Big Easy Bonanza

hair and buying her raspberry ice cream. When she was a kid he used to take her for walks and buy her cones. It was about the only pleasant memory of her childhood.
    Marcelle’s glass was still half full. For Chauncey’s sake, she thought. For Chauncey she could make the drink last another hour.
    It was absurdly quiet here. There was only the drone of conversation and the genteel clinking of glasses. You’d hardly know it was Mardi Gras at all, and indeed, in a way it wasn’t. The Boston Club party was stultifyingly different from anything anyone else in the city was doing that day. There wasn’t a soul in costume—unless you counted the two women from Mississippi in the clown outfits. Someone’s guests.
    And no one was rowdy, out-of-hand, or seemingly even drunk, though Marcelle suspected at least fifty percent had arrived with a blood alcohol content well above the legal driving limit. These were the sorts of people who held their liquor well and pretended their livers would last forever. Her grandfather, for instance. She’d never seen him drunk in her life, yet never seen him without a drink in hand, never kissed him without tasting bourbon. The old boy had been well pickled for the last forty years. Yet it didn’t seem to interfere with his performance—he’d been bossing around most of the old coots currently juicing it up in these very dark-paneled rooms for most of his life. Too bad Bitty hadn’t inherited his ability to remain standing while blotto.
    Marcelle wondered where her grandfather was and hoped she wouldn’t run into him. But he didn’t walk that much anymore. Probably found a leather wing chair in which to sink and be surrounded by his sycophants. He’d be looking exactly like a toad on a leaf—enormous belly and chest, tiny legs, big ugly mottled head, and sharp, dangerous little eyes. No wonder Bitty had married someone so different—so handsome and gentle.
    Oh, Chauncey, I hope Bitty or Henry doesn’t wreck it for you. Or me, God knows, that’s a distinct possibility. But what is there to do but drink? It’s so dismal here.
    Feeling defeated, Marcelle strolled to the bar and got her fourth drink of the morning (if it wasn’t her fifth). In fact, she realized, this was a lovely room—not dismal at all. A kind of garden room. The rest of the club looked very much as she would imagine a men’s club on St James’s Street in London—dark wood, leather chairs, Oriental rugs. Stately. Elegant. At the moment, full of forsythia and lovely spring flowers. The Boston Club was famous for the elaborate flower arrangements it always displayed at Mardi Gras. Marcelle almost smiled.
    The ladies of Venus and the members of Endymion (880 strong) wore outlandish feather headdresses, but even these could barely hold a candle to the feather getups the Mardi Gras Indians conjured up. And the Indians were wildly out-flashed by the drag queens. But at the Boston Club, when they kicked out all the jams, that meant they had some flowers brought in.
    Marcelle looked around her and wondered why she found the atmosphere so dismal. Maybe it was the clothes. To a man, the gentlemen wore dark suits—except for the ones on the reception committee, who wore full-dress morning clothes. The women’s suits and silk dresses all looked as if they’d cost what Marcelle had paid for her car, and they were in punctiliously impeccable taste. But to Marcelle’s mind, “frumpy” might have been a better description—nothing above the knees or very much below them.
    It was middle-of-the-road city in these dark and hallowed halls. Neutral ground. That was what New Orleanians called the median strips that divided the streets. The phrase suddenly seemed a metaphor for what was wrong with the whole place—everybody trying to hold the neutral ground. You were supposed to look neutral, act neutral, pretend you were beige—when your whole family might be falling apart even though your father was King of Carnival. Suddenly it seemed funny. The drink was helping.
    “That’s more like it.” It was Jo Jo Lawrence, all blond hair and football shoulders. He bumped against her slightly, dumping white wine all over her pink silk blouse. “Oh, Lord. I’m sorry.” He dabbed at her with a paper napkin, lightly touching her breasts.
    “It’s okay.” Marcelle brushed at her own chest. “It’s white. It’ll hardly show at all when it’s dry.” She raised her face to his. “What’s more like it?”
    “That