A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  “The son he never had.”

  “I guess so.”

  He raises his warm hand to her cheek, brushes the hair from her face. The wind blows it back again.

  “Do you want me to use it, Elizabeth? Do you want it to be in my book?”

  She thinks of their books, life stories told again and again, printed on cheap paper, piled in damp stockrooms, returned to sender.

  She said she didn’t blame them for writing the books. Lovers do it for each other. Making sense isn’t such a bad dream. It’s the clamoring for fame and fortune that makes them ridiculous, the way they blow their material.

  She’d told herself that she wanted only to believe he’d had a thousand other lives.

  She looks at Tupper Daniels’ serious face, as pale as sand, at the darkening sky behind him. His eyes are on hers and won’t leave them. She loves him. Soon she’ll be traveling.

  “I only want you to get your book finished,” she says. “Whatever it takes.”

  Chapter 15

  My mother said, “He sold that land for a song,” as if she meant it literally.

  We were at her kitchen table in Maine, my last night with her. We’d had a late dinner and a walk along the beach and we were sharing a bowl of blueberries before going to bed. The bowl was between us on the table, the lamplight shining in its pale blue dregs of sugar and milk. Occasionally, a moth would strike the window screen beside us or the wind would rise, lifting the leaves on the trees and making me believe I could still hear the sea.

  I was tracing lines into the yellow oilcloth with the edge of my spoon.

  “It was a lovely, large piece of land,” she said, smiling just enough to darken those deep lines around her mouth. “It was where he’d grown up, and if he’d kept it, he could have given it to you. It would have been your inheritance. But he sold it for a song.” As if she had been there and he had, literally, asked only for a song. As if he had heard some strolling minstrel or itinerant tenor singing sweetly to the ocean or the fields and like a touched, impetuous king had said, My land for a song, just another song!

  “You would have thought he had a hundred other plots just like it,” she said.

  She folded her arms over her slight breasts. The sweater she was wearing was Ward’s, a long brown cardigan with suede patches on its sleeves. She’d thrown it on when the two of us went out for our walk, but had not taken it off on our return.

  “He was like that,” she said, her thin white hand moving slowly from her elbow to her shoulder, up and down the dark sweater. “He came home with the cash from the sale and a hundred little boxes filled with, oh”—she closed her eyes briefly—“silly things. Scarves and stockings and that little crystal bird I used to have in the china cabinet. And some beautiful wine, just for me; he wasn’t drinking then.” She tilted her head, only slightly, almost sadly, rounding her lips for the words as if there were more pleasure in the sound of them than in their memory. “And some tins of strange teas,” she said. “And English toffee. And a box of green tomatoes. Just things he’d picked up on the way home—stopping for one thing and then another, all the way across the island—to appease me for the loss of the land.”

  She looked at me in the dull light of the small, milk-glass lamp, smiling as if I, too, should be appeased by this tale of his charming eccentricities. Reconciled to the loss by the lovely story it made.

  “That’s what he did,” she said, and there was something about her mouth, some movement in the shadows that framed it or in the long thin set of her lips that made me think she was going to cry. But I’d never seen her cry for my father. “That and a thousand other things. Since you’ve asked.”

  She stood and picked up the bowl, brought it to the sink.

  “I meant on his trips away,” I said, nearly shouting over the running water, refusing to be appeased. “On all his trips away.”

  She turned, as she had turned that day in our own kitchen when I had sat on my father’s lap to share his morning beer and had asked him, too, what he did. “Government work,” she said over her shoulder. “You know that.”

  Then she asked if I’d mind driving down to Boston alone tomorrow. That is, alone with Ward.

  I said I didn’t mind, and just a few hours later I watched from his car as she turned back to her cottage, a small woman with a ponytail, rolling up her sleeves.

  Chapter 16

  Joanne screams, as if surprised to see them, throws her arms around Elizabeth and says, “Hi” to Tupper with a laugh that would make anyone suspicious.

