A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  “And what do you think the aunt would have said?”

  She walks past him to the grave, and stands before it where, perhaps, her father once stood, his footprints pressed silver into the grass. She reads again the slight epitaph—Jesus, Mary, Joseph—and recalls that the sponsor of it all, the one who had filled her womb, filled poor Joseph with awe for his son and his wife and the way she had loved, is not mentioned, not present. The silent Partner. The quintessential Lover. The absent and so irrefutable Husband.

  “She would have said that her love went beyond that,” she says, turning to Tupper.

  “Beyond what?” he asks from the bench.

  “Him.” She thinks of Bill, Bill himself, Bill telling her that she shouldn’t let loving him become her whole life. That she should get a job, a hobby, a dog. Bill himself reminding her that he was just an ordinary man, no prince, no god, no one capable of utterly changing her life by falling on his knees.

  Reminding her that the ring she wore had meaning only in her wild imagination.

  The ring that, when she left him, could bring tears to the eyes of strangers.

  “She had to leave him,” she says, “because her love had gone beyond him. It had surpassed him. She had to leave him to be free to keep loving him the way she wanted to. So she could continue to believe in him.”

  Tupper laughs a little, stands, squeezes his fingertips into the front pockets of his jeans. He walks toward her. “You mean so she’d be free to tell all her stories about him, to make him into some kind of myth.”

  She nods. Joanne had said: It has nothing to do with Tommy, meaning the disappointment, the discovery that he could not, after all, utterly change her life. But maybe the hope, the desire, the expectation itself had nothing to do with him either. Maybe it had only to do with all the stories she’d been told, the myth: Love will come to you, love beyond everything. It will change your life forever.

  The myth he alone can refute; that his absence alone can make irrefutable. The myth in which he is best left in shadow, best left imagined, or remembered, or told.

  Told in the darkened bedroom, told to the warm, the homely, the necessary husband: the myth of another—Husband, Father, Prince.

  “Yes,” she says, thinking not my father then, but my mother. My mother who needed the myth of Husband, eternal Husband, and the other ordinary husband who was willing to believe in it. My mother who could start her life over again simply by retelling it, by waking in another man’s bed and telling him: I love a man, a charming man, a man with a thousand different lives. And everything will change, but this, in me.

  Her mother, who could be reconciled to her life, to his life, to all that through him she had lost, by the lovely story it made.

  “Because some love,” she whispers, feeling him beside her, “goes beyond even the lover himself. Some love can surpass even him, the real lover, until his real presence is no longer required for the love to last. Love that’s like a spiritual life, like pure faith.” She hesitates, but his head is bent as if he were a priest in a confessional, or a pilgrim at a shrine. “It’s love that can’t be ended,” she goes on. “Or replaced. It’s the way my mother loved, the way she, the aunt”—and yes, why not, she wants him to believe it—“my grandmother loved. The way I’ve loved.”

  The wind stirs and a red plastic flower, perhaps a carnation, rolls along the grass. Tupper raises his head, slowly, not smiling, not quite serious. His eyes pale and round. “Whose novel are you writing now?” he asks, a small twitch at his mouth. “Not mine.”

  She nods, the pulse at her throat and her ears, her spine staightening. “Mine then.” She puts her hands to the front of her jacket and feels her own soft breasts. He will know her worth, the way she is capable of loving. She and all the women before her. He will know what magic has touched her by the story she tells. “Because that’s the way I love Bill, the way I’ll always love him. It’s the way I love him and it will never change. No matter what. Because it’s in me. It’s mine.”

  “Your fiction,” Tupper adds, leaning close to her.

  “Yes.” Hesitating, his square smile suddenly making her fear the word. “Mine.” The foolish, passionate word of all her silly authors.

  His dry lips are to her cheek. “But not,” he says, his breath warm, sharp, “a particularly good one.”

