The Sixth Day of Christmas

December 25, 1979
The Silver Trophy

 

 

 

Nineteen seventy-nine was a hard year for everyone.

Hard on Noni's mother. Only three years since their wedding and Noni had already left Roland Hurd. That was a shock to Mrs. Tilden, although she remained confident that she and Doctor Jack could persuade her daughter to return to her husband.

Bud Tilden's recent heart attack was also a shock, especially hearing about it not from Bud himself but from Kaye King, who’d happened to see Noni's father being discharged from the hospital. Kaye drove him home to Algonquin Village, and then came to Heaven's Hill to tell them about it.

The heart attack was apparently mild, but Mrs. Tilden nevertheless was flooded with the commiseration of her friends, who emphasized how easily she might have lost Bud forever. While it could be said that, having evicted him from their home three years earlier, Bud Tilden was already lost to her, he was still legally and socially her husband, and all the public sympathy she received actually made Mrs. Tilden feel as if his death would have been a devastating blow. She didn’t ask him to move back in, but she didn’t proceed with the divorce either.

Having left Roland, Noni was staying at Heaven's Hill, which never seemed to change, no matter who came or went. The married Noni's room looked much the same as it had when she was a child there. So did the married Wade's room (of course the hidden drug paraphernalia and pornographic magazines were gone). Even the long dead Gordon's room hadn’t changed. Nor had Bud Tilden's den, except that all his records of the old timers singing sadly about love had been replaced on the shelves by his wife's collection of mechanical music boxes, and all his matched sets of the Great Books were also gone. But his vinyl photo albums were still there—thirty-five of them—as if he’d done an album for each year of his and his wife's married life, except that every album was as randomly helter-skelter as the first had been.

Sometimes Mrs. Tilden thought she would make it her project to tear out all the photos, programs, tickets, and souvenirs, and put them in chronological order, beginning with the old sepia daguerreotypes of nineteenth-century Gordons picnicking in Tuscany in top hats and lace umbrellas, and ending with little Michelle's seventh birthday party at Disney world.

But the task overwhelmed her; each page was like a disjointed nightmare into which it exhausted her to try to read meaning. For example, on the last page of the last album her husband had glued all the photos of Judy Tilden herself, had pasted her life into a chaotic jumble—Judy in a wedding dress, Brownies uniform, baby-doll pajamas, cap and gown, poodle skirt, horse-show outfit, swimsuit with a racing number, Givenchy strapless formal, bathrobe when she’d been too depressed after Gordon died even to put her clothes on, and in the middle of them all, her earliest naked baby picture, lying helpless on her back like a turtle.

Bud Tilden had taken only books and records with him when he left, not these albums nor his basketball trophies, which still filled the same shelves, just as the same family Christmas ornaments crowded the branches of the enormous spruce tree. Just as the same five red stockings hung by brass holders on the living room mantle and were still beautifully embroidered with the words BUD, JUDY, GORDON, WADE, NOELLE.

Judy Tilden had never discussed tough times with her maid, but 1979 had been hard on Amma Fairley, too.

Amma's daughter Deborah, Kaye's mother, had died the previous summer from a rapidly critical pneumonia. On Kaye's last visit, shortly before her death, his mother had been well but tired and withdrawn; he couldn’t persuade her even to discuss leaving her sister Hope's house and moving down to North Carolina where Kaye could help care for her. Two months later she was in the hospital; after three days there she was dead.

Kaye flew with Amma to Philadelphia where he caused a scene at the hospital, accusing the staff of homicidal negligence and threatening a lawsuit. But in his heart he thought his mother had just given up fighting. And fighting had always been her reason for living.

He brought her ashes back South and put some in a small alabaster case in the shoebox called “The Promised Land.” The rest he drove to Alabama where he sprinkled them off the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma; it was from that city that Deborah King had been so proud to march with Dr. King to Montgomery. Kaye watched her ashes float down into the river from the middle of the bridge where Alabama state troopers had long ago beaten Selma marchers with clubs and the world had seen them do it. Kaye let himself cry because no one could hear him. People in cars rushing by stared at the man on the bridge, but they couldn’t see his tears.

While in Alabama, Kaye attempted to locate his father through the one photograph he had of the young protest marcher. He wasn’t successful, but he hired a private investigator to continue the search.

In the autumn, Kaye had a call from the investigator telling him that his father's name was Joe Wesley, that he’d been drafted and that he had died in an ambush in the Mekong Delta. He’d been twenty-five, which meant he’d been only seventeen or eighteen when he’d fathered Kaye. The man returned the photograph, which Kaye put with his mother's ashes in the shoebox.

Amma's other daughter Hope and Hope's family left Philadelphia and moved to California, looking for work. Amma never saw them.

At home, Amma had been having troubles with Tatlock as well. Warned by his V.A. doctor for years about the dangers of his diet, he still blamed that doctor when he lost his other leg to diabetes. His convalescence was long and cantankerous. Amma's own medical bills, for she had to have cataract surgery, had forced her to borrow from Kaye's savings. (It had never occurred to Judy Tilden to provide Amma—who had worked for her family for almost half a century—with health insurance or social security or even a week's paid vacation.)

When the Fairleys’ old Dodge gave out for good, Amma said she was starting to feel about the same. Even with the furnace heat in Clayhome turned down to fifty-two, she couldn’t pay the bills. In a single year, oil prices had gone up 50 percent and inflation in the U.S. was high. For warmth, Amma kept a fire going with wood that two of her brothers had split for her from fallen oak and pine trees in the forests of Heaven's Hill. When Wade Tilden heard what they were doing, he told his mother that she ought to charge Amma for the wood—firewood cost a hundred fifty dollars a cord—but Mrs. Tilden wondered what people would think if she did that to her Aunt Ma after all these years. Noni said she was stunned that Wade would even think of it, much less say it.

