A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  Tupper sighs. “What else do you know about him?”

  “He was a Dutchman. A fire-and-brimstone Dutchman, my father said. And he married very late in life. And he had a farm.”

  “And there was something about your father,” Tupper adds, slowly, staring ahead, “that appealed to him so much, he left him everything he had.”

  “Yes,” she says, watching him. “Even though my father had lived there only about a year.” There was something about her father, some intrigue, some charm, some story to tell her grandchildren: He was no ordinary man.

  Tupper looks at her, says, “It’s interesting,” as if he is developing a theory. He takes her hand. “I’m glad we decided to make this trip.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  They drive silently. The houses that line the highway have gradually disappeared. First there was one house after the other, then large clumps of houses interspersed with small, then only one or two, and now just the occasional, irregular home or shopping center or farmhouse and roadside stand. The trees along the road have grown sparse, the fields appear more frequently, the Island seems to be flattening out before them, shaking itself of the city and the suburbs and the last fifty years, becoming more of what it was when her father lived here.

  Of course she has been out this way before, years ago, in high school and college, on those summer weekends when she and her friends would take off from their jobs as salesgirls and waitresses and nurse’s aids and head for the Hamptons, but she is not sure that she ever thought of her father then. Thought that this, perhaps, was the road he took that first day with his uncle or this the town where he lived those first ten years, or this the road he took back again, into the city, riding this time with Jerry Case and the other sons of the wealthy summer people whom he had also somehow charmed, somehow befriended (riding in drunkenly, impulsively, like Gatsby and Nick and Jordan and Daisy and Tom), on his way to meet, for the first time, her mother.

  She has no recollection that she ever thought these things, or, if she did think of them, the recollection has been obscured by her own, primary memories of those weekends: the crowded motel rooms or cottages littered with nightgowns and beer bottles and electric curlers, with opened bags of potato chips and popcorn and a dozen damp pieces of bathing suits that hung from shower curtains and curtain rods and chair backs and faucets like bright, broken balloons. The drunken rush for the shower when she and her girlfriends came home from a day on the beach and a four-to-seven happy hour; the various formulas for getting a second wind (ice on the face, a brisk walk, a Pepsi, a nap, a joint), and then, all of them sunburned and shampooed, piling into cars and heading into town again, where the boys would be standing on tables in bars and shouting in hoarse voices, spilling beers and starting fights and pulling down their pants. The waking to find those same boys, or ones just like them, asleep in the living room or in cars outside the door or on the bed or floor or sleeping bag next to her.

  Memories that now are without meaning—or, as memories, have no more meaning than they had as events.

  And yet, all along, through it all, whatever this place had to tell her about her father had been there. All along, if she had just driven past the bars and the discos and the desperate, nearly crazed struggle to have fun, if she had just gotten alone and driven a little further out onto the Island, she could have found the house where her father once lived. She could have, perhaps, watched it quietly from across the street, from behind a tree or inside a car, until sooner or later the screen door opened and slammed behind a girl much like herself, with her father’s gray eyes and sharp nose and dark hair, who would step barefoot from the shaded porch to the grassy lawn, a whittled walking stick in her hand.

  She looks at Tupper Daniels. His profile is perfect, without irregularities. It moves perfectly into the collar of his white sweater, his smooth chest, his loose corduroy slacks which are the palest, softest gray. His gray suede bucks. Gentleman’s Quarterly might call it the casual look for fall, perfect for an autumn weekend in the Hamptons. He has a sense of what’s appropriate, she’ll have to admit that. He does know how to put things together.

  “I am glad you talked me into this,” she says.

  He pats her hand, returns his to the wheel. “I’m glad I did too.” And once again, there is in his voice, in the way he moves his mouth and raises his chin, that sense of quiet, subtle sagacity: He knows more than he’s telling. Yet now she finds it not threatening, but assuring, exciting. Soon, he will let her in on it.

  “I can’t wait to get there,” she says.

