The Last Noel (8 page)

December 21, 1972
The Chinese Jar

 

 

 

In Heaven's Hill, fifteen-year-old Noni walked tentatively and loudly on her new clunky platform heels down the front stairs into the hallway and looked in the mirror at the gown her mother had chosen for her to wear to the Senior Class Christmas Dance, to which she'd been invited although only a sophomore. From the den, where her father had begun spending his evenings, she could hear Walter Cronkite tell the country about casualties in Vietnam.

Then she heard the chinkling ice in the bourbon glass.

“Daddy?”

Noni's father moved into the foyer and propped himself against the console with the easy grace that wouldn't desert him until the fifth or even the sixth drink. “Look at you. Who's the lucky fellow taking the Princess to the Ball?”

“I already told you, Roland Hurd.”

“Ah.” He raised his crystal glass. “Doctor Jack's handsome boy. The running back. The senior. The Princeton man. The pick of the mothers.”

“Come on, Daddy.”

“Well, would you please go get a ten out of my wallet by
the bed? In case the Son of Dr. Hurd runs out of gas.”

“He's not going to run out of gas.” She bent down, brushed her father's cigarette ashes from the parquet marble. “Daddy, be careful, you're getting ashes on the floor.”

Bud Tilden kissed his daughter's nose and she turned her face from the familiar smell of bourbon and tobacco. “These days, honey, even a princess should carry cash.” With his soft smile he spun her in a waltz step and told her that she was perfectly beautiful. For Noni, the compliment was both sweet and meaningless. Her father had always said she was perfectly beautiful.

“Mom?”

From the living room came the thin mellifluous voice of Joni Mitchell singing a carol on the radio. Noni found her mother in the room alone, hanging tinsel strand by careful strand on the giant Christmas tree; Mrs. Tilden kept at the decorating task for days, long after everyone else lost interest, adding glass balls beside porcelain bears beside painted nutcrackers, adding ornaments old and new, until all the green was gone. She was proud of the tree, which was so famous in Moors that photos of it appeared in the
Moors Mercury Gazette
almost every year.

Near her, a silk couch was crowded with shiny rolls of wrapping paper, boxes of ribbons. Beneath the tree there were already dozens of beautifully wrapped presents spilling out across the floor. Among them was Noni's gift for Kaye, a fountain pen she'd bought at the Moors jewelry store with money from her savings account.

Tightening her tortoise-shell barrettes, Mrs. Tilden sat down at the piano bench and carefully studied her daughter. She turned Noni, arranged the fabric in her dress, coiled an elaborate curl in her hair. Then with her unhappy smile she said that Noni looked very nice but that she might want to consider not wearing those clunky shoes and she might try just a little more lift to her bodice, by which she meant the rubber
pads she'd left on Noni's bed, and that a little less eye shadow might make a nicer impression. She pinched Noni's cheeks, told her to pinch them again from time to time to give herself “a little more color.”

These suggestions, which carried far more weight than her father's compliments, sent Noni back up the stairs, on the verge of tears, and caused a fight between her parents. Their argument—Noni's father's charge that her mother was judgmental; Noni's mother's charge that her father was passive and weak and gave their daughter none of the guidance necessary to help her make her way in life—was a battle carried on in the hallway in complete silence through facial expressions that they both understood.

Upstairs, Noni passed Gordon's bedroom where the door was always open, his childhood books were always dusted, his khaki pants and ironed blue shirts were hanging in the closet and his old loafers with their crushed heels were under the Hitchcock rocking chair with the cane seat. Even his cherrywood baby crib that had belonged to the Gordons forever still sat there against the wall. Sometimes Noni would find her father in Gordon's room, sitting in the little rocking chair, quietly looking out at the night.

