NORA JANE’S GRANDMOTHER lived in a blue frame house on the corner of Laurel and Webster streets. It was there that Nora Jane was happy. There was a swing on the porch and a morning glory vine growing on a trellis. In April azaleas bloomed all around the edges of the porch, white and pink and red azaleas, blue morning glories, the fragrant white Confederate jasmine, red salvia and geraniums and the mysterious elephant ears, their green veins so like the ones on Nora Jane’s grandmother’s hands. Nora Jane hated the veins because they meant her grandmother was old and would die. Would die like her father had died, vanish, not be there anymore, and then she would be alone with only her mother to live with seven days a week.
“Let me set the table for you,” she said to her grandmother, waking beside her in the bed. “Let me cook you breakfast. I want you to eat an egg.”
“Oh, honey lamb,” her grandmother replied, and reached over and found her glasses and put them on, the better to see the beautiful little girl, the better to be happy with the child beside her. “We will cook it together. Then we’ll see about the mirlitons. You can take them to Langenstein’s today. They said they would buy all that you had.”
“Then I’d better hurry.” Nora Jane got out of bed. If she was going to take the mirlitons to Langenstein’s she wanted to do it early so she wouldn’t run into any of her friends from Sacred Heart. She was the only girl at Sacred Heart so poor she had to sell vegetables to Langenstein’s. Still, they had not always been poor. Her grandfather had been a judge. Her father had gone to West Point. Her grandmother had sung grand opera all up and down the coast and auditioned for the Met. She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and swung her long legs out of the bed and began to search for her clothes. “You cook breakfast then,” she said. “I’ll go pick the mirlitons before it gets too hot.”
She put on her shorts and shirt and found her sandals and wandered out into the backyard to pick the mirlitons from the mirliton vines.
A neighbor was in the yard next door. Mr. Edison Angelo. He leaned over the fence. “How’s everything going, Nora Jane?” he asked. “How’s your grandmother?”
“She’s feeling fine,” Nora Jane said. “She’s fine now. She’s out of bed. She can do anything she likes.”
Nora Jane bent over the mirliton vines. They were beautiful, sticky and fragrant, climbing their trellis of chicken wire. The rich burgundy red fruit hung on its fragile stems, fell off into Nora Jane’s hands at the slightest touch. She gathered a basketful, placing them carefully on top of each other so as not to bruise them. Mirlitons are a delicacy in New Orleans. The dark red rind is half an inch thick, to protect the pulp and seeds from the swarming insects of the tropics, for mirlitons are a tropical fruit, brought to New Orleans two hundred years ago by sailors from the Caribbean. Some winters in New Orleans are too cold for mirlitons and the fruit is small and scanty. This had been a warm winter, however, and the mirliton vines were thick with fruit. Nora Jane bent over her work. Her head of curly dark black hair caught the morning sun, the sun caressed her. She was a beautiful child who looked so much like her dead father that it broke her mother’s heart and made her drink. It made her grandmother glad. Nora Jane’s father had been her oldest son. She thought God had given Nora Jane to her to make up for losing him. Nora Jane’s grandmother was a deeply religious woman who had been given to ecstatic states when she was young. It never occurred to her to rail at God or blame him for things. She thought of God as a fallback position in times of trouble. She thought of God as solace, patience, wisdom, forgiveness, compensation.
Nora Jane’s mother had a darker meaner view. She thought God and other people were to blame for everything that went wrong. She thought they had gotten together to kill her beautiful black-haired husband and she was paying them back by staying inside and drinking herself to death. Still, it wasn’t her fault she was weak. Her mother had been weak before her and her mother before that. It was their habit to be weak.
Nora Jane’s grandmother came from a line of women who had a habit of being strong. One of them had come to New Orleans from France as a casket girl, had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean when she was only sixteen years old, carrying all her possessions in a little casket and when she arrived had refused to marry the man to whom she was assigned. She had married a Welshman instead, a man who had been on the boat as a steward. Each generation of women was told this story in Nora Jane’s grandmother’s family and so they believed they were strong women with strong genes and acted accordingly. When she was about four years old Nora Jane had looked at the strong story and the weak story and decided to be strong. It was the year her father died and her grandmother sat in the swing on her porch and watched the morning glory vines open and close and the sun rise and fall and believed that God did not hate her even if he had allowed her son to die in a stupid war. Many of the men who fought with him had written her letters and she read them out loud to Nora Jane. One young man, whose name was Fraser, came and stayed for five weeks and painted the outside of the house a fresher, brighter blue and put a new floor in the kitchen of the house. Every day he sat on the porch with Nora Jane’s grandmother as the sun went down and talked about the place where he lived. A place called Nebraska. When all the painting was done and the furniture put back in the kitchen, he kissed Nora Jane and her grandmother good-bye and went off to see his own family. After he was gone Nora Jane and her grandmother would talk about him. “Where’s Fraser gone?” Nora Jane would ask.
