Cocoa Beach

by Beatriz Williams

“You’re back,” Simon said a few weeks earlier, as we collapsed laughing against a tree after some shared joke, I forget the subject.

  I wasn’t altogether back, not quite. I felt sometimes as if I had changed, in some small yet fundamental way. My memory, from time to time, played tricks on me—not forgetting things, exactly, just scenes going in and out of focus, so that I couldn’t rely on my own recollection, like I used to, which unsettled me. I thought I had lost some tiny spark of defiance, some fraction of my independent will, when my head shattered Hunka Tin’s windshield last August.

  But Simon’s will had filled the void. He had poured his strength into my broken body and molded me back together, and he had sealed my recomposition yesterday, when he slid a slim gold band over the knuckle of the fourth finger of my left hand and said, in a voice packed tight with sincerity, not missing a single word: With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

  How could I possibly question him, after a speech like that?

  We drove out of London along the Richmond Road, while the sky drizzled delicately upon the roof of Simon’s battered two-seater Wolseley. He had bought it last month from an old Harrow friend of his, an infantry officer who had lost both legs at Passchendaele and no longer needed a motorcar—or at least the kind of motorcar you drove yourself—and the gears ground noisily from disuse. The terraces passed by, gray and wilting, separating eventually into semidetached houses and then to boxy suburban villas. We kept a comfortable silence, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the roar of the motor, and I believe I dozed off once or twice, exhausted by the wedding and everything that followed, by too much champagne and too little sleep. In my haze, I felt the car slow down and turn, and I raised my head to the hoary English sight of a half-timbered public house, dripping rain from the eaves.

  “Lunch,” said Simon.

  That night he talked about his parents.

  “It was a love match, actually. They were most spectacularly in love, or so I’m told. Isn’t that strange? One never imagines one’s parents in that condition.”

  “No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

  “Of course, the trouble was, they never really loved anything else half so well as each other. I often thought that there wasn’t room for another person between them.”

  “Not even you and your brother and sister?”

  “No. That’s the trouble with devotion, you see. They were always off on romantic escapades. They left us with nannies, Samuel and me, when we were three months old. Took off to Borneo for a year, to dive for pearls.”

  “Dive for pearls?”

  “Oh, it was good fun, no doubt. Some friend of my father’s—it was Lydia’s father, in fact—he lured them out with the promise of adventure and riches. You have to learn how to hold your breath properly and that sort of thing, and I doubt there would have been a surfeit of clothing. Terribly improper for my mother, of course, back in those days, though that was part of the allure for her. She was always a bit daring and headstrong. Anyway, it was all marvelously exotic—I’ve seen the odd photograph—but of course you don’t want babies along on that kind of expedition, and once we were out of sight and reach, you see, they more or less forgot our existence. Like a pair of pets left behind. I’m not at all certain they would have come back altogether, if Mummy hadn’t gotten pregnant with Clara. I think she was cross about that, actually. Babies were such a nuisance to her. Father was certainly cross. I remember how black-faced he was, when they returned.”

  Simon lay on his back, smoking, his head propped by a pillow. We had stopped for the night at some sort of seaside village outside of Exeter, dreary with rain, and after a tasteless supper under the surveillance of a lean, red-faced landlady dressed in faded black bombazine from another century, we had raced each other up the stairs to our room in the rafters, dominated by an ancient, creaking bed frame that could have left the poor woman in no doubt of our entertainment. Afterward, Simon had rummaged through the luggage and produced a bottle of brandy—liberated last autumn from an abandoned German staff billet in the Argonne, he told me—which he now drank in small, disciplined sips from a tumbler on the bedside table.

  “Did you mind?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember. I was only a baby. I should add that my grandparents looked after us as well—my father’s parents—so it wasn’t as if we were surrounded only by professionals. I was awfully cut up when Granny died. She was great fun. Gave us far too many sweets. Then Mummy came home and had Clara, and I don’t think they ventured any farther than the Continent after that, at least until I went away to school. But the unavoidable fact is that they were bored by home and hearth, that’s all. The inconvenience of children. And Mummy never really liked Cornwall anyway. Too cold and rainy, even in August, and anyway she had loads of blunt in the beginning, she could do what she wanted. A Home Counties heiress. Granddad and Grandmama thought she was throwing herself away on Father, because we’re a third-rate family, really, no title or anything like that. Just a damp pile of stones near the sea. A few neglected acres of citrus in America. Until the money ran out, why, you couldn’t keep them there longer than a week.”

  I turned on my side to face his profile. “It won’t be like that for us.”

  “Won’t it? We are terribly in love, after all. Just as they were.”

  “But you’re not like that. You’re going to be a wonderful father. You were born to give life to others.”

  He reached for the ashtray. “I hope so.”

  “You’re melancholy again.”

  “Oh, it will pass, never fear. Where the devil did I leave my cigarettes?” He heaved himself from the bed and found the battered case on the floor next to his discarded shirt.

  I sat up and held out my arms. “Come back.”

  “I told you, it will pass. It’s nothing to do with you.”

  “Everything about you has to do with me. Don’t you remember? For better or worse. Richer or poorer. So you have to tell me what’s troubling you.”

