A Bigamist's Daughter Read Free

she dresses well, so Elizabeth only notices her size when they are standing side by sidein front of the bathroom mirror, or when, like now, she stands close enough to block out one entire side of the office.
    “Bigamy?” Ann says. “My, my, he didn’t look the type.” And then she laughs that staccato, sophisticated laugh Elizabeth loves her for. “That’s an answer to the divorce problem. I wish Brian had thought of it.” She’s been divorced from Brian nearly seven years now, but his name still haunts her conversations; she seems to hold it in her mouth like a dog with a bit of coat-tail: the only part of the thief that didn’t get away.
    “You would have preferred Brian to be a bigamist?”
    She shrugs, hands on her wide hips. “Why not? Half a man’s better than none at all. And think of the freedom; he’d have to work double-time being two husbands, but I’d only have to work part-time being half a wife. It’s the working girl’s answer to a demanding marriage. Don’t get a part-time job, get a part-time husband! I love it.”
    Elizabeth tells her she’s got a point. Had Brian been a bigamist, she knows, Ann would have made herself believe this. She has a marvelous way of turning every rotten thing her once-husband did into some kind of sly joke in which she is ultimately the winner. Her poetry, which she used to let Elizabeth read, was full of such twists.
    “Well,” says Ann. “Are you going to sign old Tupperware?”
    “Probably.” She flips through the manuscript and then drops it onto her desk. “And I told him I’d call him tomorrow, so be a dear and get me his file so I can make out his contract. Type a folder for him too, and find me a time tomorrow afternoon when I can see him—he’ll probably sign then.”
    “Right-oh, chief,” Ann says, saluting and turning to walk out the door. The “chief” is to remind Elizabeth, nearly six years her junior, that she’s getting carried away.
    “And then take the rest of the morning off,” Elizabeth calls after her. An apology.
    “You’re a sport,” Ann calls back.
    Tupper Daniels’ background file consists of his first letter to Vista, the questionnaire he was asked to fill out, the summary he was asked to submit and the two letters arranging this morning’s meeting.
    His questionnaire says he’s submitted to all the major houses, the real publishers, and was turned down by each one. It doesn’t say why. It says he finally decided to come to Vista because he feels a writer should believe in his work enough to pay to have it published. He also adds that Stephen Crane published his own first works himself, and he’s always admired Stephen Crane.
    She sits back, lights a cigarette. She recalls having read it all before, just yesterday probably, but it had no meaning then. She reads hundreds of these backgrounds a week, hundreds of letters from people with books that Vista simply must publish, no matter what the cost. Housewives with desks full of poetry, businessmen with exposés they’re sure will change the world, old people, so many old people, with memoirs and philosophies they want urgently to be preserved, recorded. So many pathetic people with dreams of immortality and a spot on the Tonight Show.
    In the beginning they had depressed her with their sad stories and hopeless ambitions, but gradually she came to see that, like anyone who dealt with the public, she would have to keep her sympathies, and her imagination, in check. How, she reasoned, could even the most humble shoe salesman accomplish his work if each socked or stockinged foot he held brought visions of this little piggy and pedicures and calluses earned in vain pursuits? Of mortician’s tags hung from cold toes?
    She picks up his summary. It’s sketchy, but enough to allow her to discuss his book with him for hours; her own special talent.
    “This is an intriguing story in the tradition of some of our greatest Southern writers. It deals with a young man who