The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She was missing something! Always she was missing something, she’d failed to see sufficiently, or to hear. She must begin again.

  Running along the Quarry Road, panting. And into the cemetery on the gravel lane that had become shabby in recent months, pebbles scattered in the grass at the sides of the lane, and weeds emerging. Dandelions everywhere! For the caretaker of the Milburn cemetery was not so fastidious as he’d once been. For the caretaker of the Milburn cemetery was not so courteous and deferential as he’d once been. There was a vehicle or vehicles in the interior of the cemetery. And something was wrong, there was some upset there. And a woman calling to Rebecca, who gave no sign of hearing. Calling Ma? in a voice so absurdly weak, how could Anna Schwart have heard it! Rebecca was inside the house when the explosion erupted. The very air shook, vibrated. She would believe that she had witnessed the shooting, the impact of the buckshot at a distance of approximately six inches from its soft, defenseless target, yet she had not witnessed it, she had only heard it. In fact the explosion was so deafening she had not heard it. Her ears had not the capacity to hear it. Her brain had not the capacity to absorb it. She might have fled in panic as an animal would have fled but she did not. A recklessness born of the stubborn inviolable vanity of the young, that cannot believe that they might die, might have carried her inside the bedroom where virtually in the doorway, for the room was so small, Jacob Schwart was standing blocking Rebecca’s way. She was pleading with him. He was smiling his familiar smile. It was a mocking smile of stained and rotted teeth like a crudely carved jack-o’-lantern smile yet it was (she would see it so, she who was his only daughter and the only child remaining to him now) a mordantly tender smile. A reproachful smile and yet a forgiving smile. You! Born here. They will not hurt you. His words were senseless like so much of what he said and yet she, his daughter, understood. Always she would understand him though she could not have articulated what it was she understood in his despairing and jocular face as, grunting, he managed to turn the shotgun against himself and there came a second explosion far louder than the first, far more massive, obliterating; and something wet, fleshy and sticky flew at her, onto her face, into her hair where it would coagulate and have to be carefully scissored out by a stranger.

  Yet: Rebecca had missed something, again. God damn it all passed so fast, she could not see.

  The crucifixion of Christ, that was a mystery.

  The crucifixion of Christ, she came to detest.

  Listening stony-hearted and unmoved as Reverend Deegan preached his Good Friday sermon. That Rebecca had heard before, and more than once. The man’s bulldog face and whiny, blustering voice. Betrayal of Judas, hypocrisy of the Jews. Pontius Pilate washing his hands of guilt with the excuse What is truth? And afterward at the house she’d wanted to escape yet could not for Miss Lutter must read aloud from the Book of St. John as if Rebecca were not capable of reading for herself. And Miss Lutter shook her head, sighing. Cruelly Rebecca thought It’s for yourself you feel sorry, not for Him. And Rebecca heard herself ask, with childlike logic, “Why did Jesus let them crucify Him, Miss Lutter? He didn’t have to, did He? If He was the Son of God?”

  Warily Rose Lutter glanced up from her Bible, frowning at Rebecca through silver-rimmed bifocals as if, one more time, to Rose Lutter’s disgust, Rebecca had muttered a profanity under her breath.

  “Well, why? I’m just asking, Miss Lutter.”

  Hating the way the older woman was always looking so hurt, lately. When it wasn’t true hurt but anger she felt. A schoolteacher’s anger at her authority being challenged.

  Rebecca persisted, “If Jesus really was God, He could do whatever He wanted. So if He didn’t, how could He be God?”

  It was supreme adolescent logic. It was an unassailable logic, Rebecca thought.

  Rose Lutter gave a moist, pained cry. With dignity the older woman rose, shut up her precious soft-leather Bible, and walked out of the room murmuring, for Rebecca to overhear, “Forgive her, Father. She knows not what she says.”

  I do, though. I know exactly what I say.

  That night Rebecca slept poorly, waking often. Smelling the damned potpourri on her bureau. At last, barefoot and stealthy, she carried it out of her room to hide in a hall closet, beneath the lowest shelf where, to her chagrin, Rose Lutter would discover it only after Rebecca was gone.

