by Andrea Lewis
“Louis. We’ll be back for you.”
His eyes shone glassy in the flat light. He gripped my thumb.
“We’re your new mother and father. I’m Genevieve.”
He gripped harder, his palm hot and damp. The nurse rolled him onto his hip and smoothed a sheet under him. My husband said, “We should go.” Louis released his grip and closed his eyes.
Then we were outside, pushing onto a crowded streetcar that made a slow climb up Esplanade through the stifling evening air. It was Friday and all the shops were closing. The sun drooped in the west like a ripe apricot behind a maze of garden magnolias.
Emile was silent as far as Bayou St. John. Then he said, “The boy will need a bed,” and took off his trilby to wipe his brow.
The boy will need a bed. As if I hadn’t thought of that. As if the things Louis would need weren’t adding up inside my brain. Clothes. A room. Love. What did he eat? What size was he? What school grade? What religion? Probably godless, given that mother of his. Cate Paradiso. The so-called jazz singer everybody admired so much, who as far as I could tell had squandered her life, utterly squandered it. Emile told me how for years she hauled Louis up and down the eastern seaboard with her ragtag musicians in second-class train cars and second-hand Studebakers, singing in clubs, the great chanteuse. She made a success of a recording company for two or three years, but it all went bad after ’29. She had to come back to poor little New Orleans and take up in the big house her parents left her and run it into the ground, or so I had heard. Louis probably had two years total in a proper school and now he was fourteen and his mother dead by her own hand.
At home over supper as I poured iced tea Emile said, “I’m sorry, Genevieve. It was a foolish promise.”
I hope you didn’t miss that: an apology from Emile. “Is it even legally binding?” I asked. Emile had promised Cate Paradiso he would be Louis’s guardian if anything happened to her.
“Yes. It’s legal. I signed it. I didn’t see this coming.”
Later, Emile turned on The Collier Hour from WNOC while I washed up. I didn’t want to talk. I had to think.
I was fifty-two. Emile was fifty-nine and we had been married for thirty-four years. Our biggest disappointment had been our inability to have children. Not for lack of trying. In the early years, we went at each other like feral cats in an alley, like rabbits in a cage, as if our God-given task was to populate the earth. But no child was conceived.
Still we had a good life. Emile had his law practice. I volunteered at Sisters of Mercy, where they took in poor women. I tried my hand at watercolors, found I was good at it, and even taught classes. I played canasta and mahjongg with a group of ladies who were well-meaning, if a little silly. What I wanted was to travel—there were always excursions advertised: Florida Keys, Cuba, Jamaica. Except for a childhood trip to Lafayette—how I remember the excitement of setting out—I had never left New Orleans. But over the years Emile turned inward. He worked himself near to death and he scrimped money and he thought travel was foolish. Once hard times hit, I was grateful he had saved so much. But I had wanted more. More life. More adventure.
II. The House on St. Charles Avenue
If Greek gods ever settle in New Orleans, they will settle on St. Charles Avenue, under the canopy of live oak, amid the scents of jessamine and pomegranate. All that greenery absorbed sound too, as if people here could afford silence as well as mansions.
The house was like a white ship plying a green ocean, its double-deck gallery reaching up through the trees and the second-story windows topped with Arabian curves. But the front steps creaked as if to herald the ruin and decline inside Cate Paradiso’s home.
The front-room carpet had been taken up and I smelled moldering wood. The floorboards looked dirty around the edges and lighter under the piano. Emile had told me about the piano, a gigantic black Mathushek grand worth two thousand dollars. It would be sold to pay debts.
“Hello?” I expected to find the estate agent Emile had hired to sell the place and its contents. What contents remained. Cate Paradiso had been selling things for cash. The faded ochre wallpaper showed dark rectangles where paintings had once hung.
“Hello?” I started up the stairs, carrying the suitcase I brought for Louis’s things.
In a room off the landing a man was leaning over a small desk, opening a drawer. The desk held a world globe; the rest of the room had a single bed, a small chiffonier, and, on the wall, a mechanical drawing of a steam locomotive with all the parts labeled. I expected the estate agent would be a white man but this man was Africa-black. A Northern Negro—or so I suspected from the close cut of his suit and the pomaded height of his hair. I said, “I am Mrs. Emile St. Victoire.”
