A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  She could tell him, for instance, that there was no loss involved. She had made herself his wife. It was a private ceremony, she could say, attended only by the bride. She had bought the ring in a Buffalo jewelry store and outside in the parking lot, alone in the car, she had taken off her glove and slipped it on. She closed her eyes and spoke words to herself about loving him for the rest of her life. Everything will change but this, in me. Although the steering wheel was cold, she left the hand bare. She watched it moving to the window or the horn, saw it choose boxes and bags from the supermarket shelves, open her purse, accept change. She noticed it each time it flashed like a beacon through the cold dull fog of housekeeping and job-hunting and all the hours she waited for him to come home.

  She could say she had made herself his wife and so she became not the precarious live-in, second choice, but the eternal, duty-bound mate. Became not one of those timid lovers who sleeps with a packed bag at her side, one shod foot on the floor, or one of those cautious, passionless woman who refuses to say forever (as if her life will never end, never consist of more than those tiny stepping-stones of the present), but one who has claimed, for the rest of my life, all but this, but me.

  She made herself his wife and so could smile at the innocent indifference of busy husbands, smile when she found herself, like a wife, feeling neglected. And at night, while they sat together watching television or while he slept heavily beside her, she could finger the ring and feel like a woman with a double life, or a spy from another planet: If only you knew what this ring means, where it has come from. Like an assassin gone underground: If only you knew what I am capable of.

  She could say she had made herself his wife, forever, and so there was no loss involved.

  Or, she could tell him: Sarah was always there; he was, indeed, loyal. She could tell him of a rainy afternoon in summer when she was looking through his bookcase (she would say for something to read) and among the hardcover textbooks from his business courses and a few paperback thrillers, she had found a slightly oversized book that he had slipped sideways into the back of the shelves. A photography book called Nurses, that showed nurses at various times, in various places: caring for men during World War II, walking together through a slum at the turn of the century, graduating, picketing, laughing together over a patient’s birthday cake, embracing each other, assisting at operations, crying. Nurses who were nuns and nurses who were men; nurses who looked like grandmothers or sex symbols or harbingers of death.

  In the front of the book there was written, in black ink, in a long, graceful hand, “Gaze at this and think of me. I love you, Sarah.” It was dated three years before.

  She could tell him how she sat and looked at the book for a long time. Of course, it was not the first trace of Sarah she had seen. When they moved in, Bill had not hesitated to point out what pots and pans and coffee mugs and bath towels he had taken from Sarah. And he proudly showed her a pen she had once given him and a small sculpture they had bought together and he had “gotten away from her” when he left. But the book, she’d say, somehow touched her. Made her breath come short. Maybe it was the “I love you,” so simple and assured. The date, three years ago, before she had ever seen either of them. Or maybe it was the nurses themselves. Since Christmas, Elizabeth had been working in a large department store, in an alcove called “Enchanted Evenings,” where she sold bright gowns to what seemed to her like the same four Polish woman about to take a cruise to Bermuda, and with the summer she had gone from full-time to part-time because, as she’d told Bill, she needed to think about what she wanted to do with her life, although all she’d really done was think about him. But here before her were all those photos of all those women with a profession, a most important profession. Here was Sarah (and—she’d never thought of it before—how lovely she must look in her white dress and white stockings and soft white shoes, her hair braided and twirled into a thick gold bun!) showing him the range of her expertise, her emotions, her long history. Showing him that she was a professional woman who necessarily must have more on her mind than love but who would manage to love him still.

  She sat on the couch, the day low and heavy against the sliding glass doors behind her and thought how dull her own love, which was all her life, had made her.

  She could tell him: She had asked Bill once if he ever thought of Sarah and he was silent for a moment and then said, “No, I don’t think I ever do.” It was the hesitation, of course, that convinced her and she brought her ring to her mouth.

  She asked him once, after an elaborate lead-in: What was Sarah’s birth sign? and he pretended not to remember the month or day she was born.

  He answered once that he thought she was Swedish. Or Scots.

  He said he vaguely remembered bringing her a rose when he came to visit, but he was sure he didn’t bring one every time.

  She was afraid of deep water, he said. Or is that you?

  Thinking of Sarah one night as they held each other, she began to cry. He was startled; he may have been asleep. When he asked what was wrong she said, “You’ll never love me enough.” Stroking her, laughing a little, he said, “No, I probably never will.”

  She could tell him that gradually she came to think of them both as victims of the same disaster. The unwilling survivors of a tragedy that had deprived them both of all but their lives. He longed for Sarah, she for him. She came to think that if he was not her lover he was, at least in love, her brother.

  She could say that she began to measure their love-making, which, from the very beginning, had veered and swayed unpredictably, according to what she imagined were his thoughts of Sarah. When he was rough and passionate and impulsive, he was trying to forget her. When he was gentle, inquiring, loving, he had decided he never could. When he pulled away and laughed at her enthusiasm, he was feeling both guilty and ashamed and, perhaps, a little repulsed by her dark hair, her hips which were growing a little too fleshy, her legs that were not quite long enough, not Sarah’s.

