A Widow for One Year (12 page)

The next morning, in the carriage-house apartment, Eddie had only begun his arrangement of the pink cashmere cardigan on the bed— together with a lilac-colored silk camisole and matching panties—when he heard Marion’s exaggerated clomping on the stairs leading up from the garage. She didn’t knock on the door—she
beat
on the door. She wasn’t going to catch Eddie in the act
this
time. He had not yet undressed to lie down beside her clothes. Nevertheless, a moment of indecision overcame him, and then there wasn’t time to put Marion’s clothes away. He’d been thinking about what an unwise color choice it had been for him to put pink and lilac together; yet the
colors
of her clothes were never what motivated him. He had been drawn to the lace on the waist of the panties, and to the lace in the fabulous décolletage of the camisole. Eddie was still fretting over his decision when Marion beat on the door a second time; he left her clothes on the bed and hurried to answer the door.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said with a smile. She was wearing sunglasses, which she removed when she came into the apartment. For the first time, Eddie noticed her age in the crow’s-feet at the outer corners of her eyes. The night before maybe Marion had had too much wine—five glasses of anything alcoholic was a lot for her.

To Eddie’s surprise, she moved directly to the first of the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy she’d brought to the rental house, proceeding to explain her choices to Eddie. The pictures were of Thomas and Timothy when they were more or less Eddie’s age, which meant the photos had been taken shortly before the boys died. Marion explained that she’d thought Eddie might find photographs of his contemporaries familiar, even welcoming, in what might be
un
familiar and
un
welcome circumstances. She’d worried about Eddie, long before he arrived, because she knew how little there would be for him to
do
. And she had doubted that he would have an easy time of it; she’d anticipated the nonexistence of any social life for the sixteen-year-old.

“Excepting the younger of Ruth’s nannies, who were you ever going to meet?” Marion asked. “Unless you were especially outgoing. Thomas was outgoing, Timothy was not—he was more introspective, like you. Although you
look
more like Thomas,” Marion told Eddie, “I think you
are
more like Timothy.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. He was stunned that she’d been thinking about him before he arrived!

The photography tour continued. It was as if the rental house were a secret room off the guest-wing hall, and Eddie and Marion had
not
ended their evening together; they had merely moved on, to another room, with other pictures. They traipsed through the kitchen of the carriage-house apartment—Marion talking and talking all the while— and back into the bedroom, where she continued talking, pointing to the one photograph of Thomas and Timothy that hung over the headboard of the bed.

Eddie had little difficulty recognizing a most familiar landmark of the Exeter campus. The dead boys were posed in the doorway of the Main Academy Building, where, under the pointed pediment above the door was a Latin inscription. Chiseled into the white marble, which was offset by the great brick building and the forest-green double door itself, were these humbling words:

HVC VENITE PVERI
VT VIRI SITIS

(The U’s in
HUC
and
PUERI
and
UT
had all been carved like V’s, of course.) There were Thomas and Timothy in their jackets and ties, the year of their deaths. At seventeen, Thomas seemed almost a man—at fifteen, Timothy seemed very much a boy. And the doorway where they stood was the photo background most commonly chosen by the proud parents of countless Exonians. Eddie wondered how many unformed bodies and minds had passed through that door, under that stern and forbidding invitation.

COME HITHER BOYS
AND BECOME MEN

But it hadn’t happened for Thomas and Timothy. Eddie was aware that Marion had paused in her narration of the photograph; her eyes had fallen upon her own pink cashmere cardigan, which (together with her lilac-colored camisole and matching panties) was displayed on the bed.

“Goodness—not pink with lilac!” Marion said.

“I wasn’t thinking of the colors,” Eddie admitted. “I liked the . . . lace.” But his eyes betrayed him; he was looking at the décolletage of the camisole, and he couldn’t remember the word for it.
Cleavage
came to his mind, although he knew that wasn’t the right word.

“The décolletage?” Marion prompted.

“Yes,” Eddie whispered.

