Southern Ruby

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘In case you were wondering, yes, I’m afraid they’re real, Amandine. They’re preserved after slaughter to sell to tourists.’

  I turned to see Elliot Davenport, the jazz history professor I’d met at Estée’s funeral. He wasn’t wearing a gaudy outfit this time, but a grey fitted shirt that showed off his toned body. In his shopping basket were some potatoes, flour and several packets of Fig Newtons biscuits.

  ‘They’re a weakness of mine,’ he said. ‘I like to munch on them when I’m marking student papers.’

  ‘They’re called Spicy Fruit Rolls in Australia,’ I told him. ‘They were my favourite biscuits when I was a child.’

  ‘Biscuits?’ he said, grinning. ‘That sounds very posh. We call them cookies here.’

  After finishing at the cashier, we stepped out into the street together.

  ‘What have you been up to this morning?’ he asked me.

  I wasn’t about to reveal that I was trying to find out if my grandmother had been a stripper or not, so I told him I was exploring the area.

  ‘Well, would you like to come back to my place for a “biscuit”? My apartment building is a former Creole mansion constructed in 1820 — it’s still got the original windows and transoms. I think you’ll like it.’

  I laughed. ‘Okay, that sounds good. I was planning on doing an architectural tour anyway.’

  We walked along Bourbon Street, past a rowdy group of male tourists with plastic cups of beer in their hands. One of them was wearing a tank top with a silhouette of a pole dancer and a slogan that read I support single moms. I thought of the pictures I’d seen of well-dressed patrons watching strippers in the 1950s. Things had certainly changed in the Quarter.

  ‘White trash!’ Elliot whispered to me.

  ‘Bogans!’ I whispered back.

  ‘“Biscuits”, “bogans” — I’m going to Australia to learn the language!’

  Further on, a crowd had gathered around a gangly girl with curly hair who was playing a piano accordion and singing. Elliot and I sat on the kerb to listen to her. She had a crystal-clear contralto voice that reminded me of the 1930s jazz singer Connee Boswell, but with a modern element to it. She was singing Louis Armstrong’s ‘Skeleton in the Closet’. When she finished the piece, the audience applauded enthusiastically and dropped notes into her accordion case. She moved on to other jazz numbers, and the crowd was joined by more people.

  ‘She’s unique,’ I said to Elliot. ‘I’d pay to see her perform. Why is she out on the street?’

  ‘In New Orleans we don’t snub street artists or think of them as buskers,’ he explained. ‘You’ll see some of the best music out here on the street. Even our famous musicians are just part of the scene. I saw Dr John at the laundromat on Esplanade the other day, washing his shorts like any other regular guy.’

  We dropped some dollar bills in the girl’s case and continued on.

  ‘Jazz is considered a sophisticated taste now, but it didn’t start out that way,’ Elliot told me. ‘It had its birth in the bordellos of the Storyville district of New Orleans and is a blend of musical influences from everything, from the old slave chants to ragtime and the blues, brass bands and a primitive African beat. It was considered the right kind of music to put men in the mood to spend money on women and liquor. A lot of people don’t know that Jelly Roll Morton got his start playing in brothels, or that Louis Armstrong’s mother was a prostitute.’

  ‘Wow! I had no idea.’

  ‘Boston, New York and Philadelphia might have museums and opera houses sponsored by honourable philanthropists and businessmen, but many of the charitable institutions and public works in New Orleans were paid for by the madams of brothels. This is a city built on sin.’

  I remembered Grandma Ruby’s story and was about to ask him about burlesque and jazz, but before I had a chance we reached his apartment building. The courtyard was accessed through an arched passageway that I assumed had once been used for horse-drawn carriages, and was a dizzying riot of banana trees, bamboo, fan palms and ferns in hanging pots. A fountain in the middle tumbled water into a pond brimming with lilies and goldfish. Looking around the courtyard helped me understand Grandma Ruby better. She loved the house in the Garden District because that’s where she had lived with her husband and children, but she was definitely a product of the French Quarter: dark and sultry.