He looked amused. “If you say so.” Everything about him was large: large elongated head, large barrel chest, large square teeth, large hooded eyes. Perhaps forty years old.
“Are you the estate agent?” I asked.
“No.” He closed the drawer. “Raphael Mercier. Folks call me Rafe.”
“I’ve come for Louis Paradiso’s things,” I said.
“Me too.” He put his hand on the desk as if to stake this claim.
I brushed past him to the chiffonier and opened it. A few shirts and a wool jacket drooped from hangers over a jumble of clothing underneath. “I’m to be his mother,” I said.
“His mother?” Mr. Mercier opened the desk drawer again and started pulling out what looked like folded maps.
“Yes. My husband and I are Louis’s legal guardians.” I knelt and opened the suitcase. I picked a boy’s cotton shirt from the pile of clothes. The collar was a gray crescent of grime.
“But Louis knows me from way back,” Mr. Mercier said. “I told him he could stay with me.”
I folded the shirt into the suitcase. “Well, he can’t, Mr. Mercier.”
“It’s Rafe,” he said.
“Rafe. Should I know who you are?”
“I’m one of Cate’s sidemen,” he said, as if all God’s creation knew this.
“Sidemen?” I took the wool jacket off its hanger.
“One of her musicians.”
“I see.” The jacket was good quality but the lining was torn.
“Trumpet.” Rafe pointed to himself and waited for the significance of trumpet to reach me.
“I see.” I smoothed the jacket into the suitcase.
“You never did hear Cate sing?”
“No, I was never so blessed.” I pulled socks from the clothing heap and tried to make pairs. Nothing matched.
“You don’t care for jazz music?”
“No.” I didn’t know anything about jazz music, but I was growing angry with the dead Cate Paradiso. Her son’s clothes were a mess. I gave up and rolled a brown and a black sock together. “And I don’t care for mothers who abandon their children.”
“Oh, don’t be judging on Cate,” he said. “Please.”
“I do judge her.” I held up the sock ball. “Why did she do this?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. She was broke, I know that.” He looked about the room. “But she was far and above all this.”
“All what?” I demanded. “Above caring for a child? Earning a living?”
“Maybe.”
I watched his face, his sad eyes, and I wondered if he had been in love with her.
“She was born to sing,” he added, “I’m sure of that.” He tidied the maps into piles on the desk.
“Mr. Mercier,” I said.
“Rafe.”
“Rafe. I see you’ve lost someone who meant a lot to you.”
He blinked slowly and I was afraid he might weep. Instead he put his long fingers on the globe and began to twirl it slowly. “It’s funny,” he said. “Cate was like … like the sun. You know?”
I wanted to say yes, but I had never known anyone like the sun.
“She had a way of holding the center.” Now he gave the globe a furious spin. Pink and amber continents blurred by, aquamarine ocea
ns.
“The center?” I asked.
“On stage,” he said. “When we played.” He watched the spinning globe slow down. “She was all light. She had these huge, wide eyes and she would signal all the cues to us, like she was the center and we would all get there together.”
“Get where?”
He laughed lightly. “Heaven?”
For some reason that embarrassed me. I gave up on folding and busied myself scooping clothes into the case and snapping it shut.
“You seen Louis?” Rafe asked.
“He’s in St. Michael’s.” I lifted the case by its handle, as if I had a train to catch.
“He all right?”
“He’s severely traumatized, Mr. Mercier. Rafe.”
“I know. I’m the one who found them.”
“Found them where?” I asked.
Rafe pointed to the floor below. “By the piano,” he said. “Cate cut her arms.” He drew a finger from wrist to elbow. Again on the other side. “Louis was trying to close the cuts with his own hands.”
I thought of the dried blood under Louis’s fingernails. Rafe went on. “The cops came.” He slammed the drawer he had been emptying and straightened to his full height. “They took me for questioning. Me.” Now his eyes did film with tears. “Who loved her.”
