A Widow for One Year (11 page)

It began by her taking him out to dinner. She drove, without asking him if he wanted to drive. To his surprise, Eddie was grateful to his father for insisting that he pack some dress shirts and ties and an “ all-purpose” sports jacket. But when Marion saw him in his traditional Exeter uniform, she told him that he could dispense with either the tie or the jacket—where they were going, he didn’t need both. The restaurant, in East Hampton, was less fancy than Eddie had expected, and it was clear that the waiters were used to seeing Marion there; they kept bringing her wine—she had three glasses—without her having to ask.

She was more talkative than Eddie had known her to be. “I was already pregnant with Thomas when I married Ted—when I was only a year older than you are,” she told him. (The difference in their ages was a recurrent theme for her.) “When you were born, I was twenty-three. When you’re my age, I’ll be sixty-two,” she went on. And twice she made a reference to her gift to him: the pink cashmere cardigan. “How did you like my little surprise?” she asked.

“Very much!” he stammered.

Quickly changing the subject, she told him that Ted had not really dropped out of Harvard. He’d been asked to take a leave of absence— “for ‘nonperformance,’ I think he called it,” Marion said.

On every book jacket, in the part about the author, it always stated that Ted Cole was a Harvard dropout. Apparently this half-truth pleased him: it conveyed that he had been smart enough to get into Harvard and original enough not to care about staying there. “But the truth is, he was just lazy,” Marion said. “He never wanted to work very hard.” After a pause, she asked Eddie: “And how’s the work going for you?”

“There’s not much to do,” he confided to her.

“No, I can’t imagine that there is,” she replied. “Ted hired you because he needed a driver.”

Marion had not finished high school when she met Ted and he got her pregnant. But over the years, when Thomas and Timothy were growing up, she had passed a high-school equivalency exam; and, on various college campuses around New England, she’d completed courses part-time. It had taken ten years for her to graduate, from the University of New Hampshire in 1952—only a year before her sons were killed. She took mostly literature and history courses, many more than were necessary for a college degree; her unwillingness to enroll in the other courses that were required had delayed her getting a diploma. “Finally,” she told Eddie, “I wanted a college degree only because Ted didn’t have one.”

Thomas and Timothy had been proud of her for graduating. “I was just getting ready to be a writer when they died,” Marion confided to Eddie. “That finished it.”

“You were a
writer
?” Eddie asked her. “Why’d you stop?”

She told him that she couldn’t keep turning to her innermost thoughts when all she thought about was the death of her boys; she couldn’t allow herself to imagine freely, because her imagination would inevitably lead her to Thomas and Timothy. “And to think that I used to
like
to be alone with my thoughts,” she told Eddie. Marion doubted Ted had
ever
liked to be alone with his. “That’s why he keeps his stories so short, and they’re for children. That’s why he draws and draws and draws.”

Eddie, not realizing how sick he had become of hamburgers, ate an enormous meal.

“Not even love can daunt the appetite of a sixteen-year-old boy!” Marion observed. Eddie blushed; he wasn’t supposed to say how much he loved her. She hadn’t liked that.

And then she told him that when she’d displayed her pink cashmere cardigan on the bed for him, and especially as she’d chosen the accompanying bra and panties and was arranging these in their respective places—“for the imagined act,” as she put it—she had been aware that this was her first creative impulse since the death of her sons; it had also been her first and only moment of what she called “pure fun.” The alleged purity of such fun is debatable, but Eddie would never have questioned the sincerity of Marion’s intentions; it hurt his feelings only slightly that what was love to him was merely “fun” for her. Even at sixteen, he should have better understood the forewarning she was giving him.

When Marion had met Ted, Ted introduced himself as a “recent” Harvard dropout who was writing a novel; in truth, he’d been out of Harvard for four years. He was taking courses in a Boston art school. He’d always known how to draw—he called himself “self-taught.” (The courses at the art school were not as interesting to him as the models.)

