Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  “Yeah?”

  “I need a room,” I said. “What are the rates?”

  “Three bills a night. In advance. A buck extra if you bring in a broad.”

  “Three nights,” I said, and gave him a ten-dollar bill. He handed me back a dollar and the key to room 127.

  “One flight up,” he said, without removing the cigarillo. A staircase behind the Coke machine led upstairs.

  The room was narrow, with a bare yellow light on the high ceiling. The furnishings revealed themselves in bits and pieces: a bed, a bureau, a night table; a 1952 calendar with a picture of Miami Beach; a small sink; a pale-blue spread over the bed, with little white wool balls all over it.

  No telephone.

  No bath.

  I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.

  I noticed a wire mesh over the windows. A stain on the wall looked like Italy. I was very hot. I leaned back and was soon asleep.

  In New Orleans.

  Where Eden Santana lived her life.

  Chapter

  70

  For two days, I searched for her through the streets of the city. I started with the telephone book (none in the room, none in the lobby, found them hanging in a post office), looking up all the Santanas in New Orleans, calling each of them, receiving baffled replies as I begged for information. After each call, I left my name and the number of the hotel. I remembered old movies and detective stories and the way private eyes relentlessly tracked the missing. I went to the gas company, asking for records on Eden Santana or James Robinson. The woman behind the counter looked at me as if I were crazed and then called over a superior.

  “That’s confidential info’mation, son,” a hairless blue-eyed man said. “Why you want that?”

  I couldn’t tell him, so I fled. Then I thought of going to the newspapers, the Times-Picayune or the States-Item, and asking to look at their clippings for James Robinson. If he was so bad, there must have been stories about him in the papers. But when I called up and asked if I could look at their clippings they wanted to know why I needed to see them and I said I was a student writing a term paper and a woman said, “Well, honey, whyn’t you git yaw pifessor to write you a letter, and we see what we can do …”

  And, of course, I couldn’t go to the police.

  By noon of the first day, I was exhausted and hot, sitting on a bench in Jackson Square. I was very thirsty. I saw a guy selling shaved ice dyed with juice and asked for cherry. It was sweet and cold and when I finished, I ordered another. They were three cents each. I gazed around the square and saw painters with easels setting up under the arcade and I wondered what would happen if I did find Eden and then thought, Well, maybe we could just live here.

  For I had come to think of New Orleans as the most beautiful city I’d ever seen. Hour after hour, I walked through the cobble-stoned streets of the French Quarter, peering into dark entryways to the gardens within, with their fountains and plants and birds. I was filled with a sweet sense that they were from another century, the time of the French and the Spaniards, sealed off and protected from the present by their heavy iron gates. Leaning on the rough plaster walls, my body burning from the summer heat, I gazed into the cool interiors and thought of Eden’s people long ago, coming down the river to find husbands here for their women, while white dandies went to the quadroon balls and picked out their own women and installed them in these houses. Upstairs, behind the balconies with their scrolled ironwork, I could see bedrooms with high ceilings and they must have lain there in the hot summer afternoons, naked to the breeze or the stirred air made by ceiling fans. The rooms made me think of a painting in the Craven book, a naked woman lying on a couch, in the company of a black cat and a black woman. Except that here in New Orleans, in my version of the painting, the naked woman was black and the cat was white and an even blacker woman was looking on.

  On that first night I wandered everywhere, drawn not only by Eden now, but by the city itself. Before going out, I made a drawing of her face and carried it with me as I started visiting the bars. I went down to Bourbon Street, where Dixieland music blared from the honky-tonks, and I talked to bartenders and doormen and whores, showing the picture, asking if they knew her.

