Found in the Street (2 page)

2

Jack Sutherland had had what he considered a fine day. He had been to the supermarket in preparation for his five-year-old daughter Amelia's arrival tomorrow, then uptown to get some cash from his bank, then a pleasant lunch with his old college friend Joel MacPherson at a pub-like restaurant near CBS where Joel worked. Joel had liked Jack's four drawings, roughs, for
Half-Understood Dreams,
and his words had picked Jack up: “Just what I want! They look puzzled, discouraged—half-dead!” And Joel had laughed a bit madly. The book, eighty-two pages in length, was Joel's and the drawings, at least twenty, would be Jack's contribution. Jack didn't care for the title and had told Joel so, but a title could always be changed. The book was about a New York couple with college-age son and daughter, all of whom had dreams and expectations that they could not and maybe did not want to disclose to the rest of the family or to anyone else. So the dreams and fantasies were half-understood by the dreamers, and half-enacted in real life, and were misunderstood or unnoticed by the others. After lunch, and having left his drawings with Joel, Jack had walked to his favorite art supply shop on Seventh Avenue. Laden with a new portfolio and a couple of sketch pads and a bottle of Glenfiddich for Natalia (due day after tomorrow, Friday), he had treated himself to a taxi home instead of taking the IRT down to Christopher Street as he usually did.

What made him especially happy was that he would have Amelia to himself for about twenty-four hours. Amelia was arriving by bus tomorrow morning from Philadelphia, accompanied by Susanne, their informal nanny. Maybe he'd have Amelia a day more, since Natalia so often delayed her arrivals by one day.

And Jack also liked the Grove Street apartment, a floor through on the third floor of a well-preserved old town house. He liked it because he and Natalia had done a fair amount of work on it together, painted certain rooms and bought the kind of stuff they liked. They had been given the Grove Street place three or four years ago by a great-aunt of Natalia's who had gone a bit dotty in her old age. Natalia and Jack paid only the taxes and upkeep. The old great-aunt had a house somewhere in Pennsylvania, and since she was now in a nursing home, she would never set foot either in the Pennsylvania house or in the Grove Street apartment, everyone was pretty sure. Sometimes Natalia visited the old lady who half the time did not recognize her. She was ninety-six, and could go on to a hundred, Natalia said, as this was the habit in her family.

Jack and Natalia had had a wall torn down to make a larger living-room area, and put bookshelves against two walls. Jack's workroom was down a hall, closed on three sides with a curtain on the hall. He had a long table of the right height for standing at, and also a chair that swiveled up, if he wanted to sit while he worked.

For the last three months, Jack had been in Philadelphia, in a studio on Vine Street to which a friend of his had given him the key. In this way he had been able to visit Natalia easily on weekends at her family's house in Ardmore. He had of course been welcome to stay in the big Ardmore house too, as half its rooms were empty, but Jack preferred a place of his own, however crummy, to work in. Natalia's mother Lily was at the Ardmore house in summer, her mother's friends were always coming in, some of them staying a day or two, and meals were served by the butler Fred. Not Jack's cup of tea, not for more than two days at a time. He also thought it was good for Natalia to spend time away from him. She was the kind of girl, or woman, who would bolt and run off, perhaps forever, if she felt the marital harness chafing even a little. Natalia had been “sort of obliged,” as she put it, to stay a few weeks with her mother, and her mother did sometimes make Natalia a present of a thousand dollars, even more, if Natalia or they both needed it or wanted it for something specific. But Jack knew that money was not the reason Natalia visited her mother so often. Natalia got more laughs and pleasure from her mother's company than she admitted.

In his workroom, Jack unwrapped his new gray portfolio, so clean now, so free of the charcoal fingerprints, the ink spatters it would get in the next months, undid its three black bows and took a look at its empty interior, then closed it and laid it aside. He pushed the fixative bottle back among the ink bottles, jars of paint and cans of pens and brushes at the back left corner of his table, and laid his sketch pads on his work area.

