A Widow for One Year (15 page)

“The poor child!” Marion interrupted him. “I don’t want her to be like
me
!”

Dumping Mrs. Vaughn

For the next five or six days, before Ruth’s stitches were removed, the child didn’t go to the beach. The nuisance of keeping the cut dry made the nannies irritable. Eddie detected an increased sullenness in Ted’s and Marion’s behavior toward each other; they had always avoided each other, but now they never spoke to or even looked at each other. When one wanted to complain about the other, the complaint was made to Eddie. For example, Ted held Marion responsible for Ruth’s injury, although Eddie had repeatedly told him that it was he who had let Ruth have the photograph.

“That’s not the point,” Ted said. “The point is,
you
shouldn’t have gone into her room in the first place—that’s her mother’s job.”

“I told you. Marion was asleep,” Eddie lied.

“I doubt it,” Ted told the boy. “I doubt that ‘asleep’ accurately describes Marion’s condition. I would guess that she was
zonked
.”

Eddie wasn’t sure what Ted meant. He said, “She wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean.”

“I didn’t say she was drunk—she’s never drunk,” Ted told Eddie. “I said she was
zonked
. Wasn’t she?”

Eddie didn’t know what to say; he reported the problem to Marion.

“Did you tell him
why
?” she asked the boy. “Did you tell him what you
asked
me?”

Eddie was shocked. “No, of course not,” the sixteen-year-old said. “

Tell
him!” Marion exclaimed.

So Eddie told Ted what happened when he asked Marion about the accident. “I guess
I
zonked her,” Eddie explained. “I keep telling you— the whole thing is
my
fault.”

“No, it’s Marion’s fault,” Ted insisted.

“Oh, who cares whose
fault
it is?” Marion said to Eddie. “

I
care,” Eddie said. “
I’m
the one who let Ruth have the photograph in her room.”

“This isn’t about the photograph—don’t be silly,” Marion told the sixteen-year-old. “This has nothing to do with you, Eddie.”

It was a blow to the boy to realize that she was right. Eddie O’Hare was involved in what would be the most important relationship in his life; yet what was happening between Ted and Marion had nothing to do with him.

Meanwhile, Ruth asked every day about the unreturned photograph; every day there was a phone call to the frame shop in Southampton, but the matting and framing of a single eight-by-ten photo was not a priority in the framer’s busiest season of the year.

Would the new mat have a spot of blood on it? Ruth wanted to know. (No, it would not.) Would the new frame and the new glass be exactly like the old frame and the old glass? (Close enough.)

And every day and every night, Ruth would lead the nannies, or her mother or father, or Eddie, through the gallery of photographs hanging in the Coles’ house. If she touched
that
photo, could the glass cut her? If she dropped
this
one, was it also glass and would it break? Why did glass break, anyway? And if glass could cut you, why would you want any glass in your house?

But before Ruth’s repeated questions, the month of August had passed the midpoint; it was markedly cooler at night. Even the carriage house was comfortable for sleeping. One night when Eddie and Marion were sleeping there, Marion forgot to tack the towel over the skylight. They were awakened early in the morning by a low-flying flock of geese. Marion said: “Going south already?” She didn’t speak to Eddie or Ruth for the rest of the day.

Ted radically revised
A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound;
for almost a week, he presented Eddie with a completely rewritten draft every morning. Eddie would retype the manuscript the same day; the next morning Ted’s rewrite would come back to him. No sooner was Eddie beginning to feel like an actual writer’s assistant than the rewriting process stopped. Eddie wouldn’t see
A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
again until it was published. Although it would be Ruth’s favorite among her father’s books, it would never be a favorite of Eddie’s; he’d seen too many versions of it to appreciate the final draft.

And in the mail one day, just before Ruth’s stitches were removed, was a fat envelope for Eddie from his father. It contained the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons; in fact, it was the very same list of names and addresses that Eddie had thrown away on the ferry while crossing Long Island Sound. Someone had found the envelope with the embossed Phillips Exeter Academy return address and the senior O’Hare’s carefully handwritten name—a janitor, or one of the ferry crew, or some meddler snooping through the trash. Whoever the idiot was, he or she had returned the list to Minty O’Hare.