  ‘Our resident ghost walks straight across this courtyard, humming an old French song, “Sur le Pont d’Avignon”,’ Elliot said. ‘She then goes through this wall into my apartment before disappearing. ‘But she looks content and doesn’t cause any trouble so nobody has ever called in the ghost-busters.’

  ‘Seriously? You’ve seen her?’

  He grinned. ‘Not yet. I’ve only heard about her from my neighbours. But a few more drinks on Friday night on Bourbon Street and I might.’

  I followed him through the front door and was immediately charmed by the quirky and cramped apartment. The kitchen, dining room and living room were all one space, with roughly hewn floorboards, oriental rugs and more CDs on the custom-made shelves than there were books in my parents’ bedroom. A saxophone was propped on a stand in the corner, and a wrought-iron spiral staircase led to an upper floor. Three of the walls were the original exposed brick while the fourth had been painted vintage green, which worked well with the lush vegetation of the courtyard. But it was the kitchen corner that intrigued me. It was the most minimalist kitchen I’d ever seen, consisting of only a narrow fridge, a square ceramic sink, a medicine cupboard and a freestanding cooker. But judging by the well-used saucepans and the crowded spice rack that hung along the wall, Elliot must love to cook.

  ‘Come meet Duke,’ he said, placing his shopping in the medicine cupboard before turning to an armoire whose doors had been removed and replaced with chicken wire. Inside was an arrangement of branches, water containers and a kitty litter tray on the bottom. Elliot reached in and brought out a grey squirrel, perching him on his sleeve to show him to me. The squirrel climbed up and down Elliot’s arm and playfully swiped at his face.

  ‘He’s so cute,’ I said, patting the animal.

  Duke leaped from Elliot’s shoulder onto the curtain rod and began grooming himself.

  ‘Is he happy in his cage?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t he want to go outside?’

  ‘I only put him in the cage to keep him out of trouble when I’m not home. Otherwise he’s got free use of the room, and I take him out for a run around the courtyard at least once a day. I don’t believe in keeping wild animals as pets, but he came to me in an unusual way. I discovered him on the back seat of my car when I was returning from a teachers’ conference in Oregon. He was a baby, and I couldn’t reunite him with his family as I didn’t know where he’d come from — I might have acquired him at any number of stops I’d made along the way. I took him to a vet who showed me how to feed him. She noticed he was blind in one eye, and for that reason he’ll never be able to be rehabilitated back into the wild.’

  ‘He’s lucky he found you then,’ I said.

  He plucked Duke from the curtain rod and rubbed cheeks with him. ‘No, I’m lucky to have found him. He’s good company for me. My apartment’s too small for a dog or a cat and I love animals.’

  The more I discovered about Elliot, the more I liked him. Being able to cook and being kind to animals were big pluses.

  ‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?’ I asked.

  ‘No problem. It’s upstairs.’

  The bathroom was as quirky as the rest of the apartment, with low exposed beams and unfinished walls that contrasted sharply with the sparkling white bathtub and sink. In the corner was a slim bathroom cupboard. Although I tried not to, I couldn’t resist looking inside for ‘girlfriend evidence’ — lipstick, perfume, scented bath salts — among the guy stuff. But there wasn’t any.

  On my way back downstairs I caught a glimpse of the tidy bedroom with its pale blue colours and canopied bed. Very nice, I thought. I was getting a good feeling a
bout Elliot.

  He had made coffee and set out some Fig Newtons on a plate.

  ‘I appreciate you sharing your stash with me,’ I told him.

  ‘My pleasure. I’ll share my biscuits with you anytime, Amandine.’

  I blushed so deeply I felt like a fourteen-year-old girl again.

  He looked at me curiously, then took a sip of coffee. ‘I was thinking that I should introduce you to a friend of mine. He’s a jazz aficionado in his seventies. You can quiz him on the A–Z of New Orleans music and he knows all the answers. There’s a good chance he could have met your father. We can go see him now if you like?’

  ‘You bet!’ I said. ‘I know it might be hard to believe, but I only discovered recently that my father was a musician. Learning about him through his music is like a gift to me.’