  He steps in front of her, laughing softly, and puts his arms around her shoulders, forcing her hands to her sides, knocking her glasses with his cheek. “Oh, Elizabeth,” he whispers into her ear, fondly. “You are so transparent sometimes.” He steps away, still holding her shoulders, shaking his head. “Don’t you see what you’re doing? You love me and it scares you. All right,” he shrugs. “It’s okay to be scared. I’m a little scared too.” Kindly, “But don’t try to handle it by running away. By claiming you still love someone else—someone you’d barely mentioned until you’d admitted you were in love with me. Don’t try to put me off with some eternal-love fiction.” Chuckling, shaking his head. “I know you too well for that. I see through you.”

  He embraces her again, and her story, all she wanted to believe, is suddenly reduced to something simple and pathetic: an excuse, a contrivance, a pitiful cry for sense. Now I know why it happened to me.

  Her single laugh is like a stab. He loves her, he sees through her. He sees through all the stories she has told. “Yes,” she says, holding him tightly to keep her fingers from his small pale eyes. “Yes, you probably do.”

  She watches suburbia creep back into the landscape, irregular fields and trees giving way for homes and hamburgers and piles of crushed auto bodies that flash their former bright colors between scabs of orange rust. He has found his ending, he said.

  The bigamist is her father, he said, and for his ending he will use her father’s past. He will show, in the last chapter, how Beale came from England and was raised by a man like the uncle. The aunt will be mentioned, but she will be dead already. (“This is a book for women, but not necessarily about them”) There will just be the two men in the house. Then the scene will change to England, where a man, leaving one wife, walks across London to the home of another. (“I may fly over just to check on street names and details.”) On the way, he wonders about a woman he’d once married and given a son. He thinks he heard she moved to America. The man will be described in the exact same words as Beale, her father, so that it is clear that the bigamist in the book is a bigamist’s son.

  “You’ll see his past,” he said proudly, “and you’ll understand his whole life.”

  She said, “It’s silly.”

  He said, “It’s exactly what you were talking about, with your aunt and uncle, how the past explains everything, how there are bigamists everywhere and women just have to learn to make the best of them. I’ve changed the details but the theme is the same. It’s exactly what you were talking about.”

  Now, riding in silence, watching the sky grow dark and the small blue lights come on in every home, watching the stars, also blue, but weak competition, appear slowly above them, it occurs to her that every great realization given up, spoken, placed in another’s clumsy hands is, at heart, silly; every message from the grave a stale sermon or a slick song; every fiction, with all its attempts at sense and order, climax and resolution, words that mean something and change everything, laughable. Terribly laughable. Merely an excuse for fear, for laziness, for bad luck.

  It occurs to her, returning to the frightened orange lights of the city, the air made dull by far too many lives, that Vista is, after all, the sanest, clearest place to be. Her side of Vista, where they take it for granted that whatever is shared is marred. Where they understand the tyranny of what lovers do to each other.

  “Will you call me tomorrow?” he asks at her door, and she nods, smiling. She knows he would interpret the truth as a mere challenge, another transparent ploy. She has confided in him; he will now want the heart of everything she says.

  “Sure,” she tells him. “I’ll call you.”

>   Chapter 20

  We sat on her porch, my mother and I, in the green wicker chairs where Ward and I had sat waiting for her just the night before. Where I had listened to him talk about my father—his long absences, his constant distractions, the life he had lived without us.

  It was early morning, and the chairs were still damp from last night’s rain. The sun that cut through the leaves had turned the shadows around us a deep, mossy shade of green but had failed to warm the wet odor of the woods.

  We sat in silence, drinking coffee and looking out at the trees. I found I was playing an old, familiar game.

  When my father was alive, I would sometimes increase the pain or the pleasure of waiting for him by trying to capture, exactly, the one moment before the moment he arrived. I would close my eyes and say now, now. Now it is quiet and everything is the same, but in the next moment—or this one, or this one—a door will swing open, a car will pull into the drive, a word will be spoken and everything will change.

