The House on Coliseum Street Read online

  “Oh dear,” Aurelie said, “I just know it was left over from that Jamaica trip last year.”

  “I suppose so,” Joan said politely. “Anyhow I feel kind of rocky.”

  “Some tea?”

  “No,” Joan said, “nothing.” There seemed to be people coming and going in the downstairs hall. “What’s going on?”

  “Friends of Doris.”

  “Shouldn’t you be down?”

  “That,” Aurelie said, “is not polite.”

  “My stomach hurts,” Joan said.

  Aurelie left, closing the door firmly behind her. Joan opened the long white box across the foot of her bed. Yellow roses. She called Fred back.

  “Was there a card?” he asked.

  For a moment she panicked: there had not been a card. “No,” she said, and told the absolute truth, “but I don’t know anybody else who would.”

  “I’m teasing you,” he said. “I knew you liked yellow so I sent them.”

  “Can I ask you to supper,” she said, “tonight?”

  He hesitated just a moment. “Sure,” he said, “sure thing.”

  And she knew something else. That he had had another date which he was going to cancel. She felt triumphant. “Doris has the house full of screaming people,” she said, “but I think it’s just for cocktails. You want to make it about seven thirty so I’ll have time to cook?”

  “Why don’t we go out instead?”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Because,” she said firmly, “I’m doing penance for being so nasty.”

  He chuckled. “Well,” he said, “you’re direct. I’ll be there.”

  No, I’m not, she thought as she hung up. I’m devious. All sorts of things, but not direct.

  She dressed carefully in a full-skirted wool print and went downstairs. She headed straight for the freezer and dug through the packages. She pulled out a pint of crawfish bisque, and a small steak. She found a package of potato puffs and a carton of green peas. She brought them back to the stove. Then because she felt suddenly hungry she fixed herself a cup of fresh coffee. There was a platter of small cocktail sandwiches on the table. She took two and ate them. She was leaning on the window still looking out into the tiny back yard when the door swung open and Doris bounced into the room with a clatter of high heels and a swirl of bourbon.

  “For God’s sake,” Doris said, “the dead have arisen.”

  “Hi,” Joan said, “is it a nice party?”

  “Fine party…What are you doing?”

  “Cooking.”

  Doris inspected the packages. “My God, Aurelie’s bisque. She’ll kill you for using it when she’s been saving it for a year in there.”

  Joan shrugged. “I needed it.”

  “You better hope Aurelie doesn’t need it.”

  “Did she go out?”

  “Yep.”

  “I thought I saw her all dressed up.”

  “Bet anything she’s met somebody.”

  “Could be.”

  “Here we go again,” Doris said. “Another wedding. Why doesn’t she just sleep with them?”

  Joan asked: “Is that crowd here for cocktails, or the evening?”

  “Aurelie asked that too,” Doris made a delighted face. “We’re going before very long.”

  “Okay.”

  She clattered off with the plate of sandwiches.

  Joan got up and put the frozen bisque to heat. She stood watching the flame and wishing the lump in her own stomach would go away.

  Fred came promptly, as he always did. The cocktail party was gone then and the house was still and empty. It was a charming house, Joan thought as the bell rang. Even the worn boards of the floor looked lovely to her, and the tall thin narrow windows looked dignified. She felt her grandparents and her great-grandparents lurking behind her, propping her up.

  They sat in the living room and had Martinis. “The house looks so nice to me today,” she said.

  “It’s a beautiful house.”

  “I don’t always think so.”

  “Joan and her house on Coliseum Street,” he teased.

  “Anyhow,” she said finally, feeling that there was more said than they were actually saying and wanting to figure it out, “come talk to me while I finish dinner.”

  They ate in the dining room, properly, at a carefully set lace-covered table.

  “You’ve been to a great deal of trouble,” Fred said.

  “I told you why.”

  “Damned if you didn’t.”

  “Anyhow I want to talk to you.”

  “You’re so serious.”

  “I’m not a good cook,” she said, choosing her words carefully, trying to feel out just the right approach for him, “and I don’t know the first thing about housekeeping.” She could see by the sudden expressionlessness on his face that he knew what was coming. “But I guess I could learn and not be too bad about it.”

  “I guess so.” He wasn’t going to help her. He wasn’t going to help her at all.

  She tried directly. “You used to want to get married. A while ago. Do you still?”

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  That persistent cold feeling. “Because I would like to get married.”

  He still did not say anything. He was studying the epergne in the center of the table.

  “Maybe I waited too long,” she said lamely, “maybe you don’t want to.”

  He smiled at her across the table, suddenly. “It is kind of peculiar, you’ll admit that.”

  “Don’t laugh at me.”

  “I wasn’t … but I always thought that women wanted more moonlight and roses in the approach.”

  “We’ve had that already.”

  “I’d swear you’d been married four times from the way you talk, so that the whole thing was very businesslike.”

  “I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”

  “Poor baby,” he said, “let’s go get a bottle of champagne and celebrate properly.”

  She nodded, biting her lower lip. For some absurd reason she said, “I feel like crying.” That was true.

