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The very first novel by literary legend Alice McDermott, this is a story of love and loss, family and human connection. With a gorgeous confidence of narrative voice, it’s a novel sure to capture you with its sharpness and style.
The New York Times Bestselling Author of After This and Charming Billy
Elizabeth Connelly, editor at a New York vanity press, sells the dream of publication (admittedly, to writers of questionable talent). Stories of true emotional depth rarely cross her desk. But when a young writer named Tupper Daniels walks in, bearing an unfinished novel, Elizabeth is drawn to both the novelist and his story—a lyrical tale about a man in love with more than one woman at once. Tupper's manuscript unlocks memories of her own secretive father, who himself may have been a bigamist. As Elizabeth and Tupper search for the perfect dénouement, their affair, too, approaches a most unexpected and poignant coda.
A brilliant debut from one of our most celebrated authors, A Bigamist's Daughter is "a wise, sad, witty novel about men and women, God, hope, love, illusion, and fiction itself" (Newsweek).
| ISBN-13: | 9780312573492 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2012 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
Alice McDermott is the author of five previous novels, including Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; and At Weddings and Wakes, all published by FSG and Picador. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.
Hometown:
Bethesda, MarylandDate of Birth:
June 27, 1953Place of Birth:
Brooklyn, New YorkEducation:
B.A., State University of New York-Oswego, 1975; M.A., University of New Hampshire, 1978
1
SHE IS ALMOST BEGINNING to believe him.
He's been here for nearly twenty minutes now, sitting across from her on the edge of his seat, his forearms resting on her desk, his hands folded before him, the right hand covering the left, the left a fist that he occasionally taps, ever so lightly, upon the gray steel to give his voice emphasis. His voice is Southern, slow, but with a rising quality that makes her feel it's being rushed from behind, that something is pushing him to get the story told faster, to get it finished. Perhaps it is only her slow, habitual glances at the clock on the edge of her desk, or the quick sounds of the typewriters outside her office.
But his voice will not be rushed, and his face, that light, open, seemingly featureless face that only very blond people can have, very blond people with pale skin and colorless lashes, remains unchanged.
"He seemed to look different each time we saw him," he tells her, reciting. "Not a difference in weight or dress or disposition, not even the difference that can come over someone at different seasons, but a true, somehow internal difference. At times, he would look kind—God, so kind it made you want to kneel, filled you with an optimism, a joy, that was almost religious. At other times, he would look fierce, savage, so that you knew if he were to touch you, as we'd seen him touch his wife (who was only one of his wives) and a shopgirl, and even a dog at these times, there would be no humanity in it, no connection of blood and living skin, no recognition. Just weight and direction; the blade of the tractor meeting dry earth."
He speaks slowly, carefully, and his voice, like his small blue eyes, seems to search the air, the pale sunlight coming from the window behind her, as if some response should be found there. As if each word were a cue.
"One summer we saw him in town. He was driving a gray Mercedes with Montana plates and it was the first any of us had seen of him for nearly a year and a half. He pulled up in that car that was like a flash of black water thrown onto the dry, dusty street, stepped out, and then stood there, seeing no one, but waiting, as if for our vision to clear. He seemed thinner, even taller than we'd remembered him and he wore white duck trousers and a loose white shirt. He was tan and his hair had begun to turn gray.
"He walked slowly into the liquor store, all of us watching him and him knowing we were watching, came out with a bottle, got back into his car and drove out to his home that, as far as any of us knew, he hadn't seen in the past year and a half. And all of us, despite what we'd been saying when we saw his wife—who was really only one of his wives—moving through us like a whipped dog, despite the pity we'd been giving her, the puzzled shame we thought we'd seen her wearing, despite that, any one of us, man, woman and child, would have sold his soul to have been there in that darkened house on the Fainsburg Road that night, to have been there waiting to receive him."
