The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For this visit to Ardmoor Park, Hazel was wearing a summer dress of pale yellow organdy with a sash that tied at the back, a favorite of Gallagher’s. On her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat of an earlier era. On her slender feet, high-heeled straw sandals, with open toes. In a playful mood to celebrate Zack’s three-week residence at the Vermont Music Festival, she had painted both her fingernails and toenails coral pink to match her lipstick.

  On the wheelchair footrest Thaddeus Gallagher’s toes twitched and writhed. The abnormally thick nails were discolored as old ivory. Like embryonic hooves they seemed to Hazel who could not help staring, revulsed.

  This old man, Thaddeus Gallagher! A multi-millionaire. A much-revered philanthropist. Hazel recalled the wall of photographs in the lodge at Grindstone Island: a younger, less monstrous Thaddeus with his politician friends.

  The shadow of death is upon him Hazel thought. She saw it, the fleeting shadow. Like the hawk-shadows passing over her and Gallagher as they’d climbed the steep hill on Grindstone Island.

  Yet the older man confronted and confounded the younger. By quick degrees Gallagher lapsed into muttered monosyllables even as Thaddeus talked with zestful animation. Gallagher shifted uneasily in his chair, he seemed unable to catch his breath. Ordinarily, Gallagher did not drink alcohol at this hour of the day but he was drinking it now, very likely to show his father that he could. Hazel saw how he was refusing to glance at her. He was refusing to acknowledge her. Nor did he look Thaddeus Gallagher fully in the face. Gallagher looked like a man whose vision had gone blank: his eyes were open but he did not seem to be seeing. Hazel understood that she, the female, was meant to observe father and son: son and father: the elder Gallagher and the younger: meant to appreciate how the elder was the stronger of the two, in this matter of masculine will. This scene, Thaddeus had arranged.

  At first, Hazel felt sympathy for Gallagher. As she’d felt a maternal protectiveness for Zack when he’d been a younger boy, at the mercy of older boys. But also impatience: why didn’t Gallagher confront his bully-father, why didn’t he speak with his usual authority? Where was Chet Gallagher’s corrosive sense of humor, irony? Gallagher had a superbly modulated “radio” voice he could turn on and off at will, playfully. He made his little family laugh, he could be devastatingly funny. Yet now at his father’s house the man who never stopped talking from morning to night was speaking vaguely, hesitantly, like a child trying not to stammer. This was the first Gallagher had returned to his childhood home since his mother’s death years before. It was the first Gallagher had seen his father in such intimate quarters since that time. He is remembering what hurt him. He is helpless as a child, remembering. Hazel felt a wave of contempt for her lover, unmanned by this overbearing invalid.

  Hazel would have wished not to be a witness to Gallagher’s humiliation. But she knew herself, by Thaddeus’s design, the crucial witness.

  Beyond the flagstone terrace and the swimming pool with its rich aqua tiles was a stretch of gently sloping lawn. Not all of the lawn was mowed, there were patches of taller grasses, rushes and cattails. On a hill above a glittering pond, a stand of birch trees looking in the sun like vertical stripes of very white paint. Hazel remembered how in the drought of late summer, birches are the most brittle and vulnerable of trees. As in a waking dream she saw the trees broken, fallen. Once beauty is smashed it can’t ever be made whole.

  Seeing where Hazel was looking, Thaddeus spoke with childlike vanity of having designed the landscaping himself. He’d worked with a famous architect, and he’d had to fire the architect, finally. In the end, you are left with your own “genius”�such as it is.

  Adding, in a pettish tone, “Not that anyone much gives a damn, among the Gallaghers. My family: they’ve all but abandoned me. Nobody comes to visit me, hardly.”

  “Really! I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Gallagher.”

  Hazel doubted it was true. There were many Gallagher relatives and in-laws in the Albany area, and she had not heard that Thaddeus’s other adult children, a brother and a sister, were estranged from him as Gallagher was.

  “You have no family, Hazel Jones?”

  There was a subtle emphasis on you. Hazel felt the danger, Thaddeus would try to interrogate her now.

  “I have my son. And I have…”

  Hazel’s voice trailed off. She was stricken by a sudden shyness, reluctant to speak Chet Gallagher’s name in his father’s presence.

  “But you and Chester are not married, eh?”

  The question came blunt and guileless. Hazel felt her face heat with discomfort. Beside her, withdrawn and seemingly indifferent, Gallagher lifted his glass to his mouth and drank.

