A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  She smiles. They have been sitting side by side, leaning against the back of her couch, but now she moves away from him, to the center of the bed, and pulls her legs up in front of her, crossing her ankles, pressing her thighs to her breasts. He watches her movements carefully and then smiles too, as if he has read some meaning into them; a meaning he knows she is unaware of and so refuses to share.

  She rests her chin on her raised knee and says, “Go on,” to make it clear she will not ask why he’s smiling. The lamp beside him makes his hair seem white, his face powdery.

  He leans his head back against the couch, looks up at the prints hanging just above him, as if he were trying to read what was written behind them. The light falls over his taut throat. “A man who loves and marries,” he says to the ceiling. “Loves and marries.” Without moving his head, he looks down at her, making his eyes seem shifty. “But why? Why does he marry when he could just have affairs? When extramarital sex—as we’ve just proven—is as good, if not better, than marital, and certainly, even forty years ago, nearly as available.” He looks up again. “Why indeed?”

  She waits, wondering if he expects her to answer, wishing she hadn’t been so willing to think about bigamy. “Why?” she asks softly.

  He lets out a long sigh: Is it disappointment?

  “In a way,” he says, “it’s for the ceremony. The way it can bind the woman to him, not through the vows, really, but through the religious, mystical, almost dreamlike aura of it. The sense of fate, of fulfillment of prophecy, that it must give a woman.” He lifts his head. The light falls on his face again. “Remember Joy? The fat wife? The one the townspeople call Joy in sorrow?” He says sorra. “Joy in longing?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Remember her wedding scene?” He raises his free hand, two curved fingers, as if he were about to make a shadow-bunny, and scratches two marks in the air. “Joy looked at him through her tulle veil,” he recites, his voice suddenly low, formal, as if he were on the telephone, “the bride-veil that even now was being flecked with black from the inside, from her heavily mascared lashes.” He moves his raised hand gently, humming the words, wafting a tune toward her. “She smelled the warm, turbid odor of orchids, a smell close and hot like that of an animal, trapped, panting, and knew this was not merely a dream, this body perspiring in its bride-white dress not merely the trick of some heavy guilt or a supper eaten too quickly, too soon before bedtime, this man before her saying yes and making it both an affirmation and her name, the word itself her name, not merely the ascension of her waking hopes into somna-bulant dream, but knew instead that this was the beginning of her life; the secret life that had, since her birth, been spinning itself at her core.”

  He closes his eyes, smiles softly. Another woman is now singing that if you’re a girl from New York City, you know love is like a Broadway show. Opens them again. “Remember?”

  It occurs to her that he could be leading her into a trap, getting her to say, yes, yes, I remember and then crying, Aha! I never wrote such a thing!

  “Yes,” she says.

  “The ceremony itself is important to Beale,” he goes on, “because of the way it binds the woman to him. But the repetition of the ceremony, the ceremony taking place again and again is important to him too—although one is never any more important than the other.”

  He scratches the air again. “First second third would mean nothing to a man whose life was without progression, was only a series of rhythmical stops and starts, each as impossible and as fruitless to rank or distinguish as the rhythmical stops and starts of a heartbeat.” He brings down the hand. “Did that stand out for you, the image of each wife as one of many heartbeats?”

  I never wrote such a thing, he could cry, which proves you never read my book. You’re no real editor!

  “Yes,” she says.

  He leans forward, holds up one finger. “Well, that’s another reason why he marries. The women sustain him, just as the townspeople do when they talk about him, meet on porches, in the thick, turbid odor of wisteria and breathe into his ubiquitous ghost those stories and speculations that would sustain him all the time he was away. He is a man whose life is without progression, who loves and marries, loves and marries. Beginning after beginning, but”—he waves his hand like a magician—“no end.”

  She nods. “I see.”

  “Which may be why I’m having such trouble with the ending,” he says. “Any kind of ending undermines one of my basic themes—Beale’s immortality.”

