What It Means To Miss New Orleans
WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS
In Memory of John Kennedy Toole and His New Orleans
Saturday, before sunrise, I pulled into Mom’s driveway and bumped the horn twice. A yellow porch light cut on over the front door of her patio home. She wasn’t ready. Mom had agreed to leave early so we could get from Mobile to New Orleans, take care of business, and get back home in one day. I hit the horn again, long and loud.
On Monday afternoon I had received my first certified letter. A lady named me the sole heir of an estate. Her name was Miss Trixie Trollope. We had spent the week trying to place the benefactress. Mom called old friends from New Orleans and casually asked if they happened to know of a lady named Trixie who was over one hundred, had no known kinfolk, and lived alone somewhere in the Greater New Orleans area. Nobody recalled having heard of the old woman.
At least three times a day Mom called me with updates on relatives. She would ask me if I remembered seeing a certain distant cousin, great aunt or uncle at the last family reunion. I listened to the old family stories over and over. By Friday she was thinking about selling her antique shop and moving back home to Kokomo, Mississippi. After a week of Mom’s incessant nostalgia, I considered going alone to Miss Trixie’s estate, but Mom was an interior decorator and antique dealer who’d know the value of everything. And the value of the property and all its appurtenances would be worth a fortune. I needed her.
Mom came stumbling out the front door with a small ice chest, her platform shoes clopping on the walkway. She was all purple, gold, and green, even down to the gold sparkles on her two-inch platforms.
“Good morning, darlin’,” Mom said. “What do you think?”
I let her kiss my cheek. Kiss, kiss, and kiss. Fast as that. “It’s muggy already and rain’s forecasted and I wanted to beat it.” I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand.
“No, grumpy. Now the outfit, the sun hat and scarf, they’re all Mardi Gras colors, for New Orleans.” She waited, her face half in my window.
“You’re two months late, Momma. You look like you’re going to a tacky tourist party.”
Mom insisted on me driving the old way along the Gulf on Highway 90. It was the route we used to take to Mobile when we lived on the West Bank in the early seventies. Mom had packed a lunch so we could stop like old times and eat on the beach in Biloxi. In Mississippi, rain blurred the coastal towns together—Pascagoula, Gautier, Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Gulport . . . We parked at Biloxi beach and ate leftover baked skinless chicken and cornpones in the car.
“We ate fried chicken,” I said.
“I know, darlin’, I didn’t know any better then.”
Far ahead, jutting into the Mississippi Sound from the narrow strip of brown sand, through the rain, I could make out a building that I hoped was a casino. I’d have to set aside a little of the inheritance and try my luck.
“I was noticing how much it’s built up since Camille,” Mom said loudly over the rain. “I was wanting to show you the foundations. Steps led up to slabs—”
“I remember. Every time a tropical storm’s in the Gulf, the news replays the old Camille footage of that screaming woman.” I mimicked her pointing to her destroyed home, squealing, “My house! My house!”
“Slabs with nothing but a brick fireplace,” Mom continued. “Nothing but slabs. No carpet, no hardwood floors, nothing.”
I smiled over at Mom, but she was looking out of her window at old houses across the highway from the beach. I cranked the truck. Highway 90 is four to six lanes now. We passed flashing casino lights on an enormous building shaped like a Spanish galleon and surrounded by a sea of shining cars and buses in a Wal-Mart-sized parking lot.
“Wow. Bet before long this is going to be better than Vegas.”
“It’s not like it used to be,” Mom said. She talked about living in New Orleans in the carefree seventies. It was a nice place for a boy to grow up, she was saying. She asked about neighbors, one-by-one. “Remember the Gunn’s?” she said. “Remember the Dubuses? The Logues?” I answered, “No, no, no. Don’t remember.”
“You liked that pretty little Logue girl,” she said. I did remember. I remembered the girl, Tanis. In the fourth grade I stole a china dog from home and gave it to her.
