I called Elise first thing the next morning. She wasn’t available, but I left a message – I was leaving New Orleans Saturday with a car full of priests. If she had any prayer requests, now was a great time. Then I spent the rest of the morning being stupid. I drove around the rental places looking for a small trailer to haul what I assumed would be a mountain of personal items for the two priests. Even though I had personally witnessed hundreds of cars pulling trailers north, it somehow hadn’t registered with me that renting a trailer would be hard. It was, of course, impossible. Every trailer in a thousand miles had been reserved weeks earlier.
By the third rental place I had given up on a trailer and started looking for a luggage rack for the top of the car. The first clerk I asked about that was aghast. “You would put a luggage rack on a Citroen 9000?” I wasn’t sure if he felt it was beneath the dignity of a Citroen to haul luggage, or if he was worried the weight of the rack would crush the roof of France’s finest effort in automotive engineering.
Finally I gave up on rental places and started visiting auto parts stores. Given the quality of French vehicles, auto parts are a billion franc industry and there is a parts store on nearly every block. It only took three stops before I found a simple pair of bars I could mount on top of the roof with suction cups and straps. One of the clerks was so interested in seeing how the rack would look on a Citroen, he came out of the store and helped me get the contraption set up. It seemed solid enough to me, at least solid enough to get a suitcase or two up there for the trip to St. Louis.
I then put the car back in the hotel lot and headed back to the library. I still had one diary to read. Margaret had been right about the value of the other two diaries; I was sure this one would be important as well. I spent a few minutes talking with Mr. Guillard and returning the book he had loaned me the day before. I told him I would be leaving the next day, and he seemed genuinely saddened. I was one of very few people who were using the library, and I suspected his days were now going to seem longer.
Back in my study carrel I pulled out my dictionary and the last diary and started translating. I saw right away that this was going to be an unpleasant diary to read. The diary was essentially a lament, written by Eloise deShazar, a woman in her late thirties who arrived in Louisiana in 1722 – the third wave of Huguenot immigration. Her life was very hard. The trip over had been especially bad, with storms delaying the crossing and making most of the passengers continually ill. Her husband had been injured when the ship lurched in a storm, and with a broken arm and a concussion, he arrived in Biloxi already near death. He contracted malaria within a week of arriving and was dead before they had even found a permanent place to stay.
She had two sons in their late teens, and three younger daughters. Would her sons take care of her now? The land that had been assigned to the family, their grant, was on the west side of New Orleans. This was not good. The farms at Biloxi were now in their third year and enough had been learned about where to plant and what to plant, that they were surviving, if with great difficulty. But New Orleans was a different matter. First, there was the two-day journey along the gulf then through the bayous and along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. There were a few farms along the way, and a way-station had been set up where people would spend the first night, but much of the journey still had the feel of a trip into endless swamp, with every mile separating you from friends, family, and help. Her diary entries for those days were an endless list of fears.
Late on the second day they got to New Orleans. Their guide proudly pointed out the virtues of the new city – the wide streets, the regular layout of the city – grids and squares where most European cities were a jumble of narrow twisting alleys meeting at odd intervals and odd angles. Monsieur Descartes could not have designed a better city, was the claim of the guide. Eloise had no idea who Monsieur Descartes was, and rather than see wide and even streets, she saw emptiness. The houses could be counted in the dozens, the main streets on one hand. Off to the west, where their land grant lay, she saw ruts in the mud leading off into the forest. It seemed dark, and forbidding.
They spent three nights in New Orleans. They met people, went to church, studied maps of the area, and took legal possession of their grant. Eloise warmed to New Orleans and didn’t want to leave it. Maybe she could find work there? Maybe someone would take in a poor widow lady? Unfortunately, New Orleans had no shortage of widow ladies. What was really needed was people willing to make farms and supply food to the colony. Several men would go out with the family for the first few days to help them clear an area and to show them the best places to plant, but they made it clear the proper place for the family was on their land.
Each family was allotted one mule. The men who would help them each brought their own mules, so four mules pulled four wagons of belongings, farm tools, seed, and food to the new farm. The trip to the land took four hours. They passed two other new farms along the way, and stopped to talk, but the rest of the walk was through towering trees and empty space. Eloise walked along beside her wagon and talked with her girls, but her thoughts were constantly about the distance they had covered. Four hours to the farm meant four hours back to town, four hours to get help in time of sickness, fire, or Indian attack. They were truly alone.
