Whistling in the Louvre

Abstract

Whistling in the Louvre John Alford (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. photo of child by Steve Woods [End Page 66] The smell of insanity: acrid, piss-logged wood. The only way they'll get rid of it, she told us, is to rip up the flooring. The butch could have done it, too, with her bare hands. A jangle of keys, the reassuring click of a tumbler, and we were back in the hall. My wife, with concern in her voice: But one got used to it, right? No, you never do. Twelve years later, sitting on the hospital lawn, I catch a whiff of it in the breeze. I prefer waiting outdoors. Besides, the sun feels good on my face. Fall is in the air. A typical July morning in New Hampshire. Delbert had let me know I'd come at an inconvenient time. "Early this month, aren't you, Professor?" [End Page 67] I apologized. I explained that I had to leave the country tomorrow and handed him the envelope, the usual fifty plus an extra ten for upsetting his routine. He folded the envelope without comment and, lifting the heavy fan of keys that dangled from his belt, buried it in his neatly pressed whites. I'll say this for him: he fills out a pair of trousers better than any man I know. Otherwise, he's an odd mixture of parts. Skin the color of molasses ("high yellow," we used to say), freckles, frizzy red hair, a hooked nose. He asked where I was off to this time. "Africa," I replied. Pointless to say Accra or even Ghana, names as foreign to him as the language I'm going to research—Fante-Twi. "Your ex was here last week." "Oh?" I paused. I didn't want to seem too eager; he was already more privy to my feelings than I liked. "How did she look?" "Sassy." He cocked his head and made a show of recollecting the details. "Yeah, right sassy, I'd say. She was wearing a pink skirt and a fluffy white sweater. Her hair was different. Cropped. You know, like a boy's." He could have been making it up, but it sounded like Olivia. Sassy. A pink skirt. Short, no doubt. As short as propriety—or her age—allowed. My chairman once told her she had the best legs in the Big East, and she believed him. I tried to picture her with cropped hair. "Did she happen to ask about me?" "No." A broad grin, exposing a mouthful of teeth too regular to be real, signaled the end of our routine niceties. "I'll fetch James now," he said. "It might take longer than usual. It's a shaving day, you know." Yes, I knew. He was reminding me I'd inconvenienced him once before on a shaving day. It had taken him an hour to produce the boy, smiling, sans eyepatch, through broken clouds of bloody tissue paper. I check my watch. Already half an hour in this hard Adirondack chair. I'm reminded that time has no meaning here. Nothing changes. The patients grow older, of course, but no one notices. From somewhere behind the barred windows come the sounds of a tinny piano, a Scott Joplin rag, the same agitated notes over and over. I catch another whiff of urine and ponder the indignities of senescence. Jamie does not belong among these old men. Only thirty-four, he has begun to behave, to think, even to look like them. Olivia has the photographs. Countless images of her pretty boy, the long lashes, the cherubic smile flashed obligingly for the camera. But like the subject, they too are fading. I prefer the more enduring record of my notebooks. With each rereading, I delight afresh in his development. At eighteen months, a vocabulary of more than five hundred words. At twenty-four months, the formation [End Page 68] of embryonic sentences, mostly commands. Change diaper, watch TV, blow nose, hurry with bottle and my favorite, first elicited by an incidental brush of my hand, rubba back. Soon, the leap to making up his own words...