Nine Lives

by Dan Baum

  JOHN GUIDOS

  EILEEN’S HALLMARK, CATON STREET

  July 1982

  Dad’s old wooden coin organizer, heavy mahogany worn smooth by decades of pawing fingertips, moved the numismatist in him. When he circled his finger idly in the dimes, the clinking was loud in the empty store. He’d keep his eyes down, because he couldn’t bear to look up at what he’d done to his father’s heritage.

  What on earth had he been thinking, to borrow so much money? How could a guy working so hard to be normal—to do the plain, ordinary things everybody else did—get into such a mess? Dad had run Eileen’s Hallmark out of a nine-hundred-square-foot niche for decades and earned enough, with his Navy pension, to support the family and send John and his brother, Jim, to Catholic schools and college. John had foolishly expanded Eileen’s to the size of a small supermarket—a vast barn of trinkets and doodads that nobody needed. John’s thinking had been: Why sell a little glass kitten for eight dollars when a porcelain ballerina, pirouetting on a filigreed music box, went for a hundred and twenty? Why sell a twenty-nine-dollar pen-and-pencil desk set when one made of titanium—and containing clock, barometer, and four-function calculator—went for two hundred dollars? Ronald Reagan’s election had inspired John to stock full-color, foot-tall soldiers and sailors with giant angels standing over them, their translucent glass wings spread wide. Beautiful things. Eighty dollars. A bunch of them went out the door in a patriotic fever when Reagan was first inaugurated, so John had ordered a boatload more. Meanwhile, the headlines had melted from euphoric patriotism to jobless recession. The few people milling around the vast, inadequately lit store seemed unable to afford more than greeting cards and the occasional scented candle.

  As for the marriage, John and Kathy were going through the motions. He needed her for the masquerade. His compulsion to dress as a woman and pleasure himself was only growing stronger. After closing, he’d drive down Elysian Fields and go for a walk in the French Quarter, finding himself, inevitably, outside the Roundup, Gregory’s, the Wild Side, or the Double Play, watching beautiful, laughing men go in and out, loud and free and playful. Every time, he turned away.

  As for Kathy, she needed him for the status and big house in Metairie with the stained-glass front door, the all-black bathroom with gold fixtures, the swimming pool. She’d interpreted the expansion of Gentilly as evidence that she was a wealthy woman. No matter how many times John explained that the growth was built on borrowed money—that they could lose everything—she saw only her broad-shouldered husband at the helm of a glittering empire. She’d insisted on a new car, replied to every credit card offer that came in the mail, and maxed out on all of them. She left the kids—Sandy and Paul—with a nanny to go shopping in her Cadillac most days. She was lost in a fantasy role of her own—the nouveau riche Metairie matron. If something didn’t change soon, he’d end up losing the business Dad spent a lifetime building.

  If that happens, he told himself, I’ll keep the old change drawer.

  BILLY GRACE

  2525 ST. CHARLES AVENUE

  Christmas 1982

  Billy Grace was nervous. Hosting the annual Christmas party at 2525—the Rex mansion—was a solemn responsibility. For seventy-five years, the doors had swung open at precisely noon on Christmas Day—usually with a crowd huddled on the porch and spilling down the broad stairs. Silver bowls of potent eggnog adorned the grand table beneath the dining room chandelier, and tiny sandwiches of sliced duck were passed around by servants. But not too much of either, because at precisely two o’clock everybody was ushered out and the grand doors locked. The 120-minute Christmas party at 2525 was an event that nobody who mattered uptown would dream of missing. At age thirty-two and playing host for the first time, Billy was vigilant.

  It was a long tumble down the chain of inevitability, he now realized, that had him and Anne finally living in the Rex mansion. After Tulane and Tulane Law School, he and Anne, newly married, had finally gotten the taste of the wider world for which Billy had longed. They’d moved to New York City so Billy could earn a one-year master’s in tax law at New York University. Their apartment on Bleecker Street was small and dismal but ineffably romantic, and once Billy was finished, he had an invitation to clerk at the U.S. Tax Court in Washington, D.C. It seemed that finally the big world was busting open to greet him.

