The Futilitarians Read online

  The evening wound down with a tentative though satisfying sense of something beginning, a night class we were all auditing, and an agreement to create a monthly curriculum guided by the vagaries of the group. Since there was some dissatisfaction with the abstract nature of the talk that evening, even though ostensibly that’s what we were there for, and some of us craved a little narrative, for the next meeting Case suggested “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” by Tadeusz Borowski, evidently agitating to push us to the extreme of modern societal evil. It’s the title story from a beautiful and brutal postwar collection by a Polish writer and journalist who was imprisoned and put to work in Nazi concentration camps, was liberated, wrote about it all, and committed suicide at the age of twenty-eight. But sure, we collectively shrugged in assent, and, this being the Age of Impulse, when forethought and waiting are less and less acceptable, Case tapped at his iPhone, accessed the vast shared cyber brain of human knowledge, found the link, and instantly sent the horror of Auschwitz straight to all of our inboxes while we talked and drank.

  A tiptoe procession bore crumb-laden platters and glasses down the hallway, past our sleeping boys’ bedroom, to the kitchen. Empty wine bottles clanked discreetly into the trash can under the sink. Bikes were liberated from the fence, and parking spots opened back up in front of the house. It was late. Brad and I left the dishes in a precarious pile on the counter until the morning and went to bed, minds buzzing and happy, surprised about how well it had gone, grateful for our friends.

  The search had begun, and it was already so affirming and fun. As mother, daughter, wife, teacher, I directed much of my day toward the needs of others. Yes, I could carve out time alone to read and write and replenish the mind and soul, but the ECRG provided the bonus of so many other viewpoints to embrace and invigorated my own experience of the reading, minus the competitiveness and insecurity I’d often felt in school. That night we’d contrasted Epicurus’s claim that the attainment of knowledge was necessary for one’s “soul-health” with the Preacher-King’s warning: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” I was used to sorrow, didn’t even mind sorrow, but the possibility of a hybrid “soul-healthy sorrow” felt useful. This communal investigation of living felt useful, and necessary. I set my alarm for too early, turned off the bedside lamp, and burrowed under the covers, feeling something like relief.

  A few hours later, in the early morning of January 6, Nina would leave Case. “Damn the Existential Crisis Reading Group,” Nina said repeatedly as she packed up her things. We had sensed the tension between them before, and apparently all the talk of intentionality and the ex-girlfriend had set her off. But still, Brad and I agreed later that day, it wasn’t such a great sign for the beginning of the ECRG. Then again, it was a reminder that the search could lead to all kinds of outcomes. January 6 is also the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrating the Three Kings’ discovery of baby Jesus, son of God, in the manger, an important day not only on the Catholic calendar but also the New Orleans calendar, because it marks the beginning of the carnival season, pops off the cork of the year. I always loved our celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany as a kid because it meant more presents, and then later as an adult for the import, the celebration of discovery and hope. Joyce secularized the Catholic use of “epiphany” for literary purposes, and humanity co-opted it for personal uses, to put a name to those rare, gleaming revelations that sometimes travel from afar to change our understanding of ourselves or the world.

  On that same morning of the Feast of the Epiphany, my dad, with almost no immunity due to his chemo treatments that week, took the long drive to the Angola prison, tucked into the crook of the state near the Mississippi border, to visit his pro bono client on Death Row and fell ill upon returning home. Days later, he died a patriarch’s death in the Touro Infirmary with all of his remaining children around him, prayer working its binding magic among us, even though most of us held only the barest vestige of faith, and really only when it seemed to serve us. He’d been unconscious for most of the day, and all there was to do was attend to the running down of the animal machine, anticlimactic, exhausting.

  A couple of days later, taking a break from the death chores, five of the surviving siblings went to lunch at the Rib Room, table 5, Dad’s table, to drink with his fresh ghost. We had collectively grieved before, but with a different quality. This was a father’s death, a shifting of the axis. Without the shock and horror and self-recriminations of our sisters’ suicides, which bound us so tightly to the events of their deaths, we faced a chasm, a great unmooring.

