A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  She has her authors and all their sorry little books in the proper perspective. She has Jesus there, too. And her parents, perhaps.

  She wonders if some things should remain without any perspective at all.

  At least with Bill, she was never sure how she’d find him.

  She gets up on her elbow, looks at him, at the blush fading from his chest. “Shall we go eat crepes now? Just like last time?”

  But he pulls her to him, holds her tightly. Without the excuse of passion, she feels awkward in his arms. She thinks of how both their chests are bare.

  “I’ve missed you,” he says into her hair.

  Uncertain, she whispers, “Thank you.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Yes,” she says, improvising. It’s as if the man in the projector room has put on the third reel before the second. She can only guess where they are now: friends? lovers? sex maniacs?

  “I thought so much about you,” he says, stroking her hair, then her back. She rolls away from him, leaving her hand on his stomach so he won’t ask why.

  “Have you been away?” This is like an amnesia victim who’s afraid she should know the answer.

  “No,” he says, putting his hand over hers.

  “Working on the book?”

  He shakes his head, turns to look at her. “But I’ve been thinking about it, though. I’ve got an idea for the ending.”

  “Good,” she says. She decided in the cab that she’d take Ann’s first piece of advice: sleep with him only until the book is finished and the contract signed, and then say good-by forever.

  Already the decision is lending their relationship a sweetly fatal air, like Love Story the second time you read it.

  “Do you want to tell me your idea?” she asks him.

  He frowns. “I said all pleasure.”

  “I don’t mind.” She turns onto her stomach, tucking the pillow under her, cool side up. “Tell me.” She is being very gallant.

  He clears his throat. “Well, looking the book over, I realized there’s not much in the way of background. Mostly because nobody where I grew up knew anything about Bailey’s background either. He really did show up one day—just the way I have it in the book.”

  He pauses, and at first she thinks it’s one of the many pauses that pepper his slow speech. But it lasts longer that most and so she says, “Go on.”

  “Well,” he clears his throat again. “I thought maybe I could do something with that.”

  She looks at his profile. His neat, blond sideburn is oddly geometrical, a fine, square fuzz. “With what?”

  “His past.”

  “But you just said you didn’t know anything about his past.”

  He turns to face her. “I know,” he says sadly.

  He stares at the ceiling, she at the back of the couch, her headboard. Outside, a young boy’s shrill voice cries “Asshole!” Another laughs.

  “And don’t you usually tell the past in the beginning?” she says slowly, watching the white threads of the couch moving in and out of one another, blurring into a whole. “Not at the end?”

  “You think so?” His voice is humble. It reminds her that she’s the expert. That she has no idea.

  She wonders if she’s trying to put off the inevitable. Only until he finishes his book, until the stroke of midnight, until Jenny gets leukemia.

  “Well,” she says, conceding to fate, “I suppose you could end with the past.”

  He rolls onto his side, faces her. “That’s what I was thinking,” he says, enthused. “It could really be different. Like suddenly you see his past and you understand the whole book. Almost a touch of, oh, I don’t know, Agatha Christie.”

  “Like Rosebud” she says, startling them both.

  “What do you mean?” He looks at her keenly; they’re brainstorming now.

  She feels a little foolish but goes on. “I don’t know if it applies, really,” she says, “because I don’t remember the movie that well, but wasn’t it at the end of Citizen Kane, when they show you the sled burning, that you see it’s named Rosebud? And that’s how you know the way his past affected him?” She’s sorry she mentioned it.

  He shakes his head. “No,” he says slowly, not wanting to offend her. “I don’t think that’s the same thing. I don’t think this has ever been done before.”

  She turns to look at the couch again. None of them ever think it’s been done before: coming of age during World War II as it’s never been done before, the sexual liberation of a suburban housewife as it’s never been done before, the Book of Revelation …

  “All right,” she says, feeling like a straight man. “What happened in his past that will make us understand the whole book? Why did he become a bigamist?” She realizes she’s talking about him as if he were a real person.

