Screening Room Read Free Page A

Mother considered the male species a challenging recreation. Many nights, she would have two dates. After her first young man delivered her back to her house, apologizing for keeping her out late when she was evidently so tired, she would turn out the lights in her room, pretend to sleep for twenty minutes, then jump out of bed, reapply her makeup, and meet her “late date” beneath the sweating bayou tree on the corner of the street. A photograph from this period shows her dressed for a rendezvous with the opposite sex. She is wearing a filmy V-neck dress with a floral pattern and padded shoulders, a strand of pearls around her neck, high heels, and white gloves.
    By several accounts, my mother, Jeanne Garretson, was the life of the party in New Orleans in the mid-1940s. She was frequently seen with a bunch of young men and women at Pete Fountain’sjazz club or dancing at the Roosevelt Hotel, attending parties of the Pickwick Club at Mardi Gras, eating with a crowd at Antoine’s or at little Creole restaurants on Decatur Street. She told humorous stories and was a magnificent dancer, effortlessly mastering such Latin steps as the rumba, the samba, and the tango, as well as various ballroom dances. Her favorite was the jitterbug, which perfectly mirrored her own nervous and impulsive nature.
    A number of the young men enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Tulane learned of my mother’s exceptional dancing abilities and begged her to offer them dancing lessons. Which she was happy to do, provided she receive certain compensations. After each dance class, which took place in an unused conference room of the university, Mother would leave her unfinished homework in sociology and history discreetly cloaked within a copy of the
Times-Picayune
. One of the cadets would deliver the completed assignments to her sorority house the next morning. (Although Mother slept in her parents’ residence on Octavia Street, she spent all of her waking hours in the grand but disintegrating mansion of Alpha Epsilon Phi and preferred to orchestrate her correspondence and romantic adventures from that address.) Mother was perfectly capable of doing her homework herself, but she considered this pact with the cadets a delicious prank, with the added benefit of liberating more time for social engagements. In fact, the arrangement seemed satisfactory to all parties. Then, like many good things, it was taken to excess. To gain favor with her sorority sisters, who were sometimes jealous of her easy success with the opposite sex, Mother began taking their homework as well as hers to the Tulane cadets. The logistics eventually became so complex that one of the students, an accounting major, had to work out a flow diagram, of which numerous carbon copies were made. A copy fell into the hands of a dean. After which an unsympathetic article appeared in one of the college bulletins:
    Yesterday, Dean Howard Barthelme uncovered a scheme in which ROTC students have been completing homework assignments for Newcomb women in exchange for dance classes. An investigation of the campus room where the classes were allegedly given, Blessey 131, has turned up several cigarette butts stuffed under a couch, a pink boa, and a cracked recording of “Llora Como Llore,” by Martína Lombassa. Professor David Abernathy of the Chemistry Department expressed the opinion that the record might be a Cuban rumba, but he was unwilling to join the ad hoc discipline committee. According to several of the cadets, whose names are being withheld, the dance classes were taught by Miss Jeanne Garretson, a junior at Sophie Newcomb and a New Orleans native.
    The next day, my mother was summoned to the academic dean’s office at Sophie Newcomb. For the occasion, she wore a tailored suit, high heels, and her pearls. The dean stared admiringly while listening to her discuss Jung’s theory of archetypes. (She was a psychology major.) After twenty minutes, he excused her with