A Widow for One Year (25 page)

Ted had wanted multiple showerheads for the outdoor shower; that way, he and his squash opponent could take a shower together—“like in a locker room,” Ted had said. “Or all the children can shower together.”

“
What
children?” Marion had repeated.

“Ruth and her nanny, then,” Ted had replied.

The lawn in the presently unmanaged yard gave way to an untended field of tall grass and daisies. There should be
more
lawn, Ted had decided. And some sort of barrier to keep the neighbors from seeing you when you were in the pool.

“
What
neighbors?” Marion had asked.

“Oh, there will be lots more neighbors one day,” Ted had told her. (He was right about that.)

But Marion had wanted a different sort of yard. She liked the field of tall grass, and the daisies; more wildflowers would have suited her. She liked the look of an untamed garden. And maybe a grape arbor, but with the vines allowed to run unchecked. And there should be
less
lawn, not more—and more flowers, but not
prissy
flowers.

“ ‘Prissy . . .’ ” Ted had said scornfully.

“Swimming pools are prissy,” Marion had said. “And if there’s more lawn, it will look like an athletic field. What do we need an athletic field for? Is Ruth going to be throwing or kicking a ball with an entire
team
?”

“You’d want more lawn if the boys were alive,” Ted had told her. “The boys liked to play ball.”

That had been the end of it. The yard had stayed as it was—if not exactly a yard-in-progress, at least an unfinished yard.

In the dark, listening to the crickets and the tree frogs and the distant percussion of the surf, Eddie was imagining what would become of the yard. He heard the ice cubes rattling in Ted’s glass before he saw Ted, and before Ted saw him.

There were no lights on in the downstairs of the house, only the light from the upstairs hall, and from the guest bedroom, where Eddie had left his light on, and from the feeble night-light in the master bathroom, which was always left on for Ruth. Eddie marveled how Ted had managed to make himself another drink in the dark kitchen.

“Is Ruth asleep?” Eddie asked him.

“Finally,” Ted said. “The poor kid.” He went on shaking the ice cubes in his glass; he kept sucking his drink. For a third time, Ted offered Eddie a drink and Eddie declined.

“At least have a beer, for Christ’s sake,” Ted said. “Jesus . . . just look at this yard.”

Eddie decided to have a beer. The sixteen-year-old had never had a beer before. His parents, on special occasions, drank wine with dinner, and Eddie had been permitted to have wine with them. Eddie had never liked the wine.

The beer was cold but bitter-tasting—Eddie wouldn’t finish it. Yet going to the refrigerator to get it, and turning on (and leaving on) the kitchen light, had broken Ted’s train of thought. Ted had forgotten about the yard; he was thinking more directly of Marion instead.

“I can’t believe she doesn’t want custody of her own daughter,” Ted said.

“I don’t know if that’s it,” Eddie replied. “It’s not that she doesn’t
want
Ruth. Marion just doesn’t want to be a bad mother—she thinks she’ll do a bad job.”

“What kind of mother
leaves
her daughter?” Ted asked the boy. “Talk about ‘a bad job’!”

“She said she wanted to be a writer, once,” Eddie said.

“Marion
is
a writer—she just doesn’t do it,” Ted told him.

Marion had told Eddie that she couldn’t keep turning to her innermost thoughts when all she thought about was the death of her boys. Eddie said cautiously to Ted: “I think Marion still wants to be a writer, but the death of the boys is her only subject. I mean that it’s the only subject that keeps presenting itself to her, and she can’t write about it.”

“Let me see if I follow you, Eddie,” Ted said. “So . . . Marion takes every existent photograph of the boys that she can lay her hands on— and all the negatives, too—and she goes off to be a writer, because the boys’ death is the only subject that keeps presenting itself to her, although she can’t write about it. Yeah . . .” Ted said, “that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said. Whatever theory there was about Marion, the theory had a hole in it; there was a gap in what anybody knew or said about her. “I don’t know her well enough to judge her,” Eddie told Ted.

“Let me tell you something, Eddie,” Ted said. “
I
don’t know her well enough to judge her, either.”

Eddie could believe that, but he wasn’t about to let Ted feel virtuous. “Don’t forget—it’s
you
she’s really leaving,” Eddie told him. “I guess she knew you pretty well.”

