I loved the way Louis talked to me as though I were his age. “Yes, a gentleman needs a car,” I replied.
“I’m glad you consider me a gentleman, Addie. That’s more than some people do. I meant to say, though, that the Army understands I need to get my house in order, so to speak, before I can do my best work for them.”
Louis looked at me as though I should say something else, but I couldn’t think of anything. He put his foot on the accelerator, which gave a yelp like Pumpkin barking, and the car lunged forward.
“I’m not much of a driver,” said Louis.
“Oh, you’re a wonderful driver! It’s the car’s fault, I’m sure,” I answered.
“You’re very kind, Addie, and it’s a good thing for me that you are. I need your help with Tom.” Louis said this in such a sincere way, I was positive he had forgotten to use his silver tongue.
“I’ll do anything I can, Louis,” I answered.
As we drove past Three Twenty Audubon Street, we both looked at it. In the dark, and behind the sycamore trees that lined the street, it looked like it had before it was modernized; it looked like home to me.
“You miss Three Twenty?” Louis asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I could never think of Aunt Toosie’s as home. It was newer and much cozier, a grey-blue cottage, trimmed in what we call gingerbread, wood cut out in a lacy pattern and painted snow-white. Aunt Toosie had trained a Confederate Jasmine vine up a trellis and it made the whole front porch smell sweet. Inside, everything was “Early American,” Aunt Toosie said, although the furniture was only about ten years old. But it wasn’t home to me, even though it looked like something in a book.
Three Twenty Audubon Street had also looked like something in a book—by Edgar Allen Poe. Everything had been old-fashioned, just the way my grandparents had fixed it up. “Victorian”, they called it, for the Queen who sat on the English throne in the nineteenth century. The heavy furniture had been covered in dark upholstery. Thick curtains designed to keep out light and hold old musty smells opened up only to reveal more curtains made of lace and forever in need of mending or cleaning. There were little doilies and china figures everywhere. Dust catchers, Aunt Toosie called them. Not that Aunt Eveline and Nini, who worked for us, hadn’t kept every bit of the house spic and span.
“It’s funny,” Louis was saying, “but when I was away I used to think of Three Twenty more than my own home. I spent a lot of time there, many happy afternoons and evenings with your Uncle Ben, who was my friend. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
So many people had lived at Three Twenty Audubon Street besides me and Aunt Eveline. I could hardly remember her brother, my Uncle Ben. “This place is the repository of bygone years,” Aunt Eveline used to say happily, groping her way around the living room.
“I can almost see your Papa,” Nini would add, pausing in her dusting to gaze into the darkest corner of the room where my grandfather’s huge mahogany-and-mohair chair stood like a throne. “I sees him sitting there, reading his paper, nodding, ’cause he’s getting sleepy, jumping awake when he hears you come in the room. ‘Eveline! Fetch my cane! I’m going for a stroll on the levee!’”
Nini and Aunt Eveline would go on like that all morning as they traveled with the cleaning equipment through every room of the house, stirring up dust and calling up ghosts that had once lived at Three Twenty.
“An old couple moved out last week and a new family just moved in,” I said to Louis. “A man and his wife and a girl my age.”
“Is she a friend of yours?”
“Not really. I don’t know her yet. I think she may be a little older than I am. The postman told me about her.” Norma Jean was the girl’s name. I knew that much. “I think she has my old room,” I added trying to keep the envy out of my voice.
When Aunt Eveline died and I moved to Aunt Toosie’s, Nini had helped Aunt Toosie bring a few of my things to her house, but Aunt Toosie didn’t have room or even want the heavy old furniture and dark oil paintings. “Give it all to the Salvation Army,” Uncle Henry had said. Four truckloads of stuff, everything I have grown up with, were carted away. I had watched the men stagger down the front steps with the grandfather clock. Its bong had once scared me to death, but that day, it seemed to be calling for help, chiming sadly as it was jogged along. After the clock came my mother’s trunk, and even though Aunt Toosie had tenderly unpacked it and brought the contents to her house, it still was unbearable to see the trunk tossed in a truck. The only thing left in the house was the giant-size armoire too big to fit down the narrow attic stairs. Aunt Eveline had used it for storage and Aunt Toosie was supposed to go through it and take what she wanted, but it was full of junk and Aunt Toosie had never gotten around to it. The Three Twenty I knew was gone. Aunt Eveline was dead and Nini was semi-retired and only working now and then when she was needed. She lived in the country, waiting for the day her niece and my friend, Holly, would visit from her unhappy home in Chicago.
“Addie,” Louis interrupted my reverie. “I really meant it when I said I needed your help. Will you help me?”
“Oh, yes, Louis, I’ll do anything I can but—”
“But what?”
“But how could I help you?”
“Well, for one thing, you could get Tom to—well, I can’t expect too much. I mean I can’t expect him to love me, but if he could bring himself to forgive me for what I did, leaving him and his mother. Then maybe after a time—well, I guess that would be all I could hope for! Forgiveness.”
“Oh, Louis, I’m sure he’ll love you—after a while—the minute he knows how nice you really are. Anybody would!” I realized that I’d practically told him I loved him, and I could feel myself blushing in the dark. If I couldn’t say the right thing, why couldn’t I at least learn to keep my mouth shut?
“Tom has every right to refuse to even see me,” Louis continued. “I can understand that. That’s where you come in, Addie. If you let him know I’m human, not some monster, and that I deeply regret my mistake—if you think I’m all right, then maybe he’ll give me a chance. Do you see what I am?”
“Oh yes! Of course!” I said.
But what I saw was Tom thinking I was siding with his father against him and his mother, and suddenly, I was not nearly so sure that meeting Tom with Louis was such a great idea.
I was even less sure when the train pulled into the station with a lot of clanging and puffing steam. The conductor hanging on the steps signaled the engineer to stop and I panicked. What was I doing standing here with Louis, meeting Tom’s train? It wasn’t my business. It was all I could do not to run for all I was worth. Oh, Aunt Eveline, how do I get into such scrapes? Aunt Eveline declined to answer.
If I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the expression on Tom’s face when he got off the train. In the first place, I’d forgotten how grown up he was, or maybe he’d grown more since I saw him three months before. He looked a lot like Louis. In fact, he looked exactly like Louis, only younger.
“Tom!” I said, surprised by the resemblance.
He saw me and started to smile; he was getting out of the train and had one foot on the step when he saw Louis. He must have felt he was seeing himself as he would look in twenty-five years. Tom’s expression froze, and he tripped and fell. Louis rushed forward to help him up, but Tom was on his feet and gave him a shove with his shoulder, a look of pure hate on his face. Louis drew back as though he’d been slapped, and good old Addie, ready