Madeleine's Ghost (28 page)

I look it over politely, make a few comments about French philosophy of the era, and hand it back. But I am still a bit surprised. Pascal in the bayou.

“You know, I try to talk to the family about what I've been reading, but they just roll their eyes. They think I'm a crazy old man, even my wife. We're not a stupid bunch, Mr. Conti. Don't make that mistake, no, sir. My
père
and my
grandpère
, they were smart as a whip—I mean in a country way, because they were real country people. Still, seems like we could use a little of this stuff in the family.” He taps the book. “I mean, a little abstract thinking …”

After that there is another long silence. I hear the water moving against the dock and birds in the bayou. It is possible to sit with an old man without talking and not feel awkward. After a certain age there is the sense that all conversation has been had, all points argued, and it is only the companionship that matters. Like children, old people do not want to be alone. At last we are roused by a tug upon the line.

“Ha!” Papa Rivaudais says. “Sometimes if you don't go to the fish,
the fish, they come to you.” There is a brief struggle, he is weak, but his seventy-odd years of fishing experience wins out. He reels in a two-pound bream, its dark scales glistening in the diminishing light. “I almost feel sorry for the creatures,” he says.
“Lacrima rarum
, as the Romans used to say, how sad it is, but I tell you, split 'em open, clean 'em out, stick 'em on the grill with some lemon juice and garlic butter, and the sadness will pass.” He tosses the fish into the basket. Then, fifteen minutes later, he pulls up another one, a two-pound sunfish, all silver and brilliant spots, gasping for oxygen in the thin air.

We sit for another hour like that. I join him in an alcohol-free beer, and he trolls the line as the sun descends, green and gold, through the trees. Then, in the final moments of dusk, two pirogues wind their way from the creek into the lagoon.

“There they are. The husbands,” Papa Rivaudais says, and stands with difficulty. I make out four men in the pirogues and hear their hearty shouts as they call back and forth, each to each. I bend to take up the tackle box and basket as Papa Rivaudais folds the canvas chair, but he sets this aside for a moment and turns to me. In the fading light I can hardly see his face.

“I'll tell you a secret,” he says. “Antoinette is my favorite out of all my girls. Not a mean bone in her body.”

I am silent.

“She nearly killed me when she ran off with that swamp redneck. She wasn't much older than thirteen, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“And I'm telling you, the girl hasn't been the same since. That son of a bitch, he broke something inside her. She's never been able to settle down. She's the only one of my girls who didn't finish college, the only one who isn't married, doesn't have a child. Always so unsatisfied, jumping from one thing to the next. The store's been good for her, but it's just not enough. You know what I'm saying, Mr. Conti?”

I don't, but I nod anyway, and he puts his hand on my shoulder, and we head slowly up the rise toward the lighted cabins.

T
HE STARS
are up, but even here you can see the lights of New Orleans as a pale green reflection in the sky. From the darkness of the bayou now, the reedy chirp of frogs and the occasional plop and splash of fish in the lagoon. An upside-down half-moon throws a sinuous glimmer on the dark water. In the yard the husbands have constructed a bonfire, and the orange blaze lights our faces on the patio. We are all out eating beneath the stars: Mama and Papa, Antoinette and her sisters, Elise, Manon, Claudine, and Jolie, and their husbands.

The baby is asleep. The two little girls, both eight years old, their long black hair done in pigtails, dance like Pocahontas around the bonfire, then roll, fighting and shrieking, on the woodchips of the drive. One is Manon's daughter and half Irish; the other 100 percent Creole, the fruit of Claudine's union with her husband, Paul Sarpy, of the Sarpyville Sarpys, representative from St. Charles Parish to the state legislature in Baton Rouge, but the little girls could be sisters instead of cousins. They are alike as two peas in a pod. The dark, pretty Rivaudais blood seems to dominate all lesser heritage.

The picnic table is littered with paper plates and casserole dishes. The coals of the barbecue glow white hot, always perfectly ready twenty minutes after the last person has eaten. There was barbecued bream, crawfish jambalaya, Texas caviar, which is marinated black-eyed peas, corn on the cob, mixed greens, red beans, and rice. Only scraps remain. Now we sip Louisiana Lemonade, which is a potent combination of crushed ice, mint, fresh lemonade, and an indigenous sugarcane liquor called Davant, found only in the Plaquemines delta.

