Nora Jane: A Life in Stories

by Ellen Gilchrist

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

Since receiving the National Book Award for Victory Over Japan in 1985, Ellen Gilchrist has developed a fervently devoted readership. This collection's new novella is vintage Gilchrist, taking on the continuing joys and perils of Nora Jane and company.

Release date: August 22, 2005

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

NORA JANE’S GRANDMOTHER lived in a blue frame house on the corner of Laurel and Webster streets. It was there that Nora Jane was happy. There was
a swing on the porch and a morning glory vine growing on a trellis. In April azaleas bloomed all around the edges of the porch,
white and pink and red azaleas, blue morning glories, the fragrant white Confederate jasmine, red salvia and geraniums and
the mysterious elephant ears, their green veins so like the ones on Nora Jane’s grandmother’s hands. Nora Jane hated the veins
because they meant her grandmother was old and would die. Would die like her father had died, vanish, not be there anymore,
and then she would be alone with only her mother to live with seven days a week.


“Let me set the table for you,” she said to her grandmother, waking beside her in the bed. “Let me cook you breakfast. I want
you to eat an egg.”


“Oh, honey lamb,” her grandmother replied, and reached over and found her glasses and put them on, the better to see the beautiful
little girl, the better to be happy with the child beside her. “We will cook it together. Then we’ll see about the mirlitons.
You can take them to Langenstein’s today. They said they would buy all that you had.”


“Then I’d better hurry.” Nora Jane got out of bed. If she was going to take the mirlitons to Langenstein’s she wanted to do
it early so she wouldn’t run into any of her friends from Sacred Heart. She was the only girl at Sacred Heart so poor she
had to sell vegetables to Langenstein’s. Still, they had not always been poor. Her grandfather had been a judge. Her father
had gone to West Point. Her grandmother had sung grand opera all up and down the coast and auditioned for the Met. She kissed
her grandmother on the cheek and swung her long legs out of the bed and began to search for her clothes. “You cook breakfast
then,” she said. “I’ll go pick the mirlitons before it gets too hot.”


She put on her shorts and shirt and found her sandals and wandered out into the backyard to pick the mirlitons from the mirliton
vines.


A neighbor was in the yard next door. Mr. Edison Angelo. He leaned over the fence. “How’s everything going, Nora Jane?” he
asked. “How’s your grandmother?”


“She’s feeling fine,” Nora Jane said. “She’s fine now. She’s out of bed. She can do anything she likes.”

Nora Jane bent over the mirliton vines. They were beautiful, sticky and fragrant, climbing their trellis of chicken wire.
The rich burgundy red fruit hung on its fragile stems, fell off into Nora Jane’s hands at the slightest touch. She gathered
a basketful, placing them carefully on top of each other so as not to bruise them. Mirlitons are a delicacy in New Orleans.
The dark red rind is half an inch thick, to protect the pulp and seeds from the swarming insects of the tropics, for mirlitons
are a tropical fruit, brought to New Orleans two hundred years ago by sailors from the Caribbean. Some winters in New Orleans
are too cold for mirlitons and the fruit is small and scanty. This had been a warm winter, however, and the mirliton vines
were thick with fruit. Nora Jane bent over her work. Her head of curly dark black hair caught the morning sun, the sun caressed
her. She was a beautiful child who looked so much like her dead father that it broke her mother’s heart and made her drink.
It made her grandmother glad. Nora Jane’s father had been her oldest son. She thought God had given Nora Jane to her to make
up for losing him. Nora Jane’s grandmother was a deeply religious woman who had been given to ecstatic states when she was
young. It never occurred to her to rail at God or blame him for things. She thought of God as a fallback position in times
of trouble. She thought of God as solace, patience, wisdom, forgiveness, compensation.


Nora Jane’s mother had a darker meaner view. She thought God and other people were to blame for everything that went wrong.
She thought they had gotten together to kill her beautiful black-haired husband and she was paying them back by staying inside
and drinking herself to death. Still, it wasn’t her fault she was weak. Her mother had been weak before her and her mother
before that. It was their habit to be weak.


