The Gravedigger’S Daughter (39 page)

“You see, you have changed my life! Now I’m here in Port Oriskany, and this is my son Zacharias…”

She would not lie to him. She would not claim to be Hazel Jones.

Though she could not absolutely deny it, either. For there was the possibility that she’d been adopted. Hadn’t Herschel suggested this, they’d found her, an infant, newly born on a ship in New York Harbor…“My parents are gone, Dr. Hendricks. I will never be able to ask them. But I never felt that I was theirs.” In her exhausted and deranged state this seemed to her more than theoretically possible.

The child frowned up at her. Why was Mommy talking to herself? And smiling, biting at her scabby lip.

“Mommy? C’n we go now? It smells bad here.”

She turned, numbly. She groped for the child’s hand. She was thinking hard and yet no thoughts came to her. In the wan reflective surfaces of frosted-glass doors they were passing her face was obscured and only her thick straggling hair was sharply defined. She looked like a drowned person.

One of the frosted-glass doors opened. The sickly medicinal smell was intensified. An individual was leaving suite 420, occupied by Hiram Tanner, D.D.S. On an impulse Rebecca entered the waiting room. Did D.D.S. mean dentist? A woman receptionist frowned at her from behind a desk. “Yes? Can I help you, miss?”

“I’m looking for Dr. Hendricks in suite four-fourteen. But the office seems to be closed.”

The receptionist’s crayon-eyebrows lifted in exaggerated surprise.

“Why, haven’t you heard? Dr. Hendricks died last summer.”

“Died! But…”

“All his patients were notified, I thought. Were you one of his patients?”

“No. I mean…yes, I was.”

“His office hasn’t been vacated yet, there’s some problem. It was left in pretty bad shape and has to be cleaned.”

The receptionist, middle-aged, tidily dressed, was looking from Rebecca to the child nudging against her thigh. She was staring at their battered faces.

“There’s other doctors you could see in the building. Down on floor two there’s�”

“No! I need to see Dr. Hendricks. It’s the son I mean, not the father.”

The receptionist said, “There hasn’t been anybody around that office since last summer, that I’ve seen. People say somebody comes in after hours. There’s things get moved around, there’s debris in boxes for the janitor to take away. I used to see the son, but not recently. It was a stroke that killed Dr. Hendricks, they said. He had a lot of patients but they were getting old, too. I never heard the son was a doctor.”

Rebecca protested, “But he is! ‘Byron Hendricks, M.D.’ I’ve seen his card. I was supposed to make an appointment…”

“A man about forty, is he? Nervous, like? With a kind of strange way about him, and eyes? Always dressed kind of different, wearing a hat? In cold weather it was a fedora, other times it was a straw hat. He wa’n’t never any M.D. that I ever heard of but I could be wrong. He might’ve gone to medical school but wasn’t practicing, there’s some like that.”

Rebecca stared at the woman, as Zack nudged and twisted impatiently against her legs. Seeing Rebecca’s shock, the woman laid her hand on her bosom: “See, miss, I don’t feel comfortable passing on rumors. Dr. Tanner was one to say hello to the old man, and they’d chat for a few minutes, but Dr. Tanner didn’t know them, either of them, real well.”

Rebecca said, confused, “Can you be a doctor and not ‘practice’? But…” Seeing in the woman’s eyes a measure of pity, yet of satisfaction. She thought she had better get accustomed to it.

She thanked the receptionist, pulled Zack with her out of the office and shut the door behind her.

Out in the corridor Zack wrenched out of her grasp and ran limping ahead of her, flailing his arms foolishly and making a whistling-gagging noise as if he couldn’t breathe the stale air. He was becoming unruly, obstinate. He had never behaved this way in any public place in the past.

Rebecca half sobbed, “Zack! Damn you get back here.”

He was about to punch the elevator button
down
. Rebecca was surprised he knew to do such a thing, at his age. She slapped his hand away. She didn’t want to summon the elevator operator, the uniformed Negro with the neat narrow mustache and playful-brooding eyes, knowing how he would look at her with pity, too.

“We’ll take the stairs, honey. Stairs are safer.”

A windowless stairway three steep flights down, to a heavy door marked exit on a back street.

The ringing in her ear was louder, distracting. Almost, she thought there were nocturnal insects somewhere near.

