Both his grandparents died the year Michael started high school, his grandmother in the spring and his grandfather two months after. And though many aunts and uncles had died over the years, these were the first funerals that Michael ever attended, and they were to be engraved forever in his memory.
They were absolutely dazzling affairs with all the accoutrements of refinement which Michael loved. In fact, it troubled him deeply that the furnishings of Lonigan and Sons, the funeral parlor, and the limousines with their gray velvet upholstery and even the flowers and the finely dressed pall bearers seemed connected to the atmosphere of the elegant movies Michael so valued. Here were soft-spoken men and women, fine carpets and carved furniture, rich colors and textures, and the perfume of lilies and roses, and people tempering their natural meanness and crude ways.
It was as if when you died you went into the world of Rebecca or The Red Shoes or A Song to Remember. You had beautiful things for a final day or two before they put you in the ground.
It was a connection that intrigued him for hours. When he saw The Bride of Frankenstein for a second time at the Happy Hour on Magazine Street, he watched only the great houses in the picture, and he listened to the music of the voices and studied the clothes more than anything else. He wished he could talk about all this to somebody, but when he tried to tell his girlfriend, Marie Louise, she didn’t know what he was talking about. She thought it was dumb to go to the library. She wouldn’t go to foreign movies.
He saw that same look in her eyes that he had seen so often in his father’s eyes. It wasn’t fear of the unknown thing. It was disgust. And he didn’t want to be disgusting.
Besides, he was in high school now. Everything was changing. Sometimes he was really afraid that maybe now was the time that his dreams were supposed to die and the real world was supposed to get him. Seems other people felt that way. Marie Louise’s father, sitting on his front steps, looked at him coldly one night and demanded: “What makes you think you’re going to college? Your daddy got the money for Loyola?” He spat on the pavement, looked Michael up and down. There it was again, the disgust.
Michael had shrugged. There was no state school in those days in New Orleans. “Maybe I’ll go to LSU at Baton Rouge,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get a scholarship.”
“Bull Durham!” the guy muttered under his breath. “Why don’t you think about being half as good a fireman as your father?”
And maybe they were all in the right, and it was time to think of other things. Michael had grown to almost six feet, a prodigious height for an Irish Channel kid, and a record for his branch of the Curry family. His father bought an old Packard and taught him how to drive in a week’s time, and then he got a part-time job delivering flowers for a florist on St. Charles Avenue.
But it was not until his sophomore year that his old ideas began to give way, that he himself began to forget his ambitions. He went out for football, made first string, and suddenly he was out there on the field in the stadium at City Park and the kids were screaming. “Brought down by Michael Curry,” they said over the loudspeakers. Marie Louise told him in a swooning voice on the phone that as far as she was concerned he had taken over her will, that with him she would do “anything.”
And these were good days for Redemptorist School, the school which had always been the poorest white school in the city of New Orleans. A new principal had come, and she climbed on a bench in the school yard and shouted through a microphone to inflame the kids before the games! She sent huge crowds to City Park to cheer. Soon she had scores of students out collecting quarters to build a gym, and the team was working small miracles. It was winning game after game, by sheer force of will it seemed, just scoring those yards even when the opposition was playing better football.
Michael still hit the books, but the games were the real focus of his emotional life that year. Football was perfect for his aggression, his strength, even his frustration. He was one of the stars at school. He could feel the girls looking at him when he walked up the aisle at eight o’clock Mass every morning.
And then the dream came true. Redemptorist won the City Championship. The underdogs had done it, the kids from the other side of Magazine, the kids who spoke that funny way so that everyone knew they were from the Irish Channel.
Even the Times-Picayune was full of ecstatic praise. And the gymnasium drive was in high gear, and Marie Louise and Michael went “all the way” and then suffered agonies waiting to find out if Marie Louise was pregnant.
Michael might have lost it all then. He wanted nothing more than to score touchdowns, be with Marie Louise, and make money so he could take her out in the Packard. On Mardi Gras day, he and Marie Louise dressed as pirates, went down to the French Quarter, drank beer, snuggled and necked on a bench in Jackson Square. As summer came on, she talked more and more about getting married.
Michael didn’t know what to do. He felt he belonged with Marie Louise, yet he could not talk to her. She hated the movies he took her to see-Lust for Life, or Marty, or On the Waterfront. And when he talked about college, she told him he was dreaming.
Then came the winter of Michael’s senior year. It was bitter cold, and New Orleans experienced its first snowfall in a century. When the schools let out early, Michael went walking alone through the Garden District, its streets beautifully blanketed in white, watching the soft soundless snow descend all around him. He did not want to share this moment with Marie Louise. He shared it instead with the houses and the trees he loved, marveling at the spectacle of the snow-trimmed porches and cast-iron railings.
Kids played in the streets; cars drove slowly on the ice, skidding dangerously at the corners. For hours the lovely carpet of snow stayed on the ground; then Michael finally went home, his hands so cold he could scarcely turn the key in the lock. He found his mother crying.
His dad had been killed in a warehouse fire at three that afternoon; he’d been trying to save another fire fighter.
It was over for Michael and his mother in the Irish Channel. By late May, the house on Annunciation Street was sold. And one hour after Michael received his high school diploma before the altar of St. Alphonsus Church, he and his mother were on a Greyhound bus, headed for California.
Now Michael would get to have “nice things” and go to college and mix with people who spoke good English. All this turned out to be true.
His Aunt Vivian lived in a pretty apartment on Golden Gate Park, full of dark furniture and real oil paintings. They stayed with her until they could get their own place a few blocks away. And Michael at once applied to the state college for the freshman year, his father’s insurance money taking care of everything.
Michael loved San Francisco. It was always cold, true, and miserably windy and barren. Nevertheless he loved the somber colors of the city, which struck him as quite particular, ochers and olive greens and dark Roman reds and deep grays. The great ornate Victorian houses reminded him of those beautiful New Orleans mansions.
Taking summer courses at the downtown extension of the state college, to make up for the math and science which he lacked, he had no time to miss home, to think of Marie Louise, or of girls at all. When he wasn’t studying, he was busy trying to figure things put-how San Francisco worked, what made it so different from New Orleans.