I didn’t dream, which was a blessing.
I used to hate driving down Magazine Street in that time I was beginning to think of as simply
before.
Magazine Street was an artery of the city that twisted from Canal Street all the way to Riverbend, following the course of the river, less than half a mile away from the protective levee at any point in its meanderings. It was one of those bizarre streets calculated to push a driver with out-of-state license plates over the edge rather quickly. It began as a one-way at Canal on the Uptown side, corresponding roughly to Decatur in the Quarter. Its path was pretty straight until it reached St. Andrew in the lower Garden District, where it suddenly and without warning changed into a two-way street for the rest of its narrow path. Magazine Street was lined almost its entire distance with shops of every shape, size, and nature, like A&P, Walgreen, coffee shops, thrift stores, antique shops, neighborhood bars, and upscale restaurants. It was potted and scarred, lined with parked cars, and always jammed with traffic. It always hummed with life and activity, which could be incredibly frustrating when you were in a hurry—and God forbid you got stuck behind a city bus. When I had to go uptown, I preferred to take Prytania, a few blocks away. It was more of a residential street, with fewer lights and a lot less traffic.
But after drinking a pot of coffee and getting dressed, I decided to take Magazine Street, just to see what it was like.
And almost immediately regretted the decision.
Few businesses were open. Most of them still had their show windows boarded up. There was a noticeable absence of both cars and pedestrians. The traffic light at Jackson wasn’t working, and the National Guard had set up stop signs on small easels that were almost impossible to see. The Dunn and Sonnier Floral Shop at the corner had lost the wall facing Jackson Avenue, which had collapsed into a huge pile of dusty red bricks piled up on the sidewalk. There was a hand-painted sign atop the bricks, reading DO NOT REMOVE BRICKS. Like St. Charles, the sidewalks were covered with bagged garbage and piles of tree limbs. Some of the lampposts were bent into low angles over the street, and a telephone pole close to Washington Avenue looked like it was going to fall at the next gust of wind. It looked like one of those abandoned ghost towns in the old West. I’d always taken the vibrant life of the city for granted and regretted, as I passed closed business after closed business, all my bitching before about pedestrians and getting stuck in traffic.
I turned onto Fourth Street and parked in front of the address Paige had given me. Surrounding the entire property was a black iron fence, sunk into a retaining wall of cement, about a foot high. The house was huge, painted white with green shutters. It was about a three-story Victorian house, with a verandah that ran around the entire first floor. Some of the windows in the uppermost floor were still covered with plywood boards, and the shutters on the second floor were closed. The massive lawn was unkempt, as though it hadn’t been mowed in weeks. There was another, unattached building in the rear. A driveway lined with a hedge on both sides led up to the house, and several expensive cars sat there. There was a big fountain in the center of the yard in front of the house, but it was completely dry. I stood there and looked at the house for a moment, and read the plaque mounted on the fence next to the gate. The house, like so many of the others in the neighborhood, was on the national registry of historic homes, and the plaque mentioned the architect who’d designed and built it for Henri Verlaine as a gift to his wife, Alais.
I’d never heard of the architect, but that didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t an expert on the history of New Orleans architecture.
I walked up to the gate and pushed the button. I stood there for a moment, watching the house. There was a flutter at the curtained windows beside the front door, and then the gate buzzed. I pushed it open and walked up the sidewalk.
As I reached the top of the steps, the front door opened to reveal a rather stout black woman in a maid’s uniform. Her hair was shot through with gray, and her eyes were lined with red. I got a strong sense that she had a lot of inner strength. Her strong face was lined, but her eyes showed intelligence and wariness. She looked like one of those women who always dressed like a queen to go to church on Sunday and prayed regularly, yet had a strong bedrock of common sense at her core. “Yes?” she asked in a higher-pitched voice than I expected. She didn’t smile.
“Um, is there a member of the family available?” I asked. I felt awkward under her stare, and found myself shifting my weight from foot to foot.
“Why?” Her facial expression didn’t change, and I got the sense she was weighing my worth in her mind.
