“Where’d she go?”
Sadie shook her head. “I’d have thought you’d be more supportive.”
It was impossible to talk to hopheads. You couldn’t get a straight answer. It wasn’t only that they hallucinated; they made you feel as if you were hallucinating too.
“Sadie.” He touched her elbow. “Did you see Orleania go somewhere?”
“I hope she went home. She looked exhausted.”
Maybe that was it. But it hurt that on this particular night she would go home early. “She had a long day I guess,” said Isadore. “Her family works her hard.”
Sadie giggled. “Hold on, Izzy. Don’t you know?”
“Night, Sadie. I’m sick of your nonsense and side answers.”
“She’s your own girl and you don’t know.”
He looked for the Reverend. Had he disappeared too? They had business to discuss.
Sadie was laughing to herself. “Men are blind,” she said, and there was a strangely coherent quality to her voice that dragged him back.
“Who’s blind?”
“That girl is in the family way. She’s got that glow. You don’t know?”
Isadore’s fob watch jolted into life in his inner jacket pocket, beating hard against his chest. It wasn’t the normal rhythm, however. It beat much too fast.
“Baby, you remember our sweet days at the Octoroon?” Sadie drew closer, her voice cloying. “Now that you’re a big-timer, maybe you can give Auntie a little candy.”
Isadore could only gape at her.
“You got a quarter maybe?” she said. “A dime? A dime for Aunt Sadie?”
It was as if a cog had broken and it kept accelerating, the minute and hour hands spinning out of control, and it wasn’t until he patted the empty pocket that he remembered he had given his fob watch to Zutty Singleton. He had given it up and he wasn’t ever going to get it back. He felt its absence in his pocket, the lightness against his breast, and he was reminded, for the first time since his father’s death, what it felt like to lose something forever.
JULY 3, 1918—THE GARDEN DISTRICT
The eight-foot-tall grandfather clock loomed at the foot of her bed, thonging and clicking, each night winding her thoughts and sending them awhirl, transforming her brain into levers, hammers, rotating gears. This was useful when she wanted to solve a puzzle but oppressive when she wanted to sleep. Tonight she felt particularly defenseless against the clock, which was built into a stout pilaster that wouldn’t have been out of place supporting the portico of the Palermo Cathedral. In fact she wouldn’t have been surprised if the clock, a gift from one of Sal’s uncles—“uncles”—had been pilfered from the cathedral itself, a plaster replica substituted in its place. A week after Sal’s death, ragged with sleeplessness, Beatrice had asked Giorgio to haul it out of the bedroom, only to awake in the night to see Sal, having grown eight feet tall and as sturdy as oak, standing in the place of the clock at the foot of their marriage bed, glaring down at her. She made Giorgio return the clock the following morning. It must have weighed four hundred pounds, but he lifted it as if it were hollow.
The clock sent her mind revolving around Giorgio, who was currently in the one place over which she had no supervision: out. Home, she could monitor him. Out, anything went. Where did he go and what did he do? Her mental gears clicked through the possibilities. Tick: He’s with his friends. Tock: What friends? Tick: He’s collecting payments. Tock: Past midnight? Giugi knows to make rounds at the bars in the mornings, when there are the fewest patrons, and no grocers are up this late, they have to open their stores in less than five hours. Tick: He’s seeing a girlfriend. Tock: What girlfriend? Besides, he left in a sweat, straight from a day at the dig. If he had a date, wouldn’t he have bathed? Tick: He’s doing something he doesn’t want you to know about. Tock: He tells me everything. Tick: He’s doing something he doesn’t want anybody to know about. The Tulane professor hasn’t been found. What if Giorgio was responsible? What if he did more than scare the professor out of town?
She reminded herself that this line of thought was ludicrous. Her desperate desire for Giorgio to take an interest in the family business, to one day inherit it, so long thwarted, had mutated into a perverse fantasy: that simple, dull Giorgio had overnight become a calculating lieutenant, willing to commit unspeakable acts of terror to protect the Vizzinis’ burgeoning empire. She should be ashamed. The preposterous fantasy only reflected her own longing for him to be someone other than who he was.
