In these drowsy-loving talks with Tignor she did not say home. She knew how Tignor would screw up his face at home.

And yet, Tignor was not to be predicted. He surprised Rebecca by saying he’d been thinking of renting a furnished apartment for her anyway. In Chautauqua Falls, out along the canal in the country where it was quiet, he knew of a place. “You and the baby would live there. Daddy would be there when he could.” So tenderly Tignor spoke, Rebecca could have no reason to think this was the end of anything.

Lying on a hotel bed writing a letter on hotel stationery, a glass of bourbon on the bedside table. So delicious, by lamplight! She wasn’t so lonely with Tignor away, now she had the baby snug inside her. This letter she would work damn hard at, she would make a first draft and copy it over.

April 19, 1955

Dear Miss Lutter,

I am sending you this little Easter gift, I thought of you when I saw it in a store here in Schenectady. I hope you can wear it on your Easter coat or dress. “Mother-of-pearl” is so beautiful, I think.

I guess I never told you, I am married and moved away from Milburn. My husband and I will have a residance in Chautauqua Falls. My husband is Niles Tignor, he is a businessman with the Black Horse Brewery you have heard of. He is often traveling on business. He is a handsome “older man.”

We will have our first baby in December!

I will be 18 in three weeks. I am quite “grown up” now! I was very ignorant when I came to live with you and could not appreciate your goodness kindness.

At 18 I would no longer be a ward of the county, if I was not married. So it will be all legal that

Miss Lutter there is something for me to tell you I don’t know how to find the words

I am so ashamed of

I am so sorry for

I hope that you will remember me in your prayers. I wish

“Bullshit.”

It had taken Rebecca almost an hour to stammer out these halting lines. And when she reread them she was overcome with disgust. How stupid she sounded! How childish. She’d had to look up the simplest words in the dictionary yet she’d managed to misspell residence anyway. She tore the letter into pieces.

Later, she sent Miss Lutter the mother-of-pearl brooch with just an Easter card. Your friend Rebecca.

The brooch was in the shape of a small white camellia that seemed to Rebecca very beautiful. It had cost twenty dollars.

“Twenty dollars! If Ma could know.”

She included no return address on the little package. So that Miss Lutter could not write back to thank her. And so that Rebecca could never know if her former teacher would have written to thank her.

“Mrs. Tignor. Good to meet you.”

They were burly good-natured men like Tignor whom you would not wish to cross. In taverns and hotel tap rooms they drank with Tignor and they looked and behaved like Tignor’s other drinking companions but they were police officers: not the kind to wear uniforms, as Tignor explained. (Rebecca hadn’t known there were police officers who didn’t wear uniforms. They had higher ranks: detective, lieutenant.)

These men mingled easily with the others. They were hearty eaters and drinkers. They picked their teeth thoughtfully with wooden toothpicks placed in whiskey shot glasses on bars beside pickled pigs’ feet and fried onion rings. They favored cigars over cigarettes. They favored Black Horse ale which was on the house wherever Niles Tignor drank. They were respectful of Rebecca whom they never failed to call “Mrs. Tignor”-with sometimes a hint of a wink over her head, to Tignor.

They’ve met other women of his. But never a wife.

She smiled to think this. She was so young, damned good-looking she knew they were saying, nudging one another. In envy of Niles Tignor who was their friend.

If they carried guns inside their bulky clothes, Rebecca never saw the guns. If Tignor sometimes carried his gun, Rebecca never saw it.

38

She was Niles Tignor’s wife, and she was having Niles Tignor’s baby. These were days, weeks, months of surpassing happiness. And yet, like any young wife, Rebecca made a mistake.

She knew: Tignor did not like her behaving in any over-friendly way with men. He had made it clear to her. He had warned her, more than once. Now she was pregnant, her skin glowed darkish-pale as if lit from within by a candle flame. There was often a flush in her cheeks, often she was breathless, moist-eyed. Her breasts and hips were more ample, womanly. Tignor teased her, she was eating more than he was. Almost hourly, the baby in her womb seemed to be growing.

Of course Rebecca knew (from the illustrated pamphlet Your Body, Your Baby & You), that in fact the “fetus” more resembled a frog than a human being, yet by the twelfth week, in May, she fantasized that Baby Niles had already acquired a face, and a soul.

“There are men crazy for pregnant women. A woman blown up like a goddam whale, still there’s men who…” Tignor’s voice, bemused and disdainful, trailed off. You could see that he, Tignor, was not inclined to such perversity.

And so Rebecca knew, to shun the attentions of men. Even elderly men. She was aloof and indifferent to the most innocuous of greetings-“Good morning!”-“Fine morning isn’t it?”-cast in her direction by men in hotel corridors, elevators, restaurants. Yet she had a weakness for women. Now in her pregnancy, she was avid for the company of women. Tignor was annoyed by her gabbing with waitresses, salesclerks, chambermaids for more than a minute or two. He liked his exotically good-looking young wife to be admired, to be vivacious, and to display “personality”: but he did not like too much of this, behind his back. In the hotels in which Niles Tignor was known as a frequent guest he knew he was talked-of by the staff, he knew and accepted this but he did not want Rebecca to tell tales of him, that might become exaggerated in the re-telling, and make him into a figure of fun. And now that his wife was pregnant, and would soon begin to show her pregnancy, he was particularly sensitive.

It was in May 1955, that Tignor returned unexpectedly to their room in the Hotel Henry Hudson in Troy, to discover Rebecca not only gabbing with the chambermaid who was making up the room, but helping the woman change the bed. In the corridor just outside the door Tignor froze, observing.

For there was his wife deftly tucking in bedsheets, tugging at a sheet as the other woman tugged at the other end. With girlish eagerness Rebecca was saying, “…this baby, he’s always hungry! He takes after his daddy for sure. His daddy wants him bad as I do. I was so surprised! I thought my heart would burst, I was…well, I was so surprised. You don’t expect men to have those kinds of feelings, do you? My birthday was last week, I’m nineteen and that’s plenty old enough to have a baby, my doctor says. I guess I’m a little scared. But I’m very healthy. My husband is always traveling, we stay in the best hotels like this one. He has an important position with the Black Horse Brewery, maybe you know. You know him, I guess?-Niles Tignor?”

When Rebecca glanced around, to see why the maid was staring so fixedly past her shoulder, she saw Tignor in the doorway.

Quietly Tignor told the maid, “Out. I need to speak with my wife.”

She would not try to elude him. Vividly she recalled her father needing to discipline her. Not once but many times. And Tignor had been sparing with her, until now. Pa’s way had not been to slap but to grab her by the upper arm and shake-shake-shake until her teeth rattled. You are one of them. One of them! Rebecca no longer knew if she had ever known what Pa had meant by these words and what she had done to provoke him but she knew she’d deserved it, her punishment. You always know.