It was the only thing in the room hinting towards any effort at decoration. Richard Garces had given it to me: a snapshot he'd taken of La Verne when they worked together at Foucher Women's Shelter, a month or so before she died. She'd stuck her head in the door to ask a question about one of his clients and been trapped there forever. Smiling and at the same time instinctively trying to turn her head away. A Verne I'd not known at all, really. Richard's lover Eugene, successful fashion photographer by trade, starving fine-art photographer by inclination, had cropped and enlarged the snapshot.
For ten years, so long and often that I no longer really think about it, I've told this story to my students, Michelangelo's definition of sculpture: You just take a block of marble and cut away whatever's not part of the statue.
That's what our lives do. Wear away what's not part of the sculpture. Pare us down, if we're lucky, to some kind of essential self.
Or to some hardened, unconsidering icon if we're not.
LaVeme and I had met when we were both little more than children and had gone on chipping away, sometimes together, sometimes apart, most of our lives. No one had been more important to me; my life was inexorably linked withfyers. And yet there was no one to whom I had been less kind, no one, among the many I had hurt, whom I had hurt more.
Once Verne said to me, "We're just alike that way, Lew. Neither of us is ever going to have anyone permanent, anyone who'll go the long haul, who cares that much." But she was wrong. In the last years of her life, years during which for the most part I never saw her, she got off the streets. She educated herself, became a counselor and the quietest sort of hero, helping retrieve others' lives even as she ransomed her own. She fell deeply in love, married, and was on her way to reuniting with lost daughter Alouette when a stroke struck the last blow at the marble. By way of saying farewell and the many thank-yous I'd never had time for, I searched out and found Alouette, but after a time she, like so many others, had gone away.
Gone away as had David, my own son. Into the darkness that surrounds us all.
It occurred to me now that LaVeme may well have been the finest person I've known.
Individually, collectively, we struggle to rise out of the slough of ourselves, strive upwards (like a man trapped in water beneath ice, swimming up to the air pocket just under, where at least he can breathe) towards something better, something more, than we truly are. That's the measure of grace given us. But few of us individually, and seldom does the collective, manage it.
Leaving, I turned off lights, threw the switch that shut down power to the slave quarters. Stopped off in the kitchen to open a can of tuna with egg bits for Bat and have a glass of water from the tap, then walked three doors down, to where, as usual, the bright green DeVille taxi sat out front.
"Father home?" I asked the young man who came to the door. Rap's heavy chopped beat and nervous legato lyrics filled the room behind him. He wore jeans so oversize that they hung on his hips like a skirt, crotch down about his knees, bottoms lopped off. Sixteen, seventeen. Head shaved halfway up, hair like a woolly shoot above. All ups and downs.
"Yeah," he said.
"Think I might speak to him, Raymond? That possible?"
"Don't see why not."
Norm Marcus appeared behind him, peering out. He wore baggy nylon pants, a loose zipped sweatshirt, shower cap.
"Lewis. Been a while. Thought I heard the door."
"Raymond and I were just saying hello."
"I bet you was. Well, Cal and me, we're just sitting down to breakfast." I never had been able to figure when this family slept, what kind of rhythm they were on. "Why don't you come on in and join us? There's plenty of food, and we can always find an extra chair somewheres."
Then to his son: "You want to step away now, Raymond, give us some room here?"
The boy shrugged and returned to the couch that, near as I could tell, he lived on. He was surrounded there by stacks of CDs, half-eaten packages of chips, Pepsi cans, pillows and a blanket.
"Thanks, Norm. Some other time. Soon. I promise."
"You need a ride."
"Afraid so. But look, you're about to eat-"
"No problem, Lewis. Just wish we'd see you sometime when you could stay a few minutes. Where we going? So I can tell Cal how long I'm gonna be."
He stepped into the kitchen and was back at once.
"Let's roll."
From his couch Raymond carefully ignored our departure.
"I apologize for taking you away from your family and your dinner, Norm," I said as we turned onto St. Charles, "but it's important."
"You wouldn't of asked, otherwise."
He took Jackson to Simon Bolivar, turned onto Poydras. The hospital was surrounded by stretches of vacant lots behind chain-link fencing. As he cut between two of them, I said, "I think my son's in the ER."
He nodded. "Hurt bad?"
I told him I didn't know. Neither of us said anything else until we pulled in at the hospital.
"You want me to come inside with you, man? Or wait out here?"
I shook my head. "But thanks."
"Anything I can do, you let me know."
"I will."
"Tough, huh?"
I'd started away when he called out: "Lewis." He leaned down into the passenger window so we could see one another. Put a closed hand to his ear. Call me.
One might have expected to see Craig Parker, with his elegantly understated clothes, blond hair and strong features, in the pages of a fashion catalog rather more than in this chaotic, bloody, antiquated ER. Yet, surrounded by junkies and drunks, gunshot wounds, knifings, crushed limbs and cardiacs, the breathless, he seemed strangely at home here-calm and in control. A rare fortunate man who had found his place in the world and begun to flourish.
He thanked me for coming, turned to a woman nearby and said, "Cover for me, Dee?" Three other people were all talking to her at the same time. "Sure, no problem," she told him.
"Come with me, please, Mr. Griffin."
We went down a hallway straight and narrow as a cannon.
"Something I need to tell you. Bear right, here, sir… Shortly after we spoke, the patient arrested. He came back pretty quickly, but whenever the bottom drops out like that, it's a tremendous shock to the system. We've put him on a respirator, chiefly to take some of the strain off his heart. It-"
"I know, Dr. Parker. I've been through this before." Searching for LaVerne's daughter Alouette, first I had found her premature baby, on a ventilator in a neonatal intensive care unit up in Mississippi. Alouette herself had been on one for a while.
He nodded. "I wanted you to be prepared. Most people aren't. Here's the book, before I forget" He pulled it from one bulging side pocket of his lab coat.
The cover was all but torn away, mended top and bottom with Scotch tape. A horseshoe-shaped section like a bite was gone from the lower right corner. Cover, spine, pages, all were filthy, mottled with a decade and a half of spills.
I hadn't seen a copy in years but, holding it now, I remembered-with a physical lurch of memory and an instinctive motion to save myself, as though about to fall from a precipice-the day I sat writing thefinal chapter.
I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar. I sat beside him, ordered a bourbon, and told him what I had to.
For a long time then we were quiet.
"He's in here, Mr. Griffin."
Through the open door I saw several people standing over a gurney. On it lay a nude, catheterized young man. One of the workers was between us, and I couldn't see the young man's face. A bright green ventilator stood by the wall, squeezing air into him through plastic tubes that danced with each respiration. Other, smaller tubes snaked down from poles hung with bags of saline and medication. Tracings of his heartbeat, respiratory pattern and blood pressure stuttered across the screen of a monitor overhead.