The Seventh Day of Christmas

December 24, 1984
The Wedding Band China

 

 

 

It was Christmas Eve, and Noni had invited Kaye to have dinner with her at Heaven's Hill to celebrate their birthdays. Just the two of them.

In its slow indifferent turning, the world had changed seasons, changed lives, and five long years had passed since the death of Bud Tilden.

The first year was hardest. It took Noni months to forgive her mother, whose public widowhood, modeled on Jackie Kennedy's, had begun with ostentatious weeping behind a black veil at the funeral. Watching Mrs. Tilden receiving the condolences of friends, as if she’d never thrown her husband away, so upset Noni that she had refused to join her in greeting guests at the open house at Heaven's Hill after the burial.

But in the end she could not stiffen herself against her mother's uneasy solitude, her desperate busyness, and they reconciled.

It had taken longer for Noni to reconcile with her brother Wade, who had rushed home from Cancun and blamed her for allowing his daughter Michelle to spend time with her grandfather and as a result to be grief-stricken by his sudden death. Wade had also raged at Amma Fairley for letting Michelle run out of the house and so see her grandfather's dead body. (It was to this disturbing experience that Wade was later to attribute his daughter's refusal to become a social star at her elementary school.)

According to Wade, Noni and Amma had acted irresponsibly, first for allowing Tilden ever to visit Heaven's Hill; second, for “abandoning the man to his own wacko devices.” While for years Wade had shown little interest in whether his father lived or died, and was persuaded that his father felt the same about him, Bud Tilden's death, shooting hoops in the snow after forty years of heavy smoking and drinking, had so incensed Wade that he tried to evict the Fairleys from Clay-home for causing it. Only his mother's distress (how could she manage without Aunt Ma?) stopped him. He then demanded that she at least charge the Fairleys “the going rent for a house that size in the best neighborhood in Moors.”

Noni told her mother that it would be indecent to ask her lifelong maid for rent on a house that Clays had been living in since 1850. Mrs. Tilden agreed that people might think ill of her if she did it.

Wade told Noni her priorities were screwed up. Noni told Wade that all her life she had tried hard to love him but that it was no longer possible for her to like him.

His response was, “You always liked black people better than whites anyhow.”

At the funeral reception itself, Wade had accused Kaye of killing Bud Tilden by performing “voodoo mouth-to-mouth” on him. An enraged Kaye flung him against the wall in the foyer. When Wade covered his face with his hands, Kaye told him he was too contemptible to hit, and he walked out of the house with Wade yelling after him that he was going to call the cops. Kaye knew he wouldn’t. It would embarrass the family.

Kaye tried hard to talk his grandmother into moving off the Heaven's Hill property, but Amma refused. Clayhome was her home, as it had been her daddy's home, her granddaddy's, her great-great-great-granddaddy's, and she would stay as long as she was able.

As for Roland Hurd, he had immediately flown back to Moors from Houston as soon as he’d heard of Noni's father's death. At the graveside he’d pleaded with her to salvage their marriage “for Bud's sake.” It was a low but effective strategy. So was Roland's claim that he couldn’t live without her, that he needed her to get through life.

Doctor Jack also begged Noni to return to Roland. “Noni, you’ve got to give love a second chance. Roland’ll fold without you. It was when your mom quit on him that your dad folded.” This was also a low blow, but very effective, for not only did Noni love Doctor Jack, she believed deeply that what he’d said was true. You should never give up on love.

So she agreed to think about a reconciliation with her husband, although in truth she couldn’t think about anything yet. She asked for time. Roland returned to Texas for three months. When he came back to Moors, he brought with him a promise. He would quit drinking. He didn’t know why Noni thought his social drinking was such a problem; nevertheless, to please her, he’d quit. Noni accepted this promise, one that her father had never made. Maybe her father hadn’t been as strong as her husband. After all, Roland had quit smoking (which her father had never done). Why shouldn’t he quit drinking, too?

Part of Noni's decision to try to save her marriage was her great desire, after her miscarriage and now that she’d lost her father, to have a child. She wanted to be pregnant with new life before the anniversary of Bud Tilden's death the following Christmas. Having a baby growing would help, she hoped, fill the awful emptiness that his death had left inside her.

“I have to try to make something last,” she’d told Kaye the morning she left Heaven's Hill. “Don’t make it worse.”

