A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  Joanne wipes the wet counter and unplugs the processor. “Oh, yeah. Really. Tommy’s so great.” She rinses the sponge and smiles at Elizabeth over her shoulder. “You like the apartment?”

  “Beautiful.” She can’t possibly say, Everything matches but Tommy.

  Joanne leans against the counter, drink in hand. Tucks the other under her arm. She is braless and her plaid shirt is thin. There’s a deep shadow where the buttons open at her throat. Even without a bra, Elizabeth thinks, admiring the achievement, she has cleavage. Her denim skirt is straight and perhaps a little too large. “I’m not happy with this room,” she says. “I may repaper it. Use brighter colors. Although I’m kind of stuck with avocado green.”

  Elizabeth looks around the crowded kitchen. The appliances are avocado, the food processor, the tea kettle, the electric can opener, the coffee maker, the blender behind the bottles of vodka and gin. Also the pinstripe in the ruffled curtains they’d picked out together in Macy’s, the clock, the juice squeezer, the popcorn maker, the canisters for sugar and flour and tea. Even the handles on her utensils and the labels on the spice jars.

  She laughs. “Well, you asked for it.” At the engagement party, the shower, the wedding, on the bridal registry in Bloomingdale’s where the long list of kitchen items that could be bought for the bride was headed: avocado green.

  Joanne shrugs. “And the bathroom is all wrong. It was Tommy’s idea to use the kiddie wallpaper. It doesn’t work.”

  “Oh, I like it. It’s cute.”

  She shakes her head, takes a long drink. “It’s too cute,” she says. She slips her hand into a green mit and pulls open the oven door. Elizabeth can feel the warm gust of air, smell the oregano. “We’re just having lasagne,” Joanne says. “I hope it’s all right.”

  “Fine.”

  She closes the door. “I didn’t know what to make.” She leans back, throws the glove on the table. She seems distracted. “Are you hungry?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Good. I’m not hungry at all. Let’s get drunk. We never get drunk together anymore.”

  They laugh and touch glasses, both remembering all those nights they spent in bars together, meeting boys, all those nights Joanne would stay at Elizabeth’s apartment in Flushing (her father calling three and four times a night and once showing up at the door at six A.M. just to make sure she was really there), the two of them lying side by side on the double bed, drinking wine and telling each other stories, love stories, war stories, fish stories, about boys.

  “You remember Mark Leibowitz?” Joanne asks.

  “The Mark you dated?”

  She nods. “He called me. Or called my mother. He’s getting a divorce.”

  “Why’d he want to talk to you?”

  “To go out. He didn’t know I was married.” She picks up a stray piece of carrot and pops it into her mouth. “And know what my mother said?”

  Elizabeth shakes her head.

  “She said, ‘She married a lawyer. He’s not Italian, but at least he’s a Catholic. I guess you never heard of a Catholic lawyer.’ ”

  “You’re kidding!”

  She rolls her brown eyes, flutters her hands. “My mother? That surprises you? I’m surprised she didn’t say worse.” She takes Elizabeth’s glass and makes them both another drink, the smell of lime suddenly overpowering the lasagne. “So, anyway,” plopping ice into each glass, “I’ve been trying to call him. To apologize. He hasn’t been home.”

  She hands Elizabeth her drink. “Maybe I’ll have lunch with him or something. I’d like to see him again.”

  Mark had been the love of Joanne’s life when Elizabeth was in Buffalo. She never met him, but somehow the possibility of Joanne seeing him again disturbs her. She had considered him long gone. Like Bill.

  “What about Tommy?”

  Joanne laughs. “He knows I’ve had other gentlemen callers—” She picks up the accent, “ ‘Why, sometimes there weren’t enough chairs to accommodate them all.’ ” Drops it. “And besides, if I have lunch with him in the city, Tommy will never have to know.”

  Elizabeth frowns, but before she can say anything, Joanne takes a quick step forward, touches her arm. “Oh, I’m only kidding. I wouldn’t sneak out on Tommy.” She looks at her glass. “He’s my husband, not my father.”

