Chapter 28
Lord of the Flies
Lev lumbered off in his dark serge suit, past the saxophone-player as a passing freighter moaned a lonesome tone in harmony, beneath the afternoon sun sparkling its wake. I watched him as he crossed the trolley-tracks on his way to seek his friends, and then I followed him as far as the Café du Monde, where I found Theresa waiting.
The sun was starting to set on this crescent city, behind us over the maybe not-mighty-enough muddy river. But we were savoring our last hours of this visit to this earth. For all her faults, we love her.
“I have to tell you,” said Theresa, “About a conversation I had with someone the last time I was in New Orleans, for the dedication of that statue of me.”
I nodded, saying nothing, and Theresa began.
“There was a hurricane-warning. Everyone was asked to stay off the streets, and I was sitting in the common parlor of that little guesthouse on Esplanade Avenue where I’m leaving my baggage now, which I like because it borders the world beyond tourism here, and because of what it says about time. Its architecture is Creole, but simple enough to seem perhaps a modern copy. It pleases broadly.
“It was morning, and the coffee and pastries were out, and I was relaxing in a Louis XIV chair, feeling no need to be anywhere else, as I do right now. A woman entered the parlor, looked at some brochures on a table there, piled some pastries high on a plate, and poured herself a cup of coffee. She parked her plate and saucer on the table beside me, and sat down in the chair on the other side.
“’This is a beautiful old Victorian house,’ she said, ‘and so nicely period-appointed.’
“Aback, I didn’t say a word.
“’My husband was Italian,’ she went on, “But I’m more British in my taste. I go to England every year. My husband was a doctor. He died of cancer’
“’I am sorry for your loss,’ I answered. ’Traveling must help you in your grief.’
“’Oh’, she said. ‘It was long ago, and I don’t get to travel much. I have to work for a homeless-shelter to make ends meet. Family and friends mostly finance my travel.
“‘My children take most of my money,’ she added after a bite of Danish. ‘They’re old enough to support themselves. But they still depend a lot on me. They don’t like to work. They drive me crazy. Kids!’
“’What brings you to New Orleans?’ I had to ask.
“’Some friends, some relatives of my husband I used to work with, told me they were coming,’ she answered. ‘I told them someone where I work now used to live here and talks about it all the time, and they asked me if I’d like to come along.’
“’Did your friend live here long?’ I asked, wondering why not now.
“’He’s not my friend,’ she answered. ‘He’s one of the most disgusting people I’ve ever met, and we’re going to fire him when I get back. I think he might have said five years, working for some hotel, the Clarion maybe. Something like that.’
“’Do you know why he left?’ I asked her, wondering still more now.
“’Maybe he was fired here, too,’ she said. ‘He said he’d been bumming around the country for two years before he came to Boston. He told me once that he went there for the history. American history is all that’s there. I told him that.’
“’Yes,’ I answered. ‘The Pilgrims and the Puritans came from Europe and pretty much made America, after they got the Indians out of the way. I wonder how Martin Luther would have felt, had he known what he did for America.’
“’Exactly,’ she said, her mouth full of Danish. ‘You’re funny.’
“’Why are you firing this guy?’ I asked, now even more curious, and aback.
“’He thinks I’m a racist,’ she said, after swigging some coffee.
“’That’s ridiculous,’ she added. ‘I’m a knee-jerk liberal. I always vote Democrat. That bigot Bill voted for George Bush. He said he voted for Carter against Ford but voted for Reagan because Bush was his running mate. I told him I voted for Carter both times. I always vote Democrat. I’m not a bigot.’
“I didn’t answer. She had paused without eating or drinking anything. So I thought she might continue without prompting. I stood to get another cup of coffee.
“’Want some more coffee?’ I asked, pausing politely, as I now always try to do.
“’Yes,’ she said. ‘Please, and would you mind getting me some more pastries?’
“She held up her plate with a partly eaten doughnut still on it. I took the plate and filled it for her, piling it as highly as she had. After the two trips I needed to carry the two cups of coffee and the plate of pastry, I sat down again. After digging out the partly eaten doughnut and swallowing it, she did continue talking.
