The Gravedigger's Daughter Part 26

(As Rebecca lapsed into a fit of giggles, in panic.) "Say 'I do,' my dear. Do you?"

"Y-Yes. I do."

"And do you, Niles Tignor"

"h.e.l.l yes."

In a mock-severe voice intoning: "By the authority vested in me by the State of New York and the County of Niagara on this nineteenth teenth day of March 1954 I hereby p.r.o.nounce you..."

Somewhere outside, at a distance a siren pa.s.sed. An emergency vehicle. Rebecca smiled, danger was far away.

"Bridegroom, you may kiss the bride. Take care!"

But Tignor only closed his arms around Rebecca, as if to shield her with his body. She felt his fist-sized heart beating against her warm, bruised face. She would have closed her arms around him, but he held her fixed, fast. His arms were heavy with fleshy muscle, his sport coat was scratchy against her skin. Her thoughts came to her in slow floating balloons Now I am married, I will be a wife.

There was someone she wanted to tell: she had not seen in a long time.

"Mrs. Mack" had doc.u.ments to be signed, and a two-pound box of f.a.n.n.y Farmer chocolates. This woman, squat like her husband, with thin-penciled eyebrows and a fluttery manner, had forms for Tignor and Rebecca to sign, and a Certificate of Marriage to take away with them. Tignor was impatient, signing his name in a scrawl that might have been N. Tignor if you peered closely. Rebecca had trouble holding the pen in her fingers, hadn't realized that all the fingers of both her hands were slightly swollen, and her concentration faded in and out of focus, so Tignor had to guide her hand: Rebecca Schard.

"Mrs. Mack" thanked them. She wrested the box of chocolates out of her husband's hands (the box had been opened, Mr. Mack was helping himself and chewing vigorously), and handed it over to Tignor like a prize.

"These're included in the price, see? You get to take 'em with you on your honeymoon."

"My mother was always warning me, something bad would happen to me. But nothing ever did happen. And now I'm married."

Rebecca smiled so happily with her banged-up mouth, Tignor laughed, and gave her a big wet smacking kiss in full view of whoever, in the lobby of the Hotel Niagara Falls, might be watching.

"Me too, R'becca."

Never at the General Washington Hotel had Rebecca seen any room like the honeymoon suite at the Hotel Niagara Falls. Two good-sized rooms: bedroom with canopied bed, sitting room with velvet sofa, chairs, a Motorola floor-model television set, silver ice bucket and tray, crystal gla.s.ses. Here too Tignor playfully carried his bride over the threshold, fell with her onto the bed tugging at her clothes, gripping her squirmy body in his arms like a wrestler, and Rebecca shut her eyes to stop the ceiling from spinning, the bed-canopy overhead, Oh! oh! oh! gripping Tignor's shoulders with the desperation of one gripping the edge of a parapet, as Tignor fumbled to open his trousers, fumbled to push himself into her more tentatively at first than he'd done in Beardstown, in a m.u.f.fled choked voice murmuring what might have been Rebecca's name; and Rebecca shut her eyes tighter for her thoughts were scattering like panicked birds before the wrath of hunters as their explosive shots filled the air and the birds fled skyward for their lives and she was seeing again her father's face realizing for the first time it was a skin-mask, a mask-of-skin and not a face, she saw his mad eyes that were her own, saw his tremulous hands and for the first time too it came to her I must take it from him, that's what he wants of me, he has called me to him for this, to take his death from him. Yet she did not. She was paralyzed, she could not move. She watched as he managed to maneuver the bulky shotgun around in that tight s.p.a.ce, to aim at himself, and pull the trigger.

Tignor groaned, as if struck by a mallet.

"Oh, baby..."

It was her privilege to kiss him, as his wife.

The heavily sleeping man as oblivious of Rebecca kissing his sweaty face at his hairline as he was of the single forlorn fly buzzing trapped in the silken canopy of the bed, overhead.

