A Bigamist's Daughter (4 page)

A year or so later, my mother and I ran into Sister Immaculate Rose as we were coming out of church. She noticed my father wasn’t with us and mentioned that I’d said he worked for the government.

“That’s right,” my mother answered coolly.

“How interesting,” the nun said. “In what capacity?”

My mother stared at her a long time and then slipped her sunglasses from the top of her head, over her eyes. “I’m not at liberty to say,” she whispered. Her lips barely seemed to move. The nun glanced at me and I tried to make my face as grave as my mother’s. Then, without another word, we both walked stiffly, mysteriously, away. At home we said nothing about the encounter and I presumed the answer, though still not true, was no longer a lie.

The nuns, it seemed, were always fascinated by my father. Perhaps they sniffed some tragedy, some rich life of sin behind his disappearances, or found my mother’s devotion to a man who was seldom there similar to their own calling; whatever the reason, they often asked me about him and gave me deep, searching looks whenever I, or anybody else, spoke about fathers in class.

On the day he died—that is, the day we heard he was dead—my mother gave me a picture of him to take to school
with me after the funeral. She said the nuns at Blessed Virgin, the “all-girl” high school where I was a freshman, would probably take me aside when I got back and ask a lot of questions, so I should show them the picture to curb their curiosity.

A week later, on my first day back at school, I was called from my homeroom the minute I got to my seat. Sister Illuminata, the principal, Sister Lucille and Sister Reine Regina, our religion teachers, were waiting for me in the “Rap Room,” a former storage closet that had been set aside for “rap sessions” between the nuns and the girls in the school. It was decorated with the felt posters an art class had made and was closed the following year when one of the nuns found an unopened condom among the cushions and bean-bag chairs.

The three sisters hovered around me, their hands between their breasts or up their sleeves, and asked me how my mother was, how I was, and was it business my father was on when he died? I mumbled yes and then whipped out the snapshot my mother had given me. They passed it around, saying how handsome he was and nodding at one another as if that’s what they’d expected.

A year later, I was taken aside again by Sister Loretta Belle Lynn (the nuns had started using their real names by then), a gaunt, ancient nun who occasionally taught Latin and often called girls into her office for “spiritual guidance counseling.” She sat me in her small, dusty cubicle, asked me about school and what sports I liked, and if I had a boyfriend, and then, leaning so low across her desk that the blotter made her chin and bony throat reflect green, she whispered, eyes wide, “I saw your father last night.”

Although I was beginning to read Freud and Nietzsche by then, beginning to drink heavily on weekends and to argue cynically about anything, I had nearly ten years of Catholic
training and just enough Irish blood in me to drop my mouth open and begin to tremble. Immediately, I pictured the dark, cell-like room where the nun must have slept and my father’s pale, wispy form slowly gathering in it.

“You did?” I whispered back.

She smiled and I thought I glimpsed something serene and mystical about her yellow teeth and smooth, thin lips. “He said he misses your mother very much.”

I felt my heart beating. My mother, not me. I wondered if he had seen me Saturday night at Jack’s party.

“It’s very hard for him being without her.”

I nodded, my mouth was dry.

“That’s why he needs your help. You must do everything you can for him.” She ran the words together like a chant. “You want to help him, don’t you?”

“Yes, Sister,” I whispered.

“Well,” she went on. “It was about seven last night when I saw him.” I thought it oddly early, but decided she must have been in chapel, after dinner. She paused, played with her worn, married-to-God wedding band. “I was just coming out of the drugstore and your father was just coming in. He had a bag of groceries with him and he said he had to pick up some cold medicine. The poor man hadn’t even gotten home from work yet.” She leaned forward a little. “Now, Elizabeth,” she said, “you could very well do the shopping when you get out of school at three and not leave it to your father. I know you probably want to be with your friends after school, but with your mother gone, you’ll have to make some sacrifices, for your dear father’s sake.”

I looked down at my hands. “Yes, Sister,” I said. Frances Connelly’s mother had died a few weeks before. Sister Loretta had gotten the last name right but “E” comes before “F” in
the school files, so she’d sent for me. “I’ll do my best, Sister,” I said. I left the office with her blessing, feeling I had done both Sister Loretta and Frances Connelly a great favor.

