A Summons to New Orleans

by Barbara Hall

  “You make me tired,” Boo said, and Nora suddenly remembered a bizarre statement her mother used to make whenever anyone frustrated her. She’d say, “You make my ass want to chew a tobacco.”

  She giggled, thinking of it.

  Then she said, “Tell the kids I love them and I will see them on Sunday.”

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

  “Good-bye, Mother.”

  “Listen, sister, if you think you can get off that easy, you have another thing coming.”

  “Think, Mother,” she said. Boo was always getting clichés wrong. “You have another think coming.”

  “If you had survived the death of a child, you wouldn’t be so careless with your own.”

  Nora thought about letting that remark pass. Through the years, she had practiced that approach with Boo. But suddenly she didn’t feel like doing that anymore. The remark was careless and cruel, and it fed the lie that Nora had lived for years.

  “I did survive the death of a child. I survived Pete dying. And I always blamed myself, but it wasn’t me. It was you.”

  She thought she heard her mother catch her breath, and she felt frightened by what she was saying, but with her new-found resolve, she could do nothing but keep going.

  “I heard him fall out of the bed that night, but I was just a child. I assumed the grown-ups would have taken care of it. And I’m sure he cried, and I’m sure you heard it, but you ignored it. Because that is what you do when children cry. You get enraged, and you wait for it to go away, and if it doesn’t, then you punish.”

  “I cannot believe you are speaking to me this way. He was my child . . .”

  “Yes, I can imagine the guilt you must feel.”

  “You are going to hell, young sister,” Boo said, and her voice was tight with anger.

  “Maybe you just ignored Pete crying all night, or maybe you went in there and gave him a good spanking, and threw him back in his crib.”

  “Are you saying I killed my child?”

  Nora sighed and prepared to reassure her mother, as was her old habit, and then she realized that she was saying it, did believe it, had always secretly believed it. It might not be true, but it had settled in her heart like an infection. And rather than face the possibility that her mother could do such a thing, she had taken on the blame herself. She would rather live with the guilt than the realization that her mother was probably a monster.

  But it was consistent, wasn’t it? She remembered, as a little girl, the times she would have an ear infection, and would try to stifle her cries because if her mother came to see about her, she would berate her or possibly spank her to make things worse. She would take her to the doctor only when things got so bad they couldn’t be ignored. And any inconvenience at night was not to be tolerated. What was her father doing all this time? Ignoring them all, no doubt, the way he did, denying that he even belonged in this life.

  She was about to accuse her mother, then realized that her children were still in her care and she couldn’t afford to alienate her. Besides, she was tired of accusing.

  “No, Mother, of course not. I’m just tired and under a lot of stress. Maybe I will try to come back early.”

  “That’s more like it,” Boo said, sniffing. She paused and made a choking sound. Nora could picture her manufacturing her tears. For some reason, Nora pictured her mother young again, as she was when Nora was a child, with her thick black hair and black eyes and beautiful olive-toned skin. She was smoking then, always, though Boo didn’t smoke anymore. She saw her sitting at the kitchen table of the old house, where they lived when Nora was little, all dressed up for a day on the town, pacing in the kitchen as she talked on the wall phone. The telephone number was Hemlock 8071. This was in the days before prefixes were attached. They used code words. But Hemlock? Why would a whole town choose a poison to represent them? It was fitting, but scary, nonetheless.

  “I’m sorry I said that about Pete,” Nora repeated, though she had every intention of saying it again, when her children were back in her care.

  “You should be.”

  “I’ll work on getting an earlier flight. Just take good care of them. And whatever you’re angry about, even if it involves me, don’t take it out on them.”

  “I swear, you are plumb losing your mind.”

  Nora hung up and sat there breathing hard. She should definitely try to get an earlier flight. She had to get her children back. But it wasn’t that easy. She had to answer to her friends. She had to make sure they were all right, too.

