One Sunday morning, when I returned to this town after a few days away, I was strolling aimlessly through the streets when the sound of the bells of the old cathedral drew me to the holy temple. Let us join, I told myself, the crowd of the faithful who always fill the sanctuary when the Lord’s day returns; let us go hear the voice of the ministers of a tolerant and merciful God praising his infinite greatness; let us go listen to the holy, eloquent words of the wise priest who is temporarily replacing the respectable parish priest that death has just taken from us. A few young men were gathered at the church door and as I walked past them, the words schism, priests, and churchwardens struck my ear. I crossed the threshold of the temple and was astonished when I saw only two or three people kneeling on the stone floor instead of the crowd I thought I would encounter; instead of the holy hymns and evangelical words I came to hear, absolute silence reigned inside this vast edifice.

I tried to imagine what could possibly cause such abandonment of this holy place, which has been so greatly venerated for so long by the people of Louisiana. I was thinking about the few words I had gathered at the entrance when I saw a beautiful young woman with wild hair and disheveled clothing run in through one of the side doors of the temple, cross the balustrade that separates the nave from the sanctuary, and prostrate herself on the steps of the altar devoted to the comforter of the afflicted, that tender and poetic Mary, mother of the savior of mankind. I approached the balustrade and leaned against it, unnoticed by this stranger, so absorbed were all the faculties of her being in the prayer she was murmuring. Suddenly, she raised her eyes bathed in tears toward the image of the queen of martyrs and cried out: “O holy Mary, my patron saint, take pity on me. While the story of my sufferings makes my sisters smile and my mother herself calls me a madwoman when she sees my tears flowing, O you, virgin full of indulgence, now that I have prayed and a little tranquility has slipped into my heart, please listen kindly to what I need to tell you in the hopes of lightening my sorrow.”

After collecting herself for a moment, the young woman continued in these terms:

“Up to the age of sixteen, my life was as calm as the innocent thoughts that then filled my mind. I obeyed the lessons of a pious aunt who loved me tenderly and with whom I had lived since I was a very small child, and I lovingly practiced the admirable precepts of the Christian religion. Alas, death came to rob me of that good relative and I had to go live with my mother, whom I sincerely loved, but the noisy life there was not at all in harmony with the peaceful habits I had acquired since early childhood.

“I had lived in my mother’s house for a year and I still could not accustom myself to the silly language of my elder sisters, who were only interested in balls, feasts, and finery. They went to every party and always wanted me to accompany them. Up to then I had resisted all temptations, but at the end of the last carnival, my mother, who said she did not like my stubbornness, demanded that I enter a world that was utterly new to me.

“So to obey her, I made up my mind to go to several of those balls, which always made me shiver with horror; for in the midst of a crowd of men speaking a different language, with impudent looks and bold gestures, not one girl had a brother under whose protection she could take shelter; not one woman had a legitimate husband whose honorable name could impress that vulgar crowd avid for crude pleasures.

“At one of these strange gatherings, I had retired, according to my custom, to the least conspicuous part of the room, disposed to refuse all the invitations to dance that I might receive. I had already turned down several of them when a young man whose manners were full of distinction, quite unlike those of the other dancers, came up to me and with exquisite politeness insisted that I grant him the favor, he said, of giving him the waltz that was about to begin. I wanted to refuse again but I did not have the strength to do so, unfortunately for me. At that moment, the orchestra began to warm up, his hand grasped mine, I gave myself entirely to him, and we were soon immersed in the crowd of dancers.

“Little by little, the ball lost its repulsive features to my eyes. It is true that I could see only Gustave: that was the name of my attentive partner. We danced together all night and when I left I carried away in my heart sentiments quite different from the ones I had when I left the previous balls.

“Gustave and I saw each other frequently after that. With all my heart, I shared the love I thought I had truly inspired in him, so often did he repeat it. One day, my mother informed me that the man I loved, having first obtained her consent, had asked her to propose our union to me. I did not dissimulate my joy and answered that I would be happy to become Gustave’s wife. But when the woman who brought me into the world wanted me to understand that this young man, who occupied a position in society well above ours, could not unite with me in a legitimate way, I hid my head in my hands and wept with an indignant heart, for it was only as a mistress and not as a wife that Gustave wanted me.

“I did not wish to see him anymore.

“Some time had passed when one day my mother told me: ‘But my dear daughter, since you are repulsed by a condition that so many young ladies seek in this country, why don’t you contract a marriage of conscience? Gustave is proposing this to you.’ ‘What is a marriage of conscience?’ I asked my mother. ‘It is,’ she answered, ‘a pact which is outside the law, but to which a priest gives all the character of a legitimate engagement.’ ‘Well then, Mother, I have no further objection,’ I told her. ‘An engagement taken at the foot of the altar must always suffice, it seems to me; who would dare violate its sanctity? I do not understand why one must have the sanction of the law in that case.’ My mother, full of joy, agreed with me and left our home immediately.

“A few days later I was united with my lover.

“My happiness did not last. Hardly a year had gone by after our union when Gustave, whose inconstant character had become clear to me, seemed to be doing his best to fill my heart with all the anguish of the most frightful jealousy, for I was madly in love with that man. How many times did I follow him to those balls I have already mentioned, not to find ease for my pain but to make it more harrowing still? There I would see Gustave lavish his attention on other women, perhaps less pretty than me, while I, not daring to confess my suffering to anyone and blushing to see myself thus disdained by my husband, would withdraw, alone and pensive, to a corner of the room. I found myself repeating to myself these verses I had read somewhere and that were engraved in my memory, as they seemed to have been written to paint the state of my own soul:

“At last, I joyfully welcomed the day I became a mother, and I thought that this sacred title I had just acquired would make my husband’s affections return to me. Alas, it was only an illusion, and reality was soon to drive it quickly from my heart...

“I soon learned that Gustave, regardless of the vows that united us, was about to contract another marriage. I did not want to believe it. But when I spoke to him about it, he confessed that financial motives were forcing him to take on this new engagement, but as for the rest, he would never cease to have for me all the attentions that could make a woman happy. ‘Oh,’ I said to him bitterly, ‘do you really think that I could be happy if I must live with the certitude that I have a rival whom you yourself have acknowledged? Besides, you cannot abandon me like this. The priest received our vows, did he not? Is it in your power to untie the indissoluble knot that binds us to each other? Can you be so ignorant of the duties imposed on us by the laws of marriage?’ ‘You are forgetting,’ he answered smiling, ‘that we are united only by a marriage of conscience.’ ‘So your conscience does not trouble you?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he answered coldly. Then I threw myself at his feet. To bring him back to more honorable feelings, I showed him our child, that angel who only yesterday flew out of my arms to increase the cohorts of those who ceaselessly praise the name of the Creator. Annoyed by my moans and sobs, Gustave banished me from his presence.

“I never saw him again.

“A week ago I learned that his new marriage was celebrated with great pomp; a week ago God stripped me of the little reason that I still retained; and whenever I happen to regain some sanity, it is only to measure the extent of my misfortune.”

Then, suddenly, the madwoman’s tears dried up. She let out a frightful laugh that disturbed the sanctity of the place in which we stood. She crossed the balustrade again and hurried out of the temple as quickly as she had come in, through the door facing the altar to Mary.

I followed her as she stopped on the sidewalk in front of the church. At this moment, an elegant carriage drawn by two spirited horses passed rapidly by on the street. A young lady of great beauty and an elegantly dressed gentleman were sitting inside. After staring into the carriage, the madwoman cried out, “That’s him!” and I saw her rush out in front of the horses.

“Stop!” people cried from all sides. It was too late. The coachman was able to control his horses and they stopped, but not before they horribly trampled the body of the unfortunate woman writhing under their hooves. I looked at the people inside the carriage; the young lady appeared to be shuddering in pity; an extreme pallor covered the face of the elegant man, whose whole body was frighteningly motionless at this moment.

The bloody corpse of the young woman was soon carried under the peristyle of City Hall.

“Was she demented?” asked the lady in the carriage with a voice full of compassion.

“Yes, madam,” I cried, “she went mad because a coward took advantage of her naiveté and shamefully deceived her; and that coward, madam, is—”

“Whip the horses! Go!” shouted the pale man, suddenly emerging from his stupor.

The coachman obeyed this order, the horses galloped off... and the young lady leaned out vainly in my direction to grasp the last words I had just pronounced...

She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by (good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And there she sat until the captain came and hunted her up for supper. She could not do anything of herself; she had to be initiated into everything by someone else.

She was known on the boat only as “the little convent girl.” Her name, of course, was registered in the clerk’s office, but on a steamboat no one thinks of consulting the clerk’s ledger. It is always the little widow, the fat madam, the tall colonel, the parson, etc. The captain, who pronounced by the letter, always called her the little convent girl. She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl. She never raised her eyes except when spoken to. Of course she never spoke first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured them — penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.

She was dressed in deep mourning. Her black straw hat was trimmed with stiff new crape, and her stiff new bombazine dress had crape collar and cuffs. She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her head tight and fast. Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her footfalls.

Her hair was as black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the white surrounding the pupil. Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra pin the very last thing before leaving. She had a round little face, and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort giving them a pathetic little forced expression. Her complexion was sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in darkened rooms. The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place where a breastpin should have been. She was so little, so little, although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans alone.

Unless the captain or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back — oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain, and particularly of the clerk. Everyone knows the fund of humor possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table at meal-times affords. On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips and a sign of the cross. And always at six o’clock of the evening she remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind her of it.

She was in mourning for her father, the sisters told the captain, and she was going to New Orleans to her mother. She had not seen her mother since she was an infant, on account of some disagreement between the parents, in consequence of which the father had brought her to Cincinnati, and placed her in the convent. There she had been for twelve years, only going to her father for vacations and holidays. So long as the father lived he would never let the child have any communication with her mother. Now that he was dead all that was changed, and the first thing that the girl herself wanted to do was to go to her mother.

The mother superior had arranged it all with the mother of the girl, who was to come personally to the boat in New Orleans, and receive her child from the captain, presenting a letter from the mother superior, a facsimile of which the sisters gave the captain.

It is a long voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans, the rivers doing their best to make it interminable, embroidering themselves ad libitum all over the country. Every five miles, and sometimes oftener, the boat would stop to put off or take on freight, if not both. The little convent girl, sitting in the cabin, had her terrible frights at first from the hideous noises attendant on these landings — the whistles, the ringings of the bells, the running to and fro, the shouting. Every time she thought it was shipwreck, death, judgment, purgatory; and her sins! her sins! She would drop her crochet, and clutch her prayer-beads from her pocket, and relax the constraint over her lips, which would go to rattling off prayers with the velocity of a relaxed windlass. That was at first, before the captain took to fetching her out in front to see the boat make a landing.

Then she got to liking it so much that she would stay all day just where the captain put her, going inside only for her meals. She forgot herself at times so much that she would draw her chair a little closer to the railing, and put up her veil, actually, to see better. No one ever usurped her place, quite in front, or intruded upon her either with word or look; for everyone learned to know her shyness, and began to feel a personal interest in her, and all wanted the little convent girl to see everything that she possibly could.

And it was worth seeing — the balancing and chasséeing and waltzing of the cumbersome old boat to make a landing. It seemed to be always attended with the difficulty and the improbability of a new enterprise; and the relief when it did sidle up anywhere within rope’s-throw of the spot aimed at! And the roustabout throwing the rope from the perilous end of the dangling gang-plank! And the dangling roustabouts hanging like drops of water from it — dropping sometimes twenty feet to the land, and not infrequently into the river itself. And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks, and singing of Jim Crow songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through red lips, and laughing, and talking and — bewildering! entrancing! Surely the little convent girl in her convent walls never dreamed of so much unpunished noise and movement in the world!

The first time she heard the mate — it must have been like the first time woman ever heard man — curse and swear, she turned pale, and ran quickly, quickly into the saloon, and — came out again? No, indeed! not with all the soul she had to save, and all the other sins on her conscience. She shook her head resolutely, and was not seen in her chair on deck again until the captain not only reassured her, but guaranteed his reassurance. And after that, whenever the boat was about to make a landing, the mate would first glance up to the guards, and if the little convent girl was sitting there he would change his invective to sarcasm, and politely request the colored gentlemen not to hurry themselves — on no account whatever; to take their time about shoving out the plank; to send the rope ashore by post-office — write him when it got there; begging them not to strain their backs; calling them mister, colonel, major, general, prince, and your royal highness, which was vastly amusing. At night, however, or when the little convent girl was not there, language flowed in its natural curve, the mate swearing like a pagan to make up for lost time.

The captain forgot himself one day: it was when the boat ran aground in the most unexpected manner and place, and he went to work to express his opinion, as only steamboat captains can, of the pilot, mate, engineer, crew, boat, river, country, and the world in general, ringing the bell, first to back, then to head, shouting himself hoarser than his own whistle — when he chanced to see the little black figure hurrying through the chaos on the deck; and the captain stuck as fast aground in midstream as the boat had done.

In the evening the little convent girl would be taken on the upper deck, and going up the steep stairs there was such confusion, to keep the black skirts well over the stiff white petticoats; and, coming down, such blushing when suspicion would cross the unprepared face that a rim of white stocking might be visible; and the thin feet, laced so tightly in the glossy new leather boots, would cling to each successive step as if they could never, never make another venture; and then one boot would (there is but that word) hesitate out, and feel and feel around, and have such a pause of helpless agony as if indeed the next step must have been wilfully removed, or was nowhere to be found on the wide, wide earth.

