A Widow for One Year

“So . . .” Ruth said, “tell me what dead is.”

“Ruthie, listen to me . . .”

“Okay,” Ruth said.

“When you look at Thomas and Timothy in the photographs, do you remember the stories of what they were doing?” her father asked her. “In the pictures, I mean—do you remember what they were doing in the pictures?”

“Yes,” Ruth answered, although she wasn’t sure she could remember what they were doing in every picture.

“Well, then . . . Thomas and Timothy are alive in your imagination, ” her father told her. “When you’re dead, when your body is broken, it just means that we can’t see your body anymore—your body is gone.”

“It’s under the ground,” Ruth corrected him.

“We can’t see Thomas and Timothy anymore,” her father insisted, “but they are not gone from our imaginations. When we think of them, we see them there.”

“They’re just gone from this world,” Ruth said. (For the most part, she was repeating what she’d heard before.) “They’re in another world?”

“Yes, Ruthie.”

“Am I going to get dead?” the four-year-old asked. “Will I get all broken?”

“Not for a long, long time!” her father said. “ I’m going to get broken before you are, and not even I am going to get broken for a long, long time.”

“Not for a long, long time?” the child repeated.

“I promise, Ruthie.”

“Okay,” Ruth said.

They had a conversation of this kind almost every day. With her mother, Ruth had similar conversations—only shorter. Once, when Ruth had mentioned to her father that thinking about Thomas and Timothy made her sad, her father had admitted that he too was sad.

Ruth had said: “But Mommy’s sadder.”

“Well . . . yes,” Ted had said.

And so Ruth lay awake in the house with something crawling between the walls, something bigger than a mouse, and she listened to the only sound that would ever succeed in comforting her—at the same time that it made her melancholic. This was before she even knew what “melancholic” meant. It was the sound of a typewriter—the sound of storytelling. In her life as a novelist, Ruth would never be converted to the computer; she would write either in longhand or with a typewriter that made the most old-fashioned noise of all the typewriters she could find.

She did not know then (that summer ni

ght in 1958) that her father was beginning what would be her favorite of his stories. He would work on it all that summer; it would be the only piece of writing that Ted Cole’s soon-to-arrive writer’s assistant, Eddie O’Hare, would actually get to “assist” Ted with. And while none of Ted Cole’s books for children would ever enjoy the commercial success or the international renown of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, the book Ted began that night was the one Ruth would like the best. It was called, of course, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, and it would always be special to Ruth because she was its inspiration.

Unhappy Mothers

Ted Cole’s books for children could not be categorized with respect to the age of his audience. The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was marketed as a book to be read aloud to children between the ages of four and six; the book succeeded in that market, as did Ted’s later books. But, for example, twelve-year-olds often experienced a second appreciation of Ted Cole. These more sophisticated readers frequently wrote to the author, telling him that they used to think he was a writer for children—that is, before they discovered the deeper levels of meaning in his books. These letters, which displayed a variety of competence and incompetence in penmanship and spelling, became the virtual wallpaper in Ted’s workroom.

He called it his “workroom”; later Ruth would wonder if this didn’t define her father’s opinion of himself more sharply than she’d perceived it as a child. The room was never called a “studio,” because her father had long ago stopped thinking of his books as art; yet a “ workroom” was more pretentious-sounding than an “office,” which it was also never called, because her father appeared to have considerable pride in his creativity. He was sensitive to the widely held belief that his books were merely a business. Later Ruth would realize that it was his ability to draw that her father valued more than his writing, although no one would have said that The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls or Ted Cole’s other books for children were successful or distinguished because of the illustrations.

Compared to whatever magic existed in the stories themselves, which were always scary and short and lucidly written, the illustrations were rudimentary—and there were too few of them, in every publisher’s opinion. Yet Ted’s audience, those millions of children from four to fourteen, and sometimes slightly older—not to mention the millions of young mothers who were the principal buyers of Ted Cole’s books—never complained. These readers could never have guessed that Ruth’s father spent much more time drawing than he spent writing; there were hundreds of drawings for every illustration that appeared in his books. As for his storytelling, for which he was famous . . . well, Ruth was accustomed to hearing the typewriter only at night.

Imagine poor Eddie O’Hare. In 1958, on a summery June morning, he was standing near the Pequod Avenue docks in New London, Connecticut, waiting for the ferry that would bring him to Orient Point, Long Island. Eddie was thinking about his job as a writer’s assistant, never suspecting that there would be precious little writing involved. (Eddie had never contemplated a career in the graphic arts.)

Ted Cole was alleged to have dropped out of Harvard to attend a not very prestigious art school—truly, a design school that was chiefly populated with students of mediocre talent and modest ambitions in the commercial arts. He never gave etching or lithography a chance; he preferred just plain drawing. He used to say that darkness was his favorite color.

Ruth would always associate her father’s physical appearance with pencils and erasers. There were black and gray smudges on his hands, and eraser crumbs were a constant accessory to his clothes. But Ted’s more permanent identifying marks—even when he was freshly bathed and cleanly dressed—were his ink-stained fingers. His choice of ink would change from book to book. “Is this a black book or a brown one, Daddy?” Ruth would ask him.

The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was a black book—the original drawings were in India ink, Ted’s favorite black. A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound would be a brown book, which was responsible for the prevailing odor of the summer of 1958—Ted’s favorite brown was fresh squid ink, which, although more black than brown, is sepia-like in tone and has (under certain conditions) a fishy smell.

Ted’s experiments with keeping the squid ink fresh were a strain on his already strained relationship with Marion, who learned to avoid the blackened jars in the refrigerator; they were also in the freezer, where they stood perilously close to the ice trays. (Later that same summer, Ted tried preserving the ink in the ice trays—with comedic, if harrowing, results.)