DN16

On the Death of Marion Badon

[note dated, but probably late 1944 or early 1945]

His eyes came back again to the Girl whom he had always called "My Heart," and his grief began to rise and his eyes dimmed. He wiped them dry and still stood there alone with the Girl in the silence of the undertaking parlor. His lingering last look, took in the folded hands resting upon her belly, her long tapering fingers--hands that he had kissed so many times--and his gaze followed the somewhat peach-colored knitted evening gown on up, passing over the wrinkles of her throat--not very deep ones--the color of her skin.  

It was now "the tint of Mexican gold," as Lafcadio Hearn might have said, but it showed much more color than when she had been alive, he thought. Then she was much whiter, her skin like ivory just beginning to show the first tinge of yellow. He looked at her breasts--almost non-existent, and studied her chin and her swollen carmined lips. Her cheekbones seemed to stand out more prominently in her swollen face, and the powder was too heavy for naturalness. Her lips protruded more than he had ever known them, and the bridge of her nose showed a pronounced ridge that was almost Jewish. Her hair was browner and fluffier than he had known it. He had always thought it as black as the raven's wing. And it was one of the things that accentuated her Indian blood. But now it seemed dark brown and fluffy like a white woman's.

When he reached her forehead that he had studied so long and remembered perhaps more distinctly than any other part of her face, he looked at it and did not find the whiteness accentuated by the hair--black hair--parted in the middle. The brown hair was now parted on the side. One deep wrinkle cut a small gulley across her brow, the wrinkle that he had seen grow deeper with the years. But one caught his attention and held it more than anything else. it was a slight group of very small wrinkles which might have been made by one in pain and bewilderment, fighting hard against oncoming darkness.   

It could have been placed there by the pressure of thumb or forefinger of the undertaker upon the unresponsive skin, but to the Man it told of those last few minutes when the Girl, whom he had so long laughingly called "My Heart," had looked up for the last time out of the vale of pain, and bewilderment and attempted to open wider her surprised, dimming eyes at the approach of the Dark Rider. He looked in vain for the gray hairs that he had kidded her about only two weeks previously, but they were not to be seen. 

Then, a great cry welled up out of his soul, "O Marion," and he turned and went to the side door of the parlor, and stood studying the nearby houses and rooftops, as the evening Angelus of the church across the street rang out its benediction of blessing and peace across the hot city that lay spent beneath the heat of a slowly cooling day. He stood at the door, thinking, thinking . . . .  

I am reading through long books on Louisiana history that I have never seen, documents that I find unfamiliar, but interesting and true to fact, and I have already dreamed of  that cemetery where Marion is buried.. It is funny that the type of dreams are so similar to those I had long ago. But these dreams must be mixed up with my interest in Louisiana history, and especially New Orleans history, that seems to have  been born a part of me. There is always that damnable feeling that I was in New Orleans some time long ago, when the houses  were close to the sidewalk, and built in the old style of long ago.

I think it a species of incipient insanity, having experienced that our slight "normal" aberrations are the things that grow into complexes when the pressure of nerves is applied. But if ever a man had reasons to believe in reincarnation, I have those reasons when I stand before houses that I have never seen but seem as familiar to me as if I had been raised up in them. I never saw pictures of French houses before I came to New  Orleans and country houses are not built like these queer specimens one sees in the downtown section of New Orleans, but still I cannot account for it, and yes, when I first came here at the age of seventeen, it was the downtown section that awoke [something in me]. . . .

Each time that he felt sobs rising to his throat, he forced them down and went on, but suddenly someone began singing "Danny Boy," over the cheap radio next door, and grief came down in torrential tears. He went towards the front of the house so that the people next door could not hear him through the thin walls of the kitchen and bathroom. Snatching up a soiled sheet, he sat down, shaken with the first onrush of incoherent grief -- bitter, wringing grief -- long-delayed grief, and gave himself up to it. 

He tried to reason it out even then. He had not ever loved the Girl wildly, nor hardly hoped to love her possessively, but he did remember that he had often said, that she was one of his dreams. He had never had any wild desire to marry or be with her.  Maybe it was the funeral or the sadness?  

Then he commenced thinking how for years he had kept in touch with her and she with him, how it was only meet and salute and then gone, but it was always--sooner or later--that meet and salute. He had held on to other woman that long and in just that sort of way. . . .

Down through the streets of Old New Orleans the procession slowly wheeled its way. the Man could remember with vivid exactitude several insignificant things which never would have been noticed at all. Somehow the sinking rays of the sun -- although still hot -- took on a look similar to that other funeral procession in which he had rode almost thirty years before. It was his father's funeral and he could remember how the children at the school where he attended, stop from their play to look up at the horse-drawn plumed hearses and carriages as it passed by.

Pass old houses that awoke dim, nostalgic memories out of some other-life that the Man might have lived, and into the oak-lined old French avenue, to the large cemetery with its rich tombs of marble and granite. Although he had oft-times passed there when he was a chauffer twenty years before, he never knew that colored people were buried in that fine cemetery. He turned to Rev. Holmes and asked: "Are the white and colored segregated in here, Reverend?" and was answered. "I do not think so, in fact, I am quite sure they are not. these old cemeteries of more than a hundred years, haven't got much segregation--never had."  

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