The Gravedigger’S Daughter (49 page)

Families of skunks sometimes hibernated beneath the outbuildings. The warm weather would have roused them.

“Skunks have to live somewhere. Just like us.”

Hazel spoke playfully. Gallagher laughed. He was liking Hazel Jones again now that she wasn’t leading him up the damned mountain to a heart attack.

Gallagher tried the doors of several cabins until he found one that wasn’t locked. Inside, the air was cold and very still. Like an indrawn breath it seemed to Gallagher who was feeling unaccountably excited.

The cabin was made of weatherized logs, built above a small glittering stream. Nearby were birch trees whose trunks were blindingly white in the sunshine. The interior of the cabin was partly shaded and partly blinding. There was a faint but pungent odor here of skunk. There were twin beds, new-looking mattresses loosely covered with sheets, and pillows without pillowcases. On the floor was a hook rug. Standing inside the cabin, with Hazel Jones, Gallagher felt a rush of emotion so powerful it left him weak. He had an urgent impulse to talk to her, to explain himself. He had not talked very seriously with her since coming to the island and their time together was rapidly running out. Tomorrow he would have to drive his little family back to Watertown, their individual lives would resume. He had bought a beautiful house for Hazel and the child but they had not yet come to live with him.

No child. He had no child.
If you have lost your way it is best to have no child
.

It was then that Gallagher began to speak haphazardly. He heard himself tell Hazel Jones how as a boy he’d camped in the woods on summer nights, alone. Not with his brothers but alone. He had a “pup” tent with mosquito netting. The guest cabins hadn’t been built yet. Noises in the woods had frightened him, he’d hardly slept at all, but the experiences had been profound, somehow. He wondered if all profound experiences occur when you’re alone, and frightened.

It was like wartime in a way, sleeping outdoors, in tents. Except in wartime you are so exhausted you have no trouble sleeping.

He told Hazel that his father had built most of the cabins after the war. Thaddeus had expanded the lodge, bought more land along the river. In fact, the Gallaghers owned property elsewhere in the Thousand Islands which was being developed, very profitably. Thaddeus Gallagher had made money during wartime and he’d made a lot more money, after: tax laws highly favorable to the Gallagher Media Group had been passed by the Republican-dominated New York State Legislature in the early 1950s.

( Why was Gallagher telling this to Hazel Jones? Did he want to impress her? Did he want her to know that he was a rich man’s son, yet innocent of acquiring riches, himself? Hazel could have no way of knowing if Gallagher shared in any of his family money or if�just maybe!�he’d been disinherited.)

Hazel had never asked Gallagher about his family, no more than she would have asked him about his former marriage. Hazel Jones was not one to ask personal questions. Yet now she asked him, with a startling bluntness, if he’d been in the war?

“The war? Oh, Hazel.”

Gallagher’s wartime experience was not a subject he spoke of easily. His brash swaggering jocular manner could not accommodate it. His eyes snatched at Hazel Jones’s eyes, that were so glistening, intense. Just inside the cabin door they stood close together yet not touching. They were very aware of each other. In this small space their intimacy was unnerving to Gallagher.

“Did you see the death camps?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see the death camps?”

“I was in northern Italy. I was hospitalized there.”

“There were no death camps in Italy?”

It seemed to be a question. Gallagher was uncertain how to answer. While he’d been overseas, at first in France and then in the Italian countryside north of Brescia, he had known nothing about the infamous Nazi death camps. He had not really known much about his own experience. Twenty-three days after landing in Europe he’d been struck by shrapnel in his back, knees. Around his neck he’d worn a collar thick as a horse collar and he’d gotten very sick with infections, and later with morphine. He understood that he’d witnessed ugly things but he had no access to them, directly. It was as if a scrim had grown across his vision, like a membrane.

Now Hazel Jones was regarding him with a curious avid hunger. Gallagher could smell the fever-heat of the woman’s body, that was new to him, very arousing.

“Why did the Nazis want to kill so many people? What does it mean, some people are ‘unclean’�‘impure’�‘life unworthy life’?”

