Longer than one might expect or endure, as it turned out. Every night, for a full week, my mother stared stiffly and sleeplessly at the ceiling while the possum launched escape attempt after escape attempt, clawing at the aluminum and gnawing at the wood, and every night the weight of its suffering seemed to sink heavier and heavier upon her in that bed, like a deadening cloak of blame ... a guilt quilt.
Of course, to fully understand the situation, you need to know something about my mother at the time. Miss Willa Desforge was an outlandishly beautiful girl, with startling green eyes and hair as black and glistening as a newly waxed hearse, as well as a gifted painter admitted to the John McCrady Art School at the age of twelve and, at fifteen, as a special student to Sophie Newcomb College's art school. But God does not bestow that kind of beauty and talent freely, as you know or should know; His love must be paid. For my mother, the price He exacted was schizophrenia, diagnosed at sixteen following her first suicide attempt.
She'd always had delusions of grandeur (and does to this day, nevermind the indignities of Post-it notes and spoonfeeding); this is partly owing to my grandparents, who coddled their only child insufferably—their Willa was the sole survivor of three pregnancies, sandwiched between two stillborn siblings—and instilled in my mother the belief, with an alarmingly literal precision, that she was an angel Providence had conferred upon them to raise. Invisible wings, supernatural faculties, a heart bleached of sin, the whole warped works. But at sixteen she began to fear the world was tilting against her—that, grabby and envious, it longed to strip her of her wings. First she noticed greasy fingerprints on her bedsheets, too faint for others to see, but clearly, to her, the black smeary evidence that somebody or somebodies had it in for her. Cribbing from her Nancy Drew books, she dusted her room for more fingerprints, and, with openmouthed horror, discovered them everywhere: on her nightstand, inside her dresser drawers, freckling the walls, and, most disturbingly, strewn across her body. Made visible (to her) by the dusting of talcum powder, they were like bruises as seen in a photo negative: whorls of white on her legs, arms, and shoulders, and ringing her neck like a pearl choker. My grandfather dismissed her reports as the products of a young girl's imagination, inflamed by puberty and aggravated by her genius, but nevertheless had an old acquaintance from the New Orleans Police Department—Desforge père worked in the DA's office for a brief stint in his twenties—inspect the house for signs of entry. The policeman assured my mother she was safe; yet she knew otherwise.
A week later she was unable to move her fingers. The intruders, she claimed, were stealing into her room each night to tighten wood clamps on those fingers, just enough to splinter the bones with hairline cracks but not break them completely. And because she couldn't move her fingers, she couldn't paint; she stopped going to her art classes, and her after-school hours, formerly filled with long painting sessions during which my grandparents would leave her dinner outside her bedroom door, turned listless and gray. As day switched to night, she would sit at the foot of her bed and stare at her immobile hands. Soon she began speaking in something like tongues, nonsensical blather that came streaming from her mouth in emotional torrents, like impenetrable lingual salads hurled from a shooter. She decided her father was in cahoots with the intruders, along with her schoolteachers, and she refused to be alone with him in a room or to go to school. At this point my grandparents naturally should have sought medical help but they felt certain this was the dark lining of the silver cloud of genius and would pass, like a cold that broth and bedrest would cure. Then, on a weekday morning in the winter of 1950, she surrendered to the earthly conspiracy against her. She'd give them the absence they wanted. One by one, she emptied all of her oil paints into her mouth, cadmium yellow and lead white and arsenic-laced cobalt blue—a garish, self-annihilating palette squeezed down her throat.
As suicide attempts go, it was a weak one. (She'd get better at it over the years—oh, much fucking better.) My grandmother found her lying on her bedroom floor, rainbows of drool leaking from the corners of her mouth, but Willa vomited up the paint before her stomach had to be pumped. It was, I've sometimes imagined (albeit abstractly), the world's most beautiful vomit: a gastric rendition of Joseph's coat of many colors, its wild variegation and vivid chromatic streaks a pooling rebuke to the black mind that sought to swallow them. Immediately my grandparents, stricken and confused, admitted her to Tulane Hospital, where the first of her nightmare bouts of insulin coma therapy began.
