The Gravedigger’S Daughter (25 page)

It was said of Tignor that he trusted no one.

It was said of Tignor that he’d once killed a man. Maybe it was self-defence. With his bare hands, his fists. A tavern fight, in the Adirondacks. Or had it been Port Oriskany, in the winter of 1938 to 1939 during the infamous brewery wars.

“If you’re a man, you don’t want to mess with Tignor. If you’re a woman…”

Rebecca smiled thinking
But he wouldn’t hurt me
.
There is a special feeling between him and me
.

It was said that Tignor wasn’t a native of the region. He had been born over in Crown Point, north of Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, his ancestor was General Adams Tignor who had fought to a draw the British general John Burgoyne, in 1777, when Fort Ticonderoga was burnt to the ground by the departing British army.

No: Tignor was a native of the region. He’d been born in Port Oriskany, one of a number of illegitimate sons of Esdras Tignor who was a Democratic party official in the 1920s involved in smuggling whiskey from Ontario, Canada, into the United States during Prohibition, gunned down in a Port Oriskany street by competitors in 1927…

It was said of Tignor that you must not approach the man, you must wait for him to approach you.

“Somebody wants to meet you, Rebecca. If you’re the ‘black-haired Gypsy-looking chambermaid’ who works on the fifth floor.”

This was the first Rebecca heard, that Niles Tignor was interested in her. Amos Hrube with his smirky, insinuating smile.

Later that day, Mulingar, beefy and mustached, bartender in the Tap Room. “R’becca! Got a friend who’d like to meet you, next time he’s in town.”

It was Colleen Donner, a switchboard operator at the hotel, a new friend of Rebecca’s, who made the arrangements. Tignor would be in town the last week of October. He would be staying at the hotel for just two nights.

At first Rebecca could not speak. Then she said yes, yes I will.

She was sick with apprehension. But she would go through with it. For she loved Niles Tignor, at a distance. There was no man Rebecca had loved in all her life, and she loved Niles Tignor.

“Only I know. I know
him
.”

So she consoled herself. In her loneliness, she was fervent to believe. For Jesus Christ had long since ceased to appear to her, wraith-like and seductive in the corner of her eye.

Since leaving Miss Lutter, Rebecca had ceased to think of Jesus Christ, altogether.

Let the girl go, fucker
.

I’ll break your ass
.

This loud furious voice she heard almost continuously. In her thoughts it was always present. Cleaning rooms, pushing her maid’s cart, smiling to herself, avoiding the eyes of strangers. Miss? Miss? Excuse me, miss? But Rebecca was courteous and evasive. All men she kept at a distance as she kept her distance from all hotel guests, including women, whom she could not trust, in their authority over her. For it was the prerogative of any hotel guest to accuse any member of the staff of rudeness, poor performance, theft.

Let the girl go
…

She was dreamy, and she was agitated. She was unaccountably excited, and she was stricken with an almost erotic lassitude. She had never been involved with any boy or man, until now. At the high school, there had been boys who were attracted to her, but only crudely, sexually. For she’d been the gravedigger’s daughter, from outside Milburn. She’d been a Quarry Road girl, like Katy Greb.

When she thought of Niles Tignor, she felt a cruel, voluptuous sensation pass over her. Of course, she hadn’t known his name at the time he had entered Baumgarten’s room and yet somehow she had known him. She wanted to think that they had exchanged a glance at the time.
I know you, girl
.
I have come here for you
.

That day, a Friday in October 1953, Rebecca worked her eight-hour shift at the hotel. Not tired! Not tired at all. Returned to Ferry Street, bathed, shampooed her hair, brushed and brushed her long wavy hair that fell past her shoulders, halfway down her back. Katy gave her a tube of lipstick, to smear on her mouth: bright peony-red. “Christ, you look good. Like Ruth Roman.” Rebecca laughed, she had only a vague idea who the film actress Ruth Roman was. She said, “‘Ruth’�‘Rebecca.’ Maybe we’re sisters.” She wore a lime-green sweater that fit her bust tightly, and a gray flannel skirt that fell to mid-calf, a “tailored” skirt as a salesgirl at Norban’s described it. LaVerne gave her a little silk scarf to tie around her neck, such “neckerchiefs” were in vogue.

Stockings! Rebecca had a pair without a run. And high-heeled black leather shoes, she’d bought for $7.98, for the occasion.

She met Colleen outside the rear entrance of the hotel. As employees, they would not have dared to enter through the lobby.

Colleen scolded, “Rebecca! Don’t look like you’re going to some damn funeral, try to
smile
. Nothing’s gonna happen to you, you don’t want to happen.”

It was early evening, and the Tap Room was beginning to fill. At once Rebecca saw Niles Tignor at the bar: a tall broad-backed man with peculiar, nickel-colored hair that seemed to lift from his head. He surprised her, for he stood at the bar with other, ordinary men.