“You do remember, don’t you?” Mom touched my arm and said, “Y’all used to go to Mardi Gras together and trade doubloons. We’d take the ferry and on the walkway you’d look down between the planks at the water and squeeze your Dad’s hand. Remember the Choctaw parade passed by our house.”
I just didn’t want to talk about memories. I wanted to plan what to do with the inheritance. I drove faster.
“Remember family picnics at Audubon Park? You wanted every birthday under that huge live oak. Its branches were stooped and stretched out like a grandfather reaching down to pick up his grandchild. You loved those trees.”
I asked, “Did I tell you I ended up getting over ten thousand for Great Grandfather’s Confederate rifle? And this Trixie lady’s left me her entire estate.”
Mom said, “I still can’t believe you sold it. An hundred fifty years . . . family heirloom and you sold it like it was nothing.”
“Hey, ten thou isn’t nothing.”
“You put a cheap price on your heritage.”
“Come off it, you’d have sold it, too.”
“I sell other people’s antiques, not our family’s, and not my granddad’s rifle from the War.”
Mom didn’t say another word until we entered Slidell and I asked myself, out loud, “I wonder who Miss Trixie was? How’d she know me?”
Mom stretched her arms and legs. She was yawning when she said, “Where in New Orleans did you say she lived?”
“It didn’t,” I said, and glanced at the certified letter. “It only gives directions to the lawyer’s office on St. Charles. It’s probably close by there. I wish it was on the West Bank in one of those upscale suburbs.”
“Saint Charles? Maybe it’s uptown in one of those antebellum mansions. Wouldn’t that be something!” Mom squeezed my arm. “Or downtown! Historic downtown New Orleans, a mysterious benefactress, it’s exciting.” Then she said, “Could we go by Magazine Street on the way. I love the musty smell of those antique shops.”
“We only have one day, Momma.”
“Says who? Why you always have to be all in a rush? Rush, rush, rush.” Mom checked her make-up in the visor mirror. “You need to learn to slow down and appreciate life or you’ll end up like your father.”
When we exited the highway and drove down into the city the sky was low and heavy, and the air was sodden, as if the entire city was hungover. Mud puddles hid the depth of jarring potholes that littered the wet streets. On St. Charles, I pulled to the curb in front of Penny, Penza & Pound. “I say ol’ chap, sounds like a bloody carpet bagging British CPA firm to me, Penny, Pence and Pounds,” Mom said in an English accent and giggled.
I turned to Mom, “Look, it’ll only take a minute for me to run in. Why don’t you stay in the truck?”
“You kidding?”
“It’s not safe to leave it here. Watch it or it’ll get stolen, or one of those New Orleans cops will write us a ticket.”
She opened her door. “It’s okay here.”
I walked up to the front door and turned around. Mom was by the truck looking up at the old mansion. She hollered, “Darlin’ this is beautiful. These houses are twice the size of the ones in downtown Mobile.”
As the screen door slammed behind me, I heard Mom in her platform shoes clip-clopping up the walk.
A retro-metro-purple-lipstick-wearing receptionist had us sign three or four notarized papers. Mom stood close next to me, giddy in her Mardi Gras outfit, smiling at the girl in purple lipstick. I felt warm. I gently pressed my hand on the center of Mom’s back. “Let’s go, Mom.” We left with directions and a legal envelope embossed with the funny name of the firm and in a golden half-circle underneath, “Serving the Crescent City Since 1967”.
Mom drove and I gave directions. The address was near the wharves. Dark, thick clouds hung low. Mom turned on the headlights. After several intersections, I glanced at her. We were at a stop sign and three grungy teenage boys were on the street corner. Nobody was behind us, and nobody was coming from either way, and Momma was stopped, watching two dirty, barefoot girls.
“Look, they’re playing hopscotch with doubloons just like when . . .”
