The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (3 page)

McGee told me later that she had wondered too. “Elizabeth and I talked about it all the time.” Talked about what? “What the hell was wrong with you.” My mother displayed uncharacteristic reticence, but then she hadn’t told me until rather late in the game—after I’d called off what would have been my first wedding—that she never thought I should marry the man in question. That had proved so successful she had no intention of opening her mouth this go-round, though I could tell it was driving her crazy. Patrick Dunne displayed no such restraint, taking almost every opportunity to declare: “You need to marry that man and buy a big house.” John himself told me on our third or fourth date that he thought we’d end up together in a sprawling kitchen. That had sounded especially nice, even then, but I had not wanted the reason we tied the knot to be better appliances. (Though, God knows, I needed them.)

At Bourbon, the tiny kitchen featured a refrigerator with no inside light and missing drawers, a dishwasher that wasn’t hooked up to a water line, and a tin can of an oven that was barely twenty-four inches across. When the first cake I baked never rose, I attributed it to the damp weather or mismeasurement of baking powder and made it again before figuring out that there was simply not enough room for air to circulate around the thing. This was a problem for a person who loves to cook and entertain as much as I do, so I became adept at making whole meals on the grill or on the lone large eye of the tiny stovetop. For all the charm of my various residences, I had never even had enough counter space to own a microwave. Suddenly, settling into a house, a real one, as opposed to a stage set, began to sound like nirvana. I started envisioning a laundry room, the big kitchen of John’s imagination, a kennel for a dog—an entirely different kind of package than the one that entailed gay bars and nurses’ outfits, as entertaining as they had been.

John’s apartment had plenty of appliances—a toaster, toaster oven, microwave, washer/dryer, everything—but not a modicum of charm. When he left his marriage, he took the first apartment he saw in the paper that had room enough for his son and daughter to spend the night, and then he never left. It was near the airport, in one of those overpaved anonymous stretches that could be Anywhere in America. Within sight of the place there was a Sports Authority, a Home Depot, a Petco, a Starbucks. The only tip-off that you might be near New Orleans was that the cineplex across the street sold frozen margaritas, daiquiris, and Jack and Cokes along with the usual selection of soft drinks. The name of the apartment complex was Citrus Creek, but there was no citrus and no creek and all the units were so identical that no matter how many times I visited I still had to call from the car so he could guide me to the right one. After more than five years of camping out in no-man’s-land, he was ready for a real house too. But first we needed to get married.

I was forty-two when we did it—so advanced in years that my boss called me and said she wanted me to write about “what it’s like to be an old bride for the first time.” I wasn’t in the least bit offended. It felt wonderful to be so sure after so long and I said so. We got married on my parents’ front lawn in Greenville, surrounded by our closest friends and family. I wore a pale green dress and when I walked out with my father, the crowd burst into spontaneous applause—I don’t think for me so much as in recognition of the fact that I was finally doing such a good and right thing. Our rehearsal dinner, at an abandoned cotton gin we’d cleaned up and electrified, featured a Louisiana-centric feast of fried catfish,
boudin
, crawfish
rémoulade
, roast suckling pig, and mirlitons stuffed with jumbo lump crabmeat. On the day of the wedding, friends gave us an outdoor lunch with fried chicken, ham biscuits, and pimiento cheese sandwiches, and at our reception, John sang “Hey There Little Red Riding Hood,” one of the conditions of our engagement. It was perfect, but we were only halfway there. We still needed a place to start our lives together, a point driven home to us when we returned from our honeymoon.

We arrived, after dark, to find scaffolding and sacks of mortar everywhere—Betty had finally decided to repair the crumbling courtyard wall that leaked water into our increasingly unhappy next-door neighbor’s house. At 6:30, on our first morning as a married couple in our own bed, eight masons peered at us through the enormous fanlight window on the second floor, a routine that continued for two more months. They dropped bricks on all the plants; they blared not one but two radios—so much for peace and privacy and hanging around in my nightgown, but it had been bound to happen. We’d finally been visited by one of the “triage units,” the name a friend of mine once gave to the battalions of workmen who trundle in every morning in their beat-up vans and pickup trucks, charged with the mission of keeping the entire French Quarter more or less standing. The place is old after all, and constantly visited by a lot of very bad things—extreme heat, ceaseless damp, subterranean termites, flying Formosan termites. (The latter swarm at night and eat wood nine times faster than their cousins—during a single horrifying night at Betty’s, a colony ate an entire beam in the attic.) A hurricane destroyed the handful of palmetto huts that comprised the first “Quarter” in 1719, just a year after Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded the place. Despite the pleadings of his engineer (who possessed the improbably stripper-esque name Le Blond de La Tour), Bienville refused to move his city to a less precarious spot, and two years later another hurricane came and wiped it out again.

