A Widow for One Year (3 page)

Most members of Eddie’s generation—and of a half-generation before and after his—had read
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls,
or (more likely) they’d had it read to them before they were old enough to read. And a majority of the faculty and most of the Exeter students had also read some of Ted Cole’s other children’s books. But truly no one else at Exeter had read Ted’s three
novels;
for one thing, they were all out of print—in addition to being not very good. Yet, as a faithful Exonian, Ted Cole had given the Exeter library a first edition of each of his books and the original manuscript of everything he’d written.

Eddie might have learned more from the rumors and the gossip—at least “more” in the sense of what might have prepared him for the labors of his first summer job—but Eddie’s appetite for reading was a testimony to the earnestness with which the boy studied to be a writer’s assistant. What he didn’t know was that Ted Cole was already becoming an
ex
-writer.

The truth is, Ted was chronically attracted to younger women; Marion had been only seventeen, and already pregnant with Thomas, when Ted married her. At the time, Ted was twenty-three. The problem was, as Marion grew older—and although she would always be six years younger than Ted—Ted’s interest in
younger
women persisted.

The nostalgia for innocence in the mind of an older man was a subject that the sixteen-year-old Eddie O’Hare had encountered only in novels—and Ted Cole’s embarrassingly autobiographical novels were neither the first nor the best that Eddie had read on this subject. Yet Eddie’s critical assessment of Ted Cole’s writing did not diminish the boy’s eagerness to be Ted’s assistant. Surely one could learn an art or a craft from someone who was less than a master. At Exeter, after all, Eddie had learned a great deal from a considerable variety of teachers, most of whom were excellent. Only very few of the Exeter faculty were as boring in the classroom as Eddie’s father. Even Eddie sensed that Minty would have stood out as a representative of mediocrity at a
bad
school, let alone at Exeter.

As someone who’d grown up on the grounds and in the nearly constant environment of a good school, Eddie O’Hare knew that you could learn a lot from older people who were hardworking—and who adhered to certain standards. He didn’t know that Ted Cole had ceased to be hardworking, and that what remained of Ted’s questionable “standards” had been compromised by the unendurable failure of his marriage to Marion—this in combination with those unacceptable deaths.

Ted Cole’s children’s books were of more intellectual and psychological (and even emotional) interest to Eddie than the novels were. A cautionary tale for children came naturally to Ted; he could imagine and express
their
fears—he could satisfy children. Had Thomas and Timothy lived into adulthood, they would doubtless have been disappointed in their father. And it was only as an adult that Ruth Cole would be disappointed in Ted; as a child, she loved him.

At sixteen, Eddie O’Hare was suspended somewhere between childhood and adulthood. In Eddie’s opinion, there was no better beginning to
any
story than the first sentence of
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls:
“Tom woke up, but Tim did not.” In Ruth Cole’s life as a writer—and she would be a better writer than her father, in every way—she would always envy that sentence. And she would never forget the first time she heard it, which was long before she knew it was the first sentence of a famous book.

It happened that same summer of ’58, when Ruth was four—it was just before Eddie came to stay with them. This time it was not the sound of lovemaking that woke her—it was a sound that she’d carried into wakefulness from a dream. In Ruth’s dream, her bed had been shaking; when she awakened,
she
was shaking—therefore, her bed seemed to be shaking, too. And for a second or more, even when Ruth was wide-awake, the sound from her dream had persisted. Then it abruptly stopped. It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

“Daddy!” Ruth whispered. She’d remembered (this time) that it was her father’s turn to stay with her, but her whisper was so soft that she couldn’t hear her own voice. Besides, Ted Cole slept like a stone. Like most heavy drinkers, he didn’t fall asleep, he passed out—at least until four or five in the morning, when he could never get back to sleep again.

Ruth crept out of her bed and tiptoed through the master bathroom to the master bedroom, where her father lay smelling of whiskey or gin—as strongly as a car smells of motor oil and gasoline in a closed garage.

“Daddy!” she said again. “I had a dream. I heard a sound.”

“What sort of a sound was it, Ruthie?” her father asked; he hadn’t moved, but he was awake.

“It got into the house,” Ruth said.

“The
sound
?”

“It’s in the house, but it’s trying to be quiet,” Ruth explained.

“Let’s go look for it, then,” her father said. “A sound that’s trying to be quiet. I’ve got to see this.”