I lean against the railing with my drink and listen to the husbands talk about sports. New Orleans is trying to acquire an ice hockey team. The semipro Winnipeg Glaciers might become the NHL New Orleans Revelers sometime in the next six months. I have nothing to add to the conversation.

“I'm telling you what, this city needs a good hockey team,” says Paul Sarpy. “I say why not, if the fans will support it?”

Jim Remington isn't so sure. He is Jolie's husband, an old friend of Paul's from the days when they both worked as staffers on Capitol Hill—and they are still two glad-handing Hilloid preps in plaid shorts and pressed Warthog polo shirts from Britches of Georgetown. Their Bass Weejuns are worn without socks. They met their future wives at the same Bush inaugural party in a Republican group house at A and First streets, SE. Jim is a member of the famous Remington gun family and vice-president of a new division that installs alarm systems. Antoinette has told me that he wired her parents' house on Prytania Street and her own apartment in the Faubourg Marigny, free of charge.

“Face it, Paul,” says Jim. “New Orleans is just too hot for a hockey team. It's a sun town. Hockey doesn't go in a sun town.” He's a tall, handsome fellow with a shock of black hair. He looks quite at home with the rest of the Rivaudais clan.

“Y'all heard of the Los Angeles Kings?” says Charles-François, Elise's husband. “Los Angeles is a sun town, but they've got a tradition of hockey going back to the thirties.” A content and balding engineer in his early forties, he sits very close to his wife at the picnic table. She's just a year or two younger than he, but could pass for twenty-eight. Their two girls are off to camp for the summer, and they're cuddling like newlyweds.

“I personally would patronize a hockey team in New Orleans,” says Manon's husband, Sean O'Farrell, the Irishman.

“Of course you would,” Jim says. “Any sports is good business for you. More drinking.”

“That's not it a' tall,” he says. “We're not a real sports bar. I like hockey. Fast-paced game. But word around the place is this—team's going to be called the Bayou Blades, and they're going to be based out of Baton Rouge.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit to you,” Sean says.

There is no trace of the hip jazz musician left in this man. He put down his saxophone a long time back, and now he's just one of the boys.
The artistic streak he once possessed has been leached out by the Louisiana heat and the easy living afforded by his wife's money. But recently he has gone from being the bum of the family, butt of Irish drinking jokes, to something of a success story: After years of sullen loafing, he opened an Irish bar in the French Quarter, called O'Farrell's Four Provinces. It is an exact replica of a favorite pub in Dublin, down to the Guinness on tap and the gouges in the oak wainscoting caused by an IRA bomb in the seventies. The place has become so successful he's thinking of expanding to Metairie.

“The question is, Where are we going to put a hockey team?” Charles-François says now. “Not in the Superdome.”

“That'd be a sight,” Paul says. “Zambonis in the Superdome.”

“What we really need is a baseball team down here,” Jim says. “Now there's a good sun sport. The boys of summer …”

Et cetera.

The conversation passes from sports to local Republican politics, then to the state of nutria devastation in the swamp. Thousands of miles of wetland have been destroyed by this small brown muskratlike animal from South America, accidentally introduced to the ecosystem in the 1930s. It reproduces like mad and will eat anything.

This is a topic for everyone, even Mama Rivaudais, who thinks the nutria is a cute animal with just as much a right to live as anything else. Only Antoinette and her father and I hold back. The old man, I know, has come to value his silence. He nods off in his chair. Antoinette keeps quiet for reasons of her own. But I have never been good at such gatherings. Normal folks eating and drinking and talking sports and politics just to hear themselves talk. The husbands are all fine fellows, who express very interesting and well-considered opinions, but I am vaguely depressed by the whole thing and bored to tears. I nod and smile and sip my Louisiana Lemonade and make the occasional assenting exclamation, but they don't have much use for me. The very fact that I live in New York seems a threat.

