The Witching Hour (10 page)

And these were good days for Redemptorist School, the school which had always been the poorest white school in the city of New Orleans. A new principal had come, and she climbed on a bench in the school yard and shouted through a microphone to inflame the kids before the games! She sent huge crowds to City Park to cheer. Soon she had scores of students out collecting quarters to build a gym, and the team was working small miracles. It was winning game after game, by sheer force of will it seemed, just scoring those yards even when the opposition was playing better football.

Michael still hit the books, but the games were the real focus of his emotional life that year. Football was perfect for his aggression, his strength, even his frustration. He was one of the stars at school. He could feel the girls looking at him when he walked up the aisle at eight o’clock Mass every morning.

And then the dream came true. Redemptorist won the City Championship. The underdogs had done it, the kids from the other side of Magazine, the kids who spoke that funny way so that everyone knew they were from the Irish Channel.

Even the
Times-Picayune
was full of ecstatic praise. And the gymnasium drive was in high gear, and Marie Louise and Michael went “all the way” and then suffered agonies waiting to find out if Marie Louise was pregnant.

Michael might have lost it all then. He wanted nothing more than to score touchdowns, be with Marie Louise, and make money so he could take her out in the Packard. On Mardi Gras day, he and Marie Louise dressed as pirates, went down to the French Quarter, drank beer, snuggled and necked on a bench in Jackson Square. As summer came on, she talked more and more about getting married.

Michael didn’t know what to do. He felt he belonged with Marie Louise, yet he could not talk to her. She hated the movies he took her to see—
Lust for Life
, or
Marty
, or
On the Waterfront.
And when he talked about college, she told him he was dreaming.

Then came the winter of Michael’s senior year. It was bitter cold, and New Orleans experienced its first snowfall in a century. When the schools let out early, Michael went walking alone through the Garden District, its streets beautifully blanketed in
white, watching the soft soundless snow descend all around him. He did not want to share this moment with Marie Louise. He shared it instead with the houses and the trees he loved, marveling at the spectacle of the snow-trimmed porches and cast-iron railings.

Kids played in the streets; cars drove slowly on the ice, skidding dangerously at the corners. For hours the lovely carpet of snow stayed on the ground; then Michael finally went home, his hands so cold he could scarcely turn the key in the lock. He found his mother crying.

His dad had been killed in a warehouse fire at three that afternoon; he’d been trying to save another fire fighter.

It was over for Michael and his mother in the Irish Channel. By late May, the house on Annunciation Street was sold. And one hour after Michael received his high school diploma before the altar of St. Alphonsus Church, he and his mother were on a Greyhound bus, headed for California.

Now Michael would get to have “nice things” and go to college and mix with people who spoke good English. All this turned out to be true.

His Aunt Vivian lived in a pretty apartment on Golden Gate Park, full of dark furniture and real oil paintings. They stayed with her until they could get their own place a few blocks away. And Michael at once applied to the state college for the freshman year, his father’s insurance money taking care of everything.

Michael loved San Francisco. It was always cold, true, and miserably windy and barren. Nevertheless he loved the somber colors of the city, which struck him as quite particular, ochers and olive greens and dark Roman reds and deep grays. The great ornate Victorian houses reminded him of those beautiful New Orleans mansions.

Taking summer courses at the downtown extension of the state college, to make up for the math and science which he lacked, he had no time to miss home, to think of Marie Louise, or of girls at all. When he wasn’t studying, he was busy trying to figure things put—how San Francisco worked, what made it so different from New Orleans.

It seemed the great underclass to which he had belonged in New Orleans did not exist in this city, where even policemen and fire fighters spoke well and dressed well and owned expensive houses. It was impossible to tell from what part of town a person came. The pavements themselves were amazingly clean, and an air of restraint seemed to affect the smallest exchanges between people.

When he went to Golden Gate Park, Michael marveled at the
nature of the crowds, that they seemed to add to the beauty of the dark green landscape, rather than to be invading it. They rode their glamorous foreign bicycles on the paths, picnicked in small groups on the velvet grass, or sat before the band shell listening to the Sunday concert. The museums of the city were a revelation, too, full of real Old Masters, and they were crowded with average people on Sundays, people with children, who seemed to take all this quite for granted.

Michael stole weekend hours from his studies so that he could roam the De Young, and gaze in awe at the great El Greco painting of Saint Francis of Assisi, with its haunted expression and gaunt gray cheeks.

“Is this all of America?” Michael asked. It was as if he’d come from another country into the world he had only glimpsed in motion pictures or television. Not the foreign films of the great houses and the smoking jackets, of course, but the later American films, and television shows, in which everything was neat and civilized.

And here Michael’s mother was happy, really happy as he had never seen her, putting money in the bank from her job at I. Magnin where she sold cosmetics as she had years ago, and visiting with her sister on weekends and sometimes her older brother, “Uncle Michael,” a genteel drunk who sold “fine china” at Gumps on Post Street.

One weekend night they went to an old-fashioned theater on Geary Street to see a live stage production of
My Fair Lady.
Michael loved it. After that they went often to “little theaters” to see remarkable plays—Albert Camus’s
Caligula
and Maxim Gorky’s
The Lower Depths
and a peculiar mishmash of soliloquies based on the work of James Joyce called
Ulysses in Nighttown.

Michael was entranced with all this. Uncle Michael promised him that when the opera season came he would take him to see
La Bohème.
Michael was speechless with gratitude.

It was as if his childhood in New Orleans had never really happened.

He loved the downtown of San Francisco, with its noisy cable cars and overflowing streets, the big dime store on Powell and Market, where he could stand reading at the paperback rack, unnoticed, for hours.

