A Density of Souls (3 page)

“Junior,” Jeff said. “Gets better, dude.”

As Stephen tried another nod, Jeff stared at him for a second before turning and leaving. When Stephen finally heard the freight door slam shut behind Jeff, the aftershock of sudden desire congealed. He finally understood the whispers that had followed him around all day.

He knew what was being said. And he knew it was true.

Because Meredith had spent the morning with Brandon Charbonnet and Greg Darby, she could easily introduce herself into the posse of girls who spent lunch period on the hill next to the cafeteria with their sleeves and hems rolled back to the tanning powers of the sun. Kate Duchamp had immediately rolled over onto her stomach, pushed her Oakley sunglasses up off her face, and said a word hardly anyone said as a freshman on the first day of high school. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Meredith replied with forced indifference as she took her seat.

“You went to Polk, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why you’re friends with those guys?”

“One of them is so hot . . .”

“Greg,” a voice finished.

“No . . . Brandon is so fine! Have you ever seen his brother?” asked 18

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another female voice Meredith couldn’t identify. All the girls around her were lying flat on their backs beneath the glare of the sun.

“Who’s the other one?” Kate asked.

Meredith felt as if the patch of earth beneath her butt had shifted and sunk several inches beneath her. The other one!

“Omigod . . .” Now Meredith recognized the voice. It was Cara Stubin, the football coach’s daughter and the only other freshman girl to make varsity cheerleading along with Meredith. “He’s like . . .”

“Stephen. He’s kind of cute . . .” another voice from the grass offered.

“I heard his mom is like so fucked up,” Cara continued. Meredith’s first instinct was to rise up and stomp one foot into Cara’s stomach.

“My mom said she came to this parents’ meeting in this dress with, like, her tits hanging all over the place . . .”

Other girls laughed. Meredith realized Kate had not taken her gaze off her.

“I’m sorry. But I think I’d be a little screwed up, too, if my husband blew his brains out!” another girl said defensively.

“Do you know him?” Kate asked Meredith.

She remembered a cemetery pummeled by rain. She remembered a tangle of mud-flecked legs. The memory led Meredith to commit an act that would carve itself into her memory with the building precision of regret.

“He’s a fag,” she said flatly.

Some flame guttered inside of her, quietly and without protest. She felt hotter, but she assumed it was the sun on her bare arms.

Kate laughed, signaling that Meredith’s pronouncement was more of an accusation than a joke.

Ten minutes before the lunch bell rang, Kate Duchamp invited Meredith to go to the bathroom with her. Meredith followed silently as Kate led her through the desolate English Hallway, past classrooms where teachers savored lunchtime silence at their desks. Once inside the bathroom, Kate said, “Watch the door,” gesturing toward it with one thumb before moving slowly down the four stalls, checking for feet. She opened the door to the first one. Meredith braced herself across the door.

“So how long have you been friends with them?” Kate asked, as she gathered her platinum blonde hair behind her head, holding it tight in one fist.

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“Since we were kids. We all live near each other.”

“Brandon’s fine. You’re not, like . . . You guys don’t . . .”

“No!” Meredith responded so quickly that Kate laughed before she sank to her knees on the stall floor. Meredith listened to the sound of Kate vomiting into the toilet bowl. She rose, butt first, out of the open stall door, wiping the corner of her mouth with a triangle of shredded toilet paper.

“That crap they serve isn’t even meat. It’s like meat juice with, like, extra fat poured on top.”

Meredith managed a laugh. Kate hadn’t even had to gag herself to force her lunch out of her stomach.

“What about the other one?” Kate asked, stepping clear of the stall door.

“Greg?” Meredith asked, with a note of ambivalence in her voice that suggested even she—his childhood friend—was not sure of his name.

“Yeah,” Kate said, her eyes darting back and forth between Meredith and the open stall door. Meredith guessed that if she hesitated Kate would lose interest in the conversation and ask right out why she hadn’t tried to throw up her lunch.

“Well . . .” Meredith said.

Kate smiled.

By Friday, Meredith Ducote and Greg Darby were declared “together”

by their classmates.

