A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  It was in a Park Avenue apartment with thick brocade furniture and rose-colored rugs. A skinny Irish woman passed around silvery trays of caviar and thin toast. A slick-haired butler, just like you see in the movies, stood behind the long table that served as a bar. The room was smoke-filled, full of laughter, high and deep.

  She sat on a couch in a far corner of the room, her two girlfriends on either side of her, and when an older man, balding and well dressed, crossed the room and sat in the chair beside them, the three seemed to ripple with attentiveness, like birds waking.

  He found them cute, adorable, perched there on that couch like three little parakeets (he even made a joke about parakeets, since one of them, Dolores, my mother, wore a dress of powder blue) and sensing this, they answered all his questions pertly, precociously, chirping their names and the names of the companies they worked for, taking short drags on their cigarettes and quick sips from their martinis.

  He promised them, if they were good and had not taken up with some young men by the end of the party, that he would take then all to Child’s for an early breakfast.

  “There’s nothing,” he said, winking at Betty, the blonde, who sat closest to him and because of her hair was always considered the most forward of the three, “like having pretty girls for breakfast.” He patted the arm of his chair as if it were their collective knee.

  When he walked back to the bar, Betty told them quickly, her hand over her mouth, that he was Samuel Southwick, the general manager, which meant that if he took them out for breakfast they would go in the company’s limousine.

  At this, Janet and Dolores laughed, although Betty, newly sophisticated since her boss had invited her to this party and asked her to bring her prettiest girlfriends, merely touched her bright hair.

  My mother looked over her shoulder at me. The poor man died of a heart attack just a few weeks later, she added. He died on the floor of the men’s room—the executive one of course—before anyone even got to him. It was a shame. But at least he was there that night.

  As if his death was in some way redeemed by his presence at what was, for my mother, a fateful party. I remembered that she had included him in the story the last time, too.

  Later, there was a commotion at the front door and four young men burst into the room, their faces flushed, ties pulled down and collars opened. One grabbed the skinny maid and kissed her on the lips. The thin toast slid from her silver tray. People laughed.

  “Jerry Case,” Betty whispered, her hand to her hair. “My boss’s son.”

  The four men headed for the bar and the girls moved their heads a little and leaned against one another, trying to see.

  Suddenly, Betty drained her glass and turned to Dolores. “Do you want to go to the bar with me?” Her breath reeked of peppermint, and my mother marveled at how skillfully she had gotten the Lifesaver from her purse to her mouth without anyone noticing. She laughed a little. “You can’t just walk up there.”

  Betty looked at her a minute, considering, and then waved her hand. “Ask Janet.”

  But Janet’s thin face was struck with horror at the mere suggestion. “You can’t do that,” she whispered.

  Betty sighed, looked at her glass. “Then I’ll go by myself,” she said, touching her hair again, her talisman. But she made no move.

  And then (here my mother’s voice grew rich), then, like the waters of the Red Sea or the skies over Bethlehem, the crowd of guests parted and she saw the young men headed their way. She heard Janet take in her breath and she delicately tapped Betty’s toe with her own. She could smell the three sweet odors of their perfumes rise into the air like an offering.

  One sat in the chair beside Betty, another on the couch next to Janet, the third stood before them, and behind him the other. Dark hair and gray eyes, a trim mustache and a smile that was somehow pained, somehow lewd. A smile that seen alone, seen just as bright, slightly crooked teeth under a black mustache and a sharp nose could only be an evil smile, a nasty smile, but taken in with the whole face, especially the lovely, long-lashed eyes, was merely bemused.

  A smile, I realized as I listened, no longer my father’s, but Bill’s, watching me from our bed, from across a table, from between my legs. Those blue eyes looking up, that smile—the teeth a little crooked, cruel, the sharp nose, the thick mustache—saying, Look what I can do to you. How I can change you, make you laugh, cry, scream.

  The light out on the water was changing, playing silver to black to dark blue with each wave. I was tired of listening.

