by Greg Herren
I felt enormously betrayed.
“You’re looking well, Cecile,” Papa Bradley boomed as he walked over to MiMi’s chair, standing beside it and glancing down at her briefly. MiMi ignored him and smiled at my parents.
There was tension in the air as greetings were exchanged, and I found myself looking around, trying to figure out where the tension was coming from. These gatherings were always tense—to say the least—but this time felt different somehow, like something truly unpleasant was floating just beneath the surface, and all it would take was one spark to ignite an explosion that would be almost impossible to put out. I glanced over at Frank, but he was talking in a low voice to Storm.
Aunt Leslie reached up and grabbed my arm, pulling gently until I leaned down. “I’m so sorry,” she said in a low whisper, “for what’s about to happen.”
“What’s going to happen?” I whispered back, but she just shook her head and gulped down half of her wine.
Puzzled, I walked over to the bar and poured myself a stiff vodka and tonic. As I took a sip, Mom joined me and helped herself to a glass of red wine. That’s off, too, I thought. Papa Bradley always plays bartender, making hearty jokes that aren’t funny about what everyone wants to drink. But he stood still beside MiMi’s chair, not saying anything, just sipping his own bourbon.
I was watching him when the door chimes rang again. He started a bit, looking over at the doorway nervously. What’s got the old bastard so spooked? I wondered, glancing around to see if anyone else had noticed his nervousness. What is going on around here?
He relaxed a little as his youngest child, my aunt Enid, swept into the room.
Enid was what was politely called a “change of life baby.” MiMi thought she had an intestinal tumor—and was quite shocked to discover she was pregnant. Enid was only a few years older than Storm. She’d never married, and had only recently left the house on State Street for her own apartment in the lower Garden District.
I’d always felt kind of sorry for Enid. She’d been a pretty little girl, but by the time she was in her teens she began gaining weight and had never looked back. She was small, barely over five feet tall, but at her heaviest she’d weighed in excess of three hundred pounds. A few years earlier she’d had that weight-loss surgery to put a band around her stomach. She was now down to a skeletal ninety pounds or so. When she was heavy, she’d always smelled slightly sour. Now she tried too hard to be glamorous. Her light brown hair was coiffed into a ridiculously complicated up-do, which probably meant she’d spent the entire afternoon at the beauty salon. She spoke in a girlish little voice that wasn’t age appropriate and was kind of creepy. She was very fond of pinks and lavenders—she was wearing a pink silk dress with matching shoes and carrying a pink patent leather bag. When she was happy or pleased, she squealed in delight like a child and clapped her hands together. She frequently talked louder than necessary, always in that high-pitched voice. I felt sorry for her—it couldn’t have been easy to be raised in my grandparents’ house. She was always friendly almost to the point of pushiness, demanding and insisting on confidences, showering anyone and everyone she knew with cards and little gifts, lecturing others regularly on their bad behavior and how to be a better person. She was devoted to her cat, Harley, and her Christmas cards always featured the two of them.
My mother despised her with a passion she usually reserved for right-wing politicians, oil company executives, and racists.
She’d done poorly at Newman and flunked out of the University of New Orleans after two semesters. She would occasionally get a part-time job, which would last a month or two, and as far as I could tell she’d never dated anyone. And as Rain once said to me grimly, “Never tell her anything you don’t want the world to know.”
We’d been close when I was younger, but as I got older she started rubbing me the wrong way.
I hazarded a sidelong glance at Frank, who had a smile plastered on his face as she dashed toward him with a disturbing high-pitched squeal. She’d formed one of her unnatural attachments to him, regularly sending him heart-shaped cards with “thinking of you” in glittered script on the outside and her neat, precise printing on the inside—in pink ink, of course.
Frank gave me a “help me” look as she threw her arms around him and squeezed him and giggled. “Did you get my card?” she said breathlessly in her childish voice, and squealed. “Wasn’t it just the cutest ever?”
