The Second Day of Christmas

December 25, 1968
The Piano

 

 

 

Earlier in the week, Noni had left a red envelope inside the screen door of Clayhome addressed to “Mr. John Montgomery King.” Kaye's grandmother had shaken her head at the waste of the unused five-cent stamp. The envelope contained a stiff creamy card with a drawing of Heaven's Hill on it. “You are cordially invited,” the printed handwriting began, and it went on to request Kaye's company at a “Holiday Open House” on December 25 from two to five.

It was now two-thirty, Christmas Day.

“We’re not talking about it. You’re going and you’re not going empty-handed,” Kaye's grandmother Amma told him matter-of-factly. “Those poor people have had a terrible loss and Christmas just makes it worse.”

Kaye, twelve today, replied with ironic movements of his eyebrows and lips. “Right, and what the whole Tilden family's waiting for is me to come over there with these dumb cookies and make their lives just perfect again.”

Amma Fairley turned her quiet dark gold eyes on her grandson, glancing from his braided headband to his peasant shirt and the colorfully embroidered vest that his mother had made him up in Philadelphia, copying a picture he’d shown her of Jimi Hendrix. “Tell you what I’m waiting for, Mister I-Know-Everything—you putting a civil tongue in your head before the only place you’re going is up those stairs.” She pointed through the sweet-smelling kitchen to the narrow steps whose edges had been worn by time as round as river stones; they led to the room that was now going to be Kaye's.

“Fine!” He crossed his arms emphatically. “Fine! That's the only place I want to go. You think I want to go watch Aunt Yolanda wait on those people? You’re the one making me show up where nobody gives a rat's—” The gray-haired woman held up a warning finger and the boy closed his mouth over the last word of his sentence. “You’re the one,” he repeated in a stubborn mutter.

“That's right. I’m the one.” Carefully smoothing the wrinkles from a piece of used green tissue paper, she pushed it across the tabletop at him. “Here. Wrap that candy up.” On a card she wrote in her flowing formal schoolhouse script, “Merry Christmas from Aunt Ma, Uncle Tatlock, and Kaye.”

It was Kaye King's fifth holiday trip down to North Carolina since he’d met Noni, but this Christmas everything was changing. This time there would be no train ride back with his mother to Philadelphia after New Year's; instead he would stay in Moors and live with his grandparents. Nineteen sixty-eight had been a hard year for Kaye's mother, with losses too fast and too deep for her cemetery of sticks and rubber bands to contain—in the end, a harder year than the boy could hide from those who would separate them.

Finally in November, when the sky in West Philadelphia was always gray and the days too quickly gave way to night, his mother gave way as well, retreating to a darkness from which, despite all the tricks his years with her had taught him, he could not bring her back. After she was carried strapped on a gurney to a hospital, her sister, unable to support the boy, called home to North Carolina for help. Amma Fairley sent Kaye a train ticket.

Now his grandmother watched him as he turned the radio dial from a choir on her church music station singing “Jesus the Light of the World” over to loud Motown on the rock station, in order, she knew, to keep her from talking. Abruptly, Aretha Franklin shouted, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me!” The old radio spluttered static as if indignant at the change.

Kaye hit the plastic box hard with his fist, then yanked out its plug.

“What you so angry about, Kaye?”

“Nothing.”

But that wasn’t true, although he claimed otherwise, even to himself. Kaye was angry. Angry with his mother for choosing madness over him, with his aunt for choosing her own children. Angry at his expulsion from the urban turbulence of the world he knew, where—despite his small size—he’d won, with his fearless audacity, a place for himself. He was angry with his grandparents for living in the South where he would have to fight alien battles on a foreign terrain with unfamiliar weapons.

He didn’t want to live in Moors, North Carolina, and go to the Tildens’ holiday party at Heaven's Hill. He dreaded entering a new school where he would have to explain details about his parents to strangers. What was wrong with his mother? Where was his father? He didn’t want to admit that, as far as he knew, his parents had never married and that he’d never laid eyes on his father, although he did have a snapshot of this young man, taken at a march in Montgomery, that he kept with his mother's Popsicle-stick crosses in her shoebox called “The Promised Land.”

Kaye had brought this shoebox with him on the train with his large duffel bag. That's all he’d brought. What few toys he’d had, he’d given away to friends. He’d returned his books, his sports gear, and his used violin to the school that had lent them to him. He didn’t want to play the violin down here in Moors. He didn’t want to start school at Gordon Junior High in a room of white southerners, only one of whom he knew and that one a girl. Kaye hadn’t spoken to Noni Tilden since his arrival at Clayhome three days earlier and he didn’t want to speak to her.

It was the first Christmas in Moors that he had felt this way. While he and Noni had never so much as written a postcard or said a word on the phone during the full year between each of his earlier trips South, still, in the past, he had always been glad to see her and to renew their disputatious conversation. From the moment his uncle drove him through the brick gates of Heaven's Hill, he had always stared eagerly out the rear window of the black taxi, searching for Noni, readying himself to come bounding out the door to challenge her with new knowledge. And he knew that just as eagerly, Noni had started in right after Thanksgiving asking Aunt Ma almost daily, “How long before Kaye's coming?” and that she’d be waiting to see the old black taxi bring him in through the white stone drive.

