A Bigamist's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

had seen me Saturday night at Jack’s party.
    “It’s very hard for him being without her.”
    I nodded, my mouth was dry.
    “That’s why he needs your help. You must do everything you can for him.” She ran the words together like a chant. “You want to help him, don’t you?”
    “Yes, Sister,” I whispered.
    “Well,” she went on. “It was about seven last night when I saw him.” I thought it oddly early, but decided she must have been in chapel, after dinner. She paused, played with her worn, married-to-God wedding band. “I was just coming out of the drugstore and your father was just coming in. He had a bag of groceries with him and he said he had to pick up some cold medicine. The poor man hadn’t even gotten home from work yet.” She leaned forward a little. “Now, Elizabeth,” she said, “you could very well do the shopping when you get out of school at three and not leave it to your father. I know you probably want to be with your friends after school, but with your mother gone, you’ll have to make some sacrifices, for your dear father’s sake.”
    I looked down at my hands. “Yes, Sister,” I said. Frances Connelly’s mother had died a few weeks before. Sister Loretta had gotten the last name right but “E” comes before “F” inthe school files, so she’d sent for me. “I’ll do my best, Sister,” I said. I left the office with her blessing, feeling I had done both Sister Loretta and Frances Connelly a great favor.
    When I told my mother about the incident, she merely shook her head and said she would light a candle for poor Sister Loretta that night when she went down to St. Elizabeth’s for the Altar Rosary Society meeting.
    My mother, by then, had become very active in our church, probably because it provided her with enough holy days and conferences and missions and bazaars and meetings to absorb her need for expectations, something to look forward to, just as hopeless crushes and later, hopeless love affairs, absorbed mine. It was a need my father had established in both of us.
    While my father was alive, we lived in a constant, subtle state of expectation. We’d wake up every morning thinking this might be a day he’d come home, and go to bed at night thinking we might awake at any time to find him leaning over us, smiling. We were happy to have each day begin and happy to have it behind us, to have been brought one day closer to the day he would return.
    When he did return, whether it was for a day or long enough for us to grow confident in his presence, casual in our references to him (but casual in the same self-conscious way I have since heard the newly rich refer to their help and their summer homes), our house was blessed by that strange aura that guests or Christmas or even just having all the lights on at three A.M. can give a place. My mother would put the special white chenille bedspread on her bed, and I would lie awake at night listening to him snoring in her room, trying to interpret the deep, throaty sounds he made, imagining it was his own secret way of speaking to me.
    On the morning we got the call from Wisconsin, telling us he was there and he was dead, I stayed home from school andmy mother and I had breakfast on tin snack tables in the living room. We watched all her favorite morning shows, shows that school usually deprived me of, and she said how good it was to have someone there who appreciated Hugh Downs’ good looks and soft manner as much as she did. We cried together when we changed the channel and caught the last half hour of Now, Voyager. That afternoon my mother got dressed and went down to church to talk to the priest, who convinced her to join the Altar Rosary Society. Two weeks later, I fell madly in love with Rosemary Hart’s brother Tim, who drove us home from school one day. He was a senior at Pius X Seminary and well on his way to the priesthood, but I never knew when he would show up at school to drive us home again.
    By the time I