Southern Ruby (9 page)

I thanked her and then we exchanged some small talk: Aunt Louise asked about Sydney and what I was doing; I told her about my university studies and what the weather was currently like. It wasn't a very in-depth conversation but I did feel an underlying rapport with her. When we ended the call I sat back down on the couch with my head in my hands. Had that all really happened — and so easily?

A key sounded in the door and I looked up to see Tamara and Leanne, their arms loaded with grocery shopping.

‘What's up with you?' Tamara asked, peering at me over a bunch of spinach. ‘You look like you've seen a ghost.'

‘I'm going to New Orleans!' I told her.

‘When?'

‘As soon as I can get a ticket.'

N
o sooner had I stepped into the arrivals area of Louis Armstrong Airport than a woman's voice called, ‘Amanda!'

I scanned the crowd waiting for passengers and found a woman in her late forties waving to me. She stood out from the tropical smorgasbord of tee-shirts, micro sundresses, shorts and flip-flops with her tailored beige dress and wedged hairdo. As we got closer, we stared intently at each other's face as if searching for something. With her rounded figure and fair skin she was the antithesis of me in physical appearance. She wore a necklace of silver glass beads while I wore Nan's vintage rose pendant. Her earrings were discreet Akoya pearl studs, mine were Betsey Johnson crystal encrusted skulls. Yet it was there in the light in her eyes: a recognition of kin.

She threw her arms around me. ‘Welcome back to New Orleans, darling! I'm your Aunt Louise.'

A trim man in pressed chinos and a button-front shirt joined us. ‘I'm Jonathan,' he said, heartily shaking my hand. ‘You've flown a long way to get to New-OAR-linz.'

He was softly spoken and his Southern accent was so striking that it took me a second to understand him. I remembered how my mother had described him as ‘hip'. With his moisturised skin and chiselled sideburns he was simply well-kept now.

‘Almost an entire day,' I said, brushing my fingers through my hair. ‘But I changed planes in Los Angeles.'

‘Well, let's get you back to the house,' he said, grasping the handle of my wheeled suitcase. ‘You must be exhausted.'

Aunt Louise linked her arm with mine and we followed Uncle Jonathan. She was no longer a disembodied voice on the telephone, but a real human being with her flesh pressed to mine.

‘I'm so glad you came,' she said, beaming from ear to ear. ‘Momma is beside herself with excitement, and I hope you and I will laugh as much together as your mother and I did.'

Her natural affection put me at ease, and the way she described her relationship with my mother gave me a fluttery sensation in my heart. I'd thought our first meeting might be awkward, but I felt like I'd just grown another two inches. I'd never had an aunt before. I'd only had Nan.

‘How is my grandmother?' I asked. ‘She's had some trouble with her heart?'

‘She has to take four different types of medication, but she's tougher than she looks,' Aunt Louise assured me. ‘Her physician, Doctor Wilson, says that she'll die young. “You might be eighty, ninety or one hundred when you finally go, Ruby,” he jokes. “But you'll still be young.”'

‘I'm glad,' I said, more keen than ever to meet my Grandmother Ruby. She would be able to tell me more about my father than anybody.

The air outside the terminal hit me like a burst from a hairdryer. The humidity was more oppressive than Sydney mid-January and the sun stung my winter skin. We reached Uncle Jonathan's car, a red Mustang convertible.

‘I'll leave the top up,' he said, hoisting my suitcase into the boot. ‘The weather's been oppressive today. We might get a storm on the way into town.'

He opened the door and pulled the front passenger seat forward so I could climb in the rear.

‘No, look at her legs,' Aunt Louise told him. ‘She's got Dale's height. She should sit in the front.'

The casual mention of my father's name was a shock. I had only known him as the man who had ‘destroyed our life' and taken my mother with him to an early grave. Now, maybe, I would see him in another light. After all, these were the people who had loved him.

‘No, that's fine,' I assured Aunt Louise. ‘I'll be good in the back.'

I removed my denim vest and adjusted my halter top before getting in the car. Aunt Louise gave a start when she saw the tattoos on my shoulders, but then she smiled.

‘Wings! How beautiful! It's like you're an angel.' To my surprise, her eyes filled with tears as she added, ‘A beautiful angel who has come back to us.'

