by Chip Cheek
“It sounds fun.”
“I was a child, for heaven’s sake.”
Henry smiled. “Well, you’re grown-up and married now. And so is Clara. She seems like she worships you.”
Effie cocked her head and felt the tiny mole behind her ear, a reflex when she was piqued in a certain way. “People don’t change so much.”
He knew that wasn’t true. There was a time when he could have called Effie a bully—like when she’d fed Betty Moody’s hair into the gears of the pencil sharpener in Mrs. Jackson’s class—and look at her now: his lovely wife. But he only shrugged and let it go.
A violent chopping sound came from the archway; they listened to it. A minute later Clara swept back into the room with a bucket of ice, her movements so smooth she might have been roller-skating. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long. Look at you two! I love the old dear, but if I’m not there to look over her shoulder every second … Well, you know how it is.” She was at the bar now, dropping ice into the glasses.
“What are you doing here?” Effie asked.
“We’re just here for the weekend. It’s my brother’s birthday. You remember Scott, of course,” she said, smiling meaningfully, but Effie didn’t. “Effie, you’re joking! You had such a crush on him!”
“I did?”
“God, yes! You were smitten with him. You used to hug him around the waist and he’d have to pry you off. You were a determined little girl. Is she still that way, Henry?”
Henry didn’t know what to say. He laughed.
“You’re thinking of someone else,” Effie said.
“Don’t worry, Henry,” Clara said, “Scott’s married now. To a little cunt, if you want to know the truth, but married nonetheless. You’re far more handsome, anyway.”
He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly; she couldn’t have said what he thought she’d said. He beamed at her and remembered Reverend Miller once saying in a sermon that Satan appeared in beautiful guises, singing praises and charms. He could listen to her talk all day. While she fixed the drinks she explained that Scott was turning twenty-five—next week, technically—and they were going to have a bash, and all his friends from Princeton and the army and the junior associates at the law firm were coming down, people from Philadelphia and D.C. and New York and as far away as Boston. Where they would sleep, she had no idea. “On top of each other, I suppose!” She crossed over from the bar and handed them their drinks and sat with her own drink in an armchair by the sofa.
“Well, it sounds like a personal thing,” Effie began, but Clara cut her off.
“Stop it right there. You will not be intruding, I promise you. It’s a party! Mother and Father aren’t even here, they’re staying in Philly.” Clara leaned forward and put her hand on the arm of the sofa. “My belle, I’m begging you to stay. I’ll hardly know a soul. You’ll be doing me a favor—really.”
It would be rude, Henry thought, to refuse at this point. He took Effie’s hand. “We can stay a little while,” he said, and when Effie said, “I mean…” Clara cried, “Oh, joy!” and held up her glass. “To long-lost friendships,” she said. “And to new ones too.”
The drink was delicious. He’d never had gin before, and the piney taste of it went perfectly with the airy room, the big windows, and the verdant backyard shimmering in the breeze. Before he knew it, he’d had half of it.
Clara grilled Effie about her life, but before Effie could fully answer anything she would interject with a story of her own, or a reminiscence about people they’d both known or things they’d done in Cape May. Like the time Clara and Holly had broken into the lighthouse and flashed their tits at the summer regatta, in the full light of day, while Effie sulked below because she was too scared to join them. (Effie had no memory of this.) Or the game of hide-and-seek, which Effie had begged them to play, when Clara and Holly and some other girl they were with had managed to elude her for nearly an hour, until Effie was sobbing in the street, in a part of town she didn’t know, and had to ask a stranger how to get back to New Hampshire Avenue. (This Effie remembered. “It was horrible,” she said, unamused, and Clara, stifling her laughter, said, “It was horrible, wasn’t it? Oh, darling! We were little beasts. I’m sorry.”) Occasionally she would ask Henry something—“Have you just been in love with her your entire life?”—and he would answer sheepishly, smiling like a fool. But mostly he just listened, or half listened, distracted by the sparkly sensation of the drink going down and the glowing light coming into the house. The gin was working; his body felt effervescent. Clara crossed her legs and displayed a lovely foot in high-heeled sandals, her skin tanned and gleaming, her toenails glossy white. She was the most glamorous person he had ever met. She lived in Manhattan, and she was married to a man named Richard, who ran a bank and whose family, Henry gathered, was extremely wealthy. There was no mention of children. Clara came from Philadelphia, from a more modest family of lawyers, and this place in Cape May was her parents’ summer getaway. “This old shack,” she called it. She and Richard had a place on Nantucket that she liked much more—but this was Scott’s weekend, and it was what he wanted.
