“Just paid someone else to do it?” Sharon asked.
Richard nodded. “It wasn’t only him and his pirates—lots of the merchants of New Orleans made big profits from his crimes. We’re trying to show that violence can be indirect. It’s an important point.”
Sam took the controls and tried to make the puppet walk, but he didn’t know how. Jean Lafitte staggered with his arms splayed and his butt in the air. “What else did he do?” Sam asked.
“At one point, Governor Claiborne offered a $500 reward for his capture. Lafitte turned around and offered $2,500 for Claiborne.”
Sam snorted. “Impudent bastard.” Jean Lafitte flailed around, flopping like a duck.
“That he was,” Richard said. “But in the end, he was one of the heroes of the Battle of New Orleans. And he was pardoned by the president.”
“So, why would a pirate run a blacksmith shop?” Sam asked. Jean waved a hand. Sam was starting to understand how the controls worked.
“It was a front,” Richard said, nodding at Sam’s progress as a puppeteer. “Lafitte pretended to run the blacksmith shop, and customers came in and made purchases, but what they were buying wasn’t iron grillwork. It was ‘black ivory,’ smuggled slaves.”
Sharon frowned. “Is that something you really want to show kids?”
“That’s bothered me, too,” I said. “Martin and I are working out how to get it into the script. Or whether we should get it in.”
“Did Lafitte reform after he was pardoned?” asked Sharon.
“Not for long,” I admitted. “Maybe we’ll end with the pardon, though. Show that a person who’s done wrong can make up for it.”
“Isn’t that bending the facts a bit?” Sam asked.
Richard thought for a moment. “This isn’t a full biography of Jean Lafitte. The point is an honest one, though, because people can reform.”
Sam set Jean Lafitte back into the box. “Do you ever do anything but puppets?”
“Let’s do something else right now,” I said. “Let’s go to the Quarter and get lemon ices at Brocato’s.”
“I’d rather have spumone,” said Sam.
We called Thu and Martin, but they didn’t want to drive over to New Orleans. Martin asked us to bring back some ice cream. They were having a dinner for us four and the rest of the Motley family that evening, so I volunteered to go by Eddie’s stand and pick up vegetables.
“Are all the shows as serious as the Snow Queen one and the Jean Lafitte?” asked Sam as we walked down Royal Street.
“Oh, no,” said Richard. “There’s the Nasruddin one. He’s sometimes a fool and sometimes a trickster. And the shadow puppets include Hacivat and Karagöz—they’re funny, too. The story behind them is political, because the sultan had them killed for joking too much. Then he missed them, so a dervish made puppets to tell their jokes.”
“Do you go looking for this sort of stuff?” Sam sounded frustrated. I glanced sharply at him—it wasn’t like Sam to make a fuss over something unless it was important to him. I couldn’t imagine why the puppets would be.
“What do you mean?” asked Richard.
“Well . . . negative. Slavery, and tyranny, and the mirror that makes you see everything twisted. It’s all so grim.”
“Someone has to face the way things are and try to change them,” Richard said.
“Maybe, but you’ll never do it by scolding.” Sam stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, as if he could make his point better if he didn’t have to walk at the same time. Sharon took his hand and pulled him back into step with us.
“What do you suggest?” Richard asked.
“Well, hell, I’m not a puppeteer. Maybe you know best. But if I went to a puppet show, I’d be hoping the show would have a magical feeling. The stories you’re telling, it’s almost like you’re going out looking for misery.”
“Don’t have to,” Richard told him. “It’s everywhere.”
“Story of our times?” asked Sam.
“Story of our species,” Richard said. “Don’t blame me. I didn’t make the world.”
Our species was on its good behavior that afternoon in the Quarter. Whoever made the world, it didn’t look so awful. Cheerful crowds meandered and window-shopped and stared into the ferny courtyards through antique wrought-iron gates. Did any of those gates come from Jean Lafitte’s blacksmith shop?