When I told my mother about the incident, she merely shook her head and said she would light a candle for poor Sister Loretta that night when she went down to St. Elizabeth’s for the Altar Rosary Society meeting.

My mother, by then, had become very active in our church, probably because it provided her with enough holy days and conferences and missions and bazaars and meetings to absorb her need for expectations, something to look forward to, just as hopeless crushes and later, hopeless love affairs, absorbed mine. It was a need my father had established in both of us.

While my father was alive, we lived in a constant, subtle state of expectation. We’d wake up every morning thinking this might be a day he’d come home, and go to bed at night thinking we might awake at any time to find him leaning over us, smiling. We were happy to have each day begin and happy to have it behind us, to have been brought one day closer to the day he would return.

When he did return, whether it was for a day or long enough for us to grow confident in his presence, casual in our references to him (but casual in the same self-conscious way I have since heard the newly rich refer to their help and their summer homes), our house was blessed by that strange aura that guests or Christmas or even just having all the lights on at three A.M. can give a place. My mother would put the special white chenille bedspread on her bed, and I would lie awake at night listening to him snoring in her room, trying to interpret the deep, throaty sounds he made, imagining it was his own secret way of speaking to me.

On the morning we got the call from Wisconsin, telling us he was there and he was dead, I stayed home from school and
my mother and I had breakfast on tin snack tables in the living room. We watched all her favorite morning shows, shows that school usually deprived me of, and she said how good it was to have someone there who appreciated Hugh Downs’ good looks and soft manner as much as she did. We cried together when we changed the channel and caught the last half hour of
Now, Voyager.
That afternoon my mother got dressed and went down to church to talk to the priest, who convinced her to join the Altar Rosary Society. Two weeks later, I fell madly in love with Rosemary Hart’s brother Tim, who drove us home from school one day. He was a senior at Pius X Seminary and well on his way to the priesthood, but I never knew when he would show up at school to drive us home again.

By the time I left for college, my mother was known to nearly every priest and nun in the Rockville Centre diocese as good Mrs. Connelly, and she’d had lunch with the bishop three times. When she took a weekend off to drive me up to school, I felt rather like some mongrel who’d interrupted the meditations of Saint Francis to be let out to pee. She did it graciously, willingly, because she loved me, but it was clear she had more important things to get back to.

She kept our house and her faith until I graduated from college, and then, on the day I returned with my steamer trunk and my arctic parka, my diaphragm and my résumés, she said I’d have to find an apartment of my own because she was selling the house and moving to Maine.

She said nothing about giving up her religion, but when I arrived in Maine that August and went into her bedroom to unpack my bags, I saw no crucifix above the bed, no rosary beads on the night table, no prayer book, no holy cards, not even the statue of St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases and her favorite apostle, perched on the wide windowsill.

There was only the white chenille bedspread on the big,
fourposter bed and, on the heavy dresser, in a new silver frame, a blurry snapshot of my father.

“I’ve cleaned out the two top drawers for you,” my mother said, pointing to the dresser. “And half the closet.”

She pulled open the closet, which was actually an old wooden armoire, and showed me the empty side, the tangled hangers rattling within it. “That should be enough room.”

“Sure,” I said. “I guess so.” I glanced at my three suitcases, my coats, my shopping bag, all my worldly possessions.

“Of course,” my mother said, “you’ll have to leave some things packed. Just push the suitcases under the bed when you’re through with them.” She had her hands on the hips of her gray, baggy trousers and her rolled-up shirtsleeves made little wings on her elbows. I was used to seeing her plump, her hair teased into curls, her face round and somewhat surprised-looking. I had a terrible impulse to wail, I want to go home!

She crossed the room and embraced me again. Even her smell was wrong, not perfume but soap and woodsmoke. “It will be all right,” she whispered, in her old way, and then she backed away, smiling, as if she had given me some secret message and now must carry on with her part. “You must be hungry,” she said, “I’ll make us something to eat.”

I smiled, too brightly perhaps: an intruding houseguest pretending her welcome was sincere. “That sounds great,” I said and she nodded and patted my arm, leaving me alone to unpack what I could.