It was a miracle that the pilot ever got her up into the pilot-house; but pilots have a lonely time, and do not hesitate even at miracles when there is a chance for company. He would place a box for her to climb to the tall bench behind the wheel, and he would arrange the cushions, and open a window here to let in air, and shut one there to cut off a draft, as if there could be no tenderer consideration in life for him than her comfort. And he would talk of the river to her, explain the chart, pointing out eddies, whirlpools, shoals, depths, new beds, old beds, cut-offs, caving banks, and making banks, as exquisitely and respectfully as if she had been the River Commission.

It was his opinion that there was as great a river as the Mississippi flowing directly under it — an underself of a river, as much a counterpart of the other as the second story of a house is of the first; in fact, he said, they were navigating through the upper story. Whirlpools were holes in the floor of the upper river, so to speak; eddies were rifts and cracks. And deep under the earth, hurrying toward the subterranean stream, were other streams, small and great, but all deep, hurrying to and from that great mother-stream underneath, just as the small and great overground streams hurry to and from their mother Mississippi. It was almost more than the little convent girl could take in: at least such was the expression of her eyes; for they opened as all eyes have to open at pilot stories. And he knew as much of astronomy as he did of hydrology, could call the stars by name, and define the shapes of the constellations; and she, who had studied astronomy at the convent, was charmed to find that what she had learned was all true. It was in the pilot-house, one night, that she forgot herself for the first time in her life, and stayed up until after nine o’clock. Although she appeared almost intoxicated at the wild pleasure, she was immediately overwhelmed at the wickedness of it, and observed much more rigidity of conduct thereafter. The engineer, the boiler-men, the firemen, the stokers, they all knew when the little convent girl was up in the pilot-house: the speaking-tube became so mild and gentle.

With all the delays of river and boat, however, there is an end to the journey from Cincinnati to New Orleans. The latter city, which at one time to the impatient seemed at the terminus of the never, began, all of a sudden, one day to make its nearingness felt; and from that period every other interest paled before the interest in the immanence of arrival into port, and the whole boat was seized with a panic of preparation, the little convent girl with the others. Although so immaculate was she in person and effects that she might have been struck with a landing, as some good people might be struck with death, at any moment without fear of results, her trunk was packed and repacked, her satchel arranged and rearranged, and, the last day, her hair was brushed and plaited and smoothed over and over again until the very last glimmer of a curl disappeared. Her dress was whisked, as if for microscopic inspection; her face was washed; and her fingernails were scrubbed with the hard convent nailbrush, until the disciplined little tips ached with a pristine soreness. And still there were hours to wait, and still the boat added up delays. But she arrived at last, after all, with not more than the usual and expected difference between the actual and the advertised time of arrival.

There was extra blowing and extra ringing, shouting, commanding, rushing up the gangway and rushing down the gangway. The clerks, sitting behind tables on the first deck, were plied, in the twinkling of an eye, with estimates, receipts, charges, countercharges, claims, reclaims, demands, questions, accusations, threats, all at topmost voices. None but steamboat clerks could have stood it. And there were throngs composed of individuals every one of whom wanted to see the captain first and at once; and those who could not get to him shouted over the heads of the others; and as usual he lost his temper and politeness, and began to do what he termed “hustle.”

“Captain! Captain!” a voice called him to where a hand plucked his sleeve, and a letter was thrust toward him. “The cross, and the name of the convent.” He recognized the envelope of the mother superior. He read the duplicate of the letter given by the sisters.

He looked at the woman — the mother — casually, then again and again.

The little convent girl saw him coming, leading someone toward her. She rose. The captain took her hand first, before the other greeting, “Good-by, my dear,” he said. He tried to add something else, but seemed undetermined what. “Be a good little girl—” It was evidently all he could think of. Nodding to the woman behind him, he turned on his heel, and left.

One of the deck-hands was sent to fetch her trunk. He walked out behind them, through the cabin, and the crowd on deck, down the stairs, and out over the gangway. The little convent girl and her mother went with hands tightly clasped. She did not turn her eyes to the right or left, or once (what all passengers do) look backward at the boat which, however slowly, had carried her surely over dangers that she wot not of. All looked at her as she passed. All wanted to say good-by to the little convent girl, to see the mother who had been deprived of her so long. Some expressed surprise in a whistle; some in other ways. All exclaimed audibly, or to themselves, “Colored!”

It takes about a month to make the round trip from New Orleans to Cincinnati and back, counting five days’ stoppage in New Orleans. It was a month to a day when the steamboat came puffing and blowing up to the wharf again, like a stout dowager after too long a walk; and the same scene of confusion was enacted, as it had been enacted twelve times a year, at almost the same wharf for twenty years; and the same calm, a death calmness by contrast, followed as usual the next morning.

The decks were quiet and clean; one cargo had just been delivered, part of another stood ready on the levee to be shipped. The captain was there waiting for his business to begin, the clerk was in his office getting his books ready, the voice of the mate could be heard below, mustering the old crew out and a new crew in; for if steamboat crews have a single principle — and there are those who deny them any — it is never to ship twice in succession on the same boat. It was too early yet for any but roustabouts, marketers, and church-goers; so early that even the river was still partly mist-covered; only in places could the swift, dark current be seen rolling swiftly along.

“Captain!” A hand plucked at his elbow, as if not confident that the mere calling would secure attention. The captain turned. The mother of the little convent girl stood there, and she held the little convent girl by the hand. “I have brought her to see you,” the woman said. “You were so kind — and she is so quiet, so still, all the time, I thought it would do her a pleasure.”

She spoke with an accent, and with embarrassment; otherwise one would have said that she was bold and assured enough.

“She don’t go nowhere, she don’t do nothing but make her crochet and her prayers, so I thought I would bring her for a little visit of How d’ye do to you.”

There was, perhaps, some inflection in the woman’s voice that might have made known, or at least awakened, the suspicion of some latent hope or intention, had the captain’s ear been fine enough to detect it. There might have been something in the little convent girl’s face, had his eye been more sensitive — a trifle paler, maybe, the lips a little tighter drawn, the blue ribbon a shade faded. He may have noticed that, but — and the visit of How d’ye do came to an end.

They walked down the stairway, the woman in front, the little convent girl — her hand released to shake hands with the captain — following, across the bared deck, out to the gangway, over to the middle of it. No one was looking, no one saw more than a flutter of white petticoats, a show of white stockings, as the little convent girl went under the water.

The roustabout dived, as the roustabouts always do, after the drowning, even at the risk of their good-for-nothing lives. The mate himself jumped overboard; but she had gone down in a whirlpool. Perhaps, as the pilot had told her whirlpools always did, it may have carried her through to the underground river, to that vast, hidden, dark Mississippi that flows beneath the one we see; for her body was never found.

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will — as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.

When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “Free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

And yet she had loved him — sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door — you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”

“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’s quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

But Richards was too late.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of joy that kills.

It was with much caution that Whistling Dick slid back the door of the box-car, for Article 5716, City Ordinances, authorized (perhaps unconstitutionally) arrest on suspicion, and he was familiar of old with this ordinance. So, before climbing out, he surveyed the field with all the care of a good general.

He saw no change since his last visit to this big, alms-giving, long-suffering city of the South, the cold weather paradise of the tramps. The levee where his freight-car stood was pimpled with dark bulks of merchandise. The breeze reeked with the well-remembered, sickening smell of the old tarpaulins that covered bales and barrels. The dun river slipped along among the shipping with an oily gurgle. Far down toward Chalmette he could see the great bend in the stream, outlined by the row of electric lights. Across the river Algiers lay, a long, irregular blot, made darker by the dawn which lightened the sky beyond. An industrious tug or two, coming for some early sailing ship, gave a few appalling toots, that seemed to be the signal for breaking day. The Italian luggers were creeping nearer their landing, laden with early vegetables and shellfish. A vague roar, subterranean in quality, from dray wheels and streetcars, began to make itself heard and felt; and the ferryboats, the Mary Anns of water craft, stirred sullenly to their menial morning tasks.

Whistling Dick’s red head popped suddenly back into the car. A sight too imposing and magnificent for his gaze had been added to the scene. A vast, incomparable policeman rounded a pile of rice sacks and stood within twenty yards of the car. The daily miracle of the dawn, now being performed above Algiers, received the flattering attention of this specimen of municipal official splendor. He gazed with unbiased dignity at the faintly glowing colors until, at last, he turned to them his broad back, as if convinced that legal interference was not needed, and the sunrise might proceed unchecked. So he turned his face to the rice bags, and, drawing a flat flask from an inside pocket, he placed it to his lips and regarded the firmament.

Whistling Dick, professional tramp, possessed a half-friendly acquaintance with this officer. They had met several times before on the levee at night, for the officer, himself a lover of music, had been attracted by the exquisite whistling of the shiftless vagabond. Still, he did not care, under the present circumstances, to renew the acquaintance. There is a difference between meeting a policeman on a lonely wharf and whistling a few operatic airs with him, and being caught by him crawling out of a freight-car. So Dick waited, as even a New Orleans policeman must move on some time — perhaps it is a retributive law of nature — and before long “Big Fritz” majestically disappeared between the trains of cars.

Whistling Dick waited as long as his judgment advised, and then slid swiftly to the ground. Assuming as far as possible the air of an honest laborer who seeks his daily toil, he moved across the network of railway lines, with the intention of making his way by quiet Girod Street to a certain bench in Lafayette Square, where, according to appointment, he hoped to rejoin a pal known as “Slick,” this adventurous pilgrim having preceded him by one day in a cattle-car into which a loose slat had enticed him.

As Whistling Dick picked his way where night still lingered among the big, reeking, musty warehouses, he gave way to the habit that had won for him his title. Subdued, yet clear, with each note as true and liquid as a bobolink’s, his whistle tinkled about the dim, cold mountains of brick like drops of rain falling into a hidden pool. He followed an air, but it swam mistily into a swirling current of improvisation. You could cull out the trill of mountain brooks, the staccato of green rushes shivering above chilly lagoons, the pipe of sleepy birds.

Rounding a corner, the whistler collided with a mountain of blue and brass.

“So,” observed the mountain calmly, “you are already pack. Und dere vill not pe frost before two veeks yet! Und you haf forgotten how to vistle. Dere was a valse note in dot last bar.”

“Watcher know about it?” said Whistling Dick, with tentative familiarity. “You wit’ yer little Gherman-band nixcumrous chunes. Watcher know about music? Pick yer ears, and listen agin. Here’s de way I whistled it — see?”

He puckered his lips, but the big policeman held up his hand.

“Shtop,” he said, “und learn der right way. Und learn also dot a rolling shtone can’t vistle for a cent.”

Big Fritz’s heavy mustache rounded into a circle, and from its depths came a sound deep and mellow as that from a flute. He repeated a few bars of the air the tramp had been whistling. The rendition was cold, but correct, and he emphasized the note he had taken exception to.

“Dot p is p natural, und not p vlat. Py der vay, you petter pe glad I meet you. Von hour later, und I vould haf to put you in a gage to vistle mit der chail pirds. Der orders are to bull all der pums after sunrise.”

“To which?”

“To bull der pums — eferybody mitout fisible means. Dirty days is der price, or fifteen tollars.”

“Is dat straight, or a game you givin’ me?”

“It’s der pest tip you efer had. I gif it to you pecause I pelief you are not so bad as der rest. Und pecause you gan visl ‘Der Freischütz’ bezzer dan I myself gan. Don’t run against any more bolicemans aroundt der corners, but go away from town a few tays. Good-pye.”

So Madame Orleans had at last grown weary of the strange and ruffled brood that came yearly to nestle beneath her charitable pinions.

After the big policeman had departed, Whistling Dick stood for an irresolute minute, feeling all the outraged indignation of a delinquent tenant who is ordered to vacate his premises. He had pictured to himself a day of dreamful ease when he should have joined his pal; a day of lounging on the wharf, munching the bananas and coconuts scattered in unloading the fruit steamers; and then a feast along the free-lunch counters from which the easy-going owners were too good-natured or too generous to drive him away; and afterward a pipe in one of the little flowery parks and a snooze in some shady corner of the wharf. But here was a stern order to exile, and one that he knew must be obeyed. So, with a wary eye open for the gleam of brass buttons, he began his retreat toward a rural refuge. A few days in the country need not necessarily prove disastrous. Beyond the possibility of a slight nip of frost, there was no formidable evil to be looked for.

However, it was with a depressed spirit that Whistling Dick passed the old French market on his chosen route down the river. For safety’s sake he still presented to the world his portrayal of the part of the worthy artisan on his way to labor. A stall-keeper in the market, undeceived, hailed him by the generic name of his ilk, and “Jack” halted, taken by surprise. The vendor, melted by this proof of his own acuteness, bestowed a foot of frankfurter and half a loaf, and thus the problem of breakfast was solved.

When the streets, from topographical reasons, began to shun the riverbank the exile mounted to the top of the levee, and on its well-trodden path pursued his way. The suburban eye regarded him with cold suspicion, individuals reflected the stern spirit of the city’s heartless edict. He missed the seclusion of the crowded town and the safety he could always find in the multitude.

At Chalmette, six miles upon his desultory way, there suddenly menaced him a vast and bewildering industry. A new port was being established; the dock was being built, compresses were going up; picks and shovels and barrows struck at him like serpents from every side. An arrogant foreman bore down upon him, estimating his muscles with the eye of a recruiting-sergeant. Brown men and black men all about him were toiling away. He fled in terror.

By noon he had reached the country of the plantations, the great, sad, silent levels bordering the mighty river. He overlooked fields of sugar-cane so vast that their farthest limits melted into the sky. The sugar-making season was well advanced, and the cutters were at work; the waggons creaked drearily after them; the Negro teamsters inspired the mules to greater speed with mellow and sonorous imprecations. Dark-green groves, blurred by the blue of distance, showed where the plantation-houses stood. The tall chimneys of the sugar-mills caught the eye miles distant, like lighthouses at sea.

