by Doug Burgess
“He’s probably finishing his dinner. I made boiled lobster, his favorite…” She repeated the whole thing like a record. In the meantime, I was looking around, peering behind doors, waiting for him to pop out like a jack-in-the-box. The living room was empty, the hallway dark. The dining room table was set for two, with good bone china imported from England and two brass candlesticks, still lit. The lobster tray was shaped like a lobster itself, with a goopy smile painted on that welcomed you to feast on his brothers. It was empty.
Then Irene screamed.
We found Teddy in the kitchen. He lay on his back, one arm flung toward the door, the other palm-upward at his side, as if he were semaphoring. He was dressed in a singlet and gray trousers with midnight-blue suspenders that Emma had given him for Christmas last year. His shirt was as wet as Emma’s, and his face was bright red, like he’d just been told a dirty joke. There was a pool of blood under his head and a dark red smear on the green Formica table next to him. And those lobsters! They lay on either side, arms splayed out like his, just as red as he was. I remember thinking that was oddly funny: three corpses laid out on the linoleum.
“Emma,” I said slowly, as calm as I could. “You’d better tell us what happened.”
She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking down at her fiance’s body like it was a particularly stubborn carpet stain. And in that same detached voice she answered, “I was making lobsters. They are Teddy’s favorite. He likes them with mayonnaise sauce. I didn’t hear him come in from work; I was at the stove with my back turned to the door. Teddy wanted to surprise me. He came up behind me and grabbed my shoulders just as I was taking the pot off the burner. I jumped. The water went all over both of us. Teddy stumbled back and slipped on the wet floor. He hit his head. Is he…is he dead?”
“Don’t worry about that now,” Maggie said. She was very pale.
Irene wrapped her arm around Emma’s shoulders. “You poor dear,” she murmured. “You just go into the living room and sit down on the sofa. Connie, Mags, and me will take care of everything. Come on, now.” Irene led Emma like a child into the other room and plopped her down. Then she came back to me and said under her breath, “What do you both think?”
“It’s a pretty convincing story,” I whispered back, “but it doesn’t explain the broken vase or the overturned lamp in the living room.”
“Or the bruise,” Maggie added.
Irene put her hands on her hips. “We can fix some of that. Would anybody believe the rest?”
I considered this. “Depends on how much they find out about Teddy’s little hobbies.”
Maggie sighed. “I don’t think we can take that chance.”
“The important thing,” I told them both, “is to make sure she has a good story and keeps to it—”
“Teddy was having an affair.”
All three of us jumped. Emma was standing in the doorway. Her eyes looked feverish. “I got a letter in the mail today. It wasn’t meant for me. It was from Teddy, to some floozy he’s been keeping on the side. I read it. A goodbye letter because he’s getting shipped out.” Her voice was unspeakably bitter. “He lied to me. He was cheating on me the entire time.”
There was a long pause. “Yes, dear,” Irene told her sadly, “we know.”
“I made him lobsters,” Emma said once again. “I didn’t know what else to do. They are—were—his favorite. I figured—I dunno what I figured. Win him back? I don’t know. But they were still on the stove when he got home. Teddy came in and took off his jacket and shirt and stood there grinning at me in his undershirt. I showed him the letter. I wasn’t going to, but I did. And he… Oh, it’s horrible! He laughed at me. Called me a fool and a bitch, and said if I wasn’t so damn frigid he wouldn’t need to go whoring around. I came at him; he pushed me back. The lamp fell over, and one of the green jade vases broke. I went into the kitchen. He was just behind me, still laughing. And that’s when…”
“Don’t say any more,” Maggie said, her voice shaking.
“I threw the water at him. I don’t think I meant to kill him. I don’t know. But he hit his head and now he’s dead.” She hiccupped, tittered at the accidental rhyme. “I’m not sorry. Not even a little sorry. Everything was a lie.”
