Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Numbly he was setting his work-tools aside, beneath the overhang of the redwood deck. The new shovel was not so shiny now. Quickly then—shakily—climbing the steps, to wash his hands in the kitchen. A relief—he saw his family down at the shore, with the neighbors—the new wife, the children. No one would interrupt Reno washing the little glass-bead necklace in the kitchen sink, in awkward big-Daddy hands.

  Gently washing the glass beads, that were blue—beneath the grime a startling pellucid blue like slivers of sky. It was amazing, you might interpret it as a sign—the thin little chain hadn’t broken, in the earth.

  Not a particle of dirt remained on the glass beads when Reno was finished washing them, drying them on a paper towel on the kitchen counter.

  “Hey—look here! What’s this? Who’s this for?”

  Reno dangled the glass-bead necklace in front of Devra. The little girl stared, blinking. It was suppertime—Daddy had grilled hamburgers on the outdoor grill, on the deck—and now Daddy pulled a little blue-glass-bead necklace out of his pocket as if he’d only just discovered it.

  Marlena laughed—Marlena was delighted—for this was the sort of small surprise Marlena appreciated.

  Not for herself but for the children. In this case, for Devra. It was a good moment, a warm moment—Kevin didn’t react with jealousy but seemed only curious, as Daddy said he’d found the necklace in a “secret place” and knew just who it was meant for.

  Shyly Devra took the little glass-bead necklace from Daddy’s fingers.

  “What do you say, Devra?”

  “Oh Dad-dy—thank you.”

  Devra spoke so softly, Reno cupped his hand to his ear.

  “Speak up, Devra. Daddy can’t hear”—Marlena helped the little girl slip the necklace over her head.

  “Daddy thank you!”

  The little fish-mouth pursed for a quick kiss of Daddy’s cheek.

  Around the child’s slender neck the blue-glass beads glittered, gleamed. All that summer at Paraquarry Lake Reno would marvel he’d never seen anything more beautiful.

  Hey Dad

  Almost wouldn’t recognize you. And you wouldn’t recognize me.

  Your face is gaunter than your photo-face. Your eyes are hidden by dark-tinted glasses. The goatee looks like Brillo-wires pasted on your jaws.

  Hey Dad: congratulations!

  Hey Dad: me.

  I’m in the third row. I’m the face with the smile.

  Hey Dad this is coincidence.

  You are one of five Honorary Doctorate awardees.

  I am one of 233 Bachelor of Arts awardees.

  You are sixty-two years old. I am twenty-one years old.

  We both look ridiculous don’t we Dad? You in the black academic gown on this sweltering-hot day in May, in New England. Me in the black academic gown on this sweltering-hot day in May, in New England.

  You in shiny black leather shoes, proper black silk socks.

  Me in black leather sandals, sockless.

  You in a folding chair on the commencement platform. First row of the select—president’s party.

  Me in the third row of 223 graduating seniors. Seated on the hard hard stone of the quasi-Greek amphitheater.

  One of a small sea of black-robed kids. Some of us in T-shirts and swim trunks beneath the black robes ’cause it’s God-damn hot in mid-May on our little Colonial-college campus in New England.

  Some of us hungover from last night’s partying. Some of us high.

  Some of us God-damn sober.

  Confronting the rest-of-our-lives, God-damn sober.

  But hey Dad: it’s cool.

  Don’t worry that I will make a scene. That I will confront you.

  Though crossing the platform to have my hand shaken by the president. Though crossing the platform in my black academic robe and mortar-board cap passing within eighteen inches of your knees.

  Though I seem to be, if your biographies are accurate, your only son.

  That is, biographies indicate that you are the father of two daughters, from your first, long-ago marriage.

  Biographies of M——— V——— are respectful. Mostly noting your controversial work in ethics, political commentary. Briefly noting your several marriages. And no record of your numerous liaisons.

  Hey Dad relax: I’m not the type to confront, or to confound. I have never been the type, I think.

  You have not shied away from public pronouncements that have caused dissension, controversy. Your books on the “ethics of killing”—(war, abortion, euthanasia)—that made your early reputation. Your books on “American imperialism” in the Third World, your scathing attacks on “colonization in new forms.”

  You are the egalitarian, the friend of the oppressed. You speak for those in the Third World who can’t speak for themselves.

  You would not “colonize” anyone—of course.

  Your (thinning, graying-coppery) hair is still long, in the style of the 1960s. Signaling to youth in the audience that, for all his academic distinction, and the Brillo-goatee threaded with gray, M——— V——— is one cool dude.

  Already when my mom knew M——— V——— in the long-ago, you were a person of distinction. And, for sure, one cool dude.

  Not that Mom talked about you. Never.

  Not that Mom thought about you. In recent years.

  Not that my stepfather knew (much) about you.

  Hey Dad this isn’t about them. This is about me.

  And this is about you.

  This is about coincidence.

  What a brainteaser to calculate the odds: not just M——— V——— receiving an honorary doctorate at his (unacknowledged, unknown?) son’s commencement but the son existing.

  For that hadn’t been your intention, hey Dad?

  It isn’t an operation, it isn’t surgery. It’s a medical procedure. It’s common like going to the dentist.

