Rumors from the Lost World Read Free Page A

upstairs, child,” she told me, though I was a high school graduate, already rebelling against the social constraints my father insisted on. “I don’t want them going through the tin box.” This was World War II, remember, fought so long ago people called it The Good War? Against the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians. Errol Flynn came once to the Municipal Auditorium to sell war bonds.
    â€œIt’s a scream,” Emily says. “You know I’m right, don’t you? New Orleans has always been the country’s salad bowl. Greeks, Italians, Irish, blacks, French, Spanish, Eastern Europeans. You name it. The whites thinking they could do what they wanted to blacks, the Irish and the French thinking they were better than Mediterraneans. Am I right?”
    Well, her mother says, we saw newsreels of the Blitz, used ration stamps, had to line up for meat, sweeten our coffee with saccharine, do without ice cream and cake. We knew something was wrong. Patriotism seemed like the answer. Anyway, I couldn’t figure why Mama wanted the box hidden away, but no matter. I was obedient. It was GI green, about the size of a breadbox, full of our papers. Birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates. A world in a breadbox. And my father’s alien registration, paperclipped to a miniature Italian flag—those bright sun-filled colors, so different from the war effort. You know we had to mix bright yellow food coloring into the margarine to make it look edible?
    I shoved the box into my closet, because the two agents downstairs, even though they were tearing our house apart, wouldn’t search the room of a girl, an innocent daughter. So Mama figured, anyway, leading me back downstairs. “Not a word,” she said. “Not a peep.”
    At nineteen, I was the youngest of thirteen children born to Mama, and the only one who still lived at home. It was a Tuesday, I remember, a meatless Tuesday, and Olsen was as thick as a steak, a good half foot taller than me. He slit open a sagging chair, the one in front of our gramophone, a console bought second-hand and polished to a high mahogany sheen. The chair would be worth maybe a dollar on the street, but it was the one nobody else sat in when Papa was home.
    â€œYou toiletface,” I said. My mother put a hand to her mouth, my father started grinding his jaw, but he was afraid to speak. It was the first time in my life I used such a word, the worst I could think of, though God knows I heard it often enough, something my brothers called my older sister. But the effect was different, a little scandalous, very vulgar, in the mouth of a bashful child, five foot two. I was no bigger than Charlie Chaplin. “What right you have to come in here?”
    â€œEvery right in the world, sister,” Olsen said. Grinning, he pulled one of my long dark braids. “That’s some head of hair you got, sugar.” He looked over at my father, sitting stiffly at attention, perspiring in his frayed, worsted suit. “We’re just making sure you all cooperate with the war effort.” He slashed the chair until stuffing came out, then overturned a steamer trunk. Worn keepsakes, sweaters, shawls, and doilies spilled across the floor.
    Seeing red, nothing but the motion of my blood, I rose to my toes and pummeled Olsen in the back. “You damn palooka!”
    Shoulders hunched, he pivoted, frowning, and took one long steady look before bursting into a low-registered laugh. Gasper, the second man, came up behind me and hoisted me to the couch, sat me down with my parents. “That’s enough, Joe Louis.” My father, jaw grinding, studied the frayed carpet in that self-conscious way people have when they’re embarrassed for the furniture. As for my mother, she was no Sicilian, but she knew what poverty was. She also knew we were just a bad break from more of it.
    â€œThey put up with that shit?” Emily’s face