CHAPTER ONE: FELICITY IN NEW ORLEANS

Wherein Felicity LeJeune, a young native of the city of New Orleans, finding herself at a crossroads of life, seeks solace from the Virgin.

As Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec, ninety-six years-old, dozed like a wilted sprig of mint on her death bed, her granddaughter, Felicity Odille LeJeune, waited impatiently for the end, wondering where on earth the old woman had found so much green chiffon to pass away in.

Felicity also wondered if she should attempt to wake Grandmere, to give her a message to carry to God.

Felicity's spiky short hair, baggy clothes, pierced nostril, and eight-hole black work boots were the manifestations of the 'be-more-manly-every-day' discipline she'd practiced for years. The goal of the regimen was to achieve maximum teenage boyishness by the time she turned thirty, and to maintain it indefinitely, or until the angel now hovering so patiently over Grandmere came to take her, too.

Poor Grandmere. How she had worried about proper attire, clean undergarments, correct posture, and a myriad other Victorian details. For all Felicity knew, her grandmother Le Bec was the repository of the last complete set of 19th century manners to exist on the planet; this was perhaps why, in her dying hour, she did not recognize the granddaughter who in comportment and manner of dress was the perfect denial of her life's work.

Felicity clicked the stud in her tongue several times against the back of her teeth. It sounded like typing. Christmas muzak poured out of the staticky speaker on the wall, the management of Charity Hospital having apparently decided, like the rest of America, that Christmas began the day after Thanksgiving. From the bed behind a ratty curtain an invisible patient coughed. Patients in every room started coughing at once, as if linked by a pull-chain. The machine registering her grandmother's increasingly feeble life signs pinged three times in a row.

A glassy brown eye rolled upward, away from Felicity. was awake.

"Is it Christmas?" the old woman asked.

"No, Grandmere. It's only the fourth of December."

The glassy brown eye focused briefly on the shape by the bed.

"Doctor," she asked Felicity, "has Reverend Mullin arrived yet?"

Reverend Mullin! The hound of hell! Felicity sometimes thought of Mullin as a dog yapping at her heels, at other times she saw him as a snake emerging from under her pillow just as she was about to fall asleep. She had been only thirteen when Grandmere had the dream that had bound her to Mullin, and ended Felicity's childhood. The night before Easter,1985, Grandmere had dreamed that Jesus Himself appeared to her and ordered her to dispense with the paraphernalia of the Popes and leave the Catholic church. She found herself kneeling in a pasture, and His body, emanating light, filled the entire horizon. His index finger pointed to a huge television that rested between two mountains. The face of an angry man was on the screen, and written in black letters under the face were the words: THE MINISTRY OF THE UTMOST GOD'S TEMPLE, 15600 VETERANS BOULEVARD, METAIRIE, LOUISIANA, JEREMY "ELVIS" MULLIN, PASTOR, TELEPHONE 999-9999. Mullin is your only hope, Marie-Frances, and the hope of your spawn! thundered Jesus, even as the mountains crumbled, leaving only the TV. Scared to death of losing her soul, Grandmere pleaded in vain with the raging Savior. Begging for mercy, she recalled her devout childhood, her mother's faith, the baptisms of her children, her pilgrimage to Medjugordje with a bus-full of white people from Chalmette, and the Carmelite convent where her virtuous great-great-Grandmere had been raised. (She still had in a trunk the lacy tear-stained handkerchiefs into which her ancestress had poured her grief at being shut away in the convent by her own mother, the light-skinned mistress of a white French Creole aristocrat.) But Jesus was stern, unequivocal, and above all, specific. Brooching no dissent, he commanded her by name: Marie-Frances Claire LeBec, you must be born again or you shall never see The Kingdom of God. A spiral gust of wind sprung out of the numbers on television and Grandmere tumbled like a leaf back into her bed.

Next day they drove out to a suburb that no one in their family would have admitted was part of New Orleans, to partake in the barbarian Baptist rites.

"The Reverend Mullin," the old woman insisted, "Where is he, doctor? Is he here yet?" The glassy eye rolled around like a marble.

