A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  He laughs and she laughs with him. “It’s true!” she says. “You Southerners may want to sit on a bench with your ancestors and remember the dead, but there are other races who’d rather bury them and leave town. Good-by and good riddance.”

  She stops abruptly. She will not add, like my mother, like my father.

  She looks at him and he is smiling, his eye bright in the darkness. He is waiting to hear her say it: Like my father. She hugs herself, rubbing her arms. “It’s true,” she says again, shivering a little, looking into the park behind them. “We’d better go before we get mugged.”

  He gets up, casually puts his arm around her shoulder. “I did have a valid point to make,” he says after they’ve walked for a while. “I’ll just have to write it down and then maybe you’ll see what I’m trying to say.’” He stops, snaps his fingers. “The book,” he cries. “The ending, using the past. That’s it!”

  She watches him, suddenly tired. If only he were normal, worked for the telephone company, talked politics and movies. “What’s it?”

  He begins to walk again, the little bounce a skip, his hand moving up and down as if he were leading a band. “I don’t know yet,” he says. “But what we were saying, it relates somehow. The past as an ending, it relates.” He grins at her, all those lights behind him. “You see, you are helping me,” he says.

  And she laughs, takes his arm, tells him in that case, they should hurry home. The end is near.

  Chapter 9

  I returned to Maine last spring, flying this time, although whatever there had been to rush to was already over. My mother had said, or Ward had told me she’d said, that it would be silly to call me. Silly to have me be there merely to steady her hand, waiting patiently, the way I would help an old woman descend a curb.

  Leukemia takes time and there had been some hope. She’d thought it best that I not know until it was over; I had, she said, better things to do.

  Ward could not come to meet me. Carol, a large-faced woman in her forties and Lillian, the old woman my mother had met on the beach, were there instead, smiling like nurses, oblivious to the chaos of the airport and the tangle of sullen traffic outside, the stinking, slightly antiseptic haze over everything. At first I wondered why both women had come, but when they put me in the back seat and immediately began chatting about the weather and the news, I understood. It was to allow me the opportunity of silence.

  And I was silent. Not for any thoughts of my mother, but because everything I thought to say to them, and I fashioned and discarded a hundred sentences along the way, seemed a lame variation of Blanche Dubois’ “the kindness of strangers.”

  One of the most important days of my life and nothing seemed original.

  Ward’s house had the sharp, wet odor of a recently doused fire. The two women brought me inside, and when Ward limped down the stairs they quickly went into the kitchen to make lunch. He seemed older. His face was drawn, his plaid shirt, though buttoned at the collar, barely brushed his thin throat; I wondered, with the quick, belated insight of those who have missed the point once before, just what slow illness his lean body held.

  He shook my hand, awkwardly, his eyes filling and then quickly going dry, as if the tears had just lapped against them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And I said, “Thank you. I’m sorry for you.”

  He shrugged a little, like a stranger at a bus stop who has also arrived too late, recognizing what by mere coincidence we appeared to share. The living room, the fireplace, the bay window, the old heavy furniture, so neat that even the worn threads of the cushions seemed recently combed, was filled with a mustard-colored light. The tea kettle out in the kitchen began to whistle.

  “I’m sorry for you,” he repeated.

  When Lillian came in with a rattling tray of sandwiches and teacups, she cried, “Sit down, sit down,” as if we were up too soon after an operation.

  I quickly sat on the couch. Ward on the chair opposite me. Carol then entered with the teapot and placed it on the coffee table between us. “Do you drink tea?” she asked, leaning to pour, and when I said I did, she went on about how her husband couldn’t stand it. Lillian said it was just as well, it yellowed your teeth, although I, of course, had nothing to worry about, being so young and, she certainly hoped, free of dentures, what with flouride and flossing and all they have these days when she’d only had baking soda …

  Ward seemed to retreat from the room as the women chatted, turning all his attention to the teacup and sandwich that balanced on his lap, absorbing himself in the careful progress of his spoon from saucer to coffee table to sugar bowl (his lips forming a small “o” as he scooped), back over the table and the carpet and his own knee. He stirred his tea with slow scrapes and clicks and kept his thumb and forefinger on the cup’s delicate handle as he raised his sandwich and bent his head to meet it.

  I wondered if my mother had ever grown impatient with this numbing care, or if she had found it sadly endearing.

  He had called me at six-thirty the night before, Thursday, just as I bit into a limp strand of spaghetti and decided it was cooked. I turned off the burner under the pot, stirred the Ragú, and went into the living room to answer, thinking it was Joanne, or Peggy from downstairs. I had always imagined that such a call would come late at night—one of those screaming, hourless calls that wake you, heart pounding, fully prepared for whatever is terrible and unreal—and so when I heard the sputter of long distance and a man’s hesitant, “Hello?” I felt only a mild curiosity.

