Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Except she would remember looking for them in the audience at the rear of the high school auditorium though knowing they would not come of course . Not her mother Anna Schwart, not her father Jacob Schwart . Never would they have come to this public place to see their daughter honored . After the ceremony making her way like a furtive animal through the foyer of the high school, where a “reception” was being held for the spelling bee winners, their relatives and teachers and other adults. She was awkward and self-conscious among them, a solitary child without a family. Her face smarted with hurt, shame. Yet she knew how her parents would disdain this place and these people.

Those others you must never trust, our enemies.

“Rebecca?”-her name was being called but amid the confusion of voices and laughter Rebecca could not be expected to hear. She was headed for a side door marked exit.

“Rebecca Schwart? Please come over here.”

Someone clutched at her. She was surrounded by adults. A woman with a bronze helmet-head and staring eyes. And there was the man with the glittery glasses and striped necktie, principal of Milburn High School, who gripped Rebecca firmly by the elbow and led her to a group of students and adults being photographed for the Milburn Weekly Journal and the Chautauqua Valley Gazette . Rebecca, the youngest and smallest of the spelling bee winners, was made to stand in front, center. She was told to smile, and so she smiled. Cameras flashed. Her startled squinting smile she held, the cameras flashed again. Hearing and not-hearing a murmured conversation not quite out of earshot.

“That Schwart girl-where are her parents?”

“Not here.”

“For God’s sake why not?”

“They just aren’t.”

And then Rebecca was released, and headed for the exit. From somewhere behind her she heard Miss Lutter calling-“Rebecca, don’t you need a ride home?”-but this time she didn’t turn back.

She had not planned to show the dictionary to them. Not to anyone in the family. She’d told her father about the spelling bee and the awards ceremony and he’d scarcely listened, nor had her mother listened. And now, she would hide the dictionary beneath her bed knowing how they would scorn it.

And there was the danger that one of them might toss it into the stove.

A long time ago Jacob Schwart had hoped that his sons would do well in school but neither Herschel nor Gus had done well and so he had become indifferent to the schooling of his children, he was contemptuous of Rebecca’s primer school books leafing through them sometimes saying they were fairy tales, trash. Newspapers and magazines he brought home he was likely to read thoroughly, with a perverse ardor, yet these too he dismissed as trash. Since the war had ended he no longer listened to the radio after supper yet he did not wish others in the family to listen to it. “Words are lies.” This pronouncement he made often, with a jocular screwing-up of his face. If he was chewing tobacco, he spat.

For so much since the war was a joke to him. But you could not always know what would be a joke, and what would not. What would make him laugh so hard his laughter shaded into wheezing coughing spasms, or what would set Pa off .

Something in the newspapers, maybe.

Shaking the front page of the paper, face contorted in derision and outrage. Slamming his fist against the paper flattening it onto the oilcloth cover of the kitchen table. Jacob Schwart had a particular loathing for the sleek-black-haired black-mustached little-man governor of New York State, his mouth worked in speechless fury seeing the governor’s photograph. Why exactly, no one in the family knew. Jacob Schwart detested Republicans, yes but Jacob Schwart detested F.D.R. and F.D.R. was a Democrat, wasn’t he. Rebecca tried to keep these names straight. What meant so much to Pa should mean something to her, too.

Those others . Our enemies . We are dirt to them, to scrape off their shoes .

“What the hell’s this? You ?”

It was a shock, Pa tossing the Milburn Weekly onto the table, flattening it with his fist and confronting his daughter.

He was incensed, insulted. Rebecca had rarely seen him so upset. For there was Rebecca Esther Schwart of Milburn District #3 , in a group photograph on the front page of the paper. Spelling Bee Winners . Awards Ceremony at Milburn High . Pa yanked Rebecca to the table, to stare at herself, a diminutive and startled image of herself, amid the gathering of smiling strangers. She had forgotten the occasion, she could not have anticipated that anything real would come of the flashbulbs and the jocular, jokey Smile, please! And now her father was demanding to know what was this! what this meant! Saying, wiping at his mouth, “ I never knew anything about this, did I? God damn to hell, I don’t like any child of mine acting behind my back.”

Rebecca stammered saying she had told him, she had tried to tell him, but Pa continued to rage. He was one whose rage fed on itself, ecstatic. He wrenched the newspaper toward the light, at differing angles, to see the incriminating front page more clearly. Finally turning to Rebecca, disbelieving, “It’s you, huh! God damn to hell. Behind my back, my daughter.”

“I’t-told you about it, Pa. The spelling bee.”

“”Spelling‘-what?“

“”Spelling bee.“ Words you spell. In school.”

“”Words’ I tell you words: bullshit. Every word that has ever been uttered by mankind is bullshit.“

Herschel and Gus, drawn by the commotion, examined the scandalous front-page photograph and article, amazed. Gus said it was good news wasn’t it?

Pa said, sputtering, “Bring the damn ”prize‘ out, I want to see this damn “prize’ for myself. Fast!”

Rebecca ran to get the dictionary where she’d hidden it. Beneath her bed. Shame-shame, she’d known it would get her into trouble, why she’d hidden the dictionary beneath her bed .

As if anything could be hidden from Jacob Schwart. As if any secret would not be exposed, like soiled underwear or bedclothes, in time.

Rebecca’s face was very warm, her eyes stung with tears. (Where was Ma? Why wasn’t Ma here, to intercede? Was Ma hiding away in the bedroom from Pa’s raised voice?)

Rebecca brought the Webster’s Dictionary to her father, she would obey him even as she feared and hated him. Seeming to know beforehand, with a child’s resignation to fate, as a doomed animal bares its throat to a predator, that he would toss the dictionary into the stove with a curse.

Almost, Rebecca would remember he’d done this. Tossed her dictionary into the stove, and laughed.

In fact, Pa did not. He took the heavy book from her, and laid it on the table, suddenly quieter, as if intimidated. Such a heavy book, and so obviously expensive!

His mind would calculate rapidly what a book this size might cost: five dollars? Six?

Gilt letters on the spine and cover. Marbleized endpapers. Almost two thousand pages.

With a flourish Pa opened the front cover, and saw the bookplate:

SPELLING CHAMPION MILBURN DISTRICT #3

*** 1946 ***

REBECCA ESHTER SCHWART

Immediately Pa saw the misspelling, he laughed harshly, and was triumphant. “Eh, you see? They are insulting you-”Eshter.“ They are insulting us. This is no accident, this is calculated. Spelling the child’s name wrong to insult who named her.” Pa showed the bookplate to Herschel, who peered at it, unable to read. In frustration he poked the dictionary as you’d poke a snake with a stick, saying, “Jezuz. Keep the fuckin thing from me, I’m lergic .” This provoked Pa to laugh heartily, he had a weakness for his older son’s crude humor.