It was true that each Christmas it had taken them a little longer to recover the freedom that they’d felt riding together on the sled the night they’d met—as if they were moving backwards, away from intimacy. Still, this was the first Christmas Kaye had felt that he didn’t want to see Noni at all. In fact, he’d pretended not even to notice her as she’d run waving behind his uncle's taxi. This was the first time he’d stayed obstinately locked in his room—listening loudly to Hendrix's Electric Lady-land, or reading one of his mother's books, Soul on Ice and Man-child in the Promised Land—whenever he heard Noni downstairs in Clayhome's kitchen, hoping, he knew, to visit with him.

But now Kaye's grandmother was making him go to the Tildens’ annual Christmas party, making him help bake the candies and cookies he was to take there as a gift. It was the last thing he wanted to do.

In pressuring him to attend this party, Amma Fairley was not motivated by awe or fear or even respect for her employers, but by a kind and generous pity. The Tildens’ oldest son Gordon had been killed in Vietnam the previous February, almost a year ago now. But this was their first Christmas, their first social gathering, without him.

“Noni lost her brother. She needs your help,” Amma said. “Or she wouldn’t have come over here with that invitation, not with you looking through her like she was a old piece of glass. And no grandchild of mine's going to treat his friends that way.”

“She's not my friend,” snorted Kaye. He dropped the warm white sugar balls and dark almond chocolates into a drawstring cloth bag with a sunflower sewn on it. He wrapped the bag in the green tissues and held the twisted top while Amma ran red paper ribbon between scissors and thumb so the tips sprang into festive curls. “My friends all live in Philly.”

“Well, those Philly friends of yours didn’t invite you to a party and she did and she's the one with a big brother that got killed and you’re going and you’re taking these sweets with you.”

Since her teens, Amma Fairley had worked as a maid at Heaven's Hill, and while in those forty years she had never been invited to a party there, on many occasions she had cooked for and cleaned up after the Christmas Open House. In the past few years, she had turned those duties over to her stepdaughter Yolanda, whose husband also ran errands for the Tildens in his taxi, but from past experience Amma knew that guests would be expected to bring small gifts, usually of holiday food or drink, to this party. She also knew that the most courteous guests came neither too early nor too late; she was keeping an eye on the metal clock above the stove to make sure that her grandson left Clayhome just before three o’clock to cross the lawn to Heaven's Hill.

As for any further attempts to persuade Kaye to wear his new brown wool suit, a birthday present from her, instead of the bizarre and jarring outfit he had on, or to let her trim what he called his Afro, Amma had never been one to waste precious energy on futile desires. It was enough that he should go pay the Fairleys’ respects to the Tildens at their Open House. And go he would.

She watched the boy with an appraising eye as he swiftly moved the cookie cutter over her sheet of gingerbread dough, leaving behind neat rows of brown Santa Clauses. “You got busy hands like me,” she told him. “I never had any use for an idle hand.” Amma nodded with tolerant disappointment at her husband Tatlock out in the living room in his wooden wheelchair, asleep in front of the large brown television set where he’d been watching news of the astronauts circling the moon in Apollo 8 the night before. The three astronauts were taking pictures of the earth rising behind the moon. Everyone was worried about them because Apollo 1 had blown up in January of 1967 and killed the men trapped inside.

Kaye gave a studied look at his grandmother's second husband, overweight and crippled in his chair beside the black iron coal stove. Grandpa Tat watched the news morning, noon, and night. Kaye didn’t like the news; the news had driven his mother crazy. But unlike her, Tatlock listened to the goings-on in the great world with absolute impartiality and no emotional investment whatsoever. The news was his way out of the house, but it didn’t touch him, not the way his own troubles did. His own troubles were his chief interest and chief conversation. With endless fascination he would recount the minutest details of his physical condition, with a ghoulish emphasis on how he’d “lost it all. Toes. Foot. Leg.”

Tat had worked outdoors for thirty-five years on the grounds crew of the nearby Haver University, had built big walls and roads and fences, dug big ponds and cleared big trees. Now, he was shrunk into a wooden wheelchair in a low room, a sufferer with diabetes and, according to him, a victim of prolonged medical neglect for which, as he endlessly vowed, he would someday get a lawyer and bankrupt the veterans hospital.

Amma was saying, “That man tells me he can’t do nothing ’cause he lost his leg to the Sugar. What's his leg got to do with his hands?”

Kaye shrugged. “He's got disability. You want him to get a tin cup and beg on Main Street?”

Her eyes—the strange dark amber that Tatlock called cat eyes—flecked gold. “Kaye King, don’t make me think you’re calling my table sales begging on the street.”

“No, Ma’am.” But in fact that had been what Kaye had meant. His grandmother's street vending embarrassed him; she resembled too closely the beggars on the sidewalks of Philadelphia. Amma spent evenings at her sewing machine, making place mats, dishcloths, aprons, tea cozies, guest towels, and such. On these objects she had started sewing, at Tatlock's suggestion, large yellow sunflowers that served as a kind of logo of her craft. In good weather, she sold them from a table set up in front of Moors Savings Bank, where Noni's father Bud Tilden worked for his father-in-law. She sold them as fast as she could make them. She also sold her candies and cookies, her pickled fruits and canned vegetables, cut flowers and dried herbs and willow baskets. For decades now she had sold anything she could think of to make or grow and she kept the money in a savings account at Moors Bank.

Kaye echoed his grandfather's perpetual lament. “What's he suppose to do? Thanks to that V.A. hospital he can’t even walk.”

“There's a million things Tat could do.” Amma scooped the gingerbread Santas onto the baking sheet. “Help me with the million things I do. Sit behind my sales table in his wheelchair and free me up to do my work. He could help me sew. A man can sew, same as a woman.”

“You said he was a hard worker.”

