A Bigamist's Daughter (3 page)

She turns from the window and goes back to her desk. His manuscript is thick, on expensive paper, professionally typed. The author has already invested in his work, he believes in it. If Mr. Owens were here, he’d tell her to hit him for seven.

One contract, fifteen minutes, and $200 is in her savings account. She passes Tupper Daniels and his mysterious man on to production (Won’t Ned love how neat it is, how much it looks like the real thing!) and goes home at five o’clock.

Home to her studio apartment and her casual glances at the calendar, to her calculations that in about three more weeks it will be a year since Jill’s party, a year since she’s had anyone in her bed. Back to her studio apartment and her memories of that morning nearly a year ago, when she threw him out—Greg was his name, she thinks. Yes. Greg. Threw him out because he smelled of smoke and slept with his mouth open, because waking up with the feeling, Oh shit, who’s this? makes for wonderful jokes but lousy mornings and lousy days. Because right there and then on that Sunday morning, with her apartment a mess and her sheets looking gray and feeling greasy
and a strange, bearded man sleeping next to her with his mouth open, she had vowed—shaking him, telling him to leave—that there’s be no more casual sex, that next time she had someone in her bed it would be for love.

Now, nearly a year later, she’s willing to settle for a fine friendship or even a true concern. Although Ann has suggested a one-night stand might help get things moving again, a one-night stand who arrives late and agrees to be gone by morning.

She glances at her clock. It’s almost lunchtime. She should pick up the contract, roll it into her typewriter, get it over with.

But there is something about this book, the image of that man, the bigamist, as Tupper Daniels talked him into existence, that remains with her, intrigues her still.

Maybe, she thinks, there is Ward’s voice, three summers ago now, talking into the gloom of that damp, tree-shaded porch on that darkening summer evening. There is the sound of his voice as they sat on the creaking wicker chairs and watched through the screens the speckled light that fell sparsely across the front of her mother’s house. His voice, deep and puzzled, a voice, she tried to imagine then, that her mother heard in moments of passion, loneliness, in the small, mundane exchanges of early mornings and later afternoons. (Ward, my mother’s lover: Even now the expression is only ludicrous to her, a hilarious joining of words that suddenly made possible a host of other inappropriate couplings: my mother’s sexuality, my mother’s orgasms, my mother’s immorality. My mother and Ward.) There is Ward’s voice telling her about her mother’s fears, her theories. Ward’s voice never saying the word bigamist (for, she is certain, he would have to know how silly it would sound, how obsolete the word had become) but still, somehow, filling the air with the word, so she could feel it forming on her own tongue.

“Your mother has worried,” he said, sitting in the wicker chair with its dark-green paint seeming to crack and snap each time he moved, leaned forward to see her more clearly, leaned back to watch the deepening shadows. “She has confided in me about your father’s long absences, his constant distractions. She has no proof, but her intuition is strong.”

And she had felt the dampness rising from the concrete floor, from the growing shadows of the trees. The cool, bitter air of the Maine woods at night, in late summer.

“She has confided in me that she felt each time your father left he was leaving for something more solid and formed and more compelling than he ever admitted to. Something more than a job. Which made it more difficult for her to see him go. More difficult than you’ve probably ever realized.”

And the word, she is sure, was there between them, on the damp air.

Or, no. It wasn’t there then because then there was a roll of thunder and Ward unfolded himself from the old chair and got up to stand closer to the screen. Then the rain began, gathering first in the leaves of the trees and then falling on the roof and in the dirt around her mother’s house, its sound somehow diminished by the filter of trees and yet somehow made more terrible by it. And then her mother’s car came into the driveway and she ran to the porch, pulling the light screen door open with more force than was necessary, and Ward took her arms and they both laughed about how wet she’d gotten as they went inside for her to change, turning on the lights as they passed through the rooms.

So there was no time then for the word to form between them, no time for her to feel it fully on her lips.

But now, with the idea, the image, of a bigamist here in her office in New York, two years later, she can recall that day, recall Ward sitting in that chair, speaking of her father, his long
face pale in the dark air on the porch of her mother’s home, and she can remember it as if the word had been there.

She picks up Tupper Daniels’ bright, neat manuscript and slips it back into the yellow envelope.

Different women crying in different rooms in different cities, on different days of the week. One fat, one thin, one buxom, one small and wiry like her mother. A trail of broken-hearted women crying because he is gone, again, but all the while knowing he will return, again, to leave, to return; and all the townspeople wishing to be in her place, to receive him, again. A trail of broken-hearted women with before them a lifetime of sad partings and joyous reunions; of heartbreaks that do no damage and happy endings that end nothing.

Perhaps, she thinks, it is only frantic arm-waving when a simple direction would do; perhaps her job has become too easy and she’s feeling the need to wear herself out. Perhaps this stubborn celibacy has left her with a need to wear herself out in other kinds of frantic, inconsequential acts. Perhaps she is merely curious.

He told her his book was about a bigamist, a polygamist, a chameleon of a man who balances women like so many spinning plates on so many tall sticks; a man, he said, whom every woman will be intrigued by. As she slips his neat manuscript into her brief case, she’s almost beginning to believe him.

Chapter 2

When I got to Maine that August, my mother was thinner than I’d ever seen her. Muscular, somehow, although undoubtedly aged, as if she had shed so much of herself, her old plumpness, until this tight core, which had always been there, was all that was left. The house where she was living was nothing like the house we had lived in on Long Island, with its painted red bricks and white shingles, its wrought-iron porch and fake black shutters, the house I had last seen her in. This was a small, squat cottage set in a shallow valley among heavy oaks, off a road that was really only a half-mile extension of Ward’s driveway, a road that ended in my mother’s driveway and a narrow footpath that led to the beach. The house was covered with rough maroon and green shingles, and there was a low, sloping screen porch across the back and a small, dilapidated greenhouse to the right. The land around it was soft with layer upon layer of dead leaves, and even on the hottest days there was a damp coolness about the house; it had a smell that alternately struck me as fertile and tomblike.

