A Widow for One Year (2 page)

At four, Ruth was too young to ever remember Eddie
or
his penis with the greatest detail, but he would remember her. Thirty-six years later, when he was fifty-two and Ruth was forty, this ill-fated young man would fall in love with Ruth Cole. Yet not even then would he regret having fucked Ruth’s mother. Alas, that would be Eddie’s problem. This is Ruth’s story.

That her parents had expected her to be a third son was not the reason Ruth Cole became a writer; a more likely source of her imagination was that she grew up in a house where the photographs of her dead brothers were a stronger presence than any “presence” she detected in either her mother or her father—and that, after her mother abandoned her
and
her father (and took with her almost
all
the photos of her lost sons), Ruth would wonder why her father left the picture hooks stuck in the bare walls. The picture hooks were part of the reason she became a writer—for years after her mother left, Ruth would try to remember which of the photographs had hung from which of the hooks. And, failing to recall the actual pictures of her perished brothers to her satisfaction, Ruth began to invent all the captured moments in their short lives, which she had missed. That Thomas and Timothy were killed before she was born was another part of the reason Ruth Cole became a writer; from her earliest memory, she was forced to imagine them.

It was one of those automobile accidents involving teenagers that, in the aftermath, revealed that both boys had been “good kids” and that neither of them had been drinking. Worst of all, to the endless torment of their parents, the coincidence of Thomas and Timothy being in that car at that exact time, and in that specific place, was the result of an altogether avoidable quarrel between the boys’ mother and father. The poor parents would relive the tragic results of their trivial argument for the rest of their lives.

Later Ruth was told that she was conceived in a well-intentioned but passionless act. Ruth’s parents were mistaken to even imagine that their sons were replaceable—nor did they pause to consider that the new baby who would bear the burden of their impossible expectations might be a
girl
.

That Ruth Cole would grow up to be that rare combination of a well-respected literary novelist
and
an internationally best-selling author is not as remarkable as the fact that she managed to grow up at all. Those handsome young men in the photographs had stolen most of her mother’s affection; however, her mother’s rejection was more bearable to Ruth than growing up in the shadow of the coldness that passed between her parents.

Ted Cole, a best-selling author and illustrator of books for children, was a handsome man who was better at writing and drawing for children than he was at fulfilling the daily responsibilities of fatherhood. And until Ruth was four-and-a-half, while Ted Cole was not always drunk, he frequently drank too much. It’s also true that, while Ted was not a womanizer every waking minute, at no time in his life was he ever entirely
not
a womanizer. (Granted, this made him more unreliable with women than he was with children.)

Ted had ended up writing for children by default. His literary debut was an overpraised adult novel of an indisputably literary sort. The two novels that followed aren’t worth mentioning, except to say that no one—especially Ted Cole’s publisher—had expressed any noticeable interest in a fourth novel, which was never written. Instead, Ted wrote his first children’s book. Called
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls,
it was very nearly not published; at first glance, it appeared to be one of those children’s books that are of dubious appeal to parents and remain memorable to children only because children remember being frightened. At least Thomas and Timothy were frightened by
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
when Ted first told them the story; by the time Ted told it to Ruth,
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
had already frightened about nine or ten million children, in more than thirty languages, around the world.

Like her dead brothers, Ruth grew up on her father’s stories. When Ruth first read these stories in a book, it felt like a violation of her privacy. She’d imagined that her father had created these stories for her alone. Later she would wonder if her dead brothers had felt that
their
privacy had been similarly invaded.

Regarding Ruth’s mother: Marion Cole was a beautiful woman; she was also a good mother, at least until Ruth was born. And until the deaths of her beloved sons, she was a loyal and faithful wife—despite her husband’s countless infidelities. But after the accident that took her boys away, Marion became a different woman, distant and cold. Because of her apparent indifference to her daughter, Marion was relatively easy for Ruth to reject. It would be harder for Ruth to recognize what was flawed about her father; it would also take a lot longer for her to come to this recognition, and by then it would be too late for Ruth to turn completely against him. Ted had charmed her—Ted charmed almost everyone, up to a certain age. No one was ever charmed by Marion. Poor Marion never tried to charm anyone, not even her only daughter; yet it was possible to
love
Marion Cole.

