lighter than
Therese went to visit her brother in Southern California. A lie, he knew, though he had not touched the phone, merely heard the voice through the answering machine. Fine. Good-bye.
When his old girlfriend Elizabeth called from New York, he talked to her until he actually passed out. The next morning she told him he must get psychiatric help. She threatened to drop work and fly out if he didn’t agree. He agreed. But he was lying.
He did not want to confide in anybody. He did not want to describe the new intensity of feeling. He certainly didn’t want to talk about his hands. All he wanted to talk about were the visions, and nobody wanted to hear about that, nobody wanted to hear him talk about the curtain dropping that separated the living from the dead.
After Aunt Viv went to bed, he experimented just a little with the touching power. He could tell a great deal from an object when he allowed himself to handle it slowly; if he asked questions of his power-that is, tried to direct it-he could receive even more. But he did not like the feel of it, of these images flashing through his head. And if there was a reason he had been given this sensitivity, the reason was forgotten along with the vision, and the sense of purpose regarding his return to life.
Stacy brought him books to read about others who had died and come back. Dr. Morris at the hospital had told him of these works-the classic studies of the “near death experience” by Moody, Rawlings, Sabom, and Ring. Fighting the drunkenness, the agitation, the sheer inability to concentrate for any length of time, he forced himself through some of these accounts.
Yes, he knew this! It was all true. He too had risen out of his body, yes, and it was no dream, yes, but he had not seen a beautiful light; he had not been met by dead loved ones; and there had been no unearthly paradise to which he was admitted, full of flowers and beautiful colors. Something altogether different had happened out there. He had been intercepted as it were, appealed to, made to realize that he must perform a very difficult task, that much depended upon it.
Paradise. The only paradise he had ever known was in the city where he’d grown up, the warm sweet place he’d left when he was seventeen, that old great square of some twenty-five-odd city blocks known in New Orleans as the Garden District.
Yes, back there, where it all started. New Orleans which he hadn’t seen since the summer of his seventeenth year. And the funny thing was, that when he considered his life, as drowning men are supposed to do, he thought first and foremost of that long-ago night when, at age six, he had discovered classical music on his grandmother’s back porch, listening in the fragrant dusk to an old tube radio. Four o’clocks glowing in the dark. Cicadas grinding in the trees. His grandfather was smoking a cigar on the step, and then that music came into his life, that heavenly music.
Why had he loved that music so much when nobody around him did? Different from the start, that’s what he’d been. And his mother’s breeding could not account for it. To her all music was noise, she said. Yet he had loved that music so much that he stood there conducting it with a stick, making great sweeping gestures in the dark, humming.
It was in the Irish Channel that they lived, hardworking people, the Currys, and his father was the third generation to inhabit the small double cottage in the long waterfront neighborhood where so many of the Irish had settled. From the great potato famine Michael’s ancestors had fled, packed into the emptied cotton ships on their way back from Liverpool to the American South for the more lucrative cargo.
Into the “wet grave” they’d been dumped, these hungry immigrants, some of them dressed in rags, begging for work, and dying by the hundreds from yellow fever, consumption, and cholera. The survivors had dug the city’s mosquito-infested canals. They had stoked the boilers of the big steamboats. They had loaded cotton onto ships and worked on the railroads. They had become policemen and firemen.
These were tough people, people from whom Michael had inherited his powerful build, his determination. The love of working with his hands had come from them and finally prevailed in spite of years of education.
He’d grown up hearing tales of those early days, of how the Irish workingmen themselves had built the great parish church of St. Alphonsus, dragging the stones from the river, laying the mortar, collecting for the beautiful statues that came from Europe. “We had to outdo the Germans, you see, you know they were building St. Mary’s right across the street. Nothing on earth was going to make us go to Mass with each other.” And that’s why there were two magnificent parish churches instead of one, with Masses being said by the very same staff of priests every morning.
Michael’s grandfather had worked as a policeman on the wharves, where his father had once loaded cotton bales. He took Michael to see the banana boats come in and the thousands of bananas disappearing into the warehouse on the conveyor belts, warning him about the big black snakes that could hide in the banana stalks right until they hung them up in the markets.
Michael’s father was a fire fighter until his death one afternoon in a fire on Tchoupitoulas Street when Michael was seventeen. That had been the turning point of Michael’s life, for by that time his grandparents were gone, and his mother had taken him back with her to the place of her birth, San Francisco.
There was never the slightest doubt in his mind that California had been good to him. The twentieth century had been good to him. He was the first of that old clan ever to earn a college degree, ever to live in the world of books or paintings or fine houses.
But even if his dad had never died, Michael’s life would not have been a fireman’s life. There were things stirring in him that had not ever stirred at all, it seemed, in his forebears.
It wasn’t just the music that summer night. It was the way he loved books from the time he learned to read, how he gobbled up Dickens when he was nine years old, and treasured ever after the novel
Years later in San Francisco he had given his beloved construction company that name: Great Expectations.
He used to fall into
But nobody ever beat up Michael. He had enough healthy meanness from his father to punish anyone who even tried. Even as a child he was husky and uncommonly strong, a human being for whom physical action, even of a violent sort, was fairly natural. He liked to fight too. And the kids learned to leave him alone, and also he learned to hide his secret soul enough that they forgave him the few slips and generally liked him.
And the walks, what about those long walks that nobody else his age ever took? Even his girlfriends later on never understood. Rita Mae Dwyer laughed at him. Marie Louise said he was nuts. “What do you mean, just walk?” But from the earliest years, he liked to walk, to slip across Magazine Street, the great dividing line between the narrow sunbaked streets where he’d been born and the grand quiet streets of the Garden District.
In the Garden District were the oldest uptown mansions of the city, slumbering behind their massive oaks and broad gardens. There he strolled in silence over the brick sidewalks, hands shoved in his pockets, sometimes whistling, thinking that someday he would have a great house here. He would have a house with white columns on the front and flagstone walks. He would have a grand piano, such as those he glimpsed through long floor-length windows. He would have lace curtains and chandeliers. And he would read Dickens all day long in some cool library where the books went to the ceiling and the bloodred azaleas drowsed beyond the porch railings.
He felt like Dickens’s hero, the young Pip, glimpsing what he knew he must possess and being so very far from ever having it.
But in this love of walking he was not entirely alone, for his mother had loved to take long walks, too, and perhaps it was one of the few very significant gifts she had given him.
Houses she had understood and loved, just as he always would. And when he was very small, she had brought him to this quiet sanctuary of old homes, pointing out to him her favorite spots, and the great smooth lawns often half concealed by the camellia shrubs. She had taught him to listen to the cry of the birds in the oaks, to the music of hidden fountains.
There was one dark house she dearly loved which he would never forget, a long grim town house affair with a great bougainvillea vine spilling over its side porches. And often when they passed, Michael saw a curious and solitary man standing alone among the high unkempt shrubs, far to the back of the neglected garden. He seemed
