A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  “I used to live around here,” she tells Tupper, although she suspects she is lying.

  She’d found the apartment the day after her mother had announced she was leaving for Maine. Found it quickly, in a cold sort of fury—the pathetic girl-child flung from the nest—and she moved in before her mother had even begun packing, determined to prove that she too had plans for her own life and was anxious to get on with them, but hoping, she is sure now, that such a swift, startling first flight would frighten her mother into bringing her home again.

  Instead, her mother had said, “What luck!” and offered her the good furniture from their living room. Elizabeth refused it, tightly telling her she could make do with the stuff from the basement, playing the martyr but also fearing to see the pieces from her own home huddled in that ugly apartment like flood victims in a school cafeteria.

  She did, however, accept the double bed from her mother’s room, feeling that if her mother was making a statement by offering it to her, she would make a statement by accepting it. Although just what either of them might have been stating remained unclear.

  “Have you known this girl a long time?” Tupper asks suddenly.

  “Joanne?” She wonders if the driving has made him forget to say woman. “Since grammar school.”

  “What’s her last name?” The car has increased his accent too.

  “Paletti. Or it was. Now it’s Paletti-Hanson.”

  “Sounds like a machine gun,” he says. “The Paletti-Hanson 244.”

  She smiles. Short rows of stores whizz by. A place where she and Joanne used to stop for bagels after bar-hopping in the city, still decorated, as it was then, with its multicolored grand-opening flags and a spindly fluorescent sign that says HOT. She calms down a little. This must be the right way.

  “What does she know about me?”

  She looks at him. His jaw, reflecting the red sweater, moves slowly.

  “Just that you’re a friend.”

  He nods. What she’d really said was that he was an author she’d met at work, so don’t ask what ridiculous things have happened at Vista lately. Joanne, who has always been more interested in romance than ethics, had said only, “Who cares what he does. Is he cute?”

  “What does her husband do?” He emphasizes the “her” as if he were comparing hers to yours.

  “Tommy’s a lawyer.” She sees a sign for the Cross Island Parkway, and so, because it’s two miles ahead, says calmly, “We take the Cross Island. It’s up here about two miles.”

  He nods and looks over his shoulder to change lanes. She feels her heart pounding. Cross Island goes where?

  “What time are they expecting us?”

  “Between six and seven. But I told her you wanted to drive out to the beach first.”

  “Here?” he says, slowing for the exit.

  “Yes,” she says, having no idea. She’s reading signs desperately now, wondering how long she can keep him lost before he realizes it.

  “You almost sound worried about meeting them,” she says, still looking out the window, trying to sound calm.

  He shrugs. The road is narrow. Cars seem to squeeze in on all sides. “Well, this is the first time you’ve introduced me to any of your friends. I feel you’re finally letting me get past your professional life.” She wonders if he considers sleeping with him part of her professional life. He takes one hand from the wheel and puts it over hers, which is perspiring on the white seat. “I feel I’m finally getting close to you.”

  He looks at her, smiling, squeezing her hand, and she smiles back at him, still glancing at the fleeting signs. He will make this evening significant despite her.

  She has invited him, she thinks, because Joanne asked her to. Or, no, because he suggested renting a car and taking a drive and Joanne provided them with a destination. Because she had promised Joanne she’d come out and he could save her the trouble of the train.

  They go quickly through an underpass that blocks the sun and her ears.

  She has invited him because she feared, has been fearing since the wedding, to go to Joanne’s newlywed apartment celibate and unattached, like a pathetic old aunt. Because she feared Tommy’s exuberant graciousness as he carefully avoided touching Joanne or discussing their affection in front of her, the way one might avoid references to color and light when your only guest is blind. Because she feared Joanne’s pity and optimism—“Oh, you’ll meet someone. It always happens when you least expect it”—dished out in her cozy living room, in her lucky marriage.

  She invited him because she needed someone, some man, to hold up beside Joanne’s: Joanne’s man, Joanne’s love, Joanne’s happiness.

  And yet, Joanne has claimed she’s not happy. Maybe, she thinks, she needed someone to hold up beside that too. If you’re out, I’m out.

  They pass a sign naming a familiar road.

  “The next exit,” she says, hoping, once they’re off the Parkway, that her memory will clear.

  “Are you sure?” he says. “I thought you could go straight highway.”

  “You can, but this is more scenic. The trees are so pretty.”

  Saying it, she notices them for the first time. Brown, gold, yellow, red, lining the highway. Autumn again.

  “You’re the native,” he says, turning off.

  “That’s true.” But as they drive down a wide road, past 7-11’s and Burger Kings and body repair shops flanked by weary trees with bright leaves that are as pathetic as all final efforts, she knows she is lost.

  “Where now?”

  “Keep going.” She is the native. She lived on this island for eighteen years. You’d think she would remember.

  And then she sees the white bank with the turquoise clock. It is a clothing store now.

  “How’d you like to take a detour?” She tries to make it sound bright, impulsive.

  “Where to?”

  “To the town where I grew up. I can get us to the beach from there as well as from here.” She can get them to the beach if the A&P where you’re supposed to make the turn is still there.

