The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  On his days off, he did not seek the company of other men, the camaraderie of bars. He preferred the presence of women, the sound of their voices; he found he could think best and most clearly against their chatter. That was why his friendship with the Robichaux sisters lasted so long. They were delighted to go out; they chattered steadily to each other, ignoring Oliver as completely as if he weren’t there at all. He didn’t sleep with either of them, he hadn’t wanted to, and neither had they.

  He noticed another thing. Women never flirted with him. Never the smile, the sidewise glance that he saw turned on other men. It was always up to him to make the first move. Then they were eager to come walk with him, or have a beer with him at one of the crowded noisy German Biergartens, or ride with him on a smoky little excursion train to take the evening breeze at the lake. He bedded the ones he liked best, allowing himself the use of their bodies exactly twice a month, no more, no less. They were all nice girls, seamstresses, shopgirls, housekeepers, and maids. He liked to hear about their lives, he was so curious about other people. For almost a year he was especially fond of Catherine Drury, a plump black-haired Irish lady’s maid. Once, riding the streetcar on her day off, she pointed out the house on St. Charles Avenue where she worked. “There, what do you think of that, mister?” A vast house of gray stone, with arched doorways and gothic windows, battlements and turrets, rising from a smooth green artificial hill.

  As the streetcar passed, Oliver said, “I will have a house like that.”

  Catherine laughed and slipped her arm through his. “Such talk, my boy. … I’ll tell you this. It’s a bloody big place to keep clean, and Herself is always yelling to me to brush her hair: ‘Not so hard, Catherine; can’t you do anything gently, Catherine?’… You know what’s happening next week?” Oliver shook his head. “A tournament, you ever hear of anything like that?”

  Oliver remembered reading a novel once … yes, he knew what a tournament was.

  “She’s Lady Mathilda, and she’s got a peaked hat with chiffon off the top of it. And a beautiful dress, blue and silver. Would you know the dressmaker had to throw the first one away because she didn’t like the fit. And the Mister, he’s going to be a knight and ride a horse.”

  “Where?” Oliver asked.

  “In the country somewhere. Who cares where?” Catherine sighed and settled back on the straight wood seat. “You know,” she said, “rich people are crazy. I’ve worked for one and the other since I was a little girl, and they’re just not like you or me.”

  Like me, Oliver thought. Like me.

  HE WAS fond of all these girls. He brought them the sort of presents he could afford: a strand of coral beads, a small cameo, an elaborately carved hatpin. If they got pregnant, and said it was by him, he never argued, never once, just gave them the money to be rid of the baby.

  But he did not get married. He had calculated that he could not afford to get married until he was forty-five. By then he should be a man of property, a successful businessman, with something to offer a wife. And she, in her turn, should be a virgin of good family, accustomed to the comforts he’d be able to give her.

  He had calculated it exactly and he knew he was right.

  AFTER A few more years he went to Manzini and said, “I want to get out of this business.”

  Manzini, shocked and surprised, patted his ulcer-filled stomach, “Mother of God, what will happen now?”

  “You can buy me out,” Oliver said, “or I can find somebody else to buy me out.”

  “Why?” Manzini asked sadly. “It is so profitable.”

  “I’m sick of whores,” Oliver said. “I’m sick of the way this place looks and smells.”

  “You have something else,” Manzini said suspiciously. “Something else.”

  “Yes,” Oliver said.

  He had another partner, a Scotchman named McGhee, whom he’d known briefly in California when he was smuggling arms. Together they planned a gambling casino outside the city limits, at Franciscan Point. Even allowing for payoffs, Oliver thought, the money should be very good.

  That same year Maurice Lamotta came to work for him. Lamotta was the errand boy at Manzini’s produce office. He was small and slight with the pinched-in face and the threadlike bones of the very poor. He had no family—Oliver questioned him carefully—no, not even a cousin. He was fifteen and presently he was sleeping in the back of Manzini’s office. “He’s very good with figures,” Manzini said casually, “sometimes I let him help with the accounts.”

  At that moment Manzini lost his errand boy. Quietly Oliver made a proposition to Lamotta: finish school, then come to work. In the meantime he could live in the house on Conti Street. “A two-year investment,” Oliver said, “are you worth it?” “Yes,” Lamotta said, and then as an afterthought, “sir.”

  When he graduated from Boys High School, Oliver was waiting. His ventures were now so varied that he needed a central office and a bookkeeper. With his profits he’d bought a small factory that made work shirts and overalls. With a bank loan, he acquired an unsuccessful department store, an old two-story wooden building, on Esplanade Avenue. The upstairs, now all storage, dusty and crowded and hardly used, would become his office. Oliver looked at Lamotta’s thin face, which had put on only a little weight in two years of regular meals, and was satisfied with his bargain.

  OLIVER’S MOTHER sold the last farm in Edwardsville and moved to New Orleans. He’d bought a house for her, a small cottage on Kerlerec Street, a good solid house of plastered brick, with doors and floors and windows of painted cypress. The two tall front windows were kept shuttered and locked, but behind the house there was a garden, two big fig trees growing against the seven-board fence, and a wisteria vine running up the side of the wall. The river was close by—you caught a stir of breeze from it, even on hot nights, and you always heard the boats—a friendly pleasant sound, Oliver thought.

