City of Refuge (24 page)

Craig asked if they had ever been out of New Orleans before, and the one who hadn’t wanted to talk said, “I was in Baton Rouge one time.”

That day Craig talked to three other people, all of whom seemed to be in some degree of shock. The last was a woman who looked to be in her early sixties, wearing a bright paisley blouse and a wig of straight, styled black hair, although her eyebrows were gray. How, Craig wondered, had she managed to keep the wig with her through all the evacuating? They spoke at a table in a green-painted cinder-block common room inside, while several people watched a soap opera on the television. She filled him in sketchily on some background facts: she had been a schoolteacher, she was leaving the next day to stay with her brother in Indianapolis, she had raised five children at her house in the Lower Ninth Ward. She spoke in an educated manner, with a formality that Craig had heard before in black people of a certain generation.

“I am going to tell you something,” she said, regarding him across the coffee table. “This event is a tragedy for the country. Do you understand? It is not just a tragedy for our people, black or white, people from New Orleans. This is a tragedy for everyone in this country. This is the greatest country on earth, and if this is the best they can do then it is a shame on all of us. It is an embarrassment in front of the world.”

Craig took notes in his notebook as she watched him. “How old are you?” she asked him.

Craig stopped writing, smiled a little, looked at the woman. “I’m thirty-six.”

“You’re not old enough to remember Martin Luther King.”

Craig chuckled, self-effacingly, said, “No, but I certainly know his story and his speeches.”

The woman did not smile along with him. “I am a teacher,” she said. “I have taught young people for almost fifty years. I am seventy-four years old.” At Craig’s unfeigned look of surprise, she said, “Does that surprise you? I was born in 1931 during a rainstorm in Algiers, Louisiana. You know where that is. Right across the river from downtown. There was no bridge at that time; you took the ferry if you wanted to come to New Orleans. My parents raised me and my three brothers through the Great Depression and the Second World War, what they called Jim Crow times. I have seen many things come and go. We had to sit in our own place in the movie theaters, we could not go to the public pool, or the beaches by the Lake. But I have never seen a time this bad in our country. I am not just talking about this particular event of Hurricane Katrina. There was an aspiration toward something better that does not exist today.”

The woman’s sound was one Craig had heard on many occasions from older African-Americans—the formal diction, the essential seriousness, the indifference to making an impression—the gravitas—a word that Craig hated although he used it all the time. Listening to these people, usually older, he always felt exposed, as if his measure were being taken and he was being found wanting. What, after all, had he done to help things? He asked this woman, who gave her name as Mrs. Gray, where she had taught.

“Lawless High School, and then at McDonough 35 until I took my retirement. What people need to know is that there are schools in New Orleans with no books, with no light fixtures in some classrooms. Where there should be a toilet in the lavatory, sometimes it is only a hole in the floor. And no toilet paper; some children had
to bring their own toilet paper to school. I am telling you the truth. How are young people supposed to learn in such an environment? How are they supposed to feel that something is expected of them? School is a place where you learn values, and among them is the value of yourself as a part of a larger group. What are these conditions saying to our young people?”

“Do you see this as a function of racism?” Craig asked.

The lady regarded him with that look again, which he did not know how to read; it was not appraising, exactly. She seemed to be sifting, weighing, feeling the texture of his reactions and their timing, thinking, Which kind is this one? How far has he gotten; how much distance is there? How real was the concern? The tacit assumption was that white people with any grasp at all of what racism actually was, and how it worked, were as rare as albino elephants.

“It is not really just about racism,” she said, “as far as it goes. Our society has always faced racism. You notice I say ‘our society,’ because I don’t believe that racism affects only the people of color, as they call us now. The racism hurts the people who have it, also. I will explain it this way. When integration came many white people left the city of New Orleans because they did not want to have their children attending integrated schools. This, really, is where the collapse of the public schools started. But, now…these people who moved may have felt they were doing the right thing by their children, but look at what the long-term effect has been, with the increase in crime, and poverty and public assistance. As long as we are thinking about an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ we are thinking the wrong way in our society.” She stopped talking, and fixed him with the look again. Uncomfortable, he asked her in what part of town she lived.

“I lived in the Lower Ninth Ward on North Derbigny Street. My husband died six years ago. My entire life was in that house—photos, my teaching awards, scrapbooks. I imagine I have lost everything I own except what I was able to take with me to the Superdome on
that Sunday. But it is not really about what we each have lost individually. It is about what we have lost collectively.”

The woman’s calmness and clarity and intelligence affected Craig strongly, and he hoped he would be able to re-create that sound and that affect on the page. When the conversation seemed to have come to a close, Craig thanked her for her time and she offered her hand, still seated on the couch. “Good luck writing your article,” she said. “Do the best you can. Let people know what you are hearing.”

