A Widow for One Year

  And so Eddie O'Hare was lucky. While Eddie took Ruth's hand and walked with her to the Chevy, Ted took his time. He knew that every autograph-seeker who approached him at the signing table was a potential ride home, but he was picky; he didn't want to be just anyone's passenger.

  For example, Mendelssohn introduced him to a woman who lived in Wainscott. Mrs. Hickenlooper said she would be happy to drop Ted at his house in Sagaponack. It really wasn't out of her way. However, she did have some other shopping to do in Southampton. It would take her a little more than an hour, after which she didn't mind stopping back at the bookstore. But Ted told her not to trouble herself; he said he was sure another ride would come his way within the hour.

  "But I really don't mind, " Mrs. Hickenlooper said.

  I mind! Ted thought to himself; amiably, he waved the woman away. She went off with an inscribed copy of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, which Ted had painstakingly dedicated to Mrs. Hickenlooper's five children. She should have bought five copies, Ted believed, but he dutifully signed the one, fitting all five names of the Hickenlooper progeny on a single, crowded page.

  "My kids are all grown up now," Mrs. Hickenlooper told Ted, "but they sure loved you when they were little ones."

  Ted just smiled. Mrs. Hickenlooper was pushing fifty. She had hips like a mule. There was a farmlike solidity to her. She was a gardener, or so it appeared; she wore a broad denim skirt, and her knees were red and stained with soil. "There's no way to be a good weeder without kneeling!" Ted had overheard her telling another man in the bookstore. He was a fellow gardener, apparently--they were comparing gardening books.

  It was ungenerous of Ted to take a disparaging view of gardeners. After all, he owed his life to Mrs. Vaughn's gardener--for if the courageous man hadn't warned Ted to run, Ted might not have escaped the black Lincoln. Nevertheless, Mrs. Hickenlooper just wasn't the ride home that Ted Cole was looking for.

  Then he spotted a more promising candidate. A standoffish young woman--she was at least of legal driving age--had hesitated in her approach to the autographing table; she was observing the famous author and illustrator with the characteristic combination of shyness and frolicsomeness that Ted associated with girls who stood on the threshold of attaining more womanly qualities. In a few years, what was now hesitant about her would turn calculating, even shrewd. And what was now coltish, even daring, soon would be better contained. She had to be at least seventeen, but not yet twenty; she was both frisky and awkward, both unsure of herself and eager to test herself. She was a little clumsy, but she was bold. Probably a virgin, Ted was thinking; at least she was very inexperienced--he was sure.

  "Hi," he said.

  The pretty girl who was almost a woman was so startled by Ted's unexpected attention that she was speechless; she also turned a prominent shade of red, midway between blood and a fire engine. Her friend--a vastly plainer, deceptively stupid-looking girl--exploded into snorts and giggles. Ted had failed to notice that the pretty girl was in the company of an ugly friend. With any interesting-looking young woman who was sexually vulnerable, wasn't there always an oafish, unappealing companion to contend with?

  But Ted was undaunted by the sidekick. If anything, he saw her as an intriguing challenge; if her presence meant it was unlikely that he would get laid today, the potential seduction of the pretty young woman was no less inviting to him. As Marion had pointed out to Eddie, it was less the occurrence of sex than the anticipation of it that titillated Ted; he seemed driven less to do it than to look forward to it.

  "Hi," the pretty girl finally managed to reply.

  Her pear-shaped friend couldn't contain herself. To the embarrassment of the pretty girl, the ugly one said: "She wrote her freshman English term paper on you!"

  "Shut up, Effie!" the pretty girl said.

  So she's a college girl, Ted Cole concluded; he guessed that she worshiped The Door in the Floor.

  "What was the title of your term paper?" Ted asked.

  " 'An Analysis of the Atavistic Symbols of Fear in The Door in the Floor, ' " the pretty girl, who was clearly mortified, said. "You know, like the boy not being sure that he wants to be born--and the mother not being sure that she wants to have him. That's very tribal. Primitive tribes have those fears. And the myths and fairy tales of primitive tribes are full of images like magic doors, and children disappearing, and people being so frightened that their hair turns white overnight. And in myths and fairy tales there are lots of animals that can suddenly change their size, like the snake--the snake is very tribal, too, of course. . . ."

