As the priest said this, Ramadan accidentally switched the lens direction and touched the shutter on his phone. The flash lit up their row. His body tensed and, awaiting Mama Joon’s admonishment, he held his breath. When no “shush” or slap on the hand came, he glanced up and saw she wasn’t the least bit disturbed by him. She was staring straight ahead, her body as stiff as his—only not with apprehension, but rapture.
A woman turned to glare at him, and the priest had paused, too. He smiled and then used Ramadan’s interruption to support his thesis.
“Yes, we are all stars—as bright and seemingly as fleeting as a flash. Little twinkling lights in the constellation of humanity—while we last!”
Ramadan looked at Mama Joon, whose mouth opened just enough to say “Ah!”
Ah!? Had he gotten it from her, or had she gotten it from him?
He went back to tinkering with his phone. Now he wanted a picture of him and Mama Joon, with her going Ah! Tapping the reverse perspective on the camera, he disabled the flash.
“For, let’s face it, we do not, in the current state, shine forever—though, ultimately, shine forever we shall!”
Ramadan’s hands were shaking as he rushed to frame the shot. The screen was filled with a blurred image of the cathedral ceiling. Then, just him and the marble statue of an angel hovering over his shoulder holding a vessel of holy water.
“And thus, in our current state, we must cling, like Clara, to our curiosity. We must try, as best we can, to explore the secrets of our souls. Therein lies the secret to our light and to life! To everlasting life!”
“Ah!” Mama Joon said again. Ramadan leaned to his right, touching his shoulder to hers, and guided the camera’s eye until the iPhone displayed them both. There! He tapped the shutter three times, hoping at least one shot would be well lit and in focus.
“This is why we go to the moon, why we go to Mars, why we go to Maui! Curiosity! We go in search of signs of life and Life! Little l and big L. Of course, we are really searching for an even bigger L. LOVE. And what is the means of our exploration? It isn’t, as they say, rocket science, dear friends! We don’t need NASA. We don’t need a jet engine. No microchip. No code. We simply need Christ.”
When he heard this, Ramadan stopped looking at his phone, and he tugged at the crucifix around his neck, his mother’s, which Mama Joon had given him when he turned seven and celebrated his First Communion.
“Christ is our rover. He is the one who will help us discover—should we be curious enough—what is there under the dust of ourselves, for surely we are dust. We are, each of us, an unknowable planet—but not to Christ. He shines the light on what quakes beneath the rock-hard surface of humanity, the DNA of life: love. In exposing love, he shows us that indeed there was, is, and always will be life on Mars. Eternal life.”
He watched Mama Joon mouth Ah! again.
“Let us pray . . . the Profession of Faith.”
She closed her eyes in prayer and rose from the pew. Others stood as well, but Ramadan returned to communing with his phone. He saw that in every picture he’d just taken, positioned over his and Mama Joon’s shoulders, the angel was still there.
“Ah!” he said, turning to look at the actual statue. Mama Joon, now stirred by his movements, opened her eyes. Patting the back of his head, she motioned that it was time to stand up and pray.
* * *
AFTER MASS THEY stepped into the New Orleans summer sun, which though a famed oppressor—its downward look upon its subjects, its power to wilt the spirit—today lit Jackson Square in a way that liberated its beauty. The heat had sanitized the square, and the sunlight was having its way with the city scene—dappling the original art easeled against the park fence with a vibrancy the artists could not achieve on their own; embellishing the sweaty spots on the polo shirts and khaki shorts of brunch-seeking tourists, their armpits and crotches, with a suggestive humor they’d never have tolerated at home. The slate and cobblestone walkways were clean and dry, as if the sun had sizzled away the residue of an early morning rain—Nature’s own eco-friendly power-washing, an admission of Her complicity in modernity, Her genuine care for the urban landscape.
As always upon exiting the cathedral, Mama Joon focused straight ahead, on the park. There—what a surprise!—she saw, lining the iron fence, the bright green leaves of the banana plants finally regenerating from the storm; they’d been in tatters for years. She hadn’t been here in several months, and seeing the healthy-looking stalks rising high, set against the sky, so full of strength, growth, life, she felt there was hope. In the throes of her own persistent, post-storm ailments, she dared to consider that the long-awaited rejuvenation of the banana trees, and her ability to notice it, might be some kind of a sign that she, too, was entering a recuperative phase. Couldn’t life—the signs of more life, that is—be like that? First an uplifting sermon. Then the leaves of fruit trees reaching for the heavens. Omens! Yes. Salvation, if you could count on it at all, would be delivered as this: a sunny Sunday morning in June!