“He has gone to Nebraska,” her grandmother would answer. “He went to try to find his wife.”
“Where’s his wife?”
“He doesn’t know. She got tired of waiting for him.”
“She’s sad, like Momma, isn’t she?”
“I think so, some people get sad.”
“But not us, do we?”
“Let’s walk over to the park,” her grandmother said, and got up from the swing. “Those Emperor geese are dying to see you. They’re waiting for you to bring them some bread.”
“Then do I have to go home?”
“Sometime you do. Your mother doesn’t like it if you stay here all the time.”
“I’ll go tomorrow. In two days I’ll go back over there.”
“We’ll see. Put on your shoes. Those geese are waiting for you by the bridge.”
Of course sooner or later she would have to go back to her mother’s house and watch her mother cry. Although the older she got the less she had to put up with it. Her mother’s house was seven blocks from her grandmother’s house. Her mother’s house was in the three hundred block of Webster Street and her grandmother’s house was in the five hundred block of Henry Clay. By the time she was six years old Nora Jane was allowed to walk from her grandmother’s house to her mother’s house anytime she wanted to as long as the sun was up. She knew every house and yard and porch and tree between the three hundred block of Webster Street and the five hundred block of Henry Clay. She knew which fences made the best sound when she ran a stick along the railings. She knew which dogs were mean. She knew which people got up early and which ones were sleepyheads. She knew who took the Times-Picayune and who did not. When the golden rain trees bloomed and when the magnolia blossoms opened. Hello, Nora Jane, everyone would say. How you keeping? How’s everything with you?
Nora Jane carried the basket of mirlitons up the wooden steps to the kitchen. Ever since she was a small child she had sat on those steps to dream. She dreamed of elves and fairies, of ballet dresses and ballet shoes, of silk and velvet and operas and plays. There were photographs of her grandmother in operas in a book in the house. Photographs of long ago before her grandmother’s face got old. In one photograph her grandmother was wearing a crown.
Nora Jane paused on the stairs, resting the basket of mirlitons on the rail. A fat yellow jacket buzzed past the door, a golden Monarch beat against a window, a blue jay flew down and sat upon a yard chair. Nora Jane walked on up the stairs and into the kitchen. It was seven o’clock in the morning. Already the sun was high. It was time to go to Langenstein’s. “I’m going right now,” she called to her grandmother. “I’ll eat breakfast when I get back.”
“Have a piece of toast then. Take it with you.”
“I’m fine. I want to get these over there while they’re fresh.” She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and walked out through the rooms. It was a shotgun house with one room right behind the other. Her grandmother let her leave. She knew why Nora Jane wanted to get to Langenstein’s so early and she approved of it. It was the same reason she swept her porch at dawn. Ladies didn’t do housework. Ladies didn’t sell vegetables to the grocery store.
Nora Jane proceeded down the street, down Webster to Magazine and over to Calhoun, past Prytania, Camp, Coliseum, Perrier and Pitt to Garfield, past the Jewish cemetery and into the parking lot of Langenstein’s, which is the richest grocery store in New Orleans, perhaps the richest grocery store in the world. A few ladies were already parking their cars and going in to wheel small old-fashioned carts through the narrow aisles. Past shelves of exotic imported foods and delicatessen items, past chicory coffee and avocados and artichokes and stuffed crabs and seafood gumbo and imported crackers and candy, past wine vinegar and Roquefort cheese and creme glacee and crawfish bisque and crawfish etouffee and potage tortue and lobster and shrimp ratatouille.
An old lady was being helped from her car by her chauffeur, a young woman in a tennis dress bounced by with a can of coffee in her hand, a fat white cat walked beneath a crepe myrtle tree, a mockingbird swooped down to pester it. Nora Jane ignored all that. She hurried across the parking lot and into the office and found Chef Roland at his desk. He was a man who loved the world. He loved food and God and music and all seven of his children and the idea of Food and God and Music and Children. He cooked all day and listened to his employees’ troubles and then went home and listened to his wife’s troubles and drank wine and talked on the telephone to his brother who was a Benedictine monk in Pennsylvania and wrote long impassioned letters to his brother who was a Jesuit in Cincinnati. Dear Alphonse, the letters would begin. Put down your apostasy and your rage. Please write to Maurice. Maurice longs to hear from you.
