by Anita Shreve
He studies the cone of moonlight on the water.
“I’m upsetting you,” Vivian says, reaching across the space between them and touching him on the shoulder. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“She’s married,” he says.
Vivian withdraws her hand and sighs. “And ain’t that a shame,” she says.
Mironson is padding softly along the hallway, a wet towel over his arm.
“You too?” McDermott asks, keeping his voice low.
“Thought a bath would help,” Mironson says.
“Must be something in the air,” McDermott says. “Vivian just left.”
“We’re all keyed up,” Mironson says.
“I’m leaving early in the morning,” McDermott says. “I’ll see you back at the city.”
“Why?” Mironson asks.
“Eileen needs me. I haven’t been around for weeks.”
“Sorry about that. Of course you should go. But listen,” Mironson says, “there are about a hundred newsletters left that have to be put together. If you could do those before you leave, you could take them with you. Wake up Mahon. Get him to drive you in.”
Alphonse stirs on the mattress, his bedroll having unraveled hours ago. McDermott takes off his shoes and pants and shirt and gently tries to nudge Alphonse off the diagonal and over to his side of the mattress. But Alphonse, in his sleep, is a dead weight and will not easily be budged. McDermott slides his bedroll onto the floor. He lies on top of it in his underwear, studying the eerie moon-glow on the white windowsill. Beside him Alphonse is still snoring, and down the hall, a thousand miles away, a woman he knows is sleeping.
I think she feels the same, if it’s any consolation.
He folds his arms under his head and stares up at the ceiling. Even from that first day on Christmas Eve, he felt Honora getting inside him. He didn’t know it that day, but he remembers the sense of giddiness when she drove away, his direct prayer to God. He thinks about what happened earlier on the wet grass. The way her skin felt under his hand. In his mind, he goes over the kisses again. Were there two or three? The sound she made at the back of her throat. He knows he will remember the precise sound of that moan all his life, that he will have to listen to it again and again — a record on a turntable.
Alphonse twitches on the mattress, and McDermott turns to look at him. He can make out the spindly frame in the moonlight. The boy, in his sleep, turns onto his stomach and stretches his arms out toward the wall. He seems to be growing, McDermott thinks, even as he watches.
Honora
Earlier, she heard voices outside the window, Vivian’s and McDermott’s on the porch, and then later, in the hallway, Mironson’s gruff baritone. Beside her, Sexton sleeps in his guileless pose, his arms thrown up behind his head, looking exposed and vulnerable and content, and for a moment Honora has a dreamy and irrational desire to lay something heavy on his throat and crush his windpipe.
My God, she thinks, sitting upright.
She slips on her dressing gown. She closes the bedroom door with a soft click. She picks up her feet, trying not to scuff her slippers along the wooden floor. She doesn’t want to wake anyone in the bedrooms off the hallway. At the bottom of the steps, she pauses for a moment and listens. She can hear the surf, never absent, and something else. A rustle of papers. Coming from the front room, she is sure of it.
“I’m just finishing this,” McDermott says when she reaches the doorway.
“Oh,” she says, surprised. “You’re up early.” A sliver of excruciatingly bright light slips over the horizon, and Honora winces away from it.
“I’m leaving,” he says, turning his head away as well.
“Now?” she asks. She leans against the doorjamb.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“My sister needs me,” he says, bending to collate the stacks of paper on the table.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“Everything’s fine,” he says.
McDermott is a bad liar, she thinks. “It’s because of last night, isn’t it?” she says, moving a step closer. He bends to his task, not answering her.
“Iwish . . . ,” she says.
His head snaps up. “What do you wish?” he asks, and she cannot tell if he is hopeful or angry.
“I’ll make you some breakfast,” she says. The sun slants in through the east windows, showing every speck of dust on the table. The side of McDermott’s face is pink. She hugs her dressing gown around her.
“I’m not hungry,” he says.
“How are you getting back?” she asks.
“Mahon’s driving me.”
“Is he up?”
“I’ll wake him in a minute.”
“I’ll make him breakfast, then,” she says.
“It’s barely five, Honora. Go back to bed.”
“He has to eat. You have to eat too, for that matter.”
McDermott is silent.
“Suit yourself,” she says.
She separates the strips of bacon with a fork, the grease sizzling in the cast-iron pan. She imagines the scent of the bacon wafting its way up the stairs and slipping under Alphonse’s door and waking the boy and sending him pell-mell into the kitchen. Twice she has heard footsteps going up and down the stairs, but so far Alphonse has not yet appeared. She longs to see his goofy face, the iron-filing haircut, the bug eyes, the shirt misbuttoned in his haste. She has hardly ever made anyone as happy as she seems to make Alphonse. Today she’ll make him swim twenty feet on his own. He can do it. Sometimes you have to push a child to make him learn.
She hears a rustle in the doorway. “Got four strips here with your name on them,” she says.
“You ought to let me starve.”
Honora, in a crouch in front of the icebox, looks up in surprise. “I thought you’d gone,” she says.
“I came to apologize,” McDermott says.
“No need to apologize. A lot of men are cranky when they wake up,” she says, standing and bringing a box of eggs to the stove. “My brothers were terrible.”
