Nine Lives Page 4

  On their living room mantel was a forest of framed photos. In the oldest, a fifteen-year-old Tootie and his uncle Becate wore beaded tunics, baggy suede trousers, and, for headdresses, sadly drooping strings of turkey feathers. They looked like Indians in an old black-and-white western. Tootie hated those suits. They wouldn’t do what he wanted them to do, he’d told Joyce early in their courtship. And what was that? she asked him.

  He only shook his head. For a long time, he didn’t answer that question. Then one day, he told her: he wanted to stop the fighting.

  Joyce had snorted and flapped a hand. To her, it seemed the whole point of being an Indian was the fighting. For years, it was the same after every Mardi Gras and St. Joseph’s Night; Tootie would walk in with his suit cut up and bruises all over his face. The battlefield always seemed to be the little pontoon bridge over the canal at Fourth and Rocheblave, the one they called the Magnolia. Someone would start with the “humba, humba”—the Creole bow-down challenge—and it was on. Joyce had often asked why they had to cross that bridge, and Tootie’s explanation was always infuriatingly the same: Indians go where they like. It made her crazy.

  Tootie always blamed the suits. If a man put more of himself into his suit, he said, he wouldn’t need to fight. Every year, he went down to the Circle Food Store to see the man who slaughtered the fowl, got his turkey feathers, and made another suit. And every year he’d come home from Mardi Gras bloody.

  Then came the year he didn’t go by the Circle for feathers. Instead, he’d taken three buses out to a costume-and-hobby shop in Metairie and come home with shopping bags full of garish feathers in a bright crazy orange God never intended a bird to be. Another bag held beads and sparkly sequins in a mind-boggling array of colors and sizes. Joyce had peeked under the rug when he wasn’t looking; all the money was gone.

  Tootie had set to work right then, with a bruise from the Mardi Gras humbug still fresh on his cheekbone. He’d used half egg cartons, lifting a flap in the apron of the costume, wedging an egg carton under, so that it pushed out a dazzling grid of beads: a three-dimensional suit, he called it. His father had dreamed of such a suit. This suit, he’d told her, was going to make them stop fighting with the gun and the knife and start fighting with the needle and thread.

  Tootie had always been careful to put his suit in progress away when people came to call, but with the three-dimensional orange suit he became obsessed with secrecy. Nobody could pass through the door until he had every piece of the suit packed away. He’d go over every rug and sofa cushion, so that not a trace of bright orange feathers showed anywhere. The suit was so bright it was painful to look at under the harsh kitchen lightbulb. The headdress—Tootie called it a crown—radiated in every direction, with a snake rising from its middle. Pirouetting in the kitchen, Tootie had become a man of beaded flame. No vestige of that Hollywood Indian remained.

  It had worked just as Tootie had hoped. He’d come home unbruised that year. His suit had struck the others blind. And they started taking after him; nobody made those tired old blanket-and-turkey-feather suits anymore. Everybody came out in colors. It took beaucoup work to make a suit that could stand up to Tootie’s, and nobody wanted to work all year and take a chance of having a suit cut up and bloodied by some knucklehead with a broken beer bottle. For his part, Tootie made it his mission to stay ahead of everybody else. The green suit, the white suit, the pink suit—year after year, each was more beautiful, more elaborate, more extreme than the last.

  JOYCE SPENT THE AFTERNOON dropping in on Mardi Gras parties up and down the block, running into her children from her first marriage—Gwendolyn, Phyllis, and Charles—who were looking after her youngest, little Denise. A little after five, Joyce was in the kitchen, rolling catfish fillets in fish fry, when she heard a hubbub out in the street. She opened the door and there stood Tootie, his face contorted, Mutt-Mutt behind him, clutching his pant leg. Tootie’s crown was missing. His beautiful turquoise suit was torn and matted. Across his cheekbone spread a greenish bruise. Mutt-Mutt was crying. She ran to them, put a hand on Tootie’s feather-covered arm, and felt water squish up between her fingers.