The only thing capable of soothing her blood in moments like this, besides an osteopathic adjustment, was a pot of warm milk. But what if, while she was in the kitchen, Giorgio came home? She chided herself—she knew exactly what she’d do. She’d ask him, straight out, where he’d been. He was her son, after all. Imagine that, being afraid of one’s own little boy!
But she was afraid. And she was afraid that she was afraid.
Her pulse thumped faster than the second hand and she wondered if the clock was not solely to blame. Perhaps one of the mysterious ingredients in Mother Siegel’s Longevity Syrup had contributed. The potion tasted like sarsaparilla and metal, an ominous admixture. But in her siege on mortality she had to explore every possible line of attack. Even when it tasted like sarsaparilla and metal and gave her the collywobbles.
With a groan—the groan of a woman fully fifty-five years of age—she sat up, her wiggling toes reaching for her slippers. A cool whisper of air entangled her ankles; in these high-ceilinged Uptown houses the air was always cooler closer to the floor. The clock chose that moment to chime the half hour—half past midnight—and her heart seized. She bit her cheek; this was unlike her, the anxiety, the vacillating, the tiptoeing. She switched on the bedside lamp, her eyes squinting from the sudden electric glare. After glancing one last time to make sure that the clock was still a clock and not her husband risen from the grave, she wrapped herself in her eiderdown bathrobe. Her mind began to quiet. When she thought about it logically, her fear had nothing to do with Giorgio. Her suspicions were but a new manifestation of the big anxiety, the anxiety that warmed all the others like a stove heating a home through its network of interlocking pipes.
She’d studied the question of mortality as long as she could remember, but Sal’s death had led her to reach certain conclusions. Lying in the dark, the clock calibrating her thoughts, she had developed her own unified theory of mortality—or, rather, its opposite. Immortality took four forms, not all of them equal. Most useless was poetic immortality, the immortality of place names, art, and great works. Beatrice knew the name of a French duke because he had bequeathed his name to her adopted city. She knew the name of Dante Alighieri because he had written odes to the woman after whom she herself had been named. And she knew the name of George G. Earl, general superintendent of the Sewerage and Water Board, because it was stamped across every sewer cover in New Orleans. The Industrial Canal, the city’s “key to the doors of the world,” would bear a similar plaque with her name. The contributions of Hercules Construction Co.—a firm named after another mortal who had been immortalized through his labors—would be recorded in history books. But how long would the world remember a poem, or even a city? What if some plucky New Orleanian, centuries hence, built an even wider canal? Where would that leave Hercules Construction Co., Beatrice Vizzini, Proprietor? Her name would corrode like the bolts in the canal’s locks.
She flicked on every light she passed along the way to the kitchen. She stepped lightly so that she wouldn’t awake Lizzie. She was grateful for Lizzie’s help but the girl didn’t know when to stop helping.
Nearly as futile as poetic legacy was biological legacy. Beatrice had Giorgio, but his three older sisters—Rosalia, Beatriceta, and Giulia—had been lost to malaria and croup. Giorgio, already thirty-two, showed no inclination to provide her with a grandchild. All it took was a single barren generation to sever the biological chain. Besides, what good was biological legacy when you were dead?
As for the im
mortality of the soul, she had her doubts, but just in case she had Lizzie deliver a two-dollar banknote every Sunday to Padre Scramuzza at St. Mary’s, served as an honorary principessa in the annual Santa Rosalia parade, and invited the entire neighborhood to her St. Joseph’s Day party, for which Lizzie prepared an altar decorated with candles, chalices overladen with cherries, and pastries molded into the shapes of doves, hammers, and wreaths. At times, she would grant, she had behaved ungodly. One particular time, really. But she had repented.
