The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She laughed, thinking of the man’s rage.

  “He would kill me now, would he? But I’m out of his reach.”

  She smiled. She touched the scabs at her hairline, that were nearly painless now. She would not speak of Tignor to the child nor would she ever again tolerate the child whimpering and whining after Dad-dy.

  “There is Mommy now. Mommy will be all to you, now.”

  “But Dad-dy�”

  “No. There is no Dad-dy. No more. Only just Mommy.”

  She laughed, she kissed the anxious child. She would kiss away his fears. Seeing that she laughed, he would laugh, in childish imitation. Wishing to please Mommy and to be kissed by Mommy, he would quickly learn.

  Never again would she utter aloud the name of the man who had masqueraded as her husband! He had tricked her into believing that they were married, in Niagara Falls. It had been her stupidity that tricked her, she would think no more of it. The man was dead now, his name erased from memory.

  The child’s name, that was the father’s. A diminutive of the father’s. A curious name, that made others smile quizzically. She would never call him by that name again. She must re-name the child, that the break with the father would be complete.

  Leaving Chautauqua Falls she’d driven the stolen Pontiac on back roads north and east through the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains and into and past the rolling farmland of the Finger Lakes region and at last into the Mohawk Valley where the river moved swift and sullen and steel-colored beneath shifting columns of mist. She had not dared to stop anywhere she and the child might be recognized and so she pushed on, pain-wracked and exhausted. In a shallow rocky stream beside one of the roads she washed the child and herself, tried to clean their wounds. She kissed the child repeatedly, overcome with gratitude that he hadn’t been seriously injured; at least, she didn’t believe he had been seriously injured. His small supple bones appeared to be intact, his skull that had seemed so delicate to his anxious mother, the eggshell-skull of infancy, was in fact tough and resilient and had not been cracked by the raging man.

  Grateful too that the child couldn’t see his own swollen and blackened eyes, his distended scabby upper lip, his blood-edged nostrils. And that the child was so impressionable, he would take his emotional cues from her: “We got away! We got away! Nobody will ever find us, we got away!”

  Strange how happy Rebecca was becoming, as the Poor Farm Road swiftly receded into the past.

  Strange how jubilant she felt, despite her swollen face and aches in all her bones.

  Leaning over to kiss and hug the child. Blow in his ear and whisper nonsense to make him laugh.

  In cornfields they hid from the road and relieved themselves like animals. Afterward running and hiding from each other, shrieking with laughter.

  “Mom-my! Mom-my where are you!”

  Rebecca came up behind him, closed her arms about him in a swoon of happiness, possessiveness. She had saved her son, and she had saved herself. She would see that her life, though mauled and shaken as if in the jaws of a great beast, was blessed.

  The child’s true name came to her then: “‘Zacharias.’ A name from the Bible.”

  She was so very happy. She was inspired. She would abandon the stolen car in Rome, an aging city beyond Oneida Lake of about half the size of Chautauqua Falls. This was a city that meant nothing to her except the man who’d masqueraded as her husband had business dealings there, he’d spoken of Rome often. She would leave the car there to confound him, as a riddle.

  Parked the car, gas tank near-empty, near the Greyhound bus station. He will reason that we are traveling east. He will never find us.

  She reversed the course of their flight. At the Greyhound station she bought two adult tickets to Port Oriskany, 250 miles back west.

  Adult tickets in case the ticket seller was queried about a fleeing mother and her child.

  Neither she nor the child had ever ridden on a bus before. The Greyhound was massive! The experience was exhilarating, an adventure. Nothing to do on a bus but stare out the window at the landscape: rapidly passing in the foreground beside the highway, slowly passing at the horizon. Though she was very tired and her bones ached yet she found herself smiling. The child lay sleeping beside her, snug and warm. She stroked his silky hair, she pressed her cool fingers against his swollen face.

  Will you take my card at least.

  If you should wish to contact me.

  Accept from me your legacy. Hazel Jones.

  “‘Dr. Hendricks’ is the name. ‘Byron Hendricks, M.D.’”

  The uniformed man, very dark skinned, with a narrow mustache and heavy-lidded eyes, regarded her with surprise.

