Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (15 page)

Just a few minutes! Well—maybe a half hour.

The train might have been delayed. Yes in fact—I would tell my mother that.

Pitcairn was one of the narrow residential streets of south Carthage, that led down to the riverfront—the Black Snake River that bordered the city on its eastern edge. Much of this part of the city was loading docks, warehouses and small businesses, but the Nivecca address was in a residential neighborhood of brownstone row houses built almost to the curb.

It was a neighborhood not so different from my own, except just a little older, shabbier—there were no driveways, and so vehicles were parked on the street; there were virtually no front yards, so children’s toys, even bicycles, lay on the edge of the sidewalk where they’d been allowed to fall.

The row house at 2117 Pitcairn resembled its neighbors: two-storey brownstone with a steep shingled roof, a small front stoop, a small grassless front yard. On the sidewalk I stood uncertainly, wondering what I would say. Would glamorous Anna-Marie Nivecca answer the door? Would I thrust her wallet at her and stammer—what?

How surprised she would be! I would say
I thought I had better bring this over in person. Otherwise—it might have been appropriated.

But was
appropriated
too ostentatious a word? Maybe better to say—
stolen
?

I saw a movement at a window beside the door. Someone had been watching me.

“Hello?”—the door was opened, a man stood in the doorway.

It was Jalel Nivecca: I knew him.

Except, the man looked older than I would have expected. His hair straggled in his face, very dark, but laced with gray. His face was still gypsy-handsome but ravaged with worry or tiredness and his clothes—shirt, trousers—looked as if he’d been sleeping in them. And he was barefoot.

I told him hello and explained that I had a wallet belonging to Anna-Marie Nivecca.

“A wallet?
Her
wallet?”

He took the wallet from me and looked through it eagerly.

“Where did you find this?”

I told him: on the train from Utica to Carthage, just this morning.

“On the
train
? From—?”

“From Utica.”

Of course, the train had come from Albany, or New York City. It was misleading to say Utica, which happened to be where I’d gotten on.

And the wallet might have been lost at another time, the previous day perhaps. On a train from Carthage to Utica and beyond.

The man who had to be Jalel Nivecca, Anna-Marie’s husband, was looking stunned, as if he’d been hit by a blow on the head not quite powerful enough to knock him out—he was still standing. But the more I tried to explain the circumstances of my finding the wallet, the less he seemed to be listening. He was staring at the snapshots—his eyes filled with moisture.

He hadn’t checked the bills. Or the credit card.

“You say you found this on the
train
? This morning?”

Carefully I repeated what I’d said. I had not ever been so close—physically—to a stranger, in such an emotional state; I could not help but feel responsible. I tried to assume the brisk no-nonsense but friendly manner of my college roommates, who would excel in such a minor emergency.

“Yes. I thought I’d better—bring it to you in person . . . There’s a card in the wallet—‘In Case of Emergency Please Notify . . .” My voice faltered. “You are—‘Jalel Nivecca’?—next of kin?”

“Yes. I am—‘Jalel Nivecca.’ ” He was staring at me, holding the wallet in his hand like something wounded he had no idea how to deal with. I thought—
She has left him. She has run away. He doesn’t know, yet—not just yet.

Slow-witted in grief, or in a kind of panic resembling grief, Jalel Nivecca asked me again about where and when I’d found the wallet:

“On the train, coming to Carthage? This morning?”

“Yes. I sat down in an empty seat, and the wallet was wedged between the seat and the wall. That’s why no one else found it, I guess—it was sort of hidden.” Nervously I spoke, as if hoping to placate the agitated man. “I thought, instead of turning it in at the depot, it would be safer, it would be quicker, to bring it to you—to bring it here—in person.”

Now that I had delivered the missing wallet, it was time for me to leave. Yet how strange, this simple fact, that would have been screamingly obvious to my mother, for instance, seemed to have no effect upon me at all.

Mr. Nivecca suddenly realized: I’d done him a favor.

Belatedly, he thanked me. He fumbled to remove a bill from the wallet, to offer me.

“ ‘Good Samaratin’—‘Samari
tan
’—” His smile was a fumbling sort of smile, in his ashy unshaven face.

Quickly I declined—“Oh no, thank you, Mr. Nivecca, I—I couldn’t . . .”

