Called Out of Darkness Page 0,5
there, people about whom I knew nothing except that they were named the Rosenthals. After the Rosenthals came the Episcopal bishop, and after that I do not know.
It was the stuff of dreams that I might one day live in such an august house. The fact is I did, decades later, come to live in such a house on a different corner only a few blocks away.
And one of the things I did then was to have built for the back of the property a long and beautiful and old-fashioned brick wall. A wonderful craftsman named Rob Newman built the wall, and I suspect no one today knows that the wall is not one hundred years old.
In those early years, all around me I saw things that shaped my perceptions and my longings. I'd stop to look at the Greek columns of the houses against the passing clouds.
All up and down St. Charles Avenue there were houses of impressive detail and overwhelming size.
In the evenings, when we would walk along the avenue and we did this all the time - I loved to look at the cut-glass doors of these houses, and the way the light sparkled in the cut glass. I called them "crystal doors." They were burning and shining in the night. And they had about them an air of mystery because I imagined the interior rooms beyond them were as magnificent as these doors.
On Hallowe'en we went trick-or-treating in the depths of the Garden District. One such door opened, and a tall man stood in a high-ceilinged hallway, on a shining floor, offering us candies in a huge silver bowl. I was hungry to see the secrets of the house in which he lived. I think he was a butler, but I wasn't sure.
These things sound too ordinary as I describe them. They had an air of enchantment. So did the many churches we visited in those days, including the vast Holy Name of Jesus Church at Loyola University with its forest of soaring columns and white marble statues; and the Jesuit Church downtown with its golden onion domes on the altar and the rich ironwork of its pews.
There was a grotto in those days adjacent to the Jesuit Church, a long stone chamber filled with high thin tapers burning away.
Everywhere I turned, I was assaulted by the sensuous and the atmospheric, and the beautiful. I don't recall ugliness or shabbiness, and I don't recall anything dark or unpleasant.
The fabric is unbroken.
Our walks along the avenue to Audubon Park, our trips downtown to the museum called the Cabildo, our rides on the St. Charles streetcar with the windows open to the breeze, even playing in the yard amid the ivy and the wild rosebushes, or venturing up the block past many different types of houses, all this seems part of the same tapestry.
For example, at the end of our block, a Rose of Montana vine had gone wild over the telephone pole and the telephone wires and I loved to look at the arching pink flowers of that lively vine. I loved the green strips of grass that bordered every sidewalk. I never stopped falling in love with particular trees.
On the way to the butcher shop on Baronne Street, two blocks behind our house, we had to pass a long open drainage ditch lined with willow trees, and this seemed to me to be the loveliest of streams.
If there was any ugliness or shabbiness it was perhaps connected with the smaller more crowded houses on Carondelet Street around the block from our house, and I think what I disliked about this stretch was the complete absence of trees.
I'm not sure.
Ceremonies of the church were also part of this tapestry, and those I most distinctly remember took place in the chapel I've described. Daily Mass was extremely interesting because the priest wore vestments of watered taffeta with thick embroidery, and even the altar boy wore a lovely white lace-trimmed surplice over his black robe.
The priest said the Mass in Latin, facing away from us, and moved back and forth across the altar as he consulted an enormous book.
The altar boy rang small golden bells at the moment of the Consecration when the priest spoke in Latin the words of Our Lord from the Last Supper, "This is my body. . . . This is my blood." This was a moment of spectacular importance and utter silence, but then the whole church was silent during the daily Mass. Nevertheless