The River Queen

by Mary Morris

  When Greg is done, he puts down his beer. The fan whirs. The hot, muggy weather tells us that another storm is near.

  37

  EVEN T. S. Eliot, that most serious of American poets whom everyone seems to forget was from St. Louis, perhaps because of his British accent, writes, “I don’t know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong, brown god, sullen, untamed, and intractable.” Eliot is also known to have said, “The sea is around us, but the river is in us.”

  This may have been the case in Eliot’s time, but I have a friend who grew up in St. Louis who tells me he never thought about the river. He also says it’s the worst town in America. He has told me that his sister, who is rich and lives in the suburbs, has contracts with her servants so that they will never reveal where she lives. This is considered a crime deterrent in the affluent outskirts of the city.

  St. Louis native Jonathan Franzen seems to share my friend’s view, at least in his novel The Twenty-Seventh City. It is the story of a police chief whose ostensible agenda is the revival of St. Louis (once ranked the nation’s fourth city and now its twenty-seventh) through the reunification of its depressed inner city and affluent suburbs. I’m going to spend the weekend in St. Louis to see for myself and Tom and Jerry are going to stay at Woodland Marina on the boat. Our plan is to meet up Sunday morning at the airport and we’ll be on our way.

  At 4:45 in the morning, Glen, Greg’s twin, comes knocking on our houseboat. I’d set an alarm, but managed to sleep through it. All of a sudden there’s rumbling. Tom topside is shouting for me to get up. I’m scrambling for my clothes and knapsack. But Glen is waiting patiently on deck. He is in a hurry to get to work, but he tells me not to rush.

  In his car we go hurtling in silence through St. Charles County. The sky is beginning to turn pale in the east. Staring straight ahead I ask Glen, “So, you and your brother are river pilots, right?”

  “That’s right,” Glen says. “We are both licensed to drive one-hundred-ton vessels.”

  “Boy, that’s amazing. And you’re identical twins and you live together in a houseboat.”

  “Just worked out that way,” Glen says.

  Clearly Glen is not a man of many words. On the other hand it is only five in the morning as we drive past dim-lit fields and the suburban outskirts of St. Louis and he drops me off. I walk from the street, carrying my own bag, despite the doorman’s efforts to grab it, into the glorious lobby of the Hyatt Regency St. Louis, located in the old Union Station. In 1894 St. Louis Union Station opened and it was the largest, most beautiful terminal in the United States. And in my opinion it still is.

  I enter the Grand Hall with its gold leaf, Romanesque arches, sixty-five-foot, barrel-vaulted ceiling, and magnificent stained-glass windows. Its “Allegorical Window” shows mythological figures representing New York to the east and San Francisco to the west and in the middle, St. Louis. I find that my room is, surprisingly, ready. I shower right away, which has become my life’s great luxury, then head to the dining room. I’m sitting down to breakfast when my cell phone rings. It’s on a default ringer and plays a loud, annoying tune. After I chat briefly with my husband, my waitress comes by to ask me about my phone. I think she’s going to tell me to put it on silent. Instead she whips out her own. “Just listen to this,” she says as she shares her ring tone with me. It’s a cat going “meow meow.” “I downloaded it off the Purina Web site. You can download just about anything,” she says.

  After breakfast I’m ready to explore the town. In front of my hotel four huge guys wait for the valet to bring their car around. Their vehicle arrives with a giant barbecue smoker attached to the back. A man wearing a T-shirt that reads EXPERIENCE THE RELIGION OF GOD waits for a cab. I decide to walk to the Jefferson Memorial and on to a gentrified neighborhood along the river known as The Landing. Cars pass with bumper stickers that read MY BLOOD IS BLUE, a reference I’ll later learn is to the St. Louis Blues. I pause to pay my respects at Busch Stadium, which is soon to see the wrecker’s ball. In the stadium shop a sale of Cardinals memorabilia is on in full force. I pick up a few souvenirs for Jerry and Tom.

