“This is the one with Thomas in the tall hat,” Ruth told the nanny crossly. “Timothy is trying to reach Thomas’s hat, but he can’t reach it because Thomas is standing on a ball.”
“Oh, you remember,” Alice said.
For how long will Ruth remember? Eddie was thinking. He watched Ted fix himself another drink.
“Timothy kicked the ball and made Thomas fall down,” Ruth continued. “Thomas got mad and started a fight. Thomas won all the fights because Timothy was smaller.”
“Was the fight in the photograph?” Alice asked.
Wrong question, Eddie knew.
“No, silly!” Ruth screamed. “The fight was after the picture!”
“Oh,” Alice said. “I’m sorry. . . .”
“You want a drink?” Ted asked Eddie.
“No,” Eddie told him. “We should drive over to the carriage house and see if Marion left anything there.”
“Good idea,” Ted said. “You’re the driver.”
At first they found nothing in the dismal rental house above the garage. Marion had taken what few clothes she’d kept there, although Eddie knew—and would always appreciate—what she’d done with the pink cashmere cardigan and the lilac-colored camisole and matching panties. Of the few photographs Marion had moved to the carriage house for the summer, all but one were gone. Marion had left behind the photograph of the dead boys that hung above the bed: Thomas and Timothy in the doorway of the Main Academy Building, on the threshold of manhood—their last year at Exeter.
HVC VENITE PVERI VT VIRI SITIS
“Come hither boys . . .” Marion had translated, in a whisper, “. . . and become men.”
It was the photograph that marked the site of Eddie’s sexual initiation. A piece of notepaper was taped to the glass. Marion’s handwriting was unmistakable.
FOR EDDIE
“For you ?” Ted shouted. He ripped the notepaper off the glass. He picked at the remnant of Scotch tape with his fingernail. “Well, it’s not for you, Eddie. They’re my sons—it’s the only picture I have of them!”
Eddie didn’t argue. He could remember the Latin well enough without the photograph. He had two more years to be at Exeter; he would pass through that doorway and under that inscription often enough. Nor did he need a picture of Thomas and Timothy; it wasn’t them he needed to remember. He could remember Marion without them; he’d only known her without them, although he would certainly admit to the presence of those dead boys.
“Of course it’s your picture,” Eddie said.
“You bet your ass it is,” Ted told him. “How could she even think of giving it to you?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie lied. In one day, “I don’t know” had become everyone’s answer for everything.
Thus the photograph of Thomas and Timothy in the doorway at Exeter belonged to Ted. It was a better likeness of the dead boys than that partial view of them—namely, their feet—which now hung in Ruth’s bedroom. Ted would hang the photo of the boys in the master bedroom, on one of the many available picture hooks that were exposed there.
When Ted and Eddie left the shabby apartment over the garage, Eddie took his few things with him—he wanted to pack. He was waiting for Ted to tell him to leave; obligingly, Ted told him in the car when they were driving back to the house on Parsonage Lane.
“What’s tomorrow—Saturday?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s Saturday,” Eddie replied.
“I want you out of here tomorrow. By Sunday at the latest,” Ted told him.
“Okay,” Eddie said. “I just need to find a ride to the ferry.”
“Alice can take you.”
Eddie decided it was wise not to tell Ted that Marion had already thought of Alice as Eddie’s best bet for a ride to Orient Point.
When they got back to the house, Ruth had cried herself to sleep— the child had also refused to eat her supper—and Alice was crying quietly in the upstairs hall. For a college girl, the nanny seemed excessively undone by the situation. Eddie couldn’t muster much sympathy for Alice; she was a snob who had immediately lorded her presumed superiority over him. (Alice’s only superiority to Eddie was that she was a few years older than sixteen.)