A Widow for One Year

  Sadly, she didn't have a car. "I use a bicycle," she told Ted, "or else I'd take you home."

  Too bad, Ted thought, but he rationalized that he didn't really like the discrepancy between the thinness of her lower lip and the exaggerated puffiness of her upper.

  Mendelssohn fretted because his wife was still out shopping. He would keep calling--she would be back soon, Mendelssohn assured Ted. A boy with an indescribable speech impediment--the only other staff in the bookstore on this Friday morning--offered an apology, for he had lent his car to a friend who'd wanted to go to the beach.

  Ted just sat there, slowly signing books. It was only ten. If Marion had known where Ted was, and how close he could be to getting a ride home, she might have panicked. If Eddie O'Hare had known that Ted was autographing books across the street from the frame shop--where Eddie was insisting that the "feet" photograph should be ready for Ruth to take home today--Eddie might have panicked, too.

  But there was no cause for Ted to feel any panic. He didn't know that his wife was leaving him--he still imagined that he was leaving her . And he was safely off the streets; therefore, he was out of immediate harm's way (meaning Mrs. Vaughn). And even if Mendelssohn's wife never came home from shopping, it was only a matter of minutes before someone would come into the bookstore who was a devoted Ted Cole reader. It would probably be a woman, and Ted would actually have to buy one of his own autographed books for her, but she would give him a ride home. And if she was good-looking, and so on, and so forth, who knew what might come of it? Why panic at ten o'clock in the morning? Ted was thinking.

  He had no idea.

  How the Writer's Assistant

  Became a Writer

  Meanwhile, in the nearby frame shop, Eddie O'Hare was finding his voice. At first Eddie was unaware of the powerful change within him; he thought he was merely angry. There was reason to be angry. The saleswoman who waited on Eddie was rude to him. She was not much older than he, but she too brusquely estimated that a sixteen-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl asking about the matting and framing of a single eight-by-ten photograph were not high on the list of those well-heeled Southampton patrons of the arts whom the frame shop sought to serve.

  Eddie asked to speak to the manager, but the saleswoman was rude again; she repeated that the photograph was not ready. "Next time," she told Eddie, "I suggest that you call before you come."

  "Do you want to see my stitches?" Ruth asked the saleswoman. "I got a scab, too."

  The saleswoman--a girl, really--clearly had no children of her own; she pointedly ignored Ruth, which raised Eddie's anger to a higher level.

  "Show her your scar, Ruth," Eddie said to the four-year-old.

  "Look . . ." the salesgirl began.

  "No, you look," Eddie said, still not understanding that he was finding his voice. He'd never spoken to anyone in this manner before; now, suddenly, he was unable to stop. His newfound voice continued. "I'm willing to keep trying with someone who's rude to me, but I won't have anything to do with someone who's rude to a child," Eddie heard himself say. "If there's no manager here, there must be someone else-- whoever it is who does the actual work, for example. I mean, is there a back room where the mats are cut and the pictures are framed? There must be someone here besides you. I'm not leaving without that photograph, and I'm not talking to you."

  Ruth looked at Eddie. "Did you got mad at her?" the four-year-old asked him.

  "Yes, I did," Eddie replied. He felt unsure of who he was, but the salesgirl would never have guessed that Eddie O'Hare was a young man who was often full of doubt. To her, he was confidence itself--he was absolutely terrifying.

  Without a word, she retreated to the very same "back room" that Eddie had so confidently mentioned. Indeed, there were two back rooms in the frame shop--a manager's office and what Ted would have called a workroom. Both the manager, a Southampton socialite and divorcee named Penny Pierce, and the boy who cut the mats and framed (and framed and framed) all day were there.

  The unpleasant salesgirl conveyed the impression that Eddie, despite his appearance to the contrary, was "scary." While Penny Pierce knew who Ted Cole was--and she vividly remembered Marion, because Marion was beautiful--Mrs. Pierce did not know who Eddie O'Hare was. The child, she presumed, was the unlucky little girl Ted and Marion had had to compensate for their dead sons. Mrs. Pierce vividly remembered the sons, too. Who could forget the frame shop's good fortune? There had been hundreds of photographs to mat and frame, and Marion had not chosen inexpensively. It had been an account in the thousands of dollars, Penny Pierce recalled; the shop really should have rematted and reframed the single photograph with the bloodstained mat promptly. We should probably have done it gratis, Mrs. Pierce now considered.

