valued. Here were soft-spoken men and women, fine carpets and carved furniture, rich colors and textures, and the perfume of lilies and roses, and people tempering their natural meanness and crude ways.
It was as if when you died you went into the world of Rebecca or The Red Shoes or A Song to Remember. You had beautiful things for a final day or two before they put you in the ground.
It was a connection that intrigued him for hours. When he saw The Bride of Frankenstein for a second time at the Happy Hour on Magazine Street, he watched only the great houses in the picture, and he listened to the music of the voices and studied the clothes more than anything else. He wished he could talk about all this to somebody, but when he tried to tell his girlfriend, Marie Louise, she didn't know what he was talking about. She thought it was dumb to go to the library. She wouldn't go to foreign movies.
He saw that same look in her eyes that he had seen so often in his father's eyes. It wasn't fear of the unknown thing. It was disgust. And he didn't want to be disgusting.
Besides, he was in high school now. Everything was changing. Sometimes he was really afraid that maybe now was the time that his dreams were supposed to die and the real world was supposed to get him. Seems other people felt that way. Marie Louise's father, sitting on his front steps, looked at him coldly one night and demanded: 'What makes you think you're going to college? Your daddy got the money for Loyola?' He spat on the pavement, looked Michael up and down. There it was again, the disgust.
Michael had shrugged. There was no state school in those days in New Orleans. 'Maybe I'll go to LSU at Baton Rouge,' he said. 'Maybe I'll get a scholarship.'
'Bull Durham!' the guy muttered under his breath. 'Why don't you think about being half as good a fireman as your father?'
And maybe they were all in the right, and it was time to think of other things. Michael had grown to almost six feet, a prodigious height for an Irish Channel kid, and a record for his branch of the Curry family. His father bought an old Packard and taught him how to drive in a week's time, and then he got a part-time job delivering for a florist on St Charles Avenue.
But it was not until his sophomore year that his old ideas began to give way, that he himself began to forget his ambitions. He went out for football, made first string, and suddenly he was out there on the field in the stadium at City Park and the kids were screaming. 'Brought down by Michael Curry,' they said over the loudspeakers. Marie Louise told him in a swooning voice on the phone that as far as she was concerned he had taken over her will, that with him she would do 'anything.'
And these were good days for Redemptorist School, the school which had always been the poorest white school in the city of New Orleans. A new principal had come, and she climbed on a bench in the school yard and shouted through a microphone to inflame the kids before the games! She sent huge crowds to City Park to cheer. Soon she had scores of students out collecting quarters to build a gym, and the team was working small miracles. It was winning game after game, by sheer force of will it seemed, just scoring those yards even when the opposition was playing better football.
Michael still hit the books, but the games were the real focus of his emotional life that year. Football was perfect for his aggression, his strength, even his frustration. He was one of the stars at school. He could feel the girls looking at him when he walked up the aisle at eight o'clock Mass every morning.
And then the dream came true. Redemptorist won the City Championship. The underdogs had done it, the kids from the other side of Magazine, the kids who spoke that funny way so that everyone knew they were from the Irish Channel.
Even the Times-Picayune was full of ecstatic praise. And the gymnasium drive was in high gear, and Marie Louise and Michael went 'all the way' and then suffered agonies waiting to find out if Marie Louise was pregnant.
Michael might have lost it all then. He wanted nothing more