“Sure it is. But talk to me about it, all right?” The baby kept sliding down; with one arm under, Alouette kept shrugging her back up. “I need to give Deborah a call about getting you guys over here for dinner sometime soon, too. Been way too long. How’s Don, by the way?”
“Doing good. Over the worst of it. Should be home in a day or two.” I told her about Derick, about Don’s latest notion. Then took leave of Alouette to wend my own way homeward-through the thickening hubbub, as Wordsworth has it. By the park to draw from its well, from Lester and his young charge, whatever solace I could, then over sidewalks heaving up like sculpted waves above the roots of ancient trees, Spanish moss overhead, buildings sharecropped into ruin all about. Everything and everyone I knew a casualty. Some of war, but most of us casualties instead of subtler things: ambition, expectation. Of sex, history, our families; of what is within us or therein lacking. Economic casualties, too. Washed away in the floods pushing downhill from America’s scripture of progress and spilling out over the banks of the gospel according to market economy, privilege and special interest, inundating us. Casualties of the system.
Almost home, I passed my favorite statue in all of New Orleans, a Confederate officer astride his horse. Time had not been good to him. His name on the statue’s base was unreadable beneath a century’s mildew, and though protected by the historical society, here he was stuck on a tiny plot of land between a sandwich shop and low-end apartment house. Both front legs of his horse were in the air, signifying that he’d died in battle. One aloft would have meant he died of wounds sustained in battle; all four aground, that he’d died of natural causes. All our statues, all our horses, should have both front legs in the air. Casualties everywhere.
It was, as I said, my day for casualty reports. I got home, found a starving cat and a message to call 528-1433, took care of the first though perhaps not (and never) to his satisfaction, dialed the second and after two rings had an uptown, quiet-spoken Yes? at the other end. Lew Griffin, I told her. Please hold. Moments later, a heavy breather.
“Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Griffin. I was not at all certain you would do so.”
I waited.
“Perhaps apologies are in order? I had not intended to catch you unaware. I thought you would know to whom you were speaking. That Mrs. Molino had seen to that.”
“I know.”
“Ah. Good, then. It’s been many years since we last spoke. A call much like this one, as I remember. I hope you’ve been well?”
Silence slalomed down the wires.
“I realize that you don’t like me, Mr. Griffin. This is as it should be: I’ve given you no reason to. Nor do I require or particularly desire your approbation.” His sentences fell into place, space and silence between, like bricks being set into a wall. “I do, however, ask that you hear me out now-if that much is possible?”
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you. I am calling … Excuse me.” He turned away from the phone. Four coughs rang out like distant rifle shots. Then he was back. “There is an individual I have need to locate. Purely a personal matter. In the past, I’m told, such searches were a specialty of yours. I wonder if perhaps you might consider, if there were some way I might persuade you to undertake, locating this individual for me.”
“Your sources were correct when they said ‘in the past,’ Dr. Guidry. I don’t do that work anymore.”
“I see…. They told me that as well, of course. Nonetheless I felt it imperative to ask. In which case, perhaps you could recommend me someone else? Another … practitioner?”
I gave him Boudleaux’s name, address, e-mail, phone and fax numbers.
“A moment. Let me … Yes, I have it. Thank you.” Silence in the wires again, that vacuum, that pull.
“I have become, I understand, a grandfather,” he said at length. “Alouette and the child, they are both well?”
“They are.”
“Very good. Then-” Again he turned away, into that chesty coughing. “Mr. Griffin, could you hold a moment, please?” the quiet, uptown voice asked. Moments later Guidry was back, apologizing. “Might you possibly prevail upon the girl to call me, Mr. Griffin? It would mean a great deal to me. I-”
This time he didn’t come back, and after a moment the quiet voice said, “I’m afraid Dr. Guidry has become indisposed. He does appreciate your help, Mr. Griffin.” Voice still there at the other end, waiting.
“I’m not at all sure the doctor would want me to tell you this, Mr. Griffin. Actually, I’m fairly certain that he wouldn’t. But nowadays, with no one else available to take these decisions, I’ve only my own counsel to fall back upon.”
She paused.
“The thing is, Dr. Guidry is dying. An advanced cancer of the prostate, that he seems to have known about for some time yet, whatever his reasons, chose to leave both unremarked and untreated. I have no way of judging whether this might affect your response to his request. I did feel you should know.”
“Thank you-Mrs. Molino, is it?”
“It is. Catherine. And Mr. Griffin?”
“Yes.”
“It is I who answers the phone, on this line, always … should you happen to call again.”
Chapter Sixteen
Morning’s minion. Dappled dawn-drawn falcon towing in its wake besides the new day, like a ragman’s cart, this wagonload of old. Breath a white plume above, Deborah’s pale body alongside. Both of them oddly insubstantial? Bellies of frost at the base of the window. Birds outside richly achitter as though seeking news of the tropics so soon and suddenly departed. Surely one of them’s heard something.
Like a tired swimmer, I turned onto my side, skimming the surface of this day. Land behind, land ahead. Neither in sight.
So many in my life fallen, gone so quickly. My parents, LaVerne, Alouette’s first child. The man I killed up by Baton Rouge as oil rigs wheezed beside us, flat birds’ heads rocking and pecking on their tethers. Can that really have been almost forty years ago? Before long, before anyone notices, Raymond Carver wrote, I’ll be gone from here, and was. Or Rilke in “Portrait of My Father As a Young Man.” He sees the dreams in his father’s eyes, the prehensile brow like his own, all the rest so contained and unknowable that, even as Rilke looks on, the image of his father begins fading into the background: O quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand. My own photograph would look much the same. Soon enough we all fade from whatever records, whatever impressions, there are of us. Fade like Rilke’s father into time itself, the gray batting forever at our backs. Might David one day, looking at a photograph of me, sense something of those same longings? I remembered the photo of my young parents sitting together, smiling and happy, on the hood of their Ford. A woman I did not recognize-where in the embittered, joyless mother I grew up alongside was this pretty young woman hiding? — and a man I knew but slightly better, a man who had faded into the background long before his time, at the very start of mine.
The birds’ tropics would be back, of course. They had only to wait here, gossiping among themselves. But my mother’s happiness, the happiness I saw in that photo, once fled never returned. Would David?
LaVerne was gone. Baby Boy McTell. Hosie Straughter. Harry, the man I killed up by Baton Rouge. Don’s son. All of us, eventually. Before long, before anyone notices.
You’re always quoting other people, Verne told me once. Anytime something important happens or some thought logjams in your head, there you are, hopping up like a schoolboy, pick me! pick me! with what Dante or Camus or Thingamabob said. You think anyone gives half a damn, Lew? And half the time, anyway, you’re only using it to avoid digging in, avoid having to find out what you think. Or what you feel.
Deborah’s arm came across my shoulder, pulling me up from the depths, back safely to land. (Did I struggle? Drowning men often do.) Spread of sunlight on every surface. Wall and curtain, bureau, nightstand, quilt, rib cage. Whole world become surfaces now: how long will they hold? I feel Deborah’s breath on my neck as she pushes into me. Warm the whole of her length, she smells faintly of sweat. Blankets and history, even this morning light, weigh us down.