For we think back through our mothers and grandmothers if we are women. - Virginia Woolf
In a photo from New Orleans circa 1940 a woman leans back on her hands with her back arched and presents herself to the world. Her smile is open and generous, confident. Her dress is tailored, her legs crossed at the ankles. Stones and leaves are scattered around her stylish open-toed heels. Behind her is a blank brick wall etched with the shadows of leafless branches. Her body is angled away from the photographer as if she is laughing at something in the distance. On the other end of the ornate concrete bench sits an abandoned baseball cap. The owner of the cap as well as the photographer are unknown, and I wonder who coaxed such a sensual and beguiling portrait out of the woman I sometimes think I know.
1922: Marjorie Peyton LaCour, born, January 27, New Orleans. The novel Ulysses is published in Paris. The New Orleans Item-Tribune begins publication. Almost one hundred people are killed while watching a silent movie in a theatre collapse in Washington, D.C. during a blizzard. Louis Armstrong moves to Chicago from New Orleans at the request of King Oliver.
Dixieland. King Oliver. Louis Armstrong. The lines of the trumpet, trombone and clarinet pour from the opposite side of the house at midnight, long after the woman who lives there is usually asleep. A woman whose consistent music of choice had been Puccini and Verdi, who knew the names of all the greats from Price to Normand to Carreras. It’s unusual to hear her listening to New Orleans jazz, especially in the middle of the night. She sits at her worn oak table, one hand on the radio knob, and she is weeping.
The house sits on an isolated strip of land in Pass Christian, Mississippi, twenty-five feet above the brown-green ribbon of Bayou Bois d’Or as it flows gently towards the Gulf of Mexico. It is a treehouse that sits atop huge pilings driven thirty feet into the ground, reinforced with crisscrossed lines of thick wire. Both sides of the house, and across the bayou, are thick with trees, longleaf and slash pine, tamarack and birch. One large moss-draped cypress tree leans over the water like an old man leaning on a cane.
“I miss New Orleans,” she says. “I see all the houses, red clay roofs, big trees.” She gestures with a long arm like a dancer with her eyes closed. “Walking to school.”
She brings both arms to rest on the table. The small table lamp illuminates her transparent skin. It appears the skin will tear in places, and she will leak out. The web of her blue veins is illuminated, a map of tiny tributaries or winding city streets. The lines of a turtle shell. A blueprint of electric circuitry.
She hasn’t lived in New Orleans for over forty years, yet memories of the time there between her birth in 1922 and 1945, the year she married, are vivid even as those from the day or year before are fleeting. She has lost all but one of her siblings, her parents and husband, and she has lost New Orleans.
She says, “Don’t you think about New Orleans? Don’t you miss it sometimes?”
It’s her life that intrigues and fascinates me, her life and time in that city.
1927: Great flood of the Mississippi River, worst US disaster to date. US Marines invade Nicaragua. First transatlantic telephone call is made from New York to London. Pontchartrain Beach amusement park opens in New Orleans.
“We took the streetcar to Pontchartrain Beach. It took a long time from uptown. Don, he came to my house, all the way from the naval base at the beach. I told him he couldn’t come in. Now why did I turn him away like that? It’s my one regret. He must have liked me, coming all that way.”
Don is the one that got away. Her one regret. Perhaps he’s the photographer or the owner of the baseball cap. I lean over for a good-night kiss and there is very little flesh, and the skeleton feels exposed and fragile. She smiles and promises that she’s not going to put the radio on again.
The next morning, we take our usual places at the old oak table, the TV on with the sound off. It’s the fall of 2020 and she’s aware of the virus, but we don’t talk about that much. “That’s all they talk about, the virus. You have the virus where you live too? You have to go to school and teach?”
Our roles resume, roles that have evolved over forty years of visits from my home in the Midwest, the daughter-biographer and the mother, her subject. What we talk about are her memories that come and go at random. Her familiar voice continues from decades ago when she told us stories every night ‘out of her head’, except now the stories are from her own life, events, sensations, philosophies.
The memories are harder to pin down now. She starts one, then moves to another and another before I have time to ask questions. The questions do not always resonate, and parts of the story are missing. It’s like she is going through an assortment of photographs scattered on a table, sifting through until one stands out, and takes hold, then it’s as though she has found something that’s been missing for a long time.
She sets down the remote and fumbles with the buttons of her cotton robe. “You can try to find a movie if you want.” Every robe she has sewn has delicate flowers on a white background, side pockets for a Kleenex, and eyelet lace around the collars. Her fingers are long and bony, and her wedding ring slips as she tries to button the top button where the fabric is soiled from constant touching.
1932: Sugar Bowl begins in New Orleans. Brave New World is published. The Lindbergh baby is kidnapped and murdered. Adolf Hitler obtains German citizenship. Start of the Dust Bowl. Radio City Music Hall opens with the Rockettes in New York.
“Remember when I used to kick high, all your cousins would laugh, there goes Aunt Margie kicking up her legs.” She stands up and holds onto the chair and kicks one leg up, then the other, to knee height.
“We were poor, but we were happy. We didn’t know the difference. Always had a piano. Mama played and we all sang. Edith says Daddy was drunk and yelled a lot. You know I never heard her make a sound when she was having babies? She had them all at home. Another baby would just be there. One time they told me to go outside and get some bricks. They needed bricks; I don’t know why. I gave them to the mid-wife.
“I used to sit on the stair landing on General Taylor Street. It had a window on the landing and I used to sit there and sing. I took the bus to singing lessons. I wanted to be a singer. I won a contest at the radio station. Pearl heard me on the radio. ‘Along the Boulevard’. Pearl said it was beautiful. Mama didn’t hear it. She was always too busy.”
Ten of them and so poor that the nuns sent them home from school with pots of red beans or vegetable soup. All the places they lived in the city, moving often when the rent was due, have street names she can list: General Taylor, Soraperu, Marengo, Arabella, Josephine.
Her mother prayed to the statues of Mary that moved from house to house with the family: the Virgin of the Seven Veils. Our Lady of Guadalupe. Queen of Peace. Mystical Rose. “Mama was smart. She went to college to be a teacher. But married women couldn’t teach. She went to St. Stephen’s Church, Pearl told me this, to ask the priest if she had to give into Daddy if he was drinking. Maybe there were six or seven of us then. He told her yes, it’s her duty as his wife.
“We were supposed to think a priest was holy, like Jesus, can you believe he told her that?
“A long time ago I read all about priests selling indulgences. All the money they have. Telling people, they can’t use birth control. And those people can’t help it if they’re queer, they’re born that way.” Her voice lowers. “And all they’ve done to children, all those innocent children. Don’t know about the church anymore. It’s not what Jesus wanted.”
“There might be a movie on. I think I’ll have another cup of tea.” She slips her feet into a flat soft slipper for the left foot, a wedged heel for the right foot to offset the hip and femur deformed by Paget’s disease, a form of arthritis. She pushes against the chair and the table to stand up and limps over to the kitchen counter.