Noni had had a miscarriage in the spring.

Nineteen seventy-nine was a hard year on everyone.

On Christmas Day, smoke floated up out of the chimney of Clayhome and mixed with snow floating down.

From Tatlock's bass to a grandchild's treble, a dozen voices sang “Happy Birthday, dear Kayyy-yuh, Happy Birthday to you.”

When the Clayhome door opened, the song reached Noni as she crossed the white lawn, pulling her niece Michelle on the red sled. She saw Kaye's old friend Parker retrieving an ice cooler from under the house's eaves. It was the first she’d known that Parker had been released from Dollard Prison. This had been his second stay there in seven years; he’d been sent back for violating parole after his first incarceration. Parker was a Muslim now and wore an embroidered fez. Years of weightlifting in prison had changed his once skinny body into bulky, oddly bunched muscles as if he’d been injected with plastic that had hardened in clumps.

Noni waved at Parker and he shouted back, “Hey there, Disco Lady!” (Years ago, she had gone to a party that Kaye had given at the Indigo Club. There she’d done the Hustle with Parker, who ever since had called her Disco Lady, or Disco Duchess, or some variation thereof.)

“Merry Christmas!” she shouted.

He pointed at the sky. “Snow!” He tilted his head back, stuck his tongue out, and caught snowflakes as they flurried around him. “Free and snow! Life is good!”

Last week, the week before Christmas, it had snowed four inches and hadn’t melted. Now it had started snowing again, on Christmas Day, for the first time since 1963. But this wasn’t the soft wet thick snow of that memorable storm when drifts had reached two feet high. These were sharp icy little mean snowflakes that bit at the face and lay in a thin sheet on the ground. Noni was outside, with her long scarf wrapped to her nose, pulling the bundled seven-year-old Michelle across the driveway on her old sled, which she’d found behind some stored porch windows. Noni was baby-sitting Michelle for a week and they were going to take a sled ride down the hill. An ardent aunt, she was happy to care for the child. Nor did she have any other particular plans that would interfere.

Noni had promised Roland and her mother not to file for divorce quickly but to “think about it” a while. In fact, she was trying not to think about it.

“Please, please, please listen to Judy,” Roland had begged; “Judy” was what he called Mrs. Tilden, his best ally. “Promise me you won’t do anything crazy, Noni. You know I love you.” Then Roland had flown off to Houston to train with a large commercial real estate corporation there.

Their marriage had lasted only twenty-seven months before the separation—long enough to put an end to Noni's graduating from Haver: complications from the miscarriage had kept her in the hospital during her spring senior term. But not nearly long enough, according to Noni's mother, before her daughter had decided to abandon “a commitment to God made in a church in front of everybody we ever met.” Mrs. Tilden frequently pointed out that she herself “stuck with” her husband Bud for twenty-seven years, not twenty-seven months, and that she herself still hadn’t rushed into a divorce even after three full years of separation.

Mrs. Tilden had no patience with Noni's plans for divorcing Roland; indeed, she became quite exercised when discussing the matter: “Noelle Hurd, don’t you dare talk to me about your husband's so-called drinking problem after I watched my whole life get poured down the drain with a glass of Kentucky's finest bourbon. Did your husband dive into your swimming pool in a tuxedo at your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and crack his head open in front of everybody you ever met?”

Noni never answered these outbursts by saying that she’d rather not watch her own life be thrown down the same drain as her mother's, if in fact that's what had happened to her mother's life. She didn’t want to explain how her case might be even worse than her mother's, for her father was a sweet and gentle man, drunk or sober (if she’d ever seen him sober), whereas on the (admittedly infrequent) occasions when Roland drank too much, he changed as abruptly and as roughly as a werewolf in a movie. Noni had often thought back to when she’d told Kaye that werewolves didn’t scare her, because she now knew better.

The best Mrs. Tilden would ever say was that if Noni had to leave her husband, maybe it was better she’d done it sooner rather than later since sooner she might still be attractive enough to find somebody else.

And Noni, a tall slender young woman, was attractive. Just turned twenty-three-years old the day before, she had large wide quiet gray-blue eyes and silvery straight blonde hair that she wore pulled back with a ribbon or barrette. Despite two decades of her mother's commands to stand up straight, there was a slight bow to her back, a curving in toward others as she listened or spoke. She had a kind mouth that she thought too wide, just as she thought her nose too long, her breasts too small, her flesh too pale. Noni had been taught to be hard on herself. But in fact people had always thought she was “pretty,” although they were more likely to talk about her “goodness” than her looks. They had always said there was not a mean bone in Noni Tilden's body, that she was always thinking of others, that she was the sweetest soul.

That was exactly what her sister-in-law Trisha, Wade's wife, had said early this Christmas afternoon, when dropping off Michelle with her suitcase. “Noni, honey, you are the sweetest soul and Michelle that little bitch loves you more than she loves me anyhow, I’m just teasing.”