The question was inevitable, and I’d been racking my mind all morning to come up with the right answer. Garden District families rarely, if ever, answer their own doors, but at the same time I doubted the Verlaines wanted me telling their maid about Iris’s business. Particularly when it was family business. My landlady, Barbara Castlemaine, lived a block over on Third Street, and no matter how many times she told me she considered her housekeeper “family,” I never fully believed her. After all, it wasn’t as if Barbara’s housekeeper took meals with her, or was a guest at her parties. After an awkward silence, I finally said, “I worked for Iris Verlaine.” I handed her one of my business cards, hoping that would do the trick.
Her face showed no change other than a slight twitch at the hinge of her jaw. She didn’t even look at my card. Instead, she held the door open and gestured to a doorway to the right. “Wait in the parlor.” She walked down the hallway and disappeared around a corner.
I walked in and sat down in an incredibly uncomfortable chair that was probably an antique. The room was large, with high ceilings and a massive chandelier that caught and reflected the sunlight coming through the big windows. There was a massive piano in one corner, its deeply polished wood gleaming, an oil painting over the fireplace, and several uncomfortable-looking chairs that matched the chair I was sitting in. The polished floor was partially covered by an old Oriental rug that was probably worth more than my car. There was no dust anywhere, no cobwebs on the chandelier. Eighty percent of the city might have been destroyed, but the Verlaine home was a well-kept museum. The air was stagnant, as though the windows hadn’t been opened since the Second World War. The oil painting was from the 1800s, and from the stern look on the man’s face, it probably was old Henri Verlaine himself. He looked like the kind of man who would found a family fortune—mean and driven.
“Mr. MacLeod?”
I stood up and turned to shake hands with a man who looked to be in his early forties.
“Joshua Verlaine,” he said. “I’m Iris’s oldest brother.”
His hair was that unnatural shade of black that comes from a bottle. There were lines on his reddish round face and dark circles under his eyes, reaching down almost to the middle of his nose. He was thin-lipped and his smile barely seemed to penetrate his heavy cheeks. There was a spot of dried blood on his upper lip, and he had missed a place shaving just to the right underside of his chin. His blue eyes were watery and bloodshot, and his hand soft and a little damp. He was low waisted and big-bellied, so he looked top-heavy, his jeans crisply ironed blue pencils hanging down from a large inflated balloon covered with yellow cashmere. Under his cologne was a slight odor of stale liquor. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing me back into the uncomfortable chair. He himself sat down on the matching loveseat. He crossed one leg over the other. “So, Iris hired a private eye?” He ran a hand over his slick hair. “This was about Daddy, wasn’t it?”
I didn’t answer at first because I was trying to remember the last time I heard a man in his forties say daddy. I pulled her check from my shirt pocket and handed it over to him. I decided to ignore his question. “She hired me the Wednesday before the storm to do a job for her. Obviously, she no longer needs the job done. I wanted to return that.” No sense in telling him she actually had fired me rather abruptly two days later by leaving a message on my machine.
He looked at the check. “You should have cashed it. I wondered what it was for when I went through her records, but we would have honored it.” He barked out a laugh. “Most people would have, you know.”
I shrugged. “I don’t like taking people’s money when I haven’t earned it.”
“An honest man, by God, in New Orleans!” He glanced at his watch. “Would you like a drink, Mr. MacLeod?”
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the clock on the mantel read ten forty-five. “No, thank you,” I said, standing up. “I should be going. I don’t want to take up a lot of your time.”
I’d taken a dislike to the place and wanted to get out so I could breathe again. The place didn’t look lived in, not one thing slightly askew for the human touch of chaos that every home seems to have if you look carefully enough. I didn’t much care for Joshua Verlaine, either. I’d known too many guys like him in my fraternity back at LSU—spoiled and privileged good ole boys who acted like your best friend so they could get close enough to stick the knife in your back at the first opportunity.
“Don’t be absurd.” He walked over to the side table and poured himself a very stiff bourbon on the rocks. “You sure you don’t want something? Water?”
“I really should be going—”
“Where have you got to go?” he asked. He barked out that laugh again. “Welcome to post-Katrina New Orleans. None of us have anywhere to be.” He took a swig from the glass. “Now sit down and tell me why Iris hired you. It was Daddy, wasn’t it?”