  As Ward began to speak, I had watched the silhouette in the high rise across the street moving around a kitchen, opening cabinets, carrying things to a table, standing, hands on hips, before what I imagined to be a stove, just, I thought, as I would be doing now if the phone hadn’t rung. I noticed the traffic in the street had grown quiet. I longed for some loud noise to set my heart beating.

  She had died at five o’clock. I remember thinking that if she had worked all her life, the hour might have had some significance.

  After we’d eaten, and Lillian had poured us all a second cup of tea, Carol, who was sitting next to me, pushed the blue bandanna back on her head (her equivalent, I learned, of rolling up her sleeves) and took a small notepad from her pocketbook. Although she ran the local library, where she had met my mother, everything about her suggested a woman who shouted orders in the open air.

  “Your mother,” she began, “had certain requests for the funeral and I’ve already spoken to Father Lappen about them. It’s all arranged, but he’d like to see you this afternoon. I’ll take you down.”

  “Thank you.” I sipped my tea, reminding myself that the ordeal was just beginning, and so was beginning to be over.

  “The service will be at ten tomorrow. She asked that there be no viewing.”

  Lillian smiled at me from the other chair. “She said she didn’t want any of us Yankees standing over her and saying, ‘Ay-yup, thar she is.’ ”

  Carol and Lillian laughed and Ward looked up at me, hopefully, I thought.

  I smiled back at them. Last night, as I packed, I had realized I knew nothing of funeral arrangements and it frightened me. That dreamlike fright of walking into an exam unprepared. I suppose my mother had realized it too.

  “She’s asked to be cremated,” Carol said softly. “I’ve cleared it with the Church for her.” She raised her thick eyebrows slightly, as if this was my cue to approve. Her face was pitted, pale as concrete.

  “All right,” I said. My mother had chosen her well. It was clear that she was the type of woman who grew solid in difficulty, who became that retaining wall you trust you will eventually run into, no matter what the catastrophe. I felt myself flat against her now. “That’s okay.”

  Ward leaned forward. “She thought”—he said, and then paused to clear his throat—“she thought it would save the complications of securing a plot here.” He smiled; it was not a real smile, but that odd upward-turning of lips that people sometimes d
o when they’re making a difficult point. “Or of bringing her back to Long Island.”

  I sipped my tea again and it was thick in my throat. “Sure.”

  “The cremation will take place after the service,” Carol went on. “She said she wanted to be at the service.” And then she placed her red hand solidly on my knee. “Would you like to see her, Elizabeth?”

  I suppose I said, “No, I’d rather not,” because the three of them bowed their heads and whispered that they understood.

  Because I didn’t see her.

  There was the young, meaty priest that afternoon who took my hand to shake it and then held it, held it until my palm began to sweat and then held it still, as if to prove that nothing human repelled him, to offer this small sacrifice—the unflinching grasp on soaked flesh—to his Lord and Saviour. The priest who said that my mother, in death, had wished to be reconciled to the Church.

  There was the mortician, who reminded me of the school photographer who came each year to take our pictures, placing each individual child on the same stool, in front of the same screen, saying the same words to get the same smile from this child unlike any other. The mortician took shook my hand, saying, “Yes, the daughter.”

  There was the plain coffin before the altar in the small church. The coffin covered with just a spray of lilacs from Ward’s yard—another of her requests: No flowers, she’d told Lillian, nothing from a florist anyway, because she’d been walking into flower shops all her life and, no matter what she’d gone in for, had always come out thinking of funerals—the church filled with people from town: the shopkeepers, the mailmen, the waitress from the coffee shop, the crossing guard, all the people a stranger would first befriend.

  I was the daughter, Dolores’ daughter from New York, and although I’d dressed carefully that morning, navy-blue suit, white lace blouse, good shoes, I felt somehow mistaken, inadequate, as if I were a new understudy taking on a role that had been played before, and much more effectively, by someone I alone had never seen.

  She had asked that a rosary be said, and when the time came, I fumbled to find the pale-blue beads Ward had given me that morning. My mother’s beads. I had a blind moment when I thought I had somehow lost them.

  The priest came down from the altar, knelt in the pew across from mind, and began the prayers. When he announced the first Joyful Mystery, The Annunciation, he turned his flushed face to me, my cue.

  I prayed: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” My voice trembled a little but with stage fright, not tears. “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

  “Holy Mary, Mother of Grace,” the others mumbled, the priest’s voice clearest among them. “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” Ten times I repeated the words, moving the beads between my fingers. The beads she had kept beneath her pillow, in the bed she had shared with my father, the bed I had shared with Bill.

  Ward, a Methodist, began the next decade, his slow voice repeating the same words.

  I remembered the nights my father was gone, when, frightened or sleepless or just bored, I would crawl into bed with her and, reaching under her pillow, feel the beads and her fingers upon them. I would ask, “Are you praying?” and she would finish whatever prayer she was thinking and answer, “Yes, I am.” She would tell me where in the rosary she was so I could pray the rest with her; but silently, she would always insist, to myself.