“Go! Go! Don’t stop so long,” I yelled. “People don’t stop unless they have to.”
Mom screeched across the intersection, “I though you wanted to see New Orleans,” she said.
“Not this part. I hope these directions are right.”
She drove through Miss Trixie’s neighborhood quickly, flashing past the bars and the BOILED CRAWFISH and OYSTERS ON THE HALFSHELL signs that stuck out everywhere.
“Darling, New Orleans has always been a dirty city. Don’t you remember when we lived here? Scraps of trash all along the gutters and sidewalks, those tin Jax and Falstaff beer cans, pull tabs, and Icee cups everywhere. And the people. Bourbon Street hippies your paw paw called them, wearing those frayed bellbottoms. And they had those plastic bottles they smoked marijuana in. Everywhere.”
Mom tapped her knuckles against her window. “It wasn’t this bad though,” she said. “It had more character then. Now it’s scary.”
I said, “It’s always been this dangerous. You just romanticize everything old and from the past.”
We turned along the river and stopped before a dazed-looking wooden apartment building across from the Desire Street wharf. A trail of scraps beckoned the passerby to climb the unpainted front steps toward some goal within the building.
My new sport tires scraped the curb as Mom parked. She leaned forward and tilted her head to try and get a better look. “Oh my. So this is it?”
I opened the truck door. “Not an estate mansion. Come on, let’s go in.”
Mom wrapped her purse strap around her shoulder and got out. “Looks familiar. Like déj* vu.”
We looked up and down the row of wooden, clapboard two-story apartments. A patchwork of boarded windows and weathered residue of duct tape crosses that once protected against past hurricanes. The neighborhood was deserted except that a couple of buildings down, two young men stood along the gutter drinking canned drinks in huggers. One looked at us.
Mom clip-clopped around the truck and grabbed my arm. “We’re safe. You sure we’ll be okay in there?”
I started up the sidewalk with Mom tight by my side holding my arm. “They should’ve sent a cop with us, don’t you think?” We followed the trail of scraps up the stairs to a brown door. I shook the key from the legal envelope and opened the door with a jiggle and push with my right shoulder.
“Smells like old books,” I said and flipped the light switch. Two lamps with yellowed shades turned on.
Mom said it smelled like rancid grease to her. And it did once she mentioned it.
Miss Trixie’s apartment was decorated with scraps, with junk, with bits of metal, with cardboard boxes. Somewhere beneath it all there was furniture. The surface, however, the visible terrain, was a landscape of old clothes and crates and newspapers. There was a pass through the center of the mountain, a clearing among the litter, a narrow aisle of clear floor that led to a window . . .
Mom pulled on a cord until the shades finally snapped up. Dust swirled and floated inside the light that filtered through the dirty window. I searched behind the wall pictures, between mattresses, and in cabinets and dresser drawers. Nothing. Mom sat at a roll top desk with a bag she had found in a closet. One side of her face yellowed in the half-light. Wrinkles deep enough to cast shadowy lines across her face made her look older than fifty-nine. “You do look rather worn,” I said, watching Mom spread the contents of her bag on her desk, but she was too occupied with her scraps to reply. I asked a little louder, “What have you got there, Mom?”
She held a yellowed paper napkin up by a corner as if it were an archeological specimen. “Look, Pat O’Brien’s. There’s all kinds of stuff in here.”
“Worthless stuff,” I said, and plopped down on a pile of grocery bags. Three roaches the size of small rodents scattered around my feet and I jumped up patting my pants. “We’re wasting our time with this junk.”
Mom turned around surveying the crowded two-room apartment as if she were thinking about decorating it. “Quit moping and help uncover the furniture and stuff that’s worth something,” she commanded. She held up a forty-five record. “Downtown, downtown,” she sang.
“Stop. We could go by Magazine or somewhere.” I kicked a bag and old rubber stamps fell out.
“Look at the furniture. Look at the china and glass in that cabinet. Depression glass or something valuable could be in there.”
