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It all starts with a thud heard through the wall (and also a long time before that). They have finished dinner and Alastor is in the middle of a description of his friend Mimzy’s latest beau. He never talks about his own love life, but often about hers. At the sound, he pauses and looks questioningly at his mother.
Florance sighs. “Mr Benoit” she explains, glancing at the wall she shares with her neighbours.
Alastor raises an eyebrow, waiting for her to go on. When she doesn’t, his smile slips a little, but doesn’t disappear. It had been Florance who taught him to smile regardless of what he felt inside, telling him that it would get him further in life than a frown. She hadn’t added that people who can’t help anyway need not know about their troubles. Nor did she mention that all she had left apart from him some days was her pride. But she’d known he was learning all that too, for all they didn’t speak about it aloud. There is a difference between knowing and knowing.
And if he is now so good at smiling regardless of what he feels that it is a little unnerving, doesn’t that mean she taught him well?
“What on earth is the man doing?” Alastor’s voice is a little strained. Florance doesn’t like to think of the associations he must have with those sorts of sounds. Sounds that he used to hear, when he was a little child and Florance sent him upstairs before his father got nasty.
She tends now to think of that man as Alastor’s father and not by his name. The Bible says Love thy enemies and the closest Florance can come to that is to remember hers by the one good thing he gave her. Connecting his memory to Alastor is an unearned kindness because really, he was never a proper father to their boy. Florance thinks that father should be a verb that extends beyond grudging financial support, and other than that the man had done nothing. On the good days.
Mrs Benoit is having a bad day and they can hear it through the wall. It becomes undeniable when they hear the poor woman whimpering. Florance lowers her glass and turns her gaze to the floor, hating that she is not going round there to help but knowing that any attempt will only make things worse.
And it is not as though the police will come if she calls them. Florance learnt that much the hard way. To them this is a “domestic matter”, as though violence in the home is somehow less awful than violence outside it. Florance could tell them that it feels much the same.
Alastor’s smile finally slips away and his left eye twitches. He stands up.
“Wait, Alastor!” Florance stands too, raising her hands placatingly.
“I’m only going to talk to him, maman” Alastor reassures her.
“It will only make things worse.”
“Not if I say the right things.”
A particularly loud crash sounds through the wall and Florance gestures to it. “Does he sound like a man who’ll listen to reason? You’ll only provoke him, and then he’ll take it out on her once you’ve left.” When Alastor doesn’t look convinced, she adds, “It’s not as if she can leave. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“She could come here” Alastor argues, but his tone is uncertain, betraying his reluctance to volunteer his mother’s hospitality when the price could be Mr Benoit hammering on the door.
“She often does” Florance tells him, “Once the upset’s over.” The man will leave and the woman will pick herself up and fix her face. It is a pattern Florance knows well, even from Before Alastor.
Time, so far as Florance is concerned, is divided into Before Alastor and After. Before Alastor, Florance went out after the worst of the bad days passed. To a friend’s, or just out onto the streets. Never back to the apartment above her mother’s little store. Her mother was too ill by then to cope with the sight of Florance’s bruises. Florance wore a smile for her mother back then, and applied her make up carefully.
After Alastor, she stayed even on the bad days, and cooked. She didn’t have the luxury of leaving when her boy needed to eat. Before Alastor, Florance didn’t eat some days rather than take charity, and felt his father’s fists rather than apologise for things she didn’t do. After Alastor, she did whatever it took to feed her boy and to placate the violent man who sometimes shared his home.
Florance was little more than a child herself when she became a mother. All of eighteen, blinking down at him blinking up at her. She fell in love that day, and she learnt that no one ever warns you about the falling part of falling in love, how it really is a heart racing freefall with no telling what is at the bottom. Her love for Alastor is big enough to swallow the world. It is a fierce, uncompromising, glorious love that blazes through everything she ever was Before. There is little she wouldn’t do for him (and that scares her).
Her own mother lived just long enough to say, “No one would blame you if you didn’t keep him, chérie” and Florance had held her baby close and tried not to resent the remark. Her mother’s life had not been made easy by being a common-law wife rather than a wife under actual law. She had wanted better for Florance. Florance had wanted better for Florance. At least her parents had loved each other, her father remaining a lifelong bachelor rather than be unfaithful to the family society would rather he didn’t have. But the man who gave her Alastor (and nothing else good) was a hard man to leave and her usually strong mother was by then too frail to help. And then there Alastor was, perfect, and innocent, and needing more than Florance’s widowed mother’s little Voodoo store could give him even if his father had let them walk away.
And then her mother had passed and the business soon followed. And then there was nowhere to turn but to dubious support doled out by a closed fist. There had been no choice. She had to provide for Alastor. Whatever it took.
Now, Alastor winces at another thud sounding through the wall. “Someone has to do something.”
“It will be over soon, bébé.”
