The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “No,” she said, “not quite that. …” Something, something, unspoken, almost unthought. A shadow. I’m seventeen, there must be something except a man I didn’t know two months ago. …

  Her mother said, weeping: “You should go down on your knees to the Blessed Virgin for a fine man like that.”

  Her father said angrily: “He will give you everything you want, more things than you can even imagine now.”

  The little vague shadow in her mind dimmed and disappeared. Stephanie D’Alfonso decided she did indeed love this tall blond man. Her engagement ring was a round diamond the size of a dime.

  They were married on an August Saturday noon at St. Rose’s Church. (Oliver thought with a twinge that his mother probably would have refused to come.) Her great-uncle was the priest, her younger cousins the altar boys. There were eight bridesmaids, all relatives, and a ring bearer who at the last minute refused to go up the aisle and had to be carried away.

  They went for a two-day honeymoon to Abita Springs. Oliver did not want to be away from his business too long.

  As the first months passed, Oliver realized what an extraordinarily good deal he’d made, what a remarkable woman he’d married.

  She was a fine housekeeper. He who had never liked food found that he enjoyed hers. He liked too the changes she made in the house he had bought for his mother; it was brighter and more comfortable. He grew more and more proud of her. She was only seventeen but she was as serious as a thirty-year-old. Serious, but friendly too. The house was always full of people; they never had dinner alone. He’d had no friends, but now he had come into a whole established world. About the only time the house was empty was during ten o’clock High Mass on Sunday. He himself never went to church; she never asked him to. Sometimes he stayed in the quiet house, smoking the best of his cigars. And sometimes he spent the morning at his office, his feet propped on the dusty battered desk.

  He was happy. Late in the evening, when they were undressing for bed, he could feel contentment, like moisture in the air, like fog, softening the edges of things, blending them gently one into the other.

  Within the year she was pregnant.

  NOW THAT HE WAS a very old man, with only the twistings and turnings of his mind to give any movement to his days, he found that he remembered very little of her, Stephanie Maria D’Alfonso, who had been his wife for eleven years and had borne him five children.

  And he remembered so many other people, people he hardly knew. Their faces came floating before his eyes when he least expected them. Like that fellow—what was his name?—yes, Saia, Vincent Saia, in the liquor business, sixty years ago: thin dark face, balding head. Oliver thought: I couldn’t have seen that man more than three or four times, and not more than a few minutes each time. But I remember him.

  Other people too. Manzini, his first partner, dead fifty years. And the nameless people, dozens of them, people he’d seen only once. Like that boy who’d come into the casino at Franciscan Point. A tall boy who shot craps, was quiet and well behaved, came once and never came back. Why remember his face? The old woman who walked by the corner of the house on Kerlerec Street every Sunday morning on her way to seven-o’clock Mass. The shoeshine boy in the barbershop who was drafted in World War I. The Chinaman who did his shirts the first year he was in New Orleans.

  He remembered all these people, but not his young wife.

  He’d been so busy, just then. And so successful. A couple of years after his marriage a European war began at Sarajevo. He thought, decided—and his shirt factory was ready to turn out American uniforms. His contracts were large, his profits enormous. … Maurice Lamotta nodded his admiring approval. … After the war, with the coming of Prohibition, Oliver gambled again. He became a bootlegger.

  It began with his boatyard. He’d bought that a few years before, a small yard a couple of miles below the city. I never made any money on that, he thought, but thank God I kept it. For years that yard, called Thibodeaux’s, had produced fishing skiffs and pirogues and even occasionally a big shrimp lugger. Old Thibodeaux was still there, and still a good builder. Together they worked out the design.

  When the boat was finally in the water, Oliver said: “Now start on another one.”

  They were the perfect boats for his purpose. They were fairly large, shallow draft, open except for a small wheelhouse. They were well built, and very fast.

  The yard prospered suddenly. Unknown gentlemen ordered boats—“Why do you go through so much trouble to hide the fact that you have a fleet of boats?” Thibodeaux asked. Oliver simply stared, and Thibodeaux, feeling the unspoken threat, was silent.