Marion raised her eyes above the bed to the image of her happy sons:
Huc venite pueri
(come hither boys)
ut viri sitis
(and become men). Eddie had suffered through his second year of Latin; a third year of the dead language loomed ahead of him. He thought of the long-standing joke at Exeter about a more fitting translation of that inscription. (“Come hither boys and become
weary
.”) But he could sense that Marion was in no mood for a joke.

Looking at the photograph of her boys on the threshold of manhood, Marion said to Eddie: “I don’t even know if they had sex before they died.” Eddie, remembering that picture of Thomas kissing a girl in the ’53 yearbook, would have guessed that Thomas had. “Maybe Thomas had,” Marion added. “He was so . . . popular. But surely not Timothy—he was so shy. And he was only fifteen. . . .” Her voice trailed away and her glance fell back to the bed, where the pink and lilac combination of her sweater with her lingerie had earlier caught her eye. “Have
you
had sex, Eddie?” Marion asked abruptly.

“No, of course not,” Eddie told her. She smiled at him—pityingly. He tried not to look as wretched and unlovable as he was convinced he was.

“If a
girl
died before she had sex, I might say she was lucky,” Marion continued. “But for a
boy
. . . my goodness, it’s all boys want, isn’t it? Boys
and
men,” she added. “Isn’t it true? Isn’t it all you want?”

“Yes,” said the sixteen-year-old despairingly.

Marion stood by the bed and picked up the lilac-colored camisole with the incredible décolletage; she picked up the matching panties, too, but she pushed the pink cashmere cardigan to the far side of the bed. “It’s too hot,” she said to Eddie. “I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t wear the sweater.”

He stood there frozen, his heart pounding, while she began to unbutton her blouse. “Close your eyes, Eddie,” she had to tell him. With his eyes closed, he was afraid he might faint. He felt himself weaving from side to side; it was all he could do not to move his feet. “Okay,” he heard her say. She was lying on the bed in the camisole and the panties. “My turn to close
my
eyes,” Marion said.

Eddie undressed clumsily—he had to keep looking at her. When she felt his weight on the bed beside her, she turned on her side to face him. When they looked into each other’s eyes, it gave Eddie a pang. In Marion’s smile, there was more that was motherly than what he had dared to hope he
might
see there.

He didn’t touch her, but when he began to touch himself, she gripped the back of his neck and pulled his face against her breasts, where he hadn’t even dared to look. With her other hand, she took his right hand and firmly placed it where she had seen him put his hand the first time—against the crotch of her panties. He felt himself explode into the palm of his left hand, so quickly and with such force that he flinched against her. Marion was so surprised that she flinched in response. “Goodness—
that
was fast!” she said. Holding his cupped palm in front of him, Eddie ran into the bathroom before he made a mess.

When he’d washed himself, he came back to the bedroom, where he found Marion still lying on her side, almost exactly as he had left her. He hesitated before lying down beside her. But without moving on the bed or looking at him, she said, “Come back here.”

They lay looking into each other’s eyes for what seemed to Eddie to be a never-ending time—at least he never wanted the moment to end. All his life, he would hold this moment as exemplary of what love was. It was not wanting anything
more,
nor was it expecting people to exceed what they had just accomplished; it was simply feeling so
complete
. No one could possibly deserve to feel any better.

“Do you know Latin?” Marion whispered to him.

“Yes,” he whispered back.

She rolled her eyes upward, above the bed, to indicate the photograph of that important passage, which her sons had not navigated. “Say it in Latin for me,” Marion whispered.

“Huc venite pueri . . .”
Eddie began, still whispering.

“Come hither boys . . .” Marion translated in a whisper.

“
. . .
ut viri sitis,”
Eddie concluded; he’d noticed that Marion had taken his hand and again placed it against the crotch of her panties.

“. . . and become men,” Marion whispered. Again she gripped the back of his neck and pulled his face against her breasts. “But you
still
haven’t had sex, have you?” she asked. “I mean not
really
.”

Eddie closed his eyes against her fragrant bosom. “No, not really,” he admitted. He was worried, because he didn’t want to sound as if he were complaining. “But I’m very, very happy,” he added. “I feel
complete
.”

“I’ll show you
complete,
” Marion told him.

