The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (9 page)

Since Monday, he told me, he’d been trying unsuccessfully to reach John on his cell, and the overloaded long-distance lines had kept him from reaching our house as well. Skeet’s a driver, so he looked at his atlas and discovered that Highway 82 runs from Greenville to Fort Rucker, where his son, just back from a tour in Afghanistan, was stationed. He figured that even if we weren’t in town, my parents would know how we’d fared, and once he found out, he’d continue on to Alabama and make a trip of it. When he called, he’d just driven 1,800 miles in two days; I hated having to give him the news that he’d missed John by less than twenty-four hours. “That doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I just needed to know that he was all right.”

As signals go, the fact that Skeet had just driven halfway across the country to check on his little brother brought home the import of the events of the week in a way that even the gift of the well-endowed bank account could not. And the quiet urgency that had propelled Skeet all the way to Greenville made me weak in the knees. Skeet and John and John’s two sisters had the same mother, a nurse who was also an alcoholic and a drug addict from whom they’d been removed by their paternal grandparents when John was almost five. A year or so earlier, John’s father, a doctor who had gone to medical school and completed his residency in New Orleans, had moved the family back to West Texas, his birthplace, where he planned to open a clinic in San Angelo. But almost as soon as he’d arrived, he was essentially lobotomized in an accident—he ran into the back of a pipe truck that had stalled in an underpass, and when the pipes crashed through his windshield, one landed square in the middle of his forehead. It was an awful, complicated story—when John and I first started seeing each other, it took him five hours and at least as many milk punches at the Rib Room to get it all out. The one constant in the narrative was Skeet, who had early on acted as a sort of ur–big brother, protecting him as best he could from their mother and her abusive boyfriend. When the situation became unbearable, it was Skeet who led his half-sisters and John, whom he carried most of the way on his back, on a trek of several miles from their house to the bus station, where he convinced the manager to put them on a Greyhound, C.O.D., to Ballinger, the town where their grandparents, along with their newly impaired father, lived.

In the aftermath, it was decided that John should go to Manhattan to live with his Uncle Charles, who was finishing up his own residency at New York Hospital, and his wife, Dorothy, a chemist who worked with Dr. George Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap smear. They eventually had two sons and a daughter of their own, and when John was in his early teens the family moved to New Orleans, where Charles taught at Tulane and started his practice as a heart surgeon. Despite the physical separation, John and Skeet stayed close, and the first time I met him I was pretty sure I had never encountered anyone so gentle or calm or at peace with himself. John has a lot of the same stillness and self-containment, but Skeet’s is seriously profound, and I was not sure how well my decidedly unquiet mind of the moment would handle the dinner at Doe’s I’d immediately invited him to. I enlisted Elizabeth to accompany me, but it had been ridiculous to worry—we had a big steak and a really lovely time and Skeet painstakingly recorded our latest two phone numbers in his notebook before pushing off to Alabama the next morning. “Don’t you want me to at least try to get John on the phone?” I kept asking him. “No, he’s busy. I don’t need to bother him.” Like everybody else in America, I had spent five days watching gruesome images of death and destruction and desperation, and each new morning brought glaring new evidence of just how inept, callous, irresponsible, and just plain base a too-big segment of humankind can be. Skeet was a timely reminder of our better angels.

That next afternoon, my father, determined to remain in his jaunty crisis mode, suggested that he drive my mother and me to Lusco’s for supper. Lusco’s, a restaurant in Greenwood, about forty-five minutes east of Greenville on the edge of the Delta, began life in the 1920s much like Doe’s, as a grocery store run by Italian immigrants. (The Delta is heavily populated with citizens of Italian descent since, during one of the many unpleasant chapters in our history, landowners suffering through the acute labor shortages of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lured thousands across the Atlantic with the promise of parcels of land, whereupon they became nothing more than indentured servants or worse.) In the Delta’s heyday, no one thought anything of driving forty or fifty miles just to eat and have fun—hell, we went all the way to Memphis for the justifiably famous lump crabmeat in hollandaise at Justine’s. It was equally worth it for the broiled pompano at Lusco’s and the festive curtained booths, originally designed to facilitate a discreet and relaxed enjoyment of wine and whiskey—unbelievably, Mississippi was legally dry until 1967.