Well, that tore it. All that anger—there was no way she could hold up to police questioning. Self-defense? Spousal abuse? Fuck that, it was 1966. The police chief in those days was Barry Haddam, and he used to slap his wife around so bad she wore a gardening hat to church every Sunday just to hide the bruises. Can you imagine explaining all this to him? The essential thing was to spare Emma, to make the whole thing disappear. Then maybe, just maybe, she’d keep her head. I think your grandma, Irene, and I all thought the same thing at once. We exchanged a glance, just one, and knew what we had to do.
I went over and took Emma shoulders in my hands. “Listen to me,” I told her fiercely. “Teddy is not dead. Do you understand that? He is still alive, and he’s going to Vietnam tomorrow. You made him lobsters as a farewell dinner. He ate them and enjoyed them very much. Are you hearing me?”
Her eyes were huge. “Yes,” she said simply.
“We will take care of this. All of it. You don’t have to worry about a thing. But you must remember that Teddy is still alive and going to Vietnam. Can you remember that?”
“Yes,” she repeated.
Maggie sat with her on the couch while Irene and I got busy. We dragged Teddy’s body through the back door and laid it out in Irene’s pickup. It was brand new then: a sky-blue Dodge with whitewall tires and tweed tartan seats, very smart. Oh, she was mad to have that thing bleeding all over her truck bed! We wrapped him in a tarp so he wouldn’t stain the wood. Then we came back into the house and started cleaning, all three of us. Emma just sat on the couch and stared. After a while she said, “It’s awfully nice of you to help out for the party tomorrow. I’m sure I don’t deserve it.” That was creepy, all right.
It took us about an hour to get everything back the way it was. I mopped up the blood and water; Irene cleaned out the pot and took the lobsters out with the rest of the trash. Couldn’t do anything about the broken vase, but who’d miss it? It was your grandma that had the final inspiration. Just as we were on the way out the door, she cried, “The letter! Emma, do you still have it?”
She pulled it right out of her pocket. “Don’t you know it was crazy to keep it?” I told her, rather sharply. Emma just shrugged. Maggie took the letter from her and we left her there, sitting on her sofa.
It was after midnight now, which was a blessing since there was no one else on the road. Irene drove carefully, just below the speed limit, peering out into the darkness to make sure there wasn’t a Statie waiting behind every bush. Of course, there wasn’t. But even I was jumpy that night. There’s a sharp curve at John Sisson Road, and as we took it, I heard the body roll and thump against the side. That gave me a nasty turn, I can tell you.
Finally, we reached Quicksand Pond. It’s not really quicksand, but a long shelf of marsh that drops off into a deepish bit of water. Plover and tern nest along the banks. Nobody goes out there, and nowadays nobody can. It’s protected. It wasn’t so back then, but it was still a desolate spot. The deep bit was known as “The Gut.” That’s where we drove that night, with mud sloshing up to the radiator grill and flying out in two giant fans on either side. We had to switch off the headlights, couldn’t risk them being seen. Everything was black, and we could feel the other’s body shivering as we sat together in the cab, staring out at nothing. Birds screeched and flew up as we passed, and the reeds made a hell of a racket slapping against the truck. Finally they began to thin out, and I could just barely see the flat, black sheen of water ahead. That was The Gut. Irene put on the brakes. Nobody said anything. We all got out—me, Irene, Maggie—and waded around to the back of the Dodge. I climbed up and pushed Teddy to the tailgate. Irene took his feet, and Maggi
e grabbed him under the armpits. I got down and helped. Together we carried him a bit deeper, then dropped him into the water. I don’t know what we thought would happen. The body bobbed on its stomach for a bit, then floated right back toward us. We tried again, pushing him into the water, but he shot right up again like a cork. “This isn’t going to work,” I said.
“We need something to weigh him down,” Maggie answered.
Well sure, we should have thought of that before. But let me tell you it’s not so easy when you are actually living through something like this. I thought maybe we could put rocks in his pockets, like Virginia Woolf, but all he wore were those trousers and they wouldn’t hold much. Irene remembered she had a spare battery behind the seat, and in the end, we tied the battery to his chest with jumper cables and turned him loose again. He sank right enough that time.
