Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (14 page)

The Good Samaritan

O
n the train from Utica in the late fall of 1981 I found the wallet.

Wedged between the soiled cushion-seat and the metallic strip beneath the window, so that it wasn’t visible to the casual eye, but I felt it nudging against my hip, a hard object, as I’d sat down heavily, books spilling out of my bookbag onto my lap and onto the floor.

Just by accident! For I’d intended to sit in another car but seeing in the corner of my eye someone I knew from school—not well, but she knew me, she’d have wanted me to sit with her so that she could tell me about her boyfriend(s), her sorority sisters, how “terrific” our college was—the prospect filled me with dismay and quickly before she could see me I’d headed in the opposite direction.

The object jutting against my hip was a woman’s wallet, a too-bright green, meant to resemble crocodile skin. Surreptitiously I examined it, hoping that no one was watching.

Clearly this was a “lost” object—it was not mine.

I was twenty years old—still young enough and needy enough to feel a little stab of elation that someone had left her wallet behind—for me.

There is a romance of lost objects, I think. Like abandoned houses, junked cars. Objects once valuable and cherished and now ownerless. Lost-and-found in our high school was a closet with shelves adjacent to the front office, for which a secretary had the key. Searching for a lost mitten you were surprised to see so many single, lost mittens and gloves, glasses with cracked lenses, soiled change purses, notebooks, sweaters, socks, a single sneaker. How could such sizable objects be
lost
? I’d gone with a friend who was looking for a lost watch, naively she’d removed her watch for gym class and shut it in her (unlocked) locker and it was gone when she’d returned—as I might have warned her, if I’d thought it was my business. And why she imagined the watch might be reported as
lost
and waiting for her in the
lost-and-found
when clearly it had been stolen was a mystery to me—but again, commenting on my friend’s judgment was not my business.

How strange it always seemed to me, people can lose so much, people are so careless.

We—my younger brother and I—had been brought up
not to be careless
. We did not have
money to throw around
as my excitable mother liked to say with an airy gesture of her hand that seemed to belie what she was saying, for you had a sense of how much my mother would have liked to
throw money around
if she’d had money for that purpose.

Nor did we squander emotions, or opinions. My opinions of others, including my closest friends, were kept private, unuttered, which was why, among girls who knew me in high school, and now in college, I was very
well liked
as one
to be trusted.

I did not share secrets with others. If told secrets, I did not betray the teller.

Guiltily I glanced up—but no one seemed to be watching. Even a middle-aged man who’d stared rudely at me as I’d made my way along the aisle had lost interest and was reading a newspaper. The childish thought came to me—
It’s a trick. A test
.

Maybe a conductor had seen me. Maybe he would loom over me and claim the wallet as
lost property
.

But the conductor was at the far end of the car. He hadn’t seen, of course. If I’d wanted to shove it into my bag, the wallet was mine.

The wallet was promising: it looked stylish, expensive. Except the “leather” was synthetic and the brass-like trim was beginning to tarnish.

On the back were tarnished-brass initials—
AMN
.

Inside, the wallet was like any other wallet—a compartment for change, a compartment for cards including a Visa card, an AAA card, medical and dental health-management cards, as well as a few snapshots, and a driver’s license made out to
Anna-Marie Nivecca, 2117 Pitcairn St., Carthage, NY.

The little photo on the driver’s license showed a smiling young woman with streaked-blond hair spilling over her shoulders, dark eyebrows, dark lips. She was not a natural blond, you could see—the hair was dark at the roots. The camera’s flash was mirrored, in miniature, in her eyes.

Born 5/19/74, Carthage, New York. Only seven years older than I was but a mature
woman
.

Anna-Marie Nivecca was very attractive, I thought. Men would turn to glance at her in the street. Women, too.

I might have felt a pang of envy, jealousy—not exactly resentment but a sort of self-lacerating admiration for one so clearly more attractive—“sexy”—than I was, or could imagine being.