Then, after hurrying through their Christmas presents, barely ahead of the snow, Wade and Trisha had flown off to Cancun and taken Mrs. Tilden with them. According to Wade, she (his mother, not his wife) had needed a break. Wade and his mother were very close now and worried all the time about each other's well-being; each thought the other “took on too much.” Mother and son had always looked alike, with their curly strawberry-blonde hair and milky red-freckled skin, but now that Wade had “gotten it together,” they thought and acted alike as well. “Mom's overdoing it,” Wade bragged. It was true that, with her planning board, altar guild, preservation society, garden club, book club, investment club, and yoga, Judy Tilden did keep busy. So busy in fact that she didn’t seem to have time to find a replacement for her husband Bud, or, despite a three-year separation, to find a lawyer to divorce him.

Both Mrs. Tilden and Wade would have been upset if they’d known that Noni had invited her father over to babysit for Michelle at Heaven's Hill. While he did so, she would make an appearance at a Christmas party that her friend Bunny Breckenridge was giving that evening. Although Noni had presented the baby-sitting to her father as his favor to her, her motive was actually to make it possible for him to spend a little time with Michelle, his only grandchild, for Wade never invited him over to their home in Gordon's Landing.

This wasn’t the first time Noni had made these secret arrangements for her father to see Michelle. As it happened, the little girl was crazy about her grandfather, who appeared to have all the time in the world for her and, unusual for an adult, absolutely no preoccupations. Sometimes when Tilden visited with Michelle at Heaven's Hill, Noni found them together in Gordon's room. Her father would be sitting in the black Hitchcock rocking chair with the little girl on his lap, reading to her from one of Gordon's children's books that still filled the shelf above his dresser.

Michelle shrieked with pleasure as she flew on the sled alone down a short, shallow slope. Noni knew that Wade and Trisha would be upset about this sledding too, for life appeared to strike them as a risky business and they tried on their daughter's behalf to avoid as much of it as possible. Also, if Wade and Trisha hadn’t been standing right there beside their Land Rover when Amma Fairley had walked over to invite Noni and Michelle to share Kaye's birthday cake, Noni would have taken her niece to the party at Clayhome. But Wade had said that Michelle couldn’t go—adding, after Amma left, “Don’t you think that's a little much, the maid inviting you to a birthday party?”

Noni had said only, “Jesus, Wade.”

But Trisha had told her husband briskly, “Babe, don’t get me started. That old woman's been taking advantage of Grandma Judy forever. But what can we do? Go put her bags in the trunk.” While Wade did so, Trisha had given Noni a long list of instructions about their seven-year-old's diet, clothing needs, sleep schedule, allergies. Then Trisha had made such a production of their departure that Michelle was sobbing by the time they drove away.

Now, halfway down the hill, the child, swaddled from head to toe in padded clothing, tumbled off the sled, rolled into a fallen tree, and started crying again. She was surprised when her bawling did not bring Noni running. Instead, her aunt called cheerfully down to her, “Come on, Michelle, my turn, bring that sled up here! Go go go go go go go!”

Michelle was so surprised that she started to do as asked. But she stopped suddenly and pointed. “Somebody's here.” Noni turned to look. It was Kaye.

The sudden sight of him made a pulse leap in Noni's neck and her cheeks flush. He looked different. Had he always been so good-looking or had he changed? His cinnamon-colored face was thinner, so the soft full lips and gold-flecked joking eyes seemed to stand out more. Snow looked very white in his short tight black hair and on his long curled eyelashes.

She had missed him. She hadn’t known how much she’d missed him, but she had. He smiled the old smile, walking toward her in sweater and slacks, no coat, ignoring as usual the bitter cold. He was leaner now than in his football days and Noni couldn’t believe that he wasn’t freezing.

She shivered herself. “Kaye! Aren’t you cold? You’ve got to be cold.”

“Where's your coat?” Michelle echoed.

“Hey, you two sound like my grandmama.” Kaye helped the child pull the sled back to the hilltop. “Y’all having fun on my sled?”

Michelle was indignant. “It's not your sled, it's my Aunt Noni's sled. She's had it since she was a little girl.”

With a grin for Noni, Kaye brushed the icy crust from the red paint, pointed. “See what that says? ‘Noelle and Kaye.’ I’m the Kaye part.”

Pushing her hat up and pulling her scarf down from her eyes, Michelle studied the tall young man; she had seen him before but not often, and she was puzzled that a black person should share a sled with her aunt. She dropped into the snow to study the crayon letters. “K-A-Y-E” she spelled aloud.

“That's me. Me, myself, and I.” Kaye winked at Noni. “Dr. Kaye King.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“Amazing, hunh?”

Kaye had been over at Heaven's Hill, talking with Bud Tilden, and he had come to tell Noni that her father was looking for her.

Michelle ran forward, saw the tall blond man waving from the porch of the big house. “Grandpoppy!” she screamed and raced slipping through the sleety snow toward the big white house.

Kaye picked up the sled's towline. “He says he's babysitting for her and you’re going to Bunny's. Want a ride? Oh and happy birthday.”

“Happy birthday. Welcome to twenty-three. Better late than…”

“It's pitiful you have to gloat about being a few lousy hours older.”

“Face it. I’m older. I’ll always be older. How have you been? Where have you been?” It was the first time she’d seen Kaye in a month. Aunt Ma said she never saw him either these days because he was always at the hospital, always told her he had no time for anything but work. “Aunt Ma thought you weren’t going to be able to come over here even on Christmas.”

Kaye shrugged. “She made such a big deal about it, I did a trade with somebody.”

“Well, it made her very happy.” Noni stepped closer, studied the shadows under his eyes. “You look so tired, Kaye.”

“Tired?” He playfully slapped himself on both cheeks. “Come on! You’re supposed to say I look so battle-fatigued and burned out that after a few years of this I deserve to charge you ten thousand dollars for an hour of my time. I’m in a macho rite of passage here. ’Course I look tired.”

