When he first knew Betsy Montjoy, when he was new in New Orleans and a fresh lawyer, he gave her cards he’d customized. ‘Walter specials.’ ‘Sorry to hear you’ve been in the hospital.’ To which he’d magic-marker in ‘mental’. ‘It’s your birthday.’ He’d added ‘100th!’ Betsy loved ‘funny’, would already be smiling in the car seat or across the table in Gautreaux’s – awaiting. It usually prompted her to say ‘You’re a nut’, or that he was ‘pretty wild and most likely dangerous’, or he was ‘probably the cleverest man in the world’. None of which was true. He was, instead, Walter B. Hobbes from Minter City, Mississippi, a skinny, good-natured oil and gas guy who read the WSJ, the FT and Petroleum Times, voted Democratic, wore tan suits with penny loafers and sometimes loud bow ties and argyle socks from Brooks, and hoped that all this meant she would marry him. Which for a while it did.
He plucked a card that featured a big cartoon goose with its orangey beak taped shut and its big riddling goose eyes bulging in sweaty, exasperated excitement. It read, ‘It goose without saying…’ Opened, little red hearts were floating around the inside atmosphere, where the goose was again pictured, this time smiling, its beak untaped and ‘… I miss you’ splashed in big electric-yellow lettering. Louise could customize it. In her knapsack she maintained a plastic bag of colored Sharpies. Something clever would occur to her on the drive to Ginny’s house – once she got over not liking it. Ginny would forget all about it in two days, anyway. A card wouldn’t make it to Kenosha, which Louise instinctually understood. There were no ready words for Ginny’s adventure or Louise’s loss. Possibly no words for anyone’s.
*
Francis Finerty was standing outside his little dentist’s office – the comfortable Mediterranean-looking former family home he’d bought when he and his wife Mary Jane came in the seventies. A honeymoon that lasted on, a fresh go, away from bombs and soldiers in the Antrim Road. He’d converted the house to a one-chair office, where he was standing out front in his frosted pink dentist’s smock and talking animatedly to Louise on the steps. Louise was the day’s last patient. He wouldn’t want her waiting out by herself. Finerty was Walter’s dentist, and he was Betsy’s dentist. He might’ve been Mitch Daigle’s dentist. He was a not-so-tall, round, jowly exuberant Irishman with sadly drooping blue eyes and bushy hair and a predilection for laughter that made New Orleanians like him, if not quite warm to him. He enjoyed telling mildly disgraceful stories from his youth when your mouth was propped open, full of metal. He didn’t tell these stories to Louise, of course.
‘I was on to explaining the concept of the phantom limb to your young medical scholar here.’ Finerty came down to the car with Louise, his lilt all ramped up for her sake. Louise wouldn’t have noticed. She had no conception of what was Irish. Louise, however, had clearly explained to him she intended to be a doctor, something she’d just made up. Finerty was holding open the car door for her to climb in with her night-guard container and plastic bag of free dental supplies. He smiled down upon her, a smile meant to indicate something was secret and collusive between them – which Louise wouldn’t have allowed either. Finerty had two grown daughters his wife had left him with, and who were now Americans. They both frustrated him and lived in New England. He liked to aver connections between dental practice and the clichéd priestly vocation he rumored he’d chosen against – conceivably unwisely. He had a fleshy flat nose, a rucked reddish forehead and thick Groucho eyebrows he could make cavort in pursuit of humorous effects in off-color Paddy stories related behind his dental mask. Sometimes he closed his eyes when he spoke – to discourage a reply.
‘Are phantom limbs part of your general discussion of night guards and teeth grinding today?’ Walter ducked to see Finerty through the open car-door space. More blasted desert air crowded in to where he was.
‘Along in a general discussion of loss,’ Finerty said. His eyebrows did indeed jink up as his black eyes widened. Finerty had a gargly voice and stiff, curly priestly hairs on the backs of his dense and subtle hands. Loss, possibly divorce, possibly disaster had been the unmentioned subtext of all treatment today. Appropriate to the anniversary of the hurricane, but not exclusive to it.