  29

  She was free! She would support herself, she would live in downtown Milburn after all. Not at Mrs. Schmidt’s disreputable rooming house but just around the corner on Ferry Street, in a ramshackle brownstone partitioned into a warren of rooms and small apartments. Here, Katy Greb and Katy’s older cousin LaVerne were living, and invited Rebecca to move in with them. Her share of the rent was only a few dollars a week?“Whatever you can afford, Rebecca.” For the first several weeks Rebecca slept on a pile of blankets on the floor, such exhausted sleep it scarcely mattered where she slept! She worked as a waitress, she worked as a merchandise clerk, finally she became a chambermaid at the General Washington Hotel.

  It was Leora Greb, now Rebecca’s friend again, who helped to get her the job at the hotel. “Say you’re eighteen,” Leora advised. “Nobody will know.”

  Rebecca was paid in cash, counted out into the palm of her hand. The hotel would not report her earnings to Internal Revenue, and so she would not be taxed. Nor would the hotel pay into her Social Security fund. “Off the books, eh? Makes things easier.” Amos Hrube, in charge of the cleaning and kitchen staff, winked at Rebecca as if there was a fond joke between them. Before Rebecca could draw back, Hrube pinched her cheek between the second and third fingers of his right hand.

  “Don’t! That hurts.”

  Hrube’s expression was pouting, playful. As an adult might pretend to sympathize with a child who has hurt herself in some silly inconsequential way.

  “Well! Sor-ry.”

  Hrube had an ugly flat face, a mashed-looking mouth. He might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. On a wall behind his desk was a framed photo of a young man in a U.S. Army dress uniform, dark-haired, lean, yet bearing the unmistakable features of the elder Hrube. His office was a windowless cubbyhole at the rear of the hotel. Leora said not to mind Hrube for he tried such behavior with all the female help and some of them liked fooling around, and some did not. “He’s basically good-hearted. He’s done me some favors. He’ll respect you if that’s what you want and if you work hard. See,” Leora said, as if this was good news, “they can’t fire us all.”

  Rebecca laughed. In fact this was good news. Her previous jobs had brought her into an unwanted proximity with men-who-hired. Always they’d been aware of her, eyeing and judging her. They had known who she was, too: the daughter of Jacob Schwart. At the General Washington there were many employees. Chambermaids were mostly invisible. And Leora had promised not to tell Hrube, or anyone, who she was, whose daughter. “Anyway that’s old news in Milburn. Like the war, people start to forget. Most people, anyway.”

  Was this true? Rebecca wanted to think so.

  Always she’d been aware of the General Washington Hotel on a hilly block of Main Street, but until Leora took her there to apply for a job, Rebecca had never entered it. The busy front lobby with its gleaming black tile floor, its leather furnishings and brass fixtures, potted ferns, ornamental chandeliers and mirrors, had to be one of the largest interior spaces Rebecca had ever been in, and certainly the most impressive. She asked Leora what the price of a room for one night was and when Leora told her, Rebecca said, shocked, “So much money just to sleep? And you have nothing to show for it, afterward?”

  Leora laughed at this. She was steering Rebecca through the lobby, toward a door marked employees only at the rear. She said, “Rebecca, people who stay in a hotel like this have money, and people who have money leave tips. And you meet a better class of men?sometimes.”

  She was hired off the books, and in her naiveté she thought this was a very good thing. No taxes!

  She liked
it that there were so many employees at the General Washington. Most of these wore uniforms that indicated their work, and their rank. The most striking uniforms were men’s: head doorman, doorman’s assistants, bellboys. ( Not all the bellboys were “boys”: some were quite mature men.) Managerial staff wore business suits and ties. There were only waiters in the better of the hotel’s two restaurants, and these were elegantly attired. Female staff were switchboard operators, secretaries, waitresses in the lesser of the restaurants and in the boisterous Tap Room; kitchen workers, chambermaids. A small army of chambermaids. The oldest of these was a stout, white-haired woman in her sixties who proudly claimed to have worked at the General Washington since the hotel had opened its doors in 1922. Rebecca was the youngest.

