Restoration

by John Ed Bradley

“I guess there’s a lesson to be learned. Are you telling me this story because it has something to do with how your father treated Levette?”

  “Nature,” Mrs. Toussaint said again. “Daddy didn’t want him. And Daddy always had the door open to everybody. He would feed the hoboes when they got off the trains looking for food. Whenever he butchered a hog he would bring some of the meat to the neighbors and whoever else was hungry. What does that tell you?”

  “I wonder if your father and Levette’s father got along.”

  “I told you they were half brothers, Levette’s daddy and my daddy?”

  “Yes. What were their names, Mrs. Toussaint?”

  “My daddy was Simon. Levette’s was Anthony. Simon and Anthony Asmore. Their father was Oscar. They had different mothers, like I said. Simon and Anthony were either nine or ten years apart. Simon came first. After his mother, Josie, ran off to Opelousas, then Oscar got remarried and Anthony was born. I don’t think Oscar ever got over his first wife leaving him like that. Did I tell you it was with a white man?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, it was. It was a white man from Opelousas.”

  “That must’ve hurt Oscar.”

  “Hurt him? It like to kill him. He would hear about it everywhere he went. People would be laughing at him. The whites would be laughing, the blacks would be laughing. I’m told this, anyhow. I grew up hearing about it, even though it had happened years before. How many black women run off with white men in those days?”

  “I couldn’t say, Mrs. Toussaint. Probably not many.”

  “That was my grandmother. It’s hard to believe. She left her husband, left her son. When Oscar would come in from the fields in the evening, who do you think got the worst of it?” The smile had left her face. She seemed to have forgotten about the coffee and cookies. “It only got worse for Simon after Anthony came along. Oscar had a pretty new wife, he had a new baby boy. But he still had Simon, too, and Simon looked enough like Josie to remind him.”

  I wondered about the woman, Josie, and her legacy. While she might’ve gone on to important things—such as working to help make life better for the disadvantaged, or volunteering to serve at her area hospital, or saving souls at a church—in Annie Rae Toussaint’s house, in Palmetto, she would always be identified with one event only. She had run off to Opelousas with a white man.

  “Simon was different complected than Anthony,” Mrs. Toussaint said. “He wasn’t nearly as bright as Anthony because his mama hadn’t been as bright as Anthony’s mama. So Oscar had his black son in Simon and his white one in Anthony, that’s what people would say. Anthony was the family favorite, the little pet, while my daddy got the spankings. Simon would come in with dirt on his clothes, Oscar spanked him. He’d sleep a little too late on a Sunday morning, Oscar spanked him for that. All the while Anthony, Levette’s daddy, is the little prince, you see? The black son caught hell and got the switch. The white son got treated like he was somebody special. Memory, Charbonnet. It will go a long way if you let it.”

  “So then Anthony dies along with his wife in the flood, and Simon, being the only relative left alive, has no choice but to take in Levette?”

  “That’s what happened. I don’t think my daddy wanted to be mean to Levette, but nature made him do it. Maybe he remembered how his daddy had always favored Anthony, and maybe this had built up in him over the years. Jealousy? Resentment? I’m sure there’s a name for it. And now here comes little Levette, and Levette looks like Anthony, only he’s even whiter. He’s the white son, the lucky son. And poor Simon, it’s not as if he doesn’t have enough troubles already. He’s barely able to feed his wife and daughter—that’s me. He can barely afford to put clothes on their backs. And because of the flood he has this nephew to raise who reminds him, every time he looks at him, that his mother was a tramp who went to Opelousas with a white man, and that Oscar Asmore, his own daddy, didn’t love him right. It all comes back, you see? He can’t help himself, even though he’s grown up and made a life for himself. He’s a responsible adult, like they say. But something comes over him and he has a drink and the next thing you know he’s taking it out on Levette, treating Levette just like Oscar treated him.”

  “Nature,” I said.

  “Human beings have more going on inside than cats. But cats remember, too. That black mama cat pushed that white kitten aside for reasons that were probably a mystery even to herself. Something in the past, Charbonnet. Something in the past that just wouldn’t fix itself.”

