by Barbara Hall
A distant sense of anger stirred in her, and for the first time she realized that, no, of course it had not been her fault. She took a man to her room, that was all. The rest of it was his crime. And certainly Simone was not to blame for what happened to her. It was horrible, that was all.
With a jolt, she thought about her encounter with the two men the night before. What if they weren’t going to mug her at all? What if they had had something else in mind? Now she was scared, and she pictured Leo Girardi’s round, reassuring face, and she felt immensely grateful and affectionate toward him. She wanted to track him down and give him a bigger tip.
A knock on the door made her sit up, her heart hammering. But it was only Poppy, of course, coming to see how she was doing.
“I’m all right. It’s Simone we should be worried about,” Nora said.
“She’s taking a nap, but I couldn’t sleep.”
“Me either.”
Poppy moved into the room and began pacing. Her usually neat hair was disheveled and it swung around her face, obscuring her expression. She fingered her silver cross and stared at the carpet as she walked.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“We have to do something about this,” Poppy said.
“Well, we’re going to the trial, I guess.”
“Yes, but we have to take care of her. We have to make sure she’s okay.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Me either,” Poppy said. “I’ve been praying for her, ever since we got back from lunch. But that is so . . . nothing. Prayer is not really a useful exercise. God is going to do what He wants, and all we can do is ask for the strength and wisdom to understand it.”
Nora said, “I don’t really believe in God.”
“I know, but that doesn’t matter to Him.”
“It doesn’t?”
Poppy shook her head. “His grace is there, whether we believe in it or not.”
“I think Simone will be okay,” Nora said, eager to get off this subject. “She seems pretty together. She’s had some counseling.”
“You don’t understand, Nora. You really don’t. When something like this happens, it gets inside you and it festers. You start to nurture it, the bad feeling, because you’re so afraid if you let it go, it will come back and kill you.”
“How do you know? Has anything like this ever happened to you?”
Poppy stopped pacing and looked at her with an expression of mild surprise. Nora rummaged through her brain, trying to recall some dark part of her history Poppy might have once shared in college. Some awful fact revealed over too many beers at a party or in a bar. God knows what Poppy had once told her that she had forgotten, or had never absorbed in the first place. Nora had been so preoccupied in college, so intent on getting good grades and graduating and marrying Cliff. It was completely possible that all manner of important information about her friends had skimmed the surface of her mind and gotten lost in her own commotion.
“Bad things have happened to me,” Poppy said. “Not exactly like that. But I know what she’s going through.”
“Oh,” Nora said, and she wanted to hear more but felt it was inappropriate to ask.
“What I really want to do is give her the Bible. I want her to be open to God’s help. I want her to turn to Him. It’s her only hope.”
“Well, that’s not necessarily true. There’s therapy and support groups, and drugs, too. Antidepressants . . .”
“I called my husband,” Poppy suddenly announced.
“You did?”
She nodded. “I was so upset, I didn’t know what else to do. Adam has worked a lot with battered women. He used to run this free clinic, where he did cosmetic surgery for women whose faces had been damaged by physical abuse.”
“That’s admirable,” Nora said. She wondered why Poppy had characterized her husband as a superficial man, concerned only with enlarging women’s breasts.
“So I asked him what to do, how to handle this. You know what he said? The only cure for this kind of pain is time. He said, ‘Poppy, you have to let this run its course. Don’t try to fix it. It’s not fixable. There’s no fast cure.’”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“But it’s just bullshit!” Poppy exclaimed, her voice breaking like a child’s. “That’s no consolation to Simone. God, I could just kill her. All this time we’ve talked on the phone and emailed each other. She let me go on and on about my marital problems, and all the time she was sitting on this terrible secret. I’m so ashamed of myself.”
Poppy started to cry. Nora didn’t know what to do. She felt cold and indifferent, even though she had shed her own tears only moments before. Now she felt her defenses returning, and she actually felt angry about Poppy’s display of emotion. All this faith in God, and here she was, just as weak and clueless as anyone.
Something rumbled in the distance, like the footsteps of God, coming to punish her for her cynicism. But it was only thunder, of course, rolling at a low, ominous pace.
Poppy wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, “It’s going to rain.”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“Didn’t she understand how dangerous this city is? Hasn’t she seen the statistics? You don’t go walking down Pirates Alley by yourself. I tried to tell you all about this city. I tried to explain that it’s hell on earth. No one would listen.”
Nora had nothing to say about that. She had committed her own indiscretions here. As if the thoughts were somehow connected she said, “Tell me again how you know Leo Girardi.”
Poppy looked at her as if she had suddenly started speaking in tongues.
“Leo?”
“Yes, he gave me a cab ride the other night. Remember?”
Poppy nodded, as if she had some vague recollection of that.
“I’d like to find him again,” Nora said, “to thank him.”
“Thank him for giving you a cab ride?”
“Well, he sort of rescued me. It’s a long story.”
Poppy nodded and said, “Leo is good at rescuing people.”
