Too Much Rain, or, The Assault of the Mold Spores

THE SPRING Miss Crystal got her allergies was no joke. Creating jobs, Mr. Manny called it, and it did turn out to be quite an industry. By the time her nose quit running and she could talk again, there were fifteen different carpenters, four painters, two attic men, and half the teenagers in the neighborhood who knew the combinations to every door in the house. Two, two, four, two, three, is the front door combination in case there is anyone left in New Orleans who doesn’t know it yet. There is nothing left in this house to steal anyway as Miss Crystal has turned out to be allergic to house dust as well as to mold spores and she is not taking any chances on any accumulating on any bric-a-brac. The allergy doctor showed Miss Crystal a blown-up photograph of a dust mite and that was the end of every book and statue and flower vase and piece of antique furniture in this house. We have gone completely modern for our interior with everything painted white and some new chairs by Mr. Mies van der Rohe who does not believe in chairs having arms on them. Also we have pulled up the carpets and put in black and white tiles that show every smudge and heel print and require a pair of floor cleaners coming in every Friday to vacuum and buff.

So much for the house. It was Miss Crystal’s body that was the real battlefield. She even insisted that I go down and be tested even though I have never been allergic to anything in my life and wasn’t showing any signs. Still, she pled and pled and finally I went on down and let them test me. They put sixty holes in your back and then you wait in this freezing cold room for twenty minutes and then they come back in to see if any of the holes have started itching or turning red. Then they put sixty more on your right arm with stronger chemicals in them and if that doesn’t get a reaction they put sixty on your left arm. They were just debating whether to put a fourth set on my leg when I called a halt. Only one of all the holes had turned red and it was to a plant that grows up in Minnesota where I am not planning on going anytime soon and besides, I had to lead a youth group at four and it was growing late.

Another note. There was this nurse in white giving allergy shots to little children. The whole time I was waiting to be tested I had to watch that going on. She was standing in the hall with this tray full of dirty little bottles of different sorts of things people are allergic to. Ragweed, maple pollen, cedar dust, geraniums, and so forth. Each little child would come up and stick their arm out and she would dip a needle down into two or three of the jars, never watching what she was doing, just chatting with the parents and jabbing the needle in and out of the jar necks. Then she’d grab the child’s arm and stick the needle in. I have never seen a nurse I trusted less. I wouldn’t take those shots for anything in the world from that woman and I told Miss Crystal so. If you take them, I warned, demand another nurse.

The first thing the allergy doctor tried on Miss Crystal was having her stay in the house and putting her on some nose spray and a drug called Seldane that dries you up without putting you to sleep. I’d stick with Benadryl, I told her. You know you have strange reactions to prescription drugs. I have to take it, she replied. I have to put my faith in someone, so I have picked out Doctor Allensby.

So she began to take these Seldane tablets twice a day, once every twelve hours, and things picked up. Not only had her doctor recommended them but they were also recommended by a medical book we bought recently. Three days go by and all is going well. She is even able to go out in the yard to oversee the gardener.

The third afternoon she went down to the video store to get Crystal Anne a video and the girl in the store started talking to her about allergies and how everyone is getting them now and isn’t it strange that it happened right when the pollution is getting worse and don’t tell her it is only plants and trees making people in the United States get sick.

“I’ve got mine under control,” Miss Crystal says. “I’m taking this new drug called Seldane. It’s great. It makes you kind of hyper but I can stand it. It’s better than not breathing.”

“Oh, my God,” the girl says. “My brother and I took that last year. It made us have terrible dreams. Very, very lifelike dreams.”

“What did you say?” Miss Crystal says. “What did you just say?” It turns out she had been having terrible dreams for three nights but had not put the two things together. In the worst dream she and I are standing in a parking lot watching Mr. Manny drive the Lexus off the top of a cliff with the baby in the backseat. Mr. Manny is Miss Crystal’s baby-faced and excessively brilliant husband. They have a mixed marriage which is doing better after many trials and tribulations. They met at a party in Pass Christian during the third day of the Six-Day War, when Miss Crystal was in her pro-Israeli syndrome and while Mr. Manny was obsessed with blonde Christian women, due to his having been sent to New England to school when he was thirteen years old. All of this came out in therapy. So they forged this troubled marriage out of these materials and they have this precious little girl, Crystal Anne, who is one of the two mainstays of my life. The other is my niece, Andria, who is at LSU leading the anti-establishment crusade. I have never been able to have a child of my own and for many years now I have seen that as a blessing in disguise. You get your heart tied up in children and you lose all sense of how to care for them and teach them to be strong. But back to Miss Crystal’s dream.