“Well enough to judge me, you mean? Oh, certainly!” Ted agreed. His drink was already more than half gone. He kept sucking on the ice cubes and spitting them back in the glass; then he’d drink a little more. “But she’s leaving you, too, isn’t she, Eddie?” Ted asked the sixteen-year-old. “You don’t expect her to ring you up for a rendezvous, do you?”

“No—I don’t expect to hear from her,” Eddie admitted.

“Well . . . me neither,” Ted said. He spat a few more ice cubes into his glass. “Jesus, this drink tastes terrible,” he said.

“Do you have any drawings of Marion?” Eddie suddenly asked him. “Didn’t you ever draw
her
?”

“It was long, long ago,” Ted began. “Do you want to see?” Even in the half-dark—the only light in the yard was coming from the kitchen windows—Eddie could sense Ted’s reluctance.

“Sure,” Eddie said. He followed Ted into the house. Ted flicked on the light in the front hall, and then they were standing together in Ted’s workroom, the overhead fluorescent lamps unnaturally bright after the dark yard.

In all, there were fewer than a dozen drawings of Marion. At first Eddie thought it was the fault of the light that the drawings looked unnatural.

“These are the only ones I kept,” Ted said defensively. “Marion never liked to pose.” It was apparent to Eddie that Marion hadn’t wanted to undress, either—there were no nudes. (None that Ted had kept, anyway.) In the drawings where Marion was seated with Thomas and Timothy, she must have been very young—because the boys were very young—but Marion’s beauty was without age to Eddie. Beyond her prettiness, all that Ted had truly caught of Marion was her aloofness. Especially when she was seated alone, she seemed remote, even cold.

Then Eddie realized what was different about the drawings of Marion from Ted’s
other
drawings, most notably the drawings of Mrs. Vaughn. There was nothing of Ted’s restless lust in them. As old as the drawings of Marion were, Ted had already lost his desire for her. That was why Marion didn’t look like Marion—at least not to Eddie, whose desire for Marion was limitless.

“Do you want one? You can have one,” Ted said.

Eddie
didn’t
want one; none of them was the Marion he knew. “I think Ruth should have them,” Eddie answered.

“Good idea. You’re full of good ideas, Eddie.”

They both noticed the color of Ted’s drink. The contents of the near-empty glass were as sepia-like as the water in Mrs. Vaughn’s fountain. In the dark kitchen, Ted had used the wrong ice tray; he’d made a whiskey and water with cubes of frozen squid ink, which had half-melted in his glass. Ted’s lips and tongue, and even his teeth, were brownish-black.

Marion would have appreciated it: Ted on his knees before the toilet in the front-hall washroom. The sound of his vomiting reached Eddie in Ted’s workroom, where the sixteen-year-old still stared at the drawings. “Jesus . . .” Ted was saying, between heaves. “This is it for me and the hard stuff—from now on, I’m sticking to wine and beer.” He made no mention of the squid ink, which Eddie thought was odd; it was the ink, not the whiskey, that had made him sick.

And it hardly mattered to Eddie that Ted would keep this promise. However, ridding himself of hard liquor was either consciously or unconsciously in keeping with Marion’s caveat that he watch his drinking. Ted Cole would not suffer a drunk-driving conviction again. If his driving wasn’t always alcohol-free, he at least never drank and drove when he was with Ruth.

Sadly,
any
moderation in Ted’s drinking served only to exacerbate his womanizing; the long-term effects of Ted’s womanizing would prove more hazardous to him than his drinking.

At the time, it seemed a fitting ending to what had been a long and trying day: Ted Cole on his knees, puking into a toilet. Eddie bid Ted a superior-sounding good night. Of course Ted could not respond, because of the violence of his barfing.

Eddie also checked on Ruth, never intending that his brief glimpse of the four-year-old, who was sleeping peacefully, would be his last for more than thirty years. He couldn’t have known that he would be leaving before Ruth was awake.

In the morning, Eddie assumed, he would give Ruth his parents’ present and kiss her good-bye. But Eddie assumed too many things. His experience with Marion notwithstanding, he was still a sixteen-year-old who had underestimated the emotional rawness of the moment—after all, he hadn’t known such moments. And, standing in the four-year-old’s room watching her sleep, Eddie found it easy to speculate that everything would be all right.

