In 1958, Mrs. Havelock’s furry pits and swaying breasts were absolutely all that Eddie O’Hare thought about when he thought about women. As for girls his own age, Eddie had been unsuccessful with them; they also terrified him. Since he was a faculty brat, his few dates had been with girls from the town of Exeter, awkward acquaintances from his junior-high-school days. These town girls were more grown up now, and generally wary of the town boys who attended the academy—understandably, they were anticipating being condescended to.
On Exeter dance weekends, the out-of-town girls struck Eddie as unapproachable. They arrived on trains and in buses, often from other boarding schools or from cities like Boston and New York. They were much better dressed, and seemingly more like women, than most of the faculty wives—excepting Mrs. Havelock.
Before leaving Exeter, Eddie had leafed through the pages of the ’53 PEAN, looking for pictures of Thomas and Timothy Cole—it was their last yearbook. What he found had intimidated him greatly. Those boys had not belonged to a single club, but Thomas was pictured with both the Varsity Soccer and the Varsity Hockey teams, and Timothy, lagging not far behind his brother, was captured in the photographs of J.V. Soccer and J.V. Hockey. That they could kick and skate wasn’t what had intimidated Eddie. It was the sheer number of snapshots, throughout the yearbook, in which both boys appeared—in the many candid photos that make up a yearbook, in all those shots of the students who are unquestionably having fun . Thomas and Timothy always appeared to be having a ball. They’d been happy ! Eddie realized.
Wrestling in a pile of boys in a dormitory butt room (the smokers’ lounge), clowning on crutches, posing with snow shovels, or playing cards—Thomas often with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his handsome mouth. And on the academy dance weekends, the Cole boys were pictured with the prettiest girls. There was a picture of Timothy not dancing with but actually embracing his dance partner; there was another of Thomas kissing a girl—they were outdoors on a cold, snowy day, both of them in camel-hair overcoats, Thomas pulling the girl to him by the scarf around her neck. Those boys had been popular ! (And then they had died.)
The ferry passed what looked like a shipyard; some naval vessels were in a dry dock, others floated in the water. As the ferry moved away from land, it passed a lighthouse or two. There were fewer sailboats farther out in the sound. The day had been hot and hazy inland—even earlier that morning, when Eddie had left Exeter—but on the water the wind from the northeast was cold, and the sun went in and out of the clouds.
On the upper deck, still struggling with his heavy duffel bag and the lighter, smaller suitcase—not to mention the already-mangled present for the child—Eddie repacked. The gift wrapping would suffer further abuse when Eddie shoved the present to the
bottom of the duffel bag, but at least he wouldn’t have to carry it under his chin. Also, he needed socks; he’d begun the day in loafers with no socks, but his feet were cold. He found a sweatshirt to wear over his T-shirt, too. Only now, his first day away from the academy, did he realize he was wearing an Exeter T-shirt and an Exeter sweatshirt. Embarrassed at what struck him as such shameless advertising of his revered school, Eddie turned the sweatshirt inside out. Only then did it occur to him why some of the seniors at the academy were in the habit of wearing their Exeter sweatshirts inside out; his new awareness of this height of fashion indicated to Eddie that he was ready to encounter the so-called real world— provided that there really was a world where Exonians were well advised to put their Exeter experiences behind them (or turn them inside out).
It was further heartening to Eddie that he was wearing jeans, despite his mother’s advice that khakis would be more “appropriate”; yet although Ted Cole had written Minty that the boy could forget about a coat and tie—Eddie’s summer job didn’t require what Ted called the “Exeter uniform”—Eddie’s father had insisted that he pack a number of dress shirts and ties, and what Minty called an “all-purpose” sports jacket.
It was when he repacked on the upper deck that Eddie first took notice of the fat envelope his father had handed him without explanation, which in itself was odd—his father explained everything . It was an envelope embossed with the Phillips Exeter Academy return address, and with O’HARE written in his father’s neat hand. Inside the envelope were the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons. It was the senior O’Hare’s idea of being prepared for any emergency—you could always call on a fellow Exeter man for help! At a glance Eddie could see that he didn’t know any of these people. There were six names with Southampton addresses, most of them from graduating classes in the thirties and forties; one old fellow, who’d graduated with the class of 1919, was doubtless retired and probably too old to remember that he’d ever gone to Exeter. (The man was only fifty-seven, in fact.)
There were another three or four Exonians in East Hampton, only a couple in Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, and one or two others in Amagansett and Water Mill and Sagaponack—the Coles lived in Sagaponack, Eddie knew. He was dumbfounded. Did his dad know nothing about him? Eddie would never dream of calling upon these strangers, even if he were in the most dire need. Exonians! he almost cried aloud.
Eddie knew many faculty families at Exeter; most of them, while never taking the qualities of the academy for granted, did not inflate beyond all reason what it meant to be an Exonian. It seemed so unfair that his father could, out of the blue, make him feel that he hated Exeter; in truth, the boy knew he was lucky to be at the school. He doubted that he would have qualified for the academy if he hadn’t been a faculty child, and he felt fairly well adjusted among his peers—as well adjusted as any boy who bears an indifference to sports can be at an all-boys’ school. Indeed, given Eddie’s terror of girls his own age, he was not unhappy to be in an all-boys’ school.
For example, he was careful to masturbate on his own towel or on his own washcloth, which he then washed out and hung back in the family bathroom where it belonged; nor did Eddie ever wrinkle the pages of his mom’s mail-order catalogs, where the various models for women’s undergarments provided all the visual stimulation his imagination needed. (What most appealed to him were the more mature women in girdles.) Without the catalogs, he had also happily masturbated in the dark, where the salty taste of Mrs. Havelock’s hairy armpits seemed on the tip of his tongue—and where her heaving breasts were the soft and rolling pillows that held his head and rocked him to sleep, where he would often dream of her. (Mrs. Havelock doubtless performed this valuable service for countless Exonians who passed through the academy in her prime years.)
