The Gravedigger’S Daughter (28 page)

First time I saw you, girl
.
I knew
.

He was gone, and he would return. Rebecca knew: for he had promised.

At work, Rebecca removed the ring for safekeeping. She wrapped it in tissue and carried it close to her heart, in a pocket of her white rayon uniform. When she removed the uniform at the end of her shift, she replaced the silver ring on the smallest finger of her left hand.

Now, it fit perfectly. Katy had showed her how to tighten the ring with a narrow strip of transparent tape.

It was generally known, in Rebecca’s small circle of acquaintances, that Niles Tignor had given her this ring.
Are you engaged? You spent the night with him�didn’t you?
But Rebecca would not speak of Tignor. She was not one to speak casually of her personal life. She was not one to laugh and joke about men, as other women did. Her feeling for Tignor went too deep.

She hated it, the levity with which women spoke of men, when no men were near. Vulgar remarks, mocking, meant to be funny: as if women were not in awe of male power, the authority of a man like Tignor. The very carelessness of the male who might spread his seed with the abandon of milkweed or maple seeds swirling madly in gusty spring winds. Female mockery was merely defensive, desperate.

So Rebecca would not speak of Tignor, though her friends persisted in asking her.
Was
she engaged? And when would he be back in Milburn? She protested, “He isn’t the man you think you know. He is…” Behind her back she knew they laughed at her, and pitied her.

In the old stone cottage in the cemetery there had been many words but these had been the words of Death. Now, Rebecca did not trust words. Certainly there were no adequate words to speak of what had passed between her and Tignor, in Beardstown.

We are lovers now
.
We have made love together
.
We love each other
…

Ugly words scrawled by boys on walls and pavement in Milburn. On Hallowe’en morning, invariably fuck fuk you waxed in foot-high letters on store windows, school windows.

It was so, Rebecca thought. Words lie.

She felt confident that Tignor would return to her, for he had promised. There was the ring. There was their lovemaking, the way Tignor had loved her with his body, that could not have been false.

No erotic event exists in isolation, to be experienced merely once, and forgotten. The erotic exists solely in memory: recalled, re-imagined, relived, and re-lived in a ceaseless present. So Rebecca understood, now. She was haunted by the memory of those hours in Beardstown that seemed to be taking place in a ceaseless present to which she alone had access. No matter if she was working, in the General Washington Hotel, or in the company of others, talking with them and seemingly alert, engaged: yet she was with Tignor, in the Beardstown Inn. In their bed, in that room.

Their bed
it had come to seem, in her memory. Not merely
the bed
.

“Tignor! Pour me some bourbon.”

This Tignor would do, happily. For Tignor too needed a drink.

Lifting the glass to Rebecca’s chafed lips as she lay in the churned soiled sheets. Her hair was sticking to her sweaty face and neck, her breasts and belly were slick with sweat, her own and Tignor’s. He had made her bleed, the folded towels had only just been adequate to absorb the bleeding.

Making love to her, Tignor had been heedless of her muffled cries. Moving upon her massive and obliterating as a landslide. The weight of him! The bulk, and the heat! Rebecca had never experienced anything like it. So shocked, her eyes flew open. The man pumping himself into her, as if this action were his very life, he could not control its urgency that ran through him flame-like, catastrophic. He had scarcely known her, he could not have been aware of her attempts to caress him, to kiss him, to speak his name.

Afterward, she’d tried to hide the bleeding. But Tignor saw, and whistled through his teeth. “God
damn
.”

Rebecca was all right, though. If there was pain, throbbing pain, not only between her legs where she was raw, lacerated, as if he’d shoved his fist up inside her, but her backbone, and the reddened chafed skin of her breasts, and the marks of his teeth on her neck, yet she would not cry, God damn she refused to cry. She understood that Tignor was feeling some repentance. Now the flame-like urgency had passed, now he’d pumped his life into her, he was feeling a male shame, and a dread of her breaking into helpless sobs for then he must console her, and his sexual nature was not one comfortable with consolation. Guilt would madden Niles Tignor, like a horse beset by horseflies.

He hadn’t
taken caution
as he called it, either. This he had certainly meant to do.