Thinking
Hendricks wanted you to believe him, trust him
.
On the towpath. At that time. He had no thought that you would ever try to find him here
.

“Just the two of us. One night. My son and me.”

They would spend the night in a walk-up hotel in a brownstone, a few blocks from Owego Avenue. Rebecca checked several rooms before taking one: examined sheets and pillowcases, lifted a corner of the mattress from the box springs to check for bedbugs, lice. The desk clerk was amused by her, eyeing her long straggly hair and bruised face. “You want the Statler, honey, you’re in the wrong place.”

The double bed took up most of the space in the room between stained-wallpaper walls and a melancholy window looking out into an air shaft. There was no bath, the toilet was in the hall.

Rebecca laughed, wiping at her eyes.

“Five-fifty a night. This is the right place.”

When they were alone in the room, Zack poked about in imitation of his mother. Pretended to be a dog sniffing in corners. Stooped to peer beneath the bed.

“Mommy, what if Dad-dy�”

Rebecca raised a warning finger. “No.”

“But Mommy! If Da�”

“There is Mommy now, I told you. From now on only Mommy.”

She would not scold the child. She would never frighten him. Instead she embraced, tickled him.

Eventually, he would forget. She was determined.

She took him for a meal before bedtime at an automat on Owego Avenue. The bright-lit, noisy atmosphere and the way in which food was acquired, pushed along on shiny plastic trays, fascinated the child. After their meal she debated taking him across the wide, windy square to the Port Oriskany Statler which was the city’s most distinguished hotel. Wanting to show him the spacious, ornate lobby crowded with well-dressed men and women. Marble floor, leather sofas, potted ferns and small trees. An open atrium to the mezzanine floor. Uniformed doormen, bellboys.

The Port Oriskany Statler sparkled with lights. At least twenty-five floors. On the far side of the sandstone building was a waterfront park, and Lake Erie stretching to the horizon. Rebecca had a vague memory of a view from high windows. He’d brought her to stay at the hotel years ago, the man who’d masqueraded as her husband. She had been so deluded, believing she’d been happy at the time! Her role too had been a masquerade.

“I was his whore. Even if I didn’t know it.”

Zack glanced up at her quizzically. As if she’d been talking to herself, laughing. He was of an age to know that adults didn’t do such things in public.

She was trying to recall if it had been here in Port Oriskany, or in another city, she’d been followed from the hotel by a man in a navy jacket and navy cap. He’d turned out to be (she surmised, she had never been certain) someone sent to test her loyalty, faithfulness. She wondered for the first time what would have happened to her if she had smiled and laughed with the man, allowed herself to be picked up.

She wasn’t sure if that had been Port Oriskany, though. But she did recall that the man who’d masqueraded as her husband had taken her to an obstetrician in this city, who had examined her and run a test on her urine and told her the good news that she was going to have a baby in eight months’ time.

The man who’d masqueraded as her husband had said in his blunt bemused voice
You’re pregnant are you, girl
. He had not said
You’re going to have a baby
.

Years later, with her surviving child, she contemplated these words. The distinction between each statement.

“Mommy are you sad? Mommy are you
crying
?”

She wasn’t, though. She’d swear she was laughing.

Next morning was brightly cold, invigorating. In the night she’d decided not to try to telephone Byron Hendricks, M.D. She would make her own way, she had no need of him. Nor did she take time to scan the telephone directory for
Jones
.

She was in a very good mood. She had slept the sleep of the dead, and so had the child. More than nine hours! He’d wakened only just once, needing to be taken out into the hall to the toilet.

Shivering with cold. Sleep-dazed. She’d led him by the hand and helped him open his pajamas, afterward guiding his hand to flush the toilet. Kissing him tenderly on the nape of the neck where there was a pear-sized ugly bruise. “Such a big boy! Such a good boy.”

In hotels like this brownstone walk-up above a shuttered restaurant, as at the glamorous Port Oriskany Statler, it happened that individuals sometimes checked in with or without luggage, safety-locked their doors and pulled their blinds and in some way�clumsy, inspired, calculated, desperate�managed to kill themselves, usually by climbing into the bathtub clothed or naked and slashing their wrists with a razor blade. At the General Washington Hotel such incidents had been spoken of in whispers, though Rebecca had never been a witness to any bloody scene nor had she been asked to help clean up afterward.

