A Widow for One Year (10 page)

Yet, if only in the many photographs of Thomas and Timothy, Eddie saw that something
had been
both good and happy, and that the Coles had once had friends. There were pictures of dinner parties with other families, couples with children; Thomas and Timothy had had birthday parties with other children, too. Although Marion and Ted made infrequent appearances in the photographs—Thomas and Timothy (even if only their
feet
) were the main subject of every photo— there was sufficient evidence that Ted and Marion had once been happy, if not necessarily happy with each other. Even if their marriage had
never
been good, Ted and Marion had had a multitude of good times with their boys.

Eddie O’Hare could not personally remember as many good times as he saw excessively depicted in those photographs. But what had happened to Ted and Marion’s friends? Eddie wondered. Excepting the nannies, and the models (or model), there was never anyone around.

If, as a four-year-old, Ruth Cole already understood that Thomas and Timothy now inhabited another world, as far as Eddie was concerned, those boys had
come
from another world as well. They’d been loved.

Whatever Ruth was learning to do, she was learning it from her nannies; for the most part, the nannies had failed to impress Eddie. The first one was a local girl with a thuggish-looking boyfriend who was a local, too—or so Eddie, from his Exonian perspective, assumed. The boyfriend was a lifeguard who possessed the essential imperviousness to boredom that all lifeguards must have. The thug dropped the nanny off every morning, glowering at Eddie if he chanced to see him. This was the nanny who regularly took Ruth to the beach, where the lifeguard was tanning himself.

In the first month of that summer, Marion, who usually drove the nanny and Ruth to the beach and later picked them up, asked Eddie to perform the chore only once or twice. The nanny had not spoken to him, and Ruth—to Eddie’s shame—had asked him (once again), “Where are the feet?”

The afternoon nanny was a college girl who drove her own car. Her name was Alice, and she was too superior to Eddie to speak to him— except to say that she’d once known someone who’d gone to Exeter. Naturally he’d graduated from the academy before Eddie had started, and Alice knew only his first name, which was either Chickie or Chuckie.

“Probably a nickname,” Eddie had said stupidly.

Alice had sighed and looked pityingly upon him. Eddie feared that he had inherited his father’s penchant for saying the obvious—and that he would soon be spontaneously dubbed with a name like Minty, which would stick to him for the rest of his life.

The college-girl nanny also had a summer job in one of the restaurants in the Hamptons, but it was not a place where Eddie ever ate. She was pretty, too, so that Eddie could never look at her without feeling ashamed.

The nighttime nanny was a married woman whose husband had a daytime job. She sometimes brought her two kids, who were older than Ruth but played respectfully with Ruth’s innumerable toys—mostly dolls and dollhouses, which were largely ignored by the four-year-old. Ruth preferred to draw, or to have stories read to her. She had a professional artist’s easel in her nursery; the easel had the legs sawed off. The only doll Ruth was attached to was a doll missing a head.

Of the three nannies, the nighttime nanny was the only one who was friendly to Eddie, but Eddie went out every night. And when he was home, he tended to stay in his room. His guest bedroom and bathroom were at the far end of the long upstairs hall; when Eddie wanted to write letters to his mom and dad, or just write in his notebooks, he was almost always left alone there. In his letters home, he neglected to tell his parents that Ted and Marion were separated for the summer—not to mention that he regularly masturbated to Marion’s scent while clinging to her slinky clothes.

On the morning when Marion caught Eddie in the act of masturbating, Eddie had elaborately arranged upon the bed a veritable reassembly of Marion herself. There was a peach-colored blouse of a thin, summer-weight material—suitable for the stifling carriage house— and a bra of a matching color. Eddie had left the blouse unbuttoned. The bra, which was positioned roughly where one would expect a bra to be, was partially exposed but still caught up in the blouse—as if Marion were in this specific stage of undress. This gave to her clothes the appearance of passion, or at least of haste. Her panties, which were also peach-colored, were placed the right way (waist up, crotch down) and they were the correct distance from the bra—that is, if Marion had actually been wearing the bra and the panties. Eddie, who was naked— and who always masturbated by rubbing his penis with his left hand against the inside of his right thigh—had pressed his face into the open blouse and bra. With his right hand, he stroked the unimaginable silky softness of Marion’s panties.

