A Bigamist's Daughter (28 page)

“It’s not,” she says when he pulls up the drive, “Quite what I’d had in mind.”

Without a pause, he pulls out again, onto the road. “What did you have in mind?” he asks patiently, carefully, as if he fears he has made some gross error.

“Something with a little more atmosphere.”

He nods, pulling smoothly into a gas station. “Atmosphere,” he says, opening his door.

The two men inside the station watch him carefully as he walks toward them through the rain. Inside, his head is obscured by a poster advertising snow tires, but she can see that his arms are straight at his side. The men, who are both sitting at a large desk, one with his feet up, slowly smile. Tupper raises his two arms and one of the men glances out the window to her. The other stretches out his arm and points behind him. The other man points too. Finally, Tupper points in the same direction. The two men laugh heartily and Tupper, smiling, is out the door.

“Not much atmosphere to choose from this time of year,” he says when he gets in beside her. “But they said there’s a place off the road somewhere. A place with little cottages or something.”

The two men are standing at the window as they pull out. They are still smiling. Immediately, he turns off the main road onto one that is narrow and tree-lined, bordered by fallen leaves that have been crushed shiny and dark brown. The houses they pass vary from shingled cottages to sprawling ranches to old
Victorian mansions, but mostly, it seems, there are trees and lawns. The air is wet and fragrant, and despite the rain she has her window wide open.

At first glance, she thinks it is merely a name above a mailbox, but as they pass it, it occurs to her.

“Stop!” she says.

“Why?” He slows down.

She turns around. “Back there. Go back.”

He stops, puts the car into reverse. “What am I looking for?”

“Stop,” she says again. She reads the sign over the white mailbox, dark blue painted on gray: “Overnight Guests.” The house, behind a long green lawn and a split-rail fence is a tall, somewhat crooked-looking old home with dark cedar shingles and black shutters. Behind it, there seems to be a barn and a chicken coop and a small white corral.

“Your uncle’s house?” he whispers.

She turns to him, smiling. “No, but let’s stay here.”

He is bending to look at the house through her window, frowning. “Why?”

“It’s different, it’s unique. Hell, maybe it’s even the uncle’s house, who knows?” He doesn’t stop frowning and she pulls out her editorial voice. “And I don’t particularly want to stay someplace recommended by the neighborhood service station.”

He looks at her, sighs, straightens up and shifts gears.

The driveway is covered with white gravel that crackles under the slow wheels and sounds to her like every arrival. A dog barks somewhere behind or inside the house and the slamming car doors echo. She sees a reddish-colored horse peering from the back barn.

The front door opens before they have mounted both steps of the small porch.

“Hello,” a woman cries warmly, stepping out to meet them. She is tall and freckled and her short red hair stands up straight over her forehead, a cigarette dangles from the corner of her mouth and she squints through the smoke. “Welcome.”

“We’d like to see a room,” Tupper says, very formally, and the woman says, her voice dry and husky, smoke-filled, “Wonderful.”

The house smells of cats, and, Tupper insists, turpentine, but the room is large with dark floral curtains and a thick floral comforter and a working fireplace already stocked with wood, and Elizabeth insists that it’s perfect. Their view is to the back, the barn, the corral, a blasted flower garden and then a hill of grass and a line of thick trees, and Mrs. Carpenter—Hedda, she said they must call her—had made them stand silently in the room, their noses in the air, until they all agreed that they could, indeed, hear the sea.

“It’s fabulous,” Elizabeth says again, standing in the middle of the room, hands on her hips. Hedda has left them to make their decision. “It’s like something out of a movie.”

“Sure is,” Tupper says, examining a large black-and-white sketch that seems to be of two sleeping cats. He turns to her. “And just what you were looking for.”

It is something Bill might say, sarcastically, but when she meets his eyes, he is smiling, fondly.

Hedda calls to them from the kitchen as they hit the last step, and they follow her voice down a hallway, past a bathroom and what seems to be a small library. The kitchen is a large room, the entire back width of the house, with a long continuous line of small windows, like those of a railroad car, splitting each of the three outside walls. She is standing by the sink, drying her hands on a checkered dishtowel. Elizabeth had at first put her at forty, but realizes now she could be fifty, or
thirty. There seems to be some gray in her dull-red hair, but no lines in her dark, pleasant face. She is slim, and over her jeans she wears a man’s long white shirt. It covers what might be any telltale sign of age in her stomach or her breasts or backside.

