by Chip Cheek
“Charming,” Max said.
Clara laughed. “Did you get that from H. P. Lovecraft?”
“No, like I said, it was one of the Coast Guard boys.”
“Well, it’s interesting,” Clara said. “Who knows what terrible things are out there.” She gave the sea a glance, turned and took Max’s arm, and they continued on. Alma fell behind again. Henry had gathered by now that she and Clara didn’t like each other, although for Max’s benefit Clara only spoke kindly of her, calling her “dear,” worrying for her safety, commenting on how pretty she was, or could be if she’d put the effort in. She was Max’s half sister, as it turned out. She’d grown up with their mother in Los Angeles, under squalid conditions, apparently. (Clara had told them this, while Max had been busy making omelets in the kitchen.) The mother had died not long ago, and now Max looked after her. They lived off the money, a generous sum of money, his father had left him. He was a Hewitt—as in Hewitt-Rowe, the shipping company.
“You mean he doesn’t have a job?” Effie had asked, and the disdain in her voice had pleased Henry. If there was one thing that turned Effie off, it was a man who was not gainfully employed.
“No, the poor soul,” Clara had said. “Aside from his writing. I feel for him deeply. You wouldn’t guess it to meet him, but he’s a lost child, really.”
“But—I mean—he can get a job,” Effie had said.
* * *
Back at Clara’s they made gin and tonics and warmed up the pot roast Mrs. Pavich had made on Saturday. They settled around the coffee table with their plates. Clara lit candles. All the doors and windows were open, and everything in the den was fluttering and alive. Leaves had begun to gather in the corners. A small bird—no, a bat, Effie cried—flitted in from the kitchen and turned sharply out to the patio.
Clara suggested they play a game of charades. There’d be no need to keep score, it was just for fun, but Effie didn’t see the point of a game if you didn’t keep score. She and Henry made one team, Clara and Max the other. Alma, who had built an unnecessary fire, sat on the rug near the hearth reading her book.
Effie held the stopwatch, and Clara drew the first slip of paper from the sun hat. She signaled that it was a person, and held her arms out to indicate a big belly, doing a little bounce. “Santa Claus,” Max said. “Jackie Gleason,” and Clara laughed and shook her head. Then she said, “Ah!” and looked above her in terror, holding her fingers to her cheeks. She dashed across the den, pointed at the radio, then up to the ceiling, and with twenty seconds to go Max cried, “Orson Welles,” and she shrieked and jumped and clapped her hands.
“That’s a lot of racket for one point,” Effie said, standing and handing the stopwatch to Max. She was all business when it came to games. She drew a slip of paper, frowned a moment, indicated that it was another person—and transformed herself: swaying her hips, batting her eyelashes at Henry, biting the tip of her finger in a perfect impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, which had been one of his contributions to the hat. When he guessed it she said, “Very good,” sat down, and recorded their point.
Max made the sign for book. And then stood still for several long seconds. Clara laughed. “Darling, do something.” So he halfheartedly mimed rifle fire, then seemed to run away from it, then repeated the sequence. “Do something else, Maxie, I’m not getting it.” But he was stuck on the move. For someone so sure and confident—someone who could execute a perfect backflip off the diving board—he seemed strangely self-conscious now. The poor lost soul. He was beginning to grow on Henry.
“Time,” Effie declared. The book had been The Red Badge of Courage.
“Oh, but that’s a hard one, darling,” Clara said.
“No, it’s not,” Effie said. “Point at something red—your trunks—make like you’re flipping a badge or something, I don’t know. Act courageous.”
Everyone laughed—especially Max. “You’re merciless, Katie Scarlett,” he said.
When Henry stood up for his turn, he pulled The Birth of a Nation, in a barely legible scratch that wasn’t Effie’s. Clara was sitting across Max’s lap in the armchair, which distracted him for a moment. He knew that it was a movie and had something to do with the KKK, but that was all. He made the sign for movie, and then, like Max, did nothing.
“How many words,” Effie said.
