The tall boy, used to privilege, looked around the vast club, now filled with pink-clothed tables and topiary trees whose branches held pink carnations and velvet bows. “I guess they have stuff like members-only Sunday brunches, and members-only monthly suppers. Stuff like that?”
“You seem to know these matters.” I wondered if he was thinking of the sailing club.
He stopped and rolled up the sleeves of his borrowed shirt. “What happens if, you know, somebody gets a divorce?”
Apparently he was. I stopped at the front doors. “Mayfair says the memberships are in the men’s names.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I thought.”
“You’re thinking of your mom?”
“She really got mad when Dad moved out.” He looked everywhere but at me.
Outside, the girls appeared to be trying equally hard to communicate with Mayfair.
“Ms. Roberdeau,” Birdie was saying, “we bet that was your aunt who came to visit my grandmom in Austin.”
“You said she went to see her teacher, Mama—” Felice chimed in.
“Hang on here.” Mayfair shook her head. “Slow down. The lady my auntie went to see, in Shreveport it was, had already been taken to the funeral home by the time she got there.”
“But you said that your mama and her couldn’t go to the school they wanted to, Mama. You said—” Felice tugged on her mother’s shirt.
“And Mrs. Grimes, who came to see my grandmom, she and her sister, they couldn’t go to the school they wanted to.” Birdie rocked up and down on her feet, looking at me for confirmation.
“Oh, children,” Mayfair said, her voice gentle, the pink Moorish country club immense in the muggy air behind her, “back in those days there were lots and lots of little girls who couldn’t go to the schoolhouse of their choice.”
Unbidden, tears filled my eyes. How little any of us understood the generations that came before. I thought of Bailey, trying to figure out his mom and dad, and of our girls here, straining to connect their segregated pasts. I thought of myself, Ella, and the parents I would never know.
30
Hello, Bird,” Karl said, letting himself in the back door. “Who’s this?”
“This is my cousin, Bailey. Bailey, this is Karl.”
“He giving you any trouble?”
Birdie shook her head. “I imagine you don’t have cousins.”
“The head cheerleader at my high school had a cousin; he had a glass eye.”
Birdie giggled, and my nephew rose to stare down the unexpected male intruder. Then, remembering his manners, he stuck out a hand, mumbling, “Thanksfortheshirt,” without a lot of conviction, shoving it in the visitor’s direction, like a ball of rags.
“Your old man’s Uncle Rufus, have I got that right?”
“Yeah,” Bailey allowed.
Karl sniffed the shirt and tucked it under his arm. “Around here, I’m Uncle Karl.”
“Okay,” Bailey said. “You want to sit or something?”
“Count me out. I got a house to show your aunt, is that right, your aunt?” He looked at me. “It’s not great, but it’s got a story.”
“Sure,” I said, glad he’d waited to show up until Birdie got home from school. Bailey, it had turned out, did best with a keeper. “I’ve been watering. Let me clean up—?”
“I’ll swing by a place I need to look at on Jasmine Lane.”
“No need to swim back to the door.” I gestured to the loafers in his hand. “I’ll meet you in the driveway.”
While I fixed up a bit, plus wondered how it would be, leaving these two alone, if my daughter would do her house guest any major damage, I heard the pair having a go at playing sibling.
“My mom sometimes goes to the movies with Karl,” Birdie told him.
“Your mom sometimes goes to the movies with any creep who asks.”
I heard a smack, and looked in to see Bailey falling to his knees as if shot, clutching his Adam’s apple. “The attack of the little people.” He rolled onto his back. “Say good-bye, Earth, I’m gone.”
“Take it back.” Birdie put her foot on his chest.
“I take it back. Your mom only goes when the creep asks her nice.”
I left the cousins caterwauling, a word of my daddy’s which I assumed meant cat fight. Daddy’s language had been floating around in my mind ever since I got home, trying to shake off the Texas trip.
In my black T-shirt and blue-and-black skirt, my straw bag on my head like someone fording the Nile, sandals in my hand, umbrella under my arm, I waited in the driveway for Karl.
