by Ciji Ware
Corlis arched an eyebrow but remained silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Aside from Jacques meeting with your family, would you also be open to a bit of woo-woo?”
Serena frowned. “Woo-woo? Do you mean voodoo?”
“No, I mean woo-woo,” Corlis said with a laugh. “I have this friend, Dylan Fouché, who might be willing to help you... and Jack... prepare for what follows down the road—however the meeting between your whole family and Jack’s uncle turns out.”
Before Serena could protest such a strange proposal, Corlis described how her very successful real estate agent—a gay dropout from the Catholic priesthood—had a reputation as a psychic and spiritual counselor.
“Why Corlis McCullough, I am shocked that such a ‘just the facts, Ma’am’ news hen like you even knows such a character, let alone has faith in his abilities to fix something that’s unfixable.”
“Now, keep an open mind, Serena,” Corlis cautioned with a mysterious smile. “One day I’ll tell you how Dylan sorted out a big mess between King and me when odd things were happening to me within the walls of my old condo on Julia Street.”
“Where Jack lives now?” Serena asked with surprise.
“The very one. Do you ever sense there are ghosts or strange entities when you’ve been there?
“Not a one,” Serena retorted.
“Well, see?” Corlis replied. “Dylan’s amazing! He cleared ’em right outta there! The guy does the same kinds of things about ancestors’ angst.”
“He does what?”
“Look,” Corlis said in a rush, “it’s too complicated to explain everything right now, but you’ve got to trust me on this. King and I love you two guys... and for the first time, I just know that Jack has met his perfect match... and you’ve met yours! Please, please come to our place before we set up a meeting with Jack’s uncle and your family,” she pleaded. “Just sit down and talk to Dylan about how you feel over what has happened and what Jack did that’s upset you so—and allow Jack to be there too.”
Serena gazed through the glass wall at the reception desk and watched Etheline hand a long garment bag protecting a Marie Antoinette costume to a customer. Finally, she turned to face her friend.
“I do trust you, Corlis—and have since the first day I met you—so I guess I’ll trust you about this Dylan person.”
“Wonderful!” Corlis exclaimed and Serena could see relief flood her face.
“But,” Serena added, raising one finger in warning, “I retain the right to get up and leave Dauphine Street at any time, if I want to. And sorry, but I just want to meet Dylan on my own. No Jack.”
Corlis titled her head and regarded the other woman for a moment.
“Agreed,” she said finally and with unaccustomed solemnity added, “Let’s take this a step at a time... and see what happens.”
Serena rang the bell near the wrought-iron gate and stood nervously on the banquette outside the Duvallons’ French Quarter residence. When Corlis opened the door, Serena noted the look of surprise that flashed across her friend’s features.
“Well, hello, you two. Dylan’s here already.”
“I brought my brother, Nick,” Serena announced.
“Moral support... or riding shotgun?” Corlis asked, gazing at the slender young man with similar coloring to his sister’s, standing by her side.
“Kind of both. Do you mind?”
“Of course not,” Corlis replied, unlatching the iron gate and beckoning both to enter through the front door into the marble-tiled foyer. “Glad to see you, Nick. Please, come on in.”
Corlis led them into the formal parlor with floor-to-ceiling windows and two elaborately carved fireplaces, spaced fifteen feet apart, which were typical in nineteenth century New Orleans sitting rooms. Sage silk drapes and an elaborate crystal chandelier hung fourteen feet above their heads.
An unusually tall man in his early forties unfolded his frame from a side chair. The reedy figure was dressed in a crisp, seersucker suit, bright yellow Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, and a solid, royal blue tie. In his lapel he sported a yellow carnation, paler than his shirt, but definitely a considered part of his sartorial ensemble.
“Meet Dylan Fouché,” Corlis announced with a faint smile as if anticipating her guests’ reaction to the flamboyant dresser.
Dylan greeted them cheerfully, “Ah... my next victims.”