He picked her up and carried her into the long upstairs hall. There were more photographs of Thomas and Timothy in the upstairs hall than in any other part of the house, and when Ted turned on the hall lights, Ruth’s dead brothers seemed to be begging for her attention— like a row of princes seeking the favor of a princess.

“Where are you, sound?” Ted called.

“Look in the guest rooms,” Ruth replied.

Her father carried her to the far end of the hall; there were three guest bedrooms with two guest bathrooms—each with more photos. They turned on all the lights, and looked in the closets and behind the shower curtains.

“Come out, sound!” Ted commanded.

“Come out, sound!” Ruth repeated.

“Maybe it’s downstairs,” her father suggested.

“No, it was upstairs with us,” Ruth told him.

“I think it’s gone, then,” Ted said. “What did it sound like?”

“It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound,” Ruth told him.

He put her down on one of the guest-room beds; then he took a pad of paper and a pen off the night table. He liked so much what she’d said that he had to write it down. But he had no pajamas on—hence no pockets for the piece of paper, which he held in his teeth when he picked Ruth up again. As usual, she took only a passing interest in his nakedness. “Your penis is funny,” she said.

“My penis
is
funny,” her father agreed. It was what he always said. This time, with a piece of paper between his teeth, the casualness of his remark seemed even more casual.

“Where did the sound go?” Ruth asked him. He was carrying her through the guest bedrooms and the guest bathrooms, turning off the lights, but he stopped so suddenly in one of the bathrooms that Ruth imagined that Thomas or Timothy, or both of them, had reached out from one of the photographs and grabbed him.

“I’ll tell you a story about a sound,” her father said, the piece of paper flapping in his teeth. He immediately sat down on the edge of the bathtub, still holding her in his arms.

The photograph that had caught his attention was one that included Thomas at the age of four—Ruth’s age exactly. The photo was awkwardly posed: Thomas was seated on a large couch upholstered in a confused floral pattern; the botanical excess appeared to completely overwhelm Timothy, who, at the age of two, was unwillingly being held in Thomas’s lap. It would have been 1940, two years before Eddie O’Hare was born.

“One night, Ruthie, when Thomas was your age—Timothy was still in diapers—Thomas heard a sound,” Ted began. Ruth would always remember her father in the act of taking the piece of paper from his mouth.

“Did they both wake up?” Ruth asked, staring at the photograph.

And that was what set the memorable old story in motion; from the very first line, Ted Cole knew this story by heart.

“Tom woke up, but Tim did not.”

Ruth shivered in her father’s arms. Even as a grown woman, and an acclaimed novelist, Ruth Cole could never hear or say that line without shivering.

“Tom woke up, but Tim did not. It was the middle of the night. ‘Did you hear that?’ Tom asked his brother. But Tim was only two. Even when he was awake, he didn’t talk much.

“Tom woke up his father and asked him, ‘Did you hear that sound?’

“ ‘What did it sound like?’ his father asked.

“ ‘It sounded like a monster with no arms and no legs, but it was trying to move,’ Tom said.

“ ‘How could it move with no arms and no legs?’ his father asked.

“ ‘It wriggles,’ Tom said. ‘It slides on its fur.’

“ ‘Oh, it has fur?’ his father asked.

“ ‘It pulls itself along with its teeth,’ Tom said.

“ ‘It has teeth, too!’ his father exclaimed.

“ ‘I told you—it’s a monster!’ Tom said.

“ ‘But what exactly was the sound that woke you up?’ his father asked.

“ ‘It was a sound like, in the closet, if one of Mommy’s dresses came alive and it tried to climb down off the hanger,’ Tom said.”

For the rest of her life, Ruth Cole would be afraid of closets. She could not fall asleep in a room when the closet door was open; she did not like to see the dresses hanging there. She didn’t like dresses—period. As a child, she would never open a closet door if the room was dark— out of fear that a dress would pull her inside.

“ ‘Let’s go back to your room and listen for the sound,’ Tom’s father said. And there was Tim, still asleep—he still hadn’t heard the sound. It was a sound like someone pulling the nails out of the floorboards under the bed. It was a sound like a dog trying to open a door. Its mouth was wet, so it couldn’t get a good grip on the doorknob, but it wouldn’t stop trying—eventually the dog would get in, Tom thought. It was a sound like a ghost in the attic, dropping the peanuts it had stolen from the kitchen.”