She poured the remaining milk in the jug into a copper pot. The pot was on the drying rack, otherwise she wouldn’t have known in which cupboard to find it. Lizzie was always hiding things, as if to ensure her own indispensability. If she fired Lizzie, Beatrice would be lost in her own house. She lit a match to the range and watched the flame dance beneath the pot. As a schoolgirl she was made to memorize a line of poetry: If I thought my answer were to one who would ever return to the world, this flame should stay without another movement; but since none ever returned alive from this depth …
The fourth, and by far most desirable form of immortality was not dying. The most recent number of Popular Science Monthly—she had taken a subscription in Sal’s name years ago, along with subscriptions to Science, Nature, and National Geographic—reported that the average life expectancy of an American woman had increased from fifty years to fifty-seven. And that was just since the turn of the century. There were various explanations, chief among them advancements in public hygiene and early identification of disease. The anopheles mosquito had nearly been eradicated from American cities, if not from the canal site, by the wide distribution of quinine. Malaria—poor Rosalia!—would vanish from the continent within a decade. Science was gaining rapidly on death. An editorial in Nature speculated that increases in life expectancy would soon keep pace with the rate at which one aged, making immortality a mathematical possibility. Was it crazy to believe that by, say, 1940, life expectancy might increase two years for every two years that passed? Beatrice only had to make it to 1940.
To ensure that she would, she took every second night an “immortality bath,” a remedy used by every centenarian she had known as a girl in Palermo, a tub of scalding water mixed with essential herbs. As she soaked, she felt her pores open like the tiny mouths of feeding chicks, the quotidian poisons draining from her lymphs. Because one also absorbed toxins from insufficiently masticated food, she was a diligent Fletcherist, chewing every mouthful at least thirty-two times before swallowing. Each morning she squeezed half of a lemon into a glass of milk, waited for it to coagulate, and ate the chunks with a tab of honey, following the example of the Russian longevitist Élie Metchnikoff. Lactic acid increased life span, everyone knew that; even the chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture had endorsed the life-conserving properties of sour milk in its various forms—yogurt, labneh, and koumiss. This diet, combined with Giorgio’s weekly osteopathic treatment, kept her blood fresh and her bones fortified. She had the energy of a thirty-year-old. The figure—not quite. But the energy and the mind. Most important, the mind. Her mind had brought her this far and the Industrial Canal was only the beginning. She was living with the expectation that there would be no end. That was why she wore gold on her fingers. Gold was immortal. They had found gold in Saint Peter’s Tomb and in the pyramids where the Egyptian pharaohs were buried. If ever she suffered a crisis of confidence, she could glance at her fingers and be reminded of her golden immortality.
She could feel the pulse in her neck without holding a finger to it. Her heart was leaping over itself.
She hovered her hands over the steam of the warming milk. Without the clock’s regimental influence, her mind began to open up, allowing more dimly considered facts to intrude. Besides Hugs’s insinuations, there had been other signs, however subtle, that Giorgio’s behavior had become erratic. A manager she trusted at Hercules had mentioned that Giorgio had been particularly “vigorous” in his supervision of the dig. She had taken that as a compliment—what a relief to hear that he was engaged in the work!—but she wondered now whether the manager spoke euphemistically.
A nacreous membrane congealed on the surface of the milk. It was a guilty pleasure, but she was alone, so she lifted it with her forefinger out of the pot. The milk wrapped around her finger, a second skin. She put her finger into her mouth and as her teeth scraped off the milkskin, she remembered the newspaper. Giorgio had made an odd reference to reading the Item during her last osteopathic treatment—on its face an absurdity as Giorgio was barely literate. And because the paper had been on the divan in her study. But she hadn’t given his lie much thought, so happy was she to discover his interest in the coming prohibition of liquor. It was reasonable that he should be concerned, since much of the shadow business’s income came from liquor sales at the grocery stores, bars, and honky-tonks that they protected. It was reasonable—just not that reasonable.
She flew to the study. Lizzie was under strict instructions never to throw out a paper until she had finished with it, which she indicated by tossing it onto the floor. The oldest newspaper, at the bottom of the stack, was dated June 29 (“World’s Biggest War Budget Passes U.S. Senate”). On Friday, Giorgio had mentioned the previous day’s paper, which meant the twenty-seventh. A muddy panic settled around her. When had she read the Thursday paper? Was it possible that it hadn’t yet been taken by the trashman? She saw herself outside the back gate on Chestnut Street, rooting through her trash in full view of the neighbors, and the image alone was enough to knock sense into her head.
