Our apartment in 1983 was very small, a second story slave quarters actually, with four rooms in a straight row. My mama and I lived there for a year or so, after daddy died and left us owing medical bills. She always promised me that we would move as soon as we could, but I liked it there. We were hidden from the world outside, entering the long rectangular patio from a side gate on Royal Street, next to the Old Mint Bookshop. There was a little alleyway leading back along the side of the shop, enclosed by the vine-covered wall of the next building, which opened unexpectedly onto the courtyard. This little brick and cobble world, with two or three banana trees and indigenous ground cover, surrounded by the two-storied slave quarters, and rustling with unknown creatures in the foliage, made for a kind of magical garden. I wasn't supposed to go anywhere after school, so this was my universe.
My mama worked a twelve hour shift as a nurse at Touro Infirmary, and I let myself in after school with a key that I wore around my neck on a red shoestring. My fuzzy yellow kitten, Chelize, was generally chasing lizards up the walls when I got home, which, for some reason, irritated Mrs. Leboux, our downstairs neighbor.
She had agreed to watch for me after school, to make sure I arrived home safely. We didn't speak much, because I didn't know what to say to her, and she didn't seem to need to talk. Yet sometimes I would hear her, later in the evening when I had gone upstairs, playing music on her piano below me. She liked lively music, music that did not seem anything like the Mrs. Leboux I saw outside watching wildlife with a scowl. I listened through the floor and sometimes hummed a little to her tunes. It was odd to think of so much cheerfulness coming from an old woman with hair dyed dead black, wearing a fringed shawl from which her hands emerged like claws, knifing her way through life with the nose of an Indian Chief. Her voice, when she spoke, was that of a crow, and her tone was oftentimes a little snippy. Maybe I caused that; I was never sure.
Mrs. Leboux and my mama had an agreement that I could go to her if I needed something after school, which I mostly didn't. She and I often sat together at the wrought iron table on the patio, after wiping the white specks of bird dropping off of it, and setting out a dish of pretzels. I would work on my homework while she hummed tunelessly to herself, watching lizards running up the walls of the patio and wiping salt crumbs from the corners of her mouth. Sometimes she would drink wine, but it never seemed to affect her. Neither happy nor sad, we would stay there until one of us finished and gave a reason to leave. That was usually me, when I needed a glass of water.
It never got quite dark in the French Quarter. The night sky was pink and muddy, and sparrows sang at midnight, their circadian rhythms permanently disrupted by the muggy lightness of the sky. When it got cool enough for me to feel hungry, I would eat the dinner left by my mama in the fridge, take my bath, and lie next to the open window of the bedroom we shared, listening to birds chirping and the occasional screams of fear or drunken silliness, until I fell into a shallow sleep. The clang of the gate, when my mama opened and shut it shortly after midnight, always woke me for a brief moment, then, satisfied that my world was again complete, I slept peacefully till she woke me in the morning.
One week in March, however, I noticed that something had changed. Mrs. Leboux was sitting at the wrought iron table when I got home from school, and she greeted me cheerfully, with a smile, asking how my day had gone. Her hair was freshly dyed a deep black, and her face was pale with powder. She had painted her claws bright red. I mumbled something in surprise and piled my books on the table. She offered to help me do my math, and didn't get upset when Chelize, my kitty, caught a lizard. In fact, she was oddly imperturbable, as though she were a windup toy with a new battery and a coat of paint. No tuneless humming, no giant slump shouldered sighs, no plucking at her fringes... Instead, she told me about the things she had done when she was my age, such as jazz dancing and going to the town parades. She talked about the boys she had liked and the clothes she had worn. I wondered what had happened to her, but I also realized how much nicer it was to have her talking to me. So far I had mostly heard her piano, and watching her stare off into space on the patio was distinctly spooky at times.
That evening, while I was eating black beans at the kitchen table, Mrs. Leboux's piano playing began. The tone was different today, not so cheerful but more thoughtful, slower. She played a melody over and over, as though trying to get it just right, and I fell into a daydream over my bowl.
I was sitting in a pretty park, under a giant oak tree in a dappled pool of sun, holding the hand of a curly haired boy with a few sprouts of new mustache. He was smiling at me as though we shared a secret. His blue suit was shiny in the sun and his shirt collar so white my pupils blazed. I laughed and took a sip of lemonade as a group of children, in a chain of held hands, crossed the boulevard to our side. A small bird made a shadow on the table and suddenly became a bowl of beans. I jerked a little and saw that I was still in the kitchen, holding one hand with the other, my food getting hard around the edges. The music downstairs had stopped.
The next morning, while Mama was putting my hair into a straight braid for school, I mentioned, "That Mrs. Leboux, she really plays some pretty piano tunes, doesn't she?"
"Does she keep you from studying? I can ask her to stop".
"No, Mama...I like it. I was just saying..." And I finished my toast.
That afternoon when I got home from school, Mrs. Leboux was waiting for me at the table outside with a cloth-covered, ratty-looking box. It was full of odd and musty little things that she wanted to show me: shiny, multi-colored shawls and yellow/white cotton gloves, little pieces of beaded collar lace and electric blue ostrich feathers. Everything was from her youth, but this little box was all there was of it. She remembered when she had worn the lace and the gloves, with whom she had been sitting, the conversations, the weather... I may have dozed a little while she talked, because I awoke to her voice sharply telling me it was time for her to go in. She slammed the door behind her.
That evening my right hand ached. I had written a history paper and thought it might be writer's cramp, but it felt as though I had shaken hands with a gorilla.
