Montauk

by Nicola Harrison

  He had come out on Friday night on the late train with not a word of remorse or acknowledgment about what had happened in the city, and then he spent the weekend hunting. Up at the crack of dawn, shooting for hours, then recuperating with his hunting fellows with drinks and cigars at the Lodge, a mansion near the Carl Fisher house. He bathed and dressed for dinner while I was at a pre-dinner floral arrangement class in the social lounge. Jeanie insisted I attend and I hadn’t objected. I was avoiding him as much as he was avoiding me.

  When we reunited with the men in the cocktail lounge, Harry pecked me on the cheek and we moved arm in arm from one group conversation to the next as if everything were as it should be. It was as if he were punishing me, making me question everything. His denial forced me into silence. My body felt stiff and uneasy and my stomach churned every time I envisioned his guilt-ridden face when he had walked into the apartment and seen me there in my lingerie. On the one hand, I didn’t want to revisit the exchange we had at the apartment and confront him, but on the other hand I wanted him to acknowledge his mistakes, take responsibility for his behavior. I wondered how our marriage could go on. Would I always cringe at the sight of him? A sight that at one point had made me smile until my cheeks hurt. Would we succumb to it and live separate lives, be strangers sleeping under the same roof for the rest of our days? Or would I forget his affair in time and eventually forgive? I wondered if he’d be able to move past the humiliation of getting caught or if he’d be cold toward me forever. Harry had made it clear that divorce was not an option. His family would be shamed and I would be disgraced and destitute.

  I drank quite a bit when I was with him and then my thoughts would run off again, infuriated that he would get away with it all so easily, without so much as an apology. He should be begging for forgiveness, promising that he would never do it again, even if we both knew he would.

  He left on Sunday evening after the fireworks even though it was the Fourth of July weekend and he could have stayed an extra day if he’d wanted to. Most of the gents weren’t working on Monday, but I felt relieved that he left. I didn’t want to be around him any longer and I could tell he didn’t want to be around me either.

  I heard someone walk across the lawn, the sound of twigs breaking underfoot. I began to stand, ready to deliver my laundry and accompany Elizabeth down the hill a little, but it was just a worker from the Manor.

  “Do you need help, ma’am?” he asked, rushing to help me up.

  “No, I’m just waiting for someone. Thank you.”

  “Would you like me to call anyone for you, ma’am?”

  “No,” I told him, “I’m fine here.”

  He nodded and walked toward the Manor. I started to worry that I’d missed Elizabeth. Aside from the laundry, I looked forward to the walk to the village. I’d ask about her boys and hear snippets about life in the fishing village, what time the boats came in the evening before, what they cooked for dinner; it reminded me of home and my childhood.

  Since I’d been back in Montauk after my visit to the city I’d felt paranoid that everyone already knew about Harry’s philandering. How could they not? Women talked and Harry, apparently, was about as discreet with his affairs as a pack of rats going through a dumpster.

  I walked briskly across the lawn to see if Elizabeth was coming up the hill; then I quickly came back to the tree, sat, then stood again. Agitated, I pulled my bag to the service door and left it there, asking one of the workers to keep an eye on it. I couldn’t very well pull it through the hotel lobby.

  The truth was I didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to be, but I started to think about this “laundry meeting” as if it had been prearranged and I was being stood up. Jeanie was holding a meeting that afternoon about activities for the upcoming month, but I had a few hours before I was needed there. Nevertheless, I felt my temperature rise as I marched into the hotel lobby.

  “Has the laundry girl been?” I asked the butler, rather hotly.

  “Yes, ma’am, just a few moments ago.” He extended his arm toward the front door. “She went that way.”

  “But I’ve been out back.…” I stormed toward the door, not even bothering to finish explaining myself, and when I got outside I saw Elizabeth, bent over, loading bags into the back seat of the car.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, not even saying hello. She jumped and bumped her head on the roof of the car.

  “Oh, good morning, ma’am,” she said, standing, squinting in the sun and rubbing her head. “Would you like me to collect your laundry?”

  “You’re late!” I said. “I was waiting for you out back; my bag is out there.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. My husband isn’t working for the post office today; it’s his day off.”

  I looked at her perplexed, still angry. This was no explanation. “And?” I said.

  “He’s out fishing, so I brought the car.” She smiled slightly, as if she wasn’t sure if she should. “It’s much easier with the car than coming up the hill with that cart,” she said.

  I let out a deep breath trying to calm myself; I wasn’t even sure why I was worked up and Elizabeth was getting the brunt of it. I walked back to the front door and asked one of the bellboys to bring my laundry bag from the service door; then I made my way back to Elizabeth’s car. I stood there unsure what to say. Elizabeth kept loading the car, filling up the back seat. She stood up and stretched out her back.

  “Is everything okay, ma’am?” she asked.

  “Yes. Fine. I’m just a little out of sorts today.” I felt disappointed. I’d planned to walk all the way down to the village with her today. I wanted the fresh air, I wanted to feel helpful and I wanted the company of someone outside of the Manor. The bellboy lifted my bag into the back seat and forced the door shut.

