A Summons to New Orleans (4 page)

“What’s wrong with Michael?”

“He’s rude, that’s what. He told me to shut up tonight.”

Nora smiled. Of course he told her to shut up. No one on earth talked more than her mother, and got less said in the process.

“And what did you say to him?” Nora asked.

“I told him I’d shut up when I felt like shutting up.”

“Mother,” Nora sighed, “you can’t engage him at his level. He’s a child. He needs guidance. You need to explain to him . . .”

“You’ve done too much explaining, that’s your problem. The boy should have been spanked when it would have done some good. But now he’s too big and he’s ruling the roost. He knows it, too, sister. Don’t think he doesn’t know who runs your household.”

Nora knew there was no hope of winning this argument. She decided to move on.

“But they’re okay, right? Basically, they’re fine?”

“They’re as fine as two children can be who’ve been taken out of school and dumped on their grandmother without a good explanation.”

“It won’t kill them to miss one week of school. And you’re always saying you want to spend more time with them.”

“I’d like to visit them, Nora Kay, not raise them. I’m through with raising children.”

“You only raised one, Mother, and I wasn’t terribly difficult.”

“Excuse me, are you forgetting your brother? Maybe you have put him out of your mind, but I haven’t.”

Nora felt her throat closing, as if she were having an allergic reaction. She knew it was the rage again, tightening in her chest and around her neck. Of course she had not forgotten Pete, her little brother who had died when he was only two.
She was six at the time. The boy had tried to crawl out of his crib in the middle of the night and had fallen on his head. A fluke thing, the doctor later said. One in a million probability. He had fallen hard and cracked his skull, and no one had heard him. He lay there on the floor all night, his brain swelling, the life leaking out of him. He existed in a coma for a while and finally slipped away. Her family had never fully recovered, and even now Nora had nightmares about it, blaming herself for not coming to his rescue. It seemed to her back then, and now, that she had heard the sound of him hitting the floor. Her bedroom was next door and she had heard the commotion, the distant thud. But it had barely registered in her consciousness and she had gone back to sleep. That was something she had never told anyone. She knew that if she told her mother, she would be opening herself up to the blame she already carried squarely on her own shoulders.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” Nora said.

“No, I should hope not. The things that I have lived through. You think your divorce is so tragic. Well, I tried to warn you. And losing a husband is nothing compared to losing a child. You just think about that.”

“I do think about it, Mother. But are my children all right?”

“They are alive, Nora Kay. They aren’t sick. They miss you and they don’t listen to a thing I tell them to do. Your son acts like his father is the second coming. Won’t hear a word against him. What’s this about him going to live with Cliff? He can’t live with that man. That man is a criminal.”

“He’s not going to live with him, Mother. It’s just a fantasy he has. He’s thirteen, and he imagines anybody would be better than me. He imagines his father would understand him. And while we’re at it, you shouldn’t be saying anything bad about Cliff. It’s not fair to them.”

“I will speak my mind,” Boo announced. “I will say whatever I feel like saying. You can’t tell me to shut up and neither can your son.”

This is lunacy,
Nora thought.
Leaving my children with this woman. She is so clearly insane.
When her father was alive, he used to tell her this. When they fought he would put Nora in the car and drive her around and say, “Doctors have told me your mother should be committed, but I can’t do that to her. And I don’t want to raise you alone. A nervous mother is better than none, don’t you think?”

Once she had asked her father why he married her. He said, without missing a beat, “Because I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And I still think so.” Remembering that, she still felt the pain she had felt then. Even as a child, she knew that wasn’t a substantial reason to marry someone.

Suddenly her mother said, “Poppy Marchand?”

“What?”

“You said something about Poppy Marchand?”

“Yes, I ran into her . . .”

“I thought you were going to visit Simone.”

“I am, but Simone got delayed, and then I found Poppy here, staying at my hotel.”

