Midwesterners
HST’s pink scalp glistens in the steam bath of a New Orleans summer. From the pocket of his suit jacket, he extracts an immaculately folded handkerchief and dabs fiercely, lips tight with disapproval: of the heat, of a trashy flyer bobbing through the gutter in the wake of the three o’clock monsoon, of the excited knots of tourists and Greek sailors who converge on him periodically, babbling in incomprehensible tongues and waving colorful scraps of paper for his autograph.
“Like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant,” he whispers to me as he grins and signs, “One does it, they all gotta do it.”
Beside him Bess suffers stoically, her pleasant features stiff with practiced gentility, her sharp, intelligent eyes hooded under the wide brim of her summer hat. She is too much the lady to protest, but from time to time she glances in my direction: why don’t I do something? Delphi, less restrained, glares openly at me and stomps down the sidewalk to argue yet again with the maitre’d, ensconced in his air-cooled portal beyond the frosted glass doors.
But they are Midwesterners. They do not understand the rich dynamic at work here, the fine democratic principle which Orleanians such as I have absorbed almost from the cradle. No one—not tourists, not ex-Presidents, not the Good Lord Jesus himself—no one jumps the line at Galatoire’s.
*****
Darwinism. Just short of mayhem, the frosted glass doors at last are flung open. We do the Galatoire’s shuffle: a tentative lock step quickens into a stately double time and then and then, as the heat-crazed patrons begin to press and mutter, threatens an all out riot. The Trumans look alarmed (where is the damn Secret Service when you really need them?), but not to worry. This, as the boys at the Rand Corporation are fond of saying, is my peculiar area of expertise. I have come here from a time when the waiter stacked thick phone directories on the cane seat of my chair so I could see the table, from a time when Léon Galatoire—old Léon himself—reached across my grandfather’s shoulder to take my tiny hand in his great brown paw.
Hesitation kills. With athleticism sharpened by long experience, I shoulder aside an arthritic elderly gentleman who is slowing the line in front of us, and race for the prize table—left rear, along the mirrored wall. I am victorious; the day is mine. We dispose ourselves thusly: HST, the consummate politician, sits with his back to the bank of mirrors—in plain sight of the citizens, yet buffered from their grasping reach. Bess, the politician’s wife, takes her seat across from him, facing pointedly away from the rest of the room. Delphie and I form the bookends: she to the President’s right, I to his left.
In the magnificently chilled air, stirred gently by the ceiling fans, the President begins to revive. The sweaty handkerchief disappears; the very seersucker of his suit jacket seems to unwilt, and to take on new life. A mustachioed waiter appears from nowhere, bearing a generous splash of Kentucky bourbon in a short glass, over a lovely bed of cracked ice. No one has asked this of him; they just seem to know these things here.
*****
Antecedents: It is said that Orleanians cherish their family connections, but we are as nothing compared to these Midwesterners. We Orleanians are pulled hither and to by a thousand pretty diversions: let a tinselly parade pass us, even a decent dinner, and we are gone. Only these Midwesterners, flame-keepers of the farm and homestead, poring over their family Bibles through the black prairie winters—only these could muster the staying power to nurture the tenuous linkage between Harry S. Truman, former President of the United States of America, and Delphinia Dickerman, private citizen, late of Missouri.
Back at the firm, in the florid Napoleonic language of the Civil Code, we would speak of “degrees of consanguinity”, and draw little lines to trace the connection from parent to child, from brother to sister to nephew. The diagram for these two would resemble one of those English hedge mazes, or the work of a particularly industrious spider. Harry S. Truman. Delphie Dickerman. Second (or is it third?) cousins, twice removed. And I, Walker Wilder, by special proxy as escort to Miss Dickerman, here to witness the meeting of the kindred in this far-away venue.
“You can come, I suppose,” she told me in her own gracious manner, peering across the stacks of research monographs and coffee-stained agricultural pamphlets that littered every available surface of her shabby government office. “Come. But try not to make a goddamn fool of yourself.”
*****
The mustachioed waiter reappears, bearing a platter stacked high with covered metal dishes. “Shrimp bisque, Mr. President,” he says as he drops the steaming liquid dead center into our gleaming white china, “an old Creole standard.” The President looks skeptically at his portion. The shrimp balls, irregularly formed spheres of chopped shrimp and spiced breading, float lumpishly on the pink surface of the bisque. He prods one gingerly with the back of his soup spoon, Looking up at his wife, he mouths a single word, scatological, accompanied by a long, low wheezing chuckle. She shushes him. Delphie leans back in her chair, laughing, and lights up another Pall-Mall.
