A Bigamist's Daughter (33 page)

“And you take me to too many cemeteries,” she says out loud, getting out of the car.

He says, “What?”

The sunglasses make her feel like a framed camera shot, hand held, walking toward some terrible fate. She blinks to
become less aware of how she is seeing. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing at all.”

The cemetery is busy with visitors this Sunday afternoon. A tow-headed family stands around a bright stone, heads hung a little, faces dumb, like passers-by stopped outside a TV store, watching the movements of a colorful, silent screen. A middle-aged woman on her hands and knees crawls around a tombstone, clipping grass. An old woman in a purple velvet hat sits on one of the stone benches that line the path and reads a thick paperback.

Around the cemetery are the fading trees and another field waiting to be filled. This, Elizabeth thinks, is what they should be like, spacious, out of the way. As serene as a golf course. Her glasses suddenly seem appropriate.

They walk toward what seems to be the older part of the cemetery, Tupper checking the dates on each stone as they pass, murmuring, “Nelson, Neilson, Nicholson, Nevelson,” as if he were looking through a phone book. Her boot heels sink into the mud and the wet grass as if the earth just below it were hollow. They walk slowly through one row and then turn and go back down another. The styrofoam forms of old wreaths are at some of the graves. Green pots of withered chrysanthemums are at others. One has a plastic lily covered with a dirty glass jar, another a feeble American flag. She watches a squirrel, its movements so slow and graceful they almost seem stylized, mechanical, hop down the grass before them. They turn again, pace another aisle, reviewing the troops. She begins to wonder why she is here.

“Neilson!” Tupper cries. “Here’s a Bridget Ross Neilson, died 1947.” He holds out his arm, like a surgeon demanding a scalpel. “What was his wife’s name, the uncle? What was your father’s aunt’s name?”

Elizabeth frowns. “Betty.”

“Was her maiden name Ross?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Is that an Irish name?”

Tupper shrugs too. “I don’t know. But then I’d say Neilson was English, like Admiral Nelson, not Dutch.”

Elizabeth looks at the stone. It is pale brown, with a small cross and “J.M.J.” chiseled at the top—what the nuns used to tell them to put on all their test papers, for good luck. Not much of an epitaph.

“Well, Bridget is an Irish name.” She looks at Tupper, not sure that she wants this to be her aunt, but sure, somehow, that she wants him to believe it is. If only to get this over with.

“But Betty usually comes from Elizabeth,” Tupper says. “Doesn’t it?”

She adjusts her glasses. “My father’s mother’s name was Elizabeth. This aunt,” she nods toward the stone, as if it were indeed hers, “lived with them in England before she came to New York. They were sisters. They couldn’t both be named Elizabeth.”

“Maybe your father was saying his Aunt Biddy.”

She nods. “Could be. But you’d think I’d remember a funny name like that.”

“You’d think,” Tupper says. His enthusiasm seems to falter. “What else do you know about her?”

She looks at him. She is bored, sick of this. “Nothing,” she says.

He slaps his thigh, “Great,” and walks a few feet down the path to a small stone bench. “You’re proving to be a great help, Elizabeth,” he says, sitting, clearly annoyed. “You’re really trying to help me.” He hunches over his lap like
The Thinker.

She looks at the wet grass, the crushed, somewhat silverish imprint of Tupper’s shoes. She wants to say, All right, then,
let’s forget about it. Let’s talk about us instead. Let’s go home. But she also wants, still, and even more, to be part of it. The bright young editor.

She walks slowly to the bench and sits down beside him. The stone is cold and the cold seems to soak through her jeans.

“My father once told me,” she says, in a tone she might use for an apology, an offering, “that his mother, in London, was always trying to pass herself off as English.”

He turns to watch her. “So?”

“So maybe the aunt did the same thing over here. Maybe she wanted people to think she was English so she said her name was Betty, not Bridget.”

Tupper sits up a little, hands on his knees. “Why would she want people to think she was English?”

She touches her glasses. “Well,” she says, improvising. “She was a maid for a while, when she first came over. Maybe English maids were more in demand—you know how you WASPs are about the English.” He is about to speak and she puts her hand on his sleeve. “Or maybe it was because of the uncle,” she says. “He wasn’t Catholic and he didn’t like Catholics, my father told me that. Maybe she told the uncle she was English and Protestant and that her name was Betty just to get him to marry her.”