Henry and Effie finished their drinks at the same time, and when Clara heard the clink of ice in their glasses she leapt up and took them and went back to the bar, talking all the while. When their drinks were refreshed, she glided over to the record player on the other side of the den and put on something smooth and Latin—or maybe Italian, because she started talking about her own honeymoon in Italy: Naples and Rome, a week each. The spring of ’54. It had been a dream, she said, but a very fleeting dream. (With small movements, she was doing a sort of cha-cha back to her chair.) “Richard was about to lose his mind by the time we got to Rome. Relaxation makes him anxious, you know. So I mostly walked around the city by myself. I had to have strangers take my picture. There’s me on the Spanish Steps. There’s me at Caffè Greco. I pretended I was a runaway princess, like Audrey Hepburn.” She sighed wistfully and sat down. “Ah, love! Hold on to it, darlings, for as long as you can. But you two must be in the throes of it.”
They looked at each other. Effie seemed more relaxed now. Her cheeks were pink, a wan smile played on her face.
“But why Cape May of all places?”
“I don’t know,” Effie said. “We thought about a few places”—that wasn’t true at all—“but then we’ve got the house up here, I guess, and I hadn’t been back here in so long.”
“Nostalgia, yes. I am the exact same way.”
“Mostly we wanted to keep it simple and easy. We could have gone anywhere in the world, I suppose, but we’ve got time enough for that.”
“Hear, hear,” Clara said.
All of this was news to Henry, but somehow, just now, it felt true.
Clara held her glass up to them. “You’ve got your lives ahead of you,” she said. “Right now, all that matters is love.” She gave them a smile that seemed pained. “Oh, you darlings. I just want to eat the two of you alive.”
Soon a stout, middle-aged woman appeared at the archway, scowling at Clara. “Mrs. Kirschbaum, the food is ready.”
“That’s wonderful, Mrs. Pavich. Will you go out and ring the bell? They won’t hear it, but who knows? The wind may be in our favor.”
The woman shuffled back through the archway, and a moment later a loud bell rang outside—there must have been a bell tower out there—and it rang, and rang, until Clara shouted, “That will be enough, Mrs. Pavich!”
* * *
The bell worked, or else it was a coincidence: not five minutes later a crowd of young people burst into the den from the backyard, looking flushed and windblown, wearing shorts and linen shirts and light dresses, all of them talking at once: “God help us!” “But I was turned the other way!” “It’s a wonder Dottie isn’t blind!” “But I was turned the other way!” “Hello, hello!” Clara made a flurry of introductions. There were seven or eight of them in all, and their names—Dottie and James, Alma and Roland and Max, Karen, and
Betsy—were lost to Henry the moment he heard them, except for Scott, Effie’s old crush, who was handsome like his sister, and whose unbuttoned shirt showed off a well-tended chest and stomach. “You don’t say!” he said when Clara told him who Effie was, but Henry could tell he didn’t remember. Even so, he wrapped her in a hug and pressed her cheek to his bare chest, and Henry felt a prick of jealousy. Who were these people? They were weirdly, effusively nice: “Fabulous to meet you!” “Georgia, you say?” “Congratulations!” “Hank, you’re the luckiest man in the world.” This last came from a shirtless man with the stocky build of a boxer. When Henry said, “I know, believe me,” the man laughed and clapped him so hard on the back that Henry spilled part of his drink out onto the rug.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said, meeting Clara’s eyes. “I’ll clean it up.”
“Don’t even think of it,” Clara said. She came over and laid her hand on the boxer’s bicep. “My darling, you don’t know your own strength.”