Four—no, five, he indicated, then held up two fingers for the second word. Unlike Max, Henry, who was shy around small groups of people, was not shy when he was performing, and though he could have mimed “birth” in any number of less dramatic ways, he chose to lie down on the rug, inches from Alma’s feet, lift and spread his knees, and with his hands make a kind of gushing motion from his crotch. Max and Clara howled with laughter. Effie, not laughing, focused on guessing the word. “Baby,” she said. He shook his hand: Sort of. He made as if to wrangle a baby from between his legs, grimacing in pain, and when she got it he said, “Yes,” and leapt to his feet—hopping, into it now. Clara had fallen from Max’s lap onto the floor. Fifth word. Hand to his chest, back rigid. “Flag,” Effie said. “Allegiance.” No, forget that. He paced. He indicated a cone growing up from his head, looked stern, made a whipping motion, all of which only confused Effie, who muttered, “A birth … Birth allegiance…” until she got it—“Birth of a Nation!”—just as Max called time.
“We get the point, right?” Effie said.
“You get the point,” Max assured her.
“That was simply amazing,” Clara said, leaning back against Max’s knees. “Henry, you surprise me.”
Henry sat back down beside Effie and hugged her shoulders. Across the way he saw Alma watching him. When he caught her gaze she held it, and he gave her a thumbs-up—lamely. She laughed, and returned it.
They played four more rounds, until there were no more papers in the hat, though by the third round it would have been mathematically impossible for Clara and Max to win, as Effie pointed out twice. “Fourteen to six,” she declared at the end, and Max said, “There’s no need to rub it in.”
They made more drinks and settled in. Effie, thrilled with victory, rested her legs over Henry’s lap and pulled an afghan over them. Once again Alma put on her shoes, bid them all good night, and slipped out the front door. Max stoked the fire.
“Where do you think she goes?” Effie asked.
Max shrugged, not looking away from the fire. “She’s an adult, she can take care of herself.”
“Clara says you’re her guardian,” Effie said, and Max looked at her in surprise. Her cheeks were flushed. She was getting forward. But before Max could answer, Clara said, “I was telling her what a good brother you’ve been.”
He put the poker back in its stand. “I don’t know about that.”
Clara had moved to the smaller sofa perpendicular to the main one, and she’d drawn her legs up, obviously making a space for Max. But he remained standing. Effie watched him, waiting for him to go on.
“I’m all she has,” he said, “for better or worse.” He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and tapped one on his wrist. “Her mother died last year. Our mother, I should say. I didn’t know her, aside from the letters. She left when I was a baby. I don’t think she took very good care of herself, or of Alma for that matter. She died of heart failure.” He lit a cigarette and settled in the armchair near Effie, on the opposite side of the coffee table from Clara.
“You so rarely speak of your family,” Clara said.
“There’s not much to speak of.”
“He says humbly. Your family built the third-largest shipping company in the world.”
Max put his feet up. “My father was a miserable old man,” he said to Effie, “and my mother was a failed starlet. The rest of my family were teetotalers, descended from Quakers, like Ahab. They’re all dead now, the ones I cared about.”
“How sad,” Effie said.
“Yes,” Max said, simply, and the silence that followed was awkward. Henry broke it by jiggling the ice in his glass, and Ma
x got up to take it, and Effie’s as well, and went over to the bar. Another drink was going to put Henry over the edge—but no matter. The day shimmered in his head.
“Oh, Maxie, let’s just go to Hawaii,” Clara said. It seemed to be a continuation of some other conversation. “I mean really, why not?”
“I told you,” Max said, dropping fresh ice into their glasses. “I would go.”
“Hawaii—yes,” Henry said emphatically, and Effie laughed and said, “Are you drunk?”
“Of course he’s drunk,” Max said. “Bravo. So am I.”
“You could come with us if you wanted,” Clara said, to Henry and Effie. “The more, the merrier. There’s nude beaches. We could lie out in the sun as nature intended.”
“We’d make a handsome set,” Max said.
Henry imagined the four of them lying naked on the beach before a vast turquoise sea, while Alma played out in the waves ahead of them.