She told me about it, once, back when I was hospitalized for the drinking and the prognosis looked bleak. The white floors and walls of the ICT ward, the beds and bedstands coated in white ceramic, the starched white uniforms of the nurses, the white-coated doctors who wore bowties so patients couldn't grab hold of dangling neckwear. First came the injection, followed by the salivating. So much saliva that the nurses would sop it with sponges. They would cover her with blankets to ease the chills, and restrain her with folded bedsheets when she thrashed or slipped into a grand mal seizure. And then, after a while, everything would go black, and an hour later she would awaken with a gavage tube up her nose and her sheets soiled, with no clue where she was or who she was—all she would know was that she was hungry, brutally hungry, as if all the humanity had been drained from her leaving one base animal urge. When she was released to her parents, after six weeks of this, she'd gained thirty pounds. Her smile seemed hollow but it was a smile nonetheless, and the doctors pronounced her better—not cured, but better. On the ride home from the hospital my grandparents talked about the weather until there was nothing more they could say about it and were visibly relieved to hear my mother agree that it was "nice." "Yes," said my grandmother. "It is nice, isn't it? It's nice. It's good that it's nice."
But the weather didn't stay nice and my mother had to be readmitted, for another fifty days of ICT, when she was nineteen. It was three weeks after this second round of treatment that the possum moved into the attic on Tonti Street, and roughly five weeks thereafter that Gerald Desforge, unable to endure further pleading from his daughter, called Dixie Pest Control on Airline Highway and asked that someone please please puhleeze come save the dwindling animal cornered in his attic.
Henryk Gniech was who they sent. A big dumb-looking Polack with oily corkscrewed hair and thin crinkled eyes and a 36-inch inseam and a 32-inch waist, skinny and mute as a light-pole. His English was barely serviceable. After four years in the U.S., Henryk could understand most of what he heard—except from blacks, who he was convinced spoke a different language altogether—but he found it damnably hard to form the English words in his mouth. The vowels and consonants slaughtered one another on his tongue, fell dead and mushy from his lips. "We got a possum up here that's giving my daughter conniptions," said my grandfather. "I don't know how long these critters can last but this one's not going down easy." Henryk Gniech merely nodded, trailing my grandfather up the stairs. "Between us, I figured the lack of water would've dropped the damn thing in a week or so. Not that I want a dead possum stinking up the house but my daughter has real fragile nerves and that scratching just rips her in two." Henryk nodded again, scanning the hallway ceiling as if studying tea leaves. "Up here's the attic," said my grandfather.
Just then my mother's bedroom door opened. She'd been napping and her eyes were red and pinched and her hair was wild, a volcanic display of black serpents. "Who's this?" she said to her father. Her accusatory tone was by now familiar.
"Man from Dixie Pest Control," he said. "He doesn't speak English. You speak English?"
Henryk nodded, staring at Willa who was staring back.
"He says he speaks English," muttered my grandfather, then said again, much louder and slower than before: "Up here's the attic."
Willa's eyes drifted down to the Ketch-All pole in Henryk's hand, a steel rod with a wire noose at one end. Stepping from the doorway, with a drowsy-drunk half-stumble, she said, "He's not going to kill it."
"He's going to get rid of it,"
said my grandfather. "Like you wanted."
"He aims to kill it," she said. "That's a lynching tool."
"A lynching tool? Hush, ain't no such thing. That's a possum grabber. Come on up here, Pest Man," he said, putting a hand to Henryk's back and directing him up the attic stairs. "She's brilliant, like I was saying, but has really fine, fine nerves," Willa heard her father say. She stood at the foot of the stairs and hollered up: "I want to see it. I want to see it ... moving."
