The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories

by Otto Penzler

  The girls begged, whimpered. “Momma? Momma, are you sick?”

  At first there was no answer. Just Momma’s breath coming quick and hard and uneven. And her olive-pale skin oily with heat like fever. Her legs were tangled in the afghan, her hair was strewn across the pillow. They saw the glint of Momma’s gold cross on a thin gold chain around her neck, almost lost in her hair. (Not only a cross but a locket, too: when Momma opened it there was, inside, a tiny strand of silver hair once belonging to a woman the sisters had never known, Momma’s own grandmother she’d loved so when she was a little girl.) And there were Momma’s breasts, almost exposed!—heavy, lush, beautiful almost spilling out of a white eyelet slip, rounded like sacs holding warm liquid, and the nipples dark and big as eyes. You weren’t supposed to stare at any part of a person’s body but how could you help it?—especially Connie who was fascinated by such, guessing how one day she’d inhabit a body like Momma’s. Years ago she’d peeked at her mother’s big milk-swollen breasts when Nelia was still nursing, jealous, awed. Nelia was now five years old and could not herself recall nursing at all; would come one day to believe, stubborn and disdainful, that she had never nursed, had only been bottle-fed.

  At last Momma snatched the cloth off her face. “You! Damn you! What do you want?” She stared at the girls as if, clutching hands and gaping at her, they were strangers. Her right eye was bruised and swollen and there were raw red marks on her forehead and first Nelia then Connie began to cry and Momma said, “Constance, why aren’t you in school? Why can’t you let me alone? God help me—always ‘Momma’—‘Momma’—‘Momma.’” Connie whimpered, “Momma, did you hurt yourself?” and Nelia moaned, sucking a corner of the afghan like a deranged baby and Momma ignored the question, as Momma often ignored questions she thought nosy, none of your business; her hand lifted as if she meant to slap them but then fell wearily, as if this had happened many times before, this exchange, this emotion, and it was her fate that it would happen many times again. A close sweet-stale blood-odor lifted from Momma’s lower body, out of the folds of the soiled afghan, that odor neither of the little girls could have identified except in retrospect, in adolescence at last detecting it in themselves: shamed, discomforted, the secret of their bodies at what was called, invariably in embarrassed undertones, that certain time of the month.

  So: Gretel Nissenbaum, at the time she disappeared from her husband’s house, was having her period.

  Did that mean something, or nothing?

  Nothing, Cornelia would say sharply.

  Yes, Constance would insist, it meant our mother was not pregnant. She wasn’t running away with any lover because of that.

  That morning, what confusion in the Nissenbaum household! However the sisters would later speak of the encounter in the big bedroom, what their mother had said to them, how she’d looked and behaved, it had not been precisely that way, of course. Because how can you speak of confusion, where are the words for it? How to express in adult language the wild fibrillation of children’s minds, two child-minds beating against each other like moths, how to know what had truly happened and what was only imagined! Connie would swear that their mother’s eye looked like a nasty dark-rotted egg, so swollen, but she could not say which eye it was, right or left; Nelia, shrinking from looking at her mother’s bruised face, wanting only to burrow against her, to hide and be comforted, would come in time to doubt that she’d seen a hurt eye at all; or whether she’d been led to believe she saw it because Connie, who was so bossy, claimed she had.

  Connie would remember their mother’s words, Momma’s rising desperate voice, “Don’t touch me—I’m afraid! I might be going somewhere but I’m not ready—oh God, I’m so afraid!”—and on and on, saying she was going away, she was afraid, and Connie trying to ask where? where was she going? and Momma beating at the bedclothes with her fists. Nelia would remember being hurt at the way Momma yanked the spittle-soaked corner of the afghan out of her mouth, so roughly! Not Momma but bad-Momma, witch-Momma who scared her.

  But then Momma relented, exasperated. “Oh come on, you damn little babies! Of course ‘Momma’ loves you.”

  Eager then as starving kittens the sisters scrambled up onto the high, hard bed, whimpering, snuggling into Momma’s arms, her damp snarled hair, those breasts. Connie and Nelia burrowing, crying themselves to sleep like nursing babies, Momma drew the afghan over the three of them as if to shield them. That morning of April 11, 1923.

  And next morning, early, before dawn. The sisters would be awakened by their father’s shouts, “Gretel? Gretel!”

  2

  . . . never spoke of her after the first few weeks. After the first shock. We learned to pray for her and to forgive her and to forget her. We didn’t miss her. So Mother said, in her calm judicious voice. A voice that held no blame.