I swallowed. Much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I didn’t have anywhere to go, except to drive around the city and look some more—or go home and watch mindless hours of television. It wasn’t like the phone was going to ring. Neither prospect was any more appealing than spending more time in the Verlaine mausoleum. I considered my options for a moment, and then I sat back down. “I’ll have a glass of ice water then, if you don’t mind.”
He handed me the glass before he sat back down on the divan. “Iris had a thing about Daddy. I guess it was because she never knew him, and of course by the time she was born Mother had erased him from our lives completely.”
“I take it the divorce was unpleasant?”
He laughed again and took another drink. “The divorce was pleasant because he was long gone by the time Mother went to court. One day, he was just gone. Darrin and I had no idea what happened …I mean, they always say the kids know, no matter how much you try to hide it from them, when there’s trouble between their parents, but hell, it took me and Darrin totally by surprise. Gone, poof, never heard from again.” He snapped his fingers and finished his drink. “Mother got rid of every picture of him, and Grandpa, well, basically he forbade us from talking about him or mentioning him to her ever again.”
“She didn’t explain why?” I sipped my water. “That seems rather odd.”
“Mother never explained anything.” He put his glass down. “If it was unpleasant, there was no need to talk about it. That’s just the way she was, bless her heart—he was gone and that was the end of it in her mind. Grandpa, though, took me and Darrin—that’s my younger brother—aside a few days after the pictures disappeared and told us that Daddy had left us because he didn’t want to be married to our Mother anymore. Mother was upset, and didn’t want to talk about it, so we weren’t to say anything to her about him anymore. He didn’t know if we would ever see Daddy anymore, but he thought Daddy was never coming back.” He laughed again, a little bitterly. “I could tell Grandpa wasn’t one bit sorry Daddy was gone. He never liked Daddy much, we could all tell that. You didn’t have to be a private eye to figure that out.”
“How old were you?” I felt myself softening a bit toward him. There was pain in his voice and etched on his face, even after all this time. And he obviously had loved his sister. Maybe I’d been too quick to judge.
“I was ten, I think, ten or eleven. Mother was still pregnant with Iris, and I’m a little under eleven years older than her…I really don’t remember much about that time.” He shrugged. “School was out, so it was sometime in the summer.”
If my father had disappeared when I was ten, I’d have led the cheers. “Were you close to your father?”
“I have good memories of him, if that’s what you mean. I was upset when he was gone. Darrin was about six, so Grandpa told me I had to help him be strong…and besides, you know, boys don’t cry.” He looked down at his hands. “But yeah, I missed him. He was a painter, you know? He used to let me play with his paints and make my own paintings.” He laughed again. “Mine were terrible. I’d certainly not inherited his talent.” He shook his head. “To this day, I don’t understand how he could just take off like that, never see us again. I’m divorced myself, but I see my kids every chance I get. What kind of man does that to his kids? No matter how big a bitch Mother might have been, he could have tried to see us.” He bit his lower lip. “But you know, Mother changed after Daddy left. She was never a real warm woman, but afterward…” He scratched his head. “It was like she forgot how to laugh.”
“And Iris?” I prompted him. I was trying to imagine what it would have been like for her.
He blew out a sigh. “It bugged her that he left, that she never knew him. A lot. I mean, for Darrin and me, well, at least we got a chance to know our dad. She never did…and well, I don’t know. I’d say to her she was better off than we were because she didn’t know him at all, so she didn’t miss him, if you know what I mean.” He shook his head. “She never said anything to Mother, of course. But she used to talk to me about it from time to time. I’d tell her to just let it go—if he wanted to see us he knew where we were—but every once in a while, she’d start thinking about it again. It was her particular little craziness, and after she started planning her wedding, I knew it was going to come up again.” His eyes got wet. “And now, of course, she’s dead… We haven’t even been able to have a memorial service, you know?” He looked away from me. “I mean, can you imagine? The police came by late that Friday night; I had to go identify her body—and then the next day we had to get ready for the fucking hurricane.”