Joyce Oates: The Gravedigger’s Daughter

“Dad- dy ! H’lo Dad- dy !”

Niley’s crunched-up little face came alive with pleasure. A child so suddenly happy, you understood there was anguish beforehand, pain. Rebecca staggered away, leaving him with the phone. She was dazed, exhausted. She stumbled into the next room, sank onto the sofa. A sofa with broken springs, covered with a not-clean blanket. A roaring in her ears like Niagara Tubing. Like the falls below the locks in Milburn, she’d stared into for long sickly fascinated minutes as a young girl.

Why could she not accuse Tignor of neglecting her. Why could she not tell Tignor she loved him even so, she forgave him.

He wasn’t required to ask her forgiveness. She knew he never would. Only, if he would accept her forgiveness!

“You called me only three times. Sent me God damn sixty-five dollars and no message, no return address on the envelope. Fuck you.”

And she had to accept it, the way Niley was chattering away to Daddy. Loves Daddy more than he loves Mommy. Always has .

Rebecca returned to the kitchen. She would take the receiver back from Niley. “Niley! Tell Daddy I need to talk to him, before he-”

But when Niley handed the receiver to his mother, Tignor must have already hung up for the line had gone dead.

It wasn’t the music. Not the music that grated against her nerves. It was the announcers’ voices. Radio voices. Advertisements. Those bright-brassy jolly-rollicking rapidly recited advertisements! And Niley crouched near, listening with frowning concentration. His small head bowed, attentive, in a pose that was not at all child-like. Listening for Daddy’s voice in the radio! Rebecca felt a pang of hurt, and of fury, that her child should be so willfully deluded, and so oblivious of her.

“Niley, turn that off.”

But Niley did not hear. Niley would not hear Mommy.

“Niley, I said turn that God-damned thing off .”

And so Niley might turn the radio volume down, reluctantly. Yet not off. So that Rebecca could still hear the voices like her rapid-chattering thoughts.

She told him no no no. That was not Daddy.

Not Daddy in the radio. No!

None of them. None of the radio voices.

(Did he believe Mommy? Was he even listening to Mommy?)

(And why should he believe Mommy? She was helpless as he was, to know whether Daddy would really return to them this time.)

Yet she too took comfort in it, often. Radio music.

Half-hearing in her sleep. Smiling as a dream of surpassing beauty enveloped her. There was Niley, not a spindly-limbed little boy you worried wasn’t growing right, wasn’t developing right, but a boy of perhaps fifteen, sixteen; a boy who was no longer a vulnerable child, yet not a hurtful man; a boy whose blurred face was handsome, and whose posture was excellent; as he sat at a piano playing for an audience so large, Rebecca could not see to the edges of it.

“He will. He will do this. Here is the promise.”

Her mother had made the promise, Rebecca seemed to think. They had listened to radio music together, in secret. How angry Pa would have been, if he’d known! But Pa had not known.

Pa had suspected, of course. But Pa had not known.

Anna Schwart had played piano, as a girl. A very long time ago in the old world . Before the crossing .

In the dream, Rebecca was suffused with happiness. And made to know how simple happiness is. Like smoothing a wrinkled cloth, dampening the cloth and ironing it, with care. That simple.

“You are a mother, Rebecca. You know what must be done.”

Niley’s favorite music wasn’t piano music, though. Melancholy-whiny country-and-western. Bright pop tunes that made you want to dance. No matter how heavy-hearted she was feeling, Rebecca had to laugh seeing the three-year-old rocking from side to side on short, stubby legs, baby-legs that looked as if they were only just flesh and no bones inside. Inspired, Niley flailed his arms about. He screeched, he trilled. Rebecca pushed aside whatever the hell she was doing, danced with him, his pudgy little hands snatched up in hers. A wildness overcame her, she loved him so. Tignor had not liked her during her pregnancy, and so fuck Tignor: here was the result of the pregnancy, and he was hers.

Careening and banging around the house, reckless colliding with furniture, knocking over a chair, banging/bruising their legs, like a drunk couple overcome by fits of mirth.

“You love Mommy best, don’t you! You do .”

The music stopped, though. Abruptly, music stops.

Announcers’ voices, so grating. God! You came to hate some of these voices like you came to hate people you saw too often, like at school, or at work. Always the same (male) voices. And Niley’s expression changed, for now he was listening to hear: Daddy’s voice?

Rebecca had tried to explain. Sometimes she didn’t trust herself, just walked away.

See the humor in it, girl. Walk away.

Don’t touch the child. The terrible rage in you, let it stay in you.

What most scared her, she might hurt Niley. Shake shake shake the obstinate little brat until his teeth rattled, eyes rolled back in his head. For so she’d been disciplined, as a child. She wanted to recall that it had been her father who’d disciplined her but in fact it had been both her mother and her father. She wanted to recall that the discipline had been deserved, necessary, and just but she wasn’t so certain that this was so.

Tignor would return perhaps on Sunday.

Why Rebecca thought this, she didn’t know. Just a premonition.

Except: it was possible that Tignor would show up outside the factory gate on Friday afternoon, or Monday afternoon. His silver-green 1959 Pontiac idling at the curb.

Hey kid: here .

Almost, Rebecca could hear his voice. She smiled, as she would smile when she heard it.

Hey you night owl folks out there this is Buffalo Radio Wonderful WBEN Zack Zacharias broadcasting the best in jazz through the wee hours .

Niley fell asleep most nights listening to this program. Yet she couldn’t enter his room to switch off the radio because he woke so easily; she couldn’t enter his room even to switch off the light. If Niley was wakened at such times he was likely to be frightened, and Rebecca would end up having to stay with him.

At least in the night Niley allowed the radio volume to be kept low. He could lie very quietly in his bed a few inches from the radio and take consolation from it.

At least with the door shut between their rooms Rebecca wasn’t kept awake by the light.

“When Daddy returns, all this will stop.”

Beside Niley’s bed was a lamp in the shape of a milk glass bunny from a Chautauqua Falls furniture store. The bunny had upright ears and a pink nose, a small peach-colored shade in some fuzzy fabric. Rebecca admired the lamp, the wan warm glow on the child’s sleeping face was comforting to her. The bulb was only sixty watts. You would not want a harsher light in a child’s room.

She wondered: had her mother stood over her, gazed upon her as she’d slept? So long ago. She smiled to think yes, maybe.

The danger in motherhood. You relive your early self, through the eyes of your own mother.

In the doorway watching Niley sleep. Long entranced minutes that might have been hours. Her heart pounded with happiness, certainty. A mother knows only that the child is . A mother knows only that the child is because she, the mother, has made it so.

Of course there is the father. But not always.

Niles, Jr. She hoped he would take on some of his father’s strength. He seemed to her a child of yearning, impulse. A spring was wound tight in him, like the spring of a toy that clatters about, deranged. Except when he slept, then Niley was fine. His tight-wound soul was quiet.