A Widow for One Year (30 page)

On that August Saturday in 1958, when he crossed Long Island Sound with the clam-truck driver, Eddie O’Hare had no telescope trained on the future. He could never have foreseen his career as a faintly praised, little-known novelist. Yet Eddie would never be without a small but loyal following of readers; it would depress him, at times, that his fans were chiefly older women and, albeit less frequently, younger men. Nevertheless, there was evidence of literary
effort
in his writing— Eddie would never be out of a job. He would eke out a living by teaching at the university level—a job he did honorably, if without much flair or distinction. He would be respected by his students and his fellow faculty members, if never adored.

When the clam-truck driver asked him, “If you’re not gonna be a writer’s assistant, what are you gonna be?” Eddie didn’t hesitate in replying to the forthright but smelly man.

“I’m going to be a writer,” Eddie replied.

Surely the sixteen-year-old couldn’t have imagined the grief he would occasionally cause. He would hurt the Havelocks, without ever meaning to—not to mention Penny Pierce, whom he had meant to hurt only a little. And the Havelocks had been so kind to him! Mrs. Havelock liked Eddie—in part because she sensed that he was beyond whatever lust he’d once felt for her. She could tell he was in love with someone else, and it didn’t take her long to come out and ask him. Both Mr. and Mrs. Havelock knew that Eddie was not a good enough writer to have
imagined
those scenes of sexual explicitness between a younger man and an older woman. Too many of the details were just right.

And so it was to Mr. and Mrs. Havelock that Eddie would confess his six- or seven-week affair with Marion; he told them the awful things, too—the parts he’d been unable to write about. At first Mrs. Havelock responded by saying that Marion had virtually
raped
him; that Marion was guilty of taking criminal advantage of what Mrs. Havelock called “an underage boy.” But Eddie persuaded Mrs. Havelock that it hadn’t really been like that.

As was his habit with older women, Eddie found it easy and comforting to cry in front of Mrs. Havelock, whose hairy armpits and mobile, uncontained breasts could still remind him of his
former
lust for her. Like an ex-girlfriend, Mrs. Havelock would only occasionally and halfheartedly arouse him—yet he was not above feeling a
flicker
of arousal in her warm, maternal presence.

What a pity, then, that he would write about her as he did. It could be described as a worse-than-usual case of “second novelitis,” for Eddie’s second novel was his worst; indeed, following (as it did) upon the relative success of
Summer Job,
Eddie’s second novel would be the low point of his career. After it, his literary reputation would slightly improve and thereafter hold to its steady, undistinguished course.

It seems certain that Eddie must have been thinking too much about Robert Anderson’s play
Tea and Sympathy;
it was later a movie, starring Deborah Kerr as the older woman, and it doubtless made a lasting impression on Eddie O’Hare.
Tea and Sympathy
was especially well known in the Exeter community because Robert Anderson, ’35, was an Exonian; this made it all the more embarrassing for Mrs. Havelock when Eddie’s second novel,
Coffee and Doughnuts,
was published.

In
Coffee and Doughnuts,
an Exeter student is frequently overcome by fainting fits in the presence of the wife of his favorite English teacher. The wife—whose braless, pendulous breasts and furry, unshaven armpits forever identify her as Mrs. Havelock—begs her husband to take her away from the confines of the school. She feels humiliated to be the object of desire of so
many
boys—in addition to how sorry she feels for the particular boy whom her unintentional sexuality has completely undone.

This was “much too close to home,” as Minty O’Hare would later tell his son. Even Dot O’Hare would look pityingly upon the stricken countenance of Anna Havelock after
Coffee and Doughnuts
was published. In his naïveté, Eddie had thought of the book as a kind of homage to
Tea and Sympathy
—and to the Havelocks, who had been such a help to him. But in the novel, the Mrs. Havelock character sleeps with the infatuated teenager; this is the only means she has to convince her insensitive husband to remove her from the school’s masturbatory atmosphere. (How Eddie O’Hare could have thought of his book as
homage
to the Havelocks is anybody’s guess.)

