Cape May

by Chip Cheek

  A chill had set in. Through a part in the trees that bordered the yard Henry saw billows of fog drifting past the streetlight. The patio was clearing. The gumbo was gone. Richard remained, chatting with a couple of the older men. From time to time Mrs. Pavich would stomp out and silently gather a stack of empty dishes. The boxer—Max—had replaced the woman next to Effie. He was still in his trunks, but he’d put on an Oxford shirt and at first Henry didn’t recognize him. He was saying something to her, and she was chuckling, shaking her head, until he paused and said, “Three times!” and she burst into laughter, snorted, put her hand to her mouth, and twisted to hide her face against Henry’s chest. She must have been drowned; Henry had never made her laugh like that.

  “What’s the good word, Hank?” Max said over Effie’s back.

  “The good word?” The question confused him. It sounded like something a Bible salesman would say.

  “Oh, Henry,” Effie said, sitting up and recovering herself. “Heaven help me, I’m not in my right mind.”

  “Another drink would set your mind right,” Max said.

  “I don’t think so,” Henry said. He wasn’t sure he cared for this Max very much.

  “You,” Effie said, pointing at Max, letting the word hang there a moment. “You do not have my best interests at heart.”

  Max laughed. “What do you say we dance instead? You dance, Hank?”

  “Oh, does he,” Effie said, and she turned and smiled at him. “He was the best damn dancer at the Spring Fling. Wasn’t I proud, baby?”

  “The Spring Fling,” Max said, grinning, and Henry felt a flush of embarrassment. What was the Spring Fling to these people?

  “Look at him,” Effie said, “he’s so modest.”

  “Come on, Hank.” Max pushed his chair back and stood up. “Why don’t you show us the stuff?”

  Henry demurred—he didn’t see anyone dancing inside—but Effie was getting to her feet too, taking the hand Max offered, and he didn’t have a choice. He followed them inside. He took Effie’s hand and slowed his pace so she would let go of Max.

  The large airy room they’d been sitting in earlier was close and smoky and loud now, and the music was jumping, infectious—a heavy drumbeat, saxophone and piano—and over by the record player a crowd of people was dancing, doing some kind of improvised bop, shaking and twisting and flailing their arms. Scott was in the crowd, and there was Clara too, shaking her hips in the middle of a cluster of Coast Guard cadets. What were they doing here? Had they heard the music from their cutters and leapt ashore?

  “God, Louis Prima,” Max said, raising his voice over the music. “How I hate this sock-hop shit. I should have brought my Bird records.”

  They joined the dancing, the crowd pressing them close, the air warm and humid. Henry’s normal reserve disappeared whenever there was music. He maneuvered himself between Effie and Max and let himself go. He danced and danced. The woman in the slip was hopping in place, her breasts bouncing wildly. A few feet away, one of the cadets was nuzzling Clara’s hair. A spray of something, Champagne or beer, fell on the crowd near Henry and they answered it with a cheer. What a party! The music let loose and went wild. He elbowed a woman in the back of the head, but before he could apologize she laughed and threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “Hey!” Effie cried, pulling him away. “Hands off, you hussy!”—and Henry gripped her hips to still her, but she was only playing: she got up on her tiptoes and kissed him, her tongue grazing his lips.

  “I can’t take you anywhere!” he cried.

  “But you have to take me everywhere—I’m your wife!”

  One song ended with a cry of saxophones, the crowd cheered, and right away another tempo began, piano and drums, low but tense with suppressed energy. Henry didn’t know this record—Louis Prima?—but he was loving it.

  Now Clara wedged herself into their midst. “My little darlings!” She hooked her arms over Henry’s and Effie’s shoulders, smelling of Chanel No. 5 and radiating heat. “I thought I’d never escape.”

  “This is some party,” Effie said. “I’ll give you that, Clara Strauss.”