After two or three minutes she heard a scuffling from above — quick scratches and the thump of boots on the attic planks, reverbed footfalls she thought she could almost see dimpling the ceiling—and rat-a-tat shouts from her father ("Get er now, over there, get er"). From below Willa screamed—a silly scream, I imagine, like that of the housewife exiled onto a footstool in the old Tom & Jerry cartoons. "What is it?" her father yelled down; he'd learned, as I later would, to take nothing for granted, not even a cartoon matron's wimpy shriek. "What's happening?" she shouted back up. "Don't you come up here," said her father, flooding her with dread. "Don't you dare let him kill it," she responded, her voice caught somewhere between a plea and a screamy demand and crackling in that middle ground. "I'll never forgive you or anyone ever again." (Ah, typical Willa Desforges hyperbole. "If you continue to bite your fingernails," she told me when I was a boy, "you will never be loved. No one will want you and you will die alone.")
Henryk Gniech descended first from the attic. Cradled in his arms was the possum, its wet dark eyes flickering back and forth, random as a flame, but its body still, its claws anchored in the sleeves of Henryk's canvas jacket, its small pink tongue limply extended. Henryk's hands—huge hands, Willa noticed, with the elongated fingers of a French Quarter stride pianist — were around it like a loose net. Brandishing the Ketch-All tool, and panting, Gerald Desforge stood behind him on the stairs. "The boy scooped him up like a pro," he said, obviously exhilarated. Willa was overcome by concurrent desires to touch and to recoil from the possum, and its carrier, and for a moment she lost her balance, wobbling toward the wall.
"They ack dead," Henryk said, his first words to her. "Is sweet."
"Where will he take it?" she asked her father. Then, correcting herself, to Henryk: "Where will you take it?"
With a shrug, he said, "A tree."
"Not one around here, though," said Gerald Desforges.
"Far away," said Henryk.
She didn't think he would kill it, not the way he was holding it, but she said anyway, almost as a question, "You're not going to kill it."
"City Park," her father said. "He can take it to the park."
"I'm going with you," she said to Henryk. "I don't trust you." This was a lie. She did trust him. Though a hired killer, he had the eyes of an old priest, of a dispenser of daily mercies rather than acrid poison. With fierce and prolonged har-rumphs, her father objected—but of course he relented, he always did. He'd go to his deathbed fearing entanglement in her nerves.
Willa waited in the Dixie Pest Control truck—spartan and filthy, the floorboards swamped with empty Coke bottles—while Henryk locked the possum in a rusty steel cage in the truckbed. The Coke bottles clinked together as he drove through New Orleans, filling the otherwise silent cab with a glassy random music.
"You must usually kill them," she said after a while.
"No," he said. The bottles chinkled in a pothole crescendo. "I have ... secret place. I give gift."
"Where?"
"Is beautiful. Most beautiful place. I show you. You want I show you?"
As he piloted the truck through New Orleans she tried to guess where he would stop, wondering what beauty might look like to a Polish exterminator, but—down Claiborne Street, then onto Rampart and then St. Claude and into the Bywater—the possibilities kept dwindling. A gift, he'd said. With a prick of horror she wondered if he intended to deliver the possum to a down-and-out black family in the Lower Ninth Ward, to cook and eat. Fear of fricassee roiled her insides. But then he turned onto Poland Avenue and kept driving toward the river until there was no more road to drive upon, and he stopped the truck at the wharf. He was grinning as he shut off the motor, as if everything—the beauty, the possum's fate—was gorgeously self-evident.
"I'm confused," she said, and something in her expression—distaste, disappointment—broke his smile. Together, in separate silences, they surveyed the scene: the Mississippi River, so muddy and drab that it barely reflected sunlight; the drydocks across the river in Algiers; the freighters and banana boats with rust stains leaking down their hulls like blood from wounds; old squat warehouses, tin-roofed terminal offices, decomposing boxcars, dry plains of concrete. She inhaled the odors of fishguts, sulfur, and shipsmoke. Is beautiful, he'd said. Finally, she might have thought (though she's rarely been prone to self-deprecation): Someone crazier than me.
"Most beautiful place," he said, his tone adding half a question mark to the statement. Gently, she shook her head no: my parents' first disagreement.
