Another colleague, Brad Resnick, who rented a portion of my father"s upstairs office for some fifteen years, summarized for me how my father had been able to dominate his compet.i.tors. "They hated to come to him," he said. "He"s the hardest person that G.o.d ever created. He"s an extremist, but he"s right."
The environment of the auction helped my father remember the excitement and adrenaline of the fur business, but it also seemed to trick him into thinking he was still partic.i.p.ating in it at full throttle. When he wasn"t avidly drinking soda, he was restlessly chewing gum, and when a conversation became especially heated, he would sometimes preserve his gum on the lid of his soda can, leaving the half-chewed wad on display until he had finished his discourse and was ready to start chewing it again. He would drift to distant ends of the auction house, become involved in exchanges that went on for a half hour or an hour at a time, and then wander back to me as if in a daze, with no realization of how much time had elapsed.
So I left my father at the auction house, walked back to our hotel room, determined which Canadian television stations broadcast The Simpsons The Simpsons and and South Park South Park and at what times of day, and spent the rest of the afternoon transcribing an interview for a magazine article I was working on. and at what times of day, and spent the rest of the afternoon transcribing an interview for a magazine article I was working on.
I slept poorly that night and woke up early the next morning with a cold, probably the result of my prolonged exposure to cigarette smoke and unknown elements in the uncontaminated Canadian atmosphere that were toxic only to the central nervous system of New Yorkers. My father was already up, unaware that I was awake; I could hear him preparing for a swim in the hotel pool. He was breathing slowly and deeply as he changed into a pair of trunks and a hotel-issue bathing robe. With each exhalation, he seemed to be urging himself to continue forward and face the day.
"How am I gonna do this?"
Breath.
"But I gotta do this."
Breath.
"I can"t do this."
Breath.
"But I gotta do this."
Breath.
I was still in a state of partial wakefulness, so I can"t be sure if I heard his words correctly. But I"m fairly certain I didn"t dream them.
For weeks it felt as if we were making no progress. Our telephone conversations had become less frequent and more cursory, usually about his health or his business or the weather he was getting upstate, and when I would remind him about our designs to travel widely and reach deep into his past, his response was always noncommittal. "I know, I know," he would say.
Then, abruptly, he became pa.s.sionately, vehemently insistent that we follow through on our plans. He had become fixated on a scene in a book I wrote that was set at a friend"s wedding, where I tried Ecstasy for the first time. In the rush of blood, endorphins, and enhanced feelings brought on by the drug, I confessed that one of my first impulses-after my overwhelming urges to go to the bathroom and lay every woman at the wedding banquet-was to call my parents and encourage them to take the drug with me. What stopped me was the realization, even in my agitated, over-sensitive state, that these were precisely the kinds of phone calls that my father used to make when he got high.
I was sitting alone in a hotel room in Memphis, working on a story and tinkering with a complicated cellphone I had recently bought, when my father called to tell me what he interpreted these pa.s.sages to mean. The LCD display of my phone had gone blank, and as I stared at my own reflection in its darkened gla.s.s screen, I heard on its speakerphone my father"s digitized voice say, "When you"re high, it brings out the true part of you. The best best part of you. part of you.
"I"m a work in progress, David," he said. "I"m still not a thousand percent comfortable with myself-if I were, would I be talking like this? I always wanted to be the person I felt I was when I was high." He sounded so certain that I was in agreement with him that I didn"t have the nerve to tell him he had misconstrued my point entirely.
A few days later, we were making our arrangements for a week-long trip to New Orleans. At my father"s insistence, we purchased our plane tickets in advance but reserved no hotel rooms nor rental cars: these remaining essentials, he said, would be taken care of when we arrived and no sooner, and then only on a day-by-day, as-needed basis. It was a most un-Dad-like way to travel, and yet it bore all the unmistakable attributes of a Gerry Itzkoff production: carefree and spontaneous, disorganized, impulsive and unnecessarily risky, demanding total freedom and utterly ignorant of consequences. Which were the expressions of the true part of him?