The Lexus falls on its nose as we watch in terror and disbelief. Then a voice comes from the car. It is Mr. Manny’s voice and he says everything is all right. He gets out of the car and then he reaches in the backseat and brings out the baby. They are both all right although they were not wearing seat belts. I think this dream is only a justification for Miss Crystal and Miss Lydia refusing to wear seat belts when they are together. Miss Lydia is Miss Crystal’s best friend. She is a famous painter out in California who gets up to seventeen thousand dollars for every painting that she paints. Still, she and Miss Crystal are bad to act like adolescents when they get together. Many of their worst habits are on the wane now but they still like to ride around New Orleans with no seat belts. They say it is to prove there is no security, but I think it is more about not messing up their dresses when they are going out.

But back to the medical problems. You cannot win at this allergy game. Once your body goes autoimmune on you it is just one long trip to the doctor or the drugstore. Meanwhile, every tree and plant in New Orleans was bursting with blooms. Putting out pollen morning, noon, and night. “I am no longer part of the beauty of the world,” Miss Crystal cried out at least once a day. “Now I have to hate the things I used to love so dearly.”

“You never did pay much attention to flowers,” I consoled her. “You’d rather be on the tennis court any day.”

“I can’t even play tennis with this going on,” she answered. “I can see the pollen falling from the trees. The more I breathe, the more Seldane I have to take.”

Here’s what Mr. Manny decided we should do. All go to Florida and stay a few weeks and if Miss Crystal gets well, buy a house there for her to live in when the going gets rough in New Orleans.

It was Monday when we decided we should leave. By Tuesday afternoon we were out at the airport, only of course by then Mr. Manny had decided he couldn’t leave his work. Now that he has quit his law firm and gotten into environmental work he is a worse workaholic than he was when he was only doing it to make money. He is fighting to save the wetlands and has almost completely stopped wearing ties.

So it was only Miss Crystal and Crystal Anne and myself who were boarding the plane. Crystal Anne and I sat together and Miss Crystal sat across the aisle reading a Vogue magazine and stopping every few minutes to blow her nose. “We will be there in two hours,” I told her several times. “Buck up your courage. We have solved worse problems than this.”

“You’re right,” Miss Crystal answered. “This is a very small problem. A problem we can fix.”

“I was going to be the lilac fairy in the school play,” Crystal Anne noted for the third time. “I’ll never get to be the lilac fairy again.”

“You are going to Florida instead,” I told her. “Many little girls would give their eyeteeth for a week off from school to see the ocean.”

We arrived in Saint Petersburg in the middle of the afternoon and a van from the hotel picked us up and carried us into town. It is a very spread-out city and quite clean and the hotel Mr. Manny had gotten for us was this very swanky hotel on the beach with an indoor pool and one outside near the ocean. Crystal Anne loves pools, although she also likes to swim in the ocean. Personally I do not like water that has chlorine in it. It reminds me too much of washday down in Boutte when my auntee would have water boiling with so much bleach in it the smell would fill the town.

We settled down in two rooms with a door that opened between them. There were balconies that looked out onto the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. Crystal Anne was enchanted by the balconies and kept going from one to the other putting her dolls on the chairs and making little nests for them overlooking the sea. She is eight years old now, just as sweet as an angel, which she has been ever since the day that she was born. Born sweet and stayed sweet. Also, she has a very fine brain and she knows how to use it. She is like Mr. Manny in that. She does not let outside influences change the way she sees things. If she has a flaw, it is that she is very rigid about her likes and dislikes. If she likes someone, she will stick up for them no matter what. If she takes a dislike to them, watch out. Well, she took a dislike to Mr. Hotchkiss, which Miss Lydia later said only proved once again that a little child should lead us.