Kaye had just sped his way through medical school at the university and was beginning an internship in cardiac surgery, living in a rented room close to campus. To supplement his income, he did research late at night for a book his advisor was writing. Although Kaye was accustomed to staying up late because of his years as night dispatcher for his Uncle Austin's cab company, lately he had been working so hard and sleeping so little that sometimes walls seemed to him to move, colors to change, words to turn into senseless squiggles on the page. Sometimes in class or over his cafeteria tray his head dropped into sleep, jerked out. He knew other last-year medical school students and interns who used pills or cocaine to keep alert, but he had a horror of drugs, of how they’d been used to control his mother.

Noni and Kaye reached the porch of Heaven's Hill and he pointed across at his car, a rebuilt cherry-red 1967 Thunder-bird Landau with whose engine he had once endlessly tinkered. “You want a ride to Bunny's? I’m not too tired to party.”

“I’d love a ride to Bunny's.”

He looked at her, struck by the warmth of her voice. He had always loved her voice, which was low and soft and Southern in its long slow vowels. It struck Kaye now that everything about Noni was like her voice; her generous mouth and blushed cheeks, even her clothes, all were perfectly Noni— gentle and warm and fine. The gray-blue cashmere scarf curling around her shoulders was the color of her eyes, the soft silvery blonde fur-collared ski jacket she wore was the color of her hair. Suddenly he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

Her face brightened. “What was that for?”

“For thanks.” Suddenly embarrassed, Kaye retreated to his mocking grin. “Thanks for that present you gave Grandpa Tat. He loved it!”

Noni touched her cheek as if to keep the kiss there. Then she looked over to Clayhome, smiling. “I thought he would.” This year Noni's Christmas present to the cranky legless Tat-lock Fairley had been a large assortment of art supplies: oil paints, brushes, canvas, and easel.

Kaye laughed. “That old man's already got all that stuff out all over the kitchen table and he's already painting a canvas. He calls it Tatlock Fairley at Home,’ and it shows him looking at the whole town of Moors, like he owned it. What in the world made you think of paints?”

Noni's enthusiasm flushed her face into the look that had made Amma call her “Sunshine” as a baby. “Well, you know how Uncle Tat's always doodled all over things and how he loves colors. But one night I saw him watching Lust for Life on TV, that movie with Kirk Douglas about Van Gogh? And he was going on about how he could paint just as well as Van Gogh if only—”

“He had his legs?”

Noni laughed. “No! His ‘chance.’ You know, his chance.”

Kaye imitated Tatlock's grumbling bass. “I bet it was the V.A. hospital cut off that painter Go's ear and they covered it up to keep the law off’em and told the world the man was crazy. I sure wouldn’t cut off my ear or my legs either, ’less I was crazy, and I’m not, no sir re bob. I am the Six Million Dollar Man. Anybody can paint some old pot of flowers like Go did. Me? I could of carved the Venus de Milo if I’d just had my chance, and she would have had the full use of her arms too—”

Noni covered her mouth. “Stop, Kaye, stop, don’t make me laugh.”

“Why, you got to pee?”

“Yes!” She ran away, pulling the sled behind her.

At six that evening, when Kaye came back to collect Noni, he heard piano music and stopped on the porch to listen before ringing the bell. He recognized the melody as one of those sad pretty Romantic pieces that her dad liked so much.

Noni was in fact playing Ravel's “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” although she hadn’t told her father the name of the piece, knowing its title would bother him. Beside the huge Christmas tree, Bud Tilden lay on the living room floor listening to the music, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the twinkling lights (they were no longer different colors but all tiny and white), while Michelle marched her new model horses across his chest. The five red stockings hung from the mantel behind him. There was a cocktail glass on the Persian carpet beside his ashtray.

“Brava, brava!” Tilden clapped when Noni finished the pavane. Michelle clapped too, then leapt up and raced to the door at the sound of the old-fashioned bell. She returned with Kaye behind her. Bud's lovely smile welcomed Kaye as it always had since the boy had met him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Kaye said, holding up his wrist to show the digital watch. “Damn thing's battery died.”

Bud Tilden sat up, cross-legged on the rug like a boy, and unbuckled the leather band of the old beautiful gold watch he wore. “Here, take this.” He held it up to Kaye. “You’re young, you care about time. I don’t have—” He smiled. “—the slightest interest. But, Kaye, if time matters to you, don’t turn it over to a battery. Pay attention. Wind it.”

Kaye backed away. “I’m not taking your watch.”

Noni said, “Forget it, Daddy, Kaye's a nightmare to give a present to.”

Tilden kept holding out the watch, looking up at the young black man, smiling. “Kaye's not going to hurt my feelings. He knows it means a lot to me to give him something when he's given me so much. He knows that.”

Finally Kaye moved forward, bent, and took the watch. “Thank you.” He nodded at the man.

“Thank you.”

“Well, Daddy, how’d you manage that?”

Tilden rolled back down onto the rug. “I’m a night owl, right, Kaye?”

“Right.” Kaye took off his plastic watch and replaced it with Tilden's. “A wise old night owl.”

Noni picked up her coat and gloves from the couch. “Kaye and I are going to Bunny's now, all right? I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Michelle goes to bed at eight. Eight, no later.”

“Oh sure sure sure.”

“Oh sure sure sure,” repeated Michelle.

“And Daddy, if you do get hungry, the refrigerator's stuffed. Mom’ll never notice.”

“I remember.” Tilden propped his still blond head on one elbow, looked at Noni and Kaye with the old lovely hapless smile. “You two,” he nodded to one, then the other. “You two are my favorite people—did you know that?—in the whole wide world.”

