The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story

by Julia Reed

  John was far better integrated than I. His musical career had come to an abrupt end when he was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, and though he is famous in very select circles for his late night renditions of “Gloria,” he spends far more time practicing law. He’s the managing partner of his law firm, has served on boards ranging from Children’s Hospital to a group that provides pro bono representation to indigent defendants, and was long ago inducted into one of the city’s oldest krewes. When he was married to his first wife, he went to the balls, wrote lyrics for skit nights at his club (that was, of course, affiliated with his krewe), played tennis at the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club, and was a member of Trinity Church. But after his divorce he went slightly off the radar—unless, that is, the waves were being transmitted in the general direction of the Rib Room restaurant or the Polo Lounge at the Windsor Court.

  John and I are both sociable beings and by the time we started going out, we could get into almost any restaurant at almost any time, but that had far more to do with John’s generous tipping habits and my growing friendships with the great majority of the restaurateurs, chefs, and maitre d’s in town (as well as the not unimportant fact that I often wrote about food) than with any exalted social standing. In any case, we certainly weren’t part of New Orleans “society,” which is something that happens to you at birth. In The Romantic New Orleanians, Robert Tallant writes that a great number of the more “exclusive” society folks “unconsciously believe that the city belongs to them” and they “seem to resent” everyone else. “Socially prominent New Orleanians frequently behave toward the rest of the population as if they were a ruling white colony temporarily residing among the natives of the Fiji Islands.”

  So here we were: humble Fijians set down in the midst of people whose families had owned the same houses for generations. Much had changed in the fifty or so years since Tallant wrote his book, and many of our most immediate neighbors were almost as new to the area as we were. Still, just two blocks away sits the oldest house in the Garden District, a raised “cottage” where the descendants of the family that bought it just after the Civil War still live. A block from us in the other direction is the house where Jefferson Davis breathed his last. When I was out there stomping on that sign I might as well have been wearing a grass skirt.

  We got a look into our own house’s history when a very polite woman actually knocked on the door (as opposed to jogging on in) and told me she had lived there in the thirties and forties. As a girl, she said, her job had been to stand on a ladder and polish the crystals of the chandelier in the front parlor; she remembered going with her mother to a Royal Street antiques shop to buy the brass lion’s head doorknocker on the front door. She was charming and generous and wanted to know if I’d like her to send me what information on the house she had. Of course, I said, and the following week a package arrived with photocopied photos of the thirties interiors (I loved that there was a print of the Mona Lisa on the wall of the second parlor), and a page from a little book called The Great Days of the Garden District, which is how I discovered when the house was built and by whom (though sadly there is little known about Mr. Gayle or the “bride” who inspired the project).

  I was gratified to read that our house, “majestically situated on a large corner lot” is “a fine example of Greek Revival style,” with its “double galleries, fluted Corinthian columns, and a deep but simple cornice above the upper porch”—though it had certainly been some time since the grounds “abounded in typical shrubs and towering magnolia trees.” The outdoor photos showed that there had been another live oak that must have been crowded out by the huge one on the corner, as well as at least two more impressive magnolias—enough, at any rate, to have given the place its name. In the package was also a bookplate with a sketch of the Greek key front door—complete with the lion’s head doorknocker—beneath the moniker “Magnolia Manor.” I had no intention of calling the house by any name at all, much less one that sounded like a retirement home modeled after Tara, but it was nice to know and good news for Benton—I immediately called him and replaced the comparatively cheap Japanese plum trees on Ben’s plan with four sweet bay magnolias.

  In return for our former resident’s trouble, I removed the lion’s head and sent it off to her with a note, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was selling her beloved chandelier at auction, along with one in the dining room that featured a few too many bronze rosebuds. By this time it was November and there was no end in sight. To buy us another month at Betty’s, I told the increasingly impatient incoming couple they could have the custom sofa that fit perfectly beneath the upstairs windows, and threw in a sea grass rug from my downstairs office. Eddie and I were still speaking—we all were, I shared after-work Budweisers with Abel and the boys, and an occasional glass of wine with Eddie, who lived not far from us in the Quarter. I was still under the vague illusion he knew what he was doing. He had found me an enormous cache of gorgeous old marble tiles from an Italian palazzo, for example, and they made the bathrooms look as though they’d been there for years. I loved him for finding them—I just didn’t realize at the time that the decision to use the sunroom’s flat roof as the staging area for about a thousand pounds of the stuff was maybe not the smartest idea. (As I write, despite numerous costly attempts to repair it, the sunroom roof is still leaking.)

  In December I sold my apartment in Manhattan (a major part of the commitment process and the one that gave me most pause), which meant that two more storage PODS were added to the burgeoning collection out front. I gave Eddie some Champagne glasses and a magnum of Veuve Clicquot for Christmas and told the couple waiting for Bourbon Street they could have my fabulous iron bed for half of what I paid for it.

