A Widow for One Year

And one of Eddie O’Hare’s earliest responsibilities—not as a writer’s assistant but as Ted Cole’s designated driver—would be to drive three quarters of an hour each way to Montauk and back; only the fish store in Montauk would save squid ink for the famous author and illustrator of children’s books. (When the fishmonger himself was beyond hearing distance, the fishmonger’s wife would repeatedly tell Eddie that she was Ted’s “biggest fan.”)

Ruth’s father’s workroom was the only room in the house where not a single photograph of Thomas or Timothy adorned the walls. Ruth wondered if maybe her father couldn’t work or think in the sight of his departed boys.

And unless her father was in his workroom, it was the only room in the house that was off-limits to Ruth. Was there anything that could hurt her in there? Was there an infinite number of sharp tools? There were countless (and swallowable) nibs for the pens, although Ruth was not a child who ever put strange objects in her mouth. But regardless of the dangers of her father’s workroom—if, indeed, there were dangers—it was unnecessary to impose any physical restraints on the four-year-old, nor was there need for a lock on the workroom door. The smell of squid ink was sufficient to keep the child out.

Marion never ventured near Ted’s workroom, but Ruth would be in her twenties before she realized that it was more than squid ink that had kept her mother away. Marion didn’t want to meet, or so much as see, Ted’s models—not even the children, for the children never came to model without their mothers. It was only after the children had modeled a half-dozen times (or more), that the mothers would come to model alone. As a child, Ruth never questioned why so few of the drawings of the mothers with their children were ever printed in any of her father’s books. Of course, since his books were for children, there were never any nudes in his books, although Ted drew a lot of nudes; those young mothers accounted for literally hundreds of drawings of nudes.

Of the nudes, her father would say: “A requisite, fundamental exercise for anyone who draws, Ruthie.” Like landscapes, she at first supposed, although Ted did few of those. Ruth used to think the reason for his relative lack of interest in landscapes might be the sameness and the extreme flatness of the land that lay like a tarmac running to the sea, or what seemed to her to be the sameness and the extreme flatness of the sea itself—not to mention the huge, frequently dull expanse of sky above.

Her father appeared to be so unconcerned with landscapes that it later surprised her when he would complain about the new houses— the “architectural monstrosities,” he called them. Without announcement, the new houses would rise up and intrude upon the flatness of the potato fields that had once been the Coles’ principal view.

“There’s no justification for a building of such experimental ugliness as that,” Ted would pronounce over dinner to anyone who’d listen. “We’re not at war. There’s no need to construct a deterrent for parachutists.” But her father’s complaint grew stale; the summer people’s architecture in that part of the world called the Hamptons was not of comparable interest—to either Ruth or her father—as the more abiding nudes.

Why young married women? Why all these young mothers ? When she was in college, Ruth was in the habit of asking her father more direct questions than at any other time in her life. It was also when she was in college that a troubling thought first occurred to her. Who else would be his models, or, more briefly, his lovers? Who else was he always

meeting? The young mothers were the ones who recognized him and approached him, of course.

“Mr. Cole? I know you—you’re Ted Cole! I just wanted to say, because my daughter is too shy, that you’re my daughter’s favorite author. You wrote her absolutely best-loved book. . . .” And then the reluctant daughter (or the embarrassed son) would be pushed forward to shake Ted’s hand. If Ted was attracted to the mother, he would suggest that the child, together with the mother, might like to model for him— maybe for the next book. (The subject of the mother posing alone, and nude, would be broached at a later time.)

“But they’re usually married women, Daddy,” Ruth would say.

“Yes . . . I guess that’s why they’re so unhappy, Ruthie.”

“If you cared about your nudes—I mean the drawings —you would have chosen professional models,” Ruth said to him. “But I guess you always cared more for the women themselves than for your nudes.”

