A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page B

job’s first fringe benefit. And she’d pitied him. Mid-sixties, somewhat wealthy, probably once handsome but now simply a nice dresser with a permanent tan, a round, old belly. Most of his poems were about his sixteen-year-old son, his only child, who was severely retarded, living in an expensive school near Philadelphia. The one poem she’d read all the way through told how hard he found it to praise the boy for writing his name on a piece of lined paper, in large, gross letters, at a time when his friends’ sons were being praised for making the football teamand the National Honor Society. How he sometimes prayed that the boy would die.
    They drank cocktails, two kinds of wine, brandy. The waiters nearly bowed to him. Whenever he mentioned his son, he would duck his head and say, “But you don’t want to hear about my troubles,” and then, minutes later, bring him up again. He wanted to discuss poetry, but he knew far more than she.
    “I decided to be a writer while I was at Vanderbilt,” Tupper Daniels is saying. “And when I graduated, my parents gave me an office in one of our guest bedrooms and a weekly salary. They said the Daniels family had not yet produced a writer.”
    She smiles at him, nods.
    It was December. The wind from the river was bitter and she had four long blocks to walk to the subway. His car, a silver-gray Cadillac, was right there. And did she mind, he asked as they drove smoothly up Eighth Avenue, if he stopped at his office for a minute? It was on the way.
    She tries to remember: Was she playing innocent? Was she truly naive, drunk?
    “My first novel was awful, I began it at Vanderbilt. It was, I’m ashamed to say, terribly macho. Hunting and fishing and violent intercourse.”
    She laughs. “Really?”
    He had his own keys to the building. The walls of the lobby were gold, the floor a beige marble. He took her arm as they walked toward the elevator; her heels clicked and echoed.
    “Actually, it was like Deliverance ,” Tupper Daniels says. “Lots of action. But totally heterosexual.”
    Upstairs, the silence was frightening, exciting. To their right there was a glass wall and a set of glass doors with gold lettering. Everything behind it was black, and as he opened the glass door with another set of keys she stood by the elevator, wondering what she would do if he told her to step into thatblackness. She decided she would run, but wasn’t sure if it would be forward or backward, into whatever he was planning or away from it.
    When he got the door open he said, over his shoulder, “Just wait here a minute.” She was strangely disappointed. Her reflection in the glass embarrassed her. Her long hair was tangled, her raincoat was wrinkled along its hem. She was standing in a bare hallway, alone, left out, denied entrance.
    “The two main characters were trappers, you see. Handsome, virile. But they had been Rhodes scholars too, so when they started trapping, they noticed that there was a kind of organized crime controlling the fur business from start to finish.”
    Finally, a soft light went on behind the glass. He was standing by a big round desk, and he waved for her to come in.
    “Sorry,” he said as she entered. “I couldn’t find the switch.”
    The light was under a large blue-and-green oil painting that nearly covered the far wall. It left the rest of the room in light shadow. The carpeting was a sea green, the four round chairs and two round couches were blue and green, set in two semicircles opposite the green reception desk. She felt she was underwater, submerged in a goldfish bowl. She was finding it difficult to breathe.
    “They only trapped for sport, and enough money to support themselves. One was a painter, the other an aspiring writer.”
    He took her arm again and led her down a dim corridor. It smelled of paper, aftershave, ink. She heard herself chattering, sounding more drunk than she was. Her legs ached.
    He opened a final door. Turned on a light. The brown