A Bigamist's Daughter (15 page)

She shakes her head. He is leading to her father. Or his book. Or both. She has to admire his subtlety. “No,” she says.

He clicks his tongue. “Well, say every morning when you walk to work, you pass by this high rise on your corner. You don’t think anything of it, it’s just one of many. But what if, where that high rise stands today, there had once been a
house where your grandmother was born, or where your great-grandfather died, or was conceived—you may never know. That place would have real significance to your life and yet you’d probably never know.”

“So?”

“So, it would always make me wonder. You could have ghosts anywhere.”

She sits up to look at him, exaggerating the knit in her brows so he can see it in the dim light. “You Southerners do believe in ghosts, don’t you?”

He laughs a little, pulls her close again. “I guess I’m not making myself very clear,” he says, and she, on her own, puts her hands under his sweater, feels the steady rise and fall of his warm belly. “Try again,” she whispers, leaning against him, giving him something, although, other than attention, she cannot say what it is.

He waits, breathes deeply. Between the bars, she can see the lights on the water, moving along the currents like bright ribbons. “At home,” he says softly, “in our back garden, there’s an iron bench. I tried to write about it once. It’s worn down and kind of green, but you can see that it used to be pretty ornate. There’s still some scrollwork on it and the feet are four animal claws. I used to pretend it was my house when I was a kid. It’s at an angle to the back of the house, actually facing the sunniest part of the garden, but if you sit in the far left corner and turn a little, so you almost have your feet up, you can look right up into the master bedroom.”

He pauses as if to consider, and she smiles. She can see him trying to write about it. Childhood memories are as big at Vista as Jesus himself. My daddy’s cabin, my grandpa’s rocker, I remember Mama. Authors relating the bland details of their usual lives—their teddy bears, their backyards, their
first loves—like breathless adventurers just out of the uncharted woods.

“When I was in my third year at Andover, I got called home because my grandfather was dying. It was spring. Still winter in New England, but spring in Tennessee, and, I don’t know, but maybe that’s why as soon as I got home I went out to the garden. And my father was there on the bench, looking up at the master bedroom, as if my grandfather were in there dying, not at the hospital thirty miles away. At first he didn’t say anything, but then he told me, although I’d heard it a hundred times before, that this was where he’d sat the day I was being born, in that same hospital, because it was where his father had sat the day he was born upstairs in that bedroom. He said (and, of course, I knew this too) that until we started going to hospitals for all our entrances and exits, this was where all the men in the Daniels family had sat while their children were up there being born, and where their children—like the little figures in our Swiss clock, he said—had come out to sit while their fathers went in to die.”

She hears the panting steps of a jogger passing behind them: an odd counterpoint.

“I thought it was a lovely image, a
kind
image of death, really,” he goes on, “as if the children were born to relieve their parents’ long vigil, their children born to relieve them. And I suppose what made it so kind was the continuity, the sense of sharing, that the iron bench provided. Each of them sat on that same bench; it was worn with the impressions that each of their bodies had made, and it had stood in that same spot for well over a hundred years.” His voice grows softer, it can get no slower.

“I guess hospitals have made it into a mere ritual, but I’m
romantic enough—maybe Southern enough—to know I’ll be sitting there when my father dies and when my children are born. And I want my child sitting there when I die, even if I am in a hospital thirty miles away.”

He draws in his breath, seems to hold it.

Yes, she thinks, ancestors too. Just that morning, she’d spent an hour with a large manuscript called
White Roots: One Hundred Years of the Armbrusters of Pinnington, Idaho.
It was an awful mess, typed by three or four different machines on a dozen different kinds of paper covered with penned-in notes and corrections. Between the pages there had been hundreds of photographs, each wrapped carefully in pale-pink tissue paper. Some were old, faded, formal portraits of plain, startled men and women with oddly glazed eyes. Others were grainy amateur photos—smudged families in front of large houses, couples in black clothes with gray faces. Still others were newer: men in uniforms hugging women with large flowers in their hair, wedding photos, color photos of families sitting on couches. The last was a studio portrait of a cute little blond girl with her fingers on her chin, wearing a dress printed with dancing poodles—as if one hundred years of the Armbrusters of Pinnington, Idaho, had produced only a vague imitation of a child star.

Orlee Armbruster, the little girl who had grown up to be the family historian, wanted Vista to contact ABC about making it into a mini-series. She suggested Robert Young or Lorne Greene to play the patriarch. She was available for all talk shows.

A barge floats swiftly by, small clear lights along its flat deck, a pudgy tug on its side. He shifts a little on the bench. Wooden bench.

“All my ghosts are contained in that one object,” he whispers,
“that bench. It’s clear and it sums up everything, and there’s nothing in the world that can move me or comfort me or even frighten me the way it can—except, sometimes, the house itself. But here, things change so much, people move around so much, your ancestors could have lived and died in a hundred different places. You could have ghosts anywhere. Do you see what I mean?”

She shrugs. “People in the country stay put, people in the city move around.” She hears her voice, petulant, contrary. Given a chance, she knows, these people will coat anything with poetry.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how to make you see.”

She looks through the bars, out over the water, to the lights of Queens. Those people out there, she could tell him, don’t live and die with the quaint, circular charm of figures in a Swiss clock, despite his daddy’s homey metaphors. They’re random, unattached, with a future that goes only to their retirement in Florida or Maine and a past that ends with Grandma in the spare room. They’re like flash bulbs going off in a large, dark theater. That’s how they glow, she could tell him, like quick, blinding flash bulbs.

“You’re so Southern,” she says instead, laughing. “All this stuff about ghosts and ancestors and monuments to the not-forgotten dead. Other people don’t think like that.”