“Sorry, Hank,” the man said, and struck him again, more gently, on the shoulder. Clara’s hand lingered at his back. Was this possibly Richard? He seemed too young for her. He was handsome, but shorter than Clara by several inches.
The crowd swarmed the bar. Ice rang in their glasses. One empty gin bottle was discarded with a crash, another one opened. Henry and Effie stayed close together, but when the group returned with their drinks they brought a whirlwind of merry chatter that radiated outward and broke them apart. They all seemed to know one another intimately, but it could have been an illusion; they made you feel like you were in on the conversation, even if you had no idea what they were talking about, and they were given to strange gestures of confidentiality—leaning in close, clutching your forearm, only to disclose some little trifle: “I hear there may be bourbon tarts on the dessert menu!” Henry smiled and nodded; a few feet away, Effie was doing the same. The talk was hard to follow, names and places and references that eluded him but that sent sparks through his imagination: Gabby and Sophie and Anders; Marblehead, the Berkshires, Palermo; the Fourth of July party with the Great Dane; Lorenzo’s hyacinths; the place setting that caught fire. Clara weaved among them all, holding a gin bottle in one hand and the tonic in the other, their host but—as Henry imagined—more than that: their sorceress, the one who was setting them spinning.
Mrs. Pavich appeared in the archway again. “Mrs. Kirschbaum,” she said, drawing everyone’s attention. “The food is getting cold.”
But then the doorbell clanged and more guests arrived, and the merry band rushed to see who it was. Cheers and greetings rang from the foyer.
Henry and Effie were reunited. “Do you want to go?” he asked.
She couldn’t seem to settle her eyes on any one place. “I mean—we’re here. We might as well stay for supper.” She caught herself and looked at him. “Do you want to go?”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine staying. If you are.”
“I’m fine.”
“Then we’ll stay. A little while.”
“If that’s what you want to do.”
Their number had doubled. The newcomers were in two groups, as far as Henry could tell: one of them very fine, as if they had just arrived from Hollywood—two couples in light blazers and sparkling dresses that revealed a great deal of skin—and the other appeared to be beatniks—a bearded man in glasses, and three women who wore their hair long and had thick eyeliner. One of the women wore nothing more than a slip and heels. If she’d been out on the street in Signal Creek, she’d have been arrested.
Eventually they all gathered, in twos and threes, around a large table outside, in a covered section of the patio bordered by hedges and vines. A giant platter of what looked to be gumbo lay in the center. Around it, bowls of soup and sauce, plates of greens and olives and bread, and three carafes of red wine. It all looked vaguely foreign. There weren’t nearly enough places at the table, and people were dragging chairs in from the poolside or were content to stand, but no one would take Henry’s seat when he offered it—in fact, they laughed at him: “No, really! I’m fine! Stay, stay!”—and he had the feeling that he was acting too formally, too politely for this crowd. He was the only person wearing a tie; he took it off and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Clara sat across from him and commanded everyone to dig in, though she ignored her own plate. Beside her sat the boxer, who had still not put his shirt on. Henry’s mother would have had something to say about that. Likely Effie would have too, if she weren’t dazzled, as he was, by the drinks and the chatter and the motley party gathering around them. Everyone was talking at once. Here and there, peals of laughter. A woman reached over him, pressing her breast against his shoulder, and her skin grazed his cheek and the tip of his nose; he caught the scent of strawberries.
The sun was setting. A soft, golden light lingered in the treetops. On the table, votive candles flickered among the settings. Everyone looked beautiful.