As soon as I opened the door of the Honda and climbed into the passenger seat, I could tell something was up. No chewing gum either in progress or on the dash. No pencil between his white realtor’s teeth. And the unmistakable (and awful) smell in his spotless show-car of air freshener. Karl was smoking again.
“Lung cancer,” I said, fastening the double seat belt.
“I’m fine, thanks,” he said.
“If you have any Juicy Fruit left over, I’ll take a stick.” That was self-defense.
He motioned to the map compartment, where I found three packs of cigarettes and two packs of gum. I unpeeled a stick. “Where are we going?”
“Middle America.” He backed out and whipped over to the through street, taking us out of our safe, secure (soggy) neighborhood, through a couple of equally wet, adjacent neighborhoods whose children went to lesser schools and were taught by teachers who probably also favored aromatherapy candles and whose plumbing probably had also needed the services of an overtime professional.
“Friendly kid back there, who smelled up my shirt. Glad he’s not Bird’s beau. Got the personality of a first try: tongue-tied and chilled-out.”
“He’s having a hard time.”
“He look like his dad?”
“Karl,” I said. Sooner or later we’d have to get to the matter, but I didn’t want him baiting me. “So what’s the house you wanted me to see?”
“Only one I’m buying, that’s all.” He sounded smug.
“You’re kidding. What brought this on?”
“One guess.” He dodged a pothole. “Opportunity.”
“That’s great.”
The house, in an area north and west of Old Metairie, at this moment blockaded off with sawhorses because the streets were flooded, had a SOLD sign in the yard. We parked on a shoulder, the only dry ground, and, shoes back in hand, walked the block to the one-and-a-half-story frame house. Which had a battered cottonwood in the yard, a dangling shutter from last night’s big blow, and an enclosed garage in the back that had been turned, it looked like, into a guest house or rental.
Inside, the place smelled damp; okay, it smelled faintly of mildew. And something else. Bats? Mold?
“Your depressed daddy left you his life’s savings?” I asked, indicating my awe at the size and condition of the fairly new builder’s house.
Karl looked at me, glum. “My dad wouldn’t get up out of that easy chair if there was a million dollars for the taking on the dining room table. My mom says he wouldn’t put his foot out if it was on fire. I try to tell her: it’s clinical.”
After the tour of the three/two-and-a-half with all-built-in kitchen and a wet bar in the living room, plus washer-dryer connections upstairs and down, plus a gas-burning fake fireplace, we sat on the front steps, with only a slight drip from the roof above hitting our heads.
Karl looked at me, then up at the gray sky, spit on his finger and held it up to tell which way the wind was blowing as his hand bent horizontal in a sudden gust from the Gulf Coast squall. He fished out a cigarette, turned his back to the gale, lit up, and took a deep, audible drag. He jiggled his octopus of realtor’s keys. “You want to hear about the house?”
“Every detail.”
“Why it didn’t sell? Otherwise I couldn’t buy so much as that ripped-off shutter there, right? I don’t know if you saw, driving over, there’s a Lutheran church on the corner and there�
��s a Unitarian church on the next block, and then there’s another different variety of Lutheran half a block past that. Nobody wants to live with all those churches. It gives them the willies. That’s what I hear. But every owner here’s been a one-family/two-kids: teacher, barber, pharmacist, high school yearbook photographer. If you take out inflation, the price of the house has not varied in relation to the market one thin dime in the forty years since it was built. This area is not going up and it’s not going down. It’s not going anywhere.”
“It’s a sure thing. No gamble.” I tried to smile.
“You got it.” He looked pleased, and pulled on his smoke. “What’d you think? Think there’s enough room for three? A private bath for Birdie?”
I couldn’t believe he meant it. “You can’t mean that,” I said. “You know we’re not, we were never—”
“I thought maybe, if we had a place big enough—”
“Karl,” I said, “I slept with Uncle Rufus.”
“You what? Come on.”
“You must have known. Since he came here to visit, we’ve—”
“If you recall, please,” he said, “we’re talking not all that long ago. Just the minute he left your place, you picked up the phone and invited me over for some serious stuff.”