Michelle bounced a plastic black stallion up Tilden's chest and poked his chin with it. “What about me, Grandpoppy?”

“You’re my favorite little girl.” He made no effort to stop her from dancing the little horse's hooves across his face. “You and the Princess.”

“Who's the Princess?”

Tilden pointed at Noni. “She is.”

Noni crossed to her father, knelt, brushed his hair back from his forehead, and kissed the familiar scent of alcohol and tobacco. His skin felt cool and smooth as marble. She picked up the drink from the rug. “Please eat some food, Daddy. Do you want me to make you a sandwich?”

“Hey, I was making sandwiches before you were born. Taste that, Kaye,” he pointed up at the glass Noni held. “That's a Zombie.”

Kaye took the drink from Noni, sipped it. “Zombie. You’re getting to the end of the list here. You gonna start over?”

Tilden shook his head. “No, I think I’ll call it quits. Zombie sounds like a good place to stop.” He rolled onto his stomach and Michelle crawled onto his back. “Kaye, soon as spring gets here, let's play some more golf. Take care of my Princess in this snow.”

“Always, Mr. T.”

In the old rebuilt Thunderbird, Kaye and Noni were bringing Parker along with them to Glade Lake, the affluent neighborhood where Bunny's parents, the Breckenridges, lived, and where (home for the holidays) she was having her party. Parker hadn’t been invited, but Noni (who had called ahead to ask if he might come) told him that Bunny had wanted to invite him, just hadn’t been sure if he’d be in Moors for Christmas.

Parker laughed. “If Allah's into white chicks in heaven, He's sure gonna make you one of them. ’Cause, Lady Disco, you are lying like a rug on a rich man's floor.”

“No, it's true!” Noni turned around in the cracked red-leather bucket seat to protest.

“Oh sure,” said Kaye in her father's voice of soft skepticism.

When the three arrived at the huge modern glass and redwood house, the party was a loud crush of people, mostly, like them, in their twenties. The Breckenridge parents had abandoned their home and fled to relatives in Raleigh. Many of Bunny's guests were old high school classmates who hadn’t seen much of each other in the last five years and had in common little but that shared past. The boys who’d had long hair in high school mostly had short hair now; the ones who’d had short hair then mostly had long hair now. Fewer of them smoked.

In large part the group was welcoming to Parker, although most awkwardly avoided questions about what he’d been up to since the old Moors High days.

Parker, who had a shaved head and a Kung Fu moustache, told Bunny he remembered her in the junior talent show, playing the guitar and singing. “You were whapping on the side of that gittar, doing this big voice Odetta/Georgia chain gang shit. ‘Huh. Huh. Huh! Oh Rosie oh Lawd gal, the Man done killed my convict pal. Huh. Huh. Huh!’”

Bunny laughed. “Was I awful?”

“Oh Lawd, gal.” He ate the Brie-filled mushroom she handed him. “But I gotta say, you had guts, those crackers guffawing at you.” Parker told Bunny he had converted to Islam in prison and was getting ready to change his name to Kareem Aked.

Bunny, who had wild frizzy long mousy-brown hair and wore loose black caftans to hide her weight told Parker she was working on her Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, and that she was keeping the name “Bunny” although it made her sound like someone who worked in a Playboy Club, because every time she heard it, it was a battle cry to war against the patriarchy.

Parker said, “Kick ass, Sister!” but declined her offered glass of chardonnay. He was a teetotaler now.

Bunny's older sister Mindy (the one who so long ago had asked Noni's brother Gordon to help escort the first black students into Gordon Junior High) was here from Atlanta with her husband; they manufactured something called “software” for computers and were doing quite well. She told Noni that sometimes she dreamt about Gordon.

From speakers embedded in the ceiling, music pulsed loudly: Elton John, the Pointer Sisters, Blondie, Carly Simon. Noni fast-danced with Parker, and slow-danced with a pleasant young lawyer named Lucas Miller, who confessed that he’d had a crush on her in high school. He wondered if she’d care to go out with him now. Noni thanked him, but said she was still married, although separated from her husband. He apologized for asking.

There was paté and a roast goose with ribbons on its legs and there were white pizzas. One of the pizzas had spinach on it and Kaye left the two other medical students he’d been talking with beside the huge raised fireplace in order to bring Noni a piece, making Doctor Jack's old joke about how she needed to eat spinach to build up her iron.

Noni was dutifully finishing the pizza slice when the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” began. Kaye looked at her, then held out his arms. “I bet I haven’t danced in a year or more.”

Noni smiled, stepped into his arms. “It’ll come back. You can do anything, remember?”

They danced so well together that people stopped to watch. They danced with the old rapport that they had had, practicing in Amma's kitchen when they were thirteen. Their bodies remembered more than they did.

But there was a difference now and they both felt it; those bodies had changed, felt less familiar, and the two of them were strangely more conscious of each other's hands, arms, hip bones, the small of her back, the length of his leg. They looked at each other, then they looked away, the intimacy in their eyes suddenly too strong for easy dancing.

Noni thought back to one of their practices in the kitchen at Clayhome, how Kaye had choreographed them in his bossing way. What had that song been? He’d mapped out every step. “All right. On ‘time goes by so slowly,’ we open out like this. Got it? Outside arm out. We lead with the outside foot. Walk, walk, walk, walk. Time goes by so slowly / And time can do so much.’ Walk, walk. That's right. Good. Now, we spin on Are you still mine?’ Spin spin, Are you still,’ now I’ll dip you, ‘mine?’ Are you still mine?’ Got it? Great, that's great. Boy, we’re good.”

