door for me. He was wearing his robe, and puffing on his obnoxious pipe and laughing. ‘I told you I would show you what I looked like when I was twenty!’ he said. He laughed and laughed.
“I remember I followed him into the parlor. And it was such a lovely room, then, nothing like it is now, you should have seen it. Absolutely lovely French pieces, mostly Louis Cinque, which Julien had bought himself in Europe when he went with Mary Beth. So light and elegant and simply lovely. That art deco furniture was all Stella’s doing. She thought it was quite the thing, what with potted palms everywhere! The only good piece of furniture was that Bozendorfer piano. The place looked perfectly mad when I went up there for the funeral, and you know of course that Stella was buried from the house. No funeral parlor for Stella. Why, Stella was laid out in the very front room in which she’d been shot, do you know that? I kept looking around, wondering where exactly it had happened. And don’t you know everybody else was doing that, and they had already locked up Lionel, of course. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. Lionel had been such a sweet boy, and so good-looking. And he and Stella used to go everywhere together. But what was I saying?
“Oh, yes, that incredible night. I’d just seen young Julien downtown, beautiful young Julien, speaking French to me, and then I was home again and following old Julien into the parlor and he sat down on the couch there, and stretched out his legs and said, ‘Ah, Richard, there are so many things I could tell you, so many things I could show you. But I’m old now. And what’s the point? One very fine consolation of old age is you don’t need to be understood anymore. A sort of resignation sets in with the inevitable hardening of the arteries.’
“Of course I was still upset. ‘Julien,’ I said. ‘I demand to know how you did it.’ He wouldn’t answer me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was staring at the fire. He always had both fires going in that room in winter. It has two fireplaces, you know, and one is slightly smaller than the other.
“A little later he waked from his dream and he reminded me that he was writing his life story. I might read that after his death, perhaps. He wasn’t sure.
“ ‘I have enjoyed my life,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a person shouldn’t enjoy his life as much as I have enjoyed mine. Ah, there is so much misery in the world and I have always had such a splendid time! Seems unfair, doesn’t it? I should have done more for others, much more. I should have been more inventive! But all of that is in my book. You can read it later.’
“He said more than once that he was writing his life story. He really had quite an interesting life, you know, being born so long before the Civil War, and seeing so very much. I used to ride with him uptown, and we would ride through Audubon Park and he would talk about the days when all that land had been a plantation. He talked about taking the steamboat from Riverbend. He talked about the old opera house and the quadroon balls. On and on, he talked. I should have written it down. He used to tell little Lionel and Stella those stories too, and how they both listened. He’d take them downtown in the carriage with us, and he would point out places in the French Quarter to them, and tell them wonderful little tales.
“I tell you I wanted to read that life story. I remember several occasions on which I came into the library and he was writing away, and remarked that it was the autobiography. He wrote by hand, though he did have a typewriter. And he didn’t mind at all that the children were underfoot. Lionel would be in there reading by the fire, or Stella would be playing with her doll on the couch, didn’t matter one bit, he would just be writing away on his autobiography.
“And what do you think? When he died, there was no life story. That’s what Mary Beth told me. I begged her to let me see whatever he’d written. She said offhandedly there was nothing. She would not let me touch anything on his desk. She locked me out of the library. Oh, I hated her for it, positively hated her. And she did it in such an offhanded way. She would have convinced anybody else she was telling the truth, that’s how sure of herself she was. But I had seen the manuscript. She did give me something which belonged to him, and I’ve always been grateful.”
At that point Llewellyn produced a beautiful carbuncle ring and showed it to me. I complimented him on it, and told him I was curious about the days of Storyville. What had it been like to go there with Julien? His answer was quite lengthy:
“Oh, Julien loved Storyville, he really did. And the women at Lulu White’s Hall of Mirrors adored him, I can tell you. They waited on him as if he were a king. Same thing everywhere he went. Lots of things happened down there, however, that I don’t much like to talk about. It wasn’t that I was jealous of Julien. It was very simply shocking to a clean-living Yankee boy such as I had been.” Llewellyn laughed. “But you’ll understand better what I mean if I tell you.
