A Widow for One Year (7 page)

They loaded the trucks first, and the first in line was a truck full of fresh clams—or, empty, it was on its way to be filled up with fresh clams. It smelled like less-than-fresh clams, in either case, and the clam-truck driver, who was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the fly-spattered grille of the clam truck while the incoming ferry docked, was the next victim of Joe O’Hare’s impromptu conversation.

“My boy here is on his way to his very first job,” Minty announced, while Eddie died a little more.

“Oh, yeah?” the clam-truck driver replied.

“He’s going to be a writer’s assistant,” proclaimed Eddie’s father. “Mind you, we’re not exactly sure what that might entail, but it will doubtless be more demanding than sharpening pencils, changing the typewriter ribbon, and looking up those difficult words that not even the writer himself knows how to spell! I look at it as a learning experience, whatever it turns out to be.”

The clam-truck driver, suddenly grateful for the job he had, said: “Good luck, kid.”

At the last minute, just before Eddie boarded the ferry, his father ran to the car and then ran back again. “I almost forgot!” he shouted, handing Eddie a fat envelope wrapped with a rubber band and a package the size and softness of a loaf of bread. The package was gift-wrapped, but something had crushed it in the backseat of the car; the present looked abandoned, unwanted. “It’s for the little kid—your mother and I thought of it,” Minty said.

“
What
little kid?” Eddie asked. He clutched the present and the envelope under his chin, because his heavy duffel bag—and a lighter, smaller suitcase—required both his hands. Thus he staggered on board.

“The Coles have a little girl—I think she’s four!” Minty hollered. There was the rattling of chains, the chug of the boat’s engine, the intermittent blasts of the ferry horn; other people were shouting their good-byes. “They had a new child to replace the
dead
ones!” Eddie’s father yelled.
This
seemed to get the attention of even the clam-truck driver, who had parked his truck on board and now leaned over the rails of the upper deck.

“Oh,” Eddie said. “Good-bye!” he cried.

“I love you, Edward!” his father bellowed. Then Minty O’Hare began to cry. Eddie had never seen his father cry, but Eddie had not left home before. Probably his mother had cried, too, but Eddie hadn’t noticed. “Be
careful
!” his father wailed. The passengers who overhung the rails of the upper deck were all staring now. “Watch out for
her
!” his father screamed to him.

“Who?”
Eddie cried.

“
Her!
I mean
Mrs
. Cole!” the senior O’Hare shouted.

“Why?”
Eddie screamed. They were pulling away, the docks falling behind; the ferry horn was deafening.

“I hear she never got over it!” Minty roared. “She’s a
zombie
!”

Oh, great—
now
he tells me! Eddie thought. But he just waved. He had no idea that the so-called zombie would be meeting his ferry at Orient Point; he didn’t yet know that
Mr
. Cole was not allowed to drive. It peeved Eddie that his dad had not allowed him to drive on the trip to New London—on the grounds that the traffic they would be facing was “different from Exeter traffic.” Eddie could still see his father on the receding Connecticut shore. Minty had turned away, his head in his hands—he was weeping.

What did he mean, a
zombie
? Eddie had expected Mrs. Cole to be like his own mother, or like the many unmemorable faculty wives who comprised almost everything he knew about women. With any luck, Mrs. Cole
might
have a little of what Dot O’Hare would call “ bohemianism” in her nature, although Eddie hardly dared to hope for a woman who gave such voyeuristic pleasure as Mrs. Havelock so amply provided.

In 1958, Mrs. Havelock’s furry pits and swaying breasts were absolutely all that Eddie O’Hare thought about when he thought about women. As for girls his own age, Eddie had been unsuccessful with them; they also terrified him. Since he was a faculty brat, his few dates had been with girls from the town of Exeter, awkward acquaintances from his junior-high-school days. These town girls were more grown up now, and generally wary of the town boys who attended the academy—understandably, they were anticipating being condescended to.

On Exeter dance weekends, the out-of-town girls struck Eddie as unapproachable. They arrived on trains and in buses, often from other boarding schools or from cities like Boston and New York. They were much better dressed, and seemingly more like women, than most of the faculty wives—excepting Mrs. Havelock.

