A Widow for One Year

A Sound Like Someone

Trying Not to Make a Sound

Eddie O’Hare paid little attention to the many conversations in the Exeter community concerning how the Coles were “coping” with the tragic loss of their sons; even five years after the fact, these conversations were a mainstay of the faculty dinner parties given by Minty O’Hare and his gossip-hungry wife. Eddie’s mother was named Dorothy, but everyone—except Eddie’s father, who eschewed nicknames—called her “Dot.”

Eddie was not a gossip maven. He was, however, an adequate student; the boy prepared himself for his summer job as a writer’s assistant with the kind of homework he imagined was more essential to the task than memorizing the media accounts of the tragedy would be.

If Eddie had missed the news that the Coles had had another child, this news did not escape Minty and Dot O’Hare’s notice: that Ted Cole was an Exeter alumnus (’31), and that his sons had both been Exeter students at the time of their deaths, was sufficient to give all the Coles an Exeter connection forever. Furthermore, Ted Cole was a famous Exonian; the senior O’Hares, if not Eddie, were egregiously impressed by fame.

That Ted Cole was among North America’s best-known writers of children’s books had provided the media with a specific angle of interest in the tragedy. How does a renowned author and illustrator of books for children “deal with” the deaths of his own children? And with reports of such a personal nature, there is always the attendant gossip. Within the faculty families at Exeter, possibly Eddie O’Hare was the only one not to pay this gossip much attention. He was definitely the only member of the Exeter community to have read everything that Ted Cole had written.

Most members of Eddie’s generation—and of a half-generation before and after his—had read The Mouse Crawling

Between the Walls, or (more likely) they’d had it read to them before they were old enough to read. And a majority of the faculty and most of the Exeter students had also read some of Ted Cole’s other children’s books. But truly no one else at Exeter had read Ted’s three novels; for one thing, they were all out of print—in addition to being not very good. Yet, as a faithful Exonian, Ted Cole had given the Exeter library a first edition of each of his books and the original manuscript of everything he’d written.

Eddie might have learned more from the rumors and the gossip—at least “more” in the sense of what might have prepared him for the labors of his first summer job—but Eddie’s appetite for reading was a testimony to the earnestness with which the boy studied to be a writer’s assistant. What he didn’t know was that Ted Cole was already becoming an ex -writer.

The truth is, Ted was chronically attracted to younger women; Marion had been only seventeen, and already pregnant with Thomas, when Ted married her. At the time, Ted was twenty-three. The problem was, as Marion grew older—and although she would always be six years younger than Ted—Ted’s interest in younger women persisted.

The nostalgia for innocence in the mind of an older man was a subject that the sixteen-year-old Eddie O’Hare had encountered only in novels—and Ted Cole’s embarrassingly autobiographical novels were neither the first nor the best that Eddie had read on this subject. Yet Eddie’s critical assessment of Ted Cole’s writing did not diminish the boy’s eagerness to be Ted’s assistant. Surely one could learn an art or a craft from someone who was less than a master. At Exeter, after all, Eddie had learned a great deal from a considerable variety of teachers, most of whom were excellent. Only very few of the Exeter faculty were as boring in the classroom as Eddie’s father. Even Eddie sensed that Minty would have stood out as a representative of mediocrity at a bad school, let alone at Exeter.

As someone who’d grown up on the grounds and in the nearly constant environment of a good school, Eddie O’Hare knew that you could learn a lot from older people who were hardworking—and who adhered to certain standards. He didn’t know that Ted Cole had ceased to be hardworking, and that what remained of Ted’s questionable “standards” had been compromised by the unendurable failure of his marriage to Marion—this in combination with those unacceptable deaths.

Ted Cole’s children’s books were of more intellectual and psychological (and even emotional) interest to Eddie than the novels were. A cautionary tale for children came naturally to Ted; he could imagine and express their fears—he could satisfy children. Had Thomas and Timothy lived into adulthood, they would doubtless have been disappointed in their father. And it was only as an adult that Ruth Cole would be disappointed in Ted; as a child, she loved him.

At sixteen, Eddie O’Hare was suspended somewhere between childhood and adulthood. In Eddie’s opinion, there was no better beginning to any story than the first sentence of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls: “Tom woke up, but Tim did not.” In Ruth Cole’s life as a writer—and she would be a better writer than her father, in every way—she would always envy that sentence. And she would never forget the first time she heard it, which was long before she knew it was the first sentence of a famous book.

It happened that same summer of ’58, when Ruth was four—it was just before Eddie came to stay with them. This time it was not the sound of lovemaking that woke her—it was a sound that she’d carried into wakefulness from a dream. In Ruth’s dream, her bed had been shaking; when she awakened, she was shaking—therefore, her bed seemed to be shaking, too. And for a second or more, even when Ruth was wide-awake, the sound from her dream had persisted. Then it abruptly stopped. It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.

“Daddy!” Ruth whispered. She’d remembered (this time) that it was her father’s turn to stay with her, but her whisper was so soft that she couldn’t hear her own voice. Besides, Ted Cole slept like a stone. Like most heavy drinkers, he didn’t fall asleep, he passed out—at least until four or five in the morning, when he could never get back to sleep again.

Ruth crept out of her bed and tiptoed through the master bathroom to the master bedroom, where her father lay smelling of whiskey or gin—as strongly as a car smells of motor oil and gasoline in a closed garage.

“Daddy!” she said again. “I had a dream. I heard a sound.”

“What sort of a sound was it, Ruthie?” her father asked; he hadn’t moved, but he was awake.

“It got into the house,” Ruth said.

“The sound ?”

“It’s in the house, but it’s trying to be quiet,” Ruth explained.

“Let’s go look for it, then,” her father said. “A sound that’s trying to be quiet. I’ve got to see this.”

He picked her up and carried her into the long upstairs hall. There were more photographs of Thomas and Timothy in the upstairs hall than in any other part of the house, and when Ted turned on the hall lights, Ruth’s dead brothers seemed to be begging for her attention— like a row of princes seeking the favor of a princess.

“Where are you, sound?” Ted called.

“Look in the guest rooms,” Ruth replied.

Her father carried her to the far end of the hall; there were three guest bedrooms with two guest bathrooms—each with more photos. They turned on all the lights, and looked in the closets and behind the shower curtains.

“Come out, sound!” Ted commanded.

“Come out, sound!” Ruth repeated.

“Maybe it’s downstairs,” her father suggested.