FICTION | James LaRowe Dear Edna

FICTION

Dear Edna

By James LaRowe

When should I have known? You left me, so I must ask. You said you wanted to learn to swim that summer at Grand Isle and insisted that Robert teach you. Should I have known then?1

Or perhaps it was that Sunday afternoon in late July. Our boys were playing croquet with their nursemaid and the squealing Farival twins. I sat in a wicker chair on the covered porch reading day-old newspapers. My cigar struggled to hold its flame. A breeze stirred the water-oaks and nettle trees along the shore. Hazy sun glinted off the water as I watched an egret patiently stalk a brownie near the mangroves. And somewhere out of view, you and Robert were swimming together in the shallows. I puffed, I waited, pretending not to care.

Then there you were, walking with him under a parasol, up the sandy path that cut through a patch of yellow chamomile. Each of you gripped the sunshade’s narrow stem, as if it were a thing too heavy for one to lift. I shifted the newspaper’s edge so I could see only you.

Your hair was loose and curled, your face flushed. Sunlight filtered through the parasol’s rose-colored lining; you appeared to be blushing. A thin shawl covered your swimming dress, which must have still been wet and clinging to your body. You

“Dear Edna” is an excerpt from a longer piece, The Figurine, narrated by Léonce Pontellier, the husband of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

whispered something to Robert and tilted your head back to laugh with him. I let a corner of the paper droop to see him walking, young, bright, and vital, beside you. Robert always carried himself with an urgent air, didn’t he? I had folded the paper into tight overlapping thirds by the time I stood.

“All day in the sun. You are burnt beyond recognition,” I said as you approached. Your smile faded. Robert’s gaze drifted to the ground. “Beyond recognition,” I repeated in a whisper.

You weren’t sun-burned. It was a shabby broker’s trick, to claim a false flaw, as if you were a barge of coffee tierces and I was a wharf-side haggler. Such a ploy often worked in my business. With you, rarely.

“Burnt?” You raised a slender hand for inspection before thrusting it at me.

“Rings,” you said. I dug the rings out of the breast pocket of my vest, where they had rested while you swam, and handed them over.

As you slipped them on, you spun around and lost your balance, taking an extra step before catching yourself. Robert couldn’t stop from grinning. You looked at him and both of you burst out laughing, right in front of me. Then you composed yourselves and tried to explain. You told a story about a wave and a seashell that you had stepped on and thought was a crab. You said you screamed and stumbled but Robert had caught you.

The two of you overlapped seamlessly in the story telling, playfully correcting and building upon each other’s words. Back and forth. Back and forth. Dear Edna, was that when I should have known? When you got to the part about how he caught you, Robert made a little motion of his own – a half-step with his arms outstretched. His shirtsleeves pulled tight against thick,

muscled arms underneath.

I performed insouciance with a fake yawn and said I was headed down the beach to play billiards at Kline’s. “Robert, come join me,” I said.

He dithered, he declined. “Thank you, but no.” He said he preferred to stay, with you.

“Send him away when he bores you,” I said and left. Feigning disinterest was ruining me.

The other Grand Isle families considered Robert Lebrun to be a harmless fawner. His family owned the resort; every summer he trailed one of the women like a puppy. Two years earlier, it had been old Madam Farival. The prior summer, he glommed onto Adele Ratignolle, and who could blame him. And now it was your turn, my wife. But did no one notice that Lebrun had grown in the meantime from a gangly teen into a robust young man? Or that he had shifted from flattering ancient Mme Farival to lavishing attention on the youngest wives at the resort?

Confronting Robert would be an admission of jealousy, as well as foolish. The last punch I threw had been a decade earlier in Manhattan. I am, well, look at me, I have always been slight. But one didn’t need brawn to succeed in my trade, or once, long ago, to have won your love. You had loved me once, hadn’t you?

As I trudged down the beach to Kline’s, a brown pelican soared off of the waters as if following me. I stopped to grind out my cigar in the trunk of a nettle tree. The pelican reared up and plummeted down toward the water like a wild arrow. A splash, then the bird bobbed with its prey in the pouch. I threw the crumpled cigar remnants into the seagrass. I needed to get my mind off you and Lebrun. I could hear a band playing up ahead at Kline’s, so off I went.