“I never slept,” he says.
“That makes two of us.” She lifts the individual pieces of bacon with the fork onto an old newspaper to drain them. She holds an egg above the empty skillet, aware that McDermott has moved farther into the room.
“I won’t be seeing you again,” he says, and she inadvertently punctures the egg with her thumb.
Her heart kicks up from its lazy morning beat. “Why is that?” she asks, trying to get the bits of shell out of the quickly cooking egg.
“Honora, look at me,” he says.
She turns, a slime of egg white on her fingers.
“Take the pan off the burner,” he says. “I want to talk to you.”
She wipes her hands on a tea towel. McDermott takes a step forward. The kitchen, on the west side of the house, doesn’t have the eye-wincing light of the front room in the mornings, but still it’s enough to see his face — pale and grainy, the eyes as blue as the ocean when the sun is setting.
“Sit down,” she says, her hands trembling now. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
He hesitates. “All right,” he says. “I could use some coffee.”
She brings the percolator to the table and shakily pours him a cup. Normally she adores the smell of coffee, but this morning it threatens to give her a headache. She sits at the only remaining chair. “The others are asleep?” she asks.
“I tried to wake Mahon twice,” he says, “but I can’t budge him.”
She folds her hands in front of her and waits.
“I’m not coming back,” he says, “so I suppose I think that gives me the freedom to tell you all the things I might have said in another life.”
“In another life,” she repeats.
“I wish you were free,” he says.
She puts her hands together and presses them hard against her lips. A sensation of heat rises and floods her limbs and face.
“I love your mouth,
” he says.
She shakes her head.
“I hate your husband,” he says. “I’m sorry about that, but it’s true.”
She takes a quick breath.
“I love the way you are with Alphonse.”
A feeling of panic rises within her.
“Last night,” he says, “on the grass, I wanted to make love to you. I wanted it so bad I thought I would do almost anything to make it happen.”
She closes her eyes. She releases a hand, and he seizes it.
“You were afraid,” he says.
She shakes her head no. “Yes,” she says.
He kisses the inside of her wrist. “I think that’s it,” he says.
Alphonse
He wakes dreaming of bacon and when he sits up he realizes there is actually bacon cooking and so he stands and hops on one foot to get his pant leg on. He is starved, or maybe he was only dreaming he was starved, and he is so glad he didn’t get stuck in Portsmouth or Ely Falls and have to spend the night at home instead of coming here and going to the dance hall in Rye. He buttons his shirt and pats his hair forward and realizes that McDermott is already up and so he looks out the window. But no, the sun is only a little bit over the horizon; he hasn’t overslept. He runs out into the hallway in his bare feet and hooks an arm around the post at the top of the stairway and takes the stairs two at a time and then slows down in the front hall because he doesn’t want to look too eager, does he? He takes a breath and listens for any of the others, but he can’t hear a thing. And then he walks as though nothing in the world were ever important to him, and when he gets to the doorway of the kitchen he stops.
McDermott and Mrs. Beecher are sitting at the table. McDermott has his back to Alphonse, and Mrs. Beecher has her eyes closed and Alphonse thinks it can’t be true but it is, Mrs. Beecher’s eyelashes are wet. McDermott and Mrs. Beecher are holding hands in an awkward sort of way, and Alphonse wants to know why she is crying. It scares him and he wants to ask them, but he doesn’t dare move or breathe because he understands that this is one of those private moments that adults sometimes have to have to themselves. And then Mrs. Beecher opens her eyes and smiles and makes a little choking sound and looks up at McDermott, and that is when she sees Alphonse, who wishes he could evaporate on the spot.
He watches Mrs. Beecher pull her hand away from McDermott’s.
“Alphonse,” she says.
Honora
She moves from room to room, scarcely knowing what she is doing or what time it is. It has been this way since Sunday, since the men left, and when she tallies up her accomplishments at the end of the day, she is always astonished at how little she has done. Sometimes she feels heavy limbed and slow and wants only to sleep. At other times, she simply sits down and weeps — brief squalls within a chartless sail. She eats leftovers from the icebox, a few bites when she can manage to get them down, always thinking she is hungry but then discovering she is not at all. When Alphonse entered the room on Sunday morning, McDermott stood and mussed Alphonse’s hair and said that he would be leaving, and then the door was open and he was walking through it, and Honora never had a chance to say another word to him — which has left her feeling constantly poised on the brink of speaking a sentence she doesn’t know the words to.
In her dressing gown, she cooked breakfast, everyone except Louis expressing surprise that McDermott had gone. She had not laundered Sexton’s clothes (she would never again wash his clothes, she decided), leaving him to scrounge through his drawers to find shirts and pants to take with him. And that is, of course, where he made his biggest mistake. Had he been truly innocent, she thinks, he would have been more distraught that she hadn’t done his laundry.
He might return midweek, he said as he left, kissing her on the side of the mouth as if nothing had ever happened. And then the men and Alphonse were gone, and she was alone in her house, and all she could do was wander from room to room, looking out the windows and replaying the few moments at the roadhouse and at the kitchen table over and over and over until she had extracted from them every possible nugget of meaning. At the time, it seemed to take place before her mind could comprehend what was happening, though it was clear her body knew immediately, and she thinks it is astonishing the way the body can respond all on its own, without the mind quite keeping up.