I was twenty-three-years old and I had just left the man I’d been living with. I say “just”; I mean I had called my mother at six o’clock that morning from the Buffalo train station, my three pieces of American Tourister (a high school graduation
gift from her), my two coats and a shopping bag full of shoes making a fortress around me, and said I was coming to see her. I didn’t know how long I would stay.

I hadn’t seen her in nearly two years, the two years since I’d moved in with Bill, the two years since she had sold our house on Long Island and moved to Maine. Of course, we’d spoken on the phone since then. Short, long-distance conversations full of pauses that always ended with one of us saying, “So, what else is new?” We were close in that we had shared my father and much time alone together in our small house, but we had never been given to whispered, late-night conversations about ourselves or to crying on each other’s shoulders, and knowing this helped me feel as I waited for the train that morning that I was truly just stopping by to visit, not crawling back to her with my life in pieces.

Ward, my mother’s landlord and neighbor, picked me up at the train station in Boston. He was a tall, thin man with buck teeth and sharp blue eyes. Had his mouth been smaller, his face fuller and his ears not quite so thick, he might have been handsome; as it was, he was merely homely. The type who you knew immediately had always been optimistically homely, who had always held the promise of an ugly duckling but never quite made the transformation, never had that moment when he blossomed or filled out or even looked a little better than you remembered him. Still, there was something very gentle, nearly gallant, about the way he approached me in the station and bent over me to take the suitcases from my hands. I disliked him immediately.

“This is quite a surprise,” he said as we pulled away from the station. His car, an old, boxy Plymouth, was terribly neat and reeked of the sweet, genderless perfume of its deodorizer, a cardboard skunk that hung from the radio’s tuning knob. I opened the window a little and smiled at him.

“I guess so,” I said, shouting the “so.”

“When Dolores came up to my house this morning and told me you were coming, I actually asked if she hadn’t dreamt that you called.” He laughed a little or perhaps just cleared his throat. “She said what amazed her the most was not that you were coming but that you were up at six A.M.” He glanced at me briefly. “Guess you’re not an early riser.”

“No,” I said, wondering why my mother had sent him, why she had not come herself or at least come along with him. “I’m not.”

We were driving over a dark bridge, Boston behind us, the narrowing harbor on either side. When we stopped at the toll booth, Ward said “Hiya,” in what seemed an exaggerated Maine accent.

“Dolores tells me you two haven’t seen each other for a while.” He seemed to repeat my mother’s name unnecessarily, as if he were trying to prove to me that he knew her well.

“That’s right,” I said. “I guess we’ve both been pretty busy.”

He sucked his teeth, nodding a little. “Dolores has had a hard life,” he said softly, and then, louder, “She’s done well up here, your mother has. She’s quite a woman.” I watched his profile, the sallow skin, the gray stubble on his cheek. The thick white hair, nearly yellow in places. He shook his head again. “After all she’d been through, to have come up here and started a new life for herself. You have to admire her. After all the hard times she’d had.”

I folded my arms in front of me and stared out the window. Fast-food restaurants, trailer parks, topless discos, motels with four-wheeled rent-a-signs in their parking lots advertising vibrating waterbeds and adult movies. And then, just beyond this strip, white colonial houses, green lawns. Suburbia.

“You really do have to hand it to her,” Ward said. “With the hard times she’s had.”

I laughed a little, implying I knew far more than he. “Oh, things were never very hard,” I said.

He glanced at me again. I’d swallowed his bait. “Children often mistake their own happiness for that of their parents. When your mother came up here, she started her life over again. I believe she needed to.”

I shrugged and laughed a little, but he was beginning to annoy me.

My mother’s life at home had been made up of morning TV shows and shirtwaist dresses, meetings of the Mothers’ Club and afternoon naps. Waiting patiently for my father.

My clearest image of her then is of a plump woman in a yellow dress, humming, peeling potatoes at the sink at five o’clock on a winter evening, the water running, the radio giving the traffic report, the table, set by me, ready for the two of us. And it was this image that made Ward’s talk of suffering ludicrous.

Yet, when we got to Maine and I saw where my mother was living and how thin she had gotten and how she wore her graying hair tied back in a low ponytail, like some old male hippie, it was this image that my mind turned to, held onto, as she embraced me and kissed my cheeks.

“You’ll find your mother’s changed,” Ward had said to me in the car as we passed from New Hampshire into Maine. “She’s happy.” He hadn’t said if she was changed
and
happy or happy merely because she was changed.

My father had seldom been home. Sometimes he was gone for days, sometimes for months, and he and my mother were always so casual about his trips, his “jobs away,” that it was years before I realized our lives were unusual. When I did realize it, I saw my friends’ predictable gone-at-seven, back-at-six fathers as dull and burdensome.

Even now, I’m not sure what he did on his jobs away. Once, when I asked him what his occupation was, he told me he was a gigolo, and I dutifully reported the news to my friends and to Sister Immaculate Rose, my second-grade teacher. When the nun smiled kindly and told me to ask him again, he said to tell her he was with the government. We were in the kitchen, I on my father’s lap sipping his beer, my mother at the sink washing something. I remember she turned and smiled and told my father not to teach me to lie, but she offered no alternative answer.