At a certain point Whistling Dick’s unerring nose caught the scent of frying fish. Like a pointer to a quail, he made his way down the levee side straight to the camp of a credulous and ancient fisherman, whom he charmed with song and story, so that he dined like an admiral, and then like a philosopher annihilated the worst three hours of the day by a nap under the trees.

When he awoke and again continued his hegira, a frosty sparkle in the air had succeeded the drowsy warmth of the day, and as this portent of a chilly night translated itself to the brain of Sir Peregrine, he lengthened his stride and bethought him of shelter. He travelled a road that faithfully followed the convolutions of the levee, running along its base, but whither he knew not. Bushes and rank grass crowded it to the wheel ruts, and out of this ambuscade the pests of the lowlands swarmed after him, humming a keen, vicious soprano. And as the night grew nearer, although colder, the whine of the mosquitoes became a greedy, petulant snarl that shut out all other sounds. To his right, against the heavens, he saw a green light moving, and, accompanying it, the masts and funnels of a big incoming steamer, moving as upon a screen at a magic-lantern show. And there were mysterious marshes at his left, out of which came queer gurgling cries and a choked croaking. The whistling vagrant struck up a merry warble to offset these melancholy influences, and it is likely that never before, since Pan himself jigged it on his reeds, had such sounds been heard in those depressing solitudes.

A distant clatter in the rear quickly developed into the swift beat of horses’ hoofs, and Whistling Dick stepped aside into the dew-wet grass to clear the track. Turning his head, he saw approaching a fine team of stylish grays drawing a double surrey. A stout man with a white mustache occupied the front seat, giving all his attention to the rigid lines in his hands. Behind him sat a placid, middle-aged lady and a brilliant-looking girl hardly arrived at young ladyhood. The lap-robe had slipped partly from the knees of the gentleman driving, and Whistling Dick saw two stout canvas bags between his feet — bags such as, while loafing in cities, he had seen warily transferred between express waggons and bank doors. The remaining space in the vehicle was filled with parcels of various sizes and shapes.

As the surrey swept even with the sidetracked tramp, the bright-eyed girl, seized by some merry, madcap impulse, leaned out toward him with a sweet, dazzling smile, and cried, “Mer-ry Christ-mas!” in a shrill, plaintive treble.

Such a thing had not often happened to Whistling Dick, and he felt handicapped in devising the correct response. But lacking time for reflection, he let his instinct decide, and snatching off his battered derby, he rapidly extended it at arm’s length, and drew it back with a continuous motion, and shouted a loud, but ceremonious, “Ah, there!” after the flying surrey.

The sudden movement of the girl had caused one of the parcels to become unwrapped, and something limp and black fell from it into the road. The tramp picked it up, and found it to be a new black silk stocking, long and fine and slender. It crunched crisply, and yet with a luxurious softness, between his fingers.

“Ther bloomin’ little skeezicks!” said Whistling Dick, with a broad grin bisecting his freckled face. “W’ot d’ yer think of dat, now! Mer-ry Chris-mus! Sounded like a cuckoo clock, dat’s what she did. Dem guys is swells too, bet yer life, an’ der old ’un stacks dem sacks of dough down under his trotters like dey was common as dried apples. Been shoppin’ for Chrismus, and de kid’s lost one of her new socks w’ot she was goin’ to hold up Santy wid. De bloomin’ little skeezicks! Wit’ her Mer-ry Chris-mus! W’ot d’ yer t’ink! Same as to say, Hello, Jack, how goes it? and as swell as Fift’ Av’noo, and as easy as a blowout in Cincinnat.”

Whistling Dick folded the stocking carefully, and stuffed it into his pocket.

It was nearly two hours later when he came upon signs of habitation. The buildings of an extensive plantation were brought into view by a turn in the road. He easily selected the planter’s residence in a large square building with two wings, with numerous good-sized, well-lighted windows, and broad verandas running around its full extent. It was set upon a smooth lawn, which was faintly lit by the far-reaching rays of the lamps within. A noble grove surrounded it, and old-fashioned shrubbery grew thickly about the walks and fences. The quarters of the hands and the mill buildings were situated at a distance in the rear.

The road was now enclosed on each side by a fence, and presently, as Whistling Dick drew nearer the house, he suddenly stopped and sniffed the air.

“If dere ain’t a hobo stew cookin’ somewhere in dis immediate precinct,” he said to himself, “me nose has quit tellin’ de trut’.”

Without hesitation he climbed the fence to windward. He found himself in an apparently disused lot, where piles of old bricks were stacked, and rejected, decaying lumber. In a corner he saw the faint glow of a fire that had become little more than a bed of living coals, and he thought he could see some dim human forms sitting or lying about it. He drew nearer, and by the light of a little blaze that suddenly flared up he saw plainly the fat figure of a ragged man in an old brown sweater and cap.

“Dat man,” said Whistling Dick to himself softly, “is a dead ringer for Boston Harry. I’ll try him wit’ de high sign.”

He whistled one or two bars of a rag-time melody, and the air was immediately taken up, and then quickly ended with a peculiar run. The first whistler walked confidently up to the fire. The fat man looked up, and spake in a loud, asthmatic wheeze:

“Gents, the unexpected but welcome addition to our circle is Mr. Whistling Dick, an old friend of mine for whom I fully vouches. The waiter will lay another cover at once. Mr. W.D. will join us at supper, during which function he will enlighten us in regard to the circumstances that gave us the pleasure of his company.”

“Chewin’ de stuffin’ out ’n de dictionary, as usual, Boston,” said Whistling Dick. “But t’anks all de same for de invitashun. I guess I finds meself here about de same way as yous guys. A cop gimme de tip dis mornin’. Yous workin’ on dis farm?”

“A guest,” said Boston, sternly, “shouldn’t never insult his entertainers until he’s filled up wit’ grub. ’Tain’t good business sense. Workin’! — but I will restrain myself. We five — me, Deaf Pete, Blinky, Goggles, and Indiana Tom — got put on to this scheme of Noo Orleans to work visiting gentlemen upon her dirty streets, and we hit the road last evening just as the tender hues of twilight had flopped down upon the daisies and things. Blinky, pass the empty oyster-can at your left to the empty gentleman at your right.”

For the next ten minutes the gang of roadsters paid their undivided attention to the supper. In an old five-gallon kerosene can they had cooked a stew of potatoes, meat, and onions, which they partook of from smaller cans they had found scattered about the vacant lot.

Whistling Dick had known Boston Harry of old, and knew him to be one of the shrewdest and most successful of his brotherhood. He looked like a prosperous stock-drover or solid merchant from some country village. He was stout and hale, with a ruddy, always smoothly shaven face. His clothes were strong and neat, and he gave special attention to his decent-appearing shoes. During the past ten years he had acquired a reputation for working a larger number of successfully managed confidence games than any of his acquaintances, and he had not a day’s work to be counted against him. It was rumored among his associates that he had saved a considerable amount of money. The four other men were fair specimens of the slinking, ill-clad, noisome genus who carried their labels of “suspicious” in plain view.

After the bottom of the large can had been scraped, and pipes lit at the coals, two of the men called Boston aside and spake with him lowly and mysteriously. He nodded decisively, and then said aloud to Whistling Dick:

“Listen, sonny, to some plain talky-talk. We five are on a lay. I’ve guaranteed you to be square, and you’re to come in on the profits equal with the boys, and you’ve got to help. Two hundred hands on this plantation are expecting to be paid a week’s wages to-morrow morning. To-morrow’s Christmas, and they want to lay off. Says the boss: Work from five to nine in the morning to get a train load of sugar off, and I’ll pay every man cash down for the week and a day extra. They say: Hooray for the boss! It goes. He drives to Noo Orleans to-day, and fetches back the cold dollars. Two thousand and seventy-four fifty is the amount. I got the figures from a man who talks too much, who got ’em from the bookkeeper. The boss of this plantation thinks he’s going to pay this wealth to the hands. He’s got it down wrong; he’s going to pay it to us. It’s going to stay in the leisure class, where it belongs. Now, half of this haul goes to me, and the other half the rest of you may divide. Why the difference? I represent the brains. It’s my scheme. Here’s the way we’re going to get it. There’s some company at supper in the house, but they’ll leave about nine. They’ve just happened in for an hour or so. If they don’t go pretty soon, we’ll work the scheme anyhow. We want all night to get away good with the dollars. They’re heavy. About nine o’clock Deaf Pete and Blinky’ll go down the road about a quarter beyond the house, and set fire to a big cane-field there that the cutters haven’t touched yet. The wind’s just right to have it roaring in two minutes. The alarm’ll be given, and every man Jack about the place will be down there in ten minutes, fighting fire. That’ll leave the money sacks and the women alone in the house for us to handle. You’ve heard cane burn? Well, there’s mighty few women can screech loud enough to be heard above its crackling. The thing’s dead safe. The only danger is in being caught before we can get far enough away with the money. Now, if you—”

“Boston,” interrupted Whistling Dick, rising to his feet, “t’anks for the grub yous fellers has given me, but I’ll be movin’ on now.”

“What do you mean?” asked Boston, also rising.

“W’y, you can count me outer dis deal. You oughter know that. I’m on de bum all right enough, but dat other t’ing don’t go wit’ me. Burglary is no good. I’ll say good night and many t’anks fer—”

Whistling Dick had moved away a few steps as he spoke, but he stopped very suddenly. Boston had covered him with a short revolver of roomy caliber.

“Take your seat,” said the tramp leader. “I’d feel mighty proud of myself if I let you go and spoil the game. You’ll stick right in this camp until we finish the job. The end of that brick pile is your limit. You go two inches beyond that, and I’ll have to shoot. Better take it easy, now.”

“It’s my way of doin’,” said Whistling Dick. “Easy goes. You can depress de muzzle of dat twelve-incher, and run ’er back on de trucks. I remains, as de newspapers says, in yer midst.”

“All right,” said Boston, lowering his piece, as the other returned and took his seat again on a projecting plank in a pile of timber. “Don’t try to leave; that’s all. I wouldn’t miss this chance even if I had to shoot an old acquaintance to make it go. I don’t want to hurt anybody specially, but this thousand dollars I’m going to get will fix me for fair. I’m going to drop the road, and start a saloon in a little town I know about. I’m tired of being kicked around.”

Boston Harry took from his pocket a cheap silver watch, and held it near the fire.

“It’s a quarter to nine,” he said. “Pete, you and Blinky start. Go down the road past the house, and fire the cane in a dozen places. Then strike for the levee, and come back on it, instead of the road, so you won’t meet anybody. By the time you get back the men will all be striking out for the fire, and we’ll break for the house and collar the dollars. Everybody cough up what matches he’s got.”

The two surly tramps made a collection of all the matches in the party, Whistling Dick contributing his quota with propitiatory alacrity, and then they departed in the dim starlight in the direction of the road.

Of the three remaining vagrants, two, Goggles and Indiana Tom, reclined lazily upon convenient lumber and regarded Whistling Dick with undisguised disfavor. Boston, observing that the dissenting recruit was disposed to remain peaceably, relaxed a little of his vigilance. Whistling Dick arose presently and strolled leisurely up and down keeping carefully within the territory assigned him.

“Dis planter chap,” he said, pausing before Boston Harry, “w’ot makes yer t’ink he’s got de tin in de house wit’ ’im?”

“I’m advised of the facts in the case,” said Boston. “He drove to Noo Orleans and got it, I say, to-day. Want to change your mind now and come in?”

“Naw, I was just askin’. W’ot kind o’ team did de boss drive?”

“Pair of grays.”

“Double surrey?”

“Yep.”

“Women folks along?”

“Wife and kid. Say, what morning paper are you trying to pump news for?”

“I was just conversin’ to pass de time away. I guess dat team passed me in de road dis evenin’. Dat’s all.”

As Whistling Dick put his hands in his pockets and continued his curtailed beat up and down by the fire, he felt the silk stocking he had picked up in the road.

“Ther bloomin’ little skeezicks,” he muttered, with a grin.

As he walked up and down he could see, through a sort of natural opening or lane among the trees, the planter’s residence some seventy-five yards distant. The side of the house toward him exhibited spacious, well-lighted windows through which a soft radiance streamed, illuminating the broad veranda and some extent of the lawn beneath.

“What’s that you said?” asked Boston, sharply.

“Oh, nuttin’ ’t all,” said Whistling Dick, lounging carelessly, and kicking meditatively at a little stone on the ground. “Just as easy,” continued the warbling vagrant softly to himself, “an’ sociable an’ swell an’ sassy, wit’ her Mer-ry Chris-mus. W’ot d’yer t’ink, now!”

Dinner, two hours late, was being served in the Bellemeade plantation dining-room.

It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans.

There was a bartender whose mouth and eyes curved downward from the divide of his baby-pink nose, as if he had combed them down, like his hair; he always just said nothing. The seats at his bar were black oilcloth knobs, worn and smooth and as much alike as six pebbles on the beach, and yet the two customers had chosen very particularly the knobs they would sit on. They had come in separately out of the wet, and had each chosen an end stool, and now sat with the length of the little bar between them. The bartender obviously did not know either one; he rested his eyes by closing them...

The fat customer, with a rather affable look about him, said he would have a rye. The unshaven young man with the shaking hands, though he had come in first, only looked fearfully at a spot on the counter before him until the bartender, as if he could hear silent prayer, covered the spot with a drink.

The fat man swallowed, and began at once to look a little cozy and prosperous. He seemed ready to speak, if the moment came...

There was a calm roll of thunder, no more than a shifting of the daily rain clouds over Royal Street.

