by John Irving
Before Eduardo could exit the driveway, Ted ran forward and stopped the truck. Although the morning air was cool, Eddie—wearing his inside-out Exeter sweatshirt—had his elbow resting on the open passenger-side window of the cab. Ted squeezed Eddie’s elbow as he spoke. “About Marion—there’s another thing you should know,” he told the boy. “Even before the accident, she was a difficult woman. I mean, if there had never been an accident, Marion would still be difficult. Do you understand what I’m saying, Eddie?”
Ted’s grip on Eddie’s elbow exerted a steady pressure, but Eddie could neither move his arm nor speak. He stops the truck to tell me that Marion is “a difficult woman,” Eddie was thinking. Even to a sixteen-year-old, the phrase did not ring true; in fact, it rang utterly false. It was strictly a male expression. It was what men who thought they were being polite said of their ex-wives. It was what a man said about a woman who was unavailable to him—or who had made herself in some way inaccessible. It was what a man said about a woman when he meant something else, when he meant anything else. And when a man said it, it was always derogatory, wasn’t it? But Eddie could think of nothing to say.
“I forgot something—there’s just one last thing,” Ted told the sixteen-year-old. “About the shoe . . .” If Eddie could have moved, he would have covered his ears, but the boy was paralyzed—a pillar of salt. Eddie could appreciate how Marion had turned to stone at the mere mention of the accident. “It was a basketball shoe,” Ted went on. “Timmy called them his high-tops.”
That was all Ted had to say.
As the pickup truck passed through Sag Harbor, Eduardo said: “This is where I live. I could sell my house for a lot of money. But the way things are going, I couldn’t afford to buy another house—at least not around here.”
Eddie nodded and smiled to the gardener. But the boy couldn’t talk; his elbow, which was still sticking out the passenger-side window, was numb from the cold air, but Eddie couldn’t move his arm.
They took the first small ferry to Shelter Island, and drove across the island, and took the other small ferry from the north end of the island to Greenport. (Years later, Ruth would always think of these little ferries as her preparation for leaving home—for going back to Exeter.)
In Greenport, Eduardo Gomez said to Eddie O’Hare: “With what I could get for my house in Sag Harbor, I could buy a really nice house here. But you can’t make much of a living as a gardener in Greenport.”
“No, I wouldn’t suppose so,” Eddie was able to say, although his tongue felt funny and his own speech sounded foreign to him.
At Orient Point, the ferry was not yet in sight; the dark-blue water was flecked with whitecaps. Since it was a Saturday, a lot of day-trippers were waiting for the ferry; most of them were foot passengers who were going shopping in New London. It was a different crowd from that day in June when Eddie had landed at Orient Point and Marion had met him. (“Hello, Eddie,” Marion had said. “I thought you’d never see me.” As if he hadn’t seen her! As if he could have missed seeing her!)
“Well, so long,” Eddie said to the gardener. “Thanks for the ride.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Eduardo said sincerely, “what’s it like working for Mr. Cole?”
Leaving Long Island
It was so cold and windy on the upper deck of the Cross Sound Ferry that Eddie sought refuge in the lee of the pilothouse; there, out of the wind, he practiced Ted Cole’s signature in one of his writing notebooks. The block letters of the capitals, T and C, were easy; here Ted’s handwriting resembled a sans-serif typeface. But the lowercase letters were a challenge; Ted’s lowercase letters were small and perfectly slanted, the handwritten equivalent of Baskerville italics. After twenty-odd attempts in his notebook, Eddie could still see signs of his own, more spontaneous handwriting in his imitations of Ted’s signature. Eddie feared that his parents, who knew their son’s handwriting very well, would suspect the forgery.
He was concentrating so fiercely that he failed to notice the very same clam-truck driver who had crossed the sound with him on that fateful June day. The clam-truck driver, who took the ferry from Orient Point to New London (and back again) every day except Sunday, recognized Eddie and sat down on the bench beside him. The driver couldn’t help observing that Eddie was caught up in the act of perfecting an apparent signature; remembering that Eddie had been hired to do something strange—there had been a brief discussion of exactly what a so-called writer’s assistant might do —the clam-truck driver assumed that Eddie’s chore of rewriting the same short name must be part of the boy’s peculiar job.
