The House on Coliseum Street

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “A thankless child,” Aurelie said and went about her work. When she was done and the house was really ready for summer, she packed her suitcase and went off to visit her cousins in Tennessee.

  As she stood waiting for the taxi that would take her to the train, she said with a kind of wistfulness, “I went to Europe in the summer, before I had so many children to support.”

  Joan and Doris, who had to attend the ritual of seeing Aurelie off each year, stood on the porch too.

  “Gee, that’s tough,” Doris said.

  “Wait till your old age,” Joan said, “and we have to support you.”

  “That,” Aurelie said dryly, “is something I can wait for without any great impatience.”

  “Have a good time and give everybody our love.”

  “Be careful with the house,” Aurelie said. “If there should be a real storm, don’t forget to close the windows, and if the water comes through, mop it up right away.”

  The taxi arrived. Aurelie signaled to it.

  “It’ll probably be hit by lightning,” Doris said, “with all those rods sitting up on the roof, attracting it.”

  “I will thank you,” Aurelie said with dignity, “not to think evil.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Doris grinned.

  “And Clara will be in every day…”

  “Like last year,” Joan said.

  “And the year before,” Doris said.

  “And the one before that.”

  “Well,” Aurelie said, “keep out of trouble when I’m gone.”

  “We’ll think about you,” Joan said, “up in those nice cool hills.”

  “With those nice yellow jacks,” Doris added.

  The driver had taken the suitcase.

  “I’m jealous of anyone who can travel so light,” Joan said.

  “Comes of lots of practice,” Doris said, “before she had children.”

  They walked down to the cab and Aurelie kissed them both good bye. “Keep out of trouble and be good.”

  Doris slammed the door with a flourish and the cab moved off along Coliseum Street. They watched until it turned at the corner.

  Doris scratched a fast rising lump on her thigh. “Another damn mosquito.”

  “Let’s go in.”

  “Well, old duck,” Doris flashed her quick grin, “our four weeks of freedom has begun.”

  “I’ll kind of miss her,” Joan admitted.

  “Jesus,” Doris said. “Don’t tell me you mean that?”

  “I do, kind of.”

  “You’re getting old, old duck. I can remember when you couldn’t wait.”

  “I know.”

  “Would have thought better of you,” Doris said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Haven’t got a date until six o’clock.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired?” Joan asked wistfully.

  “Sometimes.” Briefly, for a few seconds, Doris’s handsome tanned face was serious. The crispness, the gayness slipped away; her face in repose was infinitely sad.

  Joan had seen her like this before, not often, not more than once or twice a year, and never for long.

  “The easiest way to get over being tired,” Doris said seriously, “is just keep going.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “There’s time enough for resting,” Doris said. “Afterwards.”

  A flicker of something in the dark, heavily lashed eyes reminded Joan that her little sister had been death-haunted all through her childhood.

  She’s afraid, Joan thought, but she can swagger her way out of it.

  Doris changed. The bright hard grin came back. She shrugged. “To hell with the whole business.”

  “Well,” Joan said, “what are you going to do right now?”

  “Me?” Doris said, “I’m going right straight up to Aurelie’s bedroom and I’m going to lie right down on her bed, right on that precious spread, and I’m going to smoke cigarettes until the whole room stinks. Ain’t that wicked?”

  Without Aurelie the house seemed empty. Joan had never realized how much she had filled it.

  Because she felt vaguely lonely and upset, Joan went to the kitchen and—in spite of Clara’s threats—got out the recipe for angel food cake.

  It failed. While Clara chuckled delightedly, she dumped it into the garbage can, stalked out of the yard. She caught the St. Charles car and rode around the belt three times before she felt like coming home.

  TWO DAYS AFTER AURELIE left, on a Wednesday morning, Joan walked through the campus gate, headed for her music class. She was thinking about nothing in particular, but she just happened to raise her eyes. She stopped so short that she nearly stumbled.

  Michael Kern was leaning on his elbows at a screenless window on the second floor, grinning down at her.

  “For heaven’s sake!”

  “Wait a minute.” He disappeared.

  She wondered if she should stay right where she was. That didn’t seem right, standing in the same spot, as if she were glued there. So she moved over to the steps and leaned, as casually as she could, on the railing. A minute or so passed and she wondered if she had misunderstood. She would look silly… Maybe she just ought to go on…

  Then he came pounding down the steps. “Met some people and had to say hello.”

  She smiled, while having the strange feeling that came to her when she heard about people in a world she didn’t know. It felt sort of like being dead, she had decided once.

  He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, and because it was early in the day the starched collar still stuck up crisply and the sleeves still kept their little peaks.

  “You look mighty happy,” she said.

  “You know this is the first morning you looked up.”

  “The what?”

  “You come by every morning.”

  “Sure I do,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  “I’ve been seeing you pass every morning.”