Then — “Rain or shine,” the fat man spoke, “she’ll be there.”

The bartender stilled his cloth on the bar, as if mopping up made a loud noise, and waited.

“Why, at the Palace of Pleasure,” said the fat man. He was really more heavy and solid than he was simply fat.

The bartender leaned forward an inch on his hand.

“The lady will be at the Palace of Pleasure,” said the fat man in his drowsy voice. “The lady with the purple hat.”

Then the fat man turned on the black knob, put his elbow on the counter, and rested his cheek on his hand, where he could see all the way down the bar. For a moment his eyes seemed dancing there, above one of those hands so short and so plump that you are always counting the fingers... really helpless-looking hands for so large a man.

The young man stared back without much curiosity, looking at the affable face much the way you stare out at a little station where your train is passing through. His hand alone found its place on his small glass.

“Oh, the hat she wears is a creation,” said the fat man, almost dreamily, yet not taking his eyes from the young man. It was strange that he did not once regard the bartender, who after all had done him the courtesy of asking a polite question or two, or at least the same as asked. “A great and ancient and bedraggled purple hat.”

There was another rumble overhead. Here they seemed to inhabit the world that was just beneath the thunder. The fat man let it go by, lifting his little finger like a pianist. Then he went on.

“Sure, she’s one of those thousands of middle-aged women who come every day to the Palace, would not be kept away by anything on earth... Most of them are dull enough, drab old creatures, all of them, walking in with their big black purses held wearily by the handles like suitcases packed for a trip. No one has ever been able to find out how all these old creatures can leave their lives at home like that to gamble... what their husbands think... who keeps the house in order... who pays... At any rate, she is one like the rest, except for the hat, and except for the young man that always meets her there, from year to year... And I think she is a ghost.”

“Ghost!” said the bartender — noncommittally, just as he might repeat an order.

“For this reason,” said the fat man.

A reminiscent tone came into his voice which seemed to put the silent thin young man on his guard. He made the beginning of a gesture toward the bottle. The bartender was already filling his glass.

“In thirty years she has not changed,” said the fat man. “Neither has she changed her hat. Dear God, how the moths must have hungered for that hat. But she has kept it in full bloom on her head, that monstrosity — purple too, as if she were beautiful in the bargain. She has not aged, but she keeps her middle age. The young man, on the other hand, must change — I’m sure he’s not always the same young man. For thirty years,” he said, “she’s met a young man at the dice table every afternoon, rain or shine, at five o’clock, and gambles till midnight and tells him good-bye, and still it looks to be always the same young man — always young, but a little stale, a little tired... the smudge of a sideburn... She finds them, she does. She picks them. Where I don’t know, unless New Orleans, as I’ve always had a guess, is the birthplace of ready-made victims.”

“Who are you?” asked the young man. It was the sort of idle voice in which the greatest wildness sometimes speaks out at last in a quiet bar.

“In the Palace of Pleasure there is a little catwalk along beneath the dome,” said the fat man. His rather small, mournful lips, such as big men often have, now parted in a vague smile. “I am the man whose eyes look out over the gambling room. I am the armed man that everyone knows to be watching, at all they do. I don’t believe my position is dignified by a title.” Nevertheless, he looked rather pleased. “I have watched her every day for thirty years and I think she is a ghost. I have seen her murdered twice,” said the fat man.

The bartender’s enormous sad black eyebrows raised, like hoods on baby carriages, and showed his round eyes.

The fat man lifted his other fat little hand and studied, or rather showed off, a ruby ring that he wore on his little finger. “That carpet, if you have ever been there, in the Palace of Pleasure, is red, but from up above, it changes and gives off light between the worn crisscrossing of the aisles like the facets of a well-cut ruby,” he said, speaking in a declarative manner as if he had been waiting for a chance to deliver this enviable comparison. “The tables and chandeliers are far down below me, points in its interior... Life in the ruby. And yet somehow all that people do is clear and lucid and authentic there, as if it were magnified in the red lens, not made smaller. I can see everything in the world from my catwalk. You mustn’t think I brag...” He looked all at once from his ring straight at the young man’s face, which was as drained and white as ever, expressionless, with a thin drop of whiskey running down his cheek where he had blundered with his glass.

“I have seen this old and disgusting creature in her purple hat every night, quite plainly, for thirty years, and to my belief she has been murdered twice. I suppose it will take the third time.” He himself smoothly tossed down a drink.

The bartender leaned over and filled the young man’s glass.

“It’s within the week, within the month, that she comes back. Once she was shot point-blank — that was the first time. The young man was hot-headed then. I saw her carried out bleeding from the face. We hush those things, you know, at the Palace. There are no signs afterward, no trouble... The soft red carpet... Within the month she was back — with her young man meeting her at the table just after five.”

The bartender put his head to one side.

“The only good of shooting her was, it made a brief period of peace there,” said the fat man. “I wouldn’t scoff, if I were you.” He did seem the least bit fretted by that kind of interruption.

“The second time took into account the hat,” he went on. “And I do think her young man was on his way toward the right idea that time, the secret. I think he had learned something. Or he wanted it all kept more quiet, or he was a new one...” He looked at the young man at the other end of the bar with a patient, compassionate expression, or it may have been the inevitably tender contour of his round cheeks. “It is time that I told you about the hat. It is quite a hat. A great, wide, deep hat such as has no fashion and never knew there was fashion and change. It serves her to come out in winter and summer. Those are old plush flowers that trim it — roses? Poppies? A man wouldn’t know easily. And you would never know if you only met her wearing the hat that a little glass vial with a plunger helps decorate the crown. You would have to see it from above... Or you would need to be the young man sitting beside her at the gambling table when, at some point in the evening, she takes the hat off and lays it carefully in her lap, under the table... Then you might notice the little vial, and be attracted to it and wish to take it out and examine it at your pleasure off in the washroom — to admire the handle, for instance, which is red glass, like the petal of an artificial flower.”

The bartender suddenly lifted his hand to his mouth as if it held a glass, and yawned into it. The thin young man hit the counter faintly with his tumbler.

“She does more than just that, though,” said the fat man with a little annoyance in his soft voice. “Perhaps I haven’t explained that she is a lover too, or did you know that she would be? It is hard to make it clear to a man who has never been out to the Palace of Pleasure, but only serves drinks all day behind a bar. You see...” And now, lowering his voice a little, he deliberately turned from the young man and would not look at him anymore. But the young man looked at him, without lifting his drink — as if there were something hypnotic and irresistible even about his side face with the round, hiding cheek.

“Try to imagine,” the fat man was saying gently to the bartender, who looked back at him. “At some point in the evening she always takes off the purple hat. Usually it is very late... when it is almost time for her to go. The young man who has come to the rendezvous watches her until she removes it, watches her hungrily. Is it in order to see her hair? Well, most ghosts that are lovers, and lovers that are ghosts, have the long thick black hair that you would expect, and hers is no exception to the rule. It is pinned up, of course — in her straggly vague way. But the young man doesn’t look at it after all. He is enamored of her hat — her ancient, battered, outrageous hat with the awful plush flowers. She lays it down below the level of the table there, on her shabby old lap, and he caresses it... Well, I suppose in this town there are stranger forms of love than that, and who are any of us to say what ways people may not find to love? She herself, you know, seems perfectly satisfied with it. And yet she must not be satisfied, being a ghost... Does it matter how she seeks her desire? I am sure she speaks to him, in a sort of purr, the purr that is used for talking in that room, and the young man does not know what she seeks of him, and she is leading him on, all the time. What does she say? I do not know. But believe me... she leads him on...”

The bartender leaned on one hand. He had an oddly cheerful look by this time, as if with strange and sad things to come his way his outlook became more vivacious.

“To look at, she has a large-sized head,” said the fat man, pushing his lip with his short finger. “Well, it is more that her face spreads over such a wide area. Like the moon’s... Much as I have studied her, I can only say that all her features seem to have moved farther apart from each other — expanded, if you see what I mean.” He brought his hands together and parted them.

The bartender leaned over closer, staring at the fat man’s face interestedly.

“But I can never finish telling you about the hat!” the fat man cried, and there was a little sigh somewhere in the room, very young, like a child’s. “Of course, to balance the weight of the attractive little plunger, there is an object to match on the other side of this marvelous old hat — a jeweled hatpin, no less. Of course the pin is there to keep the hat safe! Each time she takes off the hat, she has first to remove the hatpin. You can see her do it every night of the world. It comes out a regular little flashing needle, ten or twelve inches long, and after she has taken the hat off, she sticks the pin back through.”

The bartender pursed his lips.

“What about the second time she was murdered? Have you wondered how that was done?” The fat man turned back to face the young fellow, whose feet drove about beneath the stool. “The young lover had learned something, or come to some conclusion, you see,” he said. “It was obvious all the time, of course, that by spinning the brim ever so easily as it rested on the lady’s not over-sensitive old knees, it would be possible to remove the opposite ornament. There was not the slightest fuss or outcry when the pin entered between the ribs and pierced the heart. No one saw it done... except for me, naturally — I had been watching for it, more or less. The old creature, who had been winning at that, simply folded all softly in on herself, like a circus tent being taken down after the show, if you’ve ever seen the sight. I saw her carried out again. It takes three big boys every time, she is so heavy, and one of them always has the presence of mind to cover her piously with her old purple hat for the occasion.”

The bartender shut his eyes distastefully.

“If you had ever been to the Palace of Pleasure, you’d know it all went completely as usual — people at the tables never turn around,” said the fat man.

The bartender ran his hand down the side of his sad smooth hair.

“The trouble lies, you see,” said the fat man, “with the young lover. You are he, let us say...” But he turned from the drinking young man, and it was the bartender who was asked to be the lover for the moment. “After a certain length of time goes by, and love has blossomed, and the hat, the purple hat, is thrilling to the touch of your hand — you can no longer be sure about the little vial. There in privacy you may find it to be empty. It is her coquettishness, you see. She leads you on. You are never to know whether...”

From his very beginning this person, Anthony Burns, had betrayed an instinct for being included in things that swallowed him up. In his family there had been fifteen children and he the one given least notice, and when he went to work, after graduating from high school in the largest class on the records of that institution, he secured his job in the largest wholesale company of the city. Everything absorbed him and swallowed him up, and still he did not feel secure. He felt more secure at the movies than anywhere else. He loved to sit in the back rows of the movies where the darkness absorbed him gently so that he was like a particle of food dissolving in a big hot mouth. The cinema licked at his mind with a tender, flickering tongue that all but lulled him to sleep. Yes, a big motherly Nannie of a dog could not have licked him better or given him sweeter repose than the cinema did when he went there after work. His mouth would fall open at the movies and saliva would accumulate in it and dribble out the sides of it and all his being would relax so utterly that all the prickles and tightenings of a whole day’s anxiety would be lifted away. He didn’t follow the story on the screen but watched the figures. What they said or did was immaterial to him, he cared about only the figures who warmed him as if they were cuddled right next to him in the dark picture house and he loved every one of them but the ones with shrill voices.

The timidest kind of a person was Anthony Burns, always scuttling from one kind of protection to another but none of them ever being durable enough to suit him.

Now at the age of thirty, by virtue of so much protection, he still had in his face and body the unformed look of a child and he moved like a child in the presence of critical elders. In every move of his body and every inflection of speech and cast of expression there was a timid apology going out to the world for the little space that he had been somehow elected to occupy in it. His was not an inquiring type of mind. He only learned what he was required to learn and about himself he learned nothing. He had no idea of what his real desires were. Desire is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being, and this was especially true in the case of Anthony Burns. His desires, or rather his basic desire, was so much too big for him that it swallowed him up as a coat that should have been cut into ten smaller sizes, or rather there should have been that much more of Burns to make it fit him.

For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions, and these are what sufferings must atone for. A wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were exhausted, a room in a house left unfurnished because the householder’s funds were not sufficient — these sorts of incompletions are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of makeshift arrangement. The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence such as a war, between two men or among a number of nations, is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another compensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby clearing one’s self of his guilt. This last way was the one that Anthony Burns unconsciously had elected.

Now at the age of thirty he was about to discover the instrument of his atonement. Like all other happenings in his life, it came about without intention or effort.

One afternoon, which was a Saturday afternoon in November, he went from his work in the huge wholesale corporation to a place with a red neon sign that said, Turkish Baths and Massage. He had been suffering lately from a vague sort of ache near the base of his spine and somebody else employed at the wholesale corporation had told him that he would be relieved by massage. You would suppose that the mere suggestion of such a thing would frighten him out of his wits, but when desire lives constantly with fear, and no partition between them, desire must become very tricky; it has to become as sly as the adversary, and this was one of those times when desire outwitted the enemy under the roof. At the very mention of the word massage, the desire woke up and exuded a sort of anesthetizing vapor all through Burns’s nerves, catching fear off guard and allowing Burns to slip by it. Almost without knowing that he was really going, he went to the baths that Saturday afternoon.

The baths were situated in the basement of a hotel, right at the center of the keyed-up mercantile nerves of the downtown section, and yet the baths were a tiny world of their own. Secrecy was the atmosphere of the place and seemed to be its purpose. The entrance door had an oval of milky glass through which you could only detect a glimmer of light. And even when a patron had been admitted, he found himself standing in labyrinths of partitions, of corridors and cubicles curtained off from each other, of chambers with opaque doors and milky globes over lights and sheathings of vapor. Everywhere were agencies of concealment. The bodies of patrons, divested of their clothing, were swatched in billowing tent-like sheets of white fabric. They trailed barefooted along the moist white tiles, as white and noiseless as ghosts except for their breathing, and their faces all wore a nearly vacant expression. They drifted as if they had no thought to conduct them.

