Phantom of Riverside Park

by Peggy Webb

  They were nothing to him but trinkets, useless baubles from the only places he dared show his face, exotic lands far away from people who might know him and reporters who wanted to expose him. David tried to concentrate on his possessions, but he felt as if he’d been plugged into an electric socket.

  Even with his back to the window he couldn’t break the powerful bond that connected him to the little family in the park. He had a right to see, didn’t he? Didn’t the check give him the right?

  David stalked back to the window and trained the powerful lens on the Jennings family, finding relief as he immersed himself in their problems. A better part of him, some idealistic side he’d left behind years ago, whispered that he had no business witnessing the family scene below his window; but the cynical realist he’d become knew that this was his only salvation, standing high in his penthouse apartment living his life through the strangers in the park.

  Reading their lips, he followed the conversation of the Jennings.

  “My name is on the check, Papa. How did the man know my name?”

  “I didn’t tell him. It was on there when he handed it to me.”

  “Don’t get your hackles up again. I didn’t accuse you. Did I accuse you?”

  Remorse sliced David. In all the years Elizabeth Jennings and her grandfather had been coming to Riverside Park, David had never seen them quarrel, never seen them complain, never seen them do anything except act as if they were living in the middle of some kind of fairy tale.

  David tore himself away from Elizabeth and turned his attention to the child. The lens brought the boy so close that for a moment David was disoriented, as if some powerful magic had brought Nicky into his room, cheeks as soft as the underbelly of a baby duck, sweat beads in the folds of baby fat under his chin, twin stars shining out from his dark blue eyes.

  “Look at me, Mommy.” The little boy spun himself in circles, then raced toward Elizabeth with his arms wide open. She caught him up and offered one leg as a horse. The boy threw his head back and opened his mouth wide.

  David read laughter in every line of the child’s body. Some long lost part of him strained upward through the layers of darkness. For a moment he longed to hear the child’s laughter, longed to sit in the park beside the old man and feel the sunshine on his face, longed to look into the naked eyes of a woman.

  Nicky dragged his feet in the dirt, slowing down his makeshift horsey.

  “Did you bring me a ‘prise from the baking shop?”

  “I did. Do you want me to tell or do you want to guess?”

  Nicky pondered this question for a second, then pulled up his red tee shirt and rubbed his little belly.

  “My head wants to guess but my tummy wants you to tell.”

  “I brought two jelly-filled doughnuts ... from Levitt’s.”

  Elizabeth glanced at the spry old man she called Papa and they laughed, sharing a private joke. Loneliness sat like a stone on David’s chest and for a minute he forgot to breathe.

  Nicky was jumping up and down, clapping. David envied him, that exuberance and innocence of youth. “One for me and one for Papa.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I have mine now?”

  “Not now. You have to wash your hands first. You can have it with a big glass of milk when we get home.”

  Home. A little four-room shanty in a neighborhood not fit for hardened criminals, let alone a twenty-four year old girl trying to take care of her son as well as her grandfather.

  Elizabeth Jennings’ file was in David’s desk. He knew everything about her, including the size shoe she wore.

  In a few minutes she would leave the park with her family in tow then she’d shed the pink and white uniform Celine’s Bakery required and don the black slacks and white shirt she wore for her night job with Quincy’s Cleaning Service. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she put on faded jeans and clean tee shirt and headed to the campus of Memphis State University for her night class, Computer 205.

  With a million dollars she could quit both jobs and go back to school full time. She could hire a nanny so Thomas Jennings could spend his days playing checkers and napping the way other old men do instead of caring for a run-down house and a rambunctious child. She could buy a house in a better neighborhood, one with trees in the backyard and flowers in the beds and a fence so she could get Nicky the dog he wanted. But most of all, she could give the child the surgery he needed.