Still, on this particular day, I don’t think any of us had bothered to make the trip in more than ten years, but it was a sweet suggestion and we did it. Food, after all, is a much-vaunted comfort, and by day six, I was well on my way toward gaining what became universally referred to among New Orleanians as the Katrina Fifteen. And no wonder. On that first bad night, after we realized that the levees had broken, my mother overcompensated with two-inch-thick pork chops, squash casserole, fried okra, sliced tomatoes (some of those “pretty” Arkansas Travelers, which were, it must be said, delicious), both corn on the cob and cornbread, and homemade blackberry cobbler. Every day for lunch, Frank Lijer, who has worked for my mother in all manner of capacities for almost twenty-five years, brought in bags of chili cheeseburgers and fried catfish sandwiches from the excellent Abide’s drive-in; in six days I’d been to Doe’s three times. Then there is the typical largesse of the Southerner when the chips are down—before we even arrived my eighty-nine-year-old next-door neighbor had brought over a basket of muffins and a container of her signature homemade mayonnaise; someone else dropped off a caramel cake.

On Sunday, John came back for an overnight visit and we went to Lillo’s, the third of the Delta’s venerable Italian restaurants and the site of one of my father’s better lines. In the early 1960s, a friend of his and my mother’s had recently divorced and he was dating a younger woman, a former beauty queen who did not have a lot to say when they met at my parents’ house for cocktails before going out to Lillo’s (in those days known as Lillo’s Dine and Dance) for dinner. When they pulled up, the music from the jukebox was spilling out into the parking lot, and as soon as the beauty queen got out of the car she started gyrating and carrying on like crazy. The transformation was, apparently, remarkable, and prompted my father to look at my mother and say, “She ain’t much in a parlor but she’s hell in a tonk.”

Lillo’s is no longer much of a “tonk,” but the jukebox is still there and a live combo plays on Thursday nights. On one wall there are numerous pictures of Marie Lillo, a stage actress who left the Delta to make her fame and fortune in New York, where, judging from the photographs, she also formed a tight connection with Milton Berle. I went to school with Jimmy Lillo, who runs the place these days, and he still serves the best Italian salad I’ve ever tasted (the secret is the mashed green olives in the otherwise classic dressing), excellent thin-crusted pizzas, and a delicious Delta hybrid, catfish Parmesan. Located in the next-door town of Leland, just about eight miles east on Highway 82, Lillo’s is a lot closer than Lusco’s, and maybe even better, so we met Elizabeth and some of her cousins there for an anniversary of sorts—it had been exactly a week since we’d first arrived. Despite the rather grim marker, there was cause at least for slight celebration: my old buddy Ken Wells was in New Orleans running Katrina coverage for the
Wall Street Journal
and he had been thoughtful enough to go by our house and snap a picture, which he’d emailed that afternoon. While there were a handful of big oak limbs and what looked like the whole top half of the ancient magnolia down in front, the house itself seemed to be in remarkably pristine condition. When I saw it there, glistening in the bright New Orleans sunlight, I literally jumped up and down.

I was happy to see John, we were both ecstatic to see the house, and we were, as had become the recent norm, completely stuffed with food and wine when we arrived back at my parents’ house. At the door, though, contentment gave way to hilarity. Since I was a teenager my mother has been a big proponent of the late night note, filled with all manner of instruction or, depending on my behavior, warnings. They invariably contained way too much information, and my brothers and I often kept them for our mutual enjoyment, but this one was in a class by itself, veering as it did from the usual mundane stuff about setting the alarm and turning off the outside lights, to the more pressing matter of the new family pet. Our beloved yellow Labrador, Bo, had died almost fifteen years earlier, and in his absence—and unbeknownst to me until that moment—both my parents had become unnaturally (in my opinion) attached to a tiny green tree frog, though he had not yet been given a name, which I chose to take as a good sign. For the last three years, the note informed us, the frog had come back after his warm weather sojourn at the end of every summer to take up residence in his fall-and-winter habitat, the pottery planter attached to the wall by the back door. My mother had made the discovery of his return on that very day, and urged us to be especially careful opening the door, since he was fond of taking evening outings across it and she was afraid we might alarm him, or worse, knock him off (no matter that, as I learned in my subsequent research, tree frogs have adhesive toe pads, and, though they are reluctant jumpers, they are capable of taking great leaps).

The note was illustrated with happy faces signifying her joy, and arrows designating his whereabouts, and when we got inside, neither of us could stop laughing. Not at my mother, necessarily, but in a tickled but awed appreciation of this woman who peels tomatoes for the displaced and is so overprotective of a two-inch-long tree frog she leaves notes insuring his well being taped to her door. It reminded me of a night earlier in the week when I’d come home to find her at the kitchen table putting supplies in one of the children’s relief boxes the church was sending to shelters across the state. Each volunteer packer had been instructed to include useful stuff like a toothbrush and toothpaste, sharpened pencils and paper, but also a stuffed bear. “Feel this,” she said, triumphantly handing over the softest fake fur animal I’d ever felt. I had laughed then too, at the image of my mother, prowling the aisles of Wal-Mart at ten o’clock at night, pressing shelf after shelf of plush toys against her cheek. But when she asked me, “Wouldn’t you feel better if you could hold that against your skin before you went to sleep on a hard floor?” I had to agree that I would.