  Chambermaids wore white rayon uniforms with skirts that fell to mid-calf, and short boxy sleeves. The uniform issued to Rebecca was too large in the bust and too tight in the shoulders and beneath the arms and Rebecca hated the slithery sensation of the fabric against her skin; especially she hated the requirement that, as an employee of the General Washington, she must wear stockings at all times.

  God damn she could not, would not. In the humid Chautauqua Valley summer, dragging a vacuum cleaner, mopping floors. It was too much to ask!

  Leora said, “There’s where you want Amos Hrube on your side, hon. He likes you, it makes a difference. He don’t like you, he can be a stickler for the rules. A real sonuvabitch.”

  Just surfaces. I can do this.

  She liked it, pushing her maid’s cart along the corridor. Her cart was stocked with bed linens, towels, cleaning supplies, small fragrant bars of soap. In her dowdy white-rayon costume she was invisible to most hotel guests and she never met their eyes even when some of them (male, invariably) spoke to her.

  “Good morning!”

  “Nice day, eh?”

  “If you want to make up my room now, miss, I can wait.”

  But she never cleaned any room with a guest inside, watching.

  Never remained in any room with a guest, and the door closed.

  It was the solitude of such work she loved. Stripping beds, removing soiled towels from bathrooms, vacuuming carpets she could lapse into a shallow hypnotic dream. An empty hotel room, and no one to observe her. She liked best the moment of unlocking the door and stepping inside. For as a maid she had a passkey to all the guest rooms. She, Rebecca Schwart who was no one. Yet she could pass through the rooms of the General Washington Hotel, invisible.

  One-of-many. “Chambermaids!”

  It was a word she’d never known before. She saw his mouth twisting in derision as he pronounced it.

  Chamber-maid! Cleaning up after swine.

  My daughter.

  But even Jacob Schwart would have been impressed by the guest rooms at the General Washington Hotel. Such tall windows, reaching nearly to the ten-foot ceilings! Brocade draw-drapes, and filmy white curtain panels inside. It was true that, in some of the smaller rooms, the wine-dark carpet was worn in places; yet clearly it was of high quality, made of wool. Gleaming mirrors flashed Rebecca’s lithe white-rayon figure, her face olive-pale, blurred. Very rarely did Rebecca glance at herself in these mirrors for the point of the hotel was anonymity.

  In Miss Lutter’s tidy little house everything had been too personal. Everything had meant too much. In the General Washington, nothing was personal and nothing meant anything except what you saw. Except for the top, seventh-floor suites (which Rebecca had never seen) rooms were identically furnished. There were identical bedspreads, lampshades, sheets of stationery and memo pads gilt-embossed with the hotel’s name on identical desks. Even, on the walls, identical reproductions of nineteenth-century paintings depicting scenes on the Erie Barge Canal in the late 1800s.

  Maybe, in the identical beds, there were identical dreams?

  No one would know. For no one would wish to acknowledge, his dreams were identical with the dreams of others.

  Here was the solace of the impersonal! Guests checked into the hotel, and guests checked out. Rooms were occupied, then abruptly vacated. Very often Rebecca didn’t even glimpse these strangers. Passing them in the corridor, she lowered her eyes. She knew never to unlock any door without rapping sharply on it and identifying herself, even when she was certain the room was empty. Most of the guests at the General Washington were men, businessmen traveling by car or train; weekends there were likely to be more women, and couples. It was the custom for these strangers to leave tips for the chambermaid, on a bureau, but Rebecca soon learned not to expect anything. She might discover as much as two dollars, she might discover a few nickels and dimes. And sometimes nothing. Men were likely to tip, Leora said, except if there was a wife along, sometimes the wife pocketed the tip without the man knowing.

  (And how did Leora know this? Rebecca wondered.)

  Older men tended to tip more generously than younger. And if you’d exchanged a few words with a guest, if you’d smiled at him, almost certainly he would leave a tip.

  Katy and LaVerne teased Leora about certain “hotel friends” of hers who traveled frequently through Milburn.

  Leora said, with an angry laugh, “They’re gentlemen, at least. Not like some bastards.”