  But then Anne had gotten pregnant, and after many long talks he agreed to move back to New Orleans so she could have her mother nearby. They moved to a house at Sixth and Prytania so dilapidated that when Anne first saw it, she burst into tears. When their daughter was born, they gave her the rather grand name Anne Ransdell to honor the great anti-Long, gunboat-wielding senator. (With Big Anne and Little Anne already in the family, they called the baby Ransdell to avoid having to call her Littler Anne.)

  Upon his unexpected return from New York, his father’s friend Harry McCall had made a place for Billy at his law firm, Chaffe McCall. But Billy’s was an odd specialty—state and local tax—and his salary barely paid the bills. When Liam was born, they bought a larger house, at Eighth and St. Charles. It was hard living the Garden District life, caring for the daughter of George and Anne Montgomery and two babies, on the salary of a junior associate—especially now that oil was booming, New Orleans was suddenly flooded with wealthy Texans, and prices in stores and restaurants were rising accordingly.

  The disconnect was going to be even greater now that he was responsible for this gigantic and historic house. Grandmother Kock had died in 1978, and Aunt Virginia, who suffered from polio, wasn’t able to manage such a behemoth of a house alone. For years she’d been talking about either selling it or breaking the house up into apartments. Then, earlier this year, as Anne was getting ready to give birth to their third child and Billy was looking for yet a larger house, Aunt Virginia asked if they wouldn’t all like to come live in 2525. If Billy still harbored dreams of making it in the big world outside New Orleans, those were now well and truly over. The Rex mansion’s gravitational pull had drawn him inside from as far away as Bleecker Street. It wasn’t just a nice address; this was going to be like residing inside the beating heart of uptown New Orleans.

  So Billy Grace—son of a onetime bank teller—found himself hosting New Orleans’s most important Christmas party. The Rex mansion never looked prettier than at Christmas, encrusted inside and out with generations of gilded baubles, upholstered ornaments, wreaths of live holly, twinkling lights, candles. Everybody was dressed in elegant holiday finery—the women in long velvet dresses with their hair piled up and their jewels out, and the men in dark suits with gay red and plaid waistcoats. Billy had known most of these people his entire life, and most of them he loved like family: the McCalls—whose ancestor wrote the city charter; the Walmsleys—descended from the former mayor who was one of Huey Long’s greatest antagonists; the Reilys—owners of the giant processed-food company that bore their name; the Eustises—masters of the city’s insurance and mortgage industries. They were like the great oaks out front: their roots in New Orleans’s shifty soil unimaginably deep, their wealth and influence spreading over the city like mighty crowns and casting everything around them into deep shade. They may not have bank accounts to match the oilmen from Texas who were then overrunning New Orleans, but they had history here, and manners. They’d do anything for Billy, and he’d do anything for them. I could have practiced law in Washington, D.C., or New York my whole life and not had friends like these, Billy thought.

  At the same time, though, a sliver of shadow had fallen between him and some of the others he spotted in the crowd quaffing his eggnog and duck sandwiches. The same ones who’d given George such a hard time over the zoo, who’d grown frosty when George had brought his Jewish friends to the Atlanteans’ ball, were noticeably colder to Billy now. It was hard for Billy to define; nothing overt was ever said. But a coolness had descended between Billy and some of the people he’d known since his childhood. It sometimes felt like a draft from a leaky window, a faint
chill whose source he couldn’t place, and which seemed to pass before he could analyze it.