“I don’t say him no. He worked long as somebody told him what to do and handed him money to do it. Minute that job quit, he quit too.”

Kaye stepped into the other room and watched the great hewn coal-black slabs of Tat's hands as they floated, folded, atop his rising belly. “He’d look silly sewing. He's too big.” Examining himself in the mirror over the blue threadbare velvet couch, the boy stretched up his shoulders, arched his feet, and then went back into the kitchen. “Was my real grandpa, was Grandpa King big or little?”

“Big.” Amma closed her oven door, took Kaye's hands in her own, and held them up to his face. His hands were like hers, a light cinnamon brown with broad palms and long slender fingers. “Kaye, you stop all this worrying about being tall. Look at these hands of yours. You got big hands. Big feet too. You gonna be big as Tat there, big as Bill King. I married two big men.

“But I tell you one thing, son, the biggest man I ever knew in my life was my daddy and he was the runt of his litter. My daddy Grover Clay was no bigger than you are now the day he died.”

This was news to Kaye, and the first positive thought he’d had about the forced move to Moors: that there were useful discoveries to be made here. “What was your daddy like?” He sat down, hoping for a story.

But Amma looked at her kitchen clock, handed Kaye the wrapped gift, and motioned him to the door. “Like your mama,” she said, chagrin and pride in her voice. “He was like your mama. Just ’cause he couldn’t win didn’t mean he wouldn’t fight. Get on over there.” She plugged back in her radio, found her station, and began to hum along with the choir, “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child!”

As Kaye left Clayhome, he put two of the bumper stickers he’d brought from Philadelphia into his pocket: STOP THE WAR and IMPEACH NIXON. (Even though Nixon wouldn’t even be inaugurated until January, his mother had already wanted to impeach him.) He’d give the stickers to Noni as a way of demonstrating that he was, as always, far ahead of her.

Despite the season, the day was warm and sunny, with a mild breeze that swayed the Victorian kissing balls hanging on red ribbons from the porch cornice of Heaven's Hill. The wide white door opened just as Kaye reached it and Noni stepped out to welcome him. He could see her whole face lighting up as if bright candles were shining through it. He also saw that she was still taller than he was. Standing as straight as he could, he took solace in his grandmother's prediction about his large feet and hands. “Merry Christmas,” he said, frowning. “My grandmama sent me over here.”

“Merry Christmas.” Noni's smile faltered in response to his scowl. “Happy Birthday.”

“Yeah, you too.” He looked at her, then looked at the porch roof, then sighed, making a loud noise through his lips. “Listen, I’m sorry about what happened to Gordon.”

Noni nodded slowly, swallowing the abrupt tears that always came whenever anyone was kind to her about her brother's death.

Kaye frowned. “Gordon was okay.”

“He liked you a lot.”

“I liked him too. So, I guess you heard…” Kaye made a face, pointed at Clayhome.

All of a sudden Noni wasn’t sure if she should mention Kaye's mother's hospitalization. His loss was oddly more complicated, more private, than hers. Anxiety heated her hands and face as she fought to find the right words. “Aunt Ma told me you were going to stay down in Moors and go to school here and you probably wish you weren’t but maybe it won’t be so bad.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, it will.”

She felt for a moment defeated by his certainty. Then affection rushed through her. “Kaye, I’m so sorry about what happened to your mother.”

He nodded, looking away until he gained control, then he spoke in the tone that Noni came to think of as his Philadelphia voice, the voice of the alien place called “the Street,” the place that excluded her. “Well, my mama always said, ‘You fight Whitey, he’ll take you out. Jail you, shoot you, bomb you, drug you.’ That's how they got her.”

Noni wanted to protest that all whites wouldn’t do those things, but she thought she might offend him. Instead she asked, “Don’t they think your mother’ll get better?”

He shrugged again. “¿Qué se?” Then he shook himself, literally shook himself free of memory, and smiled ironically, holding out the candy. “Well, I’m not here empty-handed.”

She took the tissue-wrapped bag. “Thank you.”

For a while they both looked at the porch floor. He noticed that she wore boots and it occurred to him that maybe they added to her height. High white boots with white tights on her thin legs and a lime green miniskirt as short as summer shorts, and over it a bulky red sweater that had Christmas trees knitted across the front. To his surprise, she had cut her blonde hair short, like the girl in Rosemary's Baby, and she was wearing makeup, at least black eyeliner and black mascara.

Finally, with a trace of his old flamboyance, he pointed at her head. “What happened to your hair? Get caught in a lawn mower?”

She looked at him for a minute, and then suddenly relaxing, grinned back. “What happened to yours?” She felt happy that he’d challenged her in that aggravating manner. “Your hair's as big as…as…a beach ball.”

He twisted the psychedelic peace symbol pinned on his headband. “A beachball? You think Philly's on the beach? You think I even know what a beachball is?”

“It's a big round rubber ball as big as your hair.”

“You ever see a black beach ball?” He crossed his arms and grinned at her with that irrepressible ebullience. “You ever hear a beachball say, ‘Shout it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!’? You ever hear that?”

“No.” Her smile widened.

“Who are you suppose to be anyhow—Twiggy?”

She mimicked his comic exaggeration, crossing her own arms as she said, “I am supposed to be me, myself, and I!”

All at once they both burst into laughter in the old way, as they’d laughed on the sled the night they’d first met.

It was at this moment that Noni's seventeen-year-old brother Wade, wearing his gray cadet's uniform from his military school, slammed out of the front door and, shoving his way between them, snarled, “I’m getting the hell out of Munster Lodge.”