Alastor eyes the wall, still standing, then glances at the door. Before he can say more, the Benoits’ front door slams and a car starts and speeds away, Mr Benoit leaving the scene of what Florance knows is a crime, whatever the police have to say about it. “There” says Florance in relief.
Alastor just looks at her. He is a stoic man. It takes quite a lot to get a strong emotional reaction from him. Even lacking a smile for this long is unusual in him. His lack of emotional expression sometimes makes Florance feel a little distant from him but she supposes this is the lot of mothers with sons. Boys have to learn to keep their emotions in check so early. If Alastor seems to find this easier than most men, that is surely something to be grateful for. It makes him very different from his father for one thing. The man had started out with his heart on his sleeve and wound up wearing only his anger.
Florance hurries round to tend to Mrs Benoit. She knows from hard experience that this will hurt the woman’s pride but it sounded bad this time. Alastor doesn’t follow, and she is grateful for that. This is a scene that might reawaken painful memories. Florance doesn’t want her son exposed to this sort of violence ever again.
As a baby he was every mother’s dream. Soft and pliant and perfect. Once he was mobile, she had her work cut out to keep him from eating flowers, tumbling down steps (squishing bugs, pulling the cat’s tail) but he was never bad. Reckless, sometimes, sure. Probably because he was so clever (and so very easily bored).
The same cleverness gave him an ear for gossip. He was interested in her conversations with her friends from an early age, following keenly whether they spoke in English or French. He soon began asking questions about the stories they shared of their neighbours’ little dramas and upsets, and she had to be careful what was said around him. He was far too young to keep a secret. Or to be properly sympathetic if the latest gossip involved someone else’s misfortune.
No mother is perfect but Florance tried so hard. She read to him every night. Before Alastor, she didn’t have much time for books. Nothing against them, just not enough hours in the day. She only read the Bible by accident, never setting out to finish it cover to cover but just doing it anyway as her mother’s insistence and her own reading piled up over the years, until it struck her that there wasn’t a word of it she hadn’t seen.
She didn’t just read Alastor the Bible, she read him everything she could lay her hands on. After Alastor, she stacked her shelves second hand books. She wanted her boy to have the best education she could give him. She taught him all the rhymes and songs of her childhood, in both her languages. She listened and asked questions when he shared his ideas (even the more startlingly violent ones. Perhaps some little boys were just like that). She worked long hours to pay for his piano lessons, knowing that his father wouldn’t spare them more than they needed for food. And not always that. When he denied them, Florance had to turn to the charity of neighbours. She always paid them back and when Alastor asked why, she explained in detail and made a point of sending him round with the money. She refused to raise a boy who didn’t pay his debts.
Alastor’s father didn’t actually live in the house, thank God. He lived in a white neighbourhood with his wife, a woman who Florance was jealous of long ago but was already praying for by the time Alastor came along and split time in two. The wife gave him lots of babies, but none of them were as beautiful as Alastor.
Whenever the man was with them, and his temper started to slip, Florance sent her beautiful boy upstairs. She taught him to hide his little body under his bed and his fear behind a smile. She hadn’t been wrong about the relative merits of a smile verses a frown. She knew that the world wouldn’t grant him the luxury of being able to show the uglier emotions in public. The world was never going to be kind to an illegitimate, quarter black boy from an impoverished neighbourhood. He needed to smile and to keep his temper better than his father, because Florance was ambitious for her boy. She wanted him to have the best life he possibly could.
And now he has it. He is a radio star, known all over the state and, increasingly, beyond. It is not necessarily what Florance would have chosen for him. She would have liked him to be a doctor, or a surgeon (he never was squeamish, after all), something that helps people (but he didn’t seem interested in that) but radio is his passion. And now, when she tells people who her son is, their eyes light up. People love him. Or at least, they love the persona he adopts when he is on air, which is not quite him so much as it is him on his very best behaviour. But of course, they are charmed when they meet him in person too. Alastor is nothing if not charming.
Perhaps he is so ready to go and confront Mr Benoit because his success has made him forget what it is like to be helpless and to feel small at the hands of a man like that. For that, Florance is grateful.
Mrs Benoit is alright. “Nothing the right make up won’t cover” she tells Florance with a shaky smile. It reminds Florance, with a pang, of Alastor’s early attempts.
It is just as well Alastor didn’t come over. Covering bruises is women’s work.
“Does he ever come round here?” her boy asks when she gets home.
“No, cher.”
“Not even to look for his wife?”
“He’s never been round here, Alastor. I promise.”
“You’d tell me if he did?”
“I would” says Florance, who wouldn’t. She starts to clear away the dishes, but Alastor stands to take over the chore. He always washes up during his visits, arguing that she cooked. He has even offered to cook, too. He is every woman’s dream.
Carrying the dishes to the kitchen, Alastor says again, “You shouldn’t have to put up with it.”
“I don’t. Mrs Benoit does.”
“She shouldn’t either.”
“I know, bébé. But it’s the way the world is.”