At the start of May, we touched down in Louisiana with no compa.s.s, no street maps and no GPS, no itinerary, and no sense of where we would be sleeping that night. (Had we been the least bit conscientious about planning the trip, we probably would not have arrived in the middle of the New Orleans Jazz Fest.) In a rental car we hired at the airport that morning, I was driving my father along the same routes he once traveled with his father in vehicles laden with mink or muskrat skins so valuable and vital to their business they would drive them to the airport and load them onto planes themselves, as if transporting elderly, infirm family members or irreplaceable works of art.
My father thought he would be able to recognize these thoroughly traveled streets on sight, but they were unfamiliar to him now; the sea-level strips of pavement buffered on either side by untamed and unending swampland had long ago been supplanted by elevated highways that bypa.s.sed the bayous entirely. Not quite two years had pa.s.sed since Hurricane Katrina tore through the area, and a protracted recovery process, only recently initiated, had done little to mask the scars of the devastation. Even the most heavily trafficked avenues were still cracked and caked with a thin, permanent layer of red clay, as if the storm had dispersed only a few weeks ago, and any street sign with more than ten or eleven letters-not uncommon in a town whose every alleyway and cul-de-sac is named for an American revolutionary or a French monument-had been bent beyond readability by heavy winds. The damage was so rampant that after a few hours of driving, it became dull to point it out. My father was irritated that the population dispersion he had been promised by the news media did not make rush-hour traffic any less congested, and he was fearful that after he"d been away from the city for so long, none of its remaining residents would recognize him.
The circ.u.mstances of our last visits to New Orleans could not have been more different. Seven years ago, I had traveled to the French Quarter for a raucous bachelor party during which I was never far from a bar or a strip club. For my father, this was the city where he had at least twice attempted to attend college and at least twice dropped out, where he had learned the family business from his father, who spent six months out of every year apart from his wife and his children entrenched in the Hotel Monteleone, doing battle with the hundreds of other furriers who were once as plentiful to the Gulf Coast as piping plovers and whooping cranes, and sending home autocratic letters every day to his hapless dropout son. My father had spent nearly half of his own life here, and yet he had not been back in nearly twenty years, not since he came to sit at his father"s hospital bed, watch him slip into a coma, and never regain consciousness. After this visit, it was hard to say when he might be back.
We were driving over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, a narrow twenty-four-mile-long suspension bridge that sits obliviously atop six hundred square miles of restless and capricious water. As I watched for any rain that would fall and compel the lake to swallow us up, my father began to tell me about something that had happened to him a few weeks ago in the Catskills.
He had been swimming at the gym and was toweling off in the locker room when an Orthodox Jew at a nearby bench took notice of him and approached him.
"Are you Jewish?" the man asked my father.
Despite the invitation to trouble that such a question usually portends, my father nonetheless answered it honestly and in the affirmative.
"Were you circ.u.mcised?" the stranger asked him. Again without stopping to contemplate the motives behind the line of questioning, my father answered yes.
"Really?" the man responded. "Because to me it looks like they didn"t finish the job." Then he added: "Do you mind if I check for myself?"
The imaginary version of my father I held in my mind"s eye absolutely floored me by consenting to the man"s request. The Jew beheld my father"s naked body and inspected his p.e.n.i.s manually and concluded that his initial observation was correct: there was still a small amount of foreskin remaining.
"No," he said. "The circ.u.mcision was not done correctly. It was not completed." He suggested to my father that the problem be rectified as quickly as possible, and my father, in a voice no doubt as calm and composed as the one in which he related the story to me, declined, and the conversation was ended.
"Now," my father said, turning to his only son, whom he loved, "why do you think this man did that?"
I could think of many reasons why an unfamiliar man might lurk in a locker room with intentions of placing his hands on my father"s manhood, most of them stemming from nasty, apocryphal rumors about the s.e.xual habits of Orthodox Jews that got spread around the secular summer camps I attended. But when I explained this to my father-that just because a man grows a long beard and wears tefillin and asks to touch your p.e.n.i.s, it does not necessarily make him a person of faith-he disagreed.
