Big Easy Bonanza

three centuries—from Creole cottages to Holiday Inns—the Garden District enjoyed a more leisurely pace. By contrast, its gracious old houses seemed rather like country estates, displaying exuberant front yards right on the streets instead of hiding tiny gemlike courtyards.
    There was a nineteenth-century Caribbean feel to the place, more so in recent years, since the fad for old-fashioned gaslights. On a summer evening, with the gaslights on, the improbable scent of mixed magnolia and jasmine in the air, one could almost hear the clack of hooves on cobblestones, see sails in the distance. The gardens were rife with banana trees, crotons, profusions of tropical plants—and each tendril, to Skip, was a viper that would surely strike if you turned your back. She thought it as evil and dangerous a neighborhood as its denizens found Tremé, as stultifying and smothering as she felt the Quarter was liberating.
    Yet her feelings had nothing to do with the beauty of the place. They were about her associations with the homes in which she’d visited here, full of air as thick as that near the river, harboring atmospheres that made you gasp for breath.
    The St. Amants’ house, with its stuffy furniture and its grand piano that no one ever played, was far from one of her favorites. It looked as if someone had gone to as much trouble to make it ordinary as Tolliver Albert had to make his apartment special and personal. Skip thought of the decor as the wing-chair-and-Audubon-print syndrome. Her parents’ house suffered from it as well, and that wasn’t the only other place she’d seen it.
    Today the shiny-finish dining table was covered with a lace cloth and laden with food that probably wouldn’t be eaten, though Skip doubted there’d be a problem with leftover drinkables.
    In one of the wing chairs flanking the fireplace sat Haygood Mayhew, Bitty’s father, white-haired, red-faced and shrunken in height, puffy in body, looking squat and square and rather like a toad. Though retired from the Carrollton Bank, he was still one of the most powerful men in New Orleans, as anyone could see who cared to observe the gaggle of would-be’s dancing attendance. The mayor was one of them.
    Gossip had it that Haygood had gone along with Chauncey and supported him. Not that he would have had any objection to a black mayor, female mayor, or any other kind so long as he or she was friendly to business in general and to the Carrollton Bank in particular. Haygood wasn’t a bigot. Wasn’t even a seersucker-suit conservative. Skip had once seen him proclaiming his nonpartisanship on a local TV show. Chauncey’s politics—so upsetting to many of Haygood’s contemporaries—had probably made the old man chortle with malicious delight.
    In the other wing chair sat Bitty, a porcelain statue draped in black. Behind her stood Tolliver, and she was receiving condolences from the only black person in the room besides Mayor Soniat—John Hall Pigott, the musician, club owner, and retired actor. Skip had never seen him in person. She hadn’t known he was so tall. His hair was starting to turn white, and he was easily the handsomest man she’d seen since leaving San Francisco. No wonder he’d been in so many movies, though some said he couldn’t act a lick. But nobody said he didn’t play brilliant clarinet, and he had been Chauncey’s staunchest, most influential ally in prying music money out of the city. For years he’d lived in California, but last year he retired from acting, returned to his hometown, and opened his club.
    Skip didn’t think of herself as the sort who got star-struck, but she noticed she was staring.

2
    They thought he was drunk, but then that’s what they’d thought yesterday. Despite appearances, he’d never really managed the oblivion he craved. Maybe it was the coke he’d had earlier that day, he didn’t know. In the end, he’d had to pretend inebriation, slumping all over the furniture and heading upstairs early.
    That way he could be ready in case Bitty needed him, but he could still get away, if not from himself, at least from dingbat Marcelle and a million smarmy relatives.
    Today he was doing better. He wasn’t exactly drunk—at least not nearly as drunk as he supposed he must look—but he was feeling better anesthetized, less exhausted, more able to play out the unlikely scenario in which they’d all become embroiled. He was an actor and this was his most important role. It was as simple as