For Mrs. Havelock, the publication of
Coffee and Doughnuts
did have at least one desired effect. Her husband took her back to Great Britain, just as she’d asked him to. Arthur Havelock ended up teaching somewhere in Scotland, the country where he and Anna had first met. But if the
result
of Eddie’s writing
Coffee and Doughnuts
was, unwittingly, a happy ending for the Havelocks, they never thanked Eddie for his embarrassing book; indeed, they never spoke to him again.

About the only person who ever liked
Coffee and Doughnuts
was someone pretending to be Robert Anderson, ’35; the alleged author of
Tea and Sympathy
sent Eddie an elegant letter, expressing his understanding of both the intended homage
and
the intended comedy. (It was devastating to Eddie that, in the parentheses following Robert Anderson’s name, the imposter had written, “Just kidding!”)

On that Saturday when he was sharing the upper deck of the Cross Sound Ferry with the clam-truck driver, Eddie’s mood was morose. It was almost as if he could foresee not only his summerlong affair with Penny Pierce but her bitter letter to him after she’d read
Summer Job
. Penny would not like the Marion character in that novel—Penny would see her as the
Penny
character, of course.

To be fair, Mrs. Pierce would be disappointed in Eddie O’Hare long before she read
Summer Job.
In the summer of ’60, she would sleep with Eddie for three months; she would have almost twice as much time to sleep with him as Marion had had, yet Eddie wouldn’t come close to making love to Mrs. Pierce sixty times.

“You know what I remember, kid?” the clam-truck driver was saying. To be sure he had the boy’s attention, the driver extended his beer bottle beyond the protecting wall of the pilothouse; the wind made the bottle
toot
.

“No, what do you remember?” Eddie asked the driver.

“That
broad
you was with,” the clam-truck driver said. “The one in the pink sweater. She picked you up in that sweet little Mercedes. You wasn’t
her
assistant, were you?”

Eddie paused. “No, her husband’s,” Eddie said. “Her husband was the writer.”

“Now
there’s
a lucky guy!” the clam-truck driver said. “But don’t get me wrong. I just
look
at other women, I don’t mess around. I been married for almost thirty-five years—my high-school sweetheart. We’re pretty happy, I guess. She’s not great-looking but she’s my wife. It’s like the clams.”

“Excuse me?” Eddie said.

“The wife, the clams . . . I mean, maybe it’s not the most exciting choice, but it works,” the clam-truck driver explained. “I wanted my own trucking business, at least my own truck. I didn’t want to drive for nobody else. I used to haul lots of things—other stuff. But it was complicated. When I saw I could make it with just the clams, it was easier. I kind of
lapsed
into the clams, you might say.”

“I see,” Eddie said. The wife, the clams . . . it was a tortured analogy, no matter how you expressed it, the future novelist thought. And it would be unfair to say that Eddie O’Hare, as a writer, would become the literary equivalent of
lapsing
into clams. He wasn’t
that
bad.

The clam-truck driver once more extended his beer bottle beyond the pilothouse wall; the bottle, which was now empty, tooted at a lower pitch than before. The ferry slowed as it approached the slip.

Eddie and the driver walked to the bow of the upper deck, where they faced into the wind. Eddie’s mother and father were waving madly from the docks; their dutiful son waved back. Both Minty and Dot were weeping; they hugged each other and wiped each other’s wet faces, as if Eddie were returning safely from a war. Rather than feel his usual embarrassment, or even the slightest shame at his parents’ hysterical behavior, Eddie realized how much he loved them and how fortunate he was to have the kind of parents Ruth Cole would never know.

Then the gangplank chains, lowering the ferry’s ramp, commenced their usual loud grinding; the stevedores were shouting to one another above the clamor. “Nice talking to you, kid!” the clam-truck driver was calling.

Eddie took what he imagined was a last look out of the harbor at the choppy water of Long Island Sound. He had no idea that the trip on the Cross Sound Ferry would one day be as familiar to him as passing through the doorway of the Main Academy Building, under that Latin inscription which bid him to come hither and become a man.

“Edward! My Edward!” his father was bawling. Eddie’s mom was weeping too copiously to speak. One look at them and Eddie knew that he could never tell them what had happened to him. With more powers of premonition than he possessed, Eddie might—at this very moment—have recognized his limitations as a fiction writer: he would always be an unreliable liar. Not only could he never tell his parents the truth about his relationship with Ted and Marion and Ruth; neither could he make up a satisfying lie.

