A Widow for One Year (14 page)

“It was a bladder infection,” she told him. She was still more of a natural mother than she knew—she spared him the potentially upsetting news that the infection had been the result of his repeated sexual attentions.

They had just finished making love in the position that Marion favored. She liked sitting on Eddie—“riding” him, Marion called it— because she enjoyed seeing his face. It was not only that Eddie’s expressions haunted her pleasantly because of their ceaseless associations with Thomas and Timothy. It was also that Marion had begun the process of saying good-bye to the boy, who had affected her more intimately than she’d ever thought he would.

She knew, of course, how strongly she had affected him—this worried her. But in looking at him, and in making love to him—especially in looking at him
while
making love to him—Marion imagined that she could see her sexual life, which had been so ardently (albeit briefly) rekindled, coming to an end.

She had not told Eddie that, before him, she’d never had sex with anyone except Ted. Nor had she told Eddie that she’d had sex with Ted only once since her sons had died, and that one time—entirely at Ted’s initiation—had been strictly for the purpose of getting her pregnant. (She had not wanted to get pregnant, but she’d been too despondent to resist.) And since Ruth had been born, Marion had not been tempted to have sex at all. With Eddie, what had begun on Marion’s part as a kindness toward a shy boy—in whom she saw so much of her sons—had blossomed into a relationship that had been deeply rewarding to her. But if Marion had been surprised by the excitement and gratification Eddie had provided, her enjoyment of the boy had nevertheless
not
persuaded her to alter her plans.

She was leaving more than Ted and Ruth. In saying good-bye to Eddie O’Hare, she was also saying good-bye to a sexual life of any kind. Here she was, saying good-bye to sex, when, for the first time, at thirty-nine, she was finding sex pleasurable!

If Marion and Eddie were the same height in the summer of ’58, Marion was aware that she outweighed him; Eddie was excruciatingly thin. In the top position, bearing down on the boy, Marion felt that all her weight and strength were concentrated in her hips; with Eddie pinned beneath her, Marion sometimes felt that it was
she
who was penetrating
him
. Indeed, the motion of her hips was the only motion between them—Eddie wasn’t strong enough to lift her weight off him. There was an instant when Marion not only felt as if she’d entered the boy’s body; she was fairly certain she had paralyzed him.

When she could tell by how he held his breath that he was about to come, she would drop her weight on his chest and, holding tight to his shoulders, roll him on top of her, because she couldn’t stand to see the look that transformed his face when he came. There was something too close to the anticipation of pain in it. Marion could hardly bear to hear him whimper—and he whimpered every time. It was the sound of a child crying out in a half-sleep before falling sound asleep again. Only this repeated split second, in her entire relationship with Eddie, ever caused Marion a half-moment of doubt. When the boy made this infantile sound, it made Marion feel guilty.

Afterward, Eddie lay on his side with his face against her breasts; Marion ran her fingers through the boy’s hair. Even then, Marion could not stop herself from making a critical observation of Eddie’s haircut—she made a mental note to tell the barber to take a little less off the back next time. Then she revised her mental note. The summer was running out; there would be no “next time.”

That was when Eddie asked his second question of the night. “Tell me about the accident,” he said. “I mean, do you know how it happened? Was it anybody’s fault?”

A second before, pulsing against his temple, he had felt her heart beating through her breast. But now it seemed to Eddie that Marion’s heart had stopped. When he lifted his head to look at her face, she was already turning her back to him. This time there wasn’t even the slightest shaking of her shoulders; her spine was straight, her back rigid, her shoulders square. He came around the bed and knelt beside her and looked into her eyes, which were open but distant; her lips, which, when she slept, were full and parted, were thin and closed.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie whispered. “I’ll never ask you again.” But Marion remained as she was—her face a mask, her body a stone.

“Mommy!” Ruth called, but Marion didn’t hear her—she didn’t even blink. Eddie froze, waiting for the patter of the four-year-old’s feet across the bathroom floor. But the child was staying in her bed. “Mommy?” she cried, more tentatively now. There was a hint of worry in her voice. Eddie, naked, tiptoed to the bathroom. He wrapped a bath towel around his waist—a better choice than a lamp shade. Then, as quietly as possible, Eddie began to retreat in the direction of the hall.

