Clara Faulkner Delacroix

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Every night shift on the Main exchange began, for Clara Faulkner Delacroix, with the same small ritual: she took the head-set from its hook, wiped the mouthpiece with her handkerchief, looked at the board and said to herself, in a whisper, that the city was in her ears. She was born in 1889 in New Orleans, in the Garden District, Louisiana, and worked for twenty-eight years as a telephone operator for the telephone company, listening to a great deal more than she ever repeated. She was the elder child of the streetcar conductor Sylvain Delacroix and the typist Nettie Faulkner Delacroix, and the sister of Baptiste Faulkner Delacroix. She never married and had no children of her own, though she was an aunt of such steady reliability that her nephew and niece took it for granted that every family had one. She died in 1938 of a sudden collapse, aged forty-nine. She was not a vampire slayer and never wished to be one. She belonged to the House of Delacroix by her father's name and to the Red Ledger's Faulkner bloodline through her mother, a line that descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and for the Ledger she did the one thing that a woman at a switchboard is placed to do. She heard where the trouble was, and she put the right people through. She was born in the Garden District, which was not where the family lived. Her parents had the narrow house on Burgundy Street, and it was a flooded kitchen that sent them uptown. A storm in the first week of March 1889 lifted the roof of the back gallery and brought half the ceiling down, and Nettie, who was seven months gone and in no condition to climb ladders, was taken in by a cousin of the Faulkner side who kept a tall house on Prytania Street, among oaks and iron fences and cast-iron lilies. The child was born there in April in an upstairs room, to the ringing of the horse-car bell at the corner. Her mother said that it was the only time in her life she had given birth in a better address than she could afford. They were back on Burgundy Street within the month, with the new roof on, and Clara was carried down the stoop in a lace christening gown that had been made for a Prytania Street baby and was a size too large. She grew up under the sound of the streetcar. Her father, who by then had ten years' service on the Canal Street line, used to take her on the platform on Sunday mornings, and she learned the stops by ear, in the order in which he called them. She was a small, quick, dark girl with her mother's attentive stare and her father's musical voice, and she had, from the age of five, the habit of listening to a conversation in the next room and being able to repeat it. This was regarded in the family as a mixed blessing. It was also noticed that she repeated only what she was asked to. At school she was the child to whom a secret could be told, and in the end the child to whom nothing was told, since it was felt that a person who could not be tempted was no fun at all. Her mother gave her a typewriter at fourteen, and taught her the keys. It was a great success, though not in the way that Nettie had expected. Clara typed neatly and fast. But she found the machine confining. It said what it was told, one letter after another, and gave no word of its own. She went, at twenty-one, to the telephone company, where a girl who could speak clearly, think quickly and stay civil to a stranger at three in the morning was valued above rubies, and was put at the switchboard on a Monday. The exchange was a long room above a bank on Carondelet Street, lined with boards of brass jacks and cords, with forty girls in white blouses sitting in two rows, and a supervisor who walked behind them with a stopwatch. Calls came in at the rate of one a second at noon. A girl was expected to answer within five. She said, hello, number please, nine thousand times a day, and it was said of her within a month that she had never once said it twice in the same tone. The Storyville years, which ran from 1897 until the navy closed the district in 1917, were hardly over when she began, and the brass bands of the old district were still playing in the cafes of Rampart Street. She heard the whole of it on the wires. She heard a bandleader asking a cornetist to meet him on Basin Street, and a landlady in the Quarter asking an undertaker to come at once, and a night clerk on Canal Street saying, in a low voice, that the gentleman in room nine had not left his bed since he arrived and that the maid would not go in. It was a very odd job. A switchboard operator, who is not meant to listen, hears, in the nature of things, the thing that was not said to anyone else, and Clara, who had been made by nature to take it in and by upbringing to keep it, passed it on. She passed it, naturally, to the Ledger. The cousins in the Quarter had learned, by the end of the first year, that if a call came through to the Main exchange with a particular phrase in it, a request for the number of the herbalist on Dumaine Street, or a question about the weather in Algiers, a girl on the third board would put it through at once, and make a note, and the note would arrive by the evening mail at a house on Burgundy Street. She never said who had telephoned, or why. She said only that a call had come, and to whom it had gone. In ten years she saved, by the Ledger's reckoning, eleven lives. She regarded the number as vulgar, and refused to discuss it. The influenza arrived in the autumn of 1918, when she was twenty-nine. The company, which had lost a quarter of its operators to illness within a fortnight, sent for her to take a double shift, and she did, and when the shift was over she walked home through streets that were lined with the carts of the dead, and knocked at the doors of the neighbours. She nursed three households. She carried soup, brought a priest, found a doctor and sat for an entire night by a cradle in a house on Marais Street, and she was never ill herself. Her mother, who watched her go out each morning with a basket, said that it was the first time she had seen her daughter do anything without being asked to. Clara said that it was the first time that anyone had needed her to do more than answer. Her mother's death in 1925, on the back stair of the house, was a blow that she felt more than she showed. She kept the house on Burgundy Street for her father, who rode the cars as a passenger for his last years and called the stops under his breath, and for her brother's children, who came on Sundays. Her niece Lorraine Faulkner Delacroix, who was ten, took to sitting on the stairs while her aunt talked on the telephone, and learned by listening the thing that she was later to use. Her nephew Howard was a quiet, round boy who wanted to be a conductor like his grandfather, and she let him ride the trolley for the afternoon with her, in the seat behind the motorman, holding a transfer. When the Depression arrived, the company cut hours, and the operators, who had been grateful for a job, were put on short weeks. She took in typing, and on Saturday mornings, at a table in the kitchen, she typed, for the Ledger, the same short notices that her mother had typed before her. Her father died in 1933 of a sudden collapse on a platform on Canal Street, and she took a room in a boarding house on Esplanade Avenue and went on, on the night shift, for another five years. She had lost, by then, a certain quickness of breath, and she said that it was the stairs. She died in the autumn of 1938, at forty-nine, at the switchboard on Carondelet Street, in the middle of a call. The girl at the next position said that she had stopped speaking in the middle of the usual phrase, put both hands flat on the board and bowed her head, and that when the supervisor ran over, the line was still open and a man at the other end was saying hello, hello, is anybody there. The supervisor took up the head-set and said that there was. She asked what number he wanted, and put him through. Clara Faulkner Delacroix is remembered in the Delacroix family as the operator of the Main exchange, the aunt who heard everything and repeated only what was needed. In the Slayerverse she stands for the voices on the wire, the women at the boards and the keys who held the hunting houses together by passing a word from one dark street to another, and who knew that a secret kept well is a kind of switchboard in itself.