Wade Tilden looked like his mother; he had her milky skin dotted everywhere with red freckles and her strawberry blond hair—although his was almost shaved. He was tall with dangling arms and his tight gray jacket was covered with gold braid and brass buttons sticking out from his thin chest in flat straight rows. Ignoring Kaye completely, he added with a casual belligerence, “Noni, you don’t want to wake up dead, tell Mom I went to see 2001. They’re just looking for any excuse to treat me like a dumb baby.” Wade was pretending to be going to the local movie theater, when in fact he and his friends were driving his new Mustang to Charlotte three hours away to attend a rock concert.

Alarmed, Noni pleaded with her brother. “Mom said you couldn’t go to Charlotte. Please, Wade, don’t upset her.”

“If she doesn’t get off my back, I’m joining the fuckin’ Army! Maybe I can get myself killed like perfect old Gordon. Maybe if I’m dead I can catch a break from those two!” Wade shouted this at the closed front door.

Mrs. Tilden, having lost her older son Gordon to friendly fire in the Tet Offensive, lived in terror that freakish violence would rob her of her younger boy as well. Had it been possible, she would have kept Wade by her side waking and sleeping, locked away from the risks of life. Nothing frightened her more than his new driver's license. Their embattled negotiations over the Mustang that Judy's father, the bank president R.W. Gordon, had ridiculously bought his grandson (as a bribe to finish school) were as prolonged and labyrinthine as a war treaty, with peace never coming closer.

“Just keep Mom off my back before I kill her and you both.” Wade repeated the warning without affect or without elaborating on how his twelve-year-old sister was supposed to accomplish this urgent task.

Kaye stood there, still invisible to Wade. He could tell that the way Wade ignored him was embarrassing Noni. So he walked away, over to one of the green rockers on the porch, and sat down in it. Kaye had always felt a physical dislike of Wade; it was as instinctive as the affection he’d felt toward Noni's other brother, the older Gordon. While over the years he’d encountered Gordon no more than half-a-dozen times, his memories of him were warm and rich.

Gordon had once told Kaye he “was taking a slow soul train to freedom,” and by his last year at college had quit his fraternity, grown his blond hair down to his shoulders, started playing the harmonica, and stopped wearing shoes. Kaye could remember seeing Gordon's long dirty white feet hopping warily over the icy lawn to untangle the Tildens’ old setter Royal Charlie from a prickly holly bush. He could remember the wry sweetness with which Gordon had winked at him once, making him feel grown-up and smart, as the college senior had been arguing about the Vietnam War with his nasty-tempered grandfather, R.W. Gordon, in the Tildens’ driveway. The old man had shouted at him, with his typical coarseness, “Don’t shit where you sleep, boy. You know how rich I am?”

Gordon had smiled, winking at Kaye. “Depends on what you mean by rich, Grandpa. Martin Luther King's the richest man I know.”

Listening now to Wade whining at Noni, Kaye was thinking that it was Wade, not Gordon, they should have named after the bank president, for Wade far more resembled R.W. Gordon in both his irascible personality and rigid politics than his gentle older brother ever had.

Two years ago, Kaye had heard from Noni about how Gordon had gone off to fight a war he didn’t believe in because Mrs. Tilden had made it clear that serving his country was expected of someone with the Gordon name. It was too bad, Kaye was thinking, it was a real shame that it had been Gordon and not Wade on whom a bomb had landed out of the Asian sky back in February.

As if Wade had overheard this thought, he abruptly wheeled around in Kaye's direction. “Hey, Sly,” he said, “why don’t you just make yourself at home on my porch?”

Noni said, “Wade!”

Kaye rocked with exaggerated contentment in the green rocker. “Thanks, I will.”

“If you’re looking for your Aunt Yolanda, she's inside serving our guests.”

Noni said, “Wade, stop it!”

Kaye stood up, staring at Wade, grinned as he extended his middle finger, and then slowly turned his hand and formed the peace sign. “Mustang Sally, I’m just here to date your sister.”

Noni said, “Kaye!”

Fists tight, Wade lunged toward him. Kaye raised his own fists and grinned, “Come on.”

But just then the door opened and Judy Tilden's head leaned out, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back by a burgundy velvet headband that matched her short burgundy velvet dress and burgundy satin pumps. She ignored Kaye and Noni both. “Wade, I need to speak to you for just a minute, sweetheart, right now.” Her head disappeared. The military cadet spun around, his face enflamed with rage as he slammed into the hall after her. “Great! What did I do wrong this time?!”

A little while later Wade stormed back outside and bolted down the porch stairs. Noni now sat in the swing that was hung by chains from a high bough on a huge oak near the driveway. Standing behind her, Kaye pushed on the wooden seat. Noni was laughing with her hands over her mouth.

Wade growled, “What's so funny?”

She shook her head, laughed harder and harder.

Wade picked up river pebbles from the driveway and gratuitously hurled them at the two doves sitting, as usual, in the dogwood near the house. Then Noni and Kaye watched as he flung himself into his Mustang and went squealing away fishtailing, tires spitting gravel behind him, unaware of the stickers on either side of his front bumper—IMPEACH NIXON and STOP THE WAR.

Noni couldn’t stop laughing. “Asshole,” Kaye said, mimicking Wade's furious stomping around the yard flinging pebbles.

“Don’t make me laugh, or I’ll, I’ll…”

“Pee?”

“Yes!” She couldn’t believe she’d admitted that. She ran off and left him. When she returned, he got off the swing and sat her back down in it. Pushing hard with her feet, she began to pull herself back and forth.