Craig worked on the piece for three days; the teacher’s words had both unsettled him and given him a compass, of sorts, for how he might proceed—for what, in fact, he might be able to make of this disruption. Through his own questions about whether to stay, his own wrestling about what all of it meant, he could still do something to help, by telling the stories, by making sure that it stayed on people’s minds, in their mailboxes.

Those thoughts were backlit by the eerily quotidian nature of apparently normal life going on all around him in Chicago. People in stores, walking on the sidewalks, evening dinners and fall clothes, school buses and post offices and firefighters washing down their trucks in front of the brick station house in the bright September air. And even the necessary steps within his own family—Annie back in school at St. Lawrence Montessori, Alice’s attempts to stitch together a regular schedule of meals and homework and shopping—felt unreal to him. Craig couldn’t help thinking of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, the thin crust of normalcy covering the erosion of humanity underneath. They needed this routining in order to stay sane; the kids, especially, needed it. But at the same time it felt obscene to him to act for even a minute as if all were normal. Their own lives had been knocked over so easily; how could they ever again
act as if there were such a thing as normal? And yet normal was what he found himself yearning for.

The question that pressed on him hardest as the days went by was what was going on in New Orleans itself. He had been waiting to make his first trip back until he could be sure that there would be gasoline available along the entire route, and by now necessary services had reportedly been restored along the interstates. New Orleans itself was still an armed camp controlled by the military, but emergency workers were being allowed in, and press as well, so Craig’s
Gumbo
credentials were an advantage.

He had talked to Bobby and Jen several times, and he and Bobby had agreed to make their first trip back in together, for moral and logistical support. Craig would rent a van so he could retrieve things from his house, and he would drive down and pick up Bobby in Baton Rouge. Craig was certainly going to write a column about his first return to the city, and in the back of his mind he thought that going in with his friend would lend an added texture to the story.

Through the mid-morning traffic, Alice drove Craig to O’Hare Airport, where he was to pick up the minivan he had reserved for the drive to New Orleans by way of Baton Rouge. He would not make it all the way that night; he planned to stop as far south of Memphis into Mississippi as he could get, stay at a hotel, then make it the rest of the way to Bobby’s the next day. The day after that, Craig and Bobby would head into New Orleans to see the city and find out what had happened to their houses and neighborhoods.

Craig had filled the trunk and backseat with all the supplies he had bought at Home Depot, every possible thing he anticipated needing on the trip: disinfectant wipes, cleaning spray with bleach to kill mold, three types of rubber gloves—thin, heavy duty, extra heavy duty—cheap, disposable rubber boots for wading through toxic muck. Two different kinds of surgical masks, an extra-large pack of heavy-duty garbage bags, a flashlight and batteries, six empty plastic tubs and a skid of twenty-four bottles of spring water, snacks, a big pail and two brushes and sponges. “I feel,” he had told Alice, “like I’m going to the hospital for an operation and I don’t know if I’m going to come out in one piece.” He had with him a short list of things Annie wanted him to bring back from the house, and she had appended a briefer list of requests from Malcolm.

By this time they were reasonably certain that the flood waters hadn’t reached their neighborhood, or their block at least. Or if they had, they weren’t deep enough to have gotten into their house. It was hard to tell. The sketchily available flood maps had bloomed slowly on the Internet, like photos developing. Bobby and Jen’s Mid-City house had almost certainly flooded, although they couldn’t be sure how badly. The ground in Mid-City was full of dips and rises, and the damage would vary from block to block. Hard information had been slow getting out because of the lack of coordination of local agencies and the failure of cell phones and telephones. Some people had blogged out piecemeal information, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, and they pored over the entries, trying to get a reliable picture (
btraven 9:01 a.m.: I’m on Oak Street and all that area is dry and up Leonidas to around Hickory…) (carrie 1974, 2:43 pm: I was on leonidas and didn’t see any water there:) biked around Irish Channel and okay up to Carondelet
), but since the forced evacuation of everyone, news had gotten sparser, and the situation had been changing, too. Everyone had been siphoned out of the city and there were, reportedly, checkpoints almost everywhere.

In the days immediately before the trip Craig was sleepless, anxious. He even snapped at Annie for leaving a toy on the stairs. He had diarrhea and headaches. Craig was aware that the attention he was paying to detail was a large channel into which his dammed-up anxiety and worry could flow. You held a torn world together with stitches of manageable detail. The trip was an excursion into a giant howling blur, a place that used to be the most welcoming place he had ever known, now full of potential threats of almost every type.