Alastor gets a look then, a grim determination behind the smile. Florance dares to hope that he might talk around the delicate topic of violent husbands on his radio show. Nothing explicit, of course, nothing that people would find distasteful. Alastor has a history of struggling to judge what people will find unpleasant, but he is careful on his show. Just a hint would help, a suggestion that he views such behaviour as unacceptable. Her boy is not without influence. Tackle this topic and he really will be every woman’s dream.
And every radio producer’s nightmare. Florance decides to make no suggestions. After all, she never made suggestions about his show before, and she is loath to make one that could get him into trouble at work.
She listens to his every broadcast, delighting in hearing his voice in her kitchen even though he’s miles away living the high life in the big city. She laughs along to his musings and anecdotes as she cooks. His accent is different on the airwaves, but his smile shines through. The show itself revolves around music, reviews of stage and dance shows, musings on city life, gossip about famous people and what Alastor terms human interest stories, which boils down to gossip about people who are not famous. Cruel gossip, in all honesty, not the light hearted fare Florance is partial too. Actually, the show is not, she has to admit, the sort of thing she would listen to if Alastor hadn’t been presenting, but he is and she is so very proud. And she tells herself she is probably to blame for how comfortable her son is with the mean spirited gossip his producers encourage. She shouldn’t have introduced him to the vice, especially when he was so young.
Once a week, the format is switched up and Alastor interrupts his own chatter with an interview with an up-and-coming star, instead of the usual jazz. Florance is amazed at how easily he converses with just about anyone. He is nothing if not charming. At other times, he is called upon to read breaking news, trusted to share distressing information about violence and suffering with the listening public. (And if she can hear his smile just as clearly on those occasions, she doubts anyone else can.)
It is wonderful that he has a job he enjoys so much. The boredom he suffered with as a small child hadn’t gone away as he grew. As he progressed from a toddler to an energetic little boy, he had started doing dangerous things just to keep himself amused. Climbing up trees and onto roofs, marching off into the bayou, helping himself to his father’s drink just to see what it was like to be giddy with it. No one had ever told Florance that little boys could be so wild. (Maybe other people’s little boys weren’t.) Faced with Alastor’s self destructive quest for entertainment, she hadn’t known what to do, and had ended up giving him more freedom than she’d planned, sooner than she’d planned, just to keep him safe from the impulses monotony stirred up in him.
She had hoped starting school would help but, while he took to his lessons every bit as well as she’d known her clever boy would, he often found himself in trouble. Just the usual boyish hijinks. Speaking out of turn, throwing a paper ball, hiding a (dead) frog in his teacher’s desk. (Breaking a little boy’s glasses. Biting another boy’s hand so hard he needed stiches.) Florance had had to warn him sternly about how disappointed she would be if he didn’t study hard and stay away from mischief. She had already learnt how formidable a weapon her disappointment was when it came to keeping her boy in line, more so than God’s disappointment in fact. She was more tangible than God, of course.
Now, Alastor seems to keep himself well entertained in the city, though the details of how are a little hazy to her. New Orleans is changing fast, and Alastor seems to spend a lot of time with the musicians, artists and writers who are now filling the French Quarter. Loose moraled people, Florance’s mother would say. Florance reminds herself that the Bible says Judge not. She always did like that verse, probably because her mother so often forgot it in her hurry to be as respectable as a common law wife was told she couldn’t be. Ironic that Florance judged her for that. Now, she knows that her mother only wanted to build up her respectability for Florance’s sake, just as Florance always tried to save face, smile and pay her debts for Alastor’s.
Alastor won’t have to worry about paying his way or being respected. He earns a good salary and so many people listen to his every word. His success is, in many ways, what her mother, as well as Florance, worked hard for, for years.
Alastor shows up later in the week, outside of his usual pattern of visits, to present her with a huge bouquet. “Oh, Alastor, mon cher! You precious darling!” Florance ushers him in, finds a vase. “I’ll put them on the table here. Oh, you do spoil me.”
“You deserve it, mama.”
Florance pauses her fussing, realising he still has a massive, identical bouquet in his arms. Confusion gives way to hope. On the subject of Alastor’s love life, she lives in hope. But when she asks, “Are we expecting company?” her son replies, “Actually, maman, these are for Mrs Benoit.”
Florance feels her own smile soften. “Oh my sweet boy. That’s such a kind thought but I’m afraid it might get her into trouble with her husband.” Sweet thoughts do not heal bruises.
“Ah, but I’ll explain to Mr Benoit that I only ordered the one bouquet for you and two arrived. An unfortunate mix up but his wife might like the extra. It will appear perfectly innocent.” Alastor smiles a flawless smile (and hard experience has taught Florance to recognise a practised liar).
She folds her arms. “I’d rather you not talk to him at all, Alastor.”
“A brief chat might put him at ease.” Alastor shrugs prettily. He is slipping back into his native accent, as he always does around her. It is never immediate, the transatlantic inflection having been drilled in. Florance can’t help but wonder whether he is letting the Louisiana back in sooner than usual now to get her approval.
