Black Dahlia White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  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.

  In 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.

  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-M
arie 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’—‘Samaritan’—” 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.

  You 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.