But we had barely arrived and Mr. Hotchkiss had not showed up yet and so we took off our traveling clothes and went down to the pool to let Crystal Anne practice swimming.

The people around the pool were very friendly. There was a couple from Maine who had met each other at a support meeting they went to after their spouses died. His had died and hers had died so they got together and have lived happily ever after for two years. They each talked a lot about the people they used to be married to. It seemed that was most of their conversation, plus some jokes he was making about the fact that she was fifteen years younger than he was and other jokes about the fact that she smoked. She mostly talked about sailing the British Virgin Islands with her dead husband who was her age and what a good sailor he was and their narrow escapes.

I began to get the picture. Her on the sailboat with her young good-looking husband, the two of them tanned and sort of devil-may-care and smoking all the time. Him in a nice house with the mother of his children. Both of them happy and content and him never giving a thought to a younger woman until his wife died and forced him into it. He was very fat and jolly and glad to talk, and she was not pretty but she was vivacious and I began to take to her.

Another woman who said she was forty-eight was lying on a deck chair and she got into our conversation and began to tell all about her young husband and how her mother pretended not to know she was married to a man half her age and was supporting him. I really liked this woman a lot. Miss Martha Ann Hamblin from Saint Louis, Missouri. She was a snowbird, which means she goes to Florida to get away from snowstorms. Her husband was with her on the trip but he was off somewhere shopping for clothes. She was very vivacious too and had a pretty face. She kept laughing when she’d tell things about herself and she and Miss Crystal were establishing a rapport.

There weren’t many other children at the pool. Just a fat girl about eight and another girl maybe twelve years old. Crystal Anne tried to make friends with the fat girl but the fat girl only wanted to play in her water wings and wouldn’t dive or swim laps. I feel a great sympathy for fat children and always want to take over and change their diet although my niece Andria tells me that psychiatrists say many fat children are born to be that way and have a slow metabolism and should not be made fun of or have people always after them trying to change their diet.

We spent most of the afternoon by the pool or walking down to the ocean and back. Miss Crystal said she felt like a new woman from breathing the salt air. Crystal Anne was trying to get in one hundred laps before the sun went down. She was up to seventy-six when we made her give up and went up to our rooms to dress for dinner. The air down here in Florida is soft and fine and full of salt. So puffy and romantic. It is easy to see why all these people from up north come down here and decide to stay. Balmy is the word I’m searching for. Balmy is the only word for it.

There were two dining rooms in the hotel. The Palm Court, which is the finest one, and a more casual area called Sixteen Palms. We tossed a coin and the Palm Court won, so we dressed up in our best clothes and put the heated rollers on Crystal Anne’s hair and dressed her in her new pink linen dress and down we went to have our first resort meal. There weren’t too many people in the Palm Court when we got there, so we took a seat at the best table looking out toward the sea and began to talk about the salt air and why it always seems to mend anything that is wrong with you. We were laughing and carrying on and making fun of the menu when this very handsome man with black hair came in and took a seat at a small table facing us. He was very elegant, tall and thin and wearing a white linen suit like you see in movies set in Europe. He had on these little wire spectacles that made him look even more distinguished. While he was studying the menu the headwaiter came over and told him there was a telephone call for him and would he like a phone, but he said no, he wouldn’t take it, he was eating dinner and would the headwaiter take a message.

Our dinner had been served but Miss Crystal had lost all interest in food. She started sitting up very straight in her chair and asking Crystal Anne things that I know couldn’t really be of any interest to her. Also, she had taken off her glasses.

I have seen Miss Crystal get that way before, like she has seen a way out of a tunnel that she thought had no end. Like she had been asleep for days and all of a sudden woke up and started blinking.

She was not looking at him. Although by now he was occasionally raising his eyes above the little glasses and looking at her. That was about all that happened that night, except that he finished dinner before we did and passed by our table on his way to go stand on the patio and drink a brandy. “What a lovely child,” he said, as he passed our table, this very cultured accent like he was from Boston or England or somewhere far away. Miss Crystal blushed and Crystal Anne bristled like he had said she was ugly. “I hate it when people do that,” she said. “It’s rude to act like children don’t know you are talking about them.”

