1 Dead in Attic (29 page)

The Family of New Orleans.

As far as crimes go in this town, the incident in the parking lot on South Clearview Parkway outside Marshalls department store on October 26 was hardly a blip on the screen.

An elderly woman was walking with an armful of packages. A couple of guys pulled up in a car. They grabbed her purse, knocking her to the ground. They drove off with a haul that amounted to forty bucks.

Witnesses ran over to help the victim. The cops came. A report was filed.

In an era of brazen daylight shootings, horrific gangland executions, and postdisaster fraud schemes that run into the millions of dollars, this was just a petty annoyance, a piece of paperwork, a statistic. Except for one lingering detail.

The victim, eighty-five-year-old Ellen Montgomery, broke her left hip when she hit the ground. She had an emergency hip replacement operation at Ochsner Hospital and spent three days in postop and then nine days in rehab.

Her son Jamie picked her up and brought her to his house in Gentilly. By mid-November, she was making good progress with a walker; despite her age and injury, Ellen Montgomery's life had been marked by an unbending will to get by on her own.

But on Friday, November 17, she complained of shortness of breath and had trouble with her balance. Sunday the nineteenth, she collapsed in the kitchen. An ambulance rushed her back to Ochsner, where doctors tried to revive her. But in the end, she died of a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot in the lung.

The Jefferson Parish coroner's office determined that the blood clot was a result of the hip surgery and therefore a direct result of the purse snatching, and thus she became another member of the mounting murder victim roster in Jefferson Parish.

The muggers have never been caught.

Ellen Montgomery was my friend and, at times, my muse.

In the Days of Pain that followed Hurricane Katrina, she was my only neighbor, and it's funny; I guess as a result of some sort of ageism on my part, during the weeks we spent together last fall, I always had this self-delusional notion that I was taking care of this old and eccentric woman, helping her get through the traumatic aftermath of Katrina, when, in fact, she was taking care of me.

But I bet she knew it the whole time.

We had first met shortly after I bought my house on Magazine Street in 1992. Her house had the classic pack rat/cat lady look to it, all paint-peeled and overgrown, hidden from the street by an iron fence and tangled trees that conjured Boo Radley or some other kind of weird or scary resident therein.

She lived there alone—unless you count her thirty-three cats.

Our single encounter way back then wound up being a small, life-changing event for me. I was single, reckless, and in a world of financial and legal trouble. My car was wrecked and my phone service cut off for months because I couldn't make the bill.

My home had been burglarized three times in a six-week period, pretty much relieving me of all my possessions and distractions. I think I can say with certainty that it was the roughest patch, both personally and professionally, that I had ever known and would know until the fall of 2005.

I was thirty-two years old and welcome to any new idea or direction that might drag me out of my self-pitying ways. Miss Ellen had heard about me—the troubled soul on the block—and she offered what she thought was the key to happiness: a stray dog.

Lord knows where she got the thing, but its presence in Miss Ellen's house was none too welcome by the feline masses that had been living there for years. The dog needed a home and I needed something, anything, and that's how I wound up adopting an exotic silvery-blue mutt of some sort of husky derivation whom I named Alibi and who taught me the notion of unconditional love and who gave me something to do, something to love, and something to look forward to in an otherwise bleak time.

Alibi left a lasting impression. In the years since, I have adopted four more homeless dogs.

After that, I rarely saw Miss Ellen. Truthfully, she had made a great impact on my life, but in my typically self-absorbed way, I never really kept in touch with her. She had her life, I had mine, and there weren't many opportunities for a shut-in cat lady and a gregarious party boy to commune.

And that was my loss, not hers.

I first returned to my home near Audubon Park on Monday, September 5, one week after the hurricane. There was no one anywhere—desolate, messy streets, debris and glass everywhere, and few signs of life other than police cars, Army Humvees, heavy-equipment trucks, and pickups pulling boats up and down Magazine Street.

I ran into my neighbor Martin as he was pulling up stakes and getting out of town after riding out the storm. He told me the area was basically abandoned except for Miss Ellen and her cats.

He had checked in on her and told me her stash of pet food and canned goods looked ample enough to sustain her until the city came back to life, and he had given her a radio and batteries, but that if I could look in on her from time to time, that would be helpful.

She had refused to evacuate and stowed away in her own home for the week because she feared that the police or the military would force her to leave. Then there would be no one to look after her cats. She told me she'd rather die with her cats in New Orleans than live elsewhere without them.

She was neither scared nor delusional nor lonely. In fact, in many ways, the near-total evacuation of New Orleans—the people, not the animals, that is—created a veritable Utopia for this self-reliant, literary, and poetic lover of animals, nature, and solitude, a woman of the simplest means imaginable with no need for modern technology and all of its noise and intrusions.

She was a woman of uncommon serenity and quiet devotion, living on the very margin of society, nestled among her modest but plentiful belongings—mostly books and paintings—in a nineteenth-century bungalow—more of a cabin than a house, really—with no cable, no air-conditioning, no shower, no lawn mower, computer, or cell phone, no ungainly attachments to the material world other than a beat-up old blue sedan for her occasional outings to the grocery, the pet store, the doctor, or church.

To her, the aftermath was an unfortunate circumstance, to be sure, but it was almost Paradise. Imagine a day, a week, a month—a whole season—with nothing to do but read dusty old novels, write poems about the weather and nature, and tend to her magnificent brood of felines, her family, some affectionate and playful, some aloof and nocturnal, all of them beloved and cared for with the patience and attention of a mother.

During daylight hours, she would often scurry about the neighborhood, literally ducking behind cars and between houses when the National Guard drove by, collecting slate roof shingles that had scattered all over the streets and yards of Uptown.