“I’m sorry.” I started for the stairs but Rafe blocked my way.
“Will you at least bring Louis to her funeral?” He reached for the suitcase. I let him take it. I hadn’t even considered the funeral. “All the musicians want to play for her. A parade and all.” He carried the suitcase downstairs and outside to the streetcar stop.
III. St. Roch Cemetery
Louis ran ahead of me when he caught sight of a squat man snake-wrapped inside a tarnished brass tuba. They tried to hug each other but settled for some secret musicians’ handshake. Other hornplayers and drummers and their wives or girlfriends also grabbed Louis’s hand or embraced him, praising Cate and wiping tears from their eyes.
About thirty of us gathered under the lacebark elms on Rampart near Ursulines and started the slow walk north and east through the side streets toward St. Roch Cemetery. A chestnut mare pulled a creaking wooden catafalque that held Cate’s white casket. Louis plodded along beside it, eyes cast down. I felt helpless to comfort him. Rafe—in a white tuxedo with a yellow satin sash across his chest—led the parade. His trumpet flashed gold in the sun but his feet tramped the route with grim resolve.
I had known Louis all of three days. I was madly in love with him. I loved his calm voice and wide, smooth forehead. I loved the oval curve of his skull through his cropped black hair and the oval mystery of his eyes as he watched my every move. He had a way of softening his gaze and tilting his head when he looked at me. For my part, some instinct—some need for something I couldn’t figure out—made me copy that look and return it. This mirror image gaze that we exchanged several times a day somehow drew us close together.
When Emile first brought him home from the hospital, Louis was wearing the knickerbockers and knee socks and white shirt I had sent along. The clothes were too small on him and he looked ridiculous. But he had such dignity. Imagine you are fourteen, in a new house with new people—a grumpy old lawyer who tells you to sit down and eat and his flustered wife who gives you some silly aspic and beet salad—and your beloved mother is freshly dead and your pants are too tight in the crotch.
All that, and Louis held his own. He was polite, deferential, nearly silent with lovely manners. So I had to credit Cate Paradiso with something. He knew to say please and thank you and sir and ma’am. If I drained my tea glass, he jumped up and brought me the pitcher, his clear ivory thumbnail pressed along the rim.
After supper I showed him his room. Yes, we had procured a bed and outfitted the back room where I used to have my art things. He studied the white eyelet dresser scarf and, above it, my own watercolor of a paddle-wheel steamer and asked, “Is this where I live now?”
I realized no one had told him anything. I sat him down on the blue chenille bedspread. “Louis, before your mother died, she asked Emile to always take care of you. If anything happened to her.”
“Why did she do that? Because you have money?”
“Well, we don’t have so much money,” I said.
“Because I know a lot of folks.”
“Yes, I know.” I wanted to appear the firm parent, but I was nervous. I was scared he might run away to Rafe or to anyone familiar.
“My mother knew all kinds of folks,” he said, as if he hoped we might forward him on like a piece of mail.
* * *
The funeral band—trombones, saxophones, two tubas, a cornet, snare drums, and Rafe’s trumpet—opened with a mournful “Nearer, My God, To Thee.” By the time we reached Elysian Fields the parade had drawn a hundred people or more. It would seem everyone in the Quarter knew Cate Paradiso.
Walking alongside the catafalque, I felt old and dull in my navy dress and brown shoes. Most of the girls and even a few women my age wore bright frocks and many had feathers in their hair, which I learned was a trademark of Cate’s. Again, I felt Louis watching me and, I suppose, reading my unease, because he took my hand. I almost wept with gratitude. In the year I would have him, he would do this often: sense what I needed and try to help.
The band did “Lonesome Road.” Rafe played a solo on “Lead Me, Savior” that was so beautiful it took me back to church as a young girl, where the notion of God was entangled with my own longing for a grand destiny. Little did I ever dream I’d be walking hand-in-hand in my middle age with a strange and beautiful boy who could explain funeral music: “That’s shoutin’ blues,” he’d say about a certain number, or “Roosevelt Sykes wrote that.”
