A Widow for One Year

But just who did this teenager think he was? Who was he to say he wasn’t leaving without the photograph?

“He’s scary,” the fool salesgirl repeated.

Penny Pierce’s divorce lawyer had taught her one thing: don’t let anyone who’s angry talk —make them put it in writing. She’d carried this policy with her into the framing business, which her ex-husband had bought for her as a part of the divorce settlement.

Before Mrs. Pierce confronted Eddie, she instructed the boy in the workroom to stop what he was doing and immediately remat and reframe the photograph of Marion in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire. Penny Pierce had not seen this particular photo in—what was it now?—about five years. Mrs. Pierce remembered Marion bringing in all the snapshots; some of the negatives were scratched. When the boys had been alive, the old pictures of them had been taken for granted and had not been very well cared for. After the boys had died, Penny Pierce assumed, almost every snapshot of them had struck Marion as worthy of enlarging and framing—scratched or not.

Knowing the story of the accident, Mrs. Pierce had not been able to restrain herself from looking closely at all the photographs. “Oh, it’s this one,” she said when she saw the picture of Marion in bed with her boys’ feet. What had always struck Penny Pierce about this photograph was the evidence of Marion’s distinct happiness—in addition to her unmatched beauty. And now Marion’s beauty was unchanged while her happiness had fled. This fact about Marion was universally striking to other women. While neither beauty nor happiness had entirely abandoned Penny Pierce, she felt that she’d never known either to the extent that Marion had.

Mrs. Pierce gathered a dozen or more sheets of stationery from her desk before she approached Eddie. “I understand that you’re angry. I’m very sorry about that,” she said pleasantly to the handsome sixteen-year-old, who looked to her incapable of frightening anyone. (I have got to get better help, Penny Pierce was thinking to herself as she went on, visually underestimating Eddie. The closer she looked at him, the more she thought he was too pretty to qualify as handsome.) “When my customers are angry, I ask them to voice their complaints in writing—if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Pierce added, again pleasantly. The sixteen-year-old saw that the manager had presented him with paper and a pen.

“I work for Mr. Cole. I’m a writer’s assistant,” Eddie said.

“Then you won’t mind writing, will you?” Penny Pierce replied.

Eddie picked up the pen. The manager smiled at him encouragingly—she was neither beautiful nor brimming with happiness, but she was nevertheless not un attractive and she was good-natured. No, he wouldn’t mind writing, Eddie realized. It was exactly the invitation that Eddie needed; it was what his voice, long trapped inside him, wanted. He wanted to write. After all, that was why he had sought the job. What he’d got, instead of writing, was Marion. Now that he was losing her, he was finding what he’d wanted before the summer started.

And it wasn’t Ted who’d taught him anything. What Eddie O’Hare had learned from Ted Cole, he’d learned from reading him. It was from just a few sentences that any writer learned anything from another writer. From The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, Eddie had learned somethin

g from only two sentences. The first one was this: “Tom woke up, but Tim did not.” And then there was this sentence: “It was a sound like, in the closet, if one of Mommy’s dresses came alive and it tried to climb down off the hanger.”

If, because of that sentence, Ruth Cole would think differently of closets and dresses for the rest of her life, Eddie O’Hare could hear the sound of that dress coming alive and climbing down off that hanger as clearly as any sound he’d ever heard; he could see the movement of that slithery dress in the half-dark of that closet in his sleep.

And from The Door in the Floor there was another first sentence that wasn’t half bad: “There was a little boy who didn’t know if he wanted to be born.” After the summer of ’58, Eddie O’Hare would finally understand how that little boy felt. There was this sentence, too: “His mommy didn’t know if she wanted him to be born, either.” It was only after he’d met Marion that Eddie understood how that mommy felt.

That Friday in the frame shop in Southampton, Eddie O’Hare had a life-changing realization: if the writer’s assistant had become a writer, it was Marion who’d given him his voice. If when he’d been in her arms—in her bed, inside her—he’d felt, for the first time, that he was almost a man, it was losing her that had given him something to say . It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O’Hare with the authority to write.

“Do you have a picture of Marion Cole in your mind?” Eddie wrote. “I mean, in your mind’s eye, can you see exactly what she looks like?” Eddie showed his first two sentences to Penny Pierce.

“Yes, of course—she’s very beautiful,” the manager said.

Eddie nodded. Then he kept on writing, as follows: “Okay. Although I am Mr. Cole’s assistant, I have been sleeping with Mrs. Cole this summer. I would estimate that Marion and I have made love about sixty times.”

“Sixty? ” Mrs. Pierce said aloud. She’d come around the countertop so that she could read what he wrote over his shoulder.

Eddie wrote: “We’ve been doing it for six, almost seven weeks, and we usually do it twice a day—often more than twice a day. But there was the time she had an infection, and we couldn’t do it. And when you take into consideration her period . . .”

“I see—about sixty times, then,” Penny Pierce said. “Go on.”

“Okay,” Eddie wrote. “While Marion and I have been lovers, Mr . Cole—his name is Ted—has had a mistress. She was his model, actually. Do you know Mrs. Vaughn?”

“The Vaughns on Gin Lane? They have quite a . . . collection,” the frame-shop manager said. (Now there was a framing job she would have liked!)

“Yes—that Mrs. Vaughn,” Eddie wrote. “She has a son, a little boy.”

“Yes, yes—I know!” said Mrs. Pierce. “Please go on.”

“Okay,” Eddie wrote. “This morning Ted—that is, Mr. Cole—has broken up with Mrs. Vaughn. I don’t imagine that there could have been a very happy resolution to their affair. Mrs. Vaughn seemed pretty upset about it. And, meanwhile, Marion is packing up—she’s leaving. Ted doesn’t know she’s leaving, but she is. And Ruth—this is Ruth, she’s four.”

“Yes, yes!” Penny Pierce interjected.

“Ruth doesn’t know her mother is leaving, either,” Eddie wrote. “Both Ruth and her father are going to go back home to the house in Sagaponack and realize that Marion is gone. And all the photographs, those pictures that you framed—every one of them, except the one you have here, in the shop.”

“Yes, yes—my God, what ?” Penny Pierce said. Ruth scowled at her. Mrs. Pierce tried her best to smile at the child.

Eddie wrote: “Marion is taking the pictures with her. When Ruth gets home, both her mother and all the pictures will be gone. Her dead brothers and her mother will be gone. And the thing about those photographs is that there’s a story that goes with all of them—there are hundreds of stories, and Ruth knows each and every one of them by heart.”

“What do you want from me?” Mrs. Pierce cried.