“Well, thank the Lord for small favors. I always liked that girl, Poppy. She’s from good breeding. Simone was crazy. She wore all that makeup. Too much mascara, made her eyelashes look like tarantulas. But Poppy, now, that girl was grounded. I feel better knowing she’s there.”

Her mother had met Poppy only a couple of times and exchanged no more than a dozen sentences with her, but she had picked up right away that Poppy was from old money. Maybe it was the pearls Poppy used to wear in those days, real ones, swinging carelessly around her neck like costume jewelry.
The fact that Poppy’s father was a judge impressed Boo, even though Poppy’s father was fairly famous for being a corrupt judge, one who took kickbacks and manipulated his courtroom accordingly. Her mother didn’t know that about him, but she probably wouldn’t have cared. A judge was a judge.

“Now, that Simone,” her mother went on, “she’s just trouble. She’s never going to amount to anything.”

“She’s a model, Mother. And now she’s a big restaurant critic, too. She does a spot on TV. She’s very successful.”

“Money can’t give you class, sister. And that Simone is from trash as far as I can tell.”

Nora bristled and tried not to enter into this debate. Her therapist was always telling her not to take her mother’s bait, but her therapist didn’t know how inviting that bait was. She tugged and Nora jumped, even after all these years. Her therapist called it the marionette syndrome. Nora didn’t like to think of herself in those terms, but where Boo was concerned, it was fairly undeniable.

Simone, of course, was not from trash. Her father was some high-level executive at a movie studio, and she had been raised among actors and politicians and royalty. She had gone to school in Europe. She spoke French. Quite a contrast from Nora’s own upbringing, the daughter of a traveling salesman in southern Virginia, a place so small it rarely showed up on a map of the state. Lewiston was a one-horse town, and the horse was not particularly healthy. She thought of her children staying there, sleeping in Boo’s one small guest room, in a tiny postwar house near the highway. It was all her mother could afford after her father’s death. For all his concern about family, her father had not provided for them. He died without life insurance, and with no savings and a lifetime of debt. No one felt up to blaming him, though. His death had been
so prolonged and painful and humiliating. Prostate cancer. The slow withering away, being attacked by the cells in his penis, a kind of ironic demise, Nora thought, given how much Boo claimed to detest “the act.” Both of her parents were devout Christians, Baptists, no less, which led them to all manner of nutty ideas about sex. Her mother thought of it as a necessary evil, and her father was somewhat obsessed with it—while denying its importance, of course. This made for a closet well stocked with pornography and a threat on her life if she ever slept with a man out of wedlock.

“You tell Poppy I said hello,” Boo said. “And you stay close to her and keep your distance from that Simone.”

“Tell the kids I’ll call them tomorrow.”

“Well, I don’t want to get their hopes up.”

“I will call them, Mother.”

“Annette chews things. Did you know that?”

“Yes. It’s age-appropriate.”

“Well, it’s not appropriate in my book. She chewed up the edges of my
TV Guide.”

“Give them a kiss from me. Remember, Michael doesn’t eat breakfast.”

“Everyone eats breakfast in my house, sister.”

“Good night, Mother.”

She hung up the phone and sat on her bed, her thoughts scrambled, floating about, trying to reassemble themselves. She knew, of course, that one day she would end up in another therapist’s office, with Michael and Annette pointing fingers at her for leaving them with their insane grandmother.

“It all started when my mother went to New Orleans,” she could imagine Annette saying. And it would just get worse from there.

4

N
ora and Poppy met for breakfast in the courtyard.

It was a little after nine, and they were sipping their chicory coffee and orange juice, nibbling on homemade biscuits and jam. The air was already close and hot. The smells of the city crept over the walls. It made Nora think of Venice, a place she had visited once with Cliff, on a business trip. He had gone there to study Italian cooking, thinking he might try to open an Italian restaurant with authentic Venetian cuisine. Venice had been beautiful and romantic, but an odd, oppressive stench seemed to take hold of the place. Nora felt that her face was constantly contorted, warding off a bad smell that loomed but never quite materialized.