Except, in other photos, by herself or with others,
Anna-Marie Nivecca
looked somehow plaintive, vulnerable—even when smiling. Like a glamour-girl of another era, one of those Hollywood starlets about whom you learned that despite her beauty she’d had an unhappy life, divorce, alcoholism, an early death.

There were just four snapshots in the wallet, trimmed to size: a young, busty
Anna-Marie
in a bridal gown with a strikingly good-looking, pale-olive-skinned young man clutching her around the waist, his smiling face pressed cheek to cheek with hers in a pose that must have been a strain to both;
Anna-Marie
with an older, heavyset couple who might have been her parents, all in dressy attire, and smiling broadly at the camera;
Anna-Marie
with a baby on her lap, and the handsome young groom now in T-shirt and shorts, sitting on the grass beside her chair with his hand loosely closed around her bare, shapely leg;
Anna-Marie
with several other very festive young women with eye-catching hair, celebrating someone’s birthday in a restaurant.

I felt a wave of something like dismay—
This is the life of a woman—a real woman. Wife and mother, loving daughter, girlfriend.

In my plain utilitarian wallet there were no snapshots, only just tight little pockets for cards. And not so many of these, either.

It seemed probable to me, the wallet with its initials had been a gift to Anna-Marie from someone who loved her. And many people loved her.

Having initials put on the wallet, in what would have been, at the time of purchase, shiny brass—was this expensive?

At last, having looked through the wallet, now I checked the bills—as if, until this moment, I hadn’t been thinking of the bills in the wallet at all.

As if the amount of money in a “lost” wallet isn’t the most crucial feature of that wallet.

As if the money hadn’t been the first, the
absolute first
thing I’d thought of, even before I’d tugged the wallet out of its niche against the wall. As soon as I’d felt the edge of the wallet nudging my hip, my instinctive thought had been—
Something valuable, left behind!

The crude jeering singsong of childhood—
Finders keepers losers weepers.

(Was I really so poor? My family so anxious about money? From earliest childhood I’d absorbed my parents’ worries—they’d been born during the Depression, and could not ever forget it. We lived with my father’s widowed mother in her clapboard house in Carthage and my father worked at a variety of jobs that seemed always to be evaporating through no fault of his; young, I’d learned that you can work, work, and work and yet be “poor” and the stigma of poverty is more painful for you than for those who chose scarcely to work at all. At the small liberal arts college to which I had a music scholarship I would have been mortified if my classmates had known how desperate I was for money—how anxious, that even my scholarship might not be enough to keep me in school. I worked part-time for food services, at the minimum wage, and hadn’t even the satisfaction of complaining bitterly and funnily about my job since I couldn’t risk others guessing how desperate I had to be for money, to work at such a job.)

Slowly I counted—and recounted—the bills in the wallet: a rumpled twenty, a five, a few dollar bills—not quite thirty dollars.

Thirty dollars! This wasn’t insignificant to me, whose wallet contained about eighteen dollars and change after the purchase of a round-trip train ticket to Carthage.

I understood, the wallet’s owner Anna-Marie didn’t have
money to throw around
, either.

You could tell by the snapshots. The hairstyles of the young women, their “dress-up” clothes, lavish makeup and jewelry.

In one of the little pockets was a card—
In Case of Emergency Please Contact Next of Kin Jalel Nivecca, 2117 Pitcairn St, Carthage, NY.

“Jalel”—this had to be the husband, olive-dark-skinned, eerily handsome like a Romantic painting of a gypsy lover, a Byronic hero, a Heathcliff.

The name “Jalel” was new to me. I wondered if Anna-Marie’s husband was of Mediterranean descent, maybe Greek, Tunisian—Middle Eastern. I wondered what it would be like to be married to such a face, for even an attractive woman like Anna-Marie Nivecca.

Outside the train window, that looked just perceptibly foggy, or greasy, as if it hadn’t been washed in a very long time, a desolate late-autumn landscape rumbled past. The train moved along the Mohawk River but I was sitting on the side opposite the river—just hills, pine woods, a chill pale late-morning sun. I sniffed at the wallet—there was a faint fragrance, a woman’s perfume maybe.