  “Now that,” Fred said, “is the only real true female reaction I’ve had from you all evening.”

  She sniffled, struggling for control.

  “I guess I won’t ever know what’s happened to you,” he said evenly, “what changed your mind. But it doesn’t matter. At least to me.”

  Then because he had come so very close to the truth and because she didn’t know what else to do she broke down and cried long comforting sobs.

  THE WINTER SLIPPED ALONG. Aurelie watched the weather reports carefully and at the first news of a frost rushed out to cover her camellias with quilts and blankets and pieces of plastic. In the wider lawns the grass turned brown with the frost, grew green in a week, turned brown with the next. The last cluttery seed pods of the golden-rain trees got blown along the gutters and the sidewalks by the steady east wind. Children straggling along the streets on their way to school were beginning raggedly to sing Christmas carols.

  As Joan lay in bed in the mornings she could hear their monotonous chanting: “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle bells…” Why, she thought, did they never learn any more of the words?

  Each morning they sang the same thing. Each morning she thought the same thing.

  She dozed pleasantly, leaning on time like a cushion. Feeling it flow like water.

  It was an illusion she had sometimes, particularly in the morning. That she floated in a current, effortlessly. Time, the everlasting river.

  Things happened as she slipped along. But not to her. She could feel them happening all around her. And sometimes she turned her head and looked to see what they were.

  The news of Mr. Norton was like that. The phone call came in the middle of a cold rainy afternoon. Joan answered. It was a woman’s voice, gentle, apologetic, asking for Mrs. Norton.

  “I don’t think she’s here,” Joan said. “Can I take a mess
age?”

  The voice coughed, very lightly. “Would you tell her that her husband just died?”

  That was how they found out. Thin grey Mr. Norton had collapsed and died of a stroke while sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, feeding the pigeons.

  He went every day, rain or clear. On this day the square was empty—it was cold and drizzling. So it was quite awhile before anyone saw the raincoated figure that had fallen from the bench to the pavement. The park patrolman noticed him finally, noticed the great swarm of pigeons that circled and squabbled. Falling, Mr. Norton had broken open the two large bags he carried: one of bread crumbs, one of peanuts. And the pigeons were fighting over him.

  Aurelie sighed and dabbed her eyes when they told her, and went off to arrange for the funeral. “Dear, dear,” she said, “I’m afraid that comes of giving up whisky.” She also bought herself a black dress. “My very worst color. I look horribly sallow in black.”

  Joan refused to go to the funeral. “Do him up without me.”

  “I don’t think I’ll go either,” Doris said. And there was a flash of something that could have been fear in her face.

  “Honestly,” Aurelie said, “you girls have such bad manners.”

  “I’m sure you can manage without us.”

  “Sure,” Doris said. “You won’t need us to beat off the banshees.”

  Joan said, “Did you decide where you’re going to put him?”

  That had been the other problem. Mr. Norton, who had been born in Bristol, Tennessee, did not have a burial plot.

  “Put him in with Grandmama,” Joan suggested. Aurelie looked horrified. “That is my family tomb.”

  Doris chuckled. “Honey baby, he is your family.”

  But finally they found a separate little plot for Mr. Norton. Way in back of the cemetery, bordering along the L&N tracks.

  Several days later Aurelie, Doris and Joan went up to the attic apartment and gathered up clothes and linens and cleared out the closets, which were packed with empty whisky bottles. Drew the curtains and covered the furniture with old sheets. Books and charts and instruments and dress swords and uniforms went into trunks whose lids were slammed down and locked. Finally.

  “Well,” Aurelie said at the end of the day, “a sad, sad job.”

  Doris’s face gleamed with sweat. “If I’d had to carry one more basket of empty bottles down those stairs I’d have dropped in my tracks.”

  “It’s finished,” Aurelie said.

  “It’s really empty now,” Joan said.

  The traces of Herbert Norton were gone. There were just two large rooms, dusky with their shutters drawn, humped with sheeted furniture. They had been emptied. Finally and completely.

  When Aurelie and her daughters left, they locked the door behind them. The spiders and the mice could take over.

  JOAN THOUGHT: THE HURT will stop when I’m pregnant. When all that empty space is filled up.

  For one flash second she thought: it’s a pity you have to have a man for it. It would be so much nicer if it just happened. If each time the little ovum burst out it carried a full child, instead of just half a one. If you could just say that this is my child, and not just half mine…

  She laughed at herself and stopped thinking that.

  I want to be great and round, she thought. And rest my hands on my belly. Folded hands resting and waiting. Feeling your body grow great and large and expand and fill the world. Filling the world with your seed.

  Sending children out one after the other. Like meteors flying off a sun. Children one after the other. Following in the steps of that first ghost child… Ghost child, lost child.

  Would they always follow it, she thought. Would they always be following that little piece of seaweed, red seaweed.

  She dreamt about it sometimes. Could see it so plain: big-eyed and red, drifting in its ocean.

  And she always woke up, her insides churning with fright. She would have to put the light on and sit and stare at the bulb until the dry white light reassured her. Even so, after one of those dreams she felt vaguely frightened and upset all day long. She took a couple of Dexedrines to make herself feel better.