  He lies flat again, looks up at the ceiling. “That’s what I don’t know yet,” he says. “That’s where you have to help me.”

  “I see.” She knows he is going to ask about her father again. Where did he go? What did he do? And, as if she knew all the answers, she smiles slyly. This time she will not get touchy. Maybe she will even tell him, “My mother had theories.” Watch his eyes shine.

  But he merely turns to her, those nice blue eyes, the smooth skin. “Will you help me?” he asks, leaning to kiss her arm, her shoulder, her neck.

  She smiles, puts her hand to his hair. “Of course I’ll help you,” she says slowly, Dorothy to the Tin Man, promising Oz and a heart. But all the while planning her own trip home. “I want to get this book finished too, don’t I?”

  On Tuesday of last week, Ann had come into her office to say, “You should probably get the Career Woman of the Year Award.”

  She looked up from yet another how-to-get-rich-quick manuscript. “Thank you. Why?”

  “Well, the big problem for the working woman is how to combine a life at home and a life in the office. You know, a sex life and a professional life, right?”

  “I guess so.”

  She folded her arms before her. “Well, you’ve managed to do both—beautifully!” She leaned forward, eyes bright. “You’re screwing Tupper Daniels at home, and screwing him again when he comes in here. The perfect solution!” She laughed her laugh and Elizabeth smiled.

  “I’ll have to remember that,” she said.

  After dinner, Elizabeth insists there be a “decent interval” before they return to her apartment and her bed. He tells her she sounds like a reluctant nun, and as they walk toward the river he begins to recite every Catholic joke he knows. They’re terrible jokes (What kind of meat do priests eat on Friday? Nun.), but she laughs at each of them—no hang-ups.

  “That is my heritage you’re talking about,” she says as they reach East End Avenue and he runs out of jokes. “I should be offended.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not your heritage,” he says. “You’re English.”

  “And Irish.”

  He takes her arm, whispers in her ear. “That’s a misfortune we needn’t mention. And besides,” getting louder, “I was under the impression you’d left all that mackerel-snatching stuff behind you.”

  “I have.” She wonders if she’s told him this or he’s only presumed it. Presumed that a modern, sexually liberated young woman such as herself would be without religion. She wonders if the apostate isn’t as easy to pick out as the preacher, and as much a cliché.

  She steers him into the tiny dead-end street that leads to the promenade. “This is what I wanted to show you,” she says. “It looks right over the river.”

  As they climb the steps and begin to stroll along the walk, she mentions all the movies that have been filmed here. He hasn’t seen any of them and it somehow disappoints her, as if the significance of the place was suddenly lost, or there for her alone. Like watching a sunset with an atheist. She thinks of telling him this, but fears the tangle of logic behind it; fears it’s an expression she learned from the nuns.

  They pause to sit on one of the benc
hes. The wind is getting stronger, colder. Without a word, he takes both her hands and puts them under his sweater, puts his hand over them. He pulls her close, until she has to bend her neck awkwardly to watch the tiny white and yellow lights of Roosevelt Island and the bridges.

  “I’m beginning to love New York,” he says. “The excitement, the glamour, the constant pace. Everyone’s just so much more alive here than in the South.” He lifts his hand off hers and points across the river. “Each one of those lights out there could be a person who lives in New York. Their lives glow just like that.”

  She wonders if he’s being poetic and feels a little embarrassed for him. “That’s Queens,” she says, smiling, but he doesn’t hear the contradiction.

  “Look at you,” he goes on. “If you lived in the South, you’d either be married by now with six kids or stuck in some boring job in an insurance office. I mean, I probably know a hundred, two hundred women back home, and not one of them has a job anywhere near as exciting as yours.”

  She sinks down on the bench, where she can only see the river from between the black bars of the railing. One hundred? Two hundred? “Don’t you know any women who live in big cities, like Atlanta?”

