Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  You see, Scott, a lie goes a long way, especially in New Orleans, where people are much too lazy to chase after it. And why bother, when there’s a sharply-dressed story oh-so much closer and easy-to-hand? We are only what others strive to see.

  As the Space Shuttle began test flight—incidentally with parts developed within the very walls which Henry had been escorted from four decades earlier—his own ascent from the gutter was complete. 1980. That’s when I first encountered him.

  Mama had died in an auto accident. I was barely five, old enough to remember her and know I was hurting. We lived in Marrero, across the river from the city center. My parents had moved from Lafayette after they married and Papa went straight to work for Henry. I didn’t know what his job was, just that every day he went to work at Mister Henry’s. My folks always called it ‘The Business’ or ‘The Store’ when I was in earshot. Sometimes Papa wore a nice suit. Other times he wore ‘Pa’s hanging loose today, Sweetheart’ clothes. Some nights he made it home in time for dinner. Others, my mother put away our dishes, left Papa’s in the oven, and readied me for bed. I always woke when I’d hear him return, no matter how quiet he tried to be. He’d kiss me before he turned in and he would always whisper ‘Night, Muffalana’ in my ear. I’d keep my eyes closed and pretend to be asleep, and when he left my room, I’d peek to see if it was still dark or gone light and look at the clock, promise myself to write the time down so I could show him that I knew he kissed me. But I always forgot by next morning and I never did and I never got to tell him that before he died. And I miss him so much, Scott. I know you would’ve liked him and he you.

  But Mama died first and we buried her and Henry came to the funeral and that was the first time I met him. He gave me $50 and told me not to tell Papa and he said what a ‘Dawlin’ Momma was and how I had her eyes and there were God-honest tears in his and I believe he was truly sorry for our loss. He told me to buy a nice winter coat at Godchaux’s and he promised that when I felt better, I could come pass days by his house in Old Metairie, so that Papa wouldn’t have to worry about me when everyone was working at The Store.

  Papa worked with Henry’s right-hand man, Frank Hinds, who was handsome and tall and about the most smartly-dressed man I ever saw before I met Henry. Frank was Irish and lived alone in Lakeview. Sometimes he came to the house to pick my father up or drop off parcels. He was always polite to my mother and businesslike with Papa. He never spoke to me, just waited in our hall, looking stern whenever he caught me peeking at him from behind my door. He fascinated my burgeoning curiosity. Where Henry swaggered, Frank strode. While Henry slouched, Frank stood rod-straight. He had the gruff brooding of a Gary Cooper, his jet black hair side-parted and neatly trimmed. Even scowling, he looked younger than his 40-something and it made me giddy to be caught looking. I didn’t know then what a crush was or what makes one so perilously alluring. It is our biology reminding us that emotion is postscript, not preface, to our baser desires.

  Sometimes, I’d eavesdrop from beneath our back porch where Frank and Papa often withdrew to smoke and talk. Frank didn’t speak like any New Orleanian I knew. He spoke quietly, but firm, commanding. He didn’t drawl like Henry or Papa and he didn’t get antsy or bluster, even when my father said something Frank seemingly didn’t like. Frank always took a time before he made a response to Papa. I thought it meant he was thinking before he spoke; in which case he definitely wasn’t like any New Orleanian I knew! I assumed it showed courtesy, he making sure not to speak across Papa. I know now I had it crossways. My father was the one yielding. The silences were Papa’s, out of fear of Frank, not respect for him. Because Frank Hinds was one of the most feared men in New Orleans. The only man who didn’t fear him was Henry. I think Frank took that personally. I think it was the only thing that ever needled him.

  At Mama’s burial, Frank finally spoke to me for the first time. As I watched him stroll toward me, my heart found my way into my mouth, no door for me to duck behind now. Papa and Grandpa were in a throng aways off. Towered over me, I was sure Frank’s dark brown eyes could see my every secret.

  “You be sure and make your mother proud,” he told me. “Don’t be a burden on your father either. He’s all you have now.”

  With that, he walked out of the cemetery.

  Henry was good with the invitation of his hospitality. He even helped Papa get me a placement at the nearby school and, that Fall, I began the routine of walking the short way to his home after class, to the grand old residence on Iona Street.