It seemed strange to me, faintly unbelievable, that this bizarrely handsome straggly-haired man seemed unaware of his handsomeness—the way he would look to a stranger, like me. If he’d been aware perhaps he would have been ironic, self-conscious; even scornful and bitter. To those who are not-beautiful, the fact that beauty doesn’t protect an individual from upset and injury always seems startling, though common sense should tell us otherwise.

At close quarters, the man’s physical beauty was not discernible, like an image seen too close, dissolving into pixels, molecules. His skin looked unhealthy and his large but deep-socketed eyes were threaded with tiny broken capillaries. His voice was hoarse, straining to sound exuberant: “Miss, thanks! My wife would want you to have this—a little ‘reward.’ ”

He mumbled something further—
reward, Samaritan. Good Samaritan.
There was a drunken sort of almost-jovial persistence in his speech as if he were speaking not to me primarily but to someone else, an invisible listener.

Weakly I said: “I don’t need a reward, really.”

It was strange, how I insisted. When I could certainly have used the money.

(Was it a five-dollar bill he clutched in his hand?
Ten
? I couldn’t imagine that Mr. Nivecca’s reward was any more than that.)

Barefoot Mr. Nivecca continued to stand on the front stoop of his house, wallet in hand. He didn’t seem to want the Good Samaritan to leave, just yet.

“
She’d
want you to have—something. For coming all this way . . .”

“I didn’t come far. From the train station.”

“You could have called. That would’ve been easier. No, you’re a
Good Sam’tan.
There’s not many like you . . .”

This vision of myself was embarrassing! I could not think of myself as other than conniving and opportunistic. For what I’d wanted—I think this was so—was to hand back the wallet to Anna-Marie herself, and see her striking face “light up” with gratitude.

I dared to ask Mr. Nivecca if he had any idea where his wife might be.

“No. I guess—I’m afraid—I’m ashamed as hell—I don’t.” He laughed, mirthlessly. The bloodshot eyes were pleading. “I’m trying to calculate—if you found this wallet on the train this morning, coming to Carthage from Utica, it’s possible that my wife took the train from Carthage yesterday to Utica, or beyond—Albany, New York City. And she left the wallet on the train then, but it was hidden, and the same train returned the next day—today. But it isn’t like Anna to be careless about money—it’s a bad sign the wallet was ‘lost.’ ”

“Did you notify the police?”

“The police! N-No.”

Mr. Nivecca was looking lost and forlorn and now frightened.

“My wife hasn’t been missing that long—only about sixteen hours. The police won’t look for a ‘missing’ adult unless she’s been gone for weeks. The assholes will say
An adult has the right to walk away.
This is a free country and your wife can go anywhere she fucking wants to go and you can’t stop her.
”

Such bitterness and scorn for the police was very like the bitterness and scorn certain of my relatives, my father’s people, felt for law enforcement officers.

I felt very sorry for the man. I felt very sorry that I’d been the one to bring him the wallet, that seemed to indicate bad news.

“Would you like me to help you, Mr. Nivecca—somehow?”

“Would you? Y-Yes, I guess so . . .” He ran his fingers through his already disheveled hair. The bloodshot eyes moved onto me, appealing.

Here was an adult man, a husband. Anna-Marie Nivecca’s husband. He had to be in his early thirties—more than ten years older than I was. Yet, he seemed so stricken; so in need of sympathy, advice. He seemed so
lonely
.

“Yes. I could use some help. Like, moral support . . . Please come inside. I—I haven’t been—guess I haven’t been thinking straight, since . . .”

He opened the door wider and stepped aside, to allow me in.

I hesitated—then stepped inside.

Passing close beside him, as I stepped inside.

And Jalel Nivecca shut the door behind me.

Y
ou know my name, I guess, but—what’s yours?”

And when I told him he repeated just my first name—“Nadia”—as if he’d never heard such a beautiful name before.

He shook my hand, vigorously. His fingers gripped mine in a way no one had ever gripped my fingers before.

My heart was beating very hard. And I swallowed hard.

He was saying that he’d taken “the little girl” to his mother’s house, until Anna-Marie returned. “I’ve been so kind of crazy-upset, all last night. Making telephone calls and waiting to hear back. And waiting out front—watching for headlights . . . Though Anna-Marie didn’t take the car, I have the car.” He paused, breathing audibly. “It’s better for the girl not to see her father so upset.”

“How old is she? Your daughter?”

“How old? Three, I think . . . Four. Her name is Isabelle.”

