The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Until this moment Rebecca hadn’t known what she believed. She hadn’t wanted to be suspicious of Tignor, she hadn’t wanted to think about it. Eighty-four dollars! And this money, too, off the books. Now it seemed probable, Tignor had played a trick on her. She was so stupidly naive. He had paid Rebecca Schwart for being a whore and he’d done it so deftly, in his way of shuffling and dealing cards, you could argue that Rebecca Schwart had not been a whore.

  Tignor was protesting, “What the hell are you saying, you? I made it up? He�what’s-his-name�‘Herschel’�did give me that money, for you. Your own brother, that loves you, for Christ’s sake you should be grateful.”

  Rebecca pressed her hands over her ears. Now it seemed so clear to her, and everyone must have known.

  “Look, you took the money, didn’t you? I didn’t see you leaving it behind on the floor, baby.”

  Baby Tignor uttered in a voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “Yes, I took it. I did.”

  She had not wanted to question the money, at the time. Within a few days she’d spent it. She’d bought food for lavish meals, for her roommates and herself. She’d bought nice things for the living room. She had never been able to contribute as much to the apartment as Katy and LaVerne, always she’d felt guilty.

  Now she saw, the others must have guessed who the money was really from. She had told them Herschel but surely they were thinking Tignor. Katy had told her, taking money for sex was only just something that happened, sometimes.

  Tignor’s eyes glistened meanly. “And you took the ring, R’becca. You’re wearing the ring, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll give it back! I don’t want it.”

  Rebecca tried to remove the ring from her finger but Tignor was too quick for her. He clamped his hand over her hand, hard against the tabletop. He was furious, that she should draw attention to them, he was exposed, humiliated. Rebecca whimpered with pain, she worried he would crush the bones of her hand, that were so much smaller than his own. She saw by the flushed glistening look in the man’s face that he would have liked to murder her.

  “We’re leaving. Take your coat. Fuck, you won’t take it, I will.” Tignor grabbed Rebecca’s coat, and his jacket, without releasing her hand. He dragged her from the booth. She stumbled, she nearly fell. People were watching them, but no one would intervene. In Sandusky’s, no one would wish to challenge Niles Tignor.

  Yet in the Studebaker, in the tavern parking lot, the struggle continued. As soon as Tignor released Rebecca’s hand, a flame of madness came over her, she tugged at the ring. She would not wear it a moment longer! And so Tignor slapped her, with the back of his hand, and threatened to do worse. “I hate you. I don’t love you. I never did. I think you are an animal, disgusting.” Rebecca spoke quietly, almost calmly. She cringed against the passenger’s door, her eyes glaring out of the darkness reflecting neon lights like the eyes of a feral cat. Clumsily she was kicking at him. She drew back both her knees to her chest, and kicked him. Tignor was so taken by surprise, he could not protect himself. He cursed her, and punched her. His aim was off, the steering wheel was in his way. Rebecca clawed at his face and would have raked his cheeks if she had been able to reach him. She was so reckless, fighting a man with the strength to break her face in a single blow, Tignor marveled at her. Almost, he had to laugh at her�“Jesus, girl!” She caught him with a flailing blow, bloodying his lip. Tignor wiped his mouth discovering blood. Now he did laugh, the girl was so brazen not seeming to know what he might do to her, in her need to hurt him.

  She had not forgiven him, for not calling her. Those weeks. That was the crux of it, Tignor understood.

  Somehow, Tignor managed to start the car motor. He kept Rebecca at arm’s length. Blood ran down his chin in tusk-like rivulets, his suede sheepskin jacket would be ruined. He backed the Studebaker around, and managed to drive nearly to the road, before Rebecca attacked again. This time, he grabbed her by her thick long hair, shut his fist in her hair and slammed her against the passenger’s door so hard, her head against the window, she must have lost consciousness for a moment. He hoped to hell he had not cracked the window. By this time, men had followed them out into the parking lot, to see what was happening. Yet even now, no one would intervene. Sandusky himself who was Tignor’s friend had hurried outside, bareheaded in the freezing air, but damn if Sandusky would intervene. This was between Tignor and the girl. You had to suppose there was a purpose to whatever Tignor had to do in such circumstances, and justice.

