A Widow for One Year (24 page)

“I’m sorry, Ruth. I don’t know,” Alice said.

“This is the one with Thomas in the tall hat,” Ruth told the nanny crossly. “Timothy is trying to reach Thomas’s hat, but he can’t reach it because Thomas is standing on a ball.”

“Oh, you remember,” Alice said.

For how long will Ruth remember? Eddie was thinking. He watched Ted fix himself another drink.

“Timothy kicked the ball and made Thomas fall down,” Ruth continued. “Thomas got mad and started a fight. Thomas won all the fights because Timothy was smaller.”

“Was the fight in the photograph?” Alice asked.

Wrong question, Eddie knew.

“No, silly!” Ruth screamed. “The fight was
after
the picture!”

“Oh,” Alice said. “I’m sorry. . . .”

“You want a drink?” Ted asked Eddie.

“No,” Eddie told him. “We should drive over to the carriage house and see if Marion left anything there.”

“Good idea,” Ted said. “You’re the driver.”

At first they found nothing in the dismal rental house above the garage. Marion had taken what few clothes she’d kept there, although Eddie knew—and would always appreciate—what she’d done with the pink cashmere cardigan and the lilac-colored camisole and matching panties. Of the few photographs Marion had moved to the carriage house for the summer, all but one were gone. Marion had left behind the photograph of the dead boys that hung above the bed: Thomas and Timothy in the doorway of the Main Academy Building, on the threshold of manhood—their last year at Exeter.

HVC VENITE PVERI VT VIRI SITIS

“Come hither boys . . .” Marion had translated, in a whisper, “. . . and become men.”

It was the photograph that marked the site of Eddie’s sexual initiation. A piece of notepaper was taped to the glass. Marion’s handwriting was unmistakable.

FOR EDDIE

“For
you
?” Ted shouted. He ripped the notepaper off the glass. He picked at the remnant of Scotch tape with his fingernail. “Well, it’s
not
for you, Eddie. They’re my sons—it’s the only picture I have of them!”

Eddie didn’t argue. He could remember the Latin well enough without the photograph. He had two more years to be at Exeter; he would pass through that doorway and under that inscription often enough. Nor did he need a picture of Thomas and Timothy; it wasn’t them he needed to remember. He could remember Marion without them; he’d only known her without them, although he would certainly admit to the
presence
of those dead boys.

“Of course it’s your picture,” Eddie said.

“You bet your ass it is,” Ted told him. “How could she even
think
of giving it to you?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie lied. In one day, “I don’t know” had become everyone’s answer for everything.

Thus the photograph of Thomas and Timothy in the doorway at Exeter belonged to Ted. It was a better likeness of the dead boys than that partial view of them—namely, their feet—which now hung in Ruth’s bedroom. Ted would hang the photo of the boys in the master bedroom, on one of the many available picture hooks that were exposed there.

When Ted and Eddie left the shabby apartment over the garage, Eddie took his few things with him—he wanted to pack. He was waiting for Ted to tell him to leave; obligingly, Ted told him in the car when they were driving back to the house on Parsonage Lane.

“What’s tomorrow—Saturday?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s Saturday,” Eddie replied.

“I want you out of here tomorrow. By Sunday at the latest,” Ted told him.

“Okay,” Eddie said. “I just need to find a ride to the ferry.”

“Alice can take you.”

Eddie decided it was wise
not
to tell Ted that Marion had already thought of Alice as Eddie’s best bet for a ride to Orient Point.

When they got back to the house, Ruth had cried herself to sleep— the child had also refused to eat her supper—and Alice was crying quietly in the upstairs hall. For a college girl, the nanny seemed excessively undone by the situation. Eddie couldn’t muster much sympathy for Alice; she was a snob who had immediately lorded her presumed superiority over him. (Alice’s only superiority to Eddie was that she was a few years older than sixteen.)

Ted helped Alice navigate the stairs, and he gave her a clean handkerchief with which to blow her nose. “I’m sorry for springing all this on you, Alice,” Ted told the college girl, but the nanny wouldn’t be appeased.

“My father left my mother when I was a little girl,” Alice sniffed. “So I
quit
. That’s all—I just
quit
. And you should have the decency to quit, too,” Alice added to Eddie.

“It’s too late for me to quit, Alice,” Eddie said. “I just got fired.”

