A Parallel Life (11 page)

This new preoccupation with death came as a surprise to me. Liz is the least sentimental human alive and, as far as I could remember, she had never even acknowledged mortality. After Raymond died, her primary mourning activity seemed to be reorganizing closet space.

“Do you have to do it right away?” I asked.

“After they shove Lucille in there, it's all over for Raymond.” The fire on the end of the Lucky flared beneath her widened nostrils. “I'm moving his bones.”

Raymond had been a short man, a dapper dresser in his day. Almost a dandy. He and Liz were quite a couple. There are pictures of them everywhere in the house. He in white linen. She a bride in a fancy wedding dress in spite of the Depression. It was a big wedding in Mater Dolorosa Church. His bones would be small bones, delicate. An anthropologist in the future would get the
wrong idea of what we looked like if he had only Raymond's bones to go by.

“You're on Social Security,” I said. “Do you have any idea how much a crypt costs?”

“We could buy one together,” Liz answered, her brighteyed slyness almost veiled by a puff of smoke.

“No,” I said. “Car payments are bad enough. The present is all I can handle.”

Liz slammed back her Coke the way someone would a shot of whiskey.

We weren't protected by a single cloud on the day Liz chose for our visit to the cemetery. The sun was fierce, and the city of the dead became a testing place for the living. Last night's rain turned to steam around our feet.

“It's awfully hot for May,” I said. Liz gave me a look of scorn. Heat was part of the process of living in New Orleans, a component of
les bon temps
. Each time I complained about it to anyone in my family, that person looked at me with suspicion. Liz had an umbrella shading her. She'd offered me one when we left the house and I'd refused. I never felt right carrying an umbrella when it wasn't raining.

Liz had found the crypt—no mean feat considering the acres of unmarked trails between all those hundreds of buildings of white plastered brick. She stood mumbling the names inscribed on the rectangle of marble that sealed the entrance to the tomb. “Not one but Raymond worth a nickel,” she said as I came closer. “I'm doing him a favor. Would you want to rise with that group? What do you think his mother's going to be wearing?”

It was a question I had never thought to contemplate—attire for the last really big party on earth.

“Not what she was buried in, I'll bet,” Liz went on. “More like the dress she wore when she was queen of one of those balls—when they still had money.” She rapped on the marble with her wedding ring. “Anybody home?” She grinned. She was wearing her dentures and they seemed too bright and new for her face. She rapped again and pretended to listen.

At the sound of this rapping a young man poked his head around from the shady side of the crypt and studied us. He had tight dark curls and skin the color of the Coca-Cola he held in one hand. In his other hand was half an oyster sandwich.

Liz looked up from her own pool of shade, startled, and then smiled with approval at the cola. “The real thing,” she said.

He nodded, a solemn young man in a New Orleans Saints T-shirt and faded but recently pressed khaki slacks. His eyes were as pale as foam. “You ladies need something?” he asked, courteous, his voice ten degrees cooler than the day.

“Just money,” Liz said.

“Ahhh, money,” he said and took a bite of the sandwich. I watched his teeth close over the gold-crusted body of the oyster and watched him chew, a ruminant.

“We want to take out my uncle's bones and find another crypt for them—and for my aunt too—when she dies,” I found myself saying. I'm not normally so forthcoming with strangers but his silence was like a vacuum cleaner sucking explanations.

Liz looked up at me over her shoulder, surprise lowering her jaw, revealing those glossy dentures. “That's about the size of it,” she said. “The only thing standing in my way is money.”

He swallowed and washed down the food with a large chug of cola. “I understand. I'm looking for work.”

“Well, I'd like to help you, but I'd be hard pressed to get together ten cents for a shoe shine,” she said.

He nodded, as though this were a perfectly reasonable position.

“Let's go,” I said. Surrounded by the white walls of the crypts, I felt like something being cooked.

“Well, now you've seen it,” Liz said to me and rapped once more on the marble. Then she looked up at the young man who was still standing there. “You did say you wanted work, didn't you?”

“I did,” he said, as thoughtful as ever. “And I do.”