The next morning, no sooner had we gone down to the beach and gotten settled on our striped beach chairs, when he came walking down to the water’s edge. He had on a pair of blue jeans and a starched white shirt and some leather handmade sandals. In the morning light he looked even handsomer than he had the night before. He walked past us and stood a long time at the water’s edge, letting us admire his back.

I should stop here and tell you something about Miss Crystal that you might miss if you only heard me tell the things she says and does. She is very lovely to look at. Not just the features of her face. She has a kind of glow about her, something coming from deep within that draws people to her. Everything she does has a kind of gracefulness and charm. I do not love her for nothing. It is because she has this glow of kindness, from the inside going out and it has always reached out to me. She does not think of me as a maid or a servant and I do not think of her as my employer. Not to mention that I have always been the highest-paid housekeeper in New Orleans and I have never had to ask for a raise. For a while there it looked as if Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny were in a race to see which one could pay more money to anyone who works for them. When Miss Crystal gave me the down payment for a house, Mr. Manny went right out and bought the gardener a pickup truck. Andria has paced up and down my living room a dozen times telling me this is a bad thing and we are all living in a fool’s paradise but I do not care. Andria has set her sights on being a television anchorwoman and so it is necessary that she see everything in the most cynical light.

Back to Florida and the scene on the beach when Mr. William Hotchkiss from Atlanta, Georgia, showed up and went to stand at the water’s edge looking out. We did not know at the time that it was Crystal Anne who was making him sad. It turned out he had a small daughter who had died several years before, carrying with her to the grave half his liver, which had failed to save her life. He had lain down beside her on a table at Mayo’s Clinic and let them take out half his liver and stuff as much as they could fit into her tiny, sick body. After she died, his wife went completely crazy and started sleeping with everyone in sight and it ended in divorce. Now he was on a leave of absence from his job and was traveling around the country trying to find a place to think straight. He had come to Saint Petersburg because once, as a young man, he had sailed from there in an old patched-up sailboat with two other young men and made it to the Virgin Islands after having to build a de-salinater for water and making a rudder out of a dinghy seat. All of this came out later in conversation. For now, Miss Crystal was sitting up straight in her beach chair, Crystal Anne was getting nervous, and I was doing my usual thing, which is watch and reserve judgment until more information comes in. I have learned this counseling teenagers at my church.

“I’m not perfect,” Miss Crystal says, meeting my eyes. “Life is short, Traceleen. Whatever winter offers, I will take.”

“I see you’re feeling better,” is all I would say to that.

“I feel terrific, to tell the truth.” She stood up and put her baby blue beach coat on over her suit. “I think I’ll take a swim. The Gulf of Mexico, think about it, connecting to the Atlantic Ocean, the deep blue sea.” She walked over in the direction of Mr. Hotchkiss, and I guess she must have said hello, or, Haven’t we met somewhere before? or, Isn’t it a nice day? because in a few minutes they were walking along the water’s edge like they were old friends. She was telling him about her allergies, I suppose, because he was nodding his head.

 

I should stop and tell you something about this day. It was paradisical. Balmy and blue, soft, soft air, brilliant sun, low clouds on the horizon and everywhere the sound of the sea lapping on the sandy shores. My powers of observation fail me. Silk is the only word that fits this day.

Crystal Anne noticed her mother talking to Mr. Hotchkiss and she came out of the water and walked back over to me. About that time a man from the hotel came along and asked if we wouldn’t like an umbrella and I said yes and he began to set up this very large green-and-white-striped umbrella above our heads. “Who is Momma talking to?” Crystal Anne asked. “Is she going to start flirting with men again?”

“Would you care to play tic-tac-toe?” I answered. “I brought a pad and pencils in case you’d like to play some games.”

“Is that the man we saw last night at dinner?”

“I think so. Yes, I think it’s the same man. He must be lonely. Down here at a hotel all by himself.”

“If she starts flirting with men, I’m going home.” Crystal Anne put on her hooded beach coat and pulled the hood up over her hair. “Why does she always have to do that?”

“Play me some games,” I answered. “Leave your momma alone. Your momma is only talking to that man.”