Kaye grabbed both chains. “Hang on!” He hauled the swing back, further and further, high over his head, as high as it could go, until Noni was almost tilted out of the seat. “Kaye, stop!”

“Hang on!”

Then Kaye pushed hard, running forward as fast as he could. Noni felt his shoulder against her back, and suddenly her body remembered the sharp feel of his bone as he’d raced her down the hill on the red sled so long ago.

Now he was running all the way beneath her swing, pushing her as hard as he could when he ducked beneath. She arced skyward, legs pumping, laughing, free.

In the wide front hall of Heaven's Hill there were willow baskets of poinsettias lining the parquet floor and holly wreaths with plaid bows on the doors. Christmas cards hung from swags of white pine on the banister. Presents from guests had piled up on the green leather bench and on the cherry console. Chocolates in gold boxes, champagne in silver boxes, a camellia in red foil. Noni placed Kaye's candies among the gifts between the little pear tree and the blue antique Chinese jar.

As they moved together toward the living room, Kaye felt himself pulling inward, making himself completely still in the way he had always tried to do whenever confronted with something he wasn’t sure of. He felt Noni sense this tightening as she took his arm. At first he resisted her, but then his muscles relaxed beneath her hand.

Gently she squeezed his arm. “Don’t worry about it if you don’t know anybody. They’re mostly jerks anyhow.”

He mugged in his cocky way. “You’re the worrier. You’re the one hid under the covers the night I met you.”

“I did not.”

“You’re the one was scared to sled down the hill.”

She smiled, happy to feel close to him again in their old joking way. “I was not. You wanted to quit before I did.”

Kaye looked into the living room of Heaven's Hill, smoky and crowded with white people, mostly middle-aged. He wagged his eyebrows, grinning, and spoke again with the bravado of that alien Philadelphia “street” voice. “Hey, long as they don’t sic their dogs on me, long as they don’t call in the Fuzz, they don’t worry me at all.”

“Most people aren’t like you say.” She felt she had to protest. “My parents’ friends aren’t like you say.”

“Sure they are.”

Swarming out of the living room with its tall windows and old Persian rugs rushed a loud hum of laughing voices. Two small children sat at the grand piano banging on the keys until a woman in taffeta bell-bottom pants ran over, slapped them on the hands, and pulled them crying away. Another woman sat down and with one finger began to play “Scarborough Fair.” A man with a plate of little biscuits leaned over and sang in her face, “Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.” His red tie said, “Ho Ho Ho,” all over it.

Another man in a shiny plaid jacket ran at a woman shouting, “Here come the judge!”

Kaye noticed that the red velvet wings on the angel atop the fourteen-foot Christmas tree were the same color as Mrs. Tilden's dress. He noticed that hanging from the mantel above the fireplace were five now empty red stockings, five—even though Gordon had been dead for almost a year. He wondered if they had filled Gordon's stocking this year, and if so, who had taken out all his gifts?

Behind a table with curved legs stood Noni's father with his handsome blond head and his son Gordon's soft sweet smile. He sang, “God rest you merry, gentlemen!” and called out “Peace on Earth, Ladies!” over and over as he poured eggnog from a huge scalloped silver bowl into small silver cups and handed them to the men and women buzzing around him. He wore a beautiful dark green jacket, and the color of the jacket matched his soft silk tie. Kaye noticed that Mr. Tilden filled his own cup with bourbon whenever he added more to the punch bowl.

“Hey there, Princess. It's been a hard day's night.”

“I know, Daddy.”

Noni's father pulled her under his arm and kissed her hair as he reached to shake Kaye's hand. “Hey there, Kaye! Peace and brotherhood, man.”

“Peace and brotherhood, Mr. T.” The boy noticed the beautiful gold wristwatch Tilden always wore and then saw a swollen scab on his wrist; there was a red streak running from the sore up under his shirt cuff. Kaye pointed at it. “Something looks bad on your hand.”

Laughing, Noni's father pulled up his cuff and showed a red streak following the veins of his arm. “Unscrewing a light bulb and it broke off.” He handed eggnog to a tall thin homely faced man in a pearl gray Nehru jacket listening to their conversation with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. “Hey, Jack, let me light your fire.”

Tilden reached toward him with his silver lighter but the skinny man brushed it aside, then took the swollen hand and pulled it close to his face. Tilden winced when he poked at the sore and told him, “Bud, this kid's right. You got blood poisoning here that’ll be headed straight for your heart if you don’t look after it. I’m giving you a prescription for antibiotics. Start taking them tomorrow.”

“Oh sure.”

The homely man turned to Noni. “And you, kid, you’re anemic. Eat more spinach.” Grinning, he pulled forward a tall, well-built teenaged boy standing bored beside him in a blue blazer and striped tie. “And will you tell my son the jock here to treat me with a little more respect? I’m a doctor, for Christ sake!”

Noni smiled shyly at the older teenager. “Hi, Roland.”

“Tell him,” nudged the thin man.

“Treat your dad with a little more respect. He's a doctor.”

The handsome boy grinned, brushing back his black curls, looking her over. “Sure thing, whatever you say, Noni.”

Noni explained as she and Kaye moved on through the crowd. “That was my godfather, Jack Hurd.”

“And his son the jock.”

“Roland's okay. Doctor Jack delivered me. He calls himself my ‘Deliverer.’ He's nice. He runs OB/GYN at the medical school.”