It concerned a religious schism that had split Chef Roland’s family. For seven years his younger brothers had battled over the matter of birth control. Look at little Nora Jane, Chef Roland told himself now. No family, only one old grandmother and a mother better left unsaid. No brothers or sisters or aunts. A family which has died out. This one little blossom on the vine.
He got up from his desk and wrapped the little girl in his arms and kissed her on the top of her head. “Ah, these mirlitons,” he said. “What a casserole I will make of these. Is this all? Only one basketful? You will bring me more?”
“I’ll bring some more over later. If mother gets up. We wanted to bring you some early in case you needed them.”
“How old are you now, Nora Jane?”
“I’m fourteen. I’ll be fifteen pretty soon. This summer. You like them? You think they’re beautiful?”
“Magnificent. Always your grandmother’s vegetables are magnificent. I want the asparagus this year. All that she can spare.” He was writing out a receipt for her to cash at the checkout stand. He knew why she was in a hurry. The Whittingtons were proud. The grandmother had sung with the opera. His father had heard her sing. He handed the receipt to her. She folded it and stuck it in the pocket of her shorts. Such a lovely child, he thought, a lovely child.
“You will come and work for me this summer?” he asked. “I will teach you to cook for me. You think it over, huh?”
“If I can,” she said. “I might help the sisters with the camp at Sacred Heart. How much can you pay?”
“Four fifteen an hour and you will learn to cook. That’s worth something, even for a pretty girl like you, huh?”
“I know how already. Grandmother taught me. We made a Charlotte Rousse for her birthday.” Nora Jane giggled. “And we made an angel cake but it fell, because the stove is old. We need a new stove but we don’t want to waste our money on it.”
“I will call your grandmother and speak to her. She will tell you to come and work for me. Better than little children all day. I’ll teach you a trade.”
“Okay,” Nora Jane said politely. “I’ll think it over. I have to go now,” she added. “Is there someone up front to cash this?”
“Yes, they’re open. Run along then. But let me know.”
“I will.” She left the office and went into the store, down between the aisles of imported foods to the checkout stand. She collected three dollars and seventeen cents and put it in her pocket, then she started home, up the street of crushed-up oyster shells, past a line of azalea bushes that grew out onto the sidewalk. A black and white cat moved lazily along beside her, then disappeared into the open door of the Prytania Street Liquor Store. I better go by Momma’s and get some clothes, Nora Jane decided. If I go now she won’t start calling Grandmother’s all day and driving us crazy.
Chef Roland stared down at his desk. Poor little girl, he was thinking. Of course she doesn’t want to come work in the deli, but it’s all I have to offer her. Poor baby, poor little thing.
The phone was ringing. Chef Roland pushed a button and answered it. It was his brother Maurice calling from Pennsylvania.
“So you’re back from Rome,” Chef Roland began. “Well, did you tell them what I told you to tell them? Did you, Maurice? Did you or not? Answer my question.”
“I want to come visit you when I get through here,” Maurice said. “Can I come down for a few days? I want to talk with you, Roland, bury the hatchet, smoke the peace pipe.”
“What did you tell them, Maurice? Did you tell him what I said or not?”
“What’s wrong, Roland, how are you in such a bad mood so early in the day? Is Betty all right? Are the children okay?”
“I just had a visit from the daughter of Leland Whittington, your old schoolmate that died fighting for the pope in ’Nam, Maurice. It broke my heart so early in the morning. Poor little fatherless thing. Poor little girl.”
“No one with Leland’s heart and will could be an object of pity. God, he was a beautiful man.”
“Leland is dead, Maurice, and I want to know if you told the pope what I told you to tell him. It’s the modern world. We have to move with it or be responsible for all this sadness. It’s our fault, it’s on our shoulders. The edict was preposterous.”
“I’ll be there this afternoon. Is that all right?”
“Of course it’s all right. I’ll tell everyone you’re coming.”
“I have to go now. We have prayers.”
“Pray for sanity,” Chef Roland said. “Pray to have some goddamn common sense.”