Not that he needs her approval. He is a grown man and he heads round there. He stays quite awhile, first standing on the porch with his flowers, then inside the house, then back on the porch, flowerless, smiling a flawless smile at Mr Benoit. Florance can’t imagine they have much to talk about and hopes that Alastor isn’t issuing heavy handed threats. (But then, it has been a while since his threats were heavy handed.)
“I think that went rather well” Alastor announces when he returns.
“I hope you didn’t stir things up.”
“No, no, we merely had a pleasant conversation. I had no idea Mr Benoit was such a keen golfer.”
Florance shudders. She doesn’t like to think of her boy merrily beating gums with a man like that. But then, she did warn him against confrontation so how can she complain? And it just goes to show how charming her boy is, how easily he converses with anyone. Musician, politician or wife beater, apparently. She manages, “Well, I hope Mrs Benoit liked her flowers.”
“I think they made her day” says Alastor sincerely. He has a good heart really, underneath the cruel gossip and the sharp smile.
Florance cooks and Alastor tells her about some drama unfolding at a club he frequents. It all sounds a bit sordid to Florance, carefully reading between the lines. She has heard about the things that go on in such places. The scandalous dancing, the risqué music, the flouting of prohibition. Not from Alastor, whose stories never feature such things directly. Speakeasies linger on the edges of his stories, discernible only if Florance chooses to notice, so she carefully doesn’t. There is a difference between knowing and knowing (and she wouldn’t mind if the worst he does is drink).
It doesn’t escape her that he paid an extra visit because of the unpleasantness with Mr Benoit. Really, it is no wonder such things affect him deeply.
Before Alastor, Florance found it difficult to predict his father’s moods. Blows came out of nowhere. After Alastor, she developed a precise awareness of when the man would punish her with more than his words. She had to, so she could send Alastor upstairs, or, better yet, once he was old enough, out the house entirely. Sometimes, the bayou was safer than his father.
Mr Benoit dies a week later, attacked on his way home from his favourite golf club. “The police think he might have been in debt to some mobster” Mrs Benoit tells Florance, “But I told them, that wasn’t like him. And how’d he even meet a mobster? That’s the sort of thing that happens in the city, not out here.” Mrs Benoit is fragile, hovering between horror and giddy hope. Florance knows all too well that the dismay at what a relationship became sometimes only fully hits when it is over. She’d been a mess after Alastor’s father died, her mind a tangle of joy and grief and all the pain she’d kept buried under her smile for years. (Alastor, for his part had been unashamedly delighted by the man’s demise. But who could blame him for that?)
“Mr Benoit is dead” she tells her son when he next comes round, this time with Mimzy in tow. She cannot fault him for duty. He never misses a visit. Really, he is the perfect son. As well as the visits, he calls her once a week. Not on a public telephone: He is earning enough now to have one in his apartment. She listens as he recounts the highs and…well, highs of his career. If there are pitfalls, he doesn’t mention them. After he has shared his news she talks about what little is new with her and her son’s wicked laughter cackles down the line.
She is glad this is a visit, not a phone call. Mr Benoit’s death is news too big and too serious to share over the phone.
But Alastor is unmoved. “Oh?” is all his response to the revelation.
“Yes.” Florance waits. “Murdered” she adds pointedly when he doesn’t say anything else.
“Murdered!” echoes Mimzy, all but clapping her hands in excitement, “Come on, spill the tea: Do they know who did it?”
Florance feels her smile slip a little and tells herself that the Bible says Judge not. It doesn’t add not even Mimzy but Florance would have appreciated it if it did. She could use the reminder. Mimzy is just so vulgar, and Florance has never forgotten that, right after the girl’s first visit, her pearls had gone missing. She is grateful that her son’s relationship with Mimzy seems to be purely platonic.
As is his relationship with every woman, so far as she can tell. For all she doesn’t like Mimzy, Florance often encourages Alastor to bring the girl round, simply because it stops the neighbours talking for a while. Florance is not the only gossip in the neighbourhood and there are theories floating about as to why a certain radio host is still a bachelor. The word homosexual has hung unspoken in the air for years now when her less kindly acquaintances ask after Florance’s boy. And, really, though Florance is no expert on these things, she suspects that some of Alastor’s friends might be that way inclined. Mimzy once gleefully informed her that one of the young men she met on a visit to New Orleans is a female impersonator. Aware that Mimzy just wanted to see the look on her face, Florance had smiled breezily.
Now, she looks at her son. “They have no idea who did it. There’s a killer in the neighbourhood, sha!” It is a frightening idea as well as surreal one. This is not the sort of gossip Florance enjoys.
Mimzy sucks in a breath. “No telling where they’ll strike next!”
“Exactly!” Florance feels a rare moment of solidarity with the woman, who at least seems to understand the magnitude of the news. Alastor still looks unimpressed, though he does say, “He, Mimzy.”
Mimzy blinks up at him. “What?”