  And, later. More sternly, losing patience: Don’t be ridiculous. There is nothing to be frightened of.

  Mom did not tell me. Mom did not ever tell me. If Mom talked about her life of long-ago when she’d been a graduate student at the distinguished Ivy League university in which you’ve been on the faculty for thirty years it was not to me.

  The quasi-Greek amphitheater looks like it has been hacked out of stone in some primitive time of public ritual, sacrifice.

  In a lurid TV melodrama I would have brought a weapon with me to commencement. A weapon hidden beneath the ridiculous black robe.

  But this is not TV, and it is not melodrama. The mood is too measured, stately, and slow for melodrama.

  “Pomp and Circumstance” played by the college orchestra. Very brassy, militant. Ridiculous old music but hey Dad, your mean old heart quickens, I bet!

  Your picture in the papers, your squinting-smiling photo-face.

  Maybe the face is wearing out, a little. Corroding from within.

  Decades now you’ve been winning awards. Decades you’ve been a known figure.

  Graduate students and post-docs and interns and assistants. And young untenured professors. You are their General. They do your bidding.

  Hey Dad it’s a strain, isn’t it: listening to other people speaking.

  But hey no one is going to confront you here.

  No one is going to accuse you.

  She hadn’t accused you. Maybe by the standards of that long-ago era you hadn’t violated university policy. Maybe there were no rules governing the (sexual, moral) behavior of faculty members and their students in those days.

  It just isn’t going to happen—that we can be together. Not just now.

  I will pay for the procedure. I can’t accompany you for obvious reasons but I will pay and I suggest that you make arrangements to have it done out of town and not here; and I will pay for your accommodations there of course.

  Which you did not, Dad. Because Mom refused.

  Which pissed you considerably, Dad. Because Mom refused.

  Because Mom wanted me. If it
meant pissing you considerably, and losing you—still, Mom wanted me.

  Hey Dad guess how I know this? Reading Mom’s journal.

  Mom’s journal—journals—she’s been keeping since 1986 when she was a freshman at the university and first enrolled in your famous lecture course.

  More than three hundred students in that legendary course.

  The Ethics of Politics. From Plato to Mao.

  But it was later, Mom met you. When Mom was a graduate student in your seminar. And Mom became your dissertation advisee—a coup for the twenty-three-year-old since it’s known that M——— V——— chooses few students to work closely with him.

  Hey Dad we know: you’ve forgotten Mom’s name.

  Or if you haven’t forgotten the name exactly, you’ve forgotten Mom.

  For there were so many of them, in your life.

  Though Mom went on to teach in universities herself. Mom has a career not so distinguished as yours but Mom too has published articles, reviews, and books.

  Has, or had. Mom isn’t working now, Mom is pretty sick.

  Mom has been pretty sick for a while. Struggling as they say.

  Determined to beat it as they say.

  And maybe she will. Odds are a little better than fifty-fifty she can make it.

  Which is why Mom isn’t here this morning. Mom and my step-dad. Why I am alone here this morning.

  With my friends, I’m a popular guy. Girls like me pretty much, too.

  But mostly I’m alone. My truest self is alone.

  Mom doesn’t know that I’ve been reading her journals. They are handwritten notebooks kept on a high shelf in her study. They are not for anyone’s eyes except Mom’s.

  And if Mom dies—it isn’t clear what will become of the journals.

  Mom isn’t famous or distinguished enough for the journals to be published, I think.

  So you don’t have to worry, Dad. Not that you’re worried.

  And not much chance is there, Dad?—you’re going to peruse the columns of names of the class of 2011 in the commencement program you’ve been given. For no name listed there could interest M——— V——— in the slightest.

  Even my name with its little red asterisk to indicate summa cum laude.

  Hey Dad here’s a question: if you had known me, if you’d foreseen me, including the summa cum laude and the Rhodes scholarship for next year at Oxford, would you have insisted upon the procedure, just the same?

  No? Yes?

  “The ethics of killing.” Did you ever wonder what it feels like to be the killed—hey Dad?

  I’m curious, I think. Passing within eighteen inches of M——— V——— on the platform maybe I will pause, for just a moment—a “dramatic” moment.

  In the phosphorescent-heat of the sun. Nearing noon, the sun will be overhead. Even the shade beneath the stage canopy will be hot, humid. Perspiration will run in little trickles down your face, Dad. Inside your clothes, Dad.

  You aren’t a young man any longer. You may notice a shortness of breath, climbing stairs. A shimmering wave of vertigo at the top of the stairs. A dark place in your heart opening—I have been a shit. My life is shit. Whatever terrible death awaits me, I deserve.

  I’m thinking now, yes I will. After the President shakes my hand and the dean hands me my diploma and I am crossing the platform in a slow steady stream of Bachelor of Arts awardees all in ridiculous black robes flapping about our ankles and I pass no more than eighteen inches from M——— V——— in dark-tinted glasses and goatee. I will stop, I will turn to you, only a moment, a fleeting moment, and among the buzz and hum of this part of commencement not many will notice. And if they notice, they will have no idea what I’ve said to you to so shock and disconcert you—Hey Dad it’s me.

  The Good Samaritan

  On 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!