In her seat, Louise frowned at Hobbes from behind her tortoise shells, in case he was about to say something disallowed – about her. Louise had constructed her own ‘look’: studious, often stern, implicitly loyal and – in a way that only she understood – sexy. She abruptly smiled to exhibit her new shiny-clean teeth. Her smell was faintly medicinal.
Finerty also liked resorting to mock philosophical palaver at the conclusion of appointments, as if a spiritual dimension also haunted tooth extractions and partial bridgework and needed to be developed, yet couldn’t properly be using regular dental–patient lingo. Francis Finerty, Walter felt, was a fully engaged spiritual man, and the loneliest man he knew. Better to stay with fishing.
‘Apropos of the season,’ Walter said to the salient issue of loss.
‘Apropos of the season precisely.’ Eyes closed. Finerty laved his soft hands together like an understanding undertaker. ‘A loss becomes its own elemental presence, which is the essence of Beckett, if you don’t mind a dentist saying so.’
‘How’re her teeth?’
Finerty smiled. He had small, blunt teeth of his own, carelessly spaced. ‘Entirely lovely. And she knows it, as well.’
‘And I know how to take care of myself,’ Louise said rudely. She smiled garishly at her father and revealed now the yellowish, translucent Lucite night guard she’d just snapped in place over her perfect incisors. ‘I have to wear this all my life,’ she said.
‘At least until the tension in that life subsides.’ Finerty smiled, too, then pulled a face of mock dismay.
‘Like I said,’ Louise said.
‘We’re working away on that,’ Hobbes said.
‘If we knew what went on between women and men we likely wouldn’t need dentists a-tall, would we?’ Finerty pushed the car door to and stepped back onto the curb in a dainty, little hefty man’s hop.
‘He’s a creep,’ Louise said instantly. Finerty was twelve inches away behind the cool window glass, still talking away about women and men. She didn’t mean it. She was only impatient.
‘No, he’s not,’ Walter said. ‘He’s a smart man, and likes you.’
‘Everybody’s smart,’ Louise said, her night guard still bulging inside her lips, as Walter eased them away from the curb. Finerty was left waving.
*
‘This is SO QUEER!’ Louise had the goose card open and was appraising it menacingly, furiously. ‘Why’s this bird got tape on its stupid mouth? What goes without saying? Didn’t I say no birds? “I miss you”? It’s disgusting.’ It was true he hadn’t considered the goose a bird.
They were driving out St Claude, a wide, rubbish-cluttered boulevard through the once-thriving all-black section of (now) shut-down schools, caved-in and looted appliance stores with wrecked white goods scattered on the sidewalk, a closed and boarded-up Hardy’s. A closed gas station. A closed ramshackle bar with a rough, red front and a tilted, inert neon roof sign. Mars Bar. Ruined houses were still ‘designated’ by the cruciform code the soldiers used two years before. People were on the streets – mostly black, unobservant, vaguely mission-less. Standing. Only every fourth traffic light seemed to be working. The city had yet to ‘come back’.
Louise was officially mortified by the faulty card selection. It made Walter feel disheartened since Louise would now be resentful and wrongly misunderstood into the evening. Their evening, now casually adrift.
‘I thought you could use Sharpies and customize it into something funny. Or sweet.’
‘Like what? It’s stupid.’ She promptly tore the goose card in half and then in fourths and then in eighths and spitefully threw the pieces on the car floor. ‘Now I don’t have anything to give. Thank God.’
‘You still have your winning personality,’ Walter said. ‘That’ll make Ginny change her mind about l
eaving. Plus, I risked my life at Wal-Mart.’
‘Fuck Wal-Mart. And you didn’t risk your life. That’s racist.’ Louise turned away to the spent cityscape and crossed her legs tightly. Did Finerty’s Irish daughters deport themselves thusly in times of turmoil? After the mother’d hied off? Finerty would’ve had novel approaches. He, himself, lacked even one.
‘How old are you?’ Steering cautiously through a signal-less intersection. Here was no place for a wreck. People were in a bad mood here. No police around to save you.