  I would try to transform each moment as it passed, make each a threshold, bless each with the significance of all it had not yet become.

  I found I was doing that now, sitting with her in silence, where I had sat just last evening and listened to Ward. Listened to him talk about my father and my mother and the stories she had told, as if I had thought that between us some word could be formed, in the air or on our lips, that would define forever the life they had lived.

  As if, like a child, I had thought I would be appeased by her stories only when I’d learned what parts of them were true.

  I found I was thinking: Now she is silent and everything I know is memory or story or hope, but in this next moment, this one, this one, there will be the sound of her voice. It will be softer and slower than even Ward’s had been. It will find, as Ward’s could not, the one word that will define him.

  I waited. There was the sound of the woods: birdsong, a slight stirring of the leaves.

  In this next moment, I thought, there will be the thrill of his definite presence, of her single, definite word. In this next moment, she will begin to speak and whatever word she choses will cut through all her stories, all my memories, all interpretations and speculations and hopes. It will be final, whatever she says in this next moment. It will be true.

  I looked at her as she watched the trees. I saw her head tremble, a slight, involuntary nod: now, now.

  But each moment passed. We sat in silence. A silence marked only by the form and the timbre of all it would not and yet might, still, at any moment become.

  Chapter 21

  Every contract signed by a Vista author contains a paragraph that is known around the office as “the cancellation clause.” It states that the Publisher shall not have the right to terminate the agreement until two full years after the date of publication. “At any time thereafter, however, should the Publisher determine that the demand for said Work be insufficient for the Publisher to continue to handle same profitably, the Publisher may then terminate this agreement and return to the Author all rights granted hereunder by giving the Author notice thereof by first-class mail.”

  As Mr. Owens first explained it to her, the need for this clause is both clear and logical. As soon as Elizabeth signs an author and receives payment, Vista’s profit has been made. After that, every penny that is put into production, or advertising, indeed, every book that’s sold (for if they sell out the first small binding, they must dig into their pockets to pay for the second) chips away at that profit. But as soon as a contract is canceled and all rights are returned to the author, Vista’s profit is frozen, the author with all his troublesome questions about sales is disposed of, and the stockroom can be cleared of yet another stack of books.

  It is merely a matter of course, then, Mr. Owens had told her, that each Vista author, two years after a contract is signed, receives notice thereof by first-class mail.

  At the time, she had thought two years a terribly long way away.

  “You said you believed in it,” the woman on the phone wails. “Don’t you remember? Those were your exact words. I even saved your letter.”

  “I remember,” Elizabeth says, sincerely. Ann is still in the file room, looking for the woman’s data. Elizabeth can remember nothing about her.

  “When the letter came this morning,” the woman goes on, her voice twirling down into a tight, desperate sound, “I was so excited. I had to sign for it, and my hand trembled. I saw it was from Mr. Owens. I thought it was good news. I thought you were going to make it into a movie or something.”

  Ann rushes in with the pale folder. Elizabeth grabs it from her, making it clear she is annoyed. Ann should have screened the call, kept the woman on hold until Elizabeth had figured out who she was and what she might want. What she could say in reply.

  The woman begins to read from Mr. Owens’ letter. “ ‘I am sorry to note that your book has not been selling well. While no one can predict such an unhappy circumstance …’ ”

  Elizabeth opens the folder. There are copies of all her letters, dated two years ago, praising All’s Fair in Love and welcoming Mrs. Lorraine Webb to Vista. Letters from Mrs. Webb—yellow, slightly scented stationery with scalloped edges and small white doves in each corner—thanking Elizabeth for her “kind kudos,” asking, if she’s ever in State College, Pa., to come and spend an evening with them. “p.s. Enclosed is my check.”