Poppy buttered her biscuit and said, “Louisiana should secede, probably. It’s not like any other state. We should stop pretending to play by the rules.”

“But why are you back here?” Nora asked. “I mean, if you hate it so much?”

“I don’t hate it. I used to. Now I accept it. I was raised here and I guess I’m kind of infected by its influence. But I can’t claim that it has anything to contribute to the rest of the country.”

“What do you do here?”

Poppy stared at her biscuit, driving the butter into its flesh. She said, “I teach school. I teach art at a middle school in Metairie. My father died two years ago and left me his estate. I don’t ever have to work again, really, but I want to stay busy.”

“I met a teacher last night. My cab driver. Leo Girardi.”

Poppy immediately stopped buttering and looked at her. “Leo?”

“Yes. You know him?”

She nodded. “He’s an old friend. But I don’t talk to him much anymore.”

“Why not?”

Poppy didn’t answer. She concentrated on her biscuit, and finally, when she spoke again, said, “I don’t paint anymore, either.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t,” she said. “It’s like . . . I don’t remember how. I can’t explain it.”

“When did this happen?”

“Around the time I left Adam. I’m sure it’s just temporary.”

“Was he an artist, too? Maybe you were competitive.”

“He’s a plastic surgeon. He spends his time making women’s breasts bigger and sucking fat out of their thighs. It’s not an honorable profession.”

“What about burn victims and that kind of thing?”

“Oh, yes, burn victims. That is what he always used when
he felt he had to justify his calling. To be fair, he did specialize in putting scarred people back together. But that’s just an excuse. I happen to think we should just live with what God gives us, even if, for some reason, He decides to give us scars. Our scars are our medals, in a way. How noble is that, trying to wipe away the business of living?”

“God?” Nora questioned, certain she had not heard right. It was not a name she associated with Poppy.

“Well, whatever higher power you believe in. For me, it’s God.”

“Since when?”

Poppy licked some jam off her fingers and said, “My life is different now.”

“Different how?”

Poppy shrugged and looked into her coffee cup.

“You know where chicory comes from, don’t you? They used to add it to coffee back during the war, when the crop was bad and it tasted like shit. Chicory was supposed to make it taste less like shit. Most of New Orleans cuisine is based on poverty, the desire to keep from starving. They ate anything that crawled past their house. Crawfish? That’s swamp trash. Catfish live in the mud. So do lobsters. Alligator meat, turtle meat, nutria, for God’s sake? That’s a rat. Smart people do not eat these things. They eat steak.”

“Well, Simone will probably have something to say about that. Now that she’s this big food critic.”

“That’s so ironic,” Poppy said. “Simone was the person who would eat the dining-hall crap, no matter how vile it was. She was born with an impaired palette. And now she’s writing about food, and considered the expert on cuisine. How did that happen?”

“I don’t know, Poppy. How did I end up divorced? How did we both end up alone?”

“That is not the point,” Poppy said.

“So why are you and your husband separated?” Nora asked.

“We can’t overcome our differences.”

“What are your differences?”

“Religion,” Poppy said.

“But you’re not religious.”

Poppy reached inside her blouse and pulled out a silver cross. She thrust it at Nora, as if to ward off a vampire, and after a second she tucked it back in.

“Poppy,” Nora said. “You have got to be kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“How the hell did it happen? Who got to you?”

“Nobody got to me,” she said. “Except Jesus.”

Nora felt like throwing up. Her throat burned as the chicory coffee came back up. This could not be happening. The memory of all those ranting, angry people in her church. Her parents’ ridiculous screaming matches, always playing out in that strange religious vernacular. Those horrible, frightening pictures of Jesus all over the house. The Bibles. The lectures, the accusations, the eyes of God, always looking down on her in judgment. Poppy could not believe those things.