“God knows I’d love to spend my life loafing around,” Effie said dryly, tilting her head back to see Max. “But alas.”
Her tone was an act. Under the afghan Henry had pushed his finger past the elastic hem of her bathing suit, and she’d opened her legs a bit so he could reach her. She was wet. The muscles in her groin tensed.
* * *
They were no longer shy of each other. They slept naked. In the morning she greeted his erection with a kiss, tickling it with her tongue, until he said he was going to die if she didn’t do it. So she did it, for the first time, and he lay back groaning, holding as still as he could, afraid of choking her. When he was about to come he said, Okay, okay, and she left off, and watched it leap out onto his stomach. It smelled like starch, she said. She reached down by the side of the bed to retrieve a towel for him and mooned him spectacularly. He laughed: now he had seen everything. She threw the towel at him. He apologized, laid her back, and repaid the favor, and she drew her knees up and sighed. That’s nice. That’s very nice. They rolled around on the bed. They made a sixty-nine. Angels averted their eyes. When he was up again she straddled him, which was how she liked it best.
* * *
They took the boat out again in the late afternoon. A film seemed to lie over Henry’s senses, and through it everything seemed soft and sweet and desirable. He felt open and unbounded. He relished every scent, every touch, every taste. How the world flaunted itself. At the marina he pointed to the octagonal building out on the pier and told everyone there was going to be a dance there on Friday night.
“The Historical Society fete,” Clara said. “I heard about it the other night.”
“We could crash it,” Max said.
“We don’t have to crash it,” Clara said. “It’s open to everyone. Except I don’t have anything to wear.”
“That’s our last day here,” Effie said, taking Henry’s hand.
“That’s too sad,” Clara said. Henry couldn’t tell if she was being sincere. “What day’s today?”
“It’s Tuesday,” Effie said. “It’s still days and days away.”
The sea was calm this time, deep blue in the late-afternoon sun. They sailed straight toward a ghostly tanker in the distance, until Cape May was nothing but a line of fiery orange and yellow land behind them. After they’d dropped the sails and made a round of drinks and drifted for a while, Alma stood up without a word and dove into the water.
Max leapt to his feet. When she came up for air she made a shriek and said, “It’s freezing!”
“It’s October,” Max called out to her. “It’s the North Atlantic. You’re an idiot.”
“It’s the Mid-Atlantic,” she called back.
“Stay close, dear,” Clara said. “We’re not anchored.”
Henry wanted to join her. His muscles twitched with intention. How would the others have reacted if he had? What would Effie have done? But he was afraid. And now Effie was saying, “Aunt Lizzie used to tell me, ‘This isn’t the creek, girl. If you’re in the water up past your knees, you’re fair game for the sharks.’”
They let Alma be. She dove and splashed in the water, and a few minutes later climbed out, up the ladder at the stern, her hair slicked back, water streaming off her body, glistening in the low, red sun like a white-and-gold seal.
* * *
That evening, after dinner, after several drinks, they decided it was time to explore the other houses on the street. They would test Max’s theory. Everyone was in agreement. Especially Alma, who brightened when Max suggested it.
They went out.
The moon was still low in the sky, and New Hampshire Avenue lay mostly hidden in the dark. The excitement stimulated Henry’s bowels, and occasionally a cramp would nearly paralyze him, but then it would pass. Alma led the way—first to the house across the street, where the front door and windows were locked, and then to the house next door to it, which was locked up as well. “We tried,” Clara said, but Alma ignored her. They crossed the street again, not back to Clara’s, but to the house next door. The Healys’ place, Effie said, and Clara said, “Yes. Mrs. Healy made my birthday cakes. I can’t do it.” She stopped on the lawn. “I’ll stay out here.” But it didn’t matter, the house was locked. So they tried the one next door, which was the house directly across from Aunt Lizzie’s. The Woods’ place, where Effie’s babysitter Betsy had lived. She had never been inside. The house lay in a sliver of moonlight. The front door was locked, but when Alma tried the tall window beside it, it lifted open.