  “Fourth floor, ma’am. Except I don’t b’lieve he is there.”

  Rebecca had not thought of this possibility. It had seemed to her since that evening on the canal towpath that the man in the panama hat had so sought her, of course he was awaiting her.

  Rebecca stared at the wall directory. Wigner Professional Building. There was HENDRICKS, B.K. SUITE 414.

  The child Zacharias was prowling about the ornate, high-ceilinged foyer of the Wigner Building, inquisitive and restless. Newly named, in this new city Port Oriskany beside an enormous slate-blue lake, he seemed subtly altered, no longer shy but frankly curious, staring rudely at well-dressed strangers as they pushed through the revolving doors entering from busy Owego Avenue. Until now he’d been a country boy, the only adults he’d seen had dressed and behaved very differently than these adults.

  When he wasn’t staring at strangers rushing past him he was stooping to examine the polished ebony marble beneath his feet, so unlike any floor he’d ever walked on.

  A dark mirror! Inside which, beneath his feet, the ghostly reflection of a boy whose face he could not see moved jerkily.

  “Zack, come here with Mommy. We’re going up in an elevator.”

  He laughed, the name Zack was so strange to him, like an unexpected pinch you didn’t know was meant to be playful or hurtful.

  Zacharias meant blessed, his mother had told him. Already he was going for his first elevator ride. Though he still limped from what the drunken man had done to him, and his small pale face looked as if it had been used as a punching bag, he knew he was entering a world of unpredictable surprises, adventures.

  The uniformed man had entered the elevator and taken his position at the controls. He said, “Ma’am, I can take you to Dr. Hendricks’s office. But like I say, I don’t b’lieve he is there. I ain’t seen any of ’em for some time.”

  It was as if Rebecca hadn’t heard this. In the elevator she gripped the child’s small-boned hand. A hot dry hand. She hoped that he wasn’t feverish, she had no time for such foolishness now. In Port Oriskany, about to see Byron Hendricks! He’d expressed surprise that Hazel Jones was married, what would he think that Hazel Jones had a child? Rebecca was feeling uncertain, confused. Maybe this was a mistake.

  Her lips moved. She might have been talking to herself.

  “Dr. Hendricks has to be there. He gave me his card only a few days ago. He’s expecting me, I think.”

  “Ma’am, you want I should wait for you? Case you comin’ right back down?”

  The uniformed man loomed over her. She had to wonder if he was teasing her, that she might become shaken, tearful; and he might comfort her. Yet he appeared to be sincere. He was wearing white gloves to operate the elevator. She smelled his hair pomade. She had never been in such proximity to a Negro man before, and she had never been in a position of needing help from a Negro man before. At the General Washington Hotel the “Negro help” had mostly kept to themselves.

  “No. That isn’t necessary. Thank you.”

  The uniformed man stopped the elevator at the fourth floor and opened the door with a flourish. Quickly Rebecca stepped out into the corridor, pulling the child with her.

  He is thinking I want Dr. Hendricks to examine my son. That’s what he is thinking.

  “He down there, tha
t dir’ection. You want for me to wait, ma’am?”

  “No! I told you.”

  Annoyed, Rebecca walked away without glancing back. The elevator doors clattered shut behind her.

  Zack was fretting he didn’t want any old doctor, he did not.

  Suite 414 was at the farther end of the medicinal-smelling corridor. On a door whose upper half was set with a sheet of frosted glass had been hand-lettered BYRON K. HENDRICKS, M.D. PLEASE ENTER. But the interior appeared to be darkened, the door was locked. There was a begrimed and derelict air to this end of the corridor.

  Desperate, Rebecca knocked on the frosted glass.

  She could not think what to do. In her fevered but vague fantasies of seeking out Byron Hendricks, anticipating that moment when the man’s eyes perceived her, when he smiled in delight in recognition of Hazel Jones, she had not anticipated him not being where he had promised he would be.

  Zack was fretting he didn’t like the smell in this place, he did not.

