A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  She shrugs, hands on her wide hips. “Why not? Half a man’s better than none at all. And think of the freedom; he’d have to work double-time being two husbands, but I’d only have to work part-time being half a wife. It’s the working girl’s answer to a demanding marriage. Don’t get a part-time job, get a part-time husband! I love it.”

  Elizabeth tells her she’s got a point. Had Brian been a bigamist, she knows, Ann would have made herself believe this. She has a marvelous way of turning every rotten thing her once-husband did into some kind of sly joke in which she is ultimately the winner. Her poetry, which she used to let Elizabeth read, was full of such twists.

  “Well,” says Ann. “Are you going to sign old Tupperware?”

  “Probably.” She flips through the manuscript and then drops it onto her desk. “And I told him I’d call him tomorrow, so be a dear and get me his file so I can make out his contract. Type a folder for him too, and find me a time tomorrow afternoon when I can see him—he’ll probably sign then.”

  “Right-oh, chief,” Ann says, saluting and turning to walk out the door. The “chief” is to remind Elizabeth, nearly six years her junior, that she’s getting carried away.

  “And then take the rest of the morning off,” Elizabeth calls after her. An apology.

  “You’re a sport,” Ann calls back.

  Tupper Daniels’ background file consists of his first letter to Vista, the questionnaire he was asked to fill out, the summary he was asked to submit and the two letters arranging this morning’s meeting.

  His questionnaire says he’s submitted to all the major houses, the real publishers, and was turned down by each one. It doesn’t say why. It says he finally decided to come to Vista because he feels a writer should believe in his work enough to pay to have it published. He also adds that Stephen Crane published his own first works himself, and he’s always admired Stephen Crane.

  She sits back, lights a cigarette. She recalls having read it all before, just yesterday probably, but it had no meaning then. She reads hundreds of these backgrounds a week, hundreds of letters from people with books that Vista simply must publish, no matter what the cost. Housewives with desks full of poetry, businessmen with exposés they’re sure will change the world, old people, so many old people, with memoirs and philosophies they want urgently to be preserved, recorded. So many pathetic people with dreams of immortality and a spot on the Tonight Show.

  In the beginning they had depressed her with their sad stories and hopeless ambitions, but gradually she came to see that, like anyone who dealt with the public, she would have to keep her sympathies, and her imagination, in check. How, she reasoned, could even the most humble shoe salesman accomplish his work if each socked or stockinged foot he held brought visions of this little piggy and pedicures and calluses earned in vain pursuits? Of mortician’s tags hung from cold toes?

  She picks up his summary. It’s sketchy, but enough to allow her to discuss his book with him for hours; her own special talent.

  “This is an intriguing story in the tradition of some of our greatest Southern writers. It deals with a young man who suddenly appears in a small Southern town. He camps on the outskirts of town, then buys the land under him and begins to build a home. When the home is completed, he disappears for nearly a year. On his return, he marries a young girl who is engaged to someone else, puts her in his home and then leaves again. He comes and goes with monthly and yearly intervals for nearly fifty years, fascinating the townspeople and marrying two other women from the town as each wife dies.

  “The townspeople are convinced that he has other wives and families across the country, and along with the story of this man’s comings and goings the novel consists of various townspeople’s theories of who and what he has elsewhere, told from the point of view of the women themselves. So the novel is actually many stories with the same mysterious man as the center of each.”

  He’d told her it was based on fact, on a man who had lived in the town where he grew up, a man later proven to be a bigamist. He’d said he was having some trouble with the ending.

  She gets up and walks to her small window. A dozen cars are parked on the roof across the street. She’s been in this office nearly two years and has yet to see one car actually moving on that roof. They’re either there or not there; she never sees them coming or going.

  Bigamy. She tries to remember some old joke, something about two women in love with the same man asking him, “What would you say to screwing us both?” and the man answers, “I’d say that’s big of me.”

  No, she thinks, that can’t be it. She’s sure it was funnier than that.