Kaye pressed his fist hard against the living room mantel. “Jack's talked you into this. Jack and your damn mother. He's using you to prop up his drunk of a son. And your mother's doing what she spends her whole life doing, polishing the family name—”

“Please, Kaye.” Noni took his hands, squeezed them tightly. “Please.”

“—So why are you turning your life over to other people?”

“Don’t tell me I’m stupid or wrong or dreaming or throwing my life away. Just tell me, ‘Good luck.’ Please.”

Kaye stared at her a long while. Then with his forefinger, he tapped the heart made of a dime that he’d given her and that she was wearing on the silver chain around her neck. “Good luck.” Then he walked out of the room. He didn’t look back. He never did.

 

On the right of the old lace-bordered place mat, a silver meat knife, fish knife, teaspoon, soup spoon.

 

It was April of 1980 when Noni moved to Houston. Roland bought them a brand new Dutch Colonial with a pool on a cul de sac.

That year Noni sent Kaye a signed first edition of Martin Luther King's Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The birthday card said, “From one Dr. King to another, with love, Noni.”

Kaye sent Noni one of Tatlock's oil paintings, with a card saying that Noni had unleashed the Afro-American Van Gogh. In the year since receiving her gift of art supplies, Tat-lock had taken up painting with a gusto he’d shown for nothing else—except food and imaginary litigation—in his entire life. He painted at least eight hours every day in his wheel-chair, painted on canvas, cardboard and siding, on old doors and pieces of tin. All his paintings were blazing with bright clean colors, straight out of the tubes and mixed with linseed oil to make them shinier.

The picture Kaye sent Noni was called (they all had their titles painted on them) “HOME ON A NICE DAY.” It was a colorful canvas showing Tatlock himself, with his legs restored, standing beside (and the same height as) Clayhome, wearing one of Amma's sunflower T-shirts and drinking an old-fashioned green soda bottle labeled “The Real Thing.” The lawn stretched away from him in a flat sheet of green, with camellias, red bud and apple trees, asters, peonies, petunias, and rose bushes all in simultaneous bloom. Across the lawn, but no taller than the sunflowers that surrounded it like a gate, stood Heaven's Hill. The painting, said Kaye's note, was to remind Noni of home.

She hung it in the empty room off the den that Roland called “hers,” the room they hadn’t gotten around to decorating yet.

Heaven's Hill felt far away from Houston, where Noni was trying hard to make a good life for Roland, who worked all the time brokering real estate deals. She studied fashionable recipes and served them to his colleagues and their wives, she planted bulbs, pickled walls, made duvet covers, joined a gym and a church and a book club. But Kaye was right. Heaven's Hill was home and she missed it. She even missed that hard first winter she’d spent there after her father's death, the winter when she couldn’t believe in spring, the winter eased only by her playing her piano and by the long chilly walks she took with Kaye in the countryside around Moors. She missed Kaye.

 

On the left of the place mat, a silver salad fork, dinner fork, fish fork.

 

In March, Noni had a second miscarriage, a girl. Reassuringly, the doctor told Roland there was no reason for them not to try again with every expectation of success. Roland's pledge to quit drinking lapsed, but he promised that he didn’t have a problem. It was only social, only relaxation.

That year, 1981, the Hurds flew home to Moors for the holidays. Against Roland's advice, Noni decided to give what she called a reconciliation dinner at Heaven's Hill. She did it while her mother was away in New York City with her granddaughter Michelle. They’d gone to stay at the Plaza and to see the Fifth Avenue Christmas windows, just as Mrs. Tilden had once done with Noni, just as her own mother had once done with her.

During her mother's absence, Noni invited Wade and Trisha to come “bury the hatchet” on her birthday, Christmas Eve. They accepted and brought with them Trisha's unmarried brother, Chadwick, Wade's business partner. Noni had also invited Kaye and Bunny Breckenridge. Roland drove Noni's old Alfa Romeo over to Hillston and bought some excellent wine for the meal.

Gathering everyone at the table that night, Noni said she did not like making speeches but that it was important to her to have her family, her husband, and her best friends together here. These were the people she loved most, in the place she loved most, here at Christmas time, when both the happiest things (her wedding, Kaye's and her birthdays) and the saddest (her father's death) had happened. She hoped that they could all try to be kind to one another, to forgive one another, to give one another a chance.

Despite Noni's plea, the peace party was not a success. Roland did not resist the impulse to say ‘I told you so.’