He extended a long, thin arm to shake hands first with Serena and then, Nicholas. The two men exchanged a look that told Serena that Nick and Corlis’ favorite psychic may have met before through New Orleans’s gay network.
“The Antonelli siblings, I take it?” Dylan said. “Good to see you both. Why don’t we all sit down?”
Serena tried not to stare at Dylan’s pale brown complexion, high cheekbones, mildly flared nostrils, and his generous smile that made her think of President Obama on a day when the U.S. Congress wasn’t bedeviling the poor man. The “spiritual counselor” Corlis had urged them to meet this day was undoubtedly a descendant of Free People of Color that had once made up some forty percent of all blacks in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Light-skinned descendants of slave mothers and white, plantation-owning fathers had often received excellent educations—sometimes in France—along with their all-white half-siblings, and were later emancipated when their Caucasian owners died. In the twenty-first century, men and women with Dylan’s heritage tended to make up the majority of middleclass African-Americans in this most southern of cities.
By this time, Dylan had taken a seat on the pale, green, silk-covered sofa and patted the cushion next to him, indicating that Serena should sit beside him. Nick took the chair Dylan had just vacated. Corlis selected the chaise lounge on the far side of the room.
“I don’t know what our hostess, here, has told you about me,” Dylan began with an easy smile, “but what I thought we might try to do today is talk a bit about the subject of ancestral clearing.”
“What?” Serena blurted, beating her brother’s similar response by a nanosecond.
Dylan laughed and glanced at his hostess again.
“I guess you didn’t dare tell them about this special stuff I do, did you?”
“It was hard enough to get them here as it was,” Corlis replied dryly.
“Well,” Dylan continued, focusing his attention on the visitors, “what I do with my clients isn’t all ‘woo-woo’ as Corlis likes to call it, but can involve a fairly new field in science. DNA researchers are the ones who have formulated this new view of the building blocks of life. It’s the field of ‘epi-genetics,’ along with what’s now labeled ‘epi-genomes’—-substances that can attach to the genes and change them.”
“Epi-what?” Nick repeated.
“Epigenetics. ‘Epi’ is Greek for ‘above,’ as in “above the genes.’ Kinda like a light switch, turning a bulb on and off. Have any of you heard about the work of John Newton?”
Nick and Serena nodded in the negative.
“Well, John Newton is a spiritual teacher who coined the term ‘ancestral clearing.’ And then there’s stem cell biologist, Dr. Bruce Lipton, who started out at the National Institutes of Health and then went to Stanford and now he’s—”
“Hold on, there,” interrupted Nick. “I don’t see what Lipton or the other guy you mentioned, or what you are saying about DNA and ancestral clearing—whatever that is—has to do with anything that brought us here.”
“Well, Dr. Lipton was one of the first to study under a microscope how DNA can be altered, and—”
“I thought DNA determined everything about a person, period,” Serena interjected.
“That’s what we all thought until about a decade or so ago,” Dylan nodded. “Now, this isn’t something I’m just making up! You can read about it on the government’s NIH site. There’s a great monograph on the relevance of Epigenetics to PTSD by a Dr. Rachel Yehuda. It basically talks about environmental influences—physical and emotional, like experiencing Katrina—alterin
g the way the genes express themselves.”
“Wow,” breathed Serena. “That’s pretty amazing to hear. The storm altered our genetic make-up somehow?”
“And, wouldn’t you agree that most of us who went through the hurricane and its aftermath have been affected to greater or milder degrees by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, yes?”
“Well... I don’t know about that,” Nick replied quickly.
“I wasn’t even here for the storm,” Serena chimed in.
“But you were here within the first year afterward, am I right? You went through some of the awful stuff that followed trying to put this city back together again?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, there’s a connection. Just hear me out.”
Serena and Nick exchanged looks and then nodded their agreement to listen to what Dylan had to say.
“There are scientists like Bruce Lipton who now believe that—in addition to the strands of DNA we’re born with—the matter surrounding DNA within the cell also plays a role in what happens during our lifetimes to our minds and bodies.”
