Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold Page 5

  “Well, at least you could keep it open as an option,” he said hesitantly. “I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you too,” she said, almost automatically. Miss him! Of course she would miss him. More accurately, she would struggle in the void without him.

  * * *

  So in the middle of February, he had gone overseas to do his errand, and remained in Europe traveling while she took classes at a community college, finished her first year, and started looking for a summer job. He wrote to her frequently, but still did not seem inclined to come back home.

  When the summer began, he brought up the possibility of a European trip again, a tantalizing possibility for her. Even if she had had the money, she doubted the wisdom of going, without knowing where Bear was at. So she stayed at home and worked. Back to normality. Back to where I have always been.

  But it wasn’t normality, after all. Something fundamental had changed, and she spent most of the summer trying to figure out what it was. Again, her imagination mocked her. You’ve gone through to the other side of the looking-glass and everything is a chess game…

  Perhaps it’s a good thing you haven’t seen Bear. Would he turn out to be something different, on the other side of the mirror? A peril instead of a protector?

  In the black early hours of the new day in that unexpected shelter in the City, she shivered.

  II

  On Monday Brother Leon had woken to the relative silence of the early morning in the Bronx. It was not yet excruciatingly hot, probably the most pleasant time of the day. He opened the window, which he had left closed last night in order to sleep. Now there were no boom boxes growling in the background, and he sighed, breathing in the smell of cooled-down concrete and fumes from the cars snarling at each other during the A.M. rush on the Cross Bronx expressway. “New York,” he said simply. It was home.

  He slipped his heavy gray habit over his head (the outfit was comfortable now but he knew it would get hotter as the day wore on), wrapped a length of rope around his waist for a belt, kissed the cross of his rosary, which had been lying beside his bed mat, and looped the brown beads around the rope. Kneeling down, he fastened his sandals, and he was dressed.

  Going downstairs, he slipped into the church, got to his knees and bent down, kissing the holy ground where the presence of the Lord resided. Getting up, he ambled over to his usual pew, genuflected and sat, pulling his hood deeply over his face to block out the view of the world, and began to focus his mind on his God.

  He resisted the impulse to look up when he heard others coming into the church for the Office of Readings.

  By the time prayer started, he was completely focused. After the Office was over, there was an hour of silent meditation, then Morning Prayer, then Mass. The friary prayer schedule was fairly rigorous. So it came as a total surprise to him, after prayer was over, to discover Nora sitting in the pew behind him. Not that he had forgotten about her, but he hadn’t really expected to see her until about nine in the morning. It wasn’t even eight.

  She was still looking drained and apprehensive, but she smiled briefly at him in greeting, though she still seemed a bit uncertain. There was a prayer book on the seat of the pew beside her, and he wondered if she had been there for the entire two hours of prayer. Brother Herman came to her and leaned over to tell her something. Brother Leon guessed that he was inviting her to breakfast. She smiled and shook her head.

  Apparently she didn’t have much of an appetite, because she appeared at the refectory door only after they were finishing breakfast, a pale figure with her white skin and yellow dress.

  “Good morning. Want something to eat?” Matt asked her after they had all said good morning, but she shook her head.

  “I’m fine, thank you. I just came to find out when I could start helping with the cleaning.”

  “Not for about fifteen minutes. Would you like to change into some other clothes?” Brother Herman asked her.

  Nora glanced down at her yellow dress, and half-smiled. “You’re all wearing the same thing you wore yesterday. Isn’t that the routine here?”

  Several of the friars laughed. “If you’d like to help with the cleaning, perhaps you’d better change out of that nice dress. We do have quite a bit of donated clothing in the vestibule, as you probably saw,” Brother Herman said. “You’re welcome to help yourself. Most of it is men’s clothing, but there might be some women’s things or something you could wear.”

  “Thank you,” Nora said. “I’ll go take a quick look right now.” She turned and vanished into the hallway like a ghost.

  Leon was about to say something to Brother Matt—some sort of joke about having a yellow dress for a habit—when he caught a glimpse of Brother George’s face. The older friar’s blue eyes were sullen beneath his red hair. Catching Leon’s eye, he scowled.

  “I don’t think we should have a woman living in such close quarters to us,” he muttered. “This idea of giving mission opportunities to the laity is all very well, but I don’t think we should have them popping in on us like this.”

  “Well, I guess the Fathers are still figuring out how this is going to work,” Leon said flippantly, referring to the priests—Father Bernard and Father Francis—by their house nicknames.

  “These are the sorts of things that should be settled on right away,” Brother George said in a low voice. “Wasn’t it St. Francis who said, ‘The Lord sent me brothers but it may be the devil who has sent me sisters’?”

  “Well, it turned out that the Lord sent him St. Clare,” Leon felt obliged to say.

  Brother George sniffed. “This girl doesn’t seem like a potential nun to me.”

  Thinking that it was better to end the conversation here, Leon got up. “Can I take your plate?” he asked, and the older brother handed it to him. Leon took the two plates and silverware into the kitchen. “Where are we meeting for class?” he asked Father Bernard. As the friary was still being renovated, the rooms for the novices’ classes changed occasionally.