Eddie would lie largely by omission, saying simply that it had been a sad summer for him because Mr. and Mrs. Cole were caught up in the prelude to a divorce; now Marion had left Ted with the little girl, and that was that. A more challenging opportunity to lie would present itself to Eddie when his mother discovered Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan hanging in her son’s closet.

Eddie’s lie was more spontaneous and more convincing than most of what was imperfectly imagined in his fiction. He told his mom that once when he’d been shopping with Mrs. Cole, she’d pointed out the sweater in an East Hampton boutique and had told him that she’d always liked the particular garment and had hoped her husband would buy it for her; now that they were divorcing, Mrs. Cole had implied to Eddie, there was good reason for her husband to save his money.

Eddie had returned to the store and bought the expensive sweater. But Mrs. Cole had left—the marriage, the house, her child,
everything
— before Eddie had had the chance to give the sweater to her! Eddie told his mother that he wanted to keep the sweater in case he ever ran into Marion again.

Dot O’Hare had been proud of her son for his kind gesture. To Eddie’s embarrassment, Dot would occasionally display the pink cashmere cardigan to their faculty friends—the tale of Eddie’s thoughtfulness toward the unhappy Mrs. Cole was Dot’s idea of good dinner-party conversation. And Eddie’s lie would further backfire. In the summer of ’60, when Eddie was falling short of making love to Penny Pierce the requisite sixty times, Dot O’Hare would meet a woman among the Exeter faculty wives who was just the right size for Marion’s sweater. When Eddie came home from Long Island that second time, his mom had given Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan away.

It was lucky for Eddie that his mother never found Marion’s lilac-colored camisole and matching panties, which Eddie kept buried in the drawer containing his athletic supporters and his squash shorts. It is doubtful that Dot O’Hare would have congratulated her son for his “thoughtfulness” in buying Mrs. Cole such suggestive underwear.

At the docks in New London, on that Saturday in August ’58, there was something in the firmness of Eddie’s embrace that persuaded Minty to give his son the keys to the car. There was not a word about the traffic that lay ahead of them being “different from Exeter traffic.” Minty wasn’t worried; he saw that Eddie had matured. (“Joe—he’s all grown up!” Dot whispered to her husband.)

Minty had parked the car at some distance from the docks, near the station platform for the New London railroad depot. After a small fuss between them concerning whether Dot or Minty would ride in the passenger seat and be Eddie’s “navigator” for the long ride home, Eddie’s parents settled into the car as trustingly as children. There was no question that Eddie was in charge.

Only when he was leaving the railroad-depot parking lot did Eddie spot Marion’s tomato-red Mercedes; it was parked within easy walking distance of the station platform. Probably the keys were already in the mail to her lawyer, who would repeat to Ted the list of Marion’s demands.

So she had probably
not
gone to New York. This awareness came as no more than a mild surprise to Eddie. And if Marion had left her car at the train station in New London, this didn’t necessarily mean she had gone back to New England—she might have been heading farther north. (Montreal, maybe. Eddie knew she could speak French.)

But what was she thinking? Eddie wondered, as he would wonder about Marion for thirty-seven years. What was she doing? Where had she gone?

II

FALL
1990

Eddie at Forty-Eight

It was early on a rainy Monday evening in September. Eddie O’Hare stood stiffly at the bar in the tap room of the New York Athletic Club. He was forty-eight, his formerly dark-brown hair was heavily streaked with silver-gray, and—because he was trying to read while standing at the bar—a thick lock of his hair kept flopping over one of his eyes. He kept brushing his hair back, his long fingers like a comb. He never carried a comb, and his hair had a fluffy, just-washed wildness to it; it was the only wild thing about him, really.

Eddie was tall and thin. Sitting or standing, he squared his shoulders in an unnatural way; his body maintained a tense, almost military overerectness. He suffered from chronic lower back pain. He had just lost three straight games of squash to a little bald man named Jimmy. Eddie could never remember Jimmy’s last name. Jimmy was retired— he was rumored to be in his seventies—and he spent every afternoon at the New York Athletic Club, waiting for pickup squash games with younger players whose would-be opponents had stood them up.