“I’m telling you all this, Ned, not to give you another chapter of my sufferings, but to explain myself to you. Why I have such a hard time being really intimate with someone, what the doctors here call emotionally unavailable. Why I just close up when we start getting close. Ever since that abortion thing, it seems I haven’t been able to trust anyone at all. I was close to Dothan, I loved him, and I wanted to keep the baby and get married, but he said I was too young. So I got the abortion and almost died, and it wrecked me. I never told anyone this story, not even Papa. It seems like my life was broken by what happened. Afterward I was old suddenly, and there was this whole half of myself locked away in cold storage somewhere.
“Papa knew something had happened, of course. I think he sensed that something was different about me, but he never knew exactly what it was. I didn’t know myself maybe, until he died.…”
She is crying now, the tears rolling off the end of her nose and her chin and spotting the blanket. I try to reach up and take her in my arms, but she holds me off with a hand on my shoulder.
“So I can’t promise you anything,” she says. “I can’t tell you that everything will be all right, that I will ever be completely O.K. I can’t tell you that I’ll never take any of the pills again, that I’ll never feel sad and shut off from everyone—”
This time I won’t let her finish. I’ve got my arms around her up under the blanket, which falls away like a layer of old skin, and I’m holding her as tight as I can, and she’s crying into the collar of my shirt now and against my neck, and I feel the sobs rack through her, and I hear her saying, “Oh, baby, oh, sweetheart,” over and over again until I put my lips over hers and we fold into each other like the petals of a single bloom, and in the next second, despite the gray and heavy Pennsylvania sky, the horizon to the south seems full of wild light and color, and I can smell Louisiana on the wind.
15
WE CLIMB up to the promenade in Brooklyn Heights to say our good-byes to the city we are leaving. Tonight the stars are up in a black sky, and Manhattan lies below, marvelous and windswept as a castle on a moor, connected to the reality of the mainland only by the spiderlike tracery of its bridges. Now the streets and avenues between the towers are flooded with a brilliant artificial light. This is entirely appropriate. After all, it is the idea of this city that matters. Not the real streets, but the dreams we have of them.
Rust takes off his hat and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. For him it’s been a long day on the range, nearly fifteen years, but he’s on his way back to Wyoming tomorrow to pick up where he left off. I’ve got a week or so, just until I can get things straightened out with Father Rose.
It’s a hot night, a small reminder of the torturous days of summer. Lovers line the benches along the promenade, nuzzling in the gloom. I hear the snap of cotton underwear, a soft moan. Ice cream melts in paper cups. The nineteenth-century town houses sit back, disapproving in the darkness of their gardens. I lean over the parapet to catch a breeze from the harbor but instead get a lungful of carbon monoxide. The BQE roars just underneath the shelf of masonry, on its way from nowhere to nowhere, a continuous and never-ending loop of taillights and exhaust.
We’re silent for a while, each remembering our years in the city, the thousand amazing details, the faces lost in the crowd. For us, New York is like a wreck sinking into deep water. Now the bow is down, now the winch and wheelhouse; soon it’s just an oil stain on the surface.
“What will you miss the most when you’re gone?” Rust says in a quiet voice, almost to himself.
“What’s to miss? The crime, the high cost of living? Eight-dollar six-packs of Genessee Cream ale? Pay phones that don’t work?” But I regret this cynicism. “Cawalloway’s,” I say suddenly. “Remember Cawalloway’s, Rust?”
“Whatever happened to that place?”
“Gone.”
“That was a good bar, cheap. And the women.”
“Yeah.”
“But you know, I think I’ll miss the subway,” he says. “Never knew what you’d see on the subway. Like a moving carnival. Just yesterday this crazy lady comes through, two hundred and fifty pounds of meat in a pink nightgown and fuzzy bedroom slippers, handing out dollar bills to every third person.”