Both Bunny and Trisha's brother thought they were being set up for a date and both resented it.

Wade hugged his sister as if nothing had ever gone wrong between them, but he completely ignored Kaye, even when Kaye, trying hard, asked him a direct question. And when Noni inquired about Parker (for whom Kaye had found a job at the hospital ER), Wade was snide: “I thought your friend Mohammed was back in Dollard Prison, Noni.”

“His name isn’t Mohammed, Wade, stop it.”

“Sorry.”

“More wine, anybody? It's a nice white Burgundy.” Roland poured himself another glass.

Wade's wife Trisha asked Kaye an endless stream of questions, but they were all about Afro-Americans; her eyes widened in bafflement when he didn’t know details about Diana Ross's relationship to Michael Jackson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's real name, the actors who played the Jeffersons on television. And Kaye's response to her query about whether he counted Indian doctors at University Hospital as blacks was to ask her, “Do you count Italians as Chinese?”

To which Trisha replied, “Wade, could I have a little more of that whatyoucallit, ratatootie? Noni, you have certainly turned into some kind of cook here, all these strange-tasting things. But good! Wade won’t eat a thing but meat and potatoes, will you, Wade? I don’t think he ever ate duck before.” Trisha went on to ask if Noni had read When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which Trisha had given Grandma Judy to take with her to New York. “It really will help her,” she assured Noni.

Noni said she found it curious that people continued to think of Judy Tilden as a widow tragically bereft of a cherished spouse, forgetting that she had evicted her husband from the house years before he died.

Wade muttered that he didn’t want to hear Noni start insulting their mother.

“It's just the truth, Wade.”

“Let's change the subject,” Roland said. “More wine?” He began a long account of how his Houston corporation had been “cutting the fat off the staff” by firing a third of its low-level employees.

Bunny, next to Kaye, interrupted to ask Roland to listen to himself. We were in a recession, she said, a severe recession caused by President Reagan's idiotic trickle-down theory, because what was trickling down was a national deficit of hundreds of billion of dollars, a deficit landing on the heads of the poor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was the end of the peace party.

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

“They’re my best friends.”

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

She didn’t hear back from him.

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noni said she’d talk to Dr. Schillings.

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

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

 

JUDITH GORDON TILDEN
HEAVEN'S HILL
MOORS, NORTH CAROLINA

 

Dear Mrs. Hadlemeyer,

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

 

Dear Sunny and Derek,

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

 

One day Noni's mother handed her a half-dozen envelopes, asking her to mail them. But two of the people to whom they were addressed Noni knew to be already dead.

So she went herself to talk with Dr. Schillings, who (being of the old school) was thoroughly unaccustomed to being questioned, much less advised, by a younger doctor, much less a black one, much less by his patient's daughter at the instigation of that young black doctor. Somewhat petulantly, Dr. Schillings told Noni that if he’d thought an ultrasound or angiography or an EEG or a CAT scan would serve any purpose other than enriching the people who’d performed the tests, he’d have ordered them. Judy Tilden was depressed and why shouldn’t she be? She’d lost her son, her father, and her husband. That was enough to depress any decent woman. There was nothing else wrong with her.

When Noni asked Mrs. Tilden to go with her to see another physician recommended by Kaye, her mother refused; even the suggestion agitated her. She blamed Kaye for “stirring Noni up for no reason.” When Dr. Schillings told her that Kaye was questioning his treatment of her, she flew into a tantrum. Why, Doctor Schillings had treated her all her life! Hysterical, Mrs. Tilden begged Noni to keep Kaye away from Heaven's Hill.

At a loss, Noni called Jack Hurd out in California; Doctor Jack called Schillings and persuaded him to put Mrs. Tilden on blood-pressure medication and on antidepressants. Noni was able to get her mother to take the drugs by having Doctor Jack telephone her. After a few days, she did in fact appear to be responding to them.

Kaye and Noni were having dinner at the new sushi restaurant in nearby Hillston (the first in the area) when Noni told him happily of Doctor Jack's intervention. She was surprised by how deeply the news upset him. He grew quiet and withdrawn. It took her half an hour to prod out of him why he was angry. His answer came out in an intense low voice that she almost couldn’t hear: her choice to rely on Jack Hurd's medical advice rather than Kaye's own, her decision to trust some older white authority rather than someone who was supposedly her closest friend, meant that in the last analysis she didn’t trust him any more than her mother did. Noni was always turning to Doctor Jack, Doctor Jack practically ran her life, Doctor Jack had guilt-tripped her into marrying Roland and into going back to Roland and…

And at that point Kaye abruptly stopped, carefully, precisely, crossed his chopsticks on his plate, and shrugged. “Sorry, it's your business, not mine. Ready to go?”