“I never knew you were such a
superior
person, Alice,” Ted told the girl.

“Alice has been
superior
to me all summer,” Eddie said to Ted. Eddie didn’t like this aspect of the change inside him; together with authority, with finding his own voice, he’d also developed a taste for a kind of cruelty he’d been incapable of before.

“I am
morally
superior to you, Eddie—I know that much,” the nanny told him.

“
Morally
superior,” Ted repeated. “Now
there’s
a concept! Don’t you ever feel ‘
morally
superior,’ Eddie?”

“To
you
I do,” the boy said.

“You see, Alice?” Ted asked. “Everyone feels ‘
morally
superior’ to
someone
!” Eddie hadn’t realized that Ted was already drunk.

Alice went off weeping. Eddie and Ted watched her drive away.

“There goes my ride to the ferry,” Eddie pointed out.

“I still want you out of here tomorrow,” Ted told him.

“Fine,” Eddie said. “But I can’t walk to Orient Point. And you can’t drive me.”

“You’re a smart boy—you’ll think of someone to give you a ride,” Ted said.

“You’re the one who’s good at getting rides,” Eddie replied.

They could have gone on being petty all night—and it wasn’t even dark outside. It was much too early for Ruth to have fallen asleep. Ted worried aloud that he should wake her up and try to convince her to eat something for supper. But when he tiptoed into Ruth’s room, the child was at work at her easel; she’d either woken up or she’d fooled Alice into thinking that she was asleep.

For a four-year-old’s, Ruth’s drawings were markedly advanced. Whether this was a sign of her talent or the more modest effect of her father having shown her how to draw certain things—faces, primarily—it was too soon to know. She decidedly knew how to draw a face; in fact, faces were all that Ruth ever drew. (As an adult, she wouldn’t draw at all.)

Now the child was drawing unfamiliar things: they were stick figures of the clumsy, unformed kind that more normal four-year-olds ( non-practicing artists) might draw. There were three such figures, not at all well drawn, and they had faceless, oval heads as plain as melons. Over them, or perhaps behind them—the perspective wasn’t clear—loomed several large mounds that looked like mountains. But Ruth was a child of the potato fields and the ocean; where she’d grown up, everything was flat.

“Are those mountains, Ruthie?” Ted asked.

“No!” the child screamed. She wanted Eddie to come look at her drawing, too. Ted called for him.

“Are those mountains?” Eddie asked, when he saw the drawing.

“No! No! No!” Ruth cried.

“Ruthie, honey, don’t cry.” Ted pointed to the faceless stick figures. “Who are these people, Ruthie?”

“Died persons,” Ruth told him.

“Do you mean dead people, Ruthie?”

“Yes, died persons,” the child repeated.

“I see—they’re skeletons,” her father said.

“Where are their faces?” Eddie asked the four-year-old.

“Died persons don’t have faces,” Ruth said.

“Why not, honey?” Ted asked her.

“Because they got buried. They’re under the ground,” Ruth told him.

Ted pointed to the mounds that weren’t mountains. “So this is the ground, right?”

“Right,” Ruth said. “The died persons are under it.”

“I see,” Ted said.

Pointing to the middle stick figure with the melon head, Ruth said: “That one is Mommy.”

“But your mommy isn’t dead, sweetheart,” Ted said. “Mommy isn’t a died person.”

“And this is Thomas, and this is Timothy,” Ruth continued, pointing to the other skeletons.

“Ruthie, Mommy isn’t dead—she’s just gone away.”

“That one is Mommy,” Ruth repeated, pointing again to the skeleton in the middle.

“How about a grilled-cheese sandwich with French fries?” Eddie asked Ruth.

“And ketchup,” Ruth said.

“Good idea, Eddie,” Ted told the sixteen-year-old.

The French fries were frozen, the oven had to be preheated, and Ted was too drunk to find the skillet he preferred to use for grilled-cheese sandwiches; yet all three of them managed to eat this lamentable food—the ketchup helped. Eddie did the dishes while Ted tried to put Ruth to bed. Under the circumstances, it had been a civilized supper, Eddie was thinking as he listened to Ruth and her father go through the upstairs of the house, describing the missing photographs to each other. Sometimes Ted made one up—at least Ted described a photograph that Eddie couldn’t recall having seen—but Ruth didn’t seem to mind. Ruth also made up one or two photographs.

