Cape May

by Chip Cheek

  “See?” she said, letting go of him. “Stand still a couple more times and you’ll be buried to the ankles. You can’t trust the ground around here.”

  While they waited for another wave she told him there were patches of quicksand all over the beach. “You can see them clearly, don’t worry, they’re little pools. But look out for them. They’re old trenches or pipes under the sand, probably. I stepped in one a couple of days ago and fell to my waist. I had to claw my way out.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. But it just goes to show…”

  Another wave crashed and swept over them, and this time, pointlessly, Henry took hold of Alma’s arm—gripped it firmly, close to her wrist. She didn’t pull her arm away, though she had to hold it at an awkward angle. As the wave withdrew, he let her go. Silently now they waited for another one. It came, and when it receded, it was just as Alma had said: Henry’s feet were completely submerged in the sand, and hers were too, even farther, above the ankles.

  “Just imagine,” she said, pulling one foot and then the other free. “Just imagine all the things buried in here.”

  “A pirate’s treasure.”

  “The bones of a sea monster.”

  They made their way back to the others. Alma sat on the bare sand beside her brother, and Henry took a corner of Effie’s towel. She was curled up in a ball, her head resting on her knees, her arms hugging the back of the dress to her thighs. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open. Henry put his arm around her. “You look awful, baby,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Clara gave Henry a theatrical frown. “She’s really caught something, the poor thing. It’s come on her so suddenly.”

  “I can’t breathe out my nose,” Effie said.

  “Do you have a fever?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Effie said miserably. “I feel cold.”

  In fact she was shivering. Henry held her close.

  “You should get back in bed,” Max said. “We’ll layer you with quilts. I’ll make soup—I saw lentils in the pantry. And Clara’s got a pharmacy in her suitcase.”

  “I’ve got stuff that’ll knock you out for a week,” Clara agreed.

  Effie made a pathetic groan. She thanked them, but she just wanted to go back to the cottage and disappear. She felt disgusting.

  “Do you want to go back now?” Henry asked.

  “I guess so,” she said. “I’m sorry, Henry. You don’t have to come with me.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course I’m coming with you.”

  Alma was looking in Henry’s direction, behind her sunglasses, and she drew her bottom lip out in a pout.

  “Get better before tomorrow night,” Clara said as they got to their feet.

  Tomorrow night was the night of the dance.

  “I’ll be there if Henry has to carry me,” Effie said.

  * * *

  As soon as she peeled the dress off, with Henry’s help, and got into her pajamas, Effie fell onto the bed in the attic room and gave up moving. Henry drew the covers over her shoulders. He kissed her cheek and asked if he could bring her anything to eat—some toast, at least? She shook her head.

  “But you should eat something,” he persisted.

  “I just want to sleep,” she said, not opening her eyes.

  He smiled. “My little darling,” he said, and kissed her again.

  He picked Alma’s dress up off the floor and without thinking brought it to his nose and breathed in. It didn’t smell like Effie; it was a light, grassy scent. He draped it over the back of the vanity chair, ran his fingertips over the fabric, turned, and for a long moment looked at his wife. She seemed unbearably sweet to him there on the bed, her hair spread over the pillow, the gentle rise and fall of her back, and he thought that there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for her. A tide of selfless, gallant feeling rose in him. He wanted to squeeze her and kiss her again—but she needed her rest. He would leave her alone.

  Downstairs he made himself a sandwich and ate it on the back porch, watching the fallen leaves flutter in the backyard. In just a month, after he and Effie were gone, it would probably snow up here. He wished he could see it. He hadn’t seen snow in years.

  He wished he had a cigarette too. Next time he was out, he would buy himself a pack. It was time he took up smoking. He was a grown man.

  He hated to be away from the others—from Alma—but the immediate future was bright, and in the meantime, with Effie dead to the world, he had the whole world to himself, and the thought tickled his stomach until, at last, something turned over inside of him, and he hurried inside, into the downstairs lavatory, where a week and a half of constipation came to an end.