  “Fire hoses!” Tootie said, pulling himself out of the ruined suit. “We were at Orleans and Claiborne, like always, peaceful. The police showed up with dogs and a fire engine and bullhorns. ‘Mardi Gras’s over!’ Like they’re not still parading up on St. Charles. Like they’re not all up in the bars on Bourbon Street. No, but we got to clear the streets, because our Mardi Gras’s over!”

  Mutt-Mutt shivered in his wet feathers. Joyce pulled his apron and shirt over his head and sent him to take a hot bath. “Let me see that bruise,” she said, but Tootie shrugged her off and took from the fridge a bottle of water with garlic cloves swirling around in it—his Creole cure-all.

  “No permit, they said, like Indians ever had to have a permit to come out on Mardi Gras day!” He drank a glass of garlic water. “They came in swinging before anybody had a chance to get out the way.” Tootie was fighting back tears. “Knocking women and kids over, just running them down. They turned the fire hoses on us like we was rioting.”

  Tootie sat down heavily on the couch.

  “The police don’t know,” he said. “They see Indians, they think we’ve got knives and guns up under our suits. They treat us like animals.” His brow lowered, and his jaw muscles worked. “Look at my suit,” he said. “I don’t even know that I’ll be able to use these feathers again.”

  Joyce could do nothing to help.

  “The police don’t know,” Tootie said. “They just don’t know.”

  FRANK MINYARD

  BOURBON STREET

  1967

  Dr. Frank Minyard took off his white sport jacket and hung it on a parking meter. “Shoes or barefoot?” he shouted. Across the street, Paul Hornung was taking off his jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.

  “Shoes!” Paul shouted back. “I’m too drunk to find my laces.”

  A small crowd had followed them outside and stood on the sidewalk, some with Old Absinthe House napkins still stuck in their collars. It wasn’t every day you got to watch a Heisman Trophy winner in a footrace up the middle of Bourbon Street—especially Paul Hornung, the star halfback who’d left the Green Bay Packers to help get New Orleans’s new football team off the ground. And everybody on Bourbon Street knew Frank.

  Frank flexed his chest and arms, feeling every bit as fit as Paul Hornung. He took his time getting ready, letting the crowd build and taking a deep breath to clear the martinis from his head. He loved the French Quarter perfume: Creole cooking, tourist-buggy horses, coffee, and the rich green undertone of the Mississippi River. As word spread to the bars and restaurants along Bourbon, people came out onto the sidewalk, clutching their drinks. Pete Fountain came out of his club to watch, still holding his clarinet. Jim Garrison, the district attorney, emerged behind him. “Frank! You break him, you bought him!” yelled John Mecom, the boyish owner of the Saints. Laughter rolled up and down the block.

  Emelie staggered out into the middle of Bourbon in her high heels, waving her arms to stop traffic, her black hair wild. Frank laughed as the cabbies meekly obeyed. His wife might be tiny, but she was ferocious. She waved her long silk scarf, and Frank and Paul took off. Frank had him for about fifty feet, but Paul began to pull away, and Frank had no choice but to bodycheck him. They both went sprawling into a heap of garbage on the curb, laughing so hard Frank thought he’d choke.

  “Everybody back inside!” Frank yelled. “I’m buying!”

  IT WAS A GREAT LIFE. Frank was a baron of the city, welcomed like a son in all the best places of the Quarter, known to everybody, loved by all. He couldn’t walk into La Louisiane, the Napoleon House, or even the New Orleans Athletic Club without spending half an hour greeting friends. At thirty-eight years old, Frank was New Orleans’s premier gynecologist; no other doc put women so at ease as they lay back in the stirrups. Nobody else had that soft purring manner, that delicate touch, tha
t way of gazing deeply into a patient’s eyes. No other gynecologist knew so well how to touch women, how to speak to them, knew so well how to ask delicate questions. None other had that Charles Atlas physique and those ice-blue eyes, either. Women loved Dr. Minyard, and Dr. Minyard loved them back—their fragrance, the way they moved, the funny little workings of their minds, the emotions they kept so delectably near the surface. He loved them one way in the examination room, another way after hours. They saturated his life. Emelie had walked out on him ten times in ten years for his philandering, but she’d come back every time because, of all the women Frank loved, he loved Emelie most and she knew it.