  I asked her for a pen and a piece of paper, and together we drew a sketch of the family tree. Oscar and Josie begat Simon, who with Lonna begat Annie Rae. Simon and Lonna were the couple depicted in the old photograph hanging on the wall. Branching off on the other side of the tree was Levette’s family. Oscar and Mary Beth begat Anthony, who with Camille begat Levette. Anthony and Camille perished in the flood, then Levette, their only child, was dead fourteen years later. “Did you have any children of your own, Mrs. Toussaint?” I said.

  “No, I never did. My husband, by the way, was Milo, Milo Toussaint.” She pointed to the place on the tree where his name belonged. “He and I were married eleven years when he got hit by a train on the tracks that run through town.”

  “Through Palmetto?”

  “I can’t say it was the worst thing that ever happened. On the other side of the tracks where he was going was the house where his girlfriend lived. It must’ve been good, because he was in a hurry to get there. He was trying to beat the train.” Her humor had returned, as had her appetite. She dipped a cookie in her coffee and took a large bite. “We always heard about Levette passing for a white,” she said. “I’m not sure it surprised anybody, and I’m not sure anybody held it against him, either. You have to remember how things were in them times. Well, you won’t be able to remember, Charbonnet, because you weren’t born yet to see it.” She inhaled deeply, then let out a long exhalation. Her face now looked troubled. “The thing that makes me saddest when I think about Levette,” she said, “is how he never really had a place. His uncle Simon didn’t want him because he was white, and the whites in New Orleans wouldn’t have wanted him had they known he was black. Dear Lord in heaven forgive me for saying this, but I used to think the only real peace he must ever have known was in those seconds when he jumped from the bridge and went falling toward the water.”

  She asked me to make her a copy of the family tree. As I was working on the sketch she returned to the kitchen and came back in a few minutes with a paper bag. Inside were cookies wrapped in aluminum foil and paper towels. “Don’t want you to go getting hungry on the drive home.”

  I included Levette’s name on the tree, along with other names that now seemed all but official. Levette Asmore and Jacqueline LeBeau had begat Beverly, who with Robert Goudeau had brought Rhys into the world. My heart got tight in my chest as I wrote out Rhys’s name.

  “I’m not familiar with these people,” Mrs. Toussaint said. “It looks like Levette was way more busy than we knew about.”

  “He liked his women,” I said. “I’ve read that there were only a dozen of his Beloved portraits known to exist, and that doesn’t seem like many until you take into account how old he was when he died. Twenty-three. I don’t know about you, Mrs. Toussaint, but I didn’t have a dozen girlfriends by the time I was twenty-three.”

  “I knew only one man in my life. Ask me that was one too many.”

  We walked out on the porch and the cat was still there, asleep in the sun. Mrs. Toussaint put her lips together and made a sharp kissing sound, and the animal looked up and meowed. “Well, Charbonnet, you sure had me reflecting. I hope I was helpful.”

  “You were, ma’am. And I’m grateful. Thank you.”

  I stepped into the yard and she dropped to her haunches and began to stroke the cat, whispering as she used both hands to massage its back. She lifted it in her arms and held it close to her chest. “I gave him a name. It came to me the other night in a dream. Unt
il then I just called him ‘Cat.’”

  “It wouldn’t be Levette, would it?”

  “Levette? Oh, no, it’s not Levette.” She didn’t seem to mind when the cat clawed her dress and climbed up on her shoulder. It sat curled up with its face pressed close to her neck. I could hear it purring from ten feet away. “It’s Casper,” she said. “After the ghost in the cartoon.”

  “Casper,” I said. “I like that.”

  “We all have them. Ghosts, I should say. Somebody told me the place where Levette used to live was famous because they had a ghost that lived there.”

  “I heard that, too. In a book it said the house had a sinister aspect.”

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “You mean, you never went to see where he lived?” She put the cat back on the ground and stood quietly watching as it cleaned itself. “He’ll run off eventually when somebody gives him better scraps,” she said. “Until then, at least we’ll know who he is.”