And this is where Eddie, the unlucky young man with the inadequate lamp shade, enters the story.
He
loved Marion—he would never stop loving her. Naturally if he’d known from the beginning that he was going to fall in love with Ruth, he might have reconsidered falling in love with her mother. But probably not. Eddie couldn’t help himself.

Summer Job

His name was Edward O’Hare. In the summer of 1958, he had recently turned sixteen—having his driver’s license had been a prerequisite of his first summer job. But Eddie O’Hare was unaware that becoming Marion Cole’s lover would turn out to be his
real
summer job; Ted Cole had hired him specifically for this reason, and it would have lifelong results.

Eddie had heard of the tragedy in the Cole family, but—as with most teenagers—his attention to adult conversation was sporadic. He’d completed his second year at Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father taught English; it was an Exeter connection that got Eddie the job. Eddie’s father ebulliently believed in Exeter connections. First a graduate of the academy and then a faculty member, the senior O’Hare never took a vacation without his well-thumbed copy of the
Exeter Directory.
In his view, the alumni of the academy were the standard-bearers of an ongoing responsibility—Exonians trusted one another, and they did favors for one another when they could.

In the view of the academy, the Coles had already been generous to Exeter. Their doomed sons were successful and popular students at the school when they died; despite their grief, or probably because of it, Ted and Marion Cole had funded an annual visiting lecturer in English literature—Thomas and Timothy’s best subject. “Minty” O’Hare, as the senior O’Hare was known to countless Exeter students, was addicted to breath mints, which he lovingly sucked while reading aloud in class; he was inordinately fond of reciting his favorite passages from the books he’d assigned. The so-called Thomas and Timothy Cole Lectures had been Minty O’Hare’s idea.

And when Eddie had expressed to his father that his first choice for a summer job would be to work as an assistant to a
writer
—the sixteen-year-old had long kept a diary and had recently written some short stories—the senior O’Hare hadn’t hesitated to consult his
Exeter Directory.
To be sure, there were many more
literary
writers than Ted Cole among the alumni—Thomas and Timothy had gone to Exeter because Ted was an alumnus—but Minty O’Hare, who had managed only four years earlier to persuade Ted Cole to part with $82,000, knew that Ted was an easy touch.

“You don’t have to pay him anything to speak of,” Minty told Ted on the telephone. “The boy could type things for you, or answer letters, run errands—whatever you want. It’s mainly for the experience. I mean, if he thinks he wants to be a writer, he should see how one works.”

On the phone, Ted was noncommittal but polite; he was also drunk. He had his own name for Minty O’Hare—Ted called him “Pushy.” And, indeed, it was typical of Pushy O’Hare that he pointed out the whereabouts of Eddie’s photographs in the 1957
PEAN
(the Exeter yearbook).

For the first few years after the deaths of Thomas and Timothy Cole, Marion had requested Exeter yearbooks. Had he lived, Thomas would have graduated with the class of ’54 —Timothy, in ’56. But now, every year, even past their would-be graduations, the yearbooks came—courtesy of Minty O’Hare, who sent them automatically, assuming that he was sparing Marion the additional suffering of asking for them. Marion continued to look them over faithfully; she was repeatedly struck by those boys who bore any resemblance to Thomas or Timothy, although she’d stopped indicating these resemblances to Ted after Ruth was born.

In the pages of the ’57
PEAN,
Eddie O’Hare is seated in the front row in the photograph of the Junior Debating Society; in his dark-gray flannel trousers, tweed jacket, regimental-striped tie, he would have been nondescript except for an arresting frankness in his expression and the solemn anticipation of some future sorrow in his large, dark eyes.