In the first year they were married, Ted had gone to work for a lithographer; he’d instantly hated the job. “Ted would have hated
any
job,” Marion told Eddie. Ted had learned to hate lithography, too; nor was he interested in etching. (“I’m not a copper or stone sort of man,” he’d told Marion.)

Ted Cole published his first novel in 1937, when Thomas was a year old and Marion was not yet pregnant with Timothy. The reviews were mostly favorable, and the sales were well above average for a first novel. Ted and Marion decided to have a second child. The reviews of the next novel—in ’39, a year after Timothy was born—were neither favorable nor numerous; the second book sold only half as many copies as the first. Ted’s third novel, which was published in 1941—“a year before you were born,” Marion reminded Eddie—was hardly reviewed at all, and only
un
favorably. The sales were so low that Ted’s publisher refused to tell him the final figures. And then, in ’42—when Thomas and Timothy were six and four—
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
was published. The war would delay the numerous foreign translations, but even before them it was clear that Ted Cole never had to hate a job or write a novel again.

“Tell me,” Marion asked Eddie. “Does it give you the shivers to know that you and
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
were born in the same year?”

“It does,” Eddie admitted to her.

But why so
many
college towns? (The Coles had lived all over New England.)

Ted’s sexual pattern was behaviorally messy. Ted had told Marion that college and university towns were the best places to bring up children. The quality of the local schools was generally high; the community was stimulated by the cultural activities and the sporting events on campus. In addition, Marion could continue her education. And
socially,
Ted told her, the faculty families would be good company; at first Marion had not realized how many young mothers could be counted among those faculty wives.

Ted, who eschewed anything resembling a real job on the faculty— also, he wasn’t qualified for one—nevertheless gave a lecture every semester on the art of writing and drawing for children; often these lectures were sponsored jointly by the Department of Fine Arts and the English Department. Ted would always be the first to say that the process of creating a book for children was
not
an art, in his humble opinion; he preferred to call it a craft.

But Ted’s truest “craft,” Marion observed, was his systematic discovery and seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of the young mothers among the faculty wives; an occasional student would fall prey to Ted, too, but the young mothers were more vulnerable game.

It is not unusual for love affairs to end bitterly, and as the marriages of the more unfortunate of these faculty wives were already frail, it was not surprising that many couples were permanently parted by Ted’s amorous adventures.

“And that’s why we were always moving,” Marion told Eddie.

In the college and university towns, they easily found houses to rent; there were always faculty on leave and there was a relatively high rate of divorce. The Coles’ only home of any permanence had been a farmhouse in New Hampshire that they used for school vacations, ski trips, and a month or two every summer. The house had been in Marion’s family since she could remember.

When the boys died, it had been Ted’s suggestion to leave New England and all that New England reminded them of. The east end of Long Island was chiefly a summer haven and a weekend retreat for New Yorkers. For Marion it would be easier
not
to talk with her old friends.

“A new place, a new child, a new life,” she said to Eddie. “At least that was the idea.”

That Ted’s love affairs had not abated since leaving those New England college and university towns was not surprising to Marion. In truth, his infidelities had
increased
in number—if not in any observable measure of passion. Ted was
addicted
to love affairs. Marion had a bet with herself to see if Ted’s addiction to seductions would prove stronger or weaker than his addiction to alcohol. (Marion was betting that Ted could more easily give up the alcohol.)

And with Ted, Marion explained to Eddie, the seduction always lasted longer than the affair. First there were the conventional portraits, usually the mother with her child. Then the mother would pose alone, then nude. The nudes themselves revealed a predetermined progression: innocence, modesty, degradation, shame.

“Mrs. Vaughn!” Eddie interrupted, recalling the little woman’s furtiveness.

“Mrs. Vaughn is presently experiencing the
degraded
phase,” Marion told him.

For such a small woman, Mrs. Vaughn left a big smell on the pillows, Eddie thought; he also thought it would be imprudent, even prurient, for him to voice his opinion of Mrs. Vaughn’s odor to Marion.