“Hazel, the Nazis were madmen. It doesn’t matter what they meant.”

“The Nazis were madmen?”

Again it seemed to be a question. Hazel spoke with a peculiar vehemence, as if Gallagher had said something meant to be funny.

“Certainly. They were madmen, and murderers.”

“But when Jews came to the United States, the ships carrying them were turned away. The Americans didn’t want them, no more than the Nazis wanted them.”

“Hazel, no. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No. I don’t.”

Gallagher had removed his dark glasses. He fumbled to slip them into his jacket pocket, but they slipped from his fingers to the floor. He was startled and somewhat repelled by Hazel’s intensity, her voice that was strident, uncanny. This was not Hazel Jones’s melodic female voice but another’s, Gallagher had never heard before.

“No, Hazel. I’m sure that wasn’t the case, what you’re saying.”

“It wasn’t?”

“It was a diplomatic issue. If we’re talking about the same thing.”

Gallagher spoke uncertainly. He wasn’t sure of his information, the subject was vague to him, distasteful. He was trying to remember but could not. His breathing was coming quickly as if he were still hiking uphill.

“The ships docked in New York harbor but immigration officials wouldn’t let the refugees in. There were children, babies. There were hundreds of people. They were sent back to Europe, to die.”

“But why did they return to Europe?” Gallagher asked. He had a flash of insight: he could debate this. “Why, if they might have gone elsewhere? Anywhere?”

“They couldn’t go anywhere else. They had to return to Europe, to die.”

“There were refugees who went to Haiti, I think. South America. Some refugees went as far away as Singapore.”

Gallagher spoke uncertainly. He really didn’t know. Vaguely he recalled the editorials in the Gallagher newspapers, as in many American newspapers, in the years before Pearl Harbor, arguing against American intervention in Europe. The Gallagher newspapers were very much opposed to F.D.R., in editorials F.D.R. was charged with being susceptible to Jewish influences, bribery. In the columns of certain commentators F.D.R. was identified as a Jew, like his Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. For a confused moment the scrim shifted in Gallagher’s memory and he saw with a child’s curious eyes, a sign in the lobby of a dazzling Miami Beach hotel jewish persons are asked not to frequent these premises. When had that been, in the early 1930s? Before the Gallaghers acquired their private Palm Beach residence on the ocean.

Gallagher said, faltering, “Much of this has been exaggerated, Hazel. And it wasn’t only Jews who died, it was all sorts of people including Germans. Many millions. And more millions would die under Stalin. Children, yes. Babies. Upheavals of madness like volcanos spewing lava…You understood, if you were a soldier, how impersonal it is. ‘History.’”

“You’re defending them, then. ‘Much has been exaggerated.’”

Gallagher stared at Hazel, perplexed. He felt an undercurrent of revulsion for the woman, almost a fear of her, she seemed so different to him, suddenly. He touched her shoulders. “Hazel? What is it?”

“‘Much has been exaggerated.’ You said.”

Hazel laughed. She was blinking rapidly, not looking at him.

“Hazel, I’m so sorry. I’ve been saying stupid things. You lost someone in the war?”

“No. I lost no one in the war.”

Hazel spoke harshly, half-jeering. Gallagher made a move to embrace her. For a moment she held herself rigid against him, then seemed to melt, to press herself against him, with a shudder. A wave of sexual desire struck Gallagher like a fist.