“Give me something to write on, Maggie,” she said. I found a scrap of paper, the back of a grocery receipt, and then a stub of pencil, and I watched her scribble away. “It's on the river side of the avenue.”

He looked at the paper. “I'll find it,” he said.

Back home, Liz propped the fan in front of an open window and put her feet on a chair. They were swollen like two small loaves of bread. Her face, without the dentures, had collapsed. She looked smaller than ever, and, for the first time I could remember, pitiful. “Tell me why I'm a foolish old woman,” she said.

I poured Coke over ice and placed the glass in her hand. “You're a foolish old woman because whatever happens after your death—or Raymond's death—isn't important.”

“Why don't I believe that?” she asked.

“I've done this before,” he said. I held the beam of light on a huge screwdriver that seemed like an extension of his right forefinger, a wand. Barely an hour earlier, Liz had
wakened me with a summons to her house because Jean Felice—that was his name—said he needed someone to drive him. He and I now stood in front of Raymond's family crypt. I half expected clouds to roll over and lightning to streak.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I wasn't sure that I liked any of this, and I wasn't made more comfortable by the knowledge that I was with a pro.

“So many ladies get lonely for their men—for their dear departed. They want them back in their lives. I help the poor widows. You wouldn't believe how many lonely widows there are.”

The night was damp—and cool—but not cold enough for the chill that crept up my back. This was more than an eccentric errand for a distressed relative. I was robbing a grave. And all because when I'd walked into Liz's house just moments ago, I'd been unable to resist the sight of her—elated, her hair red once more and crackling with sparks—dancing around the kitchen with Jean Felice.

From beyond the cemetery walls came the rattle of streetcar wheels on track. I had no idea they ran so late—or so early. “What do you mean, you do this a lot?”

“Oh, not a lot,” he said, his voice low and as reassuring as I wanted it to be. “Just enough.”

As he began to remove the top-right screw, the beam of light began to jump like the bouncing ball in an old movie sing-along.

“Have you given a thought to the final place for you and yours?” he asked in a steadying tone.

“I'm divorced. I probably won't even know where his bones are buried. Or his ashes strewn. Or whatever.”

“Oh,” Jean Felice said, and I couldn't miss the disappointment in his voice. Losing track of a loved one, or even a once-loved one, I realized, must have seemed to him like a betrayal, or, at least, a failure. I stifled the desire to apologize as he placed a screw in his shirt pocket.

“Hold the light here,” he said and pointed to the last screw, in the top-left corner. I watched him take it out, then lower his large frame into a squat, the kind that people who know how to work get into when there's something heavy to be lifted. He placed one hand on each side of the slab of marble. “I can do this by myself,” he said. “Just open the suitcase.”

The suitcase was the largest member of a set of three hard-sided Samsonite pieces that Liz had won in a raffle at Mater Dolorosa. Raymond was dead when she won it. It had never been used before. I opened the satiny lining to the night sky.

“Perhaps you'd better look away,” he said. “Put the flashlight down by the suitcase.”

I didn't protest. I not only looked away but took several steps in a direction that led me away. From that position I heard scraping, banging, sliding, and finally a clattering, which was a dry sound like a whisper. “Nice bones,” Jean Felice said. “Tidy bones.”

Liz had fresh coffee and stale doughnuts waiting for us. It was clear to me as soon as I saw her face, its mixture of apprehension and expectation, that she'd had no idea what to hope for, that she'd been driven by a fear that as soon as Lucille died, Raymond, in some way only she could understand, would be lost to her. “Oh, sweet
Jesus,” she said when she saw the suitcase. “Is he . . .?” She took a step forward and then stopped.

“He's resting inside,” Jean Felice said and put the suitcase at her feet just as a porter at the depot would have.

She made no move to pick it up.

“Would you like me to shake it?” he asked.

“Oh no,” she said, backing away, her hand on her heart.

“Just where do you want it, Liz?” I asked. I wasn't finding this much easier than she was, but Liz's domain was, after all, the realm of the ordinary, and I wanted to call her back to it. She turned toward me, flustered but relieved.