She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs, swinging her foot back and forth in a sort of nervous gesture. She stared at the wall for a moment before speaking.
“Leo was my first real boyfriend in high school. We were very close. We thought we’d get married. Daddy didn’t like him, of course. He was poor. His father was a janitor, of all things. His mother was a maid at a hotel in the Quarter. But they were good, sturdy people. Daddy wanted none of that. They weren’t ‘our kind’ of people.”
“Did he interfere?”
Poppy smirked and said, “Daddy always interferes.”
Nora did not bother to remind her that her father was dead.
Poppy said, “There was an incident, when we were seniors in high school. We got very serious and we were going to elope, but Daddy found out about it and put a stop to it. First he offered Leo money to stay away from me. Leo took it. I couldn’t believe it. He said he was only going to use the money to take me away and marry me. But . . . things conspired. It never happened. I don’t know if he gave the money back. I’d like to think he did.”
“Wow,” Nora said. “Imagine that.”
“It’s not so hard to imagine. Leo was dirt-poor, and Daddy was a very powerful man.”
“No, I mean the coincidence of me getting in his cab.”
Poppy smiled. “It’s not all that fortuitous. New Orleans is a small town. That’s what people forget. It feels like a big city, but that’s only because of the tourists. The people who actually live here, they barely make up a respectable population. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. It’s odd, because the city has all the detriments of a small town, and all the detriments of a city. It’s the worst of both worlds.”
“It’s funny, the way you talk about it. I’m surprised you ended up back here.”
“You can’t escape your history,” Poppy
said, as if that were an immutable truth.
“I think I escaped mine,” Nora put forth, not at all convinced, but hoping it was true.
“Really? You still live in Virginia.”
“But nowhere near my mother.”
“Still, have you escaped her? Do you not feel your whole upbringing walking around with you? America is this strange, nomadic place, where we jump from city to city as if changing the landscape will somehow eradicate the past and improve our dispositions. In other cultures, you don’t have that choice. Here we are afflicted by the possibility of distance. We think it’s an answer, but it’s really just a diversion.”
Nora thought of Cliff, running away to Miami with June Ann, trying to start over with a new identity, trying to pretend that he didn’t owe money to anyone, trying to forget he had children to take care of. When would it hit him? Did he wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, regretting the fact that he had deserted his obligations? She hoped so, but she didn’t feel she could count on it. She suspected that Cliff slept just fine, convinced he had gotten away, proud of himself for covering his tracks.
“But you don’t know how to get in touch with Leo Girardi now?” Nora asked.
“I’m sure he’s in the phone book. People don’t try to hide in this city. There’s no point.”
Nora nodded, trying to appear detached. Poppy chewed on a fingernail, appearing to be deep in thought. Nora waited, though she wasn’t sure what for. Eventually she realized she wanted Poppy to leave so that she could track down Leo. She had his business card, but for some reason felt strange calling him at the cab company. As if she didn’t want his dispatcher to know.
“What else did your husband say?” Nora finally asked.
Poppy shrugged. “The usual stuff. He wants me to come home. He still loves me. He wants to come to New Orleans and talk things out.”
“Is he coming?”
Poppy shook her head. “I forbade it.”
“Does that really work? Forbidding men to do things?”
“We’ll find out, I guess,” Poppy said, and it was clear that she wanted her theory to be tested.
Poppy finally left, and the thunderstorm arrived in full force. Buckets of rain thundered down on the roof, on the slate patio, against the windows. For Nora, it was a soothing sound. She always enjoyed a storm because it limited her options. There was nothing to do when a thunderstorm was happening. No talking on the phone, no taking a bath, no going outside. She could only sit and listen, flinching at each flash of lightning, counting until she heard the thunder. Annette was deathly afraid of storms. Whenever one occurred at night, Nora always awoke to find her daughter creeping into her bed. Back when she was still married to Cliff, these visits made him cranky. He’d say, “Why the hell do we have a three-bedroom house if our children are going to sleep in our room?”
“It’s only when it storms,” Nora would say.
“It storms a lot in Virginia. Why don’t we just move her in for the summer?”
Annette seemed to frustrate and confound Cliff. She had been a fix-it baby. Their marriage was already troubled when they decided they should either break up or have another child. Nora had read all the articles in Parenting and Redbook, and she knew it was wrong to have a child for this reason, but she wanted another one and decided to close her eyes to the onslaught. If Annette had been a boy, things might have been different. Throwing a baseball, coaching Little League, being a Boy Scout guide, might have gotten them through a few more years. But Annette had arrived, as feminine as any little girl could be, and she scared the daylights out of Cliff. From the moment she was born, she was aloof. She did not want to be held, did not want to be taught or guided. It was clear she intended to figure things out for herself. She taught herself how to sleep through the night at six weeks, how to walk at eleven months, how to read at age four. She never said so, but it was apparent that Annette thought her father and brother were inferior examples of humanity. So clumsy, so needy, so desperate for her attention. She ignored them to an almost pathological degree. She focused instead on her mother, as if she had an innate understanding of the female psyche, the woman’s struggle. She felt a kinship with her mother. She called her mother to kill spiders or to help her reach something on a high shelf. She did not want to be dependent on men. She didn’t trust them.
