“I’m cold, Daddy,” Graham said. “Daddy’s really cold,” the child added.
“We’re all really cold, Graham,” Ruth replied.
“Daddy’s colder,” Graham said.
“Allan?” Ruth started to say. She knew. She reached cautiously around Graham, who was cuddled against her, and touched Allan’s cold face without looking at him. She slipped her hand under the covers, where her own body and Graham’s were warm, but even under the covers Allan was cold to her touch—as cold as the bathroom floor in Vermont on a winter morning.
“Sweetie,” Ruth said to Graham, “let’s go in the other room. We’ll let Daddy sleep a little more.”
“I want to sleep a little more, too,” Graham told her.
“Let’s go in the other room,” Ruth repeated. “Maybe you can sleep with Conchita.”
They traipsed through the living room of the suite, Graham dragging his blanket and his teddy bear, Ruth in her T-shirt and panties; not even marriage had altered what she wore to bed. She knocked on the door of Conchita’s bedroom, waking the old woman.
“I’m sorry, Conchita, but Graham would like to sleep with you,” Ruth told her.
“Sure, honey—you just come on in,” Conchita said to Graham, who marched past her to her bed.
“It’s not as cold in here,” the child observed. “It’s so cold in our room—Daddy is freezing.”
“Allan is dead,” Ruth whispered to Conchita.
Then, alone in the living room of the suite, she worked up the nerve to go back into her bedroom. She closed the bedroom window before she went into the bathroom, where she hastily washed her hands and face, and brushed her teeth, ignoring her hair. She then stumbled into her clothes without once looking at Allan or touching him again. Ruth didn’t want to see his face. For the rest of her life, she would prefer to imagine him as he’d looked when he was alive; it was bad enough that she would take to her grave the memory of his unnatural coldness.
It was not yet six in the morning when she called Hannah.
“You better be a friend of mine,” Hannah said when she answered the phone.
“Who the fuck is it?” Ruth heard the ex-goalie ask.
“It’s me. Allan’s dead. I don’t know what to do,” Ruth told Hannah.
“Oh, baby, baby—I’ll be right there!” Hannah said.
“Who the fuck is it?” the former hockey star asked again.
“Oh, go find yourself another puck !” Ruth heard Hannah tell him. “It’s none of your fucking business who it is . . . .”
By the time Hannah arrived at the Stanhope, Ruth had already called Eddie at the New York Athletic Club. Between them, Eddie and Hannah made all the arrangements. Ruth didn’t have to talk to Graham, who’d fortunately fallen back to sleep in Conchita’s bed; the child didn’t wake up until after eight, by which time Allan’s body had already been removed from the hotel. Hannah, who took the boy to breakfast, was amazingly resourceful in answering Graham’s questions about where his father was. It was too soon for Allan to be in heaven, Ruth had decided; she meant it was too soon to have the heaven conversation, which there would be so many of later. Hannah stuck to more practical untruths: “Your daddy went to the office, Graham”; and, “Your daddy might have to take a trip.”
“A trip where?” Graham asked.
Conchita Gomez was a wreck. Ruth was just numb. Eddie volunteered to drive them all back to Sagaponack, but Ted Cole had not taught his daughter to drive for nothing. Ruth knew that she could drive in or out of Manhattan whenever she had to. It was enough that Eddie and Hannah had spared her having to deal with Allan’s body .
“I can drive,” Ruth told them. “Whatever happens, I can drive.” But she couldn’t bear to search through Allan’s clothes for the car keys. Eddie found the keys. Hannah packed Allan’s clothes.
In the car, Hannah sat in back with Graham and Conchita. Hannah was in charge of conversing with Graham—that was her role. Eddie sat in the passenger seat. It was unclear to everyone, Eddie included, what his role was, but he occupied himself by staring at Ruth’s profile; Ruth never took her eyes off the road, except to look in the side-view or rearview mirror.
Poor Allan—it must have been cardiac arrest, Eddie was thinking. It was; he got that right. But what Eddie got wrong was more interesting. What he got wrong was that he imagined he’d fallen in love with Ruth, just by staring at her sorrowful profile; what he didn’t realize was how much, at that moment, she had forcefully reminded him of her unhappy mother.
Poor Eddie O’Hare! What had befallen him was most unkind: the bewildering illusion that he was now in love with the daughter of the only woman he’d ever loved! But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.
“Where is Daddy now ?” Graham began. “Is he still at the office?”
“I think he has a doctor’s appointment,” Hannah told the child. “I think he went to see the doctor because he wasn’t feeling very well.”
“Is he still cold?” the boy asked.