As the car sped along Interstate 10, I stared out the window and tried to imagine what my mother's first impression of the city had been. From the air, New Orleans was broken up by swampland, oil refineries and canals, with the mighty Mississippi weaving through it. But from the ground, it looked much like the outskirts of any city, with billboards, airport motels, car yards and shopping malls.

As we approached the city centre, however, we passed an old cemetery with the above-ground tombs that I knew were a feature of the place. Further on, Uncle Jonathan pointed out the Superdome. ‘The home stadium of the Saints football team,' he said with pride.

We exited the interstate and drove along St Charles Avenue into the Garden District. Immediately, a strange sensation came
over me: as if I'd been away on an alien planet and now I was returning home.

The first thing I noticed was the light — it was my favourite kind: dainty lacework patterns of sunlight broken up by the canopy of the gigantic live oak trees that stretched their twisted branches across the avenue. The gardens beneath the trees were lush blends of shade-loving azaleas, crimson impatiens and lilies of every variety. In place of lawns, the ground was covered with ivy edged neatly at the borders. The trees and verdant gardens created an atmosphere of seductive mystery that suited the Greek Revival and Italianate mansions. A streetcar passed by down the centre of the avenue. New Orleans was casting its spell on me. It was like slipping into a dream from the past, back to the place where I was born.

We turned at a quiet intersection and passed another ancient cemetery, where the above-ground tombs seemed to peer over the high wall that surrounded them.

‘That's Lafayette Cemetery,' Aunt Louise explained. ‘During the yellow fever outbreaks the city suffered in the mid-1800s, the bodies were piled up outside the gates.'

‘New Orleans is supposed to be the most haunted city in the United States,' added Uncle Jonathan, turning to wink at me. ‘Who knows, maybe it is. But I've lived here all my life and nothing supernatural has ever happened to me.'

I looked at the houses again. What I hadn't noticed in my earlier rapture I now saw clearly: while many of them had been restored, others were sinking and settling. The sight of their sagging balconies and roofs, rotting shingles and deteriorating sidings was heartbreaking. The area gave off an air of decadent decay and some of the houses were plain creepy. I noticed the broken dormer window of one peeling and lopsided house, and half expected to see a ghost staring back at me.

Fortunately, the number of pickup trucks with restoration construction company signs on their doors and the rubbish
skips in driveways lifted my spirits. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore one of these houses properly, but clearly there were residents who were passionate about saving the Garden District. It occurred to me that if I'd studied restoration architecture at Tulane University instead of Sydney, I might never be out of work.

‘And here we are,' said Uncle Jonathan, turning into a shaded driveway bordered by magnolia and crepe myrtle trees. Bright blue agapanthus blooms and hedges of gardenias led the way to the front steps.

I stared at the Queen Anne Victorian mansion with its bay windows, porches, ornamental spindles and turret, and my breath caught in my throat. I stepped out of the car, my head spinning. The scent of jasmine was intoxicating and the buzzing of summer insects in the trees was deafening. My thoughts rushed at me all at once. I knew this house, but how could I possibly have remembered it? Then my eye fell to the name plate near the front door:
Amandine
. The link between me and the house was clear. I had been named after it.

‘The house was built by my great-great-grandfather in 1890,' said Aunt Louise, getting out of the car and standing beside me. ‘It's been our family home ever since. My father was born in that room,' she pointed to the second tier of the turret, ‘and so were you.'

I turned to her in astonishment. ‘Me?'

Uncle Jonathan chuckled as he lifted my suitcase out of the boot. ‘Now don't think we're so backward here that we were still birthing our children at home in the eighties. But your mother went into labour so quickly we didn't have time to call an ambulance. You slid straight out into your father's hands.'

This time I couldn't maintain my composure. The thought of my father being the person who'd held me in the first moments of my life was too much. A deep ache clenched my heart and I staggered. Uncle Jonathan caught me by the elbow.

‘It's the heat,' said Aunt Louise. ‘It can get to you if you aren't used to it, especially as you've come from winter in Australia and all.'

The front door opened and out stepped a petite woman in a periwinkle-blue dress with her grey hair twisted into a chic updo. In the crook of her arm rested a plump white rooster. The woman lifted her chin with the haughty imperiousness of a grande dame. Her posture was graceful, like a dancer awaiting her curtain call, and her long neck and delicate heart-shaped face added to the effect. Her beauty was so striking that I felt myself and Aunt Louise pale by comparison.

