A Bigamist's Daughter (27 page)

And what if, out there, just a hundred miles from where he spent his life with her and her mother, there is a family by the same name in a small house, also waiting for the father/husband to return, waiting these many years. In the house she’d said he sold for a song.

“All right,” she says. “We’ll go if you like.” And what would the wife, or even the daughter, have to tell her, whispering
in the kitchen about the father/husband so long and so far away? Your mother has worried, has theories. What life behind the life in the stories she told?

At dinner, Joanne had said, “Do you know the one about the Italian weatherman predicting fog—a biga mist.” It is not, in this age and time a word to be taken seriously.

Any family by the same name would, she is sure, merely be a descendant of the Irishman who bought her father’s list.

But later, as they reach the city, where the small orange lights of buildings and streets make the sky above it rosy, make the darkness beyond it starless, impossible to imagine, she asks him, casually, “Do you know the play
The Glass Menagerie?”

“Of course,” he answers. “Tennessee Williams.” And then adds, “The father was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.”

He looks at her, significantly, and she nods, accepting it. She cannot deny that it is the stuff of great literature.

Chapter 17

Significantly, they leave at dawn.

The city seems drained at this hour, and the sickly bit of orange-pink rising just over Queens only adds to its pallor, a misleading trace of color on a clearly doomed face. A bit of false hope. A bruise, not a blush.

The red car, which Tupper Daniels picked up last night, is still where he parked it, its silver bumpers locked coldly between two others, a wet brown leaf plastered to its windshield like a violent drop of blood.

She rubs her arms as she watches him skip around the car and let himself in on the other side. The street is empty, eerie, somehow too wide and too close, or just too much a city street at dawn, too set with large but perfect details—a fire hydrant, a row of brown stoops, a grouping of black garbage cans—to be real.

“All set?” he asks, turning on the ignition.

She nods.

Only coffee shops and delis are open on the avenue, and even these seem uninhabited. A man in a white shirt and apron stands in one window, looking out over two upright tins of pale muffins, waiting. A paneled delivery truck turns a corner and
stops, a man in gray hops out, his breath visible, his footsteps silent. Two bent and ragged bums solemnly shake hands at a corner, a dawn farewell.

Tupper has had the people at Hertz draw a red line across his map, tracing the route from Manhattan to the end of the Island, and so this time he asks her no questions as they cross the Queensborough Bridge, the steel girders and, on the other side, the shadow of the el blocking from moment to moment what light there is. He only hums, smiling to himself. She sits quietly with her hands in her lap, like a pregnant woman being driven to the delivery room.

It is, without a doubt, the beginning of a trip. Up before everyone else, moving swiftly. Everything behind and on either side falling away, while whatever is ahead, whatever destination, remains round and hollow and as ready to be filled as a ringing silver bowl. It’s a kind of suspension, she thinks, this traveling, stepping in at one place and out at another.

“Sleepy?” he says, his voice soft and faraway.

“No. Just thinking.”

And her father traveled. Left again and again. Sailed off the edge of the earth, stepped into the clouds, passed through the looking-glass. Arrived again at the home of a family just like the one he’d left. Arrived, perhaps, to wake in yet another woman’s bed, to receive yet another celebration from another family for another homecoming. Arrived to repeat himself over and over, all the same gestures, the long kiss for the mother, the lift and twirl for the child, the loosening of the tie, the kicking off of the shoes. The sinking into the couch with his arms spread out across its back, a huge embrace for all he sees, repeated again and again from one trip to another, so that the past becomes the future and the present and the past again, all indistinguishable, concurrent, never-ending. She remembers
there being so much noise in the house when he came home, as if she and her mother had waited for him in silence, in a kind of suspension.

“Thinking what?” Tupper says.

She opens her eyes. Already the sun has cleared the highway and most of the trees. Briefly, as they pass, she can see it fully—made small and round and moonlike by the haze.

“Just thinking.” It’s become their game. He will ask her to elaborate.

“About our trip?”

“About our trip.” The strangeness of the morning makes her daring. “About the dawn. About my father.”

He merely says, “Yes.”

Soon, pockets of suburbia go by. Trees growing bare. A reservoir, that at first she mistakes for a lake, mist rising from it.

“Should we stop somewhere for breakfast?”

She shakes her head. She realizes she is hungry but is not sure she could eat anything. Or, if she were to eat, taste anything. Perhaps it is the hour, or this odd anticipation she feels, but, whatever the reason, she imagines that anything she eats will have the plain, papery taste of a communion wafer. She recalls the stories the nuns used to tell of Crusaders going into battle after having knelt before the altar all night. Holy Communion their only breakfast, victory or heaven assured.

It had always seemed to her an exquisite gesture.

“Let’s not stop,” she says. “Let’s keep going until we get there.” She pulls down the visor as the sun begins to shine in her eyes.

“When we get there,” he says, after they have driven a while in silence, “can we see the house where your father lived? Do you know where it is?”

She shrugs. “No. I’ve never seen it. He sold it before I was
born.”
B.E.
“He sold it for a song,” she adds, trying to make him sound cavalier.

Tupper looks at her. He is wearing a loose fisherman’s sweater, a turtleneck that makes him hold his chin high. “We could probably find it if we looked, did a little research. Wouldn’t you like to see it?”

“Sure, if you want to.” She has a picture of it in her mind. Small, two stories and a slanting roof. Weathered shingles. A long porch across the front, its roof supported by white wooden beams. A smell like old pine, like an attic, like her father’s closet at home that was filled with gray suits and silk ties and white cotton shirts that were starched and pressed so carefully, their creased arms seemed paper-thin, slightly bent at the elbows. A closet filled with more clothes than a traveling man should leave behind.