  NINE

  The house on Saint Philip Street where Asmore once lived didn’t look like the sort of place a ghost would appreciate much. It was clean and tidy, with fresh paint, new copper gutters and a wooden flower box with pansies by the stoop.

  Imagining the young artist in this neighborhood took almost as much effort as it had to picture him bounding up the steps of the forlorn Wheeler Beauty Academy, because now the artist’s former home, recently refurbished, ranked as an architectural treasure bound in every direction by some of the most valuable real estate in the southern United States. In little more than half a century Asmore’s low digs had been Disney-fied.

  Only minutes before the rain had stopped, and now the black streets smoked in the late-summer heat. For a second time I brought my fist against the wood, and for a second time I tried to construct an introduction that might win favor with the current occupant. After I knocked a third time I began to wonder what to say if Asmore himself, back from the grave, pulled open the door and stepped out with a hand to shake. Had he lived, he would be eighty-three years old now. “May I have a moment of your time, please?” I might’ve begun. No, better to skip the formality and get right to the point: “Spoke to your cousin earlier today. Remember Annie Rae, do you? Well, Levette, she tells me you’re black…”

  “May I help you?”

  He appeared not from the house but the sidewalk, a small man of about fifty with a dense cloud of silver hair and a paunch, shambling up with a collection of plastic sacks bulging with groceries. While I met him with a phony smile, he fixed on me with the kind of gaze peculiar to French Quarter homeowners tired of unwelcome visits from inebriated tourists randomly searching for a bathroom.

  “Do you live here, sir?” I said, smile broadened now to the point of parody.

  He eyed me again. “How can I help you?”

  “My name is Jack Charbonnet. I was doing some research and I found this address in an old book—”

  “So you’re Charbonnet, are you?” Unable to free a hand, he stuck out an elbow and I answered the gesture by giving the bony thing a shake. “Tell me, then,” he went on, “how is Uncle Charlie getting along these days? Still miserable? Still watching the dust collect on all those old paintings?”

  My God, I thought, it was Lowenstein. It was Lowenstein who’d shared the cottage with Asmore. “You’re the other one listed in the White Pages,” I said, “the one I spoke to on the telephone? You’re the nephew.”

  “Well, the great-nephew,” he said. He handed me a couple of bags and extracted keys from a pocket. “Lawrence is the name, but my friends call me Larry, as I expect you to do. Why don’t you come in, Charbonnet? I suppose this is about my uncle.”

  “Actually it’s about the artist Levette Asmore.”

  “Then it’s about Uncle Charlie.” He shifted a bag from his left to his right hand. “I’ve got some cold Abitas in one of these somewhere. Let’s sit out in the courtyard and see if we can’t kill a few.”

  I followed him into a living room that adjoined a small dining area and kitchen. The floors were longleaf pine covered with threadbare rugs. The furnishings, though spare, fit the architectural period of the house, which made them not a day less than two hundred years old. Asmore had once brought his work into these rooms, stacking his burlap and canvas creations on chairs and tables, hanging them, and yet the walls today had not a single painting on them, nor was there a print or a poster. Each wall was a grid of brick and mortar, old posts black with age.

  “Tell me,” Lowenstein said, “ever track down that fellow you were looking for?”

  “Which fellow was that?”

  “Wiltz, I think it was.”

  “Wiltz Lowenstein was a law firm. It went out of business many years ago.”

  “Oh, so law firms go out of business, too, do they? I thought all they did was proliferate.” He handed me a bottle. “Thanks for the good news.”

  He led me past French doors into the shade of a small courtyard. We sat on rusting iron chairs beneath a sweep of banana trees towering fifteen feet high. Except for his mismatched collection of clothes he bore little resemblance to his uncle, although I did wonder if his current mood had some genetic connection. Even as he guzzled beer he was bemoaning how his neighborhood market, once a wonderful place, had become little more than a water supply for tourists. Chief among his complaints was that people stood in line to pay three dollars for a small bottle when, if they only bothered, they could find a faucet against any one of a number of buildings and drink for free. “The world has gone mad,” he said. “Absolutely insane.”