Noni grabbed his hand and shook it furiously. “It's not that I won’t listen to you. It's that she will listen to him. Jack got her to take the pills. You want me to just let her die?”

“Let's drop it.”

“Kaye, come on!”

“Fine. She's your mother. Let's go.”

And so they left it at that.

It was ironic to Noni that when she returned home that night after such a bad fight with Kaye, she’d had a phone call from an indignant Roland, his third—he said—in as many hours. She was supposed to be taking care of her sick mother, not be out partying all night with her “quote best friend unquote” Kaye King. She’d been gone for a month and Roland needed her back in Houston. It wasn’t fair for him to have to do without her.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked him.

“I just want to know what the fuck is going on,” he replied, and Noni hung up on him.

He called back an hour later and apologized, assuring her that everything he said was because he loved her so much.

During the next week, her mother looked to be feeling better—she said she was her old self again—so much so that Noni made plans to return to Houston. Wade agreed to hire a niece of Amma Fairley's to sleep at Heaven's Hill every night to keep an eye on Mrs. Tilden while Amma was at Clayhome. Yolanda (Tatlock's daughter) already did the cleaning for the Tildens, Lanie King (Amma's sister-in-law from her first marriage) did the ironing, and McKinley Clay (Amma's baby brother) took care of the yard. Amma still cooked, and still did what she called “watched over” Judy Tilden. Amma told Noni, “Honey, you either get out of that marriage or you go be with your husband. I watched over your mama since the day she was born and I guess I can keep on.”

“Get out? You always say marriage is for better or worse, Aunt Ma.”

“Noni, everybody's got a different better, got a different worse. You figure out yours.”

 

In the center of the place mat, her father's mother's Limoges wedding band china, white bordered in gold. Dinner plate beneath salad plate beneath fish plate beneath soup bowl.

 

After her return, life in the Houston Dutch Colonial on the cul de sac felt smaller and tighter and sadder. Whenever Roland drank too much and lost his temper, he apologized with an excuse: he was under a lot of stress, this wasn’t an easy time, the pressure was on. The problem was always just this particular deal, this individual meeting, this specific boss. When Noni suggested that maybe the problem was the way Roland reacted to the problem, he said she had no idea what the real world was like “out there.”

She couldn’t argue. Her world inside the Dutch Colonial felt very unreal; the very knobs on the closet doors felt unreal.

Then one morning in early December, Wade called to say that their mother was in the hospital. She’d apparently had a stroke. Noni immediately bought a ticket to North Carolina on a flight leaving late that same night. When after dinner she told Roland that she was flying home, he exploded. “This is your fucking home,” he told her. “Wade says she's fine. Let somebody else handle it. Let Wade and Trisha. You’re two thousand miles away, for Christ sake. Why do you have to take care of everything and everybody?”

All of a sudden Noni had the strangest sensation that she was walking quickly down a long corridor at the end of which someone whom she couldn’t identify stood waiting for her. On the sides of this corridor, tall old doors and broken wooden shutters, of the kind stacked in a smokehouse at Heaven's Hill, swung slapping loudly shut.

Carefully she put down on the table the dirty dinner plates that she had started to clear. She looked at her husband, sitting across from her, pouring another glass of wine, until he looked up. His eyes were still as blue, his hair as glossy black, his shoulders as broad as the day he’d called up to her in the stands of the Moors High stadium. But Noni realized that even when Roland looked right at her, he wasn’t looking at her at all.

Collecting their napkins, she dropped them onto the plates. “I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right, Roland. I don’t have to take care of everything and everybody.”

Walking to their perfectly coordinated bedroom, Noni picked up her already packed suitcase from their king-sized bed and took it to their perfectly appointed country kitchen where she put on her raincoat. She checked that her ticket was in her purse. From the dining room she could hear Roland still talking. “We aren’t even going to discuss this. Just call Wade and tell him you’re not coming.”