At the airport car rental station, a large open lot, they found the Windstar in space 23 and Alice helped Craig transfer everything from the car into the minivan. Craig oversaw the deployment of every tub, every box of trash bags, with a gradually mounting intensity;
nothing should shift as he drove, everything should be retrievable in a logical manner, he didn’t want to have to climb over storage tubs to reach the things he would need immediately. He focused on the arrangement of the boxes as intensely as if he had been performing open heart surgery.

When Craig was all packed they stood in the rental lot and looked at each other. Steadily, Alice put her hands on Craig’s upper arms, held him and looked into his eyes and said, “You’re going to do fine. Whatever happens will be fine, and we will get through it.”

Through all the anxiety, Craig heard this, and the words soothed. He wanted to hear that some part of the future was knowable, that it could be counted on. He looked Alice in her eyes—the brown, wounded, intelligent, understanding eyes that he loved—and said, “Thank you. I needed to hear that.” Then he said, “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes,” she said, still looking him in the eyes. “I love you. Please be careful.”

“You know I will,” he said. At that moment it occurred to him, suddenly, that this arc of understanding and trust was where home was, and New Orleans was not home, for that moment at least, and he realized that it might never be home again. After embracing Alice he got into the van, adjusted the mirrors and the seat, and, with Alice waving at him, he drove out of the parking lot to find his way to Interstate 57.

Alice had been secretly combing through the real estate ads, the rentals, to see whether there might be something they could afford as a temporary base that would keep them in more or less the same neighborhood around OffWabash, near St. Lawrence Montessori. She knew that they couldn’t stay much longer with Uncle Gus and Aunt Jean. Her aunt and uncle were generous, good people, but it
was all too obviously not a match made in heaven, and despite the protestations that they should stay as long as they liked, she could imagine the sigh of relief that would follow their departure.

She knew Craig wanted to move back to New Orleans. She also knew, without letting it be wholly conscious, that this was an opportunity to set themselves up in a place where life might be a little more as she had pictured it. This motive rode, like a stowaway, underneath other, more global concerns. The ecological questions around moving back to New Orleans were huge, especially for the kids. Even in a best-case scenario, wouldn’t there be toxic dust spread all over the city from the floodwaters as they receded, and wouldn’t kids be more susceptible to the long-range effects? How long would it be before the schools were back up and running? How long would it be before there were hospitals? What kind of childhood would Annie and Malcolm have in that damaged, stunted city?

These were questions that she entertained as questions, while keeping open the possibility that they might move back. But if Boucher were closed, if
Gumbo
was history, if their house was a shambles…She didn’t want to live her life as an urban pioneer. New Orleans had been challenging enough as it was. In principle she understood wanting to help out, pitch in, rebuild. But everybody had different tolerances for the sacrifices involved. It would be one thing if they were both ten years younger and childless. But now she wanted to have a life. The image she had in her mind was of pulling herself up out of a well and sitting on dry land. She could even imagine getting back some of the pleasure and openness that had been there with Craig. As part of a well-balanced diet. But the idea of making love in the middle of New Orleans’ decaying, overripe landscape was too much; she felt swamped, overwhelmed. She had to draw the line against the encroaching chaos somewhere, and she drew it at the one place over which she had some control. She imagined walking in the park, going to plays in Chicago…

Driving back into town, she opened the car windows and enjoyed the fall tang in the air, the implicit urban tempo, the interlocking parts of a functioning city just offstage. She turned on NPR and listened to the morning classical music. Vivaldi! The entire landscape, the fresh air, gave her the closest thing she had felt to an erotic charge in months. She could feel her body in its environment, instead of resisting it.

Alice had made a few calls to rental agents, left messages, and had finally set up an appointment with a broker to look at three apartments just after lunchtime that day, leaving Malcolm with Jean and Gus for a couple of hours. The first place she saw was a walk-up over a block of stores right along the main drag in OffWabash, a dismal entryway between a bakery and a shoe-repair shop on the less-developed end of the stretch, with three mailboxes at the bottom of a long, straight flight of linoleum stairs leading up to a door without even a landing. Inside the apartment, the kitchen had a thirty-year-old avocado-colored range with burnt-on spills and a window looking out onto a tenement-style fire escape; aside from that dismal window there was no light at all in the two-bedroom place, except for the bedroom window onto the street, which would certainly be too loud. Why, Alice wondered, had they put the living room in the rear and the bedroom on the street side?

The second place was worse, a basement apartment with very low ceilings and a damp smell, and no refrigerator. The bathroom turned out to have no toilet either, only a big hole in the vinyl-tile floor, and when Alice expressed surprise the broker said, “You get to choose your own. Some people think that’s an advantage.” She checked herself from snorting at the absurdity of the lame ploy, noticed something on the molding—a line of little stickers of the type you would find on fruit. They hadn’t even bothered to take them off the molding. There was stained beige shag carpeting in
the bedrooms and the living room, of which one wall had been painted solid black.