  She pulls Elizabeth through the narrow hallway (“Tommy wanted to put a bar in here, but I said, ‘Let people get in the door before you make them a drink’ ”) and into the living room where Tommy is getting up slowly, smiling his shy smile. He kisses Elizabeth on the cheek and firmly shakes hands with Tupper. (“Tupper?” “As in Tupperware—no relation.”) She and Joanne smile at their fair men.

  “This is beautiful,” Elizabeth says, looking around the living room. “What a gorgeous color.”

  Joanne laughs, wrings her hands. “Do you like it? Everyone’s showing so much beige, I thought this was different. It’s coral.”

  “It’s almost pink.”

  She bends with her laugh this time, like a rubber stick being shaken. “Don’t say that! It’s coral.”

  “It’s pink,” Tommy says, matter-of-factly. They’ve had this discussion before.

  “Well, it’s very pale,” Tupper adds.

  “This wall is nearly pink.” Joanne holds her open palm to the far wall. “You see? Every wall is a slightly different shade.”

  Elizabeth and Tupper study each wall.

  “I got the idea from Apartment Life.”

  “Her bible,” says Tommy.

  “And the carpet is called Palest Misty Rose.”

  “Pale is big,” Tommy says, like a man who has lost his temper in furniture stores.

  “Well, the whole effect is very beigy,” Elizabeth says. “Only warmer.”

  Tupper agrees.

  “Pink,” Tommy says again, and then, slapping his hands together, “Enough talk, how about a drink?” It is, she is sure, the way his father, a burly fire chief, gets a party moving.

  She and Tupper say “Of course,” and follow Joanne through the rest of the apartment while Tommy clinks glasses in the kitchen. In the small bedroom—dark-blue carpeting, dark-blue spread, towering oak headboard and bureau—there is an 8 X 10 of Tommy and Joanne on their wedding day smiling from the vanity.

  It surprises, even disappoints her. You’ll get over it. Everyone gets over it. She wonders if she would have preferred Joanne not to—preferred her to have spent the rest of her life refusing to admit that her wedding actually took place. Like some reverse Miss Havisham.

  She looks at the picture and smiles meaningfully at Joanne. But Joanne doesn’t catch it.

  In the living room, Tommy is placing drinks on the coffee table, beside platters of cheese and crackers and melon wrapped in prosciutto. She notices that he is built much like Tupper, short, broad, though a bit more stocky, a bit wider around the waist. In a few years, he’ll probably be fat. Even now, his corduroy pants look as if they could be hiked a little.

  She and Tupper sit on the edge of the coral-colored couch, Tommy and Joanne on the coral-colored chairs opposite them. All four lean into their laps a little to reach the coffee table. It makes them all look like children trying to hold it in.

  She wonders if they’ll eventually have fun.

  “So, Joanne tells me you’re a writer,” Tommy says.

  “Yes,” Tupper answers easily. “I’m just finishing my first book.”

  Tommy nods. He is colorful—edible-looking, Elizabeth has often thought. Even in midwinter, his complexion is a somewhat transparent red, and the freckles across his nose always remind her of berries pressed in red Jell-O. His eyes are grape-green, his hair the color of canned peaches. “What’s your book about?” he asks and his voice, which is perhaps a little too high,
is full of catches and bumps, the texture of a grainy pear.

  “It’s a novel,” Tupper says. “About a man in my hometown who was a bigamist.”

  Joanne laughs.

  “Nonfiction?” Tommy asks, leaning to pick up a speared melon. “Help yourself.”

  Tupper does. “No, a novel,” he says, and Elizabeth detects a certain disdain in his voice. “Novels are fiction.”

  Tommy puts the toothpick on the arm of his chair, chews and smiles. “Some of them are, I guess. But personally, I’d rather read books that don’t pretend to be made-up.” He shifts a little. “It seems to me that fiction is just so much self-centered autobiography.”

  Tupper bows his head, the perfect Southern gentleman. “You’re entitled to your opinion.” He need only add, “Suh.”

  “How’s the lawyer business?” Elizabeth asks casually, also reaching for some food and heading off Tommy’s happy approach to a full-blown argument. He has a bachelor’s in philosophy and seems to think an evening is a failure if he hasn’t slammed his fist on something and shouted, “That’s exactly my point.”

