The House on Esplanade

“On November 11, 1918, Yvonne St. Amant received a telegram at her house on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans informing her that her husband of only a few months had been killed in the Argonne. From then on, every year Yvonne lit a candle before the photograph of her husband at precisely 11 a.m. on November 11. Fifteen years later as she was lighting the candle her doorbell rang. It was a young woman who introduced herself as Yvonne’s first cousin once removed. In her arms was a tiny baby. A week later the young mother disappeared leaving the baby on a bed in the big house. Pinned to the pillow beside the baby was a note: “I am sorry.” The baby’s name was Marie Antoinette Renâee Binghamton but Yvonne always called her Bing. Bing was born in 1933 and lived into the twenty-first century. Her life encompassed many wars: WWII, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, as well as her own wars: polio that left her with an almost indiscernible limp, young love in a lit au mariage on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris, the beaches of the Cãote d’Azur, and the summer of love in San Francisco which left her pregnant with a son. And New Orleans where she always returned becoming first “une femme d’un certain age” and then an old lady, the way of all flesh. Through it all Bing had one ambition, “I don’t want to grow old before I grow wise.” This is her story.”–