  “In the office,” Father Bernard said, referring to the room where Father Francis paid bills and kept accounts. “We’ll start in a few minutes.”

  Leon nodded and started to the chapel to get his notebook. On the way, he met Brother Herman coming from answering the door. “So what’s up for this afternoon?” he asked Brother Herman, who was in charge of setting the work schedule.

  “We’re working in the high school again,” Brother Herman said as they went down the passageway to the church. “I suppose Nora can help us out there. I should find something for her to work on now.”

  They saw Nora emerge from the vestibule holding some folded-up clothing, and Brother Herman said heartily, “Did you find anything?”

  “I did, thank you,” Nora said. She hesitated. “The vestibule—did you—could you use—well, it could use some straightening out.”

  “Yeah, to put it mildly,” Leon said. “Looks like a truck sort of dumped it everywhere, doesn’t it?”

  “I could go through it for you,” Nora said.

  Brother Herman went into the vestibule. “It would be great if you could put them into different piles—shirts, coats, pants, that kind of thing. And all the women’s and children’s clothing in separate piles—we’ll send them over to the women’s shelter downtown. Eventually I’d like to get things sorted out by size.”

  “I could do that easily,” Nora said. So they left her to her work, and Leon wondered if she wanted to be alone as he retrieved his notebook from his usual pew.

  “Do you think there’s more to her problems than just a mugging?” he asked Brother Herman abruptly as they walked away.

  Before the older brother could reply, there was a banging at the front door of the friary. “The day is starting,” Brother Herman said with a sigh. All day long, people knocked at the door of the friary, asking for food, money, clothing, or just because they needed someone to talk to.

  “It’s probably Fernando,” Brother Herman muttered. “Father Be
rnard said he would be coming by to get some shoes. Why don’t you sit with him while I find him some?”

  Leon nodded. It was an unspoken rule that most visitors were not to be left alone in the friary, as too many of them would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.

  As Brother Herman greeted the old man at the door with a smile and listened to that morning’s list of woes, Leon let his mind wander. It occurred to him that they had left Nora alone in the vestibule, sorting clothes, and wondered if that was wise. We don’t know much about her, Brother George had said. He admitted the older brother was right.

  III

  A girl with hair as black as night and skin as white as snow...

  The airplane roared through the clouds over the Atlantic Ocean, and Bear, knowing he should be sleeping, but unable to force his stubborn body to comply with the change of time zones, drifted in a stupor of memories. He was seated by the window, and looking out at the billowing cloudscape below.

  Drifting in a netherworld that was neither heaven nor earth, he hung suspended, not sure of where he was supposed to be. He couldn’t do anything else until he got home, and the anxiety of wanting to do something and not being able to do anything put him into a coma of inaction that paralleled the larger inaction of his life.

  He hoped, he prayed Blanche would be there at her mother’s house when he got back, a little surprised to see him so soon, wondering if he had yet made up his mind. She had a right to know what to expect from him—

  Princess, like a rose is her cheek,

  And her eyes are as blue as the sky,

  A fragment of a poem by Andrew Lang came back to him now. He had thought of it the first time he had ever seen her. That had been during his dark days, and rough living had made him rough. She hadn’t known what to make of him when they first met, and couldn’t figure out if he was a good person or a bad person. Being with her and her family had begun to civilize him again. He owed her a lot.

  He thought about the contents of her letter. Maybe she was right. But he wasn’t anxious to go digging into the squalid wastes of the past. Even after six months abroad, he wasn’t ready.

  Finally he broke from semi-sleep to realize that they were descending to New York City. The trip was over. He felt lassitude and resignation hanging all over him like weary and petulant children, and tried to shake the feelings off. His body thought it was seven o’clock in the evening, but on this side of the ocean, it was merely one in the afternoon. It was going to be a long day.

  Fish closed the book he had been perusing and thrust it into his carryon. “Rats. I forgot to get Rose a postcard of something or other in Rome she wanted.”

  Bear smiled. Blanche’s younger sister Rose had an unusual relationship with his brother. “What did she want?”

  “Some sort of Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel.” Fish took off his hat and rubbed his hair wearily. “You know she was going to be in some sort of play this summer?”

  “Yes, Blanche told me. She got the lead in a summer stock production of Through the Looking Glass. She was playing Alice.”

  “Yes, that’s it. Well, apparently it was critically important to her that I attend one of the performances. When she found out I was going to be out of the country and would miss the whole thing, she said I’d have to come back with a postcard of this Sistine Chapel Sibyl thing or—or something terrible would happen to me. Such as her never speaking to me again. And now I’ve forgotten the postcard altogether. So I suppose that’s the end of my association with Miss Rose Brier.”

  “Well, allow me to be your savior,” Bear said, feeling in his jacket pocket. “I got her one.”

  “You did?”

  Bear held up the postcard of the Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel. “She asked me about it too. She said she had asked you but was sure you would forget.”