Rebecca knew, by instinct, that she must not make Tignor feel guilty, or remorseful. He would dislike her, then. He would not want to make love to her again. He would not love her, and he would not marry her.

Ah, how good the bourbon tasted, going down! They drank from the same glass. Rebecca closed her fingers around Tignor’s big fingers, on the glass. She loved it, that his hand was so much larger than her own. The knuckles were pronounced, nickel-colored hairs grew lavish as pelt on the backs of his hands.

She was naked, and the man was naked. In this room in their bed at the Beardstown Inn, where they were spending the night together.

Abruptly now, they were intimate. The shock of nakedness had passed over into something so very strange: this intimacy, and the sweaty closeness of their flesh. If they kissed now, the kiss was one of this new intimacy. They were lovers and this fact could not be altered.

Rebecca smiled, greedy in this knowledge. What Tignor had done to her, to her body, was like a shotgun blast, irrevocable.

“You love me, Tignor, don’t you? Say you do.”

“‘You do.’”

She laughed, and swatted him. In play, in this new dazzling intimacy where she, Rebecca Schwart, had the right now to lightly chastise her lover.

“Tignor! Say you
do
.”

“Sure, baby.”

In the sticky smelly sheets they lay dazed, exhausted. Like swimmers who have exerted themselves and lay now panting on the sand. What they had done would seem to matter less than that they’d done it, and had survived.

Tignor drifted by quick degrees into sleep. His body twitched, and quivered, with its powerful inner life. Rebecca marveled at him, the fact of him. Awkwardly in her arms, the weight of his left shoulder crushing her right arm.
What does this mean, that we have done together?
She felt the angry hurt throbbing between her legs and yet: the pain was distant, it could be endured. The flamey bourbon coursed through her veins, she too would sleep.

Waking later, in the night. And the bedside lamp was still on.

Her throat burned from the bourbon, she was very thirsty. And the seeping of blood in her loins, that had not ceased. Almost, she felt panic. Almost, she could not think of the man’s name.

She peered at him, from a distance of mere inches. So close, it’s difficult to see. His skin was ruddy and coarse and still very warm. He was a man who normally sweated when he slept, for his sleep was twitchy, restless. He grunted in his sleep, moaned and whimpered in surprise like a child. His metallic hair that lifted from his forehead, in damp spikes…His eyebrows were of that same glinting hue, and the beard pushing through the skin of his jaws. He had turned onto his back, sprawled luxuriantly across the bed, his left arm flung over Rebecca. She lay in its shelter, beneath its numbing weight.

How hard the man breathed, in his sleep! He half-snored, a wet clicking sound rhythmic in his throat like the cries of a nocturnal insect.

Rebecca slipped from the bed, that was unusually high from the floor. She winced, the pain in her groin was knife-like. And still she was bleeding, and had better take a towel with her, to prevent bloodstains on the carpet.

“So ashamed. Oh, Christ.”

Yet it was only natural wasn’t it: she knew.

Katy and the others would be eager to know, what had happened in Beardstown. They knew, or thought they knew, that Rebecca had never
been with
a man before. Now they would be ravenous to know, and would interrogate her. Though she would tell them nothing yet they would talk of her behind her back, they would wonder.

Niles Tignor!
That was the man’s name.

Rebecca made her way stiffly into the bathroom, and shut the door. What relief, to be alone!

With shaky fingers Rebecca washed between the legs, using wetted toilet paper. She would not flush it down the toilet until she was certain the bleeding had stopped, for she dreaded waking Tignor. It was 3:20
A
.
M
. The hotel was silent. The plumbing was antique, and noisy. She was dismayed to see that, yes there was fresh blood seeping from her, though more slowly than before.

“You will be all right. You will not bleed to death.”

In the mirror above the sink she was surprised to see: her flushed face, her wild disheveled hair. No lipstick remained on her mouth that looked raw, swollen. Her eyes appeared cracked, with tiny red threads. Her nose shone, oily. How ugly she was, how could any man love her!

Still, she smiled. She was Niles Tignor’s girl, this blood was proof.

The bleeding would cease by morning. This wasn’t menstrual blood that would continue for days. It wasn’t dark as that blood, and not clotted. Its odor was different. She would wash, wash, wash herself clean and the man would think no more of it.