She stared, suddenly frightened. It was a mistake, meeting him. Here was not the man she remembered, exactly. Here was a man whose booming laughter she could hear across the room, above the din of men’s voices.

He was talking with the men at the bar, he’d taken not the slightest interest in Colleen and Rebecca who were approaching slowly. The symmetry of his face seemed wrong, as if the bones beneath the skin had been broken, and one side had set higher than the other. His skin looked heated, the hue of red clay. He was larger than Rebecca remembered: his face, his head, his shoulders, his torso that resembled a barrel in which the staves were horizontal and not vertical, a rib cage dense with muscle. Yet he wore a sport coat, dull gray with darker stripes, that fitted him tightly in the shoulders. He wore dark trousers, and a white shirt open at the throat.

Rebecca was pulling at Colleen’s arm, weakly. But Colleen, trying to get the attention of her friend Mulingar, behind the bar, pushed her off.

It was a mistake, yet it would happen. Rebecca felt the crust of lipstick on her mouth, bright and smiling as a clown’s mouth.

Tignor was a man to hold the attention of other men, you could see. He was telling a story, just concluding a story, the others listened intently, already beginning to laugh. At the ending, which might have been unexpected, there was explosive laughter. Six, seven men including the bartender were gathered around Tignor. At this moment, Mulingar glanced around to see Colleen and Rebecca, girls alone in the Tap Room, amid so many men, and beginning to draw attention. Mulingar winked at Colleen, and signaled her to come closer. He leaned over to speak into Tignor’s ear, smiling his sly, lewd smile.

Tignor, however, broke off his conversation with the other men, and turned to see them. Immediately, smiling, his hand extended, he approached them.

“Girls! H’lo.”

He was squinting at them. At Rebecca. The way a hunter squints along a rifle barrel. Rebecca who was smiling felt a rush of blood into her face, a hemorrhage of blood. Only dimly could she see, her vision was blurred.

Colleen and Niles Tignor spoke, animatedly. Through the roaring in her ears Rebecca heard her name, and felt the man’s grasp, tight, very warm, gripping her hand and releasing it.

“‘R’becca.’ H’
lo
.”

Tignor escorted the girls to a booth in another part of the tavern, where it was quieter. Close by was a large fieldstone fireplace in which birch logs were burning.

How nice it was here! The oldest, “historic” part of the General Washington Hotel, that Rebecca had never before seen.

Colleen was twenty-one, and so could drink: Tignor ordered a draft beer for her. Rebecca was under-age and so could only have a soft drink. Tignor gave their orders and spoke with them politely, rather formally, at first. His manner with the girls was very different from his manner with the men.

Clearly, Tignor was taken with Rebecca, though his initial conversation was with Colleen, a flirty sort of banter. How big the man’s teeth were, a horse’s teeth! Somewhat crooked, and of the hue of rotted corncobs. And his odd broke-looking face. And his eyes that were pale, metallic gray, lighter than his skin; their glisten, fixed upon Rebecca, made her uneasy, yet exhilarated. Her heart was beating as it had beat in the high school that morning when Gloria Meunzer pushed into her from behind and Rebecca had known that she wasn’t going to run this time, she would turn, confront her enemies, she would fight.

Tignor smiled, asking Rebecca about her work at the hotel.

“Must be, a chambermaid sees lots of things, eh? Bet you could tell some stories.”

Rebecca laughed. She was very shy, with Tignor focusing upon her so. She said, “No. I don’t tell stories.”

Tignor laughed, approving. “Good girl! That’s a good girl.”

He would know, she had not spoken of him to the police. There was the secret between them, that Colleen could not guess.

On the sly, Rebecca drank from Colleen’s glass. For there was the pretense that the hotel management must not see, here was an underaged customer. Tignor ordered two more draft beers, Black Horse of course, for the table.

Damn Rebecca had no intention of remaining sober that night. She was sick of always-so-serious, God-damned
heavy heart
as her friends chided her. Looking like a funeral God damn. No guy wants to go out with a girl with a
heavy heart
. Rebecca heard herself laughing, and she felt her face flush, and she knew she looked damned good, that was why Niles Tignor was attracted to her. She would drink as much as Colleen drank, and she would not get drunk, or sick to her stomach. And when Tignor made a show of offering them Chesterfield cigarettes from his fancy silver cigarette case, engraved with the initials
NT
, Rebecca saw her fingers extract a cigarette just as readily as Colleen did, and this too made her laugh.

It was then that Tignor said, unexpectedly, frowning, in his awkward, head-on way, “‘R’becca Schwart.’ I have heard of you, and I am sorry for your loss.”