“Hazel! Dear, darling Hazel…”

Gallagher framed the woman’s face in his hands and kissed her, and she startled him with the vehemence of her response. They stood in a patch of blinding sunshine. Beyond the cabin, air shimmered with sunshine, there was a glare like fire. Hazel Jones’s mouth was cold, yet seemed to suck at Gallagher’s mouth. Awkwardly, like one unaccustomed to intimacy, with a kind of desperation she pressed against him, her arms around him tightening. There was something fierce and terrible in the woman’s sudden need. Gallagher murmured, “Hazel, dear Hazel. My dear one,” in a rapt, crooning voice, a voice distinct from his own. He drew her into the cabin, stumbling with her, their breaths steamed, nervously they laughed together, kissing, trying to kiss, fumbling to embrace in their heavy outdoor clothing. Gallagher drew Hazel to one of the twin beds. Beneath the loose, discolored sheet the mattress was bare. A smell of skunk, bestial, intimate, lifted through the floorboards. It was a strangely attractive odor, not so very strong. Fumbling, laughing, yet without mirth, for she seemed very frightened, Hazel was pulling at Gallagher’s jacket, and at the belt of his trousers. Her fingers were clumsy, deliberate. Gallagher thought
As she has undressed the child, the mother undressing the child
. He was astonished by her. He was utterly captivated by her. So long had Hazel Jones resisted him, and now! In a swath of blinding sunshine they lay on the mattress, kissing, straining to kiss, continuing to fumble with their clothing. Gallagher had long advised himself
She is not a virgin, Hazel Jones is not a virgin, I will not be forcing myself upon a virgin, Hazel Jones has a child and has been with a man
but now, this Hazel Jones was astonishing to him, gripping him tightly, drawing him to her, deeply into her. In a frenzy the woman’s mouth sucked at his, he was losing consciousness of himself, in a delirium of animal urgency and submission. In the woman’s arms he would be obliterated, this was not natural to Gallagher, had not been his experience, not for many years. Not since late adolescence, when Gallagher’s sexual life had begun. Now, he was not the stronger of the two. His will was not stronger than Hazel Jones’s will. He would succumb to the woman, not once but many times for this was the first of many times, Gallagher understood.

Her hair that was damp with perspiration stuck to his face, his mouth. Her breasts were much larger, heavier than he’d imagined, milky-pale, with nipples large as berries. He was not prepared for the lavish dark hair of her body, spiky-black at her groin, lifting into her navel. He was not prepared for the muscular strength of her legs, her knees gripping him.
I love love love you
choked in his throat as helpless he pumped his life into her.

By quick degrees the sun expanded to fill the sky.

“The breath of God.”

A wayward breeze that would drive her in a sudden, unexpected direction that was yet determined, purposeful. She, and the child who was her own purpose.

A man wants to know. A lover wants to know. Wants to suck the very marrow of your bones wants to
know
.

A man has a right. A lover has a right. Once your body is entered in that way, he will have the right.

Telling him of what can’t be told. A lover wants to know what can’t be told. For some secret must be offered. It was time, and more than time. She knew, though she was not his wife and would not be.
This girl at my high school in Milburn, d’you know where Milburn is
, and he said
No I don’t think so
and she said
When we were thirteen her father killed her mother, her older brother and her, and then himself, with a double-barreled shotgun in a back bedroom of their house they lived in a funny old stone house like a storybook cottage except it was old, it was sinking into the earth
. And he said
Jesus! what a terrible thing
shifting uneasily
was she a close friend of yours
and quickly Hazel said
No
then
Yes but not a close friend then, when we were in grade school she’d been
and Gallagher asked
Why did the father do such a terrible thing, was he insane? desperate? poor?
with surprising naiveté for one who’d been in the war and had been wounded in the war Gallagher asked and Hazel smiled in the darkness, not Hazel Jones’s bright yearning smile but a smile of rage
Are those reasons for killing your family and yourself, are those the recognized reasons
but Gallagher mistook Hazel’s trembling for emotion holding her tightly in his arms to protect her as always he would protect her
Poor darling Hazel! It must have been horrible for you, and for everyone who knew them
and Hazel smiled
Was it?
for the thought had never occurred to her. Saying
He was the town gravedigger
. As if that was the explanation. Gallagher would accept this explanation.

Hazel knew it was not true of course. No one in Milburn would have thought it was horrible. It was the gravedigger murdering his family, and himself.

Because he’d murdered them all
.
No one remained to grieve
.

Why? Because it was time
.