He frowns. “Sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to marry someone.”

She nods. “It does, but maybe she loved him.” Maybe crowds parted, their eyes met, he fell on his knees.

Tupper puts his hands under his thighs, raising his shoulders, and looks out across the stones. “It hardly seems likely,” he says, dryly. And she had to agree. The uncle, she knows, would be a ridiculous figure in such a romance. Old, stern,
bigoted. Puzzled to find himself, so late in his life, no longer a bachelor, no longer childless. Struck dumb by the miracle of her father riding beside him.

She crosses her legs, folds her arms over them. Her story, or, this time, her mother’s story, of their first sweet meeting, will not do. She looks across the cemetery, feels the weak sun on her hair, although through her glasses the place seems sunless. She watches an older couple pass by, pausing here and there, bending, as if in a garden. She glances at Tupper beside her and wonders again why they are here. It was, after all, her father they were supposed to have been looking for. Her father’s story that was to have been told, blessed with immortality.

She looks again at the pale stone, the sharp, bevel-cut of the words. Bridget Ross Neilson. J.M.J.: Jesus, Mary, Joseph.

Joseph: A man puzzled to find himself, so late in his life, no longer a bachelor, no longer childless.

“All right,” she says slowly, smiling a little. “It wasn’t because she loved him,” she says. “Maybe she lied to him about herself simply to get him to marry her. So he could help her out.”

He turns to her again, smiling kindly, as if he appreciates, but has little hope for, her efforts. “Help her out doing what?”

“Sending for my father.”

He presses his lips together, swings them to one side, considering. “She cared that much about seeing your father?”

She nods. “He’d been her favorite, back in England. Before she moved to New York. My father told me that. Maybe she’d planned to send for him from the very beginning, as soon as she got married and had her own home.”

Tupper laughs. “Very Jane Austen.”

She smiles, coyly. She could be offering him peeled grapes. “You said you wanted to appeal to women.”

He laughs again, folds his arms before him. “So you’re saying that the aunt here married old Neilson just so she could send for her nephew, your father?”

“Right.”

“The son she never had.”

“Yes.” Although she doesn’t like the phrase. It reminds her of silent-movie captions and Catholic euphemisms for aborted babies. Melodramas. And yet, she is sure, it was the phrase her father had used, telling her the story. And she had thought it a lovely story.

“Or did have,” she whispers.

Tupper pulls his head back, “What?” and a laugh, unbidden, rises to her throat. Feels more like a blow. Why not melodrama?

“Yes,” she says. “Why not? Remember I told you that his parents gave him up easily? Well, maybe it was because he wasn’t theirs, he was hers!”

“Her son?”

“Yes,” she goes on. “And remember,” having fun now, surprised herself at how she can make it fit, “my father said that the uncle was a little in awe of him when he first arrived, he didn’t know quite what to make of him when they rode out to the Island together?”

Tupper nods, but uncertainly. And yet curious, she is sure. “Yes,” he says slowly. “So?”

“Well, maybe it was because he knew.” Like Joseph, awed by the miracle of his wife and this child, of where the child had come from, of the way his wife must have loved. “He knew my father was his wife’s child by someone else.”

Tupper is squinting at her. “By
whom?”

She hesitates. “God” would be the consistent answer. “Someone in England, I suppose.” Someone who had appeared before her once and had fallen on his knees. Someone who had
done great things to her. “Someone she’d had an affair with. Someone who’d gotten her pregnant.”

“Someone she never got over?” he asks, that facetiousness again in his eyes—gray eyes through her glasses.

She nods. The miracle of his wife and the way she must have loved. “All right.”

“Someone she continued to love even after she met and married the uncle.”

“Maybe,” she says.

“Which would make him
her
bigamist figure, right?”

She studies her hands. She should say, Yes, that’s right, let’s go. One bigamist bagged, let’s go. “Or else it would make her the bigamist,” she says.

She looks up at him, the small eyes, the pale lashes. He is biting one side of his lip. “No,” he says finally. He straightens up, shaking his head. “No, that’s no good. A man like the uncle wouldn’t put up with that, a wife with a lover and an illegitimate child. A bigamist wife.”