  “Did you see that boy trying to get his hooks into me?” Clara said. Henry said he had, but she was talking to Max, who was suddenly frowning. He had his chin up, trying to see over the crowd. He wasn’t very tall. “Max,” Clara tried again, “you may need to defend my honor before the night’s over.”

  Max didn’t hear her, and Clara leaned in and repeated herself, and he laughed and said, “Anytime, my lady”—but then he excused himself and made his way through the crowd. Clara watched him go, and for a moment Henry thought he really was going to defend her honor: he approached one of the cadets, who was kissing a girl’s neck, but instead of pushing the boy away he grabbed the girl’s wrist and dragged her to the edge of the crowd, toward a corner of the den that led off into a hallway. She was one of the merry band who had burst into the den from the beach earlier in the evening. She wore a long, drab cardigan over a white bathing suit and shorts, and her hair was tied up carelessly, strands falling all about her face. She stumbled after Max, looking not so much angry as bored.

  “You know what?” Effie said, speaking more loudly than necessary. “I’m glad I ran into you, Clara Strauss, or whatever your name is. I was not glad at first, if I am to be one-hundred-percent honest, but I am glad now.”

  Clara looked away from the hallway where Max and the girl had disappeared. “What are you talking about, my belle?”

  “She’s a little soused,” Henry said, putting his hand to Effie’s back.

  “I’m as soused as I ought to be. It’s a party, isn’t it?”

  Clara laughed. “It certainly is!”

  The beat let loose again and they were jostled but Effie cried over the music: “I used to think you were an awful person!”

  Clara laughed again and cried, “What?”

  “You and Holly,” Effie said, bobbing her shoulders to her own beat. “I used to think you were terrible! Well—you were terrible! I used to pray for your souls, but I didn’t mean it. I’d say, ‘Lord, please don’t send Holly and Clara to hell on my account, I’m sure they don’t know any better.’”

  Clara stopped dancing and looked down at her incredulously. “Effie Mae, are you trying to tell me a joke?”

  Henry took Effie’s arm and told her to stop it, but she jerked away. “Quit clutching me, Henry—damn! I’m not saying anything bad. I am building up to a compliment, in fact.”

  “What a relief,” Clara said.

  “I’m talking to Clara anyhow. As a matter of fact,” Effie said, placing her hand on Henry’s chest, “why don’t you go fix yourself a drink and let us two have some girl time?”

  Clara looked at him and shrugged; she seemed content to hear whatever Effie had to say. And what did he care? He didn’t know these people. He left Effie to do what she would—to put her foot in her mouth, if that’s what she wanted. To hell with it.

  Behind the bar, he made his best guess at a gin and tonic. He poured it half and half over the last fistful of ice from the bucket, and the first swallow seared his throat. Never mind: it would be a sipping drink. He was in a state of inebriation in which he felt in full possession of himself and at the same time in complete control of the room, free to wander anywhere, drop in on any conversation, or just stand and watch people without feeling self-conscious. He saw Scott dancing with a woman who wasn’t his wife—as far as Henry understood—and his hands were lost up the back of her skirt. For shame, he thought, and laughed. Elsewhere a group of young men was huddled close together near the foyer, around a small table on which sat a transistor radio, talking excitedly about something to do with the Soviets, and when one of them looked at him warily he had the thrilling idea that they might be covert Communists, of the sort that had supposedly infiltrated the upper echelons of American society—here, it was possible!—and quickly he left them to their business.

  He wandered the perimeter. There wasn’
t much to see, as far as photographs and decorations. A few paintings of sailboats and lighthouses. A picture of what must have been Clara’s family standing around the helm of a boat, holding sailboat-shaped trophies. A sepia portrait of a couple in Bavarian costumes. Near the record player he tapped the keys of an upright piano, but it was inaudible under the music, which had changed into a kind of honking, arrhythmic jazz that Henry found disorienting, and the dance floor had cleared up a bit as a result. The people who remained, he didn’t recognize. There’d been a slippage in time. Clara and Effie were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Max, or the girl he’d stolen away. At one point Mrs. Pavich muscled herself into the room and, without any announcement, giving everyone around her a withering look, dropped a carrot cake down on the coffee table and stomped away. The sight comforted him; he remembered, dimly, that the cake had been made for them, him and Effie, in celebration of their marriage. He went over to it and ran his finger along the side and tasted the frosting. It was perfect: smooth and buttery.