  A little jolt, it wasn’t fear, but it wasn’t quite pleasant either. “I guess I just never looked up before.”

  “You go right straight on ahead… Don’t you ever look around or see who’s passing?”

  “I’m usually late in the mornings.”

  “Full of business.”

  “No,” she said, “not particularly, there’s just nothing to do around here in summer.”

  “The fun people are gone, huh?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “Can’t afford the places I want.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it always comes back to that.”

  She could feel the rough surface of the concrete pressing through her thin dress. She stood up.

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “Just wanted to stand up.”

  “What’s your class?”

  “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  He grinned. His side teeth were peppered with little gold fillings. “That’s true.”

  “I’ve got just five minutes to get all the way over to Crampton Hall.”

  “I tell you what,” he said, “I’ll dismiss my class if you’ll cut yours.”

  A large redbird was building an out-of-season nest in the sprawling gnarled crape myrtle. The tree itself was just coming into bloom. The fat green buds were beginning to burst open into ruffled white flowers. Joan stared up at it.

  “Do you know,” he said, “your eyes are bright blue in the sun.”

  “What have we got to do so urgent?”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, “and you won’t believe me.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I’ve got an aunt,” he said, “or maybe she’s a great-aunt, and she lives in Montgomery and she has a library.”

  “A real library, a public library?”

  “A one-room library… You’d like her. Nice old gal. You should see her house, right up on top a hill looking out on some other pitched roofs and cupolas all the way down to the Alabama River. I u
sed to wonder why they call it a river when it’s nothing more than a yellow creek full of garbage. You know, sometimes you can smell it clear up to the house when the wind’s right in summer.”

  Joan looked down from the redbird and over directly at him. She was pleased to notice that her hard stare made him shift his eyes to a farther building.

  “Anyhow,” after a very short almost imperceptible pause, “this old gal has a library, pardon me, a room that she calls a library because it’s full of books…”

  “I got it,” she giggled.

  “The books were left by her husband who didn’t read them either. But there’s one thing in there that she’s particular about and they’re getting kind of moldy.”

  “Moldy?”

  “And that’s why she needs a set of new owls.”

  “Of what?”

  “Owls, honey child. There are stuffed owls sitting on the tops of the bookcases, one to each side of the room.”

  “And the moths got them.”

  “Some other bugs too. So she wants me to find her four new stuffed owls.”

  “Don’t ask me,” Joan said, “I wouldn’t know where to tell you to go.”

  “I found one place. I think. It’s hard as if I was looking for dope or something illegal.”

  “I don’t think it is legal to shoot an owl.”

  What’s so particular about owls?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought I remembered seeing that somewhere.”

  “Oh God,” he said, “now I’ve got to smuggle owls.”

  “But you found a place?”

  He was staring out across the campus, scowling slightly.

  She noticed—again with surprise—that his eyes were dark and that they had ridiculously long curly lashes like a girl.

  “That’s where I want to go this morning. There’s an old guy in Tangipahoa has some he’ll sell me.”

  “This morning?”

  “Miss Question-box… Might be fun, who knows?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Just so you don’t get away,” he grabbed her wrist and raced up the steps, “while I’m getting rid of my class.”

  She was up the two flights almost before she knew it, and down a long dark hall, moving more rapidly than she had in months, conscious of the very tight pressure of his fingers. She wanted to say go slower, I can’t keep up with you. But she was afraid he wouldn’t hear or stop and people in the halls would turn around and wonder what was going on with him hauling her down the halls by one arm. So she kept up, skirts flying and hair falling in her face.

  “Here,” he said and turned abruptly into a side office. He released her arm. “Look at the pretty books.”

  Obediently she turned and looked at the shelves of textbooks, conscious all the while that the three people in the office were staring at her very hard, all without seeming to look. Two were young men, the third a middle-aged woman typing at a small desk.

  One of the men said very softly, “Been fishing?”

  Michael did not answer him. She wondered if he glared or gave a sign. She could not turn.

  “Mrs. Wright,” Michael said very formally, “will you dismiss my classes today and tell them that I’m very sick.”

  “Sick with what?”

  Joan could almost hear him grinning. “I don’t know. Use your own imagination.”

  She gave a chuckle. “If the old man ever finds out about the rules that are broken around here every single day of the week!”

  “He won’t,” Michael said. “Not when you do such a good job.”

  “Get on out of here and let some other people work.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Joan could hear the chatter begin the very moment they stepped into the hall.

  THEY FOUND THE CAR and started off. “Aren’t you afraid somebody will see you riding around like this with the top down? When you’re supposed to be working, I mean.”

  “The old man,” Michael gave his quick grin over his shoulder, “is at a seminar in the library. And that always runs two and a half hours.”

  Still, Joan noticed, he took the back way out of town, doubling and twisting along back streets through the new section of Carrollton. Finally he got on the old river road.

  “God,” he said, “I didn’t think I could find it.”

