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

Chapter Six: Bienville School

69 C H A P T E R S I X BIENVILLE SCHOOL “RUTH, YOU KNOW THOSE FRIED POTATOES AREN’T GOOD FOR THE boys. I can see why they’re so fat.” The air—like the cooktop in the yellow Formica kitchen—was electric. Dad was in the house again for the first and last time since the separation. “Rodney, you used the boys to talk your way in here, but you can’t tell me what to do. I’ll cook what I want. If you care about the boys so much, why don’t you pay for their school?” The potatoes sputtered in the hot grease. Scrambled eggs with fresh French fries was one of Mom’s country favorites—and mine. She added salt and pepper and began to beat the dozen eggs she would pour over the frying potatoes. “They’re getting fat. I know what’s good for them. And if they love that school so much, you can send them.” “On the money you give me?” “You going to invite me to dinner? I miss home cooking.” “Not on your life.” After Dad left in 1958, Mom had stayed in her room crying for a short time. Then she did whatever she needed to do. At first, she made drapes. Our house on Seville Drive became a workplace as Mom crawled around on our parquet living room floor—pinning, hemming, and pleating drapes. She drew on what she had learned from her country upbringing in Happy Jack, basting hems and sewing thick buckram into heavy cloth to make BIENVILLE SCHOOL 70 pleats, stitching lead disks into the bottom hem to make them fall right. Then it was time to hang the drapes for her clients, all five foot two inches of her, screwdriver in hand, screws clamped between clenched lips, installing the rods. She complained now and again of her calloused knees and aching back and hands. Soon, the sewing morphed into a decorating business that thrived for a while, despite the fact that she didn’t have a natural gift for the visual. In her first act of home decorating, she covered our living room parquet floor with a broad expanse of emerald green thick-pile carpet. Perhaps Mom’s temporary success at the decorating business was simply an example of her soon-to-be-famous willpower. That same year, my new school—Bienville School—staged a Mardi Gras parade. Miss Vorbusch’s third grade class paraded as conquistadors. Mom sewed my costume of upholstery fabric so thick and shiny that it could have stopped arrows from those pesky Chitimacha Indians. Suitably appointed in conquistador leggings, chestplates, and helmets, we paraded around the block pulling our American Flyers as Mardi Gras floats, pleased with ourselves. 6.1 At Sam Barthe School, 1955. BIENVILLE SCHOOL 71 Our class had just gone to the new Union Passenger Terminal to visit the statue of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the founder of New Orleans, four times governor of Louisiana, and our school’s namesake. Bienville was French, not Spanish, but the statue had the same era breastplate and helmet, nobly held in the crook of one arm as the other arm planted the flag that seized the swampland in the crook of the Mississippi River in the name of the noble Duc d’Orléans. Humbled, admiring Indians knelt at Bienville’s statue-feet. Like Bienville, our class carried pennants on poles. I was convinced that, as conquistadors, we were the next best thing to explorers and noblemen. It was pretty grand to my eight-year-old eyes. Not long after that parade, a high fever laid me low and I, like the Maid of Orléans, was visited by “voices.” For the Catholic Encyclopedia the “supernatural character” of Joan’s voices “it would now be rash to question.” But for my very terrestrial mother, voices were a bother.At my bedside, the doctor made short shrift of the problem, attributing the voices to the high fever. But I was afraid and so was she. “Mom, I hear voices. Make them stop.” “No, you don’t.” “Mom, I hear voices.” “What do they say?” “I can’t tell. They just keep repeating something.” “Randy, go to sleep.You don’t hear anything.” Did I carry the Fertel gene? I wondered. And so did she. But this was clear: I experienced my parents...