  Elizabeth smiles, wondering whose side she’s on anyway. “It would probably be fun to see Mark again,” she says. “Is he a doctor now?”

  Joanne looks up, brightening. “I guess so. I’d love to know what happened to his wife. They were only married about a year.” She shrugs. “I’m just curious about him. That’s all. Don’t you ever wonder about Bill?”

  Their nights together in her Flushing apartment had ended when Elizabeth met Bill. Better to share your bed with.

  “You mean, do I wonder who’s kissing him now?”

  She laughs. “Something like that.”

  Elizabeth nods and then closes her eyes, nonchalantly, like Mr. Owens. “I wonder. You can’t help but wonder, really. After you’ve lived with someone.”

  All that’s happened to him since she left has carved a hollow space into everything that has happened to her.

  Joanne purses her lips. “Or even just been in love with someone,” she says lightly. They both sip their drinks.

  In the living room, there is a sudden dull thud and they hear Tommy shout, “No, I insist. Literature is secondary.” Tupper’s voice follows it, lower, calmer.

  The two women glance at each other. Slowly, they smile.

  “Honey,” Joanne says in her Amanda Wingfield voice. “A little education is a dangerous thing in a man.”

  “I feel I haven’t seen you all evening,” Tupper says as they drive home.

  She has her head back, her eyes closed against the lights.

  “You and Joanne must have spent half the night in the kitchen. That surprised me. I didn’t think you were like that.”

  Like some lugubrious tradition, his book says. “Like what?”

  “Segregationists.”

  Like some lugubrious tradition, she thinks. Not the waving good-by at thin air that he wrote about, but the hiding, the need to be away from them. The long, sad tradition of two women huddled in a kitchen, whispering about their life behind their life with a man.

  “We wanted to talk,” she says.

  “Well, it must have been about us and it must have been nasty if you had to be so secretive.”

  She has not raised her head. He and Tommy are now us. Versus them. “We weren’t being secretive. We were just being polite. It was a lot of gossip you two wouldn’t have been interested in.”

  Some lugubrious tradition. Shall we retire to the drawing room and let the men smoke their cigars? Shall we go up to bed while the men finish their whiskey? Shall we knit together as they plan their war? Shall we drink our coffee in my kitchen while they work, golf, hunt?

  She smiles. He’s right to be suspicious. Only a very blind despot would fail to notice how his subjects gather when his back is turned. Only a very stupid one would fail to fear some whispered revolution.

  She lifts her head and opens her eyes. Tupper’s face is pale blue. The lights seem to crack over his forehead, sink down his cheeks, break over his forehead again. He seems young and pale, and it occurs to her that he is a long way from home, on unfamiliar ground. That he is, except for her, alone.

  She reaches over and pats his warm thigh. Was it Lenin who said a revolutionary must be without pity?

  “I guess you didn’t have a very good time.”

  He smiles at her. “No, it was fine. I just wish I’d seen more of you.”

  She slides her hand up between his legs. He is soft, warm.

  And just what whispered female revolution is she thinking of anyway? She herself decided tonight, in the warm glow of wine and candlelight and Joanne’s beautiful china, in the soft pink living room, in the moment when, leaving the apartment, she turned to wave good-by again and saw Joanne wrap her arm
s around Tommy’s neck, saw Tommy move his chin against her hair, that she still wanted it, still believed in it: marriage, eternal love. The silverware I’ll pass on to my favorite granddaughter, the dear first apartment we’ll remember all our lives, the sweet solid sound of husband: This is my husband.

  Given that, her own decision, what whispered female revolution is she thinking of?

  She clicks her tongue, laughs to herself. A little feminism is a dangerous thing.

  He shifts slightly in his seat and she removes her hand. She wonders if Tommy and Joanne are making love. She imagines Tommy would be very gentle, nearly polite.

  “I guess I’ll never feel I see enough of you,” Tupper says.

  “Well, you can see all you want of me when we get home. No holes barred.”

  He laughs, eyes on the road. “That’s vulgar!”