Kaye wasn’t precisely sure what the letters OB/GYN stood for, and would be certain to check them out later. “Infections can go straight to your heart,” he told her. “Your daddy better be careful.”

“I know.” Noni led Kaye into the crowd. “My mom met Doctor Jack in college before she met my dad. She said Doctor Jack wasn’t her type. He was a Roanoke Scholar; that's the best thing you can be at that university. They pay everything for you.”

“Who, your dad?”

“No, Doctor Jack. My dad played basketball. That's the real best thing you can be. You’re not tall, or you could try it.”

“I’m planning to be tall, lot taller than you,” he told her. “But not so I can jump around swatting at orange rubber balls.” Kaye took a handful of peanuts from a silver bowl. “I’m not gonna sing, I’m not gonna jump, run, grin, Watusi, I’m not gonna jive.”

A girl near them said, “Right on. Me either.”

Noni introduced Kaye to the girl, her school friend Bunny Breckenridge, plump and colorful in a yellow muumuu with six strings of bright beads around her neck and ostrich feathers hanging awkwardly from her wild frizzy light brown hair. Bunny felt the braid on Kaye's embroidered vest. “Holy shit, Jimi Hendrix, hunh? Cool.”

“You too,” Kaye pointed at the girl's feathers, thinking she looked a little like Mama Cass and that she had smart eyes and that she at least had recognized a Jimi Hendrix record cover when she met one. “Bunny, hunh? Is that your real name?”

“I know, isn’t it stupid? But my real name is Bernice and that's not any better. So, Kaye, Noni talks about you all the time.”

“I do not!’

While the three stood there, Kaye saw his Aunt Yolanda in a white uniform making her way through the room, holding out to guests her tray of deviled eggs with their tiny Christmasy bits of red and green peppers on top. Yolanda noticed but did not acknowledge Kaye. Embarrassed for them both, he led Noni away from Bunny, across the room toward the blazing lights of the extravagant tree.

Some of the guests, he saw, were looking askance at a black youngster moving through the crowd with his Afro and red embroidered vest, arm in arm with Noni Tilden. But most were too busy trying to talk to each other over the noise to pay much attention. Their conversations floated past him.

—Who is that boy with Noni? —

—His folks work here. You know, Judy's Aunt Ma?—

—The one that does those pretty things with the sunflowers? I love those.—

 

—Don’t let Bud Tilden tell you anything except how to make a good martini.—

 

—God rest you merry, gentlemen!—

 

Talk on the silk couches and brocaded chairs drifted by:

—Judy's doing it. It's called aerobics.—

—Well, that little Bunny Breckenridge ought to try it. How can her mother let her eat those eclairs, look at her! Is it the same as jogging?—

—Sort of, but you don’t go anywhere.—

—Oh, with this Weight Watchers you go to meetings and they clap for you.—

 

—Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.—

 

And around the Sheraton breakfront:

 

—Well, if Judy doesn’t hide that bourbon bottle from her husband, he’ll be headfirst into whatever's next to him and I hope it's me.—

—Becky!—

—Frankly, Bud Tilden, you just be my guest!—

—Becky! You are bad! Isn’t Bud your cousin?!—

—Oh good lord no. Judy's my cousin.—

 

—Here come the judge, here come the judge.—

 

—Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.—

 

Kaye stood listening as Noni showed him her favorite ornaments from her childhood on the huge twinkling tree. “So what’d you get for Christmas? A Thunderbird?”

“No, I got that for my birthday,” she grinned, looking at him. “For Christmas I got my own private jet.”

“Ho ho.”

“Ha ha.” She held up the gold watch that she’d received “from Santa,” and noticed that he still wore the flat black plastic watch he’d proudly displayed that night in her room back when they were seven.

Kaye examined her new watch dismissively. But she held onto his hand to study the handmade ring of silver coils that he now wore. “Where’d you get that?”

“A friend in Philly gave it to me.”

“A girl?”

“Yeah, a black girl. That's the only kind I’m ever going to date. You think a boy gave me a ring?”

“What girl was it?”

“What's it to you?” Actually Kaye had bought the ring for himself on South Street and he wasn’t sure why he had told Noni a girl had given it to him.

“Nothing. It's a nice ring.”

Suddenly he became aware of her hand holding his. In a strange and oddly heightened way, he could feel the skin and bones of her fingers as they touched his. He looked curiously into her eyes and when he did she blushed.

Noni was still holding his hand when, glancing away from her, he saw her mother threading her way toward them with her unhappy smile.

“Montgomery, may I help you?” asked Mrs. Tilden, her voice pleasant as a breeze, her eyes desperate. “Is there some problem at Clayhome?”

Noni's face tightened, flushed. “Mom, I invited him.”

Mrs. Tilden stared at her daughter, then she smiled her unhappy smile a little more rigidly. “Oh, you did, sweetheart? Well, that's very nice. Are you ready to play for our guests?”

“Please, please, do I have to?”

“Noni, are you ready to play for our guests? Excuse us, Montgomery.”

From his place by the over-laden tree, Kaye watched Mrs. Tilden thread her way back with Noni to Bud Tilden, who shrugged sadly as he embraced his daughter. Her mother then clapped for attention and announced that Noni would play for them the Chopin Etude in C Minor, after which she would take their requests for Christmas carols.