  We finished our coffee, then walked to St Peter Street where Elliot had parked his Ford Taurus. He opened the passenger door for me before getting into the driver’s seat. ‘I’m taking you to the Lower Ninth Ward. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a neighbourhood of New Orleans where tourists don’t go,’ he said, putting on his seat belt and turning the key in the ignition. ‘It’s got a lot of trouble with gangs and drug dealers. But don’t worry, you’ll be safe with me.’

  I bit my lip and braced myself inwardly. Between going to a funeral where the deceased participated in her own wake and discovering Grandma Ruby had been a stripper, I was ready for anything.

  ‘I don’t think it’s as bad as people make out,’ he said, as we crossed the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. ‘The area has a sense of community. Many of the residents have lived here for generations, but unfortunately it’s the riff-raff that give it a bad name. Now you’re in New Orleans you might hear the joke, “I’m from the Ninth and I don’t mind dying.”’

  The district had a rural feel about it with its chain-link fences, dirt roads, and grassy vacant lots. Many of the older houses were wooden rectangular-style dwellings known as ‘shotguns’ because of their design. The rooms followed one behind the other, with the front and back doors in line, so theoretically a bullet could be fired from one end straight through to the other. Some of the houses and lawns were neatly kept, but many showed the tired neglect of poverty. An elderly couple sat in beach chairs on their lawn. A group of boys with their jeans hanging halfway down their buttocks and their caps turned backwards did skateboard tricks in a driveway.

  ‘The area was once a plantation, but then it was subdivided into cheap land for poor European immigrants and former slaves who were working in nearby industries,’ Elliot told me. ‘Their descendants lived together in harmony until the schools were desegregated in the 1960s. Then a lot of the white people moved out.’

  He pulled up in front of a blond-brick house with a bright yellow roof and the initials F.D. painted on it. ‘Do you know who F.D. is?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  He started humming ‘Blueberry Hill’.

  ‘Fats Domino!’ I cried. ‘Did he used to live in the Lower Ninth Ward?’

  ‘He still does, right there in that house, though most people don’t even know he’s still alive. Everyone remembers Elvis Presley, but Fats Domino is almost forgotten. Well, if the Lower Ninth is good enough for a founding father of rock’n’roll, then it’s all right by me. This place has soul.’

  Elliot drove on a few more streets before pulling up in front of a house that stood out from the others around it. It was freshly painted in a caramel colour with maroon shutters and trimmings. There was a camel-back extension in the rear, and the tidy garden was bordered by a heritage green metal fence. Gardenias lined the path to the front door, and a Chinese fan palm shaded the front porch.

  We got out of the car and I expected Elliot to knock on the door, but he pushed it open and called out, ‘Terence! I’ve brought someone to see you!’

  ‘Elliot! Come in,’ a sonorous voice called from inside.

  I followed Elliot into a wood-panelled front room. A couch and armchair upholstered in orange cotton plaid faced a Rhodes electric piano. I knew those pianos had been built in the 1970s and used hammers like an acoustic piano, but the only one I’d seen until now had been in an exhibition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

  The doorway to the kitchen had been converted into an arch. A man sitting at a Formica table with a newspaper in front of him waved to us.

  ‘Come in, kids,’ he said, standing up.

  He was over six foot and straightbacked and carried himself with such regal dignity that he could have been welcoming us in a tuxedo rather than the shorts, singlet and massage sandals he was wearing. The combination of his velvety voice, sable-toned skin and intelligent brown eyes mesmerised me.

  ‘Hey, Terence,’ said Elliot, giving him a man hug. He turned back to me. ‘This is Amandine from Australia.’

  ‘Australia?’ said Terence, shaking my hand firmly. ‘Well, nice to meet you, Amandine. You’re a long way from home.’ He pulled out the vinyl seats around his kitchen table for us to sit on, then opened his kitchen cupboard, which was so methodically organised it could have been a pharmacist’s cabinet.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ he asked. ‘Tea, coffee, a root beer?’ He took out a box from the cupboard and stared at the label dubiously. ‘Or I’ve got this funny smelling green tea my neighbour Wanda left the other day. She said it would be good for my liver.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with your liver?’ Elliot asked.

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Then don’t drink it.’