Nora Jane crossed Prytania and walked down Camp to Magazine, then turned and went down Webster Street into the Irish Channel. The sun was higher now, people were coming out onto their porches, opening their Saturday newspapers, people jogged by in jogging suits, rode by on bicycles headed for the park. Maybe she won’t be up yet, Nora Jane thought. And I can just grab some clothes and leave a note. She’s getting worse. She really is. She’s worse than she was at Mardi Gras or on their anniversary. Well, forget that. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t my fault. Remember Sister Katherine said never to think it’s my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.
Nora Jane passed her godmother Leanie’s house, hurried by so she wouldn’t get stopped and have to talk. She hurried on down the street and turned into the yard of her mother’s white frame house. It wasn’t a bad house. Only Francine never cleaned it up right and it smelled like furniture polish and cigarettes. It smells like a bar, Nora Jane decided. That’s what it smells like.
“Nora Jane, is that you?” Her mother was up, walking around in a bathrobe, her hair tied back with a string. “Oh, honey, I just called your grandmother and no one answered. I was so lonely. I had bad dreams all night. Oh, I’m so glad you’re home. Look, could you go down to the corner and get me a package of cigarettes?”
“I just came by to get some clothes. I have to go to school today. They have a special day.”
“No one told me about it.”
“I’m in a hurry. Didn’t Grandmother tell you? Why didn’t she answer the phone? Well, I guess she was in the yard.” Nora Jane swept past her mother and went into her room and began to fill the basket with clothes, socks and underwear and cotton shirts and a dress for Sunday. She threw the things into the empty basket. Her mother stood in the door watching her.
“You won’t go get me some cigarettes?”
“I don’t have time. I have to hurry.”
“I want you back here tonight. I can’t stay here at night by myself.”
“I’ll come back if I can.” Nora Jane threw one last pair of underpants into the jumble of clothes and turned to face her mother. “I have to go now. I haven’t had any breakfast. I went to sell the mirlitons at Langenstein’s. I’m going. I’m starving.”
“You could eat here. I’ll fix things for you.”
“Like what? Some rotten oranges, like last time. I’m not eating out of that kitchen until you get someone to kill the roaches. I told you that. And I’m not sleeping here. I don’t want to listen to you cry.” Nora Jane passed her mother in the bedroom doorway. Her mother reached for her, almost had her in her arms. “Let go of me,” Nora Jane said. “Don’t hold me. I have to go.” She pushed her mother away and walked back through the house and out onto the porch and down the steps. Her mother followed her.
Nora Jane stopped to inspect her broken bike. “I thought you were going to get my bike fixed,” she said.
“I couldn’t do it, honey. There wasn’t any money.”
“Okay, well, I’m off.” She switched the basket to the other arm, opened the gate and struck off in the direction of the park. She had decided to walk back through the park to see what was going on. There was always something happening in Audubon Park on Saturday morning. Besides, there was a grove of birch trees Nora Jane liked to walk through for luck. Her grandmother had told her it was a copy of a sacred grove of trees in Greece where the philosophers had lived.
Nora Jane entered the park at Prytania and walked through the lucky grove of trees and over to the flower clock. A race was forming. Forty or fifty people in their running clothes were milling around the fountain and the clock. A young man was doing T’ai Chi beside the fountain. Kids rode by on bikes. Suddenly, Nora Jane was embarrassed to be there carrying a basketful of clothes. She hurried out of the park and back toward her grandmother’s house. I’m so hungry, she told herself. I shouldn’t have waited so long to eat.
She felt bad now. She was hungry and it made her cold. She hurried back down Henry Clay and turned into her grandmother’s yard. A radio was playing, much too loudly. It was WTUL, Leontyne Price singing Tosca. “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca. That was wrong. Her grandmother never played music loudly enough to be heard in the yard. Of course, sometimes she might sing along with an aria and then her voice might reach the street, but never for long, never long enough to bother other people.
This radio was too loud. It made no sense. Nora Jane dropped the basket on the porch and went on in. There was no one in the living room. In the dining room where the radio sat upon a shelf, a dust cloth was lying on the floor. That was also wrong. Her grandmother did not leave dust cloths lying on the floor. “Grandmother,” Nora Jane called. Then she looked into the bedroom. Her grandmother was lying on the floor, crumpled up on the rug beside the bed. The beautiful voice of Leontyne Price continued with the aria. Nora Jane moved like water into the bedroom and knelt down upon the floor. She covered her grandmother’s body with her own and began to weep.
* * *
A neighbor found them. She had heard the music and begun to worry. April is the cruellest month, the neighbor said to herself, for she was an English teacher. Breeding lilacs out of the dead land.