All week long, my dreams had been filled with images of floodwaters and mayhem, but it was in the kitchen with John, holding the tree frog note in my hand, that I determined the source of a deeper anxiety. So many people had lost so much. On that very same night, for example, my friend Irvin Mayfield, the extraordinarily talented trumpeter and leader of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, was in Baton Rouge, worrying about the fate of his father, who, as he would find out later, had drowned in the storm. I remembered that Antoine told me he’d lost his father to Betsy (and now, suddenly, I was inclined to believe that it was true), and my own husband had not seen his mother—or cared to—since he was four years old. And here I was with parents who were not only very much alive, but busy—aiding, working, doing, sheltering their middle-aged daughter and son-in-law, and keeping us well entertained to boot. After having been with them under such close and extraordinary circumstances, I was reminded again of their effortless generosity and humor, of the sheer charm of my own parents. I realized that my biggest fear was of an inevitability far greater than any hurricane: the fact that one day they too would be gone.

I
T WAS NOT
a fear I could dwell on for long. Monday morning the phones started working. I was at my usual post in the kitchen when my Louisiana cell rang for the first time, but the reception was so bad I was halfway down the driveway before I could tell who it was. “Julia, Julia, it’s me, Antoine,” he said, his voice high-pitched and breathless, desperate to make himself heard. I gushed on and on about how I had been worried to death about him, and he gushed right back, calling me “Boss Lady,” over and over, a moniker almost always reserved for when he was high and trying to ingratiate himself to me, but this time he was laughing—it was our mutual joke, something familiar, and I was so glad to hear from him I couldn’t stand it. He told me he had indeed made it to the Superdome and that when he was finally rescued, he was put on a bus bound for a place called Camp Copas, a Baptist Bible Camp in the town of Denton, in north Texas. I later found out that Denton had been founded by a Methodist lawyer and preacher named James Denton, who was famous for leading attacks on the Indians, and that though it is one of the fastest-growing towns in the country, less than 10 percent of the current population of about 110,000 is black. Antoine had been placed in Dorm Happiness, and though he was clearly happy to be alive and seemed to be handling his recent experiences with typical aplomb, I could tell he was a tad unsettled. I’m sure it had a lot to do with the fact that he had never been in a place with so many Baptists and white people in his life, and, come to think of it, neither had I, so I promised to come get him out of there as soon as I possibly could. When I talked to the officious-sounding woman in charge, she assured me that they would be housing Antoine for at least two more weeks, time I would use to figure out what to do with him once I got him. Greenville’s crack problem was as bad or worse as that in New Orleans, and it didn’t seem like we’d be heading home for good any time soon.

The next call, not surprisingly, was from the well-organized Mr. Dupré, who had already opened a bank account in Houston and gotten his family an apartment. His house, with its just-completed swimming pool, his wife’s artwork (she was a different kind of painter), and his beloved coin collection, was in New Orleans East, and based on what he could see from the televised flood maps, he feared it was under water. Since I owed him the usual whopping amount for a week’s work, he was eager to give me the address, and I was, under the circumstances, more than happy to send him a check. Then it turned out that I owed John Benton money too—I just hadn’t known it until he called to report that he’d righted the live oak in the back garden, the one with the new growth we had toasted the night before we left. Its roots were still so shallow it had blown sideways, and then there was the matter of the top half of the enormous magnolia and a big pile of limbs from the old oak he still needed to come cart away. Benton told me that he and a small crew had found their way back into the city just two days after the storm and were camping out in his house near the airport with a couple of ice chests full of food and water, a generator, and lots of firearms. They used the generator so sparingly the nights were passed in complete darkness, which meant that every time one of the group got spooked by a noise or saw a headlight in the drive, another almost got his head blown off. I was touched that given their rather edgy existence, not to mention the fact that they were faced with major thoroughfares to clear and huge clients, like the Port of New Orleans, to satisfy, they still found time to check on my comparatively inconsequential tree. To me, of course, it was of major consequence—as an “anchor” to the plan, it had represented a strikingly healthy percentage of Ben’s “Opinion of Probable Cost” and was so big the whole street had to be blocked off when it arrived on a truck from Florida.