  The road was very bad, and he had to drive slowly, cursing each pothole.

  Joan could feel the hot sun burn her eyes. She began to wish she had brought sunglasses.

  The pitted bumpy road turned into a new highway. “That does it, old girl,” Michael said.

  Then they were on the causeway, the straight narrow concrete strip that ran for twenty miles across the lake. On each side the water glinted sharp points of light. Up in the sky, the inevitable thunderheads were poised.

  “By the way,” Joan yelled over the wind, “does your top go up at all?”

  “Sometimes.” Again that sharp animal grin. She decided that she’d like it. She hadn’t been sure before, but now she decided that she liked it. With a little sigh she settled herself down on the hot leather cushions, felt the wind whistling by her ears, ruffling out her hair. And she stopped thinking.

  They swung off the causeway, and Michael slowed down. “God, it’s hot.”

  “It doesn’t seem to rain near as much here as it does in the city,” she said. “It doesn’t look like they’ve had a drop in weeks.”

  “Well,” Michael said, “I don’t know how long it’s been but it’s sure dusty right now.” He rubbed the side of his face and wiped the palm across his shirt. “Want to stop for a beer?”

  She nodded.

  He turned down narrow winding roads, dirt paved, between rows of pine trees. “There’s a place back in here,” he said, “if I can find it.”

  “About half a mile more.”

  “You know it?”

  “I used to come over here in the summers,” she said, “when my father was here.”

  “Have I got the right road?”

  “I think so.”

  It was a small bar with a corrugated iron roof and a Jax beer sign blinking in each window. In front was a parking lot of hard, swept white sand, studded with pine trees. The trunks of the trees were neatly whitewashed waist-high; up in their branches were strings of colored lights, and in one of them there was a loudspeaker from the jukebox inside.

  Behind the building was another parking lot. The same white sand, only here the pine needles had been allowed to accumulate, and the trees grew closer together. There were no lights and there was just the soft muted leftover sound of the jukebox—she remembered that.

  It had been a favorite spot for high-school kids. She wondered if it still was…

  The place was empty now, of course, with just one out-of-state license pulled up in front. But maybe at night it still was as crowded as it had been the times she’d come here. It had been jammed then; you’d have to hunt for a spot among all the other dark cars parked in the back lot.

  It was funny, she thought, how little you remembered of those times, though they were so important then. And how the things you did remember were the unpleasant ones.

  Like the time her corsage had gotten loose and the pin stabbed into her shoulder, drawing blood. And she had not been able to get the boy to understand, and she had been so embarrassed, drawing herself out of his arms and fumbling in her bag for a handkerchief to stop the blood.

  And she remembered other things: The smell of bad grease from the chicken frying in the bar, the urine smell of the ladies’ room that wasn’t really a ladies’ room, just a painted privy. The sour vinegar smell of the mustard on the sandwiches they always ordered and never wanted and never ate. The whispers from the other cars parked a couple of feet away. The feel of sweat-soaked shirts, sticky with starch, and skins that were hot and burning to the touch. And the smells inside the car: of upholstery and gasoline and after-shave and the heavy musky odor of sex.

  She remembered pain too, fin
gers that were clumsy and hurt and bodies that were awkward and stiff. And the terrible feel of frustration coloring everything. Those evenings that were more pain and uncertainty than anything else, but desperately longed for and pursued.

  Michael parked directly in front of the building. He did not ask her if she wanted to stay in the car, even though there were two drowsy carhops leaning against the side of the building. They went inside. “Would you like some lunch?”

  “Too early for me.”

  The beer was cold, and the glasses heavy and frosty. She remembered those glasses, though back in the parking lot the frost had melted long before they reached the little tray on the side of the car window.

  “Another?”

  She jumped. She hadn’t realized she’d drunk it so fast. “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

  He laughed. “You’ve got more moods than anybody. The first time I took you out you sulked and hardly said anything.”

  “I did?” She could remember that evening. “You were something of a creep.”

  “And now you look like you’re having a real fine time.”

  “I like it over here.”

  “Where’d you live?”

  “My father had a place on the Tickfaw, and I used to stay with him in the summers.”

  “Still have it?”

  “It was sold when he died.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, drink up and let’s go find the owls.”

  As they walked to the car she said, “My father was a remarkable man.”

  He winked to soften the words. “Doris always said that sooner or later you always started talking about him.”

  To hell with Doris, she thought. Aloud she said: “He really was. Anybody will tell you that.”

  “Except your mother.”

  “She thought he was dull.” They got in the car. “She thought he was quiet and dull. Like me.”

  There was that wink again. “You’re not quiet,” he said.

  He had a pencil-drawn map in his pocket and he began to follow it. They turned along a series of rutted sand roads and bounced slowly along between crumbling fences, undermined by honeysuckle and yellow jasmine. Under the scorching sun the perfume rose in heavy waves.

  “There it is,” Michael said.