"David, don"t you understand that the Jewish faith teaches that you cannot get into heaven unless you"ve been circ.u.mcised?" His voice cracked, and his eyes welled with tears of pride. "He wasn"t doing it for himself, he was doing it for me. It was a mitzvah."
As with any story in my father"s possession, it turned out that this was not the first time he had told it, or the fifth, or even the twenty-fifth. He had already recounted it to just about every friend and colleague he could get on the phone, mostly men his own age, and so far every single one had sided with his interpretation of the story (or so they told him, or so he told me). It was difficult enough for me to listen to on its merits: among its details about p.e.n.i.ses, and my father"s p.e.n.i.s, and observant Jews, and observant Jews touching my father"s p.e.n.i.s, there was nothing that I ever wanted to hear about again. It reminded me that there was a gap between me and my father wider than Lake Pontchartrain and at the same time no wider than my father"s last remaining piece of foreskin.
We spent the night in a motel room on the outskirts of Orleans Parish, next door to a Denny"s that was fully stocked and furnished but had not been open in months because it could not hire enough employees to keep itself in business. Our accommodations weren"t particularly inviting, either. "Well, we didn"t get killed last night," my father declared as we checked out. "I thought we"d get b.u.t.t-f.u.c.ked for sure."
That morning marked my first visit to the campus of Tulane University and my father"s first in over fifty years. The residential areas seemed no worse for Katrina"s onslaught; the dormitories were weather-beaten, though my father a.s.sured me they looked no different in his day, and beaded necklaces and Mardi Gras masks hung harmoniously from trees, but maybe they had always been there, too. In ninety-degree weather, the students strode the grounds in shorts and T-shirts bearing proud slogans like I STILL GO TO TULANE I STILL GO TO TULANE and and GO FEMA YOURSELF GO FEMA YOURSELF. With its Gothic quadrangles unabashedly modeled on Princeton"s, unabashedly plagiarized from Oxford and Cambridge, Tulane was stirring in me a pleasant sensation I rarely felt about my college experience; I believe it"s called nostalgia.
The same could not be said of my father, who became more deeply lost in his memories, the farther we trod. To him, the campus was a pastoral 110-acre reminder of days consumed by cla.s.ses, studies, and ze f.u.kshuns of Dr. Goto, a high-stakes card game called Bourre, and evenings spent riding the bus to my grandfather"s fur business in the French Quarter, working with the greasy, musky skins until midnight or one in the morning, riding the St. Charles streetcar as near as it would bring him to campus, then walking the remaining miles back to his room.
My grandfather paid him erratically for his obligatory services; on occasional weeks he gave him fifty dollars and most weeks nothing at all. My father had no dress clothes-"Not a f.u.c.king sport jacket from Alexander"s," he said-and no car to drive on the weekends, when most students abandoned the campus and left him in solitude. Though he never achieved the rank of soph.o.m.ore, my father said he had learned a valuable lesson at Tulane: "You can"t have too much money, and you can never be too much in control of your own life. You can never trust anybody."
He took out his cellphone and wandered off to call my mother, to repeat to her how he was made to work long hours at my grandfather"s shop and never had a car or any spending money. I stood where I was and called Amy to tell her that in the days leading up to this trip, I had convinced myself I was doing a good deed for my father, giving him the emotional support for a journey he never would have taken on his own, but now I realized I"d made a mistake, that this whole thing was an act of cruelty. When my father returned, he ran out the afternoon pointing angrily at the bookstores and student centers the university had lacked in his day, then stretched himself beneath one of the ancient oak trees on the main quad that refused to be moved by time and tide. I hadn"t seen him look so worn down in a while.
We returned to the city via St. Charles Avenue in search of a hotel in the French Quarter, with my father playing the role of navigator and myself in the pilot"s seat. I found it hard not to lose my temper when a traffic light would turn green and he seemed not to know which way to go, or when his lack of guidance nearly steered us off the end of Ca.n.a.l Street and into the mighty Mississippi. It was no different, I figured, than when my father was driving and he would routinely snap at me or my mother or whoever was seated in the pa.s.senger seat when he was in desperate need of directions or stuck in traffic behind a grimy station wagon teeming with Ha.s.sidim. He left me in the car for some length of time while he cased a waterside Hilton hotel, only to emerge and declare that he didn"t feel like staying there. Next he had me drop him off at the Hotel Monteleone, which had served as my grandfather"s de facto residence and whose letterhead decorated almost all his correspondence during his time in Louisiana. It did not take my father long to step in, step out, and conclude that this was not where we would be spending the night.