The mud ruts ended at their land. The children immediately went running off in all directions to see what was on the land. They had been raised in Berlin and so had never seen so much open land before. Eloise had also been raised in Berlin, and she stayed with the men as they discussed what to clear and where to build. They were near the river – she could see it through the trees. That was good, and that was bad. They could use the river to take crops to market once they had a boat. But the river also flooded every spring. They would have to both find high ground to live on and build levees where they could. For the moment that meant that trees along the river should stay – they would hold the ground. Trees back from the river should be felled and left to lie parallel to the river – they would be an initial levee. The house should be at least one hundred yards back from the river on the highest ground they could find. Eloise didn’t see anything that looked high. The men went out into the woods and spent the rest of the day looking for the best location. They eventually came back, looking cheerful, but she could read faces and she knew they had not found a location that would be totally safe. That night they slept in the wagons and swatted mosquitoes.
The next day she cooked near the wagons while the little girls gathered sticks for the fire and the men went out with saws to clear a trail to the homesite. She prayed it wouldn’t be too far from the road. Her sons learned how to cut trees. Great care had to be taken. If trees got caught up in other trees as they fell, people could be killed. If the trees landed too far from where they were needed, mules might not be able to move them. Given the care that was needed, and the unbearable heat, that first day the men were only able to cut a wagon trail to the homesite, and get four trees down to build the walls of the cabin. She saw nothing would happen quickly on that land. They pulled the wagons to the homesite as darkness fell, and she built her first fire adjacent to the cabin. She would use that fire pit for the next thirty years.
The hardest day was the next, since she knew if would be the last before the men left. They used all four mules together to pull the base logs into place for the cabin, and helped her boys cut three more trees where the first field would be planted. That afternoon they explained to the boys what should be planted where, and how. Eloise was able to get them to stay through dinner, but then they departed, leaving her family alone. She felt like crying. They slept huddled together in their wagon, the cook fire throwing some smoke but not doing much to lessen the hordes of mosquitoes. She listened for hours to hear if Indians were sneaking up on them.
The next days were endless. The boys dug a shallow well but the water seemed half mud. She strained and boiled what they could. The boys had never
done manual labor before and they got tired quickly and their hands bled constantly. She wrapped their hands in old cloths and sent them back out to work. She kept the fire going. She and the girls dragged every branch or bough they could find into the fire. She made it as big as she could – big to scare off the bugs, big to burn up the brush that made it impossible to walk, big, well, big because a big fire made her feel better.
Sunday came, but none of them had the strength to walk into New Orleans. She let the boys sleep most of the day. Before dinner she got out the family bible and read psalms. Psalms helped. They gave hope. As she now wandered in the wilderness she felt close to the ancients. Their songs were now her songs. She hoped the children were comforted as well.
Rains came the next week, and she nearly despaired. They had no cover but canvas sail cloth, and it soaked through quickly. They struggled to keep the fire going. The boys struggled to cut more trees. Days passed and she felt she was living in a wet hell. They walked through mud, they drank mud, their food tasted like mud.
When the rains finally stopped their nearest neighbors came. They had walked an hour through the mud to help them. The woman helped Eloise build a leanto near the fire so she would have some shelter while she cooked. But her real help was talk. She talked about her first year, talked about the water, showed her how to filter the water through cloth, and talked about daily life. It was heaven to have a woman to talk to. The man showed the boys how to care for the mule. They had never had a mule before and had not been sheltering or feeding it properly. He also helped them move two more logs into place on the walls of the cabin. Their children played with the girls. It was so good to have others to see, and to hope that there would be others again – that they would not always be alone in the wilderness. She cried when they left that evening, but she also says in her diary that she is relieved to have neighbors – it makes the swamp feel at least a bit more like Germany.
Most of her entries during this period are short. She talks about writing beside the cook fire after the children have gone to sleep. Sometimes she writes about missing her husband. Other times she writes about her children and how well they are adapting. Many passages curse the mosquitoes and the heat and the rain. Days go by with no entries at all, I assume because she is too tired or because the rain will give her no chance to sit and write.
By late summer three events occur that give her some hope. The boys manage to get some crops planted among the stumps, and she is happy to see plants growing. They also take one Sunday and walk into New Orleans to attend church. It is a burden for the whole family. She spends two days washing and mending clothes so that they will look presentable when they arrive, and of course the four hour walk is a burden for all of them after all the work they have put in. But the children are excited about seeing others again, and she needs to be around adults again. They arrive about midway through the service, and sit in a stifling hot log building for two more hours before the service ends. Then they are welcomed by one and all, invited to share a meal with the congregation, and given a ready ear as all of them tell about their first summer in the swamp. They pass a joyful afternoon that she is still writing about three days later. But it is just an afternoon respite, and by early evening they are back on the rutted trail to home.