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“He, not they. You don’t really think a woman would be capable of that sort of brutality, surely?”
“Hey, watch it! If he comes at me, I’ll show him what a woman can do!”
Alastor laughs. He often laughs at Mimzy, Florance has noticed. Sometimes, he seems to treat her not so much as a friend but as a pet or a favourite toy. Mimzy, in turn, treats Alastor as a shoulder to cry on when she is between suitors or needs some other unspecified help, so Florance supposes it balances out, for all she wishes her son would find nicer friends. Now, Alastor tells Mimzy, “My dear, I’m sure you have nothing to worry about. Now, then, are we going?”
Sundays, he drives Florance to church, setting out early in his Tin Lizzie to drop her off for the afternoon service. These days, he never comes in. With Mimzy here, the two of them will go for coffee in the little café on main street but when he is alone, he simply waits outside and reads over the script for Monday’s show. The congregation whisper and tut but Florance can’t imagine that God minds. And if she had said to him once on the drive home, “You know, cher, you can grow distant from God but He won’t ever grow distant from you” and if Alastor had replied, “Is that so, maman?” in a somewhat dismissive tone, no-one but God need know. (There are worse things he could be than an atheist.)
He lives alone. Alone in a big, glamourous apartment, but still alone. Florance worries about that sometimes. She has met some of Alastor’s city friends besides Mimzy. The musicians, the writers. The fellow radio stars with shows that rival or compliment his. The female impersonators even. They all seem to be just like Mimzy. Just as obviously regulars at the unseen but ubiquitous speakeasies. Just as shallow. Just as prone to making a fashion of their lack of virtue. And when Florance thinks all that, she has to tell herself Judge not, but she is not perfect, she is a mother, and she wants her son to spend his time with good people. People who will love him unconditionally as she does. But his city crowd seem to value Alastor for his growing frame and for his money. Fair weather friends, the lot of them. And it won’t always be sunny. Who will look after Alastor when she is gone? Right now, he doesn’t even have a cat for company.
He loved the cat she had when he was tiny. Florance spent hours with the pair of them on her lap, warm little mammal and warm little mammal. They were small enough to both fit comfortably, Alastor soothing himself into a doze, snuggled against her with his little hands buried in the cat’s fur or stroking its soft ears. He was fascinated by the creature’s pest control duties (He never was squeamish) and more than once she found him in the garden, being uncharacteristically quiet and watching the cat as it stalked rodents. (And if Alastor was quick to finish off any little creatures the cat left half-alive, surely that was a mercy to them?)
After church, she always cooks for him, they eat together and then he washes up. It is a weekly ritual, a lovely family tradition that Florance looks forward to every time, even when Mimzy joins them.
This time, Florance can’t make any conversation except to speculate about poor Mr Benoit.
“Poor?” asks Alastor, shocked at last.
“No one deserves what was done to him, bébé” Florance tells him.
He looks a little uncertain then, and looks away. Florance doesn’t know what to make of that.
“Oh” says Mimzy, breaking the moment, “Was he an asshole?”
“Language, Mimzy, dear” says Alastor, even though he rarely chides her for her vulgarity. Perhaps he is just grateful for the distraction. (The distraction from what? It is not as though he is squeamish. Or as if he liked the man.)
Florance would quite like to change the topic now, but Mimzy is interested, even though it doesn’t involve her or anyone she knows. Besides, talking about something else seems wrong too, somehow, as if they are ignoring the man. So Florance shares her thoughts on the situation and Mimzy listens while Alastor pretends not to. “It was terrible” Florance says, “Just terrible. The police had to use his finger prints to identify him.”
Mimzy’s eyes go wide. “Oh, shit, it was that brutal?”
Florance smiles tightly and pauses, but Alastor doesn’t reprimand the swearing again. Out the corner of her eye, Florance catches him checking his nails.
“He was on his way home from golf” she adds, “It was just a normal evening.”
Alastor seems to decide that his nails are clean and finally looks up. “Really? I didn’t know he played.”
“You did. You mentioned it when you went round last week.” (Why, Florance wonders, does she suddenly feel cold?)
Mimzy, she notices, is looking at Alastor quite strangely. Perhaps even she finds his lack of concern about a murderer in their midst a little worrying.
“Ah, yes. It must have slipped my mind.” Alastor laughs. “I’m afraid I can’t say that the world has lost a great conversationalist.”
Some mothers Florance knows would slap their boy for speaking ill of the dead, but she never hit Alastor once and she isn’t about to start now. Her disciple always took the form of scolding her son, sending him to his room or making him do chores. Some would say she was soft on him, but he had enough hardness from his father. Enough violence from his father, come to that.
Besides, he has always did have a wicked sense of humour, and Mimzy doesn’t help. She pats Alastor on the knee now and says, “Oh, Alastor, you’re such a kidder!”
