What My Last Man Did

by Andrea Lewis

  Rafe got drunk. Louis saw me to the streetcar and then went back to make sure Rafe got home. Emile was furious when I came home without Louis. “He’ll take off with that black bastard and we’ll never see him again,” he said, pacing the living room. An hour later, Louis returned and went silently to bed.

  IV. Tchoupitoulas Railway Station

  It’s all damp ochre brick that soaks up cinders and weeps out sooty streaks down the cracked façade. Tchoupitoulas. The station where Louis hopped a freight. The engineer they call King—big man from Mississippi with a red-bulb nose—finally admitted as much to me when he saw me on the platform bawling. “Aw, ma’am, half the boys in Louisiana are riding rail. He’ll be back.”

  Maybe.

  When he left, Louis took with him the final pieces of dream I had propping up my life. Suddenly I saw the paltriness of the years I had strung together. Except for that wondrous year with Louis, my life seemed to consist of putting pork chops on the table for Emile or turning out too-precious watercolors or riding streetcars to no place in particular. Yet I didn’t blame Louis for leaving.

  In the months following the funeral, Rafe came over all the time—as long as Emile wasn’t home. He would drink iced tea with me in the dining room and talk about Cate, sometimes breaking down in tears, which he used as an excuse to sip from a flask. He would sit with Louis in our back yard for harmonica lessons after school. That is, if Louis was in school, which on most days I doubted. More likely he was train-watching and hauling coal for pennies and running wild with the boys who hung around Tchoupitoulas Station.

  * * *

  The first postcard came two months after he left. Postmarked Chattanooga, October 1, 1933, addressed to me in pencil. The entire message: Louis Paradiso. As if first and last name were required for me to know he was alive.

  * * *

  I lied to Emile about Rafe. Or at least I hid the facts. It was easy to see that Rafe was the father Louis needed, but Rafe was drinking and it was getting worse. I begged him to stop and he would go on the wagon for a few days before I smelled it on him again. He would shake his head and grin the grin that must’ve captivated Cate. “I’m sorry, Auntie G., I’m no good,” he’d say.

  It all caught up to us when Emile saw the first reports from Hayward Academy, where he had insisted Louis matriculate. Poor grades and strings of absences. You’ll call me a sad excuse for a mother, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care because I saw by then how the world did not reveal itself to Louis in traditional ways, not in scholarly ways, not through math or Latin. For Louis the world was maps, music, timetables, trains.

  * * *

  The second postcard arrived two months after the first and was loquacious by comparison: Chicago Brrr Some work in yards. Stinks but pays good. Louis Paradiso.

  * * *

  To keep Rafe away, Emile stepped in with a Restriction of Contact from a judge and police to back it up. It scared Rafe enough that I never saw him again. It even seemed to scare Louis for a while so that he tried to stick with school and homework. For the next term, I sat with him most evenings over social studies lessons and algebra problems, both of us tired and bored. Too bad every class wasn’t geography. We kept the globe on his desk and sometimes he’d simply gaze at it while I tried to solve for x.

  One morning at four-thirty I was up making coffee because I couldn’t sleep. The house was quiet and dark, when suddenly I heard a key in the front door and in walked Louis. He had been sneaking out to hear Rafe play in the Quarter.

  “He’s my friend,” he explained.

  “I know, Louis, but I can’t have you out alone at night.”

  “Why not?” He wasn’t arguing. He really wanted to know. “I’ve been out a lot at night. And Rafe needs me.”

  “Rafe has to work life out for himself,” I said, feeling cruel. “Let’s leave him be for a while.”

  A few weeks later we followed Rafe’s funeral procession—less than a year after Cate’s—as his body was taken to St. Roch to rest near hers. I wonder if grief runs one death behind. Louis’s grief over Rafe seemed like delayed grief for his mother. For weeks, I heard him crying in his room or watched him lug his satchel home from school in a fog of misery. One day I caught him burying something in the back yard. It was his harmonica.

  And so when I found the slip of paper under my coffee cup—Bye Auntie G.—I didn’t blame him. I cried, but I didn’t blame him. He’d been fighting the whole summer with Emile over going back to school. Wordlessly I showed the note to Emile, who stared at it for a long time and then said, “Let him see what it’s like out there. He’ll be back.”