Two weeks later comes the biggest event of the summer – six men, plus their wives and children arrive on a Saturday to help finish the house. They bring their mules and their tools and lots of food, and finish bringing the walls up to a five foot height while one man cuts boards for a door and others trim branches to be the rafters of the roof. By the end of the day they would be under a roof for the first time in months. By any standards the cabin is tiny, squalid, and dirty, a place they would have rejected if they had seen it when they first arrived, but after living in the wagon for months, it seemed a godsend to her now.
The afternoon was running late, and I began to worry that I might not finish the diary before the library closed, so I began to skim the pages. The fall brought a small harvest, enough to give them some of their own food to eat over the winter. Mostly the harvest was a promise – if they could raise food this first year, they could raise more in the future. They might not starve.
The winter was colder than they expected, the boys cut more trees, improved the cabin, cleared more land for crops, they went to church at least once a month, that being easier once the rains stopped and the roads dried out. I thumbed through page after page. It appeared they were slowly succeeding.
Then sickness hit. They all came down with fevers and diarrhea, and she cared for all of them as best she could. A doctor visited once, but he had little medicine and no helpful advice. She refused to let the man leech the children. In three days the little girls were dead. She mourned them and buried them and feared what would come next. As much as she missed her baby girls, what if the boys died? She prayed that she would die before they did. Weeks passed and eventually the fevers subsided and she was left with her two boys.
The next entries are filled with her grief and her anger at Louisiana and her regret of having ever left Germany. It goes on for pages after page after page. I skimmed through days, and weeks, and months. It was rude of me – unfeeling – but my self-imposed deadline for leaving New Orleans was getting close, so I hurried through the next two thirds of her diary.
I hurried so fast I almost missed the Jolliet entry. It was the following fall and the boys had harvested enough food that they were able to put a load on the wagon and take it into New Orleans. They were so proud of themselves. In just their second year on the farm, they had raised enough beans and wheat that they had surplus to sell. She and the boys loaded the wagon before dawn and walked the four hours into New Orleans, dreaming of the money they would earn.
But they earned little. The crop sold, but days before a large boat had come down the river filled with wheat and corn. New Orleans had never seen so much food. And, they were told more would be coming each week well into the fall. There would be food for everyone! That was great news to the people of the town, and disaster to the local farmers. Prices were far lower than they had been in past years. There had never been competition before. Now there was. Who was this man who had undercut the local farmers? Claude Jolliet. She had his name underscored in her diary. This man had cheapened the work of her boys.
They sold their crop for less than half what it would have brought the year before, bought a few necessities, some cloth, some sugar, and trudged the four hours back to their farm fully chastened. Along the way they stopped and talked with their neighbors who told the same story. Crop prices had dropped. Food was coming down from some place called Illinois. They had worked so hard, sweating for every bean and every head of wheat, and now they got sous where they had hoped to get francs. It would be a long winter. They had fought the mud, the rain, the heat, and the mosquitoes. Now they would have to fight someone called Jolliet.
I was stunned. I had seen Jolliet as a savior. He had brought food to save hungry people. What could ever be wrong about bringing people food? I had given no thought to the local farmers. I closed the book, closed my eyes, and sat thinking about the deShazer family and all the other families who had homesteaded Louisiana. They had learned about weather. Now they were learning about market economics. I had given economics no more thought than they had. I wondered what else I had missed.
I was still sitting that way with my eyes closed, when Margaret arrived.
“Wake up, sleepy head. Time for the library to close.” She stood at the doorway of my study carrel as beautiful as before. She was dressed in orange today, but I tried not to look.
“I am awake, just pondering. You know, thinking deep thoughts.” I smiled and began putting my books in order.
“My father does a lot of pondering just like that, especially after a heavy meal.” She took the three diaries from me when I handed them to her. “Are you all d
one with these?”
“Yes. Thank you for picking them out for me. You say you have three thousand more downstairs in the archives?”
“Three thousand, eight hundred, and thirty one more. Would you like me to pull some more for you tomorrow?”
“Thank you, but I am leaving for Green Bay tomorrow. I need to get back to the university.” I packed away the rest of my materials, discarded some notes, and grabbed the rest of the books I had checked out, so the carrel would be clean for the next user.
