Ted helped Alice navigate the stairs, and he gave her a clean handkerchief with which to blow her nose. “I’m sorry for springing all this on you, Alice,” Ted told the college girl, but the nanny wouldn’t be appeased.
“My father left my mother when I was a little girl,” Alice sniffed. “So I quit . That’s all—I just quit . And you should have the decency to quit, too,” Alice added to Eddie.
“It’s too late for me to quit, Alice,” Eddie said. “I just got fired.”
“I never knew you were such a superior person, Alice,” Ted told the girl.
“Alice has been superior to me all summer,” Eddie said to Ted. Eddie didn’t like this aspect of the change inside him; together with authority, with finding his own voice, he’d also developed a taste for a kind of cruelty he’d been incapable of before.
“I am morally superior to you, Eddie—I know that much,” the nanny told him.
“ Morally superior,” Ted repeated. “Now there’s a concept! Don’t you ever feel ‘ morally superior,’ Eddie?”
“To you I do,” the boy said.
“You see, Alice?” Ted asked. “Everyone feels ‘ morally superior’ to someone !” Eddie hadn’t realized that Ted was already drunk.
Alice went off weeping. Eddie and Ted watched her drive away.
“There goes my ride to the ferry,” Eddie pointed out.
“I still want you out of here tomorrow,” Ted told him.
“Fine,” Eddie said. “But I can’t walk to Orient Point. And you can’t drive me.?
?
“You’re a smart boy—you’ll think of someone to give you a ride,” Ted said.
“You’re the one who’s good at getting rides,” Eddie replied.
They could have gone on being petty all night—and it wasn’t even dark outside. It was much too early for Ruth to have fallen asleep. Ted worried aloud that he should wake her up and try to convince her to eat something for supper. But when he tiptoed into Ruth’s room, the child was at work at her easel; she’d either woken up or she’d fooled Alice into thinking that she was asleep.
For a four-year-old’s, Ruth’s drawings were markedly advanced. Whether this was a sign of her talent or the more modest effect of her father having shown her how to draw certain things—faces, primarily—it was too soon to know. She decidedly knew how to draw a face; in fact, faces were all that Ruth ever drew. (As an adult, she wouldn’t draw at all.)
Now the child was drawing unfamiliar things: they were stick figures of the clumsy, unformed kind that more normal four-year-olds ( non-practicing artists) might draw. There were three such figures, not at all well drawn, and they had faceless, oval heads as plain as melons. Over them, or perhaps behind them—the perspective wasn’t clear—loomed several large mounds that looked like mountains. But Ruth was a child of the potato fields and the ocean; where she’d grown up, everything was flat.
“Are those mountains, Ruthie?” Ted asked.
“No!” the child screamed. She wanted Eddie to come look at her drawing, too. Ted called for him.
“Are those mountains?” Eddie asked, when he saw the drawing.
“No! No! No!” Ruth cried.
“Ruthie, honey, don’t cry.” Ted pointed to the faceless stick figures. “Who are these people, Ruthie?”
“Died persons,” Ruth told him.
“Do you mean dead people, Ruthie?”
“Yes, died persons,” the child repeated.
“I see—they’re skeletons,” her father said.
“Where are their faces?” Eddie asked the four-year-old.
“Died persons don’t have faces,” Ruth said.