  He lets out a breath and she looks up at him. At the dark-blue silhouette of his jaw and nose. How many belles are waiting back home, waiting for this New York excursion to end, for Scott to return to his Zelda?

  “Atlanta’s not the same,” he says, shaking his head. “No other city is the same. I guess you don’t see it, having grown up here.”

  “On Long Island,” she corrects him. But he is silent and she slowly leans her head against him, her ear against his soft sweater. She listens to the sound of his heart beating, thinking vaguely of all the movies that have been filmed here, all the movies that show the silhouette of a couple on a bench in a park, leaning together, looking at a river. She wonders if she is still playing the lover or becoming her.

  He pulls away a little, squinting to see her in the darkness. “That must be weird,” he whispers, “growing up in New York. Having it be your hometown. I don’t think I’d like it. The city’s so big. And it changes so much. I think I’d always wonder.”

  She frowns. “Wonder about what?”

  “About the past, I guess.” He pulls her closer. “If I grew up in the city, and my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents grew up here, I think I’d always wonder, whenever I saw a new building going up or an old one coming down, if it had anything to do with my own past. You know, I’d wonder if this was the place where my grandfather once stood, if this was the same street he walked down when he was young. If this was where my great-grandparents’ house used to be. Things change so quickly, it would be hard to have landmarks. I think I’d always wonder. Do you know what I mean?”

  She shakes her head. He is leading to her father. Or his book. Or both. She has to admire his subtlety. “No,” she says.

  He clicks his tongue. “Well, say every morning when you walk to work, you pass by this high rise on your corner. You don’t think anything of it, it’s just one of many. But what if, where that high rise stands today, there had once been a house where your grandmother was born, or where your great-grandfather died, or was conceived—you may never know. That place would have real significance to your life and yet you’d probably never know.”

  “So?”

  “So, it would always make me wonder. You could have ghosts anywhere.”

  She sits up to look at him, exaggerating the knit in her brows so he can see it in the dim light. “You Southerners do believe in ghosts, don’t you?”

  He laughs a little, pulls her close again. “I guess I’m not making myself very clear,” he says, and she, on her own, puts her hands under his sweater, feels the steady rise and fall of his warm belly. “Try again,” she whispers, leaning against him, giving him something, although, other than attention, she cannot say what it is.

  He waits, breathes deeply. Between the bars, she can see the lights on the water, moving along the currents like bright ribbons. “At home,” he says softly, “in our back garden, there’s an iron bench. I tried to write about it once. It’s worn down and kind of green, but you can see that it used to be pretty ornate. There’s still some scrollwork on it and the feet are four animal claws. I used to pretend it was my house when I was a kid. It’s at an angle to the back of the house, actually facing the sunniest part of the garden, but if you sit in the far left corner and turn a little, so you almost have your feet up, you can look right up into the master bedroom.”

  He pauses as if to consider, and she smiles. She can see him trying to write about it. Childhood memories are as big at Vista as Jesus himself. My daddy’s cabin, my grandpa’s rocker, I remember Mama. Authors relating the bland details of their usual lives—their teddy bears, their backyards, their first loves—like breathless adventurers just out of the uncharted woods.

  “When I was in my third year at Andover, I got called home because my grandfather was dying. It was spring. Still winter in New England, but spring in Tennessee, and, I don’t know, but maybe that’s why as soon as I got home I went out to the garden. And my father was there on the bench, looking up at the master bedroom, as if my grandfather were in there dying, not at the hospital thirty miles away. At first he didn’t say anything, but then he told me, although I’d heard it a hundred times before, that this was where he’d sat the day I was being born, in that same hospital, because it was where his father had sat the day he was born upstairs in that bedroom. He said (and, of course, I knew this too) that until we started going to hospitals for all our entrances and exits, this was where all the men in the Daniels family had sat while their children were up there being born, and where their children—like the little figures in our Swiss clock, he said—had come out to sit while their fathers went in to die.”