  He stepped into the semicircle made by the couch and two chairs and fell on his knees before her. He took her hand from the lap of her pale-blue skirt and raised it to his mouth.

  His teeth touched her skin and sent a chill up her neck, behind her ear.

  “Madam,” he said, still holding her hand close to his lips, raising only his eyes. “You are lovely.” And his voice, soft, sincere, still British, was Ronald Colman’s or Errol Flynn’s, or even, her favorite, Walter Pidgeon’s. (She told me once as we stayed up until three A.M. to watch Madame Curie, that during the war, before she married, while my father was overseas, she would cry each time she heard Walter Pidgeon’s voice. She said she went to one of his movies nearly every night while my father was away. And she’d always cry.)

  “You are so lovely,” he went on, “that I know not what else to do but to kneel before you. Forever.”

  Here he swayed a little and his friends reached out to support him, laughing and saying, “Whoa!”

  “I know not what else to do,” he said again, apparently pleased with the phrase.

  And then he looked up at her, placed his hand over his heart.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  And, hearing her two friends laughing on either side of her, feeling them nudging her, pinching her (it may have been a night’s drunk for the men, my mother told me, but to the girls, a life hung in the balance), my mother said, quite softly and quite seriously, “All right.”

  And while the others cheered and declared this an official bachelor party, my father turned his secret smile on her again.

  There was a line of bright blue at the horizon, above the darker blue that bled from ocean to sky and below the pale expanse that stretched above and behind us to wherever the sun was setting.

  She’d told the story before, but when he was still alive, when his presence at the party that evening had seemed to me as miraculous as the sight of him at our dinner table on an ordinary school night. When I thought no past was irretrievable if he had been there then and was with us now, if I could see him clearly then and now. If, someday, I would go to a party and he would fall on his knees.

  A star appeared in the strip of blue, a royal blue now. First star. My mother stretched out her legs and said make a wish.

  Chapter 7

  When Elizabeth came to Vista for her interview, after six weeks of sitting in employment agencies and failing typing tests and sending résumés to box numbers in the Times like so many anonymous letters to Santa Claus, she told Mr. Owens that she wanted a career, not a job. Thinking of Bill, she said she thought it was important for every woman to have a career, something hers alone, something that would remain hers, that she could remain dedicated to, despite the ups and downs, gains and losses, of her personal life.

  Mr. Owens had smiled over his fingertips and that evening had called her to say she’d been hired. She was staying at Joanne’s house then, still looking for her own apartment, and Joanne’s parents, greatly impressed, had opened a bottle of wine to celebrate. Even her own mother was taken aback by the sound of it: “Editor-in-Chief of Vista Books,” and a friend from college quickly sent the news to their alumni bulletin. “At least one of us is making it,” wrote a former sorority sister who had seen the item. She also asked if Elizabeth would mind taking a look at her husband’s nonfiction novel-in-progress.

  Elizabeth, who had caught on by then, sent no reply.

  When she did catch on to what Vista and
her job there were all about—and it took her only the first day, when Mr. Owens beat the rhythm of her work onto her desk, the first week, when she met all her coworkers and heard them talk, laugh, about their jobs—she felt no real surprise and only slight disappointment. In fact, she told Joanne, there was a certain sense of relief. Not merely because the burden of “making it” as a real-life editor-in-chief had been lifted (she’d still spent many sleepless nights, in the beginning, wondering if she were up to even the reality of her title), nor because the demands on her time and her reading skills were suddenly so reduced, but because, she said, she was reassured that she had not, after all, as for one dizzy moment she had believed, somehow sprouted wings and brilliance and left the common ground for some vertiginous land of success. Her job was not what it seemed; therefore, despite appearances, she was still herself, still normal. It was, she said, a state that appealed to her, after Bill and her strange leaving, after a childhood spent in a middle-class neighborhood where achievement often implied exile, lonely worldliness and who-the-hell-does-she-think-she-is? Where, as a teenager, she overheard often enough other women call her mother “saintly,” while using a fingertip to turn up a nose.