There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

The Leg

This happened on the penultimate Saturday in August, in the summer of 1958. At about three in the morning, the wind shifted from the southwest to the northeast. Eddie O’Hare, in the half-dark of his bedroom, could no longer hear the surf; only a southerly wind could carry the sound of the sea as far inland as Parsonage Lane. And Eddie knew it was a northeast wind because he was cold. While it seemed fitting that his last night on Long Island should feel like the fall, Eddie could not wake up enough to get out of bed and close his bedroom windows. Instead, he pulled the scant covers more closely around him; he drew his body into a ball, and, breathing into his cold, cupped hands, he tried to fall more deeply asleep.

Seconds, maybe minutes later, he dreamed that Marion was still sleeping beside him, but that she’d got out of bed to close the windows. He extended his arm, expecting to find the warm spot that Marion would surely have left, but the bed was cold. Then, having heard the windows being closed, Eddie heard the curtains closing, too. Eddie never closed the curtains; he’d persuaded Marion to leave them open. He had loved seeing Marion asleep in the predawn glow.

Even in the dead of night, and three in the morning is about as dead as the night ever gets, there was some faint light in Eddie’s bedroom; at least the clumped-together outlines of the furniture were visible in the half-dark. The shape of the gooseneck lamp on the bedside table cast a dull shadow of itself on the headboard of the bed. And the bedroom door, which was always left ajar—so that Marion could hear Ruth calling for her, if Ruth called—was edged with a dark-gray light. This was whatever light was able to penetrate the long hall, even if it was only the distant light from the feeble night-light in the master bathroom— even
that
light found its dim way to Eddie’s room, because the door to Ruth’s room was always open, too.

But on
this
night someone had closed the windows
and
the curtains, and when Eddie opened his eyes to an unnatural and total darkness, someone had closed his bedroom door. When Eddie held his breath, he could hear someone breathing.

Many sixteen-year-olds see only the persistence of darkness. Everywhere they look, they see gloom. Blessed by more hopeful expectations, Eddie O’Hare tended to look for the persistence of light. In the total darkness of his bedroom, Eddie’s first thought was that Marion had come back to him.

“Marion?” the boy whispered.

“Jesus . . . aren’t you the optimist?” Ted Cole said. “I thought you’d never wake up.” His voice came from everywhere, or from nowhere in particular, in the surrounding blackness. Eddie sat up in bed and groped for the bedside lamp, but he was unaccustomed to being unable to see it—he couldn’t find it. “Forget the light, Eddie,” Ted told him. “This story is better in the dark.”

“
What
story?” Eddie asked.

“I know you want to hear it,” Ted said. “You told me that you asked Marion to tell it to you, but Marion can’t handle this story. It turns her to stone, just thinking about it. You remember when you turned her to stone by just
asking
her about it—don’t you, Eddie?”

“Yes, I remember,” Eddie said. So it was
that
story. Ted wanted to tell him about the accident.

Eddie had wanted
Marion
to tell him the story. But what should the sixteen-year-old have said? Eddie certainly needed to hear the story, even if he didn’t want to hear it from Ted.

“Go on, tell it,” the boy said as casually as possible. Eddie couldn’t see where in the room Ted was, or if he was standing or sitting—not that it mattered, because Ted’s narrative voice, in
any
of his stories, was greatly enhanced by an overall atmosphere of darkness.

Stylistically, the story of Thomas and Timothy’s accident had much in common with Ted Cole’s
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
and
The Door in the Floor
—not to mention the many drafts that Eddie had faithfully transcribed of
A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
. In other words, it was a Ted Cole kind of story; when it came to this kind of story, Marion’s version could never have been a match for Ted’s.

For one thing—and this was immediately clear to Eddie—Ted had worked on the story. It would have killed Marion to have paid as close attention to the details of her boys’ deaths as Ted had. And for another thing, Marion would have told the story without devices; she could have told it only as plainly as possible. In contrast, the principal device in Ted’s telling of the tale was extremely self-conscious, even artificial; yet without it, Ted might not have been able to tell the story at all.