They are deep in discussion of various horrific plant pathologies. The President, old farmer that he is, is like Delphie an enthusiast. “Stewart’s Wilt,” he reminisces fondly, ladling a spoon of hot bisque to his lips, “now that was a ripe bugger. Wiped out half our Golden Bantam in the summer of 11—ears that didn’t wilt oozed yellow, smelled like a dead cat when you stripped the leaves down.”
“Bacteria,” Delphie says, nodding sagely. “From corn flea beetles. We nuke em now with emulsion DDT or streptomycin just as the shoots come out of the ground. Or better yet, use a resistant hybrid.” They sit quietly for a moment, reflecting upon the triumphs of modern applied science. Consanguinity.
Mrs. Truman turns to me with the hostess’s instinctive need to include all parties in the discussion. “What do you do, Mr. Wilder?” she inquires, fixing me with those deep-set eyes.
“I’m a lawyer,” I tell her. “Trusts, successions. In a firm here in town.”
“Oh,” she says, not unkindly.
Oh. For my own appetizer, I have selected Galatoire’s incomparable turtle soup. Now, upon reflection, I pick up the little silver pitcher of sherry that the waiter has left by the side of my soup dish, and pour in an extra two fingers for good measure.
*****
Attraction. Who can begin to explain it? I met her late one night at the Cotton Club, out in the Parish, past the juke joints and the gambling halls. I was there to witness the Rocking Horse Races, a bizarre ritual in which grown men and women propel themselves across the room on oversized wooden horses for bottles of cheap champagne. As the victors howled and doused each other with arcs of sticky pink spray, I noticed a girl—a scrawny, sharp-angled girl, sitting all alone under an improbable mop of chestnut hair, down at the end of the bar. With the skill of a thousand road trips, I approached her, extracted vital information. Delphie Dickerman. Twenty-seven. BS, agronomy, Missouri, 1953. GS-14, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.
“We’re doubles," I told her. “We’re perfect for each other.”
“What?” she asked.
“Walker Wilder. Delphie Dickerman. Double D, Double W. Perfect.” It was the kind of sugary opening that had lured coeds from Mary Baldwin to Sweet Briar, from Newcomb to Mobile College.
She looked at me, amused, unaffected, and wafted a blue cloud of Pall-Mall in my direction. And began to talk. Oh, how she talked! It is said that Midwesterners are taciturn, but those who say it have not experienced the Midwestern tongue in full flood tide, under a pleasant rain of alcohol, when the pins on the gates have all been lifted. She lectured me on the degraded fibre of the Louisiana male, caused, no doubt, by the shockingly racist and corrupt nature of our social structure. On the neglected goodness and simple dignity of old people. I sat humbled, nursing Cuba Libres, and watching her lips move ceaselessly as she talked and smoked. Her lips were very red, yet without the benefit of apparent lipstick. I am very good at spotting these things. I sat watching her red lips, drinking Cuba Libres, and pondering this conundrum.
“Hey,” she snarled. “What are you looking at?”
“Marry me,” I begged her drunkenly. “Save me from my sordid existence.”
She studied me for some moments, and actually seemed to give thought to the proposition. “Move on,” she said at last, not unkindly. “Move on. Pursue other options.”
*****
A couple of Regular Democratic powers approach the table, beaming and bearing effusive greetings (“Itzahonnatameetcha, MistaPresidunt”) in the unmistakable Brooklynese patois of the true New Orleans pol. Truman rises and glad-hands them for a minute, then turns them over to Bess, who puts on her game face and accepts more of the same. Me they ignore completely.
“Punk,” I can hear them thinking. Another punk Uptown lawyer.
My entrée arrives: a slender filet of pompano almandine, with a dribble of buttery Meunière sauce across the crunchy surface. The President looks askance at such a sissified selection. He and Mrs. Truman are laboring over the Trout Marguery—great slabs of fresh Gulf trout topped with a small mountain of jumbo shrimp and mushrooms, embedded in a casing of Hollandaise so thick and clotted as to stop a jackhammer.
“Punk,” I can hear him thinking, as he stares owlishly at my dinner through his famous glasses. Another punk lawyer.
Back at the firm, old Mr. Lapyere has given me a list of topics suitable for dinner conversation with a former President. “Do us proud, my boy,” he said to me this morning in the elevator, touching his wizened fingers to the rim of his summer boater—a natty haberdasher’s flourish that Truman might appreciate. I suspect that the list is not his alone, but a concerted afternoon’s effort by the entire partnership: twenty-five brilliant minds, fifty man-hours of precious billable time all geared to ensuring that I, Walker Wilder, their trusted associate, not make a goddamn fool of myself.
Now, feeling the need for a quick recovery, I waft one of these conversational jewels in HST’s direction. Vice President Nixon has spent the week traipsing around the Soviet Union, kicking the tires on Communist tractors, jawing with Khrushchev about the laissez faire glories of geodesic domes and Pepsi-Cola. Just last night the evening news brought us the startling image of Mrs. Nixon, delicate cheekbones aflame with embarrassment, dancing in a circle of red-kerchiefed Young Pioneers in a leafy glade somewhere outside of Moscow. I prod Truman for his observations.
