Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

“Hazel, he did it! Our son.”

There should be some reason why she survived .

She knew. She knew this fact. Yet she did not know what the reason was, even now.

So restless!

It was 2:46 A.M. Though exhausted she could not sleep. Though spent with emotion she could not sleep. Her eyes burned as if she’d rubbed them in sand.

Beside her Gallagher slept, heavily. In sleep he was childlike, strangely docile. Leaning his hot, humid body against her, nudging her like a blind creature ravenous for affection. Yet his breathing was so loud, labored. Sounds in his throat like wet gravel being shoveled, scraped. In such breathing she foresaw his death: then, she would know how deeply she loved this man, she who could not articulate that love now.

She was one whose childhood language has been taken from her, no other language can speak the heart.

Must get out! Slipped from the bed, left the darkened bedroom and the sleeping man. Insomnia drove her like red ants swarming over her naked body.

In fact, she wasn’t naked: she was wearing a nightgown. Sexy-silky champagne-colored nightgown with a lace bodice, a gift from Gallagher.

In the parlor she switched on a lamp. Now it was 2:48 A.M. By such slow degrees a life might be lived. It was five hours since Zack had played the “Appassionata.” At the reception afterward the girl with the blunt beautiful face had embraced Hazel as if they were old friends, or kin. Hazel had held herself stiff not daring to embrace the girl back.

Zack had gone away with her. Her, and others. He’d asked Gallagher and his mother please not to wait up for him, they’d promised they would not.

Rain was pelting against the windows. In the morning again there would be fog. The nighttime city was beautiful to Hazel but not very real. At this height of twenty floors, nothing seemed very real. In the near distance there was a tall narrow building that might have been a tower. A red light blurred by rain rotated at its pinnacle.

“The eye of God.”

It was a curious thing to say. The words seemed to have spoken themselves.

She wouldn’t take time to dress, she was in too great a hurry. Her trench coat would do. It was a stylish olive-green coat with a flared skirt and a sash-belt to be tied at the waist. The coat was still damp from that evening’s rain. Yet she would wear it like a robe over the nightgown. And shoes: she could not leave the room barefoot.

Looking for her flat-heeled shoes she found a single shiny black dress shoe of Gallagher’s lying on the carpet where he’d kicked it. She picked it up and placed it in a closet beside its mate.

They had returned to the hotel suite to celebrate, together. Gallagher had called room service to order champagne. On the marble-topped coffee table was a silver tray and on the tray a spillage of wrappers, bottles, glasses. Remains of Brie cheese, rye crackers, kiwi fruit and luscious black Concord grape seeds. And almonds, Brazil nuts. After the emotional strain of that evening’s program Gallagher had been famished but too excited to sit still, he’d paced about the parlor as he ate, and talked.

He had not expected Zack to play so well, perhaps. He, too, had expected some sort of catastrophe.

In May, the elder Gallaghers had had a medical scare. Gallagher’s gastric pains continued, something cloudy had showed up on an X-ray but was not malignant. An ulcerous condition, treatable. They’d decided not to tell Zack, this would be their secret.

Zack had gone off with friends from the Conservatory and other young musicians they’d met in San Francisco. After his controversial performance Zack would be something of a hero, among pianists of his own generation at least.

Hazel would not approach the door to Zack’s adjoining room. She would not turn the knob, gently: she knew it would be locked.

Yet surely the girl would not be in that room with Zack. In that bed. In such proximity to the Gallaghers. She had a room elsewhere in the hotel and she’d come alone to San Francisco and if she and Zack were alone together in any bed, exhausted now in the aftermath of lovemaking, they would be in her room. Probably.

She would not think of it. She was no one’s daughter now, and she would be no one’s mother. All that was over.

She would say, You can live your own life now. Your life is your own, to live.

She’d brought with her, to San Francisco, the most recent of Thaddeus’s letters. Love letters they were, of increasing passion, or dementia. Opening the stiff, much-folded sheet of stationery, to read by lamplight as her husband slept oblivious in the adjoining room. The letter was clumsily typed as if in lunges, in the dark; or by one whose eyesight is dimming.

Dearest Hazel Jones,

You wld tickel an old mans vanity if youd replied to my appeals but I see now, you are Hazel Jones and a good wifeand you are a worthy Motherto your son. So you wld not reply, I rever you for it. I think that I will not write to you agin this side the grave. You & the boy will recieve a consumat Reward for your fathfulness & goodness. Your shallow husband the Mouth of Liberal Consience does not have a clue! He is a fool unworthy of you & the boy, that is our secret Hazel Jones isnt it. In my will you will all see. The scales will fall from the eyes of some. God bless you Hazel Jones & the boy whose music of beauttu is to outlive us all.

Hazel smiled, and folded up the letter again, and put it away in her handbag. A voice echoed faintly as if in rain beating against the windowpanes You - you are born here . They will not hurt you .

Pushed her arms into the sleeves of the still damp trench coat, and tied the belt tight around her waist. No need to glance at herself in the mirror: she knew her hair was disheveled, the pupils of her eyes dilated. Her skin smarted with a kind of erotic heat. She was excited, jubilant. She would take money with her, several twenties from her purse. She would take several items from the mini bar: miniature bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka. She would take the playing cards, dropping them loose in a pocket of her coat. And she must not forget the key to room 2006.

She stepped into the empty corridor. Shut the door behind her waiting for the lock to click into place.

The corridor leading to the elevators was longer than she recalled. Underfoot were thick crimson carpets and on the walls beige silk wallpaper in an Oriental design. At the elevators she punched down. Swiftly she would descend from 20 to G. Smiling to recall how in the past elevators had moved much more slowly. You had plenty of time to think, descending in one of those.

At this hour the hotel appeared deserted. Floor G was very quiet. The piped-in Muzak of daytime, a chirping of manic sparrows Gallagher called it, had been silenced. Though she had never been in this hotel before Hazel moved unerringly past windowless doors marked employees only and private: no admittance. At the end of a long corridor smelling of food was kitchen: employees only. And room service: employees only. Twenty-four-hour room service was a feature of the San Francisco Pacific Hotel. Hazel heard voices on the other side of the door, a sound of dishes being stacked. Radio music with a Latino beat. She pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

How the eyes snatched at her, in astonishment! Yet she was smiling.

There were kitchen workers in soiled white uniforms, and a man in a dark, neatly pressed uniform who had just returned to the kitchen pushing a cart loaded to capacity with trays of dirtied plates, glasses and bottles. The kitchen lights were very bright, the air much warmer than the corridor had been. Amid the strong kitchen odors of grease and cleanser was a sharp garbagey odor. And a beery odor as well, for some of the kitchen workers were drinking beer. Even as the alarmed-looking man in the dark uniform began to speak, “Ma’am, excuse me but-” Hazel was saying quickly, “Excuse me, I’m hungry. I can pay you. I have my own drinks but I don’t want to drink alone. I didn’t want to order room service, it takes too long.” She laughed, they would see that she was in a festive mood and would not send her away.