Restoration (34 page)

“Levette’s
what
?”

“His mural, his painting…?”

“All right.”

“Tell Mr. Lowenstein I can show it to him, if he’s interested. But he’ll have to answer a few of my questions afterward.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said, then pressed her mouth flush against the screen and proffered a kiss. “That’s for helping me that time.”

I walked back to the garçonnière, thinking about it, and called Patrick. He seemed to have a hard time reining in the phone; it banged around awhile before he said anything. “You get my note?” He sounded hung over.

“Unbelievable,” I told him.

“He wants two million for it. He should get every penny, too, the way the market’s been going lately.”

“Did he tell you what his plans are, Patrick? He’s lived at the place for more than fifty years. I wonder where he’ll move to.”

“I didn’t ask him. He’s not the sort of man who invites personal questions of that sort, and I didn’t want to give him any excuse to reconsider and change his mind. Can you keep a secret, Jack?”

“I think you know the answer to that one.”

“I’ve talked to Elsa about buying the property—about our doing it together. Most of her accounts originate in New Orleans as it is, and for months she’s been talking about opening an office here. She makes a good living, far better than I do, and if we shop for a mortgage together we might get lucky and find someone willing to do the loan. It’s a long shot, but well worth our investigating.”

“Would you marry her, Patch?”

“Let’s not put the cart before the horse, old boy. We don’t want to be hasty. Elsa and I have been dating for only seventeen years now. Why rush things? You know,” he said, “I’m rather overwhelmed that I even find myself in a position to make a run at a place like Lowenstein’s. Before
Beloved Dorothy
entered the picture, I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Not to overstate it, but I feel a great debt of gratitude to this Asmore character. He’s changed my life, and only sixty years after he ended his. Too bad he’s no longer around to thank, isn’t it?”

“Too bad,” I said.

“One day I’ll have to place a wreath on his grave. I owe him that much. By the way, Jack, you wouldn’t know where he’s buried, would you?”

Less than an hour later I was standing at the spot in a corner of Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, just across Basin Street from the French Quarter, and hard by a housing project built on the former site of Storyville, the city’s infamous red-light district. Rain fell in sheets from the black sky and raked against my slicker, and I couldn’t stop shaking, although it wasn’t the weather that had my body in spasms.

Like others in the cemetery, Asmore’s tomb was raised above-ground
to protect the coffin inside from being disinterred in the event of flooding. I recalled from my reading that the artist’s remains did not reside in the low, rectangular structure of brick and mortar, but to stand on the sod where his friends, teachers and admirers had once stood and grieved over his empty coffin had no small impact on me. I’d become one of them, I supposed, and suddenly I felt a closeness to the man that no amount of research had been able to provide. In the graveyard he was more real to me than he had been anywhere else, including the beauty school, the small rooms of Annie Rae Toussaint’s house and his home in the French Quarter. While locating his tomb had been significant, it was the dark poetry of the legend carved on its face that made my heart pound. I reached out a hand and felt the words with my fingertips. BELOVED ASMORE, it said.

It wasn’t until I started to walk away from the tomb that other unanticipated details registered. I turned back and leaned against the rain surveying the mausoleum again as well as others in the area. At least three of them, including those to the left and the right of Asmore’s, were inscribed with the same family name: Lowenstein. “You again,” I muttered, although I can’t say it came as a surprise.

It should have ended there. But I happened to cast my eyes downward, to the foot of Asmore’s tomb, where a single flower lay on the cement slab that formed an apron under the bricks, its petals bruised from exposure, the spray of leaves around it beaded with raindrops. It was a magnolia. On the path leading up to the tomb were parallel tracks running a few feet apart and cut into the wet sod. They might’ve been put there by a gardener’s cart. But more likely they were marks left by a wheelchair.

We drove to the studio in silence. I reached to turn on the radio but he tapped the back of my hand, stopping me. He smelled of analgesic rub, urine and other odors that I thought best not to acknowledge lest they discourage me and send me back home. As usual, his shirt was
clean and stiffly starched, immaculate, while his pants were rumpled, stained and filthy. Over his clothes he wore a raincoat even though the storm was long gone. He also wore leather brogans without laces and without socks and I could see the bruises and broken blood vessels at his ankles. He was unshaven and sparse white whiskers pebbled his jaw, but at least he’d taken the trouble to comb his hair. It was good hair for an old man. I considered telling him that, but saying anything about a man’s hair felt unnatural and I couldn’t get it out. I also considered starting with the questions about Asmore, now that he was stuck in the car with me and couldn’t escape. Instead I said, “Where will you go, Mr. Lowenstein, once you find a buyer?”

He stared at me but never did answer.

It had stopped raining and now a breeze blew and tunneled down the streets. Light from the streetlamps lay in pools on the asphalt and colored the air a greenish yellow. It felt like fall was coming even though the temperature outside was probably over seventy degrees and midnight had come and gone an hour ago. I felt a loneliness I couldn’t place or make sense of. It was the loneliness, I figured, that came with the changing of the seasons, and it made me want out of my body. I wished I’d stayed at home and gone to bed. I would be sleeping now like everybody else in the world. That was how I felt: like I was the last person awake in the world, even with Lowenstein beside me and Rhys Goudeau waiting for us on Martin Luther King.

