The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir

Chapter Five: Happy Jack

53 C H A P T E R F I V E HAPPY JACK AS I GREW UP, WHEN SHE MENTIONED THEM AT ALL, MOM SPOKE always of perfect parents and a perfect family. Paw-Paw—Arthur Simpson Udstad—outsold every insurance salesman at National Life and Accident. He’d sit with potential customers in their cypress-framed houses up and down the river road drinking jelly jars of their thick coffee, roasted dark on the stove and syrupy with cane sugar.Always made the sale. The whole lower coast was his debit. He was so good the firm kept trimming his territory to even the playing field. Mom’s mother, Josephine, taught school, the best first-grade teacher Port Sulphur Elementary ever had. Her nickname in the community—Nan’ Jo’ from “nanaine” (godmother)—was a term of respect. Another nickname among the locals, gulook, referred to her fresh good looks. Light, bright, and sparkling, Jo’ cast no shadow. Everyone loved her. Nan’Jo’died in 1952, before I could really know her. Paw-Paw was a wiry old man with wispy white hair surrounding his bald pate. He taught me to net butterflies. We scrambled together through empty lots in the newly reclaimed backswamp between the city and Lake Pontchartrain to find the beautiful monarchs. To feed them, we stirred a nectar of honey and water. Holding the captured butterfly gently by the abdomen, Paw-Paw showed me the elegant brushworked powder on its wings.We watched the proboscis uncoil into the nectar and then watched the monarchs flutter against the wire screen at the glass-louvered back door on Seville Drive. HAPPY JACK 54 He taught me about eucalyptus trees, how the leaves were silver on one side, green on the other. He had recently planted a eucalyptus tree in the front yard of his house below the levee, a place where I loved to play. The tree was small, but taller than I. Because of Paw-Paw’s excitement, I longed to experience the beauty of the leaves as they swayed in the wind. I remember, too, Paw-Paw’s sweaty, back-stiffening work planting St.Augustine grass on the sandy lot surrounding our brand-new tract home. In those more frugal times before sod was bought in pallets, Paw-Paw planted single strands of that sturdy, wiry grass every foot or so, then watered and waited for the thick tendrils to multiply and grow together. Despite his elegant mien, he was a man of the country who’d lean over with a thumb to his nose to clear it. Mom used her country know-how to take care of Paw-Paw at the end when he was dying of cancer and came to live with us on Seville Drive. Nan’ Jo’ was long dead. Mom knew both the right thing to do and how to do it. She lifted him and washed him and catered to him with the energy I saw her apply again thirty years later when her brother, estranged from Aunt Helen, was dying in her house. Mom grew up a tomboy, determined never to be outdone by her big brother,Sig,three years her senior.She skipped two grades in Port Sulphur’s 5.1 Plaquemines Gothic: Arthur Simpson Udstad and Josephine (Nan’ Jo’) Jacomine Udstad. HAPPY JACK 55 one-room Rigaud Elementary School, learning, she always explained, by listening in on the grades ahead of her. By the time they moved to Port Sulphur School, she must have breathed down Sig’s neck. She always claimed she got her competitive spirit from her dad. Just tell me I can’t do something, and I will do everything in the world to do it. Even without running water or electricity, Mom always said, she never knew that her family was poor during the Depression. Their cypress house below the levee uninsulated, they got through the chilly wet winters with a fireplace in every room, comforters and pillows filled with duck down culled from the hunt, and with mattresses stuffed with moss that was taken out once a year, washed, and dried in the sun.“Winter nights, Sig, Ruth, and I,” cousin Audrey recalled in her ever-sweet memoir, Family Affairs,“would sit in front of a roaring fire and write stories that we would read to each other. Our faces almost got sunburnt facing the fire...