Every call brought a different narrative, and one of the most dramatic came from Quincy, Rose’s son. Quincy is a butcher by trade, but he is also a gentle giant, a soft-spoken, really big guy who owns a really big Suburban, and he had been extremely helpful during our incremental moves from Bourbon to First Street. He told me that Rose and Thomas had left early, right after Rose had called that Saturday, in fact, to stay with Thomas’s cousin in Natchez, and that Roseanna had gone to “the country,” up the River Road to Assumption Parish, where she grew up and where some of her siblings still lived. But Quincy had decided to ride it out, as had Joe, Rose’s brother, along with his daughter and granddaughter and his wife, Robin, and Frankie, the younger sister of Joe and Rose, who is a single mother of six children, aged two to seventeen. Roseanna had worked as a cook and housekeeper for a handful of families in New Orleans since she first came to town, when, as she says in the city’s vernacular, she “made” eighteen. Neither of us can remember now how we even met, but she helped me throw parties in one of my earliest apartments the one on Royal Street (we still laugh about the time I hung Spanish moss from the candelabra and the whole table caught on fire), and all four of them—Roseanna, Rose, Frankie, and Joe, who is an excellent bartender—had helped with every big party I ever threw on Bourbon. Sometimes Robin came too, as she had in Greenville for our wedding, and when Joe needed extra help, he called his first cousins Lorel and Lamont—they were a one-stop entertaining shop and they’d all had been working parties in New Orleans for years.

I loved them mostly because I had such a good time with them in the kitchen and, since my gatherings were slightly different in tone from the Uptown affairs they were used to, they had a good time with me too. We had a “coming out” party for a friend who had, wrongly, done some time in jail; one of McGee’s birthday bashes had been Mexican-themed and featured a piñata “stand-in” for her newly minted ex-husband, while another was a surprise with all her favorite foods, including mini-BLTs, pigs in a blanket, and fried chicken. We did countless dinners and brunches, a seated New Year’s dinner for 40, a “small dance” for 150, each without a hitch (on our part at least—the guests got up to all manner of no good, including, at the New Year’s Eve party alone, a fistfight, a fainting spell, an extremely unwelcome advance, and two different powder room trysts). Roseanna is a typical matriarch, bossy and opinionated and entirely imperturbable, while Rose, who once worked for a professional caterer, is emotional and hypersensitive, but also more talented. In the kitchen, she’d roll her eyes at me while undercutting Roseanna’s orders at every turn, leaving Frankie, who may well have the sweetest disposition of anyone I have ever known, to keep the peace. They were incredibly close (despite one fairly long and problematic stretch when Rose refused to speak to Roseanna, even when they worked together) and mightily protective of Joe, which meant that they weren’t always the most ardent fans of Robin. It was a complicated dynamic, especially in a kitchen as crowded as the one on Bourbon—Rose is the only one in her immediate family who could correctly be referred to as thin—but we never failed to end the evening laughing. One night, at a particularly festive birthday dinner for Patrick Dunne, which featured Alice B. Toklas’s “Cream Perfect Love,” Frankie announced it to the table as she’d heard it, “Cream Purple Love,” a slightly more lurid but certainly more interesting-sounding dish that I immediately vowed to create in her honor.

On the Sunday night before Katrina, they all stayed in the gymnasium of Booker T. Washington High School, where the janitor, a friend of Robin’s, was letting friends in with his key. On Monday, when they, like everyone else, thought the worst had passed, they went home, emptied out the contents of their collective freezers and refrigerators, and started barbecuing in front of Joe’s house, offering food to everyone who passed. “We had chicken, ribs, smoked sausage, hot sausage, and pork chops,” Frankie told me later, describing a mind-set and a celebration much like ours at Doe’s. “We were just cooking it up. Some people said water was coming but we had no idea what they meant because we didn’t have TV or radio or anything. We were like, ‘Coming from where? The hurricane is over.’” That night, sleeping all together in the duplex that Joe and Roseanna share, they heard the water “bubbling first,” coming out of the sewers, and when they woke up the next morning, it had risen up the porch steps. A Louisiana National Guardsman passed by and told them there was a single gas station open, at Washington and Magazine, just five blocks from our house and not all that much farther across St. Charles from theirs, so Frankie piled her kids into Quincy’s Suburban and off they went, only to be turned away by rifle-wielding cops. The police chief and mayor were AWOL, the officers told them; they’d been left with no command and no supplies and felt they had no choice but to claim the only gas left in the city for police use only. One of them pulled out his cell phone and showed Frankie photos of the Ninth Ward, where the water was already up to the rooftops. “When I saw that, I said, ‘Oh Lord, we got to get out of here, gas or no gas.’”