  A huge tractor trailer is backing out of the garage below. There are three little men in the street behind it, holding up their hands, waving, yelling, shouting directions. There’s something unnecessarily frantic about their movements, as if they’re trying to wear themselves out. Perhaps, she thinks, so they’ll feel their day was well spent; like her, right now, laboring over a simple contract she need only type a name and number on: Tupper Daniels, $6,000. The simplest procedure in her delightfully simple job.

  The first day she worked here, the miracle of being hired as an editor of Vista Books without any experience and only a college minor in English making her overly grateful and terribly anxious to please, she sat down with a pile of manuscripts before her and began to read, slowly, carefully, giving her full attention to each word. She was still on that first manuscript—a love story about a pioneer werewolf—when Mr. Alvin Owens, president of Vista, and son (with a name change) of Barney Goldfield, Vista’s founder, came into her office. He quickly snatched up the manuscript before her and put one piece of paper in its place.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, breathing his spearmint-flavored breath on her, “you read the summary so you can talk to the author, you look at the manuscript so you can count the pages. While you’re counting the pages, you check the manuscript for pornography or slander or anything that looks like mail fraud. If it’s clean, you send the author a Congratulations letter—you know, we loved your book, we loved this sentence, this chapter, whatever. Follow the form letter until you get the hang of it. Then you fill out the contract.” He pulled one of the long, four-page documents from her desk and drummed his hairy fingers over it. “If you can find reason for the book to cost more than five thousand—it’s long, it needs illustrations, the author is a doctor—you get ten percent of the difference.” He put the contract on her desk and patted it with his hand, as if to establish a rhythm. “One contract, fifteen minutes, plus the time you spend stroking the author’s ego. You make money, I make money and we can all go home at five o’clock.”

  Since then, she hasn’t read one manuscript from beginning to end. She hasn’t had to. She merely smiles at the authors and sends them contracts and acceptance letters. They, in turn, cry in her office, kiss her hand, send her gifts. They tell her: Now I know why these things happened, why I was lonely, hurt, why my child died, my husband left me, why I lost, missed out, messed up: So I could write about it.

  She looks down into the street, at the three little men who are now sitting, exhausted, on milk crates at the entrance to the garage. She imagines titles for the books they might write: Semi-Retirement on the Lower West Side; How I Backed a Tractor Trailer Out of a Garage, Once; My Life: In and Out of Mental Institutions. The last is a title Vista really has published. Kevin dug it out of the storeroom and left it on her desk one morning a couple of weeks ago with a note that read, “Perhaps this will provide some insight as to why we are here.” The jacket, in two colors on cheap paper, showed a long path leading to a wide door. The print, the path and the door were all dark green, but the rest of the jacket was light blue, as if the path led not to a mental institution but to the sky or a large lake.

  Kevin had taped a sketch of her on the back of the book, over the author’s picture. It was a very good sketch, even though he had made her cross-eyed. Kevin is a good artist. Under the sketch was a photo of
a man with large watery eyes and big ears and a dent that looked like a huge thumbprint right in the middle of his forehead. His face was also light blue, and if it hadn’t been for that, and for the dent, he would have looked like Bing Crosby. It said in his biographical note that he’d once been hit on the head by a subway train and lived to tell about it. She pointed this out to Kevin and they laughed about it all that day.

  One of the little men gets up off his milk crate, stretches, and walks slowly down the street, west toward the river. She thinks of the Steinberg poster of the New Yorker’s view of the world: the Hudson, New Jersey, Chicago, California, Russia. She thinks again about Tupper Daniels’ novel, wondering how such a story can end. What happens to a man who comes and goes for nearly fifty years? Does he come home one day and simply never leave again, making his poor wife frantic, month after month, because she’d been sure he’d be gone by now, sure by now she’d have the house to herself again? Or does he, like her own father, go away one day and come back dead? Or does he simply turn a corner as the reader turns the last page (which, she supposes, is the same as going away and dying, coming home and never leaving)?

