“Mrs. Vaughn is presently experiencing the degraded phase,” Marion told him.
For such a small woman, Mrs. Vaughn left a big smell on the pillows, Eddie thought; he also thought it would be imprudent, even prurient, for him to voice his opinion of Mrs. Vaughn’s odor to Marion.
“But you’ve stayed with him all these years,” the sixteen-year-old said miserably. “Why didn’t you leave him?”
“The boys loved him,” Marion explained. “And I loved the boys. I was planning to leave Ted after the boys finished school—after they had left home. Maybe after they’d finished college,” she added with less certainty.
Overcoming his unhappiness on her behalf, Eddie ate a mountainous dessert.
“That’s what I love about boys,” Marion told him. “No matter what, you just go on about your business.”
She let Eddie drive home. She rolled her window down and closed her eyes. The night air blew through her hair. “It’s nice to be driven,” she told Eddie. “Ted always drank too much. I was always the driver. Well . . . almost always,” she said in a whisper. Then she turned her back to Eddie; she might have been crying, because her shoulders were shaking, but she didn’t make a sound. When they arrived at the house in Sagaponack, either the wind had dried her tears or she hadn’t been crying at all. Eddie only knew, from the time he had cried in front of her, that Marion didn’t approve of crying.
In the house, after she dismissed the nighttime nanny, Marion poured herself a fourth glass of wine from an open bottle in the refrigerator. She made Eddie come with her when she checked to see if Ruth was asleep, whispering that, despite every appearance to the contrary, she had once been a good mother. “But I won’t be a bad mother to Ruth,” she added, still in a whisper. “I would rather be no mother to her than a bad one.” At the time, Eddie didn’t understand that Marion already knew she was going to leave her daughter with Ted. (At the time, Marion didn’t understand that Ted had hired Eddie not only because he needed a driver.)
The feeble night-light from the master bathroom cast such faint illumination into Ruth’s room that the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy were difficult to see; yet Marion insisted that Eddie look at them. She wanted to tell Eddie what the boys were doing in each of the pictures, and why she’d selected these particular photos for Ruth’s room. Then Marion led Eddie into the master bathroom, where the night-light illuminated those photographs only a little more clearly. Here Eddie could discern a water theme, which Marion had found appropriate for the bathroom: a holiday in Tortola, and one in Anguilla; a summer picnic at the pond in New Hampshire; and Thomas and Timothy, when they were both younger than Ruth, in a bathtub together—Tim was crying, but Tom was not. “He got soap in his eyes,” Marion whispered.
The tour continued into the master bedroom, where Eddie had never been before—nor had he seen the photographs, each one of which summoned a story from Marion. And so on, throughout the house. They traveled from room to room, from picture to picture, until Eddie realized why Ruth had been so agitated by the little scraps of notepaper covering Thomas’s and Timothy’s bare feet. Ruth would have taken this tour of the past on many, many occasions—probably in both her father’s and her mother’s arms—and to the four-year-old, the stories of the photographs were doubtless as important as the photographs themselves. Maybe more important. Ruth was growing up not only with the overwhelming presence of her dead brothers, but also with the unparalleled importance of their absence.
The pictures were the stories, and vice versa. To alter the photographs, as Eddie had, was as unthinkable as changing the past. The past, which was where Ruth’s dead brothers lived, was not open to revision. Eddie vowed that he would try to make it up to the child, to reassure her that everything she’d ever been told about her dead brothers was immutable. In an unsure world, with an uncertain future, at least the child could rely on that. Or could she?
More than an hour later, Marion ended the tour in Eddie’s bedroom —and, finally, in the guest bathroom that Eddie used. There was an appropriate fatalism to the fact that the last photograph to inspire Marion’s background narration was the picture of Marion herself, in bed with the two bare feet.
“I love that picture of you, ” Eddie managed to say, not daring to add that he had masturbated to the image of Marion’s bare shoulders— and to her smile. As if for the first time, Marion slowly considered herself in the twelve-year-old photograph.