  "Of course," Ted agreed. "How long was this paper?"

  "Twelve pages," the pretty girl informed him, "not counting the footnotes and the bibliography."

  Not counting the illustrations--just manuscript pages, in ordinary double-spaced typescript-- The Door in the Floor was only a page and a half long; yet it had been published as if it were a whole book, and college students were permitted to write term papers about it. What a joke! Ted was thinking.

  He liked the girl's lips; her mouth was round and small. And her breasts were full--they were almost fat. In a few years, she would have to struggle with her weight, but now her plumpness was appealing and she still had a waist. Ted was fond of assessing women by their body types; with most women, Ted believed he could visualize what the future would do to their bodies. This one would have one baby and lose her waist; she would also run the risk of her hips taking over her body, whereas now her voluptuousness was contained--if barely. By the time she's thirty, she'll be as pear-shaped as her friend, Ted was thinking, but all he said was, "What's your name?"

  "Glorie--not with a y but with an i-e," the pretty girl replied. "And this is Effie."

  I'll show you something atavistic, Glorie, Ted was thinking. Weren't forty-five-year-old men and eighteen-year-old girls frequently paired together in primitive tribes? I'll show you something tribal, Ted Cole thought, but what he said was: "I don't suppose you girls have a car. Believe it or not, I need a ride."

  Believe it or not, Mrs. Vaughn, having lost Ted, had irrationally directed her considerable anger toward her brave but defenseless gardener. She'd parked the Lincoln--facing out, motor running--in the entrance of her driveway; the black nose of the car's sleek hood and its gleaming-silver grille were poking into Gin Lane. Poised at the steering wheel, where she sat for almost half an hour (until the Lincoln ran out of gas), Mrs. Vaughn waited for the '57 black and white Chevy to make the turn onto Gin Lane from either Wyandanch Lane or South Main Street. She thought that Ted would not stray far from the vicinity, for she, along with Ted, still assumed that Marion's lover--"the pretty boy," as Mrs. Vaughn thought of Eddie--remained Ted's chauffeur. Therefore, Mrs. Vaughn turned up the tune on the radio and waited.

  Inside the black Lincoln, the music throbbed; the sheer volume, and the degree to which the bass vibrated the speakers in the car, almost concealed from Mrs. Vaughn that the Lincoln had run out of gas. Had the car not shuddered so violently at that moment, Mrs. Vaughn might have gone on waiting at the steering wheel until her son was brought home from his afternoon tennis lesson.

  More important, that the Lincoln finally ran out of gas may have spared Mrs. Vaughn's gardener a cruel death. The poor man, whose ladder had been knocked from under him, had all this while been trapped in the remorseless privet, where the carbonmonoxide fumes from the Lincoln's exhaust had at first made him sick and then nearly killed him. He was half asleep, but conscious of the fact that he was half dead, when the car conked out and a fresh sea breeze revived him.

  In his earlier effort to climb down from the top of the hedge, the heel of his right foot had become stuck in a twisted notch of the privet. In attempting to free his boot from the notch, the gardener had lost his balance and fallen upside down in the thick hedge--thus wedging his boot heel more snugly than before in the tenacious privet. His ankle was sorely twisted in the fall, and--hanging by his heel in the tangled hedge--he had pulled an abdominal muscle while
trying to untie his boot.

  A small man of Hispanic descent, with an appropriately small potbelly, Eduardo Gomez was not used to performing upside-down sit-ups in a hedge. His boots were of the above-ankle sort, and although he'd struggled to sit up long enough to untie the laces, he had not been able to bear the pain of the position long enough to loosen the laces. The boot would not slip off.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Vaughn couldn't hear Eduardo's calls for help above the volume and the throbbing bass of her car radio. The miserable hanging gardener, aware of the rising fumes from the Lincoln's exhaust, which were gathering in the dense and seemingly airless hedge, was convinced that the privet would be his final resting place. Eduardo Gomez would be the victim of another man's lust, and of another man's proverbial "woman scorned." Nor did the dying gardener miss the irony that it was the shredded pornographic drawings of his employer that had led him to his position in the murderous privet. Had the Lincoln not run out of gas, the gardener might have become Southampton's first fatality ever ascribed to pornography--but doubtless not the last, Eduardo was thinking, as he drifted off in the carbonmonoxide fumes. It crossed his poisoned mind that Ted Cole deserved to die this way, but not an innocent gardener.

