“This is goddamn amazing.”
“They’re going to arrest me. Lieutenant Peroux and his partner, Lentini. First I’m going to Parish Prison then I’m going to trial and then I’m going to Angola. Will you come and visit me, Louis? Will you promise to do that?”
“Asshole. You’re an asshole, Sonny. You’re an asshole for saying that. First of all, Juliet cannot identify me. There’s no way she knows it was me. And, second, I bet that old man, that vet . . . ? I bet he’s had a hundred patients named Frank. Over the years, anyway. There’s no way he puts the new Frank together with the old Frank.”
“When you talk to them put it all on me, Louis. Say whatever you want.”
“Sonny, what the fuck is wrong with you? Why would I betray you like that?” Louis’s chin trembles and his eyes begin to water. His leg has never been so quiet. “You got a cigarette, Sonny? Give me a cigarette.”
“I don’t have any cigarettes and you don’t smoke. Go back to work, Louis.”
Sonny starts across the street for the hotel parking garage where he left the truck.
“A cat scratches my arm and you make the leap you’re going to prison,” Louis says.
“I’ll understand whatever you tell them.”
“I remember nothing,” Louis says, his voice broken by sobs as he chases after Sonny in the rain. “Do you hear me, bubba? I remember nothing. . . .”
The top of the bag is pinched closed and Juliet pulls it open but too hard and the wind comes up and carries the powder into the night and out toward the housing project. It’s hard to know whether to scream or to cry and in the end she does some of both.
She takes the sandwich bag and stuffs her face in it and inhales deeply and smells a smell that could be Clorox. She inhales a second time then tours the cemetery turning over flower baskets and concretecast urns and whatever else isn’t bolted to the ground. She finds a couple of dirty syringes and holds them up to a streetlight. Both are empty.
“Is this my life?” she says to the small oval photograph of a woman under glass on one of the tombs. “It’s not your life. Is it mine? Please just tell me if it’s mine.”
She waits at the gate for the better part of an hour and when at last the party man comes walking around the corner he isn’t alone. His friend is himself a boy but a bigger one and when they’re close enough she cups her hands around her mouth and says, “Somebody ain’t very professional about how they put said items in said bag. Said customer is pissed.”
“There ain’t no science to loading a bag,” the first boy says.
“You proved that. It all flew out when I tried to get it open.”
“Find me another ring and maybe we can rectify the situation.”
She’s about had it with the little shithead, and the other one, mean as he looks, doesn’t frighten her at all. “You ever hear of the Beauvais on Esplanade? For your information, and you should think about this . . . I’m one of them people.”
The boy is quiet, confused.
“An actual Beauvais,” she continues in a proud voice.
“Your name is Actual?” He glances at the other boy. “Hey, Tee, her name is Actual.”
The bigger one nods as if he knows a few of those.
“I just want another bag,” Juliet says. “Is that asking so much?”
She figures it must be, because they walk off and leave her there.
It takes her ten minutes to reach Leonard’s weekly/monthly. The old man at the desk stops her as she’s starting up the stairs. “Leonard left.”
“Leonard left?”
“Leonard checked out.” He clears a wad of phlegm from his throat and spits in a paper cup. “Last thing he told me, he told me you came by to tell you he was sorry for everything.”
Juliet comes back down the stairs and stands in the open door of his office. “How do you know it’s me to tell that to?”
The man puts his spit cup on the floor and spreads his hands out in front of him. “He said tell the girl with the white hair and the big taters he was moving back home. That means his daddy’s house in the Garden District. Leonard comes from money, you know?”
Juliet looks out at the street, the headlights cutting the darkness. A sightseeing buggy clatters past, its guide wearing a white tuxedo and a top hat. “Not as big as the Beauvais,” she says. “Not as old, either. Don’t even come with that shit.”
“What was that, honey?”
When she looks back he’s putting a fresh pinch of snuff in his mouth. “Why would he leave like that,” she says, “so much in a hurry and all?”
“I got to believe it was them two parents that convinced him.”
“His parents?”
“Well, the ones that drove up in the Jaguar and parked out front. I gave them his room number and they went right up. It was funny seeing a pair like that in this place. They left a smell in the building like Saturday night at the Blue Room. Anyway, I could hear them letting him have it. Everybody could. It got kind of loud.” Clearly the man is relishing the chance to share this information. He rocks back in his chair and puts his feet on the desk. With both hands he holds the spit cup at his waist. “The daddy, this is Leonard’s daddy, apparently he’s some big lawyer, friends with the governor, the type of person they put his bust in the lobby of a building. Anyway, I can hear Leonard trying to argue, then the mother starts to cry and it’s like cats screwing out on the windowsill. It’s terrible. The father’s yelling now. Leonard’s going to come home or there’s going to be an intervention. Leonard’s going to Loyola, get his degree, stop this Buddy Bolden fantasy. Leonard’s going to be a responsible adult. Leonard’s not going to embarrass them anymore. That man has plans for the boy, I’ll give him that.”