  She turns from the window and goes back to her desk. His manuscript is thick, on expensive paper, professionally typed. The author has already invested in his work, he believes in it. If Mr. Owens were here, he’d tell her to hit him for seven.

  One contract, fifteen minutes, and $200 is in her savings account. She passes Tupper Daniels and his mysterious man on to production (Won’t Ned love how neat it is, how much it looks like the real thing!) and goes home at five o’clock.

  Home to her studio apartment and her casual glances at the calendar, to her calculations that in about three more weeks it will be a year since Jill’s party, a year since she’s had anyone in her bed. Back to her studio apartment and her memories of that morning nearly a year ago, when she threw him out—Greg was his name, she thinks. Yes. Greg. Threw him out because he smelled of smoke and slept with his mouth open, because waking up with the feeling, Oh shit, who’s this? makes for wonderful jokes but lousy mornings and lousy days. Because right there and then on that Sunday morning, with her apartment a mess and her sheets looking gray and feeling greasy and a strange, bearded man sleeping next to her with his mouth open, she had vowed—shaking him, telling him to leave—that there’s be no more casual sex, that next time she had someone in her bed it would be for love.

  Now, nearly a year later, she’s willing to settle for a fine friendship or even a true concern. Although Ann has suggested a one-night stand might help get things moving again, a one-night stand who arrives late and agrees to be gone by morning.

  She glances at her clock. It’s almost lunchtime. She should pick up the contract, roll it into her typewriter, get it over with.

  But there is something about this book, the image of that man, the bigamist, as Tupper Daniels talked him into existence, that remains with her, intrigues her still.

  Maybe, she thinks, there is Ward’s voice, three summers ago now, talking into the gloom of that damp, tree-shaded porch on that darkening summer evening. There is the sound of his voice as they sat on the creaking wicker chairs and watched through the screens the speckled light that fell sparsely across the front of her mother’s house. His voice, deep and puzzled, a voice, she tried to imagine then, that her mother heard in moments of passion, loneliness, in the small, mundane exchanges of early mornings and later afternoons. (Ward, my mother’s lover: Even now the expression is only ludicrous to her, a hilarious joining of words that suddenly made possible a host of other inappropriate couplings: my mother’s sexuality, my mother’s orgasms, my mother’s immorality. My mother and Ward.) There is Ward’s voice telling her about her mother’s fears, her theories. Ward’s voice never saying the word bigamist (for, she is certain, he would have to know how silly it would sound, how obsolete the word had become) but still, somehow, filling the air with the word, so she could feel it forming on her own tongue.

  “Your mother has worried,” he said, sitting in the wicker chair with its dark-green paint seeming to crack and snap each time he moved, leaned forward to see her more clearly, leaned back to watch the deepening shadows. “She has confided in me about your father’s long absences, his constant distractions. She has no proof, but her intuition is strong.”

  And she had felt the dampness rising from the concrete floor, from the growing shadows of the trees. The cool, bitter air of the Maine woods at night, in late summer.

  “She has confided in me that she felt each time your father left he was leaving for something more solid and formed and more compelling than he ever admitted to. Something more than a job. Which made it more difficult for her to see him go. More difficult than you’ve probably ever realized.”

  And the word, she is sure, was there between them, on the damp air.

  Or, no. It wasn’t there then because then there was a roll of thunder and Ward unfolded himself from the old chair and got up to stand closer to the screen. Then the rain began, gathering first in the leaves of the trees and then falling on the roof and in the dirt around her mother’s house, its sound somehow diminished by the filter of trees and yet somehow made more terrible by it. And then her mother’s car came into the driveway and she ran to the porch, pulling the light screen door open with more force than was necessary, and Ward took her arms and they both laughed about how wet she’d gotten as they went inside for her to change, turning on the lights as they passed through the rooms.

  So there was no time then for the word to form between them, no time for her to feel it fully on her lips.

