MARY
MY FATHER HAD BEEN wrestling with cancer for seven years. The summer of 2007, on a visit that ended up being in the dialysis center to which he was now tethered three days a week, he gave me a folder with all his funeral instructions and some assignments for me, his eldest child. Since he had always been such an uberorganized man (unlike I am) and we always had a no-drama, man-to-man kind of relationship, I didn’t cry while I stood over him, even when he did. But a while later, when I arrived at the airport to fly home, I called my sister and I couldn’t stop weeping. I sat on the airport floor and sobbed and sobbed. I missed my plane, in fact.
My father kept working that fall, not that he had to, but his work ethic wouldn’t give up even when his body did. Each day got tougher and tougher, but not working would have been way worse by his standard. That winter, my precious baby brother, sainted sister and our kids confabbed at my Old Town home, in what we all suspected would be our last with Daddy. We had some laughs and good eats. He gave each of us a little private chat. He told my sister not to do what he did and work until she couldn’t anymore. He died a couple of weeks later.
Christmas came and it wasn’t the same—anybody who’s lost a parent or family members knows what I mean. We tried our usual get-together in Virginia with my sister, Renie, and her family, but we were all shell-shocked and grieving. Renie doesn’t drink, but she managed to put down a couple mimosas. I do drink, but no amount of red wine could ease my grief.
On Christmas Day, after Santa’s generosity was revealed, we decided to head south to get James to the warmer climes he likes. So we packed up and took off for Carville country. To Louisiana. The first semihappy moment I’d experienced in seemingly forever was getting off the plane in sunny New Orleans. Who wears T-shirts at Christmastime? That blast of warm air was a godsend.
The Carville group lives near or in Baton Rouge, but we always liked to stay in our favorite city, New Orleans, only an hour away. We kicked off festivities with a giant, rollicking, comforting family dinner at James’s sister Gail’s new lovely home, and the warmth and laughs of the night totally distracted me from my grief. And another thing. It was Christmas, but there was no snow. Not a flake. For once, James wasn’t spending Christmas crabbing about the cold, and all his sisters were fawning over him, which makes him so happy.
What tipped the scales? What made us know that we had found home again? It’s hard to say exactly. When we got back to Windsor Court, a New Orleans hotel that we love, the girls and I went shopping (because Santa must not have gotten the secret list) and James went to the racetrack. He loves horse races, hates shopping. (Do I ever ask him, “How much did you lose today?” No. I. Do. Not.) But, given my sad state of mind, he forwent his automatic “How much did you spend today?” question when we joined up for dinner.
The night was balmy and warm—unseasonably so for a Yankee girl like I am. And the twinkly lights and stars and Christmas carols and fake snow wasn’t so bad looking either. And suddenly I felt better than I had in months, like I’d cracked open and the warmth and sunshine of New Orleans—the spirit of the people on the street, even though it was just a couple years after Katrina—were sinking in and healing me.
James and I looked at each other and knew.
The game was over. We were moving to New Orleans.
I like to think of the ease of that decision as my daddy’s last, and lasting, gift to me and my family.
JAMES
BY THE TIME THE holidays rolled around in 2007, Mary and I had begun seriously discussing a move to Louisiana. We still hadn’t quite figured out the details of how and when and where exactly, but one thing was certain: we both finally felt ready to let go of Washington.
We went down to spend Christmas with my family that year and to secretly scope the place out and make sure we really wanted to make the leap. One day between Christmas and New Year’s, my brother Steve and some of our friends headed over to the Fair Grounds in New Orleans to bet on the horses. It was a cool, sunny winter day. After one race ended and before the next began, I sidled up to Steve. “Mary and I have been talking about moving back down here,” I told him. “If I had to guess, I think this thing is probably going to happen.”
Steve seemed excited, which made me that much more excited about the prospect of being reunited with my raucous band of Carville siblings. Of course, I had no idea at that moment just how fast the move actually would happen.
I called Walter Isaacson, the journalist and biographer, an old friend who also was on the board at Tulane. I told him that we were thinking of moving to New Orleans, that I knew I wanted to teach, and that it seemed to make more sense to do so in New Orleans rather than driving back and forth to Baton Rouge to teach at LSU.
“Well, well,” he said. “Stay right where you are.”
The next thing you know, my phone rings again. It’s Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane. “So, I heard you’re thinking of moving to New Orleans,” he said. Shortly thereafter, Mary and I met Scott and his wife, Marjorie, for breakfast. Marjorie talked to Mary about what life was like in New Orleans and how quickly they had come to love it after moving to town in 1998. By the end of that breakfast, Mary was sold. She’d pretty much been ready to pull the trigger before that. But if she needed one last push, for whatever reason, that meal with the Cowens did it.
Almost immediately, I called a cousin of mine, Anne Milling. She and her husband, King, are a legendary New Orleans couple. They know everybody; everybody knows them. I told her we needed a real estate agent, and she got right on it. It seemed that Mary had a house picked out in a matter of days, if not a matter of hours.
