by John Irving
“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.
Fewer than a dozen cars were parked close to the slip. Given the sun’s reluctance to linger—and the wind, which was northeasterly— most of the drivers waited in their cars. At first Marion had stood outside her car, leaning against the front fender; then she’d sat on the fender, spreading her copy of the 1958 Exeter yearbook on the hood. It was there, at Orient Point, on the hood of her car, that Marion took her first long look at the most recent photographs of Eddie O’Hare.
Marion hated to be late, and she invariably thought less of people who were. Her car was parked at the front of the line where people waited for the ferry. There was a longer line of cars in the parking lot, where people taking the return ferry to New London were also waiting; but Marion took no notice of them. Marion rarely looked at people when she was out in public, which she seldom was.
Everyone looked at her. They couldn’t help themselves. That day at Orient Point, Marion Cole was thirty-nine. She looked twenty-nine, or slightly younger. When Marion sat on the fender of her car and attempted to hold the pages of the ’58 PEAN steady in the unruly gusts from the northeast, her pretty legs, which were also long, were mostly hidden from view in a wraparound skirt of a nondescript beige color. There was, however, nothing nondescript about the fit of Marion’s skirt—it fit her perfectly. She wore an oversize white T-shirt that was tucked into the waist of the skirt, and over the T-shirt she wore an unbuttoned cashmere cardigan that was the faded-pink color of the inside of certain seashells—a pink more common to a tropical coast than to the less exotic Long Island shore.
In the stiffening breeze, Marion tugged the unbuttoned sweater snugly around her. The T-shirt fit her loosely, but she had wrapped one arm around herself and under her breasts. That she was long-waisted was apparent; that her breasts were full and pendulous, but well contoured and natural-looking, was evident, too. As for her wavy, shoulder-length hair, the on-and-off sun caused it to change color from amber to honey-blond, and her lightly tanned skin was luminous. She was almost without a flaw.
However, upon closer inspection, there was something distracting in one of her eyes. Her face was almond-shaped, as were her eyes, which were a dark blue; yet in the iris of her right eye was a hexagonal speck of the brightest yellow. It was as if a diamond chip, or a shard of ice, had fallen into her eye and now permanently reflected the sun. In certain light, or at unpredictable angles, this speck of yellow turned her right eye from blue to green. No less disconcerting was her perfect mouth. Yet her smile, when she smiled, was rueful—for five years, few people had seen her smile.
As she searched through the Exeter yearbook for the most recent photographs of Eddie O’Hare, Marion frowned. A year ago, Eddie had been in the Outing Club—now he wasn’t. And last year he’d liked the Junior Debating Society; this year he was no longer a member, nor had he advanced to that elite circle of those six boys who comprised the Academy Debating Team. Had he simply given up the outdoors and debate? Marion wondered. (Her boys hadn’t cared for clubs, either.)
But then she found him, looking aloof among a smug and cocky group of boys who were the editors of—and the principal contributors to—Exeter’s literary magazine, the Pendulum . Eddie occupied one end of the middle row, as if he might have arrived late for the photograph and, feigning a fashionable lack of concern, had slipped into the frame at the last second. While some of the others were posing, deliberately showing the camera their profiles, Eddie was staring the camera down. As in his 1957 yearbook pictures, his alarming seriousness and his handsome face made him seem older than he was.
As for whatever was “literary” about him, his dark shirt and darker tie were the only visible factors; the shirt was of a kind not normally worn with a tie. (Thomas, Marion remembered, had liked that look; Timothy—younger or more conventional, or both—had not.) It depressed Marion to try to imagine what the contents of the Pendulum might have been: obscure poems and painfully autobiographical coming-of-age stories—artsy versions of “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Boys of this age should stick to sports, Marion believed. (Thomas and Timothy had stuck to nothing but sports.)
Suddenly the breezy, cloudy weather chilled her, or she felt chilled for other reasons. She closed the ’58 PEAN and got inside her car, then once again opened the yearbook, resting it against the steering wheel. The men who’d noticed Marion getting back inside her car had watched her hips. They couldn’t help themselves.
Regarding sports: Eddie O’Hare was still running—period
. There he was, a year more muscular, in both the photographs for J.V. Cross-Country and J.V. Track. Why did he run? Marion wondered. (Her boys had liked soccer and hockey and, in the spring, Thomas had played lacrosse and Timothy had tried tennis. Neither of them had wanted to play their father’s favorite game—Ted’s only sport was squash.)