  Rebecca was weakened now, sobbing quietly. That last blow had calmed her, Tignor was able to drive back into Milburn, and to Ferry Street. He would have helped Rebecca out of his car except as he braked at the curb she had the door open, she shrank from him to run away, stumbling up the brownstone steps and into the house. Tignor, panting, gunned the motor, and drove away. He was bleeding not only from the mouth but from a single vertical cut on his right cheek, where Rebecca’s nails had caught him. “Bitch. Fucking bitch.” Yet he was so flooded with adrenaline, he felt little pain. He guessed that the girl was looking pretty beat-up, too. He hoped he had not broken any of her bones. Probably he’d blackened an eye, maybe both eyes. He hoped to hell nobody called the police. In the parking lot behind the hotel he switched on the overhead light in the Studebaker and saw, as he knew he would see, on the front seat, tossed down in contempt of him, the little opal ring.

  The girl’s coat lay trampled on the floor.

  “It’s over, then. Good!”

  35

  Next morning, Rebecca’s face was so bruised and swollen, and she walked so stiffly, Katy insisted on calling Amos Hrube to tell him she was sick and couldn’t work that day.

  LaVerne said hotly, “We should call the police! That fucker.”

  Katy said, less certainly, “Should we take you to a doctor, Rebecca? You look like hell.”

  Rebecca was sitting at the kitchen table pressing ice chunks, wrapped in a washcloth, against her face. Her left eye had shut, enlarged and discolored as a goiter. Her mouth was swollen to twice its size. A hand mirror lay on the table, facedown.

  Rebecca thanked Katy and LaVerne and told them she was all right: it would be all right.

  LaVerne said, “What if he comes back to hurt you worse? That’s what guys do, they don’t kill you the first time.”

  Rebecca said no, Tignor would not be back.

  LaVerne lifted the telephone from the kitchen counter, and set it onto the table beside Rebecca. “In case you need to call the police.”

  Katy and LaVerne left for their jobs. Rebecca was alone in the apartment when Tignor arrived later that morning. She had heard a vehicle brake to a stop at the curb outside, and she’d heard a car door slammed shut with jarring loudness. She was feeling too light-headed to go to the window to look out.

  The girls’ second-floor apartment was only three rooms. There was but a single door, opening out onto the stairway landing. Rebecca heard Tignor’s heavy footsteps ascending, and then he was rapping his knuckles on the door. “Rebecca?”

  Rebecca sat very still, listening. She’d locked the door after Katy and LaVerne had left but the lock was flimsy, Tignor could kick open the door if he wished.

  “Rebecca? Are you in there? Open up, it’s Tignor.”

  As if the bastard needed to identify himself! Rebecca would have laughed except for the pain in her mouth.

  Tignor’s voice sounded sober, raw and aggrieved. She had never heard her name uttered with such yearning. She saw the doorknob being turned, frantically.

  “Go to hell, you! I don’t want you.”

  “Rebecca? Let me in. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I have something to tell you.”

  “No. Go away.”

  But Tignor would not go away. Rebecca knew he would not.

  And yet: she could not bring herself to call the police. She knew she must, but she could not. For if the police tried to arrest Tignor, he would fight them, and they would hurt him, badly. As in a dream she had alread
y seen her lover shot in the chest, on his knees bleeding from a chest wound onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen…

  Rebecca shook her vision clear. It had not happened, it had been only a dream. A dream of Jacob Schwart’s, when the Gestapo had hunted him down in the stone house in the cemetery.

  To protect Tignor, Rebecca had no choice but to unlock the door.

  “Hey, girl: you’re my girl, eh?”

  Tignor came inside at once, elated. Rebecca smiled to see that his face, too, had been marked: his upper lip swollen, with an ugly moist scab. In his right cheek was a jagged vertical scratch from her raking nails.

  Tignor stared at her: the evidence of his hands on her.

  A slow pained smile, almost a look of shyness, that Rebecca bore such visible signs of what he’d done to her. “Pack your things, we’re going on a trip.”

