Actually, there had been no town ordinance restricting Ted from raising the roof; he had saved a considerable sum of money, however, and the eccentricity of a squash court of his own specifications had pleased him. Among the local squash players, Ted was considered unbeatable in his odd barn, which was ferociously hot (and poorly ventilated) in the summer months; in the winter, because the barn was unheated, the court was often unbearably cold--the ball would have little more bounce than a stone.
In their one match, Ted warned Eddie of the oddities of the court, but Eddie had played the game only once before; to him, the court in the barn presented the same difficulties as any other squash court. Ted had him running from corner to corner. Ted himself would take a position in the center T of the court; he never needed to stray more than a half-step in any direction. Eddie, sweating and breathless, couldn't score a point, but Ted wasn't even flushed.
"Eddie, you look like a boy who will sleep well tonight," Ted told him after they'd finished five games. "Maybe you need to catch up on your sleep, anyway." Ted gave the sixteen-year-old a pat on the butt with the head of his racquet. He might or might not have been "snide," Eddie reported to Marion, who no longer knew what to make of her husband's behavior.
A more pressing problem for Marion was Ruth. In the summer of '58, the four-year-old's sleeping habits bordered on the bizarre. Often she would sleep through the night, and so soundly that she could be found in the morning in the exact same position in which she had fallen asleep--and still perfectly tucked in. But other nights she would toss and turn. She would lie sideways in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed until her feet would get stuck in the guard rails; then she would wake up crying for help. Worse, at times her trapped feet would become an integral part of an ongoing nightmare; Ruth would wake up with the conviction that a monster had attacked her and was holding her in its terrifying grasp. On these occasions the child would not only cry to be rescued from the guard rails; she would also need to be carried into the master bedroom, where she would fall back to sleep, sobbing, in her parents' bed--with either Marion or Ted.
When Ted tried removing the guard rails, Ruth fell out of bed. There was a rug; it wasn't a bad fall. But, disoriented, the child once wandered into the hall. And with or without the guard rails, Ruth had nightmares. In short, for the uninterrupted pleasure of Eddie and Marion's sexual endeavors, Ruth could not be relied upon to sleep through the night. The child might wake up screaming or she might silently appear at her mother's bedside, which made it risky for Eddie and Marion to make love in the master bedroom--or for Eddie, drifting heavenward in Marion's arms, to fall asleep there. But when they made love in Eddie's room, which was a considerable distance from Ruth's bedroom, Marion worried that she would not hear Ruth calling to her or crying, or that the child would wander into the master bedroom and be frightened that her mother wasn't there.
Thus, when they were in bed in Eddie's room, they would take turns running out in the hall to listen for Ruth. And when they lay in Marion's bed, the patter of the child's feet on the floor of the bathroom would send Eddie diving out of bed. He once lay naked on the floor on the far side of the bed for half an hour, until Ruth finally fell asleep next to her mother. Then Eddie crept out on all fours. Just before he opened the door to the hall and tiptoed away to his own room, Marion whispered, "Good night, Eddie." Apparently Ruth was only half asleep, for the child (in a sleepy voice) quickly echoed her mother: "Good night, Eddie."
After that, it was inevitable that one night neither Eddie nor Marion would hear the approaching patter of little feet. Therefore, on the night when Ruth appeared with a towel in her mother's bedroom-- because the child was convinced that her mother (from the sound of her) was throwing up--Marion was unsurprised. And since she'd been mounted from behind, and her breasts were held in Eddie's hands, there was little that Marion could do about the matter; she did manage to stop moaning.
Eddie, however, reacted to Ruth's sudden appearance in an astonishingly acrobatic but inept fashion. His withdrawal from Marion was so abrupt that Marion felt both empty and abandoned, but with her hips still moving. Eddie, who flew but a short distance in reverse, was suspended only momentarily in midair; his failure to clear the bedside lamp brought both the boy and the destroyed lamp crashing to the carpet, where the sixteen-year-old's spontaneous but doomed effort to hide his private parts with an open-ended lamp shade provided Marion with at least an instant of passing comedy.
