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Mary Lind, A Living Botero;
A Secret Tennessee Williams Soul
by Patrick Shannon"My soul has belonged here since I've been a child. I've known this. Not this house, but the Quarter." (Mary Lind, April 18, 1998, in her Vieux Carre patio).
Mary Lind has a legendary last name but she is not an opera star. There is no Jenny in Mary's Lind. Nor does she live in the magical world of operatic sets and music which can swell the human heart to bursting with a joyful pain.Our Mary Lind is a born and bred native of New Orleans. She may not have any connection with the great opera diva, Jenny Lind, who once performed in New Orleans at the long-gone Opera House on Bourbon Street but she's got better than that. Our own Mary Lind actually lives an even more mysterious, magical, and wonderful life. Our Mary Lind is among the few old family, native New Orleanians who actually lives on a stage once imagined by great writers like Tennessee Williams. Our Mary Lind lives a poets dream in a real dream in a dream-like city.
You see, our Mary Lind is a realtor who chooses her clients and properties, who meets interesting (and usually wealthy) people from all parts of the globe, and who sleeps and wakes in one of the most dramatic, mystical, mysterious, and artistic places in the world. For the last several years Ms. Lind has owned a very old house in the very heart of the Vieux Carre' in the 800 block of Bourbon Street. She lives, really lives, in a place that the whole world has come to associate with freedom to be one's true self, with the wild and the wanton, to live among colorful characters, in a small city within a city with great history, to work and live and love in a place where a long list of artists and writers, bon vivants and bohemians have once resided and created art, a place where all of them, the famous and the infamous, the renown and the forgotten, but a place all of whom have called home, the unique and wonderful French Quarter of New Orleans. Now the whole world has an image of the place where she lives because of the vision of America's most poetic playwright, Tennessee Williams. Mostly because of Williams, the world conjures up an image of secret gardens and patios, free love among the bohemians, palmetto palms, fountains and lily ponds, all cut off from the uninvited eye of visitors by old brick walls, iron gates, jungles of sweet scented flowers hidden down long alleyways.
This is exactly what I found when I met with our subject for this interview. It was a rather cool April morning. Breezy, with the sun behind clouds which occasionally broke to let down a beam of warm golden light. Just like a character from one of Williams' plays, she was wearing a loosely fitting bright red ankle length dress printed with a floral pattern of large white flowers. Perhaps night blooming moon flowers. Maybe unwittingly, or with the instinct of a Southern born lady, she had chosen a certain style right out of the 1940's. The kind of dress Blanch DuBois or her sister might have worn or must wear in A Streetcar Named Desire. Perfect for her figure. And like a Blanche DuBois, she looked both demure and sexy; an emotional tigress under tight control; all woman, a full blown rose in her prime to quote the master. Although small of stature, and seemingly quiet by nature, she also can appear to be an Empress lounging in her patio under a shaft of sunlight waiting to command an army of conquering men. She has a round face and brown hair which glows, an aureole of gold around her head, when the sun spotlights her for a moment. Her face crinkles around her hazel eyes when she laughs, which is often. Her smile is serene. In her mid-forties, she is a woman of experience, both glorious and sad; one moment she is a languorous, sensual, voluptuous lady of the Vieux Carre who has seen it all and makes no judgments. Another moment she becomes a little girl with a cupie-doll figure created for innocent hugging and loving; then again, she becomes the female figure of a Botero painting, all plump womanly curves. She turns her face into a beam of sunlight and her lips become the classic bee-stung shape in vivid rose red. Waiting to get or to give a long kiss, or a quick brush against a lover's cheek.
I followed her down a small long alley. At the end of the alley we were met by a white statue of St. Frances mounted on a shelf at eye level on the brick wall. We turned left and entered her patio. We sat at a white wrought iron table in matching chairs beside a pool. A small jet of water fell into the darker green water of the little pool with a cool trickling bubbling sound. It was magic. We were the only two people in the whole Vieux Carre' and we were in a small jungle. The patio was as lush as any Tennessee Williams must have remembered them to be in the 1940s before everyone wanted to paint and restore, clip and control. Banana trees, palmettos, and a wild assortment of exotic green plants, ferns, bamboos, an orchid, and a rose rooted from a cutting from her mother's funeral spray, rambled and spread out and reached for the sun or hid in the shadows, according to their nature. Pots of plants with poetic names grew with abandon. One she prized was called "Yestday, Today & Tomorrow." Light and shadow both oozed and flickered across the patio as the sun played hide and seek with the clouds.