  Nicky was begging to go home now, the lure of the doughnut egging him on. Elizabeth gave in, and the old man began to gather his belongings - a baseball cap with “Eat More Grits” stamped across the visor, a newspaper one week out of date, and a small greasy paper bag that had held his and the child’s lunch, two biscuits with sausage.

  He carefully refolded the sack. “What are you going to do about the check?”

  “I don’t know, Papa. I just don’t know.”

  They linked hands, the child in the middle. David watched until they are out of sight then sat at his desk staring at a pigeon on his windowsill. The silence in the room was the kind that would smother a man if he thought about it too much. The pigeon’s throat moved, but the thick walls surrounding David filtered out the sound.

  Far below, street lights came on and people drifted out of the buildings happy to be released from the bondage of their jobs, happy to be going home to husbands and wives and sons and daughters, happy to be planning dinners and social gatherings and quiet evenings with family, happy they were not alone.

  David pressed a button and a heavy drapery shut out the view. Another button turned on his computer. The phosphorescent cursor blinked at him from the middle of the screen, a tiny green arrow, too small to be a lifeline.

  “How appearances deceive,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  Sometimes a thing can grow so big in your mind there’s no room for anything else.

  That’s how it was with the check. All the way home Elizabeth thought about the million dollars, and about what she could do with it. She had freedom right in her pocket. All she had to do was cash the thing, and she’d never have to worry about money again as long as she lived. Provided the check was real, of course. It could be a hoax.

  Still, the idea of it engaged every brain cell so that the idle chatter of Nicky and Papa lapped over her like waves while she was submerged somewhere out of their reach. She could really run away now, go so far that nobody would ever find her. She’d build a new life for Papa and Nicky and herself, take on a new name, not Chiquita but something more appropriate for a woman of means. Estelle, maybe. Or Blanche. She’d always empathized with the Tennessee Williams’ heroine who depended on the kindness of strangers.

  Some stranger, somebody Elizabeth had never seen, somebody she didn’t even know had given her a million dollars, and if that wasn’t depending on the kindness of strangers she didn’t know what was.

  Or maybe the mysterious donor wasn’t a stranger after all. Maybe it was the Belliveaus trying to lay claim to their grandson.

  A conversation from long ago played through Elizabeth’s mind. She and Nicky’s daddy, Taylor Belliveau, had been standing underneath a tree on the University of Mississippi campus. She remembered it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday. She even remembered the tree. It was a golden rain tree, dripping with yellow clusters of flowers and the moisture from a sudden shower.

  She’d been waiting underneath the tree for almost an hour, and she was soaked through and through. Just when she decided Taylor wasn’t going to come, there he was, gorgeous and golden as the tree, a sapling of a man, yet unformed.

  “I came, so what do you want?”

  That was his greeting. No apologies for being late, no questions about her pregnancy, no tender mercies from the boy who was responsible for her condition.

  “I thought we might talk...about the baby.”

  “I told you, I’m not going to marry you. I thought you understood that.”

  “I did. Of course, I did, Ta
ylor, it’s just that I thought about your parents. They’ll want to know about their grandchild.”

  “Lizzie, if you tell my parents my goose is cooked.”

  “Why? You’re all they’ve got. They dote on you. They’re bound to want this baby.”

  Taylor had to know that was true. His parents’ reputation was legend: they never let go of anything that belonged to them.

  Red-faced and stiff-backed, Taylor stalked off fumbling with a pack of cigarettes. They shot out of the cellophane and spewed around his alligator skin boots. He ground them into the mud then suddenly his shoulders slumped. When he turned back to Elizabeth he was a little boy, winning smile, irresistible charm and all.

  “You’re not going to tell them, are you, Lizzie?”

  She could never resist Taylor when he looked at her that way. That’s what had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

  “No, I won’t tell, Taylor.”

  “Good. I knew I could count on you, Lizzie. I don’t want them to know. Not ever.”

  A sharp tug on her hand brought Elizabeth back to the present.

  “Mommy!”

  “What? What is it, Nicky?”