  As the hours passed, the air grew thicker, more feminine. Around midnight, I stood for a long while at the corner of St. Peter’s and Bourbon, listening to a white Dixieland band, looking at faces. There were hundreds of tourists and locals moving down the packed street, speaking a dozen dialects of English, talking in French and Spanish and German. There were a stream of faces: flabby, compressed, blank, sharp, beautiful. None was hers. I could smell coffee somewhere, and came again to Jackson Square, and saw lights along the Mississippi. I was very hungry. Across the street, beside the river, was a place with outdoor tables and black waiters. The Café du Monde. I didn’t know French but thought about my high school Latin and figured it out.

  The Café of the World.

  I crossed the street and sat down at an empty table. It was cooler there, with a breeze lifting off the black river. There were only two items on the menu: coffee and beignets. I didn’t know what beignets were but when the waiter came over I ordered them anyway.

  “Chicory in da coffee?”

  I didn’t know what chicory was either, but I said sure, why not? He came back with a plate of doughnuts without holes, covered with confectioners’ sugar. Beignets. I sipped the coffee, which was more powdery than ordinary coffee, the taste somehow grainy, and it was delicious. I gulped down the beignets, waved for more, and ate them in a kind of frenzy. Then I sat back, belching, swollen, as if exhausted by the sudden gorging. A riverboat went by with its lights all dazzling and bright and a band playing and people on deck and I wished that Eden was with me, drinking that special coffee, watching that river, sitting in the Café of the World.

  I woke late and everything was wet: my body, the sheets, the walls. I reached for the towel beside the sink. It was damp. I got out of there in a hurry.

  This time I followed the black people’s faces through the city until I came to a district where the architecture was different, the houses low and tin-roofed. If the doors were open, I could see all the way through them into the backyards. Black people sat on the front porches fanning themselves, drinking cold tea or lemonade, laughing in growly voices. I started showing them the drawing of Eden, but most were suspicious. Who was this white man and what he want? And then retreated into icy lemonade and muffled laughter.

  Toward late morning I felt heavier, damper, hotter, oddly drowsy, thinking: Maybe she just told me a mess of lies. Maybe she wasn’t from New Orleans at all. Maybe she was from Memphis or Texas or some other goddamned place in America. Maybe she wasn’t even from the South. And if that was true (I thought, moving into laundries and barber shops and bars), then I’d ruined my life for a lie. And for sure, I would never find her.

  And then a woman with sad yellow eyes and heavy breasts and a long pink housecoat looked at the picture and said, “Why, dat’s Eden.”

  I felt weak.

  “Do you know where she lives?” I said.

  “Oh, she moved away long tahm ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Two, t’ree years?”

  “Do you know where she went? I said.

  “Feared ah don’t. Her man Mist’ Rob’son in trouble again?”

  “James Robinson?”

  “Yeah … Big ole handsome fella. But bad news.”

  “It’s Eden I’m looking for. Not him.”

  “You trah da choich?”

  “What church?”

  “Da Catlick choich. Up by da square. Da St. Louis Cathedral. Where else a Catlick goil might be found?”

  I told the woman that if she saw Eden Santana, to tell her I was in New Orleans. I tore a corner off the drawing and wrote down the address of the hotel on Chartres Street. I handed it to her and thanked her. And then started for the Cathedral.

  The sky grew dark and tumultuous. Trees filled and be
nt in the wind. People started hurrying along the streets. A few shopkeepers began to lower their shutters. A storm was coming, but I didn’t care. This trip, this journey, was not the result of a series of lies. Eden Santana really was from here. She really had been married to a man named James Robinson. And I was sure she was still there in New Orleans. Somewhere. Maybe round this next corner.

  Jackson Square was deserted when I reached the cathedral. The main door was closed, but I found an open side door and went inside. I could smell the familiar traces of incense and burning wax; the odor made me feel like a Catholic. There was no Mass being celebrated, but there were a lot of women in black scattered around the pews, and a few black men, all of them praying in solitude. Off to the right, men and women waited on line outside a confessional booth.