So it followed that as soon as the bricklayers left, the roofers came. Two years earlier there had been a hailstorm that had sent golf-ball-sized hailstones beating down onto the original clay tiles of the slave quarter’s roof. While Betty had no intention of reusing them, she thought she might be able to sell the ones still intact, and demanded that each individual tile be removed by hand, as opposed to just knocking the damn things off in one fell swoop and getting on with the business at hand. This absurdly slow, almost slapstick process was further exacerbated by the season. It was late July, about a million degrees by nine in the morning, and then there was a tropical rainstorm every afternoon. The roofers worked for about two hours a day, long enough to lower a stack of about twenty tiles, then they’d leave and it would rain all through the house. They forgot to tarp holes, they inverted the gutters so that water gushed into the house instead of out. Rugs were soaked, books and prints were ruined, the white cotton duck slipcovers were so splotched with brown the sofas and chairs looked like giant calico cats. Three months into a roughly 1,000-square-foot job, they still weren’t done. The Bourbon Street idyll was definitely over.

The plan had been to stay at Betty’s at least another year or two after we married and save our money for the house with the big kitchen that had by now firmly taken hold in our collective imagination. But as our first anniversary came and went, it became clear that in addition to every other increasingly irritating thing about Bourbon Street, two things paramount to a successful union were in dangerously short supply. There was no space (more than half of John’s stuff was in storage and the two closets had been cramped since well before he got there) and absolutely no privacy (in addition to the steady stream of workmen, there was also Betty, whose daily arrival—to putter, to water, to change what had to be the cleanest air-conditioning filters on the planet—was announced by a great clanking ring of keys and a sporadic off-key whistle). It was time to call a realtor.

The first part was easy—we already knew where we wanted to go. Tired of the urban confines of the Quarter, we decided to follow the path the Americans who arrived in New Orleans more than 150 years before us. Like them, we sought serenity and safe haven just a few miles up the river in one of the earliest “suburbs” of the city—in the comparatively bucolic and extraordinarily lush environs of the Garden District.

The Garden District began life as the sugar plantation of Jacques-François Esnould Dugue de Livaudais, a powerful landowner who also built the city’s first racetrack. Livaudais had been building a plantation house intended to be the grandest in all of Louisiana when especially severe spring floods destroyed his crop as well as the house’s beginnings. His wife, Celeste de Marigny, daughter of an even more illustrious planter, chose that moment to leave her husband and move to Paris; when she got the plantation in the divorce settlement, she sold it in 1832 for the then-whopping price of $490,000. The purchasers hired one of Napoleon’s former engineers to divide the property into a fourteen-square-block area with spacious lots they marketed to the growing population of Americans making fortunes off of everything from lumber and cotton to the manufacture of jute-sacks. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans had become an increasingly commercial city. Its port was the natural point of entry for coffee and European manufactured goods, and the natural point of shipment for goods coming down the river from the Midwest and the East, as well for all those commodities making the Americans rich. By 1850, New Orleans was the wealthiest city in the South and its most recent denizens needed places to live.

The French Quarter, the original city, was controlled and populated by Creoles, old-line aristocrats of French origin who had held sway over New Orleans for more than a hundred years and who had no use for the tacky, nouveau riche Americans. Until the Livaudais lots became available, the newcomers had been crammed in a narrow strip between Canal Street, the eastern boundary of the Quarter, and Jackson Avenue, where the Livaudais plantation began. Though some tourist brochures still subscribe to the romantic portrayal of the area as having been settled by a stable, Southern-born, agricultural aristocracy, the majority of the houses were built by ambitious businessmen who hailed from such distinctly un-Southern climes as England, New York, Maine, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, and who often lost their fortunes as quickly as they made them. In the interim though, they managed to show off plenty, building elaborate Greek revival mansions or Italianate villas and creating the first real gardens in the city. Until then, most of the gardens in New Orleans had existed within the walls of courtyards, much like mine on Bourbon, small and hidden from view; now there was not only lavish space, but land made rich by seasons of floods like the one which had been Livaudais’s downfall. The sudden profusion was, apparently, a dramatic sight. Mark Twain, a frequent visitor to the Garden District house of his friend the writer George Washington Cable, wrote that “the mansions stand in the center of large grounds and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many-colored blossoms. No houses could be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more homelike and comfortable looking.”

