Guests on Earth (13 page)

This was entirely the wrong thing to say, as suddenly I saw myself for the creature I truly was: Joey’s pet, his servant, and nothing more. Surely my face must have changed in that instant, yet he took no notice, blundering on, with a grand sweep of the hand. “Come Evalina, and join us—” As if it were a tea party! I really don’t know what he intended by this remark, for I turned and fled, returning only when I knew that Joey would be at the Opera.

I found the bed made—clumsily—and a long-stemmed red rose laid across the pillow—my pillow! Along with a note which read “Rember Morgen” in his almost illegible hand, for Joey was virtually illiterate as well as intemperate.

Of course I stayed. What else could I do? By this time, I was nearly three months pregnant, according to my own calculations, though I could not, simply could not bring myself to tell him. And Joey mended his ways somewhat, or at least exercised greater discretion. He was tender and solicitous, even taking me on several outings. We went out on a riverboat for lunch one Sunday, as Mama and I had done years before with Mr. Graves, and I remembered every detail of the outfit she had worn on that day: the pink-and-white-striped dress, the straw hat, the white sandals. I remembered how she laughed when the flame on our bananas Foster would not go out. Joey and I also went to the Audubon Zoo, where he was fascinated by the big cats, the lions and tigers. Remarkably, he had never been to a zoo before. I put on my black dress and went to the opening of Siegfried to hear him in the title role; he was magnificent. The Fabulous Fouche Sisters did not reappear, nor any other woman.

Instead, much of Joey’s free time was taken up by a young man named Hubert Huffman, the new music critic at The Times-Picayune who had raved about Joey’s Siegfried. It was suddenly “Hubert this” and “Hubert that.” Hubert had been raised in San Francisco and educated at Harvard before beginning his career at The Boston Globe. Now Joey was bent upon introducing him to New Orleans. When I finally met Hubert, I liked him, too, a thin, blond boy with spectacles and a wide open smile and beautiful manners. He grabbed up my two hands and pressed them, saying, “Ah yes, Evalina. Joseph has told me so much about you”—a lie, I knew, for what was there to tell? Joey did not know my past, nor the link I had with this city.

During those days, I often found myself sitting at the window, gazing out upon the busy square at the beautiful fountain and the clanging streetcars or a group of nuns like a flight of birds hurrying across the street. I thought of my mother, who must have looked out such a window herself when she was pregnant with me—perhaps the
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
window in our old apartment above the Bijou on the rue Dauphine, or perhaps another, earlier window, or even a screen door, down in the bayou country. What did she see? What did she hope for, or dream of? Was she dreaming me?

We had supper with Hubert Hoffman, just the three of us, at the Court of Two Sisters, beneath a giant banyan tree in the leafy courtyard. I was wearing a black lace stole Joey had bought me in Paris. I ate every bite of my delicious crab étouffée, then my crème brûlée. The men drank Armagnac with their coffee. By candlelight their faces were beautiful, one so dark and one so light, as they spoke passionately about opera. Suddenly I knew they would soon be lovers. I remembered what Mrs. Carroll had said about tenors so long ago. After Hubert bid us adieu outside the restaurant, Joey and I walked hand in hand back to our hotel, where he made love to me.

The next morning I lay watching him sleep for a long time, watching him breathe, and when he finally awakened, I gave him his café au lait and croissant and told him about the baby. What was I thinking? What did I expect? I can no longer remember. What I got was an explosion of operatic proportion.

“Evalina!” He hurled the little china plate against the wall, where it shattered. “What have you done? How can you do this to me? To me? It is not possible, not possible. I will not have a child, not at this point in my career, not never. Never! You hear me? You hear me, mi senti?” He called me puttana, stupida. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me like a ragdoll, until I feared my neck would snap, my teeth would be broken. “How dare you? You who are nothing, nothing, to myself. Do you hear me? Nothing!”

