Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

A glisten of saliva on his mouth like a stray thought. She wanted to kiss it away. But better not.

Strand of damp hair stuck to his forehead. She wanted to brush it away but no, better not.

Hazel Jones’s secret son .

The radio on the windowsill was turned low. The music was jazz. The radio, like the lamp, emitted a comforting glow. Rebecca was becoming adjusted to it, no longer so annoyed. The announcer’s voice was nothing like the daytime radio voices. Was Zack Zacharias a Negro? His voice was softly modulated, a singing sort of voice, rather playful, teasing. An intimate voice in your ear.

And the music. Rebecca was coming to like the music.

Cool, moody jazz. Seductive. Rebecca recognized piano music of course but knew few other instruments. Clarinet, saxophone? She hated it, that she knew so little.

An ignorant woman, a factory worker. Wife, mother. Had not graduated from high school, even. So ashamed!

Only once had she heard classical music on her father’s radio. Only once, in her mother’s company. Her father had not known and would have forbidden it. This radio is mine . This news is mine . I am the father, all facts are mine . All knowledge of the world outside this house of sorrow is mine to keep from you, my children .

Tignor had not asked much about Rebecca’s parents. He knew a little, and might not have wanted to know more.

Rebecca’s brother Herschel used to say, Christ that ain’t even his name. “Schwart” ain’t even our fuckin‘ name.

It was all a joke to Herschel. Baring his big wet braying-donkey teeth.

Rebecca asked what was their name, then? If it wasn’t “Schwart” what had it been?

Herschel shrugged. Who the hell knew, who the hell cared?

Old-world bullshit, Herschel said. Nobody gives a damn about it in the U.S. of A., I sure don’t.

Rebecca begged to know their name if it wasn’t Schwart but Herschel walked away with a rude gesture.

If Jacob Schwart had lived, he would now be sixty-three.

Sixty-three! Old, but not really old.

Yet in his soul the man had been elderly even then. Rebecca could remember her father only as old, worn-out.

Upsetting to think such thoughts. It was rare for her, in her new life, to think such thoughts.

Hazel Jones did not think such thoughts.

“Mamama…”

Niley moaned in his sleep, suddenly. As if he’d become aware of Rebecca standing over him.

His smooth child-face was wizened, ugly. Oh, he looked like an elderly man! His skin was waxy-pale. His eyelids fluttered, and that nerve in his forehead. As if a wrong-sized dream, all sharp corners, had poked itself into his brain.

“Niley.”

Rebecca’s heart was torn, seeing her son trapped in a dream. Her instinct was to save him from such dreams, immediately. But no, better not. Mommy could not always be saving him. He must learn to save himself.

The dream was passing, and would pass. Niley would relax in another minute. He was a child of the new era: born in 1956. You would not call Niles Tignor, Jr. “post-war” (for everything was “post-war”) but “post-post-war.” Nothing of the past could matter much to him. As World War I was to Rebecca’s generation, so World War II would be to Niley’s. Old-world bullshit as Herschel said.

Nothing of the Schwarts would prevail in him who had never known them.

That line was extinct, the old, rotted European lineage was broken.

Niley’s dream seemed to have vanished. He was sleeping as before, breathing wetly through his mouth. The bunny lamp glowed on his bedside table. The radio on the windowsill emitted a steady, soothing sound of piano-jazz. Rebecca smiled, and backed away. She too would sleep, now. Niley would be all right, she had no need to wake him. Wouldn’t kiss him, as she wanted to do. Still he would know (she was sure) that his mother loved him, always his mother was close by, watching, protecting him. Through his life, he would know.

“I have no God to witness. But I vow.”

Sunday, in three days. Rebecca counted on her fingers. She smiled to think that Niley’s daddy would return to them then. She had a premonition!

Gypsy girl . Jewess …

Tignor’s voice was a low helpless moan, a sliding-down moan, delicious to hear. His thick-muscled body quivered with desire as if electric currents ran through it.

Rebecca smiled, recalling. But the blood beat hard and hot in her face. She was no gypsy-girl, and she was no Jewess!

And the blood beat hard and hot between her legs, where she was so lonely.

“God damn.” She was having trouble sleeping. In her and Tignor’s bed. All this day, these days since the canal towpath, oh Christ her nerves were strung tight like wire.

The weather was turning at last. Wind from the great roiling-dark lake forty miles to the north seemed to push against the windowpanes of the old farmhouse. By morning the dreamy Indian-summer weather would have been blown away, the air would be sharper, colder, damp. That taste of winter to come. Winter in the Chautauqua Valley, in the foothills of the mountains…

But no. She would not think about it. Not the future beyond the next few days.

As her parents had gradually ceased thinking about the future .

Like animals they’d become, at the end. With no future, that was what happened to you.

Desperate to sleep! Within a few hours she’d have to get up, return to Niagara Fiber Tubing. Not the thin pale froth-sleep that washed over her aching brain and brought little nourishment but the deeper more profound sleep she required, the sleep that slowed your heartbeat toward death, the sleep that stripped from you all awareness of time, place, who you are or have ever been.

“Tignor. I want you! I want you inside me. I want you…”

He’d urged her to say his special words to him: fuck, fuck me. Hurt me some .

The more hesitant she’d been, the more embarrassed, shame-faced, the more Tignor had loved it. You could see that the man’s pleasure was increased immeasurably, a tall stein into which ale was being poured, poured-poured-poured until, foaming, it overflowed.

He’d been her only lover. Niles Tignor. What he did to her, what he taught her to do to him. How painful it was to lie here in this bed and not think of him, not think of those things, her heartbeat quickened in desire.

Futile, this desire. For even if she touched herself it was not Tignor.

Before Tignor she had never slept in so large a bed. She didn’t feel that she deserved so large a bed. (Yet it was just an ordinary bed, she supposed. Secondhand, bought here in Chautauqua Falls. It had a slightly tarnished brass frame and a new, hard, unyielding mattress that had quickly become stained with Tignor’s salty sweat.)

She turned, to lie on her back. In the adjacent room, turned low, the damn radio was playing. She couldn’t hear the music but she felt the beat. She spread out her arms, her armpits were wet. Her thick hair dense as a horse’s mane had dried at last and was fanned out around her head on the pillow in that way that Tignor, face taut with a hard, sensual pleasure, sometimes arranged it with his clumsy hands.

This is what you want, Gypsy-girl, eh? Is it?

He had other women, she knew. She’d known before she married him what he was. In the hotel in which she’d worked there were tales of Niles Tignor. Through the Chautauqua Valley, and beyond. She understood it wasn’t reasonable for any woman of Tignor’s to expect a man like him to be faithful in the way that ordinary men are faithful to women. Hadn’t Tignor said to Rebecca, shortly after they were married, not cruelly but with an air of genuine surprise that she should be jealous: “Jesus, kid-they like me, too.”