“It’s a wonderful room,” Elizabeth tells her. “We’ll take it.”

She smiles. “Good.” As if she had no doubt that they would. “Have some coffee.” She points to the cloth-covered wicker basket on the table across the room. “I just took those muffins out of the oven.”

They sit at the table, under a small, tin-shaded light, Sears Roebuck Colonial, its bulb burning. Outside, the sky has grown darker, the rain visible. On the window ledge beside them is a Cheshire-like cat with dark ivy growing from his back.

Hedda puts two mugs of coffee before them and pulls out a chair to sit down. “That’s strawberry and raspberry,” she says, pointing to the fat glass jars of jam. “Homemade. And butter, not margarine.” She puts out her cigarette, blowing the last bit of smoke to the ceiling. “I never use margarine,” she says and then shrugs, “It’s my token attempt at self-destruction.”

Elizabeth and Tupper laugh, reaching for the muffins. The three talk for a while about the city and the fall tourist trade and the problems of running a guest house in a town with only one season (“One season that anyone
knows
about,” Hedda says. “As if we all disappear when it’s over, like in
Brigadoon”),
and Elizabeth decides that she likes Hedda. There is, she thinks, something strong and clean and wholesome about the woman. Despite the cigarettes, something terribly healthy, terribly attractive. The muffins are warm and the jam is rich and sweet and she can easily imagine that Hedda made both herself, that she mixed the batter with her hands and licked her long fingers as she stirred the jam.

She tells them that she lives here alone, has lived here alone
for nearly six years now, since she divorced her “last husband,” and gave up her job as an illustrator in New Haven. Although, she confesses, lowering her foggy voice so that the words seem to break on the air or slip, unheard, back into her throat, sometimes, when she has a boarder who seems a little “shady,” she pretends there’s a man living here. Sometimes she leaves out a pipe or a pair of men’s shoes, and once she even closed the kitchen door and had a long conversation with him, talking first in her normal voice and then, “In a deep, mumbly voice like this.”

“Sounds like it would be easier for you to just get married again,” Tupper says, smiling. He has loosened in her presence, appears even to be enjoying himself.

Hedda shakes her head, looks at him sternly, but fondly, as if he were a favorite son or lover who has spoken out of turn. “No, dear,” she says. “Never again. It’s been my experience that it’s woman’s happiest state, not marriage, the single life.” She leans closer to him. “It’s men who thrive in marriage.” She makes
thrive
sound like some kinky coital position and Tupper smiles stupidly, as if he is about to agree to try it.

“What brought you out here?” Elizabeth asks before he does.

Hedda lights another cigarette. “I was on vacation, right after my divorce, at a friend’s house in Sag Harbor. I told him I wanted my own place and he took me to a real estate agent who showed me this.”

Elizabeth imagines that the friend had something to do with the divorce. Hedda, she thinks, is not the type of woman who is left.

“Do you like it?” Hedda asks.

“Oh, yes,” they both say.

She gets up quickly, goes to the stove for more coffee. “I think it’s a great house,” she says as she pours. “It really should be haunted.” She brings the pot back to the stove and sits
down again, blowing smoke. “But with my luck, the ghost would be some sea captain like in—what’s the movie,
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
—and after three bad marriages, I’d be stuck with a man in my house again.”

They laugh. She is, Elizabeth feels sure, one of those women who must flick men from her, whose life is a series of lush dinners and European vacations and summer houses in Sag Harbor. A series of gifts from men. A never-ending series of various and limitless possibilities, for in every ordinary male she meets she discovers, like a jewel in a box of Cracker Jacks, the offer of love.

One of those women who will claim, of course, that looking back, she would have preferred one normal husband and a quiet life.

“Do you know anyone around here named Nelson?” Tupper asks suddenly. “Or Neilson, Nevelson, something like that?”

She takes a long drag from her cigarette, lets the smoke out through her nose. Slowly, she shakes her head. “I can’t think of any. Are they friends of yours?”