  “There’s nothing troubling me.” He lit the cigarette and stepped to the window. The London drizzle had turned to a steady rain in Hampshire, and now a gale was picking up, lashing the water against the glass. “By God, it’s rotten out there. It had better blow itself out before morning. I don’t fancy driving along the cliffs through all that, not in Jock’s old Wolseley.”

  “Simon, you can tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  I lifted my arms again, spreading them out, palms raised, and for an instant, in my lamblike faith, I might have been Christ on the cross. “Look at me. I’m healed. I’m all better. You don’t need to protect me anymore. It’s time you tell me what’s troubling you. To let me share your burden. That’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m your wife now. Richer and poor. Better and worse. Isn’t that right?”

  He turned: first his head, and then the rest of him, pale and naked in the dim light of the old oil lamp on the bedside table. He was still too thin. Too thin, his hair overtaken by gray, his face strained. How had I not noticed the new lines in his face? His sturdy, perfect bones poked against his skin. His belly was concave, and I could count the muscles of his abdomen, the movement of his ribs as he breathed. As he watched me, as his gaze dropped from my eyes to my breasts to my waist, as the cigarette dangled unloved from his fingers, I thought how I wanted to feed him. To nourish him with my own body, if I had to. The body I offered him now.

  “My wife,” he said softly.

  “Yes. Yours. We’re bound together by God. That means something, at least to me.”

  His body roused, but he didn’t step forward to claim me. He looked away, at the ceiling and then the window, and then he made for the bottom corner of the bed and sat down, cradling the cigarette between his hands. “I suppose I should tell you. I have to tell you, before we reach the house.”

  “Tell me what?”


  “I’ve been putting it off, like a coward. I knew it would upset you, and I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t want to ruin everything. Didn’t want anything to cloud yesterday. Our wedding day. I wanted it to be perfect for you. But I suppose it’s now or never.”

  I went on my knees and crawled toward him, laying my cheek on his back. My mouth dried. My blood ran light and cool, anticipating some shock. Some terrible thing. “What’s now or never?”

  He leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his thighs, nearly dislodging me. I curled my hands on either side of his waist.

  “Tell me. I’m strong enough. You’ve made me strong again. We’re married, nothing can change that.”

  “It’s Lydia.”

  Lydia.

  I licked my lips, which were dry and swollen.

  “What do you mean? About the divorce? Was there any difficulty? Is she upset?”

  He lifted the cigarette to his mouth.

  “The child? Little Sammy? Is he all right?” I raised my head. “Your brother! Has he been to see her? Was there trouble?”

  Simon detached me gently and rose to his feet and walked around the side of the bed to the table, where he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and finished the brandy. His throat moved endlessly as he swallowed, and when he set the tumbler down his face had hardened into glass.

  “I’m afraid Lydia’s dead.”

  Chapter 23

  Cocoa, Florida, July 1922

  I’m afraid the doctor’s not pleased with me. He stitches up my palm and examines my eyes and ears and all that, as duty requires. He asks me to describe my symptoms, and when I’ve finished—before the last word has left my lips, in fact—he demands to know what on God’s green earth I think I’m doing, taking opium. A young mother like me.

  I tell him I haven’t been taking opium. Just aspirin.

  Oh, the look on his face. He doesn’t think much of the moral constitution of Mrs. Virginia Fitzwilliam, that’s for certain. He checks his watch (he’s been taking my pulse, for maybe the dozenth time) and releases my wrist. On his way out the door, he glances back over his shoulder and shakes his professional head. Presumably on his way to lecture Samuel.

  Well, I don’t give a damn what he thinks. At the moment, I don’t care about anything except Evelyn, and she’s sleeping off the mad night in her own little bedroom in Simon’s apartment. My apartment—I must remember that. I close my eyes and recall the weight of my daughter, packed tight into the hollow of my shoulder as we drove down the lurid midnight highway, past the wet earth and the close-packed vegetation drizzled with moonshine. Her warm bones tucked along mine. The lumpen shape of her doll digging into my ribs. And I wonder what it is I’m really craving, the pills or the love, the chemical tranquillity or the real kind: the kind that can only be transmitted through human skin. I’m sweating again, sweating and aching and exhausted, and just as sleep begins to settle over my forehead, a name emerges from the darkness.

  Sammy.

  “Whatever happened to Sammy?” I ask Samuel when he jolts me awake sometime later, by the act of opening my bedroom door.

  “Sammy?”

  “Your son.”

  He crosses his arms. “That boy is not my son.”

  “He’s still a person. A little boy. What happened to him, after Lydia died?”

  He stands there at the foot of the bed, scowling at me. He brought a tray with him, and it’s resting on the round table by the side of the bed. The smell makes me sick. I don’t want food. I want something else. Aspirin. Evelyn. Something.

  “It was Clara,” he says. “Clara looked after him.”

  “And afterward? When Simon left for Florida?”

  “Sammy went, too.”

  “And who’s taking care of him now?”

  “That woman from Maitland, I assume. The housekeeper. That’s where Simon always left him, at the plantation, with the housekeeper and her mother. Didn’t you see him?”