The only tangible possession I have to remember my grandfather by is a postcard he sent me in 1988, when I was twelve years old, a few months before he died. On its front is a photograph of a young woman in a bikini, kneeling provocatively on a sandy beach as an alligator approaches her from behind, its jaws widening in preparation to bite her on the a.s.s. Beneath the picture is a caption that reads, "WOW! We alligators sure have fun in Louisiana." On the back of the postcard, my grandfather inscribed the following message: Dear David,A few months back I promised to write you, So-"HERE GOES!"As Ever,BobP.S. I"m going in to the Alligator Business!
I cannot recall my grandfather making that specific promise to me, but this single piece of correspondence says a lot about how I remember him. He was a randy, lively person, among the few offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants to have picked up a conversant vocabulary of Cajun curse words and Creole slang, the sort of man who wouldn"t allow the rest of his family to order dinner at a restaurant table until he"d had a chocolate milk shake first, and who got his laughs by inviting his young grandson into his study, sitting him on his lap, and confessing that he was the man who had a.s.sa.s.sinated John F. Kennedy.
In fact, during his lifetime, my grandfather was a persistent and diligent letter writer, and my father has saved hundreds of pages of the mail he wrote on a daily basis. Among the communiques that my father holds most dearly, if not quite fondly, is a set of letters my grandfather wrote to him in 1964, a few years after they became business partners, which circ.u.mscribe an incident now known as the Primeaux Affair.
Belus Primeaux was a West Louisiana furrier who had written to Bob and Gerald Itzkoff about some goods he wanted to sell them, right around the time that my grandfather was headed south to Louisiana for the winter. When my father attempted to convey this offer to my grandfather, my grandfather mistakenly concluded that my father was somehow withholding other crucial information. The misunderstanding inspired my grandfather to compose this first letter, dated simply "Wednesday, 1964," in the same elegant cursive that graces the back of my alligator postcard: Dear Gerald,In view of the fact that I was not informed as to the contents of Primeaux"s letter and having not received the original letter sent to "me," I think you ought to have your "Head" examined! This...is a very serious matter with me. I could itemize quite a list of objections I have to your conduct, in fact a very long list!Let it be understood that the following is in order:I want a letter written each and every day!You make no appointments for Monday nights that may interfere with you taking your mother to her Mah Jong [sic] game.You give your mother $50-each week.In the future, you are forbidden to super-impose your judgement for my experienced opinion or desires, as for instance the phone answering service.This As I said before, There is a long list of objections & the Primeaux affair is minor but important in principle-Of greater importance would be your failure to remember a Wedding anniversary or a Birthday or Anything! As I said before, There is a long list of objections & the Primeaux affair is minor but important in principle-Of greater importance would be your failure to remember a Wedding anniversary or a Birthday or Anything!As Ever,Bob History has lost my father"s reply, but its contents can be reasonably deduced from the relevant portions of the next letter that my grandfather sent him, dated November 16, 1964: Dear Gerald,In answer to your letter of the 13th:#1 I make no apologies for what I wrote!#2 If I wanted to fulminate our partnership, "I"d do it!"#3 If you can"t stand the treatment or consideration you are getting from me then you do it "Quit!"...In the meantime you are still in possession of information which belongs to me, I demand this information immediately! This is the sum total of my demands and which you interpret as "Insults!"I remainYOUR f.u.c.kIN FATHER.P.S. I still don"t have Primeaux"s letter. What do I have to do to get it?
Again, my father"s reply is absent from the sequence of exchanges. When my father writes to me now, usually in the form of a short email, I let the note sit in my inbox for a few days before I reply to it, if I do at all. No such luxuries were afforded to him when he communicated with his father; prompt responses were demanded and extracted from him by force if necessary. Every letter they traded was a wide-open venue to air any grievance, no matter how consequential or petty, to be discussed in the language that came most naturally to them, before the sieve of rational thought could filter out their impulsive emotions.