Marion needed only a fraction of a second to realize that Eddie was naked, and to recognize what he was doing—and with what visual and tactile aids!—but when Eddie first spotted her, she was neither entering nor leaving the bedroom. She was standing as still as an apparition of herself, which Eddie must have hoped she was; also, it was not exactly Marion herself but rather her reflection in the bedroom mirror that Eddie saw first. Marion, who could see Eddie in the mirror
and
Eddie himself, had been given the unique opportunity of seeing
two
of him masturbate at once.

She was gone from the doorway as quickly as she’d appeared. Eddie, who had not yet ejaculated, knew not only that she’d seen him, but also that, in a split second, she’d understood everything about him.

“I’m sorry, Eddie,” Marion was saying from the kitchen, as he struggled to put away her clothes. “I should have knocked.”

When he’d dressed himself, he still didn’t dare leave the bedroom. He half-expected to hear her footsteps on the stairs down to the garage—or, more mercifully, to hear her Mercedes driving away. Instead she was waiting for him. And since he hadn’t heard her footsteps come
up
the stairs from the garage, he knew that he must have been moaning.

“Eddie, it’s
my
fault,” Marion was saying. “I’m
not
angry. I’m just embarrassed.”

“I’m embarrassed, too,” he mumbled from the bedroom.

“It’s all right—it’s
natural,
” Marion said. “I
know
boys your age. . . .” Her voice trailed away.

When he finally got up his nerve to go to her, she was sitting on the couch. “Come here—at least
look
at me!” she said, but he stood frozen, staring at his feet. “Eddie, it’s
funny
. Let’s call it funny and leave it at that.”

“It’s funny,” he said miserably.

“Eddie! Come here!” she ordered.

He shuffled slowly in her direction, his eyes still downcast.

“Sit!” she commanded, but the best he could do was perch rigidly at the far end of the couch—away from her. “No,
here
.” She patted the couch between them. He couldn’t move.

“Eddie, Eddie—I
know
boys your age,” she said again. “It’s what boys your age
do,
isn’t it? Can you imagine
not
doing it?” she asked him.

“No,” he whispered. He started to cry—he couldn’t stop.

“Oh, don’t
cry
!” Marion insisted. She never cried now—she had cried herself out.

Then Marion was sitting so close to him that he felt the couch cave in, and he found himself leaning against her. He kept crying while she talked and talked. “Eddie, listen to me,
please,
” she said. “I thought one of Ted’s women was wearing my clothes—sometimes my clothes looked wrinkled, or they were on the wrong hangers. But it was
you,
and you were actually being
nice
—you even
folded
my underwear! Or you tried to. I never fold my panties or my bras. I knew
Ted
wasn’t touching them,” she added, while Eddie wept. “Oh, Eddie—I’m
flattered
. Really, I
am
! It’s not been the best summer—I’m happy to know that
someone
is thinking about me.”

She paused; she seemed suddenly more embarrassed than Eddie. She quickly said: “Oh, I don’t mean to assume that you
were
thinking about me. Goodness, that’s rather conceited of me, isn’t it? Maybe it was just my clothes. I’m
still
flattered, even if it was just my clothes. You probably have lots of girls to think about . . .”

“I think about
you
!” Eddie blurted out. “Only you.”

“Then don’t be embarrassed,” Marion said. “You’ve made an old lady
happy
!”

“You’re not an old lady!” he cried.

“You’re making me happier and happier, Eddie.” She stood up quickly, as if she were about to go. At last he dared to look at her. When she saw his expression, she said, “Be careful how you feel about me, Eddie. I mean, take care of yourself,” she warned him.

“I love you,” he said bravely.

She sat down beside him, as urgently as if he’d begun to cry again. “
Don’t
love me, Eddie,” she said, with more gravity than he’d expected. “Just think about my
clothes
. Clothes can’t hurt you.” Leaning closer to him, but
not
flirtatiously, she said: “Tell me. Is there something you especially like—I mean something that I
wear
?” He stared at her in such a way that she repeated, “Just think about my
clothes,
Eddie.”