  Hazel said, “No, Mr. Gallagher. We are not married.”

  “Though you’ve been together for six years? Seven? Such free-thinking young people! It’s admirable, I suppose. ‘Bohemian.’ Now in the 1970s, when ‘anything goes.’” Thaddeus paused, shifting his bulk eagerly in the wheelchair. His groin appeared swollen as a goiter in the snug-fitting plaid trunks. His flushed scalp was damp beneath thin floating wisps of silvery hair. “Though my son is not so young, is he? Not any longer.”

  Gallagher let this remark pass, as if unhearing. Hazel could think of no reply that was not fatuous even for Hazel Jones.

  Thaddeus persisted, gaily: “It is admirable. Throwing off the shackles of the past. Only we, the elderly, wish to retain the past out of a terror of being thrust into the future where we will perish. One generation must make way for another, of course! I seem to have offended my own children, somehow.” He paused, preparing to say something witty. “There’s a distinction naturally between children and heirs. I no longer have ‘children,’ I have exclusively ‘heirs.’”

  Thaddeus laughed. Gallagher made no response. Hazel smiled, as one might smile at a sick child.

  The old man must have his melancholy jokes. They were this afternoon’s audience for his jokes. Gallagher had estimated, Thaddeus would leave an estate valued somewhere beyond $100 million. He had a right to expect to be courted, visited. The fat dimpled spider at the center of his quivering web. He wished now to persecute his youngest son whom he loved, who did not love him. He would poke, prod, stab at his son, he would demoralize his son, try to rouse him to fury. He hoped to make Gallagher squirm with guilt as with the most severe of gastric pains. Long he’d planned this passionate love-encounter, that was also revenge.

  Winking at Hazel You and I understand each other, eh? My fool son hasn’t a clue.

  The suggestion of complicity between them left Hazel shaken, uncertain. Her face was very warm. Here was an old man long assured of his appeal to women. He was suffused with a thrumming life that seemed to have drained from his son.

  “Of course, none of us are. Is. Any longer. Young.”

  Now Thaddeus began to complain more generally of the United States federal government, saboteurs in the Republican party and outright traitors among the Democrats, America’s cowardly failure to “pull out all stops” in Vietnam. And what of the “media manipulation” of leftist intellectuals in the country, that Senator Joe McCarthy had been onto but got sidetracked, and his enemies bludgeoned the poor bastard to death. Why, Thaddeus wondered, were Jews invariably the ones most opposed to the war in Vietnam? Why were most Jews, when you came down to it, Communists, or Commie-sympathizers! Even Jew-capitalists, in their hearts they’re Communists! Why the hell was this, when Stalin had loathed Jews, the Russian people loathed Jews, there had been more pogroms in Russia than in Germany, Poland, Hungary combined? “Yet in New York City and Los Angeles, that’s all you will find. In broadcast journalism, newspapers. The ‘paper of record’�the Jew York Times. Who was it founded the NAACP�not the ‘colored people,’ you can bet, but the ‘chosen people.’ And why? I ask you, Hazel Jones, why?”

  Hazel heard these sputtered and increasingly incoherent words through a steadily mounting ringing in her ears. Mixed with the mad cries of cicadas.

  He knows. Knows who
I am.

  But�how can he?

  At last Gallagher roused himself from his stupor.

  “Is that so, Thaddeus? All Jews? They don’t disagree with one another, about anything? Ever?”

  “To their enemies, Jews present a unified front. The ‘chosen people’�”

  “Enemies? Who are the enemies of Jews? Nazis? Anti-Semites? You?”

  With a look of indignation Thaddeus drew back in his wheelchair. The subtlety of his argument was being misunderstood! His disinterested philosophical position was being crudely personalized!

  “I meant to say, non-Jews. They call us goyim, son. Not enemies per se except as Jews perceive us. You know perfectly well what I mean, son, it’s a matter of historic fact.”

  Thaddeus was speaking solemnly now. As if his earlier baiting had been a pose.

  But Gallagher rose abruptly to his feet. Mumbling he had to go inside for a few minutes.

  Gallagher stumbled away. Hazel worried he was having one of his gastric attacks, that sometimes led to spasms of vomiting. His face had gone sickly white. Gallagher had begun to experience these attacks when he’d first been heckled at anti-war rallies several years ago, in Buffalo. Sometimes he suffered milder attacks before one of Zack’s public performances.

