A Widow for One Year

“We got the feet back, Daddy! The picture is all fixed,” Ruth said.

Ted picked up his daughter and held her, kissing her forehead. “You’ve got sand in your hair, and salt water to rinse out. You need a bath, Ruthie.”

“But not a shampoo!” Ruth cried.

“Well, yes, Ruthie—you need a shampoo, too.”

“But I hate shampoos—they make me cry!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Well.” Ted stopped as usual. He couldn’t take his eyes off Eddie. To Eddie, Ted said: “I waited quite a while for you this morning. Where were you?”

Eddie handed him the pages he’d written for Penny Pierce. “The lady in the frame shop asked me to write this,” Eddie began. “She wanted me to explain to her, in writing, why I wouldn’t leave the shop without the photograph.”

Ted didn’t take the pages, but he put Ruth down and stared at his own house. “Where’s Alice?” he asked Eddie. “Isn’t it Alice who’s here in the afternoons? Where’s the nanny? Where’s Marion ?”

“I’ll give Ruth a bath,” Eddie answered him. Once again the sixteen-year-old handed Ted the pages. “Better read this,” Eddie told him.

“Answer me, Eddie.”

“Read that first,” Eddie said. He picked up Ruth and started carrying her toward the house with the beach bag slung over his shoulder. He held Ruth with one arm, carrying the photo of Marion and the feet in his free hand.

“You haven’t given Ruth a bath before,” Ted called after him. “You don’t know how to give her a bath!”

“I can figure it out. Ruth can tell me,” Eddie called back to him. “Read that,” Eddie repeated.

“Okay, okay,” Ted told him. He started reading aloud: “ ‘Do you have a picture of Marion Cole in your mind?’ Hey! What is this?”

“It’s the only good writing I’ve done all summer,” Eddie answered, carrying Ruth inside the house. Once inside, Eddie wondered how he could get Ruth in a bath—in any of the house’s several bathtubs— without her noticing that the photographs of her dead brothers were gone.

The phone was ringing. Eddie hoped it was Alice. Still carrying Ruth, he answered the phone in the kitchen. There had never been more than three or four photos of Thomas and Timothy in the kitchen; Eddie hoped that Ruth might not notice they were gone. And, because of the ringing phone, Eddie had rushed through the front hall with Ruth in his arms. Ruth might not have noticed the darker rectangles of unfaded wallpaper; the bare walls were also distinguished by the picture hooks, which Marion had left behind.

It was Alice on the phone. Eddie told her to come over right away. Then he put Ruth over his shoulder, and—holding her tight—he ran with her up the stairs. “It’s a race to the bathtub!” Eddie said. “ Which bathtub do you want? Your mommy and daddy’s bathtub, my bathtub, another bathtub . . .”

“ Your bathtub!” Ruth shrieked.

He veered into the long upstairs hall, where he was surprised to see how vividly the picture hooks stood out against the walls. Some of the hooks were black; some were the color of gold or silver. All of them were somehow ugly. It was as if the house had suffered an infestation of metallic beetles.

“Did you saw that?” Ruth asked.

But Eddie, still running, carried her into his bedroom at the far end of the hall—and then into his bathroom, where he hung the photograph of Marion in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire exactly where it had been when the summer began.

Eddie started the bath running as he helped Ruth out of her clothes, which was a struggle because Ruth kept trying to look at the bathroom walls while Eddie was pulling her T-shirt off. Except for the photo of Marion in Paris, the walls were bare. The other photographs were missing. The naked picture hooks seemed more numerous than they were. To Eddie, the beetlelike picture hooks seemed to be crawling on the walls.

“Where are the other pictures?” Ruth asked, as Eddie lifted her into the filling tub.

“Maybe your mommy moved them,” Eddie told her. “Look at you— there’s sand between your toes, and in your hair, and in your ears!”

“It got in my crack, too—it always does,” Ruth remarked.

“Oh, yes . . .” Eddie said. “It’s a good time to have a bath, all right!”

“No shampoo,” Ruth insisted.

“But the sand is in your hair,” Eddie told her. The bathtub had a European fixture, a movable hose with which Eddie began to spray the child while she shrieked.

“No shampoo!”

“Just a little shampoo,” Eddie told her. “Just close your eyes.”