  The relief was exquisite. He felt light enough to fly. He bounded up to the second-floor bathroom like a gazelle and, in the twilight gloom of the stall, took a shower, whistling “Higher Ground” while he scrubbed himself. He tiptoed into the attic room for fresh clothes and found Effie exactly as she had been before.

  “I’m going for a walk, baby,” he said sweetly, but she didn’t respond. He kissed her cheek again.

  Fed, cleansed, healthy, young, and handsome, Henry strolled down New Hampshire Avenue, and at Philadelphia turned toward the beach. Small gray-bottom clouds raced across the sky, and the noon sunlight was always changing. He was a wanderer. Homeless—for the time being. Like Alma. He might run into her. Maybe Max and Clara had left, and she’d lingered at the beach—and then what? Nothing. Anything. He was at the top of a hill, where he could see his past, present, and all of his futures, and every future was real, because he had not chosen any one. He would have to choose at some point, he knew, but for now they were all arrayed before him, so present he almost felt he could touch them.

  The beach was empty. He was wearing his trousers and loafers and didn’t want to get them sandy or wet, so he sat for a while on a bench on the promenade, until he felt self-conscious sitting there by himself. He started for the grocer’s, thinking of cigarettes, then decided it was too far for that purpose, thought of Effie in bed, worried that he’d abandoned her, and headed back to the cottage.

  * * *

  She had turned over on her back but there was still no waking her. Her mouth hung open, her breathing was wet and ugly. She would need to eat. At five, he told himself, he would force her to sit up and take something.

  The afternoon began to drag. Every so often he tried the lights. Alma had been right: no one would notice until the spring.

  He tried to read Boswell, but his thoughts wandered to the wedge in Alma’s bathing suit, to her hand on his arm, to the way she’d pouted at him when he’d said goodbye. He went back into the downstairs lavatory, dropped his trousers, knelt at the toilet bowl, and finished what he’d started last night, before Alma had walked in on him—thinking first of Effie, out of loyalty, and then, giving in, of Alma, Alma pulling him aside somewhere lush and green, peeling her bathing suit off, and the orgasm seized him before he could quite picture her naked to his satisfaction, and a shot of semen struck the back of the bowl—and remained there after he flushed. He was impressed. With a wad of toilet paper he wiped it off, looked for any stray spots on the rim or toilet seat, and flushed again.

  Afterward, lounging in the den and eating the last of the strawberries, he felt debauched and wasted. He lay back and tried to nap, but he was wide-awake.

  * * *

  Periodically he went up to the attic room to check on Effie. The room felt close and warm and smelled sweet, so he knelt and opened the windows, and Effie murmured her thanks. He got her to take some aspirin with water. Later, for supper, he warmed up a bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and brought it up to her, along with the last of the bread. He got her to sit up, added a pillow behind her. The wind had calmed; evening was coming on. He’d found a kerosene lamp in a closet downstairs. She took a bite of the bread. She sipped spoonfuls of the broth. She was shivering, her face was mottled and swollen, her eyes
were slits, and her voice was high and airy.

  “I’ve been having these vivid dreams,” she said. “Everything’s amber. The sky’s this dirty orange color.”

  “What are the dreams about?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing that makes any sense. There was one where me and Bernice DuPont were walking over this bridge, over this muddy river. And at the end of it these big men—like ten feet tall—were hanging around in rags, basically naked, and they were dirty, kind of copper, and the weird thing, they were missing some of their limbs, and they were looking at us like—I don’t know. Like they wanted to eat us.”

  She handed the bowl of soup back to him. She was shivering more violently now—her pajamas were damp—and she lay back down and Henry pulled the covers back up to her chin. “I wonder if I should try to find a doctor,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s just a fever.”

  “It’s a bad fever.”

  “It’ll burn itself out.”