  But Aunt Connie would take me aside. The older, wiser sister. It’s true we never spoke of Momma when any grownups were near, that was forbidden. But, God! we missed her every hour of every day all the time we lived on that farm.

  I was Cornelia’s daughter but it was Aunt Connie I trusted.

  No one in the Chautauqua Valley knew where John Nissenbaum’s young wife Gretel had fled, but all knew, or had an opinion of, why she’d gone.

  Faithless, she was. A faithless woman. Had she not run away with a man: abandoned her children. She was twenty-seven years old and too young for John Nissenbaum and she wasn’t a Ransomville girl, her people lived sixty miles away in Chautauqua Falls. Here was a wife who’d committed adultery, was an adulteress. (Some might say a tramp, a whore, a slut.) Reverend Dieckman, the Lutheran minister, would preach amazing sermons in her wake. For miles through the valley and for years well into the 1940s there would be scandalized talk of Gretel Nissenbaum: a woman who left her faithful Christian husband and her two little girls with no warning! no provocation! disappearing in the middle of a night taking with her only a single suitcase and, as every woman who ever spoke of the episode liked to say, licking her lips, the clothes on her back.

  (Aunt Connie said she’d grown up imagining she had actually seen her mother, as in a dream, walking stealthily up the long drive to the road, a bundle of clothes, like laundry, slung across her back. Children are so damned impressionable, Aunt Connie would say, laughing wryly.)

  For a long time after their mother disappeared, and no word came from her, or of her, so far as the sisters knew, Connie couldn’t seem to help herself teasing Nelia saying “Mommy’s coming home!”—for a birthday of Nelia’s, or Christmas, or Easter. How many times Connie thrilled with wickedness deceiving her baby sister and silly-baby that she was, Nelia believed.

  And how Connie would laugh, laugh at her.

  Well, it was funny. Wasn’t it?

  Another trick of Connie’s: poking Nelia awake in the night when the wind was rattling the windows, moaning in the chimney like a trapped animal. Saying excitedly, Momma is outside the window, listen! Momma is a ghost trying to get YOU!

  Sometimes Nelia screamed so, Connie had to straddle her chest and press a pillow over her face to muffle her. If they’d wakened Pappa with such nonsense there’d sure have been hell to pay.

  Once, I might have been twelve, I asked if my grandfather had spanked or beaten them.

  Aunt Connie, sitting in our living room on the high-backed mauve-brocade chair that was always hers when she came to visit, ignored me. Nor did Mother seem to hear. Aunt Connie lit one of her Chesterfields with a fussy flourish of her pink-frosted nails and took a deep satisfied puff and said, as if it were a thought only now slipping into her head, and like all such thoughts deserving of utterance, “I was noticing the other day, on TV, how brattish and idiotic children are, and we’re supposed to think they’re cute. Pappa wasn’t the kind to tolerate children carrying on for a single minute.” She paused, again inhaling deeply. “None of the men were, back there.”

  Mother nodded slowly, frowning. These conversations with my aunt seemed always to give her pain, an actual
ache behind the eyes, yet she could no more resist them than Aunt Connie. She said, wiping at her eyes, “Pappa was a man of pride. After she left us as much as before.”

  “Hmmm!” Aunt Connie made her high humming nasal sound that meant she had something crucial to add, but did not want to appear pushy. “Well—maybe more, Nelia. More pride. After.” She spoke insinuatingly, with a smile and a glance toward me.

  Like an actress who has strayed from her lines, Mother quickly amended, “Yes, of course. Because a weaker man would have succumbed to—shame and despair—”

  Aunt Connie nodded briskly. “—might have cursed God—”

  “—turned to drink—”

  “—so many of’em did, back there—”

  “—but not Pappa. He had the gift of faith.”

  Aunt Connie nodded sagely. Yet still with that strange almost-teasing smile.

  “Oh indeed, Pappa did. That was his gift to us, Nelia, wasn’t it?—his faith.”

  Mother was smiling her tight-lipped smile, her gaze lowered. I knew that, when Aunt Connie left, she would go upstairs to lie down, she would take two aspirins and draw the blinds, and put a damp cold cloth over her eyes and lie down and try to sleep. In her softening middle-aged face, the hue of putty, a young girl’s face shone rapt with fear. “Oh yes! His faith.”

  Aunt Connie laughed heartily. Laugh, laugh. Dimples nicking her cheeks and a wink in my direction.