One day, when she couldn’t remember many of the photos, she would make up nearly everything. Eddie, long after he’d forgotten almost all the photographs, would make them up, too. Only Marion would be free of inventing Thomas and Timothy. Ruth, of course, would soon learn to invent her mother as well.

All the while that Eddie was packing, Ruth and Ted were going on and on about the photographs—real and imagined. They made it difficult for Eddie to concentrate on his immediate problem. Who was going to drive him to the ferry at Orient Point? That was when he happened upon the list of every living Exonian in the Hamptons; the most recent addition to the list, a Percy S. Wilmot from the class of ’46, lived in nearby Wainscott.

Eddie would have been Ruth’s age when Mr. Wilmot graduated from Exeter, but possibly Mr. Wilmot would remember Eddie’s father. Surely every Exonian had at least
heard
of Minty O’Hare! But was the Exeter connection worth a ride to Orient Point? Eddie doubted it. Yet he thought it would be at least educative to call Percy Wilmot—if only to spite his father. If only for the thrill of telling Minty: “Listen, I called
every
living Exonian in the Hamptons and
begged
for a ride to the ferry, and they
all
turned me down!”

But when Eddie went downstairs to the telephone in the kitchen, he glanced at the kitchen clock. It was almost midnight; it would be wiser to call Mr. Wilmot in the morning. However, as late as it was, he didn’t hesitate to call his parents; Eddie could have a short conversation with his father only if his father was half asleep. Eddie wanted to keep the conversation short. Even when half asleep, Minty was excitable.

“Everything’s fine, Dad. No, there’s nothing wrong,” Eddie said. “I just wanted you or Mom to be around the phone tomorrow, in case I call. If I can get a ride to the ferry, I’ll call before I leave.”

“Have you been
fired
?” Minty asked. Eddie heard his father whisper to his mom: “It’s Edward—I think he’s been
fired
!”

“No, I haven’t been fired,” Eddie lied. “I just finished the job.”

Naturally Minty went on and on—on the subject of how he’d never imagined that it was the sort of job one ever, exactly, “finished.” Minty also calculated that he needed thirty more minutes to drive to New London from Exeter than Eddie would need to drive to Orient Point from Sagaponack—
and
take the ferry to New London.

“Then I’ll just wait for you in New London, Dad.”

Knowing Minty, Eddie knew that—even on short notice—Minty would be waiting at the dock in New London. His father would take his mom along, too; she would be the “navigator.”

That done, Eddie wandered into the yard. He needed to escape the murmuring from the upstairs of the house, where Ted and Ruth were still reciting the stories of the missing photographs—from both their memories
and
their imaginations. In the cool of the yard, their voices were lost to Eddie in the cacophony of crickets and tree frogs, and in the distant thumping of the surf.

The only actual argument Eddie had ever overheard between Ted and Marion had been there, in the spacious but unmanaged yard. Marion had called it a yard-in-progress, but it was more accurately a yard that had been halted by disagreement and indecision. Ted had wanted a swimming pool. Marion had said that a swimming pool would spoil Ruth, or else the child would drown in it.

“Not with all the nannies she has looking after her,” Ted had argued, which Marion had interpreted as a further indictment of her as a mother.

Ted had also wanted an outdoor shower—something handy to the squash court in the barn, but near enough to the swimming pool so that children returning from the beach could rinse the sand off before going in the pool.

“
What
children?” Marion had asked him.

“Not to mention before going in the house,” Ted had added. He hated sand in the house. Ted never went to the beach, except in the winter after storms. He liked to see what the storms washed up; sometimes there were things he brought home to draw. (Driftwood in peculiar shapes; the shell of a horseshoe crab; a skate with its face like a Halloween mask, and its barbed tail; a dead seagull.)

Marion went to the beach only if Ruth wanted to go, and if it was a weekend—or if, for some reason, there was no nanny to take the child. Marion didn’t like too much sun; at the beach she would cover herself in a long-sleeved shirt. She wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, so that no one ever knew who she was, and she sat watching Ruth play by herself at the water’s edge. “Not like a mother, more like a nanny,” Marion had described herself at the beach to Eddie. “Like someone even
less
interested in a child than a
good
nanny would be,” Marion had said.