His voice quavered with tenderness. His hand shook as he lifted a framed photograph of a little girl: blond hair, a sweet but pouty little face, rosebud mouth like a doll’s. Framed photos crowded the tabletop and prominent among these were photos of Anna-Marie, invariably photographed smiling in the posed-seeming incandescent way of a celebrity. In one, Anna-Marie seemed almost to be leaning out of the frame, jutting breasts in a gold lamé V-neck sweater.

“Your wife is very beautiful.”

“Is she!”

He sounded aggrieved, staring at this photo. If I hadn’t been there he might have slammed it flat on the tabletop.

We were in a small cluttered living room. The ceiling seemed low. The carpet was patterned in a way to distract the eye. The furniture was nondescript, the sort of things you might buy at an outlet store, but someone had taken care to drape colorful shawls and scarves over the backs of chairs and a sofa; there was even a gaily patterned silk scarf wound around a lamp shade. In vases there were dried flowers—some of them large tall bouquets of the kind you’d see in a florist’s display window.

All this
showiness
contrasted with articles of clothing—a child’s clothing?—carelessly flung about. And dirty dishes in a small stack on a badly stained glass-top coffee table. And the TV, muted, bluish flickering images at which no one was looking, in a corner of the room.

There was a smell of candles, or incense—the odor I’d inhaled from the wallet.

Seeing the gaily colored scarf tied around the lamp shade reminded me of something I’d forgotten—how I had brought a birthday present, a little silk scarf, for the pretty, popular girl whose locker was beside mine in eighth grade homeroom. Crystal Donovan was the girl’s melodic, wonderful name, a name I’d often whispered to myself, or wrote in my notebook. Around the gift box I’d wrapped a red velvet ribbon. The birthday card was one I’d taken time to choose, and it had been, like the little scarf, far more expensive than I would have expected. Crystal had been delighted with the gift, or had seemed so: she’d thanked me, and kissed me, and told others about it, and meant to tie it around her neck except someone came along, one of her closer girlfriends, or a boy, and so she’d absentmindedly set the box on her locker shelf, and forgot it.

Mr. Nivecca was talking about his wife—and their little daughter—in a rapid nervous voice. I couldn’t follow the thread of his remarks—I was thinking, just a little, of Crystal Donovan, and wondering what had become of
her
.

Like Anna-Marie, she’d gotten married young, I was sure. Had a baby, or babies. Young.

Meanly I thought—
It doesn’t mean so much, then. Having a man’s baby. You can lose him—he can lose you.

The aggrieved husband was telling me how he’d first met Anna-Marie in a local park—(of course, it was a park familiar to me, overlooking the river)—when she’d just graduated from high school, though he hadn’t known she was so young; she’d been at a picnic with friends and she’d run toward him, out of nowhere, laughing, and touched his wrist, and said something about a game of tag—“And you’re
it.
” It would turn out, Anna-Marie was engaged at the time, and Jalel hadn’t known. He’d driven her in his car to Lake Ontario, a half-hour’s drive, and they’d walked on the beach, and waded in the water: “And I asked, ‘Who is it you’re engaged to, if you’re out here with me?’ And Anna-Marie said, ‘It’s an experiment. If I’m here with you, that means—I’m not with
him
.’ ”

She’d broken off that engagement. They were married a year later. They’d always had a “pretty emotional” relationship—breaking up, getting together again—breaking up . . . Except, once you are married, Jalel said, you can’t
break up
.

“Anna-Marie was always a happy person—except when she wasn’t. I don’t mean that she’s crazy—she is not crazy. She’s been a good mother, most of the time. But after Isabelle, she’s been more unpredictable. She cries a lot, and she drinks. And more than wine. There’s this secret side to her. Sometimes when I’d return home, from work, she wasn’t here—she’d come home hours later and say she’d been ‘just walking’—‘just driving.’ She’d have left the baby with her mother or the girl next-door. Once, she said she’d been ‘in the cemetery.’

“(I even followed her once—and she did drive over into the cemetery. Her father had been buried there a few months before.) She likes to sing—loud—when she’s alone in the house with just Isabelle—or driving her car—but if I hear her, if she knows I’m nearby, she’ll stop. And she gets angry with me saying I’m spying on her. Christ!” Jalel paused, lowering his quivering voice. “I think Anna-Marie has a life I don’t know anything about—nobody does. When we got married her sister told me, ‘You think you can get to know Anna, but you can’t. You can never trust Anna.’ I thought it was bitchy of her, at the time.”