The Gravedigger’s Daughter

“Mrs. Mack” thanked them. She wrested the box of chocolates out of her husband’s hands (the box had been opened, Mr. Mack was helping himself and chewing vigorously), and handed it over to Tignor like a prize.

“These’re included in the price, see? You get to take ‘em with you on your honeymoon.”

“My mother was always warning me, something bad would happen to me. But nothing ever did happen. And now I’m married.”

Rebecca smiled so happily with her banged-up mouth, Tignor laughed, and gave her a big wet smacking kiss in full view of whoever, in the lobby of the Hotel Niagara Falls, might be watching.

“Me too, R’becca.”

Never at the General Washington Hotel had Rebecca seen any room like the honeymoon suite at the Hotel Niagara Falls. Two good-sized rooms: bedroom with canopied bed, sitting room with velvet sofa, chairs, a Motorola floor-model television set, silver ice bucket and tray, crystal glasses. Here too Tignor playfully carried his bride over the threshold, fell with her onto the bed tugging at her clothes, gripping her squirmy body in his arms like a wrestler, and Rebecca shut her eyes to stop the ceiling from spi

Tignor groaned, as if struck by a mallet.

“Oh, baby…”

It was her privilege to kiss him, as his wife.

The heavily sleeping man as oblivious of Rebecca kissing his sweaty face at his hairline as he was of the single forlorn fly buzzing trapped in the silken canopy of the bed, overhead.

In the night she found it, that she had not known she’d been looking for: in a “secret” compartment of Tignor’s suitcase, in the bathroom that was also a dressing room.

During the day, when they left the hotel, Tignor kept his suitcase locked. But not at night.

It was 3 A.M., Tignor was sleeping. He would sleep deeply and profoundly until at least 10 A.M.

In the bathroom that gleamed and glittered with pearly tiles, brass fixtures, mirrors in gold-gilt scalloped frames like no bathroom she had ever seen at the General Washington, Rebecca stood barefoot, naked and shivering. Tignor had pulled off her lacy new nightgown and tossed it beneath the bed. He wanted her naked beside him, he liked to wake to female nakedness.

“He wouldn’t mind. Why would he mind. Now we are husband-and-wife…”

Certainly Tignor would mind. He had a short temper, if anyone so much as questioned him in ways he didn’t like. A girl did not pry into Niles Tignor’s personal life. A girl did not tease the man by slipping her hand into his pocket (for his cigarette case, or lighter), for instance.

Leora Greb had warned Rebecca: never go through a guest’s suitcase, they can set traps for you and you’ll get hell.

Possibly Rebecca was looking for the Certificate of Marriage. Tignor had folded it carelessly, hidden it away among his things.

Not looking for money! (She seemed to know, Tignor would give her as much money as she wanted, so long as he loved her.) Not looking for brewery-business documents and papers. (Tignor kept these in a valise locked in the trunk of the car.) Yet in one of several zippered compartments in the suitcase she found it: a gun.

It appeared to be a revolver, with a dull blue-black barrel of about five inches. Its handle was wood. It did not appear to be newly purchased. Rebecca had no idea what caliber it was, if the safety lock was on, if it was loaded. (Of course, it must be loaded. What would Tignor want with an unloaded gun?)

It was as she’d known in the car speeding to Niagara Falls to be married: Never say no to this man.

Rebecca had no wish to remove the gun from the compartment. Quietly she zipped the compartment back up, and quietly she closed the suitcase. It was a man’s suitcase, impracticably heavy, made of good leather but now rather scuffed. A brass monogram gleamed NT.

37

She was waiting to become pregnant. Now she was a man’s wife, next she would be a baby’s mother.

Always on the move! Tignor boasted it was the only life.

In those years they lived nowhere. Through 1954 and into the spring of 1955 (when Rebecca became pregnant for the first time) they lived nowhere but in Tignor’s car and in a succession of hotels, furnished rooms and, less frequently, apartments rented by the week. Most of their stops were overnight. You could say they lived nowhere but only just stopped for varying lengths of time. They stopped in Buffalo, Port Oriskany, and Rochester. They stopped in Syracuse, Albany, Schenectady, Rome. They stopped in Binghamton and Lockport and Chautauqua Falls and in the small country towns Hammond, Elmira, Chateaugay, Lake Shaheen. They stopped in Potsdam, and in Salamanca. They stopped in Lake George, Lake Canandaigua, Schroon Lake. They stopped in Lodi, Owego, Schoharie, Port au Roche on the northern shore of Lake Champlain. In some of these places, Rebecca understood that Tignor was negotiating to buy property, or had already bought property. In all of these places, Tignor had friends and what he called contacts.

Tignor returned regularly to Milburn, of course. He continued to stay at the General Washington Hotel. But at these times he left Rebecca in another town, for she could not bear returning to Milburn.

To the hotel, she’d told Tignor. Not that!

In fact it was Milburn itself. Where she was the gravedigger’s daughter and where, if she cared to seek it out, she could visit her parents’ weedy grave sites in a shabby corner of the Milburn Township Cemetery.

She had never returned to Ferry Street to pick up the remainder of her things. In such haste she’d left, on that first, astonishing morning of her new life.

But, months later, she’d written to Katy and LaVerne. Her mood was repentant, nostalgia. She worried that her friends had come to dislike her out of jealousy. I miss you! I am very happy as a married woman, Tignor & I travel all the time on business staying in the best hotels but I miss you both, & Leora. I am hoping to have a baby…What was this: this girlish-gushing tone? Was this the voice of Mrs. Niles Tignor? Rebecca felt a thrill of sheer revulsion, for the voice emerging from her, writing rapidly as she could propel a pen across a sheet of Schroon Lake I