If Eddie O’Hare had not risen from the junior-varsity to the varsity level of competition—in either cross-country or track—then he couldn’t have been running very fast or very hard. But, regardless of how fast or hard Eddie ran, his bare shoulders once more drew the unconscious attention of Marion’s index finger. Her nail polish was a frosted pink; it matched her lipstick, which was a kind of pink shot through with silver. In the summer of 1958, it’s just possible that Marion Cole was one of the most beautiful women alive.
And, truly, there was no conscious sexual interest in her tracing the borders of Eddie’s bare shoulders. That her compulsive scrutiny of young men Eddie’s age might become sexual was, at this point in time, strictly her husband’s premonition. If Ted trusted his sexual instincts, Marion was deeply unsure of hers.
Many a faithful wife has tolerated, even accepted, the painful betrayals of a philandering husband; in Marion’s case, she put up with Ted because she could see for herself how inconsequential his many women were to him. If he’d had one other woman, someone who’d held him under an enduring spell, Marion might have been persuaded to get rid of him. But Ted was never abusive to her; and especially after the deaths of Thomas and Timothy, he was consistent in his tenderness toward her. After all, no one but Ted could have comprehended and respected the eternity of her sorrow.
But now there was something horribly unequal between her and Ted. As even the four-year-old Ruth had observed, her mother was sadder than her father. Nor could Marion hope to compensate for another inequality: Ted was a better father to Ruth than she was a mother. And Marion had always been so much the superior parent to her sons ! Lately she almost hated Ted for absorbing his grief better than she could absorb hers. What Marion could only guess was that Ted might have hated her for the superiority of her sadness.
Marion believed that they had been wrong to have Ruth. At every phase of growing up, the child was a painful reminder of the corresponding phases of Thomas’s and Timothy’s childhoods. The Coles had never needed nannies for their boys; Marion had been a complete mother then. But they had virtually nonstop nannies for Ruth—for although Ted demonstrated a greater willingness to be with the child than Marion demonstrated, he was inadequate at performing the necessary daily tasks. However incapable Marion was at performing these, she at least knew what they were and that someone responsible had to perform them.
By the summer of ’58, Marion herself had become her husband’s principal unhappiness. Five years after the deaths of Thomas and Timothy, Marion believed she caused Ted more grief than their dead sons did. Marion also feared that she might not always be able to keep herself from loving her daughter. And if I let myself love Ruth, Marion thought, what will I do if something happens to her ? Marion knew that she could not go through losing a child again.
Ted had recently told Marion that he wanted to “try separating” for the summer—just to see if they might both be happier apart. For years, long before the deaths of her beloved boys, Marion had wondered if she should divorce Ted. Now he wanted to divorce her ! If they’d divorced when Thomas and Timothy were alive, there could have been no question about which of them would have kept the children; they were her boys—they would have chosen her. Ted could never have contested such an obvious truth.
But now . . . Marion didn’t know what to do. There were times when she couldn’t bear even to talk to Ruth. Understandably, this child would want her father.
So is that the deal? Marion wondered. He takes all that’s left: the house, which she loved but didn’t want—and Ruth, whom she either couldn’t or wouldn’t allow herself to love. Marion would take her boys. Of Thomas and Timothy, Ted could keep what he could remember. (I get to keep all the photographs, Marion decided.)
The sound of the ferry horn startled her. Her index finger, which had continued to trace the borders of Eddie O’Hare’s bare shoulders, bore down on the page of the yearbook too hard; she broke her nail. She began to bleed. She noticed the groove her nail had left in an area of Eddie’s shoulder. A pinpoint of blood had spotted the page, but she wet her finger in her mouth and wiped the blood away. Only then did Marion remember that Ted had hired Eddie on the condition that the boy had a driver’s license, and that Eddie’s summer job had been arranged before Ted had told her that he wanted to “try separating.”
The ferry horn blew again. It was so deep a sound that it announced to her what was now the obvious: Ted had known for some time that he was leaving her! To Marion’s surprise, her awareness of his deceit failed to rouse any anger in her; she could not even be sure if she felt sufficient hatred for him to indicate that she had ever loved him. Had everything stopped, or changed for her, when Thomas and Timothy died? Until now, she’d assumed that Ted, in his fashion, still loved her; yet he was the one who was initiating their separation, wasn’t he?