“Gosh, really?” Nick said, sounding intrigued.
Dylan nodded eagerly. “State-of-the-art thinking currently is that we’re not only the sum total of our genetic make-up at birth, but that those genes can be changed after we’re born... altered in various ways, and to varying degrees, by stress.”
“Stress gets blamed for just about everything, these days,” Serena retorted skeptically.
“Well,” drawled Dylan, “we know that accumulated stress... in other words, the sum total of many things that have happened in our lives—positive and negative—have produced chemical reactions in our bodies. Say, a happy marriage. Or a bitter divorce... or a death. Maybe even a hurricane,” he added with causal emphasis. “Changes in body chemistry that, in turn, may actually alter a person’s genes in specific ways.”
“You mean body chemicals like adrenaline when a person nearly has a car accident, or that serotonin stuff, when somebody wins a marathon?” Nick asked, his interest obviously piqued by such a theory. “You and this Lipton character are saying that those hormones, or whatever they are, can put a notch on a gene or chromosome somehow and it acts differently after that happens?”
“You’re pretty close, there!” Dylan complimented him. To Serena he explained, “I’m sure you both have heard about the fight-or-flight response when a person is threatened by a tiger in the jungle, right?”
Serena nodded with a shrug.
“Well, now there are crazy folks like me who believe that the terror and adrenaline that might have scared your ancestor in the jungle could have changed his or her given set of DNA. Then—as altered—that set of DNA could be handed down through the family line to... say... someone like you two.”
“You mean past traumas could change the next person’s DNA?” Serena asked incredulously. “How?”
“Good question,” Dylan said with an admiring nod. “Traumas as distant as an ancestor fighting in the Civil War or in Vietnam or being locked up in a concentration camp in World War II, for instance, could have prompted that fight-or-flight response which, in turn, produces chemicals in the body like adrenaline and cortisol—which are known as stress hormones. Are you with me so far?” he asked parenthetically.
His listeners both nodded, giving him their rapt attention, now.
“These chemicals surrounding the DNA in the cells contain proteins—those epigenes I mentioned before. Remember, now that the Greek epi means the word ‘above.’ So epigenes are substances above and beyond the genes that attach to the DNA, thereby changing or mutating a gene that is subsequently handed down to the next generation in its altered form.”
“Holy Mother!” Nick said on a low breath. “That’s a terrifying thought.”
“Exactly,” Dylan agreed with enthusiasm. “Traumas like Katrina that happened in our lives, along with the traumas that may have occurred in the lives of our forebears, can, we now think, imprint themselves on DNA and change it—and then can be inherited by those born after us, just like my kinky hair got handed down to me, or Serena’s dark brown eyes to her.”
“Wow,” breathed Serena. “It sounds like you’re saying that not only might we be trying to cope with the aftermath of what happened during Katrina—but we might also be wrestling with terrible things that occurred in our family line, way back when—and not even know it?”
“And probably piling on to make everything seem even worse,” Nick added glumly.
“That’s the idea,” Dylan replied. “PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—may reach farther back than merely one bad thing, like the aftermath of Katrina, for those who experienced it. Family traumas from the past might actually exacerbate a trauma like a hurricane or being in a war zone for some folks.”
Serena pointed her index finger at Dylan, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“So are you saying that for some people, PTSD may affect them worse than others because of an accumulated amount of stress, past and present, affecting their DNA?”
Dylan nodded, adding, “In some cases, I happen to think it could.”
“How depressing is that?” Nick exclaimed.
“But not all cases, mind you,” Dylan cautioned. “There’s the unknown factor of resiliency. Some of us have it and some don’t and we don’t really know why that is.”
“Like with Mama,” Serena murmured, adding, “though how can anyone truly recover from the loss of all those family members at once?”
“Ah, but what if there’s an antidote to some of these stress hormones, or a way of better coping with the PTSD that often accompanies them?” Dylan suggested.