She wanders into the front room, which she has not cleaned in two days. She drifts here often, each time intending to throw away the balled-up trash that overflows the wastebasket, sort the stacks of clean paper on the table, empty the ashtrays, dust the Copiograph machine and the typewriter, pick up the glasses that are strewn under chairs, behind the couch, and on the windowsills. But each time she stands in the room, a sort of paralysis overtakes her so that she finds herself sitting on one of the available chairs, staring out to sea, remembering the conversations and gestures of the past several weeks. And then she wanders onto the porch and continues her daydreams, vaguely guilty, vaguely aware that she should be tending to her house instead.
A slithery movement at the side of the house catches her eye. Moments later, she hears a timid knock on the glass panes of the back door. When she walks into the kitchen to open it, a woman in a gray cotton dress is standing on the back stoop. Honora has heard that women who do not eat lose their hair and their teeth, and that this can happen even to women in their twenties. The woman before her has a bald patch on one side of her head.
“I’m sorry, miss,” the woman says even before Honora has spoken.
The sight of the woman, in her misshapen sleeveless dress, brings Honora sharply to her senses in a way that nothing else since Sunday has done.
“You’re looking for something to eat?”
“Yes, miss, if you would. My husband and I haven’t eaten since Friday.”
Honora calculates the time — four days without food. “Come in,” she says quickly.
“Oh, no, miss, I couldn’t do that. Please, miss. If you could just give me some bread or some soup, I will just go away.”
“Come in and sit down,” Honora says in a voice she does not often use, a commanding voice that is reminiscent of her mother’s. The woman does as she is told, hunching her shoulders as she walks through the door. Honora sees now that the woman’s hair is stiff; she has been bathing in the sea.
There is more food than Honora has remembered inside the cupboards and the icebox. She takes out the remains of a chicken, a bowl of baked beans, a peach pie that somehow did not make it back with the men. In a cupboard above the icebox are two dozen cupcakes that Mahon brought in that didn’t get eaten. She finds green beans and tomatoes and half a dozen fresh peaches.
“Do you have water?” she asks the woman.
“No, miss.”
Honora finds a pair of large crocks that came from Jack Hess’s store. One had beans in it, she remembers, and the other dried peas. She washes them out and fills them with water and puts them on the table. The woman immediately bends forward and takes a sip.
Honora pours cold water into a tall glass and gives it to the woman, who gulps it down. “Not so fast,” Honora says. “You’ll get a stomach cramp.”
She fixes a plate of chicken and baked beans and sets it in front of the woman while she packs up the rest of the food. The woman whose hair is stiff begins to cry.
“Is it really so bad?” Honora asks.
The woman wipes her nose on the back of her hand, and Honora gives her a handkerchief. “My husband has been on the picket line since the beginning. He’s been arrested twice,” she says. “We got evicted from our apartment. He said we could come out to the beach and live in the abandoned cottages, but then the owners started returning and we keep having to move. We have five girls with us. We’re at the other end of the beach, and we don’t have water, and we are having a terrible time of it.”
“Is it near the house that sits up on the dunes?”
The woman takes a bite of baked beans and is silent.
“It’s all right,” Honora say
s, “you can tell me. That cottage that has pale blue shutters, with a porch on the second story facing the ocean?”
The woman, who can’t be much older than twenty-eight or -nine, nods.
“If you go there, to that house with the blue shutters, the woman who lives in it will give you water. Her name is Vivian.”
“Thank you, miss.”
Honora has hardly wrapped up the food and packed it in a paper bag when the woman finishes her meal and stands. “Take this with you now,” Honora says. “I’ll put the jars out by the back door and I’ll cover them. You can come back for them later.”
“I will, miss.”
“You can use the jars when you go to fetch water at Vivian’s. She won’t mind. In fact, I think she has a faucet outside for showers. Just tell her that Honora sent you.”
“You are a saint, miss,” the woman says.
“Hardly,” Honora says.
“I have to go into Ely Falls to get my emerald ring sized,” Vivian, who is bandbox smart in nude silk shantung, is saying in the hallway. “I’ve been meaning to do it all summer, but somehow the time has just gotten away from me. Thought I’d drop by on the way and say hello.”
“Come in,” Honora says immediately, thinking that only Vivian would consider going into Ely Falls to get a ring sized when there is a strike on. “I just made a sandwich for lunch. Can I make you one too?”
“I ate before I came. I’ll have a cup of tea to keep you company, though.”
Vivian follows Honora into the kitchen and sets her silk-and-bone purse on the table. “Have you heard from Sexton? From any of the fellas?”
Honora shakes her head and fills the kettle. There’s a slight commotion at the back door, and the woman of earlier, now with a man in tow, picks up the jars and begins to walk back to the beach with them.
“Who’s that?” Vivian asks.
“Squatters living in one of the cottages on the beach. Near you, in fact. I hope you don’t mind, but they don’t have water, and I said they might ask you from time to time for water. Was that all right?”