  The road ahead is straight and empty and he seems to accelerate as a reply. Clouds have begun to gather over the sun, like dawn coming back, or refusing to leave. She opens her window and smells a cold trace of the sea, and with the gray road beneath them and the flat fields on either side, and the wind blowing in her face, she can almost imagine she has set out upon it.

  It’s raining by the time they reach the town. It’s a light rain, seen more easily in the town pond than on the windshield or in the air, but it gives everything a sodden, somewhat unsubstantial look that she finds appealing. The reds and browns and golds of the trees seem ready to drip from their branches like wet dye.

  On Main Street, there are a few shoppers covered in plastic raincoats and umbrellas, but they, and the small shops themselves, seem somehow aware that their season is over and the first of the other three already well begun. They move languidly, almost sadly, like a hostess in her bathrobe emptying ashtrays on Sunday morning.

  “I’ve done a little research already,” Tupper says as they pass through town. “There’s a motel just down the road somewhere.”

  “Oh?” she says. She hadn’t considered staying at a motel and as it appears before them, pink and blue, white arches over the office and the ice machines, she knows why.

  “It’s not,” she says when he pulls up the drive, “Quite what I’d had in mind.”

  Without a pause, he pulls out again, onto the road. “What did you have in mind?” he asks patiently, carefully, as if he fears he has made some gross error.

  “Something with a little more atmosphere.”

  He nods, pulling smoothly into a gas station. “Atmosphere,” he says, opening his door.

  The two men inside the station watch him carefully as he walks toward them through the rain. Inside, his head is obscured by a poster advertising snow tires, but she can see that his arms are straight at his side. The men, who are both sitting at a large desk, one with his feet up, slowly smile. Tupper raises his two arms and one of the men glances out the window to her. The other stretches out his arm and points behind him. The other man points too. Finally, Tupper points in the same direction. The two men laugh heartily and Tupper, smiling, is out the door.

  “Not much atmosphere to choose from this time of year,” he says when he gets in beside her. “But they said there’s a place off the road somewhere. A place with little cottages or something.”

  The two men are standing at the window as they pull out. They are still smiling. Immediately, he turns off the main road onto one that is narrow and tree-lined, bordered by fallen leaves that have been crushed shiny and dark brown. The houses they pass vary from shingled cottages to sprawling ranches to old Victorian mansions, but mostly, it seems, there are trees and lawns. The air is wet and fragrant, and despite the rain she has her window wide open.

  At first glance, she thinks it is merely a name above a mailbox, but as they pass it, it occurs to her.

  “Stop!” she says.

  “Why?” He slows down.

  She turns around. “Back there. Go back.”

  He stops, puts the car into reverse. “What am I looking for?”

  “Stop,” she says again. She reads the sign over the white mailbox, dark blue painted on gray: “Overnight Guests.” The house, behind a long green lawn and a split-rail fence is a tall, somewhat crooked-looking old home with dark cedar shingles and black shutters. Behind it, there seems to be a barn a
nd a chicken coop and a small white corral.

  “Your uncle’s house?” he whispers.

  She turns to him, smiling. “No, but let’s stay here.”

  He is bending to look at the house through her window, frowning. “Why?”

  “It’s different, it’s unique. Hell, maybe it’s even the uncle’s house, who knows?” He doesn’t stop frowning and she pulls out her editorial voice. “And I don’t particularly want to stay someplace recommended by the neighborhood service station.”

  He looks at her, sighs, straightens up and shifts gears.

  The driveway is covered with white gravel that crackles under the slow wheels and sounds to her like every arrival. A dog barks somewhere behind or inside the house and the slamming car doors echo. She sees a reddish-colored horse peering from the back barn.

  The front door opens before they have mounted both steps of the small porch.

  “Hello,” a woman cries warmly, stepping out to meet them. She is tall and freckled and her short red hair stands up straight over her forehead, a cigarette dangles from the corner of her mouth and she squints through the smoke. “Welcome.”

  “We’d like to see a room,” Tupper says, very formally, and the woman says, her voice dry and husky, smoke-filled, “Wonderful.”