As she and Ramadan strolled through the square, they came to a paisley-cloth-draped table behind which sat a stoic fortune-teller, the implements of her craft laid out before her. Tarot cards, crosses, crystals, other stones. Beside her stood a baroquely chalked sandwich-board sign: BEATRICE “MISS BEA”—SERVANT OF THE SECRET ARTS. TAROT. PALM READING. SPIRITUAL ADVICE. Oracular and ageless—was she sixty or a hundred?—Beatrice was looking away, exuding the confidence of the soft sell, as if the mere aura of her mastery was the only solicitousness necessary. Indeed it was her aloofness that spoke to Mama Joon. Look at my back, the edge of my profile, her detachment said, and intuit for yourself the reason you are staring at me in the first place: you want me to turn and look at you, to see you whole. (Later, after her reading, Mama Joon would wonder if Miss Bea had intentionally avoided making eye contact with her, hoping she would take her business elsewhere, not wanting to be the bearer of such news.)
With a nudge to Ramadan, Mama Joon indicated her wish to sit in the two wood-slatted folding chairs in front of Beatrice’s station. He followed her lead, and they each settled in opposite the woman and her cards. With a look of absolute composure and quiet anticipation, the woman greeted them with upraised palms. Her ruby-red scarf was embroidered with swirling threadwork that complimented her large gold-spangled earrings, whose cutouts of stars and crescent moons twisted and rotated with her every movement, like miniature Calder mobiles. Her earlobes drooped low, stretched by the weight of the jewelry, but also, perhaps, elongated by time, decades of close listening, of straining to hear things whispered on the wind. Her blue eyes twinkled at Mama Joon and Ramadan, revealing nothing of what they beheld, only the promise that they were, indeed, capable of seeing something others could not.
“Who is first?” she asked. “Mama or the boy?”
Her voice was vaguely European, or maybe merely theatrical. Though Mama Joon had never seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for some reason the title, the melody of the phrase, popped into her head when Beatrice spoke; the impenetrable accent sounded like what Humphrey Bogart and his scruffy companions must have been after. Ramadan heard simply what the woman wanted him to hear, the tone of enchantment.
“Oh, no . . .” Mama Joon paused, looking at the sign. “Beatrice—”
“Call me ‘Miss Bea.’”
“Well, Miss Bea, I’m June. And this here’s Ramadan. But it’s just me. For the reading, I mean. Just me.”
Miss Bea shrugged. “As you wish.” Then she added, “But nothing is just you. We are all connected.”
She paused before clarifying, “All right, maybe not me. I stand alone—mostly sit, to tell you the truth. Out here or at home. Me and my cats. Ha!”
Then she pointed her finger, moving it from side to side, grandmother to grandson, tracing an invisible line. “But you two—you are connected.”
Ramadan and Mama Joon enjoyed this weird moment, the odd satisfaction of having a strange stranger affirm t
heir attachment—the central emotion of their lives—which they had never articulated for themselves. It almost wouldn’t matter what Miss Bea said after that. She had already earned her fee. Was this how they worked? Mama Joon wondered. She had never seriously considered stopping at one of these tarot tables; the suspension of disbelief necessary to sustain her own faith had proven quite enough for one sinful citizen of the Catholic world. Now here she sat, carried away by the prettiness of the day and the sprightliness of foliage, looking for a miracle in a deck of cards. Right. But you two, you are connected. Was this how all this mystical mess with people like Miss Bea worked? They identified a silent if obvious truth, these types; they’d spot a vulnerability, a weakness, a thing you showed up with as plain as a weight problem or a hand-covered smile—or, say, a beloved grandson, arm-in-arm, almost as if you were a couple, but who you had to lean into a bit too heavily on a smooth bricked path, to keep your balance, to blunt a sharp pain. They squinted out the goodness in that, what they felt you could take, and then they served that palliative part of your predicament up to you sweetly, with an air of certainty and authenticity, leaving you charmed with the fresh knowledge of something you already knew. The best part of it, the beloved, arm-in-arm, connected part, not the lean.