We settled in and I asked her about her herself, where she was born, the usual. She relaxed in her chair.
"I went to Annunciation High School," she said in that delicious New Orleans accent called Yat. "And it isn't there anymore," she sighed. "It was at Marais and Spain Street. Nuns, nuns, nuns. Twelve years in kindergarten to twelfth grade. 13 years. Catholic. UNO for college. I was a biology major. I've been here all my life."
"You know, this is the kind of patio that is so authentic, I think Tennessee Williams would recognize it as one from his past and all his dreams and memories," I said looking around with delight. "Tourists would sell their souls to actually see or be able to rent an apartment in such a setting. You must be very proud and happy to own this."
"I bought the property nine years ago. It does give me a lot of satisfaction. When I was in High School and after I raised my son, I made up my mind I was going to buy a house in the Quarter." She was suddenly in a dazzle of sunlight. Her eyes sparkled. "What color would you say your eyes are?" I asked.
"Hazel. With gold specks in them," she said laughing.
I looked around and wondered how big this place was. One side of the patio was bordered by a two story slave quarters construct. "How many apartments do you have here?" I asked.
"Five.
"And you live in one of the little slave quarter apartments?"
"Yes," she said pointing to the door behind us. "I love my apartment. My soul belongs here. I just know it."
"You're very good friends of some gay people who live right down the block from you, not to mention many other gays that live in and around the Quarter. I mean Marsha and Rip Naquin-Delain. The guys who publish Ambush. You're not gay yourself, but you've been a good friend of the gay community. And you work with so many gay men. Why is it that so many gay men seem to be attracted to the real estate business?"
"Gay people have been very very good to me. I don't know. It's kind of, you have a lot of freedom. You can work as hard as you want. You meet a lot of interesting people. You learn your own limits. I think it's just because everybody's so friendly. It's a cohesive kind of thing."
"Other than growing up in New Orleans with that instinctive live and let live philosophy and being in a business that allows you to meet so many gays, do you think that the gay community as a whole is a good thing to have relative to purchasing and restoring real estate?"
"Yes. They're usually very qualified buyers. They're very astute about what they want and they always improve the property. That's helps us because it helps every neighborhood and every block. Gays have bought houses in a block that no one else would try and they've restored it and turned the block around. Gay people are a necessary and important part of our community."
"Is there any thing special you'd like to share or tell this minority group of people I write for, the gays and lesbians of our town?"
"Well, I'll tell you without them (gays) I wouldn't have gotten through some very, very bad times." Her eyes become moist. "They took care of me. They gave me love. People like Rip and Marsha, friends I've worked with, people I just met, they all helped me through a very difficult time, 91 through 93. Oh, I'm about to cry." She stops, gets control, then laughs. "And gays are a lot of fun."
"And they usually don't get you pregnant!"
"No. That's true." She laughs. "I don't know. I just accept everybody. If you're a turkey, you'll be a turkey - straight or gay." she laughs again. "I don't think anybody can get through bad times without good friends. But you've got to push yourself too."
She pauses. We listen to the trickling water for a moment. The sun races out of a cloud and she's showered in light. She looks up with a serene smile. "I don't know," she says. "Like I said before. My soul belongs here. All the people I know. I couldn't think of living anywhere else."
We part on this note. I walk past St. Frances, down the little alley to Bourbon Street. The peace and mysterious quiet of the jungled patio are blasted away with the noise Bourbon Street on a semi-sunny April day where filled with tourists celebrating weekend Festival. I thought of the many parties I had been to where I had seen Mary line. I always remembered her as a quiet person observing others with a Mona Lisa smile on her face. Now I know why. She lives the life that Tennessee Williams dreamed and wrote about. She lives in the middle of history. She's a woman who is the kind of person he would have written about. She has become a living version of his Rose Tattoo, his Streetcar Named Desire, his voluptuous yet fragile female, his special charismatic lady, his Larkspur Lotion lady. And I always thought her so quiet and sweetly tolerant. Still rivers run deep. Mary Lind is a open and lovely lady, with deep, deep channels of life in the blood rivers of her heart. A living Botero female in a patio behind Bourbon Street. What an inexplicable feminine treasure!
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