From the perspective of anyone other than my father, it is possible to read those letters and be both astounded and amused by them; even within our extended family, the Primeaux Affair has become a kind of inside joke, an affectionate snapshot of my grandfather at his most intractable and idiosyncratic. But to the man to whom the letters were addressed, it is impossible to contemplate them and not be seized by an intensely personal and incommunicable pain, not be transported back to a time when he was a son and not a father and could not make his intentions known to the one man he wanted more than any other in the world to understand him.
What I got from my grandfather was a bawdy postcard; what my father got from him was a philosophy of life. He was taught to be disciplined, to hold values and have convictions-to have convictions in in conviction, to know that there were times when a man must hold on to what he believes even when no one else around him will believe him. He learned that there is a man called Father whose job it is to tell you things, especially when you don"t want to believe them, and when this man called Father tells you something, it can be counted upon and it must be believed, because the opposite condition-not believing in Father-means not having certainty, and that is a circ.u.mstance too horrible and terrifying to contemplate. conviction, to know that there were times when a man must hold on to what he believes even when no one else around him will believe him. He learned that there is a man called Father whose job it is to tell you things, especially when you don"t want to believe them, and when this man called Father tells you something, it can be counted upon and it must be believed, because the opposite condition-not believing in Father-means not having certainty, and that is a circ.u.mstance too horrible and terrifying to contemplate.
After surveying the hotels of the French Quarter, my father and I settled in-by chance, at the same hotel where I had stayed during that bachelor party and done terrible things over the side of its Bourbon Street balconies. When we checked in, my father made a beeline for the bathroom. He seemed to think its tiled walls and not-quite-airtight door offered him some degree of soundproofing as he engaged in a heated cellphone conversation with someone I quickly deduced was my mother. Though I could not hear everything he said, a sufficient measure of his unrestrained invective escaped into the bedroom for me to figure out the subject of his tirade.
"...I am not not doing this with him again, Maddy! Never in a hundred million years! ..." doing this with him again, Maddy! Never in a hundred million years! ..."
"...He is ungrateful ungrateful. He is wild and he is unrestrained. You can"t control him! ..."
"...but he doesn"t talk like that when he"s on the phone to his girlfriend! ..."
"...so then tell me what the h.e.l.l is his problem with me?"
With nowhere else to go, and nowhere to sit or stand in the room where I could not hear him, I let these rough fragments scour over me in wave after abrasive wave. I would have preferred for my father"s fierce critique to have continued indefinitely than to have felt my heart seize up at the moment when his conversation ended and the room fell silent. Soon I would have to look him in the eyes again, and he would read from my defeated face that I had overheard the most crucial portions of a confession he had never meant for me to hear, thus gaining knowledge of feelings I was never meant to know he possessed. And then, somehow, we would have to get past even this.
HOW WE ARGUE IN MY FAMILY.
I. Opening Statements "You know that I could hear you in there, right? I mean, I could hear every word that you said. Is this what you think of me? Is this how you talk about me when I"m not around, when you think I"m not listening?"
"Now, David, let"s just take it easy, okay?"
"No, Dad, I don"t want to take it easy. We"re going to talk about this now."
"All right. But I don"t think you"re going to like some of the things I have to say."
II. The Recitation of Grievances "I feel that you"ve been very disrespectful to me at times on this trip. You"ve been very short with me when we"re driving in the car. You snap at me when I don"t know the directions, when I don"t know which way to turn."
II.a. So?
"So?"
"So I haven"t lived here for almost fifty years. And I see the faces that you make when I"m talking to other people. You look like you could die. What, are you embarra.s.sed of me?"
III. The Escalation of Force "Because half the time you don"t know these people. And you talk to everybody you encounter like they"re your best friends. Why do you find it so easy to open up to people you"ve never met before, but getting you to talk to me is like pulling teeth?"