  Well, Rebecca had money. She had several hundred dollars in bills of varying denominations. She would not have to find work for a while, if she was careful with the money. She would find an inexpensive hotel in Port Oriskany, she and Zack would stay the night. They were badly in need of rest. They would bathe, they would sleep in a bed with clean, crisp sheets. They would lock themselves in a room in a hotel populated by strangers, they would be utterly safe. For three nights in succession they had slept in the Pontiac, parked beside a country road, shivering with cold. The bus trip from Rome had been five long hours.

  “In the morning. I can telephone him. Make an appointment.”

  Zack saw his mother was becoming anxious. Coming to nudge himself against her thighs murmuring Mom-my? in his plaintive child’s voice.

  She was thinking it had been unwise to come directly to Dr. Hendricks’s office from the bus station. She should have telephoned to see if the doctor was in. She could look up his telephone number in a directory. It was what people did, normal people. She must learn from normal people.

  Another time, Rebecca turned the knob of the locked door. Why wasn’t Hendricks here!

  When he saw her, he would know her. She believed this. Whatever would happen next would happen without her volition. He had summoned her to him, he’d begged her. No one had ever begged her in such a way. No one had ever looked into her heart in such a way.

  The man in the panama hat. He’d followed her from town, he had known her. He had altered the course of her life. She’d been a deluded young woman living with a man not her husband. A violent man, a criminal. She would not have had the courage to leave this man if she had not met Hendricks on the canal towpath.

  Very possibly, she would not have aroused the jealousy of the man who’d masqueraded as her husband, if Hendricks had not approached her on the canal towpath.

  “You see, you have changed my life! Now I’m here in Port Oriskany, and this is my son Zacharias…”

  She would not lie to him. She would not claim to be Hazel Jones.

  Though she could not absolutely deny it, either. For there was the possibility that she’d been adopted. Hadn’t Herschel suggested this, they’d found her, an infant, newly born on a ship in New York Harbor…“My parents are gone, Dr. Hendricks. I will never be able to ask them. But I never felt that I was theirs.” In her exhausted and deranged state this seemed to her more than theoretically possible.

  The child frowned up at her. Why was Mommy talking to herself? And smiling, biting at her scabby lip.

  “Mommy? C’n we go now? It smells bad here.”

  She turned, numbly. She groped for the child’s hand. She was thinking hard and yet no thoughts came to her. In the wan reflective surfaces of frosted-glass doors they were passing her face was obscured and only her thick straggling hair was sharply defined. She looked like a drowned person.

  One of the frosted-glass doors opened. The sickly medicinal smell was intensified. An individual was leaving suite 420, occupied by Hiram Tanner, D.D.S. On an impulse Rebecca entered the waiting room. Did D.D.S. mean dentist? A woman receptionist frowned at her from behind a desk. “Yes? Can I help you, miss?”

  “I’m looking for Dr. Hendricks in suite four-fourteen. But the office seems to be closed.”

  The receptionist’s crayon-eyebrows lifted in exaggerated surprise.

  “Why, haven’t you heard? Dr. Hendricks died last summer.”

  “Died! But…”

  “All his patients were notified, I thought. Were you one of his patients?”

  “No. I mean…yes, I was.”

  “His office hasn’t been vacated yet, there’s some problem. It was left in pretty bad shape and has to be cleaned.”

  The receptionist, middle-aged, tidily dressed, was looking from Rebecca to the child nudging against her thigh. She was staring at their battered faces.

  “There’s other doctors you could see in the building. Down on floor two there’s�”

  “No! I need to see Dr. Hendricks. It’s the son I mean, not the father.”

  The receptionist said, “There hasn’t been anybody around that office since last summer, that I’ve seen. People say somebody comes in after hours. There’s things get moved around, there’s debris in boxes for the janitor to take away. I used to see the son, but not recently. It was a stroke that killed Dr. Hendricks, they said. He had a lot of patients but they were getting old, too. I never heard the son was a doctor.”

  Rebecca protested, “But he is! ‘Byron Hendricks, M.D.’ I’ve seen his card. I was supposed to make an appointment…”

  “A man about forty, is he? Nervous, like? With a kind of strange way about him, and eyes? Always dressed kind of different, wearing a hat? In cold weather it was a fedora, other times it was a straw hat. He wa’n’t never any M.D. that I ever heard of but I could be wrong. He might’ve gone to medical school but wasn’t practicing, there’s some like that.”