The kitchen opened into the two-car garage. Noni took the BMW convertible, not because she liked it but because Roland had always referred to it as “hers.”

She was a mile away, headed to the airport, before Roland stormed into the kitchen to see why she wasn’t answering him. She waited until just before her plane left before she called the house to tell him where she’d parked the car. He wasn’t there. He was driving around and around the winding roads of their subdivision looking for her. She left a message.

Arriving at Heaven's Hill, Noni moved into her old childhood room and made the house beautiful for her mother's homecoming. Mrs. Tilden's time in the hospital hadn’t been so bad. Everyone had come to see her, filled her room with flowers and balloons and baskets of fruits. The retired rector Dr. Fisher brought her communion and said she looked ten years younger. But it would take a while, everyone warned, for her “old stamina” to return. Noni said it was all right; she wasn’t going anywhere.

The sound of the phone ringing became to her the sound of Roland's voice. His angry calls insisting that she return to him finally led her to install an answering machine.

A week after her return, in a bookstore, she ran into Lucas Miller, the man she’d known at Moors High who was now a lawyer, the man she’d danced with at Bunny's party years ago. He said he was still unmarried and still had a crush on her. She told him that she didn’t want him to ask her out but she did want him to help her file papers of separation from her husband.

 

Beeswax candles in four tall silver Georgian candle-sticks. Candles in two candelabra on the mantle. Candles in sconces on all four walls.

 

And now it was Christmas Eve. The French clock on the Heaven's Hill mantel chimed eight o’clock and Kaye would be coming at any minute. Noni was setting the dining room table for two. She moved the place settings to each end of the long polished table. Then she moved them to the middle of the table across from each other. She had red wine decanted, white wine chilling.

There was no illumination in the dining room but candlelight. In the center of the table a silver Tiffany platter was held aloft by two silver mermaids. On the platter sat red apples and green pears, red and green grapes.

“Oh my god,” whispered Noni, shaking her head as she adjusted the grapes. “I am my mother's daughter.”

At this moment, her mother, she hoped, was upstairs asleep. Mrs. Tilden slept at odd times, and ate, when she did eat, at odd times too. After dark she usually went upstairs and ate her dinner in the sitting room next to her bedroom. She hadn’t been told that Kaye was coming over, but she wouldn’t come down even if he weren’t.

Today Noni was twenty-eight while Kaye was still twenty-seven. She had a surprise gift for his birthday tomorrow that she was eager to give him. There was soft Mozart music playing on the speakers in living room. Violin music. That was a part of her plan.

The doorbell rang. Noni felt oddly warm, and she glanced in the mirror above the Sheraton sideboard, but she didn’t look flushed, in fact she looked pale. She was slender in her favorite black dress; her hair was up, a silvery blonde twist. She wore the tiny gold grand-piano charm on the same wrist as the bracelet of sapphires that her father had given her, with the small sapphire earrings, on her wedding day.

Noni bit her lips, rubbed hard at her cheeks, then laughed at herself. What was she doing, dressing up for Kaye? Kaye who’d known her forever, who knew how her mother would pinch her cheeks when she was young to give her “a little more color.” Kaye who once when she’d come back from a beach trip boasting “Look how much color I got,” had teased her: “Better watch it, Noni. My people started out white as you, just went to that beach too much, trying to get a little more color.”

The doorbell rang again and she hurried into the foyer.

“Hey there, Dr. King. Merry Christmas. Don’t you look nice.”

Holding two of Amma's large wicker baskets, he stepped inside. “Merry Christmas. Happy Birthday. You look nice too, Mrs. Hurd.”

“Stop it.”

Beneath his long flowing cashmere coat, Kaye also wore black, a black linen shirt, black pleated trousers of thin Italian wool, black woven leather slippers. Amma had told Noni that it sent a shiver through her how much money Kaye spent on his clothes. But all of a sudden he had the money to spend. In his first two years in his private cardiology practice he had made more, Amma speculated, than Tatlock Fairley had made in two decades on the grounds crew of Haver University.

Of course, as Amma complained, what was the good of Kaye's having money when he wouldn’t give himself a life to have it in. Her grandson performed heart surgery on eight or ten people a week and charged them thousands of dollars each for doing it. But it was all he did. Nothing but work. So who was he to tell Amma to quit working and let him buy her and Tatlock a nice new house somewhere? Of course Tatlock was all for the plan but Amma would not leave Clayhome where she’d been born and had lived all her life. Not unless the Tildens threw her out. And that, Noni swore, would never happen in her lifetime.