  He grins at her, squeezes her hand. “I’d love to, Elizabeth.” This too he will make significant. “Just point the way.”

  “The street we want is up here,” she says, hoping it is, and twenty minutes later the tangle of streets and towns and highways that is Long Island falls simply and orderly into the neat lawns and straight sidewalks and shaded avenues named for flowers that is her home.

  “There’s where I went to kindergarten,” she says, turning in her seat. The old house is a day-care center now. “And that’s where Paul Schuster lived, the kid who always tried to kiss me at the bus stop.” She laughs. “You wouldn’t think a seven-year-old could have such bad breath.”

  Tupper laughs. He has slowed to a tour bus’s pace and is looking eagerly around. How did you come to be mine?

  “Up here is St. Elizabeth’s, where I went to grammar school.”

  The sun is slanting through the old trees now, falling on red leaves and green lawns and sidewalks littered with Big Wheels and bicycles.

  The houses, except for various colors and additions, flower gardens and shrubs, are all alike, all covered with smooth aluminum siding now rather than the wooden shingles they’d had when she lived here. It makes them all look falsely young, like middle-aged men with crew cuts. Like the now-aging vets they’d first been built for.

  “Does everything look smaller?” he says.

  “Kind of crushed.”

  “It always does. Where’s your house?”

  She fears for a moment that she has lost her voice. “The other side.” She clears her throat. “Out of the way.”

  They drive slowly past the back of the school, where two little boys in puffed baseball jackets are shooting basketballs into a netless hoop. The school building is a flat rectangle. Two stories of orange brick turned gaudy by the setting sun. The windows are filled with construction-paper ghosts and witches and lopsided orange pumpkins. She sees a white nun wit
h skinny legs walk quickly from the school to the convent and imagines she is going in for a glass of ginger ale or a weak cup of tea.

  “The church is around front,” she says. “We have to turn past it.” Obligingly, he slowly moves the car around the corner. But the church, which had also been built of white shingles, its entrance marked by a long green awning and steep brick steps, is now the same bright orange as the school. Is now flat and round with eight sides and eight entrances, like a sturdy circus tent.

  “Modern,” Tupper says.

  “It’s new.” She remembers hearing that it was being built. It was why Joanne had had to be married in Tommy’s parish. She is oddly disappointed. Where there had been grass and a grotto filled with votive candles (and where she often feared the statue of the Blessed Virgin would come alive and speak to her), there is now only a parking lot, bordered by a chain link fence and the cemetery.

  “Is your father buried there?” Tupper whispers.

  “Yeah. You want to make a left at the corner.”

  But he makes an immediate right and pulls into the parking lot, pulls up until his headlights are facing the first row of stones. “I thought you’d want to check on him,” he says when he’s turned the engine off. “I’ll wait here.” His smile is kind, understanding.

  She has never before wanted so much to spit at someone.

  But she grips the handle, pulls it. She cannot say, “No, never mind, I don’t feel like it today,” not when she’s this close and has avoided coming here for so long. Not when, by mere coincidence, she got him lost and brought him here, and he, for his own reasons, and again by mere coincidence, wants her to see her father’s grave.

  She gets out of the car without a word, thinking that the vision of her father materializing in some dark bedroom has not yet left her. That she is still Irish enough and Catholic enough to be waiting for a message from him.

  The air is sharp, full of autumn, burning leaves and the edge of snow. The time of day when a sweater becomes too light, when, going home for something warmer, you find your playtime has prematurely run out. Dinner’s almost ready, since you’re here you might as well stay. Trapped by your own eagerness to be well.

  She wishes the gate to be closed, but it isn’t. She knows lying about it won’t help.

  This path, she remembers. Down the center, three rows to the left. The cemetery is not large and seems nearly at capacity. Most of the grassy spaces are between stones or just before them. They’ll have to dig up the parking lot when the baby boom starts turning over.

  She and her mother had walked solemnly down this path with no tears, and later everyone said, “Just like Jacqueline Kennedy,” as if her mother’s reserve was a mere imitation, as adoptable and faddish as a pillbox hat. But not long after, Jackie married Onassis and the award for tasteful widowhood went to her mother alone. For widows were only admirable when dry-eyed and celibate. Ever-assured and ever-faithful, like Penelope.

  She wonders what their old neighbors would say if they knew about Ward.

  His stone has nothing to distinguish it but a small hedge, not even a foot tall, planted on one side. She wonders if that was where her mother was supposed to have gone. If the church put the bushes there just in case she changed her mind.

  There are a few dead leaves gathered at the base of the stone and she nudges them with her foot. And then, awkwardly, squats down to pull them away. She remains squatting, as if to read the inscription (there is only the name and the date, beloved father, beloved husband), until her leg falls asleep, and then she straightens up again. In front of her there is a line of trees; behind them, the convent and school parking lot. To her right there is the remaining side of the cemetery, the high chain fence, a road, and, across it, a Shop Rite, a pizza parlor, a car stereo shop. To her left there is the rest of the church parking lot, where four teenagers are riding skateboards, oblivious to the terrible sounds they make, and beyond them more homes, each with its own chain-link fence or hedge.