John and I had not been in harmony with our surroundings, or even remotely comfortable, since we returned from our honeymoon, and “homelike” was definitely not the first word that came to mind in describing life at Betty’s. We looked for a year, spending the majority of our weekends crisscrossing the neighborhood block by block, house by house. “What do you think that one’s like inside?” one of us would ask. “Will it ever be for sale?” Nothing that turned out to be for sale was right, of course, and then, finally, we found it, the house we knew should be ours, on the corner of First and Chestnut.

I
N RETROSPECT, THE
house seemed almost destined. Not only did it have the requisite big kitchen with an enormous commercial stove (one of the very few things in the almost 6,000 square-foot house that did not need to be replaced), but for more than twenty years, from 1955 to 1977, it had been occupied by Billups Phinizy Percy and his family. Like his brothers, Walker and LeRoy, he had grown up in Greenville, the adopted son of the planter and poet William Alexander Percy. (When Shelby Foote was asked why there were so many writers from Greenville, he said, “If Will Percy had lived in Tupelo, there would have been a lot of writers in Tupelo.”) I had grown up two doors down from LeRoy, the middle brother, and taught his grandchildren in day camp. (When both my paternal grandparents were killed in car wreck when I was seventeen, LeRoy handed me a martini at eleven o’clock in the morning with the words, “I think we could all use one of these.”) And though I had visited Walker in Covington, I had all but forgotten that the youngest brother, Phin, had come to New Orleans and stayed.

Phin had been a PT boat captain with JFK in the Solomon Islands and spent the rest of the war in the Pacific in a submarine, where he won the Bronze and Silver Stars. He graduated from the University of Virginia Law School and was recruited by the CIA, but gave up on that idea—and the cover it would have required—after meeting Jaye Dobbs, the heiress to the Dobbs hat fortune, at the World Series in New York. They married and ended up in New Orleans, where Phin taught constitutional law at Tulane and became a constant presence in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the
Times-Picayune
under his first name, Billups. In another coincidence, our real estate agent was a life-long friend of the four Percy children and had practically grown up in the house. Walking through it with Ricky was like having a docent—he showed me the spot in the dining room where the stylish Mrs. Percy had placed the marble bust of Venus, the wall in the second parlor where William Alexander Percy’s portrait had hung. And then there were the stories: the time young Phinizy bought a python and turned it loose in the neighborhood, causing considerable panic (it was never found) and making the local news for days on end; the time Phinizy (again) started a fire in the potting shed, but was prevented from burning down the house by the acute senses of his visiting deaf cousin, Walker’s daughter Ann, who alerted folks before it got out of hand.

By all accounts, the Percys lived well on First Street, but in the years since they’d sold the place, things had gone generally to hell. The house needed complete rewiring, all new central air and heating, and complete re-piping (the water coming out of the taps on the third floor was little more than a drip). The bathrooms were vintage disasters and contained such never-before-seen wonders as the “half-tub,” a ceramic tub the size of a shower stall, and the corner toilet (an innovation which enabled the door of the minuscule powder room to be opened). Also, whoever had carved out the space for them had done it badly—in one bedroom, the spacious closet had a window, while the tiny bathroom did not.

The house had settled so much and so weirdly over the years that there was a seven-inch differentiation in the dining room alone and most of the doors slammed shut behind you. As the post-Katrina world now knows, the diluvial soil along the river in New Orleans most closely resembles pudding. There is a reason why the shoring specialist Abry Brothers is one of the two oldest businesses in the city (the other is Antoine’s restaurant), though clearly there had been no attempt over the years to contact them. There was so little room to maneuver underneath the house, the inspector—and later, the electrician, the air-conditioning man, and the plumber—had to call in his skinniest helper.

Outside was just as bad. Most of the shutters and much of the siding needed to be replaced, and the whole thing was in desperate need of a paint job. The chimneys were crumbling and the first time I leaned against the second-floor balcony the railing gave way completely—I would have fallen to certain death had a friend not been there to grab me. On one side of the house, there were hulking exposed air-conditioning units and a crumbling asphalt drive big enough for a dozen cars, thereby rendering it a giant parking lot rather than a garden. On the other side, there was a malaria breeding ground in the form of an ugly, algae-ridden brick fountain, pretty much everything in the ground was dead or dying, and what little was still alive made no sense. There was a four-foot gap between the brick boundary wall and the hedge planted alongside it, for example, narrowing the yard considerably and providing an excellent bed for weeds.

