by Chip Cheek
He stopped, and let go of her hand. “He did?”
“You’re surprised? Alma was in pieces, you know. I don’t know what you did to her, darling, but she was inconsolable.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“Believe what you want. I’m only telling you what happened.”
They walked on. He didn’t know what to think about anything.
“Anyway, he wanted to beat you to death, but Alma begged him to leave it alone, for what it’s worth. She said you were in the doghouse already.”
“She made sure of that,” he said.
“She said she just wanted to leave, and Max said yes, it was about time they went away—and so they’re gone. Just like that: gone, gone. Like always, everything comes to exactly nothing.”
They came out of a bend in the street and the sea loomed ahead, sparkling, electric blue. The sight of it pained him. He wished he and Effie had gone, like Effie had wanted to in the beginning, before they’d ever met any of these people.
“I suppose we’ve both been abandoned,” Clara said.
“I’m sorry if I ruined things for you too.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I was getting bored.”
She amazed him. “Do you care about anything?” he asked, and she laughed and asked what that was supposed to mean. “I just mean, nothing seems to bother you.”
“Oh, Henry, sweetheart,” she said. “That’s all a ruse.”
They turned onto New Hampshire Avenue and stopped in front of her house. From her pocketbook she withdrew a card with her address on it—Manhattan, East Seventy-fourth Street—and handed it to him.
“Please write,” she said. “I love long letters. I like to read them on Sundays in the bath. And if you’re ever in New York, you’ll come visit?”
He said he would. They said their goodbyes, and she kissed him on the lips, and licked the tip of his nose.
* * *
Effie wasn’t at the house. The door stood open, just as he’d left it last night, and the lamp on the end table was still shining.
He showered. He packed his suitcase and made up the bed in the yellow bedroom. Effie had taken everything but a few dresses and some of her underclothes, but they were enough, he thought, to bring her back. She wasn’t careless. She’d never leave things behind. He put her things in her suitcase and carried it down to the den and set it beside his. And waited. The shadows grew long. A car horn beeped outside and he looked out the window to see a taxicab waiting at Clara’s. A few minutes later, it passed by on the street.
Then it was dusk. The windows were open, and the den was cold. He lay back on the sofa and pulled the quilt over him. He waited, and night fell. The lamp lit the room. The wind billowed the curtains in and sucked them back against the screens. He could hear the waves. Which meant they must be big. He knew their power now. He thought of Alma in the sea under the moon. She’d been inconsolable, Clara had said.
* * *
He fell asleep at last, and when he woke, Effie was sitting on the coffee table beside him, smoking a cigarette and observing him. At first he couldn’t be sure she was real. She didn’t move when he opened his eyes, and she didn’t say a word.
He sat up and pulled the quilt aside. “Effie. Baby.”
“You look so peaceful when you’re sleeping,” she said. “Did you know that? You look like a little angel.” He went to put his arms around her, but she held up her hand and said, “Don’t touch me.” She got to her feet and moved to the other side of the coffee table.
“Baby,” he said. “You came back.”
She said nothing.
“I’ve been a wreck,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had. Baby—I missed you so much. I’ve been dying. Where have you been?”
She had not changed her clothes. Her eye shadow had faded and there was a haunted look on her face. He wondered if she’d slept at all. “I’ve been sitting here looking at you,” she said. “I’ve been trying to decide if I can stomach you.”
He got unsteadily to his feet, but she told him to sit down. She took a last drag from her cigarette, dropped it into a glass of water, and picked up a pack of Winstons and a silver lighter he didn’t recognize.
“How long has it been going on?” she said, drawing another cigarette out.
“Baby, please…”
“How long, Henry?”
He put his head in his hands. “A few days,” he said. He looked up to see the effect this had on her, but her face betrayed nothing. She lit the cigarette and blew out a thick stream of smoke. “It meant nothing, baby. I swear to Christ. Absolutely nothing.”
“She’s pretty,” she said. “Anyone can see that. She’s a good artist too. Is that what you want? A pretty little artist?”