  But just who did this teenager think he was? Who was he to say he wasn't leaving without the photograph?

  "He's scary," the fool salesgirl repeated.

  Penny Pierce's divorce lawyer had taught her one thing: don't let anyone who's angry talk --make them put it in writing. She'd carried this policy with her into the framing business, which her ex-husband had bought for her as a part of the divorce settlement.

  Before Mrs. Pierce confronted Eddie, she instructed the boy in the workroom to stop what he was doing and immediately remat and reframe the photograph of Marion in the Hotel du Quai Voltaire. Penny Pierce had not seen this particular photo in--what was it now?--about five years. Mrs. Pierce remembered Marion bringing in all the snapshots; some of the negatives were scratched. When the boys had been alive, the old pictures of them had been taken for granted and had not been very well cared for. After the boys had died, Penny Pierce assumed, almost every snapshot of them had struck Marion as worthy of enlarging and framing--scratched or not.

  Knowing the story of the accident, Mrs. Pierce had not been able to restrain herself from looking closely at all the photographs. "Oh, it's this one," she said when she saw the picture of Marion in bed with her boys' feet. What had always struck Penny Pierce about this photograph was the evidence of Marion's distinct happiness--in addition to her unmatched beauty. And now Marion's beauty was unchanged while her happiness had fled. This fact about Marion was universally striking to other women. While neither beauty nor happiness had entirely abandoned Penny Pierce, she felt that she'd never known either to the extent that Marion had.

  Mrs. Pierce gathered a dozen or more sheets of stationery from her desk before she approached Eddie. "I understand that you're angry. I'm very sorry about that," she said pleasantly to the handsome sixteen-year-old, who looked to her incapable of frightening anyone. (I have got to get better help, Penny Pierce was thinking to herself as she went on, visually underestimating Eddie. The closer she looked at him, the more she thought he was too pretty to qualify as handsome.) "When my customers are angry, I ask them to voice their complaints in writing--if you don't mind," Mrs. Pierce added, again pleasantly. The sixteen-year-old saw that the manager had presented him with paper and a pen.

  "I work for Mr. Cole. I'm a writer's assistant," Eddie said.

  "Then you won't mind writing, will you?" Penny Pierce replied.

  Eddie picked up the pen. The manager smiled at him encouragingly--she was neither beautiful nor brimming with happiness, but she was nevertheless not un attractive and she was good-natured. No, he wouldn't mind writing, Eddie realized. It was exactly the invitation that Eddie needed; it was what his voice, long trapped inside him, wanted. He wanted to write. After all, that was why he had sought the job. What he'd got, instead of writing, was Marion. Now that he was losing her, he was finding what he'd wanted before the summer started.

  And it wasn't Ted who'd taught him anything. What Eddie O'Hare had learned from Ted Cole, he'd learned from reading him. It was from just a few sentences that any writer learned anything from another writer. From The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, Eddie had learned something from only two sentences. The first one was this: "Tom woke up, but Tim did not." And then there was this sentence: "It was a sound lik
e, in the closet, if one of Mommy's dresses came alive and it tried to climb down off the hanger."

  If, because of that sentence, Ruth Cole would think differently of closets and dresses for the rest of her life, Eddie O'Hare could hear the sound of that dress coming alive and climbing down off that hanger as clearly as any sound he'd ever heard; he could see the movement of that slithery dress in the half-dark of that closet in his sleep.

  And from The Door in the Floor there was another first sentence that wasn't half bad: "There was a little boy who didn't know if he wanted to be born." After the summer of '58, Eddie O'Hare would finally understand how that little boy felt. There was this sentence, too: "His mommy didn't know if she wanted him to be born, either." It was only after he'd met Marion that Eddie understood how that mommy felt.

  That Friday in the frame shop in Southampton, Eddie O'Hare had a life-changing realization: if the writer's assistant had become a writer, it was Marion who'd given him his voice. If when he'd been in her arms--in her bed, inside her--he'd felt, for the first time, that he was almost a man, it was losing her that had given him something to say . It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O'Hare with the authority to write.