  “That redheaded girl knows me uncannily well,” Fish muttered, taking the card and dropping his hat back on his head. “Thank you. I think.”

  They passed through the ordeal of customs and security with the usual hassles. After they reclaimed their luggage, Bear said, “Your car is back home, right? So I guess we need to call a taxi.” He started looking around for a pay phone.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Fish pulled out a cell phone, turned it on, and dialed. He glanced at Bear after he had made the call. “You really should have your own cell phone, you know. I don’t know how I’d survive without one.”

  “I prefer to be low-tech,” Bear said.

  His brother rolled his eyes. “So our plan of attack is to drop off our luggage and get over to Blanche’s house, right?”

  “Yes,” Bear said. “I have the keys to her house back at our apartment. Let me try her number again.” He glanced around the airport terminal again, irrationally, as if he expected Blanche to be there, waiting for him. But of course, she wasn’t.

  There was no answer at the Briers’ number, so the brothers went down to meet their taxi. Bear gave the driver his address and said, “Get us there as fast as you can.”

  He regretted his words soon, as the driver took this as free license to commit even more traffic violations than was usual for New York cabbies. As their taxi wove wildly in and out of traffic down the highway, Bear’s anxiety over finding Blanche took on a faster tempo.

  “Actually seems calmer here after the traffic in Rome,” Fish said jokingly, holding onto the door and the back of the seat. “Why do you have the keys to Blanche’s house?”

  “Her mom gave me a set when I watched their house for them over New Year’s, before I took off for Europe,” Bear said. “Don’t you remember?”

  Fish shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’ve seen that pile of metal you carry around in your pocket. Looks like you’ve kept every key that’s ever passed through your hands.”

  “It’s been useful,” Bear said, feeling heaviness come over him again.

  “I’d rather just stick with my set of skeleton keys,” Fish said. He glanced at his brother, and attempted to change the subject. “Father Raymond said an international trip changes a person forever. So, do you feel changed?”

  “I probably won’t notice until this crisis is over.” Trying to take his mind off the tension, Bear looked out the window at the passing buildings. “One thing for certain—most structures over here are pretty ugly by comparison with some of the old buildings I saw in Germany and France and Italy. Could you believe the beauty of some of that stonework in Venice?”

  “Stonemasonry and stone carving is a dying craft in America, or so I’m told,” Fish observed. “Even if we wanted to make buildings like those, we wouldn’t know how.”

  “That’s a shame,” Bear said, and turned that thought over in his mind for the rest of the ride.

  As they pulled up at their apartment building, Fish said suddenly, “Blanche was watering our plants for us. I wonder when the doorman saw her last.”

  “Nobody gets by Ahmed,” Bear agreed. They had known the doorman since they had been children. “He notices everyone who comes into the building.” He got out of the taxi while Fish paid the driver, and hurried inside to speak to the short Arabian man in his dark green doorman’s uniform.

  “Ahmed, have you seen Blanche Brier lately?” he asked, forgetting that the man would be surprised to see him after so long an absence.

  The man started and dropped his eyes. “No,” he said. “I have not seen her since Friday.” He seemed distinctly uncomfortable.

  “When you saw her, did she seem—upset or anything?” Bear asked, a bit awkwardly.

  “No, she—well, she seemed as she usually is,” the doorman said. “Excuse me. I must go speak to the manager.”

  Fish raised an eyebrow as the man hurried off. Bear was bewildered.

  “Something’s bothering him,” Fish remarked, getting into the elevator, lugging his bag. “Not at all like him.”

  “I should have at least said hello first,” Bear recollected his manners. “Maybe I just startled him.�
�

  “Humph.”

  The elevator reached the top floor, and Fish pulled out his own keys authoritatively. He unlocked and opened the cream-paneled door to their penthouse apartment and then paused, as though he was an animal who had caught a strange scent.

  Bear passed him with barely a glance around. “Grab your car keys and let’s go.”

  He hurried up the staircase that curved around the living room to the loft bedrooms at the top, tossed his luggage in his bedroom, and, rummaging around in his top dresser drawer, retrieved his key ring, which he had left here while he had been gone in Europe. As Fish had remarked, it was pretty heavy. One of these days, he should thin it out…

  “Bear,” Fish said from downstairs. “Something’s wrong. Look around.”

  Struck by his voice, Bear walked to the staircase balcony and looked down at the beautifully furnished apartment that had been his mother’s, now a significant part of their inheritance from her. It was a gracious living space, which his mother had designed herself and poured out her artistic talent into creating. Bear had been grateful that his father hadn’t changed it during the time when it had been in his possession.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t know—yet,” Fish said, striding past the exquisite European Madonna panel hanging in the entranceway. He paused and looked around the living room as though he were afraid to go in, in case he tripped an unseen alarm. “My antennae are going crazy. Someone’s been here since I left.”

  “Blanche has—” Bear said, and, spurred on by a sudden worry, he turned and searched through the bedrooms and bathrooms on the top floor, looking for what he dreaded finding—Blanche’s body, wounded or even dead. But there was no sign of her.