  During lunch, a reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune called the oldest of us, John, also a lawyer, who’d made it from Pittsburgh to the deathbed just in time. The paper was doing one of those article-length obituaries it publishes for people of some civic prominence and wanted to ask a few questions about our father’s life. John and my older sister, Kristin, a politician at the time, passed the phone back and forth, answering the reporter’s questions with a fuzzy magnification brought on by lunchtime martinis, the power siblings in collusion, the rest of us holding in our laughter. I sat across from them in the padded booth, the mortified middle child, mouthing “Stop it” over my Beefeater, Dad’s drink.

  Dad had held court at table 5 for over twenty-five years, since we were teenagers. The place had hardly changed. Waiters in maroon jackets eternally placed hot French bread in paper wrappers onto white tablecloths. The balcony-sheltered windows kept the noon sunlight golden, the bare bulbs of sconces and chandeliers merely embellishing the light. Church-high ceilings with faux-Tudor rafters, walls veneered with veiny green and black marble meeting a polished flagstone floor. The usual architectural suggestion—affluence as some sort of ancient privilege, anchored by the prizes of geology. Reproductions of nineteenth-century levee lanterns were mounted high on the walls of the Rib Room, names of the towns along the Mississippi painted in black on their glass: Vacherie, Houma, Verret. Table 5 resided between Belle Chasse, christened “the beautiful hunt” by the French in the early eighteenth century, and Bayou Goula, named for the Indian tribe that had been spearing deer on Delta land since before Christ. I loved the idea of the beautiful hunt, not the initial European awe of the land’s wild bounty, which quickly and inevitably turned exploitative, but the possibility of a lifelong beautiful hunt, which I always associated with long lunches with my father at table 5.

  I never quite understood Dad’s attachment to the place. I could only figure his weekly ritual was his reward as a self-made man, a rust-belt refugee who got his first job, at a grocery, at age ten, worked as a grinder in a foundry at nineteen, and by twenty-nine was the youngest strike-force chief against organized crime for the Department of Justice. Through childhood and adolescence, he’d had a terrible stutter, which he vanquished at Notre Dame with hours of practicing speeches in front of a mirror. As a young federal prosecutor he invited his mother to watch him present an opening argument in court, which he executed flawlessly, and which she beamed about for years.

  Not just a reward, though. His hard-won presence at the Rib Room, a working-class liberal midwesterner among the New Orleans moneyed elite, or at least the trappings of it, was also a perverse “fuck you” to the establishment, as he rebelled against any and all establishments, especially ones he was associated with. His white-shoe law firm, the government, the Catholic Church. Amy, the sixth and youngest sibling since the twins’ deaths, never liked the Rib Room and never went, saying she related to Dad’s blue-collar side, while the Rib Room represented his white-collar ambitions. She would embrace the blue collar literally, by becoming a New Orleans cop, working some of the most dangerous streets in the country.

  Also: Dad nurtured a grudge like a bonsai tree, tending and shaping, maintaining its diminutive, eternal perfection. Back in the 1970s, as a young federal prosecutor, he’d wanted to pick up the check at the Rib Room to celebrate a department victory. But he was a struggling gov
ernment employee with eight children, and his credit card was declined. The humiliation lodged and stuck. Eventually, he gave up the job with the Department of Justice that he loved and turned to the private sector—corporate defense. Maybe it was a consolation prize, becoming a regular at the Rib Room. Pouring his Beefeater from a martini pitcher with Gisleson etched in the glass, picking up checks at table 5 for the next couple of decades.

  Lunches with Dad at the Rib Room were about interrogation, debate, revelation, judgment, and telling stories. My father asserted himself on us in a rather formalized way. Table 5 was a malleable space, could shrink down to the claustrophobic dimensions of a confessional or expand to theater, or courtroom, with Dad playing to the cheap seats or a jury.