Like a medium, he searches the air as he speaks, and although she's sat at this desk, in this white office, and has listened to the drone of countless other voices, countless other stories ("Do you have a story to tell? Have you ever told yourself: 'I should write a book?' Vista Books seeks new authors with manuscripts of all types."), she has been, in these past twenty minutes, intrigued, interested, verging on belief.
"And the other women, his other wives, whom we could only guess about, only imagine as we waited for him to return to our town again, those women became as real to us as the women who we knew to be his wives, and we always imagined them crying. Crying in different rooms, in different cities, on different days of the week. One, we would say, is fat, with curly hair, and she cries in her kitchen and wipes her eyes with a gingham apron, a small whimper always at her throat. Another is thin, sharp-nosed. She places long, bony fingers over her face and cries sitting on the edge of a cream-colored couch in a darkening living room. Another, we would tell one another, winking, smiling a little, is blond, shapely; she lies flung across her bed, crying with awful, shuddering sobs, one red slipper on the floor, the other still dangling from her polished toes."
The phone rings, and she almost expects him to make the sound part of his story, the way a dream will sometimes gather the real world into itself and build a meaning around it.
He merely smiles, pulling his lips together, and nods when she says, "Excuse me."
It's Ann, her secretary. "Elizabeth, you've been in there nearly half an hour," she says in a low voice. "Do you need to be rescued?"
"Fine." Elizabeth reaches for her pen. "Give it to me again, slowly." She notices her movements are sluggish, drowsy.
"Should I give you about fifteen more minutes?" Ann asks.
She nods, writing nonsense, illegibly. She's not sure she wants to get rid of him so soon, but Ann's call and her response to it are automatic, cues and stage directions in a scene she knows so well that even to improvise would mean to pick up a pad and a pen and pretend to be writing. "Fine," she says. "Got it."
"It's twenty-five after ten," Ann tells her. "If he's not out by ten forty-five, I'll come in and say there's a meeting."
Elizabeth writes, "This is the day that the Lord hath made," and nods again, wondering where in her mind the phrase came from. "Well, that's fine," she says, "but tell them not to start without me."
Ann laughs a little. "Okay, I'll tell them."
She hangs up the phone and stares at the pad. Remnants of Catholic brainwashing or God trying to get a message to her? She scribbles a bit more, as if she has something urgent on her mind, and then looks up. "I'm sorry, Mr. Daniels," she says. "Please go on."
He smiles a little, eyes on his hands, and she's suddenly ashamed, afraid that he's seen through the phone call. "Well, it's all in the book," he says and then, looking up, "Why don't I just let you read it instead of reciting it to you?" He smiles, a weak smile that somehow reaches to the very corners of his mouth, squaring them. His teeth are small and white and straight, his skin smooth, beardless, his narrow eyes a very light blue. There is, she thinks, something uncomplicated and pleasant about his face.
"Yes," she says, smiling back at him, placing her hand over the thick yellow envelope before her. "Why don't I read it first and then we can talk?" She pushed her chair back slightly, places her hands on its arms. He stands. She stands too, and holds out her hand. "I'll call you as soon as I've read it all. Maybe we can have lunch."
They shake hands across her desk, above his manuscript in its yellow envelope, and for just one moment she catches a certain facetiousness in his eyes, as if he's seen through more than the phone call. She suddenly feels like a little girl caught dressed up in her mother's clothes, gravely playing grown-up. It's a feeling she often gets when acting the businesswoman around people her own age.
"I'd appreciate that," he says and smiles again. He is a broad young man, nearly stocky, and as she walks him to the door she notices that he is only an inch or two taller than she. He wears neat khaki pants and a navy-blue blazer. Loafers and no socks. She briefly imagines him naked, but can think only of a pale, rather knotty backside.
"How much longer will you be in New York?" she asks, as they walk down the corridor, the typewriters clicking on either side of them. Ann peers over the green, smoked-glass partition, watching him carefully, as if she suspects he may bolt at any minute, make a run for it back to the office, where he will demand more time. She seems ready to block the door if he dares.