Finally he let me go, throwing me back against the bed, where I lay in terror, heart beating like a drum in my ears. Joey stood at the window with arms outstretched, as if in monumental prayer. “Tesora,” he said. At length he turned and came back to me; he sat on the edge of the bed where I lay very still, too frightened and exhausted to move even though I had bitten my lip badly. Blood soaked the pillow and matted my hair. “Mi dispiace, cara.” Joey got up and went to the sink where he ran water on a towel and then came back with it to kneel, now, beside the bed, wiping the blood off my face gently, even stroking my hair. “Little swan,” he whispered. “You were with me at the beginning, you were here always. I will never forget.”

Then he stood up abruptly, or as abruptly as his lame foot and considerable bulk would allow. He placed his hands on his hips, a magisterial pose, then clapped them, surprising me. “Enough!” he decreed. “This little problem will be taken care of immediately. I go now, and I will find a way. You will stay here. When I come back I will tell you, and you will do it. You will do what I say to you. Then it will be over. The end. Fine.”

I closed my eyes.

The door slammed.

Q
UICKLY I ROSE
a
nd gathered all the belongings I thought I could carry, stuffing them into an old satchel, and left the apartment, looking carefully left and right before darting to a taxi. I ordered him to drive me out to Arabi, where I easily found a room in a boardinghouse named Temps Perdu, a peeling old mansion near the river, surrounded by magnolias and inhabited mostly by circus and carnival performers who were odd and kind, ever more solicitous as my condition became apparent to all. My baby would be a girl, announced Madame Romanetsky, a fortune-teller. I determined to take such good care of her!

I was fortunate to find a little job playing piano at the ancient church school around the corner, for chorus and assemblies and music classes; to my surprise, I found myself playing with my old light touch again, though it had been over a year since I had sat down at a piano. I moved freely about the new neighborhood, never once concerned that Joey would find me. I knew he would never try. As far as he was concerned, I was dead, and my baby with me. In fact I felt lucky to be alive, and as the gorgeous autumn progressed I grew more and more excited, vaguely planning to have her at the charity hospital over by the park. I would just appear at the emergency entrance, I thought, when it was time. My neighbors began to bring me things—a special healthy soup, with cabbage in it, from the Hungarian tumblers upstairs; a pink blanket, soft as angels’ wings, from the dwarf lady, who had knitted it herself.

One day, coming back from work, I chanced to notice a poster affixed to the kiosk on the corner—
L
ONG JOHN LIGHTNING,
it read, the
KING OF THE BLUES,
soon to appear at a club named Snug Harbor. I kept looking at the keen narrow face, the big white grin, the bright eyes . . . surely this was Mojo, the boy who’d played piano at the Bijou, all grown up!

On the appointed night, I stood waiting in the alley outside the club, and when he emerged from a taxi, nearly seven feet of him, I stepped forward and touched his arm. “Mojo?” I said.

He was still a beanpole, though now resplendent in a shiny purple suit, with high, pomaded hair. “What you say?” He looked down at me.

“I am Evalina Toussaint,” I said. “My mother was Louise Toussaint, the dancer.”

“Oh my lord, honey!” he said instantly, throwing off his girlfriend’s protective grasp as he bent down, limber as a pipe cleaner, to peer at my face.

“Do you remember us? over the Bijou?” I asked with my heart in my throat.

“Remember you? Remember you? I sure do, honey, I sure do remember you. In fact many is the time I have sat up late wondering about you, and where you ever got to, and what happen to you. Your mama—your mama—well, I know she have passed on now, to her reward. But I want to say to you, child, you had the sweetest mama on this earth, I hope you know that. And fun? And beautiful? My gracious. Why, folkses use to come from all over . . .”

But now two men from the club were pulling him away from me, gently but inexorably, one on either side.

“What I remember the best, though, is how crazy your mama was about you, Evalina, why, you never saw nothing like it. Seem like the sun rose and set on Evalina! And you used to play some piano yourself, am I right? Lord Lord. What are you doing here, girl? I tell you what, these folks is going to give you a real good seat for the show, and then we will talk afterward, you and me. What you doing, little Evalina? What is your story?”

The iron door closed, leaving his gorgeous girlfriend to glare at me once, dismissively, before stomping up the alleyway toward the front entrance. Though a man darted back out immediately with a ticket for me, I did not stay, slipping back to Temps Perdu instead, to sit rocking in the chair that the landlord had recently brought for me, clutching the Snug Harbor ticket against my stomach and thinking about my mother, who had loved me. No matter what else had happened to us, she had loved me; this was all that mattered.

