Chapter One Wherein Felicity Le Jeune, a young native of the city of New Orleans, findings herself at a crossroads of life, seeks solace from the Virgin As Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec, ninety-six years old, dozed like a wilted sprig of mint on her deathbed, her granddaughter, Felicity Odille Le Jeune, waited impatiently for the end, wondering where on earth the old woman had found so much green chiffon to pass away in. Felicity also wondered if she should attempt to wake Grandmère, to give her a message to carry to God. Felicity's spiky short hair, baggy clothes, pierced nostril, and eight-hole black work boots were the manifestations of the "be more manly every day" discipline she'd practiced for years. The goal of the regimen was to achieve maximum teenage boyishness by the time she turned thirty, and to maintain it indefinitely, or until the angel now hovering so patiently over Grandmère came to take her, too. Poor Grandmère. How she had worried about proper attire, clean undergarments, correct posture, and myriad other Victorian details. For all Felicity knew, her grandmother Le Bec was the repository of the last complete set of nineteenth-century manners to exist on the planet; this was perhaps why, in her dying hour, she did not recognize the granddaughter who in comportment and manner of dress was the perfect denial of her life's work. Felicity clicked the stud in her tongue several times against the back of her teeth. It sounded like typing. Christmas Muzak poured out of the staticky speaker on the wall, the management of Charity Hospital having apparently decided, like the rest of America, that Christmas began the day after Thanksgiving. From a bed behind a ratty curtain, an invisible patient coughed. Patients in every room started coughing at once, as if linked by a pull chain. The machine registering her grandmother's increasingly feeble life signs pinged three times in a row. A glassy brown eye rolled upward, away from Felicity. Grandmère was awake. "Is it Christmas?" the old woman asked. "No, Grandmère. It's only the fourth of December." The glassy brown eye focused briefly on the shape by the bed. "Doctor," she asked Felicity, "has Reverend Mullin arrived yet?" Reverend Mullin! The hound of hell! Felicity sometimes thought of Mullin as a dog yapping at her heels; at other times she saw him as a snake emerging from under her pillow just as she was about to fall asleep. She had been only thirteen when Grandmère had the dream that had bound her to Mullin--and ended Felicity's childhood. The night before Easter 1985, Grandmère had dreamed that Jesus himself appeared to her and ordered her to dispense with the paraphernalia of the popes and leave the Catholic Church. She found herself kneeling in a pasture, and his body, emanating light, filled the entire horizon. His index finger pointed to a huge television that rested between two mountains. The face of an angry man was on the screen, and written in black letters under the face were the words THE MINISTRY OF THE UTMOST GOD'S TEMPLE, 15600 VETERANS BOULEVARD, METAIRIE, LOUISIANA, JEREMY "ELVIS" MULLIN, PASTOR, TELEPHONE 999-9999. " Mullin is your only hope, Marie-Frances, and the hope of your spawn! " thundered Jesus, even as the mountains crumbled, leaving only the TV. Scared to death of losing her soul, Grandmère pleaded in vain with the raging Savior. Begging for mercy, she recalled her devout childhood, her mother's faith, the baptisms of her children, her pilgrimage to Medjugorje with a busload of white people from Chalmette, and the Carmelite convent where her virtuous great-great-grandmère had been raised. (She still had in a trunk the lacy tear-stained handkerchiefs into which her ancestress had poured her grief at being shut away in the convent by her own mother, the light-skinned mistress of a white French Creole aristocrat.) But Jesus was stern, unequivocal, and above all, specific. Broaching no dissent, he commanded her by name: " Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec, you must be born again, or you shall never see the Kingdom of God ." A spiral gust of wind sprang out of the numbers on television, and Grandmère rambled like a leaf back into her bed. Next day they drove out to a suburb that no one in their family would have admitted was part of New Orleans, to partake in the barbarian Baptist rites. "The Reverend Mullin," the old woman insisted. "Where is he, Doctor? Is he here yet?" The glassy eye rolled around like a marble. "Not yet, Grandmère. I'm Felicity, remember? I want you to take a message to God." The old woman's eye focused on her for a stem second. "I have to be light before Jesus. I can't be going up there laden with doctor's notes." "I'm not the doctor, Grandmère. It's Felicity. Your daughter Eliza was my mother; she ran away with a trumpet player to New York. You raised me, remember?" The bleary eye closed, but Felicity persisted. "Felicity, whose happy childhood you sabotaged with rules and regulations, whose adolescence you thwarted with visions of hell, and whose young womanhood you fucked up by giving away the only money that ever came your way. Felicity. Fe-li-ci-ty." Felicity bit hard on her lower lip. She was so angry it was all she could do to keep herself from karate-kicking one of Charity's long-suffering walls. She remembered holding tight