And here, the first time she heard the story, Ruth interrupted her father to ask him what an attic was. “It’s a big room above all the bedrooms,” he told her. The incomprehensible existence of such a room terrified her; there was no attic in the house where Ruth grew up.

“ ‘There’s the sound again!’ Tom whispered to his father. ‘Did you hear that?’ This time, Tim woke up, too. It was a sound like something caught inside the headboard of the bed. It was eating its way out—it was gnawing through the wood.”

And here Ruth had interrupted her father again; her bunk bed didn’t have a headboard, and she didn’t know what “gnawing” was. Her father explained.

“It seemed to Tom that the sound was definitely the sound of an armless, legless monster dragging its thick, wet fur. ‘It’s a monster!’ Tom cried.

“ ‘It’s just a mouse, crawling between the walls,’ his father said.

“Tim screamed. He didn’t know what a ‘mouse’ was. It frightened him to think of something with wet, thick fur—and no arms and no legs—crawling between the walls. How did something like that get between the walls, anyway?

“But Tom asked his father, ‘It’s just a mouse?’

“His father thumped against the wall with his hand and they listened to the mouse scurrying away. ‘If it comes back again,’ he said to Tom and Tim, ‘just hit the wall.’

“ ‘A mouse crawling between the walls!’ said Tom. ‘That’s all it was!’ He quickly fell asleep, and his father went back to bed and fell asleep, too, but Tim was awake the whole night long, because he didn’t know what a mouse was and he wanted to be awake when the thing crawling between the walls came crawling back. Each time he thought he heard the mouse crawling between the walls, Tim hit the wall with his hand and the mouse scurried away—dragging its thick, wet fur and its no arms and no legs with it.

“And
that
. . .” Ruth’s father said to Ruth, because he ended all his stories the same way.

“And
that
. . .” Ruth said aloud with him, “that is the end of the story.”

When her father stood up from the edge of the bathtub, Ruth heard his knees crack. She watched him stick the piece of paper back between his teeth. He turned out the light in the guest bathroom, where Eddie O’Hare would soon be spending an absurd amount of time— taking long showers until the hot water ran out, or some other kind of teenage thing.

Ruth’s father turned out the lights in the long upstairs hall, where the photographs of Thomas and Timothy were perfectly all in a row. To Ruth, especially in that summer when she was four, there seemed to be an abundance of photographs of both Thomas and Timothy at about the age of four. She would later speculate that her mother might have preferred four-year-olds to children of any other age; Ruth would wonder if that was
why
her mother had left her at the end of the summer when she was four.

When her father had tucked her back into her bunk bed, Ruth asked him, “Are there mice in this house?”

“No, Ruthie,” he said. “There’s nothing crawling between our walls.” But she lay awake after he’d kissed her good night, and although the sound that had followed her from her dream didn’t return—at least not that same night—Ruth already knew there was
something
crawling between the walls of that house. Her dead brothers did not restrict their residence to those photographs. They moved about, and their presence could be detected in a variety of unseen ways.

That same night, even before she heard the typewriter, Ruth knew that her father was still awake and that he wasn’t going back to bed. First she listened to him brushing his teeth, then she heard him getting dressed—the
zip
of his zipper, the
clump
of his shoes.

“Daddy?” she called to him.

“Yes, Ruthie.”

“I want a drink of water.”

She didn’t really want a drink of water, but it intrigued her that her father always let the water run until it was cold. Her mother took the first water that ran from the tap; it was warm and tasted like the inside of the pipe.

“Don’t drink too much or you’ll have to pee,” her father would say, but her mother would let her drink as much as she wanted—sometimes not even watching her drink.

When Ruth handed the cup back to her father, she said, “Tell me about Thomas and Timothy.” Her father sighed. In the last half-year, Ruth had demonstrated an unquenchable interest in the subject of death—little wonder why. From the photographs, Ruth had been able to distinguish Thomas from Timothy since she’d been three; only their pictures when they were infants occasionally confused her. And, by both her mother and her father, Ruth had been told the circumstances surrounding each of the photos—whether Mommy or Daddy had taken this one, whether Thomas or Timothy had cried. But that the boys were
dead
was a concept that Ruth was newly trying to grasp.