“Do you know the uncle’s last name?”

“Neilson.” She tries to remember. “Nevelson. Nelson. I don’t know, something like that.”

He glances at her, smiling a little. “It would help if we knew for sure.”

She folds her arms before her. “My father always referred to them as his aunt and uncle.” Points of his own personal history, not hers. His past, which could have been another life. Which should have been her inheritance.

Tupper sighs. “What else do you know about him?”

“He was a Dutchman. A fire-and-brimstone Dutchman, my father said. And he married very late in life. And he had a farm.”

“And there was something about your father,” Tupper adds, slowly, staring ahead, “that appealed to him so much, he left him everything he had.”

“Yes,” she says, watching him. “Even though my father had
lived there only about a year.” There was something about her father, some intrigue, some charm, some story to tell her grandchildren: He was no ordinary man.

Tupper looks at her, says, “It’s interesting,” as if he is developing a theory. He takes her hand. “I’m glad we decided to make this trip.”

“Yes,” she says.

They drive silently. The houses that line the highway have gradually disappeared. First there was one house after the other, then large clumps of houses interspersed with small, then only one or two, and now just the occasional, irregular home or shopping center or farmhouse and roadside stand. The trees along the road have grown sparse, the fields appear more frequently, the Island seems to be flattening out before them, shaking itself of the city and the suburbs and the last fifty years, becoming more of what it was when her father lived here.

Of course she has been out this way before, years ago, in high school and college, on those summer weekends when she and her friends would take off from their jobs as salesgirls and waitresses and nurse’s aids and head for the Hamptons, but she is not sure that she ever thought of her father then. Thought that this, perhaps, was the road he took that first day with his uncle or this the town where he lived those first ten years, or this the road he took back again, into the city, riding this time with Jerry Case and the other sons of the wealthy summer people whom he had also somehow charmed, somehow befriended (riding in drunkenly, impulsively, like Gatsby and Nick and Jordan and Daisy and Tom), on his way to meet, for the first time, her mother.

She has no recollection that she ever thought these things, or, if she did think of them, the recollection has been obscured by her own, primary memories of those weekends: the crowded motel rooms or cottages littered with nightgowns and beer
bottles and electric curlers, with opened bags of potato chips and popcorn and a dozen damp pieces of bathing suits that hung from shower curtains and curtain rods and chair backs and faucets like bright, broken balloons. The drunken rush for the shower when she and her girlfriends came home from a day on the beach and a four-to-seven happy hour; the various formulas for getting a second wind (ice on the face, a brisk walk, a Pepsi, a nap, a joint), and then, all of them sunburned and shampooed, piling into cars and heading into town again, where the boys would be standing on tables in bars and shouting in hoarse voices, spilling beers and starting fights and pulling down their pants. The waking to find those same boys, or ones just like them, asleep in the living room or in cars outside the door or on the bed or floor or sleeping bag next to her.

Memories that now are without meaning—or, as memories, have no more meaning than they had as events.

And yet, all along, through it all, whatever this place had to tell her about her father had been there. All along, if she had just driven past the bars and the discos and the desperate, nearly crazed struggle to have fun, if she had just gotten alone and driven a little further out onto the Island, she could have found the house where her father once lived. She could have, perhaps, watched it quietly from across the street, from behind a tree or inside a car, until sooner or later the screen door opened and slammed behind a girl much like herself, with her father’s gray eyes and sharp nose and dark hair, who would step barefoot from the shaded porch to the grassy lawn, a whittled walking stick in her hand.

She looks at Tupper Daniels. His profile is perfect, without irregularities. It moves perfectly into the collar of his white sweater, his smooth chest, his loose corduroy slacks which are the palest, softest gray. His gray suede bucks.
Gentleman’s
Quarterly
might call it the casual look for fall, perfect for an autumn weekend in the Hamptons. He has a sense of what’s appropriate, she’ll have to admit that. He does know how to put things together.

“I
am
glad you talked me into this,” she says.

He pats her hand, returns his to the wheel. “I’m glad I did too.” And once again, there is in his voice, in the way he moves his mouth and raises his chin, that sense of quiet, subtle sagacity: He knows more than he’s telling. Yet now she finds it not threatening, but assuring, exciting. Soon, he will let her in on it.

“I can’t wait to get there,” she says.

The road ahead is straight and empty and he seems to accelerate as a reply. Clouds have begun to gather over the sun, like dawn coming back, or refusing to leave. She opens her window and smells a cold trace of the sea, and with the gray road beneath them and the flat fields on either side, and the wind blowing in her face, she can almost imagine she has set out upon it.

It’s raining by the time they reach the town. It’s a light rain, seen more easily in the town pond than on the windshield or in the air, but it gives everything a sodden, somewhat unsubstantial look that she finds appealing. The reds and browns and golds of the trees seem ready to drip from their branches like wet dye.

On Main Street, there are a few shoppers covered in plastic raincoats and umbrellas, but they, and the small shops themselves, seem somehow aware that their season is over and the first of the other three already well begun. They move languidly, almost sadly, like a hostess in her bathrobe emptying ashtrays on Sunday morning.

“I’ve done a little research already,” Tupper says as they pass through town. “There’s a motel just down the road somewhere.”

“Oh?” she says. She hadn’t considered staying at a motel and as it appears before them, pink and blue, white arches over the office and the ice machines, she knows why.