  Elizabeth agrees. A man’s voice on the other side of the wall yells, “Carol,” as if it were a warning. Or maybe, Elizabeth thinks, it was “careful.” More appropriate.

  “But the most important reason why he marries,” Tupper says, “is because he loves. Because, despite appearances, he is a good man, incapable of having affairs. A man of great integrity. Infinitely moral.” He points at her, seems to suppress a smile. “Quickly,” he says, “what comes to mind when you think of a bigamist?”

  She frowns, slowly, resisting the game. Or the trap. “I don’t know,” she says: A man with a raised collar and a lowered hat brim, a guilty walk? Edmond O’Brien portraying a bigamist in a cheap, black-and-white movie, shown very late on TV, the dialogue trailing the film by only a few seconds so the words seemed dubbed? A joke about two women wanting to screw the same man? Woman crying? Ward’s voice?

  “Your book,” she says finally. But he only rolls his eyes.

  “Before that.”

  She shrugs. What comes to mind is that her mother alone was not quite sufficient for him, that the one quick ceremony was not quite enough. They were married right after the war, her mother always said, as if her father had arrived at the ceremony in stained khaki, covered with dust, a green helmet under his arm. They were married in a rectory in Brooklyn. Her mother wore a suit but no corsage.

  “Don’t you think of a villain?” Tupper asks, impatiently. “A cruel, selfish man? Or else a stupid one, forced to the altar against his own will? A man who has let his love life get ridiculously out of hand?”

  She smiles, searching for her editor’s voice. “I suppose so.” They lived alone together for nine, nearly ten years before she was born. Their time without her, they called it. “B.E.”

  “Would you have ever—before you read my book—ever have thought of a bigamist as a moral man? A man of integrity?”

  “No,” she says. And now she is living her time without them.

  He slaps his palm on the mattress. “And that’s my point,” he says. “That’s one of the things that’s so unique about this book. Bailey was no villain, nor is Beale. Despite our standard ideas of bigamy as villainy, selfishness or stupidity, they’re heroes, they’re good men.” He quickly gulps some beer, like a marathon runner slowing only to grab a cup of water and spill it over his mouth, never losing his pace. “I want this book to show that values are meaningless in themselves,” he goes on, “fragile as glass and useless as dust. I want it to show that value depends only on how you look at things, there are no absolutes. One man’s meat, the eye of the beholder.” He drinks again. “Morality is point of view.”

  She rests her head on her knee, letting him run on. She thinks vaguely of the Reflections of My Mind book jacket and how much depends on how you look at it. She wishes she could tell him about it, make him laugh, change the subject. Also of a poem Ann showed her once, called “Prayer to Orion.” Ann had written it, she said, after a ski weekend in Vermont when Brian had announced that he wanted to marry one of his company’s vice presidents. “She’s her own woman,” was the way he’d described the attraction. She was also three months pregnant.

  In the poem, Ann described how she’d gone out that night, alone, limping (she was not used to skiing) and crying a little, catching cold, had looked up to see the constellation. It told of how she began to imagine the male body (“blue black winter night skin/Cold”) around and between the stars that formed his girdle and shoulders and sword; how she began t
o imagine the details of his face and arms and waist. How, standing there in the cold, looking up, a salty phlegm running down her throat, she began to feel strangely aroused, and reassured. How she knew somehow that she would love again; that she would some day again be satisfied by a man.

  The professor she was then studying poetry with at The New School had given her an A on the poem and had written on the side, “Cosmic Fellatio!!” Pointing this out, Ann told Elizabeth that he had missed her point. “But,” she said, laughing, “maybe he’s right. Maybe all I really wanted to do was to suck off the Milky Way. I suppose it all depends on how you read it.”

  Was her mother alone not sufficient for him? Or was her father merely spreading the wealth?

  “Let me put it another way,” Tupper Daniels is saying, drawing up his knees. “A man falls in love, gets married, falls out of love, divorces, falls in love again and remarries—we say, fine, happens all the time, right? The man’s done nothing wrong.”

