Southern Ruby

by Belinda Alexandra

  I understand the relationship between the both of you wasn’t good, and I didn’t know of your existence until I read the letter. I am very sorry to learn of your condition and hope that you remain well.

  I will understand if you don’t wish to have contact with me now that so much time has passed, but I would very much like to speak with you and to learn more about my family, especially my father, who I know very little about. I hope that you will agree to meet with me should I come to New Orleans.

  Yours sincerely,

  Amanda (Amandine) Darby

  My words seemed woefully inadequate for the occasion, but they were the best I could muster. I enclosed a graduation photograph of myself, and included my address, my email and my telephone numbers on the letter. When I posted it the next day, I had a strange sensation of having cast myself out into the unknown. I prayed Grandmother Ruby would reply, because no response would be unbearable.

  The rent from Nan’s house and the money she had left me provided a modest monthly income and I no longer had to work at the real estate office. But I wanted to do something to keep myself occupied. Tamara introduced me to the manager of an Italian restaurant on King Street and I got a gig singing cabaret numbers on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. One morning, after a late night singing at the restaurant, I slept past my usual rising time and found that Tamara and Leanne had already left for the day. I made myself a cup of green tea and sat on the couch with it for a few moments before I turned on the television.

  Oprah Winfrey was interviewing Mariah Carey and her mother, Patricia, about the challenges of being an interracial child in the United States. Patricia said the family had originally lived in a mixed-race neighbourhood, but both the black and the white children shunned Mariah. They thought things would get better if they moved to a more affluent white suburb, but someone poisoned their dog and they were shot at through their front window.

  ‘What?’ I said out loud and put my cup down on the coffee table. Guessing from Mariah’s age, it must have been in the 1970s. I’d have thought the people of the United States would have resolved their conflicts over interracial mixing after Martin Luther King, Junior.

  The telephone rang. I got up to answer it but before I could reach it the ringing stopped. I looked at the caller ID but no number appeared. Either the battery was flat or it was one of those annoying marketing calls we were always getting. I returned to the couch and to the Oprah Winfrey Show. Mariah’s story intrigued me. Through my architectural course I’d met a Eurasian girl, Yumi, who had an Australian mother and a Japanese father. I thought she was the most exquisite human being I’d ever seen with her almond-shaped eyes, silky chocolate brown hair and smooth even-toned skin. It was Yumi who’d given me the courage to play up my unusual features rather than disguise them.

  ‘Stop hiding your hands,’ she told me one day when we were exploring Paddington Markets together and I’d shied away from trying on some papier-mâché bracelets she was enamoured with. ‘Paint your nails vibrant colours so everyone will notice them. My grandmother always said to take what magazines would have you believe is a fault and make it your most fabulous feature.’

  Under Yumi’s tuition I transformed myself from a social outcast to the School of Architecture’s avant-garde ‘It’ girl. I bobbed my hair, wore heavy eyeliner and drew attention to my unusual hands with bold shades of nail polish and giant amethyst power rings. I may not have looked like a Victoria’s Secret model, but that didn’t mean I had to hide myself away. Instead of being shunned as I had been at school, I found that boys flirted with me and girls wanted to know where I bought my clothes. The other students began taking my lead on the hippest nightclubs, the best house music and where to get their tattoos done.

  The telephone rang again, giving me a start. I picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ I answered, impatiently waiting for the inevitable marketing spiel about a better telephone company or a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ real estate investment offer.

  There was a pause. Then a woman with an American accent came on the line. ‘Could I speak to Amanda Darby, please?’

  My fingers tingled. ‘This is Amanda.’

  The woman paused again as if to catch her breath. ‘This is your Aunt Louise,’ she said. ‘We got your letter. Momma is too emotional to speak right now so she asked me to call. We want to see you as soon as you can come to New Orleans, darling. We want to tell you all about your father. When do you think you can come?’

  The blood drained from my face. Although I’d given my telephone numbers I hadn’t expected Grandmother Ruby — or Aunt Louise — to call. I’d thought they’d lack courage like me and write first. It took me a moment to find my voice and even then I could barely get the words out. ‘I’m sort of a free agent now,’ I told her. ‘I can come anytime.’