  Part of the ceremony of the Rib Room was that we weren’t even allowed to look at a menu for the first half hour or so. Dad’s regular waiters knew this and wouldn’t bring a menu to the table unless he asked for it. We couldn’t order until about an hour of talking and drinking had transpired. This was to demonstrate that food and time, usually the defining characteristics of lunch, were incidental, nearly irrelevant to my father at table 5. Another Rib Room lunch tradition was reminiscing about dishes that hadn’t been on the menu for years. Like the Oysters Rockefeller and the Roti Assorti and the glassy, fragile crème brûlée. The trap of growing up in New Orleans: you’re often preoccupied with what’s been lost while clinging to a grand, cobbled present—part wreck, part fantasy, part regular civic striving, but always under construction.

  And it was at this table that I had my last real conversation with him, a couple of weeks before he died. I told him Brad and I were starting an existential crisis reading group, which I thought he’d get a kick out of, having studied in the Great Books program at Notre Dame. Near the end of lunch, he gazed down Royal Street, toward the white marble steps of the courthouse where he had tried some of his biggest cases as a young prosecutor. I realized long ago that his looking-out-the-window gesture often augured one of those moments in conversation in which the speaker speaks more to himself than to others, an earnest though slightly stagey aside.

  “Have you seen the scrapbook that your mother made of our first year of dating?” he asked.

  I did remember seeing it as a child or maybe teenager, wedged on a crowded shelf between the leatherette photo albums that archived all eight of our parallel childhoods, some albums more complete than others. Mom and Dad met in 1962, when they were both sophomores in college. Dad was at Notre Dame, scraping by financially but thriving in his double major of math and philosophy. He hauled his books from South Beloit to South Bend in produce boxes proudly supplied by Mick and Dick Zick from the Black Hawk Grocery, where he worked all through high school, while admiring other students’ leather-bound trunks and matching luggage. Mom, from New Orleans, was studying Christian culture at Saint Mary’s, where women still had curfews, wore uniforms, and always donned coats over their tennis clothes when crossing campus to the courts.

  Mom put the scrapbook together on vacation with her parents at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, while stuck inside the cottage nursing a bad sunburn. Funny that my Walton grandparents vacationed at Fort Walton, as my mother once told me that Walton (also my middle name) means “walled town.” This makes perfect sense for my grandparents, who were distant, unaffectionate, and inaccessible, but not for my mother, who is more a thatched hut in a sunny meadow—open and nearly glowing with fully expressed love. Along with the name, I inherited a certain cautious, judgmental Walton reserve. I have no idea how my warm and giving mother escaped the ramparts, became someone who would make that scrapbook, carry it back to college while riding coach on the City of New Orleans train, and present it to her delighted midwestern boyfriend. Ever since I can remember, Mom, even with the brood swirling around her, has always created and commemorated with scissors and Elmer’s glue, beautiful handwriting and a cheerful generosity.

  “I had forgotten about it for forty years,” Dad said, “and she just brought it out of mothballs from somewhere. Did you see that first page? The first page says, ‘Rick is from Illinois, but not much more is known of him. He is very mysterious.’ I looked at that, and I thought, ‘You know what? Forty-odd years later I’m the same way. She still doesn’t know me. People still don’t know me.’”

  I related this to my brothers and sisters after John and Kristin hung up with the reporter. We agreed that it was a good, Dad-like mix of melodrama and truth. Either way, burying an enigma seemed even more crushing than burying a man we imagined we knew well. Answering a reporter’s questions with any authority seemed absurd. But then again, so did his death.

  It was also here at table 5, about ten years earlier, that my father had forbidden me to ever write about the deaths of Rebecca and Rachel. Intimidating in size, intellect, and absolute paternal power, he told me that if I did, he would never forgive me. He would take the affront to his grave. So, over the years, I never really did write about them, except for a cagey reference here or there. One very short story in a very small journal, invisible to him and, frankly, the world. I complied because enough damage had been done to our family by those two suicides. As unnatural as it felt, it was a casualty I was willing to sustain.