  Often—in bars and at parties, and once in the parking lot of a shopping mall—she has seen Joanne soothing friends and strangers by saying, “He doesn’t mean it personally, he just loves to argue,” the way a woman might pull at the leash of a barking dog and swear he’s just being friendly.

  “Being a lawyer is great,” he pronounces, apparently content with his second-favorite line of conversation. “Especially the money. Every week, when I run out of money, they give me more. And when that’s gone, more. They can’t give me enough of it.”

  “They don’t give you enough of it,” Joanne says, her fingers over her mouth.

  He laughs a little and seems to blush, although it’s hard to tell. “Well,” he says, “I’m still paying off loans.”

  “Where is it you work?” Tupper asks.

  “Sayville.”

  “Here on Long Island,” Elizabeth explains.

  “Yeah.” Tommy looks at his glass. “It’s a small firm, just five lawyers, including me, but it’s a good place to start. The pay isn’t fantastic, but I’m learning a lot.”

  Something’s wrong, Elizabeth thinks, watching him lean back casually, legs crossed, beige shirt a little tight around his belly.

  “We do a lot of malpractice stuff,” he goes on. “Some of it would scare the crap out of you. We’re handling this one case …”

  She looks at Joanne, who is still sitting up over her lap, one arm draped across her knee, one under her chin. Her dark brow is slightly lowered, as if she too senses something wrong but can’t quite spot it.

  “The lawyer I work for said it was like the surgeon cut into her with a broken Coke bottle.”

  She looks behind him to the pale-pink wall, softly lighted, the curtains of Palest Misty Rose, a feathery green fern, Georgia O’Keeffe’s seashells and flowers framed in silver. Joanne’s done a nice job. You’d never know her mother’s house is all turquoise and gold, couches, chairs, and lampshades covered with thick plastic.

  “Of course, we asked for the most ridiculous settlement. As far as we’re concerned, there are only three kinds of settlements: ridiculous, more ridiculous and most ridiculous. You ask for the most ridiculous sum and usually end up with just ridiculous or more ridiculous, as a compromise.”

  Tupper laughs and Elizabeth looks at Tommy again. The effect is startling. His red face, his strawberry-blond hair, his orange freckles, the pale pink behind him. He clashes! Clashes horribly with the entire room.

  She sips her drink and glances at Joanne. She would love to tell her. Years ago, it was the kind of remark that would keep them laughing for hours. (Joanne would scream, make her eyes wide, touch her fingertips to Elizabeth’s arm. “He does!” she’d cry, surprised, delighted.) But she knows there are certain things you just can’t tell a woman about her husband. Not even your best friend.

  She looks at Tommy again and sips her drink to keep from smiling. He is simply the wrong color. When Joanne quietly gets up and goes to the kitchen, she says, “I’ll help,” and follows her.

  Tommy is still telling his story of the Coke-bottle doctor and Tupper is listening closely. Material?

  With her and Joanne gone, she knows, Tommy will work the conversation around to Kant or Hegel, the British empiricists or the Christian existentialists, explaining first all their ideas and arguments, and then—always—how philosophy is meaningless to the real world. Every new person he meets sooner or later hears it. Like a rejected lover, Tommy seems compelled to tell, over and over again, why he spent so many years passionately involved with the subject and why he is not with it now, why he never really liked it anyway.

  Pretending to be worldly, he will claim that he went into law for the money (“big bucks,” he’ll call it), but Joanne has told her that Tommy went into law because he feared philosophy would make him foolish. Feared, as his father might have put it, that he would spend his life in an ivory tower, asking questions with no answers, the real world snickering below.

  Joanne told Elizabeth this, but added that Tommy didn’t know it, and Elizabeth often imagines that he will show up at Vista someday with a philosophical treatise and an assumed name.

  Joanne is at the sparkling counter, feeding carrots to her food processor. “Can I help?” Elizabeth asks over the terrible hum and Joanne answers, “He is cute. And I just love his Southern accent.”

  She holds a carrot in the air and raises her dark eyes.

  “Oh no,” Elizabeth says. She knows what’s coming.