  I walked slowly down a side aisle to the altar, glancing at faces, hoping to see Eden. She wasn’t there. I bought a candle for a nickel and lit it and knelt at the altar rail, wishing I still believed enough to pray. I didn’t but my face felt as hot as the flame of the candle. I tried to understand the layout of the cathedral, so that I could get back into the sacristy and find a priest. There was a door over to the right, as there was back home at Holy Name. I crossed the front of the cathedral, genuflecting in the center out of old habit, and went into the sacristy.

  There were rotting flowers on a table, an open closet holding cassocks and surplices for altar boys, boxes of candles from Benziger Brothers, New York. I walked over to the dark passageway that led behind the altar and saw a figure coming toward me. I felt weak. Small. As if I was an altar boy again, serving in contempt and fear. I needed something cold to drink.

  The figure came closer, his face obscure in the unlighted passage. And then emerged into the dim light of the sacristy.

  An old priest, dressed in black.

  “Can I help you?” he said in a soft voice.

  “Yes, yes, Father. I’m looking for someone … A friend. She’s Catholic. And I thought maybe you might have some address for her, a telephone number.”

  “Well—”

  I took out the drawing, which was smudged now, and told him Eden’s name and a little about her husband. The priest’s voice was whispery and dry, like dead leaves.

  “Both names are common in New Orleans,” he said, “although Santana is a lot more … Catholic than Robinson.” He scratched his scalp, then gazed at his nails. They were dirty. “I would have to look though church records. Is there any, er, trouble in this?”

  “No. No trouble. I’m a friend. She knows me.”

  “Because I couldn’t, well—”

  “If you could find her, don’t even tell me where she lives, if that’s what you’re worried about. Just tell her that I’m here and where I am. She can come to me.”

  He took a pack of Camels from under his habit and lighted one. It was the first time I’d seen a priest smoke.

  “You know, last year, someone came looking for one of my a parishioners.… And I was taken in. I gave my visitor the address and my poor parishioner is now serving twenty years at Angola. That’s the prison farm.… You’re not from New Orleans, are you?”

  “No.”

  He waited for me to tell him where I was from. But I said nothing. Something in me made it hard to lie to a priest, even if I didn’t believe what he believed anymore.

  “You don’t have to tell me where you’re from,” he said. He took a deep drag and then made a smoke ring and gazed proudly at its perfection. “But maybe you should tell me what kind of trouble you’re in.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Nobody will know.”

  “I don’t believe in confession anymore, Father.”

  “But you did once.”

  “Yes.”

  “I might be able to help.”

  “Thank you, Father. But I don’t think you can …”

  “Is the woman part of the trouble?”

  “No.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “I’m in love with her.… That’s all.”

  “That’s everything.”

  “Father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have a glass of water?”

  The summer storm hammered at the city, all water and wind, with garbage cans going over and awnings flapping and broken umbrellas careening away. Dozens of people huddled in the entrance of the Cathedral, making nervous jokes about hurricanes and disasters. There was a tremendous ka-pow and the square was instantly bright with lightning and everybody backed up, laughing and afraid. We were all huddled together, blacks and whites joined in a common need for safety.

  But I had to get out of there. The rain was blowing hard and cold. A shower of hailstones clattered across the square. And yet I felt as if I were being boiled. I shivered. I thought I was going to throw up. Another bolt of lightning split the sky over the river. My eyes burned.

  I had to go.

  To run.

  To get into the room and the bed.

  I broke out of the dense packed crowd and ran into the pelting rain, the water above my ankles.

  And then the water rose and the sidewalk came with it and hit me in the face and I was gone.

  Chapter

  71

  The fog was the color of piss and it came through the window and under the door of the high white room. Miles Rayfield stood in the cloud, wearing his white hat and his horn-rimmed glasses, his lips a bright red smear. And behind him came all the others: Sal and Max and Winnie, Buster and the Red Shadow, Captain Pritchett and Steve Canyon. As someone shouted: Everyone meet at the Café of the World!

  O Bobby Bolden!