  In Mrs. Vaughn's view, her gardener was not innocent. Earlier, she'd heard him cry out: "Run!" By warning Ted, Eduardo had betrayed her! If the wretched dangling man had kept his mouth shut, Ted would not have been afforded those valuable extra seconds. As it turned out, Ted broke into a full sprint before the black Lincoln shot onto Gin Lane. Mrs. Vaughn was certain that she would have flattened him as incontrovertibly as she'd flattened the road sign at the corner of South Main Street. It was because of her own disloyal gardener that Ted Cole had got away!

  Thus, when the Lincoln ran out of gas and Mrs. Vaughn got out of the car--first slamming the door shut and then opening it again, for she'd forgotten to turn off the infernal radio--she first heard Eduardo's weakened cries for help and her heart was instantly hardened against him. She tromped on the little crushed stones of the courtyard, nearly tripping on the fallen ladder, and there she beheld her betrayer, who was ridiculously suspended by his foot in the midst of the privet. Mrs. Vaughn was further incensed to see that Eduardo had not yet cleaned up those revealing drawings. In addition, there was a totally illogical aspect to her hatred of the gardener: he had doubtless seen her terrible nakedness in the drawings. (How could he not have seen it?) And so she hated Eduardo Gomez in the manner that she hated Eddie O'Hare, who had also seen her so . . . exposed.

  "Please, ma'am," Eduardo begged her. "If you are able to lift the ladder, if I can just hold on to it, I might be able to get down."

  "You!" Mrs. Vaughn shouted at him. She picked up a handful of the little stones and threw them into the hedge. The gardener shut his eyes, but the privet was so thick that none of the stones hit him. "You warned him! You vile little man!" Mrs. Vaughn screamed. She threw another handful of stones, which were equally harmless. That she couldn't manage to hit a motionless, upside-down gardener made her even madder. "You betrayed me!" she cried.

  "If you'd killed him, you'd have gone to jail," Eduardo said, trying to reason with her. But she was strutting away from him; even from upside down he could tell that she was returning to her house. Her purposeful little steps . . . her tight little butt. He knew before she got to the door that she was going to slam it behind her. Eduardo had long ago imagined this about her: she was a woman of tantrums, a veteran door-slammer--as if the big bang that the door made offered her consolation for her diminutiveness. The gardener had a dread of small women; he'd always imagined them to have an anger disproportionate to their size. His own wife was large and comfortingly soft; she was a good-natured woman with a generous, forgiving disposition.

  "Clean up this mess ! And then leave ! This is your last day!" Mrs. Vaughn was shouting to Eduardo, who hung perfectly still--as if paralyzed by disbelief. "You're fired !" she added.

  "But I can't get down!" he called softly to her, knowing even before he spoke that the door would slam shut on his words.

  Despite the pulled muscle in his abdomen, Eduardo found the strength to surmount his pain; doubtless he was helped by a sense of injustice, for he managed to perform another upside-down sit-up--he held the agonizing position long enough to sufficiently unlace his boot. His trapped foot slipped free. He plummeted headfirst through the heart of the hedge, flailing with both arms and legs, and (to his relief ) landed on all fours among the roots; he crawled into the courtyard, spitting out twigs and leaves.

  Eduardo was still nauseated and dizzy and intermittently lethargic from his lengthy exposure to the Lincoln's exhaust fumes, and his upper lip had been cut by a branch. He tried to walk, but he quickly returned to all fours, and in this animalistic state approached the clogged fountain. He plunged his head into the water, forgetting the squid ink. The water was foul and fishy-smelling, and when the gardener withdrew his head from the fountain and wrung the water out of his hair, his face and hands were sepia-colored. Eduardo felt like throwing up while he climbed the ladder to retrieve his boot.