  Years later, numbly sorting through Mother’s belongings after her death, I would discover, in a lavender-scented envelope in a bureau drawer, a single strand of dry, ash-colored hair. On the envelope, in faded purple ink Beloved Father John Allard Nissenbaum 1872–1957.

  3

  By his own account, John Nissenbaum, the wronged husband, had not had the slightest suspicion that his strong-willed young wife had been discontent, restless. Certainly not that she’d had a secret lover! So many local women would have dearly wished to change places with her, he’d been given to know when he was courting her, his male vanity, and his Nissenbaum vanity, and what you might call common sense suggested otherwise.

  For the Nissenbaums were a well-regarded family in the Chautauqua Valley. Among the lot of them they must have owned thousands of acres of prime farmland.

  In the weeks, months, and eventually years that followed the scandalous departure, John Nissenbaum, who was by nature, like most of the male Nissenbaums, reticent to the point of arrogance, and fiercely private, came to make his story—his side of it—known. As the sisters themselves gathered (for their father never spoke of their mother to them after the first several days following the shock), this was not a single coherent history but one that had to be pieced together like a giant quilt made of a myriad of fabric-scraps.

  He did allow that Gretel had been missing her family, an older sister with whom she’d been especially close, and cousins and girlfriends she’d gone to high school with in Chautauqua Falls; he understood that the two-hundred-acre farm was a lonely place for her, their next-door neighbors miles away, and the village of Ransomville seven miles. (Trips beyond Ransomville were rare.) He knew, or supposed he knew, that his wife had harbored what his mother and sisters called wild imaginings, even after nine years of marriage, farm life, and children: she had asked several times to be allowed to play the organ at church, but had been refused; she reminisced often wistfully and perhaps reproachfully of long-ago visits to Port Oriskany, Buffalo, and Chicago, before she’d gotten married at the age of eighteen to a man fourteen years her senior . . . in Chicago she’d seen stage plays and musicals, the sensational dancers Irene and Vernon Castle in Irving Berlin’s Watch Your Step. It wasn’t just Gretel wanting to take over the organ at Sunday services (and replacing the elderly male organist whose playing, she said, sounded like a cat in heat), it was her general attitude toward Reverend Dieckman and his wife. She resented having to invite them to an elaborate Sunday dinner every few weeks, as the Nissenbaums insisted; she allowed her eyes to roam the congregation during Dieckman’s sermons, and stifled yawns behind her gloved hand; she woke in the middle of the night, she said, wanting to argue about damnation, hell, the very concept of grace. To the minister’s astonished face she declared herself “not able to fully accept the teachings of the Lutheran Church.”

  If there were other more intimate issues between Gretel and John Nissenbaum, or another factor in Gretel’s emotional life, of course no one spoke of it at the time.

  Though it was hinted—possibly more than hinted?—that John Nissenbaum was disappointed with only daughters. Naturally he wanted sons, to help him with the ceaseless work of the farm; sons to whom he could leave the considerable property, just as his married brothers had sons.

  What was generally known was: John woke in the pitch-dark an hour before dawn of that April day, to discover that Gretel was gone from their bed. Gone from the house? He searched for her, called her name, with growing alarm, disbelief. “Gretel? Gret-el!” He looked in all the upstairs rooms of the house including the bedroom where his sleep-dazed, frightened daughters were huddled together in their bed; he looked in all the downstairs rooms, even the damp, dirt-floor cellar into which he descended with a lantern. “Gretel? Where are you?” Dawn came dull, porous and damp, and with a coat yanked on in haste over his nightclothes, and his bare feet jammed into rubber boots, he began a frantic yet methodical search of the farm’s outbuildings—the privy, the cow barn and the adjoining stable, the hay barn and the corncrib where rats rustled at his approach. In none of these save perhaps the privy was it likely that Gretel might be found, still John continued his search with growing panic, not knowing what else to do. From the house his now terrified daughters observed him moving from building to building, a tall, rigid, jerkily moving figure with hands cupped to his mouth shouting, “Gretel! Gret-el! Do you hear me! Where are you! Gret-el!” The man’s deep, raw voice pulsing like a metronome, ringing clear, profound, and, to his daughters’ ears, as terrible as if the very sky had cracked open and God himself was shouting.

  (What did such little girls, eight and five, know of God—in fact, as Aunt Connie would afterward recount, quite a bit. There was Reverend Dieckman’s baritone impersonation of the God of the Old Testament, the expulsion from the Garden, the devastating retort to Job, the spectacular burning bush where fire itself cried HERE I AM!—such had already been imprinted irrevocably upon their imaginations.)