In the night she found it, that she had not known she'd been looking for: in a "secret" compartment of Tignor's suitcase, in the bathroom that was also a dressing room.

During the day, when they left the hotel, Tignor kept his suitcase locked. But not at night.

It was 3 A.M., Tignor was sleeping. He would sleep deeply and profoundly until at least 10 A.M.

In the bathroom that gleamed and glittered with pearly tiles, bra.s.s fixtures, mirrors in gold-gilt scalloped frames like no bathroom she had ever seen at the General Washington, Rebecca stood barefoot, naked and shivering. Tignor had pulled off her lacy new nightgown and tossed it beneath the bed. He wanted her naked beside him, he liked to wake to female nakedness.

"He wouldn't mind. Why would he mind. Now we are husband-and-wife..."

Certainly Tignor would mind. He had a short temper, if anyone so much as questioned him in ways he didn't like. A girl did not pry into Niles Tignor's personal life. A girl did not tease the man by slipping her hand into his pocket (for his cigarette case, or lighter), for instance.

Leora Greb had warned Rebecca: never go through a guest's suitcase, they can set traps for you and you'll get h.e.l.l.

Possibly Rebecca was looking for the Certificate of Marriage. Tignor had folded it carelessly, hidden it away among his things.

Not looking for money! (She seemed to know, Tignor would give her as much money as she wanted, so long as he loved her.) Not looking for brewery-business doc.u.ments and papers. (Tignor kept these in a valise locked in the trunk of the car.) Yet in one of several zippered compartments in the suitcase she found it: a gun.

It appeared to be a revolver, with a dull blue-black barrel of about five inches. Its handle was wood. It did not appear to be newly purchased. Rebecca had no idea what caliber it was, if the safety lock was on, if it was loaded. (Of course, it must be loaded. What would Tignor want with an unloaded gun?) It was as she'd known in the car speeding to Niagara Falls to be married: Never say no to this man.

Rebecca had no wish to remove the gun from the compartment. Quietly she zipped the compartment back up, and quietly she closed the suitcase. It was a man's suitcase, impracticably heavy, made of good leather but now rather scuffed. A bra.s.s monogram gleamed NT.

37.

She was waiting to become pregnant. Now she was a man's wife, next she would be a baby's mother.

Always on the move! Tignor boasted it was the only life.

In those years they lived nowhere. Through 1954 and into the spring of 1955 (when Rebecca became pregnant for the first time) they lived nowhere but in Tignor's car and in a succession of hotels, furnished rooms and, less frequently, apartments rented by the week. Most of their stops were overnight. You could say they lived nowhere but only just stopped for varying lengths of time. They stopped in Buffalo, Port Oriskany, and Rochester. They stopped in Syracuse, Albany, Schenectady, Rome. They stopped in Binghamton and Lockport and Chautauqua Falls and in the small country towns Hammond, Elmira, Chateaugay, Lake Shaheen. They stopped in Potsdam, and in Salamanca. They stopped in Lake George, Lake Canandaigua, Schroon Lake. They stopped in Lodi, Owego, Schoharie, Port au Roche on the northern sh.o.r.e of Lake Champlain. In some of these places, Rebecca understood that Tignor was negotiating to buy property, or had already bought property. In all of these places, Tignor had friends and what he called contacts.

Tignor returned regularly to Milburn, of course. He continued to stay at the General Washington Hotel. But at these times he left Rebecca in another town, for she could not bear returning to Milburn.

To the hotel, she'd told Tignor. Not that!

In fact it was Milburn itself. Where she was the gravedigger's daughter and where, if she cared to seek it out, she could visit her parents' weedy grave sites in a shabby corner of the Milburn Township Cemetery.

She had never returned to Ferry Street to pick up the remainder of her things. In such haste she'd left, on that first, astonishing morning of her new life.

