The clam-truck driver once more extended his beer bottle beyond the pilothouse wall; the bottle, which was now empty, tooted at a lower pitch than before. The ferry slowed as it approached the slip.
Eddie and the driver walked to the bow of the upper deck, where they faced into the wind. Eddie’s mother and father were waving madly from the docks; their dutiful son waved back. Both Minty and Dot were weeping; they hugged each other and wiped each other’s wet faces, as if Eddie were returning safely from a war. Rather than feel his usual embarrassment, or even the slightest shame at his parents’ hysterical behavior, Eddie realized how much he loved them and how fortunate he was to have the kind of parents Ruth Cole would never know.
Then the gangplank chains, lowering the ferry’s ramp, commenced their usual loud grinding; the stevedores were shouting to one another above the clamor. “Nice talking to you, kid!” the clam-truck driver was calling.
Eddie took what he imagined was a last look out of the harbor at the choppy water of Long Island Sound. He had no idea that the trip on the Cross Sound Ferry would one day be as familiar to him as passing through the doorway of the Main Academy Building, under that Latin inscription which bid him to come hither and become a man.
“Edward! My Edward!” his father was bawling. Eddie’s mom was weeping too copiously to speak. One look at them and Eddie knew that he could never tell them what had happened to him. With more powers of premonition than he possessed, Eddie might—at this very moment—have recognized his limitations as a fiction writer: he would always be an unreliable liar. Not only could he never tell his parents the truth about his relationship with Ted and Marion and Ruth; neither could he make up a satisfying lie.
Eddie would lie largely by omission, saying simply that it had been a sad summer for him because Mr. and Mrs. Cole were caught up in the prelude to a divorce; now Marion had left Ted with the little girl, and that was that. A more challenging opportunity to lie would present itself to Eddie when his mother discovered Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan hanging in her son’s closet.
Eddie’s lie was more spontaneous and more convincing than most of what was imperfectly imagined in his fiction. He told his mom that once when he’d been shopping with Mrs. Cole, she’d pointed out the sweater in an East Hampton boutique and had told him that she’d always liked the particular garment and had hoped her husband would buy it for her; now that they were divorcing, Mrs. Cole had implied to Eddie, there was good reason for her husband to save his money.
Eddie had returned to the store and bought the expensive sweater. But Mrs. Cole had left—the marriage, the house, her child, everything — before Eddie had had the chance to give the sweater to her! Eddie told his mother that he wanted to keep the sweater in case he ever ran into Marion again.
Dot O’Hare had been proud of her son for his kind gesture. To Eddie’s embarrassment, Dot would occasionally display the pink cashmere cardigan to their faculty friends—the tale of Eddie’s thoughtfulness toward the unhappy Mrs. Cole was Dot’s idea of good dinner-party conversation. And Eddie’s lie would further backfire. In the summer of ’60, when Eddie was falling short of making love to Penny Pierce the requisite sixty times, Dot O’Hare would meet a woman among the Exeter faculty wives who was just the right size for Marion’s sweater. When Eddie came home from Long Island that second time, his mom had given Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan away.
It was lucky for Eddie that his mother never found Marion’s lilac-colored camisole and matching panties, which Eddie kept buried in the drawer containing his athletic supporters and his squash shorts. It is doubtful that Dot O’Hare would have congratulated her son for his “thoughtfulness” in buying Mrs. Cole such suggestive underwear.
At the docks in New London, on that Saturday in August ’58, there was something in the firmness of Eddie’s embrace that persuaded Minty to give his son the keys to the car. There was not a word about the traffic that lay ahead of them being “different from Exeter traffic.” Minty wasn’t worried; he saw that Eddie had matured. (“Joe—he’s all grown up!” Dot whispered to her husband.)
Minty had parked the car at some distance from the docks, near the station platform for the New London railroad depot. After a small fuss between them concerning whether Dot or Minty would ride in the passenger seat and be Eddie’s “navigator” for the long ride home, Eddie’s parents settled into the car as trustingly as children. There was no question that Eddie was in charge.
Only when he was leaving the railroad-depot parking lot did Eddie spot Marion’s tomato-red Mercedes; it was parked within easy walking distance of the station platform. Probably the keys were already in the mail to her lawyer, who would repeat to Ted the list of Marion’s demands.
So she had probably not gone to New York. This awareness came as no more than a mild surprise to Eddie. And if Marion had left her car at the train station in New London, this didn’t necessarily mean she had gone back to New England—she might have been heading farther north. (Montreal, maybe. Eddie knew she could speak French.)
But what was she thinking? Eddie wondered, as he would wonder about Marion for thirty-seven years. What was she doing? Where had she gone?