  By the time Prohibition was six months old, Oliver was ready. His big boats left Cuba and waited outside the three-mile limit. Little boats met them, loaded with liquor, and at night raced for the marshes. With their speed they could outrun any government boat. With their shallow draft they could skim in and out of marshes almost like a pirogue. As long as they didn’t foul a screw, or really ground themselves, they would be fairly safe.

  At first Oliver worked a boat himself. It was, he thought, very much like the old days, liquor-running was no different from gunrunning. And in many ways it was easier. From a different rendezvous each time—by different means: in cars, in ice wagons, stowed in corners of coal barges, Oliver’s cases of illegal liquor moved into the city. Slowly and carefully, Oliver hired his men, young men who were steady and cautious. He built them into a small, well-trained, well-disciplined group. “We’re going to be doing this for years to come,” he told them, “and we’ll do it right.”

  After the first couple of years he no longer went out himself. His young men did all that. He also had bought enough sheriffs, and mayors and police to feel fairly secure as he sat in his office on Esplanade Avenue.

  He was the best-organized, most successful bootlegger in New Orleans, and one of the best small operators in the country—at least he gathered that from the Eastern and Midwestern people who drifted by to visit him. Despite their offers, he remained an independent, and he remained small. He liked working with people he knew and trusted. “We will do better by being more modest,” he told Lamotta now and then in the quiet of the office, “we will last longer.”

  Hidden by the maze of Lamotta’s bookkeeping, his money flowed smoothly and easily into legal businesses.

  He remembered that, all of that, every detail. He could even remember women he’d never met. Like the one in the Chicago railway station. She stood on the platform, very tall and elegant in a brown dress and a feathered hat, watching the train move into the station. He waved, half-hoping he knew her. She did not answer. Hurriedly, he left his compartment, found the aisle completely blocked. The porter had piled all the luggage in the vestibule and couldn’t seem to unload it quickly; and there were four querulous old ladies struggling into their coats, tying scarves against the Chicago chill. … Oliver ran through the cars, pushing people aside, until he found an open door and jumped down to the platform. He had no clear idea of what he wanted to do; he only wanted to find her. He ran to the end of the platform where empty rails extended into the maze of the yards. He dashed back to the station door. She wasn’t there. Just a steady flow of travelers clutching bags and parcels, redcaps pushing baggage trucks—he saw nothing in their muffled shapes. He stopped, breathless. He was beginning to be very cold; he’d left his overcoat in the compartment. He gave a last quick look around, then trotted back to his car. The porter had just finished handing luggage to the redcap, and the old ladies, scarves tied and coats buttoned, were getting down.

  He could remember that woman with perfect clarity. But he’d forgotten Stephanie Maria D’Alfonso. Not that he hadn’t been a good husband. The more he thought about it, the surer he was: he’d been a good husband. Always been kind and considerate, always afraid of hurting her. It had begun that way. On their wedding night, he was appalled by the pool of virginal blood. She hadn’t made a sound, nothing except for a stiffening of her body. He was so re
pelled by what he had done that it was days before he touched her again. And then he did so only because she asked if there was something wrong. But he never quite got over the fear. She seemed so delicate and vulnerable to him.

  Poor little girl, the old Oliver sighed. Poor little girl.

  Left without a mark. Unless you counted the two daughters. Two living children out of five.

  Something was wrong with their children. The first one was fine and healthy; the second, which everybody expected to be even larger, was much smaller and weaker. The third, a boy, was born dead; the fourth and fifth were boys also, tiny premature things, whose chests quivered briefly and then ceased.

  THE FIRST child, the healthy dark girl named Anna, after the mother of the Virgin Mary, was born exactly fourteen months after their wedding.