  Aunt Louise gave a warm chuckle. ‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ she said. ‘I know it must be strange for you after all this time and it’s difficult for me to say all I’d like to on the telephone. I’m going to email you the details of our travel agent. She’ll book everything for you. Johnny and I will pick you up at the airport. We’ll have so much to say to each other then and I’m looking forward to showing you our New Orleans hospitality.’

  I thanked her and then we exchanged some small talk: Aunt Louise asked about Sydney and what I was doing; I told her about my university studies and what the weather was currently like. It wasn’t a very in-depth conversation but I did feel an underlying rapport with her. When we ended the call I sat back down on the couch with my head in my hands. Had that all really happened — and so easily?

  A key sounded in the door and I looked up to see Tamara and Leanne, their arms loaded with grocery shopping.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Tamara asked, peering at me over a bunch of spinach. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I’m going to New Orleans!’ I told her.

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as I can get a ticket.’

  SIX

  Amanda

  New Orleans, 2005

  No sooner had I stepped into the arrivals area of Louis Armstrong Airport than a woman’s voice called, ‘Amanda!’

  I scanned the crowd waiting for passengers and found a woman in her late forties waving to me. She stood out from the tropical smorgasbord of tee-shirts, micro sundresses, shorts and flip-flops with her tailored beige dress and wedged hairdo. As we got closer, we stared intently at each other’s face as if searching for something. With her rounded figure and fair skin she was the antithesis of me in physical appearance. She wore a necklace of silver glass beads while I wore Nan’s vintage rose pendant. Her earrings were discreet Akoya pearl studs, mine were Betsey Johnson crystal encrusted skulls. Yet it was there in the light in her eyes: a recognition of kin.

  She threw her arms around me. ‘Welcome back to New Orleans, darling! I’m your Aunt Louise.’

  A trim man in pressed chinos and a button-front shirt joined us. ‘I’m Jonathan,’ he said, heartily shaking my hand. ‘You’ve flown a long way to get to New-OAR-linz.’

  He was softly spoken and his Southern accent was so striking that it took me a second to understand him. I remembered how my mother had described him as ‘hip’. With his moisturised skin and chiselled sideburns he was simply well-kept now.

  ‘Almost an entire day,’ I said, brushing my fingers through my hair. ‘But I changed planes in Los Angeles.’

  ‘Well, let’s get you back to the house,’ he said, grasping the handle of my wheeled suitcase. ‘You must be exhausted.’

  Aunt Louise linked her arm with mine and we followed Uncle Jonathan. She was no longer a disembodied voice on the telephone, but a real human being with her flesh pressed to mine.

  ‘I’m so glad you came,’ she said, beaming from ear to ear. ‘Momma is beside herself with excitement, and I hope you and I will laugh as much together as your mother and I did.’

  Her natural affection put me at ease, and the way she described her relat
ionship with my mother gave me a fluttery sensation in my heart. I’d thought our first meeting might be awkward, but I felt like I’d just grown another two inches. I’d never had an aunt before. I’d only had Nan.

  ‘How is my grandmother?’ I asked. ‘She’s had some trouble with her heart?’

  ‘She has to take four different types of medication, but she’s tougher than she looks,’ Aunt Louise assured me. ‘Her physician, Doctor Wilson, says that she’ll die young. “You might be eighty, ninety or one hundred when you finally go, Ruby,” he jokes. “But you’ll still be young.”’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said, more keen than ever to meet my Grandmother Ruby. She would be able to tell me more about my father than anybody.

  The air outside the terminal hit me like a burst from a hairdryer. The humidity was more oppressive than Sydney mid-January and the sun stung my winter skin. We reached Uncle Jonathan’s car, a red Mustang convertible.

  ‘I’ll leave the top up,’ he said, hoisting my suitcase into the boot. ‘The weather’s been oppressive today. We might get a storm on the way into town.’

