Free Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story

his eyes. As an afterthought he added, “Though, mind you, it won’t be as good as your father’s.”
    “I already ate. Thanks.”
    “Just make yourself at home.”
    Matthew got up and went to the kitchen, his house shoes scuffing and cane tapping along on the high-glossed red oak floors. Julian stood up and stretched his arms. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until now, as heaviness draped his body like a curtain of lead.
    Julian’s gaze fell on a long wall leading to a hallway, where hung a huge, gold-trimmed oil painting. Dressed in a white gown that swirled at her feet, a woman smiled cryptically from the canvas, her long white arm extended, her gloved hand resting on a wooden banister at the bottom of a large staircase.
    Parmenter’s wife, Clarisse, Julian thought. A real New Orleans socialite. Probably done before one of the Mardi Gras balls.
    He remembered vaguely the last time he’d seen her. I heard your mama was feeling poorly. A thin white woman in thin white linen standing at the screen door. Straightbacked, defiant against the codes of her station, the woman had boarded a streetcar and then a bus that took her across town to a place she’d never been—a handmade world of shotgun houses, lazy remnants of jazz, whiffs of barbecue, and angel’s trumpet trees. All just to bring an ailing black woman a tuna-salad-on-lettuce-leaf lunch and a pot of clove and sassafras tea. She’d put the picnic basket on the kitchen table while Julian told his bedridden mother, “You got some company.”
    The woman had smiled and followed him into the sickroom, where white curtains ruffled from a breeze through the open window. She turned to him. Would you mind putting water on for tea? Bands of sun through kitchen blinds laying golden stripes across the walls, the water’s slow boil, the scent of gardenias hanging over the porch steps where she had been. A “fine lady,” his mother’s frail voice had uttered later. But only now, years later, Julian wondered. Could she have known what her husband had done?
    It was a thought that did not ride in alone—it was saddled with a twinge of guilt. No reason to suspect the kind woman’s visit was in any way an apology for a husband whose business affairs were as unknowable to her as the mountains of the moon. Just a charitable gesture, the way southerners do. The woman’s visit, the tea and lunch, seemed to lift his mother’s spirits that week, which would be her last. When a stroke claimed Clarisse’s own life less than a year later, the image of the delicate southern lady, head high, dressed in crisp white linen, stuck in Julian’s mind.
    Another frame held an enlarged black and white photograph, grainy and slightly faded—Simon Fortier and Matthew Parmenter, right hands clasped in handshake in front of a green awning and a sign announcing PARMENTER’S CREOLE KITCHEN. Opening day. Both men nattily dressed in starched and pressed white shirts, heads full of thick, longish hair, faces full of cocky grins. Two bright young men on a tear in the world, owner and head chef, employer and employee, friend and friend.
    But the next frame dulled his eyes, drained blood from his face. Parmenter again, smiling, shaking hands in front of the awning of the restaurant. But his father’s image was replaced with another familiar one—the president of the United States
    “I hope you like iced tea. It’s all I have.” Parmenter was standing behind him holding a tray with two full glasses. Seeing Julian’s stunned eyes and dropped jaw, he said, “Oh, haven’t you seen that before?” He ambled to the living room and set the tray of glasses on a small table near Julian’s chair.
    Julian no longer had a taste for tea, but sat and sipped anyway. He well remembered Simon coming home excited that night. It was more than a dozen years ago, just before his father retired. Simon, I want you to meet someone , Matthew had yelled above the cackle of boiling pots on the six-burner