“All right. This is going to sound like a stock answer, but I’ll miss the Brooklyn Bridge,” I say. “A beautiful span. Walking across to the city in the summer at dusk, then up through the crowds of Chinatown and all the fish and squid and eels laid out and reeking, then up into the East Village, and beautiful, hip women getting out of cabs.”
“I’ll be in Cheyenne by tomorrow night.” Rust shakes his head. “Shit. Hard to imagine it after all this time. And the farm. I was twenty-two when I left that dusty-ass place for good. Now I’m going back.”
“A change of pace, Rust,” I say. “We can’t go on like this forever.”
For once he doesn’t squint toward the horizon but looks down at the toes of his cowboy boots. “I suppose I can write my book back there as well as I can write it here, probably better,” he says. “But I’ll have a big spread to take care of. And my jackass brother’s got a kid. A little girl, seven years old. The mother ran off after a year, so I’m the legal guardian. Way I see it, you can’t take care of a little girl without a wife. I suppose now I’ll have to get myself a wife.”
“Anyone in mind?”
He shrugs.
Suddenly there is a touch of panic in my gut. This is New York. People sacrifice everything to be a part of the teeming life of this city—their dignity, their health, their standard of living—because on certain evenings you can almost imagine the streets are still paved with gold. Who knows what could happen tomorrow or the next day or next year? If we could just stick it out. Maybe then the city will open its doors to us, hand us the keys to the future. Maybe we are giving up too soon!
“You know that story about Dick Whittington, Rust,” I say when I catch my breath.
“Used to play for the Yankees. Shortstop, right?”
“No.” I smile. “It’s a story I read once when I was a kid. A kid’s story. About this country boy, Dick Whittington, who leaves his home to seek his fortune in the big city. In this case, London.”
“So?”
“So he’s there awhile, and times are tough, and his only friend is a stray cat he can’t afford to feed. Then, one day, he’s had enough of the heartache, puts the cat in a bag, and decides to go back to the country. He’s on the highroad a few miles out of town when the bells of the churches start pealing and he hears this voice from the bag saying, ‘Turn back, Dick Whittington, turn back.’ ”
“It’s the cat talking?” Rust says.
“Well, Dick takes the cat out, and it won’t say anything, so he puts it back and goes on his way. Then he hears it again. ‘Turn back, Dick Whittington,’ and the same thing happens again, three times in all. But the last time he turns back and eventually becomes lord mayor of London, thrice, as the story goes.”
“How’s that?”
“The cat is sold for a fortune to a foreign prince from a catless country with a big rat problem. Then Dick marries the boss’s daughter and goes on from there. That’s not the point, though.”
“So what’s the point?”
“Come on, Rust.”
He thinks it over for a while. “You hearing talking cats now, Ned?” he says.
“Not really,” I say. “The point is Dick Whittington turned back and we’re leaving.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Rust says, and sweeps his hat to Manhattan. “This is not London. And in New York any man who listens to a talking cat is a fool.”
He straightens and puts his hat back on, and his face is lost in shadow, and he turns and walks down the promenade, worn heels of his boots scuffing against the pavement. I take a last look at New York glittering through the haze, breathe in a last breath of New York air damp from the sea and both fragrant and stale from the life of cities, and a moment later turn t
o follow him.
In silence then, for the last time, we descend together across the park, under the Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, under the creaking steel of the Manhattan, through the dangerous neighborhoods, and along the cobbled streets of Molasses Hill into the darkness of the warehouses.
16
A DIRGE FULL of oboe and trombone sounds low over the Mississippi. This is the first funeral on such a grand scale on the river in a hundred years. It seems the whole parish has turned out to watch it pass. The barge carrying Madeleine’s coffin and black obelisk churns up midstream, followed by powerboats full of jazz musicians, journalists, caterers, and a TV news crew. Police speedboats from New Orleans lead the way, their sirens turning soundless and pale in the sunlight. Fishermen and curious pleasure boaters in Chris-Craft are anchored to the sandbars. Spectators watch from the batture and from the roofs of cars pulled over on the Belle Chasse Highway, beer cans in hand. Down this part of the country it’s any excuse for a party.