I opened the mildew dark china cabinet. It smelled like old cardboard and wax. Novelties and memorabilia cluttered the shelves. I reached in and removed a curved Pat O’Brien glass. Two or three candles, tall, fat, and colorful, were on each shelf. I set a yellow star-shaped one on top of the cabinet and lit the wick. Inside, a little black boy in overalls holding a cane pole dangled his ceramic legs over the edge of a shelf as if it were fishing off a wharf. Ceramic angels and gilded saints enshrined the shelf above. Behind the fisher boy, sat a riverboat. On the side of the boat gold paint traced the raised white words “Old Man River.”
Our house was a block from the levee. Most days passed with me fishing and watching ships. One Saturday when I was nine or ten, I was flying a box kite and the string broke. The kite crashed onto the deck of a yellow ship with a blue Chiquita emblem. A dark man ran to the kite and waved it back and forth, even after I waved back. He looked like an ant on a giant floating banana. Dad was a merchant marine after he left the Navy. He was gone six months out of the year, but he said the money was good. I tried to imagine seeing him at far away ports through the eyes of a foreigner.
The faint scent of wax and cinnamon mingled with my vague memories. Each novelty I removed from that cabinet evoked fragments of the past. And these trinkets, scraps, and things were not my own. What memories did they hold for Miss Trixie? Why would she leave them to me?
Mom was pulling scraps out of a brown paper bag and singing, “La la la la--, la la la la la la la--, la la la la la la--, downtown. You can forget all your troubles, forget all your . . . la--, la la la la la la and go downtown, downtown.”
“You don’t remember the words,” I said and laughed at her.
“You don’t either.”
“Afraid that was before my time. I do remember Three Dog Night. Remember ‘Joy to the World’? Did I ever tell you that once when Jo was staying with us we found a dried up squushed bullfrog in the street and we mailed it to the band? Jo typed a letter to the lead singer. It said ‘Dear Cory, Jeremiah was a bullfrog. We found him. He must’ve had some mighty fine wine cause he really got smashed!’”
Mom laughed. “Y’all did not do that.” She opened a peeling veneered armoire and sorted through ribbons, swatches of fabric and other scraps. She packed some, but threw away trash bags full. “Who could this strange Trixie woman have been? She saved everything.”
I stretched my arms behind me until it hurt. Then, I went into the bedroom and rummaged through stacks of shopping bags from Schweggman’s. I uncovered an antique spring iron bed and a yellowed but intact chenille bedspread. I felt the tufted patterns with my fingertips. Grandma had one like it. A Close-and-Play turntable sat opened on top of two stacked wig or hatboxes that made a kind of nightstand. I stepped back into the main room and searched through Mom’s growing pile of stuff to save and found the “Downtown” record. The label said “Petula Clark.” I clicked the plastic dial to 45 rpm and closed the record player. The speaker crackled with static. I opened the player, carefully cleaned the needle, blew dust off the record and closed it again. I adjusted the volume so Mom could hear the music.
Behind the Close-and-Play was a framed picture of an elderly lady and a young girl with a baby. My cousin Jo and her baby Jason. “Mom!” I ran into the other room. Mom was holding a newspaper clipping up to the window.
“Wait,” she said. “Look at this. A clipping with three pictures of some freaky
characters . . .”
“Look, Mom!” I said.
She waved me over. “Is that a white smock over that fat guy lying in the street? The caption says WILD INCIDENT ON BOURBON STREET. Story’s something about a high school porn ring. Why would she cut that out?”
“Jo, Momma. I mean look at this picture. It’s Jo when Jason was a baby.”
Mom looked up, but not at me.
“It’s her and Jo,” I said again.