The Pawn

Regarding sexual capacity, a sixteen-year-old boy is capable of an astonishing number of repeat performances in what Marion, at thirty-nine, would attest was a remarkably short period of time. “My
goodness
!” Marion would exclaim, to the perpetual and nearly constant evidence of Eddie’s erections. “Don’t you need time to . . .
recover
?” But Eddie required no recovery; paradoxically, he was both easily satisfied and insatiable.

Marion was happier than she’d been at any time she could remember since her sons had died. For one thing, she was exhausted; she was sleeping more soundly than she had in years. And for another thing, Marion took no pains to conceal her new life from Ted. “He wouldn’t dare complain to
me,
” she told Eddie, who was nonetheless anxious that Ted
might
dare complain to
him
.

Poor Eddie was understandably nervous about the obviousness of their thrilling affair. For example, whenever their lovemaking had marked the sheets in the carriage-house apartment, it was Eddie who was in favor of doing the laundry—lest Ted should see the telltale stains. But Marion always said, “Let him wonder if it’s me or Mrs. Vaughn.” (When there were stains on the bedsheets in the master bedroom of the Coles’ house, where Mrs. Vaughn could not have been the cause, Marion said, more to the point, “Let him wonder.”)

As for Mrs. Vaughn, whether or not she knew of the strenuousness of Marion’s exertions with Eddie, her more subdued relationship with Ted had changed. While Mrs. Vaughn had once epitomized furtiveness by her hesitant and darting movements in the driveway—both on her way to model and on her way back to her car—she now approached every new opportunity to pose with the resignation of a dog submitting to a beating. And when Mrs. Vaughn left Ted’s workroom, she staggered to her car with a carelessness that implied her pride was irretrievable; it was as if the particular pose of the day had defeated her. Mrs. Vaughn had clearly passed from the
degraded
phase, as Marion had called it, into the final phase of shame.

Ted had never been in the habit of visiting Mrs. Vaughn at her summer estate in Southampton more than three times a week. But the visits were less frequent now, and of notably shorter duration. Eddie knew this because he was always Ted’s driver.
Mr
. Vaughn spent the workweek in New York. Ted was happiest in the Hamptons during the summer months, when so many young mothers were there without their commuting husbands. Ted preferred the young mothers from Manhattan to the year-round residents; the summer people were on Long Island just long enough—“the perfect length of time for one of Ted’s affairs,” Marion had informed Eddie.

It made Eddie anxious. He had to wonder what Marion thought was “the perfect length of time” for her affair with
him
. He didn’t dare ask.

In Ted’s case, the young mothers who were available in the off-season were more troublesome to break up with; not all of them were as ongoingly friendly (
after
the affair) as the Montauk fishmonger’s wife, whom Eddie had heretofore known only as the ever-faithful provider of Ted’s squid ink. At the end of the summer, Mrs. Vaughn would be back in Manhattan—where she could fall apart about a hundred miles from Ted. That the Vaughn residence was on Gin Lane in Southampton was ironic, considering Ted’s fondness for gin and posh neighborhoods.

“I never have to wait,” Eddie observed. “He’s usually walking along the side of the road when it’s time for me to pick him up. But I wonder what she does with her kid.”

“Probably tennis lessons,” Marion had remarked.

But lately Ted’s trysts with Mrs. Vaughn were lasting no more than an hour. “And last week I left him there only once,” Eddie reported to Marion.

“He’s almost finished with her,” Marion said. “I can always tell.”

Eddie assumed that Mrs. Vaughn lived in a mansion, although the Vaughn property, which was on the ocean side of Gin Lane, was walled off from his view by towering hedges. The perfect pea-size stones in the hidden, disappearing driveway were freshly raked. Ted always told Eddie to let him out of the car at the entrance to the driveway. Maybe Ted liked the feel of walking to his assignations on those expensive stones.

Compared to Ted, Eddie O’Hare was a mere fledgling at love affairs—a rank beginner—yet Eddie had quickly learned that the excitement of anticipation was
almost
equal to the thrill of lovemaking; in Ted’s case, Marion suspected that Ted enjoyed the anticipation
more
. When Eddie was in Marion’s arms, the sixteen-year-old found this possibility unimaginable.