In the picture, Eddie was two years younger than Thomas and the same age as Timothy at the time of their deaths. Nevertheless, Eddie looked more like Thomas than like Timothy; he looked even
more
like Thomas in the photo of the Outing Club, where Eddie appeared more clear-skinned and confident than the majority of those other boys who possessed what Ted Cole assumed was an abiding interest in the outdoors. Eddie’s only other appearances in the ’57 Exeter yearbook were in the photographs of two junior-varsity athletic teams—J.V. Cross-Country and J.V. Track. Eddie’s leanness suggested that the boy ran more out of nervousness than for any apparent pleasure, and that running might possibly be his only athletic inclination.

It was with feigned casualness that Ted Cole showed these pictures of young Edward O’Hare to his wife. “This boy looks a lot like Thomas, doesn’t he?” he asked.

Marion had seen the photographs before; she’d looked at all the photos in all the Exeter yearbooks very closely. “Yes, somewhat,” she replied. “Why? Who is he?”

“He wants a summer job,” Ted told her.

“With
us
?”

“Well, with
me,
” Ted said. “He wants to be a writer.”

“But what would he do with you?” Marion asked.

“It’s mainly for the experience, I suppose,” Ted told her. “I mean, if he thinks he wants to be a writer, he should see how one works.”

Marion, who’d always had aspirations of being a writer herself, knew that her husband didn’t work very much. “But what exactly would he
do
?” she asked.

“Well.” Ted had a habit of leaving his sentences and thoughts unfinished, incomplete. It was both a deliberate and an unconscious part of his vagueness.

When he called back Minty O’Hare to offer his son a job, Ted’s first question was whether Eddie had his driver’s license. Ted had suffered his second drunk-driving conviction and was without a driver’s license for the summer of ’58. He’d hoped that the summer might be a good time to initiate a so-called trial separation from Marion, but if he were to rent a house nearby, and yet continue to share the family house (and Ruth) with Marion, someone would have to drive him.

“Certainly he has his license!” Minty told Ted. Thus was the boy’s fate sealed.

And so Marion’s question regarding what Eddie O’Hare would
do,
exactly, was left standing in the manner that Ted Cole frequently let things stand—namely, he let things stand vaguely. He also left Marion sitting with the Exeter yearbook open in her lap; he often left her that way. He couldn’t help noticing that Marion seemed to find the photograph of Eddie O’Hare in his track uniform the most riveting. With the long, pink nail of her index finger, Marion was tracing the borders of Eddie’s bare shoulders; it was an unconscious but intensely focused gesture. Ted had to wonder if
he
wasn’t more aware of his wife’s increasing obsession with boys who resembled Thomas or Timothy than poor Marion was. After all, she hadn’t slept with one of them yet.

Eddie would be the only one she
would
sleep with.

A Sound Like Someone
Trying Not to Make a Sound

Eddie O’Hare paid little attention to the many conversations in the Exeter community concerning how the Coles were “coping” with the tragic loss of their sons; even five years after the fact, these conversations were a mainstay of the faculty dinner parties given by Minty O’Hare and his gossip-hungry wife. Eddie’s mother was named Dorothy, but everyone—except Eddie’s father, who eschewed nicknames—called her “Dot.”

Eddie was not a gossip maven. He was, however, an adequate student; the boy prepared himself for his summer job as a writer’s assistant with the kind of homework he imagined was more essential to the task than memorizing the media accounts of the tragedy would be.

If Eddie had missed the news that the Coles had had another child, this news did not escape Minty and Dot O’Hare’s notice: that Ted Cole was an Exeter alumnus (’31), and that his sons had both been Exeter students at the time of their deaths, was sufficient to give
all
the Coles an Exeter connection forever. Furthermore, Ted Cole was a
famous
Exonian; the senior O’Hares, if not Eddie, were egregiously impressed by fame.

That Ted Cole was among North America’s best-known writers of
children’s
books had provided the media with a specific angle of interest in the tragedy. How does a renowned author and illustrator of books for children “deal with” the deaths of his own children? And with reports of such a personal nature, there is always the attendant gossip. Within the faculty families at Exeter, possibly Eddie O’Hare was the only one
not
to pay this gossip much attention. He was definitely the only member of the Exeter community to have read everything that Ted Cole had written.