You always disliked the place. Dark, smoky, and filled with men, Kline’s Hotel isn’t for everyone. But its dining room, bar, and billiards hall filled a necessary purpose. Kline’s served as refuge and impromptu mercantile exchange for every businessman vacationing with his family on the Gulf. We love our families, we love our wives, but still, sometimes we must escape.

I set up shop at a back table and disappeared into the persona of: Léonce, the buoyant broker. I shot billiards, drank whiskey daisies, and gossiped all night with the other financiers. We traded stories of crop yields and tides, partnerships and dissolutions, and money to be had. I bought several diplomatic rounds of drinks and defeated nearly all comers to my table. The sole match I threw was to a man from Mobile, after he mentioned word of a cotton barge stranded on a shoal off Horn Island.

“Tricky waters,” I said. I knew the exact spot. I could have a pair of keelboats out there the next day to offload the bales and lug them to port.

The Alabamian cheered when my final shot caught the lip of the bunker and caromed wide, giving him the win. In the brief joy of his victory, he gave me the name of the barge owner and the broker of said stranded shipment – a plump man named Tiggins whom I knew and suspected to be eating a thick steak in the Hotel’s dining room.

I waited in the dim glow of the hallway’s brass lamps with their smoky glass bulbs etched in fleur-de-lys.

“Monsieur Tiggins, quelle chance! Let us grab a drink,” I said as he waddled out of the dining room. I lighted a cigar and offered another to him as I steered us to the bar. The deal was sewn up by midnight.

I left Kline’s in high spirits with my pockets full of wadded-

up bank notes and coin from the billiards table. It’s odd how the mind works. I hadn’t forgotten about that afternoon, but my dourness was gone. I whistled on the walk back to our cabin. I whistled out at the dark Gulf. I whistled up at the moon. I even whistled at the old nettle tree smudged with my inky ash. When I arrived at the cabin, I waltzed into our bedroom, to wake you and tell you of my night.

You were so tired that you barely managed to sit up and keep your eyes open. I battled your drowsiness with ebullience and volume. I paced about, occasionally bumping into furniture; I wanted my words to rouse you as I replayed the evening shot by shot. “Oh, and I must tell you about the barge run aground!” I exclaimed at one point, droning on and on through to the final carom, to the access it unlocked, and the deal I cut. So involved was I in these reveries that I hadn’t realized, until I had finished, that you were lightly snoring.

Me: crestfallen and silent. You: lovely as always, but asleep.

I turned for the boys’ room, perhaps they were awake.

Our diminutive Étienne was splayed across the bed with his pillow under a thigh, the sheets twisted in a ball, and the quilt clumped on the floor. By day, he was a mousy child; at night he thrashed like a marlin. I slipped the pillow back under Étienne’s head and tucked in his bedcovers. Across the room, Raoul was perfectly still on his back with his head centered on the pillow and arms resting atop the folded quilt. The ever-serious older brother, Raoul looked nearly dead by contrast. I sat on the foot of his bed.

My stories once thrilled you. Before the boys were born, you would have tossed aside your covers and followed me to the porch. You’d rock with your arms around your knees and the candlelight flickering in your eyes and ask rapt, probing, yet

encouraging, questions. Then later, we might make love.

Did you know that one time, early in your pregnancy with Étienne, I counted all the hairs in your eyebrows? I used to treasure watching you sleep, still amazed that you had paired with me, that you were mother to my boys. One afternoon, the idea struck. You were so thoroughly exhausted and asleep that I was able to inspect your brows closely with a lorgnette to insure a proper count. Two-hundred-and-twelve on the left. Twohundred-twenty-seven on the right. Even your imperfections are bewitching.

I took this tally because I wanted to know something about you that you didn’t. Your outward beauty has always been too much for me. The scales were never even. But neither was twohundred-and-twelve and two-twenty-seven.

I wondered, as I sat on the corner of our child’s bed, what new secrets you had.