  That chill crawled around his neck now as he reflected that 1982 had ended without his being invited to join the Louisiana Club. On one level, it didn’t bother him. He was a member of the Boston Club on Canal Street, after all; how many lunch clubs did he really need to belong to? And it wasn’t as though Billy had made the mistake of asking to join the Louisiana Club. He knew full well that even to indicate one would welcome membership was a disqualifying social felony. A man was put up secretly for membership by a member, and then was subject, without his knowledge, to the tyranny of the blackball. Any member could veto another’s prospects simply by saying no and organizing four friends to do likewise. Nobody was ever asked to explain his veto, so nobody ever had to be so uncouth as to say out loud he found the fellow too liberal, too pushy. In theory, the poor guy would never even know he’d been considered, but in practice, of course, one of the great unmentioned pleasures of being a member of the Boston or the Louisiana was making sure everybody knew exactly who had been found wanting. None of the swaggering oilmen from Houston, for example, would ever set foot inside, and everybody made damned sure they knew it. That Billy had been pointedly excluded as well stung him. The Louisiana Club, tucked away a few blocks off Canal on a short street called Union, was one notch above the Boston Club; it meant a higher level of acceptance into uptown society. It meant automatic membership in Momus, one of the really old, truly blue-blooded Mardi Gras krewes. Billy’s father belonged, and that usually was enough to assure a son’s membership. But Billy had been passed over.

  George appeared out of nowhere, clapping Billy on the shoulder. He had a smashing red-and-green holiday vest on under his suit jacket. His face was flushed and damp with excitement and exertion, his longish white hair falling over one eye. He pointed out Leon Irwin III, the forty-three-year-old son of the benefactor of Billy’s dad. Leon was a much-beloved and flamboyant uptown character. Everybody knew he was homosexual, but nobody ever mentioned it, and certainly nobody held it against him. Just this past February, WDSU had aired a fifteen-part series on male prostitution and had caught poor Leon soliciting sex in a flower shop on North Rampart Street. Leon, to his good-natured credit, didn’t deny it—he even talked openly about the experience. But he hadn’t been the same since; he was drinking more, and a trembly, tragic pall had settled over his former cheer. The whole affair had uptown simply furious with WDSU. “See to him, Billy,” George instructed. “And Helen over there? Her mother’s quite ill; don’t forget to ask after her, and remind me tomorrow to send something. Oh, and look at her,” George said with a flick of his eyes at another lady. “She shouldn’t be wearing Armani. It drapes on her all wrong.” Billy laughed. It was one of George’s private party games, to be the sotto voce critic of the women’s fashions. Whether he genuinely knew anything about women’s clothes, Billy had no idea. But he fancied himself an exquisite eye. Billy had never known anyone quite like his father-in-law. The energy the man had for his friends—for making everybody around him feel good, and for arranging social events—was mind-boggling even by the standards of uptown men. Billy remembered being struck, during his and Anne’s brief sojourn in New York, how it was always the women who seemed to invite them places and organize get-togethers. Their husbands just seemed to go along. He realized then how different was New Orleans from the “real” world. With all the events on a Mardi Gras krewe’s calendar, it was the men of uptown New Orleans who piloted their families’ social calendars—the balls, the coming-outs, the luncheons—not the women. Nobody put more into it than George.

  Billy had no doubt that his being excluded from the Louisiana Club had something to do with his being George Montgomery’s son-in-law. Billy had joined George and Big Anne in their very public support of Dutch Morial when he ran for mayor in 1978. Few uptown New Orleanians ever came right out and said they wouldn’t abide having a nigger mayor, but the division between those willing to accept the reality of a changing New Orleans and those who weren’t was plain. New Orleans was no longer ruled from the card rooms of the Louisiana and Boston clubs, that was for sure, and Billy knew plenty of people—some of them right here in this room—who couldn’t quite get their minds around it.

  This frostiness Billy was feeling, though, might not have been about race at all. It may be he was just too hungry for the leisurely gentlemen of the Louisiana Club. Billy knew he’d been pretty open about his eagerness to earn more money to supplement his associate’s salary at Chaffe McCall. He’d wanted a second automobile. He’d wanted to become a member of the New Orleans Country Club and play golf. He’d wanted a second home in Destin, Florida, where he and Anne had vacationed. So he’d started letting on around town that he was looking for businesses to buy into, for investment opportunities, for a little action on the side. He’d advertised himself as a young man on the make, without a lot of money but with plenty of entrepreneurial drive and a boundless appetite for hard work. He’d identified himself with this new money-oriented turn the city had taken since the oil boom had started. Looking around his bedecked and swirling living room now, he realized that among certain of his guests, entrepreneurial drive and an appetite for hard work were as off-putting as support for a black mayor—if not more so. A certain breed of coupon-clipping uptown New Orleanian didn’t need that kind of energy stirring the unruffled air inside the Louisiana Club.

