Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist Page B

singing. “Oh, your love washes on me like rain on a dead man’s shoes…” Lady Margaret moved on into the kitchen, humming along with the music. “Oh, your love washes on me…your love make my car run funny…like sugar in the gas tank make my carburetor skip…” She opened a cabinet, took down a box of vanilla wafers and began to stuff them into her mouth. She put water on to boil for tea. She opened the door of the old refrigerator and surveyed its contents. She pulled a piece of yellow ice off the coils of the freezer and stuck it into her mouth shivering at the forbidden gaseous taste. When she was a child Lady Margaret had longed for the ice on the coils of her grandmother’s refrigerator but the maid always caught her and took it away. “Why you want to go and do yourself that way,” Maeleen would say. “That ice all full of poison gas. That ice gonna make a hole in your stomach. You the craziest little girl in the world, Lady Margaret. You the craziest child I ever did see.”
    Lady Margaret took a carton of yogurt down from a shelf and tasted it, hoping to diffuse the poison gas. She walked over to the kitchen table carrying the yogurt and set it down beside the newspaper, which was opened to her review.
    â€œWriter Attacks Crescent City,” the headline said.
    The Assumption, by Anna Hand
    Ms. Hand’s new book abounds in clichés, crude language, and uses real names of places in New Orleans in a way that can only be called name-dropping. Her sketchy characterizations leave the reader wondering if a woman like Lelia Clark can be called a heroine. Lelia thinks only of herself as we see her living a debauched life in New Orleans, then running away to join a bunch of hippies in Montana. There, Ms. Hand would have us believe, she finds love and a sense of social consciousness by working with delinquent boys.
    The cover, a copy of a painting by El Greco, is a tasteless use of a religious painter’s work to decorate what can only be called a book written by an atheist.
    Last year Ms. Hand shocked the city by publishing a book of stories based on real-life tragedies in the Crescent City. Many people went out and bought the book anyway. Well, this time New Orleans is not going to pay to be attacked. Especially by a heroine who is supposed to be good at languages (she is teaching French to the delinquents) but can only express herself in the sort of expressions better left in late night bars.
    The back cover of the book is a photograph of Ms. Hand wearing a big grin and a plantation hat with long streamers. The picture is doubly shocking considering the things inside.
    Margaret Lanier Sarpie
    Lady Margaret dropped the newspaper on the floor and picked up the box of papers beside it. She thumbed through the pages, pulled one out, began to read. It was a novel she had been writing for several years. “When Sherry got home from her luncheon with her aunt there was a note on a silver salver by the door. The salver, in a pattern called Fleur-de-lis, was part of a set of silver left to Sherry by her great-grandmother. The note was from Doug Hamilton again. Would he never leave her alone? This time he was more persistent than ever. ‘We simply can’t do without you. No one else in the state has the voice and personality to sing that part. We know you are in mourning and we honor your sorrow. But we beg you to join us in saving the opera house. That opera house is important, Miss Claverie. It is the heart of the city’s cultural life. Won’t you reconsider your decision? Won’t you give it your deepest, truest thought?’
    â€œSherry looked up the long curving marble stairway made of pink Georgia marble to the landing where John had stood the last time she ever saw him. She had been wearing a floor-length silver and blue gown of satinade worked with lace insets at the hem and sleeves. Every time she walked up the stairs he was still