A Widow for One Year (29 page)

Penny Pierce would not mince words in her reply. (“Hi yourself.
Remember
you? Who could forget sixty times in—what was it?—six or seven weeks? If it’s a summer job you want, it’s yours.”)

In addition to the frame-shop job, Eddie would, of course, be Mrs. Pierce’s lover. The summer of ’60 would start out with Eddie staying in a guest bedroom of Mrs. Pierce’s newly acquired property on First Neck Lane, until such a time as he found suitable lodging of his own. But they became lovers before he found such a place—truly, before he’d begun to look. Penny Pierce would be glad to have Eddie’s company in the big, empty house, which was in need of some enlivening interior decoration.

However, it would take more than new wallpaper and upholstery to banish from the house an aura of tragedy. A widow, a certain Mrs. Mountsier, had not long ago committed suicide on the grounds of the property, which was summarily sold by her only child—a daughter who was still in college, and who was said to have been estranged from her mother at the time of her mother’s death.

Eddie would never know that Mrs. Mountsier was the same woman he’d mistaken for Marion in the Coles’ driveway—not to mention the role that Ted had played in the unhappy mother-and-daughter story.

In the summer of ’60, Eddie would have no contact with Ted—nor would he see Ruth. He would, however, see some photographs of her, which Eduardo Gomez brought to Penny Pierce’s shop to have framed. Penny told Eddie that, in the two years since Marion had taken away the photos of Ruth’s dead brothers, only a small number of replacement photographs had been brought to her shop for framing.

They were all of Ruth, and—like the half-dozen photos Eddie saw in the summer of ’60—were all unnaturally posed. They possessed none of the candid magic of those hundreds of photographs of Thomas and Timothy. Ruth was a sober, frowning child who viewed the camera with a suspicious eye; when a smile was occasionally coaxed out of her, it lacked spontaneity.

In two years, Ruth had grown taller; her hair, which was darker and longer, was often in pigtails. Penny Pierce would point out to Eddie that the pigtails were expertly braided, and some care had been given to the ribbons at the end of each pigtail, too. This couldn’t be Ted’s work, Penny told Eddie—nor could the six-year-old have managed it herself. (Conchita Gomez was responsible for the pigtails and the ribbons.)

“She’s a cute little girl,” Mrs. Pierce said of Ruth, “but I’m afraid she’s going to miss getting her mother’s looks—by about a mile.”

After making love to Marion an estimated sixty times in the summer of 1958, Eddie O’Hare would not have sex for almost two years. In his senior year at Exeter, he would qualify for English 4W—the
W
stood for writing of the creative kind—and it was in this class, under the guidance of Mr. Havelock, that Eddie would begin to write about a young man’s sexual initiation in the arms of an older woman. Before this, his only efforts to fictionalize his experiences in the summer of ’58 had entailed an overlong short story that was based on his disastrous delivery of Ted Cole’s drawings to Mrs. Vaughn.

In Eddie’s story, they are
not
drawings; they are pornographic poems. The character of the writer’s assistant is very Eddie-like, a hapless victim of Mrs. Vaughn’s rage, and Mrs. Vaughn herself is unchanged— except for her name, which is Mrs. Wilmot (after the only name Eddie could remember from the list of every living Exonian in the Hamptons). Naturally Mrs. Wilmot has a sympathetic gardener of Hispanic descent, and it falls to the noble gardener to retrieve the shredded pornographic poems from the surrounding hedges—
and
from the small fountain in the circular driveway.

The character of the poet is only distantly based on Ted. The poet is blind, which is why he needs a writer’s assistant in the first place— not to mention why the poet also needs a
driver
. In Eddie’s story, the poet is unmarried, and the end of his affair with the character named Mrs. Wilmot—to whom, and about whom, he has written his shocking poems—is described as the
woman’s
fault. The blind poet is an entirely sympathetic character, whose plight it is to be repeatedly seduced and abandoned by ugly women.

As the go-between for the poet, whose love for the wicked Mrs. Wilmot shows signs of being tragically unswerving, the much-abused writer’s assistant makes a heroic effort that costs him his job. He describes to the blind poet what the hideous Mrs. Wilmot truly looks like; while the description so enrages the poet that he fires the young man, the truth of the description finally frees the poet from his self-destructive attraction to women of Mrs. Wilmot’s kind. (The ugliness theme is a little unpolished, even amateurish, for while Eddie meant by this an
inner
ugliness, it is largely the
outer
ugliness of Mrs. Wilmot that is apparent—and unseemly—to the reader.)

