Big Easy Bonanza

that. It didn’t matter how much he drank—if he kept his mind on the task at hand, he could handle it. The booze would just smooth things out and allow him a little more freedom.
    Still, there was one area in which it wasn’t working. He couldn’t shake an odd feeling he had somewhere in the center of his body—a very uncertain, unsure, mixed-up, confused sensation. It had to do with the ambivalent feelings he’d had for his father. To his surprise, he actually felt grief that Chauncey was dead. Of course, he felt a lot of other things too—relief for one, for another, a kind of dark happiness on his mother’s account.
    Chauncey was no good for Bitty, never had been, had driven her to drink. She was going to be a lot better off without him, might even kick her addiction.
Was she drinking today?
he wondered. It was hard to tell with all the pills Langdon was stuffing down her.
    How beautiful she looked. The black dress with the blonde hair was about as dramatic a combination as you could find outside a Carnival ball. Henry adored the dress and wondered idly if it would fit him. But of course it wouldn’t—there was a reason for Bitty’s nickname.
    He was continually surprised that she really was a tiny, ethereal creature—like Titania, only more fragile. He had the most delicious memories of sitting in her lap, cuddling at her breast, being picked up and comforted. He couldn’t have been more than two or three, but he remembered so vividly that he still sometimes thought of her as big. In a way, in his mind, she was. He’d never said good-bye to the strong happy mother he remembered.
    Unlike most of his friends, who seemed to recall only the traumas of their childhood, Henry harbored bittersweet, haunting thoughts of the way it was with Bitty and him before Marcelle was born—even after for a while. He was adored and fulfilled. When Bitty started drinking, and when the drinking gradually increased to the point that some days she couldn’t take care of him and his sister, the happiest days of his life came to an end.
    Yet he never stopped wishing he could have the idyll again. Now that Chauncey was dead, for instance, he wondered what the chances were. For Bitty. For himself. Even, a little, for Marcelle. And for Tolliver—most definitely for Tolliver. For all of them as a family. Yes, he thought of Tolliver as family, and most ardently wished he were.
    As he watched the continuing parade of New Orleanians coming to pay their respects, he wondered how many were glad Chauncey was dead. A lot, he suspected, might have reason to be glad. He was sure he had done the right thing yesterday. And had done it very well, in his opinion, though it wasn’t the sort of thing you went around crowing to yourself about.
    Oh, God, could that abysmally dressed woman over there be the person he thought she was? From the back all he could see was a gray flannel suit, not so much out of style as never there to begin with. Très ordinaire. (And très schlumpy—hips like a retaining wall.) The whole effect was made worse by brown pumps and hair done up in some kind of half-assed French twist, but coming out of the pins in great curly clumps. Oh, shit. There couldn’t be two women in New Orleans anywhere near that tacky. Fuck, it had to be.
    What in bloody hell did Skip Langdon think she was doing, just coming over and walking among the guests as if she’d been fucking
invited
? Shit and piss. He was going to have another drink and then by God, he was getting rid of her. Bitty didn’t need her here, and neither did he.

3
    Tolliver stood behind Bitty’s wing chair, one hand on her shoulder, like a patriarch in an old tintype. He knew it looked stiff and pretentious, but he couldn’t very well sit on the arm of the chair and he wanted Bitty to know he was there, to feel his physical presence—his hand on her shoulder—and draw sustenance from it.
    Bitty could draw strength only from him and Henry, and Henry had left, apparently in pursuit of a young woman who was obviously looking for the bathroom. He wondered briefly whether she was an old schoolmate or what.
    He smiled, surely as woodenly as George Washington ever had, he thought, as the passing parade paid their respects to the widow. He couldn’t keep his mind on the occasion at hand. His life was passing before him.
    He was standing there smiling, holding on to Bitty’s shoulder, and realizing that he had lived vicariously through the St. Amants. He had done