Thinking of Gordon, Noni could no longer hold back her tears, and she ran into her bedroom, where she stared sobbing at herself in the mirror of her vanity table and agreed with her mother that everything was wrong and nothing would ever be right. Then she told Gordon's silver-framed photograph that she hated her mother and that she hated herself as well; she told him she felt as if the floor were cracking open underneath her and that she was falling down through nothingness forever. In the old days, Kaye would have listened to how she felt, but now Kaye never seemed to want even to be around her, much less talk about anything that really mattered. Noni flung herself onto her four-poster bed, threw the rubber breast pads on the floor,
and crushed her face into the pillow. Finally when the tears did stop, she moved over to sit on her hope chest and stare out the window at the moonlit sycamore boughs. She tried to make the tree look like a ghost again, the way it had transformed itself in her childhood, but now it only looked like a tree.

After a while, she heard the doorbell ring downstairs. Changing into the satin shoes that her mother had left in a box of gold tissue papers on the little pink couch, she washed her face in her bathroom, applied less eye shadow than before, and hurried the length of the hall to her parents' room.

On her mother's bedside table, beside the Tab can and the Kleenex and hand cream and the bottles of Vitamin C and sleeping pills and amphetamine diet pills (to which Wade had no doubt helped himself), and the stacked hardcover library books—
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Love Story, Watership Down—
there was a Christmas photograph of the three-year-old Noni in a green velvet dress; she was sitting on her mother's lap, with Gordon and Wade, both in green velvet jackets with plaid bow-ties, on either side of them. Noni had a fleeting urge to smash the picture on the corner of the table, but the impulse faded before she even touched the frame.

On her father's side of the bed sat his perennial aspirin bottle and Rolaids, an empty crystal glass, a leather tray strewn with loose coins, cuff links, wooden golf tees, and the wallet where he always kept at least a dozen ten-dollar bills. The wallet was empty.

Noni stormed back along the wide hall to the “children's” wing of the house. She didn't knock on Wade's door because Wade only locked it when he was in there, talking on the phone to his idiot girlfriend or looking at
Playboy
and playing with himself under the covers so hard that Noni had heard the bed thump. His room was freezing now because he left the windows open while he was gone, to get rid of the smell of all the
pot he smoked. Noni went straight to the huge poster on the far wall of the Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz in his tiny bikini trunks with gold medals strung around his neck. She slipped her hand behind the poster and pulled out four of the stolen ten-dollar bills.

Three of these bills she had just returned to her father's wallet when Bud Tilden himself wandered into the room looking for her, holding her new floor-length fitted wool coat. “Doctor Jack Jr.'s downstairs. The Princeton man. You look like a Christmas dream come true, the first Noelle, the last Noelle, the best Noelle.”

Noni didn't tell her father that Wade was robbing him, but showed him that she had placed the ten dollars in her small velvet purse.

He smiled. “That's right, Princess. Powder room.” She wasn't sure what he meant.

As they started back down the stairs together, she took Tilden's arm and turned him so that he would be next to the banister but so that it would look as if he were escorting her, rather than she guiding him. It was a trick she'd seen her mother use.

In the foyer, her mother was telling Roland Hurd that the orchid corsage he'd brought Noni would go perfectly with her dress. Looking nothing at all like his homely father, Roland was tall with black shiny curls and skin that always looked tan. He was—she was amazed to see—larger than her slender father. Over his tuxedo he wore a gray wool coat that made him appear completely grown-up. His eyes were as blue as the under glaze of the Chinese jar on the console. The first time she'd seen those blue eyes burning into her, last August at Pinky Mann's pool party, she'd felt as if her legs were melting. To avoid his stare, she had abruptly dived into the pool and then had swum underwater until she had stopped feeling as if she had been stung by bees. The second time, he was holding
in the crook of his arm his white football helmet and when he called, “Hi Noni,” up into the stands, she saw that his eyes were the color of the blue hawk on his helmet. Roland Hurd was so handsome and so popular that when Noni had phoned to tell her friend Bunny that he had asked her, although she was only a sophomore, to the Senior Christmas dance, Bunny had said, “No way.” And another friend had screamed so loudly into the phone at the news that it had hurt Noni's ear.

