City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  He loved living in the Lower Ninth Ward. Its rhythm was his rhythm, despite the danger, the violence. It was their place; it belonged to the people in the Ninth Ward and they knew it and they managed as they could, and they were proud to have made lives there. No one had ever promised them, of all people, that life was going to be easy or without daily struggle, and there, at least, they took pride that it was their own struggle. And, unlike in some other parts of town, there weren’t a lot of people from outside coming through to bother them. SJ had built part of it, just like his father and grandfather, and it had made him who and what he was, and it had made his parents and almost everyone he knew.

  People elsewhere didn’t understand it. He had family in Texas, just outside Houston, whom he liked visiting; they lived in a subdivision where only half the lots had been developed, and the lawns were struggling where they even existed, but each house had some land around it, even beyond the large yard, and his cousin Aaron was able to keep goats and chickens and they had a horse to ride, too. They always barbecued outside when SJ visited, sitting around in the dusty evening, often with Mexican accordion music floating across from a few houses away. Nobody bothered anybody.

  “Look here,” Aaron would say to SJ, “why you want to go back up in there and worry about you gonna get shot some night?”

  “Why am I going to get shot?” SJ replied, sipping at his one beer and enjoying the breeze on his face.

  “They don’t have to even mean to shoot you,” Aaron’s wife, Dot, said.

  “They don’t have to mean it,” Aaron repeated. “That’s right. Get hit with a stray shot. You move out here get you two or three acres, ain’t nobody bother you. Get that boy out of that bad, too.”

  Wesley was their best argument, SJ knew, no doubt. But it wasn’t just Wesley; it wasn’t that simple. He would have to move Lucy, too, and then what would happen with Daddy’s house, and Lucy’s house, and his own house—the shelves and the cabinets and wainscoting and molding and trim, the wide pine floors? And the workshop out back that he had worked on for two years, all the wiring he had laid in…People who didn’t build things themselves thought everything was interchangeable. But you didn’t just get up and leave the place you had fought to build.

  “It’s not the same thing,” SJ said.

  “Why it’s not?”

  “If they told you you could live in China and have a big house and a big yard and pay less money, would you do it?”

  “They got plasma TV?”

  They laughed about it, but that was more or less the signal to drop the subject until the next visit, and their talk turned to the NCAA finals. Aaron’s own son went to Grambling and had been to New Orleans twice for the Bayou Classic, and the stories that got back to Aaron had confirmed his sense of New Orleans as a place for freaks, period.

  Finished outside, now, SJ locked up the truck and the van and walked up the three steps into his wood-frame house, a shotgun double that he had altered into a single-family arrangement. The rooms were small and the ceilings low, but everything had been done well, not like some of the cheap work he had seen out in the East, or the careless renovations he saw Uptown, where the landlords milked all that Tulane student rent money out of their decaying housing stock. Six years ago, after Rosetta died, he had put a camelback upstairs on it—two rooms you reached by a stair that went up from the side of the living room, and he slept in the left-hand one. You didn’t have to worry about building variances so much in the Lower Nine since they weren’t too serious about checking, and even if they did it was an inexpensive proposition to cut through any red tape—and it was a roomy, good house. Often Lucy stayed over in Camille’s old bedroom, downstairs on the left side. It was just as Camille had left it; she had stayed there on visits home from NC State.

  He walked inside, ready for a shower, and in the living room he found Lucy, sitting on the couch, asleep. His older sister, Lucy, with her head down, chin on her collarbone, snoring, her black T-shirt riding up on her stomach and her pants unbuttoned, and they had slid open enough so that over her drawers he could see the top of the scar from the Charity Hospital C-section that had brought Wesley into the world. Her pincurls were plastered down on her forehead and the sides of her head like the swirls in a rum cake. Her skin was dark and dry and in places almost blue-black, the color of gun metal. She had diabetes she didn’t take care of, and she had heart trouble and she drank too much and she had been an on-again, off-again user of combustible cocaine products. And in fact the nice white social worker lady had questioned in strong terms whether Wesley might not be better off placed in foster care, but the fact was, above all else, that Lucy truly loved Wesley and the boy knew it and it was the closest, most stable relationship in his life. SJ loved Lucy, too; almost everybody did. She could get drunk and act foolish, but it came out of a generosity of spirit.

  SJ took a long look at her, sleeping there, her head resting against her collarbone. Then he bent down and touched her gently and said, “Wake up. Wake up, sister. Let’s eat something.”

  2

  Craig Donaldson finished a cup of lemon ice, which he had carried across Carrollton Avenue from Brocato’s to the Gumbo offices in the midday heat, and he was just about to call the music editor to check some last-minute changes when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, checked the number first—it was Alice—and flipped it open, saying “yeah” in his cut-through-the-preliminaries voice. An intern passed and looked at him questioningly; Craig held up one finger and turned slightly away.

  Alice was upset, and it took a moment for her to quiet down; when she did it turned out that their daughter Annie had gotten called into the principal’s office, in this first week of school, for using a bad word.

  “Craig, is it too much to ask that my seven-year-old daughter grow up without calling people ‘motherfuckers’ and dancing like a hooker?”