  But it was also such a great, unfair contradiction that here, in this place where he encouraged me to question authority and think critically, he also demanded I shut myself off creatively from the most affecting experiences of my life. Or more precisely, I could scribble away in a journal, I just couldn’t share it with the world. A phenomenon one writer I know described as chewing and not swallowing.

  The golden light of the Rib Room was cooling now with afternoon, the shadows among the tables and pillars gathering depth. The dining room was empty of patrons. Busboys were changing linens and resetting tables for dinner, straightening the silverware, centering the white peaks of napkins. I thought about my obligation to honor the wishes of the dead. In this town, the dead can take up a lot of real estate, both physical and mental. But what about honoring the wishes of the irrational dead?

  As I sipped my Beefeater, I realized that Dad had, in fact, taken his mandate to his grave, and I could write about whatever the hell I wanted to write about now. I felt a guilty tremor of lightness. I felt kind of mean. How horrible was it that as I sat here with my siblings, sickened with loss, I was thinking about this particular liberation? It’s tricky, that impotent vindictiveness reserved for the dead. With no solid target, you either end up absorbing the poison or expelling it altogether.

  As the lunch ended, we living dogs toasted our dead lion. Then this wounded pack of sons and daughters, dressed up in the baroque drama of grief and dark tailored clothes, took off into the French Quarter to drink at the bars where our father always had—Harry’s Corner, the Chart Room, the Old Absinthe House—retracing and sniffing out the dank trails of old sins and past adventures, heading into the jungly chaos of our first fatherless year.

  That night I returned to a house humming with the special quiet of sleeping boys. Bleary, spent, drinking water out of the kitchen faucet, I saw Chris’s postcard of the Mayan calendar tucked into the crisp new Saturn Bar calendar on the wall. Hang on in 2012. He was right. The wild ride had already begun.

  FEBRUARY

  World of Stone

  Grieving during carnival season was an odd enterprise. Somewhat like grief, carnival’s chief tension is between ritual and chaos. And also like grief, it involves breaking out of daily rhythms and getting in touch with something more communal. The season of carne vale, or “farewell to the flesh,” lasts for weeks, from the Feast of the Epiphany to Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. The same parades have been parading the same nights of the week in the same sequence for years; people have appointed days for throwing and attending certain parties. The same families escape town for the week of Mardi Gras; after all, not everyone enjoys the massive crowds, the traffic, the excess. Most schools in New Orleans, both Catholic and secular, close for the week of Mardi Gras Day, or at lea
st part of it. Regular business is suspended, unless your regular business is the service industry or law enforcement.

  During the controversial first post-Katrina Mardi Gras, held when the city was still mostly broken and depopulated, our family’s unofficial slogan was from theater critic John Lahr: “Frivolity is the refusal of the human species to suffer.” After Dad died, instead of abstaining from carnival that year, as might’ve been wise, I threw myself into it. I wasn’t refusing to suffer, I deeply needed to suffer, I was just letting the celebration invade my grief, and vice versa. Our dad’s death was still unreal and still near enough that it shaded all of our actions with a self-conscious though real poignancy. Death brought its own unbearable clarity to scenes often left gauzy or shrouded with activity. We brothers and sisters brought our kids to the parades, caught beads and trinkets alongside them, and did not cancel our parties. Dressed up in formal attire, we went to the Mayor’s Ball at Gallier Hall fronting St. Charles Avenue, a neoclassical edifice of Tuckahoe marble built in the mid-nineteenth century. The double rows of huge columns with scrolled Ionic capitals, in the South, are a style of architecture often associated with oppression as much as authority. That night we watched the krewe of Pegasus parade down the avenue in viewing boxes erected on the steps of Gallier Hall for the mayor and the members of the city council, including my sister Kristin.