But, months later, she'd written to Katy and LaVerne. Her mood was repentant, nostalgia. She worried that her friends had come to dislike her out of jealousy. I miss you! I am very happy as a married woman, Tignor & I travel all the time on business staying in the best hotels but I miss you both, & Leora. I am hoping to have a baby...What was this: this girlish-gushing tone? Was this the voice of Mrs. Niles Tignor? Rebecca felt a thrill of sheer revulsion, for the voice emerging from her, writing rapidly as she could propel a pen across a sheet of Schroon Lake Inn stationery, in the eerie stillness of the hotel room. I am sending some money here, please buy something nice for the apartment, new curtains? a lamp? Oh I miss us together staying up late, laughing; I miss Leora dropping by; I would call you but Tignor would not like it, I am afraid. Husbands are jealous of their wives! I should not be surprised, I suppose. Especially, Tignor is jealous of other men of course. He says he knows what men are "in their hearts" & does not trust his wife with any of them. Rebecca paused, for a moment unable to continue. She could not allow herself to read what she'd written. She could not allow herself to imagine what Tignor would say, should he read what she'd written. May I ask a favor? If you would please send me some of the things I left behind there, my dictionary especially? I know this is a big favor, for you to wrap & mail something so heavy, I guess that I could buy a new dictionary, for Tignor is very generous giving me money to spend as his wife. But that dictionary is special to me. Rebecca paused, blinking away tears. Her battered old dictionary: and her name misspelled inside. But it was her dictionary, Pa had not tossed it into the stove but had relented, as if, in that instant, that flooded back upon her now with the power of hallucination, Pa had loved her after all. Please send to Mrs. Niles Tignor c/o P.O. Box 91, Hammondsville, NY (which is where Tignor receives mail, as it is central to his travels in NY State). Here is $3. Thank you! Give Leora a hug & kiss for me will you? I miss our old days playing rummy after school Katy don't you? Your friend Rebecca. How tired she was, suddenly. How stricken with unease. For this voice was not hers; no word was hers; as Rebecca, she had no words; as Mrs. Niles Tignor, each word that escaped from her was somehow false. Hurriedly she reread the letter, and wondered if she should rip it up; yet, the point of the letter was to ask for her dictionary to be sent to her. How tired she was feeling, her head ached with anxiety: Tignor would be returning to the room, she dared not allow him to see her writing a letter.

Hastily she added a P.S., that made her smile: Tell Leora to pa.s.s on to that a.s.shole Amos Hrube I DO NOT MISS HIS UGLY FACE.

Each month she was ever closer to becoming pregnant, Rebecca believed. For less frequently now did Tignor take caution. Especially if he'd been drinking, and there just wasn't time. Even as they made love Rebecca rehea.r.s.ed telling him Tignor? I have news. Or, Tignor! Guess what you're going to be, darling. And me, too. Brushing aside as you'd brush aside an annoying fly any memory of those rumors of Niles Tignor she'd heard back in Milburn that the man had children of all ages scattered across the state, that his young wives came to harm, that even now he had at least one wife and young children, he'd only recently abandoned.

Some months, she would swear she was. Just had to be.

Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s felt heavy, the nipples so sensitive she winced when Tignor sucked them. And her belly hard and round and tight as a drum. Tignor was crazy for her, said it was like a drug to him, her and him together he couldn't get enough of. And not taking caution signaled to Rebecca he wanted a baby just as she did.

Rebecca had not wished to ask Tignor straight out if he wanted children, nor would Tignor have asked Rebecca for there was a curious reticence between them in such matters. Tignor spoke crudely and casually using such words as f.u.c.k, screw, suck, s.h.i.t but he would have been deeply embarra.s.sed to utter such an expression as having s.e.xual intercourse. No more could Tignor have spoken of making love to Rebecca than he could have spoken in a foreign language.

It was all right for Rebecca to become emotional, such behavior was expected of a woman. "You love me, Tignor, don't you? A little?" Rebecca would ask, plaintive as a kitten, and Tignor would mutter, "Sure." Laughing, on the edge of being annoyed, "Why'd I marry you, sweetheart, if I didn't?"

