City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  On the kitchen table Aaron unrolled the heavy brown paper, reached into the bag and slid out a stack of old, heavy 78-rpm records. Everyone gathered around a little closer to see these artifacts of another era. SJ’s father had been a great music fan; he loved the singers especially. He was a Billy Eckstine man, and SJ could remember that deep baritone from way back in his childhood, and the words “I a-pol-o-gize…” with that patented catch in Mr. B’s voice between the syllables, coming out of their old record player. His Daddy loved Frank Sinatra, too, and a few blues singers. He wasn’t much for instrumentals, unless it was something romantic like Gene Ammons playing “Canadian Sunset.” Or he’d put a nickel in the slot to hear “The Masquerade Is Over” by Lou Donaldson if he was in a certain type of mood. But mostly it was the singers—Herb Jeffries doing “Flamingo,” Al Hibbler singing “Ebb Tide”…that whole lost continent of smoky romance…

  “Mahalia Jackson,” he heard Camille’s voice saying. “Daddy look at this.”

  SJ picked up the record his daughter had seen, a green label, Apollo Records, Mahalia Jackson singing “Didn’t It Rain.” SJ looked through the discs—the Famous Ward Singers, Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes, the Pilgrim Travelers, the Caravans…He had never thought of his father as much of a gospel fan.

  They brought the discs carefully into the den, where there was a forty-year-old wooden stereo console that could play records and still had the 78 speed, and Aaron took one of the records off the stack and looked at it before he put it on the turntable. “Mahalia Jackson,” he said, to himself, but also as if he were seeing a photo in an album of a friend long gone.

  They stood around as Aaron set the mechanism to 78 rpm and fit the disc over the spindle, and the automatic mechanism dropped the disc onto the turntable and after a moment a high hissing noise materialized, and some low organ notes. Aaron turned the volume up, and then the voice came out of the speakers:

  Precious Lord,

  take my hand.

  Lead me on,

  let me stand.

  I am tired,

  I am weak,

  I am worn…

  They stood silently, listening. SJ thought about his father, and his mother, and Rosetta, and Lucy. In that room with the people he loved around him, he also felt the presence of the others he loved, who were not there. Bury the dead, he thought, so they can live. It isn’t enough just to survive; the ones who have gone have to survive, too.

  SJ and Leeshawn strolled the evening streets of Aaron’s neighborhood. SJ recognized that he wasn’t ready to have a full-blown relationship with her. Leeshawn had been a source of strength for him after Lucy’s death, she took care of details, brought food to the house, was a good and strong companion. And they had had fun, she had brought him back to life. But too many things had happened too quickly, and it was all going to take sorting out. He struggled to find the right words.

  “SJ,” Leeshawn said, looking at the ground as they walked, “I knew, in front, what you were dealing with. I went into it with my eyes open. I don’t know how you managed the last couple of months.”

  “I managed because of you,” he offered, quickly.

  “Well,” she said, “I know I helped out in different ways, but you been dealing with a lot of things that I couldn’t help out with. And I seen you dealing with them. And I want you to know that you are the man that I thought you were.” She fished a tissue out of her purse. “You even more. You a lot more, J…”

  “I feel like I need to do this. It’s not even that—I know I have to do this.”

  “I don’t need convincing. And you going to do it. I know you need to deal with Rosetta’s memory.” She looked at him as they walked along. “Oh yes,” she said. “I know that.”

  They hadn’t talked much about Rosetta, and he was surprised that she had located that fact with such clarity. But more was involved than that, too. He had told her about the odd feeling of—peace wasn’t the word; maybe comfort—that he had had sitting in his bedroom on his visit back, and she seemed to understand. “I need to prove to myself,” he said, now, “that I can stand again.”

  “You will,” she said.

  “Allright, and it means a lot to me you saying that,” he said. “I’m telling you…but I need to prove it to myself. I need to do that before I can move on.”