“How’s it going, kid?” the clam-truck driver asked. “Looks like you’re working hard.”
A future novelist, if never a hugely successful one, Eddie O’Hare was a young man with an instinct for spotting closure; as such, he was happy to see the clam-truck driver again. Eddie explained to the driver the task at hand: having “forgotten” to ask Ted Cole for his autograph, the boy didn’t want to disappoint his mom and dad.
“Let me try,” the clam-truck driver said.
Thus, in the lee of the pilothouse on the wind-blown upper deck, the driver of a clam truck rendered a flawless imitation of the best-selling author’s signature. After only a half-dozen attempts in the notebook, the clam-truck driver was ready for the real thing; Eddie allowed the excited man to autograph the O’Hare family’s copy of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls . Snugly out of the wind, both man and boy admired the results. In gratitude, Eddie offered the clam-truck driver Ted Cole’s fountain pen.
“You gotta be kidding,” the clam-truck driver said.
“Take it—it’s yours,” Eddie told him. “I really don’t want it.” He really didn’t want the pen, which the clam-truck driver happily clipped to the inside pocket of his dirty windbreaker. The man smelled of hot dogs and beer, but also—especially out of the wind—of clams. He offered Eddie a beer, which Eddie declined, and then he asked Eddie if “the writer’s assistant” would be returning to Long Island the following summer.
Eddie didn’t think so. But, in truth, Eddie O’Hare would never quite leave Long Island—least of all, in his mind—and although he would spend the following summer at home in Exeter, where he worked for the academy as a guide in the admissions office, giving tours of the school to prospective Exonians and their parents, Eddie would return to Long Island as soon as the summer after that.
In the year of his graduation from Exeter (1960), Eddie was prompted to seek a summer job away from home; this desire, in combination with Eddie’s developing awareness that he was attracted to older women—and that they were attracted to him—would lead Eddie to remember Penny Pierce’s business card, which he had saved. Only when Eddie was anticipating his graduation from the academy—about a year and half after Penny Pierce had offered him a job in her Southampton frame shop—did he realize that Mrs. Pierce might have been offering him more than a job.
The Exeter senior would write to the Southampton divorcée with disarming candor. (“Hi! You may not remember me. I was formerly a writer’s assistant to Ted Cole. I was in your shop one day and you offered me a job. You may remember that I was, albeit briefly, Marion Cole’s lover?”)
Penny Pierce would not mince words in her reply. (“Hi yourself. Remember you? Who could forget sixty times in—what was it?—six or seven weeks? If it’s a summer job you want, it’s yours.”)
In addition to the frame-shop job, Eddie would, of course, be Mrs. Pierce’s lover. The summer of ’60 would start out with Eddie staying in a guest bedroom of Mrs. Pierce’s newly acquired property on First Neck Lane, until such a time as he found suitable lodging of his own. But they became lovers before he found such a place—truly, before he’d begun to look. Penny Pierce would be glad to have Eddie’s company in the big, empty house, which was in need of some enlivening interior decoration.
However, it would take more than new wallpaper and upholstery to banish from the house an aura of tragedy. A widow, a certain
Mrs. Mountsier, had not long ago committed suicide on the grounds of the property, which was summarily sold by her only child—a daughter who was still in college, and who was said to have been estranged from her mother at the time of her mother’s death.
Eddie would never know that Mrs. Mountsier was the same woman he’d mistaken for Marion in the Coles’ driveway—not to mention the role that Ted had played in the unhappy mother-and-daughter story.
In the summer of ’60, Eddie would have no contact with Ted—nor would he see Ruth. He would, however, see some photographs of her, which Eduardo Gomez brought to Penny Pierce’s shop to have framed. Penny told Eddie that, in the two years since Marion had taken away the photos of Ruth’s dead brothers, only a small number of replacement photographs had been brought to her shop for framing.