  The house smells of cats, and, Tupper insists, turpentine, but the room is large with dark floral curtains and a thick floral comforter and a working fireplace already stocked with wood, and Elizabeth insists that it’s perfect. Their view is to the back, the barn, the corral, a blasted flower garden and then a hill of grass and a line of thick trees, and Mrs. Carpenter—Hedda, she said they must call her—had made them stand silently in the room, their noses in the air, until they all agreed that they could, indeed, hear the sea.

  “It’s fabulous,” Elizabeth says again, standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips. Hedda has left them to make their decision. “It’s like something out of a movie.”

  “Sure is,” Tupper says, examining a large black-and-white sketch that seems to be of two sleeping cats. He turns to her. “And just what you were looking for.”

  It is something Bill might say, sarcastically, but when she meets his eyes, he is smiling, fondly.

  Hedda calls to them from the kitchen as they hit the last step, and they follow her voice down a hallway, past a bathroom and what seems to be a small library. The kitchen is a large room, the entire back width of the house, with a long continuous line of small windows, like those of a railroad car, splitting each of the three outside walls. She is standing by the sink, drying her hands on a checkered dishtowel. Elizabeth had at first put her at forty, but realizes now she could be fifty, or thirty. There seems to be some gray in her dull-red hair, but no lines in her dark, pleasant face. She is slim, and over her jeans she wears a man’s long white shirt. It covers what might be any telltale sign of age in her stomach or her breasts or backside.

  “It’s a wonderful room,” Elizabeth tells her. “We’ll take it.”

  She smiles. “Good.” As if she had no doubt that they would. “Have some coffee.” She points to the cloth-covered wicker basket on the table across the room. “I just took those muffins out of the oven.”

  They sit at the table, under a small, tin-shaded light, Sears Roebuck Colonial, its bulb burning. Outside, the sky has grown darker, the rain visible. On the window ledge beside them is a Cheshire-like cat with dark ivy growing from his back.

  Hedda puts two mugs of coffee before them and pulls out a chair to sit down. “That’s strawberry and raspberry,” she says, pointing to the fat glass jars of jam. “Homemade. And butter, not margarine.” She puts out her cigarette, blowing the last bit of smoke to the ceiling. “I never use margarine,” she says and then shrugs, “It’s my token attempt at self-destruction.”

  Elizabeth and Tupper laugh, reaching for the muffins. The three talk for a while about the city and the fall tourist trade and the problems of running a guest house in a town with only one season (“One season that anyone knows about,” Hedda says. “As if we all disappear when it’s over, like in Brigadoon”), and Elizabeth decides that she likes Hedda. There is, she thinks, something strong and clean and wholesome about the woman. Despite the cigarettes, something terribly healthy, terribly attractive. The muffins are warm and the jam is rich and sweet and she can easily imagine that Hedda made both herself, that she mixed the batter with her hands and licked her long fingers as she stirred the jam.

  She tells them that she lives here alone, has lived here alone for nearly six years now, since she divorced her “last husband,” and gave up her job as an illustrator in New Haven. Although, she confesses, lowering her foggy voice so that the words seem to break on the air or slip, unheard, back into her throat, sometimes, when she has a boarder who seems a little “shady,” she pretends there’s a man living here. Sometimes she leaves out a pipe or a pair of men’s shoes, and once she even closed the kitchen door and had a long conversation with him, talking first in her normal voice and then, “In a deep, mumbly voice like this.”

  “Sounds like it would be easier for you to just get married again,” Tupper says, smiling. He has loosened in her presence, appears even to be enjoying himself.

  Hedda shakes her head, looks at him sternly, but fondly, as if he were a favorite son or lover who has spoken out of turn. “No, dear,” she says. “Never again. It’s been my experience that it’s woman’s happiest state, not marriage, the single life.” She leans closer to him. “It’s men who thrive in marriage.” She makes thrive sound like some kinky coital position and Tupper smiles stupidly, as if he is about to agree to try it.

  “What brought you out here?” Elizabeth asks before he does.