“Well, for your last night, how would you like to see a play? Some of my old college friends are producing a play based on one of the diaries of the original families. I think you might find it interesting.”
In truth, I was exhausted. I find translating difficult work, and this diary had been a real challenge. And then there was the matter of the Jolliet food boats. What I really wanted was some quiet time to think through the implications of that. Sometimes I feel like a dog that just wants to lie still for a while and chew on a bone. This new view of Jolliet was something I needed to chew on. On the other hand, I didn’t relish going back to an empty hotel room in an empty hotel. Besides, I think I was too tired to think of a good excuse for not going to the play.
“Sure. If you will give me directions, I can meet you there after I change.”
“There is no need for that. This is a very informal production. Some of these people are still graduate students, so you can imagine how they will be dressed. We can leave directly from here, and grab a sandwich along the way. It is an easy place to get to. The theater is just a block or so from my apartment.” The minute she said “apartment” I know my pulse rate jumped about twenty beats per minute, but I let that pass and followed her out of the library.
We took the streetcar again over to the south side of the river, and got off where we had two nights earlier. If anything, the street was even more crowded, and most of the tables were occupied. We wound our way through the crowd to her apartment where she said she just needed to stop for a couple minutes. Walking behind her through that crowd, watching her move, I struggled to look anywhere but at her, but I found that nearly impossible.
“Would you like to come up and have a glass of wine?” She asked at the door to her building. She said it so lightly you would think she was talking to an old friend. There was nothing in her look or in her voice that implied anything other than a glass of wine. But for me the temperature in New Orleans had just gone up about twenty degrees.
“Thank you, but I’ll wait here.” She just smiled and slowly opened the door and went inside. I waited in the shade of the building entrance, looked around the street, and tried to get my mind on history, or geography, or economics, anything but the obvious. She came down in about ten minutes and swiftly led me down the street. She had changed something, but I wasn’t sure what. She was wearing the same dress, but maybe she had changed her hair, or put on some jewelry. I looked everywhere but at her as we walked up the street toward the theater.
In the next block we found a bakery and got two ham and cheese sandwiches and then ate them on a park bench outside the theater. As it turned out, the “theater” was just an open area up two flights of stairs. There was no marquee outside, just a bulletin board announcing each night’s activities scheduled for that space. It looked like the play “Founding Families” was going to have a three night run. We sat in the shade of the building and ate our sandwiches. Given our position near the entrance, Margaret became a kind of informal greeting committee, hugging old friends and introducing me as “an American historian.”
For a college play presented in a glorified attic, the crowd was fairly large. Most of them were young, but there were some older folks too. I wondered if they were the parents of the performers. Margaret seemed to know everyone, and barely had time to eat her sandwich. She also had me jumping up regularly to shake hands, although I nearly balked at one point. Four young men with blue arm bands greeted her and seemed to get extra long hugs. While she was hugging, I was trying to decide what politeness dictated for me. Did I shake hands with people who blew up cathedrals? Maybe these men hadn’t been involved; maybe they had. I edged backwards so I would be out of reach. But Margaret was having none of that.
“Shawn, I would like you to meet four members of our army.” She then gave me each of their names. I tried to wave to them and take a step back, but “Captain Goulet” held out his hand so directly I couldn’t pretend not to see it. Finally I took it, but then I did something I have never done before – I crushed his hand. He responded after an instant and we stood locked in a contest of grips, but I had the larger hand. Finally he yielded and took his hand away, shaking it.
“You Americans seem to like contests of strength.” He stared at me, now seeming determined to stare me down.
“You French have been powerful enemies for a very long time,” I responded.
“Yes,” he answered. “The French have been your enemies. We Louisianans can be many things. And I promise you, we will remember our friends and our enemies when this war is over.”
“I hope the war never starts.”
“The war has already begun. We fight for our independence, and we will win our independence. Most Americans understand that and support us.”
“This American hopes your political differences are settled before more people die.”
“Tell that to the Pope and the bastards in Green Bay,” one of the other “officers” retorted, and all four of them pushed past me and into the theater building.
“You have an interesting approach to making new friends” Margaret smiled at me, attempting to defuse the situation.
“I am sorry if I embarrassed you,” I replied.
“They have certain expectations about Americans. You just confused them. They will be fine in a while.” At that point she took my hand and led me into the building. What is it about French women and grabbing hands? They do it so well. I instantly forgot about the blue arm band guys and meekly followed Margaret up two flights of stairs to see a play I had absolutely no interest in.