  Then I pop across the street into the International Bowling Hall of Fame, where I learn that bowling was originally a pagan ritual, performed with human skulls and bones for pins, usually the remains of one’s enemies. There were other aspects of this cheery history. Pictures of devils bowling. Judges who executed the innocent were said to spend eternity bowling with their victims’ heads.

  There’s free bowling here, so I get a pair of shoes and bowl four frames. Continuing my walk east, ahead of me the Gateway Arch looms and behind it is the river. I pass a park where a wedding party stands in a giant flowing fountain that acts like a waterfall. The bridesmaids wear cranberry red and matching flip-flops. The groom and groomsmen are bedecked in red St. Louis Cardinals caps and clutch beer cans. A crying flower girl clings to one of their arms. The bride in white flip-flops is perched precariously in the center of the flowing fountain, trying not to fall.

  Across the plaza a hundred couples are moving in identical steps. The teacher with a bullhorn tries to explain the complicated move, which the crowd attempts to follow. I’m sure it’s a swing dance class, but I can’t hear the music. It’s odd to see a hundred people moving when there’s no beat.

  I wish I could find a place for a cup of coffee, but for blocks and blocks there’s nothing but government buildings, some of which have been abandoned. There are no little shops, no takeout, nothing but a long path of hard pavement as I walk the long stretch to the arch. I come to the steel Gateway Arch, which was built as a welcome gate to the West. Behind it the river chugs, slow-moving, turgid, and, as T. S. Eliot noted, brown.

  Early that evening I head over to the Delmar Loop. In the cab ride, I see how the inner city itself is decimated. There’s no life here—no shops, no cafés. And the neighborhoods seem divided between white and black, rich and poor. I recall my friend who comes from St. Louis and wonder if he doesn’t have a point.

  On the Walk of Fame I locate Miles Davis’s star at 6314 Delmar and pay my respects. Then I go to check out Chuck Berry’s place, Blueberry Hill, named after the great Fats Domino number (and again my thoughts take me to New Orleans, a place I now know for sure I’m not going to get to on this trip). I’m told I might get a glimpse of Chuck Berry himself, but what I find is a sawdust joint, filled with Elvis dolls, album covers, old jukeboxes, dead animals, and bar food.

  After a beer at Blueberry Hill, I pause on the street to listen to a brass band, all black boys, playing a pretty good street rendition of “I Got a Woman.” Then I go for dinner at a place called Brandt’s. A very large and very good blues singer, dressed entirely in orange, named Kim Massie, is belting out songs in a gospel voice. I take a table near the front and order a salad. Kim Massie’s got her eyes closed and she’s singing about how she’s leaving on that midnight train to Georgia. “I’d rather stay in his world than be without him in mine,” she croons and her accompanist hums along with her.

  Someone passes her a note and she switches to “Happy Birthday.” The woman sitting beside me covers her face and turns to two young women who I determine are her daughters, “I told you not to…” Kim Massie starts riffing on “Happy Birthday” and turns it into a kind of old Ella Fitzgerald number and tears fill my eyes.

  Tomorrow is my father’s 103rd birthday. I’ve been wanting not to “go there,” to push this thought away. I had already planned his party. I’d made out a guest list. I thought he’d make it. I thought he’d just go on and on. And now I’m sitting alone in a restaurant, listening to a blues singer croon “Happy Birthday” to a woman I don’t know.

  A couple of years before he died, I asked my father to drive around Chicago and show me all the places he remembered and where he’d lived. He was at the wheel, something that scared me as he was almost a hundred years old. A few weeks later he would turn on to four lanes of oncoming traffic on the Outer Drive and stop driving forever. But o
n that day he took me to all his old haunts. We rode to see an old limestone building on the West Side, where they’d lived in a cold-water flat. We drove down to 47th Street and the old Bronzeville district of the South Side, where the music was. Then we went to another neighborhood and pulled up in front of a house.