  She nodded, they walked. SJ remarked to himself, again, how she always surprised him by being stronger than he thought she would be. There was nothing she was saying that wasn’t right. One of these days, after he had done at least some of what he needed to do, maybe if they could get through the next time period, maybe he would ask her to marry him. But he was getting ahead of himself…And he didn’t want to say anything about the future that would make her hope for something that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure of, himself, yet.

  “Can we take it a step at a time is what I’m saying. Just see, see how time goes and what it does. Can you do that?”

  She fished in her purse for another tissue. “Of course I can do it, J,” she said. “If that’s what you need. What else I’m going to do? I’m in love with you. What else I’m going to do?”

  Craig and Alice drove back home along Wabash Avenue, with Annie and Malcolm asleep in the backseat, through the iron and steel heart of the country as it slowly readied itself for bed. All around them, off the side streets that led up from Wabash, and in the second-floor apartments along the avenue, where they saw people moving in the windows while they waited for the traffic light to change on the corner and the heater breathed warmth around their feet. Had they been in an airplane they would have seen, spreading around them across the suburban landscape and out into the countryside, twinkling diamond lights on the black velvet of the rolling land, and in the distance the glowing hive of the city, Chicago, and perhaps running lights from one or two adventuresome boats out on the lake. The traffic light changed, and they went on as the commercial strip dissolved into houses up on shoulders of land behind the sidewalks of Elkton, lights glowing warm in the windows they saw as they made their way home. Alice put her hand on Craig’s leg and he took his right hand off the wheel to hold hers.

  “Thank you for being so sweet today,” she said. “I think it meant a lot to them that we were there.”

  “It was a nice day,” he said.

  Back home, they found a basket sitting by the front door, containing muffins and fruit, and a card from their landlady wishing them a happy Thanksgiving. Inside, in their warm apartment, they got Malcolm into bed, and got Annie into her pajamas, and they prepared coffee for the morning. Annie, not yet ready for bed, got out one of her books and curled up on the couch, so like her mom, Craig thought. They stashed the leftovers Jean had sent home with them, and then when things were put away and stable they made a movement in the direction of their customary evening television tableau. Alice brought a cup of tea into their living area, and Craig watched her walk to the couch and sit down next to their daughter and stroke Annie’s hair, and Annie didn’t stop reading. He looked at them there, his life.

  Standing behind the couch, he quietly set down the TV remote and said, “How about if I build a fire?”

  III

  27

  Some version of Mardi Gras has been held in New Orleans on the Tuesday preceding Ash Wednesday for almost two hundred years, the most famous expression of a tradition that goes back deep into pagan celebrations; a carnival, a farewell to the flesh. It kicks off the season of renunciation that precedes springtime.

  There are many different Mardi Gras in New Orleans. There is the Mardi Gras of the large parades put on by krewes with hundreds of members, and there is the Mardi Gras of the small marching clubs with a couple dozen members, who parade around the quiet streets of their own neighborhoods. There is the day of families who stake out a spot along a parade route, and the day of individuals and couples who strike out for the unknown early in the morning and have no idea where they will finish the day. There is the day of the Mardi Gras Indian
s, and the day of the tourists and sybarites, gay and straight, who flood into the French Quarter. For some, it is a day of tightly scripted ritual, culminating in a masked ball, but for most, the day represents the spirit of improvisation itself. On Mardi Gras, you go where the day takes you.

  In the months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was deeply split over whether to hold Mardi Gras that February. Bodies were still being found in attics and under rubble. Many asked whether it wouldn’t send the wrong message to people outside the city. Would it say that things were now okay, when everyone knew how far things were from okay? Or, worse, would it send the message that New Orleanians didn’t know the difference between okay and not-okay?

  For tens of thousands who couldn’t make it back home, the question was, How could they have Mardi Gras without us? For the hundreds who had seen loved ones die in front of their eyes and seen their communities destroyed, the response was not linear at all. The sound of celebration assaults a grieving heart. The city had already said farewell to enough flesh for one year. The timing was wrong.