My mother had been raised to believe that to ask any personal questions was to pry, to presume there was something that would not be told voluntarily, and, as I was growing up, she had passed the belief on to me. It seems ironic in light of our Catholicism, which makes a ritual of prying, of exposing your private life to another, albeit in a quiet, guarded atmosphere,
a yellow-lighted darkroom of sorts, where the exposure will not be too great and the listener is sworn to secrecy, but even now I am surprised and somewhat offended by strangers who can sit beside me at a party or on a train and ask me about my love life and my sex life and my deepest fears. I am somewhat envious, too, of those who can answer such questions easily, although I often wonder what so much discussion, so much exposure, does to the quality of those feelings.

That evening, over grilled cheese sandwiches and tea, we discussed Ward (“He’s a dear man,” my mother said, “but so ugly.”) and Lillian, an old woman my mother had met on the beach, and some of my friends from high school and even the service on Amtrak. But she did not ask me why I had left Buffalo so suddenly, nor did I ask her why she was living here, so far from all her old friends and neighbors, from Brooklyn and Long Island where she had spent her life.

Whatever you need to know about a person, my mother used to tell me, you’ll find out eventually if you pay attention.

Life as a play, not a press conference.

Later we sat in the small living room, she on the overstuffed reading chair by the window, I on the corduroy day bed where I was to sleep, and watched a TV movie about two girls trying to make it in Las Vegas. We were both in our robes, and I was very tired, but I could still feel the motion of my long train ride and I could see, as if from the corner of my eye, that the events of last night and early that morning were still with me, and so I was not ready to go to sleep.

I liked, too, seeing my mother in the thick quilted robe she had worn at home, that now, too big for her, gave her some of the bulk and familiarity she had been missing. She was still not the same as she had been before, not to me, but in the hours I’d been there this new image of her had begun to merge slowly with the old, and I wondered if her hair hadn’t always
been this gray, if she’d ever really been that heavy, if those deep lines that looked like dark parentheses around her lips had not more or less always been there. I had trouble recalling how she’d looked when her hair was short and curly.

The TV helped, too, the sound, the light. After my father and our old house, it was the thing my mother and I had shared the most, back home.

When the movie ended—one of the girls became a serious actress, the other mistress to an eccentric millionaire—my mother looked at me and grimaced and said, “Junk.” I agreed, although I had enjoyed it.

“We should get to bed,” she said. “No one stays up this late in Maine.” She stood and gathered the blanket and pillow that she had set out on the rocking chair. “If you need another blanket during the night, just come into my room and take one from the closet. It gets rather cold at night.”

“Okay.” I took the bolsters and the corduroy covers from the bed. The sheets underneath were plain white and smelled cold. “It must be brutal in here during the winter.”

“Oh, it’s terribly cold,” she said. She put the pillow under her chin, slipped it into the case and threw it on the bed with a deftness I knew I could never match. My mother again.

“Last winter,” she said, “there were drifts that nearly covered the roof.” She turned down the bed, smoothed the top sheet over the edge of the gray blanket.

“Is it warm enough for you?” I asked, hearing her own tone as she’d approved each of my winter coats and the apartments I’d had up at college. “I mean, is it winterized and everything?”

She looked over the bed and then looked up at me and smiled. “No,” she said. “Not at all. I stay at Ward’s house during the winter.”

She pushed a piece of my hair back behind my ear. Although
we were the same height, the gesture made me feel very small. Even her robe smelled of woodsmoke, although the cottage had no fireplace.

“Isn’t that scandalous?” I asked, trying to laugh.

“No,” she said. She held herself before me rather delicately, as if her center were made of fragile glass. It made me feel childish, or fat, clumsy—a woman without a lover facing a woman with one. I glimpsed, for a moment, what Ward must have found so fascinating and tragic about her: that odd and delicate core, full of secrets. “We old people,” she said, “are easily forgiven our indiscretions. Especially during the long, cold winters. In the summer, Ward likes to stay here, so it works out nicely.” She hugged me again, quickly this time. “It is good to have you here,” she whispered. “I hope you’ll stay a little while.”