“The first time Julien took me it was winter, and he had his coachman drive us up to the front doors of one of the best houses. There was a pianist playing there then-I’m not sure who it was now, maybe Manuel Perez, maybe Jelly Roll Morton-I was never the fan of jazz and ragtime that Julien was. He just loved that pianist-they always called those pianists the professor, you know-and we sat in the parlor listening, and drinking champagne, and it was quite good champagne, and of course the girls came in with all their tawdry finery and foolish airs-there was the Duchess this and the Countess that-and they tried to seduce Julien, and he was just perfectly charming to all of them. Then finally he made his choice and it was this older woman, rather plain, and that puzzled me, and he said we were both going upstairs. Of course I didn’t want to be with her; nothing could have persuaded me to be with her, but Julien only smiled at that, and said that I should watch and that way I’d learn something of the world. Very typical Julien.
“And what do you think happened when we went into the bedroom? Well, it wasn’t the woman Julien was interested in, it was her two daughters, nine and eleven years old. They sort of helped with preparations-the examination of Julien, to put it delicately, to make certain that he didn’t have you know … and then the washing. I tell you I was stunned to watch those children perform these intimate duties, and do you know that when Julien went to it with the mother, the two little girls were there on the bed? They were both very pretty, one with dark hair, the other with blond curls. They wore little chemises, and dark stockings, if you can imagine, and they were enticing, I think even to me. Why, you could see their little nipples through the chemises. Didn’t have hardly any breasts at all. I don’t know why that was so enticing. They sat against the high carved back of the bed-you know, it was one of those machine-made atrocities that went clear to the ceiling with the half tester and the crown-and they even kissed him like attending angels when he … he … mounted the mother, so to speak.
“I’ll never forget those children, the way it all seemed so natural to them! And natural to Julien.
“Of course he behaved throughout all this as gracefully in such a situation as a human being could possibly behave. You would have thought that he was Darius, King of Persia, and that these ladies were his harem, and there was not the slightest bit of self-consciousness in him or crudery. Afterwards, he drank some more champagne with them, and even the little girls drank it. The mother tried to work her charms on me, but I would have none of it. Julien would have stayed there all night if I hadn’t asked him to leave. He was teaching both the girls ‘a new poem.’ Seems he taught them a poem every time he came down; and they recited three or four of the past lessons for him, one a Shakespeare sonnet. The new one was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
“I couldn’t wait to leave that place. And on the way home, I really lit into him. ‘Julien, whatever we are, we are grown people. Those were just children,’ I said. He was his usual genial self. ‘Come on, now, Richard,’ he said, ‘don’t be foolish. Those were what are called trick babies. They were born in a house of prostitution; and they’ll live out their lives that way. I didn’t do anything to them that would hurt them. And if I hadn’t been with their mother this evening, somebody else would have been with her and with them. But I’ll tell you what strikes me, Richard, about the whole matter. It’s the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that’s the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it’s wondrous to me. They make me think of the wildflowers that grow in the cracks of the pavements, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.’
“I didn’t argue with him any further. But I remember that he talked on and on. He said there were children in every city in the country who were more miserable than those children. Of course that didn’t make it all right.
“I know he went to Storyville often, and he didn’t take me along. But I’ll tell you something else rather strange … ” (Here he hesitated. He required some prodding.) “He used to take Mary Beth with him. He took her to Lulu White’s and to the Arlington, and the way they managed it was that Mary Beth dressed as a man.
“I saw them go out together on more than one occasion, and of course if you ever saw Mary Beth you would understand. She was not an ugly woman in any sense, but she wasn’t delicate. She was tall and strongly built, and she had rather large features. In one of her husband’s three-piece suits, she made a damned good-looking man.
