A Widow for One Year (17 page)

“When Ted asks you where I’ve gone, just say you don’t know,” Marion told Eddie.

“But where
are
you going?” Eddie asked.

“You don’t know,” Marion repeated. “If Ted insists on a better answer, to
anything,
just say that he’ll be hearing from my lawyer. My lawyer will tell him everything.”

“Oh, great,” Eddie said.

“And if he hits you, just hit him back. By the way, he won’t make a fist—at worst he’ll slap you. But you should use your fist,” Marion advised Eddie. “Just punch him in the nose. If you punch him in the nose, he’ll stop.”

But what about Ruth? The plans for Ruth were vague. If Ted began to shout, how much should Ruth hear? If there was a fight, how much should the child see? If the nannies had been dismissed, Ruth would have to be either with Ted or with Eddie, or with them both. Why wouldn’t she be upset?

“You can call Alice, if you need help with Ruth,” Marion had suggested to Eddie. “I told Alice that you or Ted might call her. In fact, I told her to call the house about midafternoon—to see if you needed her after all.” Alice was the afternoon nanny, the pretty college girl with her own car. She was the nanny Eddie liked the least, Eddie had reminded Marion.

“You better get to like her a little,” Marion replied. “If Ted kicks you out—and I can’t imagine that he’ll want you to
stay
—you’re going to need a ride to the ferry at Orient Point. Ted’s not permitted to drive, you know—not that he would want to drive you, anyway.”

“Ted’s going to kick me out and I’m going to have to ask Alice for a ride,” Eddie echoed.

Marion merely kissed him.

And then the moment was at hand. When Eddie stopped at Mrs. Vaughn’s concealed driveway on Gin Lane, Ted said, “You better wait here for me. I’m not going to last a half hour with that woman. Maybe twenty minutes, tops. Maybe ten. . . .”

“I’ll go and come back,” Eddie lied.

“Be back in fifteen minutes,” Ted told him. Then he noticed the long scraps of his familiar drawing paper. The tatters of his drawings were blowing in the wind; his drawings had been ripped to shreds. The forbidding barrier of privet had kept most of the torn paper from blowing into the street, but the hedges were bedecked with waving flags and strips of paper, as if some unruly wedding guests had strewn the Vaughn estate with makeshift confetti.

As Ted walked up the noisy driveway at a slow, stricken pace, Eddie got out of the car to watch; he even followed Ted a short distance. The courtyard was littered with the remains of Ted’s drawings. The spitting fountain was clogged with wet wads of paper; the water had turned a sepia shade of grayish brown.

“The squid ink . . .” Ted said aloud. Eddie, walking backward, was already retreating to the car. He had spotted the gardener on a ladder, plucking paper from the privet. The gardener had scowled at both Eddie and Ted, but Ted had noticed neither the gardener nor the ladder; the squid ink, staining the water in the fountain, had entirely captured Ted’s attention. “Oh boy,” he muttered, as Eddie left him.

Compared to Ted, the gardener was better dressed. There was always something careless and rumpled about Ted’s clothes—jeans, a tucked-in T-shirt, and (on this somewhat cool Friday morning) an unbuttoned flannel shirt that was flapping in the wind. And this morning Ted was unshaven, too; he was doing his best to make the worst possible impression on Mrs. Vaughn. (Ted
and
his drawings had already made the worst possible impression on Mrs. Vaughn’s gardener.)

“Five—
five
minutes!” Ted called to Eddie. Given the long day ahead, it hardly mattered that Eddie didn’t hear him.

Back in Sagaponack, Marion had packed a large beach bag for Ruth, who was already wearing her bathing suit under her shorts and T-shirt; in the bag were towels and two changes of clothes, including long pants and a sweatshirt. “You can take her anywhere you like for lunch,” Marion told Eddie. “All she ever eats is a grilled-cheese sandwich with French fries.”

“And ketchup,” Ruth said.

Marion tried to give Eddie a ten-dollar bill for lunch.

“I have money,” Eddie told her, but when he turned his back on her to help Ruth into the Chevy, Marion stuck the ten-dollar bill into the right rear pocket of his jeans, and he remembered what it had felt like the first time she’d pulled him to her by tugging the waist of his jeans—her knuckles against his bare stomach. Then she’d unsnapped his jeans and unzipped his fly, which he would remember for about five or ten years—every time he undressed himself.

