A Widow for One Year Read Free

young Edward O’Hare to his wife. “This boy looks a lot like Thomas, doesn’t he?” he asked.
    Marion had seen the photographs before; she’d looked at all the photos in all the Exeter yearbooks very closely. “Yes, somewhat,” she replied. “Why? Who is he?”
    “He wants a summer job,” Ted told her.
    “With us ?”
    “Well, with me, ” Ted said. “He wants to be a writer.”
    “But what would he do with you?” Marion asked.
    “It’s mainly for the experience, I suppose,” Ted told her. “I mean, if he thinks he wants to be a writer, he should see how one works.”
    Marion, who’d always had aspirations of being a writer herself, knew that her husband didn’t work very much. “But what exactly would he do ?” she asked.
    “Well.” Ted had a habit of leaving his sentences and thoughts unfinished, incomplete. It was both a deliberate and an unconscious part of his vagueness.
    When he called back Minty O’Hare to offer his son a job, Ted’s first question was whether Eddie had his driver’s license. Ted had suffered his second drunk-driving conviction and was without a driver’s license for the summer of ’58. He’d hoped that the summer might be a good time to initiate a so-called trial separation from Marion, but if he were to rent a house nearby, and yet continue to share the family house (and Ruth) with Marion, someone would have to drive him.
    “Certainly he has his license!” Minty told Ted. Thus was the boy’s fate sealed.
    And so Marion’s question regarding what Eddie O’Hare would do, exactly, was left standing in the manner that Ted Cole frequently let things stand—namely, he let things stand vaguely. He also left Marion sitting with the Exeter yearbook open in her lap; he often left her that way. He couldn’t help noticing that Marion seemed to find the photograph of Eddie O’Hare in his track uniform the most riveting. With the long, pink nail of her index finger, Marion was tracing the borders of Eddie’s bare shoulders; it was an unconscious but intensely focused gesture. Ted had to wonder if he wasn’t more aware of his wife’s increasing obsession with boys who resembled Thomas or Timothy than poor Marion was. After all, she hadn’t slept with one of them yet.
    Eddie would be the only one she would sleep with.

A Sound Like Someone
Trying Not to Make a Sound
    Eddie O’Hare paid little attention to the many conversations in the Exeter community concerning how the Coles were “coping” with the tragic loss of their sons; even five years after the fact, these conversations were a mainstay of the faculty dinner parties given by Minty O’Hare and his gossip-hungry wife. Eddie’s mother was named Dorothy, but everyone—except Eddie’s father, who eschewed nicknames—called her “Dot.”
    Eddie was not a gossip maven. He was, however, an adequate student; the boy prepared himself for his summer job as a writer’s assistant with the kind of homework he imagined was more essential to the task than memorizing the media accounts of the tragedy would be.
    If Eddie had missed the news that the Coles had had another child, this news did not escape Minty and Dot O’Hare’s notice: that Ted Cole was an Exeter alumnus (’31), and that his sons had both been Exeter students at the time of their deaths, was sufficient to give all the Coles an Exeter connection forever. Furthermore, Ted Cole was a famous Exonian; the senior O’Hares, if not Eddie, were egregiously impressed by fame.
    That Ted Cole was among North America’s best-known writers of children’s books had provided the media with a specific angle of interest in the tragedy. How does a renowned author and illustrator of books for children “deal with” the deaths of his own children? And with reports of such a personal nature, there is always the attendant gossip. Within the faculty families at Exeter, possibly Eddie O’Hare was the only one not to pay this gossip much attention. He was definitely the only