In the taxi riding back to Stockholm, Hannah had asked Ruth: “Wasn’t Hamlet’s father a Swede? And his bitch of a mother, too— and the bad uncle, I suppose. Not to mention the dumb girl who drowns herself. Weren’t they all Swedes?”
“No, they were Danes,” Ruth replied. She took a grim satisfaction from the fact that she was still bleeding, if only a little.
“Swedes, Danes—same difference,” Hannah said. “They’re all assholes.”
Later Hannah had announced: “I’m sorry your sex was just ‘okay’— mine was terrific. He had the biggest schlong I’ve ever seen, so far,” she added.
“Why is bigger better?” Ruth had asked. “I didn’t look at Per’s,” she’d admitted. “Was I supposed to?”
“Poor baby. Don’t worry,” Hannah had told her. “Remember to look at it the next time. Anyway, it’s how it feels that matters.”
“It felt okay, I guess,” Ruth had said. “It just wasn’t what I expected.”
“Did you expect worse or better?” Hannah had asked her.
“I think I expected worse and better,” Ruth had replied.
“That’ll happen,” Hannah had told her. “You can count on it: you’ll definitely have worse and better.”
At least Hannah had been right about that. At last Ruth fell back to sleep.
Ted at Seventy-Seven
He didn’t look a day over fifty -seven, of course. It was not merely a matter of the squash keeping him fit, although it troubled Ruth that her father’s trim, compact body, which was the prototype of her own body, had established itself in her mind’s eye as the model of the male form. Ted had kept himself small. (In addition to Allan Albright’s habit of eating off other people’s plates, there was the problem of Allan’s size: he was much taller and a little heavier than the men Ruth generally preferred.)
But Ruth’s theory, in regard to how her father had failed to age, was separate from her father’s physical fitness or his size. Ted’s forehead was unlined; there were no pouches under his eyes. Ruth’s crow’s-feet were almost as pronounced as his. The skin of her father’s face was so smooth and clean that it might have been the face of a boy who’d only begun to shave, or who needed to shave only twice a week.
Since Marion had left him, and—retching squid ink into a toilet— he’d sworn off hard liquor (he drank only beer and wine), Ted slept as soundly as a child. And however much he’d suffered from the loss of his sons—and, later, from losing their photographs—he appeared to have put his suffering to rest. Maybe the man’s most infuriating gift was how soundly, and for how long, he could sleep !
In Ruth’s view, her father was a man without a conscience or the usual anxieties; he felt no stress. As Marion had observed, Ted did almost nothing; as an author and illustrator of children’s books, he had already succeeded (as long ago as 1942) in excess of his small ambitions. He hadn’t written anything in years, but he didn’t have to; Ruth wondered if he had ever really wanted to.
The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, The Door in the Floor, A Sound Like So
meone Trying Not to Make a Sound . . . there wasn’t a bookstore anywhere in the world (with a decent children’s section) that didn’t carry Ted Cole’s backlist. There were videocassettes, too; Ted had provided the drawings for the animation. About all Ted did now was draw.
And if his celebrity status had dimmed in the Hamptons, Ted was in demand elsewhere. Every summer he seduced at least one mother at a fair-weather writers’ conference in California, and another at a conference in Colorado, and another in Vermont. He was also popular on college campuses—especially at state universities in out-of-the-way states. With occasional exceptions, today’s college students were too young to be seduced by even as ageless a man as Ted was, but the neglected loneliness among faculty wives whose children had grown up and left home was unabated; those women were still younger women to Ted.
Between the writers’ conferences and the college campuses, it was surprising that, in thirty-two years, Ted Cole had never crossed paths with Eddie O’Hare, but Eddie had taken pains to avoid such an encounter. For him, it was merely a matter of inquiring who comprised the guest faculty and the visiting lecturers; whenever Eddie had heard Ted’s name, he’d declined the invitation.
And, if her crow’s-feet were any indication, Ruth despaired that she was showing her age more than her father showed his. Worse, she was deeply concerned that her father’s low opinion of marriage might have made a lasting impression on her.
On the occasion of her thirtieth birthday, which she’d celebrated with her father and Hannah in New York, Ruth had made an uncharacteristically lighthearted remark on the subject of her few and fast-failing relationships with men.
“Well, Daddy,” she’d said to him, “you probably thought I’d be married by now, and that you could stop worrying about me.”
“No, Ruthie,” he’d told her. “It’s when you are married that I’ll start worrying about you.”
“Yeah, why get married?” Hannah had said. “You can have all the guys you want.”
“All men are basically unfaithful, Ruthie,” her father had said. He’d already told her that—even before she went to Exeter, when she’d been fifteen!—but he found a way to repeat it, at least semiannually.
“However, if I want a child . . .” Ruth had said. She knew Hannah’s opinion of having a child; Hannah didn’t want one. And Ruth was well aware of her father’s point of view: that to have a child was to live in constant fear that something would happen to your child—not to mention the evidence that Ruth’s mother had (in her father’s words) “failed the mother test.”
“ Do you want to have a child, Ruthie?” her father had asked her.
“I don’t know,” Ruth had admitted.
“There’s a lot of time to stay single, then,” Hannah had told her.