In the doorway by the console where the old blue Chinese jar sat beside the metal pear tree, Kaye leaned over, kissed Noni's cheek. “Been pinching your cheeks again?”

She ignored him, took one of the baskets; there was a covered cake stand and a covered salad bowl in it. In the other basket there was a large enamel cooking pot. “So what's this? Did you really make this?”

Their agreement about their birthday dinner tonight was that they would each contribute half the meal. He followed her along the front hall. “What was the first thing I told you the night we met?”

She placed the basket on the sideboard in the dining room. “That it was snowing, which was obvious.”

“What was the second thing?” He stopped and looked around the candlelit room at the gleaming crystal and silver of the table setting, the red tapers and green pears, the low leaping flames of the gas fire in the fireplace. With a bow, he applauded her.

“Thank you.” She curtsied.

“So what was the second thing I told you?”

“How to run my life. Oh, I don’t know.”

“I told you I can do anything. And that includes cook.” Kaye pushed past her into the kitchen, placed the pot on the stovetop.

She took the lid off the pot and the smell of hot delicious soup floated up. “Oh, you didn’t make this. This is Aunt Ma's she-crab soup.”

“This is Kaye's she-crab soup.” He crossed his arms in the old flamboyant way. “You don’t say those were Rockefeller's oysters you and I ate last night. You say those were your damn oysters. Well, this is Amma Fairley's recipe and it's my soup. ’Course Grandpa Tat says,” and Kaye lowered his voice to his Tatlock rumble, “‘If I’d just had my chance, I’d of proved I invented she-crab soup and he-crab soup both, and every other kind of soup Campbell's stole from me, and I’d of been the richest Indian in America, if I’d just had my chance to prove I was an Indian.’ Okay, Noni, stop that laughing, you’re going to pee.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Nope, it's not going to work this time. I’m over it.”

“Oh, no, you’re not.”

After she poured the soup into the tureen, Kaye brought it to the dining room table. Both were suddenly made strangely formal by the setting. “Madame,” he smiled and pulled back her chair for her and she sat. She could feel his breath near her hair as he pushed the chair in.

She toasted them with the wine. “To us. To Christmas past and present…”

“And future.” He handed her a bright red ribboned box. “Happy Birthday.” In the box was another charm. This one a little gold telephone. “You remember that silver dime shaped like a heart I gave you a long time ago?”

She gestured out to the foyer. “It's upstairs in my jewelry box.”

“Well, you can’t call anybody for a dime anymore, no matter how bad you need them.” He held up a quarter.

Noni reached across the table, touched his hand, then took the quarter from him. “‘When you feel lost and about to give up, / Cause your life just ain’t good enough,’ reach out for me too.” She smiled back at him. “’Course, Kaye King, I know you never would be about to give up and you never would feel life just wasn’t good enough, but just in the remote, remote, remote possibility—”

“You like the soup?”

“The soup is delicious.”

Back in the kitchen, Noni watched Kaye's long fingers cut precisely and perfectly through the melon, then carefully drape prosciutto over it. His hands had always been beautiful to her.

As they ate the melon, they talked about Parker, who’d been fired for insubordination from the job Kaye had helped him find at University Hospital. Kaye feared that Parker might be back on drugs that he’d gotten addicted to in prison. Parker and Kaye were drifting apart. Parker had accused Kaye of thinking he was too good for him, but Kaye said it wasn’t personal. He really had no time these days for anyone or anything but medicine. His life was his work.

Noni rolled her eyes. “Of course it's personal. It's about drugs, it's about what happened to your mother. It's too painful for you to be around Parker. So you avoid him.”

“Sure sure sure.”

“Well, why can you have theories about me and my mother, but I can’t have theories about you and yours?”

Kaye watched Noni squeezing lemon into olive oil. “You’ve got wonderful hands,” he said. “It's in your hands that you can see how strong you are.”

She smiled, wiggling her fingers. “Fingers of steel. All that Chopin. Thank you.”

As they ate the sautéed shrimp, they talked about Bunny, who, despite her professional success—she was the youngest full professor in her department at Columbia—was unhappy because she still couldn’t find the right man, or even—as she joked—“the wrong man.” Noni said that Bunny was thinking of having a baby by herself.