  Damn him: Hazel couldn’t help resenting it, being left behind with Gallagher’s father. This grotesque old man in his wheelchair glaring at her.

  Saying, in Hazel Jones’s way that was both breathless and apologetic, and her widened eyes fixed upon the glaring eyes in a look of utter distress, “Chet doesn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Gallagher. This is an emotional�”

  “Oh yes, is it, for ‘Chet’? And for me, too.”

  “He hasn’t been in this house, he said, since�”

  “I know exactly how long, Miss Jones. You needn’t inform me of facts regarding my own God-damned family.”

  Hazel, shocked, knew herself rebuffed. As if Thaddeus had leaned over and spat on her yellow organdy dress.

  God damn your soul to hell, you bastard.

  Sick dying old bastard I will have your heart.

  The gravedigger’s daughter, Hazel Jones was. There was never a time when Hazel Jones was not. Saying, in an embarrassed murmur to placate the enemy, “Mr. Gallagher, I’m sorry. Oh.”

  The white-jacketed servant hovered at the edge of the terrace, perhaps overhearing. Thaddeus noisily finished his drink, a vile-looking scarlet concoction laced with vodka. He too might have been embarrassed, speaking so sharply to a guest. And to so clearly innocent and guileless a guest. His glassy eyes brooded upon the swimming pool, its lurid artificial aqua. In the ripply surface, filaments of cloud were reflected like strands of gut. Thaddeus panted, grunted, scratched viciously at his crotch. He then rubbed his hefty bosom up inside the T-shirt, with a sensuous abandon. Hazel lowered her eyes, the gesture was so intimate.

  The photographs she’d seen of Thaddeus Gallagher in the lodge at Grindstone Island were of a stout man, heavy but not obese, with a large head and a self-possessed manner. Now his body appeared swollen, bloated. His jaws had the look of jaws accustomed to ferocious grinding. Hazel wondered what cruel whimsy had inspired him to dress that day in such clothes, exposing and parodying his bulk.

  “Bullshit he’s ‘emotional.’ He’s a cold-hearted s.o.b. You will learn, Hazel Jones. Chester Gallagher is not a man to be trusted. I am the one to apologize, Miss Jones, for him. His idiotic ‘politics’! His Ne-gro jazz! Failed at serious piano, so he takes up Ne-gro jazz! Mongrel music. Failed at his marriage so he takes up women he can feel sorry for. He’s shameless. He’s a mythomaniac. He told me, bratty kid of fifteen, ‘Capitalism is doomed.’ The little pisspot! These newspaper columns of his, he invents, he distorts, he exaggerates in the name of ‘moral truth.’ As if there could be a ‘moral truth’ that refutes historical truth. When he was a drunk�and Chester was a drunk, Miss Jones, for many more years than you’ve known him�he inhabited a kind of bathosphere of mythomania. He has invented such tales of me, my ‘business ethics,’ I’ve given up hoping to set them straight. I’m an old newspaper man, I believe in facts. Facts, and more facts! There’s never been an editorial in any Gallagher newspaper not based upon facts! Not liberal crap, sentimental bullshit about ‘world peace’�the ‘United Nations’�‘global disarmament’�but facts. The bedrock of journalism. Chester Gallagher never respected facts sufficiently. Trying to make himself out some kind of white Ne-gro, playing their music and taking up their causes.”

  Hazel was gripping a sweating glass in her hand. She spoke evenly, just slightly coquettishly. “Your son is a mythomaniac, Mr. Gallagher, and you are not?”

  Thaddeus squinted at her. His chins jiggled. As if Hazel had reached over to touch his knee, he brightened.

  “You must call me ‘Thaddeus,’ Hazel Jones. Better yet, ‘Thad.’ ‘Mr. Gallagher’ is for servants and other hirelings.”

  When Hazel made no reply, Thaddeus leaned toward her, suggestively. “Will you call me ‘Thad’? It’s very like ‘Chet’�eh? Almost no one calls me ‘Thad’ any longer, my old friends are falling away�every season, like dying leaves.”

  Hazel’s lips moved numbly. “‘Thad.’”

  “Very good! I certainly intend to call you ‘Hazel.’ Now and forever.”

  Thaddeus moved the wheelchair closer to Hazel. She smelled his old-man odor, the airless interior of the old stone cottage. Yet there was something sweetly sharp beneath, Thaddeus Gallagher’s cologne. A monster-man, crammed into a wheelchair, yet he’d shaved carefully that morning, he’d dabbed on cologne.

