Vieux Carre Read Free Page A

white, that’s called bag people. They just wander round with paper bags that hold ev’rything they possess or they can collect. Nights they sleep on doorsteps: spend days on boxes on corners of Canal Street with a tin cup. They get along: they live— long as intended to by the Lord.
    MRS. WIRE : Yor place is with me, Nursie.
    NURSIE : I can’t please you no more. You keep callin’ Nursie, Nursie, do this, do that, with all these stairs in the house and my failin’ eyesight. No Ma’am, it’s time for me to retire.
    [
She crosses upstage. The kitchen area is dimly lighted. Nursie sits at the table with a cup of chicory coffee, eyes large and ominously dark as the continent of her race
.
    [
A spot of light picks up the writer dimly at the entrance to the hall
.]
    MRS. WIRE : Who? Who?
    WRITER : It’s—
    MRS. WIRE :
You
. . .
    WRITER : Mrs. Wire, you’re blinding me with that light. [
He shields his left eye with a band
.]
    MRS. WIRE [
switching off the light
]: Git upstairs, boy. We’ll talk in the mawnin’ about your future plans.
    WRITER : I have no plans for the future, Mrs. Wire.
    MRS. WIRE : That’s a situation you’d better correct right quick.
    [
The writer, too, collides with the bizarre, colorfully decorated knapsack
.]
    WRITER : What’s — ?
    MRS. WIRE : Carry that sack upstairs with you. Nursie refused to.
    [
With an effort the writer shoulders the sack and mounts a step or two to the kitchen level
.]
    WRITER : Mrs. Wire told me to carry this sack up here.
    NURSIE : Just put it somewhere it won’t trip me up.
    WRITER : Sky? Sky?
    NURSIE : She say that’s his name. Whose name? I think her mind is goin’ on her again. Lately she calls out, “Timmy, Timmy,” or she carries on conversations with her dead husband, Horace . . .
    WRITER : A name— Sky? [
To himself
.] Shines like a prediction.
    [
He drops the knapsack at the edge of the kitchen light andwanders musingly back to the table. Nursie automatically pours him a cup of chicory
.
    [
Again the area serving as the entrance passage is lighted, and the sound of a key scraping at a resistant lock is heard
.]
    MRS. WIRE [
starting up from her cot
]: Who? Who?
    [
Jane enters exhaustedly
.]
    JANE : Why, Mrs. Wire, you scared me! [
She has an elegance about her and a vulnerability
.]
    MRS. WIRE : Miss Sparks, what’re you doin’ out so late on the streets of the Quarter?
    JANE : Mrs. Wire, according to the luminous dial on my watch, it is only ten after twelve.
    MRS. WIRE : When I give you a room here . . .
    JANE : Gave me? I thought rented . . .
    MRS. WIRE : [
cutting through
]: I told you a single girl was expected in at midnight.
    JANE : I’m afraid I didn’t take that too seriously. Not since I lived with my parents in New Rochelle, New York, before I went to college, have I been told to be in at a certain hour, and even then I had my own key and disregarded the order more often than not. However! I
am
going to tell you why and where I’ve gone tonight. I have gone to the all-night drugstore, Waterbury’s, on Canal Street, to buy a spray can of Black Flag, which is an insect repellent. I took a cab there tonight and made this purchase because, Mrs. Wire, when I opened the window without a screen in my room, a cockroach, a
flying
cockroach, flewright into my face and was followed by a squadron of others.
Well
! I do
not
have an Oriental, a Buddhistic tolerance for certain insects, least of all a cockroach and even less a flying one. Oh, I’ve learned to live reluctantly with the ordinary pedestrian kind of cockroach, but to have one fly directly into my face almost gave me convulsions! Now as for the window without a screen, if a screen has not been put in that window by tomorrow, I will buy one for it myself and deduct the cost from next month’s rent. [
She goes past Mrs. Wire toward the steps
.]
    MRS. WIRE : Hold on a