Nora Jane’s grandmother came from a line of women who had a habit of being strong. One of them had come to New Orleans from
France as a casket girl, had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean when she was only sixteen years old, carrying all her possessions
in a little casket and when she arrived had refused to marry the man to whom she was assigned. She had married a Welshman
instead, a man who had been on the boat as a steward. Each generation of women was told this story in Nora Jane’s grandmother’s
family and so they believed they were strong women with strong genes and acted accordingly. When she was about four years
old Nora Jane had looked at the strong story and the weak story and decided to be strong. It was the year her father died
and her grandmother sat in the swing on her porch and watched the morning glory vines open and close and the sun rise and
fall and believed that God did not hate her even if he had allowed her son to die in a stupid war. Many of the men who fought
with him had written her letters and she read them out loud to Nora Jane. One young man, whose name was Fraser, came and stayed
for five weeks and painted the outside of the house a fresher, brighter blue and put a new floor in the kitchen of the house.
Every day he sat on the porch with Nora Jane’s grandmother as the sun went down and talked about the place where he lived.
A place called Nebraska. When all the painting was done and the furniture put back in the kitchen, he kissed Nora Jane and
her grandmother good-bye and went off to see his own family. After he was gone Nora Jane and her grandmother would talk about
him. “Where’s Fraser gone?” Nora Jane would ask.


“He has gone to Nebraska,” her grandmother would answer. “He went to try to find his wife.”

“Where’s his wife?”

“He doesn’t know. She got tired of waiting for him.”

“She’s sad, like Momma, isn’t she?”

“I think so, some people get sad.”

“But not us, do we?”

“Let’s walk over to the park,” her grandmother said, and got up from the swing. “Those Emperor geese are dying to see you.
They’re waiting for you to bring them some bread.”


“Then do I have to go home?”

“Sometime you do. Your mother doesn’t like it if you stay here all the time.”

“I’ll go tomorrow. In two days I’ll go back over there.”

“We’ll see. Put on your shoes. Those geese are waiting for you by the bridge.”

Of course sooner or later she would have to go back to her mother’s house and watch her mother cry. Although the older she
got the less she had to put up with it. Her mother’s house was seven blocks from her grandmother’s house. Her mother’s house
was in the three hundred block of Webster Street and her grandmother’s house was in the five hundred block of Henry Clay.
By the time she was six years old Nora Jane was allowed to walk from her grandmother’s house to her mother’s house anytime
she wanted to as long as the sun was up. She knew every house and yard and porch and tree between the three hundred block
of Webster Street and the five hundred block of Henry Clay. She knew which fences made the best sound when she ran a stick
along the railings. She knew which dogs were mean. She knew which people got up early and which ones were sleepyheads. She
knew who took the Times-Picayune and who did not. When the golden rain trees bloomed and when the magnolia blossoms opened.
Hello, Nora Jane, everyone would say. How you keeping? How’s everything with you?


Nora Jane carried the basket of mirlitons up the wooden steps to the kitchen. Ever since she was a small child she had sat
on those steps to dream. She dreamed of elves and fairies, of ballet dresses and ballet shoes, of silk and velvet and operas
and plays. There were photographs of her grandmother in operas in a book in the house. Photographs of long ago before her
grandmother’s face got old. In one photograph her grandmother was wearing a crown.


Nora Jane paused on the stairs, resting the basket of mirlitons on the rail. A fat yellow jacket buzzed past the door, a golden
Monarch beat against a window, a blue jay flew down and sat upon a yard chair. Nora Jane walked on up the stairs and into
the kitchen. It was seven o’clock in the morning. Already the sun was high. It was time to go to Langenstein’s. “I’m going
right now,” she called to her grandmother. “I’ll eat breakfast when I get back.”


“Have a piece of toast then. Take it with you.”

“I’m fine. I want to get these over there while they’re fresh.” She kissed her grandmother on the cheek and walked out through
the rooms. It was a shotgun house with one room right behind the other. Her grandmother let her leave. She knew why Nora Jane
wanted to get to Langenstein’s so early and she approved of it. It was the same reason she swept her porch at dawn. Ladies
didn’t do housework. Ladies didn’t sell vegetables to the grocery store.