That night they started dancing. It was in the Palm Court again. There was a band playing South American dance music and Mr. Hotchkiss came to our table while we were waiting for the main course and asked Miss Crystal if she’d like to dance. They went out onto the dance floor and started dancing like they’d been dancing together all their lives. By now Miss Crystal had heard most of his story and her interest in him was furthered by sympathy.

She was wearing blue again, a long blue silk sheath with a little jacket. I had on my cerise cotton suit and Crystal Anne was wearing white with a pink sash, looking exactly like an angel.

That night she insisted on sleeping in my room with me. “I don’t like Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said, when we had turned off the lights and said our prayers. “I don’t like the way he looks at me.”

“He came down here because his little girl died and his wife went crazy on him. It won’t hurt us to be nice to him.”

“She’s going to let him go to Disney World with us. Just because his little girl died doesn’t mean he ought to dance with Momma all the time. If he goes to Disney World, I won’t go.” She rolled over with her face to the wall and put a pillow over her head and held it there.

“Go to sleep, honey. We’re not in charge of everything that happens.”

“We’re on a planet,” she said, rolling back over and throwing the pillow on the floor. “It’s just a planet circling the sun. All around is darkest space.”

“God is here,” I put in.

“Maybe he is and maybe he’s not. If he is, he’s doing a terrible job.”

In the end only Crystal Anne and I went to Disney World. Miss Crystal stayed at the hotel taking dancing lessons. Crystal Anne and I had a pretty good time. We had our photographs made and a five-minute video of us talking to Donald Duck. We rode about two dozen rides and ate lunch in Rapunzel’s Tower and bought sweatshirts and sunglasses and got home about five in the afternoon completely exhausted. At least I was.

We went up to our rooms and Crystal Anne threw herself down on Miss Crystal’s bed and started pouting. I was in the next room with the door open between the rooms.

“Did you have fun at Disney World?” Miss Crystal asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I wanted you to be there. People look at me funny when I’m with Traceleen.”

“Why is that?”

“They think a maid is taking care of me.”

“Do you think that?” I couldn’t get up and close the door. I didn’t know what to do. I coughed, but they did not seem to hear. I coughed again. “Come in here, Traceleen,” Miss Crystal said. “This concerns you too.”

“Black people should be at home taking care of their own families,” Crystal Anne said. “That’s what everybody thinks.”

“I don’t have any children but you,” I answered. “This is my job, Crystal Anne. Also, my heart’s desire. I love being in Florida with you. You know it’s true.”

“You’re mad about Mr. Hotchkiss, aren’t you?” Miss Crystal had decided to bite the bullet.

“I think it’s going to be like it was in Maine with Allen. You and Daddy will get a divorce and I’ll have to live in two houses like Augusta Redmon.”

“I am only getting to know Mr. Hotchkiss so that when Lydia comes down here she will have someone to go out with. I’m trying to get Lydia to come and join us. I haven t told you yet because I wasn’t sure she could come. Well, there it is, now you know and don’t be disappointed if she doesn’t come.” Miss Crystal looked at me across Crystal Anne’s head. It was the biggest lie I had ever heard her tell her child. The worst lie she had told since she quit drinking. It was a lie that was destined to draw me in. I took the bait. “See there, honey. It’s not what you thought it was.” Crystal Anne looked at me out of the bottom of her eyes. It is impossible to lie to her. Many children are that way. It is a gift they have.

“I’m going swimming,” she said. “I want to get in some laps before dinner.”

As soon as Crystal Anne left the room Crystal got on the phone and called Miss Lydia in California and began to plead with her to come and join us. “I’ll buy the airplane ticket,” she said. “I’ll pay for everything. You better come and meet this man. He’s a ten. You know you don’t like any other kind.”

So the upshot of it was Miss Lydia agreed to come the following day. It turned out she was in a lull between painting jobs anyway and thought she might drum up some portrait business among the snowbirds.