He was right. I had. I’d called him, hurt and angry because Red had had his mind on Mr. Emu all through our fine dinner at the Pink Cafe. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Bird know this?”
“I believe so.”
“That tongue-tied beanpole know it?”
“I suspect.”
“Then how come I’m just now hearing about it? The guy who just bought a house for who he thought was his future family? Tell me that? Tell me how come?” He was yelling.
“Things changed in Texas.”
“He got a lot of money, is that it?”
“If I’d been after money, would I have been pimping plumbers for my tenant?”
“What’s he got, then? What’s he got I haven’t got?” He threw his cigarette into the squishy yard and lit another. “A kid. He’s got a kid.” He looked stabbed.
I let out my breath, knotting my hands. “Two. Two boys.”
He rose to his feet and bellowed out at the strong Gulf wind. “He’s got two kids. Now you’ve got three. And I don’t have one. Not one single kid, and me staring at fifty.”
I pulled him back down to the wet step. Remembering how devastated I’d been when Buddy inherited a trio and I didn’t have any and wasn’t likely to get any. And now here I was, doing the same thing to my friend Karl. I knew how bad that hurt, to think your time has come and gone. And it was too late, for both of us, for me to give him one the way Buddy had for me. “I’m sorry,” I said again, not knowing how to let him know I understood.
He began to tear up his cigarettes one by one, dropping them in a neat pile. “You know what my mom said to me? She said, ‘If you don’t have a kid, you’ll turn out just like your pa.’ I told her, ‘He had a kid, and he turned out like he did. Maybe he’d of been a golf pro if he hadn’t.’ That just came to me, golf pro. That had a good ring.”
“Uncle Rufus and I go way back,” I said. “It’s like not losing all those years.”
“All those years?” He wiped his eyes, getting tobacco shreds on his cheeks. “What about all these years I lost? What about that?”
“You didn’t lose them. We helped each other out. You showed me your houses. I got a little support with Birdie. That’s not losing. Birdie likes you.”
He bawled. “That’s the way of it. You get attached. You can’t help it. I saw this house, I know it’s got an iffy location and cheesy construction, and I thought, hell, that’s my job, finding people the houses that are going to fix their lives. Why not mine for a change? I said. Why not fix mine for a change? You think I don’t know I been treading water ever since my divorce? You think I don’t know living in my folks’ garage apartment is a death wish? You think I don’t know you didn’t have intention one of ever moving in with me and ironing my shirts and making me carry out the garbage? You think I didn’t know somebody with kids was gonna show up on your falling-down doorstep one day?”
“I liked you, too,” I said.
“You did? Sure you did. I was okay, wasn’t I?”
“You were definitely okay.”
He rubbed around on his face, shifted the shoulders of his realtor’s jacket. He fished out a packet of gum and handed me a stick. Peace offering. “I should of married the head cheerleader,” he said. “She’d of had half a dozen.”
31
Bailey had just spent at least ten minutes on the phone with Karl. Right, Karl. Hanging up in frustration, he said, “Gross. He asked me to go to the movies with him. What’s he think, just because I wore his slimy shirt, we’re going to hook up? Gross.” He reached his arms across the kitchen table, hugging the other side, banging his chin on the wood.
“Karl likes movies,” I explained. I’d come back from seeing him earlier in the week, shut the door of my room, dodging still-spatting cousins, and cried into my pillow, for all those things in our lives that never worked out. For “Uncle Karl,” the gum-chewing realtor, who had been assured that he’d be welcome at our house anytime.
“Forget it,” Bailey muttered. “I’ll buy him another shirt. He said I ruined it. Sheesh, it wasn’t even cotton.”