  * * *

  The third postcard was from New York City. By then it was springtime, 1934, and he’d been gone for a year and a half. The picture on the card was of The Cotton Club. Man here remembers Cate. Have work. Louis Paradiso.

  * * *

  The farther Louis receded from me, the greater my love grew. I loved his courage, how he listened to his inside voice, how he corrected his course. I’d get angry for a while—How could you? and all that—and then go back to loving him.

  I copied some of his courage and started traveling on my own. I remember the first time I went up to the window at Tchoupitoulas Station and asked for a ticket for Vicksburg. Four hours up the line for most folks, but for me, a journey into a new world. Or into myself. I felt like a character from the funny papers, bending back bars to get out of jail.

  Louis would not return for four years. I had kept the house after Emile died and still lived there with a girl who helped me. I think I knew from the knock on the door that it was Louis, rangy and shy, just turned nineteen. “Auntie Genevieve,” he said in that same soft voice, those same Chinaman eyes crinkling up in that same innocent smile. “How are you?” As if he’d been gone a few days.

  He towered over me as we embraced and I cried, maybe harder than I had cried when Emile passed. As if to cheer me up, Louis said, “I have a girlfriend.” He brought her by and I tried to like her but she seemed cheap and frivolous. Louis spent too much money on her.

  I took longer and longer trips. I’ve been to Memphis, St. Louis, and—for one glorious week—Chicago, where I listened to jazz music, the only lady of a certain age in white gloves sitting in a 39th Street club.

  What I love most is setting out. The first open sweep of river with cloud shadows moving on the pale brown water. Is that what Louis saw? Mules in traces in the cane fields, cotton waiting to be picked, or the fresh bales under burlap on the loaders. Pain, glory, vistas. Ladies in traveling suits and men with valises. Kitchen gardens spooling past with peas strung up and cabbages gone to seed. Shacks, barges, factories. Barefoot boys running by the train, waving, hollering. All the parish seats: East Feliciana, South Vacherie, Pointe Coupee, Iberville. Sometimes I have one of Louis’s maps with me, opened on my lap, and I trace the route as we roll along.

  7

  Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me

  Louis melds from the yellow afternoon into the tavern’s soft dark. Blinded, he goes by smell—spent matches, oiled wood, stale beer. But a tunnel of sun from a back door reaches the bar. Eggs glow white as light bulbs in a jar of brine. The slim silhouette in the mirror—angled cap, straight shoulders, khaki uniform—turns out to be Louis’s own reflection. Hands in pockets, he touches a fold of bills, a crumpled letter, and his good luck charm.

  A tall Negro barman looms behind the taps, watching. The place serves colored. Two GIs perch on barstools next to a girl in a black feather hat. Louis nods a greeting. The men are probably from McClellan, but he doesn’t know them. Someone else, another girl, sits alone in the back. Louis pays for a beer and takes it to a booth.

  It’s easier, going to colored places. He is tired of explaining that he is only one-thirty-second Negro; that one grandmother was an octoroon, but his father’s side was all Chickasaw. He is tired of explaining, too, that he did not see action in Europe or the Pacific. He did not kill Japs, he did not kill J
erries, he did not storm beaches. He spent VJ day—two months ago—making forty-two vanilla cakes with chocolate icing in the officers’ mess at McClellan Airfield. Not a fit job for a man of twenty-seven—patting sprinkles into icing—but the army saw his copper-colored skin and made him a cook. Since his discharge he’s managed to get ten miles from the base, to Sacramento.