He felt hungry. He had bought pastrami and cole slaw for himself at a delicatessen this morning. But first a nice cool drink. The drinks cabinet was of bamboo and had sliding doors. Natalia had chosen it, and it had been expensive, Jack recalled. He poured Jack Daniel's onto ice cubes, added some tap water, then turned on the TV. Before he sat down in the green slip-covered armchair, he touched his back right pocket, intending to take his wallet out. The wallet wasn't there. Then it was in the jacket he had worn today.

Jack lingered for a few seconds, watching the TV screen, before he went to the front closet. The inside pocket of the blue cotton jacket was empty, so were the jacket's side pockets. Funny. Jack wandered to the kitchen, looking, then to his worktable, then to the bamboo cabinet where he had stuck the Glenfiddich. No wallet. He opened the apartment door. The navy blue doormat's surface was clear.

What had happened? He'd paid the taxi out of the wallet, definitely. Had he dropped it on the taxi's floor? In the gutter? Jack grabbed his house keys and ran down the stairs. With fantastic luck it'd still be there. He recalled where the taxi had stopped. The gutter held nothing but a couple of filter-tipped cigarette butts, a ring from a beer can. Jack looked up and down, each way, then went back upstairs, eyes on the steps the whole way.

Well,
this
was a damned nuisance!

Maybe he'd meant to shove the wallet into his back pocket and missed. Served him right for being a little Western today, wearing levis and sneakers, carrying his wallet in his back pocket as he almost never did. Suddenly he remembered gripping the wallet between his knees after getting an extra dollar out of it for a tip. It must've fallen to the cab's floor, so there was no chance he'd see it again. The next fare would see it and quietly pocket it.

What pained him was the loss of his favorite snapshot of Natalia and him, just before they got married, and just about the time Natalia had become pregnant. Maybe she had been then.
I got married to get myself out of finishing school,
Natalia had said a couple of times to friends, smiling. They had also got married because Natalia was pregnant, and she'd been frightened and nervous about having an abortion, frightened of having to give birth too, but fortunately she had given birth, and it hadn't been too difficult. There were a couple of other snapshots of Natalia in that wallet, one looking so young and sure of herself at twenty­-two, smiling, lips closed as usual, and with a bigger smile in her eyes. He'd never see the pictures again, and she would never look quite the same for any camera's eye either.

“Goddam it!” Jack got up from the armchair.

There were the credit cards too, Brooks Brothers, American Express and some gas company. Which one? He'd have to write the credit card people right away, and he hoped he had his account numbers here, that they weren't in the back of an address book that Natalia might have in Ardmore. Jack went to the kitchen, not quite as hungry as he had been. He'd have to go to his bank again tomorrow for cash, of which he had none now. Lucky he had some change for the subway.

Jack carried his plate of pastrami with dill pickle and cole slaw and a can of beer to the armchair in front of which he had set up one of the little folding tables that Natalia detested but put up with. “Dammit to hell,” Jack murmured as a final remark on the wallet, before he took a bite of his sandwich. The TV was still on, though Jack wasn't interested. The TV was like another table in a restaurant, making a cozy noise.

The telephone rang and Jack got up, thinking it was Natalia, hoping she hadn't already decided to delay her coming. “Hello?”

“Hello. May I speak to Mr. Sutherland, please?”

“This is Sutherland. Speaking.”

“Can you tell me your first name?”

“Ye-es. John.”

“Did you lose something today, Mr. Sutherland?”

What was the guy—he didn't sound like a kid—up to? Money, of course, but Jack had a sudden hope of recovering at least the photos. “I lost a wallet.”

The man laughed a little. “Well, I've got it. All safe and sound. You're the one in the picture? With the blond girl?”

Jack frowned, tense. “Yes.”

“Then I'll know you when I see you. I wouldn't want to give it to the wrong person. I'm not far away. Shall I bring it over? In the next quarter of an hour?”

“Yes, but—Look, maybe I can meet you downstairs on the sidewalk? There's someone asleep in the apartment just now, so I—”

“Very good, sir. Down on the sidewalk in about ten minutes? Eight minutes?”