Was this something Nora had inadvertently communicated to her? Had she sent those signals to her at an early age, possibly even in the womb? She hoped not, and yet she was secretly proud of her daughter’s stern defiance and independence. She never had to worry about Annette. She did worry about Michael, who rattled around in his existence like a loose marble. Life baffled him. He seemed to be held hostage by the mercurial nature of being alive. From an early age, Michael was hesitant to attempt anything, already anticipating his own failure. He seemed almost paralyzed. He tried out for sports teams and quit before the final cut. He studied just enough to get by. He noticed girls from afar. Lately he had started to show an interest in music, making a cautious attempt to play the guitar. But he hid these efforts behind his locked bedroom door. Whenever Nora asked how it was going, he denied knowing what she was referring to. Michael was allergic to risk, it seemed, and Nora simply did not know how to talk him out of it. She didn’t know how, she realized, because she felt she shared that affliction. For some reason, Annette regarded her mother as a brave and adventurous person, but that was a mother she had created in her own mind.
“I like having a mother who works,” Annette had announced when Nora started her calligraphy business. “You said you always wanted to write, and now you are!”
Nora had laughed, and it took her a moment to realize that Annette honestly did not understand the difference.
“Well, honey, that is not the kind of writing I meant,” she admitted. She felt incapable of deceiving her daughter.
“What kind, then?”
“I wanted to make up stories. You know, write books.”
“So, write books,” Annette said, as if it were that simple. “You know how.”
“No, I don’t really.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I read books all the time. You start with chapter one. You don’t have to say ‘Once upon a time.’ You can just start writing about imaginary people, and you can make them do and say all kinds of things.”
“It’s not that easy, sweetheart.”
“Yes, it is, Mom. I’ve read these books, and some of them aren’t all that good. You just start giving people names and making them do things. Like something scary happens to them. Or something magic. And it all ends up okay. You should put a cat in there, too, or a dog. There’s always a pet or something.”
Nora had laughed, admiring her daughter’s raw and, as usual, linear interpretation of literature. But was she so far off? Something happens. There’s a pet. It all works out.
This sort of wisdom was exactly what had frightened Cliff. Nora recalled, with a chill, how Annette had interrogated him one morning at the breakfast table not long before he ran away. Out of the blue she had said, “Daddy, would you leave Mommy if you thought you could get away with it?”
Nora had been packing the kids’ lunches at the counter. Cliff was reading the paper and shoveling cereal into his mouth, disconnected from his environment. Michael was still loitering upstairs, getting dressed.
Cliff said, “Annette. What on earth would make you say that?”
“I dunno. But would you?”
Nora paused and waited for his answer. She wanted to know.
“You have an incredible imagination,” Cliff had said.
“No, I don’t,” Annette said. She seemed to have that understanding of herself. She was too attuned to details, too busy analyzing reality and putting it all in a meaningful order. She could not give herself over to flights of fancy. And this was when Nora realized that all her nagging suspicions about Cliff and his waning interest in her were real.
Cliff had refused to answer the question, and had
gotten up to go to work, leaving the house about twenty minutes earlier than he needed to. After he was gone, Nora sat down at the table across from her daughter and said, “Why did you ask that question?”
Annette shrugged, unwilling to answer. She picked the marshmallows out of her Lucky Charms, and Nora was glad her daughter had not answered. It was something Annette had overheard him saying on the phone, probably. The end of their marriage had come to stay; it hovered over them like a dark cloud. She could not hide from it anymore. Her daughter had already embraced the knowledge.
Annette had been conceived as an answer to their problems, and in the end, she had lived up to that promise. She had arrived as the truth teller. She had let them know, in no uncertain terms, that the game was up. The lie was exposed. The only thing left to do was to act.
That seemed so long ago, a memory shrouded in all the events that had followed it, a whole lifetime of things that had come after, but, in fact, nothing had come after. Months ago, that was all. Not even a full season.
The storm was going away, so Nora felt safe picking up the telephone. (Was there really any danger in being on the phone during a storm, she wondered, or was this some leftover superstition from her childhood?) She dialed 411 and asked for Leo Girardi, a residence in New Orleans. The operator couldn’t find it. “Try Leonardo Girardi,” Nora suggested.
“In Saint Bernard’s Parish,” the operator said. “Hold for the number.”
It rang and rang. Finally, a small voice answered, a little girl, about Annette’s age.
“Girardi residence,” she said.
“Is your father there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Can I talk to him?”
“Who are you?”
“Just a friend.”
“My father has lots of friends.”
“I rode in his cab,” Nora said, feeling a bit foolish that she needed to explain herself to a child. “What’s your name?” she asked, hoping to gain equal footing.
“Nicole. They call me Nicky, but I hate it.”