  She could tell him of their last evening together when he had come home from work, his tie off, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his brief case under his arm and his jacket over his shoulder and she’d said, as he came into the kitchen to kiss her, “Sarah called.”

  How he’d grimaced and said, “She probably thinks I owe her money for something,” and, in the same breath, “Are you making potato salad?”

  How he had refused to call her back, claimed he no longer remembered her number. How she had started out being understanding, “Call her, I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me.” (Planning to say, when he called and found Sarah had never called him, “Well, it sounded like Sarah.”) How she had grown sarcastic, “Why are you so afraid to talk to her? Can she still affect you so much?” and had finally cried, “I won’t live with her ghost any longer!”

  How he had watched her, first startled by her outburst, then amused, and finally, when she threatened to leave him, angry.

  How he had leaned across the table, one fist clenched, saying, “Look, I love you. I once loved Sarah, I won’t deny it, but I don’t anymore. I love you now, okay? All right? I love you. I don’t know how many ways to say it. You want me to marry you? Christ, I’ll marry you, if that will make you believe me. Anything so you’ll believe me and we can drop the subject and get on with our lives.”

  She could tell him that at that moment she believed it. He loved her, not Sarah. He had loved Sarah once but now he loved her. At that moment, she believed it. And she also understood that to say she believed it would mean the subject could be dropped, ended; and the subject, she understood at that moment, was all her life.

  How she began packing at midnight. Bill lying in bed, his voice low. “I’m not entering into your little drama, Elizabeth. I know what you’re doing and I won’t play along. You’ve got no reason to leave and you’ve got no place to go. You’re acting. I’ve got meetings tomorrow. I can’t spend the night battling your made-up problems. This is not The Late Show, for God’s sake.
” And later, “I love you. I love our life together. What more do you want from me?”

  How she was crying when she walked out the door.

  She could tell him that she left because she was willing to admit that Sarah was the love of his life, but not that there was no love of his life at all.

  She could say that she left because he believed that his love, which was smooth and featureless and solid as a wall (a blank wall where she was pinned, where he stopped at the end of a day), which had been worn so smooth by others whom he once had loved but now loved no more, was enough to sustain her.

  Or she could tell him again (for where is the evidence to contradict her?) that it was Sarah who parted them. For he had loved her first and he was a romantic. Tall and handsome and too loyal.

  Instead, she tells him, lying in this strange room, the arc of firelight making the ceiling seem high and touched with gold, “Even now, I’m not always sure I’m over him.”

  She tells him, and there is nothing in the air, in her memory or his, to contradict her, that there was no loss involved, she had made herself his wife. She recalls that even on the train as she was leaving him, even now in this dim room, her love could bring tears to the eyes of strangers.

  Chapter 19

  She wakes with some dream of Bill, Bill talking to her, talking endlessly. Tupper Daniels sleeps beside her with his mouth closed and his hand over his heart. If the revelations of the night are still with him, they don’t disturb his sleep. His face is serene, neither his mouth nor his eyelids twitch or tremble. All she has told him is safe, well below the surface.

  And she’d said he was her mythical other half. Said: Even now, it isn’t over.

  The light behind the heavy curtains falls softly, weakly, into the room, dulls the edges of the dresser and the tops of the bedposts, fills the room with odd shapes. Staring hard, she can see the shadow of a fish, what seems to be a distant line of mountains at the foot of the bed, a dark madonna in a corner, a long shadow boat, perhaps a battleship, on the ceiling. She closes her eyes for a moment and when she opens them again, the images have disappeared.

  She would like to wake him, to ask, What next? What should I tell you next and when will you find your ending? And what after that? When does it all take shape, the ads, the distribution, the bright young editor who turned vanity publishing on its ear?—but she has never been good at waking her lovers. She has always wanted either to shake them or to kick them, or, as with Bill, never to wake them at all, and so she merely lies beside him, thinking how she might some day describe this moment to her children, to the press, to some future biographer who asks about the weekend in which she discovered the first best seller of a house that until then had been known as a joke.

  She imagines Bill reading it, wondering why he isn’t mentioned, and then smiles at her own dreams. She smiles at Tupper in his dreamless sleep.

  Later, she gets up quietly and slips into her robe, walks down the silent hallway. In the bathroom mirror, she looks different to herself. Somehow sharper and more clear. It may only be the strange surroundings, the wide bevel on the mirror, the blue-tiled wall behind her (although, she realizes, she doesn’t feel strange, feels quite at home among all the small surprises of a place she’s never seen before). She brushes her hair, holds it for a minute in a ponytail at the back of her head and lets it fall to her shoulders. It may just be that she always looks better on a morning when she hasn’t slept well.

  As she opens the door, she sees Hedda in a loose black robe with long, winglike sleeves, going silently down the stairs. There is something gracefully feline about her movements; as Elizabeth steps from the bathroom, she stops, and, like a cat, slowly turns her head.

  “You’re up,” she whispers hoarsely.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth says.