  Taken by surprise, Rebecca laughed. “‘Trip’? Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Tignor reached for her, Rebecca eluded him. She wanted to strike at him again, to slap his hands away. “You’re crazy, I’m not going anywhere with you. I have a job, damn you you know I have to work, this afternoon�”

  “That’s over. You’re not going back to the hotel.”

  “What? Why?” Rebecca heard herself laugh, now frightened.

  “Just get your things, Rebecca. We’re leaving Milburn.”

  “Why the hell d’you think I’d go anywhere with you?�damn bastard like you, a man hitting a girl, treating me with such disrespect�”

  Calmly Tignor said, “That won’t happen again, Rebecca.”

  There was a roaring in her ears. Her brain had gone blank, like overexposed film. Tignor was stroking her hair, that was coarse, matted. “C’mon, honey. We got to hurry, we got a little drive ahead�to Niagara Falls.”

  On the kitchen table beside the squat black rotary telephone Rebecca left the hastily printed note for Katy Greb and LaVerne Tracy to discover that evening:

  Dear Katy, and dear LaVerne�Goodbye I am gone to get married.

  Rebecca

  36

  Mrs. Niles Tignor.

  Each time she signed her new name, it seemed to her that her handwriting was altered.

  “There’s enemies of mine out there, honey, they’d never approach me. But a wife, she’d be different.”

  Tignor, frowning, made this pronouncement on the night of March 19,

  1954, as they drank champagne in the honeymoon suite of the luxurious Hotel Niagara Falls that overlooked, through scrims of drifting mist, the fabled Horseshoe Falls. The suite was on the eighth floor of the hotel, Tignor had booked it for three nights. Rebecca shivered, but made herself laugh knowing that Tignor needed her to laugh, he’d been brooding much of the day. She came to sit on his lap, and kissed him. She was shivering, he would comfort her. In her new lace-trimmed silk dressing gown that was unlike any item of clothing Rebecca had ever seen let alone worn. Tignor grunted with satisfaction, and began to stroke her hips and thighs with hard, caressing motions of his strong hands. He liked her naked inside the dressing gown, her breasts loose, heavy as if milk-filled against his mouth. He liked to prod, to poke, to tease. He liked her to squeal when he tickled her. He liked to jam his tongue into her mouth, into her ear, into her tight little belly button, into her hot damp armpit that had never been shaved.

  Rebecca did not ask what Tignor meant by his enigmatic words, for she supposed he would explain, if he meant to explain; if not, not. She had been Niles Tignor’s wife for less than twelve hours, but already she understood.

  Clamped between his knees as he drove, a pint bottle of bourbon. The drive from Milburn north and east to Niagara Falls was approximately ninety miles. This landscape, layered with snow like rock strata, passed by Rebecca in a blur. When Tignor lifted the bottle to Rebecca, to drink from it, as you’d prod a child to drink from a bottle by nudging her mouth, he did not like her to hesitate, and so she swallowed the smallest sips she dared. Thinking Never say no to this man. The thought was comforting, as if a mystery had been explained.

  “Tignor, my man! She’s of age, eh?”

  “She is.”

  “Birth certificate?”

  “Lost in a fire.”

  “She’s sixteen, at least?”

  “Eighteen in May. She says.”

  “And ain’t been c’erced, has she? Looks like both of you been in a car crash’r somethin.”

  C’erced Rebecca heard as cursed. No idea what this squat bald man with tufted eyebrows, said by Tignor to be a trusted acquaintance, and a justice of the peace who could marry them, was speaking of.

  Tignor responded with dignity: nobody was being c’erced. Not the girl, and not him.

  “Well! See what we can do, man.”

  Strange that the office of a justice of the peace was in a private house, small brick bungalow on a residential street, Niagara Falls nowhere near the Falls. And that his wife�“Mrs. Mack”�would be the sole witness to the wedding.

  Tignor steadied her, she’d had to be helped into the house for bourbon on an empty stomach had made her legs weak as melted licorice. The vision in her left eye, that was what’s known as a shiner, was gauzy. Her swollen mouth throbbed not with ordinary pain but with a wild hunger to be kissed.

  It was a “civil” ceremony she was told. It was very brief, requiring less than five minutes. It passed in a blur like turning the dial on a radio, the stations fade in and out.

  “Do you, Rebecca…”

  (As Rebecca began to cough, then to hiccup. So ashamed!)