“This is a difficult thing for a father to explain to his daughter, Ruthie. But . . . if nakedness—I mean the feeling of nakedness—is what a nude must convey, there is no nakedness that compares to what it feels like to be naked in front of someone for the first time.”

“So much for professional models,” Ruth replied. “Jesus, Daddy, do you have to?” By then she knew, of course, that he didn’t care enough about his nudes, or his portraits of the mothers with their children, to keep them; he didn’t sell them privately or give them to his gallery, either. When the affair was over—and it was usually over quickly—Ted Cole would give the accumulated drawings to the young mother of the moment. And Ruth used to ask herself: If the young mothers were, generally, so unhappily married—or just plain unhappy—did the gift of art make them, at least momentarily, happier? But her father would never have called what he did “art,” nor did he ever refer to himself as an artist. Ted didn’t call himself a writer, either.

“I’m an entertainer of children, Ruthie,” he used to say.

To which Ruth would add: “And a lover of their mothers, Daddy.”

Even in a restaurant, when the waiter or the waitress couldn’t help staring at his ink-stained fingers, this never elicited a response from Ted of the “I’m-an-artist” or the “I’m-an-author-and-illustrator-of-children’s-books” kind; rather, Ruth’s father would say, “I work with ink”—or, if the waiter or waitress had stared at his fingers in a condemning way, “I work with squid.”

As a teenager—and once or twice in her hypercritical college-student years—Ruth attended writers’ conferences with her father, who would be the one children’s book author among the presumed-to-be-more-serious fiction writers and poets. It amused Ruth that these latter types, who projected a vastly more literary aura than that aura of unattended handsomeness and ink-stained fingers which typified her father, were not only envious of the popularity of her father’s books; these ultraliterary types were also annoyed to observe how self-deprecating Ted Cole was—how enduringly modest a man he seemed !

“You began your career writing novels, didn’t you?” the nastier of the ultraliterary types might ask Ted.

“Oh, but they were terrible novels,” Ruth’s father would reply cheerfully. “It’s a miracle that so many book reviewers liked the first one. It’s a wonder it took me three of them to realize that I wasn’t a writer. I’m just an entertainer of children. And I like to draw.” He would hold up his fingers as proof; he would always smile. What a smile it was!

Ruth once reported to her college roommate (who had also been her roommate in boarding school): “I swear you could hear the women’s panties sliding to the floor.”

It was at a writers’ conference where Ruth was first confronted with the phenomenon of her father sleeping with a young woman who was even younger than she was—a fellow college student.

“I thought you’d approve of me, Ruthie,” Ted had said. When she criticized him, he often adopted a self-pitying tone of voice with her— as if she were the parent and he the child, which in a way he was .

“ Approve of you, Daddy?” she’d asked him, in a rage. “You seduce someone younger than I am, and you expect me to approve ?”

“But, Ruthie, she’s not married, ” her father had replied. “She’s nobody’s mother . I thought you’d approve of that .”

Ruth Cole the novelist would eventually come to describe her father’s line of work as “Unhappy mothers—that’s my father’s field.”

But why wouldn’t Ted have recognized an unhappy mother when he saw one? After all—at least for the first five years that followed the death of his sons—Ted lived with the unhappiest mother of them all.

Marion, Waiting

Orient Point, the tip of the north fork of Long Island, looks like what it is: the end of an island, where the land peters out. The vegetation— stunted by salt, bent by the wind—is sparse. The sand is coarse and strewn with shells and rocks. That June day in 1958 when Marion Cole was waiting for the New London ferry that was bringing Eddie O’Hare across Long Island Sound, the tide was low and Marion indifferently noted that the pilings of the ferry slip were wet where the fallen tide had exposed them; above the high-water mark, the pilings were dry. Over the empty slip, a noisy chorus of seagulls hung suspended; then the birds veered low over the water, which was ruffled and constantly changed colors in the inconsistent sun—from slate-gray to blue-green, and then to gray again. The ferry was not yet in sight.