  Hedda lights another cigarette. “I was on vacation, right after my divorce, at a friend’s house in Sag Harbor. I told him I wanted my own place and he took me to a real estate agent who showed me this.”

  Elizabeth imagines that the friend had something to do with the divorce. Hedda, she thinks, is not the type of woman who is left.

  “Do you like it?” Hedda asks.

  “Oh, yes,” they both say.

  She gets up quickly, goes to the stove for more coffee. “I think it’s a great house,” she says as she pours. “It really should be haunted.” She brings the pot back to the stove and sits down again, blowing smoke. “But with my luck, the ghost would be some sea captain like in—what’s the movie, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir—and after three bad marriages, I’d be stuck with a man in my house again.”

  They laugh. She is, Elizabeth feels sure, one of those women who must flick men from her, whose life is a series of lush dinners and European vacations and summer houses in Sag Harbor. A series of gifts from men. A never-ending series of various and limitless possibilities, for in every ordinary male she meets she discovers, like a jewel in a box of Cracker Jacks, the offer of love.

  One of those women who will claim, of course, that looking back, she would have preferred one normal husband and a quiet life.

  “Do you know anyone around here named Nelson?” Tupper asks suddenly. “Or Neilson, Nevelson, something like that?”

  She takes a long drag from her cigarette, lets the smoke out through her nose. Slowly, she shakes her head. “I can’t think of any. Are they friends of yours?”

  Tupper smiles. “No. Elizabeth had an uncle who used to live here, and her father grew up here. We were just curious about where his house might have been.”

  Hedda turns to Elizabeth, sympathetically, she thinks. “Is your uncle dead?”

  She nods, she’s never thought of him as her uncle. “A long time ago.”

  “Check the library,” Hedda says. “Or the newspaper office. One of them has all the town’s obituaries on file. You might get an address from that.”

  “Great idea!” Tupper says, and, to Elizabeth, “Want to try it?”

  She smiles, finishing her coffee. “If you like.” Although she’d prefer to stay here, get the details of Hedda’s three marriag
es, her single life, her discovery that only men thrive.

  Tupper gets up, thanks Hedda, offers to pull the car around front so Elizabeth won’t get too wet. When he’s gone, Hedda turns to her and smiles, but with a funny, rounded, almost frightened shape about her mouth.

  “You’re not looking for your father, are you?” she asks.

  Elizabeth’s own mouth seems to fill with salt water. “Pardon?” she says, politely. The politeness taking over like a cartoon ghost rising up from the prone, unconscious body.

  Hedda puts her elbow into her hand, holds the cigarette near her ear. Shakes her head to dismiss the question. “My daughter,” she explains, “she’s about your age, went on a kick last year about finding her father. My first husband. We were divorced when she was two and he took off for God knows where and never bothered to see her again. It never seemed to matter to her when she was growing up—my second husband adopted her and the third couldn’t do enough for her—but all of a sudden, she wanted to see him. I don’t know if it was the whole Alex Haley bit, or because someone on one of the soaps, Days of Our Lives I think it was, was doing the same thing, or maybe because she started thinking about having children of her own. But, whatever it was she started calling up relatives and visiting strange towns, libraries and newspaper offices, checking obits, because I told her that as far as I knew he could be dead.” She stamps out her cigarette. Elizabeth hears the car pulling around the drive.

  “Did she find him?” she asks.

  Hedda throws her head back over her shoulder, as if to indicate that he’s in the living room. “Oh yes. Right here on Long Island. Well, actually in Bayside. They had lunch together and she met his family, but all she told me about it was that he had an awful Queens accent and a son with the thickest neck she’d ever seen. She said she was sorry she wasted so much time. They had nothing to say to each other.” She looks at her nails. “Of course, part of it might have been my fault,” she adds. “I probably made him sound a lot better than he was, over the years.” She smiles, to herself. “How do you tell someone about some poor man you once loved desperately without lying about him a little?” She laughs. “At least in Days of Our Lives the girl discovered that her father was in prison on a murder charge. Katie was a little disappointed in comparison.”