  Perhaps, for a moment, she had believed the job to be something else, something grand (she had, after her interview, walked up to Saks and bought a suit of editor-gray tweed), but, she told Joanne, she’d always been suspicious of good fortune, and although she’d said nothing at the time, she began to think as soon as she was hired that her job couldn’t possibly be what it seemed.

  But there were compensations, she liked to point out.

  There were, for instance, the bonuses. As Mr. Owens often reminded her, no other publisher, subsidy or otherwise (he refused to call Vista a vanity press, which may be what had misled her in the interview) so rewarded its editors. And when, after two weeks of work, she was able to afford a broker’s fee and so finally move into her own apartment, she had to agree (as her mother and Mr. and Mrs. Paletti and Joanne agreed) that things being what they were, the money was a great advantage.

  As was the job itself. For despite her early fears of incompetence, she soon discovered that the only talent she’d really developed in college—how to look as if you’re listening and sound as if you’ve done all the reading—was the only talent required of her here, in what she’d once referred to as “the real world.”

  But the greatest compensation of all, she liked to say, was her initiation, at a time when she needed new friends, into the delightful secret society of Vista office workers. The den of thieves, as Ann now calls them, that consisted at the time of the guys in Production (many of them gone now), Marv in Publicity, Kevin the Art Director, Frieda the Copyeditor (now off writing comic books) and Jake, Ned’s predecessor. (Ann herself came later, when Elizabeth had been at Vista for nearly six months. On her interview, she told Elizabeth that she was not a career secretary but a poet. She said she only hoped that a job in publishing would support her habit, give her incentive to write and, perhaps, a chance to make some contacts—a statement that is still a great source of amusement to them both.)

  If Elizabeth had ever believed her psychology-major friends, who claimed that as an only child with a traveling father she would spend her life looking for siblings, family, she could have replied with great assurance that she’d found them in these people; the core of office workers who understood completely what Vista was all about; who winked at her over the heads of authors or culled for her favorite terrible sentences from each manuscript, or sent her facetious memos about the books she’d signed. (To Elizabeth, From Production, Re: Tommy the Timid Toilet: A Fantastical Guide to Potty Training. Book to be printed on 400 2-ply sheets. Strong, absorbent, squeezably soft. Pink, yellow or blue? Pls. advise.) The core of workers who kept one another laughing, kept the jokes rolling, as if this were not, in truth, a vanity publisher where real people spent real money to publish the books they’d spent years of their lives to write, but a half-hour situation comedy about a vanity publisher, where the authors were character actors or walk-ons or special guest stars and the regular cast of actor/workers vied each week for the best lines.

  If she was not, in reality, an editor-in-chief at a large New York City publisher there was the compensation that she was at least a wry and well-loved co-star in this sophisticated and somewhat cynical comedy series. A buddy to her peers, normal to the rest of the world, and of course, to her authors, pure gold. If she had not scaled the heights of success, she had at least found a safe corner where the view was about the same; where there were enough people looking up to give her the illusion of looking down.

  The authors, too, were some compensation (although this she did not say), for with each of them she became that glamorous, successful career woman she’d had in mind when she first recited her theories in Mr. Owens’ office. Became, if only for a half an hour at a time, and if only behind her closed office door, that liaison between humble dreams and the glittering metropolis, that yea- or nay-sayer who could change lives; became, in short, everything she had, if only for a moment, imagined herself someday to be.

  And how her authors believed in her! Because their own success was so wrapped up in hers, her brilliance so much a proof of their own, their awe of her—her position, her power—was completely guileless, utterly generous. They imagined for her none of the bitterness or disillusionment or private loneliness we like (hope) to bestow on one who has done so well at such an early age, and Elizabeth, when she was with them, was sometimes able to enjoy their admiration, enjoy the success her title implied, as if she was indeed an editor-in-chief and all their worship was indeed well-founded.