  He opened the door and pulled the front passenger seat forward so I could climb in the rear.

  ‘No, look at her legs,’ Aunt Louise told him. ‘She’s got Dale’s height. She should sit in the front.’

  The casual mention of my father’s name was a shock. I had only known him as the man who had ‘destroyed our life’ and taken my mother with him to an early grave. Now, maybe, I would see him in another light. After all, these were the people who had loved him.

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ I assured Aunt Louise. ‘I’ll be good in the back.’

  I removed my denim vest and adjusted my halter top before getting in the car. Aunt Louise gave a start when she saw the tattoos on my shoulders, but then she smiled.

  ‘Wings! How beautiful! It’s like you’re an angel.’ To my surprise, her eyes filled with tears as she added, ‘A beautiful angel who has come back to us.’

  As the car sped along Interstate 10, I stared out the window and tried to imagine what my mother’s first impression of the city had been. From the air, New Orleans was broken up by swampland, oil refineries and canals, with the mighty Mississippi weaving through it. But from the ground, it looked much like the outskirts of any city, with billboards, airport motels, car yards and shopping malls.

  As we approached the city centre, however, we passed an old cemetery with the above-ground tombs that I knew were a feature of the place. Further on, Uncle Jonathan pointed out the Superdome. ‘The home stadium of the Saints football team,’ he said with pride.

  We exited the interstate and drove along St Charles Avenue into the Garden District. Immediately, a strange sensation came over me: as if I’d been away on an alien planet and now I was returning home.

  The first thing I noticed was the light — it was my favourite kind: dainty lacework patterns of sunlight broken up by the canopy of the gigantic live oak trees that stretched their twisted branches across the avenue. The gardens beneath the trees were lush blends of shade-loving azaleas, crimson impatiens and lilies of every variety. In place of lawns, the ground was covered with ivy edged neatly at the borders. The trees and verdant gardens created an atmosphere of seductive mystery that suited the Greek Revival and Italianate mansions. A streetcar passed by down the centre of the avenue. New Orleans was casting its spell on me. It was like slipping into a dream from the past, back to the place where I was born.

  We turned at a quiet intersection and passed another ancient cemetery, where the above-ground tombs seemed to peer over the high wall that surrounded them.

  ‘That’s Lafayette Cemetery,’ Aunt Louise explained. ‘During the yellow fever outbreaks the city suffered in the mid-1800s, the bodies were piled up outside the gates.’

  ‘New Orleans is supposed to be the most haunted city in the United States,’ added Uncle Jonathan, turning to wink at me. ‘Who knows, maybe it is. But I’ve lived here all my life and nothing supernatural has ever happened to me.’

  I looked at the houses again. What I hadn’t noticed in my earlier rapture I now saw clearly: while many of them had been restored, others were sinking and settling. The sight of their sagging balconies and roofs, rotting shingles and deteriorating sidings was heartbreaking. The area gave off an air of decadent decay and some of the houses were plain creepy. I noticed the broken dormer window of one peeling and lopsided house, and half expected to see a ghost staring back at me.

  Fortunately, the number of pickup trucks with restoration construction company signs on their doors and the rubbish skips in driveways lifted my spirits. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore one of these houses properly, but clearly there were residents who were passionate about saving the Garden District. It occurred to me that if I’d studied restoration architecture at Tulane University instead of Sydney, I might never be out of work.

  ‘And here we are,’ said Uncle Jonathan, turning into a shaded driveway bordered by magnolia and crepe myrtle trees. Bright blue agapanthus blooms and hedges of gardenias led the way to the front steps.

  I stared at the Queen Anne Victorian mansion with its bay windows, porches, ornamental spindles and turret, and my breath caught in my throat. I stepped out of the car, my head spinning. The scent of jasmine was intoxicating and the buzzing of summer insects in the trees was deafening. My thoughts rushed at me all at once. I knew this house, but how could I possibly have remembered it? Then my eye fell to the name plate near the front door: Amandine. The link between me and the house was clear. I had been named after it.