“You should have told me that you lost this,” Eddie’s father wrote to him. “I would have copied the names and addresses and given them to you again. Thankfully someone recognized their value. A remarkable act of human kindness—and at a time in our history when acts of kindness are growing rare. Whoever it was, man or woman, didn’t even ask to be repaid for the postage! It must have been the Exeter name— on the envelope, I mean. I’ve always said that you can never overestimate the influence of the academy’s good name. . . .” Minty had added one name and address, he noted to Eddie: an Exonian in nearby Wainscott had somehow been omitted from the original list.

It was an irritating time for Ted, too. Ruth claimed that her stitches gave her nightmares; she had most of her nightmares when it was Ted’s turn to stay with her. One night the child cried and cried for her mother;
only
her mommy—and, to Ted’s further exasperation, Eddie— could comfort her. Ted had to call them in the carriage house and tell them to come home. Then Eddie had to drive Ted back to the carriage house, where, Eddie imagined, the imprints of his and Marion’s bodies were still visible (if not still warm) on the bed.

When Eddie returned to the Coles’ house, all the upstairs lights were on. Ruth could be soothed only by being carried from photograph to photograph. Eddie volunteered to complete the guided tour, so Marion could go back to bed, but Marion seemed to be enjoying herself; in fact, Marion was aware that this would probably be her last journey through the photographic history of her dead boys with her daughter in her arms. Marion was actually prolonging the narrative that accompanied each picture. Eddie fell asleep in his room, but with the door to the upstairs hall open; for a while, he could hear Ruth’s and Marion’s voices.

Eddie knew by the child’s question that they were looking at the photograph (in the middle guest bedroom) of Timothy crying and covered with mud. “But what happened to Timothy?” Ruth asked, although she knew the story as well as Marion did. By now, even Eddie knew all the stories.

“Thomas pushed him in a puddle,” Marion told Ruth.

“How old is Timothy with the mud?” Ruth asked.

“He’s
your
age, honey,” her mother said. “He was just four. . . .”

Eddie knew the next photo, too: Thomas in his hockey uniform, after a game at the Exeter rink. He is standing with his arm around his mother, as if she’d been cold throughout the entire game—but she also looks extremely proud to be standing there with her son’s arm around her. Even though he has taken off his skates and is standing, absurdly, in full hockey uniform but with a pair of unlaced basketball shoes on his feet, Thomas is taller than Marion. What Ruth liked about the photograph is that Thomas is grinning widely, a hockey puck gripped in his teeth.

Just before he fell asleep, Eddie heard Ruth ask her mother: “How old is Thomas with the thing in his mouth?”

“He’s Eddie’s age,” Eddie heard Marion say. “He was just sixteen. . . .” About seven
A.M.
the phone rang. Marion answered it when she was still in bed. She knew by the silence that it was Mrs. Vaughn. “He’s at the other house,” Marion said; then she hung up.

At breakfast Marion told Eddie: “I’ll make you a bet. He breaks up with her before Ruth gets her stitches out.”

“But don’t the stitches come out on Friday?” Eddie asked. (There were only two days until Friday.)

“I’ll bet he breaks up with her
today,
” Marion replied. “Or at least he’ll try. If she’s difficult about it, it may take him another couple of days.”

Indeed, Mrs. Vaughn would be difficult about it. Probably anticipating the difficulty, Ted tried to break up with Mrs. Vaughn by sending Eddie to do it for him.

“I’m going to do
what
?” Eddie asked. They were standing by the biggest table in Ted’s workroom, where Ted had assembled a stack of about a hundred drawings of Mrs. Vaughn. Ted had some trouble closing the bulging portfolio; it was the largest portfolio he had, with his initials engraved in gold in the brown leather—T.T.C. (Theodore Thomas Cole).

“You’re going to give her these, but
not
the portfolio. Just give her the drawings. I want the portfolio back,” Ted instructed Eddie, who knew that the portfolio had been a gift from Marion. (Marion had told Eddie that.)

“But aren’t you going to see Mrs. Vaughn today?” Eddie asked him. “Isn’t she expecting you?”

“Tell her I’m not coming, but that I wanted her to have the drawings,” Ted said.

“She’s going to ask me when you
are
coming,” Eddie replied.

“Tell her you don’t know. Just give her the drawings. Say as little as you have to,” Ted told the boy. Eddie scarcely had time to tell Marion.

