“Do I snore, Eddie?” Marion asked him—seemingly apropos of nothing.
“Not yet, not that I’ve heard,” he told her.
“Please tell me if I do—no, kick me if I do. I’ve had no one to tell me if I do or don’t,” Marion reminded him.
Marion indeed snored. Naturally Eddie would never tell her or kick her. He slept blissfully through the sound of her snoring, until the eastbound 3:22 woke them again.
“Dear God, if Ruth won’t sell us the house, I’ll take you to Toronto. I’ll take you anywhere but here,” Marion said. “Not even love could keep me here, Eddie. How do you stand it?”
“My mind has always been somewhere else,” he confessed. “Until now.” He was amazed that her scent, where he lay at her breasts, was the same one he remembered; the scent that had long evaporated from Marion’s lost pink cashmere cardigan—the same scent tha
t was on her underwear, which he had taken with him to college.
They were sound asleep again when the westbound 6:12 woke them.
“That one was westbound, wasn’t it?” Marion asked.
“Correct. You can tell by the brakes.”
After the 6:12, they made love very carefully. They’d fallen back to sleep when the eastbound 10:21 wished them a sunny, cold, clear-skied good morning.
It was Monday. Ruth and Harry had a reservation on a Tuesday-morning ferry sailing from Orient Point. The real estate agent—that hefty woman easily given to tears of failure—would let the movers in and lock up the Sagaponack house after Ruth and Harry and Graham were back in Vermont.
“It’s now or never,” Eddie said to Marion, over breakfast. “They’ll be gone tomorrow.” He could tell that Marion was nervous by how long she took to get dressed.
“Who does he look like?” Marion asked Eddie, who misunderstood her; he thought she meant who did Harry look like, but Marion was asking about Graham. Eddie had understood that Marion was afraid of seeing Ruth, but Marion was also afraid of seeing Graham.
Fortunately (in Eddie’s opinion), Graham had been spared Allan’s lupine appearance; the boy definitely looked more like Ruth.
“Graham looks like his mother,” Eddie said, but that wasn’t what Marion had meant, either. She’d meant which of her boys did Graham resemble, or did he resemble either of them? It wasn’t Graham himself whom Marion was afraid of seeing—it was any reincarnation of Thomas or Timothy.
The grief over lost children never dies; it is a grief that relents only a little. And then only after a long while. “Please be specific, Eddie. Would you say that Graham looks more like Thomas or like Timothy? I just need to be prepared for him,” Marion said.
Eddie wished he could say that Graham looked like neither Thomas nor Timothy, but Eddie had a better memory of the photographs of Ruth’s dead brothers than Ruth had. In Graham’s round face, and in his widely spaced dark eyes, there was that babylike sense of wonder and expectation that Marion’s younger son had reflected.
“Graham looks like Timothy,” Eddie admitted.
“Just a little like Timothy, I suppose,” Marion said, but Eddie knew it was another question.
“No, a lot. He looks a lot like Timothy,” Eddie told her.
This morning Marion had chosen the same long gray skirt, but a different cashmere crewneck; it was burgundy-colored, and in place of a scarf she wore a simple necklace—a thin platinum chain with a single bright-blue sapphire that matched her eyes.
First she’d put her hair up; now she let it down on her shoulders, with a tortoiseshell band to keep it off her face. (It was a windy day, cold but beautiful.) Finally, when she thought she was ready for the meeting, Marion refused to wear a coat. “I’m sure we won’t be standing outside for long,” she said.
Eddie tried to distract her from the momentousness of the meeting by discussing how they might remodel Ruth’s house.
“Since you don’t like stairs, we could convert Ted’s former workroom into a downstairs bedroom,” Eddie started to say. “The bathroom across the front hall could be enlarged, and if we made the kitchen entrance the main entrance to the house, then the downstairs bedroom would be pretty private.” He wanted to keep talking—anything to distract her from imagining how much Graham might resemble Timothy.
“Between climbing the stairs and sleeping in Ted’s so-called work room . . . well, I’ll have to think about that,” Marion told him. “It might eventually feel like a personal triumph, to be sleeping in the very room where my former husband seduced so many unfortunate women—not to mention where he drew them and photographed them. That might be most pleasurable, now that I think of it.” Marion had suddenly brightened to the idea. “To be loved in that room—even, later, to be cared for in that room. Yes, why not? Even to die in that room would be okay with me. But what do we do with the goddamn squash court?” she then asked him.
Marion hadn’t known that Ruth had already converted the second floor of the barn—Marion also hadn’t known that Ted had died there. She’d known only that he’d committed suicide in the barn, by carbonmonoxide poisoning; she’d always assumed that he’d been in his car, not in the goddamn squash court.
These and other trivial details preoccupied Eddie and Marion as they turned off Ocean Road in Bridgehampton; they took Sagaponack Road to Sagg Main Street. It was almost midday, and the sun fell on Marion’s fair skin, which was still remarkably smooth; the sun caused her to shade her eyes with her hand, before Eddie reached across her and lowered the sun visor. The bright-yellow hexagon of incalculable light shone like a beacon in her right eye; in the sun, this spot of gold turned her right eye from blue to green, and Eddie knew that he would never again be separated from her.
“Till death do us part, Marion,” he said.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Marion told him. She put her thin left hand on his right thigh, and kept it there while Eddie turned right off Sagg Main onto Parsonage Lane.