I shuddered as we passed the corner of Royal and Governor Nicholls, the Lalaurie house trimmed with its own edging of iron lace. No one in early New Orleans suspected—but when a fire broke out, the firemen found slaves in prison cells. And a torture room. The owners fled, and black ghosts had haunted the place ever since. As I researched Louisiana history for the theater, though, I’d learned that a charitable group had used the house during the Depression. For years, they fed and cared for anyone who asked for help. No one remembered that. I sighed. Maybe Sam had a point.
Richard broke into my thoughts. “Getting tired, sweetheart?”
“I guess so. Let’s go on to Eddie’s and then take the ferry home.”
Later, on the boat, we got out of the car to watch the brown water of the river slide past. Richard told Sam and Sharon more about the theater.
“We’re putting together a set of the Nasruddin stories for some comic relief. A few of them are funny, almost like jokes. In one, he’s told he has to pay for truth. When he protests, the seller reminds him that the price of a thing is set by its scarcity.”
Richard chuckled. “In another, he goes to get a drink of water and his friend asks him to bring a cup back. He comes back without it, and tells the friend, ‘After I got my own drink, I found you weren’t thirsty anymore.’
“But my favorite so far is the one where he’s asked what fate is. He answers that fate is like a weaving, the visible threads intertwined with invisible ones. He points to a man going off to be hanged. ‘Is it his fate to be hanged because one man saw him commit the crime, or because another gave him the money to buy a knife? Or is it because of all the good folk who didn’t stop him?’”
“Too dark,” objected Sam. “That one will never do for comic relief. You need to lighten up! You know, it’s like in my profession. It’s awful to lose a kid to cancer. People think doctors are so detached, but that’s not so for me. But I can’t let it stop me. Because there’s always someone else I can help. You can get sidetracked on the negative stuff and never see anything else. And then, I’m sorry, but you’re worthless to anyone, including yourself.” He sounds angry. Almost, anyway.
We scrambled back into the car as the west bank of the river approached, and then drove off the ferry into the streets of Algiers, our next-door town. I thought about Sam’s words as I drove.
He was right. I worried about everything—Richard, the baby, my parents. I worried almost constantly. But Thu and Martin had worse problems than we did, and they’d both survived terrible losses. And they seemed much less burdened than Richard and me. What about that? Why am I working for peace when I haven’t made peace with myself?
When Martin opened the door that evening, the smell of good food tumbled out to meet us. Thu had cooked a rice dish, spicy and almost familiar. Sharon and I went back to the kitchen to help her.
“What is this?” I asked, stealing a before-dinner taste from a copper pot.
“It’s called Com Chien Thap Cam. Of course, I couldn’t get Vietnamese rice.”
“What difference would that make?” Sharon asked.
Thu looked surprised. “Oh, it makes an enormous difference. Rice of each area has its own flavor. When people move away from their own village, they miss the taste of their own rice almost more than anything else.”
I lifted the lid of a big saucepan. “What’s this?”
Thu, rinsing vegetables at the sink, turned to see what I was looking at. “Oh, it’s pho. You’d call it beef noodle soup.”
Eddie and Francine came into the kitchen. “Hey, dirty rice!” Eddie exclaimed.
Thu flew to her pot
and surveyed the contents. “Where?”
“Right there in the pot—dirty rice.”
“It’s not dirty! What are you talking about, Eddie?” Thu’s face was set in a deep scowl, an expression I’d never seen from her before.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean it was dirty, Thu. I’m sorry—I meant it was ‘dirty rice.’ It’s a Creole dish.”
“That’s the name of a dish?” She was still suspicious. “What is it?”
“Oh, rice with stuff in it. Vegetables and onions and giblets, maybe shrimp or crawdads. Or maybe that’s a pilau. Mama never taught me how to cook. I call them all ‘dirty rice.’”
“Giblets? Crawdads? Pilau?” Thu was floundering in new words.
Francine laughed. “Tell you later, honey. He said it—his mama didn’t teach him nothin’ about cooking. I’ll show you. This Com whatever-you-call-it, it is a lot like pilau. Dirty rice.” She shot Eddie a look of mock disgust. “Bet you don’t even know how to get you a cup of coffee.”