  When she came out into the courtyard, she found all of them except Poppy sitting at a table, staring distractedly into their coffee or up at the trees. They looked as if they had received bad news, and Nora wondered if somehow a verdict could have been returned.

  It took her a moment to realize that Leo was with them.

  He lifted his coffee cup to his lips with a shaking hand. He did not look at her.

  “Did someone die?” Nora asked.

  Simone blew cigarette smoke at the clouds and said, “This is Poppy’s friend, Leo. He’s here to tell us that Poppy’s gone crazy.”

  “Poppy’s been crazy,” Nora said.

  “Yeah, but now she’s really done it.”

  Nora looked at Adam, simply wanting to know the facts, but he seemed to think she was asking for an explanation. He only shrugged and stared at his lap.

  “She called,” Simone said, “a few minutes ago. She’s out at her house. And if her story is to be believed, she has dug up her basement floor.”

  “And found a body,” Leo said, finally letting his eyes meet Nora’s.

  “A body?” Nora asked, her heart speeding up. She looked at Leo and waited for him to go ahead and confess.

  Leo read her expression and said, “Nora, there is no god-damned body. There is no dead baby. We’ve been over this.”

  “Well, we should go out there,” Nora said. “We should find out what’s happening.”

  “We were just waiting for you.”

  Simone drove, with very little urgency. Nora wanted to take control of the car. She felt panicked. In her imagination, she pictured Poppy down on her knees in the basement, clawing up the dirt with her bare, white hands. At the very least, she pictured her crying, hysterical, letting her paranoid fantasies get the better of her. Why was everyone else so unconcerned? Nora wondered, looking around her. Simone drove with one hand, the other massaging the back of her neck. Leo sat next to her, leaning over occasionally to change the radio station. In the back, next to her, Adam at least had the good sense to fidget. But he didn’t make eye contact with Nora. He stared at the scenery and chewed a nail.

  Finally Simone pulled up in front of a sprawling Creole mansion, with a wraparound porch, ornate wrought-iron balconies, gables, an enormous magnolia tree in the front yard and an even larger weeping willow beside it.

  It was beautiful, but Nora had no trouble believing that the house had a few secrets.

  They knocked on the door, but no one answered. Then Leo opened the door with a key. No one asked where he had gotten it. Nora assumed he had had it since high school.

  “Poppy? Where are you, sweetie?” Simone called out.

  Her flippant term of endearment made Nora feel annoyed.

  “We should check upstairs,” Adam said.

  “No,” Leo said. “Downstairs. That’s where she thinks the body is.”

  The house had the curious quality of being crowded with furniture, yet feeling completely unlived in. Not as if its owners had abandoned it, but as if they had never really lived there. Like a museum house, like Monticello, where, try as she might, Nora never could picture Thomas Jefferson living. Couldn’t picture it as anything but a place crowded with European tourists and American schoolkids on field trips.

  The furniture was not unlike that style—Regency, or whatever the hell it was, with all those curled legs and fancy designs, dark wood, damask upholstery, floral prints, so vivid they were almost obsce
ne, and lots of pewter everywhere. The main room was a double parlor, typical of the era. A writing desk sat at the window, facing out. Nora pictured the legendary Judge Marchand sitting at it, working, scheming.

  Leo opened the door to the basement, and Adam preceded him down the stairs. Nora and Simone hesitated, as if they didn’t want to know.

  Nora said, “How long have you known that Poppy was crazy?”

  “Always,” Simone said.

  “So why did you ask her to come here this weekend?”

  “Because,” Simone said, “she was the only person I knew who had seen worse than a rape trial. I knew it wouldn’t faze her. With you, I couldn’t be sure.”

  They stood there for a moment, and Nora didn’t know how to respond. She looked at the wooden stairs leading down into the basement, a bare bulb swaying overhead.

  “Should we go see?” Nora asked.

  “Yes. We should.”

  They walked down the wooden stairs, their footsteps echoing off the bare cinder-block walls. When they got to the bottom, Nora saw Leo and Adam standing next to a mound of dirt. A pick and a shovel were propped against the wall. Poppy was sitting in a chair across from them, legs crossed, hands in her lap. She was smiling.