For the rest of the visit, Florance listens as Alastor and Mimzy regale her with tales of their New Orleans lives. He so clearly loves the city and she is happy he has found a place he feels he belongs. She knows that the little town he grew up in was never quite that. It was too small a place to be an illegitimate child with mixed heritage. Perhaps it is no wonder he kept getting into fights and then of course the fights didn’t help.
Not that Alastor has abandoned the Louisiana that lies outside New Orleans. His work takes him all over the state. He interviews jazz singers in their hometowns and broadcasts live from Mardi Gras celebrations in and out of the city. He has even been called on to open a few department stores and speak at charity fundraisers. Some weeks, he spends as much time out of the city as in it. And he prefers to come to her for their visits. Perhaps he has picked up on how overwhelming she finds New Orleans. Perhaps he misses home. (Perhaps taking his country manners on and off like a mask his harder with his city friends around.)
The police don’t release Mr Benoit’s body for burial right away. “They’ll be looking for evidence I suppose” Florance tells Alastor with a shudder.
Alastor gives a little hum, conveying unconcern, a little boredom. Florance feels compelled to say, “You might think I’m going on about it, sha, but this happened in my town! What if the killer’s still around?”
“Maman! As if anyone would hurt you.”
Of course, someone had hurt her, often, and Alastor knows it well. He had been nine, the first time he came downstairs during one of his father’s rages. She was huddled in a corner of the kitchen, shielding herself from the blows. And then in the doorway, a little voice: “Mama?”
She still has nightmares about it. His father had turned to him and Florance had sprung up, wrapped her arms round the man’s neck from behind and clung on. Suddenly it didn’t matter what he did to her. Suddenly the only thing that mattered was keeping him away from Alastor.
(She had woken that night to find Alastor in her room, holding a steak knife to his sleeping father’s neck. Florance had shaken her head urgently and slipped out of bed to guide her son back to his own room. “If you had killed him” she had told her boy, “I’d have told the police it was me. They’d have given me the electric chair but it would be worth it to keep you safe, bébé.” And it would have been, because her love for him was big enough to swallow the world.)
For a time, Mr Benoit’s death is all the local paper – or anyone else – will talk about. But then, a few weeks after Alastor and Mimzy’s visit, an infamous mobster from the city shows up dead in the bayou, and the gruesome reports of just how dead reach beyond New Orleans, leaking black and white and bloody into the pages of the newspapers even in Florance’s little town. (Alastor reports the death on his show with the same audible smile he always has on air, whether he is discussing fashion or reporting on deadly earthquakes.)
The next time Florance sees him, she is the one visiting him for a change. Alastor welcomes her into his impressive, unlived in apartment, a gauze stuck to his cheek that makes her glad that his audience can’t see his face. He winces when she puts her hand to it, but doesn’t stop smiling.
“What happened, cher?”
“An unfortunate run in with a neighbour’s cat” he explains, “I had to help catch the thing and it fought back.” He laughs easily and Florance thinks fondly of how he used to cuddle up to their own cat, back when he was small and soft and innocent.
In the end, it was his father who did for the cat, back when Alastor was still a toddler. The poor creature got in the way when the man was in one of his moods, jumping down from the counter just as he aimed a kick at Florance. She buried it in the garden and told Alastor that it had died of old age. She never got another pet, just in case.
She makes jambalaya in his impressive, well stocked kitchen while Alastor sits at the table, getting up to help when she lets him. “Mr Benoit’s sister visited” she tells him as she stirs the pot, “She wanted to see where it happened and Mrs Benoit bought her round for tea. She seems lovely.” Florance pauses, taste testing her cooking. “Having a sister like that, it makes me believe there must have been some good in him once.”
“Who?” Alastor glances up from polishing glasses.
“Mr Benoit, Alastor.”
“Ah, him.” For some reason, Alastor laughs. Then he sees her expression. “I’m sorry, maman.” He pulls himself together. “How is his wife?”
“Doing okay. She’s going to sell the house, have a fresh start.”
“I’m glad.” And this time his sincerity is natural and pure. He has a good heart really (Really).
(And if, when she walks in later on him redressing his wound, she notices that the scratch marks on his face are far too wide apart to be made by a cat, well there are lots of innocent explanations for that. But Florance doesn’t ask for any.)
Alastor’s good heart wasn’t always readily apparent when he was a child, once he’d slipped from sweet, soft toddlerhood to danger-questing childhood. At least some of the fighting was an equal squabble, Alastor rising to the bait of boys who mocked him and giving as good as he got. Which, Florance explained to him, was still very wrong. (“The Bible says put down the sword, sha” she’d told him once, and Alastor had replied, “I didn’t have a sword, mama. It was a penknife.”) Worse were the times it wasn’t an equal fight, when Alastor went after boys who were smaller or weaker than him, or who were just not expecting it. When his teachers reported this to her, Florance had told herself that the other children were mistaken or lying. No mother is perfect and denial felt so much better than the alternatives. But no neighbourhood has so many liars and there are only so many ways to mistake spiteful words and brutal punches.