But now and again, across the central hallway, would step a masseur. The masseurs were Negroes. They seemed very dark and positive against the loose white hangings of the baths. They wore no sheets, they had on loose cotton drawers, and they moved about with force and resolution. They alone seemed to have an authority here. Their voices rang out boldly, never whispering in the sort of apologetic way that the patrons had in asking directions of them. This was their own rightful province, and they swept the white hangings aside with great black palms that you felt might just as easily have seized bolts of lightning and thrown them back at the clouds.

Anthony Burns stood more uncertainly than most near the entrance of the bathhouse. Once he had gotten through the milky-paned door his fate was decided and no more action or will on his part was called for. He paid two-fifty, which was the price of a bath and massage, and from that moment forward had only to follow directions and submit to care. Within a few moments a Negro masseur came to Burns and propelled him onward and then around a corner where he was led into one of the curtained compartments.

Take off your clothes, said the Negro.

Pete brought Chris home one evening after supper. I remember it was early spring, because the Talisman rosebush by the kitchen steps had begun to blossom out. For that time of year it was cool: there was a good stiff wind off the river that shook the old bush and creaked it, knocked the biggest flowers to bits, and blew their petals into a little heap against the side of the wood steps. The Johnsons, who lived in the house next door, had put their bedspread out to air and forgot to take it in. So it was hanging out there on the porch railing, a pink spread with a fan-tailed yellow peacock in the middle. I could hear it flapping — loud when the wind was up, and very soft when it fell. And from out on the river there were the soft low tones of the ships’ whistles. And I could hear a mockingbird too, perched up on top the house, singing away, forgetting that it was nighttime. And in all this, Pete’s steps in the side alley, coming to the kitchen door.

“Hi, kid!” Pete held open the door with one arm stretched behind him. Chris came in.

I thought at first: That’s a white man. And I wondered what a white man would do coming here. I got a second look and saw the difference, saw I’d made a mistake. His skin wasn’t dark at all, but only suntanned. (Lots of white men were darker.) His eyes were a pale blue, the color of the china Ma got with the Octagon soap coupons. He had brown hair — no, it was closer to red, and only slightly wavy. He looked like a white man, almost. But I saw the difference. Maybe it was just his way of carrying himself — that was like a Negro.

But he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen, excepting none. I could feel the bottom of my stomach roll up into a hard ball.

“This here’s Celia,” Pete said.

Chris grinned and his blue eyes crinkled up into almost closed slits. He sat down at the table opposite me, flipping shut the book I’d been reading. “Evening’s no time to be busy, kid.”

Pete picked up the coffeepot from where it always stood on the back of the stove and shook it gently. “There’s some here all right,” he said to Chris as he reached up to the shelf for a couple of cups. “You want anything in yours? I reckon there’d be a can of milk in the icebox.”

“No,” Chris said. “I like it black.”

Pete lit the fire under the speckled enamel coffeepot. “Where’s Ma?”

“They having a dinner tonight... she said she’ll be real late.” Ma worked as a cook in one of the big houses on St. Charles Avenue. When there was a dinner, it meant she’d have to stay around and clean up afterward and wouldn’t get home till eleven or twelve maybe.

“She’ll get tomorrow off, though,” I told Chris.

“Good enough.” He grinned and his teeth were very square and bright.

They sat down at the table with me and stretched out their legs. Holding the coffee cup to his mouth, Chris reached out one finger and rubbed the petals of the big yellow rose in the drinking glass in the center of the table. “That’s real pretty.”

“Lena’s been putting them there,” Pete said.

“That’s sure the one I want to meet,” Chris said, and grinned over at Pete, and I knew that he’d been talking about Lena.

CHARACTERS: Narrator, Joe Brown Jr., Bertha (Joe’s wife), Mrs. Williams (Joe’s teacher), Dr. Brayboy (a black psychiatrist), Mr. Andrews (Joe’s boss), Mrs. Brown (Joe’s mother), Mr. Brown (Joe’s father), James Roberts (Joe’s friend), Mr. Spaulding (anti-poverty program administrator), Chief of Police.

SETTING: New Orleans.

TIME: Now. It is important that the actors make their speeches in rhythm to the background music.

Tom and Letty Wilson were rich in everything. They were rich in friends because Tom was a vice president of the Whitney Bank of New Orleans and liked doing business with his friends, and because Letty was vice president of the Junior League of New Orleans and had her picture in Town and Country every year at the Symphony Ball.

The Wilsons were rich in knowing exactly who they were because every year from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday they flew the beautiful green and gold and purple flag outside their house that meant that Letty had been queen of the Mardi Gras the year she was a debutante. Not that Letty was foolish enough to take the flag seriously.

Sometimes she was even embarrassed to call the yardman and ask him to come over and bring his high ladder.

“Preacher, can you come around on Tuesday and put up my flag?” she would ask.

“You know I can,” the giant black man would answer. “I been saving time to put up your flag. I won’t forget what a beautiful queen you made that year.”

“Oh, hush, Preacher. I was a skinny little scared girl. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall off the balcony I was so sacred. I’ll see you on Monday.” And Letty would think to herself what a big phony Preacher was and wonder when he was going to try to borrow some more money from them.

Tom Wilson considered himself a natural as a banker because he loved to gamble and wheel and deal. From the time he was a boy in a small Baptist town in Tennessee he had loved to play cards and match nickels and lay bets.

In high school he read the Nashville Banner avidly and kept an eye out for useful situations such as the lingering and suspenseful illnesses of Pope Pius.

“Let’s get up a pool on the day the Pope will die,” he would say to the football team, “I’ll hold the bank.” And because the Pope took a very long time to die with many close calls there were times when Tom was the richest left tackle in Franklin, Tennessee.

Tom had a favorite saying about money. He had read it in the Reader’s Digest and attributed it to Andrew Carnegie. “Money,” Tom would say, “is what you keep score with. Andrew Carnegie.”

Another way Tom made money in high school was performing as an amateur magician at local birthday parties and civic events. He could pull a silver dollar or a Lucky Strike cigarette from an astonished six-year-old’s ear or from his own left palm extract a seemingly endless stream of multicolored silk chiffon or cause an ordinary piece of clothesline to behave like an Indian cobra.

He got interested in magic during a convalescence from German measles in the sixth grade. He sent off for books of magic tricks and practiced for hours before his bedroom mirror, his quick clever smile flashing and his long fingers curling and uncurling from the sleeves of a black dinner jacket his mother had bought at a church bazaar and remade to fit him.

Tom’s personality was too flamboyant for the conservative Whitney Bank, but he was cheerful and cooperative and when he made a mistake he had the ability to turn it into an anecdote.

“Hey, Fred,” he would call to one of his bosses. “Come have lunch on me and I’ll tell you a good one.”

They would walk down St. Charles Avenue to where it crosses Canal and turns into Royal Street as it enters the French Quarter. They would walk into the crowded, humid excitement of the quarter, admiring the girls and watching the Yankee tourists sweat in their absurd spun-glass leisure suits, and turn into the side door of Antoine’s or breeze past the maitre d’ at Galatoire’s or Brennan’s.

When a red-faced waiter in funereal black had seated them at a choice table, Tom would loosen his Brooks Brothers tie, turn his handsome brown eyes on his guest, and begin.

“That bunch of promoters from Dallas talked me into backing an idea to videotape all the historic sights in the quarter and rent the tapes to hotels to show on closed-circuit television. Goddamnit, Fred, I could just see those fucking tourists sitting around their hotel rooms on rainy days ordering from room service and taking in the Cabildo and the Presbytere on TV.” Tom laughed delightedly and waved his glass of vermouth at an elegantly dressed couple walking by the table.

“Well, they’re barely breaking even on that one, and now they want to buy up a lot of soft-porn movies and sell them to motels in Jefferson Parish. What do you think? Can we stay with them for a few more months?”

Then the waiter would bring them cold oysters on the half shell and steaming pompano en papillote and a wine steward would serve them a fine Meursault or a Piesporter, and Tom would listen to whatever advice he was given as though it were the most intelligent thing he had ever heard in his life.

Of course he would be thinking, You stupid, impotent son of a bitch. You scrawny little frog bastard, I’ll buy and sell you before it’s over. I’ve got more brains in my balls than the whole snotty bunch of you.

“Tom, you always throw me off my diet,” his friend would say, “damned if you don’t.”

“I told Letty the other day,” Tom replied, “that she could just go right ahead and spend her life worrying about being buried in her wedding dress, but I didn’t hustle my way to New Orleans all the way from north Tennessee to eat salads and melba toast. Pass me the French bread.”

Letty fell in love with Tom the first time she laid eyes on him. He came to Tulane on a football scholarship and charmed his way into a fraternity of wealthy New Orleans boys famed for its drunkenness and its wild practical jokes. It was the same old story. Even the second-, third-, and fourth-generation blue bloods of New Orleans need an infusion of new genes now and then.

The afternoon after Tom was initiated, he arrived at the fraternity house with two Negro painters and sat in the low-hanging branches of a live oak tree overlooking Henry Clay Avenue, directing them in painting an official-looking yellow-and-white-striped pattern on the street in front of the property. “D-R-U-N-K,” he yelled to his painters, holding on to the enormous limb with one hand and pushing his black hair out of his eyes with the other. “Paint it to say D-R-U-N-K Z-O-N-E.”

Letty stood near the tree with a group of friends watching him. He was wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows, and a freshman beanie several sizes too small was perched on his head like a tipsy sparrow.

“I’m wearing this goddamn beanie forever,” Tom yelled. “I’m wearing this beanie until someone brings me a beer,” and Letty took the one she was holding and walked over to the tree and handed it to him.

One day a few weeks later, he commandeered a Bunny Bread truck while it was parked outside the fraternity house making a delivery. He picked up two friends and drove the truck madly around the Irish Channel, throwing fresh loaves of white and whole wheat and rye bread to the astonished housewives.

“Steal from the rich, give to the poor,” Tom yelled, and his companions gave up trying to reason with him and helped him yell.

“Free bread, free cake,” they yelled, handing out powdered doughnuts and sweet rolls to a gang of kids playing baseball on a weed-covered vacant lot.

They stopped off at Darby’s, an Irish bar where Tom made bets on races and football games, and took on some beer and left off some cinnamon rolls.

“Tom, you better go turn that truck in before they catch you,” Darby advised, and Tom’s friends agreed, so they drove the truck to the second-precinct police headquarters and turned themselves in. Tom used up half a year’s allowance paying the damages, but it made his reputation.

In Tom’s last year at Tulane a freshman drowned during a hazing accident at the Southern Yacht Club, and the event frightened Tom. He had never liked the boy and had suspected him of being involved with the queers and nigger lovers who hung around the philosophy department and the school newspaper. The boy had gone to prep school in the East and brought weird-looking girls to rush parties. Tom had resisted the temptation to blackball him as he was well connected in uptown society.

After the accident, Tom spent less time at the fraternity house and more time with Letty, whose plain sweet looks and expensive clothes excited him.

“I can’t go in the house without thinking about it,” he said to Letty. “All we were doing was making them swim from pier to pier carrying martinis. I did it fifteen times the year I pledged.”

“He should have told someone he couldn’t swim very well,” Letty answered. “It was an accident. Everyone knows it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.” And Letty cuddled up close to him on the couch, breathing as softly as a cat.

Tom had long serious talks with Letty’s mild, alcoholic father, who held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and in the spring of the year Tom and Letty were married in the Cathedral of Saint Paul with twelve bridesmaids, four flower girls, and seven hundred guests. It was pronounced a marriage made in heaven, and Letty’s mother ordered Masses said in Rome for their happiness.

They flew to New York on the way to Bermuda and spent their wedding night at the Sherry Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue. At least half a dozen of Letty’s friends had lost their virginity at the same address, but the trip didn’t seem prosaic to her.

She stayed in the bathroom a long time gazing at her plain face in the oval mirror and tugging at the white lace nightgown from the Lylian Shop, arranging it now to cover, now to reveal her small breasts. She crossed herself in the mirror, suddenly giggled, then walked out into the blue and gold bedroom as though she had been going to bed with men every night of her life. She had been up until three the night before reading a book on sexual intercourse. She offered her small unpainted mouth to Tom. Her pale hair smelled of Shalimar and carnations and candles. Now she was safe. Now life would begin.

“Oh, I love you, I love, I love, I love you,” she whispered over and over. Tom’s hands touching her seemed a strange and exciting passage that would carry her simple dreamy existence to a reality she had never encountered. She had never dreamed anyone so interesting would marry her.

Letty’s enthusiasm and her frail body excited him, and he made love to her several times before he asked her to remove her gown.

The next day they breakfasted late and walked for a while along the avenue. In the afternoon Tom explained to his wife what her clitoris was and showed her some of the interesting things it was capable of generating, and before the day was out Letty became the first girl in her crowd to break the laws of God and the Napoleonic Code by indulging in oral intercourse.

The dogs are scratching at the kitchen door. How long, Lydia thinks, has she been lost in the thought of her rival dead? She passes her hand over her eyes, an unconscious effort to push the hot red edge off everything she sees, and goes to the door to let them in.

When Ivan confessed that he was in love with another woman, Lydia thought she could ride it out. She told him what she had so often told him in the turbulent course of their marriage, that he was a fool, that he would be sorry. Even as she watched his friends loading his possessions into the truck, even when she stood alone in the silent half-empty house contemplating a pale patch on the wall where one of his pictures had been, even then she didn’t believe he was gone. Now she has only one hope to hold on to: he has left the dogs with her and this must mean he will be coming back.