“He’s sending you to break up with her—what a coward!” Marion said, touching Eddie’s hair in that motherly way she had. He was sure she was going to say something about her perpetual dissatisfaction with his haircut. Instead she said, “Better show up early—she’ll still be getting dressed. That way she’ll be less tempted to invite you in. You don’t want her asking you a million questions. The best thing would be to ring the bell and just hand her the drawings. You don’t want to let her get you inside the house, behind closed doors—believe me. Be careful she doesn’t kill you.”

With that in mind, Eddie O’Hare arrived at the Gin Lane address early. At the entrance to the expensively pebbled driveway, he stopped by the impressive barrier of privet to remove the hundred drawings of Mrs. Vaughn from the leather portfolio. He feared it might be awkward to give Mrs. Vaughn the drawings
and
take back the portfolio while the small, dark woman was standing furiously in front of him. But Eddie had miscalculated the wind. After Eddie put the portfolio in the trunk of the Chevy, he transferred the drawings to the backseat of the car, where the wind blew them into a disorderly pile; he had to close the doors and windows of the Chevy in order to sort through the drawings in the backseat. He couldn’t help but look at the drawings then.

They began with the portraits of Mrs. Vaughn with her angry little boy. The small, tightly closed mouths of the mother and her son struck Eddie as an unkind genetic characteristic. Also, Mrs. Vaughn and her son both had intense, impatient eyes; seated side by side, they made fists of their hands and held them rigidly on their thighs. In his mother’s lap, Mrs. Vaughn’s son appeared to be on the verge of clawing and kicking free of her—unless she, who also appeared to be on the verge, impulsively decided to strangle him first. There were easily two dozen or more such portraits, each conveying chronic discontent and mounting tension.

Then Eddie came to Mrs. Vaughn alone—at first fully dressed, but deeply alone. Eddie instantly grieved for her. If what Eddie had first spotted in Mrs. Vaughn was her furtiveness, which had given way to her submissiveness, which in turn had led her to despair, what he’d missed seeing in her was her mortal unhappiness. Ted Cole had caught this trait even before the woman began to take off her clothes.

The nudes had their own sad progression. At first the fists remained balled up on the tense thighs, and Mrs. Vaughn sat in profile—often with one or the other shoulder blocking her small breasts from view. When at last she faced the artist, her destroyer, she hugged herself to hide her breasts, and her knees were tightly pinched together; her crotch was mostly concealed—her pubic hair, when visible at all, was only the thinnest of lines.

Then Eddie groaned in the closed car; the later nudes of Mrs. Vaughn were as
un
concealed as the frankest photographs of a cadaver. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, as if her shoulders had been savagely dislocated in a violent fall. Her exposed and unsupported breasts drooped; the nipple of one breast seemed larger and darker and more down-pointed than the other. Her knees were spread apart, as if she’d lost all sensation in her legs—or else she’d broken her pelvis. For such a small woman, her navel was too large, her pubic hair too abundant. Her vagina was gaping and slack. The very last of the nudes was the first pornography that Eddie O’Hare had ever seen, not that Eddie fully understood what was pornographic about the drawings. Eddie felt sick and deeply sorry that he’d seen the drawings, which had reduced Mrs. Vaughn to the hole in her center; the nudes managed to make even less of Mrs. Vaughn than what had remained of her strong smell on the rental-house pillows.

Under the tires of the Chevy, the crunching of the perfect stones in the driveway leading to the Vaughn mansion sounded like the breaking bones of small animals. As Eddie passed a squirting fountain in the circular driveway, he saw the movement of an upstairs curtain. When he rang the doorbell, he nearly dropped the drawings, which he was able to hold only by hugging them with both his arms against his chest. He waited forever for the small, dark woman to appear.

Marion had been right. Mrs. Vaughn had not finished getting dressed, or possibly she’d not completed the exact phase of
un
dress that she might have been preparing in order to look alluring to Ted. Her hair was wet and lank, and her upper lip seemed rubbed raw; at one corner of her mouth, like a clown’s unfinished smile, remained a trace of the hair-removal ointment that she’d too hastily tried to wipe away. Mrs. Vaughn had been hasty in her choice of a robe as well, for she stood in the doorway in a white terry-cloth thing that resembled a giant, ungainly towel. It was probably her husband’s robe, for it hung over her thin ankles; one edge dragged on the doorsill. She was barefoot. The wet nail polish on her big right toe had been smeared across the top of her right foot in such a way that it looked as if she’d cut her foot and was bleeding.