“Leonard,” Juliet says sadly.
“They left with him in the backseat, staring out the window like he’d been sentenced to life at the state penitentiary with no possibility for parole. I never liked Leonard, he had some bad habits and some worse friends, but to see him like that like to break my heart.”
Juliet knows the feeling. Her own heart seems to have stopped beating in her chest.
“Leonard,” the old man says, “off on his way to be somebody.”
The crime scene tape has been removed, the lawn groomed, the lower gallery swept clean. But little else about the Beauvais has changed since Sonny’s last visit.
He stands at the gate trying to absorb all that he can of the building’s immortal façade: the windows hung with green plantation shutters, the double doors framed by open-flame gas lanterns, the giant ferns and ivies swinging in the breeze. Behind Sonny on the avenue traffic rumbles past, throwing light that streaks across the pale wicker furniture.
“Why, if it ain’t Sonny LaMott!” a voice calls. And there suddenly is Anna Huey, a solitary figure in the dusk, moving toward him past the crape myrtles. “Hey, sugar. I thought that was you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sonny says.
“So nice to see you again, baby. You’ll come in and visit, won’t you?” She unlocks the gate and signals for him to enter, then she wraps her arms around him as he steps inside. “You want a cup of tea, sugar. How about a cup of tea?”
With her friend gone and the sad fraud exposed, Anna Huey wears the kind of casual but elegant clothing Sonny’s often seen on well-to-do tourists visiting from the North, generally New Yorkers who seem to know brand names as well as they do their own family names. To add to the picture, she appears to have changed her hairstyle, which today features a loose chignon on the back of her head, about the size of a roll of socks. Her sturdy crepe-soled shoes have been replaced with smart leather pumps, and her legs, absent the white hose, no longer whistle when she walks. The transformation is so striking that Sonny requires several moments to absorb it.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you. But wasn’t I before?”
Sonny follows her up the path and into the house. “I was out driving and ended up here,” he explains. “Why do I alway
s end up here, Mrs. Huey?”
“Maybe because you know you’re always welcome. Come have a seat, sugar.”
As she prepares the tea in the kitchen Sonny sits in his usual place in the parlor and allows the dark to press in close and hold him. Everything is as it was, everything the same, and it comes to him that this is only as it should be. The house and furnishings belonged to Anna Huey all along, after all. Even the collection of Beauvais portraits.
She returns with a tray and takes the chair next to his, and the routine, though familiar, is somehow disconcerting. Sonny can feel his heart laboring in his chest. And there seems to be an obstruction at the precise center of his throat; he coughs, twice, but it doesn’t go away. “I was hoping to ask you some questions,” he says.
Anna Huey nods. Pours the tea.
“They’re about things that might be hard to talk about. I hope I can say them.”
She finishes and sits holding the ceramic pot in one hand and his cup in the other.
“I keep thinking about what Miss Marcelle said in her will about holding no grudges against your brother Anthony.”
“You want me to tell you about Anthony, Sonny?”
He brings the cup up to his mouth but doesn’t drink. “I didn’t understand that part.”
Anna Huey returns the pot to the tray. She seems to be trying to decide whether she herself understands it either. “Anthony was only thirteen years old when he left New Orleans. That was 1971. He’s never been back.”
“I remember seeing him around a few times, but I never really knew him. No one ever bothered to introduce us, as I recall.”
“No, sugar, you wouldn’t have been introduced. He was just the maid’s little brother, and that wasn’t anyone, was it?” She gives an unhappy laugh and says, “Now that I reflect, Anthony really was more like a son to me than a brother. Both my parents had passed when he was a baby and me and my husband Charles took him in. We didn’t have any children of our own and so we took to raising him like one. He was the caboose of the Arceneaux family—fifteen years younger than I am and seventeen years younger than my sister May.”
“Didn’t know May, either.”
Anna Huey shakes her head. “May at the time I’m talking about was living in a place near Los Angeles called Inglewood. Ever hear of it?”
“Heard of it but never been there. I’ve never been west of Orange, Texas, as a matter of fact. My mother had some cousins out there. We took the Greyhound one summer when I was a kid.”
She looks at him without speaking for a minute.
“I guess I’m nervous,” he explains.
“I understand. I’m nervous, too.”
“I’m just tired of the mystery. You have to help me, Mrs. Huey.”
“I was talking about May?”
“Yes. May in Inglewood.”
“Well, she and her husband had a car-detailing business out there—they’ve since moved on to real estate, but that’s what they were doing in those days. Anyway, after what happened between Anthony and Mr. Johnny I thought it best he leave town and May volunteered to take him. It wasn’t Miss Marcelle’s fault he had to go, it was all Mr. Johnny’s. But she blamed herself to the end. She paid for Anthony’s plane ticket and opened a bank account in his name. Up until the day there wasn’t any left to give she was still sending him money.”
