After Brian, she fell into a depression that lasted the better part of three years. She spent a month at her parents’ house, in her old room, and refused to see Henry. Without consulting him first, she had her tubes tied, so she could never have children again. When she came home she began to clean constantly, and the house always smelled of bleach and Lysol. And cigarette smoke, because she’d taken up smoking for good. She drank every night until she was drunk, and sometimes she never came to bed. She fought with Henry’s mother, who called her a mean-spirited and neglectful woman, and after one particularly nasty fight, Effie, on her own, moved a heavy sideboard against the door connecting the Old Wing to the main part of the house, and for good measure, she nailed the door shut. It remained shut for twelve years, until Henry’s mother died.

Henry worked a signal freight to Brunswick, Georgia, three runs a week, where he’d stay the night in a boardinghouse, and he had an affair with the young widow who ran it. He would believe, later, that the change in Effie had made him stray, but in fact the affair had started while she was pregnant with Brian and things were bright. Her name was Rose. She had red hair and freckles, like Ida June, and she was ten years older than he was. One of her legs was slightly shorter than the other, and she had to wear a special shoe on that foot, with an elevated sole. He’d come into Brunswick after midnight and she’d run a bath for him, and in the morning she’d fix breakfast for him and the three other boarders, including J. P., another brakeman on the signal freight, who had become Henry’s best friend, and who kept the secret. But after a year, Henry was bumped up onto a better run, up to Atlanta, and he never saw Rose again.

Effie, he told friends, had left him for Signal Creek United Methodist Church. He meant it fondly, because it coincided with happier times. She joined and eventually led the church’s finance committee. When part of the church caught fire, she formed the booster club to raise money for repairs. She had a reputation for toughness. She got along better with men than with women. One woman, Vivian, another member of the finance committee—whom Henry would kiss, years later, at the end of a party, when they were both drunk—said to him, “I love her, Henry, I really do, but you are an angel to put up with that broad every day of your life.”