  “I ast you free times already. When we get home can I play on my swing?”

  “Yes, you can.”

  What if Taylor’s parents had somehow found out about Nicky? They’d want him. She’d always believed that. It was Elizabeth they wouldn’t want, the unsuitable girl from the wrong side of the tracks. They would find some way of trying to take Nicky away from her.

  And perhaps they had. Perhaps the check was Belliveau bait, and if she cashed it she would set off a cataclysmic chain of events that would destroy her, that would destroy them all.

  Elizabeth hastened her step, hurrying toward the only haven she knew, the ugly house that looked like an old Dominicker hen with its feathers pecked all to pieces.

  She shut her eyes to the exterior, which she couldn’t do a thing about, and hurried inside. She’d done everything she could to make it a home, and she’d succeeded in that, at least, for every evening on the long walk from the park, Papa and Nicky acted as if they were headed to the Belliveau mansion.

  She pushed open the door and walked inside and just stood there telling herself to breathe. Forget the check and breathe.

  The soft diffused light of evening lent a grace to the house that belied the cracked linoleum, the peeling paint, the scarred furniture. A complete stranger would mistake what he saw for poverty, but when Elizabeth walked through the front door she saw a rakish charm. The huge bouquet of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace, wildflowers that grow along every roadside in the Deep South, disguised the watermarks on the table, and her grandmother’s crazy quilt covered the faded sofa. Made mostly of calico, every scrap told a story. Elizabeth’s favorite was the one her grandmother told about the blue velvet and ivory lace that adorned the center of the quilt.

  All the while she was washing Nicky’s hands and pouring his glass of milk, Elizabeth felt her grandmother watching over her shoulder and one of the stories Mae Mae used to tell popped into her mind. Mae Mae’s stories were always short and to the point, and always ended with a bit of sage advice.

  “When I married Thomas I was poor as a church mouse,” she used to say. “So was he, but that didn’t stop him from getting me a fine wedding dress. I had bleached some flour sacks and was busy sewing up a plain white gown, when Thomas rode up to my house as big as you please with an armful of blue velvet. ‘Wear this,’ he said. ‘It matches your eyes.’ Then he rode off without another word. It was curtains he’d brought me, blue velvet curtains. I didn’t tell him it was July and a hundred degrees in the shade. I went down to Woolworth’s Five and Dime and bought a little medallion of ivory lace for a nickel. Sewed it in the center of the bodice, right over my heart. Two weeks later I walked down the aisle at First Baptist sweating like a horse, but Thomas said I was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. That was good enough for me.”

  “Where did he get the curtains, Mae Mae?”

  “I never asked and he never said. Don’t ever look a gift horse in the mouth, Elizabeth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re liable to get bit.”

  Nicky finished his doughnut and the screen door banged shut behind him as he raced toward his tire swing. It was attached to the only tree that had the audacity to grow in their neighborhood, a spindly sweet gum that clung stubbornly to the red clay soil beside their back door.

  “Come push, Papa,” Nicky yelled.

  “As soon as I wash the dishes. And don’t you go doing anything foolish like trying to climb that tree till I get there. If you do I’ll skin your hide.”

  Nicky giggled, and so did Elizabeth. Her son didn’t believe Papa any more than she had when she was four years old. With his competitors and business associates he was tough as nails, but when it came to his grandchild, he was all bluster and no bite.

  There’d been that time in January when Elizabeth had defied Papa’s and Mae Mae’s orders and gone wading in the icy pond behind the barn. She’d stepped into a hole and wondered whether she’d be dead by drowning before she froze to death. Then all of a sudden she decided she was too young and too mean to die, and she’d finally floundered backward to the safety of the pool bank.

  “I’m going to skin your hide,” Papa had said, then he’d built a big fire, wrapped her in towels and sat in a rocking chair holding her till she quit crying.

  Mae Mae was mad as an old wet hen. “I declare, Thomas Jennings, you’re too soft when it comes to her.”