Around them as they danced at the Breckenridge house, the party went on. There was talk of whether Noni had left Roland or vice versa, and why. Whether their former class president was gay and if he was not, why was he still living with his college roommate? Whether their former head cheerleader was pregnant.

Kaye and Noni slow-danced while around them there was talk of Three Mile Island, new Swedish stoves, Apocalypse Now, pocket calculators, the Sugar Bowl, the Pritikin diet, the new discount mall, whether sexual fidelity was unnatural to the human species, and what the meaning of happiness might conceivably be.

Kaye and Noni fast-danced again while there was talk of whether Parker (or rather Kareem Aked) was guilty of what he’d gone to prison for, and if so what exactly had it been? Whether Kaye—who certainly had turned out a more handsome man than they had thought to conjecture—was involved with anyone, and if so, who.

There was talk about whether Bunny had slept with Kaye, with Noni, or with Parker; if with Parker, it might explain why he had come to this party, even if guilty of whatever crime had sent him to the state prison, if in fact prison was where he had been.

In fact, Parker wasn’t at this party anymore, at least Noni and Kaye couldn’t find him when they stopped dancing, although they searched through the house. They needed to leave so Noni could drop off a Christmas gift for Reverend Fisher who lived in the next block. She worried that perhaps she and Kaye, dancing, had paid too little attention to Parker, and that, feeling uncomfortable, he had left Bunny's without telling anyone, although he was miles from his own neighborhood and without a car.

But after another search through the house, and with Kaye's assurances that Parker could take care of himself, she finally agreed to go. The truth was, she wanted to get back to Heaven's Hill to check on Michelle and her father. She feared, not that her father would overdrink when in charge of the child, but that Michelle would talk him into letting her stay up way past her bedtime, just as Noni herself long ago had talked him into it.

Michelle was actually sound asleep in Noni's four-poster bed. Amma Fairley had come over to Heaven's Hill and found the child sleeping on the red leather couch beside Bud Tilden; A Christmas Carol was showing on the television. Amma had brought Tilden a bowl of her Brunswick stew, which she knew he loved. In the past, she could always get him to eat her stew when nothing else would tempt his appetite.

Turning off the set as Ebenezer Scrooge leapt happily through the streets of London with Tiny Tim on his shoulder, Tilden lit a cigarette and gestured for her to sit down with him.

“Amma,” he said, “I’ve got a serious question for you.” He wondered if Amma wouldn’t agree that we don’t need ghosts, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, to show us visions of our ruined pasts and our unhappy present and our doomed futures.

She told him she wasn’t sure what he meant.

“I mean, don’t we have those visions with us all the time anyhow? All the time. And you know what, our knowing what we’ve done, what we’ve left undone—it doesn’t help one bit, Amma, it doesn’t change us at all. There's a book,” he pointed at the shelves where rows of music boxes had now replaced his collection of Great Books. “A Greek philosopher said, To know the good is to do the good.’ But, Amma, who was he kidding?”

Amma carried Tilden's untouched cocktail from the coffee table and poured it down the drain of the wet bar sink. “Well, Mr. Tilden—”

“How many years have we known each other? Thirty?” He took her hand. “Thirty? Do I call you Mrs. Fairley?”

Amma patted his hand, removed hers. “If you knew what the right thing to do was, why wouldn’t you do it?”

He laughed, put out his cigarette. “Oh, Amma. You’d do the right thing. That I do know. Noni’d do the right thing. But that's all I know on earth and all I need to know. You think Noni and Kaye’ll ever get together?”

She stiffened, stood to leave. “I don’t know if they will or not.”

“But you think they shouldn’t? Hang on, don’t go. Hell, they’re probably seventh cousins anyhow. What do you bet? You know damn well, Amma, your family and Judy's family have been all mixed up together for the past two hundred years.”

Amma did know this, knew that in the long oral history of the Clays there were tales of nocturnal visits by Gordon men to Clayhome women. She had been told that her greatgrandfather was actually, secretively, a Gordon, and that was why her eyes were amber and her skin cinnamon. But Amma said none of this, and didn’t want to. All she said in the doorway was, “Mr. Tilden, you carry this child up to bed for me and then you come on down to the kitchen and eat some of my stew. You’re not looking too good.”

Giving up the conversation, he sweetly smiled. “Oh sure. Thanks for the stew. I love that stew.”

“I know you do.”

Half an hour later, Amma returned to the den from sitting beside Michelle's bed. She found the stew bowl on the kitchen table empty and Bud Tilden gone.

He was nowhere in the house, but she heard the stereo playing loudly, an orchestra.

Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 boomed out from the speaker Tilden had moved to face through a window onto the porch so that he could listen to it while outside.

By the lights on the front porch and by the Christmas lights hung on the shrubs and bushes bordering the circular drive around the lawn of Heaven's Hill, Amma could see Bud Tilden out there in the icy slush, throwing a basketball into an old ratty hoop on a backboard that he had set up in a corner of the yard a long time ago.

Amma remembered watching him out there, way back twenty years or more, when he’d been running around under that hoop with little Gordon sitting high up on his shoulders so the boy could drop the ball through the rim. She remembered long summer twilights with the two of them playing with that basketball. Gordon shrieking with pleasure and Bud Tilden shouting, “Another one! You’re so good!” A long time ago.

She watched Tilden now through the living room window. Over and over the tall slender man leapt in air, arced the ball over his head, threw it, raced to catch it under the net, spun, and threw it again. Usually—and this surprised Amma—it dropped right through the rim and into the net.