"I have some shopping to do," he says. "And some old friends to visit. Actually, when I come to New York I usually just stay until I get tired of it. Once I was here about four hours, once for over six months."
The idle rich. She imagines the price of his contract edging up over the $5,000 mark.
They stand in the small reception room and shake hands. It's a sleazy room. Dark paneling, brown-and-orange Danish modern furniture, beige linoleum. It's so much like a front, like the fake offices they used to set up for Candid Camera, she often wonders how their "authors" fail to see it. The first time she sat here, when she came up for her interview two years ago, she could think only of illegal abortions and unlicensed electrolysis, of Allen Funt suddenly revealing that nothing is what it seems to be.
As it's not, in here. Vista Books is a vanity publisher masquerading as a real one. Making the dreams of every would-be writer come true, for a while. And then sending them the bill.
"I'll call you," she says to him. "Soon." They stand looking at each other, smiling somewhat awkwardly. She knows what he's waiting for. "Tomorrow," she says, giving it to him.
Now he really smiles. "Great. I hope you like it."
She reaches for the door and holds it open for him. "I'm sure I will."
He says, "Have a good day," and walks out. He has an odd little bounce in his step, and he walks with his hands straight at his sides, like a well-behaved child.
Bonnie, the receptionist, sits behind a small window opposite the door watching her, sucking on a red-and-white straw stuck into a can of grape soda.
"Yuk," she says as Elizabeth turns back into the room. The straw doesn't leave her mouth. "He's a creepy one." There are bright red pimples spread across her forehead like strawberry jam. She is fat, painfully homely; nasty with homeliness.
"You think so?"
"Yuk," she says again, and then adds, biting the straw, "Ned wants you in Production."
She goes the back way, through the stockroom, a large gray area that smells damp and oily like an old garage. There are rows and rows of books, some in opened boxes, some wrapped in brown paper, others piled loosely on metal shelves, their jackets sooty and torn. Hector, the stock boy, is on one of the wooden skids, disco-tap dancing to the music from his transistor. He waves to her. She waves back. She fights her recurrent fantasy of the entire room in flames.
As she enters Ned's office, a small, windowless room between the storeroom and the large area where the six members of Vista's production staff actually work, she can tell this is not going to be a pleasant session. He has a large, sloppy manuscript on the desk before him; judging from his face, it is giving off a terrible odor.
"You signed this book?" he asks. "The Coy Caitiff?"
She moves to his desk and looks at the title page. "By Blanche Willis. Yes, I signed it. It's a good contract."
"I don't suppose you've read it." His eyes and forehead are small, pushed together, but the rest of his face is wide, long, exaggerated like a cartoon character's. He's spent the last ten years with a trade publisher, and after six months at Vista he's still a little surprised at what goes on at a vanity press.
"I didn't read the whole thing," she tells him. "But I read some of it. Why?"
He sits up in his chair, sighing, playing with the buttons of his shirt. "The copy editor I gave it to just brought it back. He can't make any sense of it. He says the main character keeps changing his name. And his sex. He says on one page the author's calling him Fess and on the other page she's calling him Bess, and sometimes she describes the clothes as male, sometimes as female. I've just looked at it and I can't make any sense of it either." He pushed the manuscript away from him, toward her. "How am I supposed to send it to the compositor if I don't know where it's supposed to be B-E-S-S and where it's supposed to be F-E-S-S, where it's supposed to be he and where it's supposed to be she?"
She begins to laugh a little. Ned doesn't, and she wishes he would. She realizes that Ned takes his job seriously because he has a wife and five children and a mortgage, but she also believes a certain amount of laughter is important, for perspective.
"It's really very simple," she tells him, pretending to be serious. "It's all explained in the outline." She sits on the edge of his desk. Blanche Willis, she knows, has already become a celebrity in her small New Jersey town, and her husband, who is an executive for the telephone company, has just given her an office in his own building, where she can begin working on the sequel. She had called just yesterday to ask Elizabeth what she thought of Dustin Hoffman starring in the movie version of her book. Blanche wondered if he was "serious" enough.