“New York City,” Paul says, rolling the words off his tongue like an accusation. It is one of the few comments aimed in my direction the whole evening. He hooks his thumbs in the belt loops of his plaid shorts like a
sheriff's deputy and gives me the once-over. “If you want my opinion, New York City has much more influence than it should in the making of national policy.” Claudine rolls her eyes at this. Another one of her husband's speeches. “The concerns of New York are not the concerns of the rest of America. New York resembles London more than it does Baton Rouge or even Chicago. All the way down here, we know what New Yorkers are thinking, what New Yorkers are doing. Just because New York is where the media is located and the media controls information and makes policy in this country.”

I agree. He seems a little disappointed. He wants more, an argument. I don't feel like saying anything, but I see that I am expected to continue. The husbands watch me in anticipation, drinks in hand. “Yes, New York reminds me of Paris in 1871,” I say hesitantly. “A radical place full of radical ideas, ruled by the mob and their newspapers, and defiant of the Prussians. The rest of France capitulated; Paris didn't. Paris had its own mind that was not the mind of France. When the rest of the country made a humiliating peace at Sedan, the Foreign Legion was called in to pacify the Parisians, and there was a terrible civil war. They slaughtered at least one hundred thousand civilians in the streets. Buried them at the barricades where they fell, beneath the cobblestones of most major intersections. They still dig up bones to this day when they do street repairs.” I immediately regret my words, but this clumsy historical analogy is the only thing that occurs to me.

An awkward silence follows. Paul seems confused or offended; he doesn't know what to say. Jim Remington coughs. Antoinette looks over at me and is about to intervene, but she shrugs and smiles. The smile is for me alone, lazy and fond. I feel a little jolt to my heart, my awkwardness falls away, and suddenly the night is beautiful, and it doesn't matter. I go back to my Louisiana Lemonade, which at that moment seems an excellent beverage.

“You know, perfect skin is a gift from God,” Mama Rivaudais says, breaking the silence at last. It is a comment entirely out of the blue that succeeds in easing the tension. There is laughter and general disbelief.

“What the hell! Has the heat got to you, Mama?” Elise says from beside her husband at the picnic table.

“All of my girls have perfect skin,” Mama insists. “Perfect skin even in high school, when girls have a tendency to break out. I can't remember any of you even having one little pimple. Can you, dear?” She nudges her husband awake.

“Huh?” the old man says.

“Perfect skin,” she says. “All our girls. What do you think?”

He is puzzled for a moment; then he nods. It is his wife. “Yes, like a baby's butt,” he says, and drifts back to sleep.

Antoinette, with her arms crossed at the railing, shakes her head. “Well, I can remember a pimple or two,” she says.

“You girls should be grateful for what you have, and you have a lot. The Lord has been very kind to this family. Some girls would kill for perfect skin.”

At last there is a murmur of assent and a moment of appreciation for God's bounty. This is as close as we will come tonight to the mysteries. Then the fire burns low; the pigtailed Indians run out of steam around the fire and are put to bed by their mothers. The old folks move slowly to the shadows of the central cabin, and the women and men begin to separate to the wings. That's the way it is on these Rivaudais family gatherings. Women and children sleep in one cabin, the husbands in another, with Mama and Papa in between.

“They get you a good bed?” Antoinette says.

“Yeah,” I say. “The pullout couch.”

We are standing at the railing, staring out at the lagoon. A light goes on behind the sliding glass doors in the husbands' cabin as they make ready to settle in for the evening with a frat house camaraderie full of farts, cigarette smoke, and bad dirty jokes. We hear a strange hissing sound, and the dark snout of an alligator breaks the ripple of moonlight on the water. Antoinette slips her hand beneath my arm. Moonlight falls along her cheek. Mama was right. Her daughter's skin is indeed perfect.

“I'm glad you came,” Antoinette says. “We've got to do this man-woman
thing, family tradition, you know. Otherwise I'd stay up half the night talking to you.”

“That's O.K.,” I say. “I'm really tired. The trip. Can't believe I left New York just this morning. We'll talk tomorrow.”

“Thing is,” she says, “I haven't been sleeping so well lately. I wouldn't mind talking to someone.”