Amma walked out onto the porch. She saw Tilden's big silver basketball trophy sitting on the top step with a bottle of champagne in it, packed in snow. She called to him over the sweet sad music to come on inside, that it was too cold and icy to be out in the yard throwing a ball around at night in just his pants and that thin V-neck sweater.

Jogging through the slush to the foot of the porch, he asked her please if she couldn’t stay with Michelle just a few more minutes. Just let him do a dozen baskets in a row if he could, let him do thirty-five, please. He smiled as he lit a cigarette, then picked up the trophy and showed her the champagne bottle. “If I make it, here's my victory cup. We’ll celebrate, you and I, Mrs. Fairley, okay? Thirty-five in a row. Thirty-five married years, thirty-five baskets.”

Amma went back inside and returned with Tilden's fleece jacket. “I’ll stay a little while more. Tat's sleeping and I’ve got stuff I need to get done here. But you put this on.”

He ground out the cigarette, took the jacket, slipped into it. “That twenty-fifth anniversary party was some disaster, right? Remember that? Poor Judy. She hung in there as long as she could, don’t you think?”

Amma zipped up the jacket as if he were a child, the way she used to do for Kaye. “For better, for worse, the Book says. You got to decide what that means to you. I didn’t leave my husband Bill King ’til I left him in the ground at the cemetery. And I’ll leave Tat Fairley the same way. Or he’ll leave me. Whatever God decides. ’Til death do us part. That's what it means to me. And that's what I plan.”

He smiled at her, tucked the silver cup under his arm. “Oh Amma, sometimes death just gets to be too long to wait.”

She watched him from the porch for a while. It had stopped snowing, and he didn’t seem to have had all that much to drink tonight. He looked as if he might be enjoying himself, and heaven knows, the man could use a little happiness. Not a bad man, not mean, not cheap, not hard. Not hard enough maybe. Too soft anyhow to keep Judy from feeling like she had to be so hard herself. He must have been good with that basketball in his day, thought Amma, as she walked back to the kitchen to clean up the meal she had talked him into eating. As she dried dishes in the kitchen she thought of as hers, she sang:

 

When that first trumpet sounds, I’ll get up and walk
         around.

Ain’t no grave can hold my body down.

 

Out on the lawn, Bud Tilden stopped for a moment, looked up at the great endless night where the sky now sparkled with infinite millions of disinterested stars. He thought something he had never believed before, about his connection to this universal dome above him: he thought not how small he was in relation to it but that he was a part of it, that he was a piece, even if broken, of a lovely and eternal wholeness. He felt in harmony, like the music he was listening to. He saw Noni playing the piano, her face so beautiful, so filled with the beauty she heard.

He ran faster, leapt higher. Again and again the ball dropped through the hoop.

Kaye's red Thunderbird was parked in front of the ivy-covered stucco house where Dr. Fisher lived; Kaye was waiting for Noni who was inside giving a Christmas gift to the elderly minister. Snow on the lawn was thin, and there were icy patches on the walkway and the sidewalk.

Suddenly he was startled by a bright light in his eyes and a loud rapping on his car window. It was a Moors policeman. The officer shined his flashlight into the front and back seats of the Thunderbird. Kaye rolled down the window but didn’t speak.

The policeman, young (Kaye's age), white, stone-faced, said, “What’re you doing here?” Not, thought Kaye angrily, “Can I help you, sir?” Not even, “Sorry to bother you, sir, but what are you doing here?” Not even, “Sir, what’re you doing here?”

“Waiting for a friend,” Kaye replied. He could have said more but didn’t.

“Can I please see your license and registration?”

“I’d need to know why you want to.” Kaye saw another policeman suddenly run out from the side of a nearby house, slipping on ice as he headed up the sidewalk toward them, looking into the dark yards with his flashlight. “I’m legally parked. My plates are in order. What's your probable cause, officer?”

Now the policeman opened Kaye's door. “Step out of the car please.”

In part Kaye was thinking of Amma's rule, “Save it for when it's worth it.” In part he was watching the other cop ring the doorbell of the house next to Reverend Fisher's, and in part he was wondering where Parker had gone when he’d left Bunny's party. Meanwhile he slid from the Thunderbird, and without looking at the young policeman handed him his opened wallet. In the wallet, facing the driver's license, was a photo card identifying John Montgomery King as a doctor at University Hospital. Kaye was interested in whether the cop would notice the ID and, if so, whether it would change things.

It changed things immediately. The policeman returned the wallet. “We’ve had a report of a suspicious person in the neighborhood, sir, and a possible attempted break-in.”

The other officer had now disappeared inside the house next door.

Kaye asked, “How would someone define ‘a possible attempted break-in’? Would that be a black person slowing down in a white neighborhood?”

Doctor or not, his tone was too much for the young officer whose face returned to stone. “I need to see your registration.”

As Kaye reached for the glove compartment, he saw a sight that surprised him and probably, he thought, surprised the policeman even more. Out of the gray stucco ivy-covered Georgian house walked three people: old Dr. Fisher in his clerical collar and a baggy cardigan sweater, Noni in her beautiful gray cashmere coat, and, with Noni's arm through his, Parker Kareem Aked Jones.

Noni waved at Kaye, calling to him as he stepped around the car toward her. “Oh, Kaye, here we are. We’re so sorry to keep you waiting, aren’t we, Reverend Fisher? Parker and I just lost track of time.” Tightening her arm, Noni pulled Parker closer to her. “Didn’t we, Parker?”