Once she could deny it no longer, Florance punished her boy as she should have done from the start. (And if he seemed more sorry to be caught than anything else, well isn’t that natural for a child?)
The man who runs the local paper writes a piece arguing that the dead gangster was murdered by the same man who did for Mr Benoit. When Alastor next visits, he reads it, then shakes his head. “All nonsense” he assures her, “There are no gangsters in your little town.” He smiles his bright smile.
“The police don’t seem to think it was rival mob who killed the gangster” Florance points out.
“A jilted lover perhaps? I’m sure men like that are positively awful to those of fairer means.”
Florance smiles. Her son is such a darling when his smile takes on that hint of protective sympathy. She can always reassure herself that even if he is an atheist and a drinker, Alastor is at least kind to women. So many young men these days make sport of toying with young ladies. Stringing a girl along, promising her the world and then running off once they’ve had their way. Or perhaps that has always happened, and it is just less hidden now, now that people talk about unseemly things in the papers and picture shows. Perhaps the unkindness of young men is simply harder to ignore now. But Alastor is a perfect gentleman. Gallant. He holds doors open for ladies, pulls chairs out for them, seethes with a quiet disgust when the papers report worse than unkindness. Surely he must be just as gentlemanly to the young women he courts, if he courts any.
Florance would love grandchildren. (But she would love them the way she loves Alastor, unconditionally, and with keen awareness of how catastrophically revokable unconditional love is, no matter what a child might grow up to do or be.) If Alastor never has children, she won’t resent it. She doesn’t need him to procreate to build up their little family or ensure her a legacy. He is her legacy. He is her family.
Mr Benoit’s funeral finally goes ahead. Alastor is on air that day, and Florance has to admit she is a little relieved that there is no chance of him attending. He has hardly been sympathetic given his distaste for the man, and besides, the language around grief, the I’m sorry and the rest in peace have always seemed overly performative on his tongue. When he was a child, she had had to explain to him that such platitudes are just good manners. She supposes a lot of children don’t take death seriously.
As a child he had played at death, he and the neighbours’ children. He wasn’t at odds with all of them. He never fought with the girls and there were boys he tolerated. Younger, quieter boys mostly. Florance supposed he found them less threatening (and easier to control). They would occupy themselves with games that weren’t as wholesome as she would have liked. War games that involved feigning gruesome death, imaginary games featuring monsters chasing and eating them. They snuck off deeper into the bayou than their parents liked them to go. Innocent enough, but not wholesome.
(There were other things too. Mr Johnson came in from his yard on one occasion to find that Alastor and the Kelly boy had snuck into the house and opened his gun cabinet. Alastor was aiming a rifle at the other boy and shouting “Bang!”)
(He killed a deer once as a child. Just the once. That she knows of.)
But really, can she blame him for being confused about violence with the father he had?
And there was the time Mrs Williams slapped Alastor round the face when she came home from the store to find him and her twins at the kitchen table with a Ouija board. Florance had lost her temper on that occasion, and not at Alastor either. Yes, she knew that using a Ouija board with no expertise was bad. Her own mother had sold them in her store and made Florance promise never to touch them, not once. And yes, she knew that Alastor was older than the twins and should have stopped them. Or not suggested it and produced the board from who knows where, if the twins’ version of events was to be believed. But, God help her, Florance couldn’t not take her son’s side when someone hit him, even if he might need to be disciplined more than defended. She and Mrs Williams hadn’t talked for months.
As he grew, he went longer and longer without getting into trouble at school but the sort of trouble it was when it came got more serious. He said spiteful things. He got into worse fights. (He tried to persuade Mrs Clarke’s middle son to drink bleach, before the teacher came in and caught them.)
(After that incident, his teacher advised Florance to take her boy to a doctor. But Florance had already thought about that, and then thought about the institutions where troubled children were sometimes sent and the things that happened to them there and she dismissed the idea outright.)
After that, she tried all the harder to instil compassion and duty in her son and, over painful years, it worked. (And if he seemed more convinced by her telling him that he would get more out of life if he was kind to people than by appeals to his compassion, no one but God need know.)
After he came downstairs that first time, it had been impossible to keep him away during his father’s outbursts. From then on, her bébé took as many beatings as her, unwilling to leave her to face the man alone. Her perfect son, brave and strong. Every mother’s dream. And his father every mother’s nightmare.
All that was back in the old neighbourhood. Once he started earning good money, Alastor had bought her a new home, in a mixed neighbourhood closer to the city, so he could make his weekly visits. It’s the sort of place where Florance would have got unfriendly looks or worse had she lingered there when her boy was small, and she’d been hungry-looking, and bruised, and dressed in worn out clothing. Now she is none of those things and her son is the popular radio show host and the way is made clear.
She misses their old neighbourhood at times but Alastor seems to have no real emotional connection to it. She can hardly blame him for that: She was the one who raised him ambitious, after all.