But in what way was Mrs. Cole a zombie ? Eddie was watching the clamtruck driver consume a hot dog, which the driver washed down with a beer. Although Eddie was hungry—he’d not eaten since breakfast—the slightly sideways drift of the ferry and the smell of the fuel did not incline him toward food or drink. At times the upper deck would shudder, and the entire ferry swayed. And there was the added factor of where he was seated, directly downwind of the smokestack. He began to turn a little green. It made him feel better to walk around the deck, and he decidedly perked up when he found a trash can and seized the moment to throw away his father’s envelope with the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons.
Then Eddie did something that made him feel only a little ashamed of himself: he strolled over to where the clam-truck driver sat suffering the agonies of digestion, and boldly apologized for his father. The clam-truck driver suppressed a belch.
“Don’t sweat it, kid,” the man said. “We all got dads.”
“Yes,” Eddie replied.
“Besides,” the clam-truck driver philosophized, “he’s probably just worried about you. It don’t sound easy to me, being no writer’s assistant. I don’t get what it is you’re supposed to do .”
“I don’t get it, either,” Eddie confessed.
“You wanna beer?” the driver offered, but Eddie politely declined; now that he was feeling better, he didn’t want to turn green again.
There were no women or girls worth looking at on the upper deck, Eddie thought; his observation was apparently not shared by the clamtruck driver, who proceeded to roam the ferry, looking intently at all the women and girls. There were two girls who had driven a car on board; they were full of themselves, and despite being not more than a year or two older than Eddie, or only Eddie’s age, it was evident that they regarded Eddie as too young for them. Eddie looked at them only once.
A European couple approached him and asked in heavily accented English if he would take their picture as they stood at the bow—it was their honeymoon, they said. Eddie was happy to do it. Only afterward did it occur to him that the woman, being a European, might have had unshaven armpits. But she’d been wearing a long-sleeved jacket; Eddie also hadn’t been able to tell if she was wearing a bra.
He returned to his heavy duffel bag and the smaller suitcase. Only his “all-purpose” sports jacket and his dress shirts and ties were in the suitcase; it weighed next to nothing, but his mother had told him that his “good” clothes, as she called them, would be sure to arrive unwrinkled that way. (His mom had packed the suitcase.) In the duffel was everything else—the clothes he wanted, his writing notebooks, and some books that Mr. Bennett (by far his favorite English teacher) had recommended to him.
Eddie had not packed Ted Cole’s entire oeuvre . He’d read it. What was the point of carrying it with him? The only exceptions were the O’Hare family’s copy of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls —Eddie’s father had insisted that Eddie get Mr. Cole’s autograph—and Eddie’s personal favorite among Ted’s books for children. Like Ruth, Eddie had a personal favorite that was not the famous mouse between the walls. Eddie’s favorite was the one called The Door in the Floor; it frankly scared the shit out of him. He hadn’t paid close enough attention to the copyright date to realize that The Door in the Floor was the first book Ted Cole had published following the death of his sons. As such, it must have been a difficult book for him to write at all; it certainly reflected a little of the horror that Ted was living in those days.
If Ted’s publisher hadn’t felt such sympathy for Ted because of what had happened to his children, the book might have been rejected. The reviewers were almost unanimously un sympathetic to the book, which sold about as well as Ted’s other books, anyway; his popularity appeared to be of that unassailable kind. Dot O’Hare herself had said that it would be an act of indecency bordering on child abuse to read that book aloud to any child. But Eddie was thrilled by The Door in the Floor, which, in fact, enjoyed a kind of cult status on college campuses—it was that reprehensible.
On the ferry, Eddie thumbed through The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls . He’d read it so many times that he didn’t read a word of it again; he looked only at the illustrations, which he liked more than most book reviewers had. At best reviewers would say the illustrations were “ enhancing” or “not obtrusive.” More often the commentary was negative, but not that negative. (Such as: “The illustrations, while not detracting from the story, add little. They leave one hoping for more next time.”) Yet Eddie liked them.
The imaginary monster was crawling between the walls; there it was, with its no arms and no legs, pulling itself along with its teeth, sliding forward on its fur. Better still was the illustration of the scary dress in Mommy’s closet, the dress that was coming alive and trying to climb down off the hanger. It was a dress with one foot, a naked foot, protruding below the hem; and a hand, just a hand with a wrist, wriggled out of one sleeve. Most disturbing of all, the contours of a single breast seemed to swell the dress, as if a woman (or only some of her parts) were forming inside the dress.
Nowhere in the book was there a comforting drawing of a real mouse between those walls. The last illustration showed the younger of the boys, awake in bed and frightened of the approaching sound. With his small hand, the boy is hitting the wall—to make the mouse scurry away. But not only is the mouse not scurrying away; the mouse is disproportionately huge . It is not only bigger than both boys together; it is bigger than the headboard of the bed—bigger than the entire bed and the headboard.
As for Eddie’s favorite book by Ted Cole, he removed it from his duffel bag and read it once more before the ferry landed. The story of The Door in the Floor would never be a favorite of Ruth’s; her father had not told it to her, and it would be a few years before Ruth was old enough to read it for herself. She would hate it.
There was a tasteful but stark illustration of an unborn child inside its mother’s womb. “There was a little boy who didn’t know if he wanted to be born,” the book began. “His mommy didn’t know if she wanted him to be born, either.
“This is because they lived in a cabin in the woods, on an island, in a lake—and there was no one else around