“’Me a racist. It’s ridiculous. He’s a Republican. He voted for Bush. He told me Lincoln was a Republican. I told him that, if Lincoln were alive today, he’d have voted for Clingon. He had no answer to that.’”
“Lev told me about a homeless-shelter in Boston,” I interrupted Theresa to ask. “Did she say its name?”
“L’Amore de Santa Clara,” answered Theresa. “For Claire.”
“Yup, that’s it,” I said. “Lev went barhopping with its finance-administrator.”
“Tell me how the stories match,” said Theresa, with a sigh.
“For a moment,” Theresa continued, “I listened to the wind and rain outside, thinking of walking down to the river to watch the wildness. But I felt a little like the wedding-guest buttonholed by the ancient mariner. So I sipped some coffee, and she swigged some and continued.
“’I like you people,’ she said. ‘I admire your rhythm. I love those little kids tap-dancing on Bourbon Street. We walked up there yesterday with umbrellas, and they were dancing in the rain. And I love your southern accents. I call it the voice of America. Me, a racist!’
“’Why does he think you are?’ I asked.
“’Well, he says it’s because of the way we treated a black receptionist. She wasn’t really a Negro, but she was black, darker than you. She was from Jamaica, and we treated her very well.
“’We gave her that job, answering the telephone. It was an important job, with board-members and counselors calling. I don’t know what any black people have to complain about in this country anymore. We gave you your freedom and let you work for us. And we take care of you at L’Amore de Santa Clara.
“’Bill’s crazy. When Mother Teresa died, right after Princess Diana died, I said in our staff dining room that I wasn’t sure Mother Teresa should be canonized but that I was pretty sure Diana should be, for all the traveling she did to raise awareness of the world’s troubles. Bill picked up his tray and left without finishing his lunch.”
“Yeah,” I said, interrupting again. “The finance-administrator was Billy the Kid’s ghost. Lev said he had a pretty good time barhopping with him and someone named Bob Hope. He said he’d likely be fired, for trying to restart the Lincoln County wars.”
“Makes sense to me,” said Theresa, nodding. “But wait ‘til you hear what this strange person said to me next. Interesting name, Bob Hope. Very nice name.”
“I think so, too,” I said, shrugging, and Theresa went on.
“’That’s what I’m talking about,’ that person said, ‘noblesse oblige. I don’t know where Mother Teresa came from, but Princess Diana was a princess. She didn’t have to do anything for you people or any other poor or sick people, but she traveled the world doing all she could for you. Mother Teresa just stayed in Calcutta, or Bangladesh, or wherever. This is the 21st century, after all. We need to get it right.
“’And there’s his stupid name, Billy Lee. I told him that stupid name shows breeding in the South or the rural Midwest. He’d told me he’s from some nowhere tiny town in Michigan called Coldwater, and he’s spent all that time down here. It’s no wonder he’s a Republican, and he says he’s not a Republican. He says he’s independent.
“’Can you believe that? He thinks there’s something wrong with what Clingon did with that floozy intern. I asked him whether he thinks the president of the United States should be held to a standard higher than the rest of us, and he said of course he did. And he said he would have voted for FDR but not for Truman and those bombs.
“’I told him Roosevelt had a mistress. I told him they all do, because that’s how politicians are, and you can’t change that. He said that the only thing Fits Jr. ever said that made sense to him was that, although things might not get perfect in a thousand years, we could start working at it now. I don’t remember Fits Jr. saying that.
“’It sounds like some kind of Chinese notion, like a journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step. Maybe Truman bombed those Japanese so we wouldn’t have to listen to Confucius. Billy Lee said Abraham Lincoln died to keep people from using the word “breeding” as I did. That’s got to be some kind of Zen Buddhist notion.’
“’Yes,’ I said when she paused for another bite of Danish. ‘Orientals do have a slanted outlook on life. You must have treated that Jamaican receptionist very well.’