Kaye gave his parodic eyebrow bounce. “That’ll be a first. Didn’t even Jesus's mother need an angel or a bird or something to help her out?”

“Don’t even try, you’re not getting my goat tonight.”

He grinned at her. “Okay, not your goat. How ’bout your lamb of God?”

“That is so bad. That is really wretched, even for one of your jokes. And don’t start in on St. John's.”

“Did I say anything?”

“I could see it in your eyes.” Noni told him that the truth was, sitting in church brought out the best in her—it was the place where she felt at peace.

“Bull,” said Kaye. “It's the place where that fine old glorious Gordon past falls bong on your head with big gold thunks— the altar rail dedicated to devoted wife Martha McAllister Gordon, thunk; the pulpit stand in loving memory of Shelby W. Gordon Jr., thunk; collection plate, stained glass, thunk, thunk, thunk. You need to get out.”

“I got out. You don’t think Houston is a long way from Moors?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You think you have such a life? You just told me you had no life at all.”

“I didn’t say that. I said my work was my life.”

Noni raised her shoulders, held them arched and ironical.

“Don’t get sarcastic with your shoulders,” he told her.

“What? You don’t like my shoulders as much as my wonderful hands?”

“Your shoulders are wonderful, too,” he smiled. And then suddenly they were both embarrassed. “I’ll tell you whose life is his work these days.” Kaye changed the subject. “Tatlock Fairley, the African-American Van Gogh.”

It had been only a few years since his grandfather Tatlock had started setting up his pictures beside Amma's sales table outside the bank. The first pictures he’d sold were paintings of vanished Moors landmarks, all with himself prominent in them: there was one of Tat and R.W. Gordon in front of the old Moors Savings Bank that had been torn down. One of Tat and Dr. Fisher in front of St. John's Church before they’d added the modern annex. One of Tat and a crowd of car buffs at the old filling station, another of Tat and shoppers at the dime store that was now a parking lot, another of Tat and the owner at a fruit stand that was now the site of the town's first ATM kiosk.

Not only had passersby immediately begun to purchase these paintings for twenty-five dollars each, one day a woman who owned a fancy art gallery over in Hillston had come to call on Tat at Clayhome. She’d picked out ten of his works, all kinds, big pictures on old doors, little pictures on tin boxes, telling him she’d give him fifty percent of what she sold them for, and that if this lot sold, she’d buy more. At first Tat had been indignant; why should the gallery owner keep half of his money? But when the woman had told him what she planned to charge for his pictures, “that old man signed so fast he smoked the paper.”

“He's going to do a painting of me,” Noni said. “‘Noni at the Piano.’”

Kaye tossed the salad he’d brought. “I guess you’ll be playing a duet then, ’cause you can bet that old man’ll paint himself right beside you on the bench.” He served Noni's plate. “Spinach salad. Eat some. Anemic.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know—”

“Everything.”

“Right.”

They took their coffee to the living room where violin music was softly playing through the speakers. The only illumination was the fire in the fireplace and the delicate shimmer of the white lights on the Christmas tree. Noni, not her mother, had put up the tree this year and it was the most perfectly shaped one that Kaye had ever seen there, a white pine beautifully tapered. It was also the least decorated tree he’d ever seen at Heaven's Hill. “So your Christmas trees are green,” he grinned.

Some things had stayed the same. As always the five big red stockings embroidered BUD, JUDY, GORDON, WADE, NOELLE, hung from the mantel. Noni's suggestion that they leave the stockings packed away this Christmas had so distressed Mrs. Tilden that she’d withdrawn it. The stockings were only decorative now; there was no pretense of a Santa filling them.

But there were presents under the tree. Kaye's from Noni was in a large box wrapped in green. When he opened it, he saw a violin in a case, its beautiful reddish wood gleaming in the firelight. He was surprised into silence.

While Kaye had played violin in elementary school in Philadelphia, and again in the string orchestra at Gordon Junior High, he had never owned an instrument of his own, nor ever wanted to. “I’m not really into it,” he’d told Miss Clooney when he’d reached high school.

“You’re right about that, Kaye,” the music teacher had replied. “You just don’t want to feel what that violin makes you feel.”

“You think you know me, Miss Clooney?”

Kaye had liked Miss Clooney, who called herself “the last of the burnt-out hippies” and who was the teacher who years ago had organized the student council into the honor guard for the first black students to integrate Moors High. Still, he had returned the rented violin and quit the program.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said to Noni now. “Hang it on the wall? I can’t play this.”

