Defining home

July 16, 2009

Dear Julie,

Everybody is searching for something or someone to believe in, Hannah Jelkes says. She believes in wanting to help each other through nights when the soul yowls. Nights like the night in Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana."

"The Night of the Iguana" offers a sweaty carnality unusual for the early 1960s and an understanding of people literally at the ends of their ropes. It has compassion for a humanity Williams knows to be lost and unfailingly laughable.

Maybe living in New Orleans had something to do with his point of view. Right after moving to New Orleans in the 1980s, I briefly worked at a nursing home helping Dale, the maintenance man, tear up and replace old carpeting and the like. Dale was a dour fellow with no front teeth, which made the cigarette always in his mouth dangle at a precarious angle. On weekends, he became a waiter in the dinner theater attached to the nursing home. On weekends he put in his bridge and smiled.

His rolling gait and the parrot that sat on his shoulder while he led singalongs of "My Wild Irish Rose" and "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" during intermissions at the dinner theater made me assume the impresario of this establishment, Cap'n Woods, once had been a real sea captain. But Dale, our Greek chorus, told me Cap'n Woods had only been captain of a seafood restaurant in Baton Rouge.

The nursing home's cook was a craggy, ill-humored man with a thick German accent. One day some of the chicken breasts he served the residents at their buffet still were wrapped in packaging. On weekends Bert donned a tuxedo, white socks and Birkenstock sandals to become the dinner theater's maitre d'. Dale told me Bert wore sandals because he'd had gangrene earlier in his life. If Dale knew how Bert got gangrene he didn't say.

These were characters almost as untidy and ropeless as those in "The Night of the Iguana." Hannah Jelkes is an itinerant sketch orphaned in her teens. She has spent much of her life ferrying her aged grandfather Nonno, last of the Romantic poets, around the world, she drawing tourists in plazas and dining rooms and he reciting poems for a few pesos or rupees.

Nonno has been working on his latest poem for 20 years.

Home, Hannah says, is not a place made of wood or bricks. "I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can ... well, nest -- rest -- live in, emotionally speaking." Home is where her grandfather is.

The Rev. Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon is a boozy Episcopal priest shepherding teachers from a Texas Baptist women's college around spiritual sites in Mexico. Shannon became a spiritual tour guide after being locked out of his church in Virginia for scandalous behavior. He likes young women and does not love the "senile delinquent" Western theologies have made of God.

The third member of this triangle is Maxine, the bawdy keeper of the Mexican seaside hotel where most of "The Night of the Iguana" transpires. She's fond of Shannon but plays with her cabana boys and solves everything with a rum coco.

Cap'n Woods treated the people who worked for him harshly, but I didn't rebel until the day I was told to vacuum his office. He wasn't there, so I naturally looked at his bookcase to see what kind of books he read. One book looked back at me. I don't remember the title. I do remember the many pictures of Nazis inside.

This man was running a nursing home. I wondered how Bert had spent the war. My soul shivered. I wanted to go home.

The solace in being lost and laughable, if we are, lies in Hannah's determination to seek each other, her belief that home is the place you have in someone else's heart.

Love, Sam

sj-blackwell@att.net;