A powerful sensation swept over me, to which I could have given no name.

Next to the name “Jalel Nivecca” was a telephone number.

I thought—
I should call this number.

Except—I hated telephone calls. It was an obstinate sort of shyness, that made me stammer. I could not stop myself from imagining, at the other end of the line, someone frowning in impatience.

Yes Who is this? What do you want?

I did not like calling my parents, even. I did not ever like to call strangers.

It was not my choice to be returning home for the weekend from college, where I studied piano and composition; my mother wanted me to help her with the care of my grandmother, who was now more or less bedridden with severe rheumatoid arthritis and what was called—the words filled me with horror—congestive heart failure. (And there were other family problems, too boring and heartrending to enumerate! “Just come home. Help me, for once”—my mother’s plea.) It was generally believed in the family that I was studying to be a public school music teacher but much of my time was spent on music composition, and much of my life—the intense, secret life in my head—was filled with music and poetry: poetry-set-to-music.

Strands of music, strands of things I’d read or heard were always weaving in and out of my thoughts. Alone, I was engaged with this other world, and did not feel lonely; I felt most lonely when I was with other people, with whom I struggled to feel a meaningful connection, or suffered wondering what they felt for me.
Such a plain, earnest girl—but why does she take herself so seriously? No one else would!

Traveling to and from Carthage on the train, I loved to sit alone and work on my music. Sketchy compositions that were inspired by—though I would not have wished to acknowledge this—such American composers as Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, George Crumb, Daniel Pinkham who were the first composers I’d encountered who were not household names. (Pinkham had been composer-in-residence at the small liberal arts college in Utica for just one year, sixty years ago. Yet his influence persisted.) And I worked on my poetry, which was inspired by such Romantics as Shelley, Keats, Emily Brontë but also Emily Dickinson—whose work most intrigued me when I felt that it was beyond my comprehension. When I opened my manila folder, I felt a charge of excitement and hope.

My professors encouraged me—of course. Effusive with praise, uncertain of their own talent, our professors knew that it was in their interest to encourage as many of us as possible.

My roommates might have been twins: big brusque jovial girls who campaigned for class offices, excelled at sports and took it as a personal challenge to “draw out” people like me. One of them, Lolly O’Brien, told me, memorably: “Y’know, Nadia—a person could spend a lifetime—
two
lifetimes!—listening to the great music that has already been composed.” Lolly wore the navy-blue nylon parka issued by the college crew team. Her forehead furrowed as she regarded me with pitying eyes. “Mozart, Beethoven, what’s-his-name—the opera-writer—the German . . . Just the operas of Wagner—the one with the flying horses in it, the ‘Val-ker-ie’ . . . You could spend a lifetime just listening to
that
.”

I tried not to laugh. Or maybe I just laughed. It was very funny, and it was very good advice.

I told Lolly that I wasn’t trying to write Wagnerian operas. And I wasn’t trying to listen to them, either.

Later, I overheard Lolly complaining to our roommate—
She’s weird! She’d be better off with a single room.

I
n Carthage, I left the train with the wallet in my bag. It was not my intention to carry the wallet away with me but to turn it in to the lost-and-found in the depot but when I approached the clerk at the counter—a young woman with a sty prominent on her eyelid who called to me sharply, “Yes? Next?” as if I were waiting in line and not just standing a few feet away indecisively—I realized that I couldn’t entrust Anna-Marie Nivecca’s wallet to her.

She will steal the money.

She will steal the snapshots.

Nor did I call the telephone number listed for
Jalel Nivecca.

Instead, I thought that I would return the wallet to the Pitcairn address: the street wasn’t far from the train station, in south Carthage. This was a part of the city in which I didn’t think I knew anyone.

It wasn’t like me to behave so impulsively. Recklessly!

Vaguely I knew that my mother would be waiting for me—though cell phones were beginning to be in use they weren’t yet common, and it would not have been expected that I should call my mother to say that I’d be a few minutes late.