She had been a dilettante but extremely prolific painter for years and had filled her house, floor to ceiling, with her work. But she had run out of canvases and no art stores were open and she thought the slate tiles would make a base for lovely pictures—the color just jumps off them—and so she began to fill dozens, then hundreds, of other people's rooftop debris with impressionistic paintings of trees and oceans and wind and sky, the night sky that shined so brilliantly last fall over a city with no working lights and that she often admired for hours in her backyard alone at night with her thoughts and her cats.

And so I took to looking after her in those days, making sure she was comfortable and content, and, of course, she always was, though she lacked a few luxuries that she dearly wanted. She was not the type to do what other members of the Resistance were doing—entering the darkened Circle K, Whole Foods, and Winn-Dixie, scouring for food, water, booze, and whatever else they needed to survive.

So, each day, when a supply truck from Baton Rouge would deliver supplies and food to the team of
Times-Picayune
reporters and photographers working out of the city, I would scavenge through the care packages for the things that Miss Ellen told me she desired: coffee, sugar, creamer, batteries, and, of all things, peanut butter.

She loved peanut butter.

And so I began my routine early last fall, bringing small care packages to Miss Ellen, and when the newspaper started appearing in the city again, I would bring her a daily copy.

She read me her poetry—she wrote dozens of haikus a day, dreamy meditations on quietude, dappled sunlight, the sounds of birds returning to the area, things like that. She would tell me what book she was reading that day—she had returned to a collection of Beatrix Potter's work that she had read many years ago—and she tried, in vain, to tell me the names of the cats as they wandered out of hiding, one by one, to check out the strange visitor.

In turn, I would tell her the most recent news and events of the city—the water finally receding, the military putting down the clamps on looting, all that stuff. I painted a mental picture for her of life in the city. She always greeted the news with a knowing pause. “Well, I suppose it will get better,” she would always say.

I realize now, all this time later, that I was living in my own little
Tuesdays with Morrie.
Miss Ellen was my one window into real life, the simple life, the beautiful life of just being, reflecting, and creating. Of living life in the moment, never complaining because what's the use. She's the only person I knew who could look at the violently jagged tangle of fallen trees in her yard and not see loss and anger but just smile and say, “It's very interesting, isn't it? The shapes.”

I also realize now that, despite the nagging notion I always had that I was simply humoring a simple and lonely cat lady, she might have been one of the smartest people I ever met.

Much as I tried to latch on to her Zen-like appreciation for the beauty, power, and grace of life and all its capricious fury, I was pretty much a wreck in those days. I had virtually stopped eating or sleeping, and my hands had begun to shake uncontrollably. One day as I stood up to bid Miss Ellen good-bye, I felt a dizzy rush hit me with the force of a speeding train.

I tripped over a recycle bin on her porch as I was leaving and she asked if I was okay and I said yes, just a little tired and stressed out, and I ducked and climbed my way out of the obstacle course of trees in her yard and turned to walk down the sidewalk to my house and I blacked out.

I pitched face-forward on her sidewalk and snapped my glasses in half and opened a gash on my head and spent the next several hours drifting in and out of consciousness on my back. I have written about this episode before, how I lay there on the sidewalk of a major metropolitan city for several hours but no one came to help me, no one passed by; it was just me and the sky above, burning into me.

The only thing I remember during that period—three, maybe four hours on the ground, I don't know—was the sound of Miss Ellen in her house singing to her cats. Her voice drifted out the open windows like a gentle piano sonata, lilting and calm, and it added the sense that maybe I was crazy or dreaming or dead or all three.

It was the voice of a guardian angel.

I realize now, all these months later, that Miss Ellen was the closest thing to sanity that I encountered for months. And I was so embarrassed about what happened leaving her house that day that I did not again return to her house until after she was dead.

I had once again taken benefit of her inherent healing touch, her natural grace, and then I walked away from her life, just as I had done when I leashed up Alibi and walked away all those years ago.

She had her life and I had mine. After the storm, her old friends returned to town. Her church reopened. The local grocery stores reopened. She didn't need me for peanut butter anymore.

My family came back. My kids and my work consumed me—and we adopted a new stray dog!—and life went on and everything around here changed every day but I thought there would always be one constant: I thought the Cat Lady would be there for me if I ever needed her again.

I never got around to introducing her to my kids. I never got to tell them: This is Daddy's teacher.

I'm going to ask her family if I may have one or two of her slate paintings to remember her by. I guess that will be enough to remind me that the simple things in life are what get you through the day, and that fear and loneliness are but self-contrivances, and that life's great moments are just what Tennessee Williams always said they were: the kindness of strangers.

I am sitting in my office at home. I'm feeling an attack of the mean reds coming on. I need medicine. Now.

To my wife I say, “I'm going to hear Rebirth at the Maple Leaf.” I ask her if she's ready to go out and party and this is our private joke, because she is already in bed, comfortably settled with a book for the evening.

I like knowing that when reasonable people are turning in for the night around here, some places haven't even fired their engines yet. My usual bedtime coincides with the hour when scores of bar backs across the region are just beginning to slice limes for the midnight rush of Coronas and gin and tonics.

I don't take advantage of this social phenomenon very much anymore. My need to bring sunglasses with me when I go out on a Saturday night has long since expired.

All the same, there's nothing like walking out of a bar after a night of shooting pool and dancing to a jukebox, into the vengeful glare of the morning sun, to remind you that you live in an alternate universe, that alternate universe being here, New Orleans.

Though I rarely indulge, I have always found a strange comfort in living in a town that never closes. I never want a drink at four in the morning anymore. But I like knowing that I could get one if I did.

And that I wouldn't be alone.