Beneath the Weight of Sadness by Gerald L. Dodge

Eventually we started going to his dorm room to make love. I started calling him Ethe.
    He told me that his parents were both intellects and distant from him, as if they had a secret alliance that excluded him, and his brother and sister, too. But their expectations for their children were high and they could afford to have high expectations, because the Engroffs had plenty of money. They’d owned textile mills in northern Massachusetts and their investments had been wise. When I decided to marry Ethan Engroff, I didn’t know how much money he would inherit. I knew he’d be a good lawyer. I knew that because, when he was verbose, he was eloquent.
    But then a bottle of Dolce & Gabbana perfume changed the course of our future life. No more legalese for my Ethan. He’d bought the perfume for me on our very first Christmas together. The idea probably occurred to him when he was holding the elegant box. For certain it struck him by the time he had gift-wrapped the box himself.
    To his mind no self-respecting lover would give a gift wrapped by a stranger—too impersonal. I know he thought to himself (as he still does with regularity), Who boxed this perfume? Certainly not the perfume manufacturer. Who boxes all the things we buy: jewelry, toys, shoes, tea, cards, cereal…etc., etc. He did rigorous research, hours and hours and hours of research at Butler Library when he should’ve been studying for school. Because Ethan Engroff had already decided he would no longer invest his time in the study of law at Columbia University, but would manufacture high-quality specialty boxes for all the businesses that needed boxes.
    “I’ve done the research, Amy, and I cannot fail with this. Plus, if I do,” he said confidently, “I can always come back and take up where I left off”—and he put his finger up in the air to halt any protest I might have had, not that I did—“and even if we are married and Truman is already in the oven—” (Ethe had already decided our child would be a boy, and we would name him after the old one-star general himself, all of which was fine with me and really my idea)—“I still have a trust fund coming from the Engroff side that makes the Canton amount pale in comparison.”
    We were married that spring after our first Christmas together, after I graduated, and then we went to the Cape Cod house for two months. We could’ve gone anywhere, gone to Europe or Asia or the islands, but both of us wanted to go to the cape, and so for those two months the house was off limits for any of the Engroff family, including the one-star general. Six bedrooms, each one like a suite, and we made love in each of them. I had never been happier in all of my twenty-two years. It was total bliss, then. Ethe was enthused about his kernel of an idea, as he liked to call it, and we looked at maps of New Jersey attempting to locate the ideal town where we would live, and the location—not too close to where we would eventually settle—where he would start the business. Ethe was so certain the business would be a success. It didn’t hurt that, even though the textile industry had dried up, the Engroffs had incredible connections throughout the world of finance, along with— I’m afraid this is the way the world works, Baby Amy— political connections.
    Two blissful months of touring the cape and Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. I thought, then, that we could’ve lived there for the rest of our lives. Not long into the second month, I was sure I was pregnant. Ethe was ecstatic. It proved to be a false alarm, but it didn’t matter. We seemed to be utterly perfect for each other, and there was not a single minute, not a single, lovely, blissful minute, we weren’t happy. No spats, no sudden emotional upheavals, no cross moments. Ethe whispered to me one night in one of the six rooms, “We are soul mates, Baby Amy. I know it now and you do, too.”
    Oh, and I did. Yes, I did.
    We rented a house in Long Valley, New