“Look here at my princess,” her father told Roland, handing her over at the foot of the stairs. “Have you ever seen anyone so beautiful in your whole life?”

Roland, whose perfections she could read in her mother's eyes, politely said that he never had.

Each night when Amma Fairley left Heaven's Hill, she walked through its galleries and hallways and up and down its stairs and turned off all the lights in its empty rooms. Each night, an hour or two later, when she looked out across the lawn from Clayhome as she was looking now, all the lights were back on and the big white house was blazing out at her as if the people living inside it had set it on fire. All these years and she couldn't teach the Tildens to stop wasting electricity. They were careless, or they were scared of the dark, or maybe they were both. Even when Judy and her husband had been living alone in the house, when Wade was off in college and they'd sent little Noni up North to that boarding school after Judy'd said she didn't think much of the Moors schools anymore; even then the two of them had kept the lights on in almost every one of the seventeen rooms in Heaven's Hill, even the children's rooms.

Amma sat by the lamp at her kitchen window sewing her sunflowers onto the aprons she'd made. Pulling off her glasses,
she threaded the needle with yellow thread. From the next room came the bland murmur of television voices, Tat listening to his programs with the Labrador dog, Philly, lying on the floor by his wheelchair. Amma had her old radio on beside her, Mahalia Jackson singing “Go tell it on the mountain.”

Of course, she thought, when you lose a child like the Tildens had lost Gordon over in Vietnam, it makes you so scared about the others you need the lights on. Even four years later. When that phone call had come that Gordon was gone, Amma and little Noni had grabbed Judy just in time as she dropped straight to the floor. After that it was like Bud and Judy Tilden just didn't have the strength to come through things together. It was like that news about Gordon took all the hope out of their marriage. Amma could see how they blamed each other and how they blamed themselves. She could see Bud Tilden turning more and more to drinking alone. She could see Judy just freezing up, like she'd packed her heart in ice so she'd never have to feel it again.

It was Mr. Tilden who took the call, three years back now, from that school up North about how they'd had to rush Noni to the hospital with pneumonia just a few months after she'd gotten there. Twelve years old, up North by herself, alone in that hospital. Now Noni's mama Judy had been sick all the time when she was little, but Amma hadn't even believed all those illnesses of Judy's were real; they were just a way for Judy to get attention from her busy daddy and mama. But Noni had been truly sick; she had almost died. The Tildens had brought her home to Moors from the airport in an ambulance bed. And then it had taken the child another month lying in her room before she could start back to school at Gordon Junior.

Amma would say this for her grandson Kaye, back then he'd brought over his books and helped Noni with her homework evening after evening that whole spring. Every day before
he hurried off to his job dispatching at the taxi company, he was over there at Heaven's Hill helping Noni. Bud Tilden had treated him like his own son, he was there so much. Kaye had been a good friend to Noni.

And Noni had been a good friend to him. When her health got better, the two of them started spending every evening here at Clayhome, laughing, listening to those rock and roll records, learning some new dance or other that they'd seen on television. Back in Philadelphia, Deborah had taught Kaye to love to dance, and he and Noni got to be really good at all their fast steps and combinations, though they never did seem to do any dancing anywhere except here in Amma's house.

Funny, Kaye loved to dance but he wouldn't have a thing to do with music any other way, even though he had a nice voice, tenor like Amma's daddy Grover King. Noni had found out how Kaye had played violin in Philadelphia back in the fourth and fifth grades, and she'd kept at him and gotten Amma to keep at him to join that little school orchestra she was in at Gordon Junior. Amma had taken Tatlock to one of their concerts where Noni had the solo on the piano. But it wasn't too long before Kaye quit his violin. And not too much longer before it seemed like he'd just about quit Noni, too.