Read The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story for Free Online

the original City Hall (now called Gallier Hall) and whose son James Jr. was also a noted local architect. (Their name originally had been Gallagher but, like a lot of Irish immigrants, they Frenchified it before their arrival in order to fit in.) The doors are Greek key, the mantels black marble, the plaster cornices handsome and streamlined, and the medallions not overly flowery. The original windows are Greek key too, and enormous, so that the whole house is filled with light. We both fell immediately in love with its lavish proportion, airy simplicity, and ample corner lot. The plans had been an attempt to make a sow’s ear into a garish silk purse, and in this case the lovely sow’s ear was eminently preferable.
    By the time we closed in August, I felt like we’d owned the house forever—and not just because poor Ricky had already let me in at least a hundred times after our offer had been accepted. On those occasions, I wandered around daydreaming, scribbling endlessly in my orange speckled notebook, but I already knew what I wanted. I’d been preparing for owning some house, somewhere, sometime, for so long that I’d saved every World of Interiors and House & Garden magazine since I was twenty, moving them in increasingly battered boxes from apartment to apartment, city to city. I’d been carrying around a swatch of Bennison “Crewelwork” linen like a talisman for almost fifteen years; I was well versed in the subtle differences between Farrow & Ball’s “Straw,” “String,” and “Matchstick” paint colors. More than a year before we laid eyes on the house, I had bought (on the layaway plan at a local antique store) the parcel gilt bamboo Regency benches I now knew would go in the front parlor. As a child, I never cared a whit about Barbie, it was her dream house I was obsessed with. Now at last I had my own.
    After the closing, we went straight to First Street to open the door with our own key for the first time, and then continued on to my friend John Besh’s restaurant August for lunch. We took a table in a front corner by the window and John ordered a bottle of my favorite Billecart-Salmon Champagne; as we raised our glasses I realized I wasn’t just toasting the house, I was toasting all that went with it. Here I was, well past forty, and until this moment the word “home” had still meant the house on Bayou Road, the town of Greenville. In my early twenties, I knew at the time that the cities where I went to work—Washington, Atlanta, Orlando, Washington again—were only stops along the way to some future home I assumed would be permanent. What I had not planned on was to live like a vagabond for fifteen more years after that, going back and forth between New York and New Orleans, never really committing to either place, becoming a true citizen of neither.
    In New York, my “community” was mostly comprised of fellow journalists and my clubhouse Elaine’s (there are worse fates), but I belonged to nothing. I turned up occasionally at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church (I happen to be a Presbyterian, but there was also the fact that it was a convenient six blocks from my apartment), and in New Orleans I went to Trinity Episcopal because it is Elizabeth’s church and I only ever went with her. Once, I volunteered in one of New Orleans’s worst housing projects—a valiant nun was trying to start a student-run newspaper—and my heart would break when I’d return from New York and listen to the messages from children who had needed my help while I was gone. I couldn’t volunteer—I couldn’t even get a dog. Until my (Manhattan) cat died, I paid my Jamaican cleaning lady Carmen to watch TV with him every day just to keep him company—and to assuage my considerable guilt. Maintaining such a dual existence had been a lot like my hesitance about marriage. My much-vaunted mobility and freedom had, in fact, been denying me the richness of a settled life, of being a productive member of