  “Where are you off to now?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “Home to drop off the bags, then up to the lighthouse to pick up.”

  “The lighthouse?” I asked.

  “Yes, remember Mr. Brown, the lighthouse keeper? I do his laundry—he’s a family friend and he helps us out a lot, especially with the car.”

  “I remember.” I nodded. He had seemed so familiar to me, yet so intense and inquisitive. It had felt nice, if slightly unnerving, to have someone notice me so much. I wanted to get away from the Manor and take my mind off things. “Do you mind if I come along? I’ve never seen the lighthouse.”

  Elizabeth looked around as if she was worried someone had heard me ask. “Ma’am, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Why?” I asked, but before she had a chance to respond I started talking again. “It’s not a bad idea. I would really enjoy the drive. I go to all the same places, Gurney’s, the Yacht Club, here, the Beach Club. I’d love to see the scenery.” I made my way around to the passenger side and put my hand on the door. Elizabeth hadn’t moved. She was looking at the ground. “Unless you don’t want me to accompany you,” I said.

  “It’s not that, ma’am. It’s just that…”—she paused and looked up—“I might get in trouble. People might talk.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Elizabeth, you’re starting to sound like the women at the Manor,” I said, opening the door and climbing in.

  She stood there, hands on her hips, running her foot along the edge of the wooden-spoked wheel. I watched her for a minute, then stared straight ahead through the windscreen. Eventually she took her foot down from the wheel, reached into the car, flipped the coil box switch, then walked to the front of the car. She bent down and pulled the hand crank toward her a half turn. Nothing happened, so she cranked it again, this time with force, and the engine began to roar.

  We rode in silence and out of the corner of my eye I saw her push a long lever forward, release her foot slightly off one of three pedals and pull the throttle down. I’d always sat in the back of the car whenever Harry and I went anywhere, and we always had a driver take us where we wanted to go. At one point Harry had talked about buying the Model 48 and I
was rather excited at the prospect of learning to drive one day, but in the end he decided against it and was happy with Albert or José driving us around town. With the exception of a few rides I took in college, I wasn’t used to being driven around by a woman.

  We wound our way off the Manor driveway and toward the hill where Elizabeth usually wrestled with her laundry cart, and we started to bounce in our seats from the uneven road. The engine was loud at first, but as we made our way down the hill it started to smooth out.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, keeping her eyes on the road.

  The breeze from the open windows felt good, but the tension in the car made me clammy and uncomfortable—I’d been too forceful; it wasn’t like me. A laundry bag from the stack in the back seat fell forward between Elizabeth and me and I pushed it back in place, wondering whose laundry that might be. We reached the bottom of the steep and bumpy hill, then turned left onto the main road and right toward the village, the same route we’d taken when we walked there a few weeks earlier. We crossed over the train tracks and turned into the fishing village, which, to me, even though it was no more than five minutes from the Manor, felt like another world. Just as before, I was amazed at the beauty of the water and all the docked boats catching the sunlight just a few feet from where the row of small, run-down wooden houses began. We pulled up outside her house. She put the car in neutral, pulled on the brake so that the engine came to a sputtering stop.

  “Elizabeth,” I said. “I hope this is not too much trouble.” Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel and she sighed but said nothing.

  “Look,” I said, feeling that ugly, irritable streak surge once again through my veins. “If you don’t want me to tag along I can get out and walk home.” I was defensive and embarrassed for forcing myself on her this way when I clearly wasn’t welcome, and yet every time I spoke I seemed to make things worse.

  “Ma’am, I really can’t afford to lose this job. If the hotel management saw me giving you a ride they’d think I was bothering you or asking for something. After all, when you summer guests leave in September there’s no more work. Things are really hard for the families out here. I have to make enough now to get us through to the next summer.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but she kept on going.

  “There are a lot of laundry gals who would kill for this job. I only got it through my husband’s connection to the Manor. He’s been delivering mail and special packages to the patrons since it first opened.…” She paused, looked up at me for a second and then back to the steering wheel. “My husband doesn’t think it’s a good idea. I’m sorry, but my boys are always hungry and they don’t stop growing. This is not a game for me.”

  Part of me just wanted to get out of the car and run back to the Manor, I was so embarrassed and ashamed. Was this a game for me? Was she some distraction from the petty realities of my upturned life? I hadn’t thought about the possibility of jeopardizing her job just because I felt angry and frustrated and in need of a change of scenery. I could go back to the Manor and everything would go on as before, I suddenly realized, but this little scene that I had caused could cost Elizabeth her livelihood.

  I reached into my handbag and felt around for the tiny baby’s bonnet that I’d brought from Dolly’s factory. I considered giving it to Elizabeth now as a peace offering, but the moment wasn’t right; she was angry and I deserved it. I felt the soft bobbles of crocheted wool and held it between my thumb and forefinger; then I ran my fingers along the bonnet slowly as if I were worrying the beads of my mother’s rosary, all the way to the silk ribbons that Elizabeth would tie, gently under her baby’s soft, fleshy chin. I suddenly had a deep desire to hold the baby close to my chest and smell the powdery, milky smell of his hair. My eyes filled with tears. I looked out of the window and blinked them away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally. “You’re right; of course you are. It’s just that I’ve so enjoyed the brief moments we’ve spent together. I’d like to be a friend to you if I can.” Elizabeth turned back to the steering wheel. “And I’m sorry I was so brash with you before.”