He was more comfortable out here than he had been inside. The gathering dusk enveloped him, and all he had to do was eat and drink and listen, catching one thread of conversation over here, another over there. Scott sat at the head of the table, beside a pretty blonde who must have been his wife—the little cunt. Most of the talk was impenetrable to him, about people and places and events he had no connection or access to, but some of it excited him: talk of art and gallery openings, of bebop records and clubs in Harlem, of cases before the Supreme Court, which some of the crowd seemed to know intimately, of the integration of the schools—vis-à-vis the tensions in Little Rock—which everyone seemed to support without question. It was thrilling to think of what Uncle Carswall or his mother would have said to all this, how disgusted they would be with these people, and Henry found himself nodding eagerly about opinions he’d never spent much time thinking about one way or another. The gumbo was delicious, rice and potatoes and sausage, a good bit of spice in it too, and he was pretty sure there were cashews in it, if that was possible, and crunchy disks of some kind of root vegetable—he didn’t care, he was shoveling it in. He said this to Effie: “Boy, I’m just shoveling this in! It’s outstanding, isn’t it?” But she only gave him a generic nod, distracted by someone on the other side of her, and that was all right, he had finished his third gin and tonic and had poured himself some wine, and he was feeling thoroughly, pleasantly drunk. Effie was too, he could tell: she had become chatty. The woman she was talking to, who appeared to be Mexican or Arabian or maybe just Jewish, was continuing the conversation about the integration of the schools, soliciting Effie’s opinion as if she were an eyewitness in a war: “But do you see much trouble where you are?” she asked, and Effie said, “Oh, no, no, no, not one bit, really, that’s just stuff in the news—I mean it’s there, you know, it’s obviously an issue, you understand, but it’s not the day-to-day, or rather, we live the day-to-day, so it’s quite different…” It might have been the alcohol changing her, or affecting his own ears, but Effie’s voice didn’t sound like her own: she sounded faintly aristocratic, a little like Clara imitating Scarlett O’Hara. She described how close her family was to her cook’s family, how they exchanged gifts at Christmastime; she explained how her father was the mayor of the town where they lived (this impressed the woman very much), how he owned a farm-supply store too, and gave money to charity. It was strange to hear Effie talk about Signal Creek to someone who knew nothing about it, and for a moment he felt a powerful kinship to her, of a sort he would never have felt back home. When the woman, seeing Henry listening in, asked about his family, Effie spoke for him, calling Uncle Carswall’s property an “estate” and saying he had nearly a thousand acres of land. She wasn’t lying, exactly, but it gave the impression that he lived on a big antebellum plantation instead of the plain old ugly country outside of Signal Creek. He didn’t mind, though. He could play the part. “How lovely it must be!” the woman said, and Henry cleared his voice and said it was, it was indeed.
An elderly man in a sweater and blazer came out onto
the patio. He surveyed the crowd and, seeing Clara at the table, came over behind her and set his big veiny hands on her shoulders. To Henry’s shock, she said, “Richard, dear!” and reached up to squeeze his forearms.
The man couldn’t have been younger than sixty. He had a long, solemn face and unruly white eyebrows. He would have made a good schoolmaster. “I see the party is under way.”
“Sit, darling, sit,” Clara said. “How wonderful you’ve decided to join the living. Max, dear, would you mind?”
The boxer bowed and got up from the table with his plate, and Richard took his place and waited while Clara piled a heap of gumbo for him. Henry squeezed Effie’s knee under the table, to get her attention and point out what was happening, but she was too absorbed in her conversation to notice. If Clara was going to make introductions, she never got a chance, because another group of people came out onto the patio, and when she saw them she cried, “Helen Crabtree, you horrible bitch!” and bolted up from the table to give the woman in question a hug. Poor Richard was left to himself, but he didn’t seem to mind; his attention was directed at his plate, and steadily he made his way through the gumbo and a side of greens, pausing only once to pour himself an austere amount of wine.
Through the big windowpanes, now that the inside was brighter than the outside, Henry could see more people gathering in the den, big groups of them, laughing, sipping from martini glasses, smoking cigarettes. He saw the beatnik in the slip take her shoes off and hand them to a man who placed them into a potted plant. He saw a naked toddler run screaming from the archway. He saw an Oriental woman with a complicated bun and silvery eye shadow. He saw a man with circular sunglasses and a shaved head under a beret. Who were these people? Where had they come from? They had materialized out of the enveloping dark. Most of them seemed to be young, Scott’s or Clara’s ages, but there was a group of older men too, in tuxedos—family friends, maybe, or Richard’s friends, or people from Scott’s law firm, or professors at Princeton. Who could say? The record player had been turned up and something hopping, with horns and a drumbeat, was coming through the open French doors. For the past week he’d felt isolated from the world, and now the world was upon him, or some strange version of it.