  But now, with the idea, the image, of a bigamist here in her office in New York, two years later, she can recall that day, recall Ward sitting in that chair, speaking of her father, his long face pale in the dark air on the porch of her mother’s home, and she can remember it as if the word had been there.

  She picks up Tupper Daniels’ bright, neat manuscript and slips it back into the yellow envelope.

  Different women crying in different rooms in different cities, on different days of the week. One fat, one thin, one buxom, one small and wiry like her mother. A trail of broken-hearted women crying because he is gone, again, but all the while knowing he will return, again, to leave, to return; and all the townspeople wishing to be in her place, to receive him, again. A trail of broken-hearted women with before them a lifetime of sad partings and joyous reunions; of heartbreaks that do no damage and happy endings that end nothing.

  Perhaps, she thinks, it is only frantic arm-waving when a simple direction would do; perhaps her job has become too easy and she’s feeling the need to wear herself out. Perhaps this stubborn celibacy has left her with a need to wear herself out in other kinds of frantic, inconsequential acts. Perhaps she is merely curious.

  He told her his book was about a bigamist, a polygamist, a chameleon of a man who balances women like so many spinning plates on so many tall sticks; a man, he said, whom every woman will be intrigued by. As she slips his neat manuscript into her brief case, she’s almost beginning to believe him.

  Chapter 2

  When I got to Maine that August, my mother was thinner than I’d ever seen her. Muscular, somehow, although undoubtedly aged, as if she had shed so much of herself, her old plumpness, until this tight core, which had always been there, was all that was left. The house where she was living was nothing like the house we had lived in on Long Island, with its painted red bricks and white shingles, its wrought-iron porch and fake black shutters, the house I had last seen her in. This was a small, squat cottage set in a shallow valley among heavy oaks, off a road that was really only a half-mile extension of Ward’s driveway, a road that ended in my mother’s driveway and a narrow footpath that led to the beach. The house was covered with rough maroon and green shingles, and there was a low, sloping screen porch across the back and a small, dilapidated greenhouse to the right. The land around it was soft with layer upon layer of dead leaves, and even on the hottest days the
re was a damp coolness about the house; it had a smell that alternately struck me as fertile and tomblike.

  I was twenty-three-years old and I had just left the man I’d been living with. I say “just”; I mean I had called my mother at six o’clock that morning from the Buffalo train station, my three pieces of American Tourister (a high school graduation gift from her), my two coats and a shopping bag full of shoes making a fortress around me, and said I was coming to see her. I didn’t know how long I would stay.

  I hadn’t seen her in nearly two years, the two years since I’d moved in with Bill, the two years since she had sold our house on Long Island and moved to Maine. Of course, we’d spoken on the phone since then. Short, long-distance conversations full of pauses that always ended with one of us saying, “So, what else is new?” We were close in that we had shared my father and much time alone together in our small house, but we had never been given to whispered, late-night conversations about ourselves or to crying on each other’s shoulders, and knowing this helped me feel as I waited for the train that morning that I was truly just stopping by to visit, not crawling back to her with my life in pieces.

  Ward, my mother’s landlord and neighbor, picked me up at the train station in Boston. He was a tall, thin man with buck teeth and sharp blue eyes. Had his mouth been smaller, his face fuller and his ears not quite so thick, he might have been handsome; as it was, he was merely homely. The type who you knew immediately had always been optimistically homely, who had always held the promise of an ugly duckling but never quite made the transformation, never had that moment when he blossomed or filled out or even looked a little better than you remembered him. Still, there was something very gentle, nearly gallant, about the way he approached me in the station and bent over me to take the suitcases from my hands. I disliked him immediately.

  “This is quite a surprise,” he said as we pulled away from the station. His car, an old, boxy Plymouth, was terribly neat and reeked of the sweet, genderless perfume of its deodorizer, a cardboard skunk that hung from the radio’s tuning knob. I opened the window a little and smiled at him.