* * *
The second evening at our house—the scene much the same, except I skipped the aspic and I had taken Louis to Wainwright’s for proper clothes—I saw Rafe through the window, coming up our walk with Louis’s globe under one arm and a guitar case under the other. When Rafe stepped inside, Louis ran so hard into his arms that the globe clattered to the floor.
Emile stood up and said, “You must be Mr. Mercier.” Rafe reached around Louis to extend his hand, but Emile wouldn’t take it. “I’ll thank you to stay away from the boy,” he said, even as Louis clung to Rafe.
“What?” Rafe almost smiled in disbelief, splaying one of his big hands across Louis’s back.
“I’ll ask you to leave my home.” Emile could be powerful in court, but at that moment he looked weak next to the towering Rafe with his hooded glare of scorn.
Rafe chose to ignore Emile. He let Louis tug the guitar case from his hand and they sat on the carpet and opened it like eager youngsters readying a game. The guitar case held no guitar; it held the maps and the locomotive diagram from Louis’s room on St. Charles Avenue. It held a Hohner harmonica in a cobalt blue box. Apparently Rafe had been teaching Louis to play the harmonica.
I sat near them on a footstool, drawn by their excitement. Louis undid the accordion folds of a Gulf Oil Motoring Map of the East Coast. I glimpsed the red-artery roads tying Virginia to Pennsylvania, New York to Massachusetts, with connecting nodes of big cities and small dots of towns along the way, places Louis had most likely been that I would never see. Even the knowing way he handled the map—he pointed to Atlantic City and laughed with Rafe at some private joke—made me ache with envy for all the living he had already done without me. He traced his finger up to New York City. “I used to live there,” he told me proudly. “I’ll take you sometime.”
“I always wanted to see it,” I said.
My husband would live two more years before his heart attack, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for that moment.
* * *
At the gravesite in St. Roch Cemetery, someone read the twenty-third Psalm while Rafe blew a plaintive wail in the background, so soft it was like the very air was keening. Then a young girl led a blind man out in front of the crowd. He had a tin guitar
slung over his shoulder and a green glass bottleneck on the little finger of his left hand. “Willie Johnson,” Louis whispered.
The man half-hummed, half-moaned his way through a lament while he slid the bottleneck across the guitar frets and picked out sad twangs and heartbreak chords. He rocked from side to side while he played and his eyelids fluttered over empty white sockets. “‘Dark Was the Night,’” Louis added.
The crowd turned so quiet. It seemed the whole city had come to a halt. A few of the ladies got to their knees, then Louis did, and so, gradually, almost everyone else did. I wasn’t sure I could get on my knees, but Louis steadied me and I made it, with only one crack loud enough to be embarrassing. We stayed there several minutes after the song ended. I had slipped into prayer, asking God to give Louis a chance in this world, and when I opened my eyes, Louis was still beside me with bowed head and tears on his cheeks. People rose one by one and many walked past Louis and touched his shoulder. “She’s singing with angels,” someone told him. Or, “She loved you, son.”
When the procession left St. Roch, the band struck up the joyful songs and fast marches. They played an up-tempo “We Shall Walk through the Streets,” which they had played as a dirge on the way in. I knew this was tradition, but the bright tunes felt wrong, given that Cate Paradiso had left this world too early.
The musicians gave it their all—trombone slides flashing skyward and the tuba players chuffing along with sweat stains spreading on their backs—but the sadness was too deep. One by one, people got tired, gave up, and hugged Louis one last time before breaking away from the procession. Louis drew Willie Johnson over and introduced me as his “Auntie Genevieve.” I don’t remember even speaking to the man, so thrilled was I by this new name Louis bestowed upon me and would use forever after. He only ever called Emile sir.
Rafe and a few others stopped in one bar and then another along St. Claude. Louis and I waited outside, fanning our faces with funeral cards. “Do you think she was beautiful?” he asked, holding up his mother’s picture on the card.
There was no denying the voluptuous curve of her mouth or the haunted cast of her eyes. I took Louis by the shoulders. “Yes, Louis, she was beautiful.” I pulled him close. My first real embrace of my son. His hands were warm on my back and he let me crush him against my chest for a long time.