  Unnerving how, close up, you could see the younger Thaddeus inside the elder’s face, exultant.

  “‘Hazel Jones.’ A lovely name with something nostalgic about it. Who gave you that name, my dear?”

  “I�don’t know.”

  “Don’t know? How is that possible, Hazel?”

  “I never knew my parents. They died when I was a little girl.”

  “Did they! And where was this, Hazel?”

  Gallagher had warned, his father would interrogate her. Yet Hazel could not seem to prevent it.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Gallagher. It happened so long ago…”

  “Not that long ago, surely? You’re a young woman.”

  Hazel shook her head slowly. Young?

  “‘Hazel Jones’ The name is known to me, but not why. Can you explain why, my dear?”

  Hazel said lightly, “There are probably ‘Hazel Joneses’�Mr. Gallagher. More than one.”

  “Well! Don’t let me upset you, my dear. I’m feeling guilty, I suppose. I seem to have upset my overly sensitive radical son, who has run off and left us.”

  Briskly then Thaddeus pressed one of the buttons on the wheelchair. Hazel heard no sound but within seconds a male attendant appeared, in T-shirt, swim trunks, carrying terry cloth robes and towels. This young man called Thaddeus “Mr. G.” and was called by the older man what sounded like “Peppy.” He was about twenty-five, darkly tanned, with a blandly affable boy’s face; he had a swimmer’s physique, long-waisted, with broad wing-like shoulders. Hazel saw his eyes slide onto her, swiftly assessing yet vacant. He was one who knew his place: a wealthy invalid’s physical therapist.

  “Will you join me, Hazel? They say I must swim every day, to keep my condition from ‘progressing.’ Of course, my condition ‘progresses’ in any case. Such is life!”

  Hazel declined the invitation. She came to assist Peppy as he helped Thaddeus into the pool, at the shallow end: this was a Hazel Jones gesture, spontaneous and friendly.

  “My dear, thank you! I hate the water, until I get into it.”

  Peppy fastened red plastic water wings onto the obese man, over his fatty shoulders and across his immense drooping bosom. Slowly then he helped Thaddeus into the water with the frowning attentiveness of a mother helping her clumsy, somewhat fearful child into the water, that shimmered and quaked about him. Hazel offered her hand. And how grateful Thaddeus was, gripp
ing her hand. As his weight slipped into the water like a bag of concrete Thaddeus squeezed Hazel’s slender fingers in a sudden helpless panic. Then, as if miraculously, Thaddeus was in the pool, wheezing, paddling with childlike abandon. Peppy walked and then swam beside him slowly. Thaddeus was laughing, winking up at Hazel who followed his slow progress through the now choppy water, walking at the edge of the pool.

  “Hazel! You must join us. The water is perfect, isn’t it, Peppy?”

  “Sure is, Mr. G.”

  Hazel laughed. Her pretty dress had been splashed, and would stink of chlorine.

  “Really, Hazel,” Thaddeus said, holding his head erect out of the water, with an absurd dignity, “you must join us. You’ve come so far.” The motions of his hefty arms were energetic, those of his atrophied legs feeble.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit, Mr. Gallagher.”

  “‘Thad’! You promised.”

  “‘Thad.’”

  Thaddeus was enlivened again, with a frantic gaiety.

  “There are women’s bathing suits in the changing rooms, over there. Please, go look.”

  Hazel stood irresolute. Almost, to spite her lover she was tempted.

  As if reading her thoughts Thaddeus said slyly, “You must, dear! To show up my cowardly son. He fled, he’s afraid of his old crippled father who has prostate cancer, and a touch of colon cancer to boot. But do you see Thaddeus slinking away in cowardly defeat? You do not.”

  Hazel knew not to react to this disclosure. Never must she make any reference to Thaddeus Gallagher’s health. She would pretend she had not heard. Carefully she removed her high-heeled sandals, to walk barefoot at the edge of the pool. Her legs were long, supple with muscle. Her legs were smooth, shaven. It was a fetish with Hazel Jones to shave her legs, thighs and armpits and other areas of her body that might betray her by sprouting dark, rather curly coarse hairs. As Hazel Jones ate sparingly, to remain Hazel Jones who was slender, very feminine and very pretty. In the smelly aqua water, Thaddeus Gallagher strained to watch her.