We couldn't get any channels on our TV, so I never watched it. Instead I lay on the couch, counting tiles and making pictures in my mind out of the water stains on the plaster walls. After eating that night, I lay in the living room, reading a magazine, pushing Chelize off the pages as I read. When Mrs. Leboux's piano sounded below me, the tune was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't name it, almost like a slow version of something I had once heard being played faster. I petted the cat and listened, staring at a water spot in the ceiling corner. A warm, heavy hand landed on my shoulder and I jumped. It was the curly haired young man that I had seen earlier, his mustache now black and fully grown, his face longer and sharper. He was wearing a shiny suit, a little short in the arms, and bidding me goodbye.
"Give me your hand for a minute, Little One", he said. Kissing my cheek, with his dark brown eyes looking directly into mine, he said he would be gone for a little while. A canvas bag was slung over his shoulder, the kind to carry on a bus trip.
"Don't worry; you'll see me again", he said, but I had my doubts. His leather shoes made a clopping sound on the floorboards as he walked out the door. A searing pain went through my shoulder where he had touched it, and I lunged off the couch. The cat was hanging from my sleeve, claws dug into my flesh. The piano downstairs was silent.
My mama asked about the pale pink handprint on my shoulder the next morning, while I was getting dressed in the bathroom.
"I thought you said the cat scratched you", she said.
"I must have slept on my hand, Mama," was all I could think to say.
Mrs. Leboux grew increasingly odd during that week. The next afternoon when I got home she was dressed for tea. She wore a large, black straw hat with iridescent blue feathers in a fan on one side, white gloves and a silken, fringed shawl. Her hair was especially black, and piled in a nest under her hat. The wrought iron table was covered with a piece of lace and set with her silver tea service, but with coffee inside the teapot. The silver platter was loaded with beignets from Cafe Du Monde. The greasy bag they had come in was in a ball on the ground and Chelize was batting it around furiously amongst the lizards. I thought of Alice in Wonderland, but didn't say so. She told me her brother Jacob was coming to visit her soon and so we should celebrate together. We ate beignets while she told me about the proper way to set a table, saying that her mother had taught her that when she was about my age.
"At twelve, you must begin to think about being a woman", she mentioned. I agreed, watching the powdered sugar accumulate on the fingertips of her gloves. She was wearing a big, clunky ring over them, on her right ring finger.
"Many things can happen when you are twelve", she said later, suddenly gathering the tea things from the table. Ducking her head and blinking, she lurched into her open doorway and disappeared inside, kicking the door shut behind her with a bang.
That evening I did not hear the piano until ten o'clock. I was already lying, hair damp, in my bed, the pinkish fog flowing onto my bed from the window. It was playing a single note, repeated loudly, then softly, then loudly again. I was combing out my hair by the light of a small opaque window, pulling the tangles out, one by one. A loud banging came suddenly from the bookshelf in the corner of the small, dark room. I felt the chair vibrate beneath me as a man ran heavily to me, saying in a rough whisper, "Get under the bed, Little One! Hurry...and be quiet". It was the boy, now grown, with deep furrows on his pale forehead. He pulled me by my hands and shoved me toward the bed. I dropped to the floor, rolling, and heard the loud blast of a taxi outside, laying on the horn to get the drunk who had called him to come out of the bar.
"I ain't waitin' all night!", a man's voice shouted, then silence. A few moments later, the clink of the gate at the end of patio, then my mama let herself into the house.
"Why, Honey, what are you doing under the bed? Why were you carrying on like that? I could hear you all the way down the alleyway...". Mama was rolling me toward her from under my bed, as she checked to see that all my parts were intact. I couldn't answer her. My hands were burning like fire and my tongue was dry. A bookshelf in the corner of the room was slowly closing into the wall, like a door.
Mama put me back to bed with a little cup of catnip tea and a Tylenol. I lay awake for hours, not thinking, listening to the sparrows singing, and hearing foggy taxi horns and people voices in the pinkish world outside my window. It was a sad and strange feeling, but I couldn't tell you why. When I finally fell asleep, I drifted into a dreamless fog and sank below the bottom of my consciousness.
The next morning while I was eating cinnamon toast and Mama was braiding my hair, she said, "Sweetie, I have to tell you something. It's gonna upset you."
I stopped chewing and waited.
"Last night, after I found you crying, I went down to talk to Mrs. Leboux, to see why she hadn't come to see about you, She didn't answer the door and I had a feeling, so I called the police". She hesitated a moment, planning her voice.
"They went in and found her under her bed. She was only 54, you know, but it looks like she had a heart attack and died."
I thought about last night and I knew how she had felt. I was sure of it. Then, something occurred to me:
"But, Mama, her brother is coming to visit soon!", I said. "She was all excited about it".
My mama got a sad and careful look on her face. "Honey, she didn't have any relatives left alive. She told me so, herself. She was the last one".
I thought I knew how Mrs. Leboux had felt about that, too. But I don't think, in the end, she had been disappointed. I could feel it in my very hands and that she had not been left without a visit. It may even be that she hadn't left alone.
The next day Mrs. Leboux's obituary was in the Times-Picayune. It read:
Mellya Leboux, nee Liebowitz, passed away of natural causes in her home at 814-B, Rue Royale, yesterday evening at midnight. She was born in Elzach am Breisgau, Germany, on August 26, 1929. On January 4, 1957, she married her husband, Aristide Leboux, an American Naval Officer, in a small ceremony in St. Jude's Cathedral in New Orleans, LA. They were happily married for 15 years, until his death. There were no children. Her father and mother, Ernst and Clara Liebowitz, and brother Jacob, died in separate concentration camps in Germany in 1941, when she was 12. She was removed to an Austrian orphanage after being found wandering the streets. There are no surviving family members. Services will be provided by the Helping Hands Society at Large Oak Crematory, New Orleans, LA.