  ‘The house was built by my great-great-grandfather in 1890,’ said Aunt Louise, getting out of the car and standing beside me. ‘It’s been our family home ever since. My father was born in that room,’ she pointed to the second tier of the turret, ‘and so were you.’

  I turned to her in astonishment. ‘Me?’

  Uncle Jonathan chuckled as he lifted my suitcase out of the boot. ‘Now don’t think we’re so backward here that we were still birthing our children at home in the eighties. But your mother went into labour so quickly we didn’t have time to call an ambulance. You slid straight out into your father’s hands.’

  This time I couldn’t maintain my composure. The thought of my father being the person who’d held me in the first moments of my life was too much. A deep ache clenched my heart and I staggered. Uncle Jonathan caught me by the elbow.

  ‘It’s the heat,’ said Aunt Louise. ‘It can get to you if you aren’t used to it, especially as you’ve come from winter in Australia and all.’

  The front door opened and out stepped a petite woman in a periwinkle-blue dress with her grey hair twisted into a chic updo. In the crook of her arm rested a plump white rooster. The woman lifted her chin with the haughty imperiousness of a grande dame. Her posture was graceful, like a dancer awaiting her curtain call, and her long neck and delicate heart-shaped face added to the effect. Her beauty was so striking that I felt myself and Aunt Louise pale by comparison.

  But then her expression crumpled and she gave a cry, rushing down the steps towards me and placing her cool, tiny hand on my arm. ‘Amandine!’ she said softly, tears filling her violet-coloured eyes. ‘You’ve come back!’ Her grip tightened. ‘You’ve come back to me. I knew you would. I am your Grandma Ruby.’

  I was captivated by her. It was as if I’d stepped into a fantasy and she was the queen of this magical place. How could these three people standing with me in this tropical garden in front of this fairytale house be real? They had seen me come into the world, had raised me until I was two years old, and then vanished from my life like fairies. Now here we were, united again. I was Alice returned to Wonderland.

  ‘We’d better get Amanda some water,’ Aunt Louise told her mother. ‘The heat today is unbearable.’

  Grandma Ruby touched my cheek and smiled. Then seizing my hand with a physical strength that belied her size, she yanked me up the porch stairs and into the house, with Aunt Lo
uise and Uncle Jonathan trailing behind.

  She led me to a parlour with salmon-pink walls, mahogany trimmings and a grandfather clock that struck twelve midday right at that moment. My gaze drifted from a red velvet sofa with cabriole legs and trifid feet to the Aubusson rug that covered part of what appeared to be the original oak floors. I’d been a subscriber to Antiques Collector magazine for years. Now the treasures from its glossy pages were here in front of my eyes.

  Then it occurred to me that these objects were the first things I’d seen as a baby. I probably crawled around on that carpet and stared open-mouthed at the crystal chandelier suspended from an ornate plaster medallion. Nobody in Australia had understood how a well-crafted piece of furniture could send me into a state of euphoria, but suddenly it made perfect sense.

  ‘Amandine?’ I turned to see Aunt Louise holding out a tray with glasses of iced water and lemon. ‘Oh,’ she said, colouring slightly, ‘I meant to say “Amanda”. I keep forgetting.’

  ‘No,’ I told her, ‘please call me Amandine. I like it.’

  ‘Amandine’ had sounded like a pretentious name in Sydney, but here it fit me like a second skin. Perhaps it was the name of the person I was always meant to be — and soon I would discover who that person was. At my reply, everyone seemed to let out a collective sigh that they’d been holding since my arrival. It was as if by accepting my birth name I had agreed to return to the fold.

  The conversation was polite as we progressed from the parlour to drinking mint juleps in the garden’s summerhouse when the afternoon cooled off. My last meal had been breakfast at Los Angeles airport, and whether it was the effect of bourbon on an empty stomach, the heat, or the heady scent of the wisteria vine that shaded the summerhouse, the past seemed to peel away as Grandma Ruby, Aunt Louise, Uncle Jonathan and I mapped our way from the time I’d left New Orleans to the present.