  She nods.

  “But another man falls in love, marries, stays in love, but then falls in love—equally in love—with someone else and so he marries her too. And then we cry bigamy! Villainy! But, really, who’s the better man, the more loyal, more loving, more true-to-his-word?” His little round eyes are stretched open.

  She tries to laugh. “There’s got to be something wrong with your logic.” Spreading the wealth? Blessing other women with his sudden homecomings?

  He throws up his hand. “What’s wrong, except the way we’re used to looking at love and marriage, and divorce? Except our obsolete sense of values.”

  She looks at her beer, picks at the gold foil around its neck. And if her father had called them that morning, said he was in Wisconsin with his other wife, would they have said, How lovely, how loyal? “But he lies,” she says slowly. “He doesn’t tell one wife about the other.” She realizes she’s talking about his book and quickly adds, “Does he?”

  Tupper leans back, like a man sitting exhausted under a tree. “No,” he says, “that’s true. But I think, somehow, they know. He doesn’t need to tell them. I think they’re all in a kind of conspiracy of silence.”

  She continues to play with the label, scraping gold flecks onto her sheets. Her mother had theories.

  “They say nothing—and, you probably noticed, asked him few questions—because they understood, somehow, the delicate balance he has established between them. And because they know the other wives don’t imply he loves them less. In fact, each time he returns to one of them, it’s a confirmation of his love. That’s why I named one of the wives, the blonde with the painted toes, Penelope—‘Penelope, after Ulysses’ wife, who waited those many years, who was beset by suitors yet ever-assured, ever-faithful.’” He nods a little, as if to say, You know the rest.

  She nods back: Yes, I do.

  “Ulysses, after all, had Circe while away, and still he returned to Penelope. And I don’t think there can be any doubt of his love for her.” His hand is splayed over his stomach. He strokes himself gently. “This is what I mean in the book when I call him the Magician and talk about the spell he casts over the women when he marries them. It’s a spell that keeps them from questioning him, but also keeps them assured that he’ll always return.” He smiles at her. “So he doesn’t lie to them, he merely accepts their silence.”

  She shrugs a little, as if to concede the point. Perhaps, if her father had called that morning and said he was in Wisconsin with his other wife, she and her mother would have shrugged, said nothing, waited for him still. Perhaps she would have believed he was merely spreading the wealth—for what magic did her plump, plain mother have except that she was the woman her father had chosen, the one he came home to?

  She presses her lips to her knee, recalls a night, the night of the East Coast blackout. She and her mother were in the kitchen, making dinner. The back door opened and her father appeared just as all the lights went out; instead of his usual greeting, there was a wild clamor for flashlight and candle, their movements through the dark made more frantic, no doubt, by his sudden presence beside them, slapping his pockets for matches, advising they try a different drawer. As soon as the flashlight was found, he went down to the basement to check the fuse and she and her mother stood side by side in the kitchen, in the hollow blue light of the gas flames under the pots on the stove, staring at the open cellar door like wives outside the black mouth of a mine.

  They said nothing, exchanged no look. The only sound was the muffled tattoo of boiling water, and Elizabeth was suddenly filled with the fear that her father would never emerge. That she and her mother had shared an illusion in that single moment before the flickering lights died, in the first few minutes of darkness, that they were sharing some strange unconsciousness now. She feared that any look, any touch, any word exchanged between them would break that unconsciousness, throw the lights back on, return them to the ordinary evening they’d been living just moments ago.

  And then the faint round moon of light, so faint that at first she didn’t trust it, moving in soft loops toward the basement wall, and her father’s voice, “They’re out all over,” the solid footsteps on the wooden stairs. She and her mother moving toward him, simultaneously.

  His face was cold as she kissed it and he smelled of alcohol, either a shot of whiskey or a slap of aftershave (he kept a bottle of each in his glove compartment) and when the candlelight caught his eyes, they were small, sparkling, bright as silver. He joked all night about his exquisite timing.