Moving to New Orleans went from an idea to a reality in the span of a few months. At Christmas 2007, we were still wrestling with whether to end our two-decade stay in Washington. By May, we had bought a house and were beginning to pack our boxes. When the kids’ school year ended in Alexandria, we headed south. After a quarter of a century, I was actually going home.
12.
Are We Really Home?
MARY
WE DIDN’T PRETEND WE were 100 percent sure of the decision. We just woke up every morning and looked at each other and asked:
Right decision?
Wrong decision?
While we waited to move, we waited for answers. We waited for signs, portents, any validating omen—anxious to be assured that we were doing the right thing. There were no rational reasons to move so we turned to looking hard for any reason, any indication, even irrational ones.
JAMES
LOOKING BACK ON IT, we didn’t know exactly what we were getting into. It wasn’t clear at all that it was going to work out. So much of the city was still a mess. The political leadership was tenuous. Our daughters were going into fifth grade and eighth grade, which is a tough time for such a big move. It was a risk any way you looked at it. But sometimes you have to take that leap of faith.
I’ve found that it’s always better in life to be part of something that’s trying to make it as opposed to something that already has it made. The real thrill is trying to build something new or save something worth saving as opposed to only protecting what you have. It’s more fun to be the guy coming from behind than the guy trying to stay out front.
That was part of the appeal of New Orleans. In Washington, you can go to a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center. You can give money to this cause or that museum. It’s a nice thing to do. It’s a tax deduction. But it doesn’t exactly move the needle.
In New Orleans, Mary and I thought we might actually be able to move the needle. For better or worse, it’s a smaller pond, and one in much more need. The idea for me, at almost sixty-five, that I would be able to throw a pebble and actually see the ripples we were making here was very appealing. Our hope was that whatever we did we might literally be able to see the impact.
MARY
IN THE FIRST MONTHS of residing in our new
home, I was overwhelmed with the endless tasks of setting up a house, settling kids, finding my way to the grocery store without getting lost for hours—and the really critical mission of locating a hairdresser and manicurist and all those services you take for granted after thirty years in the same location.
Plus the presidential election was approaching, never fun at the Matalin-Carville homestead, though this one wasn’t the marriage mauler all the previous ones had been since James’s enthusiasm was tempered by Hillary’s unexpected defeat and I wasn’t all that attached to the McCain operation, though I admired him and adore Sarah Palin. And the wet blanket of grief lingering from my father’s passing, and Tim’s, kept my mood in check despite the ubiquitous enchantments of New Orleans.
While I fretted nonstop about the girls making new friends, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have any pals myself to whip up spontaneous adventures with. You know, the kind of buddies you can drop in on unannounced, happily digging through their iceboxes, hunting through their wine collection, and taking over their TV. The kind of gal-pals who could take one look at me before I opened my mouth and say, “Girl, you’re a hot mess. What’s the matter?”
Maria had been that pal for more than thirty years. But Maria wasn’t transportable to New Orleans. She was a Buffalo gal, not a Southern belle, and she couldn’t stand the heat. That added to my list of things to be sad about, but we still had the phone, and she could detect any hot mess without any physical prompts. We both traveled a lot over the years, and when the going got tough, a call would come in out of the blue.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t BS a BSer.”
“You’re a worrier.”
“And you’re a hot mess.”
And so it went—and still goes.
My first response to extreme stress is to pretend it doesn’t exist. Which is fine when Maria or my sister were around to take one look at me and go into fix-it mode. I didn’t realize how entrenched my unhealthy neurotic dependency on them was until one day, after weeks of repressed hot messiness, Anne Milling showed up at my door with a bouquet of white lilies and I burst into tears. And couldn’t stop.
Anne is James’s lovely cousin, which blows every New Orleanian mind as there couldn’t be two more different people. Anne is the epitome of what you think of when you hear “gracious Southern lady” and James epitomizes everything you’d imagine a crazy coonass would be, if you had such an imagination. And if you do, I am sorry for you.
As it turned out, by sanity-saving coincidence (if you believe in them, which I don’t), Anne was our neighbor in Uptown and, as good fortune would have it, the queen of New Orleans. At the time, I didn’t know that since I was still getting lost getting groceries and didn’t have the mental bearings to study the social structure of my new place yet.
All I knew was that Anne was uniquely gracious, tremendously loving and inordinately helpful in getting us settled. She knew everyone, she was in the middle of spearheading countless Katrina recovery efforts, and she invited us to everything and generously threw parties and lunches and dinners to introduce me to her astounding array of friends. In addition, praise be to Jesus, she possessed an uncanny hot mess detector.
Anne was my first NOLA friend, a sister, mentor and protector.
JAMES
SO THE WANDERING SON came home. It only took a quarter century, but I’d finally made the journey back south, as I’d always suspected I would one day.
I was the only one of eight kids who had ever moved outside the borders of Louisiana. Hell, only two of us ever left the Baton Rouge television market. I had one sister who moved a little more than an hour away from Baton Rouge, and you’d have thought she moved to the moon. Washington might as well have been Mars or Jupiter.
Everybody else stuck close to home and, needless to say, stuck together. That made perfect sense. Ever since we were kids, we’d been intensely loyal to one another. We’d fuss and fight at home—being the oldest, I probably harassed my siblings more than anyone—but out in the larger world, the Carville kids watched out for one another.