  “ ‘I had malaria fever all that spring,’ ” Joanne recites in a soft, Long Island version of a drawl. “ ‘The change of climate from East Tennessee to the Delta—weakened resistance—’ ” She puts her thin fingers to her forehead. “ ‘I had a little temperature all the time—not enough to be serious—just enough to make me restless and giddy!’ ” She sashays slowly. “ ‘Invitations poured in—parties all over the Delta!—“Stay in bed,” said Mother, “you have fever!”—but I just wouldn’t—I took quinine but kept on going, going!—Evenings, dances!—Afternoons, long, long rides! Picnics—lovely!—So lovely, that country in May.—All lacy with dogwood, literally flooded with jonquils!’ ” She pauses, looks meaningfully at the refrigerator, smiling. “ ‘That was the spring I had the craze for jonquils. Jonquils became an absolute obsession. Mother said, “Honey, there’s no more room for jonquils.” And still I kept on bringing in more jonquils. Whenever, wherever I saw them, I’d say, “Stop! Stop! I see jonquils!” I made the young men help me gather the jonquils! Finally there were no more vases to hold them, every available space was filled with jonquils. No vases to hold them? All right, I’ll hold them myself!’ ”

  She brings her eyes to the carrot, smiles at it as if it were a jonquil. “ ‘And then I—met your father! Malaria fever and jonquils and then—this—boy.…’ ”

  The two of them lean together toward the Formica counter, laughing. “I can’t believe you still remember all that.”

  “It was my stage debut!” Joanne laughs. “Remember when I started going out with the guy who played the gentleman caller, Frank O’Murphy, and my mother thought he must be half Italian with a name like Franco?”

  Elizabeth nods. “I remember hearing about it. I was up at school.”

  Joanne sips her drink and then grimaces, swallowing hard. “I hope I don’t start imitating Tupper. You know how I get when I drink.”

  Elizabeth laughs, lowers her voice. “You should really recite your speech for him at dinner. He’ll think you’re very literary. Even poetic.”

  Joanne lowers her voice too. “Can you imagine? I’ll just turn to him at dinner and say, ‘Tell me, Mr. Daniels, have you ever had malaria fever?’ ”

  They laugh again, girlfriends, until Tommy comes out and moves the bottle of gin away from them. “I knew you two would be giggling out here,” he says fondly. “We’re going to have another drink, but maybe I’d better cut you ladies o
ff.”

  Spoken like a buddy bartender.

  Joanne puts her glass in front of him and wipes one corner of her eye. “We haven’t even started yet,” she says, shoving the jonquil-carrot into the machine. “We’re gonna take quinine and keep on going, going!”

  When Tommy hands her the drink, he leans to kiss her forehead. She smiles up at him, eyes huge.

  “He’s sweet,” Elizabeth says, after he has returned to the living room. (“So,” they hear him, “what was your major in college, Tupper?”) She is not sure why she says it, except that, as if she’d been shown a newborn baby, a compliment seemed appropriate.

  Joanne smiles. “He’s my honey. Whenever I get sick of being married, I think of how sweet he is.”

  Elizabeth recalls Ann’s “The people were so nice.” It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d meant Brian.

  “And he really puts up with me.” She dumps the sliced carrots into a wooden bowl already filled with lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers. “I’ve been making him take me out on dates the last few weekends. You know, waiting for me in the living room and everything.” She makes a face to show how silly she is.

  “That’s good,” Elizabeth says.

  She shakes her head, tossing the salad with her hands. “How can you have a date with someone who was sitting on the toilet with the newspaper when you stepped out of the shower?”

  They both laugh and Joanne says suddenly, “Do you remember the time I went to the Xavier prom and the guy—Larry—showed up in a top hat and tails? He had a cane and gloves and everything.”

  “Senior year?”

  They both nod.

  “Well, you can’t have surprises like that when you’re married. You see too much of each other.” She turns to put the salad into the refrigerator. Unlike when they met in Penn Station, she doesn’t seem to be protesting this—merely passing the information on, an old married lady advising the virgin bride.

  Elizabeth decides not to bring up the wedding pictures.

  “But you’re happy?” she says and realizes she has, in a way, brought them up.