Nora Jane proceeded down the street, down Webster to Magazine and over to Calhoun, past Prytania, Camp, Coliseum, Perrier
and Pitt to Garfield, past the Jewish cemetery and into the parking lot of Langenstein’s, which is the richest grocery store
in New Orleans, perhaps the richest grocery store in the world. A few ladies were already parking their cars and going in
to wheel small old-fashioned carts through the narrow aisles. Past shelves of exotic imported foods and delicatessen items,
past chicory coffee and avocados and artichokes and stuffed crabs and seafood gumbo and imported crackers and candy, past
wine vinegar and Roquefort cheese and creme glacee and crawfish bisque and crawfish etouffee and potage tortue and lobster
and shrimp ratatouille.


An old lady was being helped from her car by her chauffeur, a young woman in a tennis dress bounced by with a can of coffee
in her hand, a fat white cat walked beneath a crepe myrtle tree, a mockingbird swooped down to pester it. Nora Jane ignored
all that. She hurried across the parking lot and into the office and found Chef Roland at his desk. He was a man who loved
the world. He loved food and God and music and all seven of his children and the idea of Food and God and Music and Children.
He cooked all day and listened to his employees’ troubles and then went home and listened to his wife’s troubles and drank
wine and talked on the telephone to his brother who was a Benedictine monk in Pennsylvania and wrote long impassioned letters
to his brother who was a Jesuit in Cincinnati. Dear Alphonse, the letters would begin. Put down your apostasy and your rage.
Please write to Maurice. Maurice longs to hear from you.


It concerned a religious schism that had split Chef Roland’s family. For seven years his younger brothers had battled over
the matter of birth control. Look at little Nora Jane, Chef Roland told himself now. No family, only one old grandmother and
a mother better left unsaid. No brothers or sisters or aunts. A family which has died out. This one little blossom on the
vine.


He got up from his desk and wrapped the little girl in his arms and kissed her on the top of her head. “Ah, these mirlitons,”
he said. “What a casserole I will make of these. Is this all? Only one basketful? You will bring me more?”


“I’ll bring some more over later. If mother gets up. We wanted to bring you some early in case you needed them.”

“How old are you now, Nora Jane?”

“I’m fourteen. I’ll be fifteen pretty soon. This summer. You like them? You think they’re beautiful?”

“Magnificent. Always your grandmother’s vegetables are magnificent. I want the asparagus this year. All that she can spare.”
He was writing out a receipt for her to cash at the checkout stand. He knew why she was in a hurry. The Whittingtons were
proud. The grandmother had sung with the opera. His father had heard her sing. He handed the receipt to her. She folded it
and stuck it in the pocket of her shorts. Such a lovely child, he thought, a lovely child.


“You will come and work for me this summer?” he asked. “I will teach you to cook for me. You think it over, huh?”

“If I can,” she said. “I might help the sisters with the camp at Sacred Heart. How much can you pay?”

“Four fifteen an hour and you will learn to cook. That’s worth something, even for a pretty girl like you, huh?”

“I know how already. Grandmother taught me. We made a Charlotte Rousse for her birthday.” Nora Jane giggled. “And we made
an angel cake but it fell, because the stove is old. We need a new stove but we don’t want to waste our money on it.”


“I will call your grandmother and speak to her. She will tell you to come and work for me. Better than little children all
day. I’ll teach you a trade.”


“Okay,” Nora Jane said politely. “I’ll think it over. I have to go now,” she added. “Is there someone up front to cash this?”

“Yes, they’re open. Run along then. But let me know.”

“I will.” She left the office and went into the store, down between the aisles of imported foods to the checkout stand. She
collected three dollars and seventeen cents and put it in her pocket, then she started home, up the street of crushed-up oyster
shells, past a line of azalea bushes that grew out onto the sidewalk. A black and white cat moved lazily along beside her,
then disappeared into the open door of the Prytania Street Liquor Store. I better go by Momma’s and get some clothes, Nora
Jane decided. If I go now she won’t start calling Grandmother’s all day and driving us crazy.


