A Bigamist's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

to Sister Immaculate Rose, my second-grade teacher. When the nun smiled kindly and told me to ask him again, he said to tell her he was with the government. We were in the kitchen, I on my father’s lap sipping his beer, my mother at the sink washing something. I remember she turned and smiled and told my father not to teach me to lie, but she offered no alternative answer.
    A year or so later, my mother and I ran into Sister Immaculate Rose as we were coming out of church. She noticed my father wasn’t with us and mentioned that I’d said he worked for the government.
    “That’s right,” my mother answered coolly.
    “How interesting,” the nun said. “In what capacity?”
    My mother stared at her a long time and then slipped her sunglasses from the top of her head, over her eyes. “I’m not at liberty to say,” she whispered. Her lips barely seemed to move. The nun glanced at me and I tried to make my face as grave as my mother’s. Then, without another word, we both walked stiffly, mysteriously, away. At home we said nothing about the encounter and I presumed the answer, though still not true, was no longer a lie.
    The nuns, it seemed, were always fascinated by my father. Perhaps they sniffed some tragedy, some rich life of sin behind his disappearances, or found my mother’s devotion to a man who was seldom there similar to their own calling; whatever the reason, they often asked me about him and gave me deep, searching looks whenever I, or anybody else, spoke about fathers in class.
    On the day he died—that is, the day we heard he was dead—my mother gave me a picture of him to take to schoolwith me after the funeral. She said the nuns at Blessed Virgin, the “all-girl” high school where I was a freshman, would probably take me aside when I got back and ask a lot of questions, so I should show them the picture to curb their curiosity.
    A week later, on my first day back at school, I was called from my homeroom the minute I got to my seat. Sister Illuminata, the principal, Sister Lucille and Sister Reine Regina, our religion teachers, were waiting for me in the “Rap Room,” a former storage closet that had been set aside for “rap sessions” between the nuns and the girls in the school. It was decorated with the felt posters an art class had made and was closed the following year when one of the nuns found an unopened condom among the cushions and bean-bag chairs.
    The three sisters hovered around me, their hands between their breasts or up their sleeves, and asked me how my mother was, how I was, and was it business my father was on when he died? I mumbled yes and then whipped out the snapshot my mother had given me. They passed it around, saying how handsome he was and nodding at one another as if that’s what they’d expected.
    A year later, I was taken aside again by Sister Loretta Belle Lynn (the nuns had started using their real names by then), a gaunt, ancient nun who occasionally taught Latin and often called girls into her office for “spiritual guidance counseling.” She sat me in her small, dusty cubicle, asked me about school and what sports I liked, and if I had a boyfriend, and then, leaning so low across her desk that the blotter made her chin and bony throat reflect green, she whispered, eyes wide, “I saw your father last night.”
    Although I was beginning to read Freud and Nietzsche by then, beginning to drink heavily on weekends and to argue cynically about anything, I had nearly ten years of Catholictraining and just enough Irish blood in me to drop my mouth open and begin to tremble. Immediately, I pictured the dark, cell-like room where the nun must have slept and my father’s pale, wispy form slowly gathering in it.
    “You did?” I whispered back.
    She smiled and I thought I glimpsed something serene and mystical about her yellow teeth and smooth, thin lips. “He said he misses your mother very much.”
    I felt my heart beating. My mother, not me. I wondered if he