‘Old enough to say “Fuck Wal-Mart”,’ Louise said. ‘And a lot more.’
‘Well, try to save back something nice to say to Ginny.’ Louise had pronounced an address on Delery Street before she went ballistic on the offending card.
‘I’m not going without a gift. That goes without saying.’ Louise had righteous anger always at her disposal now. A relatively recent asset.
‘Well, you’d better concoct something fast. It wasn’t about a card, anyway. It was the gesture that counted. Or would’ve been.’
‘What am I supposed to say?’ Louise sniffed, as if possibly she might cry a little, or at least try. This was not one of her assets. Or her mother’s. Dry eyes were their redoubt.
‘Okay,’ Walter said. ‘Let’s see. How about “Dear Ginny, I’ll miss you when you’re gone.” Or, “Dear Ginny, I hope your new life in Kenosha is wonderful.” Or, “I hope I see you again.” Those seem serviceable.’
‘They’re pathetic.’
Louise was working her teeth hard and did not now have her device in.
‘No, they’re not pathetic. They’re things that shouldn’t go without saying. This is a part of your education.’ It was pompous, but he meant it – though she would ignore it.
‘Why did you get divorced?’ Louise said blazingly. It had been her default accusation for some time. Always brandished from ambush. A rabbit out of a mean hat.
‘I don’t know,’ Walter said, seeing a Delery Street sign ahead – a paper placard someone had stapled on a telephone pole in place of the regular sign, hurricaned away. All around the sign were other handwritten notices, many in Spanish, advertising ‘DEMOLICION DE SU CASA.’ ‘REPAROS.’ ‘NO SE SIENTE SOLA.’
‘Yes, you do,’ Louise said angrily. ‘Was it your fault?’
‘I’m sure it was,’ Walter said.
‘Why did you even do it, then? You were bad.’
‘Nature doesn’t like to be observed,’ Walter said. Again, he felt profoundly fatigued. ‘It’d be better if nature did. At least a little. Sometimes.’
Louise looked at him contemptuously, blinking her small, intense brown eyes behind her glasses, fists clenched, her sack of dental supplies still in her lap. Louise had gained weight in the last months. She had an adolescent pimple on the side of her forehead near her hairline, which she was leaving unattended out of malice. The torn-apart goose-card pieces were scattered on her black school shoes.
‘I don’t understand you,’ Louise said. She was now twenty-five, he was her poor-communicator boyfriend, they’d just broken up, possibly for the last time.
‘I know,’ Walter said, slowing for the turn on Delery by a great empty-windowed, weather-beaten high school. ‘It’ll have to do for now, though. It’ll be an interesting subject for later life.’
‘What later?’ Louise said victoriously. ‘There won’t be any later.’
*
Delery – long, straight, pot-holed, refuse-strewn – was a street of wreckages. Where the flood had churned through, homes had been flattened, floated off foundations, had their roofs removed and spirited away. Others – the compact brick ones – had been scoured out and ruined, too, but in a way that left the outside walls sturdily standing. Weeds thrived in lots where concrete slabs had held houses. A sleek, fiberglass sporting craft had been miraculously hoisted then deposited on top of a white frame bungalow, and at another domicile an ancient green Studebaker had been shoved through the front door into a living room. All achievements of the water. Most of the houses bore the familiar dark stain of high water above the casements and the same hash marks left by rescuers. One house proclaimed ‘NO PIG FOUND/9-10’ beside its door. Another simply said, ‘ONE DEAD HERE.’
Farther down and out toward the lake, beneath the baking white sky, a crew of young, shirtless and aspiring black boys was busily gutting a house and loading usable timbers and shingles onto a sagging pickup bed. Almost no one was living out here or in the surrounding blocks of battered streets. All was becoming fields again. A few surviving trees. The long view. It was the lower 9, the submersible land that had always been poor and black, but had been a place to live. Louise’s school had made a field trip to here, and afterwards gone back and committed moving poems all about it, painted gawdy, desolate landscapes, written letters to kids in faraway cities, predicting everything would be restored soon and become even better. Come back.