  She smiles. A little feminism, she thinks, merely makes you suspicious. Makes you kick at all those pretty pink rocks of romanticism, exposing their wormy undersides, but doesn’t make you lift them up and toss them out completely. Doesn’t keep you from pity and hope and seeing his side of it. From those old longings for husband, beloved husband buried forever at your side.

  She looks out the cool window. Through the dark trees that line the highway she can see the yellow lights of dens and living rooms and bedrooms, each with a blue television light within it like the heart of a flame, or the iris of a jaundiced eye.

  She tries to think of feminism again, whispering in kitchens, kicking at rocks, but it all flicks away, comes to her in parts, as if someone were spinning the dial, finding nothing to watch.

  She read somewhere that children raised on television have problems with attention spans. And job satisfaction.

  She leans back against the door, facing him. “I’m drunk.”

  He glances at her. “Good. I want to ask you something.”

  She places a hand on the dashboard, elbow straight. “Shoot.”

  He moves his head to see her, faces front again. “Let’s go away together. Next weekend. Just the two of us. I’ll rent the car again and we can just take off.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe out on Long Island, where your father was from. You said it’s pretty.”

  She studies his profile, but the passing lights are like a strobe. He could be smiling, frowning, or alternately doing both.

  “Why?”

  He faces her briefly. “I want to have you to myself. I want to get out of the city. You said you liked it out there.”

  She smiles. They will go to the land of her father and there she will discover her birthright. Her white roots.

  “And you talked to me today,” he says. “I won’t deny it. I want you to talk to me more. I want you to tell me everything you know.”

  “For your book?”

  “For us, too. For you.”

  They will go to the land of her father and there they will be bound forever by the discoveries she makes. Bound hand and foot. Bound to be disappointed.

  “I doubt that we’ll dig up any artifacts,” she says.

  He reaches out to touch her. “We’ll be alone. We’ll create our own artifacts.”

  And what if, out there, just a hundred miles from where he spent his life with her and her mother, there is a family by the same name in a small house, also waiting for the father/husband to return, waiting these many years. In the house she’d said he sold for a song.

  “All right,” she says. “We’ll go if you like.” And what would the wife, or even the daughter, have to tell her, whispering in the kitchen about the father/husband so long and so far away? Your mother has worried, has theories. What life behind the life in the stories she told?

  At dinner, Joanne had said, “Do you know the one about the Italian weatherman predicting fog—a biga mist.” It is not, in this age and time a word to be taken seriously.

  Any family by the same name would, she is sure, merely be a descendant of the Irishman who bought her father’s list.

  But later, as they reach the city, where the small orange lights of buildings and streets make the sky above it rosy, make the darkness beyond it starless, impossible to imagine, she asks him, casually, “Do you know the play The Glass Menagerie?”

  “Of course,” he answers. “Tennessee Williams.” And then adds, “The father was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.”

  He looks at her, significantly, and she nods, accepting it. She cannot deny that it is the stuff of great literature.

  Chapter 17

  Significantly, they leave at dawn.

  The city seems drained at this hour, and the sickly bit of orange-pink rising just over Queens only adds to its pallor, a misleading trace of color on a clearly doomed face. A bit of false hope. A bruise, not a blush.

  The red car, which Tupper Daniels picked up last night, is still where he parked it, its silver bumpers locked coldly between two others, a wet brown leaf plastered to its windshield like a violent drop of blood.

  She rubs her arms as she watches him skip around the car and let himself in on the other side. The street is empty, eerie, somehow too wide and too close, or just too much a city street at dawn, too set with large but perfect details—a fire hydrant, a row of brown stoops, a grouping of black garbage cans—to be real.

  “All set?” he asks, turning on the ignition.

  She nods.

  Only coffee shops and delis are open on the avenue, and even these seem uninhabited. A man in a white shirt and apron stands in one window, looking out over two upright tins of pale muffins, waiting. A paneled delivery truck turns a corner and stops, a man in gray hops out, his breath visible, his footsteps silent. Two bent and ragged bums solemnly shake hands at a corner, a dawn farewell.