Her daughter's screams notwithstanding, Marion understood that this would be an episode of longer-lasting trauma for Eddie than it would be for Ruth. This conviction was what prompted Marion to say to her daughter, with seeming nonchalance, "Don't scream, honey. It's just Eddie and me. Go back to bed."
To Eddie's surprise, the child dutifully did as she was told. When Eddie was once again in bed beside Marion, Marion whispered, as if to herself, "Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Now we can stop worrying about that ." But then she rolled onto her side, with her back to Eddie, and although her shoulders shook slightly, she was not crying--or she was crying only inwardly. However, Marion would not respond to Eddie's touch or his endearments; he knew well enough to leave her alone.
The episode prompted the first clarifying response from Ted. With unflinching hypocrisy, Ted chose the moment when Eddie was driving him to Southampton for a visit with Mrs. Vaughn. "I presume it was Marion's mistake," Ted stated, "but that surely was a mistake for the two of you--to let Ruth see you together." Eddie said nothing.
"I'm not threatening you, Eddie," Ted added, "but I must tell you that you may be called upon to testify."
"Testify?" the sixteen-year-old said.
"In the event of a custody dispute, regarding which of us is more fit as a parent," Ted replied. "I would never let a child see me with another woman, whereas Marion really has made no effort to protect Ruth from seeing . . . what she saw. And if you were called upon to testify to what happened, I trust that you wouldn't lie --not in a court of law." But Eddie still said nothing.
"From the sound of it, it was a rear-entry position--mind you, not that I have a personal problem with that, or with any other position," Ted was quick to say, "but for a child I imagine that doing it doggishly must seem especially . . . animalistic." For only a second did Eddie imagine that Marion had told Ted; then Eddie realized, with a sinking feeling, that Ted had been talking to Ruth.
Marion concluded that Ted must have been asking Ruth all along, from the very beginning: Had the child seen Eddie and her mother together? And if together, how together? Suddenly, everything that Marion had misunderstood was clear.
"So that's why he hired you!" she cried. He'd known that Marion would take Eddie as a lover, and that Eddie could never have resisted her. But that Ted thought he knew Marion that well was contradicted by the fact that Ted didn't know her well enough to understand that she would never have battled him for custody of Ruth. Marion had always known that the child was lost to her. She had never wanted Ruth.
Now Marion was insulted that Ted didn't think well enough of her to realize that she would never claim--not even in passing conversation, not to mention in a court of law--that Ruth would be better off with her mother than with her deceitful, feckless father. Even Ted would do a better job with the child than Marion could do, or so Marion thought.
"I'm going to tell you what we're going to do, Eddie," Marion told the boy. "Don't worry. Ted's not going to make you testify to anything-- there isn't going to be any court of law. I know a lot more about Ted than he knows about me."
For a seemingly endless three days, they couldn't make love because Marion had an infection--sex was painful for her. She nevertheless lay beside Eddie and held his face against her breasts while he masturbated to his heart's content. Marion teased Eddie by asking him if he didn't like masturbating next to her nearly as much (if not more) than making love to her. When Eddie denied this, Marion teased him further; she sincerely doubted that the women in his future would be as understanding of his p
reference as she was. She found it rather sweet, she told him.
But Eddie protested: he couldn't imagine that he would ever be interested in other women. "Other women will be interested in you," Marion told the boy. "They may not be secure enough about themselves to let you masturbate, instead of demanding that you make love to them. I'm just warning you, as a friend. Girls your own age are going to find it neglectful of you."
"I will never be interested in girls my own age," said Eddie O'Hare, with the kind of misery in his voice that Marion had grown fond of. And although Marion teased Eddie about this, too, it would turn out to be true. He never would be interested in a woman his own age. (This was not necessarily a disservice that Marion had done him.)
"You just have to trust me, Eddie," she told him. "You mustn't be afraid of Ted. I know exactly what we're going to do."
"Okay," Eddie said. He lay with his face pressed against her breasts, knowing that his time with her was coming to an end--for how could it not end? In less than a month he would be back at Exeter; not even a sixteen-year-old could imagine maintaining a thirty-nine-year-old mistress under boarding-school rules.