  Oliver came home to find his wife in labor, his house swarming with excited people. His own cook and his mother-in-law’s cook were taking a roast out the oven, giggling head to head. His two cousins-in-law and their husbands were playing mah-jongg in the living room. A white-dressed nurse he had never seen before bowed to him as she hurried past. His mother-in-law and the doctor were out of sight in the bedroom. His father-in-law poured him a whiskey just as the uncle who was a priest walked in the door. He’d brought a younger priest with him, “Cousin Umberto,” he said in explanation. (Oliver did not remember him at all.) His wife’s Aunt Harriet was arranging the silver service (a wedding present from his father-in-law) on the dining-room table. The big ornate urns steamed chocolate and coffee vapors across the room as she carefully arranged platters of small cakes and sandwiches.

  “Why didn’t somebody call me?” he asked. “Why didn’t she?”

  Nobody answered him.

  After an hour or so, even the more distant relatives arrived. Oliver didn’t know their names and didn’t bother learning them. The children played outside in the yard, quietly and patiently. The women sat on the porch and watched them and drank coffee and chocolate. The men crowded into the living room and drank whiskey. Oliver went to the back porch, by himself, and waited. By ten o’clock the youngest children were fast asleep in all the corners, the women had fallen silent, and the men were pretty well drunk.

  Oliver thought: They are her blood, all of them. Not one of them is mine. Except for that small thing being born in the bedroom. It is a pity that old woman my mother didn’t live to see it. She would have been so busy here and so pleased.

  The girl was born just before midnight. The women cried and the men had another drink. Oliver went to see his wife; she was asleep, heavily. “First labors are hard sometimes,” the doctor said. Oliver shivered. He had hurt her again, when he should have protected her. Before the nurse bundled them away, he caught a glimpse of red-stained sheets. He thought again of his wedding night, and he was sick with shame. The fragile dark-eyed girl had had nothing from him but blood and pain.

  WITH THE next birth, he arranged things more to his liking. He went to a hotel and stayed for two days.

  Because he knew he would never get used to birth. He who had prided himself on getting used to anything. He who had killed and felt nothing. He was terrified of a brown-eyed girl. The weeks preceding the births were agony for him; he could scarcely look at her. He found excuses to stay late at his office; he found business to take him to Chicago or St. Louis or Miami. As soon as he heard her labor had begun, he was violently nauseated, and something more, something he couldn’t quite describe. Something to do with that bit of flesh forcing its way out of her body, leaving a trail of blood. As if he himself were destroying her.

  She said nothing, but she seemed to understand. And to sympathize. She kept the births as much apart from him as she could. Because the last two children were premature, they were not born at home. But neither time did he go to the hospital with her. Once he was in Chicago. For the last one, she didn’t even wake him. She slipped out of her bed (in which she now slept alone; weeks earlier he’d found an excuse to sleep in another room) and telephoned her mother. Oliver found her note in the morning.

  Her monstrous thoughtfulness shocked Oliver. He felt little beside it; he felt petty. He would have to do something; he would buy something for her, something that was lovely and very expensive. Women always liked jewelry, that’s what he’d get. He left his office in the middle of the morning, a thing he never did, to look in the jewelry shops on Canal Street. He found nothing good enough for him. That afternoon he took the train to Chicago. He would find something there, something expensive enough to be worthy of her.

  And he did. He came home feeling pleased and satisfied and at peace with himself. His wife’s present was very, very expensive. Only—in later years, later decades he never could remember exactly what it was. He thought it was a long rope of pearls and a pair of diamond-crusted earrings in which two huge pearls hung like tears. He remembered his mother saying, “Pearls are tears.” So that was what he got: pearls in payment for Stephanie’s tears.

  Or so he thought. He wasn’t really sure.

  It was the way everything was with her. He just couldn’t remember.

  YET WHEN she died, he was sick with grief. His hands and his feet turned cold, then lost all sensation. He let a match burn to his fingers, he smelled his own skin burning and felt nothing. And yet he was not sad in any recognizable way. He was—simply, suddenly—nothing. Nothing at all. She was buried with a big church funeral, choir and Mass and black cloth and stinking waves of incense and flowers. Her family wept openly, men and women together; someone shrieked, someone fainted, the air filled with sharp trails of ammonia-and-lavender salts. Her two daughters stood quietly, tearless, fingers twitching at the end of motionless arms. Oliver saw it all. Saw the sweat on the pallbearers’ faces, the dust on their shoes from the white shell walk, saw the brown bruises on the edges of the white orchid coffin cover.