  By January we were out of time, not to mention items to use as bribes, so we rented two more storage units, packed one suitcase each, and moved into Elizabeth’s guesthouse for what we promised would be just a few weeks, maybe less. Mike, Elizabeth’s husband, had committed suicide two years earlier, and we all—John and I, McGee, Elizabeth and her two girls—had become even more of a family. Poor Elizabeth had been putting up with me since McGee and I first availed ourselves of her floor. When I came to New Orleans to cover Edwards, Mike, an incredible cook, fed me most nights along with Elizabeth and the girls at their kitchen table, and created a still-memorable menu for a party they threw to welcome me to town. Now she was again providing comfort and hospitality far beyond the call of duty—or family. This time, at least, it was I who did the cooking for our hostess and Lizzy, thirteen. (Katie was in her freshman year at the University of Virginia.) But in the end, no amount of meals or the weekly cases of wine John carried in could justify our long tenure. We moved in just before Mardi Gras, which fell early that year, on February 2. It would be almost six months before we left.

  In March, though only four rooms—the front parlors, the dining room, and the kitchen—were operational, I threw a book party for my friend Roy Blount. In September he had told me he had a book about New Orleans, Feet on the Street, coming out in the spring. “Great,” I told him. “Our house will certainly be finished by then, good Lord. Please let us host a book party.” By that time, McGee, a superb decorative painter who had worked on my apartment in New York, was busy transforming the hideous dark wood panels in the library (which turned out to be pieces of plywood and old flooring stained a dull mahogany) into a lighter and much more beautiful faux bois, and she enlisted one of her helpers to throw a coat of paint up in the dining room, whose walls were still under much discussion. (Before it was all over we put up at least ten coats of paint, including two shades of coral, one shade of gray, three shades of brown, and four shades of blue—this was the third blue.) We had already bought a dining table that seats twenty-four from Patrick Dunne, so we moved that in along with John’s grand piano, ignored the bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings and the plywood ramp that doubled as front steps. My buddy Ken Wells, a Manhattan-based novelist and editor who originally hails
from Houma, recruited his brothers and the three of them, who call themselves “Crawdiddy,” played Cajun music in the second parlor, while my best friend Jessica Brent, a gifted singer and songwriter who had driven down from Greenville, sang and occasionally sat in on piano and guitar. I filled a silver punch bowl with the lump crab salad I know Roy loves, assembled a vast bar, and welcomed Roy’s list and our friends, which at this point included John Benton and his wife and Eddie and his girlfriend.

  When Jessica laid eyes on Eddie, she was incredulous. “That’s your contractor?” she asked me. I became immediately defensive and not just a little afraid. Jessica can be a tiny bit paranoid but she is also blessed with a highly developed sense of the telling detail. “Yeah, that’s Eddie. What’s your problem?” The problem, she said, is his hair, and she had a point. Eddie is extremely proud of his wavy, silvery mane and he had clearly taken extraordinary care in styling it for the evening. He imagined himself a player of sorts, not a contractor, and he’d been telling everybody who’d listen, with the exception of John and me, that ours was his last job. He was producing a virtual reality CD tour of the French Quarter with an Australian partner, and lately he was spending most of his time at our house in the relative luxury of his air-conditioned truck, talking on his cell phone and working on his laptop, rather than keeping anything but the loosest of tabs on his workforce.

  The workforce, whose members did not happen to be sitting in an air-conditioned truck, were getting cranky. They also seemed to have lost anything remotely resembling a ruler or a level. Every cabinet knob was higher or lower than its partner; none of the locks turned because they weren’t lined up. Doors—expensive, newly milled, solid cedar doors—were either hung crookedly or the frame hadn’t been measured properly, mistakes that didn’t faze Abel or Tony or Ernesto, the Mexican carpenter who looked like an evil Jesus, in the slightest. They just lopped them off with a saw until they fit. The “invisible” doors of the vast storage closets we were adding to the third floor were a particular conundrum, as well as one of the reasons we hadn’t been able to move up there yet. So far they had been installed and painted three different times and every time they either fell off or there was a minimum of one-inch gaps between them.

  In April I arrived to find that the stone for the terrace—the gorgeous thick slabs of bluestone that had come all the way from a quarry in Pennsylvania—hadn’t been laid according to Ben’s plan, which was so simple a three-year-old reasonably good at puzzles could have followed it. Each stone had been cut to the specified dimensions and numbered; the numbers penciled on the stones matched the numbers printed on the plan. But the team Eddie had hired for the outside work had plunked them down in a pattern of their own devising instead, cutting the generous slabs into L-shapes and slivers to make it work.

  Eddie assured me he would replace the stone but it meant blasting up the whole terrace with a jackhammer, waiting for a new shipment, and starting over. Somehow, I handled it. I was more interested at that point in why, if you put your hand on our master bedroom doorframe, you could feel vibrations from the air conditioning so powerful it felt like a plane was about to take off through the wall. “It’s an old house,” was Eddie’s stock response. I told him I didn’t think it was age that was also causing every vent in every room upstairs to gush so much water they looked like mini waterfalls. “It’s normal condensation,” he said. “It’s because the doors are open so much.” I could only assume he thought I was blind, but then it dawned on me that he actually believed his own bullshit. Working under that theory was enormously liberating; I quit begging him and called his air-conditioning guy myself. When he finally deigned to turn up, he found that the clumsy, roly-poly Felipe had stomped on the ducts months earlier when he sprayed insulation in the attic and most of the airflow had been drastically restricted. Within an hour the waterfalls were staunched and the vibrations quieted.