“There's space in my bedroom closet,” she said. Jean Felice picked up the suitcase and together we followed her into the cluttered room. She opened the door to the closet and took out a pile of blankets wrapped in a clear plastic bag. “Right there,” she said. Jean Felice slid the suitcase into the space and closed the door.

“I can't thank you enough,” Liz said when he stood facing her, dusting his hands. “I'm afraid I was about to go crazy.”

“Not at all,” he said and bowed his head.

“What can I give you for your troubles?” she asked.

This question astonished me. I couldn't believe she hadn't talked about this before, but then I realized that she'd been in such a state of frantic anticipation that thoughts of money had just slipped away. I had a brief vision of Jean Felice retrieving the suitcase from the closet and holding it hostage to some extravagant demand.

“Whatever you'd like,” he said, eyes down.

Liz grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the side of
the room, pressing me against an armoire. “What do you have?” she said, and then followed me to the kitchen where I'd left my handbag. I had a ten, a five, and four ones.

“I have nineteen dollars.”

“That'll be fine,” he said. “I'll take fifteen and leave you with the ones, and tell your aunt I'll be looking for a suitable crypt for her.” He put the money away, then reached over and took my hand, examined it, then squeezed it. “You're a good person. You're going to make nice bones too someday.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Liz and I watched him walk down the porch stairs. The rising sun cast long shadows and Jean Felice's slid along the ground after him. As soon as he turned the corner, Liz went back in and opened the refrigerator. “It's too hot for coffee,” she said, dropping ice into two glasses, the smile on her face positively goofy with joy.

“It is.” I was tired suddenly, my eyes heavy.

“Could you stop at the grocery after work?” she asked, pouring in the Coke. “I'm all out of a few things.”

“Of course,” I said, watching her set the full glass on the table. She had begun to hum, something off-key and wheezy. As I reached for the glass, I took a look at my hand—at the scar on my middle finger from a cut when I was ten, at the pattern of freckles on the back, at the alphabet of tiny lines creasing my palm—at the clever skin. “Whatever you need.”

T
HE MAN SIMONE D
'
QUESNAY
had been engaged to marry was shot and killed on a Normandy beach. One year later, despite her grief—or because of it—she married Alex Oliver, a distant cousin from north Louisiana. For a while she seemed happy, but then she began to do things that were hard to understand.

People in town excused her at first. They said that she had tragedy on her side, that she wasn't able to get over Jackie Hebert's death, and they were inclined to feel sorry for her. But their pity started to wear thin. The sky blue Packard convertible that Jackie had given Simone as an engagement present was turning up in odd places, and Simone, as she drove daily, methodically, over the back roads of St. Athanatius Parish, grew more and more careless about whom she was seen with.

At first it had been Alex's Aunt TaTa. Well, if a young and beautiful woman like Simone wanted to drive around with an old crone, who could find fault with that? TaTa obviously loved riding. She held her little black straw hat on with one white-gloved hand and used the other hand to point to things they passed as she named them. “Pussy cat. Post office. Little pissant.” Taking particular delight in each pop of a
p
and hiss of an
s
.

Sometimes, the cook's half-wit daughter Ophelia occupied the front seat beside Simone. Ophelia rode with her head back and her mouth open, her upturned eyes like dark marbles in a bowl.

Later, the long-boned, gap-toothed adolescent Felton Mackay rode alongside Simone. Felton, who worked at the gas station, was known to be part of a inbred clan from up by the state line, a group rumored to make a living by supplying two-headed calves and hump-backed mules for traveling sideshows.

“She talks a streak,” Felton said to his boss after one ride. “She took me to some little church in Savannah Branch and made me sit there while she prayed—on her knees! I didn't have no notion of what she was saying on the way out—or the way back.”

“Are you going to put gas in her car or am I?” asked Mole, the owner of the station. Simone was pacing in the shade of the awning. Her peach-colored linen dress, damp with sweat from sitting on the leather upholstery, clung to her legs as she followed a line between two slabs of concrete, placing one high-heeled shoe in front of the other like a tightrope walker.