It was a painful moment. Rebecca wasn’t sure at first what she had heard.

Bit her lip to keep from laughing. But she could not keep from laughing.

Why do you think I have a loss! I don’t
.
I don’t care
.
I wanted them dead, I hated them both
.

It was a purely nervous reflex, Rebecca’s laugh. Both Tignor and Colleen stared at her. Rebecca wanted to hide her face in her hands. She wanted to leave the booth, and escape from this place. She managed to say, to Tignor, “I…don’t think about it, now.”

Tignor cupped a hand to his ear, he hadn’t heard.

Rebecca repeated her faltering words. By now her face was throbbing again with blood. Tignor nodded. “That’s right, girl. Good.” There were things of which Niles Tignor did not wish to think, either.

He squeezed her hand. She felt that she would faint, at the touch.

Rebecca’s hand was hardly a small, delicate female hand and yet, in Tignor’s grip, it became so; his fingers, squeezing, with unconscious strength, made her wince.

Girl
he’d called her.

They’d known each other a long time.

“Like this, Rebecca.
Don’t
breathe in right away, wait till you get more used to it.”

Colleen was showing Rebecca how to smoke. As Tignor looked on, amused. A Technicolor movie it was, music billowing beneath. Not Ruth Roman but Debbie Reynolds, June Allyson. Rebecca was behaving like these pretty, pert film actresses. She was a good-girl-learning-to-smoke, she coughed, tears spilled from her eyes. She was a girl learning-to-drink. She was a girl to please a man, not just any man but a man like Niles Tignor, and though she looked like a slut, in her tight sweater and tight skirt and her mouth a lurid lipstick red, and her hair wavy and tangled down her back, yet she wanted you to think she was a good girl, and naive.

A girl a man wanted to protect, and to love.

Why this happened, Rebecca didn’t know: Colleen leaned over and kissed her on the lips!

A joke, it must have been. Tignor laughed.

Oh, but tobacco had such an ugly taste. Mixed in her mind with milk…

Damn Rebecca was not going to puke. Not here! Not her.

Luckily, the subject shifted. Rebecca let her cigarette go out. Washed away the taste with a swallow of her lukewarm cola. Colleen, a shrewd girl who’d “dated” many men, and some of these men old as Niles Tignor, knew the questions to ask of their escort: where did he travel, where did he like best, did he have girlfriends all over the state like people said, where was he headed after Milburn, did he have an actual home, anywhere?

Tignor answered most of these questions with a pose of seriousness. He liked everywhere he went but favored Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. He liked all the people he met! For sure, he liked the General Washington: the hotel was a damn good Black Horse customer.

He had no “home”�maybe. He wasn’t one to especially want a “home” like other people. Near as he could figure, “home” was a weight dragging at your ankle. Unless “home” could be something he could take with him anywhere he went, like his car.

Rebecca was struck by Tignor’s words. She knew no one who had ever articulated such thoughts. There was a precision here of thinking, though Tignor’s actual words were commonplace, that thrilled her. Like Herschel, he was. A crude expression yet something subtle beneath, and unexpected. For wasn’t “home” a trap, really? Confinement, a prison. A dank airless cave. You crawled into your cave, to die. What would a man like Niles Tignor want with a mere
home
?

Rebecca said eagerly, “I don’t have one, either. A ‘home.’ Just someplace I keep things. I live on Ferry Street with my friends but it isn’t my home. I could sleep out anywhere�by the canal, or in a car.”

Tignor laughed, and stared at her, and drank. Rebecca was drinking beer now, from a glass someone had set before her.

It was past nine o’clock: Tignor ordered food for them.

Roast beef on kimmelwick bread, a specialty of the Tap Room. French fries, dill pickles. Foaming glasses of Black Horse draft ale. Rebecca would not have thought she could eat, in Niles Tignor’s presence, yet she was surprisingly hungry. Tignor devoured not one but two of the enormous roast beef sandwiches, washed down with ale. His big teeth flashed, he was utterly happy.

“Gin rummy, girls. Know it?”

Rebecca opened her heavy-lidded eyes. Suddenly there was Tignor shuffling cards.

Out of nowhere, a shiny, new-looking deck of playing cards! With remarkable skill Tignor shuffled, caused cards to flash in the air in a kind of waterfall, fascinating to observe. Rebecca had never seen anything like Tignor’s skill with cards. And such big, ungainly hands! “Cut, babe.” He’d slapped down the deck, Rebecca cut it, and Tignor snatched up the deck again and continued to shuffle, grinning at his audience. Like glittering blades he dealt cards to Colleen, to Rebecca, to himself, to Colleen, to Rebecca, to himself…When had it been decided that they would play cards? Rebecca recalled the gin rummy games she’d played at the Greb house, and wondered if Leora had taught them correctly.