Sonny reaches out and touches Anna Huey’s arm. “All of a sudden I feel like laughing,” he says. “Will you understand if I have to laugh?”
“Of course. I laugh all the time about horrible things. Laugh all you want, sugar.”
And so he does, Sonny laughs.
“It was a Sunday afternoon when Juliet found them together. They were upstairs in a bedroom, sprawled out on a couch apparently, and I heard a scream and a commotion on the stairs when Juliet came running down. She almost fell—she collapsed near the bottom and had to grab hold of the balustrade. She stood back up and staggered around knocking things down, a lamp and a clock and a table, some other things. I couldn’t begin to imagine why she was so upset. I tried to talk to her and settle her down but it was no use, she was past hysterical and somewhere you don’t go and ever expect to come back the same again. It went on like that for a while before she mumbled something about her daddy and Anthony and I ran upstairs and Mr. Johnny was standing putting on his suit like nothing had happened. ‘A little less starch in the collar next time,’ he told me.” Anna Huey glances at Sonny. “Sonny, you still feel like laughing, sugar, go ahead.”
But Sonny doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t move in his chair.
“Miss Marcelle always loved Anthony. He’d gone to her months before looking for a job and she’d let him cut grass and trim the hedges with the other men. It didn’t suit him, though. Anthony was small and you might say delicate and when he complained it was too hard or too hot she brought him in the house. She bought him a suit at D. H. Holmes and he practiced being a butler for a while but somebody knocked, he wouldn’t even answer the door. Most of the time he was out in the garage washing the cars with Mr. Johnny. At least that’s what we thought he was doing. I remember madam used to joke that Johnny Beauvais had the cleanest cars in the state of Louisiana.”
Anna Huey stares across the room at the black screen of the TV, and it’s as though the piece of history she just described was being broadcast there.
“When Anthony was a little boy we used to put straightener in his hair. He always had to have a doll or a little stuffed animal. Go to church or the store, he was carrying it by a leg. Charles would say there was something not-right about him. That’s the word he used too: not-right. We’d argue about it, the only fights we ever had that I can remember. I guess I was protective on account of Mama and Daddy having passed and I felt sorry for him. He was cute too. Oh, Anthony was a beautiful child.”
Sonny touches her arm again. “Juliet found them together?”
“Yes.”
“She never told me.”
“No? Well, I’m not surprised. Think of the shame. She loved her daddy. And her daddy—did she ever tell you this . . . ? Her daddy was a Beauvais.” Anna Huey falls silent, then says, “I told Juliet she had to talk to her mama and tell her what she saw, but she refused. More than hurting her mother she didn’t want to hurt her father. She cursed me, yelling, when I told her that I would have to go and do it. I found Miss Marcelle outside watering her bougainvillea and I asked if I could speak to her a minute and we walked out under the trees. She dropped her can when I told her about Anthony. I’ll never forget that . . . water splashing on her clothes, the look on that woman’s face.”
From the kitchen comes the sound of a ringing telephone. Anna Huey sits quietly until it stops. “A week later Mr. Johnny killed himself. In case you want to see it Miss Marcelle left a copy of his death certificate upstairs with her things. I can run and get it.”
“That’s okay.”
“Suicide by drowning, says so in black and white.”
“I believe you, Mrs. Huey.”
“Miss Marcelle always told people it was an accident, and somehow she kept the Picayune from reporting the facts. I guess she was trying to protect Juliet. But the man did it to himself. That’s what the Orleans Parish coroner ruled, and that’s why in the end there wasn’t any insurance for madam to collect. For doing what he did with a little boy he should’ve gone to prison. Instead he put his wife in one, because when he decided to die he made sure Miss Marcelle was there to see it. I guess he wanted her to have that picture, the last thing.” Anna Huey lifts the teapot but seems to decide neither of them needs any more. “It wasn’t just Anthony,” she says. “But we didn’t learn that until later.”
“There were other boys?”
“The Quarter is full of children. Some will tap-dance on the bricks for a nickel. For a nickel more others will do other things. To be honest,” she says, “I could never do anything but feel sorry for Juliet. Anything she ever did, I forgave her. Even today I do. That girl c
ame into this world a sweet precious angel, her mother’s joy, and the things she saw, sugar. Oh, the things she saw.”
They sit without speaking until Sonny can tolerate the silence no longer. He stands and straightens his clothes but then he sits down again.
“Now’s the time to ask,” Anna Huey says, “if there’s anything else you need to know. After today I leave all this behind me.”
“Just one more thing, Mrs. Huey. And it’s not so much about them as it is about you.”
“Say it, sugar.”
“Why would you pretend to be a cleaning woman and live as Miss Marcelle’s servant when you were the one who owned this house? Why allow that indignity?”
My Juliet: A Novel Page 30