"I don"t know, David. I guess that"s just my way. What does it matter to you, anyway?"
IV. The Queen"s Gambit "You go around acting like you can behave any way you want. Don"t you realize that you"re alienating the people who are closest to you? I think you"re going to look up one day and realize that you"re all alone."
"Who? Who am I alienating?"
"Me. My sister."
IV.a. The Queen"s Gambit Accepted "Oh, is that so? You think you know what your sister thinks?"
"We"ve talked about you. I think she would agree with me."
"You sure about that? You want me to call her on the phone right now and ask her?"
"N-no."
V. The Invocation of the Immutable Past "You have always been a willful person, David. Even from the time you were a little boy, when we would go for drives in the car, do you know that you used to reach up from the backseat and change the radio stations I was listening to?"
"What the f.u.c.k does that have to do with anything? You listen to me, you monster, you have no right to invoke my childhood. You missed half of it because you were constantly high on drugs. You have no idea who I was then, and you have no idea who I am now."
"David, I can"t keep apologizing to you for all the years that I was on drugs. I"m not taking them now, am I? I"m not high now, am I?"
VI. Outright Revisionism "Do you know that in all the time I used to get high, I never once raised my hand to you or your sister? I never once got physical with either of you. You know that, don"t you?"
"Oh my G.o.d, that is so not true! You say this all the time, and I always correct you, and you never remember. You think that if you say it enough times, that makes it true."
VII. Turnover on Downs "I think you still have a lot of issues to deal with from my drug use."
"And your problem is that you"re incapable of seeing people as anything other than who they used to be."
VIII. The Threat to Throw the Chair out the Window "I think I"m going to throw this G.o.dd.a.m.n chair out the G.o.dd.a.m.n window."
"Don"t do that."
IX. Closing Statements with Partial Apology "Look, David, I apologize that you overheard me talking to your mother before. I feel terrible about that. It"s like I keep telling you: I"m a work in progress, okay? I"m not going to get everything right all the time. Now do you forgive me?"
"Okay. Fine."
X. The Changing of the Subject "I"m starving. You want to go downstairs and get something to eat?"
"Sure."
Chapter 9
On the morning of our third day in New Orleans, my father awoke reinvigorated. Prior to our trip, his greatest concern had been that everyone he once knew in the city would be gone, and those who remained would no longer remember him or choose to acknowledge him. Following our fight and reconciliatory oyster dinner, the pendulum of his emotions was free to swing in the opposite direction. Daylight had barely broken, and he was already dialing away at his cellphone, calling information in search of phone numbers: for a woman with whom he used to play cards at Tulane, who he had heard was unmarried and still living in Louisiana; for a former roommate who had fled all the way to Arizona to escape his gambling debts; and for another roommate who had apparently made a fortune as an executive for a Texas-based cafeteria-services corporation. It did not matter if these people lived in time zones where the sun had not yet risen, or if his son, in the bed right next to his, was not yet ready to accept the fact that it was morning. He wanted to get someone, anyone, on the phone, and he wanted to talk right away.
He was especially concerned about a woman named Adelphia, a New Orleans native who was about his age and who had started working for my grandfather at around the same time he did. I did not have to ask if my grandfather paid her the same wages that my father received, or if her duties were commensurate with his; she was a woman, and she was black. But she remained with my grandfather for the duration of his Louisiana career, and she was at his hospital bedside every day as he suffered the progressively worsening stages of a subdural hematoma, and she was with him on the day he died. Despite the crucial supporting role she played in my family"s history, I had never met Adelphia, although I had once briefly encountered her daughter, Esther, who worked in the hospitality department of the hotel where my friends and I stayed during our bachelor-party debauchery. She sent a complimentary fruit basket to our room before we proceeded to throw up all over our accommodations.
It seemed certain that Adelphia and her family would have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and we had no idea when or if they might have returned to New Orleans. Months before our trip, when I first sat down with my father to review his life history, he had asked me to help him use various search engines and other computer tools to see if we could find Adelphia"s telephone number or home address. But for as much as my father professed to care about her, he could not remember what last name she went by, and all the phone numbers we found that might have been hers simply rang without end.