“I was twenty-seven,” she said, the passage of time, the melancholy of it, filling her eyes.
It was her fifth glass of wine, which she finished now in a perfunctory fashion. Then she handed her empty glass to Eddie. He remained standing where he was, in the guest bathroom, for a full fifteen minutes after Marion had left him.
The next morning, in the carriage-house apartment, Eddie had only begun his arrangement of the pink cashmere cardigan on the bed— together with a lilac-colored silk camisole and matching panties—when he heard Marion’s exaggerated clomping on the stairs leading up from the garage. She didn’t knock on the door—she beat on the door. She wasn’t going to catch Eddie in the act this time. He had not yet undressed to lie down beside her clothes. Nevertheless, a moment of indecision overcame him, and then there wasn’t time to put Marion’s clothes away. He’d been thinking about what an unwise color choice it had been for him to put pink and lilac together; yet the colors of her clothes were never what motivated him. He had been drawn to the lace on the waist of the panties, and to the lace in the fabulous décolletage of the camisole. Eddie was still fretting over his decision when Marion beat on the door a second time; he left her clothes on the bed and hurried to answer the door.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said with a smile. She was wearing sunglasses, which she removed when she came into the apartment. For the first time, Eddie noticed her age in the crow’s-feet at the outer corners of her eyes. The night before maybe Marion had had too much wine—five glasses of anything alcoholic was a lot for her.
To Eddie’s surprise, she moved directly to the first of the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy she’d brought to the rental house, proceeding to explain her choices to Eddie. The pictures were of Thomas and Timothy when they were more or less Eddie’s age, which meant the photos had been taken shortly before the boys died. Marion explained that she’d thought Eddie might find photographs of his contemporaries familiar, even welcoming, in what might be un familiar and un welcome circumstances. She’d worried about Eddie, long before he arrived, because she knew how little there would be for him to do . And she had doubted that he would have an easy time of it; she’d anticipated the nonexistence of any social life for the sixteen-year-old.
“Excepting the younger of Ruth’s nannies, who were you ever going to meet?” Marion asked. “Unless you were especially
outgoing. Thomas was outgoing, Timothy was not—he was more introspective, like you. Although you look more like Thomas,” Marion told Eddie, “I think you are more like Timothy.”
“Oh,” Eddie said. He was stunned that she’d been thinking about him before he arrived!
The photography tour continued. It was as if the rental house were a secret room off the guest-wing hall, and Eddie and Marion had not ended their evening together; they had merely moved on, to another room, with other pictures. They traipsed through the kitchen of the carriage-house apartment—Marion talking and talking all the while— and back into the bedroom, where she continued talking, pointing to the one photograph of Thomas and Timothy that hung over the headboard of the bed.
Eddie had little difficulty recognizing a most familiar landmark of the Exeter campus. The dead boys were posed in the doorway of the Main Academy Building, where, under the pointed pediment above the door was a Latin inscription. Chiseled into the white marble, which was offset by the great brick building and the forest-green double door itself, were these humbling words:
HVC VENITE PVERI
VT VIRI SITIS
(The U’s in HUC and PUERI and UT had all been carved like V’s, of course.) There were Thomas and Timothy in their jackets and ties, the year of their deaths. At seventeen, Thomas seemed almost a man—at fifteen, Timothy seemed very much a boy. And the doorway where they stood was the photo background most commonly chosen by the proud parents of countless Exonians. Eddie wondered how many unformed bodies and minds had passed through that door, under that stern and forbidding invitation.
COME HITHER BOYS
AND BECOME MEN
But it hadn’t happened for Thomas and Timothy. Eddie was aware that Marion had paused in her narration of the photograph; her eyes had fallen upon her own pink cashmere cardigan, which (together with her lilac-colored camisole and matching panties) was displayed on the bed.
“Goodness—not pink with lilac!” Marion said.