  Tupper has had the people at Hertz draw a red line across his map, tracing the route from Manhattan to the end of the Island, and so this time he asks her no questions as they cross the Queensborough Bridge, the steel girders and, on the other side, the shadow of the el blocking from moment to moment what light there is. He only hums, smiling to himself. She sits quietly with her hands in her lap, like a pregnant woman being driven to the delivery room.

  It is, without a doubt, the beginning of a trip. Up before everyone else, moving swiftly. Everything behind and on either side falling away, while whatever is ahead, whatever destination, remains round and hollow and as ready to be filled as a ringing silver bowl. It’s a kind of suspension, she thinks, this traveling, stepping in at one place and out at another.

  “Sleepy?” he says, his voice soft and faraway.

  “No. Just thinking.”

  And her father traveled. Left again and again. Sailed off the edge of the earth, stepped into the clouds, passed through the looking-glass. Arrived again at the home of a family just like the one he’d left. Arrived, perhaps, to wake in yet another woman’s bed, to receive yet another celebration from another family for another homecoming. Arrived to repeat himself over and over, all the same gestures, the long kiss for the mother, the lift and twirl for the child, the loosening of the tie, the kicking off of the shoes. The sinking into the couch with his arms spread out across its back, a huge embrace for all he sees, repeated again and again from one trip to another, so that the past becomes the future and the present and the past again, all indistinguishable, concurrent, never-ending. She remembers there being so much noise in the house when he came home, as if she and her mother had waited for him in silence, in a kind of suspension.

  “Thinking what?” Tupper says.

  She opens her eyes. Already the sun has cleared the highway and most of the trees. Briefly, as they pass, she can see it fully—made small and round and moonlike by the haze.

  “Just thinking.” It’s become their game. He will ask her to elaborate.

  “About our trip?”

  “About our trip.” The strangeness of the morning makes her daring. “About the dawn. About my father.”

  He merely says, “Yes.�
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  Soon, pockets of suburbia go by. Trees growing bare. A reservoir, that at first she mistakes for a lake, mist rising from it.

  “Should we stop somewhere for breakfast?”

  She shakes her head. She realizes she is hungry but is not sure she could eat anything. Or, if she were to eat, taste anything. Perhaps it is the hour, or this odd anticipation she feels, but, whatever the reason, she imagines that anything she eats will have the plain, papery taste of a communion wafer. She recalls the stories the nuns used to tell of Crusaders going into battle after having knelt before the altar all night. Holy Communion their only breakfast, victory or heaven assured.

  It had always seemed to her an exquisite gesture.

  “Let’s not stop,” she says. “Let’s keep going until we get there.” She pulls down the visor as the sun begins to shine in her eyes.

  “When we get there,” he says, after they have driven a while in silence, “can we see the house where your father lived? Do you know where it is?”

  She shrugs. “No. I’ve never seen it. He sold it before I was born.” B.E. “He sold it for a song,” she adds, trying to make him sound cavalier.

  Tupper looks at her. He is wearing a loose fisherman’s sweater, a turtleneck that makes him hold his chin high. “We could probably find it if we looked, did a little research. Wouldn’t you like to see it?”

  “Sure, if you want to.” She has a picture of it in her mind. Small, two stories and a slanting roof. Weathered shingles. A long porch across the front, its roof supported by white wooden beams. A smell like old pine, like an attic, like her father’s closet at home that was filled with gray suits and silk ties and white cotton shirts that were starched and pressed so carefully, their creased arms seemed paper-thin, slightly bent at the elbows. A closet filled with more clothes than a traveling man should leave behind.

  “Do you know the uncle’s last name?”

  “Neilson.” She tries to remember. “Nevelson. Nelson. I don’t know, something like that.”

  He glances at her, smiling a little. “It would help if we knew for sure.”

  She folds her arms before her. “My father always referred to them as his aunt and uncle.” Points of his own personal history, not hers. His past, which could have been another life. Which should have been her inheritance.