Big Easy Bonanza

ended up window-shopping. She’d walked a block over to Royal, which stank almost as much as Bourbon, but at least here there were no sleazy clubs with the smoke still hovering. There were antique shops, filled with lovely things a cop couldn’t afford.
    She was caught up in the journey, in the city, as she had never been before moving away and often was, lately. She let herself go with it, enjoying herself, getting the fresh start she wanted. It was wonderful the way, in forty-five short minutes, you could go from the dilapidated beauty of St. Philip to the tawdriness of Bourbon, the commercial elegance of Royal, and finally, once on the streetcar, the magnificence of St. Charles. The farther Uptown you went, the more the mansions lining the avenue looked like stately English homes. Skip got off at Jackson Avenue, the line of demarcation between Downtown and the Garden District. She wasn’t far from Tolliver Albert’s, and St. Charles at this point—yesterday’s parade route—was nearly back to normal. Skip turned toward the river and Trinity Episcopal Church, as familiar to her as her old bedroom on State Street.
    Her parents were at church. She took communion, let the priest smear her forehead with ashes in the shape of a cross, and left with hardly a glance at them. Outside she had an almost uncontrollable urge to walk to the river. She was looking toward it, shivering (she’d worn no coat, only a suit, and the wind had come up) when she heard her mother’s voice: “Skippy.”
    She stopped and turned around, seeing that her mother was wearing black and needed to lose ten pounds. “Hello, Mother.” Her mother had wanted her to call her “Mummy,” but even the other girls at McGehee’s didn’t say that.
    “Did they give you the day off?” Her mother spoke of “them” as if they were enemies who held her daughter prisoner.
    “Not really. They gave me a nice assignment. I’m working on the murder.”
    “Oh, Skip. It’s not as if it were a stranger—it’s Chauncey!”
    “I think that’s why it means more to me than it would to the average cop. It’s a good assignment, Mother. Be proud of your little girl.”
    “Oh, Skip!” said her mother again, as if Skip had told her she’d been arrested.
    “I met a nice boy, Mother.”
    “You did? Someone we know? Is it serious?”
    “A friend of Cookie Lamoreaux’s.” She had dragged out poor Steve Steinman because she wanted to give her mother something—just a little something—to reassure her. But now she could see the pitfalls of what she had said.
    “Is he from here?”
    “From L. A., but Cookie’s known him forever. They were roommates at Duke.”
    “Skippy, you be careful. We don’t know this boy and the world is full of people who can hurt you.”
    “I’ll be careful, Mother. Why didn’t Daddy come out?”
    “You know how he is, darling. He told me to ask you when you’re coming home.”
    “I live on St. Philip Street, Mother.”
    “In a hovel.”
    “I have to go to work now.”
    “Won’t you consider going back to school?”
    “I like my job. I’m on my way to the St. Amants’. Are you going?”
    “We’ve already been.”
    “Good-bye, then.”
    One day after church she and her brother had walked to the river. It was summer then and the closer they got, the heavier the air became. The last couple of blocks, it was nearly impossible to breathe, the way the air sat on top of your chest and refused to go in. Skip was wearing a fancy dress and ruining it, sweating. Her brother took off his coat and tie and threw them away. There were still mansions on Jackson, some of them half falling down, some still fine, interspersed with roach-ridden apartment houses. It was that way for a block or two, to Magazine Street. And after that it was poor, got poorer as it got hotter and heavier. Her mother had beaten her for it, but it was one of the finest adventures of her childhood.
    Doing it now might be dangerous, she thought. Some would say that nowadays a young woman shouldn’t even walk through the Quarter to Canal to catch the streetcar. It didn’t matter—it was too cold anyway, and she had to get to the St. Amants’. She turned toward the lake and then Uptown onto Prytania.
    Privately Skip called the Garden District “Rappaccini’s District” after the poison garden in the Hawthorne story. She found it as achingly beautiful—in its way—as she found her own neighborhood. But instead of the tumble of structures from