  The men were always at The Store but I was not alone there. The house had a day-maid, Mama Gertie, a hard-as-hog’s hide woman who cooked and cleaned; imagine if the Terminator were the beefy black housekeeper from Tom and Jerry. That was Gertie! As well as keeping me in check, she looked after Henry’s new bride, Lirienne. I’d heard of Lirienne. Henry had married her that past spring. Everyone said she was beautiful and young and petite and delicate. I was dying to meet her. I was an only child who had lost her mother. In my mind, I imagined Lirienne to be a princess who would make it all all right. But she never appeared downstairs. Gertie kept me close at all times, enlisting me in the kitchen or dispatching me to dust the main rooms. I sensed her reticence in letting me too far from her sight. Whenever I asked after Miss Lirienne, Gertie would snap, “She sleeping,” and bustle me into another chore.

  The only time Gertie left me alone was when she took meals to Lirienne. When she did, she made me sit at the kitchen table and ordered me to “play possum and stay put meantime.” In my second week, I rebelled and snuck up after her. Gertie had closed Lirienne’s bedroom door behind herself so I tip-toed around the vast upper floor, too scared to try any of the other doors lest the sound betrayed me. But one was slightly ajar and I cautiously opened it. It was a fully made-up baby room. A rocker crib sat in the center, a wooden mobile suspended from the ceiling fan above it, from where too an insect net was completely draped over it. The crib was empty but the mobile was adorned with the flying horses from the carousel in City Park. Excitedly, I reached inside the netting. All I wanted was to touch my favorite. I never got the chance. The next I knew, Gertie was dragging me by the skin of my skull out of the nursery and down the stairs. I barely had time to yelp before we were back in the kitchen and she was tanning the backs of my legs with her broad hands.

  “I only wanted to see the baby!” I shrieked. I cried with each strike, “Where’s the baby?” as if that might soften the blows. It didn’t.

  “The baby sick,” was all Gertie said after. “Is in God’s hands now but you worry none bout it. And don’t go upsetting Miss Lirienne with your snooping, ya hear?”

  I expected that would be the end of me in Old Metairie. But the next morning, my father dropped me off at the school and told me to go straight to Henry’s after, as always. Gertie, it seemed, was savvy enough to keep my indiscretion to herself, as much for her position as for mine. She was also perceptive enough to realize that I needed company. So the following week, she brought Monica Washington, her niece, to that end.

  Monica was a year older than me but she was a shy and withdrawn girl. She had a terrible lisp which affected her confidence and disrupted her schooling. Gertie knew she would get no trouble from Monica and hoped Monica’s presence would occupy my restless imp. It did more than that. We quickly became best friends and beloved souls to each other. Monica began to come out of her shell and I became the model houseguest. We never saw Lirienne. We rarely saw Henry. Sometimes he stopped by with a huge bag of Evans’s pralines and showered us all with hugs and high bonhomie. Mostly we played under Gertie’s watchful gaze, hung out in the TV room, or wandered the rear garden, always looking to the drawn curtains of the main bedroom. We decided that Lirienne must be as beautiful as Rapunzel, too lovely for our eyes.

  The house on Iona Street was many things.

  It was truly beautiful. The path up to it was laid with warm brown paving stones and, halfway to the front portico, it circled around a unique adornme
nt in keeping with Henry’s rakish affectation: a quarter reproduction of Michelangelo’s ‘Bacchus’. The brazen bronze figure stood buck naked on a tall pedestal and water bubbled from his chalice like a stream of molten diamond.

  The structure was opulent, even by Old Metairie standards. A front of many windows, its façade was the shade of heirloomed cotton. The front garden was lightly planted with winged elm and magnolia trees and their foliage hid much of the residence from the street. It might have invited intrigue and envy from the outside, but I was a child, with no care for such petty designs. As Spring of 1981 blossomed, the lawn became a meadow to me, dappled by the green and pink sun sprites which streamed through the leaves. As I tried to grasp their beams in my hand, I forgot about my earthly woes. My young soul was a boundless vessel, eager to be filled with their bounty.

  The grand abode was another skin for Henry, like the suits and the name. Dirty money went in one end of the Almonester machine and turned his aspirations into reality. Cash was the raw material but Henry was really laundering himself, hiding his rotten core behind evermore elegant layers of respectability.

