A Widow for One Year

The episode prompted the first clarifying response from Ted. With unflinching hypocrisy, Ted chose the moment when Eddie was driving him to Southampton for a visit with Mrs. Vaughn. “I presume it was Marion’s mistake,” Ted stated, “but that surely was a mistake for the two of you—to let Ruth see you together.” Eddie said nothing.

“I’m not threatening you, Eddie,” Ted added, “but I must tell you that you may be called upon to testify.”

“Testify?” the sixteen-year-old said.

“In the event of a custody dispute, regarding which of us is more fit as a parent,” Ted replied. “I would never let a child see me with another woman, whereas Marion really has made no effort to protect Ruth from seeing . . . what she saw. And if you were called upon to testify to what happened, I trust that you wouldn’t lie —not in a court of law.” But Eddie still said nothing.

“From the sound of it, it was a rear-entry position—mind you, not that I have a personal problem with that, or with any other position,” Ted was quick to say, “but for a child I imagine that doing it doggishly must seem especially . . . animalistic.” For only a second did Eddie imagine that Marion had told Ted; then Eddie realized, with a sinking feeling, that Ted had been talking to Ruth.

Marion concluded that Ted must have been asking Ruth all along, from the very beginning: Had the child seen Eddie and her mother together? And if together, how together? Suddenly, everything that Marion had misunderstood was clear.

“So that’s why he hired you!” she cried. He’d known that Marion would take Eddie as a lover, and that Eddie could never have resisted her. But that Ted thought he knew Marion that well was contradicted by the fact that Ted didn’t know her well enough to understand that she would never have battled him for custody of Ruth. Marion had always known that the child was lost to her. She had never wanted Ruth.

Now Marion was insulted that Ted didn’t think well enough of her to realize that she would never claim—not even in passing conversation, not to mention in a court of law—that Ruth would be better off with her mother than with her deceitful, feckless father. Even Ted would do a better job with the child than Marion could do, or so Marion thought.

“I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do, Eddie,” Marion told the boy. “Don’t worry. Ted’s not going to make you testify to anything— there isn’t going to be any court of law. I know a lot more about Ted than he knows about me.”

For a seemingly endless three days, they couldn’t make love because Marion had an infection—sex was painful for her. She nevertheless lay beside Eddie and held his face against her breasts while he masturbated to his heart’s content. Marion teased Eddie by asking him if he didn’t like masturbating next to her nearly as much (if not more) than making love to her. When Eddie denied this, Marion teased him further; she sincerely doubted that the women in his future would be as understanding of his preference as she was. She found it rather sweet, she told him.

But Eddie protested: he couldn’t imagine that he would ever be interested in other women. “Other women will be interested in you,” Marion told the boy. “They may not be secure enough about themselves to let you masturbate, instead of demanding that you make love to them. I’m just warning you, as a friend. Girls your own age are going to find it neglectful of you.”

“I will never be interested in girls my own age,” said Eddie O’Hare, with the kind of misery in his voice that Marion had grown fond of. And although Marion teased Eddie about this, too, it would turn out to be true. He never would be interested in a woman his own age. (This was not necessarily a disservice that Marion had done him.)

“You just have to trust me, Eddie,” she told him. “You mustn’t be afraid of Ted. I know exactly what we’re going to do.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. He lay with his face pressed against her breasts, knowing that his time with her was coming to an end—for how could it not end? In less than a month he would be back at Exeter; not even a sixteen-year-old could imagine maintaining a thirty-nine-year-old mistress under boarding-school rules.

“Ted thinks that you’re his pawn, Eddie,” Marion told the boy. “But you’re my pawn, not Ted’s.”

“Okay,” Eddie said, but Eddie O’Hare did not yet realize the extent to which he truly was a pawn in the culminating discord of a twenty-two-year marital war.

Ruth’s Right Eye

For a pawn, Eddie asked a lot of questions. When Marion had recovered sufficiently from her infection so that they could make love again, Eddie asked her about what sort of “infection” she’d had.

“It was a bladder infection,” she told him. She was still more of a natural mother than she knew—she spared him the potentially upsetting news that the infection had been the result of his repeated sexual attentions.

They had just finished making love in the position that Marion favored. She liked sitting on Eddie—“riding” him, Marion called it— because she enjoyed seeing his face. It was not only that Eddie’s expressions haunted her pleasantly because of their ceaseless associations with Thomas and Timothy. It was also that Marion had begun the process of saying good-bye to the boy, who had affected her more intimately than she’d ever thought he would.

She knew, of course, how stron

gly she had affected him—this worried her. But in looking at him, and in making love to him—especially in looking at him while making love to him—Marion imagined that she could see her sexual life, which had been so ardently (albeit briefly) rekindled, coming to an end.

She had not told Eddie that, before him, she’d never had sex with anyone except Ted. Nor had she told Eddie that she’d had sex with Ted only once since her sons had died, and that one time—entirely at Ted’s initiation—had been strictly for the purpose of getting her pregnant. (She had not wanted to get pregnant, but she’d been too despondent to resist.) And since Ruth had been born, Marion had not been tempted to have sex at all. With Eddie, what had begun on Marion’s part as a kindness toward a shy boy—in whom she saw so much of her sons—had blossomed into a relationship that had been deeply rewarding to her. But if Marion had been surprised by the excitement and gratification Eddie had provided, her enjoyment of the boy had nevertheless not persuaded her to alter her plans.

She was leaving more than Ted and Ruth. In saying good-bye to Eddie O’Hare, she was also saying good-bye to a sexual life of any kind. Here she was, saying good-bye to sex, when, for the first time, at thirty-nine, she was finding sex pleasurable!

If Marion and Eddie were the same height in the summer of ’58, Marion was aware that she outweighed him; Eddie was excruciatingly thin. In the top position, bearing down on the boy, Marion felt that all her weight and strength were concentrated in her hips; with Eddie pinned beneath her, Marion sometimes felt that it was she who was penetrating him . Indeed, the motion of her hips was the only motion between them—Eddie wasn’t strong enough to lift her weight off him. There was an instant when Marion not only felt as if she’d entered the boy’s body; she was fairly certain she had paralyzed him.

When she could tell by how he held his breath that he was about to come, she would drop her weight on his chest and, holding tight to his shoulders, roll him on top of her, because she couldn’t stand to see the look that transformed his face when he came. There was something too close to the anticipation of pain in it. Marion could hardly bear to hear him whimper—and he whimpered every time. It was the sound of a child crying out in a half-sleep before falling sound asleep again. Only this repeated split second, in her entire relationship with Eddie, ever caused Marion a half-moment of doubt. When the boy made this infantile sound, it made Marion feel guilty.

Afterward, Eddie lay on his side with his face against her breasts; Marion ran her fingers through the boy’s hair. Even then, Marion could not stop herself from making a critical observation of Eddie’s haircut—she made a mental note to tell the barber to take a little less off the back next time. Then she revised her mental note. The summer was running out; there would be no “next time.”

That was when Eddie asked his second question of the night. “Tell me about the accident,” he said. “I mean, do you know how it happened? Was it anybody’s fault?”

A second before, pulsing against his temple, he had felt her heart beating through her breast. But now it seemed to Eddie that Marion’s heart had stopped. When he lifted his head to look at her face, she was already turning her back to him. This time there wasn’t even the slightest shaking of her shoulders; her spine was straight, her back rigid, her shoulders square. He came around the bed and knelt beside her and looked into her eyes, which were open but distant; her lips, which, when she slept, were full and parted, were thin and closed.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie whispered. “I’ll never ask you again.” But Marion remained as she was—her face a mask, her body a stone.