They were all of Ruth, and—like the half-dozen photos Eddie saw in the summer of ’60—were all unnaturally posed. They possessed none of the candid magic of those hundreds of photographs of Thomas and Timothy. Ruth was a sober, frowning child who viewed the camera with a suspicious eye; when a smile was occasionally coaxed out of her, it lacked spontaneity.
In two years, Ruth had grown taller; her hair, which was darker and longer, was often in pigtails. Penny Pierce would point out to Eddie that the pigtails were expertly braided, and some care had been given to the ribbons at the end of each pigtail, too. This couldn’t be Ted’s work, Penny told Eddie—nor could the six-year-old have managed it herself. (Conchita Gomez was responsible for the pigtails and the ribbons.)
“She’s a cute little girl,” Mrs. Pierce said of Ruth, “but I’m afraid she’s going to miss getting her mother’s looks—by about a mile.”
After making love to Marion an estimated sixty times in the summer of 1958, Eddie O’Hare would not have sex for almost two years. In his senior year at Exeter, he would qualify for English 4W—the W stood for writing of the creative kind—and it was in this class, under the guidance of Mr. Havelock, that Eddie would begin to write about a young man’s sexual initiation in the arms of an older woman. Before this, his only efforts to fictionalize his experiences in the summer of ’58 had entailed an overlong short story that was based on his disastrous delivery of Ted Cole’s drawings to Mrs. Vaughn.
In Eddie’s story, they are not drawings; they are pornographic poems. The character of the writer’s assistant is very Eddie-like, a hapless victim of Mrs. Vaughn’s rage, and Mrs. Vaughn herself is unchanged— except for her name, which is Mrs. Wilmot (after the only name Eddie could remember from the list of every living Exonian in the Hamptons). Naturally Mrs. Wilmot has a sympathetic gardener of Hispanic descent, and it falls to the noble gardener to retrieve the shredded pornographic poems from the surrounding hedges— and from the small fountain in the circular driveway.
The character of the poet is only distantly based on Ted. The poet is blind, which is why he needs a writer’s assistant in the first place— not to mention why the poet also needs a driver . In Eddie’s story, the poet is unmarried, and the end of his affair with the character named Mrs. Wilmot—to whom, and about whom, he has written his shocking poems—is described as the woman’s fault. The blind poet is an entirely sympathetic character, whose plight it is to be repeatedly seduced and abandoned by ugly women.
As the go-between for the poet, whose love for the wicked Mrs. Wilmot shows signs of being tragically unswerving, the much-abused writer’s assistant makes a heroic effort that costs him his job. He describes to the blind poet what the hideous Mrs. Wilmot truly looks like; while the description so enrages the poet that he fires the young man, the truth of the description finally frees the poet from his self-destructive attraction to women of Mrs. Wilmot’s kind. (The ugliness theme is a little unpolished, even amateurish, for while Eddie meant by this an inner ugliness, it is largely the outer ugliness of Mrs. Wilmot that is apparent—and unseemly—to the reader.)
Frankly, it was an awful story. But as a sample of young Eddie’s promise as a writer of fiction, it made enough of an impression on Mr. Havelock that he admitted Eddie to English 4W, and it was there, in that class of aspiring young writers, that Eddie’s more beguiling theme—the younger man with the older woman—began to flow.
Naturally, Eddie was too shy to show his earliest efforts to the class. These stories he presented in confidentiality to Mr. Havelock, who showed them only to his wife; yes, she was that selfsame woman whose bralessness and furry armpits had once provided Eddie with his beginner phase of masturbatory bliss. Mrs. Havelock would take an active interest in Eddie’s development of the younger-man-with-the-older-woman theme.
It is understandable that this subject was more interesting to Mrs. Havelock than Eddie’s prose was. After all, Mrs. Havelock was a childless woman in her thirties who was the only visible object of desire in a closed community of almost eight hundred teenaged boys. While she had never been sexually tempted by a single one of them, it had not escaped her notice that they lusted after her. The sheer possibility of such a relationship appalled her. She was happily married and unstintingly thought that boys were . . . well, just boys. Therefore, the very nature of a sexual relationship between a sixteen-year-old boy and a thirty-nine-year-old woman, which Eddie’s stories repeatedly described, attracted Mrs. Havelock’s grim curiosity. She was German-born; she had met her husband when she was a foreign-exchange student in Scotland—Mr. Havelock was English—and her entrapment in one of America’s elite, all-boys’ boarding schools continually bewildered and depressed her.
