Restoration (30 page)

“Yes, I did. It’s a cute little thing.”

“Nature’s funny how it works. That little cat’s mama was black, black on every inch of her body. I don’t know who the daddy was, but the mama used to stay around here. I’d leave her scraps on the back steps. She and I got along like family. She delivered her litter under the house and in the morning I crawled under there with my flashlight
to have a look. She had herself a place kind of dug out in the soil, where it was cool, and the kittens were feeding on her, and I put the light on them and every last one of them was black. Black from the tip of their nose to the tip of their tail, just like she was. They were all getting their milk, doing fine. I started to leave but then I heard a little meow. I moved the light around and I saw this little pink thing off to itself with some white hair on it. It was a baby kitty that the mama cat had pushed off to the side so it couldn’t get any milk. She had put it there to die. And it would have, too, if I hadn’t gone to check.”

“Was this the little cat I saw out on the porch?”

“Yes, it was. It was the only one of the litter I decided to keep. I gave all the others away and I kept the one the mama didn’t want.”

“What happened to the mama cat?”

“She left. I guess somebody gave her better scraps.” Mrs. Toussaint nibbled the edge of a cookie and gave me a smile. “How did that black cat have all black babies except for one, and how did that one come out
white
?” She lifted her eyebrows as if in expectation of an answer. “And why,” she continued, “did the mama treat the little white kitty like it did when the little white kitty was innocent and pure and had never done it anything. I forgot to tell you there were only four other kittens in the litter, so the mama had plenty of milk to go around. She just wasn’t going to have anything to do with that white cat, was she, Charbonnet?”

“I guess she wasn’t.”

“Nature,” she said, pronouncing the word
“Nay-chuh.”
“Nature made her act like that.”

“It was nature, was it?”

“Another thing I forgot to tell you is that the mama cat was a good cat. She was friendly, she liked everybody. She’d rub up against your ankles, sleep in your lap. She wasn’t even mean to other cats, these strays that come around. But then she had that little white one and all of a sudden she’s trying to kill it.”

“I guess there’s a lesson to be learned. Are you telling me this story because it has something to do with how your father treated Levette?”

“Nature,” Mrs. Toussaint said again. “Daddy didn’t want him. And Daddy always had the door open to everybody. He would feed the hoboes when they got off the trains looking for food. Whenever he butchered a hog he would bring some of the meat to the neighbors and whoever else was hungry. What does that tell you?”

“I wonder if your father and Levette’s father got along.”

“I told you they were half brothers, Levette’s daddy and my daddy?”

“Yes. What were their names, Mrs. Toussaint?”

“My daddy was Simon. Levette’s was Anthony. Simon and Anthony Asmore. Their father was Oscar. They had different mothers, like I said. Simon and Anthony were either nine or ten years apart. Simon came first. After his mother, Josie, ran off to Opelousas, then Oscar got remarried and Anthony was born. I don’t think Oscar ever got over his first wife leaving him like that. Did I tell you it was with a white man?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, it was. It was a white man from Opelousas.”

“That must’ve hurt Oscar.”

“Hurt him? It like to kill him. He would hear about it everywhere he went. People would be laughing at him. The whites would be laughing, the blacks would be laughing. I’m told this, anyhow. I grew up hearing about it, even though it had happened years before. How many black women run off with white men in those days?”

“I couldn’t say, Mrs. Toussaint. Probably not many.”

“That was my grandmother. It’s hard to believe. She left her husband, left her son. When Oscar would come in from the fields in the evening, who do you think got the worst of it?” The smile had left her face. She seemed to have forgotten about the coffee and cookies. “It only got worse for Simon after Anthony came along. Oscar had a pretty new wife, he had a new baby boy. But he still had Simon, too, and Simon looked enough like Josie to remind him.”

I wondered about the woman, Josie, and her legacy. While she
might’ve gone on to important things—such as working to help make life better for the disadvantaged, or volunteering to serve at her area hospital, or saving souls at a church—in Annie Rae Toussaint’s house, in Palmetto, she would always be identified with one event only. She had run off to Opelousas with a white man.

“Simon was different complected than Anthony,” Mrs. Toussaint said. “He wasn’t nearly as bright as Anthony because his mama hadn’t been as bright as Anthony’s mama. So Oscar had his black son in Simon and his white one in Anthony, that’s what people would say. Anthony was the family favorite, the little pet, while my daddy got the spankings. Simon would come in with dirt on his clothes, Oscar spanked him. He’d sleep a little too late on a Sunday morning, Oscar spanked him for that. All the while Anthony, Levette’s daddy, is the little prince, you see? The black son caught hell and got the switch. The white son got treated like he was somebody special. Memory, Charbonnet. It will go a long way if you let it.”

“So then Anthony dies along with his wife in the flood, and Simon, being the only relative left alive, has no choice but to take in Levette?”

“That’s what happened. I don’t think my daddy wanted to be mean to Levette, but nature made him do it. Maybe he remembered how his daddy had always favored Anthony, and maybe this had built up in him over the years. Jealousy? Resentment? I’m sure there’s a name for it. And now here comes little Levette, and Levette looks like Anthony, only he’s even whiter. He’s the white son, the lucky son. And poor Simon, it’s not as if he doesn’t have enough troubles already. He’s barely able to feed his wife and daughter—that’s me. He can barely afford to put clothes on their backs. And because of the flood he has this nephew to raise who reminds him, every time he looks at him, that his mother was a tramp who went to Opelousas with a white man, and that Oscar Asmore, his own daddy, didn’t love him right. It all comes back, you see? He can’t help himself, even though he’s grown up and made a life for himself. He’s a responsible adult, like
they say. But something comes over him and he has a drink and the next thing you know he’s taking it out on Levette, treating Levette just like Oscar treated him.”