"Not yet, Grandmere. I'm Felicity, remember? I want you to take a message to God.2

The old woman's eye focused on her for a stern second. "I have to be light before Jesus. I can't be going up there laden with doctors' notes."

"I'm not the doctor, Grandmere. It's Felicity. Your daughter Eliza was my mother, she ran away with a trumpet player to New York. You raised me, remember?" The bleary eye closed, but Felicity persisted. "Felicity, whose happy childhood you sabotaged with rules and regulations, whose adolescence you thwarted with visions of hell, and whose young womanhood you fucked up by giving away the only money that ever came your way. Felicity. Fel-ic-it-y."

Felicity bit hard on her lower lip. She was so angry it was all she could do to keep herself from karate-kicking one of Charity's long-suffering walls.

She remembered holding tight her grandmother's hand, squeezed in a mass of fluttering souls sweating profusely in their Sunday best. Mullin's cologne wafted down from the pulpit like an ill wind.

"Feel the Spirit," whispered Grandmere and Felicity imagined that Spirit had to be the reverend's cologne. It flowed from his outstretched palms as his voice thundered down on them:

"They say that we spend too much money on television! They say one hundred million dollars a year is too much to spend on spreading the word of the Lord! When that miscegenated freak, Prince, makes one hundred and thirty million! It's Friday in the world but Sunday is coming! Jesus said, I've come to take away your sins! Verily, brothers and sisters, I say! Whenever I look up to that TV camera I see my man tellin' me: 'Take it all away, Jeremy!' and truly it's Friday in the world, but Sunday is coming!"

It so happened that Prince, soon to be the graphic formerly known as Prince, was at the time Felicity's favorite person in the whole world. She wasn't sure what 'miscegenated' meant, but she suspected it had something to do with color. People all around them swooned and fell. A blind woman lifted her tear-streaked face to the TV camera and called on America to watch her see. The snow-bright girls in the choir lifted up on the wings of a heart-ripping Hallelujah! and floated on the Spirit-scented air! All but one, that is, a disgruntled angel in the first row who tapped impatiently with her foot in the direction of the preacher and scratched her neck with cherry-red fingernails. Maybe she loved Prince, too.

In the parking lot, after the service, surrounded by pick-up trucks with guns in their gun-racks, Grandmere told Felicity that God was both color-blind and considerate enough to have made much blacker people than Prince and themselves. She said that Felicity was a lucky girl. God had also seen to it that all those rednecks in the pickups praised the Lord instead of hunting her and her Prince down. Felicity, who had always thought of herself as creole, not black, got an odd sensation in the pit of her stomach. She did not like Reverend Mullin at all. Later, she found out that Mullin's God and the hunting of blacks were not mutually exclusive. One of the reverend's faithful sat on Angola's death row, drafting another appeal to the Supreme Court. He'd killed two black men because the Voice of God told him to. The upcoming race war, he wrote, would prove he was right.

"Damn it, old woman. I said I got a message for you to take to God!" Felicity was angry, but she also felt guilty. She'd been told that Charity Hospital, Huey Long's legacy to Louisiana's poor, was filled to the rafters with the dying of the city. Why they had all decided to leave their earthly existence this very afternoon of Saturday, December 4, 1999, in the very last month of the Christian millennium, was a mystery to Felicity, but maybe they knew something she didn't. Maybe she could persuade another poor soul to take her message to God. She hoped that her saying 'damn' would not preclude delivery.

"One last time, Grandmere, are you hearing me?"

The old woman didn't move.

Well, that's just like her. Even dying, the woman was proper and hard. No matter. Felicity would give her the message anyway, and she would have no choice but to take it with her. Saying anything to her now was like pinning a note to her departing soul. There was no time left to unpin it.

"Tell God," she whispered, "to grant me an orgasm."

Next week:
ANDREA IN JERUSALEM



The angels above are reproductions by Traian Alexandra Filip, a young Romanian painter who, despondent over the tragedy of his country and uneasy in exile, committed suicide a few years after emigrating to the United States. His work, including his dark, illuminated final visions, is represented by Turner Carroll Gallery.
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