“Et voilà,” she said, and ducked down and stepped inside. Henry went in after her, and the others followed.
It was nothing special inside, what little they could make out. A sparely furnished den, an oval rug, a bookcase full of portraits, the faces indistinct and ghostly, and hanging on the wall above it, a long paddle. But to Henry, the simple thrill of being inside a stranger’s house at night, uninvited, was almost unbearable. Another cramp seized him, and he was glad for the dark. Every half-visible object seemed charged with secret meaning. There was a clicking sound, and Alma announced that the electricity was off, and Clara said, “Well, Jesus, we don’t want to turn the lights on, do we?” They found their way into the kitchen, which was a little brighter, from a bay window at one end, and Alma rifled through the drawers until she said, “There we are,” and a blinding light startled them. She’d found a flashlight. She held it to her chin and made herself ghoulish.
They went upstairs, into what must have been the master bedroom. Shag carpet on the floor, a queen-size bed with a multicolored quilt. On the dresser stood a photograph of a middle-aged man and woman, the man bloated and self-important, the woman with thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Was that the Woods? Henry asked, and Effie said she wasn’t sure. Clara hung around the doorway, her arms crossed as if afraid to leave any fingerprints. Alma and Max were in the attached bathroom, looking through the medicine cabinet and under the sink, but they found nothing interesting, or embarrassing for the Woods—or whoever these people were—aside from a stack of used menthol camphor tins.
Max declared that he knew all he needed to know about the Woods. “Their children are grown and don’t care about the beach house anymore. The mister is retired. He was a home-appliance salesman. He and the missus still come out here, but without the children, they bore each other to tears. They’ll likely sell the place soon.”
They made their way back outside. “That was fun,” Clara said, but Alma, who had kept the Woods’ flashlight, was making her way to the next lawn, and they followed. That house was locked, but the one next to it was wide open: they walked in through the front door.
Effie didn’t know these people. Neither did Clara. The den was garishly nautical. Model ships lined the mantel. A ship’s wheel hung over a leather sofa, and a giant painting of a World War II battleship firing all of its guns hung opposite. In a corner stood a small armchair with white-lace arm covers. “He voted for Eisenhower,” Max said, “and she voted for Stevenson, twice, though she will never admit it to him.”
After t
hey’d wandered upstairs Effie said, “No, he’s a bachelor.” In one room was a metal-framed bed and bare walls, in another a workbench of some kind and a strong smell of varnish, and in another a small four-poster bed with a plush quilt. “His mother comes to visit sometimes.”
Quietly Alma inspected every piece of furniture, every decoration and trinket, as if searching for something in particular. Back down in the den she stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly in a circle, her eyes closed, while Clara led the others back outside. Henry hung back. “What are you doing?”
She opened her eyes, holding the flashlight aloft. “Just imagining them here.” She smiled at him. “I don’t think I’d like them very much.”
Outside, the night was warm and still. “Can we go back now, friends?” Clara said. “I’m afraid the gin is wearing off.”
But Alma said, “Just one more,” and pointed to the big Victorian house diagonally across the street, three houses down from Aunt Lizzie’s. It was the only house like it on the street—purple in the daylight, now a looming black mass, only part of its slate roof, its widow’s walk, its lone tower exposed to the moonlight. It looked like a haunted castle.
“That’s where that old couple lived,” Effie said to Henry, “the one I told you about.”
“The Bishops,” Clara said. “That’s the Bishops’ house. Edith and—I don’t remember the man’s name.”
“Do you know them?”
“They’re old friends of my mother’s. I remember them from parties.”
Alma had started across the street already. They followed.
Wraparound porches surrounded the first and second floors, deep and impenetrably dark. They stepped carefully, blind, up the front steps. The door was locked, Alma announced. They felt around for the windows and tried them, but they were all locked too. Alma said she might have seen another way in, and they followed her back down the steps and around the side of the house, where, in the open moonlight, a metal staircase led up to the second-story porch. Alma climbed it and a moment later called down to them: “It’s open.”