This morning, with the help of a Louisiana phone book and a directory a.s.sistance website, my father had managed to call just about every number that might have been Adelphia"s, politely disposing of the respondents who turned out not to be her, and diligently making note of each listing that went unanswered. Somewhat deflated, he snapped his phone shut and went into the bathroom to take a shower. And then Adelphia called back.
I answered my father"s phone, and in a soft Southern tw.a.n.g, she explained to me that she had spent the morning locked out on her porch. Though she had no answering machine, she had noticed my father"s name on her caller ID when she at last got back into her house. She said that we could come by to visit as soon as we wanted; knowing my father, I told her that would most likely be right away. I did not interrupt my father"s shower to tell him that Adelphia had been located, or that she had located herself; I waited until he emerged from the bathroom, with a towel around his waist and an electric toothbrush whirring in his mouth, at which point he started to cry. The tears streaming down his cheeks began to commingle with the toothpaste froth that had acc.u.mulated around his lips, and he looked positively elated.
Adelphia"s home in the Garden District was only a few miles from our hotel, and the directions she gave us were precise, yet we managed to drive past it at least once or twice before we arrived. It was our first visit to a predominantly black neighborhood in the city, and our first opportunity to view up close how arbitrary Katrina"s devastation had been. No structure had completely escaped the hurricane"s punishing touch, but on any given block, the damage from house to house could run a frustrating, heartbreaking gamut; one building might be missing substantial parts of its roof or its walls, or leveled to its foundation, while its immediate neighbor sustained nothing more permanent than superficial water damage.
Adelphia was waiting for us on the lawn in front of her townhouse, but my father did not recognize her right away. A small, compact woman of sixty-six, she was now dyeing her short hair a bright copper red, and her expressive eyes were hidden behind a pair of gla.s.ses that my father had never seen her wear. With a combined 133 years of life between them, they hugged each other, and my father began to cry again. She was a patient woman with a perpetual, genuine smile, but the smile, too, was a disguise; it concealed a wellspring of endurance whose depths had been plumbed by repeated misfortune and tragedy and whose bottom had yet to be found.
She was no older than sixteen or seventeen when she began working for my grandfather, a man she referred to even in the present day as "Mister Bob," and her memories of him were fairly consistent with my father"s: "Mister Bob, he hollered at me, too," Adelphia explained. "People used to say, "Why do you work for that Jew? He always hollerin" at you." I say, "Ah, he don"t mean half of what he say."" She would have known about his temperament from her first husband, Ray, who was already in my grandfather"s employ when Adelphia joined the business; Ray was an inveterate drunk who rarely showed up sober for work, if at all, but she forgave him, perhaps because she had her own habit of betting her wages on horse races.
Adelphia and Ray eventually split up, but not before they produced two sons, Patrick and Tracy. Tracy had been a heroin addict for most of his life and had done time in the Angola penitentiary for felony drug possession, but Adelphia still referred to him as her "best child," as in "I tell everybody my best child went to prison." He had been spared incarceration once before, when he was caught stealing money he was supposed to deposit in my grandfather"s bank account; my grandfather appeared at the trial to testify on Tracy"s behalf. (According to my father, my grandfather told the court, "The bank put money in the hands of a drug addict. What do you want him to do?") When Tracy was jailed for a later offense, he got seven years shaved off his sentence for defending a female guard from the attacks of a far more dangerous male inmate.
For ten years, Adelphia worked as a New Orleans cabdriver even as she continued to work for my grandfather, and after he died, she took a job as a cook and housekeeper for a fraternity house at Tulane, whose brothers were so enamored of her that they paid for her to travel with them on their annual spring-break visits to Florida. When Katrina came to town, Adelphia and her second husband, a man whose round, ebullient face gazed upon us from photographs that hung throughout the house, wasted no time in evacuating the city, driving first to Baton Rouge and then to Greenwood, Mississippi. For many months after the waters had receded, they resisted going home, antic.i.p.ating the cataclysm that would be waiting for them, and her husband, who had prostate cancer, never made the trip. "He pa.s.sed," Adelphia explained.