  By the end of the 70s, the machine was fuelled by sex and drugs. Henry had a string of cathouses, from Shreveport to New Orleans, his ‘Oyster Beds’ he called them. Riding the Gulf oil boom, the brothels in Lake Charles and Morgan City made him well-off. Parlaying the proceeds into drugs made him filthy rich. Keeping full control of his distribution chain—from the ‘vine to the vein’—meant maximum return from a modest market share, small enough not to irk the big Mafia players, the Marcello Family. Henry was the city’s first vertically-integrated hoodlum, years before the term was even coined. Even with tributes to keep the Marcellos happy, he was easily a millionaire, probably several times over. And Henry didn’t trust banks. “After you shake hands with a banker,” he’d say, “count your fingers. And check your prints too!”

  The house had long since become a second home for Monica and me. That March, our troupe became three. Lucy Bettencourt was seven and her father also worked for Henry. His wife had just left him and he seized the opportunity to avail of the peculiar kindergarten within the scoundrel’s walls. Lucy was beautiful: eyes like sapphires and blonde curls like spun gold thread. She was a sweet girl but troubled. Those blue eyes would always flit nervously this way and that. She couldn’t settle whenever the grownups were around and she was ever eager to entice Monica and me to private corners, where she would talk hushedly about things she had no right knowing, let alone speaking. No wonder her dad was keen to offload her with Gertie. In today’s world, she’d be in therapy, on Ritalin, or both. Her inner turmoil showed in a breathy frenzy of questions and revelations. In Monica and me, she had a rapt audience. And the show was a barnstormer; Lucy had the inside scoop on the whole Henry scene. Some of it might have been fanciful embellishment but that made it all the more compelling. In retrospect, most of it was true. And she had the goods on Lirienne. I was sold right there. That whole Lent, Lucy held court and piece-by-piece she filled us in.

  So we learned how Iona Street was the gilded cage which held the princess of our imagination. Lirienne Delabostrie was 14 years old when she was first offered to the men who frequented Henry’s brothel on Canal Street. The Madame christened her ‘La Cerise Mûre’—the ripened cherry. Word of her charms quickly reached Henry and he went a-courting. He was almost 60 then, still single and spritely. In his own way he must have been lonely because he fell in love and spirited her from Canal Street to be his alone. She fell pregnant and Henry produced a doctored birth cert, an amoral priest, and a secluded church. Then he took his new bride home and waited for his son-and-heir to arrive.

  The boy was born Halloween ’80. The way Lucy told it, he came out with tree frog eyes, bear claws, and a gator’s tail. Plain up, she just didn’t know. As Gertie said, he was sick, in God’s hands. He had yet to leave the hospital, going on five months now. His crib waited and Lirienne Almonester had long since retired to her room. Now knowing this, I cried nights in my own bed when I thought of it, what torment the sounds of our gaiety must be to her.

  But the day arrived when the child finally came home. One April morning after Easter, I knew something was up. Papa was unusually quiet as we made our way across the river. “You mind what Gertie says, ya hear? Specially today,” he warned, as I got out at the school gates.

  Monica was at the house when I made my way over; Lucy soon arrived. Upstairs was a concert of heavy feet and hushed voices. Frequently we heard a woman’s cries. Sometime after, a serious man with a doctor’s case came down and departed. All afternoon, a woman in a nurse’s uniform skipped up and down the stairs, speaking often with Gertie. Eventually, Gertie banished us to the garden. The drama was food and drink to Lucy’s imagination. She bombarded us with wild speculation but we were too preoccupied by what might actually be happening inside. Sometime later, Henry appeared outside, seeming drained yet elated. “Il est arrivé. Mon fils,” he exclaimed. “Le Fils Jean. My son. Petites, soon see you him. Now be good just for Gertie, help her.”

  Days passed. We waited. A dark mood descended on the grand house. Gertie grew short and impatient with us, though we gave her no reason to. The uneasy silence was broken only by two sounds. We all heard the distressed wails of the baby. Whenever Gertie went to sooth him, his cries subsided for a time, and in that quiet, I am certain it was only me who caught the low shamed sobs of Lirienne.