“But you’ve stayed with him all these years,” the sixteen-year-old said miserably. “Why didn’t you leave him?”

“The boys loved him,” Marion explained. “And I loved the boys. I was planning to leave Ted after the boys finished school—after they had left home. Maybe after they’d finished college,” she added with less certainty.

Overcoming his unhappiness on her behalf, Eddie ate a mountainous dessert.

“That’s what I love about boys,” Marion told him. “No matter what, you just go on about your business.”

She let Eddie drive home. She rolled her window down and closed her eyes. The night air blew through her hair. “It’s nice to be driven,” she told Eddie. “Ted always drank too much. I was always the driver. Well . . . almost always,” she said in a whisper. Then she turned her back to Eddie; she might have been crying, because her shoulders were shaking, but she didn’t make a sound. When they arrived at the house in Sagaponack, either the wind had dried her tears or she hadn’t been crying at all. Eddie only knew, from the time he had cried in front of her, that Marion didn’t approve of crying.

In the house, after she dismissed the nighttime nanny, Marion poured herself a fourth glass of wine from an open bottle in the refrigerator. She made Eddie come with her when she checked to see if Ruth was asleep, whispering that, despite every appearance to the contrary, she had once been a good mother. “But I won’t be a
bad
mother to Ruth,” she added, still in a whisper. “I would rather be
no
mother to her than a bad one.” At the time, Eddie didn’t understand that Marion already knew she was going to leave her daughter with Ted. (At the time, Marion didn’t understand that Ted had hired Eddie
not only
because he needed a driver.)

The feeble night-light from the master bathroom cast such faint illumination into Ruth’s room that the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy were difficult to see; yet Marion insisted that Eddie look at them. She wanted to tell Eddie what the boys were doing in each of the pictures, and why she’d selected these particular photos for Ruth’s room. Then Marion led Eddie into the master bathroom, where the night-light illuminated those photographs only a little more clearly. Here Eddie could discern a water theme, which Marion had found appropriate for the bathroom: a holiday in Tortola, and one in Anguilla; a summer picnic at the pond in New Hampshire; and Thomas and Timothy, when they were both younger than Ruth, in a bathtub together—Tim was crying, but Tom was not. “He got soap in his eyes,” Marion whispered.

The tour continued into the master bedroom, where Eddie had never been before—nor had he seen the photographs, each one of which summoned a story from Marion. And so on, throughout the house. They traveled from room to room, from picture to picture, until Eddie realized why Ruth had been so agitated by the little scraps of notepaper covering Thomas’s and Timothy’s bare feet. Ruth would have taken this tour of the past on many, many occasions—probably in both her father’s
and
her mother’s arms—and to the four-year-old, the
stories
of the photographs were doubtless as important as the photographs themselves. Maybe
more
important. Ruth was growing up not only with the overwhelming presence of her dead brothers, but also with the unparalleled importance of their absence.

The pictures
were
the stories, and vice versa. To alter the photographs, as Eddie had, was as unthinkable as changing the past. The past, which was where Ruth’s dead brothers lived, was not open to revision. Eddie vowed that he would try to make it up to the child, to reassure her that everything she’d ever been told about her dead brothers was immutable. In an unsure world, with an uncertain future, at least the child could rely on that. Or
could
she?

More than an hour later, Marion ended the tour in Eddie’s bedroom —and, finally, in the guest bathroom that Eddie used. There was an appropriate fatalism to the fact that the last photograph to inspire Marion’s background narration was the picture of Marion herself, in bed with the two bare feet.

“I love that picture of
you,
” Eddie managed to say, not daring to add that he had masturbated to the image of Marion’s bare shoulders—
and
to her smile. As if for the first time, Marion slowly considered herself in the twelve-year-old photograph.

“I was twenty-seven,” she said, the passage of time, the melancholy of it, filling her eyes.

It was her fifth glass of wine, which she finished now in a perfunctory fashion. Then she handed her empty glass to Eddie. He remained standing where he was, in the guest bathroom, for a full fifteen minutes after Marion had left him.