When she opens the door Gretta hangs back, as she always does, but Spats pushes his way in as soon as she has turned the knob, knocking the door back against her shins and barreling past her, his heavy tail slapping the wood repeatedly. No sooner is he inside than he turns to block the door so that Gretta can’t get past him. He lowers his big head and nips at her forelegs; it’s play, it’s all in fun, but Gretta only edges past him, pressing close to Lydia, who pushes at the bigger dog with her foot. “Spats,” she says, “leave her alone.” Spats backs away, but he is only waiting until she is gone; then he will try again. Lydia is struck with the inevitability of this scene. It happens every day, several times a day, and it is always the same. The dogs gambol into the kitchen, knocking against the table legs, turning about in ever-narrowing circles, until they throw themselves down a few feet apart and settle for their naps. Gretta always sleeps curled tightly in a semicircle, her only defense against attacks from her mate, who sleeps on his side, his long legs extended, his neck stretched out, the open, deep sleep of the innocent or the oppressor.

Lydia stands at the door looking back at the dogs. Sometimes Ivan got right down on the floor with Spats, lay beside him holding his big black head against his chest and talking to him. “Did you have a good time at the park today?” he’d croon. “Did you swim? Are you really tired now? Are you happy?” This memory causes Lydia’s upper lip to pull back from her teeth. How often had she wanted to kick him right in his handsome face when he did that, crooning over the dog as if it were his child or his mistress. What about me? she thought. What about my day? But she never said that; instead she turned away, biting back her anger and confusion, for she couldn’t admit that she was jealous of a dog.

Spats is asleep immediately, his jaws slack and his tongue lolling out over his black lips. As Lydia looks at him she has an unexpected thought: she could kill him. It is certainly in her power. No one would do anything about it, and it would hurt Ivan as nothing else could. She could poison him, or shoot him, or she could take him to a vet and say he was vicious and have him put away.

She lights a match against the grout in the countertop and turns the stove burner on. It is too cold, and she is so numb with the loss of her husband that she watches the flame wearily, hopelessly; it can do so little for her. She could plunge her hand into it and burn it, or she could stand close to it and still be cold. Then she puts the kettle over the flame and turns away.

She had argued with Ivan about everything for years, so often and so intensely that it seemed natural to her. She held him responsible for the hot flush that rose to her cheeks, the bitter taste that flooded her mouth at the very thought of him. She believed that she was ill; sometimes she believed her life was nearly over and she hated Ivan for this too, that he was killing her with these arguments and that he didn’t care.

When the water is boiling she fills a cup with coffee and takes it to the table. She sits quietly in the still house; the only sound is the clink of the cup as she sets it back in the saucer. She goes through a cycle of resolutions. The first is a simple one: she will make her husband come back. It is inconceivable that she will fail. They always had these arguments, they even separated a few times, but he always came back and so he always would. He would tire of this other woman in a few weeks and then he would be back. After all, she asked herself, what did this woman have that she didn’t have? An education? And what good was that? If Ivan loved this woman for her education, it wasn’t really as if he loved her for herself. He loved her for something she had acquired. And Lydia was certain that Ivan had loved her, had married her, and must still love her, only for herself, because she was so apparent, so undisguised; there wasn’t anything else to love her for.

So this first resolution is a calm one: she will wait for her husband and he will return and she will take him back.

She sets the cup down roughly on the table, for the inevitable question is upon her: how long can she wait? This has been going on for two months, and she is sick of waiting. There must be something she can do. The thought of action stiffens her spine, and her jaw clenches involuntarily. Now comes the terrible vision of her revenge, which never fails to take her so by surprise that she sighs as she lays herself open to it; revenge is her only lover now. She will see a lawyer, sue Ivan for adultery, and get every cent she can out of him, everything, for the rest of his life. But this is unsatisfactory, promising, as it does, nothing better than a long life without him, a life in which he continues to love someone else. She would do better to buy a gun and shoot him. She could call him late at night, when the other woman is asleep, and beg him to come over. He will come; she can scare him into it. And then when he lets himself in with his key she will shoot him in the living room. He left her, she will tell the court. She bought the gun to protect herself because she was alone. How was she to know he would let himself in so late at night? He told her he was never coming back and she had assumed the footsteps in the living room came from the man every lonely woman lies in bed at night listening for, the man who has found out her secret, who knows she is alone, whose mission, which is sanctioned by the male world, is to break the spirit if not the bones of those rebellious women who have the temerity to sleep at night without a man. So she shot him. She wasn’t going to ask any questions and live to see him get off in court. How could she have known it was her husband, who had abandoned her?

Yes, yes, that would work. It would be easily accomplished, but wouldn’t she only end up as she was now? Better to murder the other woman, who was, after all, the cause of all this intolerable pain. She knew her name, knew where she lived, where she worked. She had called her several times just to hear her voice, her cheerful hello, in which Lydia always heard Ivan’s presence, as if he were standing right next to the woman and she had turned away from kissing him to answer the insistent phone. Lydia had heard of a man who killed people for money. She could pay this man, and then the woman would be gone.

The kettle is screaming; she has forgotten to turn off the flame. So she could drink another cup of coffee, then take a bath. But that would take only an hour or so and she has to get through the whole day. The silence in the house is intense, though she knows it is no more quiet than usual. Ivan was never home much in the daytime. What did she do before? It seems to her that that life was another life, one she will never know again, the life in which each day ended with the appearance of her husband. Sometimes, she admitted, she had not been happy to see him, but her certainty that she would see him made the question of whether she was happy or sad a matter of indifference to her. Often she didn’t see him until late at night, when he appeared at one of the clubs where she was singing. He took a place in the audience and when she saw him she always sang for him. Then they were both happy. He knew she was admired, and that pleased him, as if she were his reflection and what others saw when they looked at her was more of him. Sometimes he gave her that same affectionate look he gave himself in mirrors, and when he did it made her lightheaded, and she would sing, holding her hands out a little before her, one index finger stretched out as if she were pointing at something, and she would wait until the inevitable line about how it was “you” she loved, wanted, hated, couldn’t get free of, couldn’t live without, and at that “you” she would make her moving hands be still and with her eyes as well as her hands she would point to her husband in the crowd. Those were the happiest moments they had, though neither of them was really conscious of them, nor did they ever speak of this happiness. When, during the break, they did speak, it was usually to argue about something.

She thinks of this as she stares dully at the dogs, Ivan’s dogs. Later she will drive through the cold afternoon light to Larry’s cold garage, where they will rehearse. They will have dinner together; Larry and Simon will try to cheer her up, and Kenneth, the drummer, will sit looking on in his usual daze. They will take drugs if anyone has any, cocaine or marijuana, and Simon will drink a six-pack of beer.

Then they will go to the club and she will sing as best she can. She will sing and sing, into the drunken faces of the audience, over the bobbing heads of the frenzied dancers; she will sing like some blinded bird lost in a dark forest trying to find her way out by listening to the echo of her own voice. The truth is that she sings better than she ever has. Everyone tells her so. Her voice is so full of suffering that hearing it would move a stone, though it will not move her husband, because he won’t be there. Yet she can’t stop looking for him in the audience, as she always has. And as she sings and looks for him she will remember exactly what it was like to find herself in his eyes. That was how she had first seen him, sitting at a table on the edge of the floor, watching her closely. He was carrying on a conversation with a tired-looking woman across from him but he watched Lydia so closely that she could feel his eyes on her. She smiled. She was aware of herself as the surprising creation she really was, a woman who was beautiful to look at and beautiful to hear. She was, at that moment, so self-conscious and so contented that she didn’t notice what an oddity he was, a man who was both beautiful and masculine. Her attachment to his appearance, to his gestures, the suddenness of his smile, the coldness of his eyes, came later. At that moment it was herself in his eyes that she loved; as fatal a love match as she would ever know.

Before the meat wagon arrived, LaStanza went to take a look at the body. He didn’t need a flashlight. The bright moon shined directly into that dirty New Orleans alley. Just inside the alley, LaStanza passed a young patrolman with sandy hair explaining to the other policemen, “He had a gun.”

The body was about halfway down the dead-end alley. LaStanza’s partner, Paul Snowood, stood over it. Next to him, a crime lab technician was reloading his camera.

“Come see this,” Snowood twanged. “Got him through the pump with one shot.” In his cowboy hat, rope tie around the neck of his western shirt, brown jeans, and snakeskin boots, Detective Snowood couldn’t look more out of place if he tried.

“You sure you don’t want me to take this?” LaStanza asked as he stepped up.

“You’re up to your ass in murders already, boy,” Snowood said. “This ain’t nothin’ but paperwork.” Tilting his Stetson back, Snowood pointed to the body with his notepad and added, “Anyway, it looks like a good shootin’.”

The body was on its side, legs straight out, arms contorted like soft pretzels. There were holes in the soles of both shoes and a worn spot on the man’s jeans above the left knee. A stain of dark blood had gathered beneath the twisted torso. A small-caliber, blue-steel semiautomatic lay two feet from the man’s head. It was a typical Saturday night special.

“You can handle the canvass for me, if you’ve a hankerin’.”

“Sure,” LaStanza said as he leaned over the body.

It was a white male, midtwenties, about five feet eight inches tall, one hundred and eighty pounds, with frizzy brown hair and a large gunshot wound in the center of his chest. Stepping out of the way of the technician, LaStanza paused and looked back at the body. There was something familiar about it. That was when he saw the hands.

He found some empty soft drink cases a few feet away and sat on them as his partner and the technician began taking measurements. Tugging angrily on his mustache, LaStanza stared at the pallid hands, at the limp fingers that looked like white goldfish left out to rot, and remembered...

“It must have been, I think she said, two years after the kidnapping when your wife first came by.” The voice on the phone sounded young. “What was that, ’83, ’84?”

“Kidnapping?”

“Yeah, she told me all about it, how it was for the private detective you hired after the police gave up.”

“You mean the picture?”

“Right, the age progression.”

“You could do it back then?”

“It was a pain in the ass. You had to write your own code. But, yeah, once we had the algorithms for stuff like teeth displacement of the lips, cartilage development in the nose and ears, stuff like that, all you had to do was add fat-to-tissue ratios by age, and you wound up with a fairly decent picture of what the face probably looked like. I mean, after you tried a couple different haircuts and cleaned up the image — the printers were a joke in those days.”

“And you kept updating Kevin’s...” He hesitated as he tried to remember the term. “Kevin’s age progression?”

“Every year, like clockwork, on October 20. Of course, the new ones, it’s no comparison. On-screen, we’re 3-D now; the whole head can rotate. And if you’ve got a tape of the kid talking or singing, there’s even a program to age the voice and sync it with the lips. You sort of teach it to talk, and then it can say anything you want, the head.”

The voice was waiting for him to say something.

“I mean, we thought it was cool, Mr. Grierson, the way you two didn’t lose hope you’d find your boy one day. Even after all these years.”

He hung up while the man was still talking. On the kitchen table, the photo album Emily had used to bind the pictures, the age progressions, lay open to one that had the logo and phone number of Crescent CompuGraphics printed along its border. His son looked fifteen, maybe sixteen, in the picture.

He had found the red album the night before, after his wife’s funeral. Indulging his grief after the desolate service and the miserly reception of chips and soft drinks at her sister’s, he had sunk to his knees before Emily’s hope chest at the foot of their bed, fingering the silk negligee bruised brown with age, inhaling the distant scent of gardenias on the bodice of an old evening gown, burying his arms in all the tenderly folded velvet and satin. It was his burrowing hand that discovered the album at the bottom of the trunk.

At first, he did not know who it was, the face growing younger and younger with each page. But soon enough, he began to suspect. And then, on the very last leaf of the red binder, he recognized the combed hair and fragile smile of the little boy who returned his gaze from a school photograph.

As he thought of Emily secretly thumbing through the age progressions, each year on Kevin’s birthday adding a new portrait on top of the one from the year before, he felt the nausea rising in his throat and took a deep breath. It’s just another kind of memory, he told himself, defending her.

He, for example, still could not forget the green clock on the kitchen wall that had first reminded him his son should be home from school already. Nor could he forget the pitiless clack of the dead bolt as he had unlocked the door to see if the boy was dawdling down the sidewalk. And he would always remember stepping onto the front porch and catching, just at the periphery of his vision, the first glimpse of the pulsing red light, like a flower bobbing in and out of shadow.

In fact, turning his head in that small moment of uncertainty, he took the light to be just that: a red rose tantalized by the afternoon’s late sun but already hatched with the low shadows of the molting elms that lined the street. And he remembered that as he turned toward the flashing light, lifting his eyes over the roses trellised along the fence — the hybrid Blue Girl that would not survive the season, twined among the thick canes and velvet blossoms of the Don Juan — and even as he started down the wooden steps toward the front gate, slowly, deliberately, as if the people running toward the house, shouting his name, had nothing to do with him, he continued to think rose, rose, rose.

Sarajevo, 1914

Stone turrets and crenelated columns loomed on either side of the Archduke’s motorcade. The crowd parted before the open carriages, an indistinct blur of faces. Francis Ferdinand swallowed some of the unease that had been plaguing him all day: a bitter bile, a constant burn at the back of his throat.

It was his fourteenth wedding anniversary. Sophie sat beside him, a bouquet of scarlet roses at her bosom. These Serbs and Croats were a friendly crowd; as the heir apparent of Austria-Hungary, Francis Ferdinand stood to give them an equal voice in his empire. Besides, Sophie was a Slav, the daughter of a noble Czech family. Surely his marriage to a northern Slav had earned him the sympathy of these southern ones.

Yet the Archduke could not divest himself of the notion that there was a menacing edge to the throng. The occasional vivid detail — a sobbing baby, a flower tucked behind the ear of a beautiful woman — was lost before his eyes could fully register it. He glanced at Sophie. In the summer heat he could smell her sweat mingling with the eau de parfum she had dabbed on this morning.