Before leaving Exeter, Eddie had leafed through the pages of the ’53
PEAN,
looking for pictures of Thomas and Timothy Cole—it was their last yearbook. What he found had intimidated him greatly. Those boys had not belonged to a single club, but Thomas was pictured with both the Varsity Soccer and the Varsity Hockey teams, and Timothy, lagging not far behind his brother, was captured in the photographs of J.V. Soccer and J.V. Hockey. That they could kick and skate wasn’t what had intimidated Eddie. It was the sheer number of snapshots, throughout the yearbook, in which both boys appeared—in the many candid photos that make up a yearbook, in all those shots of the students who are unquestionably having
fun
. Thomas and Timothy always appeared to be having a ball. They’d been
happy
! Eddie realized.

Wrestling in a pile of boys in a dormitory butt room (the smokers’ lounge), clowning on crutches, posing with snow shovels, or playing cards—Thomas often with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his handsome mouth. And on the academy dance weekends, the Cole boys were pictured with the prettiest girls. There was a picture of Timothy not dancing with but actually
embracing
his dance partner; there was another of Thomas
kissing
a girl—they were outdoors on a cold, snowy day, both of them in camel-hair overcoats, Thomas pulling the girl to him by the scarf around her neck. Those boys had been
popular
! (And then they had died.)

The ferry passed what looked like a shipyard; some naval vessels were in a dry dock, others floated in the water. As the ferry moved away from land, it passed a lighthouse or two. There were fewer sailboats farther out in the sound. The day had been hot and hazy inland—even earlier that morning, when Eddie had left Exeter—but on the water the wind from the northeast was cold, and the sun went in and out of the clouds.

On the upper deck, still struggling with his heavy duffel bag and the lighter, smaller suitcase—not to mention the already-mangled present for the child—Eddie repacked. The gift wrapping would suffer further abuse when Eddie shoved the present to the bottom of the duffel bag, but at least he wouldn’t have to carry it under his chin. Also, he needed socks; he’d begun the day in loafers with no socks, but his feet were cold. He found a sweatshirt to wear over his T-shirt, too. Only now, his first day away from the academy, did he realize he was wearing an
Exeter
T-shirt and an
Exeter
sweatshirt. Embarrassed at what struck him as such shameless advertising of his revered school, Eddie turned the sweatshirt inside out. Only then did it occur to him why some of the seniors at the academy were in the habit of wearing
their
Exeter sweatshirts inside out; his new awareness of this height of fashion indicated to Eddie that he was ready to encounter the so-called real world— provided that there really
was
a world where Exonians were well advised to put their Exeter experiences behind them (or turn them inside out).

It was further heartening to Eddie that he was wearing jeans, despite his mother’s advice that khakis would be more “appropriate”; yet although Ted Cole had written Minty that the boy could forget about a coat and tie—Eddie’s summer job didn’t require what Ted called the “Exeter uniform”—Eddie’s father had insisted that he pack a number of dress shirts and ties, and what Minty called an “all-purpose” sports jacket.

It was when he repacked on the upper deck that Eddie first took notice of the fat envelope his father had handed him without explanation, which in itself was odd—his father explained
everything
. It was an envelope embossed with the Phillips Exeter Academy return address, and with
O’HARE
written in his father’s neat hand. Inside the envelope were the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons. It was the senior O’Hare’s idea of being prepared for any emergency—you could always call on a fellow Exeter man for help! At a glance Eddie could see that he didn’t know any of these people. There were six names with Southampton addresses, most of them from graduating classes in the thirties and forties; one old fellow, who’d graduated with the class of 1919, was doubtless retired and probably too old to remember that he’d ever gone to Exeter. (The man was only fifty-seven, in fact.)

There were another three or four Exonians in East Hampton, only a couple in Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, and one or two others in Amagansett and Water Mill and Sagaponack—the Coles lived in Sagaponack, Eddie knew. He was dumbfounded. Did his dad know
nothing
about him? Eddie would never dream of calling upon these strangers, even if he were in the most dire need. Exonians! he almost cried aloud.