“Eddie?” the child asked. Her voice was a whisper.

“Yes,” Eddie answered, resigned. He tightened the towel around himself and padded barefoot through the bathroom to the child’s room. Eddie thought that the sight of Marion would have frightened Ruth more than the child was already frightened—that is, if the four-year-old had seen her mother in Marion’s newly acquired, seemingly catatonic state.

Ruth was sitting up in bed, not moving, when Eddie walked into her room. “Where’s Mommy?” the child asked him.

“She’s asleep,” Eddie lied.

“Oh,” the girl said. With a look, she indicated the towel knotted around Eddie’s waist. “Did you take a bath?”

“Yes,” he lied again.

“Oh,” Ruth said. “But what did I dream about?”

“What did
you
dream about?” Eddie repeated stupidly. “Uh, I don’t know. I didn’t have your dream. What
did
you dream about?”

“Tell me!” the child demanded.

“But it’s
your
dream,” Eddie pointed out.

“Oh,” the four-year-old said.

“Would you like a drink of water?” Eddie asked.

“Okay,” Ruth replied. She waited while he ran the water until it was cold and brought it to her in a cup. When she handed the cup back to him, she asked: “Where are the feet?”

“In the photograph, where they always are,” Eddie told her.

“But what happened to them?” Ruth asked.

“Nothing happened to them,” Eddie assured her. “Do you want to see them?”

“Yes,” the girl replied. She held out her arms, expecting to be carried, and he lifted her out of bed.

Together they navigated the unlit hall; both of them were aware of the infinite variety of expressions on the faces of the dead boys, whose photographs were mercifully in semidarkness. At the far end of the hall, the light from Eddie’s room shone as brightly as a beacon. Eddie carried Ruth into the bathroom, where, without speaking, they looked at the picture of Marion in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire.

Then Ruth said, “It was early in the morning. Mommy was just waking up. Thomas and Timothy had crawled under the covers. Daddy took the picture—in France.”

“In Paris, yes,” Eddie said. (Marion had told him that the hotel was located on the Seine. It had been Marion’s first time in Paris—the boys’ only time.)

Ruth pointed to the bigger of the bare feet. “Thomas,” she said. Then she pointed to the smaller of the feet; she waited for Eddie to speak.

“Timothy,” Eddie guessed.

“Right,” the four-year-old said. “But what did you
did
to the feet?”

Me?
Nothing,” Eddie lied.

“It looked like paper, little pieces of paper,” Ruth told him. Her eyes searched the bathroom; she made Eddie put her down so that she could peer into the wastebasket. But the maid had come to clean the room many times since Eddie had removed the scraps of notepaper. Finally Ruth held out her arms to Eddie; once more he picked her up.

“I hope it doesn’t happen again,” the four-year-old said.

“Maybe it never happened; maybe it was a dream,” Eddie told her.

“No,” the child replied.

“I guess it’s a mystery,” Eddie said.

“No,” Ruth told him. “It was paper. Two pieces.” She kept scowling at the photograph, daring it to change. Years later, Eddie O’Hare would be unsurprised that, as a novelist, Ruth Cole was a realist.

At last he asked the girl: “Don’t you want to go back to bed?”

“Yes,” Ruth replied, “but bring the picture.”

They went down the dark hall, which seemed darker now—the feeble night-light from the master bathroom cast only the dimmest glow through the open door of Ruth’s room. Eddie carried the child against his chest. He found her heavy to carry with one arm; in his other hand, he carried the photograph.

He put Ruth back in her bed, and leaned the picture of Marion in Paris against a chest of drawers. The photograph faced Ruth, but the child complained that the photo was too far away from her bed for her to see it properly. Eddie ended up propping the photograph against the footstool, near the head of Ruth’s bunk bed. Ruth was satisfied. The four-year-old fell back to sleep.

Before Eddie went back to his room, he took another look at Marion. Her eyes were closed, her lips were parted in her sleep, and her body had given up its terrifying rigidity. Only a sheet covered her hips; her upper body was bare. It was a warm night; Eddie nevertheless covered her breasts with the sheet. She looked a little less abandoned that way.