II
FALL
1990
Eddie at Forty-Eight
It was early on a
rainy Monday evening in September. Eddie O’Hare stood stiffly at the bar in the tap room of the New York Athletic Club. He was forty-eight, his formerly dark-brown hair was heavily streaked with silver-gray, and—because he was trying to read while standing at the bar—a thick lock of his hair kept flopping over one of his eyes. He kept brushing his hair back, his long fingers like a comb. He never carried a comb, and his hair had a fluffy, just-washed wildness to it; it was the only wild thing about him, really.
Eddie was tall and thin. Sitting or standing, he squared his shoulders in an unnatural way; his body maintained a tense, almost military overerectness. He suffered from chronic lower back pain. He had just lost three straight games of squash to a little bald man named Jimmy. Eddie could never remember Jimmy’s last name. Jimmy was retired— he was rumored to be in his seventies—and he spent every afternoon at the New York Athletic Club, waiting for pickup squash games with younger players whose would-be opponents had stood them up.
Eddie, who was drinking a Diet Coke—it was all he ever drank— had lost to Jimmy before; naturally he’d been stood up before, too. Eddie had a few close friends in New York, but none of them played squash. He’d become a member of the club only three years earlier, in 1987, upon the publication of his fourth novel, Sixty Times . Despite favorable (if tepid) reviews, the novel’s subject matter had not appealed to the only member of the Membership Committee who’d read it. Another member on the committee had confided to Eddie that Eddie’s membership had finally been approved because of his name, not because of his novels. (There had been a long history of O’Hares at the New York Athletic Club, although none of them were related to Eddie.)
Still, despite what Eddie perceived as the selective, grudging friendliness of the club, he enjoyed being a member. It was an inexpensive place to stay whenever he came into the city. For almost ten years now, since the publication of his third novel, Leaving Long Island, Eddie came into the city fairly frequently—if only for a night or two. In ’81, he had bought his first and only house—in Bridgehampton, about a fiveminute drive from Ted Cole’s house in Sagaponack. In his nine years as a taxpaying resident of Suffolk County, Eddie had not once driven by Ted’s house on Parsonage Lane.
Eddie’s house was on Maple Lane—so close to the Bridgehampton railroad station that Eddie could walk to the train, which he rarely did. Eddie hated trains. The trains passed so close to his house that Eddie sometimes felt he lived on a train. And although the real estate agent herself had admitted to Eddie that his Maple Lane location left something to be desired, the house had been affordable and was not so innocuous that Eddie had ever failed to rent it. Eddie hated the Hamptons in July and August; he made an exorbitant amount of money by renting his thoroughly modest house in those lunatic months.
With what he made from his writing and from the summer rentals, Eddie needed to teach only one semester every academic year. At one college or university or another, he was a perpetual visiting writer-in-residence. Eddie was also doomed to travel to various writers’ conferences, and every summer he needed to find a cheaper summer rental than what he charged for his house in the Hamptons. Yet Eddie would never have complained about his circumstances; he was well liked on the teaching-writing circuit, where he could be relied upon not to sleep with the students. Not with the younger students, anyway.
True to his declaration to Marion thirty-two years ago, Eddie O’Hare had never slept with a woman his own age—or younger. Although many of the writing students who attended the writers’ conferences were older women—divorcées and widows who had turned to writing as a form of therapy—no one thought of these women as innocent or in need of protection from the sexual inclinations of the teaching-writing faculty. Besides, in Eddie’s case, it was always the older women who made the first advances; his reputation preceded him.
All things considered, Eddie was a man who’d made very few enemies; there were only those older women who took offense that he’d written about them. But they were wrong to take Eddie’s older-women characters so personally. He had merely used their bodies and their hair, their gestures and their favorite expressions. And the undying love that each of Eddie’s younger men felt for each of Eddie’s older women was always a version of what Eddie felt for Marion; he had not felt such a love for any of the older women since.
As a novelist, he’d merely borrowed the locations of their apartments and the feel of their clothes; sometimes he used the upholstery of their living-room couches—once the rosebush pattern of a lonely librarian’s sheets and pillowcases, but not the librarian herself. (Not exactly, although he had borrowed the mole on her left breast.)
And if Eddie had made enemies of these few older women who saw versions of themselves in one or another of his four novels, he’d also made lasting friends among many older women—including several he had once slept with. A woman once told Eddie that she was suspicious of any man who remained a friend of former lovers; it must mean that he was never much of a lover, or nothing more than a nice guy. But Eddie O’Hare had long ago made peace with himself on the subject of his being “nothing more than a nice guy”; countless women had told Eddie that he could hang his hat on being a nice guy. (There were so few of them, the women said.)