Louise had sunk into silence, possibly interviewing complimentary phrases she would address to Ginny when they got to where Ginny lived. Possibly, too, the dead weight of destruction – mute, grammar-less, attractively foreign – had struck her dumb. Ahead, some white men – electric utility workers in yellow plastic helmets and white jumpsuits – were gathered around a light pole, connecting or disconnecting power. Two wrecked houses behind them had temporary trailers parked in their front yards. Though no one was in sight there. A brown-and-white spotted dog stood in the grass beside the littered street and stared at Walter’s car but didn’t move as it eased past.
‘This is horrible,’ Louise said, as if she’d never seen any of it before. She pressed her nose to the window glass, her glasses frames ticking the pane. They had a reason to be here. Everything went without saying.
The address numbers on the few standing houses were leading them to the place they were going, which was not much farther. ‘Ginny lives with her grandmother,’ Louise said gloomily. She sighed softly, apparently bored, emitting a small cloud onto the window glass. She had found her way to resolute again.
Ahead, in the next emptied-out block, waited a collection of vehicles none of the other houses or lots had out in front of them. A man was in the street, hefting household articles – a chair, a small table, a lamp – into the open back of a shiny red and white U-Haul that was promoting the state of Idaho on its side. ‘It’s not just potatoes!’ Slightly different from the happy-family card at Wal-Mart.
‘There’s Ginny,’ Louise said, buoyant, no longer bored. She knew everything she would say now.
A child dressed in exactly Louise’s uniform stood on the opposite side of the street from the man loading articles. Two cars were parked, there, in the weeds where a house had been but where now was a white concrete slab. She was just watching. A relic chain-link fence recollected a backyard where an old-fashioned mangle ironing contraption sat marooned. Everything else around Ginny was open ground with different concrete squares dotting where houses had been down Delery. A single, steepled white church rose in the distance. Gulls soared above everything, singing out soundlessly. A low husk of another tan school building sat off in the humid middle ground surrounded by nothing. It was striking – the character of destruction – always diverse.
Louise was out of the car before Hobbes could get properly stopped. From where she stood in the weeds, Ginny saw Louise, knew her, but didn’t move or signal surprise. Louise marched straight to her and started talking, as if this was an official visit. She took Ginny’s hand and waggled her arm until Ginny said something and smiled. Louise and Ginny looked alike in their school uniforms and tortoise-shell glasses and long straight hair.
Across from where the girls were talking stood a remarkably new house, raised to a man’s height on new blond-wood pillars, everything freshly painted bright blue with white trim. A new smooth, white concrete driveway was laid, new azalea plantings set in against the base of the pillars, bright plastic geraniums in window boxes, a thick green carpet of St Augustine fresh off the truck. On the eleva
ted front porch, a tiny, desiccated, elderly black woman in a long skirt stood watching the man load boxes and suitcases into the red-and-white square trailer – all things he’d brought from inside the house.
For a moment the man didn’t acknowledge anyone had arrived. Then he stopped loading and looked first at the two girls and at the Rover and at Walter Hobbes getting out. He was a moderate-sized, beige-skinned man with short, well-tended hair, wearing a tank top he’d sweated through completely, plaid Bermudas he’d also sweated through and black basketball sneakers with knee-high white socks. His skin was wrong – far too light – to be Ginny’s father. But he stood a moment, then came across the street, wiping hands on his shirt.
‘Louise wanted to come say goodbye,’ Walter said. Everything was knowable here.
‘All right. That’s good,’ the man said. He was thirty-two, smooth-muscled, compact. He might’ve been a UPS man. Mannerly, observant, implacable.
‘They’re in the same class,’ Walter said.
‘Okay.’ The man regarded the girls again. Ginny and Louise were now locked in a fast privacy. ‘Ginny,’ he said, interrupting them. ‘This is Louise’s daddy.’ Louise and Ginny stopped talking and both looked at Walter. Walter waved. Ginny waved back. Louise turned away.
A second woman appeared onto the high porch of the blue house, beside the small, elderly desiccated woman. She was very dark-skinned, and tall and statuesque, her hair in corn rows. Her face even from the street appeared reproachful.