“Honestly, Joe,” Dot said. “I sometimes wonder if you ever listen.”
“My dear Dorothy, I’m all ears,” the old bore told her. They both had a good laugh over that. They were still laughing as Eddie dragged himself through the requisite motions of going to bed. He was suddenly so tired—so indolent, he guessed—that he couldn’t conceive of making the effort to tell his parents what he’d meant. If theirs was a good marriage, and by all counts it seemed to be, Eddie imagined that a bad marriage might have much to recommend it. He was about to test that theory, more strenuously than he knew.
The Door in the Floor
En route to New London, a journey that had been tediously over-planned—like Marion, they’d left much too early for the designated ferry—Eddie’s father got lost in the vicinity of Providence.
“Is this the pilot’s error or the navigator’s?” Minty asked cheerfully. It was both. Eddie’s father had been talking so much that he’d not been paying sufficient attention to the road; Eddie, who was the “navigator,” had been making such an effort to stay awake that he’d neglected to consult the map. “It’s a good thing we left early,” his father added.
They stopped at a gas station, where Joe O’Hare made his best attempt to engage in small talk with a member of the working class. “So, how’s this for a predicament?” the senior O’Hare said to the gas-station attendant, who appeared to Eddie to be a trifle retarded. “Here’s a couple of lost Exonians in search of the New London ferry to Orient Point.”
Eddie died a little every time he heard his father speak to strangers. (Who but an Exonian knew what an Exonian was?) As if stricken by a passing coma, the gas-station attendant stared at an oily stain on the pavement a little to the right of Minty’s right shoe. “You’re in Rhode Island” was all that the unfortunate man was able to say.
“Can you tell us the way to New London?” Eddie asked him.
When they were back on the road again, Minty regaled Eddie on the subject of the intrinsic sullenness that was so often the result of a subpar secondary-school education. “The dulling of the mind is a terrible thing, Edward,” his father instructed him.
They arrived in New London in
enough time for Eddie to have taken an earlier ferry. “But then you’ll have to wait in Orient Point all alone!” Minty pointed out. The Coles, after all, were expecting Eddie to be on the later ferry. By the time Eddie realized how much he would have preferred to wait in Orient Point alone, the earlier ferry had sailed.
“My son’s first ocean voyage,” Minty said to the woman with the enormous arms who sold Eddie his passenger ticket. “It’s not the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary; it’s not a seven-day crossing; it’s not Southampton, as in England, or Cherbourg, as in France. But, especially when you’re sixteen, a little voyage at sea to Orient Point will do!” The woman smiled tolerantly through her rolls of fat; even though her smile was slight, one could discern that she was missing a few teeth.
Afterward, standing at the waterfront, Eddie’s father philosophized on the subject of the dietary excesses that were often the result of a subpar secondary-school education. In one short trip away from Exeter, they kept running across examples of people who would have been happier or thinner (or both) if they’d only had the good fortune to attend the academy!
Occasionally Eddie’s father would interject, at random, sprinkles of advice that, out of nowhere, pertained to Eddie’s upcoming summer job. “Don’t be nervous just because he’s famous,” the senior O’Hare said, apropos of nothing. “He’s not exactly a major literary figure. Just pick up what you can. Note his work habits, see if there’s a method to his madness—that kind of thing.” As Eddie’s designated ferry approached, it was Minty who was suddenly growing anxious about Eddie’s job.
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.