That should have been the end of it, but we still had to make our way out of the marsh. In darkness, don’t forget. It felt like forever, dodging and twisting around the reeds, feeling the whump of something unknown passing under the wheels. We were all the way back on Pottersville Road before Irene dared to turn on the headlights. Poor Irene. She parked the Dodge behind her house so nobody’d see it all covered with mud. But she needn’t have bothered. I came over the next morning and saw for myself: big dents in the door and fenders, rocks as big as baseballs lodged in the wheel wells, the grill all chapped and broken like snarling teeth. We washed it off, of course, but that only made it look worse. She had to tell everyone she’d lost control of the wheel and driven it into Wilbour Woods. Irene hated that lie, for she was a very good driver.
All that was left was to tackle Emma, and we did that first thing in the morning. She greeted us same as always, put a pot of coffee on, offered us rolls. It was eerie. We sat around the same Formica table. In a few short sentences, I explained what had become of Teddy and what she had to say. Teddy was leaving for Vietnam today. He had asked us to cancel the farewell party, as he didn’t want to make a fuss. We would all be seeing him off at the ferry later. And then, after a few months, Emma would receive a letter informing her that Teddy had been tragically killed. Whatever grief she might be feeling, she could release then. But not before, not now. Did she understand? Emma answered me matter-of-factly. There was no trace of anguish in her voice, or anger, or anything. Just said she understood perfectly and thanked us for everything we had done. “I’m sorry to put you to all the bother,” she said. She offered us more coffee.
The letters were my idea. There was no family to worry about: both his parents were dead. But there was still the rest of the town. So first we all drove to the pier in Fall River and waved goodbye to the New York ferry, just as if Teddy were on it. Then a few weeks later I went up to Providence and sent Emma an envelope stuffed with blank paper and Teddy’s name on it with a return address in Biloxi. Aunt Irene left that month for Paris on the Ile de France; she posted a letter from overseas with that fancy candy stripe around the edge. We couldn’t do anything about the handwriting on the envelopes, but how closely does a postman look at handwriting? I just put everything in block print and told Irene to do the same.
We only meant to do it for a few weeks, before Teddy had his “accident.” Then something really weird happened. One afternoon Emma showed up at your grandma’s house, chipper as all get-out. I thought, Good, she’s finally coming round. But then she pulls this letter out of her purse and says, “You won’t believe the funny things happening to Teddy!” And would you believe it, she rattles on about Teddy in basic training, Teddy on the ferry to Busan, Teddy working for some General Whatsits. It was the damndest thing I’ve ever heard. The glass dropped right out of my hands. Your grandma just kept staring with her mouth open. And Irene, poor sweet Irene, says right away, “Oh, that’s lovely, Emma! How he must miss you!”
So that’s how it was. I can’t really explain it, except to say it was like the pearl necklace, but much worse. She created a whole reality and put Teddy into it. To this day I don’t know whether she really believed in it or not. Sometimes I think she really did go crazy. That she forgot everything that happened that night. Other times I think she was just being sly. Like she couldn’t trust us—us—and decided to freeze us out by playacting. But why, why would she keep going? There was no reason for it. Year after year those damn letters kept coming, until everyone in town knew about it. Crazy old Emma Godfrey and her fake fancy man.
My momma always said, “The way of the transgressor is hard.” If you took a cigarette from her purse, she made you smoke the whole pack. Eat an apple from the fruit bowl without asking, you’d have apples served to you every night for a week. Like a Calvinist sort of Hell: forcing you to take a surfeit of your indulgences, again and again and again, until all enjoyment turns to ashes in the mouth.
I think what Emma did was a kind of penance. She knew nobody else would punish her, so she punished herself. Kept sending those letters, long after it even made sense. Like that old duchess in the story that strangled her children with a handkerchief, then had the handkerchief presented to her every night on a silver salver. The letters were her atonement, and waiting for them to come, seeing them in the mailbox, reminded her of her sin.