He leans back, watching her. “Well, what do they think about then?” he asks. “What do the Irish think about, for instance?”

She laughs again. “I don’t know—religion, leprechauns, beer. Not about ghosts.”

He leans closer to her. His pale skin seems brighter than it should in this darkness. “What do you think leprechauns are? And all those Catholic saints? They’re ghosts.”

She shakes her head. “But not ancestral ghosts. They’re fictional ghosts, made up.” She smiles at him to keep the conversation from getting too serious. “That’s the difference. The Irish make up their ghosts. I mean, how can you turn homely Uncle Patrick with the big nose and the rotten teeth into any kind of respectable spirit? And who wants to remember him as an ancestor? Better to bury him and then throw a big party where you can get drunk enough to hallucinate someone more appealing—someone who’s not going to burden your imagination with what he was really like.”

He laughs and she laughs with him. “It’s true!” she says. “You Southerners may want to sit on a bench with your ancestors and remember the dead, but there are other races who’d rather bury them and leave town. Good-by and good riddance.”

She stops abruptly. She will not add, like my mother, like my father.

She looks at him and he is smiling, his eye bright in the darkness. He is waiting to hear her say it: Like my father. She hugs herself, rubbing her arms. “It’s true,” she says again, shivering a little, looking into the park behind them. “We’d better go before we get mugged.”

He gets up, casually puts his arm around her shoulder. “I did have a valid point to make,” he says after they’ve walked for a while. “I’ll just have to write it down and then maybe you’ll see what I’m trying to say.’” He stops, snaps his fingers. “The book,” he cries. “The ending, using the past. That’s it!”

She watches him, suddenly tired. If only he were normal, worked for the telephone company, talked politics and movies. “What’s it?”

He begins to walk again, the little bounce a skip, his hand moving up and down as if he were leading a band. “I don’t
know yet,” he says. “But what we were saying, it relates somehow. The past as an ending, it relates.” He grins at her, all those lights behind him. “You see, you are helping me,” he says.

And she laughs, takes his arm, tells him in that case, they should hurry home. The end is near.

Chapter 9

I returned to Maine last spring, flying this time, although whatever there had been to rush to was already over. My mother had said, or Ward had told me she’d said, that it would be silly to call me. Silly to have me be there merely to steady her hand, waiting patiently, the way I would help an old woman descend a curb.

Leukemia takes time and there had been some hope. She’d thought it best that I not know until it was over; I had, she said, better things to do.

Ward could not come to meet me. Carol, a large-faced woman in her forties and Lillian, the old woman my mother had met on the beach, were there instead, smiling like nurses, oblivious to the chaos of the airport and the tangle of sullen traffic outside, the stinking, slightly antiseptic haze over everything. At first I wondered why both women had come, but when they put me in the back seat and immediately began chatting about the weather and the news, I understood. It was to allow me the opportunity of silence.

And I was silent. Not for any thoughts of my mother, but because everything I thought to say to them, and I fashioned and discarded a hundred sentences along the way,
seemed a lame variation of Blanche Dubois’ “the kindness of strangers.”

One of the most important days of my life and nothing seemed original.

Ward’s house had the sharp, wet odor of a recently doused fire. The two women brought me inside, and when Ward limped down the stairs they quickly went into the kitchen to make lunch. He seemed older. His face was drawn, his plaid shirt, though buttoned at the collar, barely brushed his thin throat; I wondered, with the quick, belated insight of those who have missed the point once before, just what slow illness his lean body held.

He shook my hand, awkwardly, his eyes filling and then quickly going dry, as if the tears had just lapped against them.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And I said, “Thank you. I’m sorry for you.”

He shrugged a little, like a stranger at a bus stop who has also arrived too late, recognizing what by mere coincidence we appeared to share. The living room, the fireplace, the bay window, the old heavy furniture, so neat that even the worn threads of the cushions seemed recently combed, was filled with a mustard-colored light. The tea kettle out in the kitchen began to whistle.

“I’m sorry for
you
,” he repeated.

When Lillian came in with a rattling tray of sandwiches and teacups, she cried, “Sit down, sit down,” as if we were up too soon after an operation.

I quickly sat on the couch. Ward on the chair opposite me. Carol then entered with the teapot and placed it on the coffee table between us. “Do you drink tea?” she asked, leaning to pour, and when I said I did, she went on about how her husband couldn’t stand it. Lillian said it was just as well, it yellowed
your teeth, although I, of course, had nothing to worry about, being so young and, she certainly hoped, free of dentures, what with flouride and flossing and all they have these days when she’d only had baking soda …

Ward seemed to retreat from the room as the women chatted, turning all his attention to the teacup and sandwich that balanced on his lap, absorbing himself in the careful progress of his spoon from saucer to coffee table to sugar bowl (his lips forming a small “o” as he scooped), back over the table and the carpet and his own knee. He stirred his tea with slow scrapes and clicks and kept his thumb and forefinger on the cup’s delicate handle as he raised his sandwich and bent his head to meet it.

I wondered if my mother had ever grown impatient with this numbing care, or if she had found it sadly endearing.

He had called me at six-thirty the night before, Thursday, just as I bit into a limp strand of spaghetti and decided it was cooked. I turned off the burner under the pot, stirred the Ragú, and went into the living room to answer, thinking it was Joanne, or Peggy from downstairs. I had always imagined that such a call would come late at night—one of those screaming, hourless calls that wake you, heart pounding, fully prepared for whatever is terrible and unreal—and so when I heard the sputter of long distance and a man’s hesitant, “Hello?” I felt only a mild curiosity.