  Leo was holding something. A small, decomposed skull sat in his palm, no bigger than a potato.

  “Oh, my God,” Simone said.

  Nora felt dizzy. She thought about throwing up, but it was a thought rather than a feeling. It was a notion, something it seemed like she should do, though her stomach was too cold and tight to feel anything like nausea.

  “His name was Christopher,” Poppy said.

  Leo shook his head slowly, staring at the skull. “But it’s impossible. He took the baby away. This can’t be true. I went with him. We took it away.”

  “He was so little,” Poppy said, “I could hold him in the crook of my arm. He liked it there.”

  Now a real sensation clouded Nora’s head, and she thought she might faint. She couldn’t imagine how she had gotten to this place, in some basement in New Orleans, with a man who had saved her from being mugged holding a baby’s skull in the palm of his hand. How could this have happened? She had played her life out so carefully. Nothing had ever indicated she would end up in this place.

  She saw Simone wipe away a tear. But Poppy showed no emotion, except for that strange, stalled smile.

  “Oh, God,” Simone said. “Poppy, this was real. All this time, it was real.”

  “What made you think it wasn’t?” Poppy asked.

  Adam took the skull from Leo and examined it, turning it over in his hands, inspecting it like the scientist that he was, looking for clues. No doubt he was trying to figure out how the baby had died, looking for some evidence of trauma. After a second, he put the skull down on the ground, then looked over into the hole that Poppy had dug. He scratched his chin, thinking.

  Leo said, “Oh, God, Poppy, I don’t know what to say. I had no idea. You have to believe me.”

  Adam walked over to Poppy and knelt down in front of her. She smiled at him and ran her fingers through his hair, as if the horror of it all was finally mitigated by the proof, and by the fact that her friends believed her.

  Adam said, “Sweetheart, this is not a baby.”

  She blinked languidly at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s not a baby’s skull. It’s a small animal. Probably a cat. It looks like a cat. And those other bones, in the hole there . . . they look like animal bones.”

  She didn’t stop smiling at him. She said, “No, dear, you’re wrong. It’s a little baby boy.”

  He shook his head and reached for her hand. The way he was kneeling there, it looked as if he were proposing to her. And he talked to her in the same sweet, solicitous tone.

  “It’s not a human skull,” he said. “I promise you. I know what they look like. I’ve seen a lot of them.”

  She shook her head. “No, Adam. This is one time when you’re wrong and I’m right.”

  Adam did not take his eyes away from her. She finally looked at the rest of them.

  “You believe me now, don’t you?”

  Simone took a step forward to peer into the hole. Then she said, “You’re sure it’s not a baby’s skull?”

  Adam stood, went over and picked up the skull again. Tracing an index finger along its edge, he said, “Most of the jaw is gone, but you can see how it protruded. There’s only enough room here for a tiny set of teeth. Look, at the top here? This is where the ears were. A human’s ears are on the side, of course. It’s clearly a cat’s skull.”

  Poppy stood and walked over to him. She looked at the skull for a moment, then her face lit up and she said, “Oh, that must be Prissy!”

  “Prissy?” Adam asked.

  She nodded. “My favorite cat. She liked popcorn. She’d chase it around the floor and then she’d eat it. It was so funny to see. She was black and white. Daddy hated her.”

  “How did she die?”

  “She died,” Poppy said, “when I got a B in French. Was that it? No, that was Lucky. I think Prissy died when I got a B in algebra. Or maybe it was because I talked back. It’s hard to remember.”

  “What do you mean?” Adam asked. “I’m trying to understand.”

  She leaned over the hole and made a gesture toward the rest of the bones. “There are a lot of cats in there, aren’t there?”

  “A lot of bones, yes,” Adam said. “I can’t swear they’re all cats.”

