Lew. Every day of my life, every hour and minute of it. Whatever I do, work, family, on some level it’s just another way of keeping fear at bay. As a child, I used to wonder why I was so different, why others weren’t afraid.”
“Then you realized they were.”
“Are they? I’m still not sure. Some are. You can see it in their eyes, the way they can’t bear to be alone or in silence, in all the habits and hungers they’d swear to you are their passions. I remember how years ago, back when I was living with you that first time, you told me you didn’t trust anyone who had no sense of humor. I think I feel the same way about people whose fear doesn’t show.”
“Maybe that’s why you do the work you do.”
She nodded. “It’s why my mother did.”
We sat quietly and I thought how proud I was of this young woman, of the life she’d made for herself. Maybe it was in the genes: she’d recapitulated her mother’s transformation. Sitting beside her there with Barry’s music flowing like honey, I was vividly aware of her youth, her vitality, of the warmth rising from her body. Of how much I loved her.
“You know what Hortense Callisher said?” she told me at the door. “
Then she went in to her family and I, after putting in the necessary appearance, offering up regrets, struck out homeward on foot. With each footfall my breath materialized before me, remained there a moment, and was gone. Only this light silk sportcoat for warmth. I had no notion what time it was. Growing late-I was safe with that. It’s always growing late. Time enough, still, to meet my kinswoman Mrs. Molino?
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In my memory she’s always there at the edge of things, sipping half cups of coffee, shuffling about in slippers: a small, ill-defined woman, face closed like a fist about-what? Pain? Her disaffection and disappointment with life, I suppose. Only in photographs, old photographs, did I ever see her smile. I don’t know what made her go on. She had no passions that I know of. There was nothing she loved, nothing was ever as it should be, nothing was good enough. As years went on she faded ever further from life, her days held together by meager threads of routine. I recognize so much of her in myself, so much of myself in her.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Self-defense.”
“What?”
“How I learned to cook. When I was a kid, we ate all this wonderful stuff, what people started calling soul food in the Sixties, corn bread, greens, pig tails, black-eyed peas, grits, salt meat. My parents were depression people, country folk. But then as urbanization kicked in full force, as the country grew more prosperous and all those wonderful progressive products hit the stores, little by little that wonderful food stopped showing up on the table. Canned peas and ground meat now. Biscuits out of cardboard tubes. You wouldn’t think they could, but things got even worse when my mother went to work-she’d waited till I was in junior high. She was getting sicker by then, too, steadily falling away from the world. Food had never mattered to her. Now she’d bring home this stuff from the grocery store where she worked, TV dinners, mixes, prepackaged foods of all sorts, and that’s what would show up on the table. When she did cook, she fried-a true Southerner. Or laid things out in a pressure cooker and turned them into something unrecognizable to sight or taste.”
Mrs. Molino’s hand, putting down her cup, continued across the table to my own. Nothing sexual in this for all her attractiveness, despite the physicality vibrating the very air around her. Simple human warmth, rather. She was one of those to whom connections came easy.
“I spent a lot of time later on, after I left home, reading cookbooks, just trying to puzzle my way through the basics. Wore a groove in kitchen tiles going back and forth from cookbooks to counter or stove.”
Since we’d missed the reservation at Commander’s, at my suggestion we’d gone instead to Jessie’s, a neighborhood bar and grill of the sort that abounds here and almost nowhere else. There was a huge, wraparound old bar and only five or six small tables in the back for food service, but far more people came here to eat than to drink. The door rarely closed all the way: one customer caught it coming in as another, toting sacks, went out. Weekends, people lined up two or three deep at the bar having a Jax, bourbon or rum and coke as they waited. Jessie was a twig-thin albino with knobby joints, six-foot-four and 120 pounds tops, hair clipped short and so colorless it disappeared under lights, maroon eyes. His catfish po-boys, dressed with shredded lettuce, homemade pickle and his own remoulade, were the stuff of legend. I’d seen children in high chairs being fed pinches of these sandwiches by their parents. They’d probably grow up, move to Texas or Iowa, and need to be weaned. Decompressed, like deep-sea divers.
The coffee was almost as good. This, in a city that takes its coffee seriously. Local legend had it that Jessie added a spoonful of graveyard dirt to each pot. Things like that made you consider how essentially pagan New Orleans could be. Citizens here still keep track of solstices, favor Halloween and All Saints’ Day over Christmas.
“You and Deborah’ve been together awhile.”
I nodded.
“Is this it, do you think?”
“I suspect so. She’s never been one to make arbitrary or tentative moves.”
“Then I’m sorry, Lewis.”
I was about to say more when Don stepped through the doorway, glanced around, and walked towards us, followed in short order by Rick Garces.
“I’m going to assume you’re looking for me, and didn’t just stop by for a catfish fix.”
“Nah. Roast beef’s better, anyway.”
“So how’d you find me?”
“You mentioned you were meeting with Dr. Guidry-”
I was fairly certain I hadn’t, but let it pass.
“-so I swung by. Mrs. Molino here-”
“Catherine: Don Walsh, Rick Garces. Both old friends.”
“-left her destination with the housekeeper, in case she was needed.”
“Good to see you, Rick.” We shook hands. “Been some time. Why do I remember you as smaller?”
“Probably because I was. And it’s all your fault. You took me to that Cuban restaurant the first time, now I can’t stay out of there. Jose has a Cuban coffee working, sandwich soaking up grease on the grill, before I’m through the door. Then afterwards the damn fool brings me flan on the house. And I’m damn fool enough to eat it.”
As we spoke, Catherine had discreetly gone off and borrowed chairs for them both from other tables. Embarrassed, as much from not noticing as from her ministry, they sat.
“And what does Eugene think of that?” I asked. Eugene had enlarged, cropped and framed my favorite photo of LaVerne, a snapshot Rick took just before she died, when she’d stuck her head in his door at the Foucher’s Women Shelter where they both worked to ask Rick about a client.
“More of you to love, is what he says.”
“Good man.”
“You bet he is.”
I went back to the window behind the bar to tell Jessie we needed four coffees when he had the chance. Steam from the grill wreathed his face. “Ever think about getting some help in here?”
“You volunteering?”
“I could get the coffees.”
“You do that. And while you’re at it, see who else needs a refill. Pot must be scraping bottom ’long about