Yet the more I thought about her, the more curious I grew, for my own baby was coming soon. What could I tell her about her grandmother, or myself, or the people we had come from? Was it possible that we even had some family, somewhere? I determined to visit Mr. Graves’s Bellefleur.

T
HOUGH MOST PLACES
i
n New Orleans had seemed smaller to me upon my return—since I had been but a child when I left—Bellefleur appeared grander than ever, almost invisible now behind its high pink stucco wall, beneath its immense canopy of live oaks a century old. To my surprise, the side gate was unlocked. I lifted the latch and walked quickly up to the massive door flanked by potted ferns and twelve white columns. I rang, then waited. No one seemed to be about. Dry leaves rattled across the portico. I rang again. Ten years had passed since I left there, yet it could have been a hundred—or only a fortnight—for Bellefleur seemed timeless, captured beneath a bell jar.

Alicia herself opened the door. She, too, appeared unchanged in all essentials—thin, but not elegant—rather more like a bird of prey now, her makeup too heavy, her avid mouth a slash of red. She was dressed in a black suit I recognized as French, with large (too large) pearl earrings and choker.

I started to speak, but she interrupted me immediately, holding up her red-nailed hand as if to ward me off.

“Never come in this house again!” She all but shrieked. “I know exactly who you are!” She stepped backward as if in fright, one hand fluttering up to the pearls. “You are that crazy girl, the whore’s daughter—Oh, what was your name?”

“Evalina Toussaint,” I said.

“It may please you to know, Evalina Toussaint, that you ruined my family, you and your mother, that horrid slut. Ruined us! My father was never the same again after his . . . breakdown. He hanged himself the next Christmas, on Christmas Day. How’s that? Merry Christmas to the family. Love, Dad. Of course he was insane.”

“I am so sorry,” I whispered, for I had loved Arthur Graves, too, as much as circumstances had allowed.

I was further unnerved by the appearance of Matilda Bloom, who moved silently, slowly, to stand in the shadowy hall just behind Alicia. White-haired and very heavy now, she did not smile or acknowledge me in any way, her face a dark mask, her black eyes filled with something deeper and harder and more sorrowful than I could bear.

Alicia went on. “We can do without your condolences, Evalina Toussaint. But I want you to know, it has been a disaster. The business gone, my brothers haywire, a rogues’ gallery of failures and fools—luckily I have been able to stay here and take care of poor Mother who has never been the same again either, as you might imagine, though we pretend. Oh yes, we all pretend—” Suddenly Alicia looked at her diamond wristwatch. “Actually Mother is out having lunch at Commander’s Palace right now,” she announced, “and you shall not be here when she returns.”

Alicia looked me over more closely now, her eyes narrowed to slits as she took in my gray wool cape and pretty boots, French, too, and my pregnancy.

“Ah,” she said. “I suppose you want money. Well, you won’t get it from me. In fact, I’d like to get back just half of what my father paid to get rid of you—but that’s long gone, I suspect. And now look at you, just like your mother! I’d hope you’d have more sense, that you’d have thought of the child, at least. How can you do this to another child? But I suppose you people just can’t restrain yourselves, can you?”

Turning to leave, I had to ask: “What do you mean, about the child?” pulling my cape close about us.

“Why, it will be a monster, won’t it? Just like you, Evalina—the child of your mother and her own father, don’t you know that? Don’t you know anything?”

CHAPTER 6

T
HUS
I
FOUND MYSELF
i
n the place I had perhaps been heading all along, the top floor of the Central Building of Highland Hospital, being administered a course of insulin shock treatments, which I did not resist. How could I? for during that time, I was nobody—a husk of a person, the shape and shell of a person, the skin of a salamander girl—all emptied out. Nobody home. Shock treatments do that, they rob you of your immediate memory, and in my case, this was a blessing.