"In the beginning of the book," she tells Ned, "Bess and Fess are twins, male and female. Bess marries a doctor and they drive cross-country for their honeymoon. Fess goes along with them because he's gay and wants to live in San Francisco. On the way, there's a car crash and Bess is killed. Fess is castrated."
"Shit," Ned whispers.
"So," she goes on, "to calm the broken-hearted doctor, Fess proposes that he become Bess and the two of them live as man and wife. This pleases Fess because he's always wanted to marry a doctor, and it pleases the doctor because he's always liked Fess better anyway. The story goes on from there."
"It's not supposed to be a funny book?" Ned asks.
"No," she says. "The author believes it's a reflection of the way we live now. That's what she wants on the jacket."
He breathes another "shit" and then asks, "So what do I tell the copy editor?"
"Tell him it's easy to figure out. When Fess and the doctor are in public, Fess is called Bess. When they're alone, he's Fess again because the doctor knows he's not really Bess. In public, Fess is she, in private, he's he, unless the doctor is kidding him and calling him she in private. I think the same goes for Fess's mother because she knows Fess is Bess, too."
Ned looks down at the manuscript and then looks up at her. Laughing a little, she slides off the desk and straightens her skirt. "Does it ever occur to you to reject a manuscript on the grounds it's ridiculous?" he asks.
She laughs out loud, again wishing he would smile. "It occurs to me every day," she tells him. "But if the author's willing to pay us to publish it, what can I do?"
He shrugs, dismissing her. As she turns to leave, she sees Kevin, their art director, standing behind her. He grins through his freckles and whispers, "Bess and Fess, what a mess," as she passes by. They both raise their shoulders and giggle into their hands. Ned ignores them.
Ann is in her office when she gets back, gathering papers from Elizabeth's OUT basket and twisting her head around to read the name on the yellow envelope.
"What's his name?" she asks as Elizabeth walks in. "Tupper?"
"That's what it says."
"As in Tupperware?"
"Yup."
She sits down at her desk and picks up the envelope. The label says Tupper Daniels, Monteagle, Tennessee. She slides the manuscript out. It's on nice paper, neatly typed, and she suddenly feels strangely embarrassed, as if he'd accidentally left something very private in her office, like a pair of rosary beads or a worn sock. Ann leans over her, her large breasts pressing softly against Elizabeth's shoulder and arm. She almost wants to block the manuscript from her view.
"What's it about?" Ann whispers.
She shrugs. "Bigamy, I think. He just recited most of the first chapter to me."
"Oh God," Ann says. She straightens up. She is a big woman, huge actually, but her face is thin and she dresses well, so Elizabeth only notices her size when they are standing side by side in front of the bathroom mirror, or when, like now, she stands close enough to block out one entire side of the office.
"Bigamy?" Ann says. "My, my, he didn't look the type." And then she laughs that staccato, sophisticated laugh Elizabeth loves her for. "That's an answer to the divorce problem. I wish Brian had thought of it." She's been divorced from Brian nearly seven years now, but his name still haunts her conversations; she seems to hold it in her mouth like a dog with a bit of coattail: the only part of the thief that didn't get away.
"You would have preferred Brian to be a bigamist?"
She shrugs, hands on her wide hips. "Why not? Half a man's better than none at all. And think of the freedom; he'd have to work double-time being two husbands, but I'd only have to work part-time being half a wife. It's the working girl's answer to a demanding marriage. Don't get a part-time job, get a part-time husband! I love it."
Elizabeth tells her she's got a point. Had Brian been a bigamist, she knows, Ann would have made herself believe this. She has a marvelous way of turning every rotten thing her once-husband did into some kind of sly joke in which she is ultimately the winner. Her poetry, which she used to let Elizabeth read, was full of such twists.
"Well," says Ann. "Are you going to sign old Tupperware?"