Alas: for all their concentrated brainpower, the political savvy of the partnership appears to be on a level with mine—that is to say, nil. In Nixon, I fear, we have stumbled upon HST’s bête noire.
“Young man,” he says severely, setting down his filigreed dinner fork. “We don’t talk about that fellow. Not now. Not ever.” His lips winch so tight that white blotches spread out about the edges. Across the table, Delphie snubs out a Pall-Mall and regards me with disgust.
HST simmers a long moment, then boils over again. “It’s disgraceful,” he says to his wife. “Just like that fellow. Arguing in public with that lunkhead. Dragging that poor woman across Russia like a trick pony.” As the President pops and sputters, I am amazed to see Bess turn to me and, just out of earshot, give me a slow, broad, unmistakable Missouri wink.
I begin to warm to them.
*****
Vocation. She works in a warren of dim cubbyholes in the attic of the massive old Customhouse, on the fringes of the French Quarter. She enjoys the irony—a USDA Field Agent in one of the most pervasively urban districts in the country—but finds the work less than taxing. Once or twice a month she ambles down to the docks to inspect a dubious shipment of Latin American fruit (“Tarantulas,” she growls delightedly, “rip your goddamn ears off!”), but for the most part her job consists of answering routine horticultural inquires from we, the aspiring public. This she manages (“What? You didn’t know that asplenium platyneruron requires high alkalinity?”) with as much tact and good humor as her innately sweet composition allows her to muster.
Occasionally she forays out into the city to pay a house call. This is especially true if the seeker of information is, shall we say, of the elderly persuasion; she collects old people as others might collect Meissen china. They remind her, I believe, of her childhood—of the innumerable grandparents, great aunts, octogenarian cousins, and other tottering clansfolk that she grew up among, in the rolling hills along the Iowa border.
Very occasionally—when she permits it—I sneak out of my office and join her on these expeditions. I have spent long hours on shady patios in Marigny or down in Gentilly, perched among the sleeping cats and potting tools, listening to some ancient worthy prattle on about her floribundas. Delphie sits raptly, chin cradled atop her fist.
“You don’t have to stay, you know,” she tells me. She worries about me, about my manifest lack of can-do spirit and ambition.
“I understand,” I reply. A cat turns over in a patch of bright sunlight, flexing its paws luxuriously. The ancient one lisps out a rambling anecdote about a cat that got stuck in her prize hydrangeas—back in thirty-nine, it was, or was it twenty-six? When that nice Mr. Harding was President.
“Don’t you have some work to do?” Delphie asks me pointedly.
Indeed I do.
*****
The late afternoon light is failing rapidly beyond the frosted glass doors. Now, as the tourists bolt the last of their suppers and dash out to seek the pleasures of Bourbon Street—now is the hour of the locals. There is much table-hopping, much neighborly porch-sitting and visiting back and forth. It is a temporary village, really, a Brigadoon, all under the benevolent administration of young Galatoire, the Mayor, and his coolly competent staff of black-tuxedoed assistants.
Bess (aided, perhaps, by the lubricative properties of chilled Kentucky bourbon) is getting thoroughly into the spirit of the occasion. She is sitting with her chair pushed far back, discussing pennant prospects for the Orioles with a sporting group of middle-aged ladies at the table behind her. She spews out baseball statistics like an IBM calculating machine.
She interests me greatly. I can’t help thinking that beneath the Victorian reserve, the accumulated crust of political wifery and Former First Ladydom, there pulses a freer spirit altogether. Perhaps I should propose a ramble of a different sort. To the Gunga Den, perhaps, a few blocks down Bourbon, where Linda Brigette, the Cupid Doll, writhes out her Exotic Interpretations at nine and eleven nightly. Or even deeper into the Quarter, to the dank little holes near Esplanade: the kind of joints where vice cops plot and murmur with the B-girls in the dark corners, where slender, oddly pretty young men eye and jostle each other along the narrow stairways, where disheveled society girls dance glassy-eyed atop the pool tables.
Enough, enough. Shocking to have such thoughts about a grandmother, a silver-haired national icon. I turn away in search of more wholesome vistas. Delphie, lover of beef, true child of the nation’s heartland, has been working her way methodically through the steak au poivre. Now, having scraped the last remnants of gelatinous Cognac sauce from the edges of her plate, she sprawls gracelessly back into her chair, rolls her eyes heavenward, and issues a long, deep, blissful sigh. The Delphie seal of approval.
