The House on Coliseum Street
Page 16
“I walked here.”
“Now really.”
“I have to walk. It’s the only way I can go.”
“Where is your coat?”
“I left it at home. I forgot to take anything.”
“You simply must have a sweater. I’ll get one in a second.”
When she left it was with a sweater around her shoulders. A sweater that smelled foreign and strange and musty with old bureau drawers and perfume that had gone stale and harsh.
When she stepped into the clear cold air she realized that that house too had the sweet sick odor of rats in it. Does it get more intense at night or do we just not notice it during the day?
She walked on steadily… Look once more, then start to forget… Down the paths, among the trees, the trees that had no smell this cold night, the hot-weather trees… Past the library, dark and closed; and who was that couple? The one I saw, only I didn’t really, way upstairs where no one ever went, only I did… Along the brick walls, through the lines of azaleas, shoulder high, spotted with an occasional early flower. They liked the cold; they would flame out in a month or so. And where did the couples go, the mating couples that huddled behind these azaleas on the hot nights of spring and summer and fall? And where did they go?
I used to park my car over there, and I would walk this way. Before. A long time before. And I would see the little light on the gas dial glow up the inside of the car and I would close the door and be secure and safe inside my steel shell.
She passed a watchman’s station. He was sitting in the tiny room, warming something on a little electric plate. He heard her heels and he came to the door and stood to watch her pass. “Good evening,” she said, graciously. He touched his cap, halfway. And he looked after her until she went around the line of bushes and was out of sight.
She passed through the gates, the imitation Spanish gates that had the plaque of the class of 1905.
I came this way that morning and I saw him in the window and he came down and we went hunting for owls.
Her heels clattered on the iron bridge over the deepest gutter. And it’s here that there was ice once. Years ago. Real ice that lasted a long time into the day, even after the sun came up. And that’s where the hibiscus bush is, the yellow one I used to pick every day last summer, every single day on the way to class. Only it’s frozen down now so there’s only some hollow brown stalks standing up; it will have to grow back right from the roots when it gets warm again.
The pavement was uneven now; tree roots had thrown it up. She went more slowly, being careful of her footing.
And then she stood in front of the house on Coliseum Street. I’ll own it some day, she thought, because I’m the oldest and Aurelie will leave it to the oldest, whether she likes me or not. A tall narrow house, with an iron fence in front and a balcony across the second floor. There were no lights showing, only a glow deep inside.
Maybe I can come back to it. And maybe I won’t even want to. Maybe. But I’ll have to go away now.
She stood directly in front of the gate and looked up at the house.
I’m standing right where that tramp stood. Right where he stood that day. Last summer. The day Michael called for the first time… And he stood out here and he must have been sick because he couldn’t seem to stay on his feet. And the police came for him…
She looked down the uneven pavement, smeared with grease by the falling camphor trees, rising in little chunks with the pressure of the tree roots underneath. He had stood and swayed and fallen and lain there, muttering something. And there wasn’t anything left of it… There wasn’t anything left of the child either, that had lived in the world and walked about and nobody had seen it and nobody knew it was there, listening. Ghost child.
She had disturbed a mockingbird. Directly overhead he shifted and fluttered and sent down a half line of song, sleepily.
I could stand anything, she thought, if it wasn’t so lonely. If I could get pregnant again, I wouldn’t be so lonely. At least not for a time. There’d be two everywhere I went then, for a while.
In the center of the tiny yard the tile fountain gurgled gently. The bronze dolphins leered and squirted obscenely. It was the one mark her father had made on the house on Coliseum Street. Joan thought: Except for me.
And I’ll have to go away now. Once they know what I’ve done, I couldn’t stay in the house. But I can go. It’s only a question of where. My father knew I would have to leave some day. And he fixed it so I can go…
And she bowed slightly to the crisp busy figure on the other side of the grave.
She opened the gate—the iron was icy cold under her hand—and went up to the door, the heavy door with its thick pane of cut crystal. The brass knob was colder than the iron. She turned and nothing happened. It was locked. Of course. It would have been locked after her. She did not have a key. She had not thought to bring one with her. She stared for a bit at the knob that turned uselessly in her hand. Then she took one of the porch chairs and sat down in it and waited. It was quite cold in the early morning, and occasionally she shivered. Once she moved her chair to the spot the sun would strike first. Then she curled up, huddled inside her borrowed sweater, and waited. The water of the tile fountain turned leaf-colored in the first light. The sun was beginning to come up.
A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau
Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.
Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.
Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly The New Mexico Review. Soon another was printed in The New Yorker. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection, The Black Prince, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.
That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The House on Coliseum Street (1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel, Keepers of the House (1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.
Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history. The Condor Passes (1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families. Roadwalkers (1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.
In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.
Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.
A 1955 announcement for
The Black Prince featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.
Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.
Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”
Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.
Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © by 1961 by Shirley Ann Grau
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-4721-1
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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SHIRLEY ANN GRAU
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