  “Good. Come have coffee with me.” Without waiting for a reply, she turns again and moves slowly down the stairs. Elizabeth glances down the hall to their room. Last night he had asked her, If you’re still in love with him, where does that leave me? You also said you loved me. She hadn’t answered, but perhaps, she thinks now, waking alone he’ll begin to understand: She is no ordinary lover. Her love for Bill hasn’t ended; her claim to love Tupper ends nothing. She follows Hedda to the kitchen.

  They take their coffee into Hedda’s library, a small room lined with books on brick and plywood shelves and centered around a large stereo/television console. The rain has stopped and bits of sun, full of shadows from the trees, stream through the mesh curtains. Hedda sits on the plaid couch, putting her feet up on the seat and pulling her black robe over them. Elizabeth sits on a brown leather recliner beside her.

  “Your friend tells me you didn’t quite find what you were looking for yesterday.”

  Elizabeth smiles. “No, not quite. Although we did take your advice and check with the library.”

  Hedda nods. “So he said.” She lights a cigarette, blows the smoke to the ceiling. Her neck is long and freckled and taut. The wide yoke of her robe shows the deep, tanned hollows around her collarbone, and Elizabeth feels certain that she is naked under the robe. She imagines that Hedda spends a great deal of time naked, wearing her freckles like a fur.

  “I think your job is fascinating,” Hedda says.

  Elizabeth laughs, modestly.

  Hedda puts her fingers to her breasts. “Well, to me it’s fascinating.” Moves the same fingers to her mouth, touching them to her tongue. “The book’s about bigamy, then?” she asks slowly.

  Elizabeth sips her coffee. “Yes.”

  Hedda laughs or says Hmph and shakes her head. “About a man who commits bigamy?” She leans forward, hands on her knees. “Is that correct, you commit bigamy?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth says. The editor. “I believe so.”

  “But you don’t commit monogamy.” She pulls her lips together, makes her eyes wide. “Do you? Or marriage. You don’t commit marriage.”

  Elizabeth laughs, “No, that’s true,” and Hedda looks at her for a moment, frowning, as if she has just corrected her in some obvious error. “The language is biased,” she murmurs, putting an elbow to her raised knee and resting her head upon her hand, a pinkie to her forehead, the cigarette dangerously close to her dry red hair. “His wives must be very patient,” she says, eyebrows raised.

  Elizabeth nods over her cup, smiling wisely. “Like Penelope,” she says.

  “Who?” Smoke curls from her cigarette.

  “Penelope. Ulysses’ wife. From mythology.”

  Hedda brushes some smoke from the air. “Oh, yes.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette and leans to stamp it out. “I suppose she was patient”—smoke pouring from her mouth and nose—“if you call filling your house with boyfriends while your husband is away patient.” She lifts the cup, blows. “I call it a romp.”

  Elizabeth is uncertain that she follows and Hedda, looking up at her, throws her head back and barks a deep, dry laugh. “Well, anyway, I’m all for it,” she says. “Bigamy. I think it would make me feel positively ambidextrous.”

  Elizabeth tries to remember the story, Ulysses, Penelope. She recalls that he killed off all her suitors as soon as he got home, but she is uncertain of Penelope’s reaction. Did she consider them boyfriends? She hears the toilet flush upstairs.

  “And it makes so much more sense,” Hedda says, standing. “Simultaneous husbands.” Her eyes go to the ceiling. “There he is, I’d better tell him we’re here. What’s his name?”

  “Tupper,” Elizabeth says. She feels she is handing him over to her.

  “Right.” Hedda leaves the room and Elizabeth hears her call from the stairs, “Tupper, darling, you haven’t been deserted. We’re down here in the library. Can I get you some coffee?”

  Elizabeth can’t hear his reply, but she hears Hedda in the kitchen and hears the phone ring and Hedda’s bright, “Why it’s you!”

  She thinks it a wonderful thing to be able to call someone darling, so naturally, without even making it a joke.
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br />   She reaches for one of Hedda’s cigarettes, lights it, and then leans back in the chair, putting her feet up and her robe over them. She tries to imagine what it would be like to live here, alone, lovely, smoking cigarettes, reading books. She sips her coffee and stares at the books along the wall. There’s Hemingway and Mailer and Ian Fleming. And Solzhenitsyn. Other books whose authors she doesn’t recognize, but whose names imply cowboys (Catch the Wild Appaloosa) or soldiers (The Bloody Stand) or spies (To Save the Munich Papers). There is also a number of history books and movie-star biographies (Gable, Bogart, Montgomery Clift, Gary Cooper), but nothing she would call a woman’s book. Perhaps, she thinks, because Hedda doesn’t need that kind of reassurance.

  Or perhaps this is her own way of filling her house with boyfriends.

  She hears Tupper come down the stairs and Hedda call to him. A minute later, he enters the library, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. “She’s on the phone,” he says. “She’ll be off in a minute.” He kisses her head and sits on the couch where Hedda had sat. He is wearing blue jeans and a pinstriped shirt. His feet, like hers, are bare. They have both made themselves at home.

  “You didn’t wake me,” he says, surprising her with his smile. After last night, her story about Bill, her refusal to make love, she’d expected him to be cool, even distant.

  “You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to disturb you,” she says.