  I moved my fingers over those same beads now, repeating the same words. If I could have rubbed some of that old belief from them, I would have. If I could have brought them to my lips and sucked from them anything other than the salt from my own fingers, any faith, any comfort, any of the old trust that the words truly meant something and that their meaning endures beyond all loss, I would have.

  Carol was leading the prayers now. Holy Mary, Mother of God.

  Because I wanted it all back. The eternal mother, the immortal confidence. The same prayers repeated. The feel of new clothes, the smell of my father’s aftershave, the clean taste of a communion wafer on an empty stomach, repeated each Sunday for the rest of my life.

  I looked at the familiar statue of the Blessed Mother on the side of the altar. Her white dress, her blue robes, her arms extended. Someone had placed a crown of flowers on her head. The wreath was a little too big and it dipped rakishly over one eye. The pinkie on her right hand was chipped, showing white plaster.

  Father Lappen was leading the final prayer: “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope.” His voice was high and nasal, as affected as a butler’s. His hands were folded before his lips, the two fat index fingers raised to his nose, nearly plugging his nostrils. “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

  I knew about conversions on battlefields and at gravesides. I knew that God had sprung from death and fear and loneliness and nostalgia in the first place. I knew why Jesus was big at Vista. I knew what I was asking.

  The priest began the litany of Our Lady and I felt Ward’s hand upon my back, felt him lean toward me and then lean away.

  Our Lady of the Sorrows, pray for us.

  Our Lady of Peace, pray for us.

  Our Lady of Perpetual Help, pray for us.

  I should have been crying for my mother, but I knew what I was asking.

  I had planned to go back to New York that afternoon, but the luncheon at Ward’s lingered until four, and as she was leaving Carol said she’d be by in the morning to take me to the airport. Lillian told me there was a dinner casserole in the refrigerator for Ward and me, and because accepting their help had already become habit, I merely smiled at them both and said thank you.

  I stood at the door until their car pulled away.

  The house, after all those visitors, had not quite settled itself. Although it showed no traces of the party (the women had seen to that) it seemed to resound with it in some way. Ward was in the kitchen, running water, clicking dishes, a loud bird was calling, cars passed by outside. The smell of perfume and food was still in the air. It was over but not yet past.

  I went upstairs to change. The house had three bedrooms. One had been made into a den, the other, where I’d slept, was the room Ward’s mother had lived in, and the third, Ward’s room, was where my mother had slept during those long winter months. Although it occurred to me that she could have slept in this room too; that a mother or a lover might have suited Ward equally well. Ward, my mother’s lover.

  I took off my suit, put on jeans and a light sweater. Church clothes to playclothes. Someone had put the flowers on the night table beside my bed. They’d been delivered just as we got back from church—the florist, despite my mother’s rejection, knowing just what time the service would end. Carol had brought them to me, grinning, and when I read the card out loud, “Sincerest Sympathy. We love you. Everyone at Vista,” the people around me had smiled, as if reassured. Reassured that I wasn’t completely alone and that, perhaps, indeed I had had better things to do these past few months. Introducing me, they had all told one another that I was an editor.

  I leaned to smell the flowers. My mother was right, you couldn’t help but think of funerals and wakes. I breathed deeply.

  I had read stories, even manuscripts, seen movies on TV and in the theater, it’s almost a cliché, but if cancer can be said to have any compensations, surely that is it: the final meetings, the wait together. The moment when the mother, while peeling potatoes or sorting clothes or setting her hair for the trip to the hospital, says some simple word or tells some new story and the daughter sees, for all of her life, what the love between them has been.

  The days when the daughter, waiting at the hospital, reviews her own life, and taking her mother’s frail hand, says, “Thank you” or “I’m sorry,” or simply: “Mother, I’m here. Don’t worry, I’m here.” />
  If cancer can be said to have any compensations, surely it is in the cliché of time allowed. Time to say what can no longer wait to be discovered. Time when death is not merely a thought to put your teeth on edge, to be dismissed with a swallow, when life is marked clearly by beginnings and endings, by spoken words that mean something and change everything.

  If she had called me, we might have said something, everything might have changed. If she had called me, I would have been delivered from all these past months of ordinary days.

  I straightened up. I was descending a stair I couldn’t see, couldn’t trust, whose next step might disappear beneath my foot.

  She hadn’t called me, and whatever her dying had to give was given to Ward. I would think of her as I’d thought of my father: not here, someplace else—in Wisconsin, in Maine—apart from me voluntarily because we both had better things to do.

  Ward was calling me. He was at the bottom of the stairs, softly calling my name and he seemed a little surprised when I appeared, as if, like a child, he’d been calling for so long he’d forgotten the intent.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “But there’s a casserole in the refrigerator.”

  “Yes. Margaret left it. The woman with the red hair. From the beauty parlor.”

  I nodded, staring down at him. The hours until I could leave seemed steep and ragged, impossible to overcome. I considered trying to get a taxi to Boston.

  “I thought maybe you’d like to …” He smiled that strange smile again. “There are some things in your mother’s house for you. Would you like to go out there with me?”