  He lights a Pall Mall and pulls the crumpled letter from his pocket. His lucky charm—a carved pelican, three inches tall, with knowing eyes—comes out with it and he sets it on the table. He smoothes the paper, which is dated September 23, 1945, at the top and signed Love, Lily at the bottom. In between, every sentence Lily wrote contradicts itself. I think about us and our love, but Mama says I’m young for nineteen and don’t know love from influenza. And, My best dream is to fly from here and we get married in a little church, but Mama says it is self-centered and stingy to leave your kin. But Louis has sent money for the train anyway. Maybe Lily will make it from New Orleans to Sacramento and join him. It’s the only thing holding him here. She’s the only thing he’s wanted for the past three years’ worth of mashed potato vats; flats of white bread in cellophane bags; triplicate forms for truckloads of ketchup, pickles, ersatz mayo, and Spam; a stupid white apron and cap; swaggering pilots who called him “boy”; and, in his off-hours, never-ending games of poker and dice that absorbed all the rage he and his messmates would never dispel in combat.

  He reads the letter again, though he has it memorized. He recites his promises to himself. He will hold onto what money he has—three hundred in discharge pay and $12.90 from his last game on base. He gets this one beer, but he will not rent a room, he will not eat in a café until Lily arrives. Then he will take her in his arms, run his palms over her skinny hips, feel her breath in his ear, and get them a room in the best hotel that will take a copper-skinned man with a buzz cut and a light-skinned Louisiana black girl.

  Suddenly, behind the letter, she is standing there. Or at least for a moment he thinks so. But it is not Lily. It is the girl who was sitting in the shadows at the back of the tavern. Japanese, as far as he can tell, though he has nothing to go by but wartime cartoons of kamikaze pilots and the emperor. He has never met a Japanese girl. Her dark hair is something like Lily’s, curled back from her face.

  “You’re not colored,” she says.

  “Neither are you.”

  She is a small woman, but hugely pregnant. So pregnant that Louis feels something like shame. As if some unmentionable craving is on display. The baby tents out the front of her blue-gray dress, decorated with a white collar and big buttons down the front. She squeezes herself onto the seat across from him, swiveling her legs in last. She wears white ankle socks with brown and white saddle shoes.

  “I’m Nisei,” she says. “Do you know what that is?”

  He nods.

  She lifts his cigarette from the ashtray. “Well, what is it?”

  “Japanese kid.” He shrugs. “I mean, Japanese … lady.”

  “Second generation Japanese-American.” She puffs once on the cigarette, coughs, puts it back.

  “I’m Chickasaw,” Louis says. “You know what that is?”

  “Indian kid?”

  “On my dad’s side, anyway.” Louis tries smiling at her, but her eyes are hard and her mouth is grim.

  She looks at his stripes. “I see you are an Indian sergeant. Kill any Japs?”

  “I spent the war in California,” he says.

  “Kill any Japs?”

  Louis clears his throat and drinks down half the beer. “I ran the officers’ mess at McClellan. That’s the kitchens and dining rooms.”

  “I know what a mess is,” she says. “That’s what they called it at Manzanar.” She cuts him a look, daring him to make something of that.

  He hasn’t thought much about Japanese internment camps and he doesn’t want to. “Can I buy you a beer?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Cigarette?” He offers the pack.

  She shakes her head. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m soon to have a blessed event.”

  Louis nods and tries to keep his eyes from drifting to the front of her dress where her breasts push out the nubby, blue-gray cloth. “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Mrs. Ruth Tanaka.” She offers her hand. “You can call me Ruth.”

  “Louis Paradiso.” It’s strange to shake hands with a girl. Her fingers are damp and warm, almost boneless.

  “You sound like you are from the South,” she says.

  “New Orleans.”

  She touches one of the buttons near her throat. “San Francisco.”

  The girl from the bar gets up and goes to the jukebox. When she drops her nickel in, the jukebox lights up red and gold. Duke Ellington. “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me.”

  “Once when I was little,” Louis says, “I met Duke Ellington.”

  Why did he say that? He never talks about those days. Or his mother. Or nights like that night they met Ellington. Winter, 1927. Sleet on the windshield of the cab. Harlem neon streaky in the dark. Louis was nine. He called his mother by her first name—Cate—and he thought all kids went to the Cotton Club. Cate’s recording company, Wildcat Records, had put her briefly in the big time. That night they heard Duke Ellington’s orchestra and met the man himself backstage. White suit, white tie, white suede shoes. He talked to Cate in a low voice. Leaning in. Filling her glass from a slim bottle. Bending down to shake hands with Louis. Later Louis woke up on the scratchy red couch, alone in the room with Ellington’s rehearsal piano. Sheet music and ashtrays all over the place. Louis settled on the piano bench and played “Chopsticks” six times. He smoked the last cigarette from a glass box shaped like a swan. He read the lyrics on the music: “tonight—I—shall—sleep—with—a—smile—on—my—face.” Five hours later Cate came back and took him to a café for breakfast.