  “…your awfully, I mean lawfully wedding husband…”

  (As Rebecca lapsed into a fit of giggles, in panic.)

  “Say ‘I do,’ my dear. Do you?”

  “Y-Yes. I do.”

  “And do you, Niles Tignor�”

  “Hell yes.”

  In a mock-severe voice intoning: “By the authority vested in me by the State of New York and the County of Niagara on this nineteenth teenth day of March 1954 I hereby pronounce you…”

  Somewhere outside, at a distance a siren passed. An emergency vehicle. Rebecca smiled, danger was far away.

  “Bridegroom, you may kiss the bride. Take care!”

  But Tignor only closed his arms around Rebecca, as if to shield her with his body. She felt his fist-sized heart beating against her warm, bruised face. She would have closed her arms around him, but he held her fixed, fast. His arms were heavy with fleshy muscle, his sport coat was scratchy against her skin. Her thoughts came to her in slow floating balloons Now I am married, I will be a wife.

  There was someone she wanted to tell: she had not seen in a long time.

  “Mrs. Mack” had documents to be signed, and a two-pound box of Fanny Farmer chocolates. This woman, squat like her husband, with thin-penciled eyebrows and a fluttery manner, had forms for Tignor and Rebecca to sign, and a Certificate of Marriage to take away with them. Tignor was impatient, signing his name in a scrawl that might have been N. Tignor if you peered closely. Rebecca had trouble holding the pen in her fingers, hadn’t realized that all the fingers of both her hands were slightly swollen, and her concentration faded in and out of focus, so Tignor had to guide her hand: Rebecca Schard.

  “Mrs. Mack” thanked them. She wrested the box of chocolates out of her husband’s hands (the box had been opened, Mr. Mack was helping himself and chewing vigorously), and handed it over to Tignor like a prize.

  “These’re included in the price, see? You get to take ’em with you on your honeymoon.”

  “My mother was always warning me, something bad would happen to me. But nothing ever did happen. And now I’m married.”

  Rebecca smiled so happily with her banged-up mouth, Tignor laughed, and gave her a big wet smacking kiss in full view of whoever, in the lobby of the Hotel Niagara Falls, might be watching.

  “Me too, R’becca.”

  Never at the General Washington Hotel had Rebecca seen any room like the honeymoon suite at the Hotel Niaga
ra Falls. Two good-sized rooms: bedroom with canopied bed, sitting room with velvet sofa, chairs, a Motorola floor-model television set, silver ice bucket and tray, crystal glasses. Here too Tignor playfully carried his bride over the threshold, fell with her onto the bed tugging at her clothes, gripping her squirmy body in his arms like a wrestler, and Rebecca shut her eyes to stop the ceiling from spinning, the bed-canopy overhead, Oh! oh! oh! gripping Tignor’s shoulders with the desperation of one gripping the edge of a parapet, as Tignor fumbled to open his trousers, fumbled to push himself into her more tentatively at first than he’d done in Beardstown, in a muffled choked voice murmuring what might have been Rebecca’s name; and Rebecca shut her eyes tighter for her thoughts were scattering like panicked birds before the wrath of hunters as their explosive shots filled the air and the birds fled skyward for their lives and she was seeing again her father’s face realizing for the first time it was a skin-mask, a mask-of-skin and not a face, she saw his mad eyes that were her own, saw his tremulous hands and for the first time too it came to her I must take it from him, that’s what he wants of me, he has called me to him for this, to take his death from him. Yet she did not. She was paralyzed, she could not move. She watched as he managed to maneuver the bulky shotgun around in that tight space, to aim at himself, and pull the trigger.

  Tignor groaned, as if struck by a mallet.

  “Oh, baby…”

  It was her privilege to kiss him, as his wife.

  The heavily sleeping man as oblivious of Rebecca kissing his sweaty face at his hairline as he was of the single forlorn fly buzzing trapped in the silken canopy of the bed, overhead.

  In the night she found it, that she had not known she’d been looking for: in a “secret” compartment of Tignor’s suitcase, in the bathroom that was also a dressing room.

  During the day, when they left the hotel, Tignor kept his suitcase locked. But not at night.