The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He would go upstairs to their suite in the Park Lane Hotel and fall onto his bed and sink into a deep dreamless sleep.

  Mother and son went upstairs to the ninth floor, Gallagher remained behind to have a drink in the hotel lounge, with the conductor of the chamber orchestra. How tireless Gallagher was, plotting the future! His life was his little family, he adored without question. Upstairs Hazel removed her stylish straw hat and tossed it in the direction of the bed. Before she could see where it might land, she’d already turned away. Neither she nor Zack had spoken since Zack had shouted at her. In the elevator ascending to the ninth floor they had not looked at each other, nor touched. Zack was very tired now, fatigue was overtaking him like an eclipse of the sun. He saw his mother standing quietly at one of the tall windows, gazing down toward the park. He went to use the bathroom, making as much noise as he could, and when he returned Hazel was still standing there, leaning her forehead against the windowpane. Always when they checked into hotels Hazel would examine their rooms for cleanliness and she would not neglect the windows, frowning to see if they were polished clean or if they had been sullied by a stranger’s forehead. Zack observed her in silence. He was thinking of the man in work clothes, who had not been his father. Who the man was, Zack would not know. If he went to Hazel, to peer at her face, he would see that it was a vacant face, no longer young and not very beautiful. The eyes would be without luster, the light drained from them. The shoulders were beginning to slump, the breasts were becoming heavy, graceless. He was furious with her. He was frightened of her. He would not speak to her, however. Certainly Hazel was aware of him, her son’s hot accusing eyes, but she would not speak. Alone together, mother and son often did not speak. What was between them, knotted together like a tangle of guts, they had no need to utter.

  Zack turned away. Went into his room adjoining the adults’ suite, shut the door but did not lock it. Fell onto the bed not removing any of his clothing nor even kicking off his shoes that were dusty from the park. Woke with a start later that afternoon to discover that the room was partially darkened, for Hazel had drawn the venetian blinds, and there was Hazel Jones lying beside Zack on top of the bed, fully clothed as well but with her high-heeled shoes kicked off, sunk into a sleep deep and exhausted as his own had been.

  25

  Dragging the stunned boy by his arm. As if wanting to tear his arm out of its socket. Yelling at him, punching and kicking. On the ground the boy tries to escape, crawling on hands and knees and then dragging himself as his father catches him, brings his booted foot down on the boy’s hands: first the right, then the left. Hearing the small bones crack. Hearing the boy screaming Daddy don’t hurt me! Daddy don’t kill me! and where is the mother, why isn’t the mother intervening, for the assault isn’t over, will not be over until the boy lies unconscious and bleeding and still the wrathful father will cry You’re my son! My fucking son! My son. Mine.

  26

  Yet it took her weeks to make the call. In fact it had taken her years.

  And then, dialing the number that was suddenly familiar again to her, steeling herself hearing the phone ring at the other end of the line, she was struck by a sudden vision of the Meltzers’ house she had neither contemplated nor envisioned in years and in that instant from the side door of the Meltzers’ house she was seeing the farmhouse next door which was the house in which she’d lived and nursed her baby in a delirium of unspeakable happiness she knew now to be the only purely happy time of her life, and she began to tremble, and could not speak with the ease and clarity Hazel Jones had wished.

  “Mrs.�Mrs. Meltzer? You won’t remember me�I lived next door to you eight years ago. In that old farmhouse. I lived with a man named Niles Tignor. You took care of my little boy when I worked in town, in a factory. You�”

  Hazel’s voice broke. She could hear, at the other end of the line, an in-take of breath.

  “Is this Rebecca? Rebecca Tignor?”

  The voice was Mrs. Meltzer’s, unmistakable. Yet it was an altered voice, older and oddly frail.

  “Hello? Hello? Is this Rebecca?”

  Hazel tried to speak. She managed to speak, in choked monosyllables. Her heart was beating dangerously hard in her chest. The damned ringing in her ear, to which she’d grown so accustomed she rarely heard it during the day, was confused now with the pulsing of her blood.

  “Rebecca? My God, I thought you were dead! You and Niley both. We thought he’d killed you, all those years ago.”

  Mrs. Meltzer sounded as if she was about to cry. Hazel silently begged her no.

