Joyce Oates - The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Always it happened so quickly. Zack could not resist. He would not have wished to resist. There was such strength in Mommy’s desperation.

Once, she’d pushed him down behind a parked car. Tried clumsily to shield him with her body.

“Niley! I love you.”

His old name, baby-name. Mommy had uttered it without realizing in her panic. Later he would realize that Mommy had expected to be killed, this was her farewell to him.

Or, she’d expected him to be killed.

Only a few times did Zack actually see the man his mother saw. He was tall, broad-backed. In profile, or turned away from them entirely. His face wasn’t clear. His hair was close-cropped, glinting gray. Once he was coming out of the Malin Head Inn, pausing beneath the marquee to light a cigarette. He wore a sport coat, a necktie. Another time he was just outside the IGA as Mommy and Zack were leaving with their shopping cart so that Mommy had to reverse her direction, panicked, colliding with another customer just behind them.

(The cart containing their meager groceries, they’d had to abandon in their haste to escape by a rear exit. Fortunately by this time Hazel Jones was known to the IGA manager and her groceries would be set aside for her to retrieve the next morning.)

Zack was left shaken, frightened by these encounters. For he knew that any one of them might be he , him . And that he and Mommy would be punished for whatever it was they’d done, he would never forgive.

Back in the apartment, Mommy would pull down all the window blinds. At dusk she would switch on only a single lamp. Zack would help her drag their heaviest chair in front of the door that was locked, and double-locked. Neither would have much appetite for supper that evening and afterward practicing piano at the make-believe keyboard, Zack would be distracted hearing behind the sharp clear notes and chords of the imagined piano a man’s upraised voice incredulous and furious and not-to-be-placated by even a child’s abject terror.

“It wasn’t him, Zack. I don’t think so. Not this time.”

Hunched over the make-believe keyboard. His fingers striking the paper keys. The piano sound would drive out the other sound, if his fingers did not weaken.

In the morning, the pebbles on the windowsill.

If it was a clear day, sunshine flooded through the glass making the pebbles hot to the touch. Zack would realize the pebble-game was not a game merely. It was real as Daddy was real, though invisible.

Mommy would not allude to what had happened the day before, or had almost happened. That was a rule of the game. Hugging him and giving him a smacking wet kiss saying in her brisk Hazel Jones voice to make him smile, “Got through the night! I knew we would.”

A curious variant on the Game of He/Him gradually evolved. This was Zack’s game entirely, with Zack’s rules.

By chance, Zack would sight the man, not Mommy. A man who closely enough resembled the man of whom they could not speak, yet somehow it happened that Mommy did not see him. Zack would wait, with mounting tension Zack would wait for Mommy to see this man, and to react; and if Mommy did not, or, seeing the man, took no special notice of him, Zack would feel something snap in his brain, he would lose control suddenly, pushing into his mother, nudging her.

“Zack? What’s wrong?”

Zack seemed furious suddenly. Pushing her, striking with his fists.

“But-what is it? Honey-”

By this time the danger might have passed. The man, the stranger, had turned a corner, disappeared. Possibly there’d been no man: Zack had imagined him. Yet, in childish fury, Zack drew back his lip, baring his teeth. It was a facial mannerism of his father’s, to see it in the child was a terrifying sight.

“You missed him! You never saw him! I saw him! He could walk right up to you and blam! blam! blam! shoot you in the face and blam! he’d shoot me and you couldn’t stop him! I hate you.”

In astonishment Hazel Jones stared at her raging son. She could not speak.

Stunned. Struck to the heart. Somehow her son had known, his father had owned a gun.

Somehow, the son had memorized certain of the father’s expressions. That look of disgust. That look of righteous fury, you dared not approach even to touch in helpless love.

Fallin ‘ in love with love .

Savin ‘ all my love . For you .

It was in the early winter of 1962 that he began to see the young woman in the smoky piano bar of the Malin Head Inn. Where he was CHET GALLAGHER JAZZ PIANO advertised in a blown-up glossy photo on display in the hotel lobby.

At first half-disbelieving his eyes, it could be her. The usherette from the Bay Palace Theater.

The one whose name Gallagher had learned from his friend who managed the theater. (Though he had not made use of this information, and vowed he would not.)

She arrived early at the piano bar, about 8 P.M. Sat alone at one of the small round zinc-topped tables beside the wall. Left before the lounge became really crowded, shortly after 10 P.M. Always she was alone. Conspicuously alone. Declining offers of drinks from other, male patrons. Declining offers of company from other, male patrons. She smiled, to soften her refusal. You could see that she was resolved to listen to the jazz pianist, not to be drawn into conversation with a stranger.

Each time, she ordered two drinks. She did not smoke. She sat watching Gallagher, attentively. Her applause was quicker and more enthusiastic than the applause of most of the other patrons as if she wasn’t accustomed to applauding in a public place.

“Hazel Jones.”

He mouthed the name to himself. He smiled, it was so innocent and naive a name. Purely American.

The first time Gallagher saw her had been one of his brooding evenings. Picking his way through Thelonious Monk’s “Round About Midnight.” Minimalist, meditative. Like making your way through the dream of another person and it’s easy to lose your way. Gallagher loved Monk. There was a side of him that was Monk . Unyielding, maybe a little cranky. Eccentric. Beautiful music Gallagher believed it, this very cool black jazz. He wanted so badly for others to hear it as he did. To care about it as he did.

That’s the problem. To be supremely cool, you don’t care. But Gallagher cared.

It’s her. Is it her?

A woman by herself in the Piano Bar. You expect a man to join her, but no one does. This striking young woman in what appeared to be a cocktail dress of some cheaply glamorous dark red material threaded with silver. Her hair was feathery and floating at the nape of her neck. She smiled vaguely about her not seeing the frank stares of men and as the waiter approached she looked up at him, appealing. As if to ask Is it all right, that I am here? I hope I am welcome .

Gallagher fumbled a few notes. Finished the meandering Monk piece to scattered applause and his agile fingers leapt to something more animated, rhythmic, sexy-urgent “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” Which Gallagher hadn’t played in a very long time.

Hadn’t realized he’d been thinking of her. “Hazel Jones.” In a way, he resented thinking of any woman. He’d have thought that he was beyond that, the tight hot sensation in his chest and groin. Since The Miracle Worker that summer he’d returned to the Bay Palace Theater only once; and that evening he hadn’t allowed himself to seek out the pretty usherette, to inveigle her into speaking with him. No, no! Afterward he’d been proud of himself for avoiding her.

The compulsion to be happy only complicates life. Gallagher had had enough of complications.