Her story will not do. “Why not?”

“It’s just no good.” He raises his collar against the growing wind and looks at her over the felt undersides of his lapels. “What would be the appeal of a woman like that? Especially to a man like the uncle. Why would he marry someone who says she’s still in love with someone else?”

She presses her hands between her knees, shivering a little, studying the dew that has beaded across her boot. “It might have been reassuring to him,” she says, slowly. “To know that she was capable of loving in a certain way.”

“Yeah,” Tupper says. “But with someone else.”

She looks up again. He is smirking at the stones. “You never know,” she insists. “The uncle had been a bachelor all his life, he’d lived alone, maybe someone like the aunt would
have appealed to him precisely because she did have a lover and a child. Because she told him that her life had been tragic and romantic, and maybe that would have appealed to him, filled him with awe.”

One corner of his lip remains twisted, as if he were smiling at something at the edge of his vision. “The same way your father, her son, filled him with awe that first day?”

She nods. “Yes. Could be.”

“Which,” he adds, “might be why the uncle left your father all his land. Almost as a tribute to what your father represented, his wife’s great love for someone else.”

“Yes,” she says again.

“Because, you’re saying, what really appealed to the uncle, what he really worshiped in the aunt, was the way she had once loved someone else. And still loved someone else.”

She watches a line of clouds moving swiftly over the trees. A voice from another part of the cemetery is suddenly caught and snapped by the wind.

“Could be,” she whispers. “Could be that’s what appealed to him.”

For what magic had touched her, through all her dull life, except that she had met him and he had fallen on his knees?

Tupper suddenly smiles his square smile, slips his hands into his pockets. “Could be,” he says. “But only if the uncle was willing to believe her, and all the stories she told him about how she was still in love.”

What magic except in the stories she told? “Sometimes,” Elizabeth says, slowly, feeling a slow pulse rising, beating softly in her ears, “people are willing to believe anything about someone else if it makes their own lives more interesting.”

Willing to believe in the stories she told, recited like prayers. Stories, like prayers, that recounted for him the way she had
loved; and redeemed the way she had suffered. Stories whose meanings, if they had meanings, he alone knew because she had confided in him.

“You don’t think the uncle might have seen through her?” Tupper asks.

She shakes her head. For what else could her mother have told him to make herself seem, to him, such an extraordinary woman, starting her life over. Why else would she have left Long Island where she had spent her life, left the prosaic death, the bishop-blessed funeral at St. Elizabeth’s where still she would have been called “good Mrs. Connelly,” the widowed virgin, the saint, if not to start her life over again with a man who would worship her for what she said she had been, how she told him she had loved? A man who would hear her call, after everything, her lover’s name.

Tupper slides close to her, puts his hand on her thigh. “You don’t think,” he says, leaning so close that she can smell the sharp odor of his breath, “that the uncle, at some point, might have asked her, ‘Well, if it was such a great love, where is he? Why didn’t he marry you? Why’d he get you pregnant and leave you?’ ”

He presses his lips together, but, it seems, with a great effort, as if he can barely fit them over his small teeth, barely contain his grin. “Don’t you think he would have asked what happened, why’d he leave you?”

She shrugs again, elaborately, shaking him off. “I don’t know,” she says. And when he doesn’t move away from her, she stands. The breeze lifts her hair and she steps back, as if to catch it. She looks down at him through her dark glasses, and suddenly longs to be alone, to return to her own thoughts as if to a sleep.

But Tupper persists. “You don’t think he would have seen through her stories a little? And maybe asked why he left her?”

She looks down at him. “We don’t know who left whom, do we?”

“All right then.” His square chin raised toward her, his smile saying he’s got her. “Even stranger, don’t you think the uncle might have wondered why, if she had this great love, and still loved him, she would have left him? Don’t you think he would have asked why
she
left
him
?”

She digs her hands into her pockets and feels a slight, sickening chill tremble down her spine. Asked why, if she loved him, she had left him, loving him still. Or why, loving him, she had let him leave her. Time and time again had let him leave her. Until the last time, which she also allowed, accepted without tears. Asked why, if she’d had this great love, the pictures and the bedspread and the sweet stories of their beginning only reappeared after she’d moved to Maine, after she’d found Ward.