  His mother arrived in June, a short sturdy woman, who looked almost the same as the last time he’d seen her twenty years before. She stepped off the train, Oliver kissed her dutifully on the cheek, and she said: “This whole town smells terrible.”

  “It’s summer,” Oliver said. “And it doesn’t smell as bad as some places.”

  “It smells worse than any place I’ve ever been.”

  “Now, you know the Ohio on a hot day … it doesn’t smell like violets.”

  She complained steadily for two weeks—about the strange name of their street; about the closeness of the other houses, an arm’s reach away across a narrow brick alley; about the way the indoor walls sweated and mildewed; about the number of priests and nuns on the street; about the noisy ringing of the Angelus three times a day; about the chattered Italian of their neighbors.

  But she stayed.

  Oliver teased her: “Ma, you better preserve those figs if you don’t want the mockingbirds to get them all.” “I want some chickens,” she said, “at least we will have decent eggs.” “Ma,” Oliver said, “I will get you a yard full of chickens.” “Oliver, is there anyone who speaks decent English in this neighborhood, this whole neighborhood?” “Ma, if you are curious about what other people are saying, you should learn a little Italian; it’s very easy.”

  “I will not,” she said, “and I hope you don’t either.”

  She preserved all the figs that summer; a line of jars filled the pantry shelves. She put red geraniums on the sunny sill of the west window and began crocheting antimacassars for the backs of the big chairs. Oliver knew then that she would stay.

  She cooked dinner for him every night, refusing steadily his offer of a cook. “No black people in my kitchen.”

  “A white cook, then.”

  “No drunken Irishwoman in my kitchen.”

  He let her alone. She was determined.

  Every Sunday they went for a walk. Though he contributed regularly to the Baptist church, they rarely went there. She did not like the minister and she did not like the sermons. She said firmly: “There’s no good to
it.”

  So every Sunday morning, they went for a long walk out Esplanade Avenue, sauntering slowly past his department store. “That building needs paint.” “Ma, when I make enough profit selling the trash inside, I will paint it.” Past big old-fashioned houses, all needing repairs. Along the shady sidewalks, under sharp-smelling camphor trees and musty-smelling oaks.

  One bright October Sunday, when the air had an edge of cool in it, his mother wore a new dress, a deep rich green silk.

  And he had a present for her that Sunday. A brooch, a straight gold bar with six diamonds. Not the finest in the world, he knew, but respectable. She would have better when he could afford it.

  The diamonds sparkled nicely against the green cloth, and the soft color made her look years younger. She felt good too, she walked with chin up and a crisp bounce to her step.

  “I’ve got the prettiest mother in town,” he said quietly, expecting a sharp correction. He got a silent grateful smile.

  He was still marveling at that smile when she asked, without slackening her pace or looking at him: “Oliver, when are you going to get married?”

  He took care not to show his surprise. After all it was a proper question. “When I am forty-five, Mama, I can afford a wife.”

  “If you can afford a mother,” she said sharply, “you can afford a wife.”

  He laughed out loud. “Have you found some girl you like?”

  She shook her head. “No, but you haven’t either.”

  “I can’t afford to. I have to get you a better house first.”

  “I don’t need a better house.”

  “I am looking at one on Canal Street. You know, when I first came here, I said someday I would live on that street.”

  She seemed to walk a little faster. “Nonsense.”

  “You will like the house, Mama.”

  “You need a wife.”

  He tried again. “You see how I come home, Mama, so tired I can’t keep my eyes open. A new wife would want more than that.”

  They reached a little triangular park and sat down on the green-painted benches at the base of a brick red monument. Neither bothered to read the inscription.

  His mother sat perfectly straight, protecting the new green dress. “You must find a wife who understands.”

  “Mama, you are the stubbornest woman I have ever met.’

  “You don’t know any proper girls, do you?”

  “None that I would marry.”

  She accepted that fact more easily than he had expected. “I didn’t think so.”

  “I have my plans, Mama. It will all work out.”

  HE BOUGHT the house on Canal Street, a large house, with a wide front porch and wide red tile steps.

  “Too big a house for me,” his mother complained. But he could see how pleased she was.

  “We will need some furniture and carpets,” he said. “Will you get them?”

  “That should be your wife’s business.”

  “You’ll need a maid, Mama,” he said, “to clean. I’ll hire her.”

  And he was surprised when she didn’t object. “Maybe,” she said slowly. “Maybe. I’m getting old.”

  She had put on quite a bit of weight, he noticed, but she looked all right. After they moved into the larger house, they no longer went on Sunday walks. She didn’t suggest it any more; he supposed it was because she worked in the garden and got outside that way. She didn’t need to take a stroll just to stretch her legs and her eyes. She’d always liked growing things and feeling mud between her fingers. He could still remember—how many years ago—the cosmos she grew by the kitchen door, the gentle colored stiff-stemmed flowers.

  She could have flowers now, he thought; in this hot climate they would burst from her fingers.