  Frank maintained two offices: one in the new and growing section of the city up by the lake called New Orleans East, the other in the city’s most fashionable address, the soaring International Trade Mart that had just opened at the river end of Canal Street. He was earning fifteen thousand dollars a month, more than his father had ever earned in a year, and not just because women loved him. Frank worked constantly, feverishly, never turning away a referral, never failing to step in for fellow docs who overbooked or went on vacation. He offered himself to the city’s hotels as the house doc on call, showing up at all hours to earn a ten-dollar bill. And, in a stroke of real moneymaking genius, he was now making Thursday rounds at Flint-Goodrich Hospital, one of the very few white ob-gyns in New Orleans treating colored women. He took heat for that from the white doctors in the New Orleans Medical Society, but he wrote those guys off as as saps who were tying one moneymaking hand behind their backs out of something as trifling as prejudice. When liberals praised him for his open-mindedness in service to suffering mankind, he gladly set them straight. “It’s not suffering mankind I care about; it’s suffering me-kind.”

  He couldn’t get enough. He had a racehorse stabled at the track, a thirty-foot sailboat moored at the marina, a Cadillac, a Mercedes, and a Porsche. His mother had been a dance-hall pianist when she’d met Frank Minyard Sr., who bounced from job to job as a printer. When Frank junior was ten, Ma bought him a secondhand trumpet at Werlein’s for Music on Canal Street for sixteen dollars. No lessons, of course; the Minyards couldn’t afford that. Ma stood him beside the cigarette-scarred upright in their little Myrtle Street house and taught him herself, starting out on “That Old Rugged Cross” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” She raised him on a diet of hymns and grievance: against the wealthy Dallas family that had disowned her husband for marrying a Catholic, against her lifelong priest who wouldn’t baptize baby Frank because her husband was a Baptist, and most of all against the wealthy swells uptown, who, she never stopped reminding little Frank, “don’t like us poor downtown whites.” He begged, during the hot summers of his childhood, to go to the pool at Audubon Park, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. Our kind stays below Canal Street, she told him. From the time he was a teenager, he had the run of the French Quarter and everything downriver, but uptown was off-limits.

  The only thing he didn’t like about being a rich doctor was finding himself too often in the company of the uptown swells his mother had taught him to despise. He did all he could to avoid them—eschewing membership in the country club, avoiding the restaurants of the Garden District and slumming instead at the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street, keeping out of the clubhouse at the track and drinking beer from paper cups in the free grandstands. The best way he’d found to avoid feeling inferior was to pile up more wealth than the white-shoe snobs of the Garden District and Audubon Place—newer and fancier cars, the finest clothes, and, of course, the palace in Lakeview. Carved out of swampland after the Second World War, it was a kind of Los Angeles suburb within the city, designed for people who’d had enough of the quaint cheek-by-jowl life of New Orleans, who were sick of termites eating their antebellum houses, fed up with pedestrians. It spread out on such a scale that one didn’t have to greet one’s neighbors; one could come and go in the privacy of the family car, pushing a button on the remote garage door opener. Lakeview meant exclusivity, quiet. But more important to Frank, it meant a place to enjoy wealth without having to rub elbows with uptown swells. No matter how much Frank earned, he’d never be accepted on St. Charles Avenue. In Lakeview, you didn’t have to have a pedigree. All you needed was cash.

  Still, from time to time a darkness would get the better of him. He’d find himself berating Emelie to tears because her high heels clacked too loud on the floor, or because she’d changed her hairstyle. More than once he’d flown into a rage for no reason at all, accusing her of affairs he knew she hadn’t had, storming out of parties, embarrassing everybody. Lately, his mood plunges were taking him straight to the bottom. He’d shouted one night at Emelie that he was going to drive all the way down Canal Street and into the Mississippi River, and until he got as close as Baronne Street, he’d really thought he might do it. Just last Christmas he’d given her a real scare; they’d been on their way to buy a tree when he’d suddenly announced that he was going to make her watch him jump off the Mississippi River bridge. She hopped out of the car at a light and walked until she found a policeman. By that time the blackness had lifted, and he’d sheepishly come around the corner to pick her up.