"Probably." She flips through the manuscript and then drops it onto her desk. "And I told him I'd call him tomorrow, so be a dear and get me his file so I can make out his contract. Type a folder for him too, and find me a time tomorrow afternoon when I can see him—he'll probably sign then."
"Right-oh, chief," Ann says, saluting and turning to walk out the door. The "chief" is to remind Elizabeth, nearly six years her junior, that she's getting carried away.
"And then take the rest of the morning off," Elizabeth calls after her. An apology.
"You're a sport," Ann calls back.
Tupper Daniels' background file consists of his first letter to Vista, the questionnaire he was asked to fill out, the summary he was asked to submit and the two letters arranging this morning's meeting.
His questionnaire says he's submitted to all the major houses, the real publishers, and was turned down by each one. It doesn't say why. It says he finally decided to come to Vista because he feels a writer should believe in his work enough to pay to have it published. He also adds that Stephen Crane published his own first works himself, and he's always admired Stephen Crane.
She sits back, lights a cigarette. She recalls having read it all before, just yesterday probably, but it had no meaning then. She reads hundreds of these backgrounds a week, hundreds of letters from people with books that Vista simply must publish, no matter what the cost. Housewives with desks full of poetry, businessmen with exposes they're sure will change the world, old people, so many old people, with memoirs and philosophies they want urgently to be preserved, recorded. So many pathetic people with dreams of immortality and a spot on the Tonight Show.
In the beginning they had depressed her with their sad stories and hopeless ambitions, but gradually she came to see that, like anyone who dealt with the public, she would have to keep her sympathies, and her imagination, in check. How, she reasoned, could even the most humble shoe salesman accomplish his work if each socked or stockinged foot he held brought visions of this little piggy and pedicures and calluses earned in vain pursuits? Of mortician's tags hung from cold toes?
She picks up his summary. It's sketchy, but enough to allow her to discuss his book with him for hours; her own special talent.
"This is an intriguing story in the tradition of some of our greatest Southern writers. It deals with a young man who suddenly appears in a small Southern town. He camps on the outskirts of town, then buys the land under him and begins to build a home. When the home is completed, he disappears for nearly a year. On his return, he marries a young girl who is engaged to someone else, puts her in his home and then leaves again. He comes and goes with monthly and yearly intervals for nearly fifty years, fascinating the townspeople and marrying two other women from the town as each wife dies.
"The townspeople are convinced that he has other wives and families across the country, and along with the story of this man's comings and goings the novel consists of various townspeople's theories of who and what he has elsewhere, told from the point of view of the women themselves. So the novel is actually many stories with the same mysterious man as the center of each."
He'd told her it was based on fact, on a man who had lived in the town where he grew up, a man later proven to be a bigamist. He'd said he was having some trouble with the ending.
She gets up and walks to her small window. A dozen cars are parked on the roof across the street. She's been in this office nearly two years and has yet to see one car actually moving on that roof. They're either there or not there; she never sees them coming or going.
Bigamy. She tries to remember some old joke, something about two women in love with the same man asking him, "What would you say to screwing us both?" and the man answers, "I'd say that's big of me."
No, she thinks, that can't be it. She's sure it was funnier than that.
A huge tractor trailer is backing out of the garage below. There are three little men in the street behind it, holding up their hands, waving, yelling, shouting directions. There's something unnecessarily frantic about their movements, as if they're trying to wear themselves out. Perhaps, she thinks, so they'll feel their day was well spent; like her, right now, laboring over a simple contract she need only type a name and number on: Tupper Daniels, $6,000. The simplest procedure in her delightfully simple job.
The first day she worked here, the miracle of being hired as an editor of Vista Books without any experience and only a college minor in English making her overly grateful and terribly anxious to please, she sat down with a pile of manuscripts before her and began to read, slowly, carefully, giving her full attention to each word. She was still on that first manuscript—a love story about a pioneer werewolf—when Mr. Alvin Owens, president of Vista, and son (with a name change) of Barney Goldfield, Vista's founder, came into her office. He quickly snatched up the manuscript before her and put one piece of paper in its place.