“Of course I do,” Eddie said, with injured dignity.
“Oh? How?” Francine put her fists on her ample hips and surveyed Eddie like he was a little kid trying to get away with something.
“Go to the Café Du Monde and tell the waiter, ‘One cup of café au lait, please.’”
Thu laughed, her hurt feelings forgotten. She brought the food to the table and the Motleys gathered around. The boys sat on chairs stacked with thick books.
All of us bowed our heads, and Martin said, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord.”
“Amen.”
Hot braided bread and a tangy salad went around. The rice dish had shrimp, sausage, mushrooms, and buttery scallions. It was delicious.
“What do you two do?” asked Martin.
“I’m an accountant and Sam’s a doctor,” Sharon answered.
“What kind of doctor?” Francine asked Sam.
“I’m a pediatric oncologist. I specialize in cancer and leukemia in children.” Judging from Francine’s expression, she wished she hadn’t asked.
“I hope you like seafood.” Thu, gesturing toward the rice dish, changed the subject gracefully.
“Lord, yes. Delicious. What kind of dish is it?” asked Sam.
“Vietnamese.”
“You’re from Vietnam?”
“I am—Martin’s Australian.”
“I think they can tell, honey,” Martin said. He’d worked on his accent so it wouldn’t distract from the puppet performances, but a little of it was still left.
“Actually, yes.” Sam smiled. “How did you meet each other?”
“I was a journalist over there until 1968.”
“And then?”
“We lived in Hue,” Martin said. “It’s in central Vietnam, the old Imperial City. It’s a university town as well, a sort of cultural and historic center. It had been quiet up until ’68, almost as if the war couldn’t come there. Thu was running her family’s marionette theater, and I was doing freelance writing and learning the puppets. When Tet came, the war roared in.”
“A siege, wasn’t it?” Sam asked.
“A massacre. House-to-house fighting, soldiers everywhere. I was outside in the street—fortunately not too far away. I was trying to get back, but I got shot. I crawled inside and Thu hid me.”
“You mean they searched your house?” Sharon sounded horrified.
“We were in the theater. But yes, they searched. More than once. Somehow, they knew a foreigner was attached to the place.”
“Where did you hide?” Sam asked.
Martin returned his question with another one. “Do you know what water puppets are?”
Sam shook his head.
“They’re a folk tradition in the north of Vietnam,” Martin explained. “Puppeteers stand in hip-deep water and manipulate the puppets with the water surface as a stage floor. Each family of puppeteers has a unique version. They hold their secrets so closely that they won’t even teach their daughters, because women marry outside the family.”
“Is that the kind of puppets you had? I thought you said Thu was managing the theater.”
“She was,” Martin said, “but we didn’t have water puppets. Thu’s family wasn’t that kind of puppeteer. We wanted to do water puppets, though, and we’d hired a young man named Minh who knew one tradition. He was from the north, and his whole family had been wiped out in the war. He thought he might as well teach us, under the circumstances.
“We built a tank under the stage and fixed the stage floor to be removable. No one knew—we wanted the opening to be a surprise. No one else but Minh knew it was there. We hadn’t filled it with water yet. That was where we hid, in the tank.” Martin turned to Thu. “Why don’t you tell the rest.”
“It was raining and very cold for Hue,” said Thu. “Martin was delirious most of the time. I thought he was dying, but I didn’t dare try to get help. I crept out once to get food and water and something to keep us warm. The only food we had in the theater was a tray of traditional Tet foods, dried fruits and vegetables, mostly sweet, and candied ginger. There were no blankets, so I grabbed a bolt of gold velvet I’d bought to make robes for kings and gods. I filled a couple of big vases with water, pushed it all back into the tank, and then crawled in and set the flooring piece back down.”
She broke off, and gave Sam a rare direct-in-the-eyes look.
