“Ha-ha.” Fannie changed the channel to the tennis match.
After the match was over, Ibby sneaked up to her room. She opened the window, turned on the fan, and sat on her bed among the dolls she’d gotten for each birthday since she’d been living with Fannie. She shoved them aside, wondering why Fannie gave her such a silly gift every year. She took the newspaper from her back pocket, carefully unfolded it, and laid it on the bed. The poorly mimeographed paper was called The Express, an underground rag put out by a radical group on campus that was anti everything except drugs. Whenever she went anywhere near the Tulane campus, someone shoved a copy of The Express in her hands. She usually crumpled it up and threw it away without reading it. Not this time.
Ibby couldn’t take her eyes off the cartoon of the naked man with long hair and a scruffy beard. He had a peace sign tattooed on his rear end and a penis that stuck out farther than his feet. He was holding up a newspaper in one hand and little round glasses in the other. The caption read, “What kind of man reads The Express?” Ibby had never seen a naked man. The image was stirring up something in her. She turned the fan on her face, then went back to studying the cartoon.
She became vaguely aware of a noise just outside her window, but she was too absorbed in the newspaper to bother finding out what it was. It sounded like the branches of the oak tree scraping against the side of the house, so she paid it no mind. Then a banging on the other side of the wall caused clouds of dust to fall from the ceiling. She jumped up and was about to run from the room in a panic when she heard a voice.
“Miss Ibby, that you?” A young black man peered through the doorway. “T-Bone. Remember me?”
Ibby didn’t quite know what to think as T-Bone stepped lightly into the room. She never would have recognized him. She remembered him as a wiry teenager of sixteen full of bravado. He was now a man with a strong, sure face. Birdelia had told her that Vietnam had changed T-Bone, made him different, more serious.
“What are you doing up here?” Ibby stuffed the newspaper into her pocket.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, Miss Ibby. I was sanding down the house to prep it for painting when I ran across a window hidden under the turret roof. When I crawled in, I found an empty room and a door with no handle. So I pried the door open with a crowbar.” He looked down at his feet. “Didn’t think nobody was up here.”
“There’s another room up here?”
T-Bone pointed behind him. “Just on the other side of this wall. Nothing to it. See for yourself.”
Ibby followed T-Bone into the adjoining room. It was octagonal, no larger than her own room, with one small window facing the front of the house. Her eyes inadvertently landed on T-Bone, who was standing over in the far corner. She was surprised at how tall he was, well over six feet, and how muscular his arms and shoulders were. His hair was cropped close to his head.
“You grown right pretty,” T-Bone said.
She was sure he was just being polite, his way of getting rid of the awkwardness that filled the tiny room. She changed the subject. “They must have shut this room off for a reason. I wonder why.”
He scratched his head. “Don’t rightly know.”
Next to his feet was a small door, no more than two feet wide. She walked over and opened it. When he crouched down next to her, his thigh brushed hers.
He reached in. “Looks like somebody was trying mighty hard to hide this box, all tucked away in the corner like it was.”
Ibby plopped down cross-legged on the floor and opened the box as T-Bone came and sat next to her. Inside, she discovered a photo album covered in a faded pink taffeta, the lace edging hanging off the side in places where it had come unglued. She gently lifted the album from the box.
There was an inscription on the inside of the front cover. “Look. It says ‘To Pearl, the most beautiful woman in the world, from the luckiest man in the world.’”
“Who’s Woody?” T-Bone asked, pointing to the signature below the inscription.
“My grandfather’s name was Norwood. Maybe that was his nickname. But why would it say ‘To Pearl’?”
Ibby flipped through the yellowed pages of the album, pretending not to notice the sound of T-Bone’s breath and the smell of his musky cologne.
He leaned in closer. “What’s that?”
Ibby picked up the newspaper clipping stuck in the creases of the album and examined it. It was an ad for the Starlight Jazz Club on Bourbon Street and contained a photograph of two women—one sitting provocatively inside a giant oyster shell in a satin bathing suit, the other, scantily clad, standing with her foot atop a papier-maché alligator.
“Looks like an ad promoting a couple of dance acts. One for Miss Pearl the Oyster Girl and one for Gertie the Gator Girl.”