Partly, that sense of loyalty came from my parents. My father was a deeply loyal man—loyal to his business, loyal to his friends, loyal to his family. My mama, Miss Nippy, always believed fiercely in her children. She demonstrated time and again how she had our backs, whether one of us got into a neighborhood scrape or whether I was on the verge of failing out of LSU (again). I suppose that from watching them we learned the lesson that looking out for your family was a duty, as well as one of life’s greatest virtues.
Even in all my years away from Louisiana, the closeness of the Carville clan never waned. I missed more birthdays and christenings and LSU games than I would have liked, but never have I lost that tightness with my brothers and sisters. Whenever any of them would come to see us or when we’d visit home, we’d slip back into the same old conversations, tell the same old stories, laugh at the same old jokes.
Some of them are Republicans. They don’t believe what I believe about abortion, or religion, or whatever. As with Mary, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. We love one another dearly, and we don’t spend much time sitting around talking politics. We talk about our kids. We talk about food. We talk about football.
Without a doubt, one of the highlights of the move back to New Orleans was reentering the orbit of my siblings and my nieces and nephews. I felt all the years apart begin to melt away as if I’d only left for a brief time.
They still consider me the black sheep, of course, given that I actually live eighty miles away in New Orleans. But that’s about the perfect distance. Mary adores my family and loves my siblings to pieces. But she’s more of a loner than most of us, and living with me is enough of a trial; I’m not sure how she’d do surrounded by the whole sprawling mess of Carvilles all the time. We can be a little overwhelming.
When you’re in Baton Rouge, the Carvilles still operate as one unit, like a loud and unruly flock of geese. My sisters are still all best friends with one another. The joke is that no one has ever seen a single Carville girl. They always run in packs. Along with my brother, their families hang out together almost every weekend.
If LSU has a baseball game on a Saturday night, I guarantee you they’re all going over to my sister’s to watch, which is exactly what they did for the game the night before, and probably what they’ll do for the game the day after. There’s something very endearing about that to me.
Families in America keep getting smaller. People get married later in life. They wait longer to have kids. That’s all fine; I went that route myself. But I’m sure glad that I come from a big family. Those same siblings you complained about when you were a kid because there were eight of you in three bedrooms and they got on your nerves—you learn as an adult that you can’t live without them, nor would you want to. They sometimes felt like your enemies growing up, but over time they become your closest friends and your most ardent defenders. Coming from a big family, I never have felt alone in this world.
My siblings also give me a deep sense of comfort that trumps any life insurance policy or 401(k). I know that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, there’s a big group of loving people eighty miles up the road who would swoop in and look after my wife and kids. There’s just no question about it; they’d be there in a second. Big families breed loyalty.
MARY
THE SPECIAL HOSPITALITY AND expansively embracing nature of New Orleanians is well-known and well documented. But to actually move there and see it firsthand—and feel it up close—is a thoroughly beautiful experience. Another facet of life in New Orleans, and equally cool, is the genuine eccentricity of Crescent City characters.
In my meandering life journey, I’ve been blessed with the friendship of many characters, but nothing prepared me for the large personalities of NOLA. And I mean LARGE. No one feels obliged to s
mooth their nonconforming edges or subdue their originality.
One day I walked unannounced into James’s work space and there, sitting in a chair, was an uncommonly handsome man radiating energy, charisma and a king-of-cool vibe. I recognized him from somewhere, though I couldn’t place him. I glanced over to a table and there on the cover of a local magazine, I saw this same specimen of male perfection staring back at me.
Turned out, he was the ridiculously talented King of Swing, the heart-stopping trumpeter and jazz maestro Irvin Mayfield, who also has a nonstop devotion to service. (Don’t miss his Jazz Playhouse at the Royal Sonesta on Bourbon Street or any of his other New Orleans establishments.) With his longtime friend Ronald Markham, a classically trained pianist and MBA (by night, rocking in Irvin’s band; by day, running the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra or NOJO), Irvin and his gang have launched countless projects to preserve indigenous New Orleans music and heritage, saving many a young kid in the process. From Carnegie Hall to the great concert halls across Europe, his music has mesmerized the masses. And along the way, he has provided schools and instruments and inspiration for the next generation of New Orleans musicians.
Everyone had a profoundly heartbreaking, gut-wrenching Katrina story—Irvin found his daddy drowned on Elysian Fields when the ghastly mud and murky waters subsided—but you never hear anyone complaining. Ever. For those who remained in New Orleans, they were only trying to put it all back together.
And it was a purely 100 percent citizen effort too. The people of New Orleans were the ones who prevented their city from becoming a “sliver on the river,” a constant tortured thought of my husband’s. In the long, hard slog after Katrina, they have buried their dead, collected tons of storm debris from the ruined jungle of dead foliage, cleaned out mangled appliances and waterlogged furniture from warehouses, scraped the black mold from what remained of their demolished homes, comforted their shell-shocked kids, fed their displaced neighbors—and housed them.
Love & War Page 28