I knew Dr. Carroll immediately, though now I am not certain how long I had been back in the hospital when he arrived; perhaps it was hours, perhaps days. I was in a little cubicle of a room, coming out of a treatment, when I heard the deep, familiar voice rolling in from a great distance somewhere above me, like thunder.

“Evalina, Evalina, can you hear me?”

I fought to open my eyes, which seemed to be glued together, and tried to raise my hand, but this I could not accomplish either, even though the restraints had been removed.

“Evalina, this is Dr. Carroll.”

I know it, I thought furiously, heart pounding. I know you—with a curious mixture of dread and relief as I struggled to come back to myself. I tried but could not control the muscles of my mouth.

He laid his hand, dry as paper, lightly on my forehead.

“Now, now,” Dr. Carroll said. “Your job here is to relax, Evalina. To rest. You may leave everything else to us. You have been very ill, but you are safe now. You are here, you are home.” His voice came down to me through shifting layers of fog. “We do not intend to let you go again. We do not intend to lose you.” Threat or promise, the words sank in.

Suddenly my eyes popped open and there he was above me, blocking the light, his head a dark shape I would have recognized anywhere—those big ears sticking out! I could not see his face. Was it day or night? I could never tell, in that place. I struggled to gain a slight purchase on one elbow and tried to speak to him, but only horrible sounds would issue forth from my mouth.

“Never mind.” His words floated like clouds above me, out of reach. “Trust me, Evalina. It is better this way.”

What way? What is better? What did he mean? But I could not speak.

The door closed. I heard steps and voices outside in the hall, then nothing. I lay exhausted in utter darkness and finally slept, to wake much later upon a cold wet sheet, humiliated. Yet somewhat restored—now I could open my eyes, sit up, even get up and stagger to the door to call the night attendant, who came running. She was a strong, bouncy Negro girl who clucked and cajoled and went to work on me immediately: “Why my goodness, look a here at you, poor thing, ain’t nobody put you to bed proper nor took you to the toilet neither one. I tell you what, you come along with me now. Just come on—” half carrying me down the hall to the communal bathroom, though it was still pitch black outside the windows.

This girl, whose name was Gloria, ran the big, old-fashioned claw-footed tub in the corner full of hot water and put me in it, then ducked out briefly to reappear with a little blue bottle of Evening in Paris bath salts, which she sprinkled liberally all about me, so that soon I was surrounded by iridescent bubbles up to my chin. “Now just lay back,” she commanded, and I did so, each cell of my body letting go. “Ain’t that better now?”

It felt wonderful. I had never seen this tub in use before. Usually we were led into the washroom by the nurses, who sometimes had to assist—or force—those in the worst conditions into the showers. Often I had to look away. Now I reveled in the luxury and warmth of my bubble bath, with time to notice the pink and maroon tile rosettes on the floor, repeated on the border running around the pink tile walls, halfway up. Out the barred window, I saw the first light fall upon the autumn foliage outside.

“Where in the world did you get this bubble bath stuff?” I asked Gloria.

“Kress’s,” she said, “on Patton Avenue, you know?”

I did know, as suddenly Asheville itself came flooding back to me—Pack Square, with the Vance Monument in the center of it, the lunch counter at Woolworth’s on Haywood Street where they made the vanilla cokes, the Grove Park Inn up on its mountain, and us up on our own, at the end of Montford Avenue, at Highland Hospital. Highland Hospital. I remembered the crenellated roofline of Homewood, the greenhouse gardens behind Brushwood. I knew exactly where I was.

I lay back in my bubbles and swore not to tell as Gloria opened one of the windows and lit an illegal cigarette, blowing smoke out into the rosy dawn. She ran some more hot water into my tub and left me again while she raced over to escort an older woman into one of the toilet stalls, a thin, gray woman bent into the shape of a question mark, who shuffled along looking down all the while and mumbled to herself and did not notice me. By then I would have been glad to get out of the tub, but as my soiled gown had disappeared, thank goodness, and there was not a towel within reach, I resisted the idea of walking naked and dripping down the hall past all those others who were undoubtedly waking up now, too.