Noni's father pulled back the embroidered bench for her at the long shining black piano. Its top was up; to Kaye it looked like a big black curving wing shadowing Noni, blocking the winter light from the window. The guests started shushing each other until the room was quiet. Seated at the bench, Noni ran her fingertips back and forth over the gold letters of the piano's name, like a blind person trying to read. She held her hands above the keys, took them away, put them back, and looked up for her father who kept smiling at her his sweet helpless smile. Then, finally, Noni struck the first chords of the etude and then she kept going, the cascade of notes beautiful to Kaye. He watched the red flush spreading from her face to her neck, her hands dead white and shaking.

He hadn’t known she could play so well. He found the music sad; it gave him strangely the same tight feeling in his chest to which thoughts of his mother gave rise. It was a feeling like a big wave that could knock you down, and that power made it seem very dangerous. Kaye wanted to feel only what he could stand up to, only what he could turn his back on and walk safely away from.

When Noni finished the Chopin, everyone clapped and Bud Tilden shouted, “Brava brava brava!” Then the woman in the red taffeta bell-bottoms yelled out, “Joy to the World!” Hurrying over, Noni's mother placed the book of carols on the piano in front of her daughter.

As the singing started, Kaye pushed a pathway through the guests and left the party. No one tried to stop him. They were talking all around the room.

 

—Oh Becky, stop it!—

—Well, it's true! How can a stick like Jack Hurd produce a gorgeous boy like Roland? Sugar, you think there's a law in this state against seducing a fourteen-year-old?—

—Peace on Earth, ladies!—

Later that night when Kaye answered the knock on Clay-home's door, there stood Noni holding a large wicker picnic basket in both hands. “Why’d you go?” she chastised him. “You just left and didn’t say good-bye. You’re always doing that to me.”

He shrugged and stared off at the moon behind her.

“I wanted to give you your present.” She handed him the basket. “Happy Birthday.”

In his arms the basket shook and a mewling cry came from within. When he opened the top, a little black puppy struggled to its feet, then fell over. “What's this suppose to be?” said Kaye, although he knew why she’d done it.

Noni smiled. “You were always telling me, ‘I want a puppy but I can’t take one back to Philly.’ So now you’re staying here, so now you can have one.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“It's a boy. My dad and I bought him at a pet store. He's a Labrador.”

Scowling, Kaye put down the basket, pulled the puppy out of it, and examined him as the little dog tried to gnaw on his fingers. “What? You picked him ’cause he reminded you of me ’cause he's black?”

Noni stamped her foot in exasperation. “No. I picked him ’cause he reminded me of you ’cause he was an asshole who doesn’t even know how to say thank you.” She turned and marched off across the lawn.

Kaye watched her go. When she was halfway across the lawn he called out into the dark, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome!” was shouted back.

On Monday morning of the following week, Wade was driving Noni to school, in order, he told her, “to score Brownie points” with their mother before she saw his fall semester grades. As they started out, he was saying how, at the rock concert in Charlotte, some creep had defiled his Mustang with hippie bumper stickers. Noni was worrying that Wade was trying to trick her into admitting the vandalism, when suddenly she was thrown forward as he slammed on his brakes.

The entrance to Heaven's Hill was being blocked by a yellow school bus. While Wade was cursing the bus, Noni saw Kaye stepping stiffly into it, his hands jammed down in the pockets of his pea jacket. Before she could think, she leapt with her notebooks and her purse out of the Mustang, calling back to Wade, “Nevermind, I’ll take the school bus.” She ran between the driveway columns over to the yellow vehicle, banging on its door just as it was closing.

At first the driver, a plump sour woman, didn’t want to take on a passenger of whom she had no record. Noni spoke to her quickly (fearful that Wade would storm the door), but she kept her voice as quiet as her mother's. “I go to Gordon Junior High. I live here at Heaven's Hill.” She pointed up the driveway at the enormous house. “I’m Noelle Tilden. My mother's Judy Gordon Tilden. My mother told me to take this bus.” While Noni was talking, she glanced back into the body of the bus, quickly spotting Kaye, the only black person on it (there were only four blacks in the whole school, for all the others who lived in Moors lived in a different district). Two-thirds of the way down the aisle, he sat alone in a double seat, pressed against the window, ignoring her.

Silently the driver struggled with the girl for authority but finally she decided against taking the risk of trouble, with the house up that hill looking so large, and the name Gordon dropped so significantly. Besides, the horn of the Mustang was beeping non-stop, presumably because she was blocking the driveway. So with a shrug, she pulled the lever that closed the door and told Noni to sit down.

Noni knew many of the students riding the bus, and more than that number knew her. She was aware that her name gave her power, made her popular. Everyone knew that Noelle Katherine Tilden lived in Heaven's Hill and wore stylish clothes, that her grandfather owned the bank and much of the town's real estate and had the same name as the school. Several seventh-graders greeted her as she passed them and offered to share their seats. She could feel them craning their necks to gawk back at her when she sat down beside Kaye.

Staring out the window, he didn’t turn his head, but as the bus moved bumpily forward, she could feel a little of the tightness give way in his arm and she could feel his shoulder turn almost imperceptibly toward her. She leaned against him. “How's the puppy?”

He just shrugged.

She tried a few casual comments, but it became clear that Kaye wasn’t going to talk to her. So she opened her music book. She struggled to study the notes of a Schumann piece she would have to play for her teacher after school, but instead she found herself thinking, on the slow ride through Moors, about the last conversation she’d had with her brother Gordon.

They’d been at the airport, the whole family. Gordon, in his new lieutenant's uniform, was going overseas, leaving his hometown—although none of them knew it—for the last time. He’d asked the ten-year-old Noni to come have a “private Coke” with him.