That night Miss Crystal went to work telling Mr. Hotchkiss all about how happily married she was and how careful everyone has to be around Crystal Anne because she is so sensitive and can read minds. Also, how fortunate everyone in Saint Petersburg was going to be when the best painter in the United States showed up for a visit and let ordinary people talk to her. I think Miss Crystal probably overdid it. Mr. Hotchkiss was so lonely and guilt-ridden over his liver not being strong enough to save his child that he was ripe for any kind of attention. We could have run in somebody with only half the personality of Miss Lydia and he would have been thrilled to meet her.

So Miss Lydia joined the party. She is a catalyst I guess you could call it. The ingredient that makes the pot boil over. She got off the airplane wearing this little black California outfit and carrying a rolled-up canvas under her arm. It was her latest painting, a portrait of a famous writer sitting beside a bowl of huge white roses. Homage to Van Gogh, it is called and we all agreed it was the best thing she had ever painted. Why she would roll it up and carry it across the United States on an airplane is beyond me but she says it is because of anxiety. She is continually worried that an earthquake will destroy one of her paintings before she has time to finish it or put it in a contest.

“I have just found out that much of what I have always thought of as anxiety is just plain fear,” she started telling Mr. Hotchkiss as soon as they were introduced. (It is not the old-fashioned way to get a man interested in you but I try to keep an open mind about such things. In the old days we would look up at a man and say, Where did you get those big brown eyes? or something more along that line.) “All these years I assumed I was suffering the ordinary anxiety and depression common to artists when all along it was just plain old Midwestern fear.”

“Imagine that,” Mr. Hotchkiss said.

“I could have told you that,” Miss Crystal puts in. “You’ve never been depressed, Lydia. Being afraid of earthquakes when you live on the San Andreas Fault is not neurotic. Why don’t you move to New Orleans and live near me?”

“I might,” she answered, and got this dark and serious look on her face and sat up straighter. “I’m rereading the Chronicles of Dune. I want to be a Bene Gesserit nun and have power over every aspect of my life. I am training myself to be constantly aware. And read body language.” She looked directly at Mr. Hotchkiss, who was sitting like a perfect gentleman. He didn’t move a muscle when she said that and I began to think maybe I had underrated him.

“Well,” Miss Crystal said. “I think I’ll join Crystal Anne in the pool. I want to get in a swim before dinner.” Miss Crystal got up and went to join her daughter and Mr. Hotchkiss suggested that Lydia change her shoes and accompany him on a walk.

Lydia agreed and went off to her room, leaving Mr. Hotchkiss and me alone. He looked off toward the sea, very gentle and companionable, and I reached in my bag for my knitting. I am knitting a pair of golf club covers for my niece Andria. It is tricky work and I forgot myself in it for a while. “I took up knitting once,” Mr. Hotchkiss said. “When I was in the navy. I knitted seven scarves, each one longer than the last. The last one was seven feet long. It was my masterpiece.”

“What sort of vessel were you on?” I asked.

“A nuclear sub. Imagine being young and unimaginative enough to do that.” He laughed a gentle laugh and I thought for a moment he might cry. It is a strange thing about very handsome men as they grow older. Either they become great to match their beauty or a sort of fading begins. Their smiles lose all excitement. It’s as if great beauty makes promises it cannot keep.

Miss Lydia reappeared, wearing shorts and a shirt and white socks and tennis shoes. She swept him up and took him off down the beach.

About that time who should come walking out of the hotel but Mr. Manny. He had finished up his work and decided to come down and surprise us. He came walking out of the hotel still wearing his suit and tie. Crystal Anne spotted him from the pool. She came tearing across the concrete and threw herself into his arms, getting him soaking wet.

Miss Crystal was slower in her welcome but I could see it was sincere. The things that have gone on between this pair that I have witnessed! Still, the love they have is always greater than their problems. They are smart enough for each other and can make each other laugh. “I look terrible” is the first thing Miss Crystal said. “My hair’s wet. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? Come on, go up to my room while I get dressed.”

“Crystal Anne and I will get a snack in the coffeeshop,” I volunteered. Nothing makes me happier than the thought that Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny might spend an hour in bed. It looked like this might be the afternoon, so I grabbed up Crystal Anne and took her inside to eat bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and drink iced tea.

