A Widow for One Year

“I was brave?” the four-year-old asked.

“You were—you are brave,” Eddie told her.

“What does brave mean?” Ruth asked him.

“It means that you don’t cry,” Eddie said.

“I cried a little,” Ruth pointed out.

“A little is okay,” Eddie told her. “ Brave means that you accept what happens to you—you just try to make the best of it.”

“Tell me more about the cut,” the child said.

“When the doctor took out the stitches, the scar was thin and white and a perfect straight line,” Eddie told her. “In the whole rest of your life, if you ever need to feel brave, just look at your scar.”

Ruth stared at it. “Will it always be there?” she asked Eddie.

“Always,” he told her. “Your hand will grow bigger, and your finger will grow bigger, but the scar will stay the same size. When you’re all grown up, the scar will look smaller, but that will be because the rest of you has grown bigger—the scar will always be the same. It will just not be as noticeable, which means that it will become harder and harder to see. You’ll have to show it to people in good light, and you’ll have to say, ‘Can you see my scar?’ And they’ll have to look really closely; only then will they be able to see it. You’ll always be able to see it because you’ll know where to look. And, of course, it will always show up on a fingerprint.”

“What’s a fingerprint?” Ruth asked.

“It’s kind of hard to show you while we’re in the car,” Eddie said.

When they got to the beach, Ruth asked him again, but even in the wet sand, Ruth’s fingers were too small to leave clear fingerprints—or else the sand was too coarse. As Ruth played in the shallow water, the yellow-brown antiseptic was completely washed away; but the scar remained a bright white line on her finger. Not until they went to a restaurant could she see what a fingerprint was.

There, on the same plate with her grilled-cheese sandwich and her French fries, Eddie poured out a spreading puddle of ketchup. He dipped the index finger of Ruth’s right hand in the ketchup and gently pressed her finger on a paper napkin. Beside the fingerprint of her right index finger, Eddie made a second print—this time using the index finger from Ruth’s left hand. Eddie told her to look at the napkin through her water glass, which magnified the fingerprints so that Ruth could see the unmatched whorls. And there it was—as it would be, forever: the perfectly vertical line on her right index finger; seen through the water glass, it was nearly twice the size of the scar itself.

“Those are your fingerprints—nobody else will ever have fingerprints like yours,” Eddie told her.

“And my scar will always be there?” Ruth asked him again.

“Your scar will be a part of you forever,” Eddie promised her.

After their lunch in Bridgehampton, Ruth wanted to keep the napkin with her fingerprints. Eddie put it in the envelope with her stitches and her scab. He saw that the scab had shriveled up; it was a quarter the size of a ladybug, but of a similar russet color and spotted black.

At about 2:15 on that Friday afternoon, Eddie O’Hare turned onto Parsonage Lane, Sagaponack. When he was still some distance from the Coles’ house, he was relieved to see that the moving truck and Marion’s Mercedes were nowhere in sight. However, an unfamiliar car—a dark-green Saab—was parked in the driveway. As Eddie slowed the Chevy to a crawl, Ted, the obdurate womanizer, was saying goodbye to the three women in the Saab.

Ted had already shown his workroom to his future models—Mrs. Mountsier and her daughter, Glorie. Effie had refused to leave the backseat of the car. Poor Effie was ahead of her time: she was a young woman of integrity and insight and intelligence, trapped in a body that most men either ignored or spurned; of the three women in the dark-green Saab on that Friday afternoon, Effie was the only one with the wisdom to see that Ted Cole was as deceitful as a damaged condom.

For a heart-stopping second Eddie thought that the driver of the dark-green Saab was Marion, but as Eddie turned into the driveway he saw that Mrs. Mountsier did not as closely resemble Marion as he’d thought. For just a second, Eddie had hoped that Marion had had a change of heart. She’s not leaving Ruth, he thought—or me . But Mrs. Mountsier was not Marion; nor did Mrs. Mountsier’s daughter, Glorie, resemble Alice—the pretty college-girl nanny whom Eddie despised. (Eddie had also jumped to the conclusion that Glorie was Alice.) Now Eddie realized that they were merely a bunch of women who’d given Ted a ride home. The boy wondered which one Ted had taken an interest in—certainly not the one in the backseat.

As the dark-green Saab pulled out of the driveway, Eddie could instantly tell from Ted’s innocent, only mildly puzzled expression that he didn’t know Marion was gone.

“Daddy! Daddy!” Ruth cried. “Do you want to see my stitches? There are four pieces. And I got a scab. Show Daddy the scab!” the four-year-old told Eddie, who handed Ted the envelope.

“Those are my fingerprints,” the child explained to her father. He was staring at the paper napkin with the ketchup stains.

“Careful the scab doesn’t blow away in the wind,” Eddie warned Ted. The scab was so small that Ted peered at it without taking it out of the envelope.

“That’s really neat, Ruthie,” Ruth’s father said. “So . . . you were at the doctor, getting her stitches taken out?” Ted asked Eddie.

“And we went to the beach, and we had lunch,” Ruth told her father. “I had a grilled-cheese sandwich and French fries with ketchup. And Eddie showed me my fingerprints. I’m going to keep my scar forever.”

“That’s nice, Ruthie.” Ted was watching Eddie take the beach bag out of the Chevy. On top were the pages of stationery from the frame shop in Southampton—the story of the summer of ’58, which Eddie had written for Penny Pierce. Seeing the pages gave Eddie an idea. He went to the trunk of the Chevy and took out the rematted, reframed photograph of Marion in Paris. Ted was now watching Eddie’s every move with increasing unease.

“I see the photograph was ready, finally,” Ted observed.