  It wasn’t until May that I completely lost it, and then it was over the comparatively minor debacle of wrongly installed doorknobs. I had spent literally hundreds of hours looking for the perfect doorknobs and thumb-turn locks, and when they finally came I walked in to find that Abel and Tony had installed them all upside down, which is the way, they said, Eddie had told them to. This meant that they would have to take them out, Bondo all the holes (we were starting to have more Bondo-ed surfaces than wood), sand and repaint the doors, and reinstall the hardware. I knew it was not the end of the world, and if Eddie had not condescendingly informed me that it was not the end of the world, I wouldn’t have snapped. But he did. When I called him he said, “It’s not like the roof fell in, Julia.” No, that would come later. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be thrilled it wasn’t a catastrophic mistake, just yet another one that was unnecessary, stupid, destructive, time-consuming, and expensive. (I had now found my own very meticulous, but insanely pricey painters who charged by the hour.)

  Then came the clencher: “You told me to do it that way.” I didn’t care if this was more of the bullshit he believed or not, I knew it wasn’t true, and I also knew that if he repeated it I might actually have a stroke, so I asked him please not say it again. Then he told me he was coming right over, and I told him that if he did I would kill him. More than anything in the world at that particular moment, I did not want to have Eddie in my line of vision. “I’m coming,” he said again. “Eddie, I don’t think you get this. If you come over here, I swear to God, I will kill you. I am not kidding.” I was standing on the front porch, screaming into my cell phone, giving the neighbors another show, and I knew I should stop but I couldn’t. By the time I had assured Eddie that I was serious, cars were slowing down and front doors were opening.

  I called John. Eddie called John. And John, in the end, went downtown and smoothed over what Eddie described as his “hurt feelings” with several cold beers at Lafitte’s. My own feelings—along with my nerves, our bank account—were shot all to hell. I had waited all my life for what I thought would be the privilege of creating the home I wanted. And while I still felt as though it was a privilege, it was also all-consuming slow torture and there was more than one moment that I longed for the occasional unencumbered loucheness of my long-ago life on Bourbon Street. Eddie, on the other hand seemed perfectly fine. A few days after John defused our standoff, his partner asked me if would I provide a blurb for their CD; Eddie himself asked if I thought maybe the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, whose board I had recently agreed to join (more commitment), would be interested in a virtual reality tour of their collection. I did not tell him to dream on; in fact, I told him I’d see what I could do. Both John and I had obviously lost our minds, or maybe we were suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. It was the only explanation. A sane person would have fired our “captor”—hell, our torturer—the night of the doorknobs rather than appeasing him. His mistakes, the ones we knew about, that is, had already cost us a literal fortune in paint alone.

  In fact, it was the painters we should have consulted—they had better insight into Eddie and the increasingly sloppy way he and his subcontractors did business than anyone. They were the folks I called in to repair the messes; they heard the daily conversations and witnessed the daily screw-ups. I was the novice—they were far more familiar than I with how a professional job is done. Their boss, Billy Dupré, was a light-skinned Creole who was such a gentleman that months passed, and many, many dollars changed hands, before I could bring myself to call him anything but Mr. Dupré. His guys—Byron, PeeWee, Sean, and James—were really good at what they did and they respected each other, but I could tell they did not have much use at all for Eddie. Unfortunately, they were also polite and minded their own business. None of them, Mr. Dupré included, told me what they really thought until it was way too late.

  So we stayed the course, and in early July, ten months after the process began, the third floor was ready enough for us to occupy. We bought a box spring and a mattress, said good-bye to Elizabeth, Lizzy, and Honey, the loyal yellow lab to whom I’d become h
opelessly attached, and toted our suitcases “home.” Two weeks later, a dead body was found a block and a half up the street, shot in the head, and dumped on the curb. In August, four weeks after that, came the biggest natural disaster in the country’s history. So much for a settled life.

  5

  LIKE MANY PEOPLE in New Orleans, I had not paid a whole lot of attention to the increasing likelihood that Katrina was heading our way. I was, as usual, far more focused on the house: There was the refreshing fact that my new team of outside painters, the hilarious Joe Wallis and his right-hand man, Freddy, was doing an excellent job, and the enduring fact that Eddie’s team was not. (On the Friday before Katrina’s arrival, his outdoor guys had laid the stones for the front walk—but at the wrong elevation, a fitting, for them, swan song, which meant it was no longer possible to open the front gate.) Also, we had already been through one hurricane (Cindy, who arrived in early July was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane after the fact), and evacuated for another—but only as far as the downtown Marriott. Even before we checked in, it was clear that Dennis would bypass New Orleans and bear down on Pensacola instead, but we had paid in advance (the rule during hurricane season) and I was eager to try out the hotel’s heavily promoted new down bedding. It did not disappoint—our weekend on Canal Street was the closest thing to a holiday we’d had since the renovation began.