Home > Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn

Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn
Author: Betsy Carter


Part 1

 

Like a piece of shattered glass, New Rochelle slips into New York with its jagged southern coastline butting against the Long Island Sound. The winters are colorless and cold, and the Sound turns a discouraging metallic green. But in springtime, cherry blossoms and lilacs perfume the air. The Sound becomes a tropical blue, hospitable to the sailboats that pour into its waters. On land, the flouncy three-story Queen Annes and plainspoken Cape Cods come alive with the sounds of lawn mowers and the smells of fried chicken.

In this congenial suburb, Geraldine and Earle Wingo ran the bakery founded by her parents, Shore Cakes, the oldest bakery in town. The smell of melting butter and cinnamon oozed from its whitewashed façade, strawberry shortcakes and chocolate cookies filled the shelves, and its walls were covered by photographs of New Rochelle sunsets and various shots of a humpback whale that once swam so far inland that the New York Times even sent a photographer.

Both her parents were gone now, but Geraldine still had her mother’s Italian looks: olive complexion, midnight black hair and dark whirlpool eyes. With her feisty nature, she was the opposite of soft-spoken Earle, whose pale blue eyes played like chimes against his milk-white skin and wavy blond hair.

The young Wingos’ story seemed a happy one in a happy place, hardly worth telling, until, on an early March afternoon in 1929, as the sky turned black and a hollow wind blew through town, Geraldine gave birth to a girl baby.

Geraldine was in labor for three hours, easy as these things go.

After that, “easy” went the way of the wind.

 

 

Chapter 1

 

It was Earle who wanted a baby.

At twenty, Geraldine wasn’t ready to give herself up to a child.

Once the prom queen of New Rochelle High, she tended to herself with the fastidiousness of a cat. Each day, she massaged Pond’s cold cream into her skin and dabbed 4711 cologne onto her wrists and neck. She brushed her hair with one hundred strokes and spread Vaseline over her fire-red lipstick. With her curvy figure, held in place by a girdle, Geraldine enjoyed the way men’s eyes blanketed her with something more than admiration, and she blushed when they told her that she smelled like gardenias. Why on earth would she give all that up for a child? In her vanity and wanton thoughts, she defied God and the Catholic Church.

Earle was an Episcopalian. He found it funny the way Geraldine crossed herself before having sex, and the clatter she’d make rubbing her fingers over those old beads of hers. Did she really think all that confessing would make God overlook the silk stockings and garters she wore?

She told Earle and her priest that her reasons for not wanting a child were practical. “The bakery’s starting to make money, and we’ve just bought our first house. Let’s not rock the boat.”

But in the late twenties, a childless woman was considered as odd as an unmarried man in his thirties. Geraldine saw how the ladies patted down their hair and ran their tongues over their teeth before speaking to Earle—beautiful Earle. She knew he had other choices. So, grudgingly, she allowed herself to get pregnant, and in 1929, just before the country slid into a depression, Geraldine gave birth. Earle wanted to name their daughter Shirley Mae, after his mother. But Geraldine insisted on Emilia, her grandmother’s name. They compromised and called her Emilia Mae.

During the first two months of her life, Emilia Mae howled in colicky pain for hours each day. Earle spent his time at the bakery, leaving Geraldine to wash, feed, diaper, and try to console the inconsolable baby. Geraldine tried everything—rocking chair, castor oil rubs, singing lullabies—but nothing quieted Emilia Mae. Sleep-deprived and desperate, Geraldine took the baby’s screams as an affront. Often, she’d run out the door as if her house were ablaze with her daughter’s shrieks. No one had told her how a baby would claw at her, body and mind, how she would be lucky if she had time for a shower, much less to run a brush through her hair once or twice.

Earle would come home from work by six thirty. He’d sit with Emilia Mae writhing in his arms and sing to her in his sweet high-pitched voice. She was a chunky baby with light strawberry hair and narrow chestnut eyes that defied you to look away from her. He’d kiss her ample tummy, and nibble on her ears. He’d tell her what a precious girl she was and how her tiny ears smelled like butter cookies straight from the oven. Because he loved her so much, he said, he would try not to eat them. Of course she smells like butter cookies fresh from the oven, Geraldine thought. I spent the last hour cleaning up Emilia Mae’s vomit and bathing her. Earle can afford to be all goo-goo-eyed over this baby. If I saw Emilia Mae only two or three hours a day, slept seven hours a night, and had normal days of talking with real people, I could be damned goo-goo-eyed as well.

By June, whatever hormonal gumbo had kept Geraldine afloat had been sucked dry by the baby’s constant wailing. Before Earle even took his jacket off at night, Geraldine would shove the baby at him and demand: “You take her. I’ve had enough.”

Emilia Mae was two months and twelve days old when Earle and Geraldine sat across from each other one Saturday morning. Earle had just looked in on Emilia Mae. “She’s sleeping like an angel.”

“An angel, pph.” Geraldine made a spitting noise.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said.

One of the things that attracted Geraldine to Earle was his lack of guile. What he said was what he meant, and mostly what he meant was as uncomplicated and well intentioned as a priest’s sermon on Christmas Eve. So it never occurred to her that with this question, Earle was about to wheel in a heap of trouble that would sit between them for years.

He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “You do love this baby, don’t you?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Geraldine could have nodded or said “Mmm hmm” and left it at that. But she’d been up half the night with Emilia Mae. Her hair was dirty, and her eyes were tiny as apple seeds. She wore her lavender robe, the one with calla lilies embroidered on it, the one that was so sexy and fluid against her skin that Earle hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her whenever she wore it. Now it was stained with breast milk and crusts of spit-up, and Earle hadn’t laid a finger on it or her since Geraldine’s belly was big enough to bend the calla lilies out of shape. In short, Geraldine, who had enough guile for both of them, didn’t bother to phrase her answer in order to please Earle. Instead, she spoke what she felt. “I would love this baby if she didn’t make me feel like a monster, or if for one moment, I felt she loved me back and didn’t bawl her eyes out every time I came near her. If she let me sleep through the night or gave me a moment to shower or fix my hair, that would be nice.” Her voice was harsh as the sound of raked rocks. “I know she’s your precious lamb. That’s because by the time you get here, she’s exhausted herself from carrying on all day with me. Then she lies in your arms like a rag doll, and you go all moony. You get to go to work, put on clean clothes, talk to other grown-ups—the things normal people do.” She stood up in front of him and outlined her body with her hands. “This is how I look on a good day. This is not normal.”

Earle spoke quietly. “C’mon honey, give it time. She’ll grow out of whatever this is. Everyone has trouble adjusting in the beginning.”

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