Thrown-away Child

circumstances of his wife’s early years. He used to tell her, “Jesus H. Christ °n a stick, you coon-asses up to Monroe—you’re the shame of Louisiana. Don’t even know how to wear shoes.” Repugnance also showed in his face when he thought about his wife’s show business career, a souvenir of which he sat upon nearly every morning.
    The chair was a big one, even for Hippo. It was Used in a movie called Fu Manchu Risen from the Grave, in which Miss LaRue—in one of her precious few Hollywood screen credits—played a bobby-soxer in a scene where a mystical gangster wanders through a California cemetery popular with romantically inclined teenage motorists.
    Spread across Hippo’s hairless, pillowy knees was the Times-Picayune. There was a celluar telephone on a table next to him, which also held a plateful of beignets, a glass of grapefruit juice, and a humidor full of Cuban cigars that were the real McCoy.
    The newspaper had been read thoroughly, including the page-one item about an Angola drifter found dead and cryptically branded under the Tchoupitoulas Street levee. And now with the paper out of the way, Hippo cocked an ear to the conversation below, which inevitably turned from girl talk to something about himself. Hippo enjoyed pretending he was too far off to hear what was being said.
    The alderman was dressed the way he usually was at that early part of the morning, before he went off to City Hall. Pin-striped trousers held up with his trademark fire engine red suspenders, nylon socks and Romeo slippers, and his sleeveless undershirt. His suit-coat, tie, and a striped shirt with white collar and cuffs were laid out for him inside. His trousers were unzipped so he could relax his belly while he went through the paper.
    Down below, Ophelia the maid—Ophelia Dabon, big and thick-armed, skin dark and shiny as a piano case—was wearing her uniform. Black cotton dress, white apron, black support hose, beige hair net underneath a starched white cap. Also sensible shoes, which she bought two pair at a time every year during the mid-January sale at D. H. Holmes.
    Mrs. Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux—who was to be called Miss LaRue by everybody, save for Hippo, who was allowed to call her Ava—was wearing nothing.
    Ophelia walked along the outer edge of the kidney bean-shaped pool. She pushed a broom in between the potted palms to sweep up the fallen detritus of the previous evening: Spanish moss, dead palmettos, drifted dirt.
    Mostly Ophelia talked, but sometimes she sang little Cajun songs from an upcountry girlhood. Her voice was not sweet. She sounded like a Sunday morning hymn after a long Saturday night’s drinking. But Miss LaRue loved hearing the songs all the same.
    Ophelia started one now:
     
    Jolie fille, jolie fille
    Écoutes-toi ma chanson
    T’es la reine
    La lumière et le son —
     
    “Ophelia... ?” Miss LaRue asked, interrupting the song, raising up her head some.
    Ava LaRue was lying stark naked on her back on a rubber blow-up raft, floating at about midpoint of the pool where the sun was strongest on her skin, which was sand white and sixty-six years old. Miss LaRue held a purple parasol to shade her neck and face. In those regions, too much tan might burn open her surgically tightened throat, cheeks, and forehead, causing collagen leaks.
    “Ophelia, what’s that pretty song of yours mean?“
    “You kidding me, Miz El. Don’t you know?” Ophelia stopped her sweeping. She looked up toward the balcony, where Hippo was biting into a fresh beignet.
    “Been a long, long time since I sang the old songs Myself, Ophelia. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”
    Ava LaRue—née Ava Dubberly of Monroe, pronounced Monroe by one and all of Ouachita parish— had made a life of forgetting things. Like many other pretty girls from dusty Louisiana towns, Ava Dubberly fled for Hollywood at the first opportunity. When she found out that Hollywood was overpopulated by pretty girls, she tried to forget that, too. And when she met a visiting fat boy from New Orleans one night on the Sunset Strip, where pretty girls might run across gentlemen willing to sport them to steak dinners. Everybody told her she made a lucky catch in the nick of time. The fat boy never let Ava Dubberly forget her luck.
    “Well, you know I was singing a old fais dodo, ’bout a black man go to Paris and take up with a Frenchy girl,” Ophelia said. “He think his little Frenchy’s just ’bout as pretty as the queen of