“Where did Lydia go with Mr. Hotchkiss?” she asked me. We were taking dainty little bites of our sandwiches, our backs straight, our napkins in our laps. Crystal Anne and I are not part of the messiness of life in the nineties.

“Lydia can take care of herself,” I answered. “She has lived through two earthquakes all alone in a little house in a redwood forest. I wouldn’t worry about her taking a walk with a man from Atlanta, Georgia.”

“What does Mr. Hotchkiss do for a living?” She sat up even straighter and knit her eyebrows together in a perfect imitation of Miss Crystal’s father.

“We haven’t asked,” I answered. “You know it is impolite to question people about their livelihoods. People will volunteer this information when they are ready.”

“I don’t like it when men don’t go to work.” She picked a piece of tomato out of her sandwich and laid it on her plate. “They should go to work in the daytime.”

“Judge not that ye be not judged” is all I would say to that. We finished up our sandwiches and iced tea. Crystal Anne had added so much sugar to her tea that the bottom of the glass looked like a beach. She removed the ice, then took her red-and-white-striped straw and fashioned the sugar into a tiny sand castle. “Are you going to eat that sugar?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. She took her iced tea spoon and very carefully filled it with the castle and put it into her beautiful little pink mouth. I would rather have a meal with Crystal Anne than any king or queen on the earth. I have never had a meal with her that did not turn out to be memorable.

We wrapped up our bread crusts for the gulls and signed our bill and walked down to the beach to give the crusts away. There was no sign of Lydia and Mr. Hotchkiss. We walked along beside the water for a while, then we went up to our rooms to dress for dinner.

At seven that night Lydia and Mr. Hotchkiss had not been heard from. At seven-thirty we went to dinner without them. At nine Miss Crystal began to want to call the police.

At ten-fifteen the phone finally rang. It was Lydia calling from a bar in Tampa, begging them to come and save her. “He’s drunk,” she told Miss Crystal. “He said he’ll kill himself if I leave him. He said he has no reason to live.”

“I knew he was a kidnapper,” Crystal Anne said, when Manny and Crystal had gone off to save Lydia. “You all go crazy if I speak to a stranger and Mother just takes up with a man she meets in a hotel and lets him take Lydia off like that.”

“Your mother does the best she can,” I answered. “You are too smart a little girl to start disliking your beloved mother just because she has flights of imagination.”

An hour and a half later Manny and Crystal reappeared with Lydia. “I have spent my life trying to escape that bar,” Lydia said. “Then I end up in it with this dull goddamn man from Atlanta. Will I ever learn?”

“Why did you go?” Crystal Anne had moved in closer. I couldn’t believe we were letting her take part in this conversation.

“Because I felt sorry for him. And because he said he wanted me to paint his dead child. From a photograph, of course. He didn’t bat an eyelash when I said twenty thousand dollars.”

“Why don’t you paint Crystal Anne instead?” Manny asked. “For, say, half that amount.”

 

Which is how a spring that began with pollen, mold, and dust mites ended up in a glorious portrait of Crystal Anne wearing a green and white sprigged dimity garden dress and holding a hat in her hand. Beside her are squirrels and robins and bluejays and a turtle and her cat and many other of the creatures that she loves so dearly. Lydia stayed with us while she painted it and while she was doing the drawings Crystal Anne would add an animal every time she saw Lydia in a good mood. The painting is called The Menagerie and a copy of it was the cover of New Orleans magazine for August of last year. It has completely dominated the living room of our house and looks perfect with the stark floors and armless Mies van der Rohe chairs.

Actually, we would not have had to move all that furniture and paint all those walls if we had waited a few months. It turns out that Miss Crystal’s allergies were really caused by all the antibiotics that she took when she had her teeth capped. What few allergies she has now can be controlled by nose spray and are only caused by the budding of the trees in spring and the going-to-seed of plants in the fall. Talking about things like that is work for a poet. If Mr. Alter hadn’t killed himself he might be here to turn this experience into literature. In his absence I have tried to do the best I can. Here is my poem.

When the dew point rises

When the buds appear

“When Aprile with its sweete showeres”

Fills the world with moisture

This is the hour when the upper respiratory system

Goes into high gear

And we must accept

We are not in charge here