  O Buz Sawyer!

  I remember them all, from that visit to the fever zone: Dwight Eisenhower was there, and Mercado from Mexico. Hank Williams entered with John Foster Dulles, and there was Tons of Fun … and Dixie Shafer too. They came in a smiling progression, looking down at me sadly and without pity. Roberta arrived holding blue-veined white flowers. Turner showed up in a Hawaiian shirt. And that was Chief McDaid and this was Tintoretto … Freddie Harada held hands with Harrelson … and there, advancing and receding, smiling and frowning, touching my face and then wide-eyed in fear: Eden Santana.

  Did she whisper to me about Joe Stalin? Did she urge me to read Ernest Hemingway? In the piss-colored fog, there was no precision. Boswell wept for Hank Williams while Eden touched my hand and then released it. I tried to rise … to join her … to dance … but my legs wouldn’t move. My hands were thick tubes. My father wept for my mother. Miles Rayfield waved in the fog. Then Eden came close and spoke to me softly in some language I didn’t know. The language of The People. The language of the Cane River. The language of Africa. I turned away, trying to conjure a cool green world, plunging deeper and deeper, going for the fresh water, past the gnawed bodies and the sharks, down into the whiteness …

  And then opened my eyes.

  Eden Santana was standing at the foot of the bed, staring at me. Her hair was brushed back. She was wearing a black blouse and a white skirt. Her eyes were glittery, intense.

  “Hello, Michael,” she whispered.

  “Eden …”

  She came around to the side of the bed and took one of my hands in both of hers. Her hands were very cool.

  “You’ve got malaria,” she said.

  “Malaria?”

  I looked at the room, its whiteness and emptiness. Saw a chair, a bureau, a night table.

  “Where is this?”

  “Charity Hospital. They brought you here two days ago. You collapsed on Chartres Street in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

  “Two days ago?”

  “That’s what the nurses tell me.”

  Two days ago?

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Father Bienville came to my sister’s house. That’s where I’m stayin. He told me you were in New Orleans. You gave him the name of your hotel, remember? I went there and they said you hadn’t been in. And you owed a day’s rent. I pai
d it and got your stuff.”

  She nodded at my flight bag, on the floor against the wall.

  “Then I started calling around.”

  “You call the police?”

  She blinked. “No. And I didn’t call the Navy either—if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  I squeezed her hand. And whispered: “I’ve got to get out of here, Eden. I’m in big trouble.”

  “I know,” she said.

  The doctor was from Honduras and he wasn’t happy about letting me leave the hospital. But I told him I was in the Air Force and would go right to my base doctor and tell him what was wrong. He gave me some tablets to take every four hours and then I got dressed and Eden led me down the white corridor past the white nurses and the white rooms filled with white people. I felt very light. As if I could fly. And then stopped when we reached the elevator bank. Eden squeezed my hand, as if trying to keep me from running.

  Red Cannon was sitting in a chair beside the elevators, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his dress whites with an SP armband. There was a .45 caliber pistol in a holster hanging off his cartridge belt. He put out the cigarette in a metal ashtray and stood up. He looked from me to Eden. Then back to me.

  “You okay, sailor?” he said, his voice quiet, even soft.

  “I guess.… It’s malaria.”

  “Well, they got a lot of experience with that over at Mainside.”

  I looked at Eden but she kept her eyes on the floor.

  “I don’t want to go back, Red.”

  “Neither do I. But we’re both goin.”

  “What if I refuse?” I said. “What if I just run?”

  “Then I have to shoot you.”

  “You aren’t kidding, are you?”

  “Hit’s my job. I’d ruther bring you back walkin than bring you back in a box. But I promised Captain Pritchett I’d find you and bring you back. I did, and I will. So we can go now, sailor, nice and quiet.”

  Eden stepped between us and for a moment, Red bristled, as if afraid she was trying to help me escape. There were a lot of people looking at us now. Patients and doctors and nurses.