  My father got out of the car and stared at the tidy brick building with a front porch. An elderly black woman with graying hair sat on the front stoop. Around her, small children, grandchildren I assumed, were playing. As we stood in front of her house, she eyed us suspiciously. I don’t blame her. We were the only white people on this block of well-appointed row houses. Her gaze turned to anger. “May I help you?” she asked, her voice thick with irony and a tinge of fear.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said, “I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just that I used to live here and I’m showing my daughter around.”

  Now she was very suspicious. She didn’t believe a word of it. “Well, we’ve been here since ’49.”

  “Oh, no, I lived here long before that,” he said. “We were here in 1907.”

  “1907?” she shrieked, a stunned look in her eyes. “What are you?” she asked. “A ghost?”

  My father laughed. “No,” he said, “I’m just a very old man.”

  On his eightieth birthday my father called me and wept into the phone. “I had a dream last night,” he said. “I dreamed about the night before we moved to Nashville and I went to stay with my aunt and uncle. She was very fat and he was very skinny and I slept between them with a big comforter over my head. All night I thought I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t have been more than five years old when we were moved to Nashville. I’m eighty years old,” he told me, “and I remember that night as if it were yesterday. My whole life lives inside of me.”

  * * *

  It is late as I hop a cab to take me over to the Soulard district, a restored neighborhood of back porches and red brick houses and alleyways. It has a distinctly New Orleans feel. A pair of extraordinary transvestites in blond wigs and four-inch heels pass me. I follow them and stumble into, then out of, a gay bar.

  I am roaming when a man staggers up to me out of the shadows. He starts talking for no reason. He is a small, slight man. Not particularly old. He’s talking about a place I’ve never heard of called Bay St. Louis and I think it’s somewhere in this town. “No,” he says, “Bay St. Louis. It’s in Mississippi. Right on the water. Prettiest town you ever saw. I was a chef there for ten years. But now it’s all gone.”

  He tells me he left before Katrina hit and went to Florida, and now Bay St. Louis where he lived and had all his friends is no more. “I got my cat and my dog with me. That’s what matters. I got out. My cat and my dog, they’re with me here. I come up here and my brother helped me get two jobs. I was doing all right, but now with this new storm coming…” His voice trails off.

  “You mean Rita.”

  “You know, it’s like a flashback. It’s like it’s happening all over again. I had these friends down in Bay St. Louis. This old guy who fishes. He’s never lived anywhere else. That’s the kind of people who are my friends. But he’s gone. Or I don’t know what happened to him. It’s just happening all over again. But I got my cat and my dog. And my brother got me two jobs.”

  “Have you talked to anyone about this?” I ask him. “Maybe you need some help?”

  “Maybe,” he says as he staggers back into the shadows as quickly as he’d come.

  In the morning I head to the airport to meet Tom and Jerry, who are going to pick me up and take me back up north to the boat. I am hungry but there is only fast food. I can’t get a drink that doesn’t have sugar. I get a coffee and a breakfast muffin. Over the loudspeaker comes a call to prayer in the chapel near the Food Court.

  As we drive in the car back in Portage Des Sioux, Tom is gleeful. “Hey, Mary,” Tom says, “we did a big shop for you yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah, what’d you get?”

  “Let’s see: We got four cases of diet Dew, diet Coke, beer, some frozen pizzas, sliced meats, candy bars, chips, a hunk of cheese, and a four-bean salad.” He pauses, obviously proud of himself. “All the healthy stuff is for you.” I’m actually not sure what the healthy stuff is, but I’m assuming it’s the cheese and the bean salad.

  38

  WE ARE caught in a great gauzy storm, the remnants of Hurricane Rita. A drenching soup. We have to batten down the hatches. Take everything off the deck that we don’t want to get soaked. Back at the marina Greg gave us an electric fan to keep the bugs off and I say to Tom, “Maybe we should put the fan away.” Disgruntled, Tom drags it off, I assume to stow it below. As we depart in a driving rain, Tom moves all his bedding and the new air mattress he picked up while I was in St. Louis and dumps them in the middle of the cabin on the floor.