Hazel Jones would come to live with Gallagher in the red-brick house he’d bought for her in Watertown and of course she would bring her son.
For the child’s sake she had consented, they would remain as long as seemed expedient as long as the man believed he loved her for the gravedigger’s daughter had not the right to bypass such an opportunity
and when two years later the child was offered a piano scholarship at the Portman Academy of Music Gallagher would buy a house in Syracuse and they would move there.

My little family
they were to him. Never in his adult life had Chet Gallagher been so happy.

It was meant to be. It was the breath of God. That my son would be a pianist, he would play before large audiences and they would applaud him
.

“But why do you care so much, Hazel?”

Gallagher put the question to her gently. He was smiling, and stroking her hand. Always he was touching her, caressing her. He adored her! But the stubbornness in her, the curious adamant unyielding will, concerned him. Her primitive soul he thought it, then was ashamed of himself for such a thought. For he did adore her, he believed he would die for her. And the child he loved too, though not as he loved the mother.

“Because”�Hazel paused, wetting her lips, confused or seeming-so as at such times she seemed shy, uncertain, her eyes avoiding his so that Gallagher could not confound her with his equanimity�“music is beautiful. Music is�” It was here that Hazel’s voice dipped in that way Gallagher found both charming and maddening, you had to lean your head close to hers, to hear. And if you didn’t hear, and asked Hazel to repeat what she’d said, she would shrink away in shyness, self-conscious as a young girl: “Oh, nothing! It’s too silly.”

Afterward hearing the solemn muttered words he had not quite heard at the time
Music is the one thing
.

“‘ Why do fools fall in love’…”

Why the hell not? He was forty-two years old and not getting any younger, smarter, or better-looking.

Laughed at himself in the bathroom mirror, shaving. This was the face he’d used to shield his eyes against�literally!�seeing at any hour and especially in the clinical unsparing light of a bathroom mirror. No thanks! But now, Hazel Jones downstairs in the kitchen preparing breakfast for him and Zack, a woman who
actually liked to prepare breakfast and wore a floral-print apron while preparing it,
Gallagher was in a mood to confront his own face without that old urge to slam a fist into the mirror, or puke up his guts into the sink.

And he loved, the boy, too.

My boy
. Occasionally even
My son
he would hear himself say, in casual conversation.

My little family
he kept to himself and Hazel.
My new life
he kept strictly to himself.

“Music isn’t ‘the one thing,’ darling. There are plenty of other ‘one things.’”

Was it so? Gallagher, a former child piano-prodigy, burnt out and for a time suicidal at the age of seventeen, certainly thought so.

He wouldn’t tell Hazel this, however. Of the many things Gallagher rehearsed to tell Hazel, this was one he would not tell her out of a fear of upsetting her, wounding her.

Out of a fear of telling the truth
.

No longer was Chet Gallagher playing jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn, he’d moved one hundred miles south to Syracuse to a house within three blocks of the music school where Zack now took intensive lessons with a pianist who’d been one of Hans Zimmerman’s favored protégés. Zimmerman had arranged for the scholarship, there would be other costs and some of them considerable if Zack was to embark upon a serious professional career. Gallagher had not needed to tell Hazel that he would pay for this embarkment, happily he would pay what was required. No longer did Gallagher play much jazz piano, wanting to avoid smoky bars, occasions for drinking too much, occasions for meeting lonely seductive women, oh Christ he so much preferred staying at home evenings with his little family he adored.

Out of a fear of telling the truth
.

Yet Hazel was reluctant to marry Gallagher! It was the great mystery of his life.

A mystery, and a deep hurt.

“But Hazel, why not? Don’t you love me?”

As always Hazel’s reasons were vague, evasive. She spoke hesitantly. You would almost think that words were thistles, or pebbles, scraping her throat. The Gallaghers would not approve of her, an unwed mother. They would despise her, they would never forgive her.

“Hazel! For Christ’ sake.”

He held her in his arms, she was so distressed. Gallagher didn’t want to upset her further. Now that they were living together he was more able to gauge her moods. Like an upright flame Hazel Jones appeared, the eye was drawn to her, dazzled by her, yet a flame is after all a delicate thing, a flame can be suddenly threatened, extinguished.

