Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Rebecca stammered, no one!

“Anybody talks to you about me, or asks questions about me, you come to me, honey. And I’ll deal with it.”

It was so, as Rebecca had boasted to Katy and LaVerne, Tignor was a generous husband. In the first year of their marriage. Long as he was crazy for her. He bought her presents, costume jewelry, perfume, sexy clothing and underwear, silky things, that aroused him sexually just to see, as Rebecca pulled them from their tissue wrappings to hold up against herself.

“Oh, Tignor! This is beautiful. Thank you.”

“Put it on, baby. Let’s see how it fits.”

And what a tease Tignor was: it helped if Rebecca had had a drink or two, to fall in with his mood.

Scattering money for her onto the bed of their hotel room, as he’d done in Beardstown so he did in Binghamton, Lake George, Schoharie. Pulling bills out of his wallet, tossing ten-and twenty-dollar bills and sometimes fifty-dollar bills into the air to flutter and sink like wounded butterflies.

“For you, Gypsy-girl. Now you’re my wife, not my whore.”

She knew: he had married her but had not forgiven her. For the insult that he, Niles Tignor, might be perceived as a man who needs to pay women for sex. One day, he would make her regret this insult.

How restless Tignor was! It was an almost physical reaction, like an itchy rash.

A few days in one place. Sometimes only just overnight. The worst time was the end of the year, the so-called holiday season. Mid-December through New Year’s Day Tignor’s business came to a virtual halt. There was plenty of drinking, and Tignor had arranged to stay at the Buffalo Statler Hotel, he had friends in the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area with whom he could drink and play cards and still: he was fucking bored . Rebecca knew not to irritate him by saying the wrong thing or by getting in his way.

She drank with him, in the early hours of the morning when he couldn’t sleep. Sometimes she touched him, gently. With the caution of a woman touching a wounded dog that might turn on her, snarling. Stroking his warm forehead, his stiff metallic hair, in a gentle teasing way that Tignor liked, making of Niles Tignor a riddle to himself.

“Tignor, are you a man who travels all the time because he’s restless, or have you become a man who becomes restless because he travels all the time?”

Tignor frowned, wondering at this.

“Jesus, I don’t know. Both, maybe.”

Saying, after a pause, “But your race is a wandering one, too. Ain’t it, R’becca?”

Sometimes after they’d just checked into a hotel, Tignor would make a telephone call, or receive one, and announce to Rebecca that something had “come up”-he had “business-on-top-of-business”-and would have to leave, immediately. His mood at such times was excited, aroused. That air of urgency about him that signaled to Rebecca to stand back, not to expect him to return for a while. And not to ask questions.

Business-on-top-of-business meant business unrelated to the Black Horse Brewery, Rebecca gathered. For more than once when Tignor disappeared like this, a call came to him at the hotel from brewery headquarters in Port Oriskany, and Rebecca had to make the excuse that Tignor was visiting local friends, they’d taken him on an overnight hunting trip…When Tignor returned, and Rebecca passed on the message to him, Tignor shrugged. “So? Fuck ‘em.”

Rebecca was lonely, at such times. But she never doubted that Tignor would return to her. On these impromptu trips he left most of his things behind, including the big scuffed-leather suitcase.

Tignor didn’t leave the revolver behind, though. He took it with him.

Mrs . Niles Tignor . She loved signing this name, beneath Niles Tignor in the hotel registers. Always there was her anticipation that a desk clerk or a manager would question was Rebecca really Tignor’s wife but none ever did.

Mrs . Niles Tignor . She’d come to think she was so smart. But like any young wife she made mistakes.

It was as she’d told Katy and LaVerne, Tignor had a jealous streak. She supposed it meant he loved her, no one had ever loved her like this, there was a danger in it, like bringing a match too close to flammable material. For Tignor was a man not accustomed to sharing a woman’s attention with other men, though he liked men to look at Rebecca, he often brought her with him to restaurants, bars, taverns to keep him company. Yet he did not like Rebecca to look at other men, even friends of his. Especially he did not like Rebecca talking and laughing more than briefly with these men. “A man has got one idea, looking at you. And you’re my wife, that idea is mine.” Rebecca was meant to smile at this but to take the warning seriously. Yet more upsetting to Tignor was the prospect of Rebecca becoming friendly with strangers, behind his back. These might be other male guests in the hotel, hotel employees, even Negro bellboys whose faces brightened at the sight of “Mis-tah Tig-ger” who never failed to tip so generously.

“Anybody gets out of line with you, girl, you come to me. I’ll deal with it.”

And what would you do? Rebecca thought of Tignor’s fists striking the helpless Baumgarten, breaking his face like melon. She thought of the revolver with the wooden handle.

“You don’t look like you live around here.”

A man in a navy jacket, a navy cap pulled low on his forehead. He’d come to sit beside Rebecca at the counter, at a diner in Hammond, or maybe it was Potsdam. One of the small upstate cities of that winter 1955. Rebecca smiled at the stranger sidelong, not meaning to smile exactly. She said, “That’s right. I don’t live here.” His elbow on the counter beside her arm, and he was leaning onto the palm of his hand, bringing his face uncomfortably close to hers, and about to ask her something further when Rebecca turned abruptly from him, left a dollar on the counter to pay for her coffee, and walked quickly out of the diner.

It was February. Sky like a blackboard carelessly erased of chalk markings. A lightly falling snow on a river whose name Rebecca could not recall no more than, in her nerved-up state, she could have recalled the name of the city they’d stopped in for several days.

Until that morning she’d believed she might be pregnant. But her period had come at last, unmistakable, cramps and bleeding and a mild fever, and so she knew Not this time. I am spared telling Tignor . In the hotel room she’d become restless, Tignor would be away until that evening. Trying to read one of her paperback books. She had her dictionary, too. Looked up her old spelling-bee words precipitant , prophecy , contingency, inchoate . So long ago! She’d been a little girl, she had known nothing. Yet it was a comfort to Rebecca, that the words, useless to her, were still in the dictionary and would outlive her. In the wintry light that fell through the hotel windows she was lonely, and restless. The maid hadn’t yet come to make up the room, she’d pulled the heavy bedspread over the tumbled sheets that smelled of sweat, semen, Tignor’s yeasty body.

Had to get out! She put on her coat, boots. Walking in the lightly falling snow in the downtown area near the hotel until she was shivering with cold, stopped in a diner to have a cup of coffee, and would have remained at the counter basking in warmth except the man in the navy jacket approached her. A man has got one idea . And on the street she happened to glance back over her shoulder and saw the man behind her, and wondered if he was following her. And it seemed to her then that she’d seen this man, or someone who closely resembled him, in the lobby of the hotel, as she’d crossed from the elevators to the front entrance. He had followed her from the hotel-had he? She’d had only a vague impression of him. He was in his thirties perhaps. He quickened his pace when she quickened hers, abruptly turning a corner, crossing a street just far enough behind Rebecca so that she might not have seen him unless she’d known to look for him. One idea. One idea. A man has got one idea . She was alarmed but not really frightened. She walked faster, she began to run. Pedestrians glanced at her, curious. Yet how good to run in the lightly falling snow, drawing sharp, cold air deep into her lungs! As she’d run in Milburn as a girl so she was running now in Potsdam, or in Hammond.