For a few seconds after he had hung up, Jack felt as if he had been dreaming. Very American voice, that had been, rather like an old man's. Nevertheless, Jack thought it had been wise not to ask the fellow to come up to the apartment. There wouldn't be any money in the wallet, but maybe there was a chance of everything else, unless this man, or someone who had found the wallet first, had decided to lift the credit cards too. Jack glanced at his watch. Nearly half past 7.

Jack got the blue jacket from the closet, and went downstairs. On the sidewalk, he shoved his hands into the back pockets of his levis, and glanced in both directions. A lanky black youth strode toward him and passed him. Two women together, three men walking separate from one another walked by without a glance at him. The minutes passed. Here came a middle-aged guy with a dog, behind him a rabbi all in black with a beard, walking briskly.

“Mr. Sutherland?”

Jack hadn't been looking at the man with the dog. At that instant, the streetlights came on, though it was still quite light.

“Yes, you are,” said the man who was as tall as Jack or taller. He had black and gray hair, alert dark eyes. “Well—” He shifted the dog's leash from right hand to left, and reached into the pocket of his old but rather good tweed jacket. “This I think is yours?” He produced the wallet.

“Where'd you find it? Right here?”

“Yes, sir. An hour or so ago.”

Jack took the wallet, since the man was extending it, stuck his thumb hastily between its sides and saw the same chunk of new twenties, lifted a flap and saw the snapshots in their transparent envelope. And there was also the little clump of credit cards.

“Two hundred and sixty-three dollars,” said the man in his husky but precise voice. “I hope that's right?”

Jack was smiling in dazed surprise. “Take your word for it. I'm—bowled over! May I offer you a hundred for your kindness?” Jack was ready to count the money out. The man looked as if the money might be welcome.

“No, sir!” said the stranger with a laugh, a shy wave of his hand. “Gives me pleasure. Not every day a man finds a wallet and can return it to the
owner
! I think it's the first time in my life!” His smile showed a first molar missing.

Jack sized him up as a lonely bachelor, maybe eccentric. “But—when someone does a good turn like this—it's only natural to want to say thanks somehow.”

“It's only natural to return something you find, if you can find the loser. Don't you think so?—That's if we lived in a decent world.” Above his now faint smile, his dark brows frowned with earnestness.

Jack gave a laugh, and nodded agreement. “You won't change your mind and buy a nice twenty-dollar steak for your dog?” Jack pulled out a twenty.

“God? He eats well enough, I think. Fresh meat most of the time and not this old fatty hamburger stuff for animals. Maybe he eats too much.” He tugged at the leash. “God, say hello to this gentleman.”

“His name's God?” Jack asked, looking at the black and white dog who stood knee-high. The dog had ears that flopped forward, a tail with a curve, giving a pig-like impression, except that its nose was rather pointed.

“Dog spelt backwards, that's all,” said the man. “I'm an atheist, by the way, so naturally I returned your wallet. I believe man makes his own destiny, his own heaven or hell on earth. For instance to spell God with a capital letter is ridiculous. There're so many gods. Did you ever think how absurd it would be to see in the newspapers that the President had asked for Jupiter's guidance? Or Thor's maybe? Make you smile, wouldn't it?”

Jack was smiling, uneasily.

“If we call our god God with a capital letter, makes you think we've run out of names, doesn't it? Africans at least have all kinds of gods, each with a different name.” He chuckled.

A nut, Jack decided, sensing that the speech could go on all evening if he let it. Jack nodded. “You've got something there. Well—my thanks again to you. I really mean it.” Jack extended his hand.

The older man gripped it as if he enjoyed shaking hands. “A pleasure, sir.—You're a journalist?”

Jack extricated his hand and edged toward his steps. “Sometimes. Freelance. Good night, sir, and thanks again.” Jack went up his front steps with his key already in hand. He had the feeling the man was watching him, but when he looked back as he closed the door, he saw the man walking eastward with his dog, not looking back at him at all.

Funny incident, Jack thought. You could never tell what might happen in New York!

He sat down at the writing table in the corner of the living-room, and took a closer look at the wallet. Amazing to have it all back! He glanced at the three snapshots first, then checked the credit cards—all there he was sure, and there were four instead of three. He did not count the money, feeling sure every dollar was there. He returned to his cold supper with better appetite.