“Remember, honey,” Marion said to Ruth. “Don’t cry when the doctor takes out your stitches. I promise—it’s not going to hurt.”

“Can I keep the stitches?” the four-year-old asked.

“I suppose . . .” Marion replied.

“Sure you can keep them,” Eddie told the child.

“So long, Eddie,” Marion said.

She was wearing tennis shorts and tennis shoes, although she didn’t play tennis, and a floppy flannel shirt that was too big for her—it was Ted’s. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Earlier that morning, when Eddie was leaving to pick up Ted at the carriage house, Marion had taken his hand and put it under her shirt and held it against her bare breast; but when he tried to kiss her, she drew away, leaving Eddie’s right hand with the feel of her breast, which he would go on feeling for about ten or fifteen years.

“Tell me all about the stitches,” Ruth said to Eddie, as he made a left turn.

“You won’t really feel them very much when the doctor takes them out,” Eddie said.

“Why not?” the child asked him.

Before he made the next turn, a right, he had his last sight of Marion and the Mercedes in the rearview mirror. She would not be turning right, Eddie knew—the movers were waiting straight ahead of her. The left side of Marion’s face was illuminated by the morning sun, which shone brightly through the driver’s-side window of the Mercedes; the window was open, and Eddie could see the wind blowing Marion’s hair. Just before he turned, Marion waved to him (and to her daughter), as if she were still intending to be there when Eddie and Ruth returned.

“Why
won’t
it hurt to take the stitches out?” Ruth asked Eddie again.

“Because the cut is healed—the skin has grown back together,” Eddie told her.

Marion was now gone from view. Is that
it
? he was wondering. “So long, Eddie.” Were those her last words to him? “I suppose . . .” were Marion’s last words to her daughter. Eddie couldn’t believe the abruptness of it: the open window of the Mercedes, Marion’s hair blowing in the wind, Marion’s arm waving out the window. And only half of Marion’s face was in the sunlight; the rest of her was invisible. Eddie O’Hare couldn’t have known that neither he nor Ruth would see Marion again for thirty-seven years. But, for all those years, Eddie would wonder at the seeming nonchalance of her departure.

How
could
she? Eddie would think—as one day Ruth would also think about her mother.

The two stitches were removed so quickly that Ruth didn’t have time to cry. The four-year-old was more interested in the stitches themselves than in her almost perfect scar. The thin white line was discolored only slightly by traces of iodine, or whatever the antiseptic was—it had left a yellow-brown stain. Now that she could get her finger wet again, the doctor told her, this stain would be removed by her first good bath. But it was of greater concern to Ruth that the two stitches, which had each been cut in half, were saved in an envelope— and that the crusted scab, near the knotted end of one of the four pieces, not be damaged.

“I want to show my stitches to Mommy,” Ruth said. “And my scab.”

“First let’s go to the beach,” Eddie suggested.

“Let’s show her the scab first, then the stitches,” Ruth replied.

“We’ll see . . .” Eddie began. He paused to consider that the doctor’s office in Southampton was not more than a fifteen-minute walk from Mrs. Vaughn’s mansion on Gin Lane. It was now a quarter to ten in the morning; if Ted was still there, he would already have been with Mrs. Vaughn for more than an hour. More likely, Ted was
not
with Mrs. Vaughn. But Ted might have remembered that Ruth was having her stitches removed this morning, and he might know where the doctor’s office was.

“Let’s go to the beach,” Eddie said to Ruth. “Let’s hurry.”

“First the scab, then the stitches,
then
the beach,” the child replied.

“Let’s talk about it in the car,” Eddie suggested. But there is no straightforward negotiation with a four-year-old; while not every negotiation needs to be difficult, there are few that don’t require a considerable investment of time.

“Did we forgot the picture?” Ruth asked Eddie.

“The picture?” Eddie said. “What picture?”

“The feet!” Ruth cried.

“Oh, the photograph—it’s not ready,” Eddie told her. “

That’s
not very nice!” the child declared. “My stitches are ready. My cut is all fixed up.”

“Yes,” Eddie agreed. He thought he saw a way to distract the four-year-old from her desire to show her scab and stitches to her mother before going to the beach. “Let’s go to the frame shop and
tell
them to give us the picture,” Eddie suggested.

“All fixed up,” Ruth added.

