Ruth and Allan watched Hannah cut in front of the line waiting for taxis. When they were sitting in Allan’s car, Allan finally kissed her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Strangely, yes,” Ruth replied.
Oddly enough, there was an absence of feeling for her father; what she felt was no feeling for him. Her mind had been dwelling on missing persons, not expecting to count him among them.
“About your mother . . .” Allan patiently began. He’d allowed Ruth to collect her thoughts for almost an hour; they had been driving for that long in silence. He really is the man for me, Ruth thought.
It had been late morning by the time Allan learned that Ruth’s father was dead. He could have called Ruth in Amsterdam, where it would have been late afternoon; Ruth would then have had the night alone, and the plane ride home, to think about it. Instead Allan had counted on Ruth not seeing the Times before she landed in New York the following day. As for the prospect of the news reaching her in Amsterdam, Allan had hoped that Ted Cole wasn’t that famous.
“Eddie O’Hare gave me a book my mother wrote, a novel,” Ruth explained to Allan. “Of course Eddie knew who’d written the novel—he just didn’t dare tell me. All he said about the book was that it was ‘good airplane reading.’ I’ll say!”
“Remarkable,” Allan said.
“Nothing strikes me as remarkable anymore,” Ruth told him. After a pause, she said: “I want to marry you, Allan.” After another pause, Ruth added: “Nothing is as important as having sex with you.”
“I’m awfully pleased to hear that,” Allan admitted. It was the first time he’d smiled since he saw her in the airport. Ruth needed no effort to smile back at him. But there was still that absence of feeling for her father that she’d felt an hour ago—how strange and unexpected it was! Her sympathy was stronger for Eduardo, who had found her father’s body.
Nothing stood between Ruth and her new life with Allan. There would need to be some sort of memorial service for Ted. It would be nothing very elaborate—nor would many people be inclined to attend, Ruth thought. Between her and her new life with Allan, there was really only the necessity of hearing from Eduardo Gomez exactly what had happened to her father. The prospect of this was what made Ruth realize how much her father had loved her. Was she the only woman who’d made Ted Cole feel remorse?
The Standoff
Eduardo Gomez was a good Catholic. He was not above superstition, but the gardener had always controlled his inclination to believe in fate within the strict confines of his faith. Fortunately for him, he’d never been exposed to Calvinism—for he would have proven himself a ready and willing convert. Thus far, the gardener’s Catholicism had kept the more fanciful of his imaginings—in regard to his own predestination—in check.
There had been that seemingly unending torture when the gardener had hung upside down in Mrs. Vaughn’s privet, waiting to die of carbonmonoxide poisoning. It had crossed Eduardo’s mind that Ted Cole deserved to die this way—but not an innocent gardener. At that helpless moment, Eduardo had seen himself as the victim of another man’s lust, and of another man’s proverbial “woman scorned.”
No one, certainly not the priest in the confessional, would fault Eduardo for having felt that way. The hapless gardener, hung up to die in Mrs. Vaughn’s hedge, had every reason to feel unjustly done-in. Yet, over the years, Eduardo knew that Ted was a fair and generous employer, and the gardener had never forgiven himself for thinking that Ted deserved to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning.
Therefore it wreaked havoc on Eduardo’s superstitious nature—not to mention strengthened his potentially rampant fatalism—that the luckless gardener should have been the one to find Ted Cole dead of carbon-monoxide
poisoning.
It was Eduardo’s wife, Conchita, who first sensed that something was wrong. She’d picked up the mail at the Sagaponack post office on her way to Ted’s house. Because it was her day of the week to change the beds and do the laundry and the general housecleaning, Conchita arrived at Ted’s ahead of Eduardo. She deposited the mail on the kitchen table, where she couldn’t help noticing a full bottle of single-malt Scotch whiskey; the bottle had been opened, but not a drop had been poured. It sat beside a clean, empty glass of Tiffany crystal.
Conchita also noticed Ruth’s postcard in the mail. The picture of the prostitutes in their windows on the Herbertstrasse, the red-light district in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg, disturbed her. It was an inappropriate postcard for a daughter to send her father. Yet it was a pity that the mail from Europe had been slow to arrive, for the message on the postcard might have cheered Ted—had he read it. (THINKING OF YOU, DADDY. I’M SORRY ABOUT WHAT I SAID. IT WAS MEAN. I LOVE YOU! RUTHIE.)