The coffin barge wavers in the current and pulls toward the far bank. A sodden black silk drapery trailing off the stern is churned under in our wake, then resurfaces twenty yards distant like the body of a drowned man. The flat prow is decorated with a black wreath. It is the latter part of October, but hot as any July day up North. Antoinette tells me I’d better get used to the heat, that in Louisiana, it’s sweltering three-quarters of the year. I tell her I remember it well, that I’m already shedding my northern skin, taking my siesta and cool bath in the long hot afternoons like any good Creole.
Now I sweat into my new linen suit and peer through my sunglasses into the green distance. At the next bend in the river we should come to Belle Azure. The great house is gone now, but the crypt is there, dug into the faint rise above the levee. And Madeleine’s niche, empty all these years, lies waiting to receive her earthly remains.
Antoinette and her family spared no expense on this funeral. Final cost for the arrangements came to over two hundred thousand dollars. They hired a construction crew and crane in Brooklyn to remove the obelisk from the churchyard at St. Basil’s, a special team from the coroner’s office to exhume the body, and lawyers to file the papers for removal at the Statehouse in Albany.
I provided the historical research for the project free of charge. The state required a complete genealogy, and there was at first some difficulty in proving the Rivaudais family’s claims to the body. It was during the course of my research that I discovered a curious fact: Since Madeleine’s day, there have been no male heirs. Not a single one. Descent has passed exclusively through the female line. The odds against this, biologically speaking, are unusually high. If it is a sort of curse, an assessment Mama Rivaudais ascribed to her grandmother, then it is a curse that has long benefited the men of Louisiana. For this sunny part of the world has seen generation after generation of gray-eyed, black-haired beauties, women who as a sort of added bonus are often graced with a languid and pliant temperament.
It is difficult to escape New York, even in death. But finally all papers were stamped and filed, all fees paid, and Madeleine was allowed to come home. Last week she was brought south around the Florida Keys and into the Gulf of Mexico’s blue water on a boat full of computer parts and plastic sandals, not too different in spirit from the New Orleans packet of 150 years ago.
A special jetty has been constructed along the levee at Belle Azure, and a road paved with shells and gravel cut through the underbrush and forest up the rise to the crypt. A derrick and flatbed truck wait to transport the casket and obelisk this last half mile. At noon the guests and musicians and journalists and caterers disembark to the green smell of newly cut wood and the wide, dirty reek of the river. I join Antoinette for the funeral procession. We walk hand in hand in the mournful cadence of slow jazz through the heat. The ceremony is short, a bare fifteen minutes. It doesn’t take long to put somebody in the ground, especially if they’ve been there since the 1840s, at least in the flesh.
Afterward, Mama Rivaudais, still healthy and sleek despite her husband’s death, stands on a chair, steadied by her daughters, to deliver a short eulogy to the crowd.
“One of our girls has come home to rest,” Mama says, her eyes vague and sympathetic through the sea green of her shades. “She has been lost to us for many years. We found her quite by accident through the help of a friend and decided to bring her back to Belle Azure, where she was born and where she fell in love. Her life was not a happy one. She suffered greatly, and resting in foreign soil up North, she has suffered ever since. But now her suffering is over.…” With this Mama turns toward the coffin resting on a black catafalque before the door of the crypt. “Sleep well, Madeleine. You’re home now, honey. We’ll see you again on Judgment Day.”
Then the coffin is borne down into the darkness and anchored in its niche. The great stone bearing the arms of the Prasères and the shields of allied noble families going all the way back to El Cid, Pacifier of the Moors, is rolled into place over the opening and sealed forever, and the iron-studded door is closed on the moldy dampness and on the dead that lie within.
