by Barbara Hall
They hugged and kissed, and walked in opposite directions across the courtyard to their rooms, agreeing to meet for breakfast at the same place in the morning.
When Nora walked into her room it was freezing cold, the air conditioner blasting. She turned it off and put on a sweater and sat on the edge of her four-poster bed, wondering why she felt uneasy. It was something Poppy had said. Not about her tragic flaw. She didn’t really care if wanting things to be just and equitable was her tragic flaw. She’d cop to that any day. She saw the same instinct in her own daughter and felt glad that she might have passed that on to her. The only thing she was really afraid of was being devoid of virtue.
But maybe that was it. Poppy had informed her that honor was different from fairness, in a way that made it clear that honor held dominion over the other. In that context, the need for fairness sounded like a superficial concern, a childish pursuit. Someone playing in the sandbox of virtue, while the true defenders were elsewhere, defending the beachhead, surrounded and undaunted by the struggle.
She picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number. Boo sounded frightened when she answered.
“Hello, Mother? It’s me. What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” came Boo’s gravelly voice, already angry and accusatory. “It’s way past eleven. Have you lost your mind?”
Nora glanced at her watch, surprised that it was so late, albeit an hour earlier than back in Virginia. Where had the evening gone?
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just went walking around, and then I ran into my old friend Poppy Marchand . . .”
“Walking around? In New Orleans? What kind of fool did I raise?”
“I’m in the Quarter, Mother. It’s safe here.” Shame flooded her as she thought about her encounter with the two men on the street, hating the notion that her mother could be right about something.
“All right, sister. You just keep waltzing around, acting like the world owes you a favor, and see what happens.”
“How are the kids?”
“Well, I don’t know. They’re asleep. They waited all night for you to call, and eventually I just had to say you probably got busy and you’d call in the morning. Annette was pouting when I put her to bed. And Michael? That boy is out of control, Nora Kay. He might need professional help.”
Nora felt nauseous and dizzy, thinking of her children sitting by the phone waiting to hear from her. How could she have neglected them? Further evidence, she thought, that she was starting to lose control of herself. There was a time when she could not even bear to be away from them. Years when she and Cliff would go out to dinner or a party, and she’d run to the nearest phone to check on them. It irritated Cliff; he thought she was overly connected to them.
“Do you really think they can’t cope without you?” he would ask. “My God, Nora, how will they ever evolve into fully-functioning adults? You act like they’re disabled in your absence. That’s a form of ego, you know. Megalomania.”
This topic had come up in couples counseling many times. Nora was too connected to the kids, he claimed, and she countered that he was too disconnected. The therapist said both of them were right, to a degree. Nora used to sit there thinking, If we are this much at odds and both right, then we shouldn’t he together. She wished she had said that, at least once, so that Cliff’s departure wouldn’t hang in the air like the last word.
“What’s wrong with Michael?”
“He’s rude, that’s what. He told me to shut up tonight.”
Nora smiled. Of course he told her to shut up. No one on earth talked more than her mother, and got less said in the process.
“And what did you say to him?” Nora asked.
“I told him I’d shut up when I felt like shutting up.”
“Mother,” Nora sighed, “you can’t engage him at his level. He’s a child. He needs guidance. You need to explain to him . . .”
“You’ve done too much explaining, that’s your problem. The boy should have been spanked when it would have done some good. But now he’s too big and he’s ruling the roost. He knows it, too, sister. Don’t think he doesn’t know who runs your household.”
Nora knew there was no hope of winning this argument. She decided to move on.
“But they’re okay, right? Basically, they’re fine?”
“They’re as fine as two children can be who’ve been taken out of school and dumped on their grandmother without a good explanation.”
“It won’t kill them to miss one week of school. And you’re always saying you want to spend more time with them.”
“I’d like to visit them, Nora Kay, not raise them. I’m through with raising children.”
“You only raised one, Mother, and I wasn’t terribly difficult.”
“Excuse me, are you forgetting your brother? Maybe you have put him out of your mind, but I haven’t.”
Nora felt her throat closing, as if she were having an allergic reaction. She knew it was the rage again, tightening in her chest and around her neck. Of course she had not forgotten Pete, her little brother who had died when he was only two. She was six at the time. The boy had tried to crawl out of his crib in the middle of the night and had fallen on his head. A fluke thing, the doctor later said. One in a million probability. He had fallen hard and cracked his skull, and no one had heard him. He lay there on the floor all night, his brain swelling, the life leaking out of him. He existed in a coma for a while and finally slipped away. Her family had never fully recovered, and even now Nora had nightmares about it, blaming herself for not coming to his rescue. It seemed to her back then, and now, that she had heard the sound of him hitting the floor. Her bedroom was next door and she had heard the commotion, the distant thud. But it had barely registered in her consciousness and she had gone back to sleep. That was something she had never told anyone. She knew that if she told her mother, she would be opening herself up to the blame she already carried squarely on her own shoulders.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” Nora said.