  After they’d lived there a year, he went to look at her garden. There was none. The grass was cut neatly, the edges trimmed—a man came every week for that—but the flower beds had gone back to grass; he could see their outlines faintly through the green.

  “Mama,” he said, “what happened to the flowers?”

  She looked apologetic. “I haven’t got to them yet, Oliver. I just can’t seem to get the hang of growing things in this climate.”

  He didn’t quite believe her, but he didn’t worry. She seemed quite happy. She’d even found a minister she liked and was very busy with the Baptist Orphans Home and the South American Missions. And every six months she said: “Oliver, I have met a very nice girl.”

  “Ma, not now.”

  When he came home that January evening—early dark and the corner street light shedding a round yellow circle on the sidewalk—he felt something wrong. His heels made a louder than usual sound as he climbed the red tile steps to the front porch. The house itself, the hall behind the leaded-glass door and the rooms behind the windows on each side, the house itself was completely dark. The maid left at four, but his mother always switched on the lamp in the front window. There should be other lights also—in the kitchen where she would be keeping dinner for him, in the dining room. …

  The skin on the back of his neck prickling, he unlocked the front door. He switched on the lights slowly, one by one, and the house opened up before him. The last place he looked was her bedroom, and by then he knew what he would find.

  She was lying on the bed, she must have been napping, and she had been dead some little time. Her body was cooling. He felt her wrist, her neck, to convince himself. Then he walked out of the house to the doctor who lived four doors away. “I suppose you will have to come see,” he said.

  While the doctor went for his little black bag, and the doctor’s children peered around the corner of the door, Oliver telephoned Maurice Lamotta. He came within ten minutes.

  HIS MOTHER’S DEATH CHANGED Oliver’s plans. Not that he grieved for her. He didn’t. He knew that she would not have expected real grief from him. They’d understood each other quite well—Oliver had been a good son; she had been a loving mother. She had raised him and, in his youth, fed him in the midst of poverty. He had made her old age affluent. They had done a good job, each with the other, and both were satisfied. You did not grieve when things reached their natural end.

  Only, that end had come more quickly than he had anticipated. He would have to change his plans.

  He’d gotten used to living with someone, he’d gotten used to company. He now required someone waiting for him at dinner in the evenings. Someone in the living room with him after dinner, while he dozed or read the evening paper. He did not want to talk, but he did require someone within reach of his eyes, if he should lift them.

  He would therefore, he reasoned, have to advance his plans a few years and marry.

  In the years that his mother had lived with him, his relationships with women had changed. He no longer used them as background for his thoughts. He no longer wanted their company, but he still needed their bodies. He had a list of seven or eight women and he visited each in turn, staying no longer with them than was absolutely necessary.

  None of those would do for a wife. Maybe he should have let his mother introduce him to those nice girls she had found. … He felt a small twinge: it would have pleased her so, but now he didn’t know their names. And he wasn’t about to go to the Ladies South American Missionary Guild to find out.

  He said to Lamotta, “Make a list of all the men I do business with. And mark the ones that have daughters.”

  “Daughters?”

  Oliver nodded and then remembering asked, “How did you meet your wife?”

  Lamotta’s face moved into a slight smile. “She was at the orphanage with me.”

  “I have to get married too,” Oliver said impatiently. “This is the way I do it.”

  Oliver found people eager to help him; he was a good match, a successful man. He went to Sunday dinners, to Saturday musicales, he went on hay rides, on picnics, he learned to dance. He looked and considered carefully. In about six months he’d made his choice, a tall blond girl who played the organ at
St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church. “Thank you,” she said, “but I don’t want to get married. Not for a while.”

  He was surprised at first, and then he was shocked. “Why?”

  “Next fall I’m going to St. Louis, to the conservatory. I’m sure I told you.”

  “Nobody is making you go to St. Louis,” Oliver said, trying to understand. “You don’t have to go.”

  “But I want to go. You don’t know how important it is, to have really good teachers. I’ve looked forward to this ever since I was a little girl, and I’ve planned for it so long. …”

  He could not quite believe that other people had plans too. “I’m too old to wait,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to.”

  He went home early that evening, puzzled and hurt. For the next few weeks he waited for her to change her mind. She did not.

  He found another girl, a short slight dark-haired, dark-eyed girl whose name was Stephanie Maria D’Alfonso. She had gone to Sophie Newcomb College for one term, had not liked it, and now she stayed home embroidering enormous quantities of linens and storing them away in her marriage chest. She was seventeen, an only daughter, quiet and gentle; she did not like dancing or parties; she preferred the porch swing with a book for company. Her father was a city judge, her uncle was a successful gambler, a cousin was in the produce business and doing well, her older brother was prospering with his bag factory.

  A good family, Oliver thought, he would be doing well to marry into it.

  At first Stephanie D’Alfonso found him strange, and she hesitated uncertainly.

  “Do you think I am too young for you?” she asked Oliver timidly. “I mean, could I be all the things you want me to be?”

  Oliver was frankly puzzled. “What things could I want you to be?” He had a sudden thought. “You mean the house? Your mother would show you how to run the house.”

  “No, no,” she said. “I think I could run your house without any trouble.”

  “What then?” he said. “You would have servants, as many as you want.”