I smothered a grin and avoided Frank’s eyes. “Shouldn’t you be rescuing him from that freak?” Mom murmured as she sipped her wine. Mom disliked all the Bradley relatives, but Enid was at the top of her list. I wasn’t sure why and was about to respond to her when she grabbed my arm in a death grip. I looked at her and was about to say something when her grip got tighter. Her face was drained of color, and her mouth was open slightly. She was staring at the doorway. I swiveled my head to see what had startled her so much and almost gasped myself.
My cousin Jared was good looking, much as I hated to admit it. He was standing in the doorway, wearing a black sweater with a gold fleur-de-lis embroidered on the chest over a pair of tight jeans. He was about six-three and weighed 230 pounds. He had the thick build of a football player, and his once-aquiline nose had a bump in it where it had been broken when he was in high school. His shoulder-length brown hair shone and was perfectly parted in the center of his head. He had wide blue eyes, but as far as I was concerned, his looks were ruined by his air of smug arrogance. But it wasn’t Jared’s appearance that rattled Mom so completely.
It was the woman on his arm.
“Tara Bourgeois,” I managed to breathe out as Mom let go of my arm.
Tara Bourgeois was probably the most notorious Miss Louisiana in the history of beauty pageants. The previous year she had swept through the Miss Louisiana pageant on her way to infamy at the televised Miss United States pageant in front of a worldwide audience of billions. I didn’t know her, but Frank and I loved to watch beauty pageants for their amazing camp value. (I was always disappointed when the talent portion passed without an accordion player.) We, of course, were rooting for Miss Louisiana as she made it through every cut, her bleached teeth glowing in her perfect smile under her perfect nose and her beautiful green eyes and long, teased and lacquered black hair. And she made it to the final five—which, of course, was the all-important question segment. I personally love that part of every pageant, as the contestants try desperately not to offend anyone and try to think fast enough on their feet so they don’t make fools of themselves. Frank and I leaned forward as Miss Louisiana was called forward and stepped to the microphone. The bland host with the big teeth and the televangelist hair pulled her question out and said, “There have been a lot of recent court decisions that have awarded gays and lesbians equal rights. Do you believe that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry, and serve openly in the military?”
Her eyes got wide with panic—you could tell she wasn’t expecting that, and I kind of felt sorry for her—until she stepped up to the microphone and said, “Well, I believe that everyone is made in God’s image.” She paused before adding, “But I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and any judge who says otherwise shouldn’t be sitting on the bench and presiding over the law in a Christian nation, and I don’t believe it is God’s plan to let gays and lesbians to serve next to our brave soldiers who are out there risking their lives every day for our freedoms.” When the audience let out a collective gasp, she smiled and shrugged, “I’m sorry, I was raised a Christian and that’s what I believe.”
There was a smattering of applause, but it was drowned out by boos and catcalls from the audience.
Frank and I sat there, dumbfounded, unable to speak.
She finished as first runner-up.
That might have been the end of it, but an openly gay blogger who runs a celebrity gossip site called her some nasty names the next day on his blog, and it turned into a huge mess. Rather than backing down, she went on the offensive. Befor
e long, evangelical Christian groups and the right-wing “Gestapo” (as Mom called them) were coming to her defense. She was eventually fired as Miss Louisiana because she was skipping required appearances as Miss Louisiana in order to promote herself as the new queen of the anti-gay movement, but she refused to take responsibility for her own actions. Instead, she claimed it was “the gays” who did it to her, and there was a huge conspiracy of radical homosexuals out to get even with her, and deny her her First Amendment rights to free speech. She was now commanding large speaking fees and had been hired by a national anti-gay marriage group, Protect American Marriage, as their spokesperson. She had also written a book called My American Dream, which was soon to be released, and was being promoted as the star speaker at an anti-gay marriage rally being held somewhere in Kenner over the upcoming weekend. Mom was trying to organize a counter-protest.
And here she was, walking into my grandparents’ home on the arm of my cousin, in a skintight blue dress with stiletto pumps, her big pageant smile plastered on her face.
And now I knew why Papa Bradley had been so nervous—he knew she was coming.