Serena and Nick both shot him looks of incredulity.
“A magic psychic bullet?” Nick scoffed.
“Nah. Something that’s been practiced by certain extraordinary people over the centuries.”
“Who? When?” Serena demanded curiously.
“Oh, folks like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi... Christ. These folks mastered the art of forgiveness,” Dylan said quietly. “And before you two charge out of the room, let me tell you what I mean.”
CHAPTER 24
“Forgiveness?” Serena repeated, incensed. “That’s you’re idea of an antidote? I don’t think that’s quite applicable in this case,” she added with frosty reserve, recalling silently how Corlis had proposed the preposterous idea that Jacques Durand wanted to meet in person to ask for her forgiveness for the unforgiveable.
For his part, Nick’s expression had grown thoughtful. He turned to Serena and said, “Remember when Pope John Paul the Second met with the man who’d attempted to assassinate him? The pope came to see the guy in his prison cell and said he forgave him. I could never understand that, but it was pretty amazing.”
“And do you remember,” Dylan interjected, “that the prisoner was eventually pardoned and thirty-three years later, he arrived at the Vatican to put roses on the pope’s tomb when he died?”
“I’d forgotten that...” murmured Serena.
Dylan said, “Science has proven in the lab, now, that a feeling of true forgiveness—as well as practices like meditation—can produce certain physiological reactions in the human body, reactions that can prompt different behavior in humans than what went before.”
Nicholas and Serena both still looked unconvinced.
“So that’s what you’re asking us to do?” said Nick. “Forgive a man like Jacques Durand who knowingly put his signature on a plan to build a canal whose walls weren’t engineered to be as strong as the experts said they should be? Forgiveness is gonna trigger some magic hormones in me and my mama’s body that’ll make things all better?”
“Not all better, but it might improve the terrible situation you’re facing right now,” Dylan replied with a faint shrug.
Serena stood up and began pacing in front of one of the two fireplaces.
“And just how do you suggest I forgive his nephew, Jack, a man I thou
ght I trusted completely... a man I even thought I might spend the rest of my life with, who didn’t tell me he was writing a story about his own uncle whose actions directly resulted in the death of our brother!”
Serena not only saw but also felt Dylan’s look of deep compassion, but even it couldn’t stem the flood of anger that washed over her for the hundredth time. Fouché might be able to forgive certain things in his life, but he hadn’t suffered a loss on a scale like that of her family.
“Granted that forgiveness at first seems impossible,” Dylan agreed, “but try to think of times when you hurt someone... maybe not as badly as you feel hurt by Jack or his uncle. But remember the situations where you behaved in such a way you knew to be wrong or unethical, but you never owned up to it publicly because you never got caught?”
Serena was struck by a sudden vision of Marco Leone’s wife at the moment she’d realized her husband had died in Serena’s arms. The older woman had immediately begun asking questions of the staff about her husband’s relationship with the costume designer. Serena was chagrined to admit to herself that all her friends in the cast lied for her—except one person.
Dylan, as if he were reading Serena’s mind, asked hypothetically, “Wouldn’t you have felt so much better if the injured party said he or she honestly forgave you your transgression and allowed you to pass out of the prison of your own guilt?”
Serena turned her back on Dylan and her brother, fighting off an avalanche of recriminations about the way Marco’s wife eventually discovered that the father of her children had been living for two years with a woman a third his age in his Las Vegas condo. A disaffected seamstress on Serena’s staff had asked to speak to Marco’s wife privately, and—bam! Mrs. Leone had suddenly barged through the door of Marco’s home while Serena was in the act of packing her bag to leave town.
Mrs. Leone had said dreadful and totally accurate things to Serena that day. Ever since, she’d tried to justify her illicit affair with a married man by pointing to Marco and his wife’s dysfunctional relationship and the fact she and her children had not been living in the same city as Marco for years. But if Serena were truly honest with herself, she realized with a flash of insight, she’d hurt the Leone family, no matter how much she’d denied it to herself all this time.