So I was still there when a truly frightening woman stomped in. Wild, red-gray hair stuck out in clumps all over her head, huge breasts swung to her waist beneath her hospital-issue gown. She wore big, dirty, untied men’s brogans, shoelaces flapping on the white tile floor. Her eyes darted everywhere, fastening upon me. She approached my tub, hands on hips, then began jabbing at the air with a fat, pointing finger.

“Get out! Get out!” she screamed. “Who do you think you are?”

I shrank back, alarmed—for she was strong, this woman, I could tell, and suddenly Gloria was nowhere in sight. But then the woman made a disgusting sound with her mouth and rushed out, the open back of the hospital gown exposing her huge red buttocks, such a sight that I couldn’t help laughing.

“Good grief!”

For the first time, I noticed the pretty, dark-haired woman about my own age standing before one of the stalls. She was laughing, too, though gingerly, as if it hurt her.

“What are you doing in that tub, anyway?” she asked. “How’d you rate that bubble bath? You’d better get out of there, or we’ll have an insurrection.”

“I’d love to get out,” I said, “if I had a towel. Do you see one anyplace?”

Bath towels were always in short supply, given out carefully by a nurse or attendant when one entered the bathroom for a shower, then taken up again afterward. Apparently they feared that we might somehow hang ourselves with them.

“Oh Lord.” Now she was giggling, for all the world as if this were a dormitory at Peabody instead of the locked floor of a mental institution. Was she a patient, too? This seemed highly unlikely, especially as she wore a pretty two-piece “sleep set,” a lavender gown and matching robe sprigged with violets, instead of a hospital gown. “Just a minute.” She darted around the maroon and pink tile wall divider into the shower area and came back with a damp bath towel, which she handed me none too soon, as the heavy door opened again. I wrapped myself up in it entirely, easy to do since I was very thin.

“Thanks so much,” I said.

“It’s okay, it was nothing.” She had a soft, Southern voice.

Then she smiled and I could see it, what was wrong with her. Beneath the perfect, arched brows, her wide violet eyes were flat and dead. Nobody home there, either.

Her eyes were like the eyes of the fish laid out in rows on ice in the French Market in New Orleans, down by the river, where I went with my mother in the past, some time ago. In the past. My who? My mother, in the past, some time ago. My mind wavered, then stilled.

“What’s your name?” she was asking.

“Evalina Toussaint,” I said automatically, though I didn’t feel I owned it anymore. I didn’t feel connected to it in any way. It could have been something I’d just picked up from the basket of toiletries by the door, like a little green bar of soap.

“What a pretty name,” the woman said. “My name is Mary Margaret Stovall.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “No. Mary Margaret Stovall Calhoun. Dixie, for short. My name is Dixie Calhoun.”

Then she smiled, and I realized how beautiful she was, really beautiful. Even that morning, in a hospital where she was undergoing a course of shock treatments, Dixie looked like a lingerie model who had just stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine, with her jet-black hair curling naturally all around her heart-shaped face. Perfect skin. Though it wasn’t quite adequate, just like mine. Dixie, too, needed a carapace. A what? A carapace. This word, straight out of Robert’s vocabulary, came into my head from no place. Nowhere. Who knew what else was out there?

“Now girls, really! This is not a gab session.” An older attendant, all business, had taken over for Gloria. The new shift—morning in the asylum.

“Bye,” Dixie said, with a fluttery little wave of the hand. Instinctively I knew that she had learned that wave from riding on floats, in parades. I could hear a parade in my head, with a Dixieland brass band. A krewe. At Mardi Gras. Glancing back toward my claw-foot tub, I saw day stealing in though the bathroom windows—pink clouds in the sky and golden sunshine on the mountaintops, reflected in the iridescent bubbles fast disappearing in the tub. Only a few were left. Now I could smell breakfast—and I was starving.

G
RADUALLY, OVER THE
n
ext few weeks, the world kept coming back to me in halting, unrelated images or words or even sudden overwhelming feelings for which I had neither name nor cause. The sweet taste of a sugary doughnut in my mouth, for instance; or a vision of white dogwood blossoms all around me as I sat in the open somewhere, in some city; the majestic swell of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on a cathedral organ, filling me with exaltation and then shame as I woke in orgasm to find the young lady physician, Dr. Gail Schwartz, patting my arm.