  He ran his hands through her hair. She told him not to stop, and he said he would sit there for as long as she wanted him to.

  * * *

  After he’d made another bowl of soup for his own supper, and ate the bread Effie hadn’t eaten, he alternated between the den and the front porch, reading, sipping Uncle George’s whiskey, wishing the others would at least stop by to check in on them. Why hadn’t they already? Wouldn’t they wonder how Effie was faring? Wouldn’t they figure Henry was feeling listless and bored, and invite him over for a game of charades? Not that he would accept, no—he would decline, magnanimously. But still, it seemed a waste of good health and youth to spend an entire evening alone. Out on the porch, he couldn’t see any lights down at Clara’s. Had they gone out? Where would they have gone?

  He tried Boswell again, reading in the den by the light of the kerosene lamp. He had to hold the book just so to see the page. The whiskey was calming him, wrapping him in a bubble that was safe from all bad feelings. Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men’s virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles.

  The words turned abstract. He drifted off. He was outside in the night and the stars and planets and galaxies, giant and bursting with color, were low enough in the sky that he could have touched them from the rooftops. And then a clatter startled him, and the book fell to the floor.

  It was Alma. She was standing in the foyer, holding the screen door open.

  “I woke you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He muttered a greeting, confused, and gathered the quilt around him.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I always seem to be walking in on you.” She let the screen door slap shut behind her and stepped into the den, giving it a quick survey. “I saw the light in the window and thought”—she smiled sweetly—“I thought my fellow night owl must still be up.”

  “I was,” he said. “I just nodded off.” He looked at the clock over the mantel. It was after midnight.

  Without asking if he wanted company, she sat down in the wicker chair by the sofa and smiled at him. She was barefoot, wearing her brown dress with the white polka dots, over it her old cardigan. But she’d put lipstick on, and he could smell her perfume, a stronger version of the grassy scent he’d made out earlier, in the fabric of her dress. “Your hair’s sticking straight up,” she said, and Henry felt for it and tried to press it down. She laughed. “Don’t bother, it’s no use.”

  It was dawning on him that she was there. That she had come to see him. “How’s your day been?” he asked.

  The question seemed to amuse her. “Dull,” she said. She asked how Effie was feeling, and he told her, in too much detail, about the course of her fever, what she’d been able to eat—and then he cut himself short, and concluded that she would be fine. “That’s good to hear,” Alma said.

  “Are you out wandering?”

  “I was heading over to that house, actually,” she said. “The big one we visited the other night?”

  “The Bishops’ house,” he said. The image of her in her ruby-red flapper’s wig came vividly to mind.

  “I need to pick out a dress. For tomorrow. Plus, there’s so much more to explore. Do you want to come?”

  For a moment he didn’t understand that she’d asked him a question. And when he did, it startled him. “With you? Right now?”

  “No, next week,” she said. “Yes, right now. You could help me find a dress.”

  He looked toward the front door, which she’d left open. “What are Max and Clara doing?”

  “Who cares?”

  He was alert now. He didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s all right if you don’t want to,” she said. She drew the cardigan tightly around herself and looked at her long toes, which, when she stretched her legs out, could just grip the glass top of the coffee table.

  “No—I want to,” he said.

  “Okay, good,” she said.

  “But,” he said, and gestured toward the ceiling.

  “She needs her sleep,” she said. “The best thing you can do for her? Leave her alone. You might as well come out.”

  She smiled mischievously at him, and he returned it. He was shivering. The room, with the door and all the windows still open, was chilly. What would happen if he went with her? She would model dresses for him in one of the upstairs rooms of the big Victorian house, in the middle of a labyrinth, where no one could see them or hear them. She would ask him to zip her up, and his knuckles would brush the smooth skin between her shoulder blades. But he couldn’t do it. If Effie awoke, and found him gone … “I can’t,” he said. “I’d feel guilty leaving her.”

