Marked Man

19

It’s not every day you sit in a diner with a stripper while she talks about a saint.

“Did you ever learn about St. Solange?” said Monica, her voice still silvery and childlike. Inside the confines of Club Lola, where every woman was there solely to satisfy a man’s most puerile urges – long limbs to wrap you tight, abundant breasts to suckle – the voice fit in perfectly. But here, in the Melrose Diner on Passyunk Avenue in the hard heart of South Philly, it was more than passing strange.

“No, never,” I said. “My people weren’t much for saints.”

“Not Catholic?”

“Jewish.”

“That’s too bad. Nothing is as comforting as a saint in times of stress.”

“I prefer beer,” I said.

She had taken the night off after her stint on the stage – a stint full of enough tricks and stunts to make even a politician blush – so she could talk about her sister. And I must say she cleaned up nice, did Monica Adair. Usually that expression refers to someone all dolled up for a change, but it was the opposite with her. In a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, sneakers, her makeup wiped off and her glossy hair pulled into a ponytail, she looked like the prettiest, most wholesome college kid you’d ever want to meet. But all it took was for her to open her mouth for you to realize she was also a total wack job.

“My mother is crazy for them,” said Monica. “Saints, I mean. Saints and plates with paintings of clowns. My sister and I were each named after the saint on whose feast day we were born. Chantal was named for St. Jeanne de Chantal, the patron saint of parents separated from their children, which I suppose is a little sad, considering how things turned out.”

“What about you?”

“August twenty-seventh, the feast day for St. Monica of Hippo. The patron saint of disappointing children. Are you going to eat that pickle?”

“No,” I said. “Help yourself.”

She reached over and plucked the long green sliver from my plate, snapped it between her teeth.

“It could be worse, though,” she said. “We could have been named after the clowns. Could you do me a favor and straighten your tie?”

“My tie?”

“Yeah, it’s a little off to the side. The other way, right. Stuff like that drives me crazy. Or untied shoelaces, or specks of dust on a lapel. And I wash my hands a lot. Is that weird?”

“If I worked where you worked, I’d wash my hands a lot, too.”

“Why?”

“I’m just saying-”

“I think they keep it quite clean.”

“I was just-”

“But St. Solange was always my favorite saint,” said Monica. “She was this shepherdess in France who took a vow of chastity when she was, like, eight. Then, when she was twelve, the son of the count on whose land she grazed her sheep put the moves on her. She refused him, so he pulled her off her horse and chopped off her head.”

“Nasty,” I said.

“But then, and this is what I like, apparently she rose up after she was killed, picked her head off the ground, and carried it into the nearby town and started preaching. It was like nothing could stop her from getting out her message. She would have been perfect on the Today show. Could you imagine Katie Couric doing the interview?”

“Talking head to talking head.”

“But the way St. Solange kept preaching even when she was gone, that’s what I feel about my sister.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She disappeared before I was born, but it’s like she still talks to me. It’s like she’s been talking to me every day of my life.”

I leaned closer, searched for a sign of insanity on her pretty face. “What does she say?”

“Are you going to eat the rest of that sandwich?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“Can I have it?”

“Knock yourself out,” I said, but even before I said it, she was reaching for the half of the corned beef special that was still on my plate.

“Mmm, that’s good,” she said after she took a bite. A shred of coleslaw hung from the corner of her mouth before she wiped it away with her finger. “I get so hungry after I work.”

“Tell me about your sister?” I said.

“Oh, Chantal, she was like a saint herself. The darling of the neighborhood. She was only six when she disappeared, but she was already special. She loved church, loved animals, took in a bird with a broken wing, a stray dog. I have a dog. Luke. He’s a shar-pei. The one with all the wrinkled skin?”

“I don’t know it.”

“From China. Not Luke, I picked him up in Scranton. The breed, I mean. Quite an aggressive sort. Don’t mess with a shar-pei. Don’t play accordion either. That’s about the sum total of my advice on life.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“And anchovies.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t know, I’m still up in the air about anchovies. A little too salty, don’t you think? But they’re not bad on pizza. Chantal liked pizza, and french fries. But especially she liked to dance. She was, like, great. My parents still have old movies of her in her outfit, doing her routines. They watch them all the time. She was on that Al Alberts Showcase. Do you know the one on TV on Sunday mornings? With all the local talent?”