The couple we bought the house from had owned it for little more than a year, thrown one splashy Mardi Gras party (we’re three blocks from the St. Charles Avenue parade route), and never moved in. Their lone “improvement” was to cover every inch of the interior with a really sloppy coat of dead-white high-gloss paint, and all the beautiful heart-pine floors with high-gloss polyurethane, two more things we’d have to undo. The effect, though intended to spiff things up for prospective buyers, was blinding, but they’d originally had far more elaborate ambitions. The house, they told us blithely at the closing, had never been quite “grand enough” for them (an admission that left us slack-jawed, as we were at that moment handing over the biggest check either of us had ever written). To that end, they’d commissioned a set of plans that were included with the house—one room, a laughably blatant attempt by the architect to give the clients what they wanted, was actually called “Grand Dressing Room.” It featured all manner of plaster scallop shells, pearls, and rosettes, motifs that were to be repeated on the master bedroom ceiling. While there was no question that the charming flag-stoned, screened-in porch of the Percy era needed some work—the same people who had allowed the wiring to crumble had replaced the screens with hideous plate-glass windows—we had in mind something slightly less over-the-top than the ornate, marble-tiled “Palm Court” on the plans. (Our version became a comfortable “sunroom,” with French windows that actually open and bookshelves on the opposite wall.) The garage was to become an “Exercise Room” and “Carriage House,” and the potting shed (which still contained the charred beams from Phinizy’s fire) would be a “Wine Room” and “Staff Area.”

When I saw those plans I knew we had been sent to rescue the house—a potting shed happened to be the one thing in addition to a real kitchen that I’d always aspired to. More important, the structure was one of the earliest in the Garden District, built in 1847 in classic Greek Revival style, before the heavier and more ornate “fruit basket” Victorian elements began to creep into mantels and plasterwork. It was designed for a man named John W. Gayle by prominent Irish-born architect James Gallier Sr. who designed the original City Hall (now called Gallier Hall) and whose son James Jr. was also a noted local architect. (Their name originally had been Gallagher but, like a lot of Irish immigrants, they Frenchified it before their arrival in order to fit in.) The doors are Greek key, the mantels black marble, the plaster cornices handsome and streamlined, and the medallions not overly flowery. The original windows are Greek key too, and enormous, so that the whole house is filled with light. We both fell immediately in love with its lavish proportion, airy simplicity, and ample corner lot. The plans had been an attempt to make a sow’s ear into a garish silk purse, and in this case the lovely sow’s ear was eminently preferable.

By the time we closed in August, I felt like we’d owned the house forever—and not just because poor Ricky had already let me in at least a hundred times after our offer had been accepted. On those occasions, I wandered around daydreaming, scribbling endlessly in my orange speckled notebook, but I already knew what I wanted. I’d been preparing for owning some house, somewhere, sometime, for so long that I’d saved every
World of Interiors
and
House & Garden
magazine since I was twenty, moving them in increasingly battered boxes from apartment to apartment, city to city. I’d been carrying around a swatch of Bennison “Crewelwork” linen like a talisman for almost fifteen years; I was well versed in the subtle differences between Farrow & Ball’s “Straw,” “String,” and “Matchstick” paint colors. More than a year before we laid eyes on the house, I had bought (on the layaway plan at a local antique store) the parcel gilt bamboo Regency benches I now knew would go in the front parlor. As a child, I never cared a whit about Barbie, it was her dream house I was obsessed with. Now at last I had my own.

After the closing, we went straight to First Street to open the door with our own key for the first time, and then continued on to my friend John Besh’s restaurant August for lunch. We took a table in a front corner by the window and John ordered a bottle of my favorite Billecart-Salmon Champagne; as we raised our glasses I realized I wasn’t just toasting the house, I was toasting all that went with it. Here I was, well past forty, and until this moment the word “home” had still meant the house on Bayou Road, the town of Greenville. In my early twenties, I knew at the time that the cities where I went to work—Washington, Atlanta, Orlando, Washington again—were only stops along the way to some future home I assumed would be permanent. What I had not planned on was to live like a vagabond for fifteen more years after that, going back and forth between New York and New Orleans, never really committing to either place, becoming a true citizen of neither.

