Chapter 4: The City of the Dead

After Carlos’ funeral, Amy stood with her grandparent’s lawyer Mr. Rasch, a well-dressed rotund man whose size betrayed the gentleness with which he had managed their legal needs.     They stood together in a tense silence.  The tension did not exist between them, but rather between the two of them and the cemetery staff;  a tension that contained the silent memory of what had happened, or not happened, at her grandmother’s funeral a half a year earlier, when the cemetery had left her grandmother’s coffin outside, unattended, for over a day before putting the casket into the designated section of the wall of the family tomb. Mr. Rasch had discovered this negligence through the network of contacts he had made over the years in his role as President of the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors.  Such negligence was somewhat common before Katrina.  Post-Katrina, it had gotten even worse, like most things in New Orleans, in part due to the poor service of most funeral homes that had existed before the flood, in part due to the loss of available workers after the flood.   There was no place to live for those that lived, no one to bury those that died. 

Amy stood with Mr. Rasch until her grandfather’s coffin was safely secured in the space that was adjacent to his wife of 65 years. She realized she wasn’t ready to leave yet, so she walked outside with Mr. Rasch and thanked him for all he had done,  and told him she’d be in touch to finish up the paper work for the estate, or at least what was left of the estate.  As Mr. Rasch’s large shadow made its way across the deserted streets of the City of the Dead, a ghost town in a ghost town, Amy turned around and entered the narrow hallway of pitched-roof mausoleum.  It had been built about 75 years ago and was made of brick  plastered over and painted white.  Dark smudges of dirt and mold had crept into the corners and nooks here and there.  A distinct rusted-orange stripe encircled the perimeter of the tomb about 12 inches from the ground,  marking the spot where Katrina’s waters had sat for those long days in August over a year ago.    Below the steeply-pitched roof and above the arched doorway stood a white marble cross encircled with white marble ivy guarding the Rubio family whose name was carved beneath the cross.  

In the shadowy cool hallway, she read the plates that named those who had once lived:

Casimiro Rubio   1865- 1040

Angela Toleda Balmes Rubio  1882 - 1966

Adela Rubio Stern  1907 - 1985

Concha Rubio Pascal   1910 - 1980

Eduardo Rubio    1914 - 1997

Graciela Rubio Hirsch   1921 - 1999

Mignon Tuyes Rubio  1920 – 2005

Carlos Rubio   1917 – 2006

Anna Rubio 1955 – 1981

A few of the Rubios were missing. They were buried in other cities – Martha in Houston and George in San Francisco.  With the exception of her grandparents, Amy knew the others who were buried here through the picture and stories she had seen and heard. She knew that Aunt Adela had been the great beauty of the women.  She knew that Aunt Concha had famous dinners for the counsul of Spain for whom she had worked—long dinners  with multiple courses presided over by her Cajun husband Bruce Pascal who started every meal with a Cajun prayer.  Eduarda was known as Guayo, later shortened by the English speaking offspring to Y-O.  He was the electrician who married Jane Callahan, Anna’s godmother.  About Graciela she heard the least, although she had met her at one time. She thought she had once caught the tail end of whisper about her great-aunt Grace’s mental illness.   Finally she was ready to leave.

She walked back outside.  Much of the grass had grown back since the flood.  It still startled her to see how few trees there were, to see so much of the vast white cloudless sky that had been hidden behind the city’s thousands of oak trees, now gone.  The absence of the protective shade of oaks was just another reminder of the absence of so much more—of residents, of the people how made New Orleans what was always so special to Amy.  The mishmash of ideas and races and opinions, the crazy-making conflicts that always ended in laughter and a good meal or a stiff drink.  And as crazy-making as these in-your-face disputes and conflicts could be, their absence was worse.  The music, now silent; the cadence of speech and the unique look of the people, both born of back room liaisons, now silent;  the food, the parades,  all this she missed as much as she missed her grandparents.

In that moment Amy made her commitment to return, to move back and make New Orleans her home once again.  She wasn’t sure how she’d manage it.  There weren’t too many places available to rent and what was available had doubled in rent. Tragedy doesn’t necessarily make heroes.   All her friends were still in places far away. 

She walked back to where she had parked her grandparents’ gold Saturn, when into her brain and completely from nowhere appeared the memory of her grandfather’s mortification  when the sales people at the dealership lined up to sing to him and Mignon as they picked up the brand new Saturn back in 1999.  Her grandfather was a private man who hated to call attention to himself (a trait she had inherited).  Of course, her grandmother had loved the attention, and so in the end Carlos suffered the humiliating experience of this ueber-customer service Public Display of Affection, and was glad Mignon was happy.  Holding on to this memory, Amy felt a surge of energy and optimism and steered the car towards uptown, where the higher land of the city along the Mississippi River, at the rim of the so-called bowl, had not been flooded.  She knew it was a million-in-one chance that she’d find anything, but what was there to loose?

She drove onto the I-10 heading downtown, and turned off the Carrollton exit.  She drove all the way down Carrollton to the River Bend, turning left along the levee and then onto Magazine Street.    About ten minutes later, she stopped the car.  A For Rent sign sat in a window, as lonely as the sole oak tree on the street, as abandoned as the city.