The Southern Cross

by Skip Horack

  The professor stops and smiles at me. He has a full head of silver hair that he brushes straight back from his forehead. The locks flow in waves all the way down to his stiff shirt collar. “When will you be joining us at our table for lunch again?” he asks me. “We’d love to have you.”

  Patience told me that his wife has been dead almost ten years. Cancer. So I guess he and I got that in common. I’ve been a widow for fifteen years now.

  “Absolutely,” drawls one of the women with him. I believe her name is Jeanette. Jeanette Kleinpeter or something.

  I’m thinking, Not never, y’all, but instead say, “Soon, I hope. I’ve just been dining so late these days.”

  The professor grins and starts singing “Soon, June,” stretching out both words so that it sounds sort of pretty. So it seems he has a nice voice when he’s not lecturing everybody. He heads down the hallway still singing, and beneath his crooning I hear Jeanette whisper to one of the others that she guesses “Miss New Orleans is too good for us Baton Rouge folk.”

  No, indeed. I’ve got bad knees and a bad back and a bad heart, but I still have the ears I had when I was a girl in Mississippi. Rabbit, that’s what Daddy used to call me. He told me that was his Choctaw name for me.

  “Pardon?” I say. “Pardon?” I holler at them pretty good but none of them will turn back and look at me. None save the professor. He stops singing and slows up, but then Jeanette pokes at him with her wrist and so he keeps moving. I swear. Too good for them? On our farm in McComb we had an enormous Nubian goat named Gracie. In the mornings I would milk her, and then I’d hitch up that lop-eared doe to a little wagon and she’d pull me to the schoolhouse. So trust me, I don’t think I’m better than anybody. Not in the way Jeanette means, at least.

  I’m hot, but I do what I can to put them out of my head and continue on my way. At the end of the hallway I see big Regina standing in front of the entrance to the dining room. She smiles like she’s been waiting there just for me. I actually like her okay. She’s a cheerful thing, always has a pretty flower of some sort stuck in her hair.

  “Well, hello there, Miss June,” she says. “How you making out this Saturday?”

  “Just fine,” I tell her. “Just fine.”

  “We got your table waiting for you.”

  “Thank you, Regina.”

  She touches my periwinkle blouse with her thick fingers. “Boy, that’s a pretty silk shirt you wearing today. It’s the bluest blue.”

  I know it’s her job to be pleasant, but there’s something about the way Regina looks me in the eye that makes me believe it’s not all for show. Again I say thank you, then I follow her into the dining room, past the empty tables that are being cleared and reset. Half of them are missing their white tablecloths and so the room has a closed-for-business feel. Regina walks with me to my table by the window and I sit down and glance around. There’s no one else in the room except for that quiet man with the gray crewcut and the brown suits. He always comes late and sits alone, just like me. We nod to each other and then we each look out the window. So I guess that’s both of our lives now, moving from window to window. Him always in his browns, me always in my blues.

  I take a nap after lunch and wake up with my back aching and that same out-of-sorts and hollow feeling I used to get only on Sundays. My apartment has a little bedroom and a little den, a bathroom and a kitchenette. I water my plants and straighten things up—but that doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes or so. Our house in Lakewood had two stories and a big backyard. Even with the maid, it still kept me busy. Too busy, according to Selby—and that’s the reason I’m here now. I might never see New Orleans again.

  The phone rings and I pick it up. It’s the guard gate calling. My grandson, Eddie, is stopping by to visit. I can see this out of some book. Give her things to look forward to, but also remember to surprise her from time to time. I want to be difficult but I can’t. I love him and I want to see him. “Oh,” I say to the man, “go ahead and let him on in, I suppose.”

  I unlock the sliding glass door in the sunroom and go outside to wait. A wave of hot air hits me like I just opened an oven. There’s a parking lot not too far from the pond, and before long Eddie comes pulling in. His vehicle is an embarrassment. I gave him my old beige Cadillac when I moved in here and now he’s gone and ruined it—darkened the windows so that I can’t even see who’s driving, put these hubcaps on the tires that look like chrome sewer lids. Here’s a boy who lives in a nice subdivision and goes to a private school. I maneuver all my life to have a grandson like that and now he spends his days wishing he were from some ghetto. But I do love him. He gets out the car and waves to me. “Well, come on,” I say. “It’s hot out here.”

