The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was the way in which Hazel allowed Gallagher to make love to her. To the degree to which Hazel allowed Gallagher to make love to her.

  In the backseat of Gallagher’s car the child Zack had disappeared from the rearview mirror entirely. He’d brought along his Royal Conservatory Pianoforte Studies and was lost in frowning concentration, oblivious of the snowy highway and occasional abandoned vehicles at the roadside.

  Gallagher had assured him there was a piano at the lodge. He could practice at the lodge. Gallagher had banged on that piano plenty of times. He’d entertained his relatives. He’d played for himself. Summers on Grindstone Island, Gallagher’s happiest memories. Wanting to convey to the child as to the child’s mother how happiness is a possibility, maybe even a place you might get to.

  Impulsively he’d bought the house in Watertown. But Hazel wasn’t ready for that yet.

  Easter weekend on Grindstone Island. It had been a very good plan except on Thursday morning a freezing rain began and within a few hours the rain had become sleet and the sleet became a wet wind-driven snow howling across Lake Ontario. Nine to twelve inches by Friday morning, and drifting.

  Still, the region was accustomed to freak storms. Snow in April, sometimes in May. Quick blizzards, and a quick thaw. Snowplows had been operating through the night. Roads into the Adirondacks would be impassable but Route 180 north to Malin Head Bay and the bridge to Grindstone Island was more or less open: traffic moved slowly, but was moving. By Friday afternoon the wind had blown itself out. Sky clear and brittle as glass.

  God damn: Gallagher wasn’t going to change his plans.

  The snow would melt by Sunday. Certainly it would melt. Gallagher was insisting. He’d been on the phone that morning with the caretaker who’d assured him that the driveway would be plowed by the time Gallagher and his guests arrived. The lodge would be open, ready for occupancy. The power would be on. (McAlster was sure there’d be power out at the camp, there was power elsewhere on the island.) In the lodge there was a kitchen, stocked with canned and bottled goods. Refrigerator and stove. All in working order. McAlster would have aired out the rooms. McAlster was a man you could rely upon. Gallagher had not wanted to change his plans and McAlster agreed, a little snow wouldn’t interfere with anyone. The island was so beautiful covered in snow. A shame such a beautiful place was deserted most of the year.

  A shame it belongs to people like you.

  McAlster, now in his sixties, had been entrusted with overseeing summer residents’ properties for decades. Since Gallagher had been a small child. Not once had McAlster spoken with the slightest air of reproach, in Gallagher’s hearing. It was Gallagher who felt shame, guilt. His family owned ninety acres of Grindstone Island of which less than five or six were actually used: the rest was woodland, pines and birches. There was a mile of river frontage, of surpassing beauty. Thaddeus Gallagher’s father had acquired the property and built the original hunting lodge in the early 1900s, long before the Thousand Islands region was developed for summer tourism. It had been a wilderness, at a remote northern edge of New York State. The small native population of Grindstone Island lived mostly in the area of Grindstone Harbor, in asphalt-sided houses, tar paper shanties, trailers. They owned bait-and-tackle shops, gas stations and roadside restaurants. They were trappers, guides, commercial fishermen and caretakers like McAlster, hiring themselves out to absentee residents like the Gallaghers.

  Don’t you feel guilty, owning so much property you rarely see Gallagher had asked his father Thaddeus as a young man provoked to ideological quarrels and Thaddeus’s reply had been hotly uttered, unhesitating Those people depend upon us! We hire them. We pay property taxes to pay for their roads, schools, public services. There’s a hospital in Grindstone Harbor now, didn’t used to be! How’d that happen? Half the population in the Thousand Islands is on welfare in the off-season, who the hell d’you think pays for that?

  Gallagher’s anger with his father so choked him, he had trouble breathing in the old man’s presence. It was like an asthma attack.

  “My father…”

  Beside him in the passenger’s seat of his car Hazel gave Gallagher a shrewd sidelong look. Unconsciously he’d been sucking in his breath. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Yes?”

  “…says he wants to meet you, Hazel. But that won’t happen.”

  He’d told her very little about his father. Very little about his family. He supposed she’d heard, from others.