It was then that he’d told her about a September morning back when he’d been a high school sophomore. The first Negro students were entering the segregated Moors High School that day. There were only two, he said, a girl and a boy. The girl wore glasses and a starched white blouse and the boy had on a navy blue suit and a tie. Yelling at them from the sidewalks were thirty or forty white parents. (One of these red-faced women—Gordon told Noni that he’d emphasized this fact to their mother to make her sympathetic to the Negroes—had been smoking in public, and wearing a quilted bathrobe.)

He said three police cars sat parked at the curb in front of the school, but the policemen didn’t get out of them or try to stop the crowd of adults from screaming at the two children. But five members of the student council organized by Mindy Breckenridge (Bunny's older sister) were waiting on the sidewalk with two teachers, the music teacher Miss Clooney and the English teacher Mr. Altman. And they made what Miss Clooney called “an honor guard” (“And the honor is ours,” she’d said) around the two Negroes and they’d walked them past the shouting parents and into the school. Gordon, the sophomore class vice president (“and that was a joke”), was one of this honor guard.

Day after day these school officers met Dorothy and Arthur after their classes, walked with them through the halls, sat with them in the cafeteria, walked with them out of the school and into the bus.

“You know what, Noni?” Gordon told his little sister as they drank their Cokes in the airport. “It's the only thing in my life I’m proud of. That I showed up that morning when Mindy called me. The only thing.”

Upset, Noni tried to make her brother feel good about himself. “Aren’t you proud to be a soldier?”

“No. I just don’t have the guts to fight Mom and the rest of it. That's what I’m telling you, Noni. It's so damn easy to give in. They make it so damn easy. So don’t get scared. Don’t let them.”

Unsure of what he meant, she ran around the chair to him, hugging him tightly. “Oh, Gordon. Please don’t go!”

“I’ve got to. You take care of Dad, okay? You know what I mean, the drinking? Nonibaloneymacaroni?”

On the bus ride now, Noni was thinking about Gordon's funeral, how the rain was falling from the shiny brim of the honor guard's hat in St. John's Cemetery as he handed the American flag to their mother. And how their father had cried so terribly, his face twisted in a way she’d never seen before, when he put his hand on Lt. Gordon Tilden's rose-covered casket. She was wondering now whether the young black woman she’d seen that day standing under an umbrella next to an ivy-covered tomb of another Gordon who’d died in a war, Capt. E.D.R. Gordon Jr., C.S.A., 1842–1864, whether the woman had been the girl Dorothy, beside whom Noni's brother had been so proud to walk.

When the school bus stopped, Kaye pushed around Noni out of their seat and hurried up the aisle. She had to move quickly to stay at his side as he strode straight through the cluster of teenagers on the lawn and climbed the stone steps of Gordon Junior High School.

At the top of the steps, he turned and found her beside him. “I named that dog Philly,” he said. “I’ll see you.”

Inside the school corridor, Noni watched as he pushed open the door labeled “Principal's Office.”

When finally Kaye walked out, she was still there in the hall, waiting for him.

And she walked with him from class to class, from locker to lunchroom, throwing the power of her name over him like a cloak. He didn’t ask her to do it, he didn’t acknowledge that she was doing it, but she knew that it would make a difference and that it was something, it was some one thing she could offer him.

And in a strange way it was also a means of her keeping close to Gordon, of keeping Gordon alive.

After school, Noni's mother drove up in their Lincoln to take her to her piano lesson, and although Noni looked in the bus windows as fast as she could when they passed it, she didn’t see Kaye inside.

That evening, back at Heaven's Hill, Noni tapped at the door of Clayhome. She could hear the radio inside, a woman on it singing, “He's got the whole wide world in His hands!” While she waited for someone to answer, she looked down and saw that there was a new cemetery of Popsicle sticks beside the door, inside their old border of stones and broken bricks. This time the plot was more crowded with the little black-marked crosses than Noni had ever seen it before. But why would the sticks even be here when Kaye's mother was in a hospital in Philadelphia, when she couldn’t have brought her crosses down to Moors this Christmas as she had done on previous years?

Kneeling, Noni read the names on the sticks: there were crosses for Che Guevara, for Black Panthers “Shot by the Los Angeles police,” for Bobby Kennedy, for Watts and for Czechoslovakia and for Hue. There were dozens and dozens of crosses. And in their center was the one that Kaye had told Noni had burst in two his mother's heart.

Black words filled both small sticks of this cross:

 

Apr 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., 39 yrs old, shot to death. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

 

“Noni? What you doing, baby?”

The girl stood, brushed soil from her white tights. “Hi, Aunt Ma. I was looking for Kaye. I wanted to know how it went, the rest of his day at school. I didn’t see him on the bus.”

Amma told Noni that her grandson hadn’t come home yet, that he had gone off with his Uncle Austin to try to find a part-time job at the taxi company. “You want to come in and see that cute little dog Philly? He is a devil.”

“Thank you, but I have to practice.” Noni pointed at the cemetery. “Is Kaye's mother down here now?”

The woman shook her head. “No. Kaye stuck those sticks in the ground himself. He brought all that stuff with him in her old shoebox. Kaye and his mama are real close, always were. It's tough on a only child.”

“If she gets better, will he go back to Philadelphia to be with her?”

Amma gave Noni a long look. “Kaye's going to stay here with us. And I’m glad he's got you for a friend. Now don’t stand out here in this cold damp without your coat on. Go on back home and get warm. I’ll tell him to call you.”

Noni lifted her thin shoulders, let them fall. “He won’t.”

Amma took the girl's flushed face in her broad strong hands. “Go on home.”