“Baby, please—please listen to me.”
“Do you want someone like her? Am I not enough for you, Henry?”
He stood up again. “You’re everything to me. The only thing I want is you. I love you, baby—I love you so much.”
She laughed, a hollow laugh, and pressed her palm to her forehead. “Great,” she said. “Thank you. You love me. You sound like a love song.”
“I don’t know how else to say it.”
She took a drag from her cigarette and stared at him for a moment. “I feel so stupid, Henry. That’s the thing: how fucking stupid I feel. It was right under my nose all the time, wasn’t it? All those times I reached for you and you weren’t there. Your fucking insomnia.” All this she delivered in a calm voice, with a smile. It left him speechless. “You’re a monster, Henry. You’re a hypocrite. You made me feel ashamed of myself, but all the time…”
“Effie, baby, I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“I don’t want an explanation. I know what you are now. What I need to know is can I live with it. Are you worth the trouble?” She glared at him, and seemed really to want an answer. “What do I gain with you, Henry?”
He held his hands out to her. “Baby, I’m worth it. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll be devoted to you, only to you, for the rest of my life.”
“What good is that?” she said. “Any man could be devoted to me. I have everything to offer. I don’t need you to tell me that. The question is—what do I get with you?”
His mouth hung open. It seemed impossible to answer. “Baby. You have my love. My loyalty—from this day forward, baby, I swear. You have…”
“One thousand acres,” she said. “That’s the only sure thing I can think of. One thousand acres of land—that’ll be ours someday. With that, and Daddy’s business, we’ll have a fortune. We’ll be secure, for our children. Everything else is bullshit.”
For a moment he was speechless again. He only wanted to hold her. “Does this mean you’ll stay?”
Fifteen
They would stay a few more days in Cape May. Until Effie made up her mind. Before they went home, she said, she wanted things to be settled, one way or another. If Uncle George came, so be it: they’d move to a hotel, or they’d go home. She put the sheets back on the bed in the attic room, but she didn’t want him to share it with her. It wasn’t a punishment, she said, it was only that the thought of him touching her made her sick to her stomach. He took the room with the rose-patterned wallpaper, where they’d made love the first time.
He woke late on Sunday and she was gone, but soon she returned, in a nice blue dress and overcoat and white stockings, carrying a bag of groceries. She’d gone to church. She’d bought a few things for supper. She’d called her parents, and suggested he do the same. As soon as she’d unpacked the groceries, she changed into a sundress and sweater and went out again.
That evening, after a quiet supper of chicken and rice, she went to bed early, and Henry stayed up drinking gin, from the new bottle they’d bought before moving over to Clara’s. He got drunk and talked out loud to himself. A grand confession, a vow for the future. There would forever be a shadow over their marriage, he admitted to himself
, but maybe all of this would enrich it somehow. It was a trial, which over time would deepen their love. He repeated this point over and over again, as if Effie were sitting in the empty wicker chair beside him.
She went on long walks by herself. She’d go out with barely a word—“I’ll be back in a little bit, Henry”—and he’d sit around the house, feeling anxious, until he decided to go for a walk himself. He’d wander the town, hoping to run into her. He’d sit on the cold beach and watch the waves. At dusk he’d make his way back to the cottage, hoping Effie would be there—that he would see, with satisfaction, an edge of anxiety on her face as she asked him where he’d been. But she’d either still be out, or she’d be in the kitchen making supper already. When he said hello, she gave him a feeble smile, and that was all.
All this time he felt an acid chill in his stomach, and as he wandered the town, he recited arguments to himself. He was a man, wasn’t he? What did Effie expect? If she thought he was the first husband to cheat on his wife, she was a fool. In fact it was likely that every husband cheated on his wife at some time or another—it might be argued that such a devotion to one person was not, in fact, what nature had intended, for either men or women, but especially for men, who, from the dawn of time, had been used to wandering. In every man’s heart, from the town drunk’s to the mayor’s, even in the reverend’s heart, there was the memory of an affair—he would bet on it. The abandonment of reason to desire. Vividly, intensely carnal: the thoughts would rise up and take over. There was no stopping them.