"Sweetheart," he said, breathing his spearmint-flavored breath on her, "you read the summary so you can talk to the author, you look at the manuscript so you can count the pages. While you're counting the pages, you check the manuscript for pornography or slander or anything that looks like mail fraud. If it's clean, you send the author a Congratulations letter—you know, we loved your book, we loved this sentence, this chapter, whatever. Follow the form letter until you get the hang of it. Then you fill out the contract." He pulled one of the long, four-page documents from her desk and drummed his hairy fingers over it. "If you can find reason for the book to cost more than five thousand—it's long, it needs illustrations, the author is a doctor—you get ten percent of the difference." He put the contract on her desk and patted it with his hand, as if to establish a rhythm. "One contract, fifteen minutes, plus the time you spend stroking the author's ego. You make money, I make money and we can all go home at five o'clock."
Since then, she hasn't read one manuscript from beginning to end. She hasn't had to. She merely smiles at the authors and sends them contracts and acceptance letters. They, in turn, cry in her office, kiss her hand, send her gifts. They tell her: Now I know why these things happened, why I was lonely, hurt, why my child died, my husband left me, why I lost, missed out, messed up: So I could write about it.
She looks down into the street, at the three little men who are now sitting, exhausted, on milk crates at the entrance to the garage. She imagines titles for the books they might write: Semi-Retirement on the Lower West Side; How I Backed a Tractor Trailer Out of a Garage, Once; My Life: In and Out of Mental Institutions . The last is a title Vista really has published. Kevin dug it out of the storeroom and left it on her desk one morning a couple of weeks ago with a note that read, "Perhaps this will provide some insight as to why we are here." The jacket, in two colors on cheap paper, showed a long path leading to a wide door. The print, the path and the door were all dark green, but the rest of the jacket was light blue, as if the path led not to a mental institution but to the sky or a large lake.
Kevin had taped a sketch of her on the back of the book, over the author's picture. It was a very good sketch, even though he had made her cross-eyed. Kevin is a good artist. Under the sketch was a photo of a man with large watery eyes and big ears and a dent that looked like a huge thumbprint right in the middle of his forehead. His face was also light blue, and if it hadn't been for that, and for the dent, he would have looked like Bing Crosby. It said in his biographical note that he'd once been hit on the head by a subway train and lived to tell about it. She pointed this out to Kevin and they laughed about it all that day.
One of the little men gets up off his milk crate, stretches, and walks slowly down the street, west toward the river. She thinks of the Steinberg poster of the New Yorker's view of the world: the Hudson, New Jersey, Chicago, California, Russia. She thinks again about Tupper Daniels' novel, wondering how such a story can end. What happens to a man who comes and goes for nearly fifty years? Does he come home one day and simply never leave again, making his poor wife frantic, month after month, because she'd been sure he'd be gone by now, sure by now she'd have the house to herself again? Or does he, like her own father, go away one day and come back dead? Or does he simply turn a corner as the reader turns the last page (which, she supposes, is the same as going away and dying, coming home and never leaving)?
She turns from the window and goes back to her desk. His manuscript is thick, on expensive paper, professionally typed. The author has already invested in his work, he believes in it. If Mr. Owens were here, he'd tell her to hit him for seven.
One contract, fifteen minutes, and $200 is in her savings account. She passes Tupper Daniels and his mysterious man on to production (Won't Ned love how neat it is, how much it looks like the real thing!) and goes home at five o'clock.