*****
Horticulture. She lives in Westwego, across the river, in a district where truck farms and ramshackle livestock pens nestle cheek to jowl with the heavy brick stacks of the chemical plants. Here she satisfies her need for space and light by keeping a garden—but what an inadequate term, this! Tomatoes as big as softballs. Corn hybrids so fiercely resistant that any sensible corn beetle would flee screaming in terror. It is her acre and a half of Paradise, her one-woman Agricultural Research Station.
Here I sit cross-legged in the dirt on a Sunday afternoon, looking on warily as a phalanx of warlike iridescent insects approaches, drawn up in loose battle formation. Just as I extend my palms in tribute and prepare to sue for terms, Delphie suddenly tackles me from behind. Her unkempt chestnut hair sprays joyously across my face; her cheek is hot and moist against my neck.
“Ooh,” I moan, mocking one of her little Midwesternisms, “that makes me just so—horny!”
For a lovely heartbeat, she hugs me even more tightly. Then, with a final excruciating squeeze (the strength in those wiry arms!) she releases me.
“Here,” she growls, dropping an evil-looking cylinder of insecticide into my lap, “make yourself useful.”
Oh, yes, she is a growler.
*****
Satiety. We are stuffed beyond human endurance. Dessert is an impossibility. Our mustachioed waiter knows this, of course, but clever showman that he is, he also knows the value of the big finishing number. On a venerable creaking cart he wheels out the flambé bowl, the wicked chicory coffee, blacker than death, and with the fussiness of a scrub nurse he lays out the implements for Café Brûlot.
Bess, by Missouri standards, is become positively giddy. Now, with a conspiratorial finger crooked just below her lips, she leans in towards Delphie with a question that has obviously been on her mind all night.
“So,” she whispers confidentially—and quite audibly—“is Mr. Wilder your young…?” She halts—embarrassed at her own brashness. “That is to say, are you and he…?”
“Yes,” I answer.
Delphie snorts.
Truman instantly sizes up the situation. “Young man,” he tells me expansively, “what you got to have is staying power.”
Staying power?
“Tell you a story,” he continues. “When I first met the Boss here,” pointing to Bess, “She was a town girl, and I was just a nearsighted little country fella. She didn’t think I was worth the hind end of a jackass, and as for her family—why, they didn’t think that much of me. But I had staying power. Stayed with her through school, through some damned bad years trying to run the farm.”
He breaks off, looking over at Bess as if expecting a scolding. But she just sits, regarding him steadily.
“Stayed through a war, a World War. And then, when I came home in 1918—when I came up that walk in my uniform, why, there was the prettiest girl in the world, waiting on the steps to marry me.”
Bess looks at him. Missouri Mule,” she says fondly.
The waiter bends over the flambé bowl with a lit taper. A bright blue flame sparks, runs rapidly around the edges, then spreads until it engulfs the inky surface of the Brûlot. We sit in silence, the four of us, staring into the blue flames. I do not know what Delphie is thinking, but I am thinking of a war, a World War. And of a doughty little country man, almost at middle age, coming home in faded puttees and government-issue spectacles. And of the prettiest girl in the world, waiting on the steps to marry him.
*****
Staying power. Our work is done here. It is time to depart. Rising, we bid farewell to our friends, our temporary neighbors. Truman joshes with the mustachioed waiter, shakes hands respectfully with His Honor the Mayor, latest scion of the Galatoires. As the maitre’d pulls back the frosted glass doors, the humid heat hits us, actually knocks us back, as if a steaming blanket had been snapped into our faces.
Outside, the hot night is alive with music and loud voices. Once more the tourists swarm and ogle, but we ignore them. Bess takes the President’s arm as we amble across Bourbon. At the Sho-Bar, across the street, they pause to examine a series of photographs depicting the artistic stylings of one Candy Bar, making her exclusive return appearance for One Week Only. HST lets out one of his low wheezing chuckles. Bess does her best to appear scandalized.
Delphie looks great tonight. Her chestnut hair glistens, every strand in place for once under the little silk pillbox that she has donned. Her legs (actual nylons, no runs!) are tanned and lovely beneath the hem of her sleeveless summer sheath.
Overcome by sudden reckless impulse, I stop, and in the midst of the swarming mob of tourists, I kiss her. She looks surprised. She smells wonderful—of fresh shampoo, of Cognac and Shalimar. What is it I love so about her—this snarler, this growler, this odd stick girl from the green farmlands?
“Marry me,” I whisper fiercely. “Save me from my sordid existence.”
“Move on,” she replies, not untenderly. “Pursue other options.” Missouri Mule. But for a moment, just for a moment, she fits her thin brown arm about my waist, and mine about hers. Thus joined, we trail down Bourbon Street in the wake of our elders, in contented pursuit of the tinkling Dixieland that seems to pour from every open doorway.