Her reward was, and would be: the man's weight upon her.

How big Tignor was, and how heavy! It was like the sky falling on you. Panting and spent and his skin that was coa.r.s.e and mismatched-looking glowed with an uncanny sort of beauty.

Rebecca believed that her love for Niles Tignor would endure for a lifetime, always she would be grateful to him. He had not needed to marry her, she knew. He might have tossed her away like a used tissue, for perhaps that was what she deserved.

Somewhere amid his things it existed: the Certificate of Marriage. Rebecca had seen it, her hand had even signed it.

Without Tignor's weight holding her fixed, fast, she would be broken and scattered like dried leaves blown by the wind. And of no more account than dried leaves blown by the wind.

She was coming to love him, s.e.xually. She would take from him a fleeting s.e.xual pleasure. It was not the powerful sensation Tignor seemed to feel, that so annihilated him. Rebecca did not want to feel any sensation so extreme. She did not want to shatter in his arms, she did not want to scream like a wounded creature. It was the weight of the man she wanted, that was all. And Tignor's sudden tenderness in the drift to sleep in her arms.

The first baby would be a boy, Rebecca hoped. Niles, Jr. they would call him.

If a girl...Rebecca had no idea.

On the move! For the brewery business was cutthroat compet.i.tive. As an agent Tignor earned a base salary but his real money came from commissions.

What Tignor's yearly income was, Rebecca had no idea. She would no more have asked him than she would have asked her father what his income was. Certainly if she'd asked, Tignor would not have told her. He would have laughed in her face.

Possibly, if she'd misjudged his mood, he'd slap her in the face.

For getting out of line he might slap her. For smart-mouthing him.

Tignor never hit her hard, and not with a closed fist. Tignor spoke with contempt of men who hit women in such a way.

Once, Rebecca naively asked when would she meet his family?and Tignor, lighting a cigar, laughed at her, genially, and said, "Tignors don't have no family, honey." He fell silent then, and a few minutes later, abruptly he turned on her and slapped her with the back of his hand demanding to know who she'd been talking to?

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, s.e.xy clothing and underwear, silky things, that aroused him s.e.xually 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 b.u.t.terflies.

"For you, Gypsy-girl. Now you're my wife, not my wh.o.r.e."

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 s.e.x. 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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sed on the message to him, Tignor shrugged. "So? f.u.c.k '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 antic.i.p.ation 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, s.e.m.e.n, 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 hotelhad 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.

Blindly she entered a woman's clothing store. She was a surprise to the salesclerks, exiting at the rear. She doubled back to the hotel, she'd eluded the man in the navy jacket. She thought no more of him. Except that evening entering the tap room of the hotel to meet Tignor, she saw the man who'd followed her with Tignor, at the bar. They were talking, laughing. The man wasn't wearing the navy jacket but Rebecca was sure it was him.

A test! Tignor was testing me.

Rebecca would never know. When she joined Tignor, Tignor was alone at the bar. The other man had slipped away. Tignor was in one of his warm, expansive moods, he must have had a good day.

"How's my girl? Did you miss your old husband?"

This time, it was a fact. Not speculation.

Waking one morning and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were heavy-feeling, and abnormally sensitive. Her belly felt bloated. There was a tingling through her body like a mild electric current. In bed in Tignor's arms she dared to wake him, to whisper to him her apprehension. For suddenly, Rebecca was frightened. She felt as if she'd been pushed to the edge of something like a parapet, she was risking too much. Tignor's response was surprising to her. She had expected him to react with a grunt of disapproval, but he did not. He was waking fully, he was thinking. She could feel his brain churning with thought. And then he said nothing, he only just kissed her, a hard wet aggressive kiss. He kneaded her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, he sucked at the nipples that were so sensitive, Rebecca winced. He whispered, "How's that feel? You want more?"