  “Alice,” Craig began, trying to suppress the adrenaline rush of annoyance he invariably experienced when he heard this sound in Alice’s voice, “our daughter is not ‘growing up calling people “motherfuckers.” ’” She picked up something bad and we’ll talk to her and explain to her why it’s bad. This isn’t the end of the world. We can deal with this. Where are you now?”

  “I’m at Boucher, sitting on a bench.”

  “Do you need me to come there?”

  Pause. “No.” Then, “Craig, I need you to take this situation seriously and not just blow it off…”

  “I’m not blowing it off. I’m just saying that I don’t think this is some insurmountable thing. This is what parents deal with…”

  “Oh…right…”

  Breathing through his nose, he went on, “…and also we’re closing the issue and I’m about to go into a meeting so I’m a little stressed. If you need me to come there, I will. If you don’t need me there I’ll talk to Annie when I get home, and our daughter, who is very smart and a good person, will understand. And I—we—will talk to her for as long as it takes for her to understand.”

  “Fine,” Alice said, and the connection ended.

  Craig flipped his phone shut, stepped into his office, closed the door and sat down at his desk to let his heart slow a little. The cell phone rang again almost immediately. This was a pattern; without looking, he flipped it open and said, “Alice…”

  “Don’t forget to pick up the cake at Gambino’s.”

  Craig searched his memory…

  “For Malcolm’s party tomorrow…?” Alice said.

  Right, Craig thought. Of course. “I’m on it. Thanks for the reminder.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. She was quiet for a moment. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  After he closed the phone he felt an immediate easing of his heart rate. He hated arguing with Alice. Even before they had to deal with the “Is-New-Orleans-The-Best-Place-To-Raise-Our-Children?” argument—for that matter even before they moved to New Orleans from Ann Arbor and had nothing worse to
worry about than what kind of olive oil to buy at Zingerman’s—when they differed on certain issues they became not just strangers but enemies. For the duration of the argument, she hated him in an impersonal way, as if he represented all the forces of entropy in the world. And he knew to his shame that for those minutes when they were in the middle of it and couldn’t find their way out, he hated her, too. And he hated hating her. The couples therapist had helped some. They probably owed her a debt for that final “I love you,” for example.

  It was strange to him that the things she seemed to get such a kick out of when they were still in graduate school in Michigan—his enthusiasm for New Orleans music, his acquaintance with all the secret handshakes and lore and iconography of the city’s labyrinthine culture, gained during his many visits, and the way that on their trips there he could lead her through what seemed a glorious and dangerous underworld full of music and food and sex—became the things about him that seemed most threatening to her and, of course, to their children.

  His office was a shrine to all that lore and iconography. Behind his desk chair hung a framed 8-x-10 photo of Fats Domino, signed to Craig by the Fat Man himself. The walls were festooned with ancient album covers, photos, posters for club appearances by New Orleans rhythm and blues legends, an old 78 record on the King Zulu label, menus from favorite neighborhood restaurants, the jacket of a 10-inch Woody Guthrie LP on Folkways, which was a souvenir of his old folky days in Ann Arbor, and a photo of Craig with the pianist and singer Dr. John, taken backstage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival the year after they moved to town. Nobody had ever had more of a crush on New Orleans than Craig Donaldson, and in these last years he had lived it out to the hilt. As the editor of Gumbo, he knew everything that was going on in the city; he was invited to everything and he knew everybody. The only problem was that Alice didn’t like it there anymore.

  Partly it had to do with her difficulty in finding her own identity in the city. It was, after all, Craig’s place; it had been his before they moved there, and ever since he had bounced from doing little music reviews for magazines and occasional stringer work for the Associated Press to being the editor of Gumbo, she had come to feel, on bad days, like a caboose on his train. She missed painting and teaching, although she and Craig had agreed that she would spend these years as a full-time mother. But partly, Craig realized with increasing gloom, her restlessness had to do with facts about the city with which it was difficult to argue. Friends had been robbed at knifepoint; others had had their houses burglarized or cars stolen or vandalized; there was fear involved in walking the streets at night even in their quiet neighborhood, the public schools were overwhelmingly lousy, the infrastructure was decaying…The things that in some lights contributed to the city’s charm of Otherness had changed their nature, for Alice at least, when at some unremarked-upon but irreversible point they had stopped being Other. Craig had come as close to going native as an outsider could get in nine years of living there, or so he thought. Alice, on the other hand, clung to her Otherness as if her life depended on it.

  Craig’s desk phone rang; it was Scott, who was putting together the literary supplement. Shyla Bruno was doing a review of Philip Roth’s newest book, and Craig said, “You going with ‘Goodbye, Portnoy’ for the head?”

  “No—listen to this—Allen came up with ‘The Gripes of Roth.’”

  Craig waited a moment and then issued one of his patented, arch, stagey chuckles. “Bingo,” he said.

  “You want to go with that?”

  “We’re there.”