  “So the bigamist is a hero,” she says softly, her lips touching her bare knee.

  “Yes,” he whispers. He has slid closer to her. “If you look at him the right way.”

  She looks down at him. He is watching her intently, smiling. There are specks of gold around her feet. A woman sings about her last chance for romance.

  She laughs. “No,” she says, shaking her head, refusing it. “There has to be something wrong with your logic.”

  Chapter 11

  Margaret Alice Greer, author of Gouged of Womanhood: Poems of Two Mastectomies, wants T-shirts. Her book is due to be published in June, and the woman feels that T-shirts printed with the title will help attract beach readers.

  Elizabeth smiles at her across the desk, careful to keep her eyes on the woman’s face. “I’ll mention it to our publicity department,” she says. Hard drops of rain hit the window behind her.

  Margaret Alice leans forward, puts one white hand on the desk, tentatively, long fingers open, like a bad actress pretending to be nervous. She is tall, homely as Lincoln, forty-nine, according to her bio. Recently divorced. Fading orange lipstick and long feet in flat black shoes. The collar of her navy-blue dress is lacy with dandruff. “It’s important that it sell well,” she says seriously, almost sternly. “I want it to be well read.”

  Elizabeth holds her smile. She could say, flicking an ash like Groucho, Then send it to college, but instead she pushes the contract across the desk. “I’m sure it will be. Your work is very powerful. I especially like the recurrent images of fruits and flowers.” She makes her eyes wide, her handiest false gesture. “It’s very exciting.”

  The woman closes her fingers, catching the words, and obediently pulls the contract toward her. There is a fogged place on the steel where her hand has rested, like breath on cold glass. On the floor beside her there is a lump of wet dry-cleaner’s bags, the color of phlegm. When she came in, she’d had them wrapped like gauze around her manuscript; had the manuscript clutched to her gouged chest like a rescued child. Now she reads the contract carefully, her head down, her elbow on the desk, her fingers moving through her thin bangs, shaking white scales onto each official page. Because of the clouds outside, the light in the office seems yellow and close.

  Elizabeth flips through the manuscript once again. Titles like “Empty Cups,” “Treasure Chest,” “A Plucked Rose.” Ned will ask: Is this supposed to be funny? And she’ll tell him that the woman believes the poems have “clothed her suffer
ing with nobility.” Ned, no doubt, will mention a certain naked king who also believed he was clothed in nobility, arrayed in gold. Pure gold.

  The pages of the manuscript smell like Band-Aids.

  When she looks up, the woman is writing out a check, smiling smugly. Now I know why it happened to me.

  Despite herself, her eyes go to the woman’s chest, the two slight yet false breasts. She imagines the poor body beneath them (And why not? Margaret Alice would not be her first naked author), imagines the chest, gouged, torn, shiny with scars, as if the woman has embraced a burning meteor. Lifted her face and stretched out her arms to declare it a beautiful day and found herself a target. A victim of chance, circumstance, some gross practical joke.

  Why me, Oh Lord? Why me?

  Elizabeth leans forward, checking her own soft breasts against the edge of her desk.

  “I have endorsements for the jacket too,” Margaret Alice says as Elizabeth takes the contract and the damp check that shows a field of yellow daisies and a blue sky. She leans down, searches through her rain-drenched pocketbook, pulls out a piece of paper folded into quarters. “These should help sales.”

  The first line reads, Patricia Marie Randall, poetess, English teacher, Cayuga High: If Edna St. Vincent Millay had had two mastectomies, she would have written poems like these.

  Another, Linda Eli, A.A., B.A.: I laughed, I cried. These poems chart Everywoman’s triumph over pain.

  She attaches the paper to the manuscript. It occurs to her that anyone could do her job—Everywoman. If you can lie, giving assurance is no chore. “I’m sure they’ll be very useful,” she says, smiling still. She wonders if she has mentioned that the poems are powerful.