She met his gaze and smiled faintly. Beneath her veil, her sweet face shone with perspiration. Back in Vienna, Sophie was snubbed by his court because she had been a lady in waiting when she met the Archduke, little better than a servant in their eyes. Francis Ferdinand’s uncle, the old Emperor Francis Joseph, forbade the marriage. When the couple married anyway, Sophie was ostracized in a hundred ways. Francis Ferdinand knew it was sometimes a painful life for her, but she remained a steadfast wife, an exemplary mother.

For this reason he had brought her on the trip to Sarajevo. It was a routine army inspection for him, but for her it was a chance to be treated with the royal honors she deserved. On this anniversary of their blessed union, Sophie would endure no subtle slights, no calculated cruelties.

The Archduke had never loved another human being. His parents were hazy memories, his uncle a shambling old man whose time had come and gone. Even his three children brought him more distraction than joy. The first time he laid eyes on Sophie, he discerned in her an empathy such as he had never seen before. Her features, her mannerisms, her soft ample body — all bespoke a comfort Francis Ferdinand had never formerly craved, but suddenly could not live without.

The four cars approached the Cumuria Bridge. A pall of humidity hung over the water. The Archduke felt his skin steaming inside his heavy uniform, and his uneasiness intensified. He knew how defenseless they must look in the raised carriage, in the Serbian sun, the green feathers on his helmet drooping, Sophie’s red roses beginning to wilt.

As they passed over the bridge, he saw an object arc out of the crowd and come hurtling toward him. In an instant his eye marked it as a crude hand bomb.

Francis Ferdinand raised his arm to protect Sophie and felt hot metal graze his flesh.

All Walgreen’s had was a little kid’s notebook, maybe four by five inches, the binding a fat spiral of purple plastic, the cover a Twiggy — Carnaby Street — white boots — flower power mess of lavender and yellow blooms.

Jeannie put it on the café table, opened it, and carefully wrote, Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch, in her best schoolgirl cursive. The juxtaposition of sentiment and sentimentality pleased her.

Next she wrote, Divorce Rich, then sat back, looked at the words, and took a long luxurious sip of the cheap but not inexpensive Pinot Grigio a harried waitress in too-tight jeans had brought her.

Rich thought she drank too much. Of course she drank too much. She was married to a goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch. She drew a neat line through the word divorce.

Divorce was out of the question. Rich would never grant her a divorce. Not if it meant giving up the “income stream from the family business,” as he euphemistically referred to her earnings as a sculptress.

No. Divorce wasn’t happening.

That left suicide and murder.

When Rich had been particularly demeaning, Jeannie’d had the occasional fling with Dr. Kevorkian, but, in all honesty, she had to admit that she was a decent individual. She paid her taxes — and his — kept a tidy house, and got her oil changed every three thousand miles. And Rich...

Rich was boring.

Not casually boring; he was a bore of nuclear magnitude. More than once she had witnessed him turn entire dinner parties to stone, seen guests’ eyes roll back in their heads and their tongues begin to protrude as he replaced all the available oxygen with pomposity. Not being a jobholder himself, he felt uniquely qualified to lecture on the subject. He told her cleaning lady how to clean, her gallery owner how to present art, the man who cast her work how to run a foundry, her agent how to sell sculpture.

Suicide was out. It would be wrong, un-American even, to deny the world her lovely bronzes while simultaneously condemning it to Rich’s monologues.

That left murder.

In the ordinary run of things, Jeannie didn’t condone murder. She wasn’t even a proponent of capital punishment. But her husband wasn’t in the ordinary run of things. He was extraordinarily in need of being dead.

Kill Rich, she printed carefully beneath the crossed-out divorce.

Another long swallow of wine and contemplation.

Over the eight years of their marriage she had shared all the nasty bits with shrinks, groups, AA, and half a dozen girlfriends. There was so much dirty laundry lining the byways of her past they rivaled the back alleys of Mexico City on wash day. Should anything untoward befall Rich, she would be the prime suspect.

There must be no evidence. None.

She scribbled out everything she’d written, then tore out the page. Feeling a fool, but being a nonsmoker and thus having no recourse to fire, she surreptitiously soaked the page in the wine and swallowed it.

As easily as that, she decided to kill her husband.

Setting her glass on the uneven surface of the wrought-iron café table, she watched the wine tremble as minuscule earthquakes sent out barely perceptible tsunamis and she thought of the things people die of.

Drowning, burning, choking, crushing, goring by bulls, hanging, falling, dismemberment, being devoured by wild beasts, poisoning, exploding, crashing in cars, boats, planes, and motorcycles, disease, cutting, stabbing, slashing, blunt trauma to the head, dehydration, hypothermia, heatstroke, starvation, vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bears’ livers, snakebite, drawing and quartering, asphyxiation, shooting, beheading, bleeding out, infection, boredom — Lord knew Rich had nearly done her in with that one.

Rumor had it people died of shame and broken hearts. No hope those would work on Rich, though over the years she had given it a go, usually at the top of her lungs with tears and snot pouring attractively down her face. A dedicated philandering deadbeat pornographer, Rich had embraced shame as an alternative lifestyle and his heart was apparently made of India rubber.

Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch, she wrote on the fresh, yet-to-be-eaten page of her notebook, knocked back the last of her wine, and left the waitress a five-dollar tip.

Two hours later she was again staring at the page. The compulsion to write what she’d done was overwhelming. Vaguely she remembered there was actually a word for the phenomenon, hyperscribblia or something. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she said as she uncapped a razor-point Pilot and put the tip against the smooth paper.

Mildly fascinated and massively alarmed, she watched as the pen flickered down the page, line by line, leaving a trail the dumbest of cops couldn’t fail to follow.

Went to the garage. Shoulder-deep in junk. No room for car. Found motorcycle. Put on gardening gloves. Drove roofing tack three-quarters of an inch into front tire just below fender. On the pen flew, painting the pictures so clear in Jeannie’s mind: Rich’s praying mantis form, clad in the endless leathers that arrived almost daily from eBay — chaps, fringed and plain, leather vests, gloves, leather pants, boots, leather jackets, leather shirts, helmets, do-rags, even a leather face guard that made Jeannie want to reread The Man in the Iron Mask — or rent Silence of the Lambs. Done up like a macho caricature of a macho caricature, the imaginary Rich pushes the bike out with his long spider’s legs. Backward rolls the heavy machine, the tack slides unnoticed up beneath the fender.

Words flow across the tiny cramped pages, spinning a tale of how the tack, pounded in at an angle just so, remains static until the curve heading out onto the freeway, where the wheel turns and the bike leans and the head of the tack finally hits the pavement, driven deeper. Bang! The tire has blown! Out of control, the motorcycle is down. Rich is sliding. My God! My God! His helmet pops off and bounces across two lanes of freeway traffic. The motorcycle is spinning now; Rich’s protective leathers begin to tear, leaving black marks on the pale concrete, hot and lumpy like a black crayon dragging across sandpaper. Leather is rasped away; flesh meets the road. Crayon marks turn from black to red. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler, high on methamphetamines, barrels down the highway, unaware of the man and motorcycle spinning toward his speeding rig. Look out! Look—

“Lover Girl? Have you been in the garage?” Rich’s murmuring voice, always pitched a decibel or so lower than the threshold of human hearing, thus forcing the unfortunate listener to say “What?” several times just to make audible something not worth hearing anyway, wisps down the short hall between the garage and the kitchen, where Jeannie sits at the counter.

“The garage? No. Why?” she calls as his rubber-soled slip-ons shuff-shuffle down the hall.

The pages. She shoves them into the Osterizer and pushes Puree. Jammed. A pint of milk. Bingo. Pasta. “Thankyoubabyjesus.”

Rich’s bald head on its Ichabod Crane neck pokes around the corner. “My things. In the garage. Did you touch them?” Rich hates her to move his things.

“No, sweetheart.”

“Dinner?” he asks, eyeing the Osterizer.

Jeannie nods, too scared to talk.

Rich settles on a stool, his pale bulbous eyes fixed on her. Under the blue stare Jeannie pours the mixture into a casserole dish with pasta and sauce from a bottle and sets the oven to three-fifty.

Rich likes it. “Happy tummy,” he murmurs as he eats, eyes glued to Fear Factor contestants on the television gagging down pig bowels in cockroach sauce.

GDMFSOB, Jeannie chants in her mind as she surreptitiously makes herself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and takes it to bed.

Rich stays up till three, as he often does. Jeannie has learned to sleep. She knows if she tiptoes down the hall like a curious child on Christmas Eve night and peeks in the piled mess he calls his office, Good Old Rich will be hunkered in front of his computer screen, bald head nestled between hunched shoulders like an ostrich egg in a lumpy nest, watching the X-rated cavortings of what he insists is not pornography but Adult Content Material.

Sleep is good.

Plotting is better.

The next day, armed with information from the library’s computer — so there will be no history on her own — Jeannie cultures botulism. It is surprisingly easy and naturally deadly. Perfect. Bad salmon. The GDMFSOB loves salmon. She doesn’t. Perfect. Until she gets hold of the pen and out it comes: Rich reeling out of the marital bed, dragging himself to the bathroom, Jeannie pretending to sleep as his calls grow ever weaker. She dialing 911, but alas! Too late! Weeping prettily as she tells the kind, attractive, young policeman how she took an Ambien and can’t remember anything until, gulp, sigh, she woke to find this. Mea culpa, mea culpa, but not really...

Damning, damning, damning, the words rattle over page after page.

Shuff-shuffle. The bald pate, the watery blue eyes. “Sketching a new sculpture?” Rich is oh-so-supportive of her work. He needs the money for his lifestyle.

“Sketching,” Jeannie manages as she snatches up the pages.

Rich turns on the television. It’s Thursday. Survivor is on Thursdays. Rich never misses Survivor.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Salmon.” Perfect but for the incriminating compulsion.

The Osterizer: olive oil, pesto, onion.

“Dinner is served.”

“Lover Girl, the salmon smells funny. Did you get fresh?”

“Fresh.”

“The pesto is great. Happy tummy.”

Over subsequent days Jeannie drips acid on brake lines and writes, melts off the tips of his épées and writes. Osterizes and seasons and serves.

And Rich lives. Thrives. Like the cat who came back the very next day. Jeannie cannot get her hands on an atom bomb.

Damn.

Nothing.

Damn.

Rich is hunkered on the sofa eating lasagna of hamburger, cheese, and the pages detailing how she greased the feet of the extension ladder before asking him to take a look at the chimney, when Jeannie realizes that, as a murderess, she’s a bust. Rich is protected by angels. Or demons. Or stupidity.

Suicide returns as an option. She can’t love. She can’t leave. She can’t live.

Damn.

Guns are too messy. Hanging too painful. Pills. Being with Rich for eight years has driven her to a veritable cornucopia: Ambien, Effexor, Desyrel, Xanax — all good traceable drugs. Surely if she takes them all at once...

The nagging of Big Brother on the forty-two-inch TV whines into the bedroom, where Jeannie, tuna sandwich untouched, sits in bed, sixty-two pills in pink, white, and yellow cupped in her palm, bottled water on the nightstand. Usually she sleeps nude, but tonight she has put on a nice pair of pajamas: discreet, modest. Lord knew how she might sprawl and froth. Better to be on the safe side.

Suicide.

So be it.

Rich had won.

Jeannie tips all sixty-two pills into her mouth and reaches for the water.

“Lover Girl?” Rich stands in the bedroom door. He looks peaked, as Jeannie’s mother might say.

“What?” she mumbles around the deadly sleep in her mouth.

“Unhappy tummy,” he moans.

He runs for the bathroom. Jeannie spits out the pills.

“Haven’t taken a dump in days,” he calls genteelly through the open bathroom door. Rich never closes the bathroom door. In fact, he makes deposits while she showers, brushes her teeth, suffocating, stifling deposits.

“Oh,” she calls with mechanical sympathy.

Two days later Rich is dead. Jeannie dials 911.

“Impacted bowel,” the coroner tells her. “Was your husband eating anything unusual?”

“Murder,” Jeannie might have said, but she didn’t.

I grew up in the Big Sleazy, uptown, off Magazine, amongst live oak trees and gangsters and musicians and bougainvillea the Christian Brothers said was put there to remind us of Christ’s blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

My best friends were Tony and Miles Cardo. Their mother made her living shampooing the hair of corpses in a funeral parlor on Tchoupitoulas. I was with them the afternoon they found a box of human arms someone at the Tulane medical school left by the campus incinerator. Tony stuffed the arms in a big bag of crushed ice, and the next day, at five o’clock, when all the employees from the cigar factory were loading onto the St. Claude streetcar, him and Miles hung the arms from hand straps and the backs of seats all over the car. People started screaming their heads off and clawing their way out the doors. A big fat black guy climbed out the window and crashed on top of a sno-ball cart. Tony and Miles, those guys were a riot.

Tony was known as the Johnny Wadd of the Mafia because he had a flopper on him that looked like a fifteen-inch chunk of radiator hose. All three of us joined the Crotch and went to Vietnam, but Tony was the one who couldn’t deal with some stuff he saw in a ville not far from Chu Lai. Tony had the Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars but volunteered to work in the mortuary so he wouldn’t have to see things like that anymore.

Miles and me came home and played music, including gigs at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon Street. Tony brought Vietnam back to New Orleans and carried it with him wherever he went. I wished Tony hadn’t gotten messed up in the war and I wished he hadn’t become a criminal, either. He was a good guy and had a good heart. So did Miles. That’s why we were pals. Somehow, if we stayed together, we knew we’d never die.