  And over water, I thought.

  When he quieted down, I began to speak, glad for the opportunity to settle at least this one issue. “The cottage,” I said, “is it really haunted?”

  “I haven’t seen the ghost,” he answered, “but I have encountered the strange and unusual in the old place, most recently last Mardi Gras when a tourist let himself in after I opened a window for the breeze. I went after him with a frying pan. I took a couple of swings, in any case. I went for his head. He might’ve ended up a ghost had my aim been better.” He liked this story. It made him laugh. He swigged his beer. “You didn’t answer me earlier, Charbonnet. How’s Uncle Charlie getting along?”

  “Uncle Charlie,” I said. “I might be talking out of school here, Larry… no, I’m sure I am, but your Uncle Charlie seems depressed to me.”

  “Yeah? Well, what else is new?”

  “He tells me he intends to sell the house. He’s made some poor financial moves and he now finds himself in a hole.”

  “He’s not alone in that hole,” Larry Lowenstein said. “Why doesn’t he sell the collection of Newcomb pottery he keeps upstairs, or the Mallard suite in his bedroom, or some of those pictures by his former teachers and friends? He could begin with the Drysdales and the Kinseys. Am I asking the obvious when I wonder how many swamp and courtyard pictures one man honestly needs?”

  “Your uncle lived here, didn’t he? With Asmore?”

  “Yes, long ago. They were like brothers, nailing chicks left and right, doing everything together. I’ve never explored the story in detail, but I know the basics from conversations with my parents—my late father, mainly. And then there are the visitors who show up asking for a peek inside. Their grandmother was a Beloved girl, or they own a painting that looks like an Asmore and hope that someone at this address can authenticate it. Every one of them seems to have another tale to add to the Asmore legend. You can’t imagine how impatient I’ve grown with the whole silly mess. I quit trying to debunk the myth a long time ago.”

  “A myth, is it?”

  “However you wish to call it, Charbonnet, you end up with the same result. Granted, the guy painted some nice pictures, especially those portraits. But he made them a lot prettier by dying the way he did, and as young he did.”

  “I’m not sure I get your point.”

  “Let me try it this way: If people believe they need to b
uy water in a bottle, they will believe anything. Does that explain it?”

  I shook my head. “The reason people buy water in a bottle, Larry, is because it’s safe and handy that way. They like art on their walls because they want to look at pretty things. One might argue they also want to be challenged, enlightened and inspired, but I think for most people it’s much simpler than that.”

  “You think so, do you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Ever stop and really look at a painting? There ain’t a whole lot to it. Basically what you have is a sheet of paper or some other material with paint smeared on the surface. That’s all it is. Why are Levette Asmore’s smears so much more valuable than the smears of other talented artists?” He washed back more of the beer, then exhaled a gassy belch before answering his question. “He knew how to market himself, is why. And what’s the best way to market yourself? If you’re an artist it’s to check out young. Look at Van Gogh. He knew it, too, didn’t he?”

  “So you’re saying that the secret to success in the arts is to kill yourself?”

  “Very well put, Charbonnet. My sentiments exactly.”

  I considered leaving at this moment. He was gracious to have invited me in, and the beer was good, but I couldn’t tolerate his ignorance. “I don’t share your opinion, Larry, I’m sorry.”

  “Nah, don’t be sorry. And don’t listen to a goddamn word I’m saying. I’m just talking. I’m still pissed for having to wait in line at the market. Maybe Asmore really was a genius, but my thoughts about the man have always been colored by my love for Charlie Lowenstein. He was with him when he died, you know? Uncle Charlie was with Asmore. He was there on the bridge. He saw him jump.”

  I was growing impatient. I let out a long sigh and sat forward on the chair. “I don’t think I believe you. It’s too… I don’t know, implausible.”

  “You don’t believe me? Well, you should believe me. Because you can take what I’m telling you to the bank. Uncle Charlie was on that bridge when Asmore killed himself. And it ruined him. Why do you think he never amounted to anything?”