“Yeah, I remember it.”

“She did a dance solo on it once. The Amazing Chantal Adair. Tap, with little red shoes. I still have those shoes, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers.”

“What happened to her?”

“No one knows. One day she went out into the neighborhood to play, like she did every day, and never came back. It was in the papers for months. The police were all over it, but they never found anything. Not her body, not a ransom note, nothing. It’s like she clicked her ruby tap shoes and disappeared.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yeah, it is.” She reached over to my plate and swiped a potato chip. I pushed the plate toward her, and she took another. “It destroyed my parents. They had me to try to make up for it, but I wasn’t quite enough, so their disappointment was doubled. They’ve never recovered.”

“What do they think happened?”

“Everyone just assumed she was murdered somehow. There was an old rummy in the neighborhood that was acting weird, but they could never pin anything definite on him. And then a rumor had it that some guy in a white van had been trawling the neighborhood for kids.”

“It’s always a white van, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, why is that? I have to remind myself that next time I rob a bank I should use the brown van. That’s the second time you looked at your watch. Do you have someplace you need to be?”

“It’s just late,” I said. “And I have to be in court tomorrow.”

“Something important?”

“No, just a custody thing.”

“It sounds important to me. Who do you represent?”

“The mother.”

“That’s nice. I’m all for mothers. Do you know who the patron saint of mothers is?”

“No.”

“St. Gerard. He was accused of getting a woman pregnant and refused to speak until he was cleared.”

“He must have had a good lawyer.”

“You ever shoot a gun, Victor?”

“Never.”

“I have one. I’ve never used it, but one day someone’s going to break into the wrong apartment and bam.”

“What with the dog and the gun, Monica, I think I’ll stay out of your neighborhood.”

“Oh, Luke. Luke wouldn’t hurt anyone. And that one guy in the park, well, he was smoking, and Luke has this thing about cigarettes. But I don’t think she was murdered. My sister, I mean. I don’t think she’s dead at all. Remember the girl that was supposed to have been burned to ashes in a fire, but it turned out she was stolen and living somewhere in New Jersey?”

“I remember.”

“I think that’s what happened. I think Chantal was taken someplace, taken because she was so perfect, and given a perfect life.”

“By who?”

“By someone who loved her very much.”

“It’s nice to think it, I guess.”

“I feel her presence all the time, like she’s close, looking over my shoulder, looking out for me. That’s what I meant when I said she’s my St. Solange. Gone but still preaching. Chantal guides my life. Because of her my life has a purpose. I was conceived to fill a gap. That it hasn’t worked out so well is a little sad, but still, it’s more than most people have. That’s why I use her name at the club. As a tribute.”

“I’m sure she’d be touched.”

“Really?” she said, her smile blinding, as if I had complimented her on her hair. “I hope so, though I expect she’ll let me know sooner or later.”

“You think after all these years she’ll just up and call?”

“Oh, Victor, I don’t just think it. I’m certain of it. How about some pie? I could go for some pie. Do you think they make pie here?”

“I’m sure they do,” I said.

It wasn’t lost on me that she didn’t ask anything about how I had come up with her sister’s name. She had waited all her life for the word, I suppose she figured she could wait for it to come out on its own. And in any event I wasn’t about to tell her of my tattoo. It was both too embarrassing and too bizarre to share that with her, especially as I observed her slightly deranged discussion of her sister. Her sister, Chantal, was a strange fire burning within her, she didn’t need me to toss on a bucket of gasoline.

So we ordered pie. I had the peach, she had the blueberry, with a dollop of ice cream on top. Even with the blue streaks on her teeth, she was beautiful. And sad, too. Usually I can spot it right off, that streak of sadness that speaks to some primal part of my personality, but with her I didn’t. It was only as she spoke that it became clear, how her life had been so sadly influenced by the missing girl who was the warp and woof of her existence.

But about one thing I was certain. All of it, the whole sad story of her missing sister, had nothing to do with me. The Chantal Adair she had been waiting her whole life to hear from was not the Chantal Adair whose name I had foolhardily tattooed onto my chest.

Sometimes my head is as dense as a solid block of ebony.