  “They are. We never had dogs. But see, Daddy thought it was the best way to teach me a lesson. If I did anything to disappoint him, the punishment was I’d lose my pet. I knew that the stakes were high. I knew the consequences. That was what he told me. So, in essence, I was the one killing the pet. He didn’t make me kill them, of course. He did it with a nylon. But I had to watch.”

  Simone looked at her, as if this fact were even more disturbing than the dead baby. “He killed your pets?” she asked.

  Poppy shrugged. “If Daddy hadn’t pushed me, I wouldn’t have amounted to anything. He said women never amounted to anything without men pushing them. He pushed my mother. Pushed her too hard, I think, right down a flight of stairs. But he was trying to help, you know.”

  “Oh, God,” Leo said.

  “Don’t act surprised, Leo. You knew him,” Poppy snapped, her voice taking on a different tone.

  “I knew he was hard on you. I didn’t know he was a monster.”

  “Of course he was a monster. He killed everything that I loved. He wanted to break my spirit. My spirit would be the death of me, he claimed. And he knew how to succeed, because he ran the whole town. People came here all the time, with their offerings, and he did them favors. That was why he wanted you to get rid of the baby, Leo. If you had done that, you would have won my hand, wouldn’t you?”

  “I couldn’t do it, Poppy. I didn’t think it was my job . . .”

  “So you let him kill the baby. Because that’s what he did when I disappointed him. He killed whatever I loved.”

  “He didn’t kill the baby,” Leo kept insisting.

  “Well, we’ll see about that.”

  Poppy dropped to her knees and started digging in the hole again, using a gardening spade. Adam knelt beside her and tried to take the tool away from her.

  “There’s no baby here, Poppy.”

  “There has to be. There must be.”

  She kept digging, and finally Leo joined in the effort to stop her. But she wouldn’t quit, so Simone and Nora pitched in, and finally they all managed to tear her away from the grisly pile of bones, the graveyard of her failures, living right below her all this time, all these years, haunting her every move.

  They finally got Poppy upstairs, and she lay down in her old bed. The room still looked like a teenager’s room, with white frilly curtains and a handmade quilt on the bed, framed photos of the prom and other high school memories on her .dresser, a bulletin board with dried corsages tacked onto it. There was ev
en a yellowed note saying, “Call Louise about graduation Barbeque.” Nora had an eerie feeling as she stood in the corner of the room, watching the others tuck Poppy into her bed, as if they were transporting her back to a better time. It seemed to be like some kind of antiquated treatment for insanity, surrounding the patient with evidence of her more stable life, going back to the point where it all began to unravel and plugging the holes as they appeared.

  Nora watched and thought, I hope I never go crazy.

  She thought of her own mother’s dalliance with mental illness and wondered if she were destined to repeat it. How could she ever hope to be better than the sum of her parts, which in her case wasn’t a hell of a lot? But then she looked at Poppy, who was clearly raised by an evil man, and she was fighting his influence to the bitter end. In fact, it might have been in deference to this cause that she had surrendered her sanity. If that were the case, Nora had no choice but to respect her.

  Leo sat next to Poppy once she was tucked comfortably in her bed, and he lovingly smoothed the hair out of her eyes.

  “I wish we could see him, don’t you?” Poppy said to him. “Our baby, I mean.”

  “It wasn’t our baby, Poppy.”

  “How old would he be now? Would he be grown up?”

  “Yes,” Leo said. “He is grown up. He is nearly twenty, I imagine. Probably in college. He’s fine, wherever he is.”

  “I wonder if he remembers me.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Leo assured her.

  Adam stood watching the two of them, knowing he didn’t have a place there.

  “Should we call somebody?” Simone asked.

  “Who would we call?” Nora asked.

  No one had an answer to that.

  Finally it was decided that they would leave her there with Leo. He would spend the night there, and in the morning they would try to find a doctor.

  Adam said, “I want to stay, too.”

  “No,” Poppy said, looking at him with a clear expression, as if she suddenly understood everything. “I want you to go. You should be in New York.”

  “But you’re my wife, Poppy . . .”