"Ted thinks that you're his pawn, Eddie," Marion told the boy. "But you're my pawn, not Ted's."
"Okay," Eddie said, but Eddie O'Hare did not yet realize the extent to which he truly was a pawn in the culminating discord of a twenty-two-year marital war.
Ruth's Right Eye
For a pawn, Eddie asked a lot of questions. When Marion had recovered sufficiently from her infection so that they could make love again, Eddie asked her about what sort of "infection" she'd had.
"It was a bladder infection," she told him. She was still more of a natural mother than she knew--she spared him the potentially upsetting news that the infection had been the result of his repeated sexual attentions.
They had just finished making love in the position that Marion favored. She liked sitting on Eddie--"riding" him, Marion called it-- because she enjoyed seeing his face. It was not only that Eddie's expressions haunted her pleasantly because of their ceaseless associations with Thomas and Timothy. It was also that Marion had begun the process of saying good-bye to the boy, who had affected her more intimately than she'd ever thought he would.
She knew, of course, how strongly she had affected him--this worried her. But in looking at him, and in making love to him--especially in looking at him while making love to him--Marion imagined that she could see her sexual life, which had been so ardently (albeit briefly) rekindled, coming to an end.
She had not told Eddie that, before him, she'd never had sex with anyone except Ted. Nor had she told Eddie that she'd had sex with Ted only once since her sons had died, and that one time--entirely at Ted's initiation--had been strictly for the purpose of getting her pregnant. (She had not wanted to get pregnant, but she'd been too despondent to resist.) And since Ruth had been born, Marion had not been tempted to have sex at all. With Eddie, what had begun on Marion's part as a kindness toward a shy boy--in whom she saw so much of her sons--had blossomed into a relationship that had been deeply rewarding to her. But if Marion had been surprised by the excitement and gratification Eddie had provided, her enjoyment of the boy had nevertheless not persuaded her to alter her plans.
She was leaving more than Ted and Ruth. In saying good-bye to Eddie O'Hare, she was also saying good-bye to a sexual life of any kind. Here she was, saying good-bye to sex, when, for the first time, at thirty-nine, she was finding sex pleasurable!
If Marion and Eddie were the same height in the summer of '58, Marion was aware that she outweighed him; Eddie was excruciatingly thin. In the top position, bearing down on the boy, Marion felt that all her weight and strength were concentrated in her hips; with Eddie pinned beneath her, Marion sometimes felt that it was she who was penetrating him . Indeed, the motion of her hips was the only motion between them--Eddie wasn't strong enough to lift her weight off him. There was an instant when Marion not only felt as if she'd entered the boy's body; she was fairly certain she had paralyzed him.
When she could tell by how he held his breath that he was about to come, she would drop her weight on his chest and, holding tight to his shoulders, roll him on top of her, because she couldn't stand to see the look that transformed his face when he came. There was something too close to the anticipation of pain in it. Marion could hardly bear to hear him whimper--and he whimpered every time. It was the sound of a child crying out in a half-sleep before falling sound asleep again. Only this repeated split second, in her entire relationship with Eddie, ever caused Marion a half-moment of doubt. When the boy made this infantile sound, it made Marion feel guilty.
Afterward, Eddie lay on his side with his face against her breasts; Marion ran her fingers through the boy's hair. Even then, Marion could not stop herself from making a critical observation of Eddie's haircut--she made a mental note to tell the barber to take a little less off the back next time. Then she revised her mental note. The summer was running out; there would be no "next time."
That was when Eddie asked his second question of the night. "Tell me about the accident," he said. "I mean, do you know how it happened? Was it anybody's fault?"
A second before, pulsing against his temple, he had felt her heart beating through her breast. But now it seemed to Eddie that Marion's heart had stopped. When he lifted his head to look at her face, she was already turning her back to him. This time there wasn't even the slightest shaking of her shoulders; her spine was straight, her back rigid, her shoulders square. He came around the bed and knelt beside her and looked into her eyes, which were open but distant; her lips, which, when she slept, were full and parted, were thin and closed.