Frankly, it was an awful story. But as a sample of young Eddie’s
promise
as a writer of fiction, it made enough of an impression on Mr. Havelock that he admitted Eddie to English 4W, and it was there, in that class of aspiring young writers, that Eddie’s more beguiling theme—the younger man with the older woman—began to flow.

Naturally, Eddie was too shy to show his earliest efforts to the class. These stories he presented in confidentiality to Mr. Havelock, who showed them only to his wife;
yes,
she was that selfsame woman whose bralessness and furry armpits had once provided Eddie with his beginner phase of masturbatory bliss. Mrs. Havelock would take an active interest in Eddie’s development of the younger-man-with-the-older-woman theme.

It is understandable that this subject was more interesting to Mrs. Havelock than Eddie’s prose was. After all, Mrs. Havelock was a childless woman in her thirties who was the only visible object of desire in a closed community of almost eight hundred teenaged boys. While she had never been sexually tempted by a single one of them, it had not escaped her notice that they lusted after her. The sheer possibility of such a relationship appalled her. She was happily married and unstintingly thought that boys were . . . well, just boys. Therefore, the very nature of a sexual relationship between a sixteen-year-old boy and a thirty-nine-year-old woman, which Eddie’s stories repeatedly described, attracted Mrs. Havelock’s grim curiosity. She was German-born; she had met her husband when she was a foreign-exchange student in Scotland—Mr. Havelock was English—and her entrapment in one of America’s elite, all-boys’ boarding schools continually bewildered and depressed her.

Notwithstanding Eddie’s mother’s opinion of Mrs. Havelock’s “ bohemianism,” Mrs. Havelock did nothing to deliberately make herself sexually attractive to the boys. Like a good wife, she made herself as attractive as she could to her husband; it was
Mr
. Havelock who favored bralessness and who begged his wife to leave her armpits unshaven— naturalness appealed to him above all things. Mrs. Havelock regarded herself as somewhat frumpy; she was dismayed at her obvious effect on these horny boys, who she knew beat off with abandon to her image.

Anna Havelock, née Rainer, could not emerge from her dormitory apartment without causing several stray boys in the dormitory hall to blush, or to walk into doors or walls because they couldn’t take their eyes off her; she could not serve coffee and doughnuts in her apartment to her husband’s advisees, or to his students in English 4W, without rendering them tongue-tied—they were so smitten by her. Quite sensibly, she hated it. She begged her husband to take her back to Great Britain, or to Germany, where she knew from experience she could live her life unnoticed. But her husband, Arthur Havelock, adored the life at Exeter, where he was an energetic teacher who was well liked by the students and his fellow members of the faculty.

It was into this basically good marriage, with its single subject of contention, that Eddie O’Hare brought his disturbing stories of his sexual entanglement with Marion Cole. Naturally, Eddie had shielded himself—not to mention Marion. The Eddie character, in Eddie’s stories, was
not
a writer’s assistant to a famous author and illustrator of children’s books. (Because Minty O’Hare had glamorized his son’s first summer job beyond boredom,
everyone
in the Exeter English Department knew that Eddie had once worked for Ted Cole.)

In Eddie’s stories, the sixteen-year-old had a summer job in a frame shop in Southampton, and the Marion character was modeled on Eddie’s imperfect memory of Penny Pierce; because Eddie could not recall what Mrs. Pierce looked like, her physical description was an inaccurate combination of Marion’s beautiful face and Penny Pierce’s matronly body, which was no match for Marion’s.

Like Mrs. Pierce, the Marion character in Eddie’s stories was comfortably divorced. The Eddie character certainly enjoyed the wild fruits of his sexual initiation;
sixty
times in less than one summer was a shocking concept to both Mr. and Mrs. Havelock. The Eddie character also enjoyed the benefits of Penny Pierce’s generous alimony settlement—for in Eddie’s stories the sixteen-year-old lived in the frameshop owner’s splendid house in Southampton, a lavish estate that bore a striking resemblance to Mrs. Vaughn’s mansion on Gin Lane.