Miss Bea offered a red deck of cards to Mama Joon. “Now—”
Mama Joon interrupted. “Yes—I want to know what’s going to happen now.”
Miss Bea smiled. “Nothing is just about now. Like people, time is connected. The past, the present, the future. I am here every day looking up at the cathedral, so I am always staring at this truth. Look at it!” She pointed up at the church with her left hand, which was holding her deck of cards.
Mama Joon and Ramadan turned their heads and looked over their shoulders.
“See high up there,” she said. “Three!” The church’s triumvirate of slate-tiled spires jutted up into the azure sky. “To some people—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But not to me. To me they are the past, the present, and the future. That is my Holy Trinity.”
“Which one is which?” Ramadan asked.
“That is for me to know, and for you to find out for yourself. Maybe it depends on where you are in your life, or who you are.”
Pointing at the tallest spire, the one in the middle, topped with a cross, Ramadan said, “The big one is the future!”
“Well, let’s find out.”
Mama Joon accepted the cards from Miss Bea and shuffled them slowly. Then she put them in the middle of the table, and Miss Bea instructed her to cut the deck into three stacks—presumably the symbolic present, past, and future, but she didn’t elaborate. Then, again as directed, Mama Joon placed one stack on top of another and handed the cards back to Miss Bea, who paused before she began to turn over one card at a time. When she was done, she had formed a cross with six cards. She was about to flip another card, but she stopped, sighed, and glanced knowingly at Mama Joon.
“I see. I see . . .”
An understanding passed between them, and Mama Joon sighed, too. Her shoulders went slack, but she pressed her chin up in a show of strength. Staring at the park, she said, “I thought maybe the bananas, the trees . . . they look so alive.”
Miss Bea arched an eyebrow. Without looking at the trees, she said, “You can’t trust bananas. A lot of people make that mistake. Plantains! Now, that’s another story.”
Mama Joon hummed agnostically. She dug a ten-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to Miss Bea, who swiped it away so quickly that it vanished without Mama Joon knowing where she put it.
Through a half-chuckle, Mama Joon said, “Another story would be nice.” She was rising to leave, when Miss Bea reached out and touched her hand.
“And another story is what you’re going to get!”
Miss Bea’s expressive eyes posed a question as she pointed at Ramadan, who was preoccupied with his phone. She winked at Mama Joon, who mouthed, “Okay.”
Miss Bea said, “Okay, Ramadan. Mr. Big Future. Now it’s your turn!”
She reassembled the deck and slid it across the table to him. He put his phone down and turned to Mama Joon for approval. She smiled an enthusiastic yes.
Yes—because this would be the easiest reading Miss Bea ever gave. Whatever she would tell Ramadan would help prepare him for what Mama Joon’s reading had just portended, a truth she had somehow divulged to this oddly observant woman. Ramadan’s future would be foretold to be as bright as this day. That was the deal. It was in Miss Bea’s wink—and in the cards, however they landed. This deck was stacked.
Ramadan picked up the tarot cards. They felt cool and smooth in his palms, almost slippery. Just as he had seen Mama Joon do, he began to shuffle. The hard, waxy coating on the surface of each card let them slide over and under one another in his hands with a surprising ease, and he found the unusual combination of the kinetic and the tactile hypnotic. Controlling this series of potentially never-ending motions felt so empowering that he didn’t want to stop.
Mama Joon said, “Ramadan, if you want to know what happens, you have to let go.”
Her words lifted him from his reverie. When he started neatening the deck, a single card flew out, flipped beyond the edge of the table, caught a breeze, and began fluttering to the ground.
“Catch it!” Miss Bea’s voice was filled with urgency, as if not retrieving the card before it landed would imperil the reading, if not something more crucial.
Ramadan didn’t really need her encouragement. He had already reached out his long, sinewy left arm and, with the lowest edge of the card only an inch from the ground, pinched the corner pointing at him like the quill of a feather. This rogue, would-be sliver of his fate shined against a background of worn slate-gray stones, which had been trod upon by millions of ghosts. If the tallest spire of the cathedral was his future, that hard, dull ground looked like so many destinies already done. It was all make-believe, of course, but in rescuing the card, he felt a rush of success, the thrill of saving himself from an imaginary demise.
“I got it!” he yelled.
“Well done!” she said, sighing with relief. “Now . . . place it here, facedown.”