“Nature,” I said.

“Human beings have more going on inside than cats. But cats remember, too. That black mama cat pushed that white kitten aside for reasons that were probably a mystery even to herself. Something in the past, Charbonnet. Something in the past that just wouldn’t fix itself.”

I asked her for a pen and a piece of paper, and together we drew a sketch of the family tree. Oscar and Josie begat Simon, who with Lonna begat Annie Rae. Simon and Lonna were the couple depicted in the old photograph hanging on the wall. Branching off on the other side of the tree was Levette’s family. Oscar and Mary Beth begat Anthony, who with Camille begat Levette. Anthony and Camille perished in the flood, then Levette, their only child, was dead fourteen years later. “Did you have any children of your own, Mrs. Toussaint?” I said.

“No, I never did. My husband, by the way, was Milo, Milo Toussaint.” She pointed to the place on the tree where his name belonged. “He and I were married eleven years when he got hit by a train on the tracks that run through town.”

“Through Palmetto?”

“I can’t say it was the worst thing that ever happened. On the other side of the tracks where he was going was the house where his girlfriend lived. It must’ve been good, because he was in a hurry to get there. He was trying to beat the train.” Her humor had returned, as had her appetite. She dipped a cookie in her coffee and took a large bite. “We always heard about Levette passing for a white,” she said. “I’m not sure it surprised anybody, and I’m not sure anybody held it against him, either. You have to remember how things were in them times. Well, you won’t be able to remember, Charbonnet, because you weren’t born yet to see it.” She inhaled deeply, then let out a long exhalation. Her face now looked troubled. “The thing that makes me saddest when I think about Levette,” she said, “is how he never really
had a place. His uncle Simon didn’t want him because he was white, and the whites in New Orleans wouldn’t have wanted him had they known he was black. Dear Lord in heaven forgive me for saying this, but I used to think the only real peace he must ever have known was in those seconds when he jumped from the bridge and went falling toward the water.”

She asked me to make her a copy of the family tree. As I was working on the sketch she returned to the kitchen and came back in a few minutes with a paper bag. Inside were cookies wrapped in aluminum foil and paper towels. “Don’t want you to go getting hungry on the drive home.”

I included Levette’s name on the tree, along with other names that now seemed all but official. Levette Asmore and Jacqueline LeBeau had begat Beverly, who with Robert Goudeau had brought Rhys into the world. My heart got tight in my chest as I wrote out Rhys’s name.

“I’m not familiar with these people,” Mrs. Toussaint said. “It looks like Levette was way more busy than we knew about.”

“He liked his women,” I said. “I’ve read that there were only a dozen of his
Beloved
portraits known to exist, and that doesn’t seem like many until you take into account how old he was when he died. Twenty-three. I don’t know about you, Mrs. Toussaint, but I didn’t have a dozen girlfriends by the time I was twenty-three.”

“I knew only one man in my life. Ask me that was one too many.”

We walked out on the porch and the cat was still there, asleep in the sun. Mrs. Toussaint put her lips together and made a sharp kissing sound, and the animal looked up and meowed. “Well, Charbonnet, you sure had me reflecting. I hope I was helpful.”

“You were, ma’am. And I’m grateful. Thank you.”

I stepped into the yard and she dropped to her haunches and began to stroke the cat, whispering as she used both hands to massage its back. She lifted it in her arms and held it close to her chest. “I gave him a name. It came to me the other night in a dream. Until then I just called him ‘Cat.’”

“It wouldn’t be Levette, would it?”

“Levette? Oh, no, it’s not Levette.” She didn’t seem to mind when the cat clawed her dress and climbed up on her shoulder. It sat curled up with its face pressed close to her neck. I could hear it purring from ten feet away. “It’s Casper,” she said. “After the ghost in the cartoon.”

“Casper,” I said. “I like that.”

“We all have them. Ghosts, I should say. Somebody told me the place where Levette used to live was famous because they had a ghost that lived there.”

“I heard that, too. In a book it said the house had a sinister aspect.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“You mean, you never went to see where he lived?” She put the cat back on the ground and stood quietly watching as it cleaned itself. “He’ll run off eventually when somebody gives him better scraps,” she said. “Until then, at least we’ll know who he is.”

The house on Saint Philip Street where Asmore once lived didn’t look like the sort of place a ghost would appreciate much. It was clean and tidy, with fresh paint, new copper gutters and a wooden flower box with pansies by the stoop.

Imagining the young artist in this neighborhood took almost as much effort as it had to picture him bounding up the steps of the forlorn Wheeler Beauty Academy, because now the artist’s former home, recently refurbished, ranked as an architectural treasure bound in every direction by some of the most valuable real estate in the southern United States. In little more than half a century Asmore’s low digs had been Disney-fied.

Only minutes before the rain had stopped, and now the black streets smoked in the late-summer heat. For a second time I brought
my fist against the wood, and for a second time I tried to construct an introduction that might win favor with the current occupant. After I knocked a third time I began to wonder what to say if Asmore himself, back from the grave, pulled open the door and stepped out with a hand to shake. Had he lived, he would be eighty-three years old now. “May I have a moment of your time, please?” I might’ve begun. No, better to skip the formality and get right to the point: “Spoke to your cousin earlier today. Remember Annie Rae, do you? Well, Levette, she tells me you’re black…”

“May I help you?”

He appeared not from the house but the sidewalk, a small man of about fifty with a dense cloud of silver hair and a paunch, shambling up with a collection of plastic sacks bulging with groceries. While I met him with a phony smile, he fixed on me with the kind of gaze peculiar to French Quarter homeowners tired of unwelcome visits from inebriated tourists randomly searching for a bathroom.

“Do you live here, sir?” I said, smile broadened now to the point of parody.