Notwithstanding Eddie’s mother’s opinion of Mrs. Havelock’s “ bohemianism,” Mrs. Havelock did nothing to deliberately make herself sexually attractive to the boys. Like a good wife, she made herself as attractive as she could to her husband; it was Mr . Havelock who favored bralessness and who begged his wife to leave her armpits unshaven— naturalness appealed to him above all things. Mrs. Havelock regarded herself as somewhat frumpy; she was dismayed at her obvious effect on these horny boys, who she knew beat off with abandon to her image.
Anna Havelock, née Rainer, could not emerge from her dormitory apartment without causing several stray boys in the dormitory hall to blush, or to walk into doors or walls because they couldn’t take their eyes off her; she could not serve coffee and doughnuts in her apartment to her husband’s advisees, or to his students in English 4W, without rendering them tongue-tied—they were so smitten by her. Quite sensibly, she hated it. She begged her husband to take her back to Great Britain, or to Germany, where she knew from experience she could live her life unnoticed. But her husband, Arthur Havelock, adored the life at Exeter, where he was an energetic teacher who was well liked by the students and his fellow members of the faculty.
It was into this basically good marriage, with its single subject of contention, that Eddie O’Hare brought his disturbing stories of his sexual entanglement with Marion Cole. Naturally, Eddie had shielded himself—not to mention Marion. The Eddie character, in Eddie’s stories, was not a writer’s assistant to a famous author and illustrator of children’s books. (Because Minty O’Hare had glamorized his son’s first summer job beyond boredom, everyone in the Exeter English Department knew that Eddie had once worked for Ted Cole.)
In Eddie’s stories, the sixteen-year-old had a summer job in a frame shop in Southampton, and the Marion character was modeled on Eddie’s imperfect memory of Penny Pierce; because Eddie could not recall what Mrs. Pierce looked like, her physical description was an inaccurate combination of Marion’s beautiful face and Penny Pierce’s matronly body, which was no match for Marion’s.
Like Mrs. Pierce, the Marion character in Eddie’s stories was comfortably divorced. The Eddie character certainly enjoyed the wild fruits of his sexual initiation; sixty times in less than one summer was a shocking concept to both Mr. and Mrs. Havelock. The Eddie character also enjoyed the benefits of Penny Pierce’s generous alimony settlement—for in Eddie’s stories the sixteen-year-old lived in the frameshop owner’s splendid house in Southampton, a lavish e
state that bore a striking resemblance to Mrs. Vaughn’s mansion on Gin Lane.
While Mrs. Havelock was riveted and greatly upset by the sexual authenticity of Eddie’s stories, Mr. Havelock—good teacher that he was—concerned himself more with the quality of Eddie’s writing. He would point out to Eddie what Eddie already suspected: there were areas of the young man’s writing that seemed more authentic than others. The sexual detail, the boy’s gloomy foreknowledge that the summer will end—and with it his love affair with a woman who means everything to him (while he believes he means much less to her)—and the relentless anticipation of sex, which is almost as thrilling as the act itself . . . well, these elements in Eddie’s stories rang true. (They were true, Eddie knew.)
But other details were less convincing. Going back to Eddie’s description of the blind poet with the writer’s assistant, for example: the poet himself was an undeveloped character; the pornographic poems were neither believable as poems nor sufficiently graphic for pornography—whereas the description of the Mrs. Vaughn character’s anger, of her reaction to the pornography and to the hapless writer’s assistant who delivers the poems to her . . . ah, this was good stuff. It rang true, too. (Because it was true, Eddie knew.)
Eddie had made up the blind poet and the pornographic poems; he had made up the physical description of the Marion character, who was this unconvincing mixture of Marion and Penny Pierce. Both Mr. and Mrs. Havelock said that the Marion character herself was unclear; they couldn’t “see” her, they told Eddie.