She returned to the kitchen to find the milk boiling. She picked up the pot with a hand towel but it was too heavy and she overpoured, the milk slapping onto the counter and onto the floor. Cursing the milk, cursing the unwieldy copper pot, and cursing herself for acting like a dippy old lady, driven from her bed in the middle of the night by anxiety about her grown son, she began swinging open cupboards. She finally found the rags below the sink with the rest of the cleaning supplies. The white vinegar, the silver polish, the Old Dutch Cleanser, the scrub brush—and the newspapers. Of course: Lizzie used old newspapers, soaked in vinegar, to clean the windows. The Item of the twenty-seventh was the second in the pile.
She scanned it, looking for clues. Beneath the headline “Sale of Beer to Stop in U.S. Sept. 30, 1919” were stories about the emergency appropriation bill that would prohibit liquor manufacture; the death of a New Orleans boy, Sidney Hellman, on a French battlefield; and recent developments, favorable and lamentable, in Berlin, Paris, and the Austrian Alps. In local news the Besemers, a grocer and his wife, were attacked by an ax-wielding maniac as they slept (Beatrice had sent a bouquet of camellias to the convalescing couple, new clients who had bought the business from a retiring grocer from Agrigento); progress had been made on the expansion of New Orleans rail lines; and businesses would close Friday to encourage the raising of War Saving Stamps by all citizens. There was nothing about the canal, nothing about the Tulane professor. So why did her brain feel heavy with blood?
“Hiya, Mamma.” Her son stood in the doorway.
“It’s late!” Her voice was much too loud. It was nearly a scream.
Giorgio advanced. She thought he would embrace her but he continued past her to the range, where he turned the gas valve shut. The milk in the pot had evaporated, leaving a black resin that had begun to smoke.
“I suppose it’s past my bedtime.” She couldn’t tell if she was more amazed by her forgetfulness or the assuredness with which Giorgio strode across the room and extinguished the flame. When he passed her, she caught an unusual scent—fresh, floral, clean—that she couldn’t immediately identify.
“Reading about the Besemers?”
She looked down and remembered the newspaper in her hands. “I had trouble sleeping. Did you have a nice evening?”
“I did, Mamma.” He made no attempt to elaborate. He smiled, but it was not his typical befuddled smile. An unsightly flutter played at the corner of his mou
th. She had the startling suspicion that there lurked, in this rotten smile, the shadow of condescension. She felt blanketed by a sudden fatigue.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.
“Mamma.” He crossed the distance between them in a single bound and hugged her. “Good night, Mamma.” He kissed the crown of her skull.
In bed she returned to the Besemer article. She wanted to stop reading, but couldn’t—the ticking of the grandfather clock forced her eyes ahead, one line at a time:
GROCER AND WIFE HACKED NEARLY TO DEATH; WON’T TELL WHO DID IT
Louis Besemer and Spouse Found with Skulls Fractured; Able to Talk, Say Nothing
An intruder attacked Louis Besemer and his wife with the ax that fractured the skulls of both, rifling the cash register of the little grocery at the corner of Laharpe and Dorgenois.
Both Besemer and his wife flatly denied to Superintendent Mooney that either owned the ax, which, stained with blood, was found in the rear of the house on the gallery where the desperate struggle took place.
John Zanca, baker, of 827 Congress street, stood puzzled at 7 a.m., at the corner of Laharpe street. Regularly Zanca had delivered bread to that grocery. Never before had he found it locked. Repeatedly he pounded.
Shuffling foot-steps at last rewarded his hammering.
“Come around to the side door,” came the message in a weak voice.
In through the side door Zanca carried the bread.
“My God, what’s happened?” he called.
Splashes of blood covered the face into which he stared.
“Aw, nothing’s the matter. Don’t worry,” said the grocer.
Zanca pushed roughly past him, grabbed the telephone receiver from the hook, and shouted into the transmitter for police.
TWO FOUND WITH FRACTURED SKULLS
“There’s been a murder or somethin’ here,” called Zanca—and left hurriedly, before the wrath of the grocer.
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