her grandmother's hand, as they sat squeezed in a mass of fluttering souls sweating profusely in their Sunday best. Mullin's cologne wafted down from the pulpit like an ill wind. "Feel the Spirit," whispered Grandmère, and Felicity imagined that the Spirit had to be the reverend's cologne. It flowed from his outstretched palms as his voice thundered down on them: "They say that we spend too much money on television! They say one hundred million dollars a year is too much to spend on spreading the Word of the Lord! When that miscegenated freak, Prince, makes one hundred and thirty million! It's Friday in the world, but Sunday is coming! Jesus said, `I've come to take away your sins!' Verily, brothers and sisters, I say! Whenever I look up to that TV camera I see my man tellin' me: `Take it all away, Jeremy!' and truly it's Friday in the world, but Sunday is coming!" It so happened that Prince, soon to be the graphic formerly known as Prince, was at the time Felicity's favorite person in the whole world. She wasn't sure what "miscegenated" meant, but she suspected it had something to do with color. People all around them swooned and fell. A blind woman lifted her tear-streaked face to the TV camera and called on America to watch her see. The snow-bright girls in the choir lifted up on the wings of a heart-ripping "Hallelujah!" and floated on the Spirit-scented air! All but one, that is: a disgruntled angel in the first row who tapped impatiently with her foot in the direction of the preacher and scratched her neck with cherry red fingernails. Maybe she loved Prince, too. In the parking lot after the service, surrounded by pickup trucks with guns in their gun racks, Grandmère told Felicity that God was both colorblind and considerate enough to have made much blacker people than Prince and themselves. She said that Felicity was a lucky girl. God had also seen to it that all those rednecks in the pickups praised the Lord instead of hunting her and her Prince down. Felicity, who had always thought of herself as Creole, not black, got an odd sensation in the pit of her stomach. She did not like Reverend Mullin at all. Later, she found out that Mullin's God and the hunting of blacks were not mutually exclusive. One of the reverend's faithful sat on Angola's death row, drafting another appeal to the Supreme Court. He'd killed two black men because the voice of God told him to. The upcoming race war, he wrote, would prove he was right. "Damn it, old woman. I said I got a message for you to take to God!" Felicity was angry, but she also felt guilty. She'd been told that Charity Hospital, Huey Long's legacy to Louisiana's poor, was filled to the rafters with the dying of the city. Why they had all decided to leave their earthly existence this very afternoon of Saturday, December 4, 1999, in the very last month of the second Christian millennium, was a mystery to Felicity, but maybe they knew something she didn't. Maybe she could persuade another poor soul to take her message to God. She hoped that her saying "damn" would not preclude delivery. "One last time, Grandmère, are you hearing me?" The old woman didn't move. Well, that's just like her. Even dying, the woman was proper and hard. No matter. Felicity would give her the message anyway, and she would have no choice but to take it with her. Saying anything to her now was like pinning a note to her departing soul. There was no time left to unpin it. "Tell God," she whispered, "to grant me an orgasm." There was a commotion in the hall outside the hospital room, and Felicity knew that the devil had arrived. Reverend Jeremy "Elvis' Mullin, the great poo-bah of the United Thieves of Love, the horned and hooved one who had stolen Grandmère's soul, barged into the room. Doctors and nurses trailed behind him with notepads, asking him for autographs. Mullin was a celebrity. "Fuck you, hypocrite and thief," she muttered as Mullin approached the dying woman's bed. "You stole Grandmère from me, you slimy bag of shit. You stole her Catholic soul from the church and from her mother and all my ancestors. Hell isn't big enough for all the pliers and drills reserved for your torment. You'll go to Catholic hell for sending Grandmère to Baptist heaven." Felicity shut her eyes so as not to look at the tight-panted, leather-jacketed, slick-haired reptile, but she could still smell him. His expensive cologne--Jurassic--barely masked his sweaty pelt and slinking scales. Felicity felt herself shoved aside--Mullin displaced people by sheer presence. She was forced to look at him: a knobby man with an oversized silver cross strung about his thick neck. His manicured hands were soft and pudgy; Felicity imagined them crossed behind his back while she locked a pair of handcuffs too tightly around his wrists. Mullin knelt beside Grandmère's bed, and taking the silver cross from around his neck, held it near the tiny wrinkled fig that was her face. "Jesus waits for you, woman! He is beaming down his welcome on you. Lord Jesus, take Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec into your arms and take her soul to your keeping!" It was a command, rendered forcefully enough to make the whole hospital room shake. Even Felicity, enjoying the fantasy of dragging the cuffed minister on his knees through the mud, felt the power of his performance. She looked out the