Southern Ruby (25 page)

I scanned the pages, still searching for Jewel but not holding out much hope, until I came across a black and white picture of a dancer on stage, taken from the side view. It was captioned:
The dancer Jewel, one of the most popular acts in New Orleans, who disappeared mysteriously in 1955
. I read the copy, but there was no further mention of her.

I stared at the picture. It showed a woman wearing a figure-hugging, black lace fishtail dress. Her soft curls hid most of her face, but the audience's expressions ranged from adoration to rapture. I tried to see Grandma Ruby in the woman, but the angle of the photograph made it impossible to discern her facial features. All I could deduce was that Jewel had been beautiful.

I put the book back and accepted I'd reached a dead end — for now anyway.

On my way to the French Quarter I stopped at a Walgreens to buy a couple of bottles of water. As I waited in line for the cashier I eyed a dumpbin full of baby alligator heads. The sign above it read:
On Special: $7.99
. Were they real or plastic?

‘In case you were wondering, yes, I'm afraid they're real, Amandine. They're preserved after slaughter to sell to tourists.'

I turned to see Elliot Davenport, the jazz history professor I'd met at Estée's funeral. He wasn't wearing a gaudy outfit this time, but a grey fitted shirt that showed off his toned body. In his shopping basket were some potatoes, flour and several packets of Fig Newtons biscuits.

‘They're a weakness of mine,' he said. ‘I like to munch on them when I'm marking student papers.'

‘They're called Spicy Fruit Rolls in Australia,' I told him. ‘They were my favourite biscuits when I was a child.'

‘Biscuits?' he said, grinning. ‘That sounds very posh. We call them cookies here.'

After finishing at the cashier, we stepped out into the street together.

‘What have you been up to this morning?' he asked me.

I wasn't about to reveal that I was trying to find out if my grandmother had been a stripper or not, so I told him I was exploring the area.

‘Well, would you like to come back to my place for a “biscuit”? My apartment building is a former Creole mansion constructed in 1820 — it's still got the original windows and transoms. I think you'll like it.'

I laughed. ‘Okay, that sounds good. I was planning on doing an architectural tour anyway.'

We walked along Bourbon Street, past a rowdy group of male tourists with plastic cups of beer in their hands. One of them was wearing a tank top with a silhouette of a pole dancer and a slogan that read
I support single moms
. I thought of the pictures I'd seen of well-dressed patrons watching strippers in the 1950s. Things had certainly changed in the Quarter.

‘White trash!' Elliot whispered to me.

‘Bogans!' I whispered back.

‘“Biscuits”, “bogans” — I'm going to Australia to learn the language!'

Further on, a crowd had gathered around a gangly girl with curly hair who was playing a piano accordion and singing. Elliot and I sat on the kerb to listen to her. She had a crystal-clear contralto voice that reminded me of the 1930s jazz singer Connee Boswell, but with a modern element to it. She was singing Louis Armstrong's ‘Skeleton in the Closet'. When she finished the piece, the audience applauded enthusiastically and dropped notes into her accordion case. She moved on to other jazz numbers, and the crowd was joined by more people.

‘She's unique,' I said to Elliot. ‘I'd pay to see her perform. Why is she out on the street?'

‘In New Orleans we don't snub street artists or think of them as buskers,' he explained. ‘You'll see some of the best music out here on the street. Even our famous musicians are just part of
the scene. I saw Dr John at the laundromat on Esplanade the other day, washing his shorts like any other regular guy.'

We dropped some dollar bills in the girl's case and continued on.

‘Jazz is considered a sophisticated taste now, but it didn't start out that way,' Elliot told me. ‘It had its birth in the bordellos of the Storyville district of New Orleans and is a blend of musical influences from everything, from the old slave chants to ragtime and the blues, brass bands and a primitive African beat. It was considered the right kind of music to put men in the mood to spend money on women and liquor. A lot of people don't know that Jelly Roll Morton got his start playing in brothels, or that Louis Armstrong's mother was a prostitute.'

‘Wow! I had no idea.'

‘Boston, New York and Philadelphia might have museums and opera houses sponsored by honourable philanthropists and businessmen, but many of the charitable institutions and public works in New Orleans were paid for by the madams of brothels. This is a city built on sin.'

I remembered Grandma Ruby's story and was about to ask him about burlesque and jazz, but before I had a chance we reached his apartment building. The courtyard was accessed through an arched passageway that I assumed had once been used for horse-drawn carriages, and was a dizzying riot of banana trees, bamboo, fan palms and ferns in hanging pots. A fountain in the middle tumbled water into a pond brimming with lilies and goldfish. Looking around the courtyard helped me understand Grandma Ruby better. She loved the house in the Garden District because that's where she had lived with her husband and children, but she was definitely a product of the French Quarter: dark and sultry.

‘Our resident ghost walks straight across this courtyard, humming an old French song, “Sur le Pont d'Avignon”,' Elliot said. ‘She then goes through this wall into my apartment before
disappearing. ‘But she looks content and doesn't cause any trouble so nobody has ever called in the ghost-busters.'

‘Seriously? You've seen her?'

He grinned. ‘Not yet. I've only heard about her from my neighbours. But a few more drinks on Friday night on Bourbon Street and I might.'

I followed him through the front door and was immediately charmed by the quirky and cramped apartment. The kitchen, dining room and living room were all one space, with roughly hewn floorboards, oriental rugs and more CDs on the custom-made shelves than there were books in my parents' bedroom. A saxophone was propped on a stand in the corner, and a wrought-iron spiral staircase led to an upper floor. Three of the walls were the original exposed brick while the fourth had been painted vintage green, which worked well with the lush vegetation of the courtyard. But it was the kitchen corner that intrigued me. It was the most minimalist kitchen I'd ever seen, consisting of only a narrow fridge, a square ceramic sink, a medicine cupboard and a freestanding cooker. But judging by the well-used saucepans and the crowded spice rack that hung along the wall, Elliot must love to cook.