Fifteen minutes after the obelisk is raised on a new brick foundation near the gate, the caterers have set up the food, and the liquor flows, and there is livelier music from the musicians and much drinking and eating in true Louisiana style until the sun sets into the river in the west.
Antoinette finds me at dusk, the horizon a thin strip of vermilion over the dark contours of the bayou. She slips her arm into mine and kisses me on the cheek.
“What are you brooding about now?” she says. She takes a taste of my warm gin and tonic, makes a face, and dumps the rest into the grass. “Come on,” she says.
“I’m really not brooding,” I say, but I shrug.
“I can always tell when you’ve got something on your mind.”
“O.K.,” I say. “I’m a historian. I tell stories about dead people. It’s Madeleine. Her story got told. Great. But what about all those people who don’t get their stories told, who end up in a ditch somewhere, forgotten?”
Antoinette shakes her head. She laughs; then she is serious. “You’ve got to pray for them,” she says quietly. “Even though you don’t know their faces, even though you never heard their voices. You’ve got to pray for the whole suffering world. But you can’t take care of them all, Ned. You know that? You can only take care of your own family. You take care of your family first, and that takes care of the world.”
“My family?”
“That’s right.”
“So how many kids you figure in this family of mine?”
“Well—” she smiles into the darkness—“I’m thirty-two now. I figure we get started right away … oh, eight, ten …”
“Jesus.”
“Why not? Got a great big old house on Esplanade. Might as well fill it up.”
Then she leans up and kisses me hard on the mouth and pulls me into the underbrush until we are deep into the bayou, and the music and the sound of human voices come to us faint and far away. It is dark here, I can barely see Antoinette’s face, but we go farther still, until there is blackness all around, and we can no longer hear the music or the voices and there is only the reedy sound of the wilderness like a rushing in the water. Somehow, Antoinette finds a dry spot against a tree and lifts up her dress.
“I said I figured we’d get started right away, I meant right now,” she says, and when I find her body in the tree darkness, it feels like home.
Epilogue
SIX MONTHS HAVE PASSED. Antoinette is six months pregnant, and it looks as if she conceived the night of the funeral—whether in the woods or at the fishing camp afterward is hard to tell.
We were married at the St. Louis Cathedral when she was just starting to show. There was a reception for family and friends at the New Orleans Yacht Club afterward. Given the circumstances, we were going to do a small ceremony, something brief and civil, but at the last minute Antoinette changed her mind, and with the help of four siste
rs sent out 350 invitations and made all the arrangements in two weeks.
“What the hell,” she said to me, “I don’t know about you, but I’m only going to get married once.”
The wedding made the society pages of the Times-Picayune, with pictures of the happy bride and dazed, sedated groom. The paper announced kindly that the groom looked nervous but resolved, that the bride looked lovely and pregnant in her dress of pale blue—it was hard to pull off the virginal white with her stomach showing like that—and that sonograms had revealed the sex of the child as male, the first boy baby in the family in over two hundred years. This came as a shock to me. I was counting on one of those beautiful girls for which they are famous and am secretly a little disappointed. But if we are going to have ten, as Antoinette says, there is plenty of room for several of both kinds.
Father Rose flew down to assist at the wedding mass and looked very priestly indeed in his vestments at the altar. He has given up golf entirely, he told me later at the reception, and has instead gone into the business of saint management full time. The strange case of Sister Januarius has received quite a bit of attention in the press lately. Miracles have been reported in Brooklyn. Cripples are walking; the blind are seeing; crutches litter the steps of the cathedral. A few of the youths of the Decateur Projects have even come to turn in their guns at the altar. Who knows what could happen next? Father Rose says the good sister is already more than halfway toward beatification. The Congregation of Rites in Rome is investigating, but it is now only a question of legal processes and canon law. Still, it could take a year or two or two centuries. The Holy See is inscrutable in these matters, Father Rose says. And the issue is complicated by the fact that Sister Januarius’s cultus was celebrated in secret for almost eighty years.
Madeleine's Ghost Page 37