Stephen overheard the news in his fourth-period history class. “Greg Darby and Meredith Ducote are going out.” The whisper from the next desk over was still resonant. The teacher, Mr. Humboldt, was asking a question. Stephen knew the answer. He looked down to his open textbook at a Mesopotamian ziggurat and felt something between nausea and acute pain. Without thinking, he raised his hand.

The classroom bristled. Mr. Humboldt couldn’t conceal his surprise. Stephen had not once raised his hand the entire week.

“Yes, Stephen?”

Stephen answered. The fall of ancient cultures would become more familiar than the students sitting around him.

2

S
tephen’s mother was named after the mispronunciation of a violent moon, the yellow of rot or cancer, that rose over the Irish Channel rooftops on a sticky June evening in 1943.

The moon drew the porch-bound residents into the middle of Constance Street, where they pondered its holy significance. This was, after all, a poor neighborhood, and its shotgun houses (nicknamed so because if someone fired a shotgun through the front door, the slug would sail cleanly out the back) that spiderwebbed from the wrong side of Magazine Street across from the Garden District to the wharves along the river’s crescent had always been the bend in the river where the least popular New Orleans residents would settle.

In 1943, these were the Irish, whose ancestors had come to America on vessels nicknamed “coffin ships”, thanks to the hordes who died of famine and disease during the long journey across the Atlantic. Along the eastern seaboard, the hollow-eyed immigrants were turned away by prosperous Americans again and again, labeled as bringers of death and plague.

It was more than fitting that New Orleans—a city built precariously on a bank of mud—would welcome the Irish. They found their best jobs in the lavish front parlors and kitchens of Garden District mansions across Magazine Street. The Irish Channel was routinely swept with malaria, and sometimes the dead were abandoned in the street.

The swamp of New Orleans made a better home for mosquitoes than humans.

Beatrice Mitchell had removed the flat cake from the oven and set it on the stove before parking Mother Millie in her rocker on the front porch. At a viciously unyielding seventy-two, Beatrice’s mother-in-law had angrily expressed her desire for “something sweet on the teeth”.

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Although Mother Millie habitually mangled common expressions, she rarely suffered reproach from her daughter-in-law.

Their house on Constance Street was a house of requests that provoked silences, which allowed plenty of space for the pungent memories of sons, husbands, and daughters lost to yellow fever. The framed photographs of John Mitchell—smiling and in uniform—inspired nightmares of his fighter plane’s plummet into the Pacific and served as frail evidence of the only link between Mother Millie and Beatrice.

A shared death.

Several days after the telegram came, Beatrice realized she was pregnant.

On that June evening in 1943, when Beatrice returned to the kitchen she froze in the doorway, one hand going to the child in her womb and the other to the door frame. What she saw on the stove shocked her. Two fat gray rats were mired in the steaming cake batter. Their bellies slid across the hot surface and their long pink tails whipped at the side of the cake tray. One of them let out a hiss.

Without a thought, Beatrice moved to the oven and sent the cake tray somersaulting out the open window above the sink in a flash of silver tin and the last vain whip of a pink tail. She heard the clatter of the tin on the concrete alley below, and as the rats squealed, she realized that the tray must have flipped, pinning them beneath the batter.

Good, she thought. Let them die a slow and painful death for entering my kitchen.

As she heard the first clamor of voices from the street, she noticed that her hands were trembling. She contemplated whether Satan was an actual, real thing or if he had chosen to sprinkle himself about the world in rats along the rivers and in fevers that melted the body. A better fighting tactic, she thought.

She returned to the front porch to tell Mother Millie there would be no cake that night when she saw the street clogged with dark forms, their arms raised toward the sky. Mother Millie’s rocker was empty.

Beatrice spotted her sitting on the curb with Margaret O’Connell, the widow from next door whose husband had stumbled off the First Street wharf. The Mississippi’s swift and unpredictable currents carried him into the prongs of a paddle wheeler that lifted him up in full view of a cluster of tourists on the boat’s deck.