  He thought he might dance some more, in spite of the music. One of the beatnik girls was dancing by herself and he swore she’d caught his eye and smiled at him. But first he had to relieve himself. It was, suddenly, an urgent matter. He hadn’t gone all evening.

  Instead of navigating the crowd and trying to find the lavatory, he wandered outside onto the patio, where the air was cool and thick with fog, and the relative quiet was soothing. By the pool a group of men was looking up at the sky. He made out Richard among them, and one of the young Communists. Henry followed their line of sight but there was nothing to see through the haze. Maybe they were inspecting the fog itself. He walked away from them, along the side of the house, into the darkness of the yard. The grass was damp and overgrown. He ran into a bush near the back corner of the house and stepped around it to a hedge. The glare of a streetlight on Madison Avenue came through the trees. He was surprised to find that his glass was almost empty. He downed the rest of it, dropped it into the grass, unzipped his trousers, and let go—at last!—into the hedge.

  What a night! He smiled up at the streetlight. It seemed to be telling him that his life was going to be brilliant. And it really was, it was really going to be brilliant. This was a party he would remember for the rest of his life—because it would mark the true beginning of his life. Yes. He would apply for that scholarship again. Forget Emory, he could go to Princeton. Marblehead, Nantucket: they would be places in his life. He and Effie would not speak often of their honeymoon, but when they did, they would say, Do you remember that party at Clara’s? Do you remember how we were? How you told Clara she was an awful person? And they would laugh about it, and they would have no memory of the first few days. God was pleased with them—he was thankful for that.

  He shook himself and zipped up and was about to make the trek back inside when he heard something, so close he thought it might be coming from the other side of the hedge: a woman breathing. Under that, a steady rhythm that at first he couldn’t make sense of, until the woman cried, “Oh!” and again, “Oh! Oh!”

  The cries were coming from a dark, open window of the house, just a few feet away from him. He had never actually heard a woman make that sound before—Effie hadn’t made it—but it was so precisely how his friends had made it for laughs that he wondered if someone were playing a joke on him. But there was a man in there too; he could hear his grunting. Henry held as still as he could, swaying, making an effort to keep his balance. “Oh!” the woman cried, and it seemed that she would never stop. The man was a Titan. Henry felt an acute pang of longing and envy. He stood transfixed, unable to pull himself away, until at last the man made a strained sound, the woman sighed, and they both fell silent. Henry waited a moment before he crept away from the window and around the bush, and he made his way back to the patio through the fog. He felt an urgent need to find his wife. The ground tilted under his feet.

  The group of men outside had dispersed. Inside he saw one of them, an elderly man, slow dancing with an elderly woman who may or may not have been his wife. Who knew with these people? The party had changed again: the music was drowsy, people were mostly in pairs. Soon they would slip away together, he thought, into dark rooms.

  Effie stood by the sofa holding her pocketbook. She looked lost and confused and he felt a rush of tenderness for her.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “I was just outside—I’m sorry. I needed some air.” He put his arms around her.

  “We need to go,” she said. He smelled peppermint on her breath.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was just sick in the bathroom.”

  “Oh God.”

  * * *

  Outside, the fog was so thick they couldn’t see the houses on the other side of the street. Madison Avenue was lighted but New Hampshire wasn’t, so they walked into a thick darkness where, somewhere, Aunt Lizzie’s cottage lay. They stumbled over the ruts in the street. They passed the cottage without realizing it and turned back when they saw the big Victorian looming out of the fog, but eventually they found it.