Piecing it together, from what I could hear of his end and what he related, he’d called Karl to ask him, Why couldn’t they get a few boards and put up a six-foot-by-eight-foot deck for his Aunt Ella while he was here, you know, be a help. To which Karl had spelled out all the reasons why not: wood rotted, then you had rotten wood with water collecting underneath, bugs gone to heaven, starting to smell, don’t even consider it. Come back and see us at Mardi Gras, kid, beautiful down here then. Ask your aunt. When pressed, Karl had then explained that you had to bring in a load of topsoil, make some runoff channels, cover it with gravel, and then fit your bricks on top of that: drainage. He could show Bailey, he had a couple of houses he could let him see how they handled the backyard problem. He could also let him look at a half a dozen designer homes nobody was showing during flood season. Forget it, Bailey told him. Then Karl had asked: “You interested in that lizard flick?”
The idea of being driven around, however, was not as insulting to my nephew-in-residence as it might have been earlier in the week. I’d let my boarder borrow my car late on Wednesday afternoon. He had decided to take his cousin to the Pink Mall for a double Blue Bell Supreme ice cream cone, since he was going stir-crazy. I’d given him the keys and a map, and offered to mark the route to the small mall.
“Give me a break,” he’d said, trying to burn rubber (not an easy task on a driveway standing in water) backing out. Needless to say, they’d got totally lost and arrived home (coneless in Purgatory) one hour later. Birdie, who knew the way on foot, didn’t know how to help him out, since she took a lot of shortcuts cars couldn’t make. As the mockingbird flew and Birdie walked, it wasn’t over half a mile. But Bailey hadn’t reckoned with the Byzantine dogleg streets designed to keep transients, strangers, all outsiders out. Again and again he’d encounted such paper-clip double loops as Magnolia Drive turning into Magnolia Lane and then Magnolia Circle and Magnolia Place. A coil of streets you had to retrace if you once got confused and took the wrong turn.
Today I’d promised him, after Birdie got back from the first fall String Project practice, a trip to a beautiful showplace. It was Saturday, and Red was due to come retrieve his younger son tonight or tomorrow, depending on what kind of time he made. And all of us were eager to see him.
“Look at that sun,” I told Bailey, gesturing to a faint increase in light visible out the kitchen door. “We’ll go to Belle Vue and you can meet my friend Henry.”
“Not another one.” He folded his arms over his head.
“Not another one. This is a gardener who taught me all I know about roses.”
“Beats me having
a date with Karl,” he groused, kicking the table leg.
I felt happy to be again at the source, and paid our nominal fees, leading the children leisurely past the long reflecting pool, the lily-pad pond with its hundred varieties of fern, the English country garden, the hummingbird garden, to the bower of climbing roses, dozens of kinds, at the end of which there was Henry. Just as I’d last seen him. Wearing knee pads, pail and implements by his side, gloves tucked in the back pocket of his work pants, hands muddy.
I introduced him to the cousins. “This is my daughter, Birdie,” I said, “and this is my nephew Bailey Hall. You met his daddy, Rufus.” And to them I explained, “This is my friend Henri Legrand. The head rose gardener at Belle Vue, and the great-great-grandson of the Empress Josephine’s gardener.”
Was that true? Did it matter? It could have been true. Sometimes, I concluded, it was all right to say what could have been true.
“Hello, Mr. Legrand,” Birdie said. “My mom talks about you.”
“My dad came here—?” Bailey asked.
“Good to see you, Ella, and to meet your young ones.” Henry stood, his knees creaking a bit, and shook hands with both of my charges. Then, getting back down again with effort, he said, “Here, boy, hold this for me. Take care, there’s thorns.”
Bailey reached out, a little taken aback, and, sure enough, got stuck and yelped. “Sorry, sir,” he said, taking a handkerchief out of his back pocket and holding the large bush over the hole.
“Use my gloves if you have the need,” Henry said. “My own fingers quit feeling that prick a long time ago. These beauties nearly drowned this week. I can’t dig them all up. That’s too costly and too risky. But this is one of my prizes, and it’s a compact plant. I’m taking the chance.” The coppery yellow color of the Mlle. Franziska Krüger seemed to tremble in the thin sunlight, as if expecting more rain. He put down what looked like crumpled net in the bottom of the hole, and then had Bailey set the shrub back in place.
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