Suicide in hotel rooms was not uncommon, but murder was very rare. Rebecca had never heard of anyone killing a child in any hotel.

Why do they do it, why check into a hotel, Rebecca had asked someone, possibly Hrube himself at a time when they must’ve been on reasonably good terms, and Hrube had shrugged saying, “To fuck the rest of us up, why else d’you think?” Rebecca had laughed, this was so inspired a reply.

Couldn’t remember why she was thinking of him now: Hrube? Hadn’t thought of that flat-faced bastard in years.

Back in the room she’d safety-locked the door, pulled the frayed blind farther down, hoisted the groggy child back into bed and climbed in beside him hugging him.

Sleep of the dead! Nothing sweeter.

In the morning using the tiny sink in the cubbyhole-toilet she managed to wash the child, including his hair. He resisted, but not vehemently. Thank God there was soap! She washed his fair fine thin hair and combed out of it the last remaining small snarls of dried blood.

Her own hair was too thick, too long and matted and snarled with dried blood to be shampooed in any sink. She hated it, suddenly. Heavy greasy rank-smelling dragging at her soul. Like her brother Herschel she was, you’d think was an Iroquois Indian.

She left the child at the automat instructing him not to move an inch, to wait for her. Hungrily he was eating a second bowl of hot oatmeal lavishly topped with milk and crystalline brown sugar of a kind he’d never before tasted. Rebecca went to have her hair shampooed and cut in Glamore Beauty Salon around the corner from the automat. She’d noticed the beauty salon on their walk the previous night, she’d studied the prices listed in the window.

How sick she was of Rebecca Schwart’s hair! Her former husband had loved her hair long, heavy, sexy twining in his fingers, burying his face in her hair as he made love to her, moaning and pumping his life into her, between the legs he’d greedily kissed and nuzzled her, the coarse wiry pelt of hair she could hardly bear to touch, herself. But that time was past. The time of her love-delusion was past. She’d come to hate her thick shapeless hair that was always snarled beneath, couldn’t force a comb through it, oily if it wasn’t shampooed every other day and of course it was not shampooed every other day, not any longer. And now the hopeless bits of dried blood snarled in it. She would have it cut off, all but a few inches covering her ears.

In the Glamore Salon she paged through
Hair Styles
until she found what she was looking for: Hazel Jones’s breezy short cut, with bangs scissor-cut just above the eyebrows.

There he sat in the automat, where she’d left him. Very still as if his thoughts had collapsed in upon themselves. His expression was intense, absorbed. He was gripping himself oddly, arms folded across his chest in a tight embrace. She thought
He is playing piano, his fingers are making music for him
.

He trusted her utterly. He had no doubt that she would return to him. Seeing her now he glanced upward, blinking.

“Mommy you’re
pretty
. Mommy you look
nice
.”

It was so. She was pretty, she looked nice. When her bruises and swellings faded, she would look more than nice.

The new feathery haircut drew eyes to her. Something in her walk, her manner. Purchasing two adult tickets at the Greyhound Bus counter, impulsively choosing a destination (“Jamestown” somewhere to the south of Port Oriskany) because the bus was leaving in twenty minutes and she was wary of lingering in this busy public place where she and the child might be observed. (Zack was wearing a cloth cap on his head. He was sitting where she’d positioned him, on the farther side of the crowded waiting room, his back to the room and to her. They would be seen together only outside at the curb as the bus loaded, and then briefly. And on the bus they would sit together as if by chance, at the very rear.) Rebecca was smiling at the ticket seller, rousing the man from his late-morning torpor. “A beautiful day, so
sunny
.” The ticket seller, male, youngish, rounded shoulders and morose eyes brightening in turn, seeing a pretty-breezy American girl with shiny dark bangs across her forehead, feathery strands of shiny dark hair lifting about her ears, smiled at her blinking and staring, “Yeah! Man it sure is.”

The remainder of her life. Maybe it would be easy.

The Greyhound to Jamestown was loading. She signaled the child to follow her. Made him a gift of two discarded comic books she’d found in the waiting room. Kissing and cuddling in their seat on the bus. “They didn’t find us, sweetie! We’re safe.” It was a game, only Mommy knew the rules and the logic behind the rules. By the time the bus was lumbering into the hilly countryside south of Port Oriskany the child had become absorbed in one of the comic books.