“’It wasn’t how I treated her,’ she said after refilling her mouth and swallowing. ‘It was how our Republican executive secretary treated her. She, the secretary, was the only administrative assistant we had, and she couldn’t do everyone’s work. So, if anyone other than management asked her to do something, she’d excuse herself. With the appropriate explanations, of course. So they’d go to the receptionist.
“’What Billy Bob or Lee, or whatever he calls himself, complained about was that we didn’t give the receptionist flowers on Secretaries Day. I told him that it was a management decision that was made by the deputy director under my advice because we didn’t wish to upset the administrative-assistant. I thought that answered his question, but he apparently didn’t think so. He just kept picking away.’
“’What’s your job at that homeless-shelter,’ I interrupted to ask.
“’I’m the human-resources specialist,’ she answered looking at me.
“’Where does the funding come from?’ I now felt need to know.
“’Mostly from government contracts, but a lot from private donations.’
“’Do you know the demography of your private donors?’ I asked.
“’The single largest group is female senior-citizens, little old ladies.’
“When she said that, she looked at me again and smiled, with crumbs at the corners of her mouth. My desire to get out into the rain and wind and be washed of this was deepening by the minute. But I had to hear more of this story of philanthropy in the cradle of liberty. I hadn’t asked the most important question.
“’Did the receptionist ever complain?’ I asked.
“’Yes,’ answered this human-resources specialist, ‘but not about the flowers, and not about doing secretarial work while she was a receptionist, which I might have considered a somewhat legitimate complaint. I guess she wanted to be more important than she was. And we’d put her in such a nice place.
“’What she said was that the administrative-assistant was rude to her and always came back late from breaks or lunch and sometimes wasn’t around when it was time for the receptionist to begin her breaks. Part of their jobs was to relieve each other for lunch and breaks, but the administrative-assistant’s duties were more important than the receptionist’s, and sometimes took her away from her desk, and she was rude to everyone. As I said, she was a Republican.
“’Employees complained more about Billy Lee than the receptionist did about the administrative-assistant. We had a very nice girl working in funding-development, and she told Billy Lee about how George Bush was in cahoots with the Arabs and trying to ruin Alaska by drilling for oil there and how Republicans don’t care about a woman’s right to choose.
“’Billy Lee said the Bushes’ experience and connections in the oil-industry put them in a position to deal with the situation however it needed to be dealt with and that he thought children would choose to live if they had a choice and that women had the right to choose not to get pregnant and that people should take responsibility for their choices.
“’The poor girl got so upset that she came to me nearly in tears, to tell me what a chauvinist Billy Lee was. When I told Billy Lee he needed to be more careful, he said he’d been careful enough not to raise those subjects with the poor girl, but that he wouldn’t have a problem with her going somewhere out of there to screw things up.
“’When I asked him what he had against her, he said she didn’t do her job and was making an administrative mess that might take years to clean up. She quit a few weeks later, and now he’s got her replacement talking about messes she’s having to clean up. Well, maybe Billy Lee was right about that, but he should have been nicer.
“’He’s so insensitive. I was telling him about my allergies once, and he said he doesn’t have any. Everybody has allergies, but some people are too insensitive to know it. His idea of sensitivity is feeling sorry for my cat when I had her spayed. I felt sorry too, but I can’t have a bunch of little kittens around. I have feelings too, you know.
“’He heard me talking about my kids once. I was hungry and went into the staff lunchroom, and I heard him through the door saying I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself for my kids’ following my example. I teach my kids to be sensitive, sophisticated like me because I know you can’t get anywhere by saying what you think.
“’I know the problem is that they don’t have a father,’ she added. ‘So I don’t try to meddle with their lives. I try to leave them alone.’
“I was having a tough time with this conversation,” said Theresa. “I’d been trying to figure out whether this human-resources specialist knew what she was saying. But, at that point in this crazy conversation, I figured it out that she didn’t know what she was saying, because she didn’t care to. She was simply irresponsible.
“’So how did you handle the receptionist’s complaint?’ I interrupted, sick of her stupid self-pity, seeking some closure, door-slamming, on her.