  Others, just as passionate and often grieving just as much, felt differently. For longer than anyone alive remembered, New Orleanians had danced at funerals. It was an obligation on those who were still alive to restate the resilience of the human spirit with wit and style, to be present, to answer when called, even with tears running down your face. If you lost your ability to dance in the face of death or trouble, then you lost everything. The point of holding Mardi Gras, they argued, was not to show the world that the city was okay. Mardi Gras was for the people of New Orleans, to prove to themselves that the spirit was not dead.

  And there was another factor: the city was broke. The tourist dollars on which New Orleans depended had slowed to less than a trickle in the preceding months. The images that had gone out around the world needed to be replaced with the familiar good-time images that drew tourists. Or so thought many of the city’s business leaders, who were the engine behind the large-scale city-wide Mardi Gras in the first place. In any case, for reasons high and low, the city went ahead with plans to hold Mardi Gras.

  There were changes designed to adapt the celebration to the city’s reduced resources. The season, which usually lasts three weeks, would last one week. Parade routes would be altered and shortened to allow an overextended police department and emergency response teams to cover the routes. Endymion, one of the largest parades, which usually ran through still-devastated Mid-City, would run instead along St. Charles Avenue. Zulu, the city’s great black parade, which rolled on Mardi Gras morning, would be shortened drastically, and would end, in supreme irony, near the Superdome, where many of its members had spent the longest week of their lives six months earlier. Every group had to adapt to something, and the city had to play it by ear. Nobody knew what would happen, or whether people would come. But Mardi Gras was on.

  And New Orleanians came, from all over the country, by plane and by car, by minivan and bus. From Houston and Atlanta, from Dallas and Chicago and Memphis and Pittsburgh and St. Louis. They made elaborate costumes in friends’ and relatives’ kitchens and brought them to town in the trunk of a rented car. They flew in from Albuquerque and Salt Lake City, Baltimore and D.C. and Detroit. They stayed in the hotel rooms that were available, they stayed in friends’ guest rooms, on couches, on inflatable mattresses and futons. Or they camped out in their own houses, with the mold on the walls, or the blue tarpaulin covering the holes in the roof. They stayed on the second floor, they showered at a friend’s house across town. They made do, they figured out a way. And when they ran into each other for the first time since the storm they embraced and heard as much of the other’s story as they could stand, saying, you are still here. You are still alive, the old New Orleans funeral message. The insistence upon the life that is left, the reminder of how finite it all is, how bitter and precious.

  How, Craig wondered, did the rooms get so big?

  It was, improbably, Mardi Gras morning again. The next day, March 1, the nice young white family who had been forced out of their Lakeview home by the flooding would technically take possession of his house, although they were allowing him to remain there through that morning.

  Craig had arrived in New Orleans the previous Thursday and had spent the weekend boxing up a few last things, cleaning, sweeping, and vacuuming up the final evidence of his life in New Orleans. In the evenings he went to parades, had dinner with Bobby and Jen and Doug and Connie and their kids.

  He was there alone. Coming down would have meant missing a couple of days of school for Annie and Malcolm. More to the point, Annie was involved in the spring play, and there were rehearsals for it, and Alice needed to be there, and Malcolm didn’t want to leave, and so Craig was back in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, alone, as he had been years long before. As it had been years before, there was no necessity in the day, only possibility. But possibility had meant fullness to him in years past; now possibility felt like emptiness.

  It was amazing, for example, how long his living room seemed without the couch bisecting it, and without the art on the walls, and with no rugs on the hardwood floors. All of it was currently appearing at Spotlight Storage in Skokie, where the 12-x-15 storage room felt very cramped indeed. Boxes of toys on top of the couch, comforters piled on top of bicycles, boxes of books, boxes of records and CDs, boxes of photo albums and clothes.