Without looking at the card, he put it on the table next to his phone. Then Miss Bea guided him through the rituals—his cutting the cards, her turning some of them over slowly, building the suspense of an impending answer to an unspoken question. As she revealed each card, she reacted with exaggerated delight, giving a convincing performance. And what wasn’t there to believe? Even to a layman, the first few cards would have predicted prosperity for Ramadan: the Sun, the High Priestess, the Chariot, the Wheel of Fortune.
“Yes!” Miss Bea said.
“What?” Ramadan asked, breathless.
“Thanks to a great lady, you will go far in life, Ramadan.” Her eyes angled up from the High Priestess to Mama Joon, who, mulling over Miss Bea’s tip, dialed back her smile.
“I will?”
“Yes. And you will go very, very far!” She tapped the Chariot.
“I knew it!”
“And you will have luck in your travels.” She stroked the Wheel of Fortune.
“Yes!” Ramadan yelled. “Tell me more!”
But then Miss Bea placed a fifth card at the top of the cross, breaking the streak of symbols so easily interpreted for good. As she released the corner of the card, it slapped against the tabletop with an ominous, amplified snap: Death.
She swallowed, and Mama Joon looked away, ashamed, as if her mortality were a moral failing.
Ramadan, eyeing their anxiety, said to Miss Bea, “What does it mean?”
She ignored him and turned a sixth card: the Ace of Swords.
“Yes!” she said.
“What does it mean, Miss Bea?” Ramadan begged.
She stared into his eyes and said, “You will slay the dragon!”
He was too old to believe in dragons, but he was just the right age to begin to appreciate a good metaphor. A dragon could be anyt
hing: a problem, a person, a weakness. Miss Bea looked at him as if trying to instill in him the fortitude she was predicting. He took a deep breath, wanting to ingest her faith, and his head went a little dizzy, as he found himself beginning to believe in her powers, to believe in Miss Bea.
Oh, the Death card had momentarily shaken Beatrice’s faith in herself, but now she, too, felt flushed—telling the boy’s story was the kind of challenge she lived for!—with a renewed confidence in her ability to read whatever the cards foretold. Reassured of her gift, she pointed to the card Ramadan had caught just before it hit the ground. “Now turn that one over—your mystery card!”
He flipped the card, and its message hit Miss Bea first—she yelped, threw her head back, and raised her hands. Then Mama Joon held her face in both her hands, but Ramadan couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. When he picked up the card to figure out why they were so overcome, he saw the illustration of a man wearing a red robe draped over a white garment. His left hand was pointing down, but his right hand was holding up a scepter or a wand. A symbol of infinity hovered over his head like a halo, as he stood behind a table, on top of which rested a golden chalice, a sword, a long staff, and a disk imprinted with a five-pointed star. Surrounding the man and his instruments and weaponry were a cascading archway and a bed of leafy roses and lilies. This imagery was so captivating that the last thing Ramadan noticed was the name of this card which had so enthralled Miss Bea, Mama Joon, and yes, now him: the Magician.
* * *
INVIGORATED BY RAMADAN’S reading, if not her own, Mama Joon suggested they take the short walk to the riverfront. He had undergone a growth spurt within the last few months and was almost as tall as she was. With his new stature and the ongoing development of the physical poise he had always had, he could be mistaken for a lanky teen, maybe even a diminutive young man. He was no prizefighter, but no one had called him “skinny as a rail” for some time either. Holding her grandson’s arm and leaning into his shoulder as they dodged Decatur Street traffic, Mama Joon let herself feel girlish and glamorous, as if she were Audrey Hepburn traipsing up Fifth Avenue with George Peppard circa 1960. Some fifty-plus years and fifty-plus pounds ago, she had seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s when it had premiered. An impressionable sixteen at the time, she had made a personal heroine of Holly Golightly. In many ways, her long affair with Judge Dumas had been imaginable only because Audrey Hepburn had made Holly’s daring, flirtatious dreamer so believable for June. An essentially good girl could take risks, be wild, screw up—have secrets—but still have things work out. No, not quite as you planned, of course. But still, here she was after all these years, even with all of her issues, on the arm of a handsome young fellow, in the middle of a fine American city, with money in the bank, on her way to the real Moon River, capable of pretending everything was just marvelous.
Ramadan Ramsey Page 14