“’We handled it as professionally as we could,’ she said, looking away from me and then straight at me, seeming suddenly bored then interested. ‘The deputy director and the director of administration and I discussed the problem and met with the administrative assistant and the receptionist in our main conference-room.’
“She paused for a bite of a doughnut and, still chewing it, continued.
“’The administrative assistant said she didn’t know what the receptionist was talking about, and we asked the receptionist to explain. The receptionist said she had already explained, and we asked her to explain for the administrative assistant. The receptionist got up and left the room, slamming the door behind her. Afterward, I told Billy Lee how unprofessionally she had responded to our efforts.
“’But we didn’t just drop it. The next Secretary’s Day we gave her flowers. We delivered them late, because I had to send them back several times because the florist wasn’t making them enough more subdued than the administrative-assistant’s as I had asked them to. The delivery would have been later, if I hadn’t given up and subdued it myself. I professionally pulled some flowers from the receptionist’s bouquet. Then I found a nicer vase for the administrative assistant.
“’But the receptionist did get flowers that year, and it proved that I was right all along. The day after the flowers arrived, the administrative assistant resigned, with one week’s notice. So, at the cost of an employee, we had solved all Billy Lee’s problems, we thought. But we were wrong again about him.
“’A few months later, he started complaining about how the deputy director was treating a black tenant in our transitional housing program, and that was after we paid a college professor more than $40,000 to train our staff to make recommendations for diversity in our workplace.
“’We paid the professor $250 per hour to hold meetings with our staff and help us set up a committee to continue to meet without him. I chaired the committee myself, and did everything I could to encourage participation. But the committee soon folded for lack of enthusiasm. I don’t know why.
“’Diversity? I even tried to get us to celebrate Jewish holidays! The executive director is Jewish, but even he didn’t participate. And, soon after, Billy Lee submitted a formal employee grievance accusing me and the deputy director of racial discrimination. That’s why we’re firing him.
“’One of his complaints was that we hadn’t implemented the professor’s recommendation of merit-based pay increases. I spent more than enough time on the diversity committee, and I earned my nickname for how much work I do. I don’t have time for an administrative load like that.
“Then he wanted to know why we eliminated two black persons’ positions and no white person’s when we needed to cut costs. Those people weren’t doing their jobs, and we have reasons for everything we do, anyway. We do very well what we do for our mission. We are, as I said, professionals.
“’And he’s ridiculous. We pointed out to him that nearly 40% of our 90 employees are minorities, including two caseworkers and our new administrative assistant. He asked what percentage of employees on antebellum plantations were minorities. What, in his weird world, does that have to do with it?
“’Billy Bob’s so stupid he doesn’t understand the social sensitivity of Woody Allen. He probably has no compassion for Michael Jackson or Peewee Herman. If he did, he’d know he has allergies, like everyone. How ungenteel.’
“Now it was time to cleanse myself of this,” said Theresa. “Whatever it was, antebellum residue or new-age sewage, I dearly needed to go for a walk in God’s wind and rain, wash myself of this dust, this crumb. But I had politely now to ask one more question, the question that measures audacity against shame.
“’What’s your name,’ I intrepidly asked.
“’Kate,’ she said. ‘It rhymes with plate. That’s my nickname, Kate Plate. People call me that because I work so hard, because I keep my plate full. You should see my desk at work, like a haystack. I don’t need a grievance on it.
“’But Billy Bob calls me a little dust pot, when he thinks I can’t hear him.
“’And that’s another crazy thing about that Billy Lee character. Our deputy director’s first name is Kerry, and our board chairman’s first name is King. So Billy Lee called us the KKK, as if a Democrat human-resources specialist and a master of social-work and a major Texaco-shareholder would be that kind of people. Kerry and I voted for the Clingons, not for that fascist family that’s trying to get back into the Whitehouse now. Billy Lee’s a Republican, like Strom Thurmond. Did I mention that?
“’But what can you expect from someone named Billy Bob. He has no class, the déclassé Appalachian hillbilly creep. He drinks beer; I drink merlot.