“Oh, honey,” the neighbor said, holding the weeping child. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”
“I can’t live with my mother,” Nora Jane said. “I can’t do it. Where will I live?”
“Maybe you can,” the neighbor said. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do.” She tried to lift the child, to make her stand up.
Nora Jane lay back down upon her grandmother’s body. The sirens were making their way down Henry Clay. The noise of the sirens filled the air.
Later that afternoon they came to take the body away. Two men in a station wagon wrapped the grandmother’s body in a sheet of canvas and carried her out of the living room and down the stairs and put her into the back of a wood-paneled Oldsmobile station wagon and drove off down Henry Clay as if they were going to a ball game. So that’s it, Nora Jane thought, pulling a morning glory pod off the vine and tearing it to pieces with her fingers. That’s all there is to it, just like I knew it would be. She’s gone and this will be gone too.
She tore some more buds off the vine and squeezed them in her hand and wouldn’t let anyone talk to her and went out into the backyard and stood by the mirliton arbor wondering what part of the opera was playing when her grandmother died. I could go in there and find the record and put it on but they probably wouldn’t let me, she thought. She climbed the stile that led over her grandmother’s back fence into Mr. Edison Angelo’s yard and went out that way and over to the Loyola University library and checked out the phonograph record and went into a booth to play it for herself. It was a very old and scratchy record from the collection of Mr. Irvine Isaacs, Junior. Leontyne Price with the Rome Opera House Orchestra under the direction of Oliviero Fabritiis, the same recording Nora Jane had learned to sing the opera from. She sat in the booth and sang the opera with Miss Price and cried as she sang. Nora Jane had inherited her grandmother’s voice. People acted so funny when they heard her voice that Nora Jane had decided long ago to keep it to herself. It was a promise she managed to keep most of her life. For almost all of her life she only sang to people she loved or people she wanted to solace or amuse. For nearly all the years of her life she managed to keep her voice to herself.
OF COURSE, NOW EVERYTHING had to change. After the funeral, after the grievers and the mourners were gone, after the sisters left and her mother was still sober, had been sober for four days, had sworn to Sister Katherine to stop drinking if she wanted Nora Jane to stay. Had settled for a bottle of pills instead, had agreed to put away the bottle if she could have the pills and was in her bedroom now, like a zombie against her pillows with the radio on low, playing jazz. After all of that Nora Jane looked around the house to see what she could do. I could clean it up, she decided. I could call that damn Francine and make her get over here. Nora Jane searched in her mother’s address book, found the number and got Francine on the phone.
“I’m sorry about your grandmother,” Francine began. “The Lord gives and the Lord taketh away.”
“Forget that, Francine. I need you to come and help me clean this place up. I can’t live in this mess. Bring your husband’s truck. We’re going to throw some things away.”
“Right now?”
“Right now. I will pay you three dollars an hour if you bring the truck. Can you come? I’ll get somebody else if you won’t.” Nora Jane sniffed, waited, began to get mad. If there was anybody who made her madder than her mother, it was Francine. “I don’t care if you do or not. Say if you will.”
“I’ll be there. Soon as I can get on a uniform.”
“Bring the truck.”
“If I can get hold of Norris.”
By the time Francine got there Nora Jane had emptied the kitchen cabinets of rotten potatoes and empty bottles and half damp grocery sacks. She had filled the grocery sacks with broken cups and half-used boxes of cereal. She had reamed out the kitchen of her mother’s house. And called the Orkin man. “I have money to pay you with,” she told him. “If you come right now and spray us with everything you’ve got.”
By the time her mother woke up the dining room rug was on the truck and a broken chair and stacks of magazines. The living room rug was rolled up on the porch to go to the cleaners and Francine was mopping the wooden floors with Spic and Span. “What’s going on?” her mother asked, coming out into the living room, still wearing the dress she had worn to the funeral. “What’s going on? My God, Francine, what are you doing?”
“We’re cleaning up this house,” Nora Jane said. “Go back to sleep. I won’t live in a pigpen. The Orkin people are coming in a minute.”
“Where’s the rug?”
“We’re throwing the dining-room rug away. I won’t live in a house with a rug like that. And this one’s going to the cleaners. Francine’s going to take it on the truck.”