I parked and got out and from inside the car he said something. I walked around to his side and opened the door and lowered my head to hear him better. “You say something, Mr. Lowenstein?”

“Goddamned arthritis,” he said.

“No, it was something else.”

“I said that’s where I went to temple.”

“Where?”

“That building there. When I was a boy.” He looked off in the direction of an old church that now was home to an African-American congregation, Baptist probably. “I grew up in this neighborhood,” Lowenstein said. “It’s all black now but I grew up here.”

“It isn’t all black,” I said.

“No, it’s all black, trust me.”

“But I know for a fact that not all the businesses are black.”

“The businesses?” And he laughed. “What businesses? The businesses on Dryades Street? The ones on Carondelet? They all left. They left a long time ago.”

“Uglesich’s Restaurant is still here. There’s a dairy still here. The Crescent City Conservation Guild is here.”

“The what?” He grabbed the doorframe and put a foot out. “Take my word for it,” he said. “I know what I’m telling you.”

I offered a hand but he pushed me away. I stood back and watched him. What had Levette Asmore seen in the man to keep him around as a friend? Had he ever been anything but rude and condescending? What about
old?
Was it truly possible that he’d been young once? A look of pain aggravated his face as he extricated himself from the car and stood on the sidewalk and rose to as tall as he could make himself. “I remember when the fire department came and saved my grandmother’s house,” he said.

“The
what?”
I said it the same way he had said it earlier, to show that it didn’t matter, that
he
didn’t matter.

He was looking across the boulevard at the firehouse. “The whole back of it was in flames. They were Irish, the firemen.”

“They were Irish? How’d you know that?”

“I remember their blue eyes.”

I was still thinking poorly of him, still wondering if he might’ve been different once. “I could give a damn what they were,” I said.

He nodded as though he understood. He looked at me awhile. “It started in the kitchen,” he went on. “They stopped it before it could move to the rest of the house.”

“Why did they have to be white firemen? Irish boys?”

“They didn’t have to be,” he said. “That’s what they were.”

“Sometimes I hate the world, I swear I hate it. I hate the way God made it.”

“So do I,” he said. “But I didn’t hate it as much back then.”

We walked to the building and Rhys opened the doors and I went in first and Lowenstein followed. The two of them stood just inside looking at each other. She helped him off with his raincoat. “Can I get you something to drink?” She was talking to Lowenstein. “How about a cup of coffee? I think I have Coke, too. Would you like a Coke?”

“I’m not thirsty.”

“I’m glad you came,” she said.

“I thought it might be worth another look.”

He refused our help getting up the stairs, and for a while I thought we’d have to carry him. With each step he paused for breath and, using a badly disfigured index finger, counted the number remaining before he reached the top. “Only nine left,” he said near the halfway point.

“You’re doing great,” Rhys said.

“Eight,” he said, five minutes later when he’d made it to the next step.

He reached the landing and asked for a chair and Rhys dragged one over and he sat with his elbows on his thighs and his upper body taking in and letting out air. A film of sweat glistened on his face. Rhys gave him a glass of water and when he drank some spilled on his shirt and exposed wisps of curly white hair against the pink of his sunken chest. “I’m used to spilling on myself,” he said.

“You should never get used to that,” Rhys said.

“It’ll dry. Give it a half hour.”

She came back with a towel and patted the wet spot on his shirt. She put the glass away, then she placed a hand on his shoulder and stooped down until her face was almost even with his. “Can I help you back up to your feet, Mr. Lowenstein? Why don’t we walk the rest of the way together?”

He glanced upward, eyes rimmed red and blinking as they met the lights overhead. He looked confused, as if he’d momentarily forgotten who Rhys was or who he was himself. “Mr. Lowenstein?” Rhys said in a sweet voice.

“I want you to know how well I thought of your grandmother,” he told her. “She was a sweet, dear girl.”

Rhys moved her hand over to the back of his neck. Her face was right in front of his. “Thank you. Thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me.”

“A dear, sweet girl,” he said again.

He got up and shuffled over to the middle of the room and stood at the foot of the tables with the mural. His gaze went first to the lovers, then to the group of men shooting dice. He tapped a hand against his flank and a strange, clumsy grin came to his face. He threw his head back and seemed to laugh, but except for a kind of wheezing no sound came out. After a minute I understood that he was crying, sobbing as he choked on the air he was trying to breathe. “I’m there,” he said, pointing his crooked finger at the painting now. “I’m still there.”

“Jack thought that might be you,” Rhys said.

“What a… what an ugly boy I was.”

“You weren’t ugly.”

“I was
ugly.”

“Here,” and Rhys brought the chair back over.

He sat as upright as he could, pushing with his hands against his thighs to keep from pitching forward, and fighting the thing that had taken control of him. “Oh Levette,” he said. “Oh Levette oh Levette…”

It was hard to watch and when I looked at Rhys I saw that she was fighting it, too. You would think it goes away at some age and doesn’t hurt so much anymore. That it fades from memory or is forgotten or scars over so that when you visit it again there is none of the wound left. But it doesn’t go away. As long as we’re alive it never goes away. “Mr. Lowenstein,” I said, “do you want me to take you home? It’s no problem if you want to go home.”