Eddie knew many faculty families at Exeter; most of them, while never taking the qualities of the academy for granted, did not inflate beyond all reason what it meant to be an Exonian. It seemed so unfair that his father could, out of the blue, make him feel that he
hated
Exeter; in truth, the boy knew he was lucky to be at the school. He doubted that he would have qualified for the academy if he
hadn’t
been a faculty child, and he felt fairly well adjusted among his peers—as well adjusted as any boy who bears an indifference to sports can be at an all-boys’ school. Indeed, given Eddie’s terror of girls his own age, he was not unhappy to be in an all-boys’ school.

For example, he was careful to masturbate on his own towel or on his own washcloth, which he then washed out and hung back in the family bathroom where it belonged; nor did Eddie ever wrinkle the pages of his mom’s mail-order catalogs, where the various models for women’s undergarments provided all the visual stimulation his imagination needed. (What most appealed to him were the more mature women in girdles.) Without the catalogs, he had also happily masturbated in the dark, where the salty taste of Mrs. Havelock’s hairy armpits seemed on the tip of his tongue—and where her heaving breasts were the soft and rolling pillows that held his head and rocked him to sleep, where he would often dream of her. (Mrs. Havelock doubtless performed this valuable service for countless Exonians who passed through the academy in her prime years.)

But in what way was Mrs. Cole a
zombie
? Eddie was watching the clamtruck driver consume a hot dog, which the driver washed down with a beer. Although Eddie was hungry—he’d not eaten since breakfast—the slightly sideways drift of the ferry and the smell of the fuel did not incline him toward food or drink. At times the upper deck would shudder, and the entire ferry swayed. And there was the added factor of where he was seated, directly downwind of the smokestack. He began to turn a little green. It made him feel better to walk around the deck, and he decidedly perked up when he found a trash can and seized the moment to throw away his father’s envelope with the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons.

Then Eddie did something that made him feel only a little ashamed of himself: he strolled over to where the clam-truck driver sat suffering the agonies of digestion, and boldly apologized for his father. The clam-truck driver suppressed a belch.

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” the man said. “We all got dads.”

“Yes,” Eddie replied.

“Besides,” the clam-truck driver philosophized, “he’s probably just worried about you. It don’t sound easy to me, being no
writer’s
assistant. I don’t get what it is you’re supposed to
do
.”

“I don’t get it, either,” Eddie confessed.

“You wanna beer?” the driver offered, but Eddie politely declined; now that he was feeling better, he didn’t want to turn green again.

There were no women or girls worth looking at on the upper deck, Eddie thought; his observation was apparently not shared by the clamtruck driver, who proceeded to roam the ferry, looking intently at
all
the women and girls. There were two girls who had driven a car on board; they were full of themselves, and despite being not more than a year or two older than Eddie, or only Eddie’s age, it was evident that they regarded Eddie as too young for them. Eddie looked at them only once.

A European couple approached him and asked in heavily accented English if he would take their picture as they stood at the bow—it was their honeymoon, they said. Eddie was happy to do it. Only afterward did it occur to him that the woman, being a European, might have had unshaven armpits. But she’d been wearing a long-sleeved jacket; Eddie also hadn’t been able to tell if she was wearing a bra.

He returned to his heavy duffel bag and the smaller suitcase. Only his “all-purpose” sports jacket and his dress shirts and ties were in the suitcase; it weighed next to nothing, but his mother had told him that his “good” clothes, as she called them, would be sure to arrive unwrinkled that way. (His mom had packed the suitcase.) In the duffel was everything else—the clothes
he
wanted, his writing notebooks, and some books that Mr. Bennett (by
far
his favorite English teacher) had recommended to him.

Eddie had not packed Ted Cole’s entire
oeuvre
. He’d read it. What was the point of carrying it with him? The only exceptions were the O’Hare family’s copy of
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
—Eddie’s father had insisted that Eddie get Mr. Cole’s autograph—and Eddie’s personal favorite among Ted’s books for children. Like Ruth, Eddie had a personal favorite that was
not
the famous mouse between the walls. Eddie’s favorite was the one called
The Door in the Floor;
it frankly scared the shit out of him. He hadn’t paid close enough attention to the copyright date to realize that
The Door in the Floor
was the first book Ted Cole had published following the death of his sons. As such, it must have been a difficult book for him to write at all; it certainly reflected a little of the horror that Ted was living in those days.