  “You’re a gentleman and a scholar,” she said, and leaned back in the chair and patted the armrests. He wished she wouldn’t give up. If she asked him one more time, he’d say yes—Yes, to hell with it, let’s go—but now she was looking at the book splayed open at his feet. She reached her foot out, pinched the edge of the cover between her toes, and pulling it toward her, said, “What is this mighty tome?”

  “It’s The Life of Samuel Johnson,” he said. It took on pretensions when he said it out loud. Why would he be reading such a book? “Uncle Carswall gave it to me. You know. It’s hard going.”

  She picked it up and flipped through it, back to front, and imitating a man’s voice, with a stuffy, aristocratic air, repeated, “Dear sir … Dear sir … Dear sir,” and returning to her normal voice, “Oh, here’s a poem.” She scanned the page but must have found it uninteresting, because she flipped some more pages, and stopped on another. “Oh. Here’s some advice for Sundays. Rise early, and—and in order to it, go to sleep early on Saturday.” She laughed. “Examine the tenor of my life … Go to church twice … Instruct my family…”

  “It was a wedding present,” Henry said. “How to be a good man, or something.”

  She closed the book and hefted it in her hands. “You have so much to learn, obviously.” She smiled at him, set it down on the coffee table, and stood up. Henry stood up too. He felt as if he’d failed her, as if he’d proven himself unworthy of her, or ridiculous.

  “I wish I could go out with you,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “You can.”

  But he only smiled. He took up the kerosene lamp and followed her to the door, held the screen door open for her, and watched as she slipped on her deck shoes, which she’d left on the porch. Beyond her the darkness was absolute. It was hard to believe there’d be a dance in town the following night. She said, “Okay,” and slapped her thighs. It meant: last chance. And when he only nodded, she said, “Well, good night,” and he said, “Good night,” and then, “Good luck finding a dress,” and she laughed at that, and turned to leave.

  Eight

  The dress she’d chosen was silvery and long, with thin shoulder straps and straight lines, and t
he fabric was as light as a slip and had a sheen to it. She came slowly down the staircase, trailing her hand along the banister, and though she never looked at Henry, he was certain that she’d been waiting for him to arrive, that this entrance had been for his benefit. Her hair was pinned up, little tendrils falling from her temples, her makeup was light and glossy, and she wore sheer stockings and silver heels. He’d never seen anyone more beautiful.

  “Aren’t you a pretty thing?” Effie said, dabbing at her nose with a tissue. Her fever had broken, and though she was still weak, she’d been determined not to miss the dance. Henry had said little to dissuade her.

  “You’re a pretty thing too,” Alma said.

  They were all pretty, after so many days in swimsuits, wrinkled linens, bathrobes, and bare feet. Effie wore the forest-green dress she’d worn at their senior prom. Henry wore his wedding suit. Max wore a white tuxedo with black lapels—because why not, because it was the only formal thing he’d brought with him from New York, because it had been in his trunk, by happenstance, from some wedding or other—and Clara wore her white halter top from last week, spiced up with a silver choker and extra flourishes in her makeup and hair. In the foyer they’d said, “Look at you!” “And you!” “But you clean up well, don’t you?”

  They ate out at the patio table in the dusk, by the light of votive candles. The power was still out. Max had whipped up a simple pasta Bolognese with a canned ragout. Alma sat beside him. She seemed cheerful, in her way. Henry thought she might at least have smiled at him, gestured to her dress, let him smile back and nod his approval, but she barely acknowledged his existence. Maybe she’d lost interest in him when he’d refused to go out with her. Or maybe she was toying with him.

  But the promise of the night, and of the days to come, cheered him, and set his nerves humming. He and Effie had decided to stay—maybe until the next weekend, though they’d play it by ear. He knew his family wouldn’t like it, that Carswall would want him back at the farm, but he was a grown man, and he could do what he wanted. They’d call their families tomorrow, and move their things over to Clara’s on Sunday.