  Edna Meltzer had not been her mother. It was ridiculous to confuse the two women. It was ridiculous to be trembling like this gripping the phone receiver so her hand shook.

  At least, she was making the call in an empty house. Both Gallagher and Zack were out.

  “Where is he, Mrs. Meltzer?”

  “He’s dead, Rebecca.”

  “Dead…”

  “Tignor died in Attica, Rebecca, two-three years ago. That’s what Howie heard. He was sent away on assault, ‘extortion’�I’m not sure what ‘extortion’ is, some kind of blackmail I guess. None of it had anything to do with Four Corners or with what he’d done to you, Rebecca. We never saw him after that time he came to our house crazy-like wanting to know where you were, and we said we did not know! He was set to kill you, or anybody stood in his way, we could see. Saying you stole his son, and you stole his car. Saying no woman had ever insulted him like that and you would pay for it. He was like a wild man, saying he would murder you with his bare hands for betraying him, and he’d murder us if he found out we were hiding you. Howie has a shotgun, Howie ain’t one to back down, I told Howie just let it be, don’t rile the man up any worse than he is. Well, Tignor went off! Left the house like it was, mostly.” Mrs. Meltzer paused to catch her breath. Hazel saw the older woman warming to her subject, thrilled, smiling. Her voice had gained strength. It was no longer the voice of an old woman. “Such a time it was, then! But now it’s real quiet here. People moved in next-door, nice family and kids and they fixed up the house some. Oh, there never was anyone like Tignor in Four Corners before or since, I have to say.”

  Hazel was sitting down. In an acid-bright patch of sunlight Hazel Jones was sitting down.

  Mrs. Meltzer was asking how Niley was, such a sweet little boy, and Hazel managed to say that Niley was fine, healthy, he was eleven years old and played piano, and Mrs. Meltzer said this sounded wonderful she was so happy to hear this, her and Howie and other neighbors in Four Corners had the bad thought for years that Tignor had murdered them both and hid their bodies in the canal maybe where nobody would ever find them, and now Tignor himself was dead, probably killed by somebody like himself, they was killing one another all the time in Attica and the guards were almost bad as the prisoners, thank God the prison wasn’t any closer than it was, but how was Rebecca? where was Rebecca living now? was she married again, did she have a family?

  “Rebecca? Rebecca?”

  She had to lie down. She was dazed, dizzy as if he’d slapped the side of her head only just a few minutes ago, the ringing in her ear was high-pitched as a deranged cicada.

  She would call Mrs. Meltzer back, another time. Only just not now.

  27

  “‘Hazel Jones.’ A mysterious name out of the past.”

  The elderly invalid leaned forward in his wheelchair to grip both Hazel’s hands in his, rather hard. She had no idea what he meant: mysterious? The man’s large glassy veined eyes of the hue of pewter gazed up at Hazel with such intensity, she was unnerved not knowing if Thaddeus Gallagher meant to be naively adoring, or was mocking such adoration of a young woman visitor. His hands gripping hers were doughy, warmly moist, seemingly boneless. Yet the man was strong. You understood that Thaddeus Gallagher was strong in his heavy upper body if not in his lower body and that he exulted in this strength, all the while continuing to smile at his startled visitor with the smiling air of a benevolent host. Haz
el felt a shiver of dread that he would not release her, Gallagher would have to intervene and there would be an unpleasant scene.

  Don’t let my father manipulate you, Hazel! Immediately we step into his presence, he will exert his will upon us like a fat spider at the center of its web.

  The shock of meeting Gallagher’s father! Not only was the old man confined to a wheelchair but his body appeared deformed, a shapeless mass of mollusc-flesh inside weirdly jaunty tartan plaid bathing trunks and a white cotton T-shirt strained to bursting. Massive thighs and buttocks were squeezed against the unyielding sides of the wheelchair. Thaddeus’s arms were muscled while his legs hung useless, pale and atrophied. Yet his feet were large and wedge-like, resting bare against the wheelchair’s padded footrest. The big bare toes twitched in obscene delight.

  An invalid! Thaddeus Gallagher! Hazel cast her companion Gallagher a look of dismay. How like Gallagher to complain of his father to her for years while neglecting to mention that the man was an invalid in a wheelchair.