  And in the evenings there was Fred. They had dinner each night now. Sometimes he picked her up. Sometimes she met him at his office.

  Her father had had an office in that same building. Now and then, in the elevators, in the halls, she and Fred met people who would remember: “Anthony Mitchell’s daughter… My dear, he had pictures of you all over his office. Not just on the desk. Not for Mitchell. All over the walls. Named his boat for you too, or was it a horse…”

  “I wish I hadn’t been so young when he died,” she told Fred.

  He just nodded.

  “You think that’s silly?”

  “Well,” Fred said evenly, “it’s better to remember things than really see them.”

  “No,” she said, “it wouldn’t have been that way.”

  She liked meeting Fred at his office, liked opening the frosted glass door that had his name on it, liked having the secretaries watch her, liked leaving with him, liked walking down the white corridors with him, the streaked marble corridors that looked cracked and dirty and smelled of pine oil.

  Each day now. He skipped the handball he had always played on Wednesday. He said nothing, and she did not ask. But she was quietly grateful.

  One evening she said simply: “I’m tired of cars. Makes it seem so awful somehow and sordid.”

  So after dinner, each evening, they went directly back to his apartment. She had never been there before alone. She had always been ashamed. Now she did not care. Not any longer. They walked boldly in the yard and she felt her backbone stiff and proud.

  A couple of days later she stopped using her diaphragm.

  Fred said, “I think we ought to celebrate whatever makes you so happy.”

  She considered telling him, then decided against it. “I don’t know,” she said, “I just feel good.”

  It seemed to her sometimes that they went rushing straight from dinner to bed. Sometimes the speed bothered her. And she would make up little excuses: “Let’s go to the French Market and have some coffee.”

  But when they were there it was always she who was first ready to leave. Not Fred.

  I’m like a bitch in heat, she thought. Shameless groveling bitch.

  She nodded her head emphatically. Fred chuckled. She glanced up at him suddenly, her skin jumping with alarm. She had forgotten him.

  She blinked rapidly and looked around, remembering back along the evening. Trying to set herself securely on this tiny spot of time that she was occupying. Trying for balance, delicately like a dancer.

  They were in Galatoire’s, having dinner. The small noisy room, the mirrored walls, the dragonfly forms of the overhead fans, the cash register clicking in back …

  She took a deep breath and was secure again. She had come here since she was a child.

  “Where were you?” Fred asked.

  “I do kind of drift in and out, I guess.”

  “Anywhere I’d be interested in?”

  “No,” she said.

  They did not mention marriage again. Sometimes it seemed to Joan that they were already married. Seemed that they had been together so close so constantly for a very long time.

  And sometimes she was surprised to find how happy she was with him. Surprised because she knew he wasn’t the right man at all.

  JOAN TOLD THE PASSAGE of time by the marks of the short cold winter. She noticed the frosts and marked their brown lines on the banana trees, each wave cutting lower. Like a brown tide, but reversed. Each one cutting down the tree until there was only a bare staff jutting up. By summer they would be eight feet high again, with their drooping purple flowers and hanging clusters of bananas.

  She noticed the crisp deep blue of the sky—a sky that was never seen except for the short months of winter. She floated under it, and as she did, she studied it carefully. The way she studied all the things abou
t her. She studied its brilliant deep unbroken color. Like bright blue china. Like the inside of a teacup put over the earth.

  A great big teacup. For days after that she felt positively friendly toward the sky. Familiar. The way you would feel toward a piece of china you had seen since you were a child. The whole world was very peaceful and very quiet.

  And quite suddenly, it ended. Ended with the few seconds it took her to recognize the car.

  THE STREET LIGHT SHOWED it plainly. There was a convertible parked in front of the house on Coliseum Street. A yellow Ford convertible, several years old. It was washed and polished.

  She had been in that car once. It was clean and washed when they began too. But the roads they had driven had left their dust on the hood and fenders, had left their sting in their eyes and their taste on lips…

  It was so simple. She felt herself go deathly cold. All of a sudden. Like the last seconds of an anesthetic.

  She got out of Fred’s car steadily, easily. She heard her heels clicking on the brick sidewalk as she walked to the gate. She heard herself saying, “Doris seems to have a date.”

  Fred took her to the heavy lead-glass door. “A big Saturday night.”

  “Won’t you come in?”

  “Now that,” he laughed, “is a formal invitation… Maybe they don’t want company. Ever think of that?”

  The words might have hurt once. But not now. The anesthetic had taken effect. She wasn’t there any more.

  She put her purse and gloves on the hall table, under the lamp with the beaded fringe. She took off her coat and dropped it on the fragile Louis XIV chair that had been Aurelie’s wedding present from her third husband.

  She looked around for Fred, saw that he was not there. She wondered… Thinking hard, she remembered kissing him good night at the door.

  The door to the little living room, the one that Aurelie called the second parlor, was closed. There were voices behind it. Clinking glass and two voices. Joan recognized them.

  She walked over and opened the door.

  She did not quite know what she had expected. But she was surprised to see only a couple facing each other, shoeless feet propped on a coffee table between the two chairs.