  He himself wasn’t present, not in his dry mouth, not in the dull pulsing ache at the back of his skull. The mouth wasn’t really his mouth, the ache wasn’t really in his head. His fingers touched none of the things his eyes saw. When he walked, he floated on air, though he could see his feet hitting solidly on the ground. Testing, he swung the tip of his shoe against the wall. He heard it and saw it but he did not feel the contact. When he dressed, his eyes told his fingers how to move. His two daughters were there, he paid no attention. His in-laws hovered around, he waved to them vaguely.

  He felt like a doll or a model. A carved man. He got out of bed and put feet on a floor he couldn’t reach. At breakfast he pressed wooden fingers together until little creases in the newspaper showed that he held it tightly. Then he lifted it in front of his eyes, and read. After breakfast a barber came to shave him; he did not trust his hands for that. He went to his office, tried to listen to what Lamotta was saying. “You decide.” He couldn’t even stay in the office, within the pressure of walls. He went for a walk, stepping hard on his nonexistent feet, walking quickly. With no place to go.

  He noticed that someone always followed him. His in-laws were worried—or was it Lamotta?—they had given someone the job of trailing him about, of being sure he did not hurt himself. Oliver recognized the following figure. “Boy works for me,” he said aloud and scratched his chin with a senseless finger. His name, his name? Yes, Robert Caillet.

  Oliver stood, arms hanging at his side, and stared at him. Robert Caillet stopped too, making no attempt to hide. Oliver turned and walked on. He did not look back again. Just walked, until sweat streamed down his face, and his thigh muscles ached. Then he rested. Leaning against a telephone pole. Sitting on the chipped bench of a streetcar stop while he read the advertising: CCC FOR COLDS, as if he had never seen the words before. Sitting on a church’s low concrete fence, watching doodlebugs work the earth under his feet. He never ate, he never seemed to get hungry. When the streets darkened, he checked the signs to see where he was, and how he could go home.

  Robert Caillet was always there.

  Oliver was never really sure h
ow long this period lasted. There didn’t seem to be any time to the days, or any real minutes to the hours. Only passing unmarked time. He no longer looked at his watch; he began to think that the numbers had disappeared from its face.

  One dusk he did not stop. The street lights came on, yellowish and faint. It had been a cool day (A change of season? he wondered dully and without curiosity), and he was not yet exhausted. He had a plan, vaguely, vaguely. Nothing that he could put into words, nothing like that. He saw that he was walking down Carondelet Street, past the rooming houses and the shabby bars, past the sounds of aimless short-lived angers, of brawls begun and ended in a minute. He turned at Howard Avenue and walked toward the railroad station. More slowly now. This was a street of Negro whores; they lined the sidewalks, calling, gesturing at him. He stopped at one of the first. She was gangling and very black, her un-straightened hair knotted into little lumps skewered by yellow hairpins. Her green taffeta dress was torn at the seams and torn at the hem; she wore high-heeled red shoes.

  She was dirty, he thought. There would be crabs on her, lurking in that kinky hair, in the folds of that black skin. There seemed to be blisters on her lips, but maybe it was just heavy lipstick. She was narrow-hipped and flat-breasted; her arms hung down in front of her body, pink palms turned outward. She was ugly and filthy and he found himself asking: “How much?”

  “Seven dollars.”

  “Too much.”

  He looked down the wide street with its lines of whores sitting on doorsteps, leaning in windows. Black skins, bright dresses.

  He looked at the woman again. In the uncertain light, he couldn’t see her face at all, just the whites of her eyes, dimly, and the glow of her gold-edged teeth.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The boy was waiting outside the door when he finished. He was much closer than usual; he had been worried.

  Oliver would walk downtown now; he would get a taxi at the St. Charles Hotel.