  “So you’re a big shot because you met Duke Ellington?” Ruth asks.

  “Didn’t mean that.” He crushes out his cigarette. “It’s just my mother. She was something.”

  “Is she in New Orleans?”

  “She died when I was fourteen. And my old man died before I was even born.”

  “My husband died in Italy.” Ruth touches her gold wedding band. Her finger is puffed up and the ring looks tight. “In Livorno.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” Louis lights another Pall Mall.

  “He was with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.”

  Everyone knows about the 442nd, the Japanese-American regiment. Most were recruited straight from internment. Many were decorated. “Those were brave guys,” Louis says.

  “He didn’t even have to go. He could have stayed in Manzanar.” She picks up Louis’s pelican charm and rubs her finger over its black eyes. “All you had to do was not sign their loyalty oath and the army wouldn’t take you.”

  “He probably wanted to fight,” Louis says. “I wanted to fight.”

  “Heroes.” Ruth shrugs. “Get your guts shot out and your family gets a flag.”

  “I’m just saying, I can understand why he went. But I’m sorry he passed. I’m sorry the baby won’t have its father.”

  “Oh, Sergeant, count on your fingers and figure it out. Livorno was ’43. He’s not the father.”

  Louis fumbles his cigarette from the ashtray and takes a deep drag.

  She holds up the little pelican. “What’s this?”

  “Old charm from my grandmother. Louisiana people think pelicans bring luck.”

  “You needed luck in a kitchen? What? Not to burn your fingers?”

  “I’m no coward.” He takes the pelican from her hand.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  The letter from Lily is still on the table. Ruth looks at it. “Love letter?”

  “Not exactly.”

  When she picks it up he says, “It’s personal.”

  Ruth starts reading, and Louis sits back. Let her read it, he thinks. He could use some advice. He watches Ruth�
�s eyes trail over Lily’s handwriting. “This is one mixed-up girl,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ruth squeezes her eyes shut and straightens her back, touches her hand to her spine and shifts her weight.

  “What’s wrong?” Louis asks.

  “With me? Nothing.” She hands him the letter. “With Lily here, you’re in trouble. She’s never going to leave her mama.” Ruth swings her legs out of the booth and pushes herself up, knuckles white on the edge of the table.

  Louis stuffs the letter in his pocket. “Where are you going?”

  She gives him a withering look and plods toward the back hallway. Louis wonders if she might deliver the baby right there in the ladies’. It looks that close.

  He finishes his beer. Hell, she’s probably right. Lily’s not coming. She’s too far away, he’s too broke, and the few times they made love before he was drafted cannot compete with the dragged-out dead-time of war. Their picnics and walks cannot compete, nor the hot picture-show house where they held hands, nor the time they saw the traveling preacher in Metairie heal a cripple; not even the time—that day of china blue sky and cool air—when she laid the old chenille bedspread on a patch of junegrass and unpacked cold fried chicken and a pecan pie. They had walked halfway to West End from the end of the tramline, and her white sandals got muddy. How she worried on those shoes, trying to clean them with fresh leaves, trying to pretend she was occupied with something other than him and what he had in mind, more urgent now that Pearl Harbor had cast its shadow. He remembers Lily covering her mouth whenever she laughed, which was often, to hide her crooked teeth. He marveled at how clean and shiny her fingernails were. Something about those fingernails and the white sandals and the pecan pie and the way she smelled of Cashmere Bouquet and the way she had picked the most hidden spot in a grove of chinaberry told Louis that was the day she would finally let him. Let him unbutton the back of the polka-dot dress and slide it off her creamy brown shoulders and let him roll on top of her—a moment he would replay so many times in his mind’s eye at McClellan that it became a kind of prayer or religion or fixed thing, like a tunnel that led to his future.