“No, I should hope not. The things that I have lived through. You think your divorce is so tragic. Well, I tried to warn you. And losing a husband is nothing compared to losing a child. You just think about that.”
“I do think about it, Mother. But are my children all right?”
“They are alive, Nora Kay. They aren’t sick. They miss you and they don’t listen to a thing I tell them to do. Your son acts like his father is the second coming. Won’t hear a word against him. What’s this about him going to live with Cliff? He can’t live with that man. That man is a criminal.”
“He’s not going to live with him, Mother. It’s just a fantasy he has. He’s thirteen, and he imagines anybody would be better than me. He imagines his father would understand him. And while we’re at it, you shouldn’t be saying anything bad about Cliff. It’s not fair to them.”
“I will speak my mind,” Boo announced. “I will say whatever I feel like saying. You can’t tell me to shut up and neither can your son.”
This is lunacy, Nora thought. Leaving my children with this woman. She is so clearly insane. When her father was alive, he used to tell her this. When they fought he would put Nora in the car and drive her around and say, “Doctors have told me your mother should be committed, but I can’t do that to her. And I don’t want to raise you alone. A nervous mother is better than none, don’t you think?”
Once she had asked her father why he married her. He said, without missing a beat, “Because I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And I still think so.” Remembering that, she still felt the pain she had felt then. Even as a child, she knew that wasn’t a substantial reason to marry someone.
Suddenly her mother said, “Poppy Marchand?”
“What?”
“You said something about Poppy Marchand?”
“Yes, I ran into her . . .”
“I thought you were going to visit Simone.”
“I am, but Simone got delayed, a
nd then I found Poppy here, staying at my hotel.”
“Well, thank the Lord for small favors. I always liked that girl, Poppy. She’s from good breeding. Simone was crazy. She wore all that makeup. Too much mascara, made her eyelashes look like tarantulas. But Poppy, now, that girl was grounded. I feel better knowing she’s there.”
Her mother had met Poppy only a couple of times and exchanged no more than a dozen sentences with her, but she had picked up right away that Poppy was from old money. Maybe it was the pearls Poppy used to wear in those days, real ones, swinging carelessly around her neck like costume jewelry. The fact that Poppy’s father was a judge impressed Boo, even though Poppy’s father was fairly famous for being a corrupt judge, one who took kickbacks and manipulated his courtroom accordingly. Her mother didn’t know that about him, but she probably wouldn’t have cared. A judge was a judge.
“Now, that Simone,” her mother went on, “she’s just trouble. She’s never going to amount to anything.”
“She’s a model, Mother. And now she’s a big restaurant critic, too. She does a spot on TV. She’s very successful.”
“Money can’t give you class, sister. And that Simone is from trash as far as I can tell.”
Nora bristled and tried not to enter into this debate. Her therapist was always telling her not to take her mother’s bait, but her therapist didn’t know how inviting that bait was. She tugged and Nora jumped, even after all these years. Her therapist called it the marionette syndrome. Nora didn’t like to think of herself in those terms, but where Boo was concerned, it was fairly undeniable.
Simone, of course, was not from trash. Her father was some high-level executive at a movie studio, and she had been raised among actors and politicians and royalty. She had gone to school in Europe. She spoke French. Quite a contrast from Nora’s own upbringing, the daughter of a traveling salesman in southern Virginia, a place so small it rarely showed up on a map of the state. Lewiston was a one-horse town, and the horse was not particularly healthy. She thought of her children staying there, sleeping in Boo’s one small guest room, in a tiny postwar house near the highway. It was all her mother could afford after her father’s death. For all his concern about family, her father had not provided for them. He died without life insurance, and with no savings and a lifetime of debt. No one felt up to blaming him, though. His death had been so prolonged and painful and humiliating. Prostate cancer. The slow withering away, being attacked by the cells in his penis, a kind of ironic demise, Nora thought, given how much Boo claimed to detest “the act.” Both of her parents were devout Christians, Baptists, no less, which led them to all manner of nutty ideas about sex. Her mother thought of it as a necessary evil, and her father was somewhat obsessed with it—while denying its importance, of course. This made for a closet well stocked with pornography and a threat on her life if she ever slept with a man out of wedlock.
“You tell Poppy I said hello,” Boo said. “And you stay close to her and keep your distance from that Simone.”
“Tell the kids I’ll call them tomorrow.”
“Well, I don’t want to get their hopes up.”
“I will call them, Mother.”
“Annette chews things. Did you know that?”
“Yes. It’s age-appropriate.”
“Well, it’s not appropriate in my book. She chewed up the edges of my TV Guide.”
“Give them a kiss from me. Remember, Michael doesn’t eat breakfast.”
“Everyone eats breakfast in my house, sister.”
“Good night, Mother.”
She hung up the phone and sat on her bed, her thoughts scrambled, floating about, trying to reassemble themselves. She knew, of course, that one day she would end up in another therapist’s office, with Michael and Annette pointing fingers at her for leaving them with their insane grandmother.
“It all started when my mother went to New Orleans,” she could imagine Annette saying. And it would just get worse from there.