Eddie was so tired that he lay down on his bed and fell asleep with the towel still wrapped around his waist. In the morning, he woke to the sound of Marion calling for him—she was screaming out his name— and he could hear Ruth crying hysterically. He ran down the hall (still in the towel) and found Marion and Ruth bent over a bloodstained sink in the bathroom. There was blood everywhere. It was on the child’s pajamas, on her face, in her hair. The source was a single deep cut in Ruth’s right index finger. The pad of the first joint of her finger had been slashed to the bone. The cut was perfectly straight and extremely thin.

“She said it was glass,” Marion told Eddie, “but there’s no glass in the cut.
What
glass, honey?” Marion asked Ruth.

“The picture, the picture!” the child cried.

In an effort to conceal the photograph under her bunk, Ruth must have banged the picture frame against a part of her bed—or against the footstool. The glass covering the photo was shattered; the photograph itself was undamaged, although the mat was spotted with blood.

“What did I did?” the four-year-old kept asking. Eddie held her while her mother got dressed; then Marion held Ruth while Eddie dressed himself.

Ruth had stopped crying and was now more concerned about the photograph than about her finger. They took the photo, still in the blood-spotted mat, out of the shattered frame; they brought the picture in the car with them, because Ruth wanted the picture to come to the hospital. Marion tried to prepare Ruth for the stitches, and there would probably be at least one shot. In truth, there would be two—the lidocaine injection before the stitches, and then a tetanus shot. Despite how deep it was, the cut was so clean and so thin that Marion was sure it wouldn’t require more than two or three stitches or leave a visible scar.

“What’s a scar?” the child asked. “Am I going to die?”

“No, you are
not
going to die, honey,” her mother assured her.

Then the conversation turned to the matter of fixing the photograph. When they were finished at the hospital, they would take the photo to a frame shop in Southampton and leave it to be reframed. Ruth began to cry again, because she didn’t want the picture to be left at the shop. Eddie explained that there had to be a new mat, a new frame, and new glass.

“What’s a mat?” the four-year-old asked.

When Marion showed Ruth the blood-spotted mat (but not the photograph), Ruth wanted to know why the bloodstain wasn’t red; the spot of blood had dried and turned brown.

“Will I turn brown?” Ruth asked. “Am I going to die?”

“No, you
won’t,
honey. No, you’re
not,
” Marion kept telling her.

Of course Ruth screamed at the needles, and at the stitches—there were only two. The doctor marveled at the perfect straightness of the wound; the pad of the right index finger had been precisely bisected. It would have been next to impossible for a surgeon to have cut the exact middle of such a small finger so deliberately, even with a scalpel.

After they dropped off the photograph at the frame shop, Ruth sat subdued in her mother’s lap. Eddie drove back to Sagaponack, squinting into the morning sun. Marion lowered the sun visor on the passenger side, but Ruth was so short that the sunlight shone directly into her face, causing her to turn toward her mother. Suddenly Marion began to stare into her daughter’s eyes—into Ruth’s right eye, in particular.

“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked. “Is there something in her eye?”

“It’s nothing,” Marion said.

The child curled against her mother, who shielded the sunlight from her daughter’s face with her hand. Exhausted from all her crying, Ruth fell asleep before they reached Sagaponack.

“What did you see?” Eddie asked Marion, whose gaze was notably distant again. (It was not as distant as the night before, when Eddie had asked her about her boys’ accident.) “Tell me,” he said.

Marion pointed to the flaw in the iris of her right eye, that hexagon of yellow which Eddie had often admired; he had more than once remarked to her that he loved the tiny yellow speck in her eye—the way, in certain light or at unpredictable angles, it could turn her right eye from blue to green.

Although Ruth’s eyes were brown, what Marion had seen in the iris of Ruth’s right eye was the exact same hexagonal shape of bright yellow. When the four-year-old had blinked in the sunlight, the yellow hexagon had demonstrated its capacity to turn Ruth’s right eye from brown to amber.

Marion continued to hug her sleeping daughter to her breast; with one hand, she still shielded the four-year-old’s face from the sun. Eddie had never before seen Marion manifest such a degree of physical affection for Ruth.

“Your eye is very . . . distinguished,” the sixteen-year-old said. “It’s like a birthmark, only more mysterious. . . .”