So there it is. Maybe you say we should have left her there, brought in the police, faced it, all out. Well, that’s one opinion. But what good would it have done? Teddy might just as well have gone to Vietnam and been killed. Lots of guys were. What did it matter, really, if the Vietnamese killed him, or Emma did? Dead is dead. Oh, but what about justice? I’ll tell you about justice. About twenty-thirty years ago, some rich prick, Count Something-or-other, murdered his wife in one of those big mansions on Bellevue Avenue. Stuck her full of insulin and watched her slip into a coma. And wouldn’t you know, he hires a Harvard Law professor and a team full of lawyers and gets acquitted. That’s justice.
But Emma didn’t have the Harvard professor. She just had us.
Chapter Eleven
Aunt Irene is coming down the stairs, her big toe seeking out one tread at a time like a snail’s antennae. The arthritis has bent her knees, and she leans on the banister. When she reaches bottom she lets out a satisfied sigh. “Glad that’s over.”
“She’s down?” Aunt Constance asks from the sofa.
“Down and out. Fought me a bit at first, but now she’s sleeping like a lamb.” Irene looks at us both benignly. “Did you have a nice little chat?”
“Oh, sure,” Constance tells her, popping the top of another Pepsi.
Chapter Twelve
Channel 12 says a storm is coming. Grandma has been saying so for days. Her internal barometer, the last and most durable of her senses, began falling on Thursday. That morning she came into my room before daybreak, switched on all the lights, and stood at the foot of the bed like the Ghost of Christmas Past. “IT’S ALMOST HERE,” she intoned, and pointed out the window.
Tony Patricola of the AccuWeather Forecast agrees with her. Outside it’s a clear, crisp day with cirrus clouds studding a perfect blue sky. But on Tony’s electric map, a monster is churning its way up the Atlantic coast. “We have live images from Norfolk,” he says excitedly, and the scene cuts to a solid wall of white, through which pinprick beams of headlights move sluggishly. “Residents of outlying areas are warned that emergency services may be suspended, and roads may become impassable after four o’clock…”
Outlying areas. That means us. Right now, everyone in Little Compton will be digging through their garages for batteries, flashlights, candles. Down at Dowsy’s Pier they’ll be dragging big blue tarps over their boats, tying them down with bungee cords, offering up a silent prayer that Jubilee Jim and Lazee Daze and Auriola will still be there in the morning. The Stop & Shop will be mobbed with frantic shoppers grabbing all the bread and milk in sight. Why always bread and milk? I have no idea. Rhode Islanders are so predictable. In New Orleans, they toast a hurricane from their barstools, but here we batten do
wn the hatches and ride it out with kerosene lamps, cold cuts, and Monopoly. The truth is, we love a good storm. There is something deeply satisfying about stocking up the pantry and deep freeze, checking the emergency generator, stacking firewood in the den. At the hardware store and the supermarket, neighbors greet each other with a kind of fatalistic exhilaration, like soldiers at the Alamo. “Big one coming this time. You paid your insurance up, Fred?” “Yeah, did you pull your boat out yet?” Old-timers will reminisce about snowdrifts that went clear up to bedroom windows, winds that could hurl a blade of straw through a sapling.
I spend the whole afternoon fitting storm covers over the windows, all thirty-seven of them. These are just sheets of plywood, once painted white but now the color of dirt, with numbers etched in the corners that correspond to a small brass tag above each casement. They used to fit snugly, but age has left them warped and frayed at the edges. Nothing fits anymore. Grandma decides to help by standing at the foot of the ladder and screaming with every panel, “That’s not the right one! That’s for the front parlor! Can’t you tell the difference?” We keep this up for about four hours. The wind pricks at my eyes, and the sky turns a dull gray. I can feel it coming now.
In a way I’m glad. Storms bring change, and lately I’ve been feeling as if the axis of the earth had been altered by one degree and turned everything just a little bit on its side. Nothing is familiar anymore. The morning light strikes objects strangely, making grotesque what used to be comforting: the Dresden shepherdess on the mantel, the old oak hatstand in the front hall. I put this to Aunt Irene, who told me it is just part of grief. “What grief?” I asked.