  “Now, Lola Mae, she was just trying out the boots Santy Claus brought her.”

  He hummed “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” while the rockers squeaked on the worn oak floor, and Elizabeth knew, even then, that as long as she had Papa nothing bad could happen to her.

  “You let her get away with murder, Thomas.”

  He hadn’t, though. It was her grandfather who had taught her thrift and responsibility. And honesty.

  The only time he’d ever been really angry at her was the Sunday she’d kept the quarter he’d given her for the Sunday School collection plate so she could buy some candy for herself. When Papa discovered the stashed loot, he’d made her sit in the corner and think about what she’d done.

  “You don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, Elizabeth, and that quarter belongs to God.”

  Since nobody had ever told her Heaven had five and dime stores, she’d wondered what in the world God was going to do with her quarter. But she hadn’t wondered aloud so Papa could hear.

  He was as tough on blasphemers as he was on thieves.

  The check in her pocket felt like stolen goods. Elizabeth set it down where it put out roots and sprouted tentacles that covered the whole kitchen table. Something ripped inside her, and she was split into equal parts of fear and hope.

  “I guess I know what you’re thinking,” Papa said.

  “I guess you do.”

  Neither of them had to say more. It was Nicky they were thinking of, Nicky with the sunny personality and the sweet disposition, Nicky with the bright smile and the questing mind, Nicky with the cherub’s face and the monstrous upper lip from surgery gone wrong.

  Through the back door came squeals of laughter. How long would that last after Nicky started kindergarten? How long before that single incident of bullying in the park became such a part of his life that he started believing he was the monster other children labeled him?

  “You could have his surgery done just like that.”

  Papa snapped his fingers, and the sound exploded like firecrackers in the room.

  They stared at the check that had suddenly shrunk down to normal size. Elizabeth snatched it off the table and marched to the telephone. Papa pretended not to notice what she was doing as she thumbed through the telephone book. He went to the sink and turned on the water as she worked her way through the bank’s computerized answering service until she go
t a real person. But she knew he was watching out of the corner of his eyes. She saw how he was standing tilted sideways with his good ear turned her way so he could hear every word.

  She found out what she wanted to know and hung up the phone.

  “The check’s good.”

  “I knew it the minute I saw it. I’m not so old I can’t tell counterfeit from the real thing. No ma’am, I didn’t roll off a watermelon truck. Even if some folks around here whose name I won’t bother to mention think I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Papa snapped the dish towel, a sure sign he was miffed.

  “I didn’t say that, Papa.”

  “Now if it was me, I’d cash that check before this fellow, whoever he is, changes his mind and takes it all back.” He gave her a sly glance. “If I had a child who needed an operation and if it was me.”

  Elizabeth smiled. Papa would offer advice till the cows came home, as Mae Mae used to say, but he was never one to ask questions.

  That wasn’t Papa’s way. He hadn’t even questioned her when she’d showed up on his doorstep with all her suitcases five years ago.

  “The sheets in the spare room are clean,” he’d said. “Get a good night’s sleep. We can talk in the mornin’ if you want to. Breakfast is at five-thirty.”

  Lying in the pine bed Papa had made she’d felt as if she were constructed of glass. She lay with her feet together and arms straight down at her sides, unmoving lest she shatter. She’d heard the wind stir when it was disturbed by a hawk’s wings, the call of the owl as it soared through the darkness looking for prey, the soft scrunch of dead leaves as mice scurried through the night.

  Having a baby out of wedlock might be the norm in some parts of the country, but in a small Bible belt town still divided into the haves and the have nots, it still brought censure. Elizabeth didn’t give a fig about public opinion; that’s not why she’d run to Papa. The terror clawing at her gut was the prospect of raising a child alone, with no job, no support, no higher education, and no way out. Or so it seemed.

  But Papa never chastised, never pried: he merely took up the slack, filled in all the gaps.