  Thaddeus winked at Hazel as if they shared an intimate joke, too subtle for Gallagher to grasp. “You seem surprised, dear? I apologize for greeting you so casually dressed but I swim, or try to swim, every day at this time. I confess that I also feel less constrained by decorum and fashion in my seventies than I did at your young age. My son ‘Chet Gallagher,’ the prize-winning journalist and public seer, might have warned you what to expect.” Thaddeus laughed, sucking at his fleshy lips. He was reluctant to release Hazel’s hands that were damp and numbed from his grasp.

  All the while, Gallagher stood awkwardly beside Hazel, staring at his father in vague unease. He had said very little. He seemed as confused as Hazel. The sight of his father whom he had not seen in several years must have alarmed him. That the elderly man was in a wheelchair and they were on their feet seemed to put the couple at a disadvantage.

  Thaddeus said fussily, “Please do sit, both of you! Pull those chairs a little closer. We’ll have drinks now. After, I hope you will both join me for a swim in the pool. It’s a very warm day, and both of you are overdressed, and are looking uncomfortable.”

  Thaddeus had been awaiting his visitors outside, by the pool. An Olympic-sized pool it was, exquisitely tiled in a deep rich aqua intended to suggest, as Gallagher had explained to Hazel, the Mediterranean. Yet the water exuded a warm sulphurous odor as of stale bathwater. Hazel’s nostrils pinched. She could not imagine herself in that water, she felt a wave of faintness at the prospect.

  Gallagher was saying, quickly, “I don’t think so, Father. We don’t have time for that. We�”

  “You’ve said. You must get back to the ‘music festival’ in Vermont. Of course.” Thaddeus spoke with dignity, though looking rebuffed. He pressed a button on the arm of the wheelchair and the motorized chair moved forward. Sunlight illuminated oily beads of perspiration on his wide sallow face. “But sit with me a while, at least. As if,” smiling up at Gallagher, “we had something in common beyond a name.”

  It was late August 1970. At last, Gallagher had brought Hazel to Ardmoor Park to visit his aging father. In the past year Thaddeus had several times invited them, with a hint that his health was “worsening”; he had learned that Hazel’s son Zacharias Jones was one of the young musicians in residence at the Vermont Music Festival in Manchester, Vermont, less than an hour’s drive from Ardmoor Park. Reluctantly, Gallagher had given in. “Maybe my father is really ill. Maybe he’s repentant. Maybe I’m crazy.” Gallagher joked in his usual mordant way but Hazel understood that he was genuinely fearful of the visit.

  Through the 1960s, the Gallagher newspapers had remained staunchly in favor of the Vietnam War. Yet, most of the papers continued to run Chet Gallagher’s column, that had won national awards and appeared now in more than fifty newspapers. Gallagher also published opinion pieces in popular magazines and occasionally appeared on television panels discussing politics, ethics, American culture. Hazel had become his assistant; she liked best doing research for him at the University of Buffalo library. It was becoming more difficult for Gallagher to maintain his distance from Gallagher Media, and from Thaddeus. Through intermediaries he heard that his father was “proud” of him�“damned proud”�though he would never agree with his youngest son’s “rabid radical politics.” Gallagher had been told, too, that Thaddeus was eager to meet his “second family.”

  Gallagher would introduce Hazel to Thaddeus as his friend and companion, he would not even call her his fiancée. He would not be bringing Zack to Ardmoor Park at all.

  He had warned Hazel not to be drawn into personal conversation with his father, still less into answering questions she didn’t want to answer. “I know he’s curious about you. He will interrogate you. He’s an old newspaper man, that’s what he knows. Poking and prodding and stabbing until the blade finds a soft spot, then he shoves it in.”

  Hazel laughed nervously. Gallagher had to be exaggerating!

  “No. It’s impossible to exaggerate Thaddeus Gallagher.”

  Gallagher’s newspaper column was accompanied by a line-drawing caricature: a comically quizzical horsey face with a high forehead, deep-pouched eyes, lopsided smile, jutting chin and prominent ears. Around the near-bald dome of a head a fringe of kinky curls like a wreath. “Caricature is the art of exaggeration,” Gallagher told Hazel, “yet it can tell the truth. In times like ours, caricature may be the only truth.”

