns and hung one of her spruce and holly wreaths on the front door. In the living room they'd decorated a small tree with some colored lights and set it up in the corner. Nothing was as big or blazing as it used to be at the Tildens, but Amma had wanted Noni and Judy and the baby to have at least something looking a little cheery when the van pulled into the drive.

Tatlock, his son Austin, and Austin's son Zaki were going to pick the Tildens up at the airport, even though Austin never
drove his taxis anymore, had ten regular drivers working for him now, had a shuttle van and a stretch limousine, too. Last July he'd driven Amma and Tat in that limo to the Peacock Room for their fortieth-anniversary party. But this evening the three Fairley men were going to the airport in Tat's personal van, because it was fixed up to handle somebody in a wheelchair, and Tat was going to take charge of showing Judy Tilden how to travel in one. And everything was ready at the house-now not just the one ramp they'd put in right away, but ramps off all three porches and an elevator from the first to the second floor so Judy could go back to her old wing of the house. Plus handicapped bathrooms upstairs and down. Money made things easier, that was certain.

It sure would be good to have somebody home over there across the lawn again. Especially a baby. Nothing was more lonesome than a house with no life growing in it.

And wonders of His love
,

And wonders, wonders of His love.

Carrying her sleeping son, now a little over a year old, Noni Tilden moved quickly beside the airline attendant as he smoothly hurried her mother's wheelchair along the ramp into the gate area.

Over the last two years, Mrs. Tilden had grown frailer and thinner, one side of her body weaker than the other, one side of her face slightly fallen. Were she not lifted and straightened in her wheelchair, she would sometimes slide down slumping into its corner. Fortunately, after Mrs. Tilden's hired nurse had gotten them situated at the London airport, the airline attendants had taken over the invalid and had been wonderfully solicitous to her throughout both long flights. Noni couldn't have managed without them.

Noni took her mother's hand, held it, walked beside her. “It's fine, Mom, we're right here with you.”

In her cashmere sweater coat, heeled boots, jeans, and soft turtleneck, her silvery blonde hair loosely pinned, Noni was a very beautiful woman with no apparent awareness of the fact. A few of the men who'd appreciatively watched her as she'd played with her baby during the long flight from Heathrow had found themselves on the same plane with her from New York, too, and after a few more cocktails, had tried a variety of conversational gambits. Noni had politely ended them. Now they smiled at her as they went past. Busy with her son, she'd noticed none of it. But then her mother had often told her she didn't see that men were flirting with her even before she'd had her little boy.

Noni had named him John Gordon and called him Johnny; he was fifteen months old and eagerly walking. He'd exhausted her during the flights, making her walk him up and down the aisles of the planes, and now he was fast asleep, a heavy weight in her arms.