Remember rumbles? When I was a kid, the gangs were Irish or Italian. Projects like the Iberville were all white, but the kids in them were the toughest I ever knew. They used to steal skulls out of the crypts in the St. Louis cemeteries and skate down North Villere Street with the skulls mounted on broomsticks. In the tenth grade a bunch of them took my saxophone away from me on the streetcar. Tony went into the project by himself, made a couple of guys wet their pants, then walked into this kid’s apartment while the family was eating supper and came back out with my sax. Nobody said squat.

Back in the 1950s and ’60s, criminals had a funny status in New Orleans. There were understandings between the NOPD and the Italian crime family that ran all the vice. Any hooker who cooperated with a Murphy sting on a john in the Quarter got a bus ticket back to Snake’s Navel, Texas. Her pimp went off a rooftop. A guy who jack-rolled tourists or old people got his wheels broken with batons and was thrown out of a moving car by the parish line. Nobody was sure what happened to child molesters. They never got found.

But the city was a good place. You ever stroll across Jackson Square in the early morning, when the sky was pink and you could smell the salt on the wind and the coffee and pastry from the Café du Monde? Miles and me used to sit in with Louis Prima and Sam Butera. That’s no jive, man. We’d blow until sunrise, then eat a bagful of hot beignets and sip café au lait on a steel bench under the palms while the sidewalk artists were setting up their easels and paints in the square. The mist and sunlight in the trees looked like cotton candy. That was before the city went down the drain and before Miles and me went down the drain with it.

Crack cocaine hit the projects in the early eighties. Black kids all over the downtown area reminded me of the characters in Night of the Living Dead. They loved 9mm automatics too. The Gipper whacked federal aid to the city by half, and the murder rate in New Orleans became the highest in the United States. We got to see a lot of David Duke. He had his face remodeled with plastic surgery and didn’t wear a bedsheet or a Nazi armband anymore, so the white-flight crowd treated him like Jefferson Davis and almost elected him governor.

New Orleans became a free-fire zone. Miles and me drifted around the Gulf Coast and smoked a lot of weed and pretended we were still jazz musicians. I’m not being honest here. It wasn’t just weed. We moved right on up to the full-tilt boogie and joined the spoon-and-eyedropper club. Tony threw us both in a Catholic hospital and told this three-hundred-pound Mother Superior to beat the shit out of us with her rosary beads, one of these fifteen-decade jobs, if we tried to check out before we were clean.

But all these things happened before the storm hit New Orleans. After the storm passed, nothing Miles and Tony and me had done together seemed very important.

I’ve always been one to keep an eye open during a church prayer — not because of my lack of faith in God but because of my lack of faith in people. What I learned by watching was that others were doing the same. People mistrust people. Each of us pulses with our own agenda. In New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter, those agendas cross frequently.

That night I was in my own house of worship — JoJo’s Blues Bar — with both eyes closed tight as I chased a shot of Jack with a cold Dixie. Fats’s band banged out the last few chords of “Blue Monday,” his lazy sax matching my own black mood. Each drink softened that black mood into brown melancholy.

A December drizzle rained outside. Cold droplets fell a muted pink along the window lit by JoJo’s neon sign, only a few regulars in the bar with ragged fedoras pulled low. JoJo’s niece Keesha, the only waitress on duty, tapped her foot slowly to Fats’s music. While she smoked, she read the Bible by dim candlelight.

“Keesha, how ’bout another Dixie?”

“You know where they’re at.”

And I guess I did. JoJo was my best friend and this was my second home. I took off my trench coat and old scarf and walked behind the bar. Pushing up my shirtsleeve, I reached into the slushy ice bin and grabbed a beer. My hand instantly went numb.

“Who’s closing up?” I asked.

“Felix,” she answered, stuck somewhere in the middle of Corinthians. “JoJo and Loretta went to Baton Rouge.”

The set finished and the sparse crowd clapped. Most of them were old men like JoJo who had frequented this place since the early sixties. JoJo’s was the only decent blues bar in a city dominated by jazz. A Little Delta on the Bayou, is what the sign outside read.

Fats pulled up a stool next to me. His face grayed under the tiny Christmas lights strung over the bar’s mirror. I looked across at both of our reflections and tilted my head. He said my name dully back to me.

“How ya been, Fats?”

“Hmm.”

“You know why JoJo’s in Baton Rouge?” I asked, for lack of anything better.

“Naw.” Fats shifted in his seat and coughed, politely turning his head away. He looked over at Keesha with her head close to the Bible.

“What? You got religion now or somethin’?”

“Seek and ye shall find,” Keesha said, blowing smoke in his face.

“Hmm,” Fats said. “Ain’t that some shit?”

Someone opened the two rickety Creole doors and a cold breeze rushed in off Conti. A horse-drawn tourist carriage clopped by with a guide pointing out famous sites. Fats popped a handful of salted peanuts into his mouth, shell and all.

“You hungry, Fats?”

He looked at my face for the first time, right in the eyes. “Yeah, I could eat.”

Fats was known for gambling or drinking away his weekly profits every Friday. He usually lived on Loretta’s leftover gumbo or handouts from JoJo.

We walked over a few blocks to the Café Du Monde. I asked for a couple orders of beignets and two large café au laits. A Vietnamese waiter set down the square donuts covered in powered sugar, and within a minute Fats ate them all.

“Hungry?”

His coffee sat empty before him. I ordered another round for him.

Fats didn’t say a word. He leaned an arm on the iron railing and looked across the street at St. Louis Cathedral. Or maybe he was looking at the bronze statue of Andrew Jackson. I’ve always liked to think it was the church, with the spotlight beams illuminating the simple high cross.

“Is it the track?”

“Naw.” He laughed.

“You need help?”

“No,” Fats said. “What I got, pod’na, is a fair deal. Just like Robert Johnson said, Last fair deal goin’ down. You know about Johnson?”

“Sure.”

“He sure played a weird guitar. I’ve always tried to make my sax do that. But it just ain’t the same.”

“What’s the deal, Fats?”

He laughed again and shook his head. He looked up. “You ever been in love, Nick?”

“Every Saturday night.”

“No, man. I mean really in love. Where it make you sick jus’ to think you ain’t gonna get no more.”

“I guess.” I looked at him as he brushed a hand over his gray suit to get off the fallen powdered sugar.

“Let’s just say I found somethin’, all right, big chief.”

“That’s where the money went?”

“Thanks for the eats, Nick.”

And with that, Fats reached down, grabbed the handle of his battered sax case, patted it like a child, and was gone. I sipped on another café au lait, warming my hands on the steaming mug.

Two days later, JoJo called to tell me that Fats was dead.

The Pie Man tells Baby that a man has got to grab his own future for his own self. The City of New Orleans pays good to work disaster cleanup and Baby would do well to cash in before all the money gets carted off. A lot more sensible, the Pie Man says, than running around punching on Spanish dudes. The Pie Man walks across the living room in his chef’s jacket. He plops down on the couch, making himself at home. The walls have been stripped naked to the studs. Baby doesn’t know which way his future is, but he’s damn sure it’s got nothing to do with scooping mold out of some abandoned school.

Baby sits at the plastic folding table in white briefs and a tank top, fingering the dry skin around his bulky, plastic ankle bracelet. He plucks a Vienna sausage from its tin and tosses the wiener in his mouth. Baby eyes the Pie Man. The Pie Man doesn’t seem to get that he has no claim on this place or anyone in it. Baby may be only fourteen, but this is his house. He’s the man here.

The Pie Man’s eyes are red. He kneads his face with both hands and looks around like he doesn’t remember why he’s there. Sauced out of his mind before noon. Probably spent the night with the winos back in Gert Town.

Baby’s mom doesn’t notice because she’s too busy flapping around the room like a hen with a case of colic. As she gathers her things for the day care center, she keeps clucking at him about making the right choices in life. Her standard rave.

She’s on Baby because a Latino day-jobber got jumped outside the package liquor last night, the latest in a string of black-on-brown beatdowns in retaliation for what happened to Baby’s boy, Chaney. Baby’s mom thinks Baby is part of the jump squad. He’s not. Yet. He doesn’t tell her this. If she and everyone else think he’s in on the attacks, it beats the alternative. Better to be feared than understood.

Baby’s mom checks her hair in a handheld mirror before placing it on the table he’s sitting at. It doubles as her dresser and the couch is her bed. Baby sleeps on the floor in his fleece blanket, wrapped up tight as a papoose. A portable stovetop makes the bathroom their kitchen. All their real stuff was destroyed in the flood from the levee breech after Hurricane Katrina passed nearly three years ago. They live in the front half of the house since the back is sealed off with blue tarp to keep the fungus odor out. It doesn’t work. Everything smells like old people’s feet to Baby.

Sanchez, the carpenter Baby used to gopher for, shot Chaney in cold blood, but the police called it self-defense — as if Chaney’s back had a chance against Sanchez’s .38. Baby’s mom called the Pie Man in to odd-job their General Pershing Street home three months ago because Sanchez and the rest of the Latinos are afraid to work in Baby’s neighborhood. She can’t afford a contractor with papers or real tools.

Baby’s mom didn’t confirm the Pie Man was his pops until old man Sanchez quit. Baby told his mom and the Pie Man that it didn’t make any difference that the drunk was his father. The Pie Man has no business making any claims after all this time. Either way, Baby sometimes finds himself staring into the Pie Man’s face, wondering what life might have been like if the man had always been around.

Chin on the table, eyes clamped shut, Baby realizes the Pie Man and his mom have been jabbering at him the whole time. Who knew? He wonders what they were like when they met each other back in the Stone Age. During the time of Public Enemy and parachute pants. Back when the Pie Man’s uneven flattop fade was in style. Back before they became voices in the wall.

They have a similar way of phoning in their rants. No commitment. They talk at him like they’re being watched. As if they’ll get in big trouble for failing to pay the right amount of lip service.

The Pie Man tells Baby he ought to respect his mom, man, because that’s the least she deserves for bringing him into this unbalanced world, and if Baby’s going to keep driving her every which way like he’s been doing, then Baby ain’t no kind of man. The whole issue could be that Baby’s not thinking, says the Pie Man, but he can start anytime now. He tells Baby to sit up and pay attention. Because he doesn’t know the Pie Man well, Baby does as he’s told. The Pie Man could be crazy or something, like Baby’s friend Touché.

“What, am I supposed to call you Daddy or something?” Baby nudges the skateboard under the table with his bare foot.

The Pie Man’s slacks, shoes, and neckerchief match his jacket, dingy white from head to toe. He mismatched the cloth buttons so that his collar is higher on one side than the other. To Baby the Pie Man looks like a homeless chocolate Chef Boyardee. There’s no trace of the freckles Baby got from his redheaded mom. The ones he catches hell for at school. The ones he tried to scrub off after reading the Dred Scott decision in American history the year before. Yet even though Baby’s freckles won’t come off, that doesn’t mean he can’t become the next great civil rights leader like Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, or Lil’ Wayne. Holding it down for the people. Real niggas.

Baby scratches the oval scab on his shin, thinking it’s going to leave a mark when it heals. If it heals. Maybe he’ll cover it with a black fist tattoo when Mom’s not looking. The tattoo is Touché’s idea. Touché wants everyone in the Mighty Black Ninja Krew to get black fist tattoos after they find and stomp Sanchez today. Baby’s heard through the grapevine that Sanchez feels bad about what he did to Chaney, and it might be true. Sanchez never held back telling Baby when he’d screwed up, but he was quick to give Baby props for good work, and he always gave Baby a cold can of soda at the end of the day.

Baby gets up to leave. But his mom yells at him and makes him sit his rear back in that chair right this instant. He’s a target, she says, and Baby feels she’s right. The Latinos have been dishing out hard-core payback. Curtis Thompson, the running back at Baby’s school, got whacked in the knee with a galvanized-steel pipe the other day. Curtis is out for the season, and with him any shot at the state championship. They say he never saw the guys who did it, but they had Spanish accents. Nobody’s safe, thinks Baby. Baby’s mom thinks she can protect him by sending him to the barber. His hair makes him look like a maniac, she says.

But Baby’s Afro is a matter of pride for him. It’s a fuzzy crown that radiates out six inches, going from black at the scalp to reddish brown at the tips. Like a halo made of rabbit’s fur. Most of his friends think it’s pretty cool. It counteracts the freckles.

One thing at a time, says the Pie Man to Baby’s mom. Baby follows the Pie Man’s lips. The way they form words. Inner-tube round one second, then flat like a pair of rotten bananas. The Pie Man says he knows Baby doesn’t want to go back on full house arrest. The Pie Man says Baby’s free lawyer, Mr. Bates, already told them Baby was out of chances. The Pie Man looks at Baby as if expecting a response, which Baby doesn’t give. Baby stares at those bananas.

The Pie Man tells Baby to get up because it’s time to go to work.

Baby looks out the window. Orange traffic barrels flank a Do Not Enter sign at the end of the block.

“Nope,” Baby says. “I ain’t doing your slave work. If that means I’m stuck inside, then so what?”

Baby’s mom sprays air freshener at him. She tells him she’ll turn him in herself if he doesn’t get that haircut. And he better be home before the streetlights come on. If he’s more than a half-inch from the front door by then, the SWAT team will come after him, she reminds him for the umpteenth-and-a-half time. She kisses him on the forehead and leaves.

The Pie Man says he’ll bring Baby to the barber now but doesn’t get up from the couch. He continues to stare at the empty space behind Baby.

“I’ll get ready.” Baby rides his skateboard to the bathroom where he straps on his Chuck Taylors and a pair of brown plaid shorts before climbing out the window.