“Good idea!” Eddie proclaimed. Ted would never think of going to the frame shop, Eddie decided; the frame shop was almost as safe as the beach. First make a fuss about the photograph, he was thinking; then Ruth won’t remember about showing her scab and stitches to Marion. (When the child was watching a dog scratching itself in the parking lot, Eddie put the envelope with the precious scab and stitches into the glove compartment.) But the frame shop was a little less safe than Eddie had supposed.

Ted had
not
remembered that Ruth was having her stitches removed this morning; Mrs. Vaughn hadn’t given Ted the time to remember very much. Less than five minutes after his arrival at her door, Ted was chased into the courtyard and up Gin Lane by Mrs. Vaughn, who was brandishing a serrated bread knife while shrieking at him that he was “the epitome of diabolism.” (He vaguely recalled that this was the title of a dreadful painting in the Vaughns’ regrettable art collection.)

The gardener, who had watched “the artist” (as he witheringly thought of Ted) make his trepid approach to the Vaughn mansion, was also witness to Ted’s intrepid retreat across the courtyard, where the artist was nearly driven into the murky fountain by the relentless slashes and stabs that Mrs. Vaughn made in the nearby air with her knife. Ted had bolted down the driveway and into the street with his former model in passionate pursuit.

The gardener, terrified that one or the other of them might run headlong into his ladder, which was a fifteen-footer, clung precariously to the top of the high privet hedge; from that height, the gardener was able to observe that Ted Cole could and did outrun Mrs. Vaughn, who gave up the chase a few driveways short of the intersection of Gin Lane and Wyandanch. There was another high barrier of privet near the intersection, and—from the gardener’s elevated but distant perspective—Ted had either disappeared into the hedges or turned northward onto Wyandanch Lane without once looking back. Mrs. Vaughn, still in a fury and still decrying the artist as “the epitome of diabolism,” returned to her own driveway. Spontaneously—to the gardener it seemed
involuntarily
—she still slashed and stabbed the air with the serrated knife.

A period of intense quiet fell over the Vaughn estate and descended on Gin Lane. Ted, tangled deep in a dense mass of privet, could hardly move enough to see his watch; the privet was a maze of such density, not even a Jack Russell terrier could have penetrated the hedge, which had scratched Ted’s hands and face and left him bleeding. Yet he had escaped the bread knife and, for the moment, Mrs. Vaughn. But where was Eddie? Ted waited in the privet for his familiar ’57 Chevy to appear.

The gardener, who had begun his chore of retrieving the shredded drawings of his employer and her son a full hour or more before Ted made his appearance, had long ago stopped looking at what he could see of the remains of the drawings. Even piecemeal, the content of the drawings was too disturbing. The gardener already knew his employer’s eyes and her small mouth, and the rest of her strained face; he already knew her hands, and the unnatural tension in her shoulders. Worse, the gardener had vastly preferred to
imagine
Mrs. Vaughn’s breasts and her vagina; the
reality
of what he had seen of her nakedness in the ruined drawings was uninviting. Moreover, he had been working at a great pace—for although he well understood why Mrs. Vaughn would have wanted to dispose of the drawings, he could not conceive of what insanity had possessed her to rip up the pornographic exposure of herself in a windstorm with all the doors open. On the ocean side of the house, the scraps and shreds had stuck in the barrier of beach roses, but some partial views of Mrs. Vaughn and her son had found their way along the footpath and were now blowing up and down the beach.

The gardener did not especially like Mrs. Vaughn’s son; he was a haughty boy who’d once peed in the birdbath and then denied it. But the gardener had been a faithful employee of the Vaughn family since before the brat’s birth, and he felt some additional responsibility to the neighborhood. The gardener could think of no one who would enjoy even these partial views of Mrs. Vaughn’s private parts; yet the pace at which he worked to clean up the mess was arrested by his fascination with what had become of the artist—namely, was the artist hiding in a neighbor’s hedge or had he escaped toward town?

At half past nine in the morning, when Eddie O’Hare was already an hour late, Ted Cole crawled out of the privet on Gin Lane and cautiously walked past the driveway of the Vaughn estate—to give Eddie every opportunity to see him, should Eddie (for some reason) have been waiting for Ted at the west end of Gin Lane, which intersected South Main Street.

In the gardener’s opinion, this was an unwise, even a reckless move. From the third-floor turret of the Vaughn mansion, Mrs. Vaughn could see
over
the privet. If the wronged woman was in the turret, she would have a commanding view of
all of
Gin Lane.