  That evening Craig pulled their 1999 Toyota up in front of their house on Cypress Street under the big oak tree Craig loved. Their house was nestled in a small neighborhood tucked between Carrollton Avenue and Broadway all the way uptown, just past the Tulane campus and Audubon Park, the opposite end of the city from the French Quarter, a leafy suburb where the old families used to go in the summer to escape the heat and pestilence of downtown.

  Their block was shaded by ancient oak trees whose roots buckled the sidewalks in front of charming, unassuming houses occupied by a mix of working people, lawyers, musicians, and teachers. Largely because of Boucher School, one of the few really good public schools in the city, the area was popular with families, black and white, generally upper middle class, who stayed involved in the school. Maple Street, with its shops and its bookstore and its little restaurants and shoe repair and dry cleaners, was five blocks away, an easy walk on a nice day. Oak Street, more rough and tumble but with the same mix of services uptown of Carrollton, would take you out to the Mississippi River levee over the railroad tracks, and along the River Road into Jefferson Parish toward the far reaches of Airline Highway and Jefferson Highway, with their seedy hotels and flea markets.

  Craig pulled the round, heavy, caramel-iced doberge cake for Malcolm out of the backseat and brought it surreptitiously to their next-door neighbors’ for safe keeping until Malcolm’s birthday party the next night. When Craig arrived home Alice was preparing dinner, Malcolm was in his booster chair, squirming, and Annie was playing by herself in the dining room. He experienced the small but distinct sense of vertigo that would occasionally visit him on viewing the Evening Tableau as he walked in, the feeling that he had stepped into a television show written by someone else after being awakened from a deep sleep and with no time for rehearsal. The feeling always burned off quickly, especially when he got to spend time alone with Annie. Alice turned to face Craig as he approached to give her a hug. He said, “I’m sorry for earlier.”

  Her mouth tightened involuntarily for a second, then her expression eased and she said, “Me too.”

  Relieved, Craig said, “I’ll go talk to Annie.” Alice nodded and turned back to the stove.

  For Craig, his daughter was everything good in the world, a summary of all tenderness and vulnerability. Malcolm was an alien to him much of the time, a small organic robot of pure animus that could have come from Alpha Centauri for all Craig saw himself in him. But in Annie he saw his own self as a child—lonely, creative, his parents headed for divorce. She was interested in things, and she loved New Orleans. He took her out to parades way back in the neighborhoods; he wanted her to feel comfortable around all kinds of people, in all kinds of environments. He wanted her to grow up loving life, and especially this city, to embrace, and not fear, its peculiar riches.

  And yet he saw a sadness in her that seemed somehow to have been passed down genetically, a melancholy as characteristic of him as his hair color or his chin, a kind of habitual mourning that the world could never live up to its best moments. And yet also such a willingness to meet the world halfway, such ability to pass the time with deep concentration, those dark rings under her eyes, which broke his heart. Fragile, almost translucent skin—she had been slightly premature. On the rare occasions when she needed to be reprimanded she would be hurt for days if she thought the scolding unjust. Alice tended to be short with her, and impatient, and Craig was Mr. Fun, or he tried to be. Sometimes it seemed to Craig that Annie was a prisoner in childhood, serving out her sentence as patiently as she could, but her incarceration would scar her for life. In any case he approached the prospect of disciplining her carefully, trying not to track the mud of any other set of issues into the conversation. He especially did not want to hand down to Annie the legacy of a broken home life.

  Craig went to where she was making something with construction paper at the dining room table. Her involvement was absolute. “Hey,” he said, “what’s that?”

  “It’s houses,” she said; she didn’t look up.

  “Hey, Annie. You know I love you, right?” She nodded, without looking up. “You know Mommy loves you, right?” After a moment, another nod, slighter. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” Annie shook her head no. “Annie—look at me.” Annie looked up at her father and her eyes, large under normal circumstances, were slightly magnified by a film of tears. “This is going to be fine. It is fine. We love you and we know
you are a good girl and I want to talk to you so that you know why this happened.”

  The phone had been ringing and now Alice poked her head around the corner, and said, “It’s Bobby.”

  “I’ll call him back,” Craig said, without taking his eyes off of Annie.

  “Annie,” Alice said, “let’s clean up; we need to get the table cleared off so we can set it for dinner.”

  “It’s a real bad word,” Craig said. “You don’t want to be saying things like that. And just because someone else says it doesn’t mean it’s okay. But you know that, right?”

  “I know.” She had started scooping her paper and scissors and tape and crayons off the table, everything together like a greedy poker player raking in her chips, into her plastic box.

  “Give me a hug.”

  After a moment’s delay she turned and ferociously hugged Craig around the neck. Then she let go and put the lid on her box and carried it to the corner of the living room where it belonged.

  In bed later, in her long cotton nightgown, Alice read through her catalogs. J. Crew, The Territory Ahead, Crate & Barrel, L.L. Bean, Winter Silks, J. Jill, Williams-Sonoma. It was Alice’s habit to read before they went to sleep—she couldn’t calm down otherwise, she said—and it had been a speed bump in their intimate life for years. Craig had given up arguing about it. Once he had shown her an article in one of her own women’s magazines that named reading in bed one of the top-five “stoppers” to a healthy sex life. All it did was get her mad.