“Are you in AA or something?” Nora asked. She recalled that Poppy had been a big drinker.

“No. I am one of those lapsed Catholics, and I just got unlapsed. Don’t worry, I am not going to start proselytizing. It’s my own private concern. But in answer to your question about Adam, that’s it. He’s Jewish.”

“So was Jesus,” Nora said.

“Oh, really?” Poppy said sarcastically. “News to me.”

“But why would his being Jewish be a problem? I mean, you knew he was Jewish when you married him, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t a Christian then. And I actually don’t consider myself to be married because we didn’t take the sacrament . . .”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Poppy. Stop! This is utter nonsense.”

“Not to me.”

They stopped talking abruptly, like quarreling lovers. Nora looked away, and was surprised to find that tears were welling in her eyes, and her throat felt tight with grief. She did not understand how this could be happening, or why it upset her so much. They sipped their coffee and accepted a refill from the porter, and still they did not talk. They listened to the sounds of the city coming to life, a steamboat whistle in the distance, trucks rumbling through the Quarter, the ground shaking as if it were liquid at the center. Which, in New Orleans, of course, it was.

Finally Nora said, “Poppy, I’m sorry. I have issues with religion. And I’m feeling very strange right now, anyway. My life is . . .”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. She wanted to say “out of control,” but that wasn’t really it. Her life just didn’t feel like it was hers. She felt like she was living someone else’s existence, in some circumstances set up by someone who hadn’t the slightest idea of what she, Nora, wanted or cared about. Who came up with calligraphy, for example? Who wanted to marry a guy with an MBA? Who had given birth to two children and let one of them turn into a teenager? It was a mystery how any of this had happened, and how it had taken her this long to feel the impact.

“Don’t worry about it,” Poppy said. “I know it’s a shock. I can’t explain it. Well, I can, but it would take too long.”

“You don’t need to explain.”

And it was true. Nora felt, despite her protestations, that she understood perfectly well. She could still remember the
days when she was little, saying her prayers at night, praying to the God her parents assured her was in control of every tiny detail, and she felt relieved that it was all up to Him, and not her.

Anyone would want to believe that.

After breakfast, they parted. It was understood, at that point
, that they needed a break from each other. Nora claimed she wanted to do some work (she had brought some invitations with her), and Poppy was going to visit some old friends in town. And, in fact, Nora went back to her room fully intending to get at least half of the one-hundred-fifty-invitation order finished. But she made it through only two when she felt overcome with the desire to call her children. She rang her mother’s number again, but the answering machine picked up. Boo’s voice reverberated in her ear, like the voice of a schizophrenic God, the God of the Old Testament:

“If you want to leave a message, do it after the beep. You have to talk loud and clear and leave your number. If I don’t understand what you’re saying, I can’t call you back. Thank you.”

Nora smiled. It was her mother’s perpetual state of admonishment. She was already angry at the caller, before he or she had a chance to speak.

Nora said, “Hi, Mom. Just me again, hoping to talk to Annette and Michael.”

She paused, wondering what else to say.

“Hi, kids,” she said. “It’s Mom. Having a great time in New Orleans. It’s very hot. Hope you’re doing okay and listening to Grandma Boo. I’ll be home soon. I’m at the Collier House, and Grandma has the number . . .”

There was a loud beeping sound, and the machine cut her off.

She hung up the phone and stared at the walls. They were the color of ripe bananas. The molding and the ceiling were white, like meringue balanced over a cream pie. The painting on the wall was a modern, psychedelic depiction of zoo animals. It was pleasantly anachronistic in the antique setting.

What the hell am I doing here?
she thought.