hospital window and saw a fat, coffin-shaped cloud slither over the Mississippi River. She knew that it was filled with all the souls leaving the city of New Orleans that very minute, and it was just waiting to pick up Grandmère's. Indeed, the cloud made directly for the hospital, and for a moment the view turned white. Then the cloud, with Grandmère's soul aboard, took off for the river again. Felicity felt another hole opening inside her, adding itself to the others: her father, Mama, Miles ... She was as full of holes as she could be, like a piece of wormy wood, or a golf course, or an aborted flute. These were her images; she knew them well. She felt empty and holey and less substantial than the green sprig of the century-old corpse in front of her. "Take me too, Lord," she whispered. "Fill me up and make me whole, even if you have to kill me." "What was that, daughter?" inquired Mullin unctuously, wiping the cross on his silk sleeve before hanging it back around his neck. "Can I comfort you?" "Not on your life, motherfucker!" Felicity replied crisply. Felicity left the room, shutting the door behind her in what she hoped was a dignified exit, and nearly knocked over a janitor angrily mopping the corridor. "It's like goddam Saigon in 'seventy-three," he muttered. "Everybody pushin' and shovin' to take the last choppers outta hell. And me gonna do all the mopping!" She needed to think. The Tulane entrance to Charity Hospital was a circus: mothers with coughing children clamored to be admitted; a man with a flowering wound wrapped in a T-shirt around his arm staggered right past her; two wheelchairs collided; a gaunt patient in yellow pajamas was leaning on her walker biting into a half-peeled orange; a junkie was throwing up on the steps. When Felicity gained the street, she saw an old toothless woman sitting on top of a broken TV looking at her gnarled bare feet. "These feet," she said to Felicity, "walked they whole life." Felicity nodded. So had her Grandmère's. The old woman had walked everywhere, disdaining streetcars and buses. It was drizzling by the time Felicity got to Basin Street. She turned onto North Rampart. Try as she might she couldn't get Mullin out of her mind. He sat there at a crucial intersection of their lives, scorching the past with his flaming yellow eyes. After her dream, Grandmère started cleaning house. The next Sunday, when Felicity would have normally put on her crisp white dress and her black patent leather shoes for morning Mass, she found neither in her closet. Missing too was the picture of Saint Cecily wrapped in her hair above the dresser. Gone from the parlor were the seven lithographs of angels, the holy water from Lourdes vase, the cherrywood rosary hanging over the sofa, the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the autographed picture of Father Hannan. But worse things were in store for her yet. Less than three weeks after they started being Baptists, Grandmère won the lottery--$2.1 million. Felicity, still only a pubescent sprout, had just become aware that the poverty they lived in made it impossible for her to buy clothes and CDs and go to the movies like her friends. When Grandmère announced the winning numbers, Felicity had nearly fainted from happiness. There was a pounding in her ears: To the Mall! To the Mall! To the Mall! To this day she knew the numbers by heart: 363-54-2122. She had written them at the top of her diary, a yellow book with a lock that she still had somewhere. Next day, Reverend Mullin preached against the lottery and said that it was "the devil's money." Grandmère prayed for guidance. Monday morning she tore up the lottery ticket. After she tore up the lottery ticket, she tore up everything of sentimental value in the house, including the photo albums containing the only pictures of Felicity's mother and one picture of her dad in uniform. Felicity had often looked at her pretty mom standing under a big oak in City Park and tried to imagine herself inside her tummy. But now that picture was gone, except inside her head. Felicity couldn't actually remember Grandmère tearing up the lottery ticket. That is what Grandmère had told her, and she had imagined the scene in such vivid detail. Felicity stopped dead in her tracks and leaned against the whitewashed wall of Saint Louis Cemetery. What if Grandmère hadn't actually torn the ticket but given it to Mullin instead? She closed her eyes and saw again the smug face of the evangelist. It was possible! When she opened her eyes, two fat tourists, big guts spilling out of their T-shirts, were breathing beer on her. One of the T-shirts displayed pairs of breasts with the captions Figs, Melons, Pears . The other tourist was sipping from a straw that curled behind his ear from a beer can on top of his hat. His shirt said, New Orleans Crawfish: We Suck Da Heads and Pinch Da Tails . He held out a brochure to Felicity. "Says here this useta be Storyville, Basin Street, the red lights district, girls, music, action!" He popped his fingers. "Where is Basin Street?" Felicity knocked the brochure out of his hand and stared into his piggy eyes. She enunciated very slowly: "Once this was Storyville. Now it's a motherfucking freeway going through a fucking cemetery. You want to know what happened to the black whores, you go ask the fucking feds who put a fucking freeway