But then her expression crumpled and she gave a cry, rushing down the steps towards me and placing her cool, tiny hand on my arm. ‘Amandine!' she said softly, tears filling her violet-coloured eyes. ‘You've come back!' Her grip tightened. ‘You've come back to me. I knew you would. I am your Grandma Ruby.'

I was captivated by her. It was as if I'd stepped into a fantasy and she was the queen of this magical place. How could these three people standing with me in this tropical garden in front of this fairytale house be real? They had seen me come into the world, had raised me until I was two years old, and then vanished from my life like fairies. Now here we were, united again. I was Alice returned to Wonderland.

‘We'd better get Amanda some water,' Aunt Louise told her mother. ‘The heat today is unbearable.'

Grandma Ruby touched my cheek and smiled. Then seizing my hand with a physical strength that belied her size, she yanked me up the porch stairs and into the house, with Aunt Louise and Uncle Jonathan trailing behind.

She led me to a parlour with salmon-pink walls, mahogany trimmings and a grandfather clock that struck twelve midday right at that moment. My gaze drifted from a red velvet sofa with cabriole legs and trifid feet to the Aubusson rug that covered part of what appeared to be the original oak floors.
I'd been a subscriber to
Antiques Collector
magazine for years. Now the treasures from its glossy pages were here in front of my eyes.

Then it occurred to me that these objects were the first things I'd seen as a baby. I probably crawled around on that carpet and stared open-mouthed at the crystal chandelier suspended from an ornate plaster medallion. Nobody in Australia had understood how a well-crafted piece of furniture could send me into a state of euphoria, but suddenly it made perfect sense.

‘Amandine?' I turned to see Aunt Louise holding out a tray with glasses of iced water and lemon. ‘Oh,' she said, colouring slightly, ‘I meant to say “Amanda”. I keep forgetting.'

‘No,' I told her, ‘please call me Amandine. I like it.'

‘Amandine' had sounded like a pretentious name in Sydney, but here it fit me like a second skin. Perhaps it was the name of the person I was always meant to be — and soon I would discover who that person was. At my reply, everyone seemed to let out a collective sigh that they'd been holding since my arrival. It was as if by accepting my birth name I had agreed to return to the fold.

The conversation was polite as we progressed from the parlour to drinking mint juleps in the garden's summerhouse when the afternoon cooled off. My last meal had been breakfast at Los Angeles airport, and whether it was the effect of bourbon on an empty stomach, the heat, or the heady scent of the wisteria vine that shaded the summerhouse, the past seemed to peel away as Grandma Ruby, Aunt Louise, Uncle Jonathan and I mapped our way from the time I'd left New Orleans to the present.

My aunt and uncle, I learned, were real estate lawyers with their own practice in the central business district. As they spoke about their work, I was distracted by the rooster Grandma Ruby now had perched on her lap. At first I was anxious that the bird was going to be beheaded for a welcoming meal for me — I had heard that the food in New Orleans could be savage — but
it soon became obvious from the way Grandma Ruby stroked him, and the adoring manner in which he gazed at her, that the rooster was a pet. She even kissed him and addressed him by name: Flambeau.

Aunt Louise noticed my interest in the bird. ‘Two years ago, Momma and I were watching a documentary on factory farming on PBS. When the chicks hatched, the male ones were thrown alive into a meat grinder. Momma was so shocked she demanded that Johnny go to a chicken farm and find a male chick for her to raise as a recompense for the cruelty of the human race. Momma's always been a compassionate person.'

‘He's very handsome,' I said.

As if he'd understood, Flambeau jumped down from Grandma Ruby's lap and strutted towards me. I reached out to scratch him and he turned himself into various poses so that I could reach his favourite spots.

‘Your neighbours don't mind you having a rooster?' I asked. I was partial to the sound of a rooster crowing in the morning. It created an atmosphere of waking up somewhere romantically rustic, like Provence. But if anyone acquired one in Roseville the other neighbours would get a petition up to the council about ‘the noise'. Children screaming all day and leaf blowers destroying peaceful Sunday afternoons were acceptable in Sydney's suburbia, but a rooster crowing a few times in the morning was not.

‘It's illegal to have a rooster in the city of New Orleans,' explained Uncle Jonathan, ‘but people here are pretty laid-back about things like that. And besides,' he said with an affectionate glance in his mother-in-law's direction, ‘if something is illegal, forbidden or frowned upon it only makes it more attractive to Ruby.'