  Then the stunned man limped aimlessly about the courtyard--since he'd already been fired, what point was there in his completing the task of gathering the scraps of pornography (as Mrs. Vaughn had demanded)? He could see no wisdom in performing any task for a woman who had not only fired him but had also left him for dead; yet when he decided that he would leave, he realized that the out-of-gas Lincoln was obstructing the driveway. Eduardo's truck, which was always parked out of sight (behind the toolhouse and the garage and the potting shed), could not slip past the privet while the Lincoln was blocking the way. The gardener had to syphon gas from the lawn mower in order to start the Lincoln and return the abandoned car to the garage. Alas, this activity did not go unnoticed by Mrs. Vaughn.

  She confronted Eduardo in the courtyard, where only the fountain separated them. The stained pool was now as unsightly as a shallow birdbath in which a hundred bats had drowned. Mrs. Vaughn held something in her hand--it was a check--and the wrecked gardener eyed her warily; he limped sideways, keeping the fountain between them, as Mrs. Vaughn began to circle the blackened water in his direction.

  "Don't you want this? It's your last paycheck!" the evil little woman said.

  Eduardo halted. If she was going to pay him, perhaps he would stay and clean up the last of the ripped-to-shreds pornography. After all, the maintenance of the Vaughn estate had been his principal source of income for many years. The gardener was a proud man, and the miniature bitch had humiliated him; yet he thought that even if the check she was offering him was the last paycheck he would ever receive from her, it would be sizable.

  With his hand held out in front of him, Eduardo cautiously inched around the spoiled fountain in Mrs. Vaughn's direction. She allowed him to approach her. She was almost within his reach when she made several hasty folds in the check, and--when it was crudely shaped like a boat--she launched it into the murky water. The check sailed into the middle of the funereal pool. It was necessary for Eduardo to wade into the fountain, which he did with trepidation.

  "Go fish !" Mrs. Vaughn shrieked at him.

  Even as he plucked the check out of the water, Eduardo was aware that the ink had run; he couldn't read what the amount had been or Mrs. Vaughn's cramped signature. And before he could step out of the fishy-smelling fountain, he knew (without once looking at her haughty, retreating figure) that the door would slam again. The fired gardener dried the worthless check against his pants and preserved it in his wallet; he didn't know why he bothered.

  Dutifully, Eduardo returned the ladder to its usual place alongside the potting shed. He saw a rake that he'd meant to repair and briefly wondered what he should do with it; he left it on the worktable in the toolhouse. He would have gone home then--he was already limping slowly toward his truck--but he suddenly saw the three large leaf bags that he'd already filled with the scraps of the shredded drawings; he had calculated that the remaining mess, when it
was all cleaned up, might fill another two bags.

  Eduardo Gomez picked up the first of the three full bags and emptied it onto the lawn. The wind quickly blew some of the paper all around, but the gardener was dissatisfied with the results; he ran limping through the pile of paper, kicking his feet like a child in a heap of leaves. The long tatters flew through the garden and draped the birdbath. The beach roses at the back of the yard, where the footpath led to the beach, were a magnet to the scraps and shreds of paper; the torn paper clung to everything it touched, like tinsel to a Christmas tree.

  The gardener limped into the courtyard with the remaining two full bags. The first of these he upended in the fountain, where the mass of ripped drawings soaked up the blackened water like a giant, immovable sponge. The last full bag, which by coincidence included some of the best (albeit largely destroyed) views of Mrs. Vaughn's crotch, was no challenge to Eduardo's remaining creativity. The inspired man limped in circles around the courtyard, holding the open bag above his head. It was like a kite that refused to fly, but the countless snippets of pornography did indeed take flight; they rose into the privet, from which the heroic gardener had earlier plucked them, and they rose above the privet, too. As if to reward Eduardo Gomez for his courage, a strong sea breeze blew partial views of Mrs. Vaughn's breasts and vagina to both ends of Gin Lane.

  It was later reported to the Southampton police that two boys on bicycles were treated to a questionable glimpse of Mrs. Vaughn's anatomy, which the boys found as far away as First Neck Lane--a testimony to the strength of the wind, which had blown this particular close-up of Mrs. Vaughn's nipple, and her irregularly enlarged areola, across Agawam Lake. (The boys, who were brothers, brought the scrap of the pornographic drawing home, where their parents discovered the obscenity and called the cops.)