A Bigamist's Daughter (36 page)
Read A Bigamist's Daughter Online
Authors: Alice McDermott
As, no doubt, he knew she would.
She sinks down into her seat. Below her is a yard full of Greyhound buses, their backs humped, their windows only reflecting light. Beside it, a field of mail trucks. Then what seems to be a power plant. They pass a highway crowded with cars, white lights on one side, red on the other. Men coming home for the evening, only to leave again in the morning. To return, to leave. And all the wives waiting in their kitchens, listening to traffic reports, fearing the worst until he comes through the door. All the wives creating those small domestic dramas that can transform their day, shine through its dullness like fools’ gold.
She looks around the car. In a little while, she’ll get up to get a small bottle of wine. Maybe even meet someone on the way, invite him back to her seat. He’ll see her manuscript bag and ask, What are you, a musician? A doctor? A traveling saleswoman?
If she likes him, she’ll say she is an artist, a mistress of her art. A hall of mirrors and secrets. A mystery.
If she likes him, she knows she’ll lie.
Alice McDermott is the author of seven novels including
After This
,
Child of My Heart
,
Charming Billy
(winner of the 1998 National Book Award),
At Weddings and Wakes
,
That Night
,
A Bigamist’s Daughter
and, most recently,
Someone
. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times and has also been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives with her family outside Washington DC.
Someone
After This
That Night
At Weddings and Wakes
Charming Billy
Child of My Heart
Someone
It is the 1920s and from the stoop of Marie’s Brooklyn apartment, the stories of her neighbours unfold before her short-sighted eyes. There is war-blinded Billy Corrigan and foolish, ill-fated Pegeen – and her parents’ legendary Syrian-Irish marriage – the terrifying Big Lucy, and the ever-present Sisters of Charity from the convent down the road. As the years pass Marie’s own history plays out against the backdrop of a changing world. Her older brother Gabe leaves for the seminary to study for the priesthood, his faith destined to be tested to breaking point. Marie experiences first love – and first heartbreak – marriage and motherhood, and discovers how time can reveal us all to be fools and dreamers, blinded in one way or another by hope, loss or the exigencies of life and love.
One life in all its devastating pains and unexpected joys; its bursts of brilliant clarity and moments of profound confusion. Fragments of a curious childhood, of adolescent sexual awakenings, of motherhood and, finally, old age are pieced together in this resonant story of an unremarkable, unforgettable woman.
After This
‘Sublime … A radiant portrait of family life’
Daily Mail
John Keane has been left haunted by his experiences of action during World War II, but when he meets Mary he settles down to bring up a large traditional Irish Catholic family in Long Island. As they struggle to uphold the family’s framework, their four children must experience the challenges and liberties born in the crucible of the 1960s. Michael and Annie taste the fruits of the sexual revolution; Jacob finds himself on the way to Vietnam; and Clare, the youngest, seeks to maintain and almost saintly innocence. With McDermott’s inimitable grace, After This captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be family.
‘A moving and evocative story about life and loss’
Irish Independent
‘Unsurpassable … A great work of art … A universal story, one that captures both the intimacies of family life as well as the distances’
Independent on Sunday
, Books of the Year
That Night
‘McDermott is a spellbinder, adding a cachet of mystery and eloquence to common occurrences … a dazzling mosaic of details and images … McDermott has wrought a miracle’
Chicago Tribune
Rick and his high school sweetheart, Sheryl, are being torn apart and their romance seems doomed. On this warm suburban night, the sound of lawn sprinklers is drowned out by the rumble of hot rods. Suddenly, a car careens over a neat front garden, teenage boys spill out brandishing chains, and Rick cries out for the girl he loves. Tonight, fathers will pick up shovels and rakes to defend their turf, and children will witness a battle fuelled by fierce, true love. This is the night they will talk about and remember as the moment their quiet world changed.
‘McDermott’s novel has a universal appeal because it is coloured by an experience which everybody will recognise … There is a depth of feeling here which is beautifully – and seriously – realised’
Independent
At Weddings and Wakes
‘A beautifully observed chronicle of New York family lives … Few writers have exploited the half-silence to such exquisite effect’
Observer
Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossom with a late and unexpected love. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family.
‘A haunting and masterly work of literary art’
Wall Street Journal
Charming Billy
Winner of the National Book Award 1998
‘Eloquent … Heartbreaking … McDermott is brilliant’
New York Times Review of Books
On Long Island one summer years ago, Billy fell in love with a beautiful Irish girl. Billy wanted to marry Eva, but she went back to Ireland. Then Billy’s cousin Dennis had to break the terrible news: Eva had died of pneumonia. Billy never got over it. Anybody who knew him would tell you so. Billy began courting Maeve not long after, but for the rest of their lives, he, she and Dennis shared a hidden, twisted grief.
‘As powerful as watching a film. We are there with the characters, we know and understand them intimately’
Independent on Sunday
Child of My Heart
‘McDermott is a genius … A poignant and rewarding fictional world.
Child of My Heart
extends her artistic triumphs, and we should rejoice’
Los Angeles Times
Theresa is the town’s most sought-after babysitter, cheerful and beloved by children and animals – she is Titania among her fairies, the one person to call on for help with a child in distress. But she’s also a solitary soul with a huge understanding of human nature for a fifteen-year-old. Theresa does not doubt her power over the fathers of her adoring charges either, whose potential lechery she toys with. Yet this unforgettable summer, it is her cousin Daisy, a frail little creature with glittery shoes and worrying bruises that don’t heal, who captures Theresa’s heart.
‘Richly textured, intricately woven … A work not only of, but about, the imagination’ Margaret Atwood,
New York Review of Books
First published in the USA in 1982 by Random House, Inc.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1982 by Alice McDermott
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from Scene VI from
The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams. Copyright 1945 by Tennessee Williams and Edwina D. Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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London WC1B 3DP
www.bloomsbury.com
eISBN: 978-1-4088-5323-8
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