The problem was that they had no idea how much they had—Quincy’s fuel gauge had long been broken, along with his rear door (a fact which had made our moving experience a bit tricky)—but the vehicle itself was sturdy and high off the ground, so they went back to get the others, hoping Joe’s much lower car could follow in Quincy’s wake. When they got there, the water in the street was up to Quincy’s tailpipe and Joe’s car just floated when he tried to drive, so all twelve of them crammed into the Suburban and made it across the river where, sixty miles out, they finally found some gas—in the nick of time, apparently, since it took $70 to fill the tank. They also found a shelter—with air conditioning and showers and toiletries in little boxes like the ones Mama had packed—near Roseanna’s increasingly crowded family homestead. The next morning, the decision was made to head north, to Dyersburg, Tennessee, where Robin had family. Her daughter, who had been watching what they had not been able to see on TV, kept calling, frantic, saying, “Come, I don’t care how many there are, just come.” They did, and by the end of the week, a local minister had arranged for a house for Frankie through FEMA, as well an apartment each for Quincy and Joe and his family.

When I hung up, I got some clothes together for Frankie’s children, who were all starting school, and sent some money to Quincy for whatever else they needed. By the time Eddie called me, from his mother’s house in Jackson, Mississippi, I was primed to be sympathetic. I was even, sort of, happy to hear from him. Though we had been at loggerheads for most of it, the renovation was still a shared ordeal, and now a hurricane had all but wiped out our adopted city. I swear I think Eddie was more into New Orleans than I was—his house in the Quarter was always on the “patio tour,” he organized the annual Christmas caroling in Jackson Square, and never missed a single Wednesday concert in the Central Business District. And now his ticket back into the “entertainment business,” the virtual reality tour of the Quarter, was pretty much worthless. He’d put all his hopes—and, I had a hunch, at least some of our money—into it, but tourists were his primary market and it seemed unlikely that they’d be around any time soon. Just two weeks before the storm, the “first run” of thousands of copies had been produced, and while he talked vaguely of “screening” one at a fundraiser somewhere in Texas, he sounded forlorn and deflated and told me he’d been almost paralyzingly depressed. We agreed to meet back in New Orleans as soon as we could, and I wished him well and meant it.

A much more entertaining call came from my friend Brobson Lutz, a doctor and specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases, who was for years the city health director. (He told me once that he’d resigned after watching our former mayor untying and retying his shoes eighteen times during a one-hour meeting and realizing that “there was some chemical driving the mayor that the rest of us weren’t taking.”) Brobson lives on Dumaine Street around the corner from my old place on Bourbon in a sprawling and extraordinarily beautiful complex of dwellings and gardens that had once included the apartment of Tennessee Williams, whom Brobson and his partner, Ken, who is also a doctor, had known well. When he called, he was somewhere in his home state of Alabama, and he had caught me on MSNBC, where I’d been on a panel with the then-New-Orleans-based historian Douglas Brinkley. Brinkley had said he could not in good conscience bring his family back into the city because of the likelihood of major outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever, and Brobson was about to blow a gasket because of what he considered the impossibility of same. I had instinctively discounted Brinkley’s dire warnings on camera, but I had no idea how overblown they actually were until I talked to Brobson, who explained that the “causative pathogens” did not exist here in sufficient quantities to be a remote threat and that the worst thing that might happen to people (in addition to cutting an arm off with a chainsaw) was a “staphylococcal abscess,” otherwise known as the kind of boil Antoine claimed he had on his butt all those years ago and which is easily treated with the common antibiotic minocycline. In addition to the typhoid talk, there had been a lot of noise about snakes and tetanus that also got him going: “There has never been a recorded snakebite after a hurricane in the history of the United States,” he hollered into the phone. “There has never been a recorded case of tetanus.” In the near term, he said, folks would be hard pressed to get a mosquito bite—the mosquitoes themselves had all been blown away.

Brobson and Ken had ridden out the storm in his house with their friends Dr. Kenneth Holditch, whose areas of academic expertise are the lives and work of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, and Edwin Curry, whom Brobson described as a “vegetarian cat lover” who writes obituaries for the
Times-Picayune
. The house, on the highest ground in town, got no damage, so they all stuck around until Wednesday, when the city turned off the water. Now he was about to have a stroke to get back in. Clearly he had no fear of diseases, and he was an old hand at hurricanes.