Unwed mother, despise
.
Forgive!
Gallagher winced at such clichés. What the hell did he care, if the Gallaghers disapproved of his liaison with Hazel Jones? They knew nothing of her, really. The most absurd, malicious things were said of her, in Albany. And now that Gallagher was openly living with her…They would never meet Hazel, if he could avoid it. By now, Gallagher was very likely disinherited. Thaddeus would have written him out of his will years ago.

“Is it money you’re worried about? I don’t need their money, Hazel. I can make my own way.”

It wasn’t exactly true: Gallagher received money from a trust established by his maternal grandparents. But he’d returned to newspaper work, he was producing radio programs. If Hazel was anxious about money, he would make more money!

He would protect Hazel Jones, that was a principle of his character. He wanted to think this was so: he was a man of principle. Even his father, supremely indifferent to the sufferings of masses of human beings like most “conservatives,” was nonetheless loyal, at times fiercely and irrationally loyal, to individuals close to him.

Thaddeus, too, had women; or had had women when he’d been younger, fitter. A primitive and seemingly insatiable sexual itch the man had satisfied with whoever was available. Yet, Thaddeus had remained a “faithful” husband in society’s eyes. He had not betrayed his wife publicly and perhaps in her naiveté (Gallagher wanted to think) his mother had never known that Thaddeus had betrayed her at all.

Gallagher heard himself ask, plaintively, “But don’t you love me, Hazel? I certainly love you.”

His voice broke. He was making a fool of himself. He seemed to be accusing her.

Hazel moved into Gallagher’s arms, as if too stricken to speak. This was proof that she loved him: wasn’t it? Pressing herself against him as, in their bed, she pressed against him, never resisting now, warmly affectionate, her arms around his neck, her mouth opened to his. He felt her heartbeat, now. He felt the quickened heat of her body. It came to him
She is remembering another man, the man who hurt her
. Gallagher felt an impulse to break her in his arms, as the other had done. To break her very bones, gripping her tight, burying his hot furious face in her neck, in a coil of her red-glinting hair.

He hid his contorted face, he wept. Tears no one need acknowledge.

Not in Watertown, and not in Syracuse had she had a glimpse of any man who resembled the man who’d masqueraded as her husband yet it came to her in a swoon of bitter certitude
If I marry this man, if I love this man the other will hunt us down and kill us
.

He could make money for his little family, certainly Chet Gallagher could. “Hazel Jones, you have the gift of happiness! You have brought such happiness into my life.” It was so: Gallagher was a young man again. An ardent lover, a fool for love! A man who’d once joked that his heart had shrunken to the size of a raisin, and was of the wizened texture of a raisin, now Gallagher’s heart was the good healthy size of a man’s fist, suffused with hope as with blood. His face appeared younger. Always he was smiling, whistling. (Zack had to ask Gallagher please not to whistle so loud, the tunes Gallagher whistled got into Zack’s head and interfered with the music Zack was playing in his head.) He drank red wine at dinner, that was all. He ate less compulsively, he’d lost twenty pounds in his gut and torso. His hair was still falling out but what the hell, Hazel stroked his bumpy bald head, twirled her fingers in the wiry fringe that remained, and pronounced him the most handsome man she’d ever met.

His ex-wife had wounded Gallagher sexually, other women had disappointed him. But Hazel Jones obliterated such memories.