  He wondered sometimes where his old trumpet was. He hadn’t played it in years.

  One night in 1967 he came in late from a night of carousing. Emelie, the children, and the maid were all asleep. Peter, Frank’s Great Dane, lumbered up to rub his head against Frank’s hand. Ciebe, Emelie’s poodle, came as close as the hallway door to take a look at him and retreated without a greeting. Even the dogs seemed to know that Peter was Frank’s and Ciebe was Emelie’s, and neither Emelie nor Frank would feed or pet the other’s. Frank crossed the living room, poured himself a bullshot—vodka and beef bullion—and stacked some jazz records on the turntable. He turned the patio speakers to low, slid open the glass doors, and stepped outside.

  It was like standing on the grounds of a fine hotel. The vast rectangular pool glittered in the moonlight; the impeccable, flowered landscaping extended all the way back to the grassy slope of the Seventeenth Street Canal levee. He settled himself into a poolside chaise longue, took a pull of his bullshot, laid his head back, and looked up into the stars and the scraps of white cloud scudding along in the moonlight as the intricate melodies of Lee Konitz enveloped him. He had ideas perhaps to buy an airplane, or maybe a chauffeured limo with a phone in it. A long one. Black.

  Inside the house, the Konitz album ended, the automatic changer dropped a fresh album onto the turntable, and Peggy Lee’s smoky voice came up, singing her new hit song, “Is That All There Is?”

  Frank felt another of his moods coming upon him. He set down the bullshot and gripped the arms of the chaise. “I had the feeling that something was missing,” Peggy Lee whispered. “I don’t know what, but when it was over, I said to myself, ‘is that all there is to a circus?’” She seemed to be speaking straight into his soul. The cars, the house, the clothes—is that all there is?

  Watch yourself, he told himself. Wait it out. The mood will pass; it always does.

  But this was the worst one yet, like being in an elevator with a cut cable. His vision went black, and he couldn’t draw breath. What is this crap I’ve surrounded myself with? he asked himself. What have I done with my life? The silly women with whom he’d betrayed Emelie paraded before his eyes. His sailboat sank into a murky sea. He put a hand on his sweaty forehead. He was worse than those seersuckered, self-centered, pompous uptown swells Ma couldn’t stand. He was a poseur, a fake, a gilded bauble with a vacuum at its center. He curled into a ball on the chaise, his hands clasped over his head, until he finally blacked out.

  FRANK OPENED ONE EYE. He lay still, testing his limbs as though he’d been hit by a car. Slowly, he raised himself to his elbows. Something was different; something was changed. He’d never failed to sleep off one of his moods before. This morning, though, his luxurious backyard looked like the backdrop of someone else’s life. Frank could catalog the morning’s
beauty, but he couldn’t feel it.

  Emelie looked up, startled, from her cup of coffee as he hustled through the kitchen. “Got an emergency,” he said, and pushed through the door to the carport.

  Nobody ever stirred on the early morning streets of Lakeview but maybe a couple of colored women trundling through the chilly dawn from the bus stop to their housekeeping jobs. It was a neighborhood of things, not people—picture windows and Buicks, lantern-holding iron jockeys and hundred-dollar boxwood shrubs. It wasn’t New Orleans at all.

  Halfway down Canal Street, around Mandina’s Restaurant and the old streetcar barn, the city began to look like itself. He stopped for a light at Claiborne Avenue. The sidewalks bustled with Negro men in narrow-lapelled suits and short-brimmed hats. Downtown. He breathed a little easier.

  He parked on the riverfront at the foot of Canal Street, where the modernist, cruciform International Trade Mart building rose like a ziggurat. In his office, the big black telephone was ringing on his desk. The receptionist wasn’t in yet. Frank picked up.

  “Frank? Barbara Poche. You went to Holy Cross with my husband, Carl.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Sister Mary David asked me to find out if you know Pete Fountain.”

  “Sister Mary who?”

  “Sister Mary David, from the Bethlehem House of Bread. She wants to ask Pete Fountain to play a benefit.”

  The Bethlehem House of Bread? It sounded like a Jewish delicatessen. Frank looked at his watch. “Listen, ah, I have patients waiting …”