Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story

truck fitted with a cherry picker crawled alongside the loosened telephone lines.
    Like the French Quarter and Uptown, the Garden District’s flooding had been measured in inches, not feet: no weeks of waiting for head-high water to drain and muddied rooms to dry. Not like his father’s neighborhood, where two centuries of history marinated for weeks in four or five feet of brackish muck, or the Ninth Ward, where all life not washed away completely was suspended indefinitely. Wasn’t it always this way? he thought. The peasants struggling down in the valley, the rich safe on higher ground.
    He parked across from the Catholic church, dug into his gym bag for a clean T-shirt, and put it on. Getting out of the car, he swabbed at his forehead with an overused handkerchief and stared at the brass numbers 1924, the clean white columns of Matthew Parmenter’s Victorian-style house, the gate that fenced in a yard of only slightly overgrown juniper grass. The house looked even more impressive than he remembered. He turned up his bottled water for a last swig, tossed the empty onto the car seat, and tried to brush back a nagging thought: If things had worked the way they should have, Daddy could have lived on this street. Daddy would be safe.
    Simon’s double shotgun was comfortable enough, a sturdy, handmade house of cedar, maple, and cypress erected by a grandfather Julian never knew. But Julian opened the latch of the massive gate of 1924—a hand-forged system of wrought iron posts in an elaborate crisscross pattern, built by the father of one of Simon’s oldest friends in his Social Aid and Pleasure Club—and remembered years ago watching his father’s best friend’s enormous house being renovated as he rode by on the streetcar. Steps of marble, a huge wrap-around porch, French doors leading to eighteen rooms. Even then he wondered—his father and Parmenter, best friends, business partners. Equals. Except somehow, they weren’t.
    He climbed the steps to the gallery, glancing into the darkened windows of leaded, beveled glass. Austere and private, the St. Charles houses had never offered visible clues of life inside even before the storm, but Julian guessed the old man was inside. Older than his father and many years retired, the former restaurateur rarely left the house. Like two stubborn and embattled sea captains, neither man would have jumped ship for a mere storm.
    This would not be easy; his father’s horrible business deal—all that lost money—still smarted like a glancing wound. But he pulled the mold-stained note from his pocket and read it again, then tucked it back. Matthew Parmenter is Daddy’s friend. For Simon’s sake, he rang the bell, sighed deeply, and waited.
    An hour earlier, he had met with Sylvia at Ondine’s Oysters, a little dive at the edge of the French Quarter not far from the French Market—a bar, really, with a cardboard sign outside that had boasted, throughout the entire storm and evacuation, WE NEVER CLOSED! A narrow, red brick-fronted place at the end of a shady courtyard, it sat wedged between a touristy T-shirt shop and a used bookstore, both vacant. In the mostly dark, windowless room, a long, brass-railed bar skirted the west wall and generatorpowered pendant lamps swagged from the tin ceiling, lighting the square, laminate tables.
    He took a seat in the back and ordered a coffee, then another as he waited. The dark interior seemed normal; the only sign of post-catastrophe afterlife was the clump of National Guardsmen gathered around the bar in severe haircuts and khaki fatigues, some sitting on backless swivel stools turning up glasses of warmish beer and mugs of tepid coffee.
    He stood and waved when Sylvia entered, the opened door allowing a momentary flush of rectangular sunlight into the room.
    “Morning.” He held out her chair as she sat. With no makeup, her hair tied in a scarf, she looked, for the first time since he’d seen her that first Sunday afternoon in town