  “That’s all right, ma’am,” she said. “You seemed upset over something.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “I had a rather nasty weekend back in the city.” I looked out to the bay and the water somehow calmed me. “My husband seems to have other interests,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could, “interests that don’t include me, if you know what I mean.”

  She looked confused.

  “Women, probably several of them. It’s probably been going on for a while; I was just too foolish to see it.”

  “Oh,” she said, glancing toward me, then away, then back to me again. I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable and I shouldn’t be telling her my business, but I felt I would go crazy if I kept it inside and all to myself.

  “I suppose I should have known, or maybe I did know, but I just couldn’t bear to admit it, and now that I’ve seen it, and he knows that I know, I can’t go back, I don’t believe. I can go forward, but things will be different, you see, and I don’t know how to live like that.”

  The tears welled up again. I took a Kleenex out of my handbag and dabbed at the corners of my eyes; then I placed both my hands in my lap, feeling a sense of relief and remorse all at once.

  Elizabeth placed her small hand on mine and left it there. “You’re a strong woman,” she said gently. “And different from the others. You’ll find a way.”

  We sat like that for a while, with the salty smell of just-caught fish and ocean, and the noise of the village all around us—men calling from the boats to the crew onshore, seagulls squawking overhead for scraps, someone hammering away in the yard by the houses and kids running on rocks and laughing at the water’s edge.

  “This is for you,” I said finally, pulling the tiny bonnet from my bag. “My friend is a hat designer and she’s toying with the idea of a baby’s line. It’s one of a kind.”

  I handed it to Elizabeth and she opened her hands, palms up like she was holding a prayer book, and she held it, as if it were a fragile, ancient document that might crumble if she so much as breathed.

  “Do you like it?” I asked, picking it up from her upturned hands and placing my hand inside to give it shape. “It’s crocheted and it’s got a little lace brim, which I thought might shade baby Jake from the sun.” I turned it around so she could see it from all sides.

  Her hands were on her chest now, one on top of the other. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life,” she said. “It’s so delicate and lovely; thank you.” She picked up one of the silk ribbons and it slid though her fingers. “But why?” she asked.

  “Why not?” I said, feeling exceptionally relieved that she had liked it and that she seemed to have forgiven me, for now. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll help you unload.”

  * * *

  The car moved a little faster without the weight of all those laundry bags shoved in the back seat. Elizabeth and I had tied scarves around our hair and the air rushed around us. I tilted my head out the window a little, holding on to my scarf, feeling invigorated and miles away from the city.

  The road was paved and smooth under the wheels of the old Ford and Elizabeth controlled the car just as well as any man I’d seen. It was thick with greenery on both sides and the trees reached over our heads toward one another, creating a shady canopy. I saw the rooftop of one, maybe two houses on the short drive up the hill, but this part of Montauk was populated mostly by birds, squirrels, and a few deer grazing at the side of the road. We passed a horse and cattle ranch and I thought how lovely it was that Montauk hadn’t been overdeveloped; there was still so much greenery and open space, with beaches that went on for miles on both sides of the hamlet. Only two vehicles passed us on the way, a state trooper and a school bus.

  “Mind if I stop and pick up a pie for dinner?” Elizabeth steered the car into a parking bay near the
top of the hill. She gestured toward a small trailer parked off to the side of the road. “She’s an old friend of ours, Mrs. Barrow, makes the best steak pies. I buy one once a week when I come up this way. You should try one.”

  I looked over and saw an elderly lady in a floral apron waving from a drop-down window.

  “Oh no, I’m fine, thanks,” I said, knowing I would eat at the Manor later but certain that if my mother were there she wouldn’t think twice. Elizabeth returned moments later with a brown paper package that she set carefully in the back seat.

  “It may not look like much, but she’s one of the best cooks in town; my boys go crazy for her pies. She’s hoping to open up a proper pie shop in town someday.”

  “I’m sure she’d do very well,” I said.

  “I hope she does. She lost both her sons to the war. So it’s just been her and her husband for the last twenty years. She deserves some kindness and some luck.”

  “Terrible. How would you even go on if your child didn’t come home from war?” I said. “It’s not like an illness that at least you can try to cure, or understand, or even an accident; you’d be wondering for the rest of your life what happened, where they were and what you could have done differently.”

  “I can’t even imagine if my boys had to go to war.…”

  “They won’t; that won’t happen again.” I thought about Roosevelt and his voice coming over the radio. Being able to hear him made me feel like I knew him, and I trusted him.

  “It could,” Elizabeth said, steering the car back onto the road. “Patrick says that German leader, Adolf Hitler, is foaming at the mouth to invade Czechoslovakia and he says once people start fighting it spreads; it’s infectious.”

  “But we would never get involved. The United States would never send their own men and boys to fight Europe’s battles again. Honestly, we would never do that, not after the last time.”