Tupper smiles. “No. Elizabeth had an uncle who used to live here, and her father grew up here. We were just curious about where his house might have been.”

Hedda turns to Elizabeth, sympathetically, she thinks. “Is your uncle dead?”

She nods, she’s never thought of him as
her
uncle. “A long time ago.”

“Check the library,” Hedda says. “Or the newspaper office. One of them has all the town’s obituaries on file. You might get an address from that.”

“Great idea!” Tupper says, and, to Elizabeth, “Want to try it?”

She smiles, finishing her coffee. “If you like.” Although she’d
prefer to stay here, get the details of Hedda’s three marriages, her single life, her discovery that only men thrive.

Tupper gets up, thanks Hedda, offers to pull the car around front so Elizabeth won’t get too wet. When he’s gone, Hedda turns to her and smiles, but with a funny, rounded, almost frightened shape about her mouth.

“You’re not looking for your father, are you?” she asks.

Elizabeth’s own mouth seems to fill with salt water. “Pardon?” she says, politely. The politeness taking over like a cartoon ghost rising up from the prone, unconscious body.

Hedda puts her elbow into her hand, holds the cigarette near her ear. Shakes her head to dismiss the question. “My daughter,” she explains, “she’s about your age, went on a kick last year about finding her father. My first husband. We were divorced when she was two and he took off for God knows where and never bothered to see her again. It never seemed to matter to her when she was growing up—my second husband adopted her and the third couldn’t do enough for her—but all of a sudden, she wanted to see him. I don’t know if it was the whole Alex Haley bit, or because someone on one of the soaps,
Days of Our Lives
I think it was, was doing the same thing, or maybe because she started thinking about having children of her own. But, whatever it was she started calling up relatives and visiting strange towns, libraries and newspaper offices, checking obits, because I told her that as far as I knew he could be dead.” She stamps out her cigarette. Elizabeth hears the car pulling around the drive.

“Did she find him?” she asks.

Hedda throws her head back over her shoulder, as if to indicate that he’s in the living room. “Oh yes. Right here on Long Island. Well, actually in Bayside. They had lunch together and she met his family, but all she told me about it was
that he had an awful Queens accent and a son with the thickest neck she’d ever seen. She said she was sorry she wasted so much time. They had nothing to say to each other.” She looks at her nails. “Of course, part of it might have been my fault,” she adds. “I probably made him sound a lot better than he was, over the years.” She smiles, to herself. “How do you tell someone about some poor man you once loved desperately without lying about him a little?” She laughs. “At least in
Days of Our Lives
the girl discovered that her father was in prison on a murder charge. Katie was a little disappointed in comparison.”

She looks at Elizabeth, smiling. Her eyes are dark brown and terribly bright; sharp, as if a thousand fascinating memories and thoughts milled around behind them, catching light like cymbals and sequins and small bits of glass. “That’s why I asked,” she says. “When your friend mentioned your uncle.” She sighs, an apology. “It does seem to be the latest fad.”

A man at the newspaper office sends them to the library, and the librarian sits them before a TV screen with a dozen reels of microfilm. Both seem slightly amused by their requests, as if Hedda’s daughter, or someone like her, had been in with the same questions just a day or two before—as if they’d been having a run on obituaries—and their amusement, as well as their serious willingness to help, only increases her sense of bulky foolishness. Surely she is too big to be playing Nancy Drew to Tupper Daniels’ Hardy Boy.

They find a Nelson who died in childbirth and a Neilson who drowned in 1935, at age 27, and a Nicholson survived by twelve children, and read fifty other stories of the dead before she sits up, shaking herself as if from some absorbing bad habit and declares that she has had enough.

“This strikes me,” she tells him, whispering, slipping into
her jacket as he sits blinking at her, the greenish light from the screen still on his face, “as a particularly morbid way of spending a weekend.”

He laughs, and, returning the reels to the librarian, follows her out into the rain.

They have lunch at a small bar with hanging plants and Tiffany lampshades—a reproduction of every bar on the Upper East Side—and then he drives her slowly through town, up and down past the huge summer homes of the wealthy and the small, inhabited homes of the year-round people, suggesting that she might, just might, see something she had forgotten or been unaware she ever knew, that would identify the house where her father lived.