  It was as if, with each author, alone in her office, she did sprout wings, take flight, but always within the safety of a dream. And always Ann’s laugh or a wink from Jake or Bonnie’s giggles and scowls could set her safely on the ground again; wake her in time to laugh softly at herself and to sigh, Ah, but it was a lovely dream.

  With her apartment and her job, her new wealth and her new friends, all she needed to complete the picture (and she thought of it as a picture, much like the one she had successfully copied in decorating her apartment) was love.

  Since coming to New York, she had tried to avoid thinking of Bill, tried to hold her thoughts of him aside the way she had seen mothers in supermarkets and shopping malls place a light hand on some screaming child’s head and calmly, patiently, turn away, ignoring the screams and the demands, even the small fists that struck at her thigh. And yet, especially after a long weekend of eating alone, watching television, speaking so little that when she went into the office Monday morning her voice startled her, seemed loose and awkward like a limb just released from a cast, the thoughts came to her still, pummeled her with memories and regrets and a thousand futile comparisons.

  So she began to go to bars with Ann and on Joanne-inspired blind dates. She brought men home. But she soon found there was little she could say to these strangers. If only because of all the hours of every day she heard it in her own voice, her ear had become finely attuned to falsehood, veiled indifference, and it frightened and disappointed her to hear it now, in the language of what she longed to call courtship. Testing some man, she would be evasive or coy, as flirtatious as a Southern belle or as full of non sequiturs as a politician, and he would simply smile, or look intense, or say something that might pass as a reply and then ask to take her to bed, just as she might say to an author, the preliminary compliments over, “Now, about the contract …”

  And even in bed, during and after the love-making, the words would drop to her pillow like dull coins. (“Have you ever been in love?” was, she discovered, a favorite male question, usually asked while staring at the ceiling, cigarette in hand. “I’m not sure I even know what love is,” she would say, testing. And he would nod, “Really.”) Words exchanged like some cheap currency, one for another, no real value implied.

  Had she spent any time with any of these men, she might, of course,
have gotten beyond such hollow beginnings, but because even the most superficial conversation led her to something she would not carelessly divulge (the details of her job, her mother’s lover, the way she’d spent the last year), she would always, having determined a young man’s latent unconcern, grow silent or just silly and he in turn would grow awkward or bored.

  She asked only for attention, she said, for something that at least resembled what she’d had before. Something that would not make her feel a traitor to her old self who had once believed, with Bill, that for the rest of her life every sexual act would be an act of love.

  Joanne said she had simply become too picky. Ann said she should learn to laugh in bed, copulation wasn’t that serious.

  But she wanted to fall in love again and she could only think of love, real love, as a moment of consummate seriousness, consummate honesty. A moment when all the laughter stopped, when her life, which she admitted was only skimming along its surface now, would slow, stop, plunge her to a depth she had never before reached, that she could only equate with holiness or revelation or a cool, silent place where her past and future would meet like two fine sprays of water, meet and mingle and rise up like a geyser, burst forth like some miraculous spring or blessed fountain (a fountain of champagne, perhaps, because, had she thought about it, the place was not unlike a church and the sound of mingling waters not unlike that of whispered vows).

  She wanted real love, she wanted true attention. She wanted, at least, to be gazed upon in the same way her authors gazed upon her, listened to in the way her authors listened to her. She wanted to find, in the real world, their kind of adoration, both to give and to receive, but mostly to show Bill someday in the future when they met again and, over lunch or a drink or in her dimly lit apartment she told the triumphant story of her life without him.

  And so when she woke one morning, just a year since she’d started working at Vista, and about nine months since she’d started testing and discarding young men, and found a bearded stranger sleeping beside her with his mouth open and a line of dried saliva caked like salt along his mustache, saw her cluttered apartment and her twisted sheets, she swore: Not again until it means something, until there’s care, love, worship. At least as much attention as her authors gave her.