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.
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.