  Relations between Gertie and Henry, testy at the best of times, now began to boil over. Heated hushed clashes occurred daily. The details were a mystery to us but we knew they concerned Lirienne, her state-of-mind, and the presence of the baby. When the lid finally blew, the vitriol in their last exchange was frightening. Violence snapped at the edges. Before any blood got spilled, Gertie grabbed her things—Monica included—turned on her heel, and never returned.

  Gertie’s place was taken by a trashily-dressed woman with way too much make-up. At first she tried to be chummy with Lucy and me. “Y’alls just call me Georgia-Lynn, Sugas. We’s gonna have so much fun, just us gals.” That lasted all of one day. She didn’t cook or clean but we certainly ate well, courtesy of daily deliveries from Langensteins market. When she wasn’t hogging the TV, Georgia-Lynn was on the phone, all cigarette smoke, giggles, and ‘Gosh y’alls!’. Lucy swore she was one of Henry’s whores and I tended to agree. Lucy was also convinced that Henry had had Mama Gertie ‘taken care of’. I found that fanciful, but allied to Monica’s continued absence, the whole scene disturbed me. Who was taking care of Lirienne? No one answered the baby’s constant pained cries now. Our painted chaperone certainly wasn’t overtly concerned. Habitually, Georgia-Lynn would jump in her car and disappear. Quick jaunts to the drugstore became leisurely dashes to Woolworths on the main road, and as a weekend neared, she would abscond to the Lakeside mall for at least an hour at a time.

  It was on just such an abandoned Thursday that I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened to the infant’s yelps for a distressing age. Overcoming Gertie’s earlier conditioning, I finally began to climb. I entered his room, his cries truly piercing at this close quarter. The net was drawn around the crib, and as I peered through the mesh and saw him for the first time, my instant reaction was to flee. When I grabbed the crib for strength, it rocked gently at my touch and his cries began to settle. I summoned the strength to look again and found his gaze was on me. That made it easier, to focus on his stare and measure his poor state gradually from there. The curiosity he showed reminded me that he was just a baby, not the swamp thing of Lucy’s horrors. There was no tail but her puerile depiction was nonetheless cruelly accurate.

  Baby Jean’s eyes were spaced apart about as far as his little head would allow. The lids were puffy, and all the while he watched me, they barely opened beyond slits. Behind them, his pupils were huge. Though they never left me, their dullness held no animation, an illusion which made him seem sadly detached. The pathos of it was compounded by the set of one eye, lower than the o
ther and drooping at a slant. It looked as though he was crying, that the fallen eye was itself a muddy tear from the place where a normal eye ought to be.

  Above his eyes, the extended exaggerated forehead forced Jean’s crown of downy black hair to be much too high up. Or did I see it wrong? Maybe it was just his eyes were too low down. They were almost to the level of his nose, itself a scrunched-up button thing, the tip pinched upward, its squatness like a baby big-toe on his bloated face. The flesh above his mouth was waxy smooth and his thin upper lip was fixed in an upward curl. As my motions soothed him, his little jaw quivered but the mouth never completely closed.

  The rocking caused a jingle from the horses on the mobile; each had a tiny tin bell around its neck. I tugged the netting and the jangling drew a delighted gurgle from Jean. He turned to gaze where the horses danced in the air above him, and sensing his interest, I slipped my hand into the crib, thinking I could help him touch one. I took his wrist and lifted his chubby little arm. When I saw his hand I screamed, to my eternal shame now. I screamed and snatched my own away but my charm bracelet caught in the netting. My breathing panicked as I flailed my arm, desperate to disengage myself. The crib pitched and the horses whipped around as I tore myself free and fled the room, not stopping until I reached the back garden. But it wasn’t far enough to escape the distress I’d left behind. Jean screamed louder than ever. I could stuff my fingers in my ears or stem the tears in my eyes but I couldn’t do both. So I sat on my useless hands and listened to every one of his cries while I bawled my own eyes out.

  I phoned Monica, told her all, and begged her to come back. She wanted to but her mother, at Gertie’s urging, forbade it. I worked the guilt angle. That got me so far. So I played the pride card. That always worked with Monica. I told her that Lucy was jawing about how the whole Washington family had fled Louisiana in fear of Henry. I knew it would goad Monica to my wishes and I was inwardly proud of my ability to concoct a plausible half-truth to that end. I could worry later about how to prevent Monica gouging Lucy’s baby blues out, once I knew she’d taken the bait.