  In fact, Thaddeus had telephoned Gallagher the previous week to inquire This new woman of yours, a cocktail waitress is she, a stripper, call girl with a bastard retarded son? Correct me if I’m wrong.

  Gallagher had hung up the phone without speaking.

  Prior to this call, Gallagher had not heard from his father since Christmas 1962 and then it had been Thaddeus’s private secretary calling, with the message that his father was on the line to speak with him and Gallagher had said politely But I’m not on this line. Sorry.

  “Well. If you don’t want me to meet your father, I won’t.”

  “You and Zack. Either of you.”

  Hazel smiled uncertainly. Gallagher knew he made her uneasy, she couldn’t read his moods: playful, ironic, sincere. As she couldn’t interpret the tone of the more tortuous and meandering of his jazz piano pieces.

  “You’re too good to meet the man, Hazel. In your soul.”

  “Am I.”

  “Hazel, it’s true! You’re too good, too beautiful and pure-minded to meet a man like Thaddeus Gallagher. You’d be despoiled by his eyes on you. By breathing the same air he breathes.”

  Why Gallagher was so angry suddenly, he didn’t know. Possibly it had something to do with McAlster.

  Hazel Jones, William McAlster. Individuals of the servant class. Thaddeus Gallagher would identify Hazel Jones at once.

  Behind a slow-moving truck spreading salt on the highway, they were approaching Malin Head Bay. It was nearly 6 P.M. yet the sky was still light. There was an icy glaze over many trees, flashing sunlight like fire. Traffic moved sluggishly along Main Street where only a single wide lane had been plowed.

  Gallagher didn’t want to think what Grindstone Island would be like.

  McAlster had promised him, though. McAlster would never go back on his word.

  McAlster would never disappoint Thaddeus Gallagher’s son.

  Relenting, Gallagher said they could always stay at the Malin Head Inn, if the island didn’t work out.

  “You aren’t worried, Hazel? Are you?”

  Hazel laughed. “Worried? Not with you.”

  She touched his arm to reassure him. A strand of her hair fell against Gallagher’s cheek. He felt a choking sensation in his chest.

  She’d told him a man had hurt her. He supposed the man had been Zack’s father, who had left her, hadn’t married her. This would have been almost seven years ago. She’d kissed him and drew away from him telling him she had no wish to be hurt by a man again.

  “I’ll make it up to you, Hazel. Whatever it was.”

  Gallagher groped for Hazel’s hand and brought it to his lips. He kissed her fingers greedily. Not an erotic kiss unless you knew the desperate ways of Eros. Gallagher had not kissed Hazel that day. They had not been alone together for five minutes. He was weak with desire, and outrage mixed with desire. He would marry Hazel Jones, next time he crossed St. Mary Bridge to Grindstone Island she would be his wife.

  McAlster was right, the island was beautiful in snow.

  “Our property begins about here. That stone wall.”

  Hazel was staring through the windshield. The child in the backseat was at last alert, watchful.

  “All that is Gallagher property, too. Miles uphill. And along the river.”

  The River Road had been plowed, if haphazardly. Gallagher drove very slowly. His car was equipped with chains, he was accustomed to driving on icy graveled surfaces. On the island, there were more trees covered in ice, tilted at sharp a
ngles like drunken figures. Some of the birches had shattered and collapsed. Evergreens were tougher, not so extensively damaged. In the road there were fallen tree limbs, Gallagher drove carefully around them.

  “You can tell it isn’t winter, can’t you. By the sun. Yet so much snow. Jesus!”

  The river was choppy, wind-churned. Vast, and very beautiful. Before the sudden freeze, the river had thawed; now at the water’s edge amid enormous boulders there were jagged ice-spikes, jutting up vertically like stalagmites. Gallagher was conscious of the woman and her child seeing this for the first time.

  “That’s the lodge, at the top of that hill. Through those evergreens. Over there are guest cabins. It looks as if McAlster has plowed us out, we’re in luck for tonight.”

  The Adirondack-style lodge was the size of a small hotel, made of logs, fieldstone and stucco. Its roof was steep and shingled and it had two massive stone chimneys. Adrift in snow at the crest of a hill was a tennis court. There was a gabled three-car garage, a former stable. High overhead a hawk drifted, lazily dipped and turned on widespread wings. The sky looked like glass about to shatter. Gallagher was seeing Hazel Jones at last beginning to see He is rich. His family is rich.