  The Big Ugly Lamp was up in Skokie, too, along with the television and the beds from upstairs and the folding-leaf hall table where the Big Ugly Lamp had sat, and the kids’ toys (some of which, dormant for months, had been sold surreptitiously at their giant two-day-only tag sale). The picnic table and benches had been sold at the tag sale, along with the four high stools that had sat around the kitchen counter and the tiki lamps from the backyard. Craig had hung on to the strings of chili pepper Christmas tree lights that they used for cookouts; he planned to put them around the ceiling in his home office in Elkton, like a crown of thorns.

  The framed ad for Hadacol, the 1940s patent medicine, was gone from the maroon wall in the downstairs bathroom. The keeper plates, glasses, and silverware were long gone, and a giant dark green garbage bag slumped in the kitchen, partly full of the take out Styrofoam plates and Chinese food containers and bags from the deli on Adams Street that had sustained Craig as he cleaned up the last of the house’s detritus—the rolls of packing tape, ninety percent spent, here and there, lying abandoned in this or that room. Upstairs, the futon where he slept (earmarked for Bobby and Jen’s future guest room, made up for the weekend with borrowed sheets), and the towel and washcloth.

  Doug had come over on Saturday to help, as had Bobby. Craig was festooned with offers of bedrooms and hospitality for all subsequent return visits in perpetuity, but the knowledge that he would be returning only as a visitor, outside looking in, weighed him down. It was easier to accept the logic from a distance—the disappeared hospitals, the environmental concerns, the fractured community, the corrupt city leadership, an epidemic of suicides and the resurgence of crime, the dicey odds on future hurricanes and proper levee rebuilding…He had gone over all the reasons why they were doing what they were doing, a hundred thousand times in his brain. But it still made him sad, and he still struggled with it.

  It was Mardi Gras now, though, and Craig planned to get into the spirit and act like a New Orleanian. He had already been out to grab a double latte at his coffee shop on Magazine Street—the PJ’s on Maple Street hadn’t yet reopened—and even though his heart wasn’t in it he had cobbled together a cowboy outfit with a hat and arranged a holster out of a belt and one of Doug’s kids’ spare toy police revolvers. He had bought an eyebrow pencil at Walgreens, finally open again, and had given himself a desperado mustache. At least I can get out in it, he thought. Doug and the kids were hooking up with the Krewe of St. Anne, and Craig figured he would see them later in the afternoon in the Quarter. Bobby and Jen were supposed to meet him at Igor’s on St. Charles Avenue just off Jackson Avenue for t
he Zulu parade, their standard place for Mardi Gras morning. It was Mardi Gras. He would make a good showing of it.

  Before he left for the drive down to Washington Avenue, which was where he parked every year, except usually with Alice and Annie and Malcolm, walking the rest of the way down St. Charles to Jackson, he stopped into the upstairs bathroom to relieve himself. The bathroom counter was bare, the shower stall bare and the medicine cabinet empty. All the foliage of shampoo bottles and razors and soap and drying towels was gone. That was what was weird, the defoliation, like a body with no hair. On his way to the john, Craig saw himself in the mirror and stopped and regarded the person he saw in the glass. His costume, he thought, in so many words, looked like shit. The holster looked lousy, not like a holster at all but like just what it was—a belt—and the toy police revolver, instead of looking like an intentionally funny replacement for a cowboy’s six-shooter, looked like just what it was, a dumb replacement, part of a last-minute costume. He looked his fake-mustached self in the eye, under the brim of the ridiculous cowboy hat.

  “Fuck you,” he said, out loud. His voice sounded inappropriate in the empty house. He was sorry he had spoken, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t meant it. After the months of hating Alice and hating Borofsky and hating the government, it came down to this: he hated himself for leaving. He knew he was in an impossible situation, he had been through it all a thousand times, and his family had to come first. It would take a long time to sort it all out. But in the meantime, Craig unbuckled the “holster” and threw it down in the hall, took off the hat and skimmed it to land on top of the holster, and rubbed his hand along the sliver of soap left in the small indentation to the right of the sink and worked the mustache off as well as he could. He would attend Mardi Gras as himself. Warts and all.