“This is a very desirable area,” the man said as they walked out. “This one won’t last.”

“Well, it just isn’t right for our needs,” Alice said, offering an unconscious thank-you that Craig wasn’t there. She could get rid of all these places without negotiating his resistance to the whole project on top of everything else.

After seeing the third apartment, half of a shingled, two-family double, she began to feel a little depressed herself. The family living in the side to be rented hadn’t yet moved out, and the place was a mess—kids’ toys and underwear all over the living room floor, someone watching the television who didn’t look up when they came in, a little boy who couldn’t have been more than a year and a half walking around in a torn shirt. The broker whispered to her “They’ll be gone in a week, and they have to clean up the property, or they forfeit their security deposit and, believe me, I don’t think they’re in a position to do that.” Alice looked at him and saw the little invitation to smirk along with him. She was losing her patience with trying to seem nice to him. The kitchen was a nightmare—dishes overflowing from the sink, pots and pans on the floor—how did they get on the floor?—and the overhead fixture missing one of the two bulbs intended to be there. “The landlord will fix all that,” the broker said.

Alice headed back to Uncle Gus’s with a draggy feeling; there is nothing like looking at beat-up, vacant apartments with no refrigerator and scuff marks on the walls and stained carpeting to make you long for your previous home. As she pulled up to Gus’s house her cell phone rang; it was from another of the listings where she had left a message. Alice was tired and hungry, but the woman on the line sounded nice, refreshing after the snark she had spent the previous two hours with, and she drove to the address the woman gave her, which was only two minutes away.

Alice pulled up to a large Arts & Crafts–style house that she immediately loved. A deep-set porch overhung with wide eaves, and the house itself finished in cream-colored stucco. It felt cozy and welcoming. An intelligent-looking woman in her early sixties met her at the door, with sharp eyes and reading glasses up in her short, salt-and-pepper hair. She introduced herself as Grace Olsen and was, it turned out, a political science professor at Northwestern. (“I realize that many people think of ‘political science’ as an oxymoron,” she said, disarmingly.) She wore a cardigan Fair Isle sweater, and the interior of her house was full of art and nice furniture; on one wall floor-to-ceiling bookcases framed a large window, and a floor lamp stood next to the couch where an open book lay, waiting to be taken up again. A long-haired black cat rubbed up against Alice’s leg immediately. None of it felt overstuffed, neurotic, it was just…like what Alice wished her own life looked like.

“Would you like a cup of tea before we look at the apartment?”

They sat and talked for half an hour before remembering to look at the apartment downstairs. The woman’s husband had died several years before. The woman asked questions and expressed concern about New Orleans, mentioned that a number of students from Northwestern were planning a program to help clean up or do whatever seemed necessary.

“Then you are only looking for a short-term rental? Six months or a year, I would imagine? Surely you want to return to New Orleans. Or do you?”

“Well,” Alice began, “we don’t know. Craig is heading down today. We don’t know what is left of the house, or what is going to happen in the city…” She looked in the woman’s searching eyes. “Honestly, I don’t personally feel that it is the best idea to move back. Craig wants to, I know that, but even if our house can be fixed and the city is working, I don’t know if that is where I want to raise my children.”

The woman drew herself up slightly, nodded a little bit. “Well, let me show you the apartment. It is very nice, and we’ll see if it suits you, and then we can talk some more.” She stood up, retrieved a set of keys from a dish on a beautiful antique sideboard, and they walked out the front door and around the house’s left side, across a private parking area for the apartment. “This would be yours,” the woman said. “We—I’m sorry; force of habit—
I
park in front.”

Approaching the door Alice noticed a large window to the left, with small panes, and through it she could see another matching window on the house’s rear wall; the room must have high ceilings, and they walked in and the woman flicked a light switch on the wall next to the door and Alice exclaimed, “It’s furnished?”

The woman laughed and looked up at the ceiling. “That’s what getting older will do for you. I didn’t tell you it was furnished?”

“No,” Alice said, looking around.

“The ad didn’t say it?” the woman said, puzzled.

“You know,” Alice said, “maybe it did. I’ve looked at so many ads…” In the corner between the two windowed walls was a fireplace, and facing, two couches at right angles, cozy, a perfect area for reading.

They walked through the apartment and Alice knew that this was where she wanted to live. At the end of the visit Alice said this to Grace and asked if she would be able to give her a couple of days to talk to Craig about it. The woman agreed, saying that the first of the month was a ways off, and Alice drove back to Gus and Jean’s with an unreasoning feeling of joy and possibility inside.