  Billy was a striver; he couldn’t help it. He’d been raised by one and had gotten a sharp early lesson in the price of uptown lassitude. When he’d arrived at Woodberry Forest in Virginia, he’d found that the easygoing gentleman’s C education of Metairie Country Day hadn’t prepared him at all to compete with equally privileged boys from elsewhere. Unlike his classmates, he didn’t understand quadratic equations, hadn’t read My Ántonia, couldn’t name the first ten amendments to the Constitution, had no grasp of the periodic table of the elements. While all his friends went on to tenth grade, he alone had been sentenced to the burning humiliation of repeating ninth.

  That was never going to happen to him again. Billy had torn into his studies during his second ninth-grade go-around as though trying to outrun a forest fire, and discovered that there was a deeper pleasure in achievement than in the boozy backslapping of uptown poolside pleasantries. As his dad liked to say, he wasn’t a Eustis or a McCall. Working suited him.

  So it was fitting, perhaps, that he wasn’t going to be part of Momus. Instead, he’d been invited to join Rex. Rex wasn’t as old as Momus, Comus, or the Atlanteans—it was founded after the Civil War, a crucial distinction—but it was built around the most important person on Mardi Gras day: Rex himself, the king of carnival. Rex was neither crassly over-democratic like the new superkrewes that accepted anybody who could pay the dues—Bacchus and Endymion—nor stuffily exclusive like Proteus, Momus, or Comus. It was the perfect happy medium; one still had to be invited, but it was much bigger in membership than the old-line krewes, and its motto, “Pro bono publico,” perfectly captured its civic mission to serve and entertain the entire city, not just the bluest of the blue bloods. It was a big, vigorous organization, much more the kind of place a comer like Billy Grace belonged than the rarefied atmosphere of Momus or the Atlanteans. Billy was proud to be a part of it.

  Rex: Its infatuation with a storybook idea of royalty was so over the top that Billy could tell himself it was all a goof, a laugh, a joke. The thirty-foot gold-lamé-and-ermine trains that the king and queen wore! The ten-year-old pages in brocaded uniforms and stockings, the bejeweled crowns. The fake beard the king always had to stick on with spirit gum. The wildly overdone pomp, the men in white ties and tails bowing … It was all a little boy’s idea of royalty. Nobody could really take it seriously, could they?

  But Billy couldn’t look around his Christmas party without noticing how many of the men he loved were members of Rex. It wasn’t a hoot or a goof at all, really. It was important. It was historic. Planning for the balls, choosi
ng a queen, selecting the maids and dukes, conceiving a theme for the parade, and, of course, anointing Rex himself—these rituals gave shape to uptown life, and had done so for more than a hundred years. They set New Orleans apart from other cities. They bestowed a specialness upon the deeply rooted elite of New Orleans, who, Billy understood all too well, couldn’t compete with their counterparts elsewhere in either wealth or enterprise or genius. The rituals of Rex weren’t ridiculous at all; they were beautiful—elegant, regal, and worthy precisely because they consumed so much of uptown’s time, money, and mental energy.

  Rex is not Momus or the Atlanteans, Billy told himself. It doesn’t exist entirely in the service of privilege and exclusion. It exists, really, to put on for New Orleans—rich and poor, black and white—the greatest free show on earth.

  They will show me the way, Billy thought. They will illuminate the path that winds between the highest reaches of uptown New Orleans and an enlightened attitude toward the city’s black citizens that would make my father proud. Above his head elaborate molding crawled around the ceiling, the crystal chandeliers that had once swung over the heads of the likes of Robert Downman and Senator Ransdell. I, Billy thought, am the next generation of Rex.