Home to her studio apartment and her casual glances at the calendar, to her calculations that in about three more weeks it will be a year since Jill's party, a year since she's had anyone in her bed. Back to her studio apartment and her memories of that morning nearly a year ago, when she threw him out—Greg was his name, she thinks. Yes. Greg. Threw him out because he smelled of smoke and slept with his mouth open, because waking up with the feeling, Oh shit, who's this? makes for wonderful jokes but lousy mornings and lousy days. Because right there and then on that Sunday morning, with her apartment a mess and her sheets looking gray and feeling greasy and a strange, bearded man sleeping next to her with his mouth open, she had vowed—shaking him, telling him to leave—that there's be no more casual sex, that next time she had someone in her bed it would be for love.
Now, nearly a year later, she's willing to settle for a fine friendship or even a true concern. Although Ann has suggested a one-night stand might help get things moving again, a one-night stand who arrives late and agrees to be gone by morning.
She glances at her clock. It's almost lunchtime. She should pick up the contract, roll it into her typewriter, get it over with.
But there is something about this book, the image of that man, the bigamist, as Tupper Daniels talked him into existence, that remains with her, intrigues her still.
Maybe, she thinks, there is Ward's voice, three summers ago now, talking into the gloom of that damp, tree-shaded porch on that darkening summer evening. There is the sound of his voice as they sat on the creaking wicker chairs and watched through the screens the speckled light that fell sparsely across the front of her mother's house. His voice, deep and puzzled, a voice, she tried to imagine then, that her mother heard in moments of passion, loneliness, in the small, mundane exchanges of early mornings and later afternoons. (Ward, my mother's lover: Even now the expression is only ludicrous to her, a hilarious joining of words that suddenly made possible a host of other inappropriate couplings: my mother's sexuality, my mother's orgasms, my mother's immorality. My mother and Ward.) There is Ward's voice telling her about her mother's fears, her theories. Ward's voice never saying the word bigamist (for, she is certain, he would have to know how silly it would sound, how obsolete the word had become) but still, somehow, filling the air with the word, so she could feel it forming on her own tongue.
"Your mother has worried," he said, sitting in the wicker chair with its dark-green paint seeming to crack and snap each time he moved, leaned forward to see her more clearly, leaned back to watch the deepening shadows. "She has confided in me about your father's long absences, his constant distractions. She has no proof, but her intuition is strong."
And she had felt the dampness rising from the concrete floor, from the growing shadows of the trees. The cool, bitter air of the Maine woods at night, in late summer.
"She has confided in me that she felt each time your father left he was leaving for something more solid and formed and more compelling than he ever admitted to. Something more than a job. Which made it more difficult for her to see him go. More difficult than you've probably ever realized."
And the word, she is sure, was there between them, on the damp air.
Or, no. It wasn't there then because then there was a roll of thunder and Ward unfolded himself from the old chair and got up to stand closer to the screen. Then the rain began, gathering first in the leaves of the trees and then falling on the roof and in the dirt around her mother's house, its sound somehow diminished by the filter of trees and yet somehow made more terrible by it. And then her mother's car came into the driveway and she ran to the porch, pulling the light screen door open with more force than was necessary, and Ward took her arms and they both laughed about how wet she'd gotten as they went inside for her to change, turning on the lights as they passed through the rooms.
So there was no time then for the word to form between them, no time for her to feel it fully on her lips.
But now, with the idea, the image, of a bigamist here in her office in New York, two years later, she can recall that day, recall Ward sitting in that chair, speaking of her father, his long face pale in the dark air on the porch of her mother's home, and she can remember it as if the word had been there.
She picks up Tupper Daniels' bright, neat manuscript and slips it back into the yellow envelope.
Different women crying in different rooms in different cities, on different days of the week. One fat, one thin, one buxom, one small and wiry like her mother. A trail of broken-hearted women crying because he is gone, again, but all the while knowing he will return, again, to leave, to return; and all the townspeople wishing to be in her place, to receive him, again. A trail of broken-hearted women with before them a lifetime of sad partings and joyous reunions; of heartbreaks that do no damage and happy endings that end nothing.
Perhaps, she thinks, it is only frantic arm-waving when a simple direction would do; perhaps her job has become too easy and she's feeling the need to wear herself out. Perhaps this stubborn celibacy has left her with a need to wear herself out in other kinds of frantic, inconsequential acts. Perhaps she is merely curious.