"I'm sorry," Eddie whispered. "I'll never ask you again." But Marion remained as she was--her face a mask, her body a stone.
"Mommy!" Ruth called, but Marion didn't hear her--she didn't even blink. Eddie froze, waiting for the patter of the four-year-old's feet across the bathroom floor. But the child was staying in her bed. "Mommy?" she cried, more tentatively now. There was a hint of worry in her voice. Eddie, naked, tiptoed to the bathroom. He wrapped a bath towel around his waist--a better choice than a lamp shade. Then, as quietly as possible, Eddie began to retreat in the direction of the hall.
"Eddie?" the child asked. Her voice was a whisper.
"Yes," Eddie answered, resigned. He tightened the towel around himself and padded barefoot through the bathroom to the child's room. Eddie thought that the sight of Marion would have frightened Ruth more than the child was already frightened--that is, if the four-year-old had seen her mother in Marion's newly acquired, seemingly catatonic state.
Ruth was sitting up in bed, not moving, when Eddie walked into her room. "Where's Mommy?" the child asked him.
"She's asleep," Eddie lied.
"Oh," the girl said. With a look, she indicated the towel knotted around Eddie's waist. "Did you take a bath?"
"Yes," he lied again.
"Oh," Ruth said. "But what did I dream about?"
"What did you dream about?" Eddie repeated stupidly. "Uh, I don't know. I didn't have your dream. What did you dream about?"
"Tell me!" the child demanded.
"But it's your dream," Eddie pointed out.
"Oh," the four-year-old said.
"Would you like a drink of water?" Eddie asked.
"Okay," Ruth replied. She waited while he ran the water until it was cold and brought it to her in a cup. When she handed the cup back to him, she asked: "Where are the feet?"
"In the photograph, where they always are," Eddie told her.
"But what happened to them?" Ruth asked.
"Nothing happened to them," Eddie assured her. "Do you want to see them?"
"Yes," the girl replied. She held out her arms, expecting to be carried, and he lifted her out of bed.
Together they navigated the unlit hall; both of them were aware of the infinite variety of expressions on the faces of the dead boys, whose photographs were mercifully in semi
darkness. At the far end of the hall, the light from Eddie's room shone as brightly as a beacon. Eddie carried Ruth into the bathroom, where, without speaking, they looked at the picture of Marion in the Hotel du Quai Voltaire.
Then Ruth said, "It was early in the morning. Mommy was just waking up. Thomas and Timothy had crawled under the covers. Daddy took the picture--in France."
"In Paris, yes," Eddie said. (Marion had told him that the hotel was located on the Seine. It had been Marion's first time in Paris--the boys' only time.)
Ruth pointed to the bigger of the bare feet. "Thomas," she said. Then she pointed to the smaller of the feet; she waited for Eddie to speak.
"Timothy," Eddie guessed.
"Right," the four-year-old said. "But what did you did to the feet?"
Me? Nothing," Eddie lied.
"It looked like paper, little pieces of paper," Ruth told him. Her eyes searched the bathroom; she made Eddie put her down so that she could peer into the wastebasket. But the maid had come to clean the room many times since Eddie had removed the scraps of notepaper. Finally Ruth held out her arms to Eddie; once more he picked her up.
"I hope it doesn't happen again," the four-year-old said.
"Maybe it never happened; maybe it was a dream," Eddie told her.
"No," the child replied.
"I guess it's a mystery," Eddie said.
"No," Ruth told him. "It was paper. Two pieces." She kept scowling at the photograph, daring it to change. Years later, Eddie O'Hare would be unsurprised that, as a novelist, Ruth Cole was a realist.
At last he asked the girl: "Don't you want to go back to bed?"
"Yes," Ruth replied, "but bring the picture."
They went down the dark hall, which seemed darker now--the feeble night-light from the master bathroom cast only the dimmest glow through the open door of Ruth's room. Eddie carried the child against his chest. He found her heavy to carry with one arm; in his other hand, he carried the photograph.