Nora Jane’s mother sat down in a chair. Her little navy blue and white print dress hung in waves around her legs, her collar was awry. The Valium was in charge. She was powerless in the face of Nora Jane’s rage. Powerless in the face of anything. She pulled her legs up onto the chair. “Am I in the way?” she asked. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
Later, in the late afternoon, after Nora Jane had paid Francine her wages and the kitchen and dining room and Nora Jane’s bedroom had been cleaned to her satisfaction and the Orkin man had come and sprayed so much Diazinon and Maxforce and Orthene around the house that even with the windows open it was hard to breathe, Nora Jane and her mother dressed in cotton dresses and walked down the street to eat oyster loaves for supper at Narcisse Marsoudet. “It looks wonderful,” her mother said. “I can’t believe you did all that in one day. I can’t believe she’s gone. Now you are the only one, Nora Jane. The last of the Whittingtons.”
“Don’t talk about it,” Nora Jane said. “I don’t want to think about it anymore.”
“I’m not going to drink, my darling honey. I’m going tomorrow to the meetings that they have. I won’t ever drink again, you can depend on that.”
“I want to get an air conditioner,” Nora Jane said. “Mr. Biggs said there would be enough money when they sold her house. They said I could have enough for anything I’d need. And a new refrigerator. I can’t stand to have that old thing anymore.” They passed Perlis’ Department Store and turned down Magazine to the café.
“I won’t drink anymore, honey. You can depend on that.” Her mother caught sight of herself in the store window. How pale she seemed, how slight beside her striding daughter. It seemed impossible, the day, the world, the store window and its terrible reflection. The huge old live-oak tree beside them and its roots. Her terrible mean teenage daughter, the death of Lydia and the sisters saying terrible things to her, the gaping hole in the earth and Lydia lowered into it, only six, seven, eight hours before, her dining room rug from Persia thrown away and nothing to take its place, poison everywhere.
“You might not,” Nora Jane said, continuing to look straight ahead. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
No sooner were they in the restaurant than it began. A white-coated waiter with a towel over his arm came to take their orders. “I’d like a Seven-Up,” Nora Jane said. “And a glass of water.”
“A glass of white wine,” her mother added. “A Chablis. But anything will do. Your house wine will be fine.”
“Just a glass. One little glass.” She looked at Nora Jane. “One little glass with dinner.”
“No, you don’t,” Nora Jane said. “Don’t do this to me.”
“Would you like a little while?” the waiter asked. He stepped back. He’d been through this plenty of times before and he wasn’t in the mood to go through it again. My God, between a mother and a child. This girl doing it to her mother. What little beasts they were. The waiter knew he would never do that to himself. Load himself down with parasites, little beasts and bitches like this frowning child. Jesus, the waiter thought. I can’t believe people do that to themselves.
“Just bring our drinks,” the mother said. “We’ll order later.”
“I won’t order,” Nora Jane said. “I won’t stay here and watch you get drunk. I’m leaving.”
“It’s only one drink. Only a glass of wine.”
“No. I won’t stay.” Nora Jane got up, pushed her chair back into the table. The waiter backed up further. Nora Jane picked up a handful of crackers from the table and put them in her pocket. She was furious and she was starving. She had been so busy cleaning up the house she had forgotten to eat. She took a second handful of crackers and turned to leave.
“Don’t you do this,” her mother said, and rose to her feet. “If you do this you will be sorry. I won’t put up with this.” The waiter came back with a tray, took the glass of wine and set it before her. Put the Seven-Up at Nora Jane’s empty place. Nora Jane picked it up, drank it greedily, put the glass back down.
“Sit down,” her mother said. “I order you to sit back down.” Nora Jane turned and walked out of the restaurant.
“Have your wine?” the waiter said. “I don’t know where they come from, these modern kids. I mean, who do they think they are, anyway? Drink your wine and I’ll get a menu. You go on and enjoy your dinner and don’t worry about her.”
He had noticed the nice diamonds on Mrs. Whittington’s hands, the nice legs, the scared gentle face. Probably a lonely divorcee. He might end up with a really big tip if he played his cards right. He leaned over the mother and straightened her silverware. “I’ll get you more crackers,” he said. “Don’t worry about the kid. They all act like that nowadays.”
Six blocks away Chef Roland was making crawfish etouffee. His brother Maurice was coming. Maurice who had given his life to God. “He knows nothing of the real world,” Chef Roland said. His wife, Betty, was listening, leaning against the sink drinking coffee and watching her husband cook. She loved to watch him cook, loved to be in bed with him on top of her, she loved him. Anything he believed she tried to believe, anything he said she agreed with. They had a happy marriage. No one believed it, but it was true. Roland and Betty Dupre had a happy marriage and had always had. At night they got into the bed and touched each other from head to toe and cuddled up like bears. In the daytime they worried about their children and cooked and ate. It was a good life, a happy life and neither of them were ever sick.