He told her his book was about a bigamist, a polygamist, a chameleon of a man who balances women like so many spinning plates on so many tall sticks; a man, he said, whom every woman will be intrigued by. As she slips his neat manuscript into her brief case, she's almost beginning to believe him.
Copyright © 1982 by Alice McDermott
Elizabeth Connelly, editor at a New York vanity press, sells the dream of publication (admittedly, to writers of questionable talent). Stories of true emotional depth rarely cross her desk. But when a young writer named Tupper Daniels walks in, bearing an unfinished novel, Elizabeth is drawn to both the novelist and his story—a lyrical tale about a man in love with more than one woman at once. Tupper's manuscript unlocks memories of her own secretive father, who himself may have been a bigamist. As Elizabeth and Tupper search for the perfect dénouement, their affair, too, approaches a most unexpected and poignant coda.
A brilliant debut from one of our most celebrated authors, A Bigamist's Daughter is "a wise, sad, witty novel about men and women, God, hope, love, illusion, and fiction itself" (Newsweek).
1. What were your reactions to Tupper's novel, which shapes the opening scenes of A Bigamist's Daughter? Would you have bought his book, joining the hordes of readers he confidently predicted would have been intrigued? What was the effect of reading a book whose plot is built around the publishing process itself—albeit a very different form of publishing from the one Alice McDermott experienced?
2. A Bigamist's Daughter was originally published in 1982. Has our image of single women changed very much since then? Would Elizabeth's experiences with dating, living alone, and establishing a career remain the same if she were a twenty-first-century character?
3. How would you describe Elizabeth's relationship with her mother? What did her mother teach her about the role of women? What transformations did both women undergo after they began living apart?
4. What is the effect of the novel's shifting points of view? In what way did it enhance the storytelling to use past-tense, first-person narration with the chapters set in Maine, allowing you to hear Elizabeth's voice in those passages, while the rest of the novel unfolded in the present tense, with third-person narration?
5. How do Ward and Tupper compare as romantics? What makes them attractive to the women in their lives? What accounts for the tremendous differences in their approaches to love?
6. What were your initial impressions of Tupper? Did your opinion of him shift throughout the novel? Would you have trusted him and dated him?
7. What does sex mean to Elizabeth? What did she hope to achieve by staying celibate for several months? What determined whether she found a sexual encounter to be fulfilling—emotionally or otherwise?
8. How do Joanne's attitudes about weddings and marriage compare to yours? What did her upbringing prepare her for in terms of marriage and having a family of her own? Did she have an advantage over Elizabeth? Would you have preferred to live Joanne's life or Elizabeth's?
9. To what extent is Elizabeth influenced by her Catholicism and by her Irish ancestry? Does she reject or embrace these legacies? How do these legacies mesh with Tupper's notions of being a Southern gentleman?
10. How is Elizabeth affected by the fact-finding trip to Long Island? Is Tupper's approach to finding an ending appropriate? Is the best ending to a novel found in actual events from someone's past?
11. Discuss your reactions to Tupper's comments about men and women at the end of Chapter Seventeen: "If a man fails to connect with a certain woman, he just goes on to someone else. But women—and I'm not condoning this, I'm just talking about the way things are—women derive so much more of themselves, their identity, their self-confidence from men."
12. Which is the greater crime in the novel's "bigamies": disloyalty or dishonesty? What lies does Elizabeth tell? Are they harmful? Or are they necessary for her survival?
13. What parallels run between the seductive hope Elizabeth offers to prospective authors and the romantic seductions she experiences in her personal life? In the end, does Elizabeth become like her father?
“It does come down to that moment, when as a reader or as a writer entering into a story we say — it’s not about me, it’s about you.” That’s Alice McDermott speaking to her newest novel (and our November B&N Book Club pick) on our Poured Over podcast, which you can stream here. It’s […]