I felt resentment and anger beginning to simmer inside me. It was one thing to listen to her hateful homophobia on national television—it was quite another to have her waltz into my grandparents’ home like she owned the place.
I wanted to punch the smug look off Jared’s face.
As my anger began to boil over in my brain, I realized Mom was walking quickly across the room toward the door. I heard someone murmur “oh dear God”—it might have been Aunt Leslie—but the rest of the room was quiet, everyone too stunned to say anything.
“Hi,” Tara said, flashing her pageant smile as Mom reached her. She stuck out her right hand. “I’m Tara, and you are…”
“Someone who hates your homophobic guts,” Mom replied, tossing the contents of her glass into Tara’s face. Tara stepped back, her perfectly coiffed hair sparkling with drops of wine, her makeup ruined, and rivulets of reddish purple liquid dripping from her chin and streaking down her bare neck and shoulders into her deep cleavage. Her dress was ruined, a huge stain on the front of it. Her eyes narrowed and she slapped Mom. “You bitch!”
No one moved as Mom slugged her with a right hook she usually reserved for security guards at nuclear power plants. Tara went over backward and vanished from view into the hallway—except for her feet in her stiletto heels.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
“Bravo!” Marguerite got out of her chair with a glare for my grandfather. “Storm, take me home. I have no desire to share a table with that”—she sniffed disdainfully—“piece of Kenner trash.”
Frank managed to disentangle himself from Enid’s clutches and nodded at me. There was a sort of stampede for the door. Jared was helping Tara to her feet as I went by them on my way to the room where Louisa had deposited our coats. Her nose was bleeding. Jared was murmuring to her, and she was crying. For a brief moment, I felt sorry for her—she was, as my sister-in-law had so snobbishly put it, Kenner trash. I would imagine it was a big deal to her to be invited to the home of a society family on State Street in New Orleans, and she’d hardly made the kind of impression she would have wanted to.
Then I remembered all of her speeches and public appearances, demeaning Frank’s and my relationship as something perverted and abominable, and whatever sympathy I had for her went right out the window.
“I guess this is an improvement,” I said over my shoulder at them. “At least this one isn’t stripping on Bourbon Street—yet.”
Frank tossed me my coat, his face rigid and red. He was furious—I could tell by the muscle tic in just below his scar. “Come over,” Mom said as she and Dad went out the front door. “We’ll have a family gathering.”
The last time I saw Tara Bourgeois alive was when I paused in my grandparents’ front door and looked back. She was seated in one of the hallway chairs with her head tilted back, and Louisa was holding a burgundy towel to her nose.
I shook my head and slammed the door behind me.
Chapter Two
Ten Of Cups
Lasting happiness inspired from above
“I still can’t believe you slugged her,” Frank said, a delighted grin on his face as he unwrapped his cheeseburger.
We were sitting on the huge sofa in the living room of my parents’ apartment. The temperature was dropping, and a cold night wind was whipping around the building. The wind was rattling the shutters on the balcony doors, like it was trying to get in. The air was heavy and damp, which meant rain later. I was hoping the rain wouldn’t start until we got back to our own place. I shivered just as the central heating clicked on. Mom wasn’t a fan of central heat—she said it felt canned and stuffy, so she rarely used it. Usually, I agreed with her, but now I was glad to hear it come on. It felt like it was less than fifty degrees inside. My nose and ears felt like they had frostbite, and even the wool blanket I had draped over my legs wasn’t helping much.
The hot air coming out of the vent just behind the couch was heavenly against my neck.
Mom had offered us leftover tofu lasagna, but we’d politely ordered burgers from the Quartermaster Deli instead. It was just the four of us. Storm and Marguerite had conveniently gotten a call on their way to the Quarter from friends with an invitation to dine at Galatoire’s, but were coming by for drinks after they finished dinner.
I suspected they knew about the tofu lasagna.