  It was no secret that the Tap Room bartender was a friend of Leora’s who’d introduced her to some of these “hotel friends” over the years.

  He had approached Rebecca, too. But Rebecca had told him no.

  Not even for a fifty-dollar tip, honey?

  No, no!

  (In fact, Rebecca didn’t allow herself to think whether a fifty-dollar tip was a possibility, or one of Mulingar’s jokes. For her six-day, eight-hour workweek she was paid precisely forty-eight dollars, counted out into her hand by a smirking Amos Hrube.)

  Rebecca felt revulsion, at the thought of being touched by a stranger. The prospect of sex-for-money was not one she wanted to think about since she knew (but had to pretend not to know) that both Katy and LaVerne sometimes took money from their “dates,” as well as Leora. As Katy said with a shrug It’s just something that happens it ain’t like it’s planned.

  It was so, such encounters seemed to be unplanned. If you were a girl, young and seemingly alone and unprotected. A man would return to his hotel room claiming to have forgotten something, while Rebecca was making up the room. A man would glance up smiling at her in the corridor as if he hadn’t seen her until that moment and begin speaking with her with an air of nerved-up intimacy and Rebecca would smile politely and continue pushing her maid’s cart along the corridor shaking her head as if uncomprehending and except if a man was very drunk or very aggressive he would not follow.

  “All right, honey. Have it your way.”

  Or, weirdly echoing Amos Hrube: “Eh! Sor-ree.”

  No predicting how Rebecca might be tipped after such an encounter. She might be left a few pennies scattered among soiled bedsheets, or a five-dollar bill folded on the dresser. She might be left a ravaged room. A filthy bathroom, an unflushed toilet.

  Even so, Rebecca understood that it was nothing personal. It did not mean anything.

  Even when there’d been no encounter, when she had not glimpsed a hotel guest, nor he her, Rebecca was sometimes wakened from her chambermaid trance by a room left in a disgusting state. As soon as you entered, you knew: a smell. Spilled whiskey, beer. Spilled food. Sex-smells, toilet smells. Unmistakable.

  There were bedclothes dragged onto the floor as if in a drunken frolic. There were stained sheets, cigarette-scorched blankets, pillowcases soaked through with hair oil. Stained carpets, brocade drapes ripped from their fastenings and lying in heaps on the floor. Bathtubs ringed in filth, pubic hair in drains. (Each drain in each guest bathroom had to be clean. Not just clean but what Amos Hrube called sparkly-clean. Hrube was known to spot-check the rooms.) The worst was a filthy toilet, urine and even excrement splattered onto the floor.

  Yet in this too there was the perverse satisfaction. I can do this, I’m strong enough. All chamberma
ids had such experiences, eventually. To be a housewife and a mother would not be so very different.

  As the hotel room was cleaned, as Rebecca mopped, scrubbed, scoured, vacuumed, re-made the bed, restored order to what had been so ugly, she began to feel elated. As the harsh odor of cleanser replaced other odors in the bathroom and the mirror and white porcelain sink brightened, so her spirits revived.

  How easy this is! Surfaces.

  She would live like this, unthinking. From day to day she would drift. Her mother’s mistake had been to marry, to have babies. From that mistake all the rest had followed.

  Wanting to exhaust herself so that, at night, she could sink into sleep without dreaming. Or, if she dreamt, without memory. Damned lucky and you know it! You, born here! Some days making her way like a sleepwalker scarcely aware of her surroundings in the high-ceilinged corridors of the General Washington Hotel into which, in life, Jacob Schwart had never once stepped.

  “A chambermaid, Pa. That’s what I am.”

  It was her revenge upon him, was it? Or her revenge upon her mother?

  She’d left Rose Lutter abruptly, she felt guilt for her behavior. One night when the house was darkened she slipped away, furtive and cowardly. It was a few days after Easter. Never would she have to hear one of Reverend Deegan’s sermons again. Never again, see Miss Lutter’s look of hurt and reproach cast sidelong at her like a fishhook. She had made secret plans with Katy and LaVerne, who’d invited her to stay with them and so while Miss Lutter slept Rebecca made up her bed neatly for the final time and left, on her pillow, a brief note.