She got out a book of Faulkner’s short stories and started to read. She was embarrassed by her desire to read Faulkner in New Orleans. (She had brought Tennessee Williams, too, and John Kennedy Toole.) Her eyes skimmed over the words, and she tried to remember how she had once felt about literature. In college, she had actually found it exciting. It had made her feel hopeful and alive. Even the authors she hated (Thomas Wolfe, Bernard Malamud, George Eliot) made her feel challenged and envious. She wanted to write. She wanted to create stories and have her thoughts communicated in English classes. When she read people she did like, her heart would speed up and she felt light-headed. Faulkner, in those days, seemed like a personal friend. Someone she should have married. She would have put up with the rage and the alcohol. Flannery O’Connor, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison . . . these people made her dizzy with the desire to talk back, to speak her own truth. She had written some short stories in college and even had some published. But once she started dating Cliff, her desire to do anything important dwindled. From the time she met him, she understood that it was he who was going to be important, and she was simply going to feed off his success. For a while she had pretended she was going to keep writing. She even jotted down some thoughts in a journal. But chasing after Cliff’s affection had become a full-time job. She married him right out of college, and then she had embarked on the
fifteen-year marathon of making him happy. Obviously she had not succeeded.

She wondered if it counted that she had satisfied him for a while. In the early days—and especially right after Michael was born—she seemed to be enough for him. He was gentle with her, considerate, even worried. He encouraged her to go to work. She shouldn’t be sitting around, cooped up in the house with a kid, he said, not with her drive and intelligence. But she felt that his encouragement was just a test, that the right response was to say, “No, I want to raise my children. I don’t want to hand them off. This is enough for me. Really.”

Though it wasn’t, of course, and she now knew it wasn’t enough for him, either. Now she realized he had been begging her to have another life, something to talk about at the dinner table other than diaper rash and Mommy and Me. She refused to go to the place of blaming herself for the demise of her marriage. But she knew that she had, in fact, cheated herself by trying to be too good. If Cliff had wanted an obedient soul, after all, he would not have married her. She was feisty enough when they first met. It was the children that had smoothed out her rough edges, made her dull. She didn’t blame them, and she didn’t blame herself. That left only Cliff. She blamed him for everything because he had behaved badly. Yet her staunch devotion had not paid off, and it did not make her feel good about herself. When the dust settled, there she was—a martyr, and there was nothing worse to live with than that.

The thing was, she didn’t want Cliff back. The truth was, he had bored her. His restaurants were silly. Oh, yes, they made a lot of money, but the food was simplistic and dull. He always gave a theme to his places, the first one being modern Southern cuisine, the second one Cuban, the third upscale Mexican, the fourth Italian. They all did well because he explored
only the surfaces of those cultures, giving people food they could recognize, setting it in a context that made them feel well traveled. She could see him manipulating people. The restaurants weren’t a bad thing, as business schemes went, but Cliff didn’t really care about the food, and that gave her an insight; she was on to him. It was as if he were tricking people. Making fun of them. And if he was making fun of them, then, what about her?

Perhaps she had actually married Cliff because he was so boring and predictable. Her parents’ volatile marriage had made her yearn for something more peaceful. She wanted no surprises. She and Cliff never fought, at least until the end, and even then the fights were polite and articulate. Once when she was needling him about something, he wheeled on her and said, “I won’t have that charge leveled at me.”

Stunned by his polite reaction, she had simply screamed, “Fuck you, you asshole.”

And he had turned and walked out, into the rain. He disappeared until three in the morning, and when he returned she attacked him with affection, and they made love on the floor of the bedroom. She was sorry, he was sorry, they wouldn’t do this again. They stayed in love for days after that. But Cliff’s unpredictable nature went on a long vacation after that, and did not resurface until he stopped paying taxes and met the waitress.

Nora could not concentrate on Faulkner now. She did not care about literature, and she missed that passion. She was not passionate about anything anymore. Passion seemed dangerous to her, yet she missed it. She examined the prose and tried to feel a stirring in her heart, but instead of taking flight, the words landed like lead, dull thuds with no echo. If she could not get excited about literature anymore, then what was left?