Worried, Conchita nonetheless began cleaning in Ted’s workroom; she was thinking that Ted might still be upstairs asleep, although he was usually an early riser. The bottommost drawer of Ted’s so-called writing desk was open; the drawer was empty. Beside the drawer was a large dark-green trash bag, which Ted had stuffed with the hundreds of black-and-white Polaroids of his nude models; even though the bag was tied closed at the top, the smell of the Polaroid print coater escaped from the bag when Conchita moved it out of the way of her vacuum cleaner. A note taped to the bag said: CONCHITA, PLEASE THROW THIS TRASH AWAY BEFORE RUTH COMES HOME.
This so alarmed Conchita that she stopped vacuuming. She called upstairs from the bottom of the stairwell. “Mr. Cole?” There was no reply. She went upstairs. The door to the master bedroom was open. The bed had not been slept in; it was still neatly made, just as Conchita had left it the morning before. Conchita wandered down the upstairs hall to the room Ruth now used. Ted (or someone) had slept in Ruth’s bed last night, or he had at least stretched out on it for a little while. Ruth’s closet and her chest of drawers were open. (Her father had felt the need to take a last look at her clothes.)
By now, Conchita was worried enough to call Eduardo—even before she came downstairs—and while she was waiting for her husband to arrive, she took the large dark-green trash bag from Ted’s workroom and carried it out to the barn. There was a code panel that opened the garage door to the barn, and Conchita keyed in the proper code. When the garage door opened, Conchita saw that Ted had piled up some blankets along the barn floor, thus sealing the crack under the garage door; she also realized that Ted’s car was running, although Ted wasn’t in the car. The Volvo was chugging away in the barn, which reeked of exhaust fumes. Conchita dropped the trash bag in the open garage doorway. She waited in the driveway for Eduardo.
Eduardo shut off the Volvo before he went looking for Ted. The tank was less than a quarter full—the car had probably run most of the night—and Ted had slightly depressed the accelerator pedal with an old squash racquet. It was one of Ruth’s old racquets, and Ted had pressed the racquet head against the accelerator and wedged the handle under the front seat. This had kept the car idling high enough so that it hadn’t stalled.
The trap door to the squash court on the second floor of the barn was open, and Eduardo climbed the ladder; he was scarcely able to breathe, because the exhaust fumes had risen to the top of the barn. Ted was dead on the floor of the squash court. He was dressed to play. Maybe he’d hit the ball for a while, and run around a little in the court. When he got tired, he lay down on the floor of the court, perfectly positioned on the T, the spot on the court he’d always told Ruth to take possession of—to occupy, as if her life depended on it, because it was the position on the court from which you could best control the play of your opponent.
Later Eduardo regretted that he opened the large dark-green trash bag and examined the contents before he threw the bag in the trash. His memory of the many drawings of Mrs. Vaughn’s private parts had never left him, although he’d seen her private parts in shreds and tatters. The black-and-white photographs were a grim reminder to the gardener of Ted Cole’s fascination with demeaned and demoralized women. Feeling sick to his stomach, Eduardo deposited the photographs in the trash.
Ted had left no suicide note, unless one counts the note on the trash bag—CONCHITA, PLEASE THROW THIS TRASH AWAY BEFORE RUTH COMES HOME. And Ted had anticipated that Eduardo would use the telephone in the kitchen, for there on the notepad, by the kitchen phone, was another message: EDUARDO, CALL RUTH’S PUBLISHER, ALLAN ALBRIGHT. Ted had written down Allan’s number at Random House. Eduardo made the call without hesitation.
But as grateful as Ruth would be to Allan for taking charge, she could not stop searching the Sagaponack house for the note she was hoping that her father had left for her . That there was no note confounded her; her father had always been able to say something self-justifying—he’d been tireless in defending himself.
Even Hannah was hurt that he’d left no word for her, although Hannah would convince herself that a hang-up on her answering machine must have been a call from Ted.
“If only I’d been there when he called!” Hannah would say to Ruth.
“If only . . .” Ruth had said.