In the glow of the moon, Beatrice could see Margaret tapping three fingers into the center of her palm as she delivered a biblical 22

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pronouncement. Beatrice walked to the edge of the porch. At first she saw the distant spire of St. Mary’s Cathedral rising over the sloping rooftops several blocks away: the landmark of her neighborhood. But it was suddenly a black crucifix set before an enormous yellow moon.

“Moooon . . . . . . . auh . . . . . . . cuuuuuuu-oahmmmme!”

The crowd in the street craned their heads around at the shriek.

Beatrice knew the voice. It was coming from the porch directly across Constance Street, the porch where eight-year-old Willie Rizzo spent most of his days.

Willie Rizzo had gone swimming in the river with some Negro children when a dock pile slammed against the side of his head, fractur-ing his jaw and almost knocking one eye from its socket. The other children, terrified at being blamed over the death of a white boy who had dared to swim with them, dragged him to shore. Willie managed to live, but with a voice forever mangled by his slippery lower jaw.

He walked with a wooden cane his father made for him. Margaret O’Connell had disclosed to Beatrice and Mother Millie that Mr.

Rizzo had cut the cane from the very dock pile that almost killed his son, as a constant reminder of the boy’s crippling stupidity.

Now Willie stood on the edge of his porch, balancing on his cane, one wild wandering eye filled with the yellow light of the moon. The residents along the block had never heard him wail with this kind of authority before. Months afterward, Beatrice would recognize the same tenor in the voices of the priests who delivered mass at St. Alphonsus.

All eyes had moved from the moon to Willie. He used his cane to propel himself off the front porch, loping across the street toward Beatrice, stumbling past the shocked glances of Margaret O’Connell and Mother Miller.

“Da . . . mhooon . . . uh . . . come!”

Even before Mr. Rizzo barreled across the street toward them, Beatrice decided Willie might have the gift of a strange, holy tongue, the language of the half-dead who spoke from both sides of the di-vide. Even as Willie’s hands were ripped from her pregnant body as his father carried him down the steps with one powerful arm around his son’s waist, Beatrice made sense and reason of the language. She made her daughter’s name.

Monica.

• • •

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23

“Some people thought I was a witch,” Monica Conlin said in a melodramatic whisper as she brought her wineglass to her lips.

In celebration of the end of his first week in high school and in recognition that he had no Friday night plans, Monica had taken her son out to dinner. Houston’s Restaurant was abuzz with the sounds of clinking glass and alcohol-induced conversation. Soft ambient lighting blended with the halos thrown by the lamps on every table.

The rumble of a streetcar passing down St. Charles Avenue filled the silence between Monica and Stephen.

Monica could not tell if Stephen’s air of vacancy resulted from boredom or from the initial stages of a perpetual sullenness she had always feared Stephen would inherit from his father. So, at the end of dinner, she continued the story of her childhood, moving from the tale of her name to her exploits in Catholic school.

“The nun used to go from desk to desk and make us stand up and read aloud out of the textbook. So you want to know what I did?”

Stephen looked down at where his plate had been.

“I calculated just how much text she was making each girl read. So when she called on me, I stood up and read it aloud from memory.

And do you want to know what she made me do?”

“Stand in the wastebasket for the rest of class,” Stephen said. “You’ve told the story a hundred times. And you stood in the wastebasket every time.”

Monica stared so sharply at the sarcastic curl of her son’s mouth that he blushed and looked away from her. She followed his eyes to where a waiter was staring openly at the ethereally beautiful woman in her early fifties with the shock of blonde hair spilling down her back and then at that rail-thin androgynous boy sitting—unwillingly, it seemed—across the table from her.

“You haven’t said an entire thing all night.” She reached for the check and removed her credit card from her wallet. “Someone had to talk.”

She signed the receipt. They sat amid frost.

The silent anger that had overtaken her son was too similar to the impenetrable silence that had captured her own husband in the years before his death. Until Stephen’s first week at Cannon, Monica had been convinced that Jeremy had not bequeathed his darkness. And that seemed just. Jeremy had forfeited part-ownership of Stephen when he took his own life, leaving his widow to battle any lingering traces of the man who abandoned them both.