I glanced at Frank out of the corner of my eyes while unwrapping my own mushroom bacon cheeseburger. He’d been unusually silent since we’d left Papa Bradley’s. The entire trip downtown he hadn’t said a word, but from the tic of a muscle in his jaw and the throbbing vein in his forehead I knew he was pissed off. I just let him stew. When Frank’s angry, it’s best to just let it burn itself out. He’d talk about it when he was ready.
But I couldn’t help but think it was weird. Surely he wasn’t that upset about Tara showing up with Jared?
“She’s lucky that’s all I did—she deserves much, much worse,” Mom replied, viciously stabbing a piece of lasagna with her fork. “I absolutely despise people who use religion as their excuse for bigotry. What religion has bigotry and hatred as its core values? I may not be a Christian but I’m willing to bet I’ve read the damned Bible more than she has.” She gestured with her fork. “Homosexuality is an abomination? I bet she eats shrimp and lobster and wears mixed-fabric clothes. Same-sex marriage is against God’s plan?” She scowled. “But it’s perfectly okay for that hypocritical piece of trash to get her nose fixed and her boobs done. So, what her precious Lord gave her wasn’t good enough for her? She thought she could improve on her God’s work? She’s an abomination.”
“I still can’t believe Papa didn’t warn us Jared was bringing her.” Dad shook his head, a sad look on his face.
I felt bad for Dad. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve never understood the Bradley side of the family. For that matter, it was impossible to believe Papa and MiMi could have supplied the DNA for Dad. Rain once theorized that either MiMi had an affair or he had to have been adopted.
If Dad didn’t have a strong resemblance to Papa Bradley, I’d find that easy to believe.
“Because he knew damned well if we knew Jared was bringing that monster, we wouldn’t have shown up.” Mom took another slug of her wine. “And he wanted us all there, regardless of how we might feel, to worship at the shrine of St. Jared. And he certainly wasn’t going to tell the Holy Child not to bring her.”
“How did they even meet?” I wondered out loud.
Mom ignored me. “I am never setting foot in that house again, and I’m never speaking to him again unless he apologizes, and he certainly won’t do that. And admit he was wrong? That he behaved in a way that was offensive? Maybe when monkeys fly out of my ass.” She shook her head. “We should have cut him out of our lives years ago. He’s always treated us like trash, anyway. The worthless drunk Skipper can do no wrong—and if
he can’t appreciate what a fine man you are, honey—” She kissed Dad on the cheek. “Well, then he doesn’t deserve our love or respect. I know he’s your father, darling—”
Dad gave her a sad smile. “It’s okay, dear.” He shrugged his shoulders. “He certainly went too far this time. I don’t understand why he favors Jared so much.”
“Because he’s a football player,” I replied.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Frank wiped ketchup off his chin and looked at me.
I smiled at him. Frank was born and raised up north and had lived in DC most of the time he was with the Feds. “It’s a Southern thing,” I said, for simplicity’s sake. “Football is like a religion down here. Like how the whole city’s gone nuts this season? How many other cities have gay bars televising the local team’s games?”
Frank nodded. “So, because Jared’s a Saint, Papa Bradley treats him different than everyone else?”
I rolled my eyes. “When I didn’t play football in high school…I might as well have been a cheerleader in his eyes.” Storm had played football—Papa Bradley hadn’t missed even one of his away games all four years. When Jared got a scholarship to play football at Southern Mississippi—a school he would have pitched a fit over if any other Bradley had wanted to go there—it was like Papa Bradley had died and gone to heaven.
Making the Saints roster in try-outs (no team drafted him) was just the icing on the cake.
“He always favored Skipper,” Dad said, taking a sip of his wine. “Whether Jared played football or not, he’s always favored Skipper.”
“Oh, Skipper’s just perfect,” Mom replied, her face hardening. “He doesn’t need to have a job or anything—or even stay sober for more than twelve hours, or stay married to the same woman for more than three years, or be a good father, or do anything besides just exist, for that matter. He can do no wrong as far as Papa Bradley’s concerned. And we can’t do anything right.” She laughed, shaking her head. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it, Frank?”