  Eddie’s wearing jeans that are too big for him and a yellow baseball cap. His white shirt is open at the collar and I can see his gold chain glinting in the sun. Still, when he smiles at me, for a moment I see the straw-haired little boy he once was. “Two seconds,” he says. “I got something for you.”

  He opens the trunk of the Cadillac and takes out a brown paper bag. This ought to be good and special. He needs to shave, and so his pale face looks like it has dirt on it. I wait for him to finally make his way to me and then give him a kiss on his scratchy cheek. He lifts the paper sack up like it’s some kind of trophy. “Hummingbird feeder,” he says. “You got a screwdriver here?”

  And so for the next half-hour instead of visiting with my grandson I sit in the sunroom while he screws the feeder to the side of the pine tree outside my door. When he’s finished I mix some sugar and water in an empty milk jug and he fills the feeder for me. I watch him from the doorway. “So are you going to come by and fill that for me every week?” I ask.

  Eddie starts to hem and haw because of course he hadn’t thought of that when he picked out his present. “Should I put it down lower on the tree?” he asks.

  Just then there’s a knock at the front door and that saves him.

  “I’m teasing you” I tell him. “I can manage fine.” I squeeze his skinny arm. “It’s wonderful. Thank you.”

  The knock is Patience coming to check my blood pressure again. I introduce her to my grandson. “Have you met Patience yet, Eddie?”

  Eddie comes around my coffee table with his arm stretched out. “What’s up?” he says.

  Patience shakes his hand and says hello. I can see her sizing up his clothes with her pretty almond eyes. The corner of her mouth twitches and I think she’s trying not to laugh. “That’s so sweet of you to come by and visit,” she tells him.

  “It’s no thing,” says Eddie. He puts his hands flat together and points to the door like he’s diving. “But I sort of need to get going now, June.”

  Patience’s eyebrows give a bounce when he says my name. She looks at me, but I just smile. I’ve made Eddie call me that since day one. I wasn’t ever interested in being a Granny or a Gram, a Nana or a Me-maw or Maw-maw.

  “Come on now,” I say. “Let me get you something cold to drink.”

  “No, really,” says Eddie. “There’s some things I gotta do today.”

  It’s a lost cause and I’m not going to beg. “Well, thank you for the hummingbird feeder,” I tell him.

  “That’s no problem,” says Eddie.

  There’s a silence but Patience breaks it. “He got you a bird feeder?” She takes me by the hand. “Well, come on and show me.” We all three move to the sunroom and Patience says, “Oh, how nice,” when she sees the red feeder screwed to the side of the pine tree. “Aren’t you a good grandson,” she says to Eddie. Patience is only five or six years older than he is, but I like the way she talks a little bit down to him. I see too many adults trying to be kids these days.

  Eddie’s looking more and more antsy and now I’m getting annoyed. “Well, get going,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to fall behind on things.” I cross my arms together and he kisses me goodbye.

  “I’ll stop by and see you again real soon,” he says.

 
; “You coming to the picnic tomorrow?”

  Eddie weaves his head like a snake. “I don’t think I can make that,” he says. “But I’ll be around here plenty.”

  “You had better.” Seeing him about to go has cooled me back down. “I love you,” I tell him. “I love you with all my heart.”

  “I know,” he says. “I love you too.”

  Eddie tells Patience goodbye and leaves out the door. I see he’s got my screwdriver stuffed in his back pocket, but I don’t say anything. He’ll find it later and maybe it will eat at him until he finally brings it on back to me. These are the games that I’m reduced to playing. Patience closes the door for me, and we stand together in the sunroom watching Eddie walk away. He’s skirting the pond when he bends down to pick up a pinecone. He throws it out past the lily pads and it lands with a splash. A little slate heron that I never saw land goes flying off from the cattails and then a car horn honks. One of the black windows rolls down in my old Cadillac, and even through the glass of the sunroom, my rabbit ears hear a girl shout, Eddie, hurry up.