As it turned out, the play was awful, but short. The plot revolved around one family and the terrible times it had in France and then in New Orleans. About every terrible thing that can happen to a family happened to them. I knew from my diary reading that all the things they were acting out probably happened, but the playwright had no sense for drama. After the first two kids die, you know that more will die, and then the father will die, and then the uncle. The only dramatic twist was deciding which, if any, of the family members would be alive at the end. I had my money on the plucky daughter, and sure enough, she makes it to the end where she gives an incredibly long speech to her fiancé about how much she loves him and Louisiana and how sure she is that they will prevail despite all the hardships they have endured.
If the play was written by a college student, I hoped the student was still a freshman, but I was the only one who had any questions about his talent. When the curtain came down (after several tries at getting the old curtain to move through the pulleys), the crowd cheered and gave the actors a standing ovation. Then the playwright came out (a guy in his late twenties already balding) and the crowd really went wild. They loved this guy. I hoped much of the attraction was the fact that the play was over in an hour, but I might have been wrong.
Margaret needed to stand and mingle for a while after the play. I stood a bit off to one side and was largely ignored. The blue arm band guys glared at me as they exited, but that was the extent of our interaction. Finally Margaret had hugged most of the cast and half the audience, and we left.
“That wasn’t a very good play, was it?” She asked as we walked down the street. She took my hand and we walked side by side toward the band and the cafes.
“It was short, that’s always a good thing.”
“Ours is a hard story to tell. I think those three thousand eight hundred and
thirty four diaries tell it best, but they are locked up in a basement and known only to the families.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “they are very powerful.”
“Will you dance with me?” We were near her apartment building already, standing at the edge of the crowd. The band was playing something slow. I took her in my arms and we danced the last of the song. Where was her left hand? Well around on the back of my shoulder. I could imagine Kelly smiling at me as she saw it.
Then the song ended and Margaret kissed me. Both her arms went around my neck and my arms went around her waist, and she kissed me for a very long time. She was a beautiful woman and she felt very good. When she was done with the kiss, she laid her head on my shoulder and said softly in my ear, “When you come back, I will be waiting for you.” Then she slowly separated herself from me and stepped over to her door. She unlocked the door and stood there looking at me for about seventeen eternities. Finally she went inside and the door closed behind her. I felt like a fly frozen in amber. Finally I could breathe again, and I slowly turned toward the cab stand and my ride home. There waiting for me was Elise.
“Elise!” I ran the last few steps to her and grabbed her around the waist. She let me take waist, but held me off when I started to kiss her.
“First, you can’t kiss me until I get that woman’s lipstick off your face.” She pulled out a handkerchief and ran it over my mouth, being none too gentle in the process. “Second, you have to tell me that I saw all there was to see.”
“That is the only time we kissed. I promise. She is an archivist at the Provincial Library and she invited me to see an historical play.”
“She’s a bimbo and gets frequent flier miles from the local cosmetic surgeon, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that. But I believe you about the kiss.”
“Thank you for coming down. I missed you.”
“That’s the right answer. Now you get to kiss me.” And we kissed for a very long time. I was still very confused about how she was here, and what she had seen, and what I had done, but at the moment, it felt great just to hold her.
“Ah, I don’t know what to do next.” I finally said. “Can we go back to my hotel, do you want to eat dinner in one of the cafes here, do you have time to be with me, or are you in meetings down here? How long do I get to keep you?”
“You get to keep me forever. But let’s talk about it in the car.” She nodded towards a very large man who had been standing at a discreet distance, and we followed him through the crowd to a large car that was parked illegally at the corner. I followed her into the back seat and the car was instantly in motion.
“I’m staying at the Maison Dupuy Hotel,” I told the driver.
“We already know that, Shawn,” Elise replied. “We dropped my bags off there hours ago before we started tracking you down. Fortunately, you are very predictable. You are the only man I know who could spend every day of his vacation in a local library. Two calls to staff and we knew who you were with and where you had gone. We ate dinner at a cafe near her apartment and waited for you to come back there.”
“I am sorry about how that looked…” I was really struggling to think of what else to say. She had seen what? Us dancing? The kiss? What was she thinking at that moment?
“What I saw was Miss Biloxi 2002 invite you up to her room, and you turn her down. The rest I can live with.”
“She’s the archivist at the Louisiana Library.”