She held the frame and blew across the glass. Dust swirled in a yellow cloud. She wiped the glass with a scrap of cloth and stared at the rheumy-eyed lady. Her body leaned like a spindly southern pine blown by the Gulf wind. Her bare legs stuck out of baggy pedal-pusher jeans and were planted in oversized, purple high top sneakers. Red lipstick smeared above her thin lips and made a cupid’s arrow. A pencil stuck out from over one ear and wisps of gray hair curled around a green celluloid visor.
“Oh my,” Mom said. “That’s Miss Trixie. And Jo holding Jason. I knew I’d been here before.” Mom looked at me. “Jo lived next door when she left the women’s shelter.”
“But, I’ve never met her.”
“Yes, yes, you don’t remember. Miss Trixie Trollope was so old and senile it’s a wonder she remembered.” Mom turned the frame over and slid the back off. Blue ink blurred from thirty years of New Orleans humidity: “Gloria and baby Jay, and me. October, 1974.”
“Gloria?”
“She called Jo that. Jo liked it.” Mom continued staring at the photo. “How’d she live so long? She looks old as Mississippi mud.”
“Jo looks so young,” I said. “How old was she when she had Jason? Fifteen?”
“Ran away at fourteen.”
“How’d she end up living next to Miss Trixie?”
“A little girl living on the streets. All hours of the night I’d get calls from the jail. Not sister Betty Jo. No, she’d call me. When she found out she was expecting, she called me first. ‘Aunt Pat Sue,’ she’d say, ‘Can I come stay with you for a while?’ She never would stay long with us.”
The picture was stuck to the glass. Mom slid the cardboard back in behind it and put the framed picture in her oversized Mardi Gras purse. “She was a girl, but rough as an alley cat. Had to be.” Mom laughed. She laughed so long I started laughing, too. Finally, Momma said, “So was Miss Trixie. They hit it off. She got Jo a job at the sweatshop where she worked. They made Bermuda shorts or something. She and Jo made arts and crafts and sold them on the street.” Mom started laughing again. “She had bags of twine, old telephone wires, swatches of denim and Bermuda whatever . . . all kinds of junk. The things they made with that junk! Mobiles, flower patches, Christmas wreaths, kissing balls, and—”
“Remember what Dad called arts and craft shows?” I asked. “Farts and craps shows,” I said and laughed.
“You and your dad.” Mom picked up a frayed square of denim with twine threaded through an eyelet in the center. She held it up and watched it dangle.
“You forgot someone named Trixie,” I said.
“We moved, and with you three boys, your piece-of-work dad, and the business. Well, I saved some things, but not everything seemed worth remembering at the time.” Mom looked at me. She was tired. Worn out. “I believe you could come out okay with the roll top desk, the armoire, china cabinet, and if that bed’s spring iron, it’ll sell good.”
“Think I’ll keep the bed frame. And the records, too.”
“It’d sell good. It’s not bad,” Mom said.
“The rest is worthless, don’t you think?”
“No.” She stood and brushed herself off. The Petula Clark song had quit playing and an amplified pop-and-scratch repeated from Miss Trixie’s bedroom.
“Close-and-Plays sell good on ebay, I bet.” I squeezed Mom with a shoulder hug like Dad used to do. “Ready to load up and go home?”
As we merged east onto I-10 and left New Orleans, I felt as though I’d stepped out of a steamy tub. I breathed in deep, tasting the air, and slowly exhaled.
I could feel Mom watching me. I was trying to picture Great Grandfather’s rifle. Carved into the stock were his name and some other markings that his regiment and company. I couldn’t remember. I determined to get it back.
After a while, Mom said, “Must be awful to live that long and not have family to pass on your heritage to. Still, she passed it to somebody.” Mom looked out the back window at our full load. We had tied down everything in the truck bed with Miss Trixie’s old twine. “Sure glad it’s not raining anymore,” Mom said.
“I’m glad, too, Mom,” I said.
END
I felt like I was right there.....
in that room, in his New Orleans, not the touristy New Orleans I saw for 3 days.
Good style.