  “ ‘It seems best at this time,’ ” the woman continues to read, “ ‘that we cancel our agreement and, if you wish, send you the remaining bound copies of your book for your own personal use.’ ”

  There are other happy letters to Production—thanking Ned’s predecessor for sending her the galley proofs, for making the few changes. An ecstatic letter praising the lovely bookjacket design they so kindly showed her. A polite, inquiring letter about how much longer it will take for the book to be printed and bound. (“It has been three months since I last heard from you and I’m beginning to think it may have all been a dream.”) A slightly less-patient letter written a month later. (“I fear I’ll meet with some accident and never see my book …”) And then, “Just got my first copy of All’s Fair in Love and my feet still haven’t touched the ground!!!”

  “You said you believed in it,” the woman cries again. “You said it was good. You said it would sell!”

  Elizabeth knows the woman is lying. One of Mr. Owens’ cardinal rules: When they talk sales, just smile. Promise nothing.

  “I don’t understand why you want to cancel my contract!”

  She sighs; What to say? “It’s not my decision, Mrs. Webb,” she begins. “I did think it was a good book. It is a good book.” She quickly skims the woman’s summary. “Even now I remember that powerful scene on the mountain when Agatha thought her husband was trying to murder her.” She is reading from her own letter. “It was chilling, beautifully rendered.”

  “It was true,” the woman interjects. “It’s a true story.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth says, going through the letters once again. “It was chilling, brilliant I thought.” At the back of the folder is the original copy of the woman’s dust-jacket photo. It shows a blond, fortyish, carefully made-up woman leaning over her typewriter, looking serious, books piled all around her. There is a pencil stuck over her ear. “A rare piece of real literature, I thought.”

  “Then why are they canceling my contract?” Her voice has softened, sounds more defeated than outraged. And, Elizabeth notices, the you has gone to they. “Why didn’t it sell?”

  Elizabeth sighs deeply, as if she too were about to cry. She notices that the photo seems to have been taken in a small room, full of books. A room, no doubt, the woman has set aside for herself, for her work, her career. She says in her questionnaire that she has taken many writing courses. “Oh, Lorraine,” Elizabeth says, “Who buys books anymore? Who, in this television society, is even interested in literature?”

  “But no one even heard of my book.”

  “People heard,” Eliza
beth says wisely. “You’re not aware of it, but people in New York, in publishing, heard. And for a new writer, that’s sometimes more important than sales, notoriety, lasting notoriety.”

  “But I didn’t even make my money back,” the woman goes on. “You promised me I’d make my money back.”

  Another lie: Even the Vista brochure says, in very large print, We cannot guarantee a return on your investment. But then, given a chance, they’ll always choose the lie. It is, after all, what she and Mr. Owens depend on. “Look, Lorraine,” she whispers, as if she is suddenly making some confession. “I’m an editor. Not an accountant. When I read a wonderful book like yours, a real contribution to women’s literature, I can’t worry about how much money it will make. I just have to get it into print, for posterity, if you will.” She waits. Mrs. Webb is silent. “And do you know, Lorraine, to tell you the absolute truth, although I’m sorry you’re so upset, I don’t really care that your book didn’t sell. In fact, it only confirms for me that it is not an ordinary book, that it is too deep, too good for the general public.” She is still silent. “And I have no regrets about publishing your wonderful story. Do you?”

  The woman hesitates. Elizabeth smiles at her office. “Well, no,” she says. “It’s just that …”

  “Personally, I think it’s a travesty that accountants, those soulless, emotionless dolts, are the ones who finally judge a book’s worth. As if monetary profit is all a piece of literature is created for. If I had my way, accountants wouldn’t be allowed even to speak to artists like yourself.”

  Mrs. Webb chuckles a little. “Well, I suppose publishing is a business, too.”

  “Please!” Elizabeth cries. “Don’t remind me. But I’m not a businesswoman, Lorraine. I’m an editor, and it breaks my heart to think that a fine writer like you can be so discouraged by the decree of the accountants.”

  “Oh,” she says, bucking up. “I’m not discouraged. I did read somewhere that even Jacqueline Susann’s first novel didn’t do that well. Not as well as the others.”