“Actually, she is not.” As Elise delivered the next few sentences I noticed two things. First, she knew a whole lot more about Margaret than I did, and second, her speech patterns had changed. Her sentences were short and crisp. Her two months in government had already had an impact. I have to admit to being a bit put off, both by the message and by the style. “She may have worked there while in college. That isn’t clear yet. What we know for sure is that the regular archivist is Robert deVille, a nice old man who was apparently sent on an early vacation. Miss Biloxi was brought in for your benefit.”
“Elise, why would someone do that?”
“Nobody seems to know at the moment, but we have people working on it.” She left that last hanging in the air, for me to imagine who “people” were and what it might mean that they were “working on it.” I had nothing to say to that. I sat basically numb while the driver took us back over the river toward my hotel. Somewhere during the ride Elise took my hand and held it in both of hers as she had so many times before, and I felt a little better. The driver pulled up to the front door of the hotel to drop us off when I suddenly remembered the fathers.
“Will we be staying in New Orleans? I promised two priests I would drive them to St. Louis tomorrow.”
“I have several reasons to want to get you out of New Orleans,” Elise replied with an expression I would be puzzling over for days, “but I would like to stay a few days. Can we move the fathers up on Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“I think so, but we should go talk with them. I suspect they are in the midst of packing.” I gave the driver directions to Father Jacques’ residence and he had us there in seconds. As before, there were no lights on in the front of the house, but I was confident they were inside. Elise asked to meet them, and the two of us walked up the stairs to the front door. I heard a noise in the front room and knew we were being watched. Rather than ring the bell or knock, I just announced myself.
“Father Jacques, this is Shawn Murphy. Can we come in?” I heard several locks being undone on the huge wooden door, and then Father Jacques pulled the door back as far as his aging body would let him.
“Shawn, welcome. We are almost packed.” Then he looked at Elise and his face changed. He was suddenly tense. It was only then that I realized Elise was wearing a white dress. Did he think she was a Huguenot?
“Father, this is Elise DuPry, my fiancé. She works in the Interior Ministry and is visiting New Orleans for the weekend.”
“Come in, come in.” He was suddenly very solicitous and waved us into the dim living room before pushing the dark oak door back into place. “Did you say DuPry? Would you be a Green Bay DuPry?”
“Yes, father.” She then did a very formal curtsy and kissed his ring. At this point Father Claude also shuffled into the room and the two stood somewhat agog. They looked star-struck.
“And to think…” I heard Father Jacques mumbling. “Because of the white dress, I almost…” I introduced her to Father Claude and Elise once again curtsied and kissed his ring. There was a long silence, and then both men started anxiously looking around for someplace to sit or something to offer her. They suddenly both wanted to be good hosts, but the situation was impossible. The place was a shambles. I saw two cardboard boxes in the living room, and several more down the hallway. Finally Father Claude noticed an old settee in the room and motioned Elise to that.
“Please my child. Won’t you sit?” Elise immediately sat on that old relic, looking as comfortable is if she had just been seated at the Plaza Hotel.
“Fathers,” I hesitated a second for the priests to remember that I was in the room. “We had talked about leaving tomorrow morning, but since Elise has come to visit me for a few days, would you mind if we made our trip Tuesday or Wednesday”
“Of course not.” Father Jacques answered. He was still looking at Elise, but I was fairly confident he was talking to me. “That will give us a bit more time to pack.”
“About that. I tried to rent a trailer to help with your belongings, but there are none in town. I did find a pair of bars for on top of the car, but I would expect it would only hold several suitcases.”
“Oh, that’s not a problem.” Elise interjected. “I have been assigned a fairly large car. What if the four of us ride north in your car, Shawn, and my driver can take the luggage in the second car.” That seemed to be agreeable, and then the fathers turned the conversation back to Elise. They wanted to tell her about their three trips to Green
Bay, and the service they had attended at the National Cathedral, and the members of her family they had met. And she expressed a great deal of interest in their church and the local parish and to their personal histories which seemed to pour out of them. How does that happen? I can know people for years and not know if they have kids or have ever been to Europe. Other people, and Elise is a master at this, can spend twenty minutes with a person and find out who their third grade teacher was. I stood to one side and watched in amazement.
Eventually the fathers began to wind down and Elise and I made our exit. The driver had us back at the entrance to our hotel minutes later, and I finally had Elise alone. We took the elevator to my room, I carried her over the threshold, and we had a marvelous end to a very confusing day.
Chapter 9
New Orleans with Elise