  Effie tripped on the top step and fell onto her hands and knees. To Henry’s relief, she started laughing. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, “I’m screwed.”

  He helped her up and asked if she had scraped anything.

  “Nah,” she said. But she had dropped her pocketbook and lost a shoe. He bent down to pick them up. She kicked the other shoe off and he bent down for it too.

  Inside, he nearly knocked over the end-table lamp trying to find the switch. When he found it, and clicked the light on, she was leaning back against the doorjamb, grinning at him. Her eye makeup had faded into dark coronas, there was a run in her stockings, and she looked dissolute and utterly ravishing. He wanted to bend her over the sofa and violate her. But then she hiccupped, and put her hand to her mouth, and for a moment he thought she was going to throw up again.

  “Come on,” he said, when the danger seemed to have passed. He took her arm. “Let’s get you into bed.”

  Three

  If they were leaving Sunday, they had done nothing to prepare for it: no washing of sheets, no cleaning the kitchen, no packing. They had not even called their families to let them know they were returning early. Effie shuffled over to the kitchen counter and looked at the “Before You Leave” list Uncle George had made for them—it was long—and hung her head in despair. She’d woken up in the night and was sick again, and Henry had found her, just before noon, asleep in her bathrobe on the sofa downstairs.

  “The time is ours,” Henry said. “We can leave Monday, or Tuesday. We don’t have to leave tomorrow. Can’t we give ourselves a day?”

  She considered this, and after a moment said he was right. The decision seemed to cheer her. Tomorrow they would get ready to leave, maybe go to church in the morning. Today they would rest. “As God as my witness,” she said, raising her fist to the ceiling, “I will never drink again.”

  He didn’t understand at first that she was trying to be funny, mocking Scarlett O’Hara. He laughed a beat too late, and she told him to shut up.

  * * *

  After she’d had a bath, he made buttered toast and they ate it out on the back porch, at a frosted-glass table he’d wiped clean of twigs and leaves. She was wearing her bathrobe, her feet propped up on his chair, her cheeks resting on her knees. He was wearing only his pajama bottoms, the fabric luxurious at his groin. It was a beautiful afternoon, cool and breezy, but his hangover made his skin warm. A line of beech trees bordered one side of the yard, and overnight, it seemed, they had turned brilliant yellow.

  “I made a complete fool of myself last night,” Effie said.

  “Baby, no. You were charming.” He rubbed her leg, felt the prickly hairs on her calf.

  “I feel sordid,” she said, and he laughed, and she lifted her head to glare at him. “Don’t belittle me.”

  “I’m not belittling you.”

  She was being playful, miserable though she
was. She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Come on,” he said. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

  She put her head in the crook of her arm. “It was kind of fun, I suppose.”

  They talked about it, describing the things they had seen. He asked if she’d seen Richard, Clara’s husband. She hadn’t, and when he described him she perked up and put her hand to her mouth and laughed maliciously. “Oh, Clara, Clara,” she said. “Clara Strauss—I mean Kirkbaum, or whatever the hell. She married for the money.”

  “It could be love.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  She remembered having a heart-to-heart with her, but she couldn’t remember a word they’d said. They’d been interrupted by a man trying to tell them a joke about a cow. “He kept saying, ‘Moo! Moo!’ but we weren’t getting it.”

  Henry said he thought he saw Communists scheming. Effie said she wouldn’t doubt it with that crew. “They may be well-to-do, but that doesn’t mean they’re good people.”

  “Maybe,” Henry said. “But I’d do it again.”

  “God,” Effie said. “Once was enough.”

  * * *

  She went upstairs for a nap and came down in the early evening, dressed and made-up, her sandals dangling from her fingers. “I think I’m coming around,” she said. “How’re you feeling?”

  “I’m alive.” He rubbed his eyes. He’d been trying to read Boswell in the den, images from last night overtaking the words, and fallen fast asleep. She asked if he wanted to take a walk—she needed to move around a bit—and he said sure.

  He put his loafers on, and they went out.