“Why not, honey?” Ted asked her.
“Because they got buried. They’re under the ground,” Ruth told him.
Ted pointed to the mounds that weren’t mountains. “So this is the ground, right?”
“Right,” Ruth said. “The died persons are under it.”
“I see,” Ted said.
Pointing to the middle stick figure with the melon head, Ruth said: “That one is Mommy.”
“But your mommy isn’t dead, sweetheart,” Ted said. “Mommy isn’t a died person.”
“And this is Thomas, and this is Timothy,” Ruth continued, pointing to the other skeletons.
“Ruthie, Mommy isn’t dead—she’s just gone away.”
“That one is Mommy,” Ruth repeated, pointing again to the skeleton in the middle.
“How about a grilled-cheese sandwich with French fries?” Eddie asked Ruth.
“And ketchup,” Ruth said.
“Good idea, Eddie,” Ted told the sixteen-year-old.
The French fries were frozen, the oven had to be preheated, and Ted was too drunk to find the skillet he preferred to use for grilled-cheese sandwiches; yet all three of them managed to eat this lamentable food—the ketchup helped. Eddie did the dishes while Ted tried to put Ruth to bed. Under the circumstances, it had been a civilized supper, Eddie was thinking as he listened to Ruth and her father go through the upstairs of the house, describing the missing photographs to each other. Sometimes Ted made one up—at least Ted described a photograph that Eddie couldn’t recall having seen—but Ruth didn’t seem to mind. Ruth also made up one or two photographs.
One day, when she couldn’t remember many of the photos, she would make up nearly everything. Eddie, long after he’d forgotten almost all the photographs, would make them up, too. Only Marion would be free of inventing Thomas and Timothy. Ruth, of course, would soon learn to invent her mother as well.
All the while that Eddie was packing, Ruth and Ted were going on and on about the photographs—real and imagined. They made it difficult for Eddie to concentrate on his immediate problem. Who was going to drive him to the ferry at Orient Point? That was when he happened upon the list of every living Exonian in the Hamptons; the most recent addition to the list, a Percy S. Wilmot from the class of ’46, lived in nearby Wainscott.
Eddie would have been Ruth’s age when Mr. Wilmot graduated from Exeter, but possibly Mr. Wilmot would remember Eddie’s father. Surely every Exonian had at least heard of Minty O’Hare! But was the Exeter connection worth a ride to Orient Point? Eddie doubted it. Yet he thought it would be at least educative to call Percy Wilmot—if only to spite his father. If only for the thrill of telling Minty: “Listen, I called every living Exonian in the Hamptons and begged for a ride to the ferry, and they all turned me down!”
But when Eddie went downstairs to the telephone in the kitchen, he glanced at the kitchen clock. It was almost midnight; it would be wiser to call Mr. Wilmot in the morning. However, as late as it was, he didn’t hesitate to call his parents; Eddie could have a short conversation with his father only if his father was half asleep. Eddie wanted to keep the conversation short. Even when half asleep, Minty was excitable.
“Everything’s fine, Dad. No, there’s nothing wrong,” Eddie said. “I just wanted you or Mom to be around the phone tomorrow, in case I call. If I can get a ride to the ferry, I’ll call before I leave.”
“Have you been fired ?” Minty asked. Eddie heard his father whisper to his mom: “It’s Edward—I think he’s been fired !”
“No, I haven’t been fired,” Eddie lied. “I just finished the job.”
Naturally Minty went on and on—on the subject of how he’d never imagined that it was the sort of job one ever, exactly, “finished.” Minty also calculated that he needed thirty more minutes to drive to New London from Exeter than Eddie would need to drive to Orient Point from Sagaponack— and take the ferry to New London.
“Then I’ll just wait for you in New London, Dad.”
Knowing Minty, Eddie knew that—even on short notice—Minty would be waiting at the dock in New London. His father would take his mom along, too; she would be the “navigator.”
That done, Eddie wandered into the yard. He needed to escape the murmuring from the upstairs of the house, where Ted and Ruth were still reciting the stories of the missing photographs—from both their memories and their imaginations. In the cool of the yard, their voices were lost to Eddie in the cacophony of crickets and tree frogs, and in the distant thumping of the surf.
The only actual argument Eddie had ever overheard between Ted and Marion had been there, in the spacious but unmanaged yard. Marion had called it a yard-in-progress, but it was more accurately a yard that had been halted by disagreement and indecision. Ted had wanted a swimming pool. Marion had said that a swimming pool would spoil Ruth, or else the child would drown in it.
“Not with all the nannies she has looking after her,” Ted had argued, which Marion had interpreted as a further indictment of her as a mother.
Ted had also wanted an outdoor shower—something handy to the squash court in the barn, but near enough to the swimming pool so that children returning from the beach could rinse the sand off before going in the pool.
“ What children?” Marion had asked him.
“Not to mention before going in the house,” Ted had added. He hated sand in the house. Ted never went to the beach, except in the winter after storms. He liked to see what the storms washed up; sometimes there were things he brought home to draw. (Driftwood in peculiar shapes; the shell of a horseshoe crab; a skate with its face like a Halloween mask, and its barbed tail; a dead seagull.)