through here." They backed away; the freak looked like she was packing heat. The light drizzle turned to rain as she entered the French Quarter at Saint Philip Street. It soaked her clothes and streaked her face and would have mingled with her tears if she'd been crying. But she was not. The cottony cloud that had collected Grandmère's soul had vanished in the leaden sky. The houses along Saint Philip Street looked dumbly at her from behind shuttered windows. They were full of as many ghosts as they could hold; wisps of white smoke wafted from their dormers. Felicity passed a store window with a large glass jar filled with colored liquid in which floated a two-headed pink lizard. Felicity forced herself to look at it. It was Mullin! The two-headed abortion was unmistakably made of the same substance as the evangelist. Felicity knew for sure that her Grandmère hadn't torn up that lottery ticket. She had offered it to Mullin on his silver collection platter, and the reptile had used the money to grow in hideous power. Her money, Felicity's money, her adolescent allowance, her college fund, her inheritance. Why else would a word-famous TV devil respond to the summons of a poor old woman dying in Charity Hospital? Because he owed her. Because she hadn't torn up the lottery ticket--she had given it to the United Ministries. Why hadn't she seen this before? She had been robbed. She remembered the new domed tabernacle Mullin built in Metairie, and the giant plaster Christ he'd erected on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain the following year. Felicity began to sense a cruddy substance emanating from the foul history of the Creole cottages on either side of the street. The former homes of slave-owning colonials stood rigidly inside their courtyards. They too had risen from pillage, extortion, slavery, gambling, and whoring. The longer she walked, the more convinced she became that Mullin had stolen her money. When Felicity reached the corner of Chartres Street she realized where she was heading. Without thinking about it, she was walking toward Saint Louis Cathedral, where she'd often gone as a girl. She kept her eyes fixed on the misty spires of the cathedral, which kept receding in the rain like a ship. It didn't help that when she looked toward the river, a real ship loomed over the levee, floating so high in the river it threatened to sail right into the Quarter. She had known all her life that the city was below sea level, but she never stopped being startled by the sight of ships over her head. New Orleans was a bowl, hugged tightly by the Mississippi River. The levees that kept the river out were no match for a hurricane or a great flood. Felicity imagined herself floating like a gardenia in a porcelain bowl. It was only a matter of time before the people and buildings were washed away. "We are doomed," she said out loud; "it's the only thing that keeps us going." Two wet pigeons looked down on her from the facade as Felicity passed through the ironwork fence and walked through the open door of the old church. A gold-ringed, speckled gray marble holy water font greeted her. It looked smaller than it had when she had had to stand on tiptoes to look at the "blessing water." The water, Grandmère told her, contained one of the Holy Mother's tears, and the tears of all the brokenhearted women of New Orleans, of which, she added ominously, "there will never be no shortage." Little Felicity didn't know what she'd done, but she'd stood accused and guilty anyway, apologizing silently for her mother and praying for her safety in that unimaginable Yankee city. The bank of votive lights in the foyer was ablaze. The sign below it read: Large 2 Dollars, Small 50 cents . Oh, large, definitely large. Felicity chose the brightest and largest. The smells of her girlhood surrounded her: old books, melted wax, incense, damp old people, roses. A chandelier, like a crown with long crystal teardrops, hung from a long chain above the altar. As she walked up the center aisle she saw a few worshipers abstracted in prayer, kneeling or asleep. They had always been here, part of the furniture since the days of her childhood, lost in an endless conversation with God or one of his host. Poor Grandmère. Maybe Mother Mary hadn't abandoned the old woman, though she'd forsaken the faith of her birth. Maybe the Holy Mother had kept up her end of the conversation, even after Grandmère had fallen silent, sure that one day the dialogue would resume. And that day was today; it had finally come. Perhaps at this very moment the two were deep in conversation. For her part, Felicity had never stopped speaking to that part of her soul which had shined so brightly in her early years. When she had decided to stop believing, she stopped addressing her interlocutor by the names she had learned long ago, but the talk went on. Felicity carried her fat light to the left of the altar, where she planted it at the feet of the Holy Mother holding the infant Jesus like a precious pastry. She knelt in a pew before the Virgin and raised her eyes to the beatific face. The words ECCE PANIS ANGELORUM were written on the ceiling. Behold the bread of angels! God sat blessing the Lamb above the altar, while just below a motley crew of early Louisiana colonists partook of the divine light. "Dear Blessed Mother," said Felicity, "please