“’And he turned up at our annual fundraiser with a girl half his age dressed better than some of our donors, and the two of them drank Budweiser from the cash-bar while polite people were waiting for their dinner-wine. That was weeks ago, and people are still talking about it, about why a woman so young and beautiful would have anything to do with boring boorish old Billy Lee. He’s going to find out how fair life can be.’”
“’Well, Kate Plate,’ I said. ‘I’m going for a walk. This weather won’t keep me from the river. There’s nothing better than wind and rain to remind a person of power and peace. I pray you’ll find peace from your troubles.’
“’We tried to tolerate him,’ she said, hardly hearing. ‘But now we’re getting even. Who’s going to hire someone who’s been fired from a homeless-shelter named for Saint Clare? He’ll be homeless himself again soon, after his unemployment benefits run out and he can’t make his mortgage-payments.’
“’So you’ll teach him a lesson?’ I asked.
“’If he’ll learn it,’ she said. ‘But white trash never learn. They’re worse than you people. You’re not really going out there, are you?’
“I did go out, in the wind and rain, and I walked down to the levee, where you and I and Slavey and Oliver used to sit and talk of times to come, and I looked into that great muddy river as you told me our friend Lev did, as it kept carrying its thousand-miles of dust to the sea, and I hoped somehow the dust would settle, everywhere, sometime, at last. I could not but think of a line from a popular American song I heard with African rhythms: ‘The Mississippi delta was shining like a national guitar.’
“Paul Simon, in the sixties, sang against the war in Vietnam. Two decades later, that white-boy named for both founders of Roman Catholicism went to Africa to borrow the rhythm for that song he named for Elvis Presley’s home, Graceland. It’s a shame that life can’t all be like music, like Paul Simon and Hank Williams and Elvis Presley learning from other people’s music and making it their own. But some Africans and African Americans said Simon was stealing from them.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard that song, but I know you’ve seen that big green cast-iron plate down by the moonwalk, like the one at my bus-stop in Montgomery commemorating me and Hank Williams. The one by the levee commemorates LaSalle’s sallying here for the sun-king, and it’s in English on one side and in French on the other, back-to-back like Oliver and Slavey at Roncesvalles. We’ve made much of LaSalle’s trip many times ourselves this visit here, back and forth between Storyville and the Motor City. And we’ve done it more easily than they, flying as one can now here.
“Oh but I am telling you things you know. But, then, what if these Earthlings told themselves the things they must already know. Mr. Simon didn’t steal anything, any more than we stole the wind between here and Detroit. It’s a shame all life isn’t like music, with everyone owning it all at once, as much as they wish, and wholly.
“You know, my dear long-traveled friend, the weirdest thing about that person Kate Plate was that she seemed to believe she was a good person. At least Cauchon and Clingon were honest enough with themselves to know they were evil. I don’t think I’ve ever been as disgusted as I was with that Kate Plate.
“A homeless-shelter named for Sainte Claire!” Theresa exclaimed, her head bowed and shaking beneath her beautiful braided hair now gray with the time of Earth. “A human-resources specialist! Kate Plate, hypocrisy perfectly personified. How can Earth still have such people on it? How long, O Lord?
“You know, too” she tried to answer, “that it’s been forty years since I sat down on that bus in the birthplace of the most official effort to bigot this land of the free, in front of the Empire theatre where honky Hank Williams had entertained so well, singing of cheating hearts in mournful strains he’d learned from his black mentor.
“And it’s been forty generations since our friend Francis tried to teach these Earthlings that, if they befriend wolves, wolves will befriend, in return. And it’s been forty centuries since Oliver led those Earthlings out of Egypt and gave them those Ten Commandments to tell them how to keep such situations from recurring. And the sins keep being passed on and on.
“Forty years,” said Theresa. “Oliver learned what forty years is, wandering in that wilderness as the people kept missing the point. He told me that that’s why now he just does his part of the job and gets himself killed, rather than hang around as you and I have this trip to Earth.