Now that her son is a big radio star, Florance is the one giving money to charity and to the church. Alastor gives her an allowance, a sort of pension, since she doesn’t have one from the government and certainly not from his father. Alastor pays for everything she could possibly need and then some. She is never hungry now. She can buy meat whenever she pleases, for all that Alastor sometimes shows up with rabbits or deer he shot on hunting trips with his city friends.
Mrs Benoit is finally able to move out, sharing a fond farewell with Florance before she embarks on the journey back to her hometown. “She said she’d keep in touch” Florance tells Alastor later, “but I’m not sure she will. Sometimes it’s painful to hold onto any connection that brings memories, after living with someone like that.”
Alastor nods, and they share a moment of quiet reflection on just what living with a man like that can cost a person.
Alastor had been fifteen when he first hit his father back. And then he had laughed and laughed (and laughed, long after it stopped sounding normal. But what had normal got to do with the things that happened under that roof?)
(By then all the neighbours were convinced he wasn’t right in the head but love, like father, is a verb and Florance chose to love him more when the neighbours liked him less. Because he needed it more. Because he didn’t ask to be the way he is.)
On his next visit, Florance tells him, “The police still don’t seem to have any leads.”
“No.” Alastor accepts the coffee she offers him and settles into a chair. “They won’t catch him” he adds, with absolute certainty.
“You can’t know that, bébé.”
“The police around here? I’m sure whoever did it is too clever for to be caught by the likes of them.”
He has a point, however indelicately he phrases it. The only time Florance has seen the police concerned to the point of making an effort was when Alastor’s father passed. Passed, an unsuitably bloodless term for such a gory end. Florance sometimes feels guilty that she didn’t know the moment of his death, that she didn’t sit up in bed in sudden awareness that the man who, for all his many flaws, had given her Alastor, was gone. Not that she could have sat up easily that day. The man had given her five fractured ribs the day before and she was kept in a permeant semi slumber by heavy duty painkillers, barely able to wash and eat. He’d gone back to his own house by then, the one he shared with his equally bruised wife and all the children who weren’t as beautiful as Alastor, but none of them had been home. They’d been at their regular lunch with the wife’s aunt, and had come home to find him sprawled in the kitchen in a pool of blood. The police were as quick to respond then as they were slow when it was Florance or his wife bleeding. A nasty accident with a steak knife, they had concluded after several hours spent on interviews and something mysterious called forensics. The man had been fixing himself up a snack and must have fallen with the knife, catching himself, as chance would have it, on the radial artery. He might have gotten help in time, but he managed to knock himself out as well, cracking his head against the kitchen counter. When his wife told Florance, her first, stunned, thought was that he always was a terrible cook.
Alastor was out all of that day, and didn’t come home until long after the wife’s phone call. When he did get in (looking surprisingly clean for someone who had been in the bayou), he’d taken the news in his stride, only telling her, “I’m going to get a job. You won’t need to worry about money, mama.”
Florance wasn’t allowed to speak at the funeral, of course, but she’d whispered to the casket as they left, “Thank you for my son.” (They left early, because Alastor couldn’t stop smiling and people were starting to notice.)
Mrs Benoit writes only the once, a cheerful little note on the back of a postcard to tell Florance she arrived safely. Florance doesn’t begrudge her following silence. Sometimes, a person needs a completely fresh start, a real, no strings, change.
Florance’s life doesn’t change, other than having new neighbours. Alastor still calls and listens dutifully down the phone to her gossip. He still visits, still bringing Mimzy along more frequently than Florance would like and less frequently than would finally silence the rumours.
The city doesn’t change, at least not for the better. Is it her, Florance wonders, or are there more disappearances these days? That or she notices them more, worried as she always is about Alastor.
She worries more now about his lack of faith. Earlier, she had assumed that he’d return to God in his own time. Now, she hints. “It’s hot outside, bébé. Why don’t you come into church just this once?”
“I’ll park in the shade.”
“It’ll still be hot.”
“I’ll be fine. Anyway, I have to read over my script for tomorrow.”
“Why do you leave it so late? It’s as if you don’t want to come to church with me.”
He laughs, which is hardly a denial. “I’m on air six days a week, mama. It’s hard to keep on top of everything.”
“Cher, you know you won’t take that radio show with you, don’t you?”
Alastor laughs again. “I’m not planning on going anywhere just yet.”
“Please, bébé, at least think about it for another time.”
“I’ll think about” he replies, his wording careful, as it always is when he promises her anything.
Florance can’t imagine that God minds. But she does.
The police never do catch Mr Benoit’s killer. There are no clues to follow, no description to release. The murderer simply vanishes into the darkness. “Who could have done it?” Florance asks her boy once, “Not someone local, surely?”
Alastor offers her a bright smile. “I really have no idea, mama.”
“That’s just as well, cher. Maybe we should try not to dwell any more on business like that.” And Florance smiles softly because her love for her son is big enough to swallow the world. (And if she doesn’t believe him, no one but God need know.)