  She reads the inscription again, but there’s no message in it. At least, she thinks, some of the Italians have pictures on their tombstones, something to remind you that the person once smiled and looked over his shoulder and wore his shirts open at the neck. Maybe even to remind you that you both have the same eyes or nose or mouth. You and this person gone.

  She looks across the street to the Shop Rite, where families are coming and going, pushing steel carts full of grocery bags, opening car doors, dragging children.

  All right. She can remember her father doing that. Going shopping with them, driving the car, sitting at the dinner table. She remembers chasing after him one morning and hearing him sing in the shower. She remembers his laugh, a silent, swallowed laugh that always came when his head was bowed. His homecomings, his sudden departures. His eyes that only after his death she learned to call “piercing.” And now he is here, in a town where he had only occasionally spent his life, deserted by the women he’d spent his life coming home to. All right. So what? Put it all together and it says what?

  She walks back to the center path. Down toward the car. Something more compelling, Ward said. He’d left each time for something more compelling.

  She opens the gate and it shuts behind her with a cold ring. She wishes it were true. Wishes it was something damn compelling. Another life, a thousand of them.

  Tupper is leaning against the car, talking to a midget in a crash helmet, orange foam rings wrapped around his every joint.

  “Hiya!” Tupper says as she approaches, suddenly Andy of Mayberry. “My friend here says we can pick up the Parkway just past the A&P.”

  “I know,” she says, but the kid points his skateboard and explains it to her anyway.

  “I know,” she tells him again. “I used to live around here.”

  She sees the boy and Tupper shrug, exchanging a look that says, As if that mattered.

  He was fifteen when he came over from London. One of seven children, but the aunt had sent for him alone, and his parents—the father a beefeater at the Tower, the mother an immigrant, English in everything, he used to say, except her guilt about no longer being Irish—gave him up gladly.

  They put him on the boat with ten pounds and a list of other relatives they had in the States, just in case the aunt, his mother’s sister, proved unreliable. He said he’d sold the list, and all the details of his own life, to an Irishman he met on the way over, and, as far as he knew, the Irishman presented himself to some or all of the names on the list and was taken in as Lizzie’s son from London.

  It’s possible that the man goes by her father’s name even still.

  His uncle, the aunt’s husband, met him in New York. He was a broad, flat-faced, serious man. A Dutchman whose family had owned and farmed the land on Long Island’s east end for four generations. Who believed in a just, tyrannical God and a hard life and the ghosts of his ancestors that stirred in his attic and called him, late on dark nights, to the small cemetery in one lonely corner of his farm. Who was slightly bewildered to find himself, well past middle age, no longer a bachelor, and now, no longer a quiet man with a childless wife.

  They rode out to the Island together in silence although the uncle often glanced at him with a look both startled and afraid, as if he’d lost his senses at an auction and raised his hand for the boy.

  His wife had said her nephew would be the child they never had.

  His first morning, the uncle woke him early, handed him large fishing boots and a crooked, whittled walking stick, and set off with him for a tour of the farm. They went through the back hedge, which was still wet with dew and full of pale cobwebs, across a field of soft brown dirt, along a country road and another field of sharp brambles, and then, with a sudden dropping of the land, to the beach and the sea itself.

  He was out of breath by then, spent by his uncle’s pace and the expanse of the farm, which, although not really large, seemed to him, after his cramped home in London, as vast as America, but the sight and the smell of the
sea crashing itself against the sand (as if, he said, it too was trying to get somewhere, and not merely content to let others ride on its back) made him laugh wildly and scramble to climb the highest dune along the shore.

  And when he shouted down to his uncle—the first question he dared ask him—“Where does it end?” the uncle, misunderstanding, had raised his own walking stick to the line of the horizon and said, “Where you came from, boy. England.”

  But my father shook his head, and, watching from his height the ocean throw itself again and again upon the slowly yielding sand, said, “No, it never ends. It goes on and on and on.”

  She stops, feeling the foolishness. A gull cries above them.

  “There are always new places to go,” Tupper says softly.

  She looks at him. The wind is whipping his blond hair over his forehead, into his eyes. He could be discussing his own life, his face is that still, that serious.

  She looks out over the beach, squinting to keep her own hair from her eyes, pulling strands of it like seaweed from her mouth. The concession stand behind them is closed, the other steel picnic tables around them deserted. She can’t distinguish the sound of the wind from the sound of the waves.

  “Can you use it?” she says and even she can hear the hope in her voice. Like an old woman passing out her life’s souvenirs to reluctant nieces and nephews. Can you use this scarf, this jewelry box, this initialed beer mug?

  Once, a grateful, childless author gave her a Kewpie doll, won in Coney Island in 1957. Won for her by her late husband. It had smelled of cheap perfume and she’d dropped it off at a church rummage sale on her way home.

  He rests his elbows on the table behind him. “Don’t know,” he says softly, musing. He shakes his head. “What made your father tell you about it in the first place? What was his point?”

  She tries to remember. When did he tell it? Where were they? How much of the story has she imagined herself? “I think he was trying to explain why the uncle liked him. He died only about a year after my father arrived, but in his will he asked that all his money and property go to my father.”