Chef Roland stared down at his desk. Poor little girl, he was thinking. Of course she doesn’t want to come work in the deli,
but it’s all I have to offer her. Poor baby, poor little thing.


The phone was ringing. Chef Roland pushed a button and answered it. It was his brother Maurice calling from Pennsylvania.

“So you’re back from Rome,” Chef Roland began. “Well, did you tell them what I told you to tell them? Did you, Maurice? Did
you or not? Answer my question.”


“I want to come visit you when I get through here,” Maurice said. “Can I come down for a few days? I want to talk with you,
Roland, bury the hatchet, smoke the peace pipe.”


“What did you tell them, Maurice? Did you tell him what I said or not?”

“What’s wrong, Roland, how are you in such a bad mood so early in the day? Is Betty all right? Are the children okay?”

“I just had a visit from the daughter of Leland Whittington, your old schoolmate that died fighting for the pope in ’Nam,
Maurice. It broke my heart so early in the morning. Poor little fatherless thing. Poor little girl.”


“No one with Leland’s heart and will could be an object of pity. God, he was a beautiful man.”

“Leland is dead, Maurice, and I want to know if you told the pope what I told you to tell him. It’s the modern world. We have
to move with it or be responsible for all this sadness. It’s our fault, it’s on our shoulders. The edict was preposterous.”


“I’ll be there this afternoon. Is that all right?”

“Of course it’s all right. I’ll tell everyone you’re coming.”

“I have to go now. We have prayers.”

“Pray for sanity,” Chef Roland said. “Pray to have some goddamn common sense.”

Nora Jane crossed Prytania and walked down Camp to Magazine, then turned and went down Webster Street into the Irish Channel.
The sun was higher now, people were coming out onto their porches, opening their Saturday newspapers, people jogged by in
jogging suits, rode by on bicycles headed for the park. Maybe she won’t be up yet, Nora Jane thought. And I can just grab
some clothes and leave a note. She’s getting worse. She really is. She’s worse than she was at Mardi Gras or on their anniversary.
Well, forget that. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t my fault. Remember Sister Katherine said never to think it’s my fault. It’s
not my fault. It’s not my fault.


Nora Jane passed her godmother Leanie’s house, hurried by so she wouldn’t get stopped and have to talk. She hurried on down
the street and turned into the yard of her mother’s white frame house. It wasn’t a bad house. Only Francine never cleaned
it up right and it smelled like furniture polish and cigarettes. It smells like a bar, Nora Jane decided. That’s what it smells
like.


“Nora Jane, is that you?” Her mother was up, walking around in a bathrobe, her hair tied back with a string. “Oh, honey, I
just called your grandmother and no one answered. I was so lonely. I had bad dreams all night. Oh, I’m so glad you’re home.
Look, could you go down to the corner and get me a package of cigarettes?”


“I just came by to get some clothes. I have to go to school today. They have a special day.”

“No one told me about it.”

“I’m in a hurry. Didn’t Grandmother tell you? Why didn’t she answer the phone? Well, I guess she was in the yard.” Nora Jane
swept past her mother and went into her room and began to fill the basket with clothes, socks and underwear and cotton shirts
and a dress for Sunday. She threw the things into the empty basket. Her mother stood in the door watching her.


“You won’t go get me some cigarettes?”

“I don’t have time. I have to hurry.”

“I want you back here tonight. I can’t stay here at night by myself.”

“I’ll come back if I can.” Nora Jane threw one last pair of underpants into the jumble of clothes and turned to face her mother.
“I have to go now. I haven’t had any breakfast. I went to sell the mirlitons at Langenstein’s. I’m going. I’m starving.”


“You could eat here. I’ll fix things for you.”

“Like what? Some rotten oranges, like last time. I’m not eating out of that kitchen until you get someone to kill the roaches.
I told you that. And I’m not sleeping here. I don’t want to listen to you cry.” Nora Jane passed her mother in the bedroom
doorway. Her mother reached for her, almost had her in her arms. “Let go of me,” Nora Jane said. “Don’t hold me. I have to
go.” She pushed her mother away and walked back through the house and out onto the porch and down the steps. Her mother followed
her.