“Just lost track of time,” repeated Parker. “Talkin’ ’bout church and stuff like that.”

Dr. Fisher reached Kaye, touched his shoulder. “Everything all right?” He turned to the young policeman, touched him as well. “What's the problem here, Officer? Dr. King have car trouble?”

“Report of a suspicious person in the neighborhood.” The cop stepped back as Noni moved next to the passenger door where she stopped expectantly. She waited a moment, then gave the cop a cool expectant look and he jumped forward to open the door for her.

“Good gracious,” said Dr. Fisher, “on Christmas? What kind of ‘suspicious’? Oh, excuse me.” The old man leaned into the front seat, kissed Noni's cheek. Then he opened the back door, gestured for Parker to get in. “Noni, good-bye, thanks so much, you and Parker, for my present. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Kaye.” The old minister led the policeman along the sidewalk away from the red Thunderbird. “So, Officer, who saw this suspicious person?”

Kaye started his motor and drove away as Parker blew out a great long sigh, then a cascade of curses, then lay down laughing in the back seat. “Disco Queen, you too much. And that little old priest ought to be on TV.”

“Parker, shut up! What's going on?”

Together Noni and Parker explained. Noni had been in the old minister's backyard, hanging up on a hawthorn tree the new bird feeder she’d given him for Christmas. Suddenly she’d spotted Parker running as hard as he could out of the yard next door. She’d jumped in front of him and grabbed him; when he’d said the police were chasing him, she’d hurried him inside Dr. Fisher's house.

Watching out the living room window, they’d seen the officer interrogating Kaye, and seen the other officer knocking on the neighbor's door. They had decided to walk out of the house together as if Noni and Parker had been paying a social call on their pastor.

Kaye wanted to know why the police were chasing Parker in the first place. Why was Parker running through strangers’ yards at night? Why had he left the Breckenridge party without telling them?

Parker said, “I felt like a rabbi at a redneck pig picking. But I didn’t want to bust up your fun the way y’all were dancing like you were trying out for American Bandstand. So I was gonna walk to where I could get on some bus line and go home, but I got lost and I didn’t wanna ring, know what I mean?, bells in Lake Glade, so the more I walked the lost-er I got and then, Jesus fuck, I see this cop shining his flashlight round those yards like he's gonna find gold with it. And I say, Kareem kiss your free ass good-bye, ’cause my parole officer is a fucker. Then I swear it was like there's Noni like Allah dropped her out of the sky…”

As Parker went on with his story, Kaye was thinking that he didn’t believe it. The saga of looking for a bus, of being lost and too wary to ask for help, was too much like the Philadelphia incident from Kaye's childhood, a story he had often told his friend. But maybe Parker wasn’t lying; maybe he wasn’t casing houses to rob them. Maybe it was true that he was looking for a bus, or maybe he was just wandering around, glancing in the windows of safe, comfortable, unfamiliar lives, intriguingly unlike his own.

Parker was still congratulating Noni on how she’d cowed the policeman by the way she’d looked at him as she’d waited for him to open her car door. “That's class. You can’t learn that. You gotta be born thinking you’re higher up.”

“I don’t think I’m higher up!’

“Sure you do.” Kaye pulled in through the brick columns of Heaven's Hill. “Parker's not saying you think you’re better, just higher up.”

“Well, I don’t know what you mean.”

“That's why I love you, Duchess.” Parker hugged her from the back seat. “Let's us three go to the Indigo!”

Disappointed that Noni and Kaye said they didn’t want to go dancing with him, Parker finally hopped out at Clayhome to pick up his sister's car.

“Go home, Parker,” Kaye told him.

“How ’bout you, Lady Disco? Change your mind. You and me and night fever.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got to check on my niece. Merry Christmas.”

“Y’all are drags,” lamented Parker. “Come on, Doctor Feelgood, least meet me later.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Parker waved goodnight as he climbed into his sister's old Pinto. Kaye and Noni stood together waving as he drove away.

“Thanks,” Kaye told her. “Even if he wasn’t trying a break-in, they’d have probably nailed him.”

“You don’t have to thank me. Parker's my friend.”

Kaye stared at her. It was true, and odd that he’d never thought it. Parker was her friend.

He walked Noni across the long icy lawn toward the big house.

Only when he stumbled over the silver trophy and the champagne bottle rolled out of it did he see the human shape lying, arms and legs at odd angles, in the snow near the basketball hoop.

He ran toward the body so fast that he’d already had time to discover that Bud Tilden was ice cold and blue in the face before Noni was near enough to see her father.

Kaye jumped up and ran back to her before she could come closer. “Call 911! Go call 911! Now!”

Her voice was terrible. “Is it Daddy?” She tried to twist around Kaye, but he blocked her, turning her toward the house, shaking her.

“You’ve got to call 911! Now! Hurry!”

Noni ran, slipped in the snow, fell to her knees, ran again, up the porch stairs and inside Heaven's Hill.

Kaye blew again and again into Bud Tilden's mouth, hit again and again on Bud Tilden's chest. After a while he was pretty sure there was no use, but he didn’t stop.

Even when the ambulance wailed in through the gates of Heaven's Hill, even when the medics tried to pull him away from the body while his grandmother Amma shouted at them, “He's a doctor!”—even then he wouldn’t stop trying to make Bud Tilden breathe again.

Kaye wouldn’t stop until Noni knelt down in the snow beside him as he pushed against her father's still heart and breathed into her father's still mouth. She put her arms tightly around Kaye, telling him, “It's all right. It's all right. You can stop. It's all right.”