When she opened her car door and stepped outside to have a closer look at those passengers disembarking the ferry, she was as sad a woman as she’d been at any moment in the past five years; yet her mind was clearer than it had ever been. She would let Ted go—she would even let her daughter go with him. She would leave them both before Ted had a chance to leave her. As Marion walked toward the ferry slip, she was thinking: Everything but the photographs. For a woman who’d just come to these momentous conclusions, her step was inappropriately steady. To everyone who saw her, she seemed positively serene.
The first driver off the ferry was a fool. He was so stunned by the beauty of the woman he saw walking toward him that he turned off the road into the stony sand of the beach; his car would be stuck there for over an hour, but even when he realized his predicament, he couldn’t take his eyes off Marion. He couldn’t help himself. Marion didn’t notice the accident—she just kept walking, slowly.
For the rest of his life, Eddie O’Hare would believe in fate. After all, the second he set foot on shore, there was Marion.
Eddie Is Bored—and Horny, Too
Poor Eddie O’Hare. To be in public with his father always caused him complete mortification. The occasion of Eddie’s long drive to the ferry docks in New London, or of his seemingly longer wait (with his dad) for the arrival of the Orient Point ferry, was no exception. Within the Exeter community, Minty O’Hare’s habits were as familiar as his breath mints; Eddie had learned to accept that both students and faculty unashamedly fled from his father. The senior O’Hare’s ability to bore an audience, any audience, was notorious. In the classroom, Minty’s soporific approach to teaching was renowned; the students whom the senior O’Hare had put to sleep were of legendary numbers.
Minty’s method of boredom was never ornate; simple repetition was his game. He would read aloud from what he judged to be the significant passages of the previous day’s assignment—when presumably the material was fresh in the students’ minds. The freshness of their minds could be seen to wilt as the class wore on, however, for Minty always located many passages of significance, and he read aloud with great feeling, and with repeated pauses for effect; the lengthier pauses were required for sucking on his mints. Little discussion followed the ceaseless repetition of these overly familiar passages—in part because no one could argue against the obvious significance of each passage. One could only question the necessity of reading aloud such passages. Outside the classroom, Minty’s method of teaching English was so frequently a matter of discussion that Eddie O’Hare often felt as if he’d suffered through his father’s classes, although he never had.
Eddie had suffered elsewhere. He was grateful that, since early childhood, he had eaten most of his meals in the school dining hall, first at a faculty table with another faculty family, and later with his fellow students. T
herefore, school vacations were the only times when the O’Hares, as a family, dined at home. Dinner parties, which Dot O’Hare gave regularly—although there were few faculty couples who met with her reluctant approval—were another story. Eddie was not bored by such dinner parties because his parents restricted his presence at them to the briefest of polite appearances.
But at family dinners during school vacations Eddie was exposed to the stultifying phenomenon of his parents’ perfect marriage: they did not bore each other because they never listened to each other. A tender politeness passed between them; the mom would allow the dad to speak, at length, and then it was the mom’s turn—almost always on an unrelated subject. Mr. and Mrs. O’Hare’s conversation was a masterpiece of non sequiturs; by not participating, Eddie could best entertain himself by trying to guess if anything of what his mother or father had said would ever be remembered by the other.
Shortly before his departure for the ferry to Orient Point, an evening at home in Exeter became a case in point. The school year was over, the commencement exercises recently concluded, and Minty O’Hare was philosophizing on what he called the indolence of the students’ behavior in the spring term. “I know that they are thinking of their summer vacations,” Minty said for perhaps the hundredth time. “I realize that the return of warm weather is itself an invitation to sloth, but not to slothfulness of such an advanced degree as I observed this spring.”
His father made these same statements every spring; the statements themselves brought forth a deadening torpor in Eddie, who’d once wondered if his sole athletic interest, running, wasn’t the result of trying to flee his father’s voice, which had the predictable, ceaseless modulations of a circular saw in a lumberyard.
When Minty had not quite finished—Eddie’s father never seemed to be finished—but he had at least paused for breath, or for a bite of food, Eddie’s mother would begin.