  She hears the panting steps of a jogger passing behind them: an odd counterpoint.

  “I thought it was a lovely image, a kind image of death, really,” he goes on, “as if the children were born to relieve their parents’ long vigil, their children born to relieve them. And I suppose what made it so kind was the continuity, the sense of sharing, that the iron bench provided. Each of them sat on that same bench; it was worn with the impressions that each of their bodies had made, and it had stood in that same spot for well over a hundred years.” His voice grows softer, it can get no slower.

  “I guess hospitals have made it into a mere ritual, but I’m romantic enough—maybe Southern enough—to know I’ll be sitting there when my father dies and when my children are born. And I want my child sitting there when I die, even if I am in a hospital thirty miles away.”

  He draws in his breath, seems to hold it.

  Yes, she thinks, ancestors too. Just that morning, she’d spent an hour with a large manuscript called White Roots: One Hundred Years of the Armbrusters of Pinnington, Idaho. It was an awful mess, typed by three or four different machines on a dozen different kinds of paper covered with penned-in notes and corrections. Between the pages there had been hundreds of photographs, each wrapped carefully in pale-pink tissue paper. Some were old, faded, formal portraits of plain, startled men and women with oddly glazed eyes. Others were grainy amateur photos—smudged families in front of large houses, couples in black clothes with gray faces. Still others were newer: men in uniforms hugging women with large flowers in their hair, wedding photos, color photos of families sitting on couches. The last was a studio portrait of a cute little blond girl with her fingers on her chin, wearing a dress printed with dancing poodles—as if one hundred years of the Armbrusters of Pinnington, Idaho, had produced only a vague imitation of a child star.

  Orlee Armbruster, the little girl who had grown up to be the family historian, wanted Vista to contact ABC about making it into a mini-series. She suggested Robert Young or Lorne Greene to play the patriarch. She was available for all talk shows.

  A barge floats swiftly by, small clear lights along its flat deck, a
pudgy tug on its side. He shifts a little on the bench. Wooden bench.

  “All my ghosts are contained in that one object,” he whispers, “that bench. It’s clear and it sums up everything, and there’s nothing in the world that can move me or comfort me or even frighten me the way it can—except, sometimes, the house itself. But here, things change so much, people move around so much, your ancestors could have lived and died in a hundred different places. You could have ghosts anywhere. Do you see what I mean?”

  She shrugs. “People in the country stay put, people in the city move around.” She hears her voice, petulant, contrary. Given a chance, she knows, these people will coat anything with poetry.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know how to make you see.”

  She looks through the bars, out over the water, to the lights of Queens. Those people out there, she could tell him, don’t live and die with the quaint, circular charm of figures in a Swiss clock, despite his daddy’s homey metaphors. They’re random, unattached, with a future that goes only to their retirement in Florida or Maine and a past that ends with Grandma in the spare room. They’re like flash bulbs going off in a large, dark theater. That’s how they glow, she could tell him, like quick, blinding flash bulbs.

  “You’re so Southern,” she says instead, laughing. “All this stuff about ghosts and ancestors and monuments to the not-forgotten dead. Other people don’t think like that.”

  He leans back, watching her. “Well, what do they think about then?” he asks. “What do the Irish think about, for instance?”

  She laughs again. “I don’t know—religion, leprechauns, beer. Not about ghosts.”

  He leans closer to her. His pale skin seems brighter than it should in this darkness. “What do you think leprechauns are? And all those Catholic saints? They’re ghosts.”

  She shakes her head. “But not ancestral ghosts. They’re fictional ghosts, made up.” She smiles at him to keep the conversation from getting too serious. “That’s the difference. The Irish make up their ghosts. I mean, how can you turn homely Uncle Patrick with the big nose and the rotten teeth into any kind of respectable spirit? And who wants to remember him as an ancestor? Better to bury him and then throw a big party where you can get drunk enough to hallucinate someone more appealing—someone who’s not going to burden your imagination with what he was really like.”