“What happened then?” he asked. He was hoarse, as if his voice didn’t want to work. I knew how he felt—I couldn’t have said a word. Richard’s chair was pushed back from the group, his face remote and shadowy.
“For days, Martin tossed on the metal floor of the tank, wrapped up in the puppets’ velvet. I wanted to warm him with my body, but I was afraid I’d hurt him. I sat in the dark near him, nauseated from fear and from having nothing to eat but sweets. The building shook from artillery. At first I was afraid a shell would hit us, later I almost wished one would. Sometimes I heard heavy boots running across the stage right above our heads, sometimes gunshots. We had no way to know who was winning.
“When the noise finally stopped, I crept out into the ruins of the street and found Americans. They medevaced Martin out.”
“What happened to Minh?” Sam asked.
“As I helped the men put Martin in the helicopter, I saw in the dim light that the soldiers had machine-gunned even a puppet Martin had left dangling on the stage. Minh was gone. I hope he got away, but we never heard. We did all we could—everything beyond that is fate.”
“You went to Australia after that?”
“Yes, and then came here. Have you ever seen Australia? It’s very beautiful.” Thu fetched a book of photographs, turning the subject away from the tragedies of her country. Relieved at the change, we passed the book around, admiring the pictures.
With dessert, Thu brought out an album of photos by Martin, and we talked about photography, and arts in general, carving, and then the puppets. As we scraped the last morsels from our dessert plates, Martin bowed his head again. We all fumbled to follow suit, even Richard and I, who had never seen grace said after meals, even when we ate with Martin.
“We give Thee thanks, almighty God, for all Thy benefits, Who livest and reignest, world without end.”
“Thanks be to God,” replied Francine, Thu, and Eddie together.
“May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”
“Amen.”
We didn’t stay long after dinner. Thu wrapped up food for us to take home, and we protested that it was too much even as we looked forward to eating it. Sharon and Sam hugged everyone, bending to put their arms around Martin. We all flocked onto the porch for good-byes. Joss and Dom called “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!” for as long as we could hear—and maybe after, for all we knew.
Part 4
~ 21 ~
July 1974
New Orleans
Kathy
Jamie was born July
23, two months early. It was a panicked night, with Thu driving Richard and me across the bridge to Charity Hospital. Sisters of Charity were the nurses, modern in skills, businesslike in their manner, and dressed for the Middle Ages in long habits and tall white headdresses winged like swans.
The nuns wouldn’t let Richard stay with me because we weren’t married, but they let Thu stay for a while. I gripped her hand so hard I was afraid I’d break it, and she never complained. I didn’t get to see Jamie at all that night. They’d hustled her off to an incubator and took me to a recovery room. I felt empty, and the emptiness was starting to fill with fear. Thu wasn’t supposed to visit before I was settled in a ward, but she sneaked in and stood beside me till they found her and made her leave.
“I would be stupid to tell you not to worry, but don’t give up,” she told me before she left. “Like a dancer on a tightrope—don’t look down.”
The sister stood adamant in her dark blue habit. Thu lingered a defiant minute and touched my arm. Then she left, stopping once to wave.
“Mrs. Woodbridge,” the sister said, “Father Evans would like to baptize your daughter now.”
Does that mean she’s going to die? “All right,” I said. “Her name is Jamie.”
“Would you choose a saint’s name for the baptism?”
“Catherine,” I said. I didn’t know many saints’ names, but I did know there was a Saint Catherine. I tried to claim my baby by giving her my own name. I was too tired to think anymore. As soon as they moved me to a ward, I fell asleep.
I woke to sunlight and the sound of traffic from the city streets, both coming in through open windows on one side of the ward. There was a line of beds along each of the long walls—I didn’t try to count how many. The walls were painted pale green, darker at the bottom to save repainting, like the walls of a bus station. I could smell rubbing alcohol and maybe floor cleaner—whatever else it was that made hospitals all smell the same.
A doctor in a white coat came through the double doors in the middle of the opposite wall. It was Sam.
“What are you doing here?” I yelped.
He made shushing gestures and bent to whisper to me.
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