  That hadn’t been Gallagher’s reason for bringing them here. He didn’t think so.

  18

  A rough wild game! Driving her like a panicked animal along the rows of cornstalks. Drunk-looking cornstalks broken and dessicated in the heat of early autumn and the browned tassels slapping and cutting at her face. Herschel clapped his hands laughing his high-pitched heehaw laugh Git along little dawgie git along little weenie long-limbed and loose-jointed and he was breathing through his mouth as he ran, as she ran, a flame-like sensation in her belly, she too was laughing, clumsy and stumbling on her small legs so she fell to one knee, she fell more than once, scrambled to her feet before the scraped welt filled in with gritty blood, if she could make her way to the end of the row of cornstalks to the edge of the farmer’s field and to the road and to the cemetery beyond�

  How the cornfield game ended, Rebecca could never recall.

  19

  “Momma? Are we?”

  It was morning. The morning of Holy Saturday. Bright, and gusty with wind. Hazel Jones was brushing her hair in swift punishing strokes ignoring the fretting child pulling at her.

  In the bureau mirror a face floated wan and indistinct as if underwater. Not her face but Hazel Jones’s young face smiling defiantly.

  You! What right, to be here!

  She’d gotten through the first night on Grindstone Island and she believed she would get through the second night on Grindstone Island and by that time it would be decided.

  “Momma? Momma!”

  The child had slept fitfully the night before. She’d heard him, in the room adjoining her own, whimpering in his sleep. Lately, he’d begun grinding his teeth, too. The wind!�the damned wind had kept him awake, unnerved him. Not a single wind but many winds blowing off the St. Lawrence River and across Lake Ontario to the west confused with human voices, muffled shouts and laughter.

  You! you! such laughter seems to accuse.

  Hazel had wakened early in the unfamiliar bed not knowing where she was at first and which time in her life this was and her heart pounded hotly in her chest as the voices grew bolder, jeering You! Jew-girl you have no right to be here.

  She had not heard such voices in years. She had not had such a thought in years. She rose from bed shaken, frightened.

  But it was Gallagher who’d brought her here. Gallagher, her friend.

  Through the front windows of the room you could see another island floating in the glittery river. Beyond that the dense Canadian shore at Gananoque.

  Gallagher’s family lodge was even larger than it appeared from the foot of the driveway. It had been built into a hill, three floors and a more recently constructed wing connected to the main house by a flagstone terrace, now drifted in snow.

  Hazel Jones, seeing the lodge, had laughed. A private residence, of such dimensions!

  For the briefest of moments seeing the Gallagher property as Jacob Schwart might see it. The man’s mocking laughter mingling with Hazel Jones’s laughter.

  Embarrassed, Gallagher had said yes the place was large, but it was really very private. And most of the lodge was shut off for the winter, they’d be using only a few rooms.

  Hazel understood that Gallagher was both ashamed of his family’s wealth, and vain of it. He could not help himself. He had no clear knowledge of himself. His hatred of his father was a sacred hatred, Hazel knew not to interfere. Nor would she believe in this hatred utterly.

  Gallagher had brought her to this room that was more a suite than a room, with a child’s room adjoining, for Zack. His own room, he told her, was close by, down the hall. His manner was outwardly contained, exuberant. This was the first time the three of them had gone away together, he was their host and responsible for their well-being. Setting Hazel’s lightweight suitcase onto her bed�old, brass, four-poster, with a quilt coverlet in pale blues and lavenders�he stood staring at it for a long moment his breath quickened from the stairs and his face flushed and uncertain and Hazel could see him summoning the precise words he wished to speak, to impress upon her.

  “Hazel. I hope you will comfortable here.”

  It was a remark that carried with it a deeper meaning. At that moment Gallagher could not bring himself to look at Hazel.

  If Zack had not been with them, investigating his room (a boys’ room, with bunk beds, Zack would sleep in the upper bunk), Hazel knew that Gallagher would have touched her. He would have kissed her. He would have framed her face in his large hands, and kissed her. And Hazel would have kissed him in return, not stiffening in his embrace as sometimes she did involuntarily but standing very still.