  Rebecca stared at the woman, as Zack nudged and twisted impatiently against her legs. Seeing Rebecca’s shock, the woman laid her hand on her bosom: “See, miss, I don’t feel comfortable passing on rumors. Dr. Tanner was one to say hello to the old man, and they’d chat for a few minutes, but Dr. Tanner didn’t know them, either of them, real well.”

  Rebecca said, confused, “Can you be a doctor and not ‘practice’? But…” Seeing in the woman’s eyes a measure of pity, yet of satisfaction. She thought she had better get accustomed to it.

  She thanked the receptionist, pulled Zack with her out of the office and shut the door behind her.

  Out in the corridor Zack wrenched out of her grasp and ran limping ahead of her, flailing his arms foolishly and making a whistling-gagging noise as if he couldn’t breathe the stale air. He was becoming unruly, obstinate. He had never behaved this way in any public place in the past.

  Rebecca half sobbed, “Zack! Damn you get back here.”

  He was about to punch the elevator button down. Rebecca was surprised he knew to do such a thing, at his age. She slapped his hand away. She didn’t want to summon the elevator operator, the uniformed Negro with the neat narrow mustache and playful-brooding eyes, knowing how he would look at her with pity, too.

  “We’ll take the stairs, honey. Stairs are safer.”

  A windowless stairway three steep flights down, to a heavy door marked exit on a back street.

  The ringing in her ear was louder, distracting. Almost, she thought there were nocturnal insects somewhere near.

  Thinking Hendricks wanted you to believe him, trust him. On the towpath. At that time. He had no thought that you would ever try to find him here.

  “Just the two of us. One night. My son and me.”

  They would spend the night in a walk-up hotel in a brownstone, a few blocks from Owego Avenue. Rebecca checked several rooms before taking one: examined sheets and pillowcases, lifted a corner of the mattress from the box springs to check for bedbugs, lice. The desk clerk was amused by her, eyeing her long straggly hair and bruised fac
e. “You want the Statler, honey, you’re in the wrong place.”

  The double bed took up most of the space in the room between stained-wallpaper walls and a melancholy window looking out into an air shaft. There was no bath, the toilet was in the hall.

  Rebecca laughed, wiping at her eyes.

  “Five-fifty a night. This is the right place.”

  When they were alone in the room, Zack poked about in imitation of his mother. Pretended to be a dog sniffing in corners. Stooped to peer beneath the bed.

  “Mommy, what if Dad-dy�”

  Rebecca raised a warning finger. “No.”

  “But Mommy! If Da�”

  “There is Mommy now, I told you. From now on only Mommy.”

  She would not scold the child. She would never frighten him. Instead she embraced, tickled him.

  Eventually, he would forget. She was determined.

  She took him for a meal before bedtime at an automat on Owego Avenue. The bright-lit, noisy atmosphere and the way in which food was acquired, pushed along on shiny plastic trays, fascinated the child. After their meal she debated taking him across the wide, windy square to the Port Oriskany Statler which was the city’s most distinguished hotel. Wanting to show him the spacious, ornate lobby crowded with well-dressed men and women. Marble floor, leather sofas, potted ferns and small trees. An open atrium to the mezzanine floor. Uniformed doormen, bellboys.

  The Port Oriskany Statler sparkled with lights. At least twenty-five floors. On the far side of the sandstone building was a waterfront park, and Lake Erie stretching to the horizon. Rebecca had a vague memory of a view from high windows. He’d brought her to stay at the hotel years ago, the man who’d masqueraded as her husband. She had been so deluded, believing she’d been happy at the time! Her role too had been a masquerade.

  “I was his whore. Even if I didn’t know it.”

  Zack glanced up at her quizzically. As if she’d been talking to herself, laughing. He was of an age to know that adults didn’t do such things in public.

  She was trying to recall if it had been here in Port Oriskany, or in another city, she’d been followed from the hotel by a man in a navy jacket and navy cap. He’d turned out to be (she surmised, she had never been certain) someone sent to test her loyalty, faithfulness. She wondered for the first time what would have happened to her if she had smiled and laughed with the man, allowed herself to be picked up.