“Martin’s gone to his baseball game,” Betty said. “I hope they win.”
“They’ll win, or they will not. Life is hard, Betty, don’t let them forget that.”
“If you say so.”
“Maurice doesn’t know it. How could he. He never pays taxes. He doesn’t have to watch the world going to pot around him, he doesn’t see the wholesale prices I’m paying for fish this week. What does Maurice know? He doesn’t know the real world. He’s lost touch with reality.”
“When does he get here?”
“His plane gets in at seven-forty. We’ll take the twins and go.”
“What about Martin?”
“Leave the food on the stove. He’ll get home.”
“Can I taste it?”
“Sure you can. Come over here.” She put the coffee cup down and went to stand beside him at the stove. He held out a spoon, blew on it to cool it down. Waited. She raised her lips to the spoon, tasted, almost swooned. It was perfect. Anything Roland did was perfect. He was a perfect man, the best chef in all New Orleans and he still found time to cook a meal for his family. “Oh, oh,” Betty said. “Oh, oh, oh.”
Chef Roland pushed the pot to the back of the stove, turned off the burner, and took his wife in his arms, ran his hands up and down her back, caressed her. He was still caressing her when the twins came in, two boys as alike as blossoms on a stem, Matthew and Mark, they were eleven years old, awkward and gangly and tall for their age, very funny, very skinny, very crazy and brave. They rode trick bicycles around the neighborhood, put the seats of the bikes on stilts, built ramps and ran the bicycles off of them. They were always getting cuts, breaking bones, having to be hurried to the emergency room. Roland and Betty adored them, thought they were wonderful.
“It’s time to go to the airport,” the twins said, coming in and beginning to eat homemade cake, cutting slices and eating it with their fingers as their parents embraced. “We better go or we’ll be late. Martin’s not going is he? He’s at a game.”
“Come along then.” Chef Roland released his wife and removed his apron. He doted a moment upon his identical gangly sons. Largess, the great bounty of the earth which had supplied him with a life of adventure and good work and a gentle wife and three daughters and four sons. “Get a fork,” he said. “What will people think if they see you eating with your fingers?”
“There’s no one here,” the twins said, and laughed their secret identical laugh.
“You’re right.” Chef Roland gathered his family and began to march out through the rooms of his huge Victorian house, past the dining room with its beautiful unbleached domestic drapes his wife had made to save him money, down the hall past the polished stairs, into the parlor and out of the double doors with the broken lock.
Nora Jane was coming up the sidewalk, tears running down her face and her fists clenched in rage. “Can I stay with you?” she asked. “Momma’s drinking wine. She’s at the restaurant drinking wine so I left. I’m never going back.”
The family curled around her. Chef Roland took her into his arms, the twins patted her. She was their baby-sitter when their sister was away at school.
“Don’t cry,” they all said. “You can stay. Come on, we’re going to the airport to get Father Maurice. You want to go with us to the airport? There’s room. There’s lots of room.”
“Don’t cry,” Chef Roland said. “Come get in the car. We’re going out to Moissant to get my brother.”
Maurice was no more in the car than the argument began. Nora Jane was sitting in the back of the station wagon with the twins. Betty and Chef Roland and Maurice were in the front.
“Well, your buddies have certainly done it down in South America,” Chef Roland began. “I guess you’re proud of that?”
“In what way?”
“You know goddamn well what way. In the birth control way. No solving it now. Let ’em starve. Right, Maurice?”
“You think you can solve the problems of South America by killing babies.”
“Killing babies! Jesus, Maurice, you sound like a born-again Baptist. Killing babies, I’m hearing killing babies. Jesus, Betty, did you hear that?”
“I didn’t see you killing any of yours,” Maurice said.
“Yeah, but I stopped having them.”
“I stopped having them,” Betty put in.
“We stopped having them. I didn’t kill my wife. I didn’t have a bunch of kids I couldn’t feed or house. They’re all born addicted now in Peru. Half of them are born addicted to cocaine. You call that Christianity, Maurice? You think that’s what He wanted you to do?”
“Oh, Roland, don’t do this to me. I’ve looked forward to this so much. I can’t tell you how I’ve missed all of you.”
“You don’t miss shit, Maurice. You guys sit up there and lay down edicts. You went to Rome last month, didn’t you? Weren’t you the personal envoy of the bishop? And what did you do? Did you speak up or did you get drunk and kiss ass?”
“Watch out,” Betty said. “You almost hit that car.”