“Earth,” she answered. “This earth. The killing beast of this earth is bigotry, and all it takes to kill the beast is to starve it of the hypocrisy that feeds it. That poet Keats, before dying fighting for a nation not his own, said it right and simply:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
“Yet and still, nobody on this Earth seems to know it, after all these millennia. Boston is the craziest place I know in this whole universe, for the vast contrast between what it claims to be and what it is. Besides calling itself the cradle of liberty, it named its capital hill after the reference in the Sermon on the Mount to a city on a hill as a beacon to all the world, while the actuality of Beacon Hill is to know it needs to hide beneath a bushel, or beneath a rock with slime and slugs. Boston is at least the capital of the hypocrisy of this country, if not of the hypocrisy of the universe.”
“I don’t know if I ever told you,” I said now. “But my first motive for joining Bob’s enterprise was to fight the hypocrisy of those crazy clingons.”
“Yes,” Theresa answered. “The Ku Klux Klan of the Thirteenth Galaxy. At least, in New Orleans, people don’t pretend not to be corrupt.”
“Meager recompense, don’t you think?” I asked her.
“It breaks my heart,” she answered, looking down.
So, Theresa and I sat alone in New Orleans near the end of our road here this time, eating beignets and drinking coffee with chicory at the Café du Monde as we gazed at the grand gold equestrian statue at the fork of streets in front, of the maid of the older Orleans Theresa had been so gloriously those seven centuries ago, as traffic passed on either side, the river behind us. From where we sat, we could see Molly’s and the French Market, the cathedral and the azaleas around the statue of Old Hickory. The projects weren’t getting much better. What does faith tell?
“I’m glad we’re going home,” said Theresa. “I miss Slavey and Oliver.”
“Me, too,” I said. “How do you think we’ve done this trip?”
“Alright, I think,” answered Theresa. “The future is bright, and your boy Quincy’s doing alright.”
“I’d ask you if you really think so, if I didn’t know you always say what you think! Do you think he has the focus?”
“He’s a little too prideful sometimes,” she answered. “And he wants too much to vindicate you, for your being voted out of office after you did so well for his species who voted you out. But yes, his focus is right and quite whole, and his heart is almost always in the right place, and that’s what’s most important. And he loves Laura.”
“Yes,” I answered. “Laura and Beatrice, what a pair. I’m no Dante, and he’s no Petrarch, but those two Earth-women are right for their part. ‘Inspirational’ is the word here, as you well know.”
“’Family values’ is another phrase here,” she answered. “There’s far too little of it here, with people preaching killing babies for no reason other than avoiding taking responsibility for a choice of theirs, and calling it the right to choose! How about the choice of the children?”
“And it’s bad on the other side also,” I said. “People preaching killing for vengeance while calling themselves conservative and Christian! How about conserving the possibility of redemption, the sanctity of life?”
“Well,” she said for Slavey. “Yasser and Ariel are setting a somewhat calm example. They’re old soldiers tired of war, trying to calm their factions to come to right. With yahoos like Netanyahu and Saddam Hussein out of the way, things might go more smoothly now. We must just keep hoping feeling grows faster than thinking.”
“Yeah,” I added for Oliver. “The fat-cats and pop-psychologists of these United States of America have no clue to the cause of that massacre on September 11.”
“Yes,” answered Theresa. “Vengeance is a vicious, vicious cycle.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Look what they did to you in Rouen. But you sang as you burned to ashes. You were so beautiful. You still are.”
She smiled and bowed her head. She always did that well, with her chin up like a young soldier. But then she frowned again.
“But, you know,” she said, “something terrifies me. What troubles me most about that Kate Plate is how old she is. If an adult falls so easily into the clingonism, what might the children of the me-generation do if Quincy sends them to war?
“I am terrified of the possibility that they might behave more badly than the people from whom they’re supposed to defend les autres. With what might they choose to fill their plates?”
“That terrifies me, too,” I said. “But it’s time for us to go. We have our rules, as you well know.”
“Terrorism!” she said. “How terrible!”