“What you were wearing when I met you,” Eddie told her.

“Goodness!” Marion said. “I don’t remember . . .”

“A pink sweater—it buttons up the front.”

“
That
old thing!” Marion shrieked. She was on the verge of laughter; Eddie realized that he’d never seen her laugh. He was totally absorbed by her. If at first he hadn’t been able to look at her, now he couldn’t stop looking. “Well, if
that’s
what you like,” Marion was saying, “maybe I’ll surprise you!” She stood up again—again quickly. Now he felt like crying because he could see that she was going to go. By the door to the stairs, she took a tougher tone. “Not so serious, Eddie—not so serious.”

“I love you,” he repeated.

“Don’t,”
she reminded him. Needless to say, he would have a distracted day.

And not long after their encounter, he returned one night from a movie in Southampton to find her standing in his bedroom. The nighttime nanny had gone home. He knew instantly, with a broken heart, that she was
not
there to seduce him. She began talking about some of the photographs in his guest bedroom and bathroom; she was sorry to intrude, but—out of respect for his privacy—she didn’t allow herself to come in his room and look at the pictures unless he was out. She had been thinking about one of the pictures in particular—she wouldn’t tell him which one—and she had stayed to look at it a little longer than she’d intended.

When she said good night, and left him, he was more miserable than he’d thought humanly possible. But just before he went to bed, he realized that she’d folded his stray clothes. She’d also taken a towel from its customary position on the shower-curtain rod, and she’d returned it, neatly, to the towel rack, where it belonged. Finally, although it was the most obvious, Eddie noticed that his bed was made. He never made it—nor, at least at the rental house, did Marion ever make her own!

Two mornings later, after he deposited the mail on the kitchen table of the carriage house, he started to make coffee. While the coffee was brewing, he entered the bedroom. At first he thought it was
Marion
on the bed, but it was only her pink cashmere cardigan. (
Only !
) She had left the buttons unbuttoned and the long sleeves of the sweater pulled back, as if an invisible woman in the cardigan had clasped her invisible hands behind her invisible head. Where the buttons were open, a bra showed itself; it was a more seductive display than any arrangement of her clothing Eddie had made. The bra was white—as were the panties, which Marion had placed exactly where Eddie liked them.

Come Hither . . .

In that summer of ’58, Ted Cole’s young mother of the moment—the furtive Mrs. Vaughn—was small and dark and feral-looking. For a month, all Eddie had seen of her was in Ted’s drawings. And Eddie had seen only those drawings where Mrs. Vaughn was posed with her son, who was also small and dark and feral-looking, which strongly suggested to Eddie that the two of them might be inclined to bite people. The elfin features of Mrs. Vaughn’s face and her too-youthful pixie haircut could not conceal something violent, or at least unstable, in the young mother’s temperament. And her son seemed on the verge of spitting and hissing like a cornered cat—maybe he didn’t like to pose.

When Mrs. Vaughn first came to model
alone,
her movements—from her car to the Coles’ house, and back to her car again—were especially furtive. She shot a glance toward any sound and in every direction like an animal anticipating an attack. Mrs. Vaughn was on the lookout for Marion, of course, but Eddie, who didn’t yet know that Mrs. Vaughn was posing
nude
—not to mention that it was Mrs. Vaughn’s strong smell that he (
and
Marion) had detected on the pillows in the carriage-house apartment—mistakenly concluded that the little woman was nervous to the point of derangement.

Besides, Eddie was too consumed by his thoughts of Marion to pay much attention to Mrs. Vaughn. Although Marion had not repeated the mischief of creating that replica of herself so alluringly arranged on the bed in the rental house, Eddie’s own manipulations of Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan, which was redolent of her delectable scent, continued to satisfy the sixteen-year-old to a degree that he had never been satisfied before.

Eddie O’Hare inhabited a kind of masturbatory heaven. He should have stayed there—he should have taken up permanent residence. As Eddie would soon discover, to have more of Marion than what he already possessed would not content him. But Marion was in control of their relationship; if anything more was to happen between them, it would happen only upon Marion’s initiation.