  Yet on the drive from Manchester to Ardmoor Park, Gallagher’s composure leaked from him like air from a deflating balloon. He was chain-smoking, distracted. He avoided the subject of Thaddeus Gallagher and spoke only of Zack whom they’d heard perform the previous evening at the music festival. Zack was now thirteen, no longer a child. He was becoming lanky, loose-jointed. His skin had an olive-dark pallor. His nose, eyebrows, eyes were striking, prominent. In the company of adults he was withdrawn, rather reserved, yet his piano performances were praised as “warm”�“reflective”�“startlingly mature.” Where many child prodigies perform with mechanical precision and a deficiency of feeling, Zacharias Jones brought to his playing an air of emotional subtlety that was beautifully reflected in such pieces as the Grieg sonata he’d played at the festival. Gallagher could not stop marveling over the performance.

  “He isn’t a child, Hazel, in his music. It’s uncanny.”

  Hazel thought Of course he isn’t a child! There wasn’t time.

  “But we’re not going to discuss Zack with my father, Hazel. He will want to know about your ‘talented’ son, he will hint that Gallagher Media could ‘put him on the map.’ He will interrogate you, he will stick and stab if you let him. Don’t fall into the trap of answering Thaddeus’s questions. The one thing he wants to know�to put it bluntly�is whether Zack might be his grandson. Because of all the things he has, he doesn’t have grandchildren. And so�”

  Hazel saw that her lover’s face was creased, contorted. He looked both angry and aggrieved, like a gargoyle. He was driving too fast for the narrow road curving through hilly countryside.

  Hazel said, “But you and I didn’t even meet, until Zack was in school, in Malin Head Bay. How can your father�”

  “He can. He can imagine anything. And it’s a fact he can’t know, even if he has hired private investigators to look into our relationship, when we first met. That, he can’t know. So I will field his questions, Hazel. We will stay for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. All this I’ve explained, but he will try to dissuade us of course. He will try to dissuade you.”

  They were passing large estates set back from the road like storybook houses. Vast green lawns in which fugitive rainbows leapt and gleamed among sprinklers. Enormous elms, oaks. Juniper pine. There were ponds, lagoons. Picturesque brooks. The estates were bordered by primitive stone walls.

  Gallagher said, “And please don’t exclaim that the house is ‘beautiful,’ Hazel. You aren’t obliged. Sure, it’s beautiful. Every damn property in Ardmoor Park is beautiful. You bet, anything can be bea
utiful if you spend millions of bucks on it.”

  By the time they arrived at his father’s house, the house of his boyhood, Gallagher was visibly nervous. It was a French Normandy mansion originally built in the 1880s but restored, refurbished and modernized in the 1920s. Hazel did not tell Gallagher that it was beautiful. Its enormous dull-gleaming slate roofs and hand-hewn stone facade reminded her of the elaborate mausoleums in Buffalo’s vast Forest Lawn Cemetery.

  Gallagher parked beyond the curve of the horseshoe drive, like an adolescent preparing for a quick departure. He tossed his cigarette onto the gravel. With the bravado of an afflicted man mimicking his own discomfort, he thumped his midriff with his fist: he’d been having gastric attacks lately, dismissed as “nerves.”

  “Remember, Hazel: we are not staying for dinner. We have ‘other plans’ back in Vermont.”

  Thaddeus Gallagher turned out not to be eagerly awaiting his visitors inside the massive house, but at the rear, by the pool. A female servant unknown to Gallagher answered the door, and insisted upon leading them to the pool area though Gallagher certainly knew the way. “I used to live here, ma’am. I’m your employer’s son.”

  Along a flagstone path, beneath a wisteria archway, through a garden whose roses were mostly spent, fallen. Hazel glanced into tall windows bordered by leaded-glass panes. She saw only her own faint and insubstantial reflection.

  And there, in his motorized wheelchair, in white T-shirt and tartan plaid trunks: Thaddeus Gallagher.

  An invalid! Elderly, and obese! Yet the man’s eyes snatched at Hazel Jones, hungrily.

  Close beside the pool they sat. A festive gathering! A male servant in a white jacket brought drinks. Thaddeus talked, talked. Thaddeus had much to say. Hazel knew, from Gallagher, that Thaddeus continued to oversee Gallagher Media, though he’d officially retired. Thaddeus woke at dawn, was on the phone much of the day. Yet he talked now with the air of one who has not spoken to another human being in a long time.