pitcher, praying for the strength to hang on until he returned home.
Like a termite-riddled post under a hammer blow, his life had crumbled with her death. He had returned to New Orleans, to the world that, if it had not cherished him, at least was one he knew. He was forty.
Some day, he thought, springing over the offal of the gutter and seeing ahead of him the pink stucco walls of his mother's house, some day he might collect the strength to leave Louisiana again. To return to France-though probably never Paris -or Vienna, or London, or Rome.
But right now he was like a man with fever who can crawl no farther than his bed, where he lies waiting to heal. Someday, maybe, he would heal.
He didn't know.
His mother still owned the house on the Rue Burgundy given her by St. Denis Janvier, when that gentleman had died in 1822. Livia January had married a respectable upholsterer named Levesque, and a few years ago he had died, too. Though January had the impression she was less than pleased about admitting she'd ever borne a son in slavery-to hear his mother talk she had never cut cane in her life-she had extended a temperate welcome and agreed that he could reoccupy his old room above the kitchen, the room next to the cook's quarters. These rooms-gar?onni?res-were the custom in a country where the presence of growing sons under the same roof was regarded with less than enthusiasm by their mothers' protectors. Being his mother, she charged him three Spanish dollars a week.
Livia Levesque was currently renting chambers in a comfortable boardinghouse in Milneburgh with a number of her better-off cronies, having let the cottage she owned there to a wealthy, white sugar broker.
She had taken Bella, her cook, with her. January's shift at the Charity Hospital officially ended at eight in the morning, though it was frequently noon before he left. He was usually too exhausted, and the day too sweltering, to even attempt to start up the open brick stove in the kitchen: he either had beans and rice bought out the back door of one of the local groceries or went without.
Today he had gone without and was wondering if he should seek out a meal at Gillette's Tavern, or bribe the cook at Breyard's for a dish of something, before returning to the Hospital in a few hours. First, he thought, pushing open the gate into his mother's yard, he wanted to get rid of this hell-begotten wool coat and waistcoat and cravat. What lunatic Frenchman had dictated that the formal dress that marked him as a professional had to be the same in a tropical city like New Orleans as it was in London or Paris? He couldn't dispense with it, of course. Leaving out the fact that his mother would kill him if she heard he'd been abroad in his official capacity less than fully and formally attired, he could say good-bye to any chance of professional employment as a musician if those who hired him saw that he dressed like a day laborer.
But at least he could sponge off again and put on a clean shirt and a slightly less excruciating garment.
It wouldn't do to be seen dressed like (for example) the verminous, long-haired scarecrow currently lounging on the steps of the gar?onni?res, spitting tobacco and reading the New Orleans Courier while he waited, quite clearly, for January to come home.
"You're lucky my mother's away," January remarked, closing the gate behind him. "She'd order Bella to chase you off with a broom. Sir," he added.
The scarecrow spat a dark stream of expectorant onto the bricks. "I been chased off better." He spoke in a mild, rather scratchy tenor and blinked up at January from un der the wide brim of a countryman's rough hat and a greasy curtain of hair the color of dried onion tops. "And worse," he added, carefully folding up his newspaper and rising to a height barely half an inch less than January's own. There was a hole in the skirts of his old-fashioned coat. "Sorta comes with workin' for the law. Now what's all this truck"-he gestured with the paper-"about there bein' `no sign yet of any epidemic fever in the city'? These newspaper fellers live in the same town as the rest of us, or what? `Some few of the weak-kneed have ignominiously fled at the sound of a rumor...' "
"The newspapers always say that," said January. "The businesses