  Pleading Don’t love me! Please.

  As Gallagher would relent with his hurt, hopeful smile All right Hazel! I can wait.

  Zack nudged against Hazel’s thigh: “Momma! Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher?”

  Rudely she was wakened from her trance. She’d been brushing her hair in long swift strokes in front of the crook-backed mirror.

  Overnight Zack had begun to call her “Momma”�no longer “Mommy.” Sometimes the word was a grudging syllable: “Mom” pronounced “M’m.”

  By instinct the child knew that speech is music, to the ear. And speech can be a music to hurt the ear.

  He’d been awake and out of bed for more than forty minutes, and was restless. Maybe he was feeling uncomfortable in this new place. Pushing against Hazel’s thigh, nudging her hard enough to bruise if she didn’t prevent him. With the back of the hairbrush she swiped playfully at him but he persisted, “I said are we, Momma? Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher?”

  “Zack, not so loud.”

  “Momma I said�”

  “No.”

  Hazel gripped his shoulders, not to shake him but to hold him still. His small body quivered in indignation. His eyes that were dark, moist and glittering, were fixed on hers in a defiant look that roused her to anger, except Hazel was never angry. She was not a mother who raised her hand to her child, nor even her voice. If Gallagher should overhear this exchange! She would be mortified, she could not bear it.

  Her face wasn’t yet Hazel Jones’s face, but darker-skinned, a rich oily-olive skin she would disguise with lighter makeup, liquid and then powder. This makeup she would take care to extend onto her throat, gradually tapering off, always subtly, meticulously. And she would take care to disguise the fine pale scars at her hairline, that Gallagher had never seen. But her hair had been brushed vigorously and bristled now with static electricity, it was a warm chestnut hue streaked with dark red, it was a hue that seemed altogether natural to her, as Hazel Jones. She wore neatly pressed gray woollen slacks and a rose-colored woollen sweater with a detachable lace collar. For this weekend visit to Grindstone Island Hazel had brought two pairs of neatly pressed woollen slacks and a be
ige cable-knit sweater and the sweater with the lace collar and two cotton blouses. Hazel Jones was a young woman of the utmost propriety in her dress as in her manner. Gallagher laughed at her Hazel Jones ways, she was so proper. Yet Hazel understood that Gallagher adored her for those Hazel Jones ways and would not wish her otherwise. (Gallagher continued to see other women. Meaning, Gallagher slept with other women. When he could, when it was convenient. Hazel knew, and was not jealous. Never would she have inquired after Gallagher’s private, sexual life apart from her.) As, at Zimmerman Brothers Pianos & Music Supplies, the salesclerk Hazel Jones had established for herself a personality distinct as a comic strip character: Olive Oyl, Jiggs-and-Maggie, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr Girl Reporter. The deepest truth of the American soul is that it is shallow as a comic strip is shallow and behind her shiny glass-topped counter in Zimmermans’ there was Hazel Jones prettily composed, smiling in expectation. Like Gallagher, Edgar Zimmerman adored Hazel Jones. Could not stop touching her with his fluttery little-man’s hands that were dry and hot with yearning. Bastard. Nazi. Hazel Jones’s smile wavered only when Edgar too emphatically touched her arm as he spoke with her in a lull between customers, otherwise her hands rested slender and serene on the shiny glass-topped counter. And Zimmerman’s customers had grown to know Hazel, and stood by patiently, ignoring the other salesclerks until Hazel was free to wait on them.

  “Momma are we! Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher!”

  “Zack, I’ve told you�”

  “No no no no no. No Momma.”

  Hazel resented it, Zack pretending to be a child. Childish. She knew, in his heart he was an adult like Hazel Jones.

  “Zack, what is this ‘we’? There is no ‘we.’ Only a man and a woman get married, nobody else. Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not silly. You’re silly.”

  Zack was becoming wild, uncontrollable. Back home he would never have dared ask such questions. He was forbidden to speak familiarly about “Mr. Gallagher” who had come into their lives to change their lives as he was forbidden to speak familiarly about “Hazel Jones.”