Noni threw up her arms. “I swear to god, Kaye, you are the absolute worst receiver of gifts I have ever met in my life. The absolute worst.”

“I mean, thank you, it's beautiful, but I’m just saying I can’t play it. I haven’t played since ninth grade and I was terrible.”

She took the violin from its case, strummed the strings, started tuning them. It was a gift of hers, perfect pitch; she had always had the burden of hearing disharmony and the gift of setting it right. After she tuned the violin, she plucked a melody on it as if it were a guitar, a simple melancholy Bach melody that they had played in the school orchestra. Bach's “Air on a G String.”

Then she handed the instrument to Kaye, who held it uncomfortably. “Well, Dr. King, why don’t you learn to play better? You’re always telling me what to do with my life, so I’m going to tell you something. They call it playing music.”

He looked at her quizzically. “So?”

“So you don’t play anymore. I bet you don’t dance. You don’t play golf even. Amma says all you do is make money.”

“I fix hearts.”

She smiled. “I used to love to play with you.” Her face flushed. She closed the violin back in its case. “You think about it.”

He followed her back through the dining room, looked at her, couldn’t move his eyes away. The only lighting was the candles on the table, and in the wall sconces, and leaping from gas flames in the fireplace. From the living room softly came the violin music.

In the kitchen with its hanging lights and copper pans, side by side at the large gray limestone sinks they washed and dried china and silverware too old and fragile for dishwashers.

Washing soap from his hands, Kaye passed Noni the soup tureen to dry. “Have you worried enough tonight about everybody but yourself? Is it time yet for me to ask you what you’re going to do? Can I nag you like you nagged me?”

Carefully she placed the china lid on the tureen. “Isn’t that all you’ve ever done? What I’m going to do when?”

“From now on. I’ll make it easy. Here’re a few choices. One. I’m going back to Texas and chuck the rest of my life away on Roland. Wait, there's Two. I’m going to stay here at Heaven's Hill, even though my mother may be perfectly okay, or even if she's not, somebody could be hired to take care of her, or even if they can’t, she could be placed in a facility, I’m going to personally be her nurse ’til one of us dies, preferably her.

“Or Three. Now listen carefully to Three. I’m going back to Haver University and finish my degree and do something with a talent I happen to have, that I just said was damn important, and that's a talent that not everybody's got.” He handed her a platter. “You want some advice? Don’t pick One or Two.”

“What do you mean, ‘do with it’? Like what, play in the lounge at the Pine Hills Inn?”

“Sure, why not? I don’t know. You figure it out.” Kaye opened the door to the walk-in utilities closet. “Any matches in here? I need to light my pudding.” He turned the light on. “Noni, look!”

Against the pantry wall, where Michelle had left it, stood the old red sled inscribed “NOELLE AND KAYE.” The writing was faded, the paint chipped, the runners rusty.

“It's our sled.” He brought it out to show her, held it up to his side. “It looks so small. Don’t you remember it being a lot bigger?”

The sled reached no higher than Kaye's waist, rested against the soft fabric on his thigh.

Noni ran her hand along the runner's curve. “It was taller than we were, remember? We could both sit on it.”

Kaye set the sled down on the kitchen floor and straddled it, his long legs stretching out on either side. “That was a long time ago.”

She nodded. The room got quieter as he looked up at her, at the deep shine of the black silk against her slender collarbone. It was so quiet that Noni could hear her own heart.

Then suddenly, loudly, the oven buzzer blared at them and Noni jumped to turn it off.

Kaye put the sled back where he’d found it. Then at the green pine table, he stuck a holly twig atop his plum pudding and poured brandy over the mounded cake. “Now go sit down.”

“Could you ever ask, instead of bossing me around?”

He put his hands on her shoulders, gently pushed her forward.

Noni was seated in the dining room when Kaye carried in the blazing Christmas pudding. He began singing as he held it out to her. “God rest you merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.”

He was shocked when her eyes welled with tears and she began to cry. Then instantly he remembered her father singing that carol, remembered how Tilden would sing that line festively at his guests, year after year, as he served them his holiday punch in the silver cups. “Oh, I’m sorry, Noni. I’m so sorry. I forgot. Forgive me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above them the footsteps rushed flying along the upstairs hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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