  Terence laughed heartily. He had a nice laugh: warm and rich, like hot chocolate.

  I drank green tea all the time, but I’d never tried root beer so when Elliot accepted Terence’s offer I asked for one too. I’d thought it was a soft drink so was surprised when Terence took an unlabelled bottle filled with a coffee-coloured liquid from the refrigerator.

  ‘Terence brews his own root beer,’ Elliot explained, while his friend poured the thick liquid into glasses.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Terence, sitting down and raising his glass to toast us. ‘From my grandfather’s old recipe. Not that stuff they sell in the stores. Real liquorice, ginger and dandelion roots, along with wild cherry tree bark, juniper berries and a cinnamon stick.’

  I took a sip. It was delicious . . . and very alcoholic!

  ‘I thought root beer was a soft drink,’ I said, coughing.

  My statement made Terence laugh. ‘In New Orleans, this is a soft drink.’

  ‘I brought Amandine to meet you because her father was a New Orleans jazz musician and we wondered if you might have known him?’ Elliot said to him.

  The old man leaned back in his chair and looked at me. ‘Well, if your father was a jazz musician in New Orleans I most certainly would have known him. There are only six degrees of separation at most in this city. What was his name?’

  ‘Dale Lalande.’

  Terence’s face froze for a moment. ‘But . . . how? Dale Lalande died so young. Too young.’

  ‘I was two years old when my parents were killed. I grew up in Australia.’

  Terence took a while to digest this information. ‘I didn’t know Dale had a child. Well then, that’s even more of a tragedy,’ he said finally. ‘You see, Dale Lalande was one of the finest musicians I’ve ever heard. He played New Orleans jazz like New Orleans jazz should be played: refined but also down to earth. I heard him play piano, saxophone and clarinet. He was a strong musician and a precise one.’ He took a sip of his root beer, and thought deeply about something before continuing. ‘He was not only an exceptional musician but a special young man. I treasure the conversations I had with him about music. People like Dale don’t come along every day and he was taken away from us way too soon.’

  It was uncanny — and a bit eerie — to hear someone talk about my father, especially in such glowing terms. It reminded me of how I’d felt when Aunt Louise and G
randma Ruby spoke about him.

  ‘I met your mother on a couple of occasions too,’ continued Terence, then smiled to himself. ‘She was a wild child. I think Dale’s solid temperament calmed her down while she stirred him up. They were quite a pair, but they were obviously deeply in love.’ He nodded towards the front room. ‘Come with me a moment.’

  We followed him to the front room. He sat down at the piano and turned it on.

  ‘This was one of your father’s,’ he said, placing his hands on the keys. ‘I remember it well.’

  His left hand produced a powerful swing bass pattern while his right moved nimbly over the keys. The music pulled at something inside of me. The piece was complex yet playful, intense yet cheeky.

  Terence stopped playing and turned to me. ‘Do you want to have a go?’ He stood up to make way for me. ‘Try it. I’ll show you how the left hand goes.’

  I sat down and gingerly touched the piano. ‘I don’t know if I can. I stopped playing after I left school, and I’ve only studied classical music.’

  He grinned at me. ‘Of course you can. You’re the daughter of a jazz genius — you’ve got it inside of you. Your daddy could play Ravel and Debussy and street music too. He never limited himself, and you shouldn’t either.’

  He showed me the hand positions and chords, and to my surprise I picked things up faster than I’d expected, even though I was out of practice.

  Elliot applauded.

  ‘Not bad at all,’ Terence said. ‘Why don’t you come to me for lessons, Amandine? I’d be happy to teach you more of your daddy’s stuff.’

  He looked at me with such compassion that tears pricked my eyes, but I managed to calm myself. Tamara’s partner, Leanne, was into crystals and was always talking about serendipity. I’d often ribbed her about her new age beliefs, but now I found the fortune I’d had in meeting someone who had known my father and his music almost too much to bear. It was enough to make me believe in magic myself.

  ‘That would be awesome!’ I told him.

  ‘Good,’ he said, with genuine enthusiasm. ‘You’ve got a nice touch. You’re not a heavy-handed player, you move gracefully.’