She’d been spoiled, that was the problem. She was a little princess, doted on by her father, made to believe in fairy tales.
But that wasn’t fair, he thought the next moment. She wasn’t at fault. He was the monster. He’d broken her heart, and he deserved whatever she gave him.
Or neither of them had been at fault—that was more true, maybe. It was Clara, Max, and Alma, who had swept them up into their drama and confused them. It had nothing to do with their love for each other. They had temporarily lost their minds, but soon they would go back to normal again.
Tuesday afternoon the sky was dark, the clouds a featureless steel gray, and the wind was so strong and cold that Effie, relenting at last, closed the windows. To Henry’s surprise, she asked if he wanted to go with her to see the waves.
The tide was high and the ocean, as far as they could see, was roiling violently. It was the kind of sea that foundered ships. They sat on a bench, their hands buried into the pockets of their coats. Only a few days ago he and Alma had leapt into the same sea. The elements were ever changing, time rolled on, it would be winter soon and then, later, it would be warm again.
“I think I’m pregnant already,” Effie said.
He wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “I mean, I think so. I should’ve had my period last week.”
“Your period,” he repeated stupidly. He understood next to nothing about this. It involved blood, and was governed, like tides and werewolves, by the moon.
“I could be wrong,” she said. “It could be the change in climate, or my schedule. Or all the drinking. I don’t know. But I’m usually so regular.”
She looked at him, tentative, pulling a lock of hair behind her ear, and it began to dawn on him what she was saying. “Effie,” he said, sitting up straighter. He put his arm around her shoulder, and placed his hand on her stomach. “Do you really think so?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said. “I wanted to see the doctor first. But it’s been on my mind. It might be nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” he said. “I can feel it.” He kissed her head and drew her to him, and she let him. They were going to have a baby. She belonged to him. Nothing else mattered. Her shoulders began to tremble, and she put her hand over her mouth and cried.
After supper that evening, he asked if he could come to bed with her. Just to sleep beside her, nothing more. Her tone, when she replied, was not angry or resentful, only tired. “I just want to be alone tonight,” she said.
But sometime in the night, he woke to her weight on the bed. She got in under the rose-patterned duvet, and he opened his arms to her. She was in her slip. She laid her head on his chest, her bare leg over his thighs. He said nothing. Questioned nothing. He held her. Lifted her slip to feel her skin. Felt the expectation in her muscles. He tugged her underwear off her hips, and she helped him, and quietly, they made love.
“Tomorrow,” she whispered afterward. “Let’s go home.”
Yes, he said. And then: “I love you, Effie.”
“I know you do,” she said.
In the morning the frost was so thick on the small lawn out front and on the rooftops of the houses that he mistook it at first for snow. He could see his breath on the air. Cheerfully, humming “Chances Are,” he made coffee, but he reined the cheer in when Effie came down from her bath. If they wanted to catch the ten o’clock to Philadelphia, she said, they had to be out the door in two hours. They could walk to the station, but she would appreciate it if he’d run down to the Western Union office and call them a taxicab, and then they wouldn’t have to carry their suitcases. He would do it, he said.
An hour and a half later the taxicab arrived outside, and on the short drive to the station Effie crossed her arms over her chest and stared out the window. She seemed veiled in darkness. He didn’t yet know that this had nothing to do with him, that traveling, which for him was always hopeful, was for her always sad. She could never say why. She’d feel better when they arrived.
Sixteen
By noon the following day they were home, and on Monday Dr. Reeves confirmed what Effie had suspected, that she was pregnant, and in July of the next year their daughter Kate was born. Henry was relieved by how much she favored him. Joyce came in August of the following year, and in the next year came Anne, and several years later, they had a son, finally, Brian, who died with a fever when he was ten days old.