take into account all the extenuating circumstances and help me!" Even as she spoke, she knew that she'd have to do better than that. "Dear Mary, is there no way for this string to be broken? The old woman's dead and all she's left me is another hole. More than half of me is gone, dear Mother, and there won't be much left if you don't help me." That wasn't quite right either. If she'd had long hair she would have let it hang loose over her eyes and prostrated herself in the manner of penitents. Her hair was short, her language was petty, her belief shaky at best. Perhaps she'd be better off gone; there was no reason for her. "All gone, all gone," lamented Felicity, "and me so young. And that preacher devil stole my lottery ticket!" "Get off it," said the Virgin. "After what my son went through, the lottery just sounds comic." "Can I help it?" Felicity said, chastened, "that I only have two modes? The despondent and the comic?" Felicity wanted to be selfless and admirable like the Holy Mother herself, or the Magdalene with her hair loosened on the Via Dolorosa, or Saint Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel. Saint Agnes with her lamb. Saint Ursula, martyred at Cologne with eleven thousand virgins. The nuns had given her an obdurate store of images. Felicity was aware of the strong smell of urine. A bum was kneeling in the pew behind her, bent in exaggerated humility. She felt a compulsion to pat the top of his dirty head. We are one, mon clochard , she murmured between clenched teeth. There is no difference between us. I will sleep with you, look for lice in your clothes, wash your intimate parts. Felicity saw herself cradling the destitute creature. As she nearly touched his head, she saw that the bum's suffering pose was disguising the fact that he was fishing white envelopes from the back of her pew. "Hey," she said. The bum straightened up and slunk away in a hurry, dropping an envelope. Felicity picked it up. Donations to the Christmas Campaign for the Restoration and Renovation of St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, La . There were a few crumpled dollars inside. Felicity dug in the hip pouch zipped to her shorts and took out a five. She put it in the envelope and was about to return it to the box when she had another thought. She dug deeper in the pouch and came up with a Post-it note and a pen. She wrote on it, 363-54-2122, and tucked the note in the envelope. "Restore the cathedral, Mother of God, and restore my lottery ticket, and restore me to wholeness, and give me back all my loved ones, and take Grandmère to you!" concluded Felicity. She stood up to go. "Oh," she added, "and grant me that orgasm.' That was her whole wish list. As she rose from her knees she knew what she had to do. Her uncle, Major Notz, who lived in the Pontalba Apartments to the right of the cathedral, was the man for the job. Major Notz had always been there for her and, though he was not actually a blood relative, had been a kind of father to her. An army buddy of her dead father, he had appeared one day at their house with presents and affection, and had persisted in caring for Felicity against the formidable opposition of her grandmother, who had hated the major from the very beginning. Felicity needed his Comforting bulk now. In her absence--how long had she been gone?--Jackson Square and, indeed, the whole sky had undergone a miraculous transformation. The sun was shining through the drizzle, and the once nearly empty square was teeming. Several tattooed and pierced young people, called "Shadow people" by the Times-Picayune but known familiarly as "Shades," lay playing cards under the mounted statue of General Jackson doffing his hat. The painters and fortune-tellers were back at their easels and cardboard tables. Behold humanity, Felicity thought, and smirked. Half of them want their portraits done; the other half want to know the future. And the other half provide it. That's three halves, and there you have it. Expressionist math. Felicity was an expert at it ever since she'd decided, at age thirteen, that nothing adds up. A mime with rain-streaked makeup, huge breasts, and hairy arms stood on a crate. A hand-lettered sash identified her as Miss Bra '99. Two tourists made faces to try to make her move. When they walked away, Miss Bra '99 came off her pedestal and took a few dollars out of a bucket at her feet. She ducked behind the Lucky Dog vendor, lifted her short skirt, and took a roll out of her panty hose. An unmistakable bulge remained. She added the dollars to the roll, stuck it back in, and climbed up on her box. The Lucky Dog vendor sold a hot dog to a midget who stared intently at Miss Bra. Why, thought Felicity, would anyone want to be such a sad parody of woman? Why, indeed, would anyone want to be a woman? Period. She had never sung, "You make me feel like a natural woman," and she had experienced a genuine vertigo of nausea when she watched a television commercial for some female hygiene spray featuring a white woman belting out that song. Holy Mother, holy, holy, bla, bla. She was moved by something both hilarious and infinitely sad. What times I live in. It was enough to make her wish she had been born in the fourteenth century, a nun sweet on Jesus. Anytime but now. Anyone but me. Copyright © 1999 Andrei Codrescu. All rights reserved.