  Only later that morning—but this was a confused, anguished account—did John discover that Gretel’s suitcase was missing from the closet. And there were garments conspicuously missing from the clothes rack. And Gretel’s bureau drawers had been hastily ransacked—underwear, stockings were gone. And her favorite pieces of jewelry, of which she was childishly vain, were gone from her cedarwood box; gone, too, her heirloom, faded-cameo hairbrush, comb, and mirror set. And her Bible.

  What a joke, how people would chuckle over it—Gretel Nissenbaum taking her Bible with her!

  Wherever in hell the woman went.

  And was there no farewell note, after nine years of marriage?—John Nissenbaum claimed he’d looked everywhere, and found nothing. Not a word of explanation, not a word of regret even to her little girls. For that alone we expelled her from our hearts.

  During this confused time while their father was searching and calling their mother’s name, the sisters hugged each other in a state of numbness beyond shock, terror. Their father seemed at times to be rushing toward them with the eye-bulging blindness of a runaway horse—they hurried out of his path. He did not see them except to order them out of his way, not to trouble him now. From the rear entry door they watched as he hitched his team of horses to his buggy and set out shuddering for Ransomville along the winter-rutted Post Road, leaving the girls behind, erasing them from his mind. As he would tell afterward, in rueful self-disgust, with the air of an enlightened sinner, he’d actually believed he would overtake Gretel on the road—convinced she’d be there, hiking on the grassy shoulder, carrying her suitcase. Gretel
was a wiry-nervous woman, stronger than she appeared, with no fear of physical exertion. A woman capable of anything!

  John Nissenbaum had the idea that Gretel had set out for Ransomville, seven miles away, there to catch the midmorning train to Chautauqua Falls, another sixty miles south. It was his confused belief that they must have had a disagreement, else Gretel would not have left; he did not recall any disagreement in fact, but Gretel was after all an emotional woman, a highly strung woman; she’d insisted upon visiting the Hausers, her family, despite his wishes, was that it?—she was lonely for them, or lonely for something. She was angry they hadn’t visited Chautauqua Falls for Easter, hadn’t seen her family since Christmas. Was that it? We were never enough for her. Why were we never enough for her?

  But in Ransomville, in the cinderblock Chautauqua & Buffalo depot, there was no sign of Gretel, nor had the lone clerk seen her.

  “This woman would be about my height,” John Nissenbaum said, in his formal, slightly haughty way. “She’d be carrying a suitcase, her feet would maybe be muddy. Her boots.”

  The clerk shook his head slowly. “No sir, nobody looking like that.”

  “A woman by herself. A”—a hesitation, a look of pain—“good-looking woman, young. A kind of a, a way about her—a way of”—another pause—“making herself known.”

  “Sorry,” the clerk said. “The 8:20 just came through, and no woman bought a ticket.”

  It happened then that John Nissenbaum was observed, stark-eyed, stiff-springy black hair in tufts like quills, for the better part of that morning, April 12, 1923, wandering up one side of Ransomville’s single main street, and down the other. Hatless, in farm overalls and boots but wearing a suit coat—somber, gunmetal-gray, of “good” wool—buttoned crooked across his narrow muscular torso. Disheveled and ravaged with the grief of a betrayed husband too raw at this time for manly pride to intervene, pathetic some said as a kicked dog, yet eager too, eager as a puppy he made inquiries at Meldron’s Dry Goods, at Elkin & Sons Grocers, at the First Niagara Trust, at the law office of Rowe & Nissenbaum (this Nissenbaum, a young cousin of John’s), even in the Five & Dime where the salesgirls would giggle in his wake. He wandered at last into the Ransomville Hotel, into the gloomy public room where the proprietor’s wife was sweeping sawdust-strewn floorboards. “Sorry, sir, we don’t open till noon,” the woman said, thinking he was a drunk, dazed and swaying-like on his feet, then she looked more closely at him: not knowing his first name (for John Nissenbaum was not one to patronize local taverns) but recognizing his features. For it was said the male Nissenbaums were either born looking alike, or came in time to look alike. “Mr. Nissenbaum? Is something wrong?” In a beat of stymied silence Nissenbaum blinked at her, trying to smile, groping for a hat to remove but finding none, murmuring, “No ma’am, I’m sure not. It’s a misunderstanding, I believe. I’m supposed to meet Mrs. Nissenbaum somewhere here. My wife.”