It’s true: the Exeter class of ’73 demonstrated that long hair for boys was in fashion; long, straight hair that was parted in the middle was also fashionable for girls. At the time, Ruth was no exception. She would go through college with long, straight hair parted in the middle, before she finally became the master of her own hair and cut it short—the way (she would say) she’d always wanted it, and not only to spite her father.
In the summer of ’73, when Eddie O’Hare was briefly at home, visiting his parents, he would pay no more than passing
attention to the yearbook of Ruth’s graduating class. (Minty had foisted the ’73 PEAN on him.)
“I think she’s got her mother’s looks,” Minty told Eddie, not that Minty would know. He’d never met Marion. Minty may have seen a photograph of her in a newspaper or magazine, around the time the boys died, but what he said nonetheless got Eddie’s attention.
When Eddie saw Ruth’s senior portrait, his opinion was that Ruth looked more like Ted. It wasn’t just the dark hair—it was her square face, the wide-apart eyes, her small mouth, her big jaw. Ruth was certainly attractive, but she was more handsome than she was beautiful; she was good-looking in an almost masculine way.
And this impression of Ruth at nineteen was enhanced by her jockish appearance in the team photograph for Varsity Squash. There would not be a girls’ squash team at Exeter until the following year; in ’73, Ruth was permitted to play on the boys’ varsity, where she was the third-ranked player. In the team photo, Ruth could easily have been mistaken for one of the boys.
The only other photograph of Ruth Cole in the ’73 Exeter yearbook was a group portrait of the girls in her dormitory, Bancroft Hall. Ruth is smiling serenely in the center of a group of girls; she looks content, but alone.
And so his dismissive glimpse of Ruth in her Exeter yearbook photographs would permit Eddie to continue to think of her as “the poor kid” he had last seen asleep in the summer of 1958. It would be twentytwo years from that date before Ruth Cole would publish her first novel—when she was twenty-six. Eddie O’Hare would be thirty-eight when he read it; only then would he acknowledge that there was arguably more of Marion in Ruth than there was of Ted. And Ruth herself would be forty-one before Eddie realized that there was more of Ruth in Ruth than there was of either Ted or Marion.
But how could Eddie O’Hare have predicted this from a T-shirt that, in the summer of ’58, was already too small for Ruth to wear? At that moment, Eddie—like Marion—wanted only to leave, and his ride was waiting. The sixteen-year-old got into the cab of the pickup truck beside Eduardo Gomez; as the gardener was backing out the driveway, Eddie was debating whether or not he would wave good-bye to Ted, who was still standing in the driveway. If he waves first, I’ll wave back, Eddie decided; it seemed to him that Ted was on the verge of waving the little T-shirt, but Ted had something more emphatic than waving on his mind.
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.