  “There’s someone waiting in there,” I say.

  Patience rubs my back with the flat of her hand. “That’s his car?”

  The girl hollers once more and I put my fingers up against the glass. “Why would he just leave somebody in there?”

  We get one meal credit per day here at Witness Oaks. They tell me that anything after that will show up on my monthly bill. So I guess, for all her sweetness, Regina is still keeping tabs on us. That’s another reason I’ve started to take my lunch late. When suppertime comes around I usually get by fine with a sandwich or some leftovers, then I walk over to the little bar down the hall for a drink before bed.

  I once read somewhere that people are no different from animals in that we also follow regular patterns—rhythms that we rarely deviate from in any meaningful way. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Take me. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in the piney woods outside McComb, Mississippi, wandering from chores to school to church—and I might have kept at that pattern my whole life if the war hadn’t come along. I had a girlfriend who passed the summer visiting family down in New Orleans. Margaret came back in the fall with stories of USO halls and handsome boys who could actually dance—even though we ourselves could not. And there was work to be found, she told me. A girl could start a whole new life in that city. Margaret said that in a few weeks she would begin classes at the secretarial college there. Come on with me, she begged. We can share a room at my auntie’s.

  And so I went to see Daddy. For reasons I can only guess at, he and Mama never had any children after me. I told him what I was thinking, and he smiled and called me Rabbit. “You always got your ear to the ground,” he said. “If New Orleans is shouting for you, then it’s shouting for you.” Within the year Mama finally died from the quiet come-and-go sickness that had been ailing her all her life. Daddy followed her only a month or so later. Heart attack. I still cry when I think about him. My daddy was my eyes.

  I wasn’t in New Orleans one week before I met Jack Hopkins. August 7, 1943. It was a Saturday night and we were at the USO on South Rampart Street. Margaret was making a fool out of herself on the dance floor, and I was standing over by the punch bowl in a cheap cotton dress, feeling as country as a dog under a porch. This was the first and only USO dance I would ever go to. It was very crowded and very hot, and the entire place smelled like Picayune cigarettes, Vitalis, and sweat. They must have had twenty black men up on stage, and the jazz that came squalling out of their horns was so loud and relentless that it scared me. Before long I’d had enough. I was walking out just as Jack was walking in. He was an officer, even I could tell that. He held the door open for me and I flat froze for a second. He was slick-haired and broad-shouldered—the best-looking man I ever saw, before or since. I know old folks are always saying things like that, but I really mean it with Jack. He was a few years older than me, and among all those drunk and frightened boys, I thought to myself that here, at last, was a man. I smiled and he smiled and then I hurried to the sidewalk and took a deep breath of that syrupy New Orleans air. I hadn’t even exhaled yet when I heard his dress shoes come a-clicking down the steps.

  We became a steady couple. Jack was from New Orleans and had been lucky enough to be stationed right up the river at Camp Plauche. Before he shipped out that January he introduced me to his family. They were rich—I found that out soon enough. Jack parked his Chevrolet in front of their big house in the Garden District and I began to cry. He had to tell me a hundred times just how much his parents were going to love me before I finally fixed my makeup and went on inside with him.

  And against all odds they did love me—especially his beautiful mother. That Christmas I promised Jack I would wait for him, and all of a sudden my whole life changed. I never worked the first day as a secretary. Jack moved me out of the room I was sharing with Margaret off North Carrollton, and his parents made a place for me in their home. Three weeks before Jack set sail for the Pacific, his mother sat down on the bed with me, started giving me my first lessons on how to act and how to be. “This will be harder on you than on Jack,” she told me. “Write him every day, but you also need to try and concentrate on other things while he’s gone.”

  “I’ll do my best, ma’am.”

  “Call me Annie now, okay?”

  “Really?”

