THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
1
Kathleen Beckett awoke feeling poorly. It was Sunday. November. Warm for this time of year. She threw off the covers and turned onto her back, undoing the bow of her sleeping gown. She wouldn’t go to church, she told her husband, Virgil, but there was no need for concern. Everyone should go on without her.
Virgil hesitated. They had been going to church for six months now, and his wife had not yet missed a service. “Dear, are you sure you’re all right?” he asked, flipping a necktie.
Kathleen, Kathy to her friends, Katie when Virgil felt sweet, nodded from the bed. “I’m perfectly fine,” she said. “I shouldn’t have slept in the flannel. You go. I’ll see you when you get back.”
Virgil kissed his wife on the forehead. Their sons, Nicholas and Nathaniel, were standing in the doorway. “Mother’s not well,” he told them. “Go dress yourselves.”
The boys stared at their mother.
“What’s wrong with her,” said Nicholas.
Virgil glared at him. “I said your mother’s not well. Don’t bother her.”
The boys retreated into their bedroom and put on their church suits. Virgil made breakfast, then piled everyone into the family’s brand- new ’57 Buick Bluebird and departed for the First Presbyterian. The church was fifteen miles from Acropolis Place, the sunny, pentagon- shaped apartment complex on the outskirts of Newark, Delaware, where the Becketts had lived since last May, ever since Virgil started at Equitable Life in Wilmington.
Kathleen had picked it out. Though it was only an apartment, it was new, carpeted in green wall-to-wall, and its signature feature was a gas fireplace that lit with a switch. There was an icebox, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf for her novels and cookbooks. In the living room, a sliding glass door led out to a white wrought-iron balcony overlooking a small, kidney-shaped community swimming pool, which the Becketts, in their brief tenure at Acropolis Place, had never seen anyone use.
Virgil didn’t care where they lived so long as Kathleen was happy, but he’d taken a pay cut to move back to Delaware and work at Equitable. Their house in Rhode Island sold for what they paid almost a decade ago. He hoped they wouldn’t stay long at the apartment.
After Christmas, he figured, they could start looking for a house in Wilmington, but until then, each Sunday the family would travel the fifteen miles to the First Presbyterian and sit in the wooden pews for forty minutes, listening to Reverend Underhill speak with passive equanimity about Jesus Christ and potluck suppers.
Usually after the service, Virgil and the other men from Equitable lingered on one part of the church’s front lawn in pressed suits and fedoras, smoking and talking business, family, the free afternoon, while the women, crisp in their crinolines, lingered in the vestibule, chatting with the reverend, anticipating an afternoon of cooking and cocktails. Today, the unseasonably warm weather prompted everyone to flee the First Presbyterian as quickly as possible, leaving the reverend to watch his congregation hastily press themselves into their cars and wonder what it was he’d said that sent them running.
Virgil Beckett was the first out the door. Major chords of the last hymn still sounded in the nave as he whispered to the boys to get their coats. I’ll check on Kathleen first, he thought. Then I’ll call Wooz. The course was bound to be open on a day like this, though he’d never golfed this late in the season before.
There were barely any leaves on the trees.
Virgil had thought about golfing throughout the entire sermon and could not tell you a word of what Reverend Underhill said. Having grown up in California, he appreciated an Indian summer, and pictured himself in his summer shirt and slacks, swinging iron, feeling the sweat slide down his back. He imagined the smell of the warm browning grass beneath him, the sight of the hanging November sun in the sky. Now, rushing the boys to the car, he worried whether the course was actually open, and if so, whether anyone would have bothered to rake and mow.
“In you go,” he said, and the boys tumbled into the back of the Bluebird.
Virgil glanced at his sons in the rearview. They hadn’t spoken much this morning and were slouched in the back seat. Their coats were already off. Their faces, pink and sticky.
“You boys okay?” he said.
“We don’t like church clothes,” said Nicholas.
Nicholas, the younger of the two, often spoke for himself and Nathaniel.
“We’re almost home,” Virgil said. “When you get home you can change and then go outside. Isn’t this a great day? Are you going to play stickball or something? Get a game going?”
The boys didn’t answer.
Virgil struck the left-hand turn signal on the Bluebird. The car tick-tocked, and they waited.
It suddenly occurred to Virgil that Kathleen might be pregnant.
He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it until now. Though most women were finished by thirty, a third child at her age wasn’t unheard of. Most of the agents at Equitable had three. But a man had to be cautious; you couldn’t get greedy and take on more than you could handle. Virgil didn’t know him well, but Tom Braddock had four boys and was apparently envied for years. Then, a month ago, the oldest died. It happened right outside his house. Some kind of a blockage in the brain — or was it the heart? Leg? At any rate, the boy just collapsed on the front lawn, and now Virgil regarded Braddock warily. It was the worst sort of terrible luck, he felt, the kind that might attach itself to you if you got too near it. Virgil’s boss, Lou Porter, had told Braddock to take a good deal of time off, whatever he needed, and everyone pretended it was for Braddock. Truth was, no one could stand to be near him.
Virgil wondered if the baby would be a girl. It would be good for Kathy to have a girl, he thought. He was happy with his boys, but a little girl could keep Kathy company in a different way, and he worried sometimes that she was lonely in a house of men.
By the time he made the final turn into Acropolis Place and steered the Bluebird into the carport, Virgil Beckett saw the new baby girl as clearly as he saw the warm afternoon golfing. He helped the boys out of the back seat, slammed the car doors, then traveled up the stairs two at a time to apartment 14B and went directly to the bedroom to check on his wife. “Kath?” he said.
She wasn’t there.
Virgil stood for a moment, looking at the bed. It was neatly made.
“Kathleen?”
He left the bedroom and searched the living room, kitchen. There was no sign of her. He was thinking she might have slipped out for some Bayer or something when he heard Nicholas cry out:
“Mother’s in the pool!”
Virgil joined his sons on the balcony.
Kathleen was standing in the far end of the swimming pool, chest-deep in water, her elbows resting comfortably on the bullnose coping. She was wearing her old red bathing suit, the one from college. He hadn’t seen it in years.
“Kathy,” he shouted, laughing. “What are you doing?”
The woman looked up, visoring her eyes with one hand to block the sun. A cigarette forked her fingers.
She saw Virgil and waved.
Virgil returned to the front door, traveled back downstairs, and by the time he reached the edge of the pool, a few of their neighbors had slid back their own glass doors and were standing, watching, from behind the rails of their balconies.
He knelt down. “Kath,” he said. “Are you all right?”
Mrs. Beckett smiled at her husband. “I’m perfectly fine,” she said. “Never felt better, in fact.”
One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024
From “one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page” (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife who goes for a swim in her apartment complex’s swimming pool one morning…and won’t come out.
It’s November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn’t particularly happy in his job but he fulfills the role. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion with a key shot up her sleeve, is now a mother and homemaker. On this unseasonably warm Sunday, Kathleen decides not to join her family at church. Instead, she unearths her old, red bathing suit and descends into the deserted swimming pool of their apartment complex in Newark, Delaware. And then she won’t come out.
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most masterly breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.