This is how he explained it (with tender enthusiasm, but brokenly, asking her constantly to fill the gaps in his story with the words he didn't know): Four years earlier, a ship from Germany had docked at the Poland Avenue Wharf, a fitting place of disembarkation for the ninety-three Polish refugees who came squinting down its gangplank. Most of them were Jews, and most survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, their inner forearms blued with their camp tattoos. A brass band was there to greet them, along with throngs of volunteers from the Red Cross and the United Service for New Americans, their biceps striped in colorful armbands. Among the arrivals was Henryk Gniech.
I do not know (with certainty, anyway) which labor camp my father survived, or what happened to him there. (Dachau, we believe—that's where the priests ended up.) We know he was a Catholic seminary student who was arrested for wearing a cassock. He told my mother this much. (For several years a member of the Catholic Patron League of New Orleans, which had sponsored his immigration, would visit to gauge his religious temperature; they'd expected him to resume his seminary studies and become a priest, something he'd never intended to do. They stopped coming after my mother entered the picture.) We know, too, that all his family died in the war, and that, along with whatever else he suffered, he was whipped terribly; his back bore a rubbery pink lattice of scars. He never spoke of any of it except, my mother suspected, in his sleep, when he would sometimes sob and utter what sounded to my mother (who never learned Polish) like dark pleas. "Like a child trapped down in a well," my mother put it. No, in rewinding his life, my father never went beyond this one sunlit point: stepping onto the hot concrete of New Orleans, the docks swarming with the soft welcoming chaos of charity workers, the moist air filled with the garish and inappropriate tuba-honks of "When the Saints Go Marching In," which would forever remain his favorite song. (He hummed it as he shaved, showered, scanned the Times-Picayune, munched peanuts on the couch.) He considered this his birth, the beginning of Him, as if everything that had come before comprised a lightless womb from which he'd squeezed free.
So this was where Henryk Gniech freed the possum, as he'd freed an ark's worth of pestilent creatures before. The possum sniffed at the air, took several meek steps from the cage, then skittered across the concrete into a safe crevice between two giant wooden crates, disappearing from sight. This was my father's gift—a second chance on the docks—the greatest gift he knew—the same one he'd himself been given. He smiled, lit a cigarette, hummed the opening bars of "When the Saints...," and returned the empty cage to the truck while Willa stood there staring, watching that dark merciful crevice with the same rapt and emotional attention she might give a Degas in the museum. She had not expected this, no. A new kind of madness. She fell in love that afternoon, and within three weeks she was pregnant.
***
Well, shit. That was a much longer interlude than I'd intended. Are you still there? I am. Still here, I mean. I had to relocate midway through that sepia burst of genealogy because some tw
iddledee with an acoustic guitar decided to serenade the masses assembled at Gate K9 with an instrumental rendition of "Dust in the Wind." This wouldn't have been so toxic—all we are, after all, is dust in the wind—had he not kept flubbing the changes and, rather than pushing forward with the song, repeating them until he got them right. First time I can recall that I've ever heard a guitar stutter. (Revision, like any other grooming procedure, should be kept private.—The Book of B. Ford, 2:13.) I'm now at Gate K12 which seems safe except for this young skinnymarink Asian fellow across from me who keeps chuckling at some apparently textual dialogue he's having with his cellphone. Back in my undergrad days, when the pocket calculator made its first appearance, I kept myself very mildly entertained in math classes by making words out of the squared numerals: 800 for BOO, for example. 5318008, upside down, for BOOBIES. 58008618, likewise, for BIGBOOBS. Ah, what hilarity! I don't suppose that's what my young Asiatic friend is doing though the physical motions are rather precisely reminiscent. It occurs to me just now that if they were to make a mega-sized cellphone—with buttons the size of, say, Lucky Strike packs—my mother could send me text messages instead of so laboriously writing me her shaky-scrawl Post-it notes. Of course, I'd need to be equipped with a cellphone myself for that to work. But still: What a triumph of technology that would be—her Post-it notes finding me anywhere, out on the streets or inside a crosstown bus, pinned to the wings of digital homing pigeons.
Dear American Airlines Page 3