“It’s all right, Evalina,” she said. “Don’t be embarrassed. This is all right—this is normal. You are beginning to recover.”

But the next morning I woke up racked by sobs and could not stop weeping for hours, though I did not know the source of my sorrow. If this was recovery, I wanted no part of it. Why couldn’t I just simply remember?

“Because the insulin shock treatments cause coma and convulsions, which are scrambling the connections in your brain, Evalina,” Dr. Schwartz told me. “This is how they work. Nobody knows exactly why they work—and any of these doctors who tell you they do is lying—but they do work. They are working now. You are better. You were sent to us in a virtually catatonic state, the result of severe trauma, injury, illness—who knows? We don’t know exactly what happened—we have only a few pieces of your story. Our first task has been to jolt you out of the condition in which we found you. Next, we may be able to help you form new connections and ways of thinking that are not so painful for you, not overwhelming. So don’t worry, you will remember when you are ready to remember. The brain is an astonishing organism in which nothing is ever lost. Nothing! Not even you.”

I liked Dr. Schwartz’s calm, quiet manner, the little gold glasses perched down on the end of her long, thin nose, her tidy bun of dark, frizzy hair, even her practical, let’s-get-down-to-business Northern accent. She seemed very young to be a doctor.

“This may take some time, but what else do you have on your calendar right now?” She smiled at me, and I smiled ruefully back, knowing already that this was so; for in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing.

“Don’t try to remember,” Dr. Schwartz said. “Concentrate on the day at hand. Just do what we tell you.” She flashed me a quick grin, and I imagined being her friend, her chum, in other circumstances.

Dr. Schwartz vanished, carrying her clipboard, to be succeeded by a host of others, each with an agenda. Thus I found myself walking up and down the long halls several times a day with a fresh-faced young man wearing a whistle who said, “How ya doin’ now, honey? How ya doin’?” unnervingly, at every lap; making bead necklaces with an art group in the day room; tossing a large red medicine ball about a room in which one woman screamed and dived for the floor whenever the ball came in her direction; and singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” lustily in a music therapy group led by Phoebe Dean, who was still on the staff, wider in the hips but just as enthusiastic as ever.

“Why, Evalina!” she cried in her ridiculously cheery way. “I’m so glad to see you. Now let’s do it again, everybody, but this time as a round—Evalina, will you lead the second group, please? Here, come on up here to do it.”

I stood up and went forward to face the group.

“Okay. Now, let’s go!” Phoebe struck her tuning fork to get the key. I led my group lustily in song, remembering every word, to my surprise. Clearly, Phoebe’s high expectations of me had a therapeutic value. We did “Dona Nobis Pacem”and “Music Alone Shall Live” in rounds, too, with Phoebe mugging as our groups competed against each other. My friend Dixie, in Phoebe’s group, could scarcely sing for laughing.

“Hurry up and get well,” Phoebe said to me when the others had left and she was gathering up her songbooks. “I could really use you to play piano for me. My assistant is going on maternity leave the first of the month.”

What month? What month was it now, for that matter? I wasn’t even sure. But indeed, my fingers had been moving against my skirt as we sang; my fingers still knew every note of the songs.

“I’d like that,” I said.

Passing by in the hallway, Dr. Schwartz turned back to wink at me, amused.

D
R.
S
CHWARTZ WAS
p
art of the new management that had gradually taken over Highland Hospital since Dr. Carroll had deeded it to Duke in 1939. Evidently this was the reason Dr. Carroll had not come to see me again while I was on the top floor; though still involved with the hospital, he no longer took an active role in patient care. A Dr. Basil T. Bennett was the medical director now. I studied his photograph on the cover of The Highland Fling, our weekly newspaper. Clearly, things had changed. I could not imagine this Dr. Bennett, with his cropped hair and upright, military bearing, ever donning tights and doublet, for instance, and acting in a play! The article about him said that since he had come to Highland directly from the army, Dr. Bennett was an expert at dealing with the many men who had suffered mental breakdowns as a result of their war experiences. I had already noted a number of such veterans receiving shock treatments along with me.