Hi folks - Continuing on with the experiment. Here is the next chapter of Music in Berlin. All comments welcomed.

New Orleans, cont...

My mother finally graduated from college after what seemed to me like a lifetime of night courses. After a brief period where she was very nervous about everything, there was a moment of jubilation when she became some sort of assistant working for one of the great big oil companies over in the business district of New Orleans. I never saw the place she worked until I was much, much older. But she became a new person then. She started to have work clothes – nice outfits that she wore very carefully – always putting them on after she finished her coffee in the morning so that she would not spill anything on herself. Her work clothes were meticulously hung up in her closet the moment she came home and every two weeks she would take a great chunk of them out of the closet on hangers and bring them to the cleaners. I was not allowed to touch her after she’d gotten dressed up in the morning or until she had changed after work. So she hugged me before heading back to her bedroom to get ready for the day. I say her bedroom, because by that time my father was so seldom home anymore that it could hardly be called theirs. When he was home he slept on the couch, then later I think after he had lost his key or maybe it was stolen, he just propped himself up on the front porch and slept there. I never asked my mother why she didn’t make him another key. They spoke very little to each other then, and at that point everything about my father made my mother angry.

By the time my father died, he had already left us in most of the ways that a man can leave his life and his family. He had stopped coming home with any regularity. We hardly knew him when he did show up. He had lost most of his teeth and his hair was matted and grey, even though he wasn’t even forty.

The morning we learned of his death a policeman came to our door. It was early, but still, my Mother was already in her work clothes. I remember exactly what she looked like that day as she walked down the long hallway of our shotgun house, the ancient floorboards creaking beneath her high heals. She had on a black and white print dress made out of light cotton fabric that swayed with her gait as she walked. It was belted at her waist with a thin red leather belt. The shade of the belt matched her lipstick. Her hair was short in those days, just down to her shoulders, light brown with streaks of blond throughout.

“Is that the doorbell?” she asked me as she walked into the living room at the front of the house. I was sitting on the couch, staring at the television with a bowl of Cheerios in front of me. I shrugged. I had barely heard the sound and I wouldn’t have recognized it anyway. In my ten years, no one had ever once rung our doorbell.

“Oh,” I heard her say as she opened the door. I looked up and caught a glimpse of the blue police uniform as she stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind her. That caught my attention and I got up and went to the door. But as I opened it to join her outside, she turned around and looked at me. “Zach, go back inside,” she said, kissing me on my forehead. “I’ll be back in in a minute, honey.” She pulled my head to her waist in a quick hug before turning me around and pushing me gently back through the door. She had never hugged me in her work clothes before.

I watched through the lace curtains of the front window, ducking behind the ancient couch that had always been in the front of our living room. She sat down on the porch bench and the officer sat down next to her. They were there for a long time. The officer eventually placed a hand gently on her shoulder, and then finally stood up and slowly walked off the porch and down the street to a beat up squad car. When he had been gone for a few minutes, I went back to the door and slowly opened it, looking around the porch and at my mother to make sure the coast was clear.

She was sitting there, just staring out at the street. She was such a contrast to look at on that porch – her bright new modern dress, perched against the backdrop of the faded clapboards of our house with their chipped white paint. The ancient bougainvillea plants draped over the edges of the porch, framing everything in a bright pink that seemed to dramatically contradict the mood of that morning.

“What happened, Mama?” I asked, still not sure if it was safe to step out onto the porch.

She looked over to me and tried to smile, but the result was little more than a flat frown. She gestured for me to come over and sit next to her on the bench, and so I did. We were in the spot that I used to sit in with my dad. But the spot felt altogether different that day. She stroked my head gently, brushing the long strands of my hair to one side. I needed a haircut then, but I hated to go to the barber.

“It’s Papa, isn’t it?” I finally asked her.

She nodded and looked down at me.

“What happened?”

“Zach,” she seemed to come awake then. She turned to face me and gently placed a hand on my cheek. “This is not going to be easy to understand, but your Papa isn’t coming home anymore. There has been…” She hesitated a moment and took a deep breath before continuing. “There’s been some sort of accident. It’s just going to be you and me now.”

I looked up to see the tears forming at the corners of her eyes. It was at that point that I knew she loved him. For so long I had only seen them doing battle with each other. The look of exasperation was constantly on her face, the look of vacancy more and more often on his. It had been forever since I had seen them close. But there must have been something between them, some love that brought them together and kept them there. I saw it that day in my mother’s eyes and I have never forgotten it.

She changed that day. Or, rather I should say that the change in her was completed on that day. She had been making a better life for herself and for us – her nights spent at college courses and then afterwards, working late – all that was to make sure that we had a future. I think – no, I know – that she’d originally wanted that for all three of us. But my father was cut from a different cloth and for whatever reason he had decided long before his death, that he couldn’t make that transition with us.