Nora Jane stopped to inspect her broken bike. “I thought you were going to get my bike fixed,” she said.

“I couldn’t do it, honey. There wasn’t any money.”

“Okay, well, I’m off.” She switched the basket to the other arm, opened the gate and struck off in the direction of the park.
She had decided to walk back through the park to see what was going on. There was always something happening in Audubon Park
on Saturday morning. Besides, there was a grove of birch trees Nora Jane liked to walk through for luck. Her grandmother had
told her it was a copy of a sacred grove of trees in Greece where the philosophers had lived.


Nora Jane entered the park at Prytania and walked through the lucky grove of trees and over to the flower clock. A race was
forming. Forty or fifty people in their running clothes were milling around the fountain and the clock. A young man was doing
T’ai Chi beside the fountain. Kids rode by on bikes. Suddenly, Nora Jane was embarrassed to be there carrying a basketful
of clothes. She hurried out of the park and back toward her grandmother’s house. I’m so hungry, she told herself. I shouldn’t
have waited so long to eat.


She felt bad now. She was hungry and it made her cold. She hurried back down Henry Clay and turned into her grandmother’s
yard. A radio was playing, much too loudly. It was WTUL, Leontyne Price singing Tosca. “Vissi d’arte” from Tosca. That was wrong. Her grandmother never played music loudly enough to be heard in the yard. Of course, sometimes she might
sing along with an aria and then her voice might reach the street, but never for long, never long enough to bother other people.


This radio was too loud. It made no sense. Nora Jane dropped the basket on the porch and went on in. There was no one in the
living room. In the dining room where the radio sat upon a shelf, a dust cloth was lying on the floor. That was also wrong.
Her grandmother did not leave dust cloths lying on the floor. “Grandmother,” Nora Jane called. Then she looked into the bedroom.
Her grandmother was lying on the floor, crumpled up on the rug beside the bed. The beautiful voice of Leontyne Price continued
with the aria. Nora Jane moved like water into the bedroom and knelt down upon the floor. She covered her grandmother’s body
with her own and began to weep.


* * *

A neighbor found them. She had heard the music and begun to worry. April is the cruellest month, the neighbor said to herself,
for she was an English teacher. Breeding lilacs out of the dead land.


“Oh, honey,” the neighbor said, holding the weeping child. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”

“I can’t live with my mother,” Nora Jane said. “I can’t do it. Where will I live?”

“Maybe you can,” the neighbor said. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do.” She tried to lift the child, to make her
stand up.


Nora Jane lay back down upon her grandmother’s body. The sirens were making their way down Henry Clay. The noise of the sirens
filled the air.


Later that afternoon they came to take the body away. Two men in a station wagon wrapped the grandmother’s body in a sheet
of canvas and carried her out of the living room and down the stairs and put her into the back of a wood-paneled Oldsmobile
station wagon and drove off down Henry Clay as if they were going to a ball game. So that’s it, Nora Jane thought, pulling
a morning glory pod off the vine and tearing it to pieces with her fingers. That’s all there is to it, just like I knew it
would be. She’s gone and this will be gone too.


She tore some more buds off the vine and squeezed them in her hand and wouldn’t let anyone talk to her and went out into the
backyard and stood by the mirliton arbor wondering what part of the opera was playing when her grandmother died. I could go
in there and find the record and put it on but they probably wouldn’t let me, she thought. She climbed the stile that led
over her grandmother’s back fence into Mr. Edison Angelo’s yard and went out that way and over to the Loyola University library
and checked out the phonograph record and went into a booth to play it for herself. It was a very old and scratchy record
from the collection of Mr. Irvine Isaacs, Junior. Leontyne Price with the Rome Opera House Orchestra under the direction of
Oliviero Fabritiis, the same recording Nora Jane had learned to sing the opera from. She sat in the booth and sang the opera
with Miss Price and cried as she sang. Nora Jane had inherited her grandmother’s voice. People acted so funny when they heard
her voice that Nora Jane had decided long ago to keep it to herself. It was a promise she managed to keep most of her life.
For almost all of her life she only sang to people she loved or people she wanted to solace or amuse. For nearly all the years
of her life she managed to keep her voice to herself.