‘Come meet Duke,' he said, placing his shopping in the medicine cupboard before turning to an armoire whose doors had been removed and replaced with chicken wire. Inside was an arrangement of branches, water containers and a kitty litter tray on the bottom. Elliot reached in and brought out a grey squirrel, perching him on his sleeve to show him to me. The squirrel climbed up and down Elliot's arm and playfully swiped at his face.

‘He's so cute,' I said, patting the animal.

Duke leaped from Elliot's shoulder onto the curtain rod and began grooming himself.

‘Is he happy in his cage?' I asked. ‘Doesn't he want to go outside?'

‘I only put him in the cage to keep him out of trouble when I'm not home. Otherwise he's got free use of the room, and I take him out for a run around the courtyard at least once a day. I don't believe in keeping wild animals as pets, but he came to me in an unusual way. I discovered him on the back seat of my car when I was returning from a teachers' conference in Oregon. He was a baby, and I couldn't reunite him with his family as I didn't know where he'd come from — I might have acquired him at any number of stops I'd made along the way. I took him to a vet who showed me how to feed him. She noticed he was blind in one eye, and for that reason he'll never be able to be rehabilitated back into the wild.'

‘He's lucky he found you then,' I said.

He plucked Duke from the curtain rod and rubbed cheeks with him. ‘No, I'm lucky to have found him. He's good company for me. My apartment's too small for a dog or a cat and I love animals.'

The more I discovered about Elliot, the more I liked him. Being able to cook and being kind to animals were big pluses.

‘Do you mind if I use your bathroom?' I asked.

‘No problem. It's upstairs.'

The bathroom was as quirky as the rest of the apartment, with low exposed beams and unfinished walls that contrasted sharply with the sparkling white bathtub and sink. In the corner was a slim bathroom cupboard. Although I tried not to, I couldn't resist looking inside for ‘girlfriend evidence' — lipstick, perfume, scented bath salts — among the guy stuff. But there wasn't any.

On my way back downstairs I caught a glimpse of the tidy bedroom with its pale blue colours and canopied bed.
Very nice
, I thought. I was getting a good feeling about Elliot.

He had made coffee and set out some Fig Newtons on a plate.

‘I appreciate you sharing your stash with me,' I told him.

‘My pleasure. I'll share my biscuits with you anytime, Amandine.'

I blushed so deeply I felt like a fourteen-year-old girl again.

He looked at me curiously, then took a sip of coffee. ‘I was thinking that I should introduce you to a friend of mine. He's a jazz aficionado in his seventies. You can quiz him on the A–Z of New Orleans music and he knows all the answers. There's a good chance he could have met your father. We can go see him now if you like?'

‘You bet!' I said. ‘I know it might be hard to believe, but I only discovered recently that my father was a musician. Learning about him through his music is like a gift to me.'

We finished our coffee, then walked to St Peter Street where Elliot had parked his Ford Taurus. He opened the passenger door for me before getting into the driver's seat. ‘I'm taking you to the Lower Ninth Ward. Have you heard of it?'

‘No.'

‘It's a neighbourhood of New Orleans where tourists don't go,' he said, putting on his seat belt and turning the key in the ignition. ‘It's got a lot of trouble with gangs and drug dealers. But don't worry, you'll be safe with me.'

I bit my lip and braced myself inwardly. Between going to a funeral where the deceased participated in her own wake and discovering Grandma Ruby had been a stripper, I was ready for anything.

‘I don't think it's as bad as people make out,' he said, as we crossed the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. ‘The area has a sense of community. Many of the residents have lived here for generations, but unfortunately it's the riff-raff that give it a bad name. Now you're in New Orleans you might hear the joke, “I'm from the Ninth and I don't mind dying.”'

The district had a rural feel about it with its chain-link fences, dirt roads, and grassy vacant lots. Many of the older houses
were wooden rectangular-style dwellings known as ‘shotguns' because of their design. The rooms followed one behind the other, with the front and back doors in line, so theoretically a bullet could be fired from one end straight through to the other. Some of the houses and lawns were neatly kept, but many showed the tired neglect of poverty. An elderly couple sat in beach chairs on their lawn. A group of boys with their jeans hanging halfway down their buttocks and their caps turned backwards did skateboard tricks in a driveway.

‘The area was once a plantation, but then it was subdivided into cheap land for poor European immigrants and former slaves who were working in nearby industries,' Elliot told me. ‘Their descendants lived together in harmony until the schools were desegregated in the 1960s. Then a lot of the white people moved out.'

He pulled up in front of a blond-brick house with a bright yellow roof and the initials
F.D.
painted on it. ‘Do you know who F.D. is?'

I shook my head. ‘No.'

He started humming ‘Blueberry Hill'.

‘Fats Domino!' I cried. ‘Did he used to live in the Lower Ninth Ward?'

‘He still does, right there in that house, though most people don't even know he's still alive. Everyone remembers Elvis Presley, but Fats Domino is almost forgotten. Well, if the Lower Ninth is good enough for a founding father of rock'n'roll, then it's all right by me. This place has soul.'

Elliot drove on a few more streets before pulling up in front of a house that stood out from the others around it. It was freshly painted in a caramel colour with maroon shutters and trimmings. There was a camel-back extension in the rear, and the tidy garden was bordered by a heritage green metal fence. Gardenias lined the path to the front door, and a Chinese fan palm shaded the front porch.

We got out of the car and I expected Elliot to knock on the door, but he pushed it open and called out, ‘Terence! I've brought someone to see you!'