  It’s tight quarters already, but I try not to complain. Here, this is just another storm. After all, thousands have had to evacuate in the South. But everything is wet. We are trapped inside the cabin. And there appears to be some cause for concern. “I’m not finding the buoys, Sir,” Tom says.

  “Just keep her straight,” Jerry replies as they scan the water. I’m searching for buoys as well. The two of them are chattering away about engines and about some boat ride they took three years ago on Lake Superior and who knows what else. The river is surprisingly choppy and for the first time I feel woozy. Everything around us is gray—the river, the sky, the air—all a misty impenetrable gray. Samantha Jean, wet and neglected, shivers under several bomber jackets at the helm. Sitting beside her, I hesitantly stroke her fur.

  At Grafton we pass the mouth of the Illinois River. I know we are gliding beneath the rocks on the eastern shore, but in the fog I can see nothing. In LaSalle and the Discovery of the Great West Francis Parkman wrote that these rocks were once “cut into fantastic forms by the elements” and were marked as “The Ruined Castles” on some of the early French maps. Somewhere along these cliffs, Marquette and Joliet spotted the sight that reminded them that “the Devil was still lord paramount of this wilderness.”

  Looming above, Parkman tells us, was an image painted in red, black, and green on the flat face of a high rock. Marquette saw “a pair of monsters, each as large as a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger, and a frightful expression of countenance. The face is something like that of a man, the body covered with scales and the tail so long that it passes entirely around the body, over the head and between the legs, ending like that of a fish.” This demon, etched by the native people, served as a warning to those who dared to venture on.

  At Mile 212, just past the confluence, instead of the face of the devil, a huge white statue appears from behind the curtain of rain and fog. It seems as if she is rising out of the depths itself. Our Lady of the River stands fifty feet over the banks on a seventeen-foot pedestal. Built in 1951 in gratitude after a great flood, the Madonna blesses and protects travelers. She seems eerily real against the opaque sky, dominating the river and showing the culmination of Marquette’s vision. Now it is the Christian God instead of the pagan that rules here.

  We keep searching for buoys but the visibility is low. Tom is at the wheel, shaking his head. He eyes our captain for guidance. “I’m looking,” Jerry says.

  “I’m looking at a pile of rocks, Sir,” Tom replies. At river marker 193.5 at Chain of Rocks Canal, we have almost no visibility. “I’m not going to get lost, am I, Sir?”

  Jerry, using his binoculars, says back to him, “It looks like it’s a straight line. Just steer her ahead.” He pauses to pat Samantha Jean on the head. “Samantha is the biggest dog of her size I’ve ever seen,” he says by way of senseless non sequitur, then gazes back at the river. He stares down at the Army Corps of Engineers maps, trying to get our location, and realizes I’ve already flipped the page. “Violation,” he says, “but not punishable.”

  Tom checks the instrument panels. “We’re going nine point eight, Sir, but it feels as if we’re going a lot slower.
”

  Jerry nods. “We are. We’re about one point five miles per hour slower. We don’t have the power of the river behind us here in Chain of Rocks. This is a man-made cutoff. I was trying to make Hoppie’s last January with Captain Greg. We had a 150-foot ship made by SkipperLiner in La Crosse. We had to break ice to go. The Majestic.… Rode her from La Crosse to Florida and up to Montauk. Almost did the Great Loop, but not quite.” The Great Loop is a trip through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, up the Atlantic Coast, back to the St. Lawrence, returning to the place where you began. Many people we met on the river would be making this journey.

  I’m staring out at the grayness and the rain. Then I start to tell them about the man who talked to me last night in the Soulard district. How he’d been in Katrina and now in Rita. “I told him he should get some help.”

  “He should get a boat,” Tom says. “If you’ve been in two hurricanes like that, you need a boat. What did God say to Noah? How long can you tread water?” Tom chortles to himself, then pauses. “Oh-oh, something’s coming my way. Barge ahead.”

  I look out at the gray water, the obscure horizon. “How can you see that?”

  “I can just feel it coming. Sometimes you can see something better by not looking at it.”