OF COURSE, NOW EVERYTHING had to change. After the funeral, after the grievers and the mourners were gone, after the sisters left and her mother was
still sober, had been sober for four days, had sworn to Sister Katherine to stop drinking if she wanted Nora Jane to stay.
Had settled for a bottle of pills instead, had agreed to put away the bottle if she could have the pills and was in her bedroom
now, like a zombie against her pillows with the radio on low, playing jazz. After all of that Nora Jane looked around the
house to see what she could do. I could clean it up, she decided. I could call that damn Francine and make her get over here.
Nora Jane searched in her mother’s address book, found the number and got Francine on the phone.


“I’m sorry about your grandmother,” Francine began. “The Lord gives and the Lord taketh away.”

“Forget that, Francine. I need you to come and help me clean this place up. I can’t live in this mess. Bring your husband’s
truck. We’re going to throw some things away.”


“Right now?”

“Right now. I will pay you three dollars an hour if you bring the truck. Can you come? I’ll get somebody else if you won’t.”
Nora Jane sniffed, waited, began to get mad. If there was anybody who made her madder than her mother, it was Francine. “I
don’t care if you do or not. Say if you will.”


“I’ll be there. Soon as I can get on a uniform.”

“Bring the truck.”

“If I can get hold of Norris.”

By the time Francine got there Nora Jane had emptied the kitchen cabinets of rotten potatoes and empty bottles and half damp
grocery sacks. She had filled the grocery sacks with broken cups and half-used boxes of cereal. She had reamed out the kitchen
of her mother’s house. And called the Orkin man. “I have money to pay you with,” she told him. “If you come right now and
spray us with everything you’ve got.”


By the time her mother woke up the dining room rug was on the truck and a broken chair and stacks of magazines. The living
room rug was rolled up on the porch to go to the cleaners and Francine was mopping the wooden floors with Spic and Span. “What’s
going on?” her mother asked, coming out into the living room, still wearing the dress she had worn to the funeral. “What’s
going on? My God, Francine, what are you doing?”


“We’re cleaning up this house,” Nora Jane said. “Go back to sleep. I won’t live in a pigpen. The Orkin people are coming in
a minute.”


“Where’s the rug?”

“We’re throwing the dining-room rug away. I won’t live in a house with a rug like that. And this one’s going to the cleaners.
Francine’s going to take it on the truck.”


Nora Jane’s mother sat down in a chair. Her little navy blue and white print dress hung in waves around her legs, her collar
was awry. The Valium was in charge. She was powerless in the face of Nora Jane’s rage. Powerless in the face of anything.
She pulled her legs up onto the chair. “Am I in the way?” she asked. “Do you mind if I sit here?”


Later, in the late afternoon, after Nora Jane had paid Francine her wages and the kitchen and dining room and Nora Jane’s
bedroom had been cleaned to her satisfaction and the Orkin man had come and sprayed so much Diazinon and Maxforce and Orthene
around the house that even with the windows open it was hard to breathe, Nora Jane and her mother dressed in cotton dresses
and walked down the street to eat oyster loaves for supper at Narcisse Marsoudet. “It looks wonderful,” her mother said. “I
can’t believe you did all that in one day. I can’t believe she’s gone. Now you are the only one, Nora Jane. The last of the
Whittingtons.”


“Don’t talk about it,” Nora Jane said. “I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

“I’m not going to drink, my darling honey. I’m going tomorrow to the meetings that they have. I won’t ever drink again, you
can depend on that.”


“I want to get an air conditioner,” Nora Jane said. “Mr. Biggs said there would be enough money when they sold her house.
They said I could have enough for anything I’d need. And a new refrigerator. I can’t stand to have that old thing anymore.”
They passed Perlis’ Department Store and turned down Magazine to the café.


“I won’t drink anymore, honey. You can depend on that.” Her mother caught sight of herself in the store w