Virtually overnight, Gallagher had gone from being a man who went to bed at 4
A
.
M
. and staggered awake next day at noon, to being a man who went to bed at 11
P
.
M
. most weekday nights and woke at 7
A
.
M
. He produced a series of radio programs (“Jazz America,” “American Classics”) that originated in Syracuse, at a local station, and was broadcast eventually through New York State, Ohio, Pennsylvania. He’d been befriended by the editor in chief of the
Syracuse Post-Dispatch
, a Gallagher-owned paper, yet one of the more independent of the chain, and had begun writing newspaper columns for the editorial page on ethical/political issues. Civil rights, school desegregation, Martin Luther King, Junior. Racial discrimination in labor unions. The need for “radical reform” in New York State divorce law. The “morally suspect” war in Vietnam. These were impassioned columns, leavened with humor, that soon drew notice.
Chet Gallagher
was the sole liberal voice published in the Gallagher newspapers, a controversial presence. When the editors endorsed, as invariably they did, Republican candidates for office, Gallagher flamboyantly criticized, dissected, exposed. That he could be as critical of Democratic candidates was a measure of his integrity. Angry letters were published condemning his views. The more controversy, the more papers sold. Gallagher loved the attention! (His columns were never censored in the Syracuse paper, but other papers in the Gallagher chain sometimes declined to print them. These decisions had nothing to do with Thaddeus Gallagher, who rarely interfered with the operations of any of his papers if they were making profits. Very likely, Thaddeus read every column of Gallagher’s, for he was a man who kept a close scrutiny on all aspects of Gallagher Media, but he never made any comment on his youngest son’s columns, so far as Gallagher knew, and he’d never exercised his power to censor a column. It had long been a principle of the old man to detach himself from his youngest son’s career as a way of establishing his own moral superiority to him.)

And so, Gallagher was happy. To a degree.

Is she married? Is that it? And not divorced? She has lied to me, is that it?

Unbidden the thought came to him, even when they were making love. Even when they were sitting side by side, clasping hands, listening to the child Zacharias play piano. (His first public recital, at the Portman Academy. Aged nine, Zack was the youngest performer of the evening and drew the most enthusiastic applause.) Sometimes he was stricken by jealousy, a misery like tight-coiled snakes in his gut.

Hazel had told him she had never been married. She spoke with such pained sincerity, Gallagher could not doubt her word.

More and more, Gallagher wanted to adopt the child. Before it was too late. But to adopt the child, he must be the mother’s husband.

In his soul, Gallagher loathed the very idea of marriage. He loathed the intrusion of the state into the private lives of individuals. He quite agreed with Marx, he’d used to quote Marx to inflame Thaddeus, for Marx had got it right, mostly: the masses of humankind sell themselves for wages, capitalists are sons of bitches who’d slit your throat and collect your blood in vials and sell it to the highest bidder, religion is the opium of the masses and the churches are capitalist ventures organized to make money, secure power, influence. Of course, laws favor the rich and powerful, power wishes only to engender more power as capital wishes only to engender more capital. Of course the industrial world is pitched to madness, World War I, World War II, always the specter of World War, the ceaseless strife of nations. Marx had got most of it right and Freud had got the rest of it right: civilization was the price you paid for not getting your throat slashed, but it was too damned high a price to pay.

Getting a divorce in New York State in the mid-1950s! Gallagher was one of the walking wounded, almost a decade later.

“Asshole. Whose fault but my own!”

The irony was, he’d married to placate others. His mother had been very ill at the time, she would die shortly after the wedding. The tyranny of the dying mother’s role in civilization cannot be overestimated! Gallagher had returned from overseas wishing not to succumb to despair, depression, alcoholism like other veterans of his acquaintance, for an entire generation the only salvation had been marriage.

Gallagher had been young: twenty-seven. Grateful not to have been killed and not (visibly) crippled. As a way of showing his gratitude for being alive he had hoped to placate others, above all his parents. A mistake he would not make again.

Living in Albany, capital of New York state, Gallagher had been aware of the intrusion of the state into individuals’ lives, even as a boy. Impossible not to be aware of politics if you live in Albany! Not the politics of idealism but grub-politics, the politics of “deals.” There was no goal higher than “deals” and no motive higher than “self-interest.” Gallagher’s disgust reached its peak in 1948 with the sordid politicking that accompanied the Taft-Hartley law which the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress passed over Truman’s veto. And Dewey’s sneering campaign against Truman, to which Thaddeus contributed a good deal of money, not all of it a matter of public record.