News from the World by Paula Fox Page B

nineteenth-century railing I leaned against had been designed, I believe, by the iron-maker Samuel Yellen. It was strong yet delicate like iron lace.
    I found a job as a file clerk in a government office attached to a huge army installation—a hangar housing experimental war planes. Two months after I got the job, a P-59, taken aloft by a test-pilot, crashed into a meadow near the hangar. The office staff was sent home that day while a medical-technical team extracted the pilot’s body and the plane parts from a crater in the ground.
    The alcoholic actress became too much for me. Her former husband, a doctor, who would stop by to visit her now and then, introduced me to a couple who lived a few blocks away on St. Ann Street. I moved in with them a few days after our meeting.
    Pat and Mary had both won prizes for their first novels but not much money. Mary had to continue her part-time work as a secretary. I met their friends who would visit them during evenings to sit and talk in their plain, underfurnished living room.
    A narrow, two-story building, a former slaves’ quarter, rose in their wild garden. It contained two rooms, a kitchen on the first floor, and on the second a small bedroom where I slept.
    I loved Pat and Mary. I loved their lives, their house, their friends. In the evenings, we often drove to Canal Street in their old car where Pat parked so that he and Mary and I could observe people as they went about their lives, walking and talking peacefully or arguing, even fighting, and look at lighted store windows and cars passing us, all in an atmosphere that was purposeful yet languorous.
    When I think about New Orleans, it’s not only the fragrance of jasmine that I recall, not only the sound of a jazz trumpet from a Bourbon Street caf é , but the city itself, powerfully alive, its uniqueness manifested in every street, in the air itself. And in the French Market down by the Mississippi, a few steps from the small house on St. Ann Street.
    In 1942, it was not yet “modernized.” When Pat and I walked there to buy vegetables and shellfish for jambalaya (a regional dish) or something else he planned to cook that evening, the food, fresh as morning, lay in wooden barrows protected from the strong sun by awnings in vivid colors. Decades later I returned to the city for a conference, and the Market’s produce lay in cement containers, and no longer suggested freshness and singularity.
    When we returned home and unloaded our sacks of food, I would climb up the narrow steps to my bedroom to lie down for a few minutes. The floorboards of the room were old and didn’t quite fit together, leaving broad gaps here and there. Pat and I had long conversations through these cracks while he cooked in the kitchen below.
    Some afternoons when Pat wasn’t at work on his second novel, he would carry an old wicker armchair to the sidewalk in front of the house to spend an hour with his black neighbor who had also brought out a chair.
    Pat and Mary’s house was the last residence in the white-only district. He and the neighbor spoke companionably together. They only argued when Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son , was published during the months I spent there.
    The friend who had first introduced me to Pat and Mary invited me to observe an operation at Charity Hospital. I told myself I was ready for anything. I said yes.
    He introduced me to the surgeon as a “visiting intern.” In the operating room, a nurse brought me a stool to stand on and a surgical mask. I watched the surgery for an hour or so as the patient’s guts, released by the scalpel, floated in the air just above his belly. I pretended interest as long as I could but my bold intention to stay to the end of the operation weakened with the passing moments, and I finally asked to leave.
    A few days later, the doctor drove me to a beach resort, Pass Christian, on the Gulf of Mexico. He wore a transparent bathing cap,