  "Do you have a picture of Marion Cole in your mind?" Eddie wrote. "I mean, in your mind's eye, can you see exactly what she looks like?" Eddie showed his first two sentences to Penny Pierce.

  "Yes, of course--she's very beautiful," the manager said.

  Eddie nodded. Then he kept on writing, as follows: "Okay. Although I am Mr. Cole's assistant, I have been sleeping with Mrs. Cole this summer. I would estimate that Marion and I have made love about sixty times."

  "Sixty? " Mrs. Pierce said aloud. She'd come around the countertop so that she could read what he wrote over his shoulder.

  Eddie wrote: "We've been doing it for six, almost seven weeks, and we usually do it twice a day--often more than twice a day. But there was the time she had an infection, and we couldn't do it. And when you take into consideration her period . . ."

  "I see--about sixty times, then," Penny Pierce said. "Go on."

  "Okay," Eddie wrote. "While Marion and I have been lovers, Mr . Cole--his name is Ted--has had a mistress. She was his model, actually. Do you know Mrs. Vaughn?"

  "The Vaughns on Gin Lane? They have quite a . . . collection," the frame-shop manager said. (Now there was a framing job she would have liked!)

  "Yes--that Mrs. Vaughn," Eddie wrote. "She has a son, a little boy."

  "Yes, yes--I know!" said Mrs. Pierce. "Please go on."

  "Okay," Eddie wrote. "This morning Ted--that is, Mr. Cole--has broken up with Mrs. Vaughn. I don't imagine that there could have been a very happy resolution to their affair. Mrs. Vaughn seemed pretty upset about it. And, meanwhile, Marion is packing up--she's leaving. Ted doesn't know she's leaving, but she is. And Ruth--this is Ruth, she's four."

  "Yes, yes!" Penny Pierce interjected.

  "Ruth doesn't know her mother is leaving, either," Eddie wrote. "Both Ruth and her father are going to go back home to the house in Sagaponack and realize that Marion is gone. And all the photographs, those pictures that you framed--every one of them, except the one you have here, in the shop."

  "Yes, yes--my God, what ?" Penny Pierce said. Ruth scowled at her. Mrs. Pierce tried her best to smile at the child.

  Eddie wrote: "Marion is taking the pictures with her. When Ruth gets home, both her mother and all the pictures will be gone. Her dead brothers and her mother will be gone. And the thing about those photographs is that there's a story that goes with all of them--there are hundreds of stories, and Ruth knows each and every one of them by heart."

  "What do you want from me?" Mrs. Pierce cried.

  "Just the photograph of Ruth's mother," Eddie said aloud. "She's in bed in a hotel room, in Paris . . ."

  "Yes, I know the picture--of course you can have it!" Penny Pierce said.

  "That's it, then," Eddie said. He wrote: "I just thought that the child would probably really need to have something to put near her bed tonight. There won't be any other pictures--all those pictures she's been used to. I thought that if there was one of her mother, especially . . ."

  "But it's not a good picture of the boys--only their feet, " Mrs. Pierce interrupted.

  "Yes, I know," Eddie said. "Ruth particularly likes the feet."

  "Are the feet ready?" the four-year-old asked.

  "Yes, they are, dear," Penny Pierce said solicitously to Ruth.

  "Do you want to see my stitches?" the child asked the manager. "And . . . my scab?"

  "The envelope is in the car, Ruth--it's in the glove compartment," Eddie explained.

  "Oh," Ruth said. "What's a glove department?"

  "I'll go check to be sure that the photograph is ready," Penny Pierce announced. "It's almost ready, I'm sure." Nervously, she scooped up the pages of stationery from the countertop, although Eddie still held the pen. Before she could leave his side, Eddie caught her by the arm.

  "Excuse me," he said, handing her the pen. "The pen is yours, but could I please have my writing back?"

  "Yes, of course!" the manager replied. She handed him all the paper, even the blank sheets.

  "What did you did?" Ruth asked Eddie.

  "I told the lady a story," the sixteen-year-old explained.

  "Tell me the story," the child said.

  "I'll tell you another story, in the car," Eddie promised her. "After we get the picture of your mommy."

  "And the feet !" the four-year-old insisted.

  "The feet, too," Eddie promised.

  "What story are you going to tell me?" Ruth asked him.