Until then they had been happy. After Joyce they’d moved into the main part of the house, and Henry’s mother and Uncle Carswall had moved into the Old Wing. (Henry’s sister had moved out and gone to secretarial school in Atlanta.) The doors and windows stood open, and in Henry’s memory, their two dogs, Rex and Colonel, were always making laps from the back door to the front, around the yard and back again, and their three girls were screaming and chasing after them, and often on a Saturday morning he and Effie lingered in bed together, the door latched, until some crisis involving the girls drew them out. By then Henry’s mother would have finished making breakfast, which Effie, though she never said anything, always took as a reproach. From the beginning they disliked each other but, being good Southern women, they kept this to themselves, and anyway Effie was often out of the house on errands. In those days Henry was protective of her, and jealous of the attentions of other men.
After Brian, she fell into a depression that lasted the better part of three years. She spent a month at her parents’ house, in her old room, and refused to see Henry. Without consulting him first, she had her tubes tied, so she could never have children again. When she came home she began to clean constantly, and the house always smelled of bleach and Lysol. And cigarette smoke, because she’d taken up smoking for good. She drank every night until she was drunk, and sometimes she never came to bed. She fought with Henry’s mother, who called her a mean-spirited and neglectful woman, and after one particularly nasty fight, Effie, on her own, moved a heavy sideboard against the door connecting the Old Wing to the main part of the house, and for good measure, she nailed the door shut. It remained shut for twelve years, until Henry’s mother died.
Henry worked a signal freight to Brunswick, Georgia, three runs a week, where he’d stay the night in a boardinghouse, and he had an affair with the young widow who ran it. He would believe, later, that the change in Effie had made him stray, but in fact the affair had started while she was pregnant with Brian and things were bright. Her name was Rose.
She had red hair and freckles, like Ida June, and she was ten years older than he was. One of her legs was slightly shorter than the other, and she had to wear a special shoe on that foot, with an elevated sole. He’d come into Brunswick after midnight and she’d run a bath for him, and in the morning she’d fix breakfast for him and the three other boarders, including J. P., another brakeman on the signal freight, who had become Henry’s best friend, and who kept the secret. But after a year, Henry was bumped up onto a better run, up to Atlanta, and he never saw Rose again.
Effie, he told friends, had left him for Signal Creek United Methodist Church. He meant it fondly, because it coincided with happier times. She joined and eventually led the church’s finance committee. When part of the church caught fire, she formed the booster club to raise money for repairs. She had a reputation for toughness. She got along better with men than with women. One woman, Vivian, another member of the finance committee—whom Henry would kiss, years later, at the end of a party, when they were both drunk—said to him, “I love her, Henry, I really do, but you are an angel to put up with that broad every day of your life.”
In the summer of 1971 a revival minister came to town, a young man named Charlie Morrell, and for a week every girl in Signal Creek—especially Kate, who had just turned thirteen—lost their minds over him. He was in his twenties still, handsome and gently passionate, charismatic under the hot, bright tent set up on the town green. Reverend Lyle (Reverend Miller had retired) had invited Mr. Morrell to town, but it was Effie who stepped in as the church’s main emissary, and helped the young minister organize the revival.
She was thirty-two that year, and still pretty—she would be pretty all her life—but four children and a Southern diet had made her fat, and Henry no longer feared that she would attract another man’s attention. In this, as with so much else, he was naïve. Charlie Morrell left town after the revival, but a few months later he was back, staying with Reverend Lyle’s family for a few weeks—on what business, Henry didn’t know—and when Henry went off on his overnight runs up to Atlanta, Effie would see him. Henry never knew what they did together, but she was rarely at home, Kate said, and would often come back late, after the children had gone to bed, and Vivian had seen the two of them walking together around the Indian Mounds. When Henry said to Effie, as casually as he could, that he’d heard she was spending a lot of time with that revival boy, Effie said yes, he was a dear young man. And when Henry asked outright, “Is there something going on between you two?” she glared at him and said, “You of all people don’t get to ask me that.”