In New York, my “community” was mostly comprised of fellow journalists and my clubhouse Elaine’s (there are worse fates), but I belonged to nothing. I turned up occasionally at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church (I happen to be a Presbyterian, but there was also the fact that it was a convenient six blocks from my apartment), and in New Orleans I went to Trinity Episcopal because it is Elizabeth’s church and I only ever went with her. Once, I volunteered in one of New Orleans’s worst housing projects—a valiant nun was trying to start a student-run newspaper—and my heart would break when I’d return from New York and listen to the messages from children who had needed my help while I was gone. I couldn’t volunteer—I couldn’t even get a dog. Until my (Manhattan) cat died, I paid my Jamaican cleaning lady Carmen to watch TV with him every day just to keep him company—and to assuage my considerable guilt. Maintaining such a dual existence had been a lot like my hesitance about marriage. My much-vaunted mobility and freedom had, in fact, been denying me the richness of a settled life, of being a productive member of a community and all that it entails. I had been a woman without a country—or at least a city—for too long.

It was time for me to dig in and if there was ever a place that needed civic involvement, New Orleans was it. The only problem was that it had been so messed up for so long that it was hard to know where to begin. The school system had been looted by its board and was on the brink of being taken over by the state; classes were conducted in buildings that had been condemned. The administration of the previous mayor, Marc Morial, like those of his predecessors, had been rife with corruption, and the police department had a similar history. Since I’d been in New Orleans, officers had been prosecuted for crimes ranging from being on the take to kidnapping, rape, and murder. Violent crime, most of it crack-and-gang driven, was rampant; the day we closed on the house there had been 170 murders so far, and there were four months left in the year.

Worse, amid this seemingly intractable mess, much of the white population, in the minority since the late 1970s, had either given up, or had never been involved in the wider life of the city in the first place. There were notable, hardworking exceptions, but among many of the so-called ruling classes, a complacency had set in that allowed most of the city’s institutions—other than their beloved Mardi Gras organizations called krewes—to rot. When controversial black councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor introduced an ordinance in 1992 that essentially required the integration of the krewes (they are private social clubs but parade on public streets), it was the first time I had seen a certain segment of the population muster outrage over anything. When I’d tried to raise money for the housing project newspaper among some of the same folks—most of whom lived within walking distance of the now-razed project and who would have been among the chief beneficiaries of a productively engaged young population—I was roundly rebuffed, usually with the line “I pay my taxes.” When Taylor’s ordinance passed, two of the city’s oldest and most exclusive organizations, the Mistick Krewe of Comus and Knights of Momus, simply chose not to ride at all.

Very little, it seemed, was worth fighting for. Though New Orleans was once thought of as an “oil capital,” a great many of the oil companies began leaving in the 1980s, driven by the depressed oil and gas market, but also because of the deplorable state of the city’s schools and services, and the fact that their executives were generally treated as social outsiders. Barred from the more exclusive clubs, they started their own, the now-defunct Petroleum Club. By the 1990s, the New Orleans economy was almost entirely dependent on tourism, which was a mixed bag at best. The great majority of the hotels, for example, were owned by out-of-town corporations that paid the bulk of their employees minimum wage.

Added to the mix was the fact that the newspaper was hardly a crusading organ or even a conscientious voice for change—settling instead on a policy best described as benign boosterism. During the 1991 governor’s race, I asked a top editor why they had held back on some of the most damning coverage of David Duke in his race against Edwin Edwards, and he told me he had not wanted to “rile” the populace. I was speechless. The populace was in desperate need of riling.

I had known all this for years, obviously, but during those years I’d been primarily an observer, perfecting mordantly amusing tales to tell in print or in conversation to people who wanted to know: “What’s it like down there?” I’d always felt a little like I had during a typically merry lunch at Galatoire’s one Friday (the day lunch almost always runs into dinner) when I’d been mesmerized by a table of guys either celebrating or forgetting—it was hard to tell which—their impending bankruptcies. It could well have been the booze—each man had at least five glasses at his place—but they did not seem particularly bothered by their misfortune and I certainly wasn’t. Galatoire’s, like New Orleans itself, was a theater, a place in which time, context, and the rest of the world had little meaning, and they were the show—a good one. Before they left they asked their waiter to fill huge “to-go” cups with cognac, so that they could make their way down Bourbon Street to the Absinthe House and watch
Jeopardy!
on the bar TV, a ritual they referred to as “Jeopardizing.”