“It’s his brother?” Nora Jane asked the nearest twin.
“Yeah.” The twins giggled. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Right here in New Orleans,” Chef Roland went on. “We got kids being born to thirteen-, fourteen-year-old girls. We got poor little girls with no homes having babies. You want me to kill you, Maurice? I’m thinking of killing people if it doesn’t stop. The Church has to join the modern world. The Church has to help, not this anti—birth control crap. I’ve had it. I don’t go anymore. We don’t go, do we, Betty? We don’t send the kids.”
“I’m so sorry,” Maurice said. “I can’t tell you how that saddens me.”
“Are you going to spend the night?” Matthew asked Nora Jane. “Are you going to live with us now? You can have our room. We’ll let her stay in our room, won’t we, Mark?”
“Her grandmother just died,” Chef Roland explained to his brother. “She’s got a bad situation at home.”
“It isn’t bad,” Nora Jane spoke up. “My mother drinks because my dad died. It’s not too bad. I just don’t like it when she drinks. She quit for six weeks.”
“I’ll go over there tonight,” Chef Roland said. “We’ll get it straightened out. Meanwhile, you stay with us. There’s plenty of room. You can have a room with Margaret Anne. You don’t have to stay with them.” He swerved to avoid a city bus, turned onto Webster Street and resumed his argument. “Life is short, Maurice, the life of the planet may be short. We can’t let people suffer. People suffer because of your bullshit. You’re too smart to keep on buying all that crap. I’m ashamed of you. You had a good mind before the Jesuits got hold of you.”
“Oh, Roland, we need to have a long talk. I can’t believe I find you so full of venom. Sadness and venom. What do you have to be sad about? We will go for a walk together. It has been so long since I’ve seen the park.”
“I go to the park all the time,” Nora Jane said. “I never miss a Saturday. There’s a grove of trees that is sacred to Apollo. My grandmother knew the man who planted them.”
“She’s Lydia Whittington’s granddaughter,” Chef Roland explained. “Remember that time Momma took us to hear her sing?”
“I heard your grandmother sing Madame Butterfly,” Maurice said. ’A long time ago when New Orleans was a center of the arts.”
“We have a boomerang,” Matthew said to Nora Jane. “We can go throw it in the park tomorrow. You want to throw our boomerang?”
“I don’t know,” Nora Jane said. Her sadness had lessened in the presence of Chef Roland and his family. Her sadness was turning back into rage. She remembered the real world. She was Lydia Whittington’s granddaughter. She had a reputation to maintain. “I better go on home and see about Momma,” she added.
“You stay with us,” Chef Roland said. He turned the station wagon into the driveway and parked by the old garage. The twins got out and took off running into the house, planning on getting in a few minutes of worthless trashy television before someone turned it off. Betty went to look for her son Martin, who was on the baseball team but didn’t get to play very much. She was always thinking about him when a game was going on, praying that he got to play, wondering if anyone had called him Four Eyes or hated him for striking out.
“I think I’ll go on home,” Nora Jane said, getting out. “Thanks for letting me go to the airport with you. It was nice to meet you, Father Maurice. I hope I’ll see you again while you’re here.”
“Let me go talk to her,” Chef Roland said. “Your mother likes me. I can talk to her.”
“She’ll be okay. She’ll be asleep by the time I get home. I’m okay. I’ll call you if I need any help. Thanks again for letting me go with you. I had a nice time.” Nora Jane was moving away.
“Let me walk you home,” Father Maurice said. “Let me go home with you.”
“No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have come over here. It’s all right. It really is. I’ll be okay.” She had gained the sidewalk now. The man looked after her, not knowing what to do, not knowing where the lines were drawn in the problem of Nora Jane.
“I’m okay,” she called back. “I really am.” She waved again and hurried off down Webster Street. I am okay, she decided. It’s all inside of me, heaven and hell and everything. I don’t have to pay any attention to her. All I have to do is go to school and wait to get out of here. I’ll get out sooner or later. That’s for sure. At least I don’t have a bunch of brothers and sisters to argue with. Their house is as bad as Momma’s is.
She stopped on the corner and looked down the long green tunnel of Henry Clay. Past the houses where the rich satisfied people lived. “I’ll get rich someday,” she said out loud. “Whatever you want you get. Well, it’s true.” I’ll be leaving here before too long. I’ll have a job and a boyfriend and the things I need. Remember what I read in that poem. Oh, world, world, I cannot get thee close enough. Remember that and forget the rest.