“Well enough to judge me, you mean? Oh, certainly!” Ted agreed. His drink was already more than half gone. He kept sucking on the ice cubes and spitting them back in the glass; then he’d drink a little more. “But she’s leaving you, too, isn’t she, Eddie?” Ted asked the sixteen-year-old. “You don’t expect her to ring you up for a rendezvous, do you?”
“No—I don’t expect to hear from her,” Eddie admitted.
“Well . . . me neither,” Ted said. He spat a few more ice cubes into his glass. “Jesus, this drink tastes terrible,” he said.
“Do you have any drawings of Marion?” Eddie suddenly asked him. “Didn’t you ever draw her ?”
“It was long, long ago,” Ted began. “Do you want to see?” Even in the half-dark—the only light in the yard was coming from the kitchen windows—Eddie could sense Ted’s reluctance.
“Sure,” Eddie said. He followed Ted into the house. Ted flicked on the light in the front hall, and then they were standing together in Ted’s workroom, the overhead fluorescent lamps unnaturally bright after the dark yard.
In all, there were fewer than a dozen drawings of Marion. At first Eddie thought it was the fault of the light that the drawings looked unnatural.
“These are the only ones I kept,” Ted said defensively. “Marion never liked to pose.” It was apparent to Eddie that Marion hadn’t wanted to undress, either—there were no nudes. (None that Ted had kept, anyway.) In the drawings where Marion was seated with Thomas and Timothy, she must have been very young—because the boys were very young—but Marion’s beauty was without age to Eddie. Beyond her prettiness, all that Ted had truly caught of Marion was her aloofness. Especially when she was seated alone, she seemed remote, even cold.
Then Eddie realized what was different about the drawings of Marion from Ted’s other drawings, most notably the drawings of Mrs. Vaughn. There was nothing of Ted’s restless lust in them. As old as the drawings of Marion were, Ted had already lost his desire for her. That was why Marion didn’t look like Marion—at least not to Eddie, whose desire for Marion was limitless.
“Do you want one? You can have one,” Ted said.
Eddie didn’t want one; none of them was the Marion he knew. “I think Ruth should have them,” Eddie answered.
“Good idea. You’re full of good ideas, Eddie.”
They both noticed the color of Ted’s drink. The contents of the near-empty glass were as sepia-like as the water in Mrs. Vaughn’s fountain. In the dark kitchen, Ted had used the wrong ice tray; he’d made a whiskey and water with cubes of frozen squid ink, which had half-melted in his glass. Ted’s lips and tongue, and even his teeth, were brownish-black.
Marion would have appreciated it: Ted on his knees before the toilet in the front-hall washroom. The sound of his vomiting reached Eddie in Ted’s workroom, where the sixteen-year-old still stared at the drawings. “Jesus . . .” Ted was saying, between heaves. “This is it for me and the hard stuff—from now on, I’m sticking to wine and beer.” He made no mention of the squid ink, which Eddie thought was odd; it was the ink, not the whiskey, that had made him sick.
And it hardly mattered to Eddie that Ted would keep this promise. However, ridding himself of hard liquor was either consciously or unconsciously in keeping with Marion’s caveat that he watch his drinking. Ted Cole would not suffer a drunk-driving conviction again. If his driving wasn’t always alcohol-free, he at least never drank and drove when he was with Ruth.
Sadly, any moderation in Ted’s drinking served only to exacerbate his womanizing; the long-term effects of Ted’s womanizing would prove more hazardous to him than his drinking.
At the time, it seemed a fitting ending to what had been a long and trying day: Ted Cole on his knees, puking into a toilet. Eddie bid Ted a superior-sounding good night. Of course Ted could not respond, because of the violence of his barfing.
Eddie also checked on Ruth, never intending that his brief glimpse of the four-year-old, who was sleeping peacefully, would be his last for more than thirty years. He couldn’t have known that he would be leaving before Ruth was awake.
In the morning, Eddie assumed, he would give Ruth his parents’ present and kiss her good-bye. But Eddie assumed too many things. His experience with Marion notwithstanding, he was still a sixteen-year-old who had underestimated the emotional rawness of the moment—after all, he hadn’t known such moments. And, standing in the four-year-old’s room watching her sleep, Eddie found it easy to speculate that everything would be all right.
There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.
The Leg
This happened on the penultimate Saturday in August, in the summer of 1958. At about three in the morning, the wind shifted from the southwest to the northeast. Eddie O’Hare, in the half-dark of his bedroom, could no longer hear the surf; only a southerly wind could carry the sound of the sea as far inland as Parsonage Lane. And Eddie knew it was a northeast wind because he was cold. While it seemed fitting that his last night on Long Island should feel like the fall, Eddie could not wake up enough to
get out of bed and close his bedroom windows. Instead, he pulled the scant covers more closely around him; he drew his body into a ball, and, breathing into his cold, cupped hands, he tried to fall more deeply asleep.
Seconds, maybe minutes later, he dreamed that Marion was still sleeping beside him, but that she’d got out of bed to close the windows. He extended his arm, expecting to find the warm spot that Marion would surely have left, but the bed was cold. Then, having heard the windows being closed, Eddie heard the curtains closing, too. Eddie never closed the curtains; he’d persuaded Marion to leave them open. He had loved seeing Marion asleep in the predawn glow.
Even in the dead of night, and three in the morning is about as dead as the night ever gets, there was some faint light in Eddie’s bedroom; at least the clumped-together outlines of the furniture were visible in the half-dark. The shape of the gooseneck lamp on the bedside table cast a dull shadow of itself on the headboard of the bed. And the bedroom door, which was always left ajar—so that Marion could hear Ruth calling for her, if Ruth called—was edged with a dark-gray light. This was whatever light was able to penetrate the long hall, even if it was only the distant light from the feeble night-light in the master bathroom— even that light found its dim way to Eddie’s room, because the door to Ruth’s room was always open, too.
But on this night someone had closed the windows and the curtains, and when Eddie opened his eyes to an unnatural and total darkness, someone had closed his bedroom door. When Eddie held his breath, he could hear someone breathing.
Many sixteen-year-olds see only the persistence of darkness. Everywhere they look, they see gloom. Blessed by more hopeful expectations, Eddie O’Hare tended to look for the persistence of light. In the total darkness of his bedroom, Eddie’s first thought was that Marion had come back to him.
“Marion?” the boy whispered.
“Jesus . . . aren’t you the optimist?” Ted Cole said. “I thought you’d never wake up.” His voice came from everywhere, or from nowhere in particular, in the surrounding blackness. Eddie sat up in bed and groped for the bedside lamp, but he was unaccustomed to being unable to see it—he couldn’t find it. “Forget the light, Eddie,” Ted told him. “This story is better in the dark.”
“ What story?” Eddie asked.