  “No. But I think Evelyn played with him, when I was sick. Why would Miss Bertram keep him a secret, though?”

  He frowns a little more. Looks at the tray and back at my face. “God knows. You’re still sick. You look terrible.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Who gave you those pills?”

  “The doctor in Cocoa.”

  “Some doctor.” He uncrosses his arms and walks to the window. “Have you remembered anything more about Clara?”

  “I don’t understand. You say she’s gone missing?”

  “I haven’t heard from her since June.”

  “June!”

  “Yes, June! You stupid girl.” He grabs the edge of the curtain. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s just—well, she’s got this unfortunate tendency to get into trouble from time to time, she’s a bit headstrong, you know, impulsive, that’s the word, and—this note. The one in your drawer. She didn’t say anything else? Whom she was meeting?”

  “Not that I remember. I wasn’t feeling well, that first night—”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “For God’s sake, Samuel, I was attacked! The doctor gave me pills for my headache!”

  He turns his face toward me. “Attacked?”

  “Didn’t you hear about it?”

  “No.”

  A funny little silence nestles in between us, right in the middle of all that soft, drunken morning air. Samuel stares at me, and his eyes turn a little wild, and his face turns a little tender. A little something else. I can’t tell what. He doesn’t move, though. Not a flinch. Until his lips move.

  “What happened?”

  “I was with Clara. We went to this—this place in Cocoa Beach, this restaurant a few miles south, after dinner.”

  “A gin joint, you mean.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about places like that. Anyway, she was—well, she was flirting, I guess, or something like that, and I went for a walk on the beach.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes. I wanted to see if it was true.”

  “If what was true? If what was true, Virginia?”

  “That the rumrunners landed on moonless nights. And there was no moon out, so I thought, well, I’ll just take a look . . .”

  “My God.” He steps forward, looms by the edge of the bed. Reaches out and touches my cheek. “That was you?”

  “Me?”

  “Are you all right? You weren’t badly hurt?”

  “No. I don’t remember it, actually. I think I’d had too much to drink, and someone hit me on the head . . .”

  “Oh, Christ. Oh, Virginia.” His hand travels along my jaw. Inspects my chin. The shape of his eyes softens and rounds, suggesting remorse. But then, it’s Samuel. You can’t read Samuel. Maybe it’s remorse, maybe it’s pity. Maybe it’s something else. He reminds me of a bear, all huge and brown and bristling, looming over me. Nudging me with his paw, to decide if I’m still alive. “And you don’t remember? You don’t know who did this?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll find him.”

  “No!” I push his hand away. “Please, don’t. Please don’t have anything more to do with this, do you hear me? It’s done enough damage, this business.”

  “What business?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Well, his face goes hard again, just like that. His eyes squint. He steps back and sucks his lips into his mouth. He says, or rather growls, “And this happened just before Clara disappeared, was it?”

  “Two nights before. We left for Maitland the next day . . .” And my voice trails away, because you see, I don’t think I really understood him until now. Understood what he meant, that is, by missing. Clara missing. Busy, energetic Clara. My head’s still fuzzy and restless, my thoughts swinging and swaying like those round-bottomed dolls you push with your finger. Revolving around my own needs, my own physical maladies. Now the dolls are going still, the light of reason is spreading and spreading, and I think to myself, for the first time
, Nobody’s seen Clara in weeks. Not since she motored right back out of Maitland in Simon’s blue Packard, the morning after we arrived.

  “And she left in the morning,” he finishes.

  I say, in my mumbling, scratchy voice: “You haven’t heard a word from her?”

  “Not a damned word. Not a note. Not a message.”

  “Do you think something’s happened to her?”

  There is a lamp balanced atop the sleek modern table, a few feet away from Samuel’s enormous body. He picks it up—a lovely, curving, elegant object, made of reflective mercury glass spun into symmetry by some expert hand, priceless—and hurls it against the wall.

  “Of course something’s happened to her! What the bloody hell else could it be? Do you think this is all just an extraordinary coincidence?”

  I’m shaking all over, shaking and sweating. Nerves shrieking. “Who, then?”

  “You tell me! Simon’s dead, it can’t be him.”

  I roll over. Turn my face into the mattress. Seize the pillow and squeeze it across the back of my head, around the cartilage of my ears. Samuel shouts something else, but I can’t hear it. Just beautiful, muffled silence.

  But you can’t block out the world forever, can you? Especially when you need to breathe. You don’t want to breathe, maybe, but you need to. So you turn your head sideways to allow a little air into your starved lungs, and there’s your brother-in-law, standing by the edge of the bed, staring fiercely. Dark hair tousled like a ruffian’s. Jaw set. Hazel eyes burning straight through your skull.

  “At least Evelyn’s safe,” I whisper.

  “Well, that’s a damned clue in itself, isn’t it? The little heiress remains intact.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Miami Beach. Who’d you see there?”

  “Lots of people. I don’t remember them all.”

  “There must have been someone.”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “You hesitated.”

  “I was trying to remember, all right? There wasn’t anyone in particular. Where’s Evelyn?”

  “Still sleeping.”