Her
hymen
he’d torn, Rebecca knew the word from her dictionary. She’d smiled, years ago seeing how close
hymen
was to
hymn
,
hymnal
.

Suddenly she recalled how, in the Presbyterian church, beside Rose Lutter who had been so kind to her, Rebecca had not really listened to the minister’s sermons. Her mind had drifted off onto men, and maleness, and sex. But with unease, disdain, for she had not yet met Niles Tignor.

In the morning though groggy and hungover, Tignor would need to make love. His breath foul as ditch water yet he would need to make love. For he was fully aroused, and mad with love for her. Couldn’t keep his hands off her, he said. Crazy about her she was so beautiful, he said.
My Gypsy-girl
.
My Jewess
.
Oh, Jesus
…

Later Rebecca would say, in Tignor’s car driving back to Milburn, her head resting against his shoulder, “You know, I’m not a Gypsy, Tignor. I’m not a ‘Jewess.’”

Tignor, bleary-eyed in the raw morning air, jaws glinting with stubble where he’d shaved in haste, seemed not to hear. Like a fisherman casting his line out, out into a fast-moving stream, he was thinking ahead to Milburn, and what awaited him. And beyond.

“Sure, kid. Me neither.”

The ring: it wasn’t the ring Baumgarten/Bumstead had placed at the foot of his bed to beguile Rebecca. She was certain, now she had time to examine it. The stone in the other ring had been a darker purple than this stone, square-or rectangular-cut, and clear as glass. ( Very likely, it had been glass.) This small oval stone was purple, and opaque.

She was not pregnant. Yet she was pregnant with her feeling for the man, that accompanied her everywhere and at all times.

It was mid-March yet still winter, very cold at night. Only the days were lengthening, there were ever-longer periods of sunshine, thawing and dripping ice. Rebecca was stubborn in her belief that Tignor would return, check into the General Washington Hotel as usual, and call her. She knew, she had not doubted him. Yet when the phone rang in the early evening, and LaVerne Tracy answered, Rebecca came to the doorway to listen, her heart beating in dread. LaVerne was a blowsy blond woman of twenty-three whose attitude toward men was both flirtatious and mocking; always you could tell if LaVerne was speaking with a man on the phone, by her malicious smile.

“Rebecca? I don’t know if she’s home, I’ll see.”

Rebecca asked who the caller was.

LaVerne covered the receiver with the flat of her hand, indifferently. “Him.”

Rebecca laughed, and took the call.

Tignor wanted to see her, that night. After 10
P
.
M
. if she was free. His voice was a shock in her ear, so close. He sounded edgy, not so bluff and assured as Rebecca recalled. His laughter sounded forced, unconvincing.

Rebecca said yes, she would see him. But only for a while, she had to work the next morning.

Tignor said stiffly so did he have to work the next morning�“I’m in Milburn on business, honey.”

In February, Rebecca had had no excuse to give Amos Hrube for being late for work, when Tignor brought her back at midday from Beardstown. She’d stood mute and sullen as Hrube scolded her, saying another chambermaid had had to take over her rooms. Tignor had wanted to speak to Hrube on Rebecca’s behalf, but Rebecca wouldn’t let him. The last thing she wanted was talk of her and Tignor among the hotel staff, beyond what the staff was already saying.

It was 10:20
P
.
M
. when Tignor’s Studebaker pulled up outside the brownstone on Ferry Street. Tignor wasn’t one to come upstairs to knock on the apartment door, instead he entered only the vestibule and called Rebecca’s name up the stairs, with an air of impatience.

LaVerne said, “Tell that fucker to go to hell. Fuck he thinks he’s hot shit, yelling for you like that.”

LaVerne had known Niles Tignor before Rebecca had met him. Their relationship was vague to Rebecca, enigmatic.

Rebecca laughed, and told LaVerne she didn’t mind.

“Well, I mind,” LaVerne said hotly. “That fucker.”

Rebecca left the flat. She knew how LaVerne would complain of her to Katy, and how Katy would laugh, and shrug.

Shit it’s a man’s world, what can you do…

If Niles Tignor snapped his fingers for her, Rebecca would come to him. She would come initially, but on her own terms. For she must see the man again, and be with him, to re-establish the intimate connection between them.