4
Nora and Poppy met for breakfast in the courtyard.
It was a little after nine, and they were sipping their chicory coffee and orange juice, nibbling on homemade biscuits and jam. The air was already close and hot. The smells of the city crept over the walls. It made Nora think of Venice, a place she had visited once with Cliff, on a business trip. He had gone there to study Italian cooking, thinking he might try to open an Italian restaurant with authentic Venetian cuisine. Venice had been beautiful and romantic, but an odd, oppressive stench seemed to take hold of the place. Nora felt that her face was constantly contorted, warding off a bad smell that loomed but never quite materialized.
Poppy buttered her biscuit and said, “Louisiana should secede, probably. It’s not like any other state. We should stop pretending to play by the rules.”
“But why are you back here?” Nora asked. “I mean, if you hate it so much?”
“I don’t hate it. I used to. Now I accept it. I was raised here and I guess I’m kind of infected by its influence. But I can’t claim that it has anything to contribute to the rest of the country.”
“What do you do here?”
Poppy stared at her biscuit, driving the butter into its flesh. She said, “I teach school. I teach art at a middle school in Metairie. My father died two years ago and left me his estate. I don’t ever have to work again, really, but I want to stay busy.”
“I met a teacher last night. My cab driver. Leo Girardi.”
Poppy immediately stopped buttering and looked at her. “Leo?”
“Yes. You know him?”
She nodded. “He’s an old friend. But I don’t talk to him much anymore.”
“Why not?”
Poppy didn’t answer. She concentrated on her biscuit, and finally, when she spoke again, said, “I don’t paint anymore, either.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t,” she said. “It’s like . . . I don’t remember how. I can’t explain it.”
“When did this happen?”
“Around the time I left Adam. I’m sure it’s just temporary.”
“Was he an artist, too? Maybe you were competitive.”
“He’s a plastic surgeon. He spends his time making women’s breasts bigger and sucking fat out of their thighs. It’s not an honorable profession.”
“What about burn victims and that kind of thing?”
“Oh, yes, burn victims. That is what he always used when he felt he had to justify his calling. To be fair, he did specialize in putting scarred people back together. But that’s just an excuse. I happen to think we should just live with what God gives us, even if, for some reason, He decides to give us scars. Our scars are our medals, in a way. How noble is that, trying to wipe away the business of living?”
“God?” Nora questioned, certain she had not heard right. It was not a name she associated with Poppy.
“Well, whatever higher power you believe in. For me, it’s God.”
“Since when?”
Poppy licked some jam off her fingers and said, “My life is different now.”
“Different how?”
Poppy shrugged and looked into her coffee cup.
“You know where chicory comes from, don’t you? They used to add it to coffee back during the war, when the crop was bad and it tasted like shit. Chicory was supposed to make it taste less like shit. Most of New Orleans cuisine is based on poverty, the desire to keep from starving. They ate anything that crawled past their house. Crawfish? That’s swamp trash. Catfish live in the mud. So do lobsters. Alligator meat, turtle meat, nutria, for God’s sake? That’s a rat. Smart people do not eat these things. They eat steak.”
“Well, Simone will probably have something to say about that. Now that she’s this big food critic.”
“That’s so ironic,” Poppy said. “Simone was the person who would eat the dining-hall crap, no matter how vile it was. She was born with an impaired palette. And now she’s writing about food, and considered the expert on cuisine. How
did that happen?”
“I don’t know, Poppy. How did I end up divorced? How did we both end up alone?”
“That is not the point,” Poppy said.
“So why are you and your husband separated?” Nora asked.
“We can’t overcome our differences.”
“What are your differences?”
“Religion,” Poppy said.
“But you’re not religious.”
Poppy reached inside her blouse and pulled out a silver cross. She thrust it at Nora, as if to ward off a vampire, and after a second she tucked it back in.
“Poppy,” Nora said. “You have got to be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“How the hell did it happen? Who got to you?”
“Nobody got to me,” she said. “Except Jesus.”
Nora felt like throwing up. Her throat burned as the chicory coffee came back up. This could not be happening. The memory of all those ranting, angry people in her church. Her parents’ ridiculous screaming matches, always playing out in that strange religious vernacular. Those horrible, frightening pictures of Jesus all over the house. The Bibles. The lectures, the accusations, the eyes of God, always looking down on her in judgment. Poppy could not believe those things.
“Are you in AA or something?” Nora asked. She recalled that Poppy had been a big drinker.
“No. I am one of those lapsed Catholics, and I just got unlapsed. Don’t worry, I am not going to start proselytizing. It’s my own private concern. But in answer to your question about Adam, that’s it. He’s Jewish.”
“So was Jesus,” Nora said.
“Oh, really?” Poppy said sarcastically. “News to me.”
“But why would his being Jewish be a problem? I mean, you knew he was Jewish when you married him, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t a Christian then. And I actually don’t consider myself to be married because we didn’t take the sacrament . . .”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Poppy. Stop! This is utter nonsense.”