While Mrs. Havelock was riveted and greatly upset by the sexual authenticity of Eddie’s stories, Mr. Havelock—good teacher that he was—concerned himself more with the quality of Eddie’s writing. He would point out to Eddie what Eddie already suspected: there were areas of the young man’s writing that seemed more authentic than others. The sexual detail, the boy’s gloomy foreknowledge that the summer will end—and with it his love affair with a woman who means everything to him (while he believes he means much less to her)—and the relentless
anticipation
of sex, which is almost as thrilling as the act itself . . . well, these elements in Eddie’s stories rang true. (They
were
true, Eddie knew.)

But other details were less convincing. Going back to Eddie’s description of the blind poet with the writer’s assistant, for example: the poet himself was an undeveloped character; the pornographic poems were neither believable as poems nor sufficiently graphic for pornography—whereas the description of the Mrs. Vaughn character’s anger, of her reaction to the pornography
and
to the hapless writer’s assistant who delivers the poems to her . . . ah, this was good stuff. It rang true, too. (Because it
was
true, Eddie knew.)

Eddie had
made up
the blind poet and the pornographic poems; he had
made up
the physical description of the Marion character, who was this unconvincing mixture of Marion and Penny Pierce. Both Mr. and Mrs. Havelock said that the Marion character herself was unclear; they couldn’t “see” her, they told Eddie.

When the source of his fiction was autobiographical, Eddie could write with authority and authenticity. But when he tried to imagine— to invent, to create—he simply could not succeed as well as when he remembered. This is a serious limitation for a fiction writer ! (At the time, when he was still a student at Exeter, Eddie didn’t know
how
serious.)

Eventually, Eddie would be afforded a small but literary reputation; he would play a little-known but respected role. He would never have the impact on the American psyche that Ruth Cole would; he would not have
her
command of the language, or ever approach the magnitude and complexity of
her
characters and plots—not to mention her narrative momentum.

But Eddie would make a living as a novelist, nonetheless. One can’t deny him his
existence
as a writer simply because he would never be, as Chesterton once wrote of Dickens, “a naked flame of mere genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions and philosophies or from the great foreign schools.”

No, that wouldn’t be Eddie O’Hare. (It would be overly generous to extend Chesterton’s praise to Ruth Cole, too.) But at least Eddie would be published.

The point is: Eddie wrote familiar, autobiographical novels—all of them variations on an overworked theme —and despite the carefulness with which he wrote (he had a lucid prose style), and a faithfulness to time and place (and to characters who were credible, and who stayed in character), his novels lacked imagination; or else, when he made an effort to allow his imagination looser rein, his novels lacked believability.

His first novel, while generally well received, would not escape those pitfalls that his good teacher Mr. Havelock had pointed out to Eddie at the earliest opportunity. Titled
Summer Job,
the novel was basically another version of the stories Eddie wrote at Exeter. (Its publication, in 1973, coincided almost exactly with Ruth Cole’s graduation from the former all-boys’ school.)

In
Summer Job,
the poet is deaf rather than blind, and his need of a writer’s assistant comes closer to the truth of Ted’s need for hiring Eddie: namely, the deaf poet is a drunk. But while the relationship between the younger and older man is convincing, the poems are not credible poems—Eddie could never write poetry—and what is allegedly pornographic about them is neither raw nor invasive enough to qualify as pornography. The deaf, drunk poet’s angry lover, the Mrs. Vaughn character (who is still called Mrs. Wilmot), is a skillful portrait of heightened ugliness, but the poet’s long-suffering wife, the Marion character, is
not
convincing; she is neither Marion nor Penny Pierce.

Eddie tried to make her a most ethereal but universal older woman; as such, she is entirely too vague to be believable as the love object of the writer’s assistant. Nor is her motivation sufficiently established; the reader can’t understand what she sees in the sixteen-year-old. What Eddie left out of
Summer Job
were the lost sons; those dead boys make no appearance in Eddie’s novel, nor is there a Ruth character.

Ted Cole, who would be amused to read
Summer Job,
which he smugly recognized as a minor work of fiction, would also be grateful to Eddie for the altered reality of the thirty-one-year-old author’s first novel. Ruth, who, when she was old enough, had been told by her father that Eddie O’Hare and her mother were lovers, was no less grateful to Eddie for excluding her from the story. Nor did it occur to Ruth that the Marion character even remotely resembled her mother; Ruth would know only that her mother was still missing.