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She was, in fact, as out of place in New Orleans as Saint Teresa would be at an orgy with de Sade: a frugal, quiet, devoutly Christian girl, I learned, the fourth daughter of a large Boston family free since the Revolutionary War, and positively ill with eastern culture. An educated girl of twenty, she thought it best to leave home to lighten her family’s burden, but found no prospects for a Negro teacher, and female at that, in the Northeast. She came south by coach, avoiding the newfangled trains after reading an expert say that traveling at over twenty miles an hour would suffocate all aboard when the speed sucked all the air from the cars. Once in New Orleans, she took a job as a nursery governess for the children of Madame Marie Toulouse, a Creole who had spent her young womanhood as the mistress of first a banker, then a famous actor, a minister, and finally a mortician. Why these four? As Madame Toulouse told Isadora, she’d used the principle of “one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, and four to go,” and they’d left her generous endowments that she invested in a hotel at Royal and Saint Peter’s streets. But Isadora was not, I’m afraid, any happier living in a Creole household than I would have been. They were beautiful; she was bookish. They were society here; she was, as a Northerner, the object of polite condescension — the Toulouses, in short, could afford the luxury of stupidity, the blind, cowlike, chin-lifted hauteur of Beautiful People. And such luxury Isadora had never known. You had the feeling, once you knew her, that she’d gambled on knowledge as others gambled on power, believing — wrongly, I think — that she had little else to offer. She let herself get fat, for example, to end the pressure women feel from being endlessly ogled and propositioned. Men hardly noticed her, pudgy as she was, and this suited Isadora just fine. She had a religious respect for Work. She was a nervous eater too, I guess, the sort of lonely, intelligent woman who found comfort in food, or went to restaurants simply to be treated kindly by the waiters, to be fussed over and served, to be asked, “Is everything all right here?”

Yet she was pretty in a prim, dry, flat-breasted way. Isadora never used make-up. At age five she had been sentenced to the straightening comb, and since then kept her hair pinned back so tightly each glossy strand stood out like wire, which also pulled back the skin at her temples, pushing forward a nose that looked startlingly like a doorknob, and enlarging two watery, moonlike eyes that seemed ever on the verge of tears. No, she wasn’t much to look at, nor was the hotel room where she lived with eight one-eyed cats, two three-legged dogs, and birds with broken wings. Most often, her place had a sweet, atticlike odor, but looked like a petshop and sometimes smelled like a zoo. Isadora took in these handicapped strays, unable to see them left unattended, and each time I dropped by she had something new. No, not a girl to tell your friends about, but one reassuring to be with because she had an inner brilliance, an intelligence and clarity of spirit that overwhelmed me. Generally she spoke in choriambs and iambs when she was relaxed, which created a kind of dimetrical music to her speech. Did I love Isadora? Really, I couldn’t say. I’d always felt people fell in love as they might fall into a hole; it was something I thought a smart man avoided.

But some days, after weeks of whoring and card games that lasted three days and nights, I found myself at her hotel room, drunk as Noah, broke and bottomed out, holding a bouquet of stolen flowers outside her door, eager to hear her voice, which was velvety and light like water gently rushing nearby. We’d sit and talk (she abhorred Nature walks, claiming that the only thing she knew about Nature was that it itched), her menagerie of crippled beasts crawling over her lap and mine. Those afternoons of genteel conversation (Isadora wouldn’t let me do anything else) we talked of how we both were newcomers to New Orleans, or we took short walks together, or we’d dine at sidewalk cafés, where we watched the Creoles. My earliest impressions of the Cabildo, the fancy-dress quadroon balls and slave auctions arranged by the firm of Hewlett & Bright each Saturday at the new Exchange Market (ghastly affairs, I must add, which made poor Isadora a bit ill), were intertwined with her voice, her reassuring, Protestant, soap-and-water smell. Aye, she was good and honest and forthright, was Isadora. Nevertheless, at other times she was intolerable. She was, after all, a teacher, and couldn’t turn it off sometimes, that tendency to talk in propositions, or declarative sentences, to correct my southern Illinois accent, with its squashed vowels and missing consonants, and challenge everything I said on, I thought, General Principle.

“Rea-a-ally, Rutherford”, she said one afternoon in her sitting room, her back to a deep-silled window where outside a pear tree was in full bloom, its fruit like a hundred green bells draped upon the branches. “You don’t think you can keep this up forever, do you? The gambling and girl-chasing?” She gave her gentle, spinster’s smile and, as always, looked at me with a steadier gaze than I could look at her. “You have a mind. And, if what you tell me is true, you’ve lacked for nothing in this life. Am I right in saying this? Neither in childhood education nor the nourishment of a sound body and Christian character?”

I gave her a nod, for this was so. Though a slaveholder, Reverend Chandler hated slavery. He’d inherited my brother and me from his father and, out of Christian guilt, taught us more than some white men in Makanda knew, then finally released us one by one, except that Jackson stayed, more deeply bound to our master than any of us dreamed. But I am not ready just yet to talk of Jackson Calhoun.

“So you were,” Isadora asked, toying with her teacup, “blessed with reasonably pleasant surroundings and pious counsel?”

I nodded again, squirming a little. Always, and eerily, I had the feeling that Isadora knew more about me than I did.

“Then aren’t you obliged, given these gifts, to settle down and start a family so you can give to others in even greater measure?” Her eyes went quiet, closing as if on a vision of her and me at the altar. “My father, you know, was a little like you, Rutherford, or at least my aunties say he was. He stayed in Scolley Square or in the pubs, looking for himself in rum and loose women until he met a woman of character — I mean my mother — who brought out his better instincts.”

“What’s he doing now?” I rested my teacup on my knee. “Your father?”

“Well. .” She pulled back, pausing to word this right. “Not much just now. He died last winter, you know, from heart failure.”

Wonderful, I thought: The wage of the family man was coronary thrombosis. “And,” I said, “he was how old?”

“Forty-nine.” Then Isadora hurried to add, “But he had people who cared for him, daughters and sons, and a wife who brought him down to earth. . ”

“Indeed,” I said. “Quite far down, I’d say.”

“Rutherford!” she yipped, her voice sliding up a scale. “It hurts me to see you in such ruin! Really, it does! Half the time I see you, you haven’t eaten in two days. Or you’re hung over. Or someone is chasing you for money. Or you’ve been in a fight! You need a family. You’re not — not common!”