  She smiled and touched my hair. In those days it was the color of honey. “Well,” she said, “you certainly are pretty.”

  “Not half as pretty as you,” I said, and I meant it.

  “No,” said Annie. “Just say thank you when someone pays you a compliment.”

  “Thank you, then.”

  “Perfect.” Annie pulled me closer to her. “I have always wanted a daughter,” she said. “And I suppose that’s going to be you, doll.”

  That night she gave me a blue dress and told me that blue should be my color because it matched my aqua eyes. I was wearing that same dress when Jack came home from the Philippines two years later, his skin so yellow from malaria pills that I hardly recognized him. I called out for him and he looked right through me. I said his name again and he focused and came running. He picked me up in one of those spinning Hollywood hugs and I could hear Annie clapping her hands as she watched us. “Junebelle,” he was saying, “you’re even more beautiful than I remember.”

  So that was the great adventure of my life—those years between leaving home and marrying Jack. Life was all surprises then. On the train back from my daddy’s funeral, Annie talked me into becoming a Catholic, and she kept on teaching me how to dress and eat and talk. One day the two of us would be walking on Canal Street loaded down with shopping bags and hatboxes, and the next we’d be dining at Galatoire’s or Commander’s after Mass. After Jack and I married, he took a job with his father and we bought the house in Lakewood. I had Selby and then we tried for a boy but finally quit just like my own parents had. We had a fine life together until one Sunday in November. We were watching the Saints game when four decades of cigarettes came knocking. Jack began coughing blood and in six months he was dead. That was 1990.

  Life with Jack was one pattern that I was sorry to see go. How I spent the next fifteen years isn’t really worth talking about. It’s five o’clock now. I put on some nice shoes and start walking to the bar.

  The bartender is an old black man named Lionel. He sees me coming down the hall and smiles. “Good evening now, Miss June,” he says.

  “Good evening, Lionel.”

  Eddie calls this place the Broken Hip. That one actually made me laugh. Its proper name is the Magnolia Lounge. The room has three tables and a rosewood bar with four stools and a brass rail.

  Lionel has his hands flat on the bar like he’s standing at the controls of a ship. “Can I make you a sazerac?” he asks.

  “That would be splendid,” I tell him. “Thank you.”

  Lionel told me that two years ago his kids moved him up to Baton
Rouge same as my Selby did me. He swears that he remembers me from when he used to work the Sazerac Bar in the Roosevelt Hotel, way back before it became the Fairmont. He’s old enough to be living at Witness Oaks himself, so I take all his memories with a pinch of salt. Still, every evening he reminds me that he remembers me, and because I like to hear that, I always order a sazerac rather than one of the gin martinis that I prefer these days.

  “Miss June,” he says to me now, “ain’t it funny where life takes us?”

  “It is indeed, Lionel.” I sit down at one of the tables. It’s empty in here. It’s almost always empty in here.

  Lionel takes his time with the sazerac, but that’s fine with me because some drinks are meant to take some time in fixing, and besides, when you’re only having one, it’s nice for there to be a ritual surrounding it. When he finally sets the glass down in front of me I have company in the Magnolia Lounge. The quiet man with the gray crewcut I see most days at lunch has walked up to the bar and ordered a beer. He makes as if to climb onto one of the stools, but then I guess he thinks better of it and goes and sits by himself at a table. This is a small room, more of a closet than a lounge, and if my arm were just a bit longer I could reach out and touch the man on his shoulder. As far as I can tell, he’s wearing the same brown suit he had on at lunch today, and up close I can see that it’s pretty cheaply made, a suit you might buy off the rack at Penney’s. He looks over at me and smiles a sad little smile. I take a sip of my drink and look away. I don’t want him ruining this moment for me, this split second when the rye and the bitters hit my throat and I’m reminded of the Roosevelt. Of velvet couches and white gloves, folks fresh off the train having drinks while bellboys haul all their bags upstairs. I get one second of that before the ice starts to melt and the drink just tastes like licorice—which, as they say, is the way with everything.