  "I don't know," the boy admitted. He would have to think of one; surprisingly, he wasn't in the least bit worried about it. One would come, he was sure. Nor was he worried anymore about what he had to say to Ted. He would tell Ted everything that Marion had told him to say--and anything else that came into his mind. I can do it, he believed. He had the authority.

  Penny Pierce knew he had it, too. When the manager re-emerged from the back rooms of the frame shop, she brought more than the rematted, reframed photograph with her. Although Mrs. Pierce had not changed her clothes, she had somehow transformed herself; she brought with her a substantially revised presence --not merely a fresh scent (a new perfume), but a change in attitude that made her almost alluring. To Eddie, she was borderline seductive--he'd not really noticed her as a woman before.

  Her hair, which had been up, was down. There'd been some alterations in her makeup, too. Exactly what Mrs. Pierce had done to herself was not hard for Eddie to pinpoint. Her eyes were darker and more pronounced; her lipstick was darker, too. Her face, if not more youthful, was more flushed. And she'd opened her suit jacket, and pushed up the sleeves--and the top two buttons of her blouse were unbuttoned. (Only the topmost button had been unbuttoned before.)

  In bending down to show Ruth the photograph, Mrs. Pierce revealed a depth of cleavage that Eddie would never have guessed at; when she stood up, she whispered to Eddie: "There's no charge for the photograph, of course."

  Eddie nodded and smiled, but Penny Pierce was not through with him. She showed him a page of stationery; she had a question for him--in writing, because it wasn't a question that Mrs. Pierce would ever have asked out loud in front of the child.

  "Is Marion Cole leaving you, too?" Penny Pierce had written.

  "Yes," Eddie told her. Mrs. Pierce gave his wrist a comforting little squeeze.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. Eddie didn't know what to say.

  "Did the blood get all gone?" Ruth asked. It was a miracle to the four-year-old that the photograph had been so completely restored. As a result of the accident, she herself bore a scar.

  "Yes, dear--it's as good as new!" Mrs. Pierce told the child. "Young man," the manager added, as Eddie took Ruth by the hand, "if you're ever interested in a job . . ." Since Eddie had the photograph in one hand, and Ruth's hand in his other hand, he had no hand free to take the busines
s card that Penny Pierce held out to him. In a move that reminded Eddie of Marion putting the ten-dollar bill in his right rear pocket, Mrs. Pierce deftly inserted the card into the left front pocket of the boy's jeans. "Perhaps next summer, or the summer after that--I'm always looking for help in the summer," the manager said.

  Again, Eddie didn't know what to say; once more, he nodded and smiled. It was a posh place, the frame shop. The display room was tasteful; there were mostly examples of customized frames. The poster art, always a favorite in the summer, featured movie posters of the thirties--Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina, Margaret Sullavan as the woman who dies and becomes a ghost at the end of Three Comrades . Also, liquor and wine advertisements were popular poster material: there was a dangerous-looking woman sipping a Campari and soda, and a man as handsome as Ted Cole was drinking a martini made with just the right amount and the right brand of vermouth.

  Cinzano, Eddie nearly said aloud--he was trying to imagine what it might be like to work there. It would take him about a year and a half to realize that Penny Pierce had been offering him more than a job. His newfound "authority" was so new to him, Eddie O'Hare hadn't yet comprehended the extent of his power.

  Something Almost Biblical

  Meanwhile, back in the bookstore, Ted Cole was reaching calligraphic heights at the autographing table. His penmanship was perfect; his slow, seemingly carved signature was a thing of beauty. For someone whose books were so short--and he wrote so little--Ted's autograph was a labor of love. ("A labor of self -love," Marion had once described Ted's signature to Eddie.) To those booksellers who often complained that the signatures of authors were messy scrawls, as indecipherable as doctors' prescriptions, Ted Cole was the king of autographers. There was nothing dashed-off about his signature, not even on checks. The cursive script was more like italicized print than handwriting.

  Ted complained about the pens. He had Mendelssohn hopping around the shop searching for the perfect pen; it had to be a fountain pen, one with just the right nib. And the ink had to be either black or the proper shade of red. ("More like blood than like a fire engine," Ted explained to the bookseller.) As for blue, any shade of blue was an abomination to Ted.