He loved the flower stands which sold bouquets of red roses for almost nothing, and the fancy stores on Union Square. He loved the little foreign movie theaters, of which there were at least a dozen, where he and his mother went to see
Never on Sunday
with Melina Mercouri and
La Dolce Vita
made by Fellini,
absolutely the most wonderful film Michael had ever seen. There were also comedies with Alec Guinness, and dark murky philosophical films from Sweden by Ingmar Bergman, and lots of other wonderful films from Japan and from Spain and from France. Many people in San Francisco went to see such movies. There was nothing secret about them at all.

He loved having coffee with other summer students in the big garishly lighted Foster’s Restaurant on Sutter Street, talking for the first time in his life with Orientals and Jews from New York, and educated colored people who spoke perfect English, and older men and women who were stealing time from families and jobs to go back to school just for the sheer joy of it.

It was during this period that Michael came to comprehend the little mystery of his mother’s family. By bits and pieces he put it together that they had once been very rich, these people. And it was Michael’s mother’s paternal grandmother who had squandered the entire fortune. Nothing was left from her but one carved chair and three heavily framed landscape paintings. Yet she was spoken of as something beyond wonderful, a goddess one would think, who had traveled the whole world, and ate caviar, and managed to put her son through Harvard before going completely bankrupt.

As for the son—Michael’s mother’s father—he had drunk himself to death after the loss of his wife, a “beautiful” Irish-American girl, from the Mission District of San Francisco. Nobody wanted to talk about “Mother” and it soon came clear that “Mother” had committed suicide. “Father,” who drank unceasingly until he had a fatal stroke, left his three children a small annuity. Michael’s mother and her sister Vivian finished their education at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and went into genteel occupations. Uncle Michael was “the spitting image of dad,” they said with a sigh, when he had fallen asleep from his cognac on the sofa.

Uncle Michael was the only salesman that Michael ever knew who could sell people things while he himself was sitting down. He would come back to Gumps, drunk from lunch, and sit there, flushed and exhausted and merely point to the beautiful china, explaining everything from his chair, while the young customers, couples soon to be married, made up their minds. People seemed to find him charming. He did know all about fine china, and he was a terribly nice guy.

This gradual education regarding his mother’s family illuminated much for Michael. As time went on he came to see that his mother’s values were essentially those of the very rich though she herself did not know it. She went to see foreign films because
they were fun, not for cultural enhancement. And she wanted Michael to go to college because that’s where he “ought” to be. It was perfectly natural to her to shop at Young Man’s Fancy and buy him the crew-neck sweaters and button-down shirts that made him look like a prep-school boy. But of middle-class drive or ambition she and her sister and her brother really knew nothing. Her work appealed to her because I. Magnin was the finest store in town, and she met nice people there. In her leisure hours, she drank her ever increasing amounts of wine, read her novels, visited with friends, and was a happy, satisfied person.

It was the wine that killed her eventually. For as the years passed she became a ladylike drunk, sipping all evening long from a crystal glass behind closed doors, and invariably passing out before bedtime. Finally one night, late, she struck her head in a bathroom fall, put a towel to the wound and went back to sleep, never realizing that she was slowly bleeding to death. She was cold when Michael finally broke down the door. That was in the house on Liberty Street which Michael had bought and restored for his family, though Uncle Michael was gone by then, too, of drink also, though in his case they had called it a stroke.

But in spite of her own lassitude and final indifference to the world at large, Michael’s mother was always proud of Michael’s ambition. She understood his drive because she understood him, and he was the one thing that had given her own life true meaning.

And Michael’s ambition was a raging flame when he finally entered San Francisco State College in the fall as a matriculating freshman.

Here, on an enormous college campus amid full-time students from all walks of life, Michael felt inconspicuous and powerful and ready to start his true education. It was like those old days in the library. Only now he got credit for what he read. He got credit for wanting to understand all the mysteries of life which had so provoked him in years past when he’d hidden his curiosity from those who might ridicule him.

He could not believe his luck. Going from class to class, deliriously anonymous among the great proletarian student body with their backpacks and their brogans, Michael listened, rapt, to the lectures of his professors and the stunningly clever questions asked by the students around him. Peppering his schedules with electives in art, music, current events, comparative literature, and even drama, he gradually acquired a true old-fashioned liberal arts education.

He majored in history finally because he did well in that subject
and could write the papers and pass the tests, and because he knew that his latest ambition—to be an architect—was quite beyond him. He could not master the math, no matter how he tried. And in spite of all his efforts, he could not make the grades that would admit him to a School of Architecture for four years of postgraduate study. Also he loved history because it was a social science in which people tried to stand back from the world and figure out how it worked. And this is what Michael had been doing ever since he was a kid in the Irish Channel.

Synthesis, theory, overview—this was utterly natural to him. And because he had come from such an alien and otherworldly place, because he was so astonished by the modern world of California, the perspective of the historian was a comfort to him. He liked above all to read well-written books about cities and centuries—books, that is, which tried to describe places or eras in terms of their origins, their sociological and technological advances, their class struggle, their art and literature.

Michael was more than content. As the insurance money ran out, he went to work part-time with a carpenter who specialized in restoring the beautiful old Victorians of San Francisco. He began to study books on houses again, as he had in the old days.

By the time he received his bachelor’s degree, his old friends from New Orleans would not have known him. He had still the football player’s build, the massive shoulders and the heavy chest, and the carpentry kept him in fine form. And his black curly hair, his large blue eyes, and the light freckles on his cheeks remained his distinctive features. But he wore dark-rimmed glasses now to read, and his common dress was a cable-knit sweater and Donegal tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. He even smoked a pipe, which he carried always in his right coat pocket.

He was at age twenty-one equally at home hammering away on a wood-frame house or typing rapidly with two fingers a term paper on “The Witchcraft Persecutions in Germany in the 1600s.”