1.
My grandmother told anyone who would listen that she got my father when she was a 60-year-old widow by beating the devil at cards.
Obviously, no one believed her, nor did we believe that Abuela was 60 when she became pregnant with Father. But with no birth certificate, we had only her word on her age. Implausible as it may be, she certainly looked the part: tiny, wizened, and perpetually clad in black, with dense eyeglasses that looked far too heavy for her head to support.
We tried to poke holes in her story, treating it like a game. We asked if, by the devil, she meant Satan, and was Dad Satan's son? Abuela just responded, with a dismissive wave, that it wasn't like that. We asked if she was really over 100, and if so, how she could get around so well. She just shrugged in resignation, her answer always the same: it must be, because she was the age she was. We asked why no one ever sees the devil around anymore, and she simply said that's how it was in Spain; she couldn't help how it was in New Orleans.
We did know she came to the States so her only son could be born a U.S. citizen; there were records for that. And we knew that he attended a prestigious university on a wrestling scholarship where he met and impregnated a girl born to old Southern money, prompting a hasty marriage, followed by my birth. I was named Max, and I was the only child they ever had together.
For all the force of his personality and physical presence, precious little of it showed in me. I had his chestnut hair color, but otherwise, the stuff of my body seemed borrowed entirely from my mother's line. I had the body of a gentleman--fit but slim--and my mother's refined features in masculine form. It was as if his Y chromosome was enough to prompt me into existence, but had nothing more to pass on to me thereafter.
After college, Mother's wealthy parents brought Father into the fold and started him in a construction business, which he shrewdly parlayed into his own fortune. He diversified his investments so he could sit back and watch his money earn more money, effectively going into retirement by the time he turned 40. The son of a poor immigrant, Francisco Tosco became Frank Tosco, lord and master of a former plantation house. He livened the place up with his bold, boisterous nouveau riche ways, which never failed to gall Mother, a constant source of friction.
And as the years unfolded, we learned that in all the ways that truly mattered, he might as well have been won from the devil himself.
2.
Father was, undeniably, a bull of a man.
He looked like one, with a block of a head set on a thick, corded neck and dense, powerful shoulders. His blunt nose had nearly always flared nostrils, and his lips and tongue were fleshy, full of unspoken appetites. His abundant brown hair was meticulously trimmed into a masculine crop, barely taming its wild curls and licks, as was his thick mustache. His appearance was brutal, yet undeniably handsome, a force of nature barely contained.
His suits were tailored to his physique, making it evident how powerfully built he was beneath the fine fabrics. He maintained his athlete's body with rigorous workouts in his private gym for hours every day, growing thicker and more intimidating with age, looking more like a seasoned pro wrestler than a southern gentleman. His thick slabs of chest muscle heaved under his dress shirts, and his lats spread his jackets wide, like wings. No one else was built like him on our plantation, or in our social circles; he was singular, a physical aberration. I could practically see the testosterone waft off him, a visible haze.
I imagined that everyone in a five-mile radius could pick up on his musky scent and wet themselves, intoxicated on his primal odor. The one person who conspicuously let it be known she did not feel that way was Mother, who was transparent in her disdain for Father, as only an old-money Southern matriarch, wielding generations of entitlement, could be.
"He doesn't need me for sex anymore, thank Heaven," she'd say, her voice dripping with cool contempt. "He's got every whore in the state on his bankroll."
With Father's wandering eye and Mother's grudging acceptance, their marriage was less a union of the 1990s and more an arrangement from antebellum days, a relic of a bygone era. Father could just as well have been King Cotton rather than an investor in software and oil; the illusion was complete.
There's a timeless quality to New Orleans, especially if you lived at either extreme on the economic scale. Middle-class people might contend with modern-day conventions, but if you had enough money, you could be utterly insulated from them, and if you had not enough money, they were too elusive to matter.
3.
I'd known Ash my whole life. His mother was a maid at the house, which made him, by extension, something like unpaid staff himself. He was often called on to be my playmate when it suited me, obliged to play what I wanted and to let me win every game.
He was never one for athletics, the preferred pastime for boys in my circle. But he had other gifts, a different kind of strength. A flair for storytelling, a wit suited to gentle mockery. And pantomime, I guess you'd call it. He amused us frequently with his hand articulations, acting out scenarios with his long, graceful digits.
Fingers lightly fluttered, each tip tracing an erratic, ethereal path.
"What's that one?" I asked, leaning closer, already captivated.
"'Butterflies migrate south for the winter," Ash answered, his voice a soft current.
In the delicate tremor of his digits, I could almost feel the collective flutter of a thousand wings, a fragile, mass movement unseen.
His hands dropped low, slowly writhing upward on delicate, twisting wrists. His fingers, initially tight buds, unfurled with agonizing slowness, before settling into a gentle, almost hypnotic sway. Wisteria in spring, he'd convey, and the very air seemed to sweeten with imaginary bloom.
