A Widow for One Year Read Free Page B

she awakened, she was shaking—therefore, her bed seemed to be shaking, too. And for a second or more, even when Ruth was wide-awake, the sound from her dream had persisted. Then it abruptly stopped. It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound.
    “Daddy!” Ruth whispered. She’d remembered (this time) that it was her father’s turn to stay with her, but her whisper was so soft that she couldn’t hear her own voice. Besides, Ted Cole slept like a stone. Like most heavy drinkers, he didn’t fall asleep, he passed out—at least until four or five in the morning, when he could never get back to sleep again.
    Ruth crept out of her bed and tiptoed through the master bathroom to the master bedroom, where her father lay smelling of whiskey or gin—as strongly as a car smells of motor oil and gasoline in a closed garage.
    “Daddy!” she said again. “I had a dream. I heard a sound.”
    “What sort of a sound was it, Ruthie?” her father asked; he hadn’t moved, but he was awake.
    “It got into the house,” Ruth said.
    “The sound ?”
    “It’s in the house, but it’s trying to be quiet,” Ruth explained.
    “Let’s go look for it, then,” her father said. “A sound that’s trying to be quiet. I’ve got to see this.”
    He picked her up and carried her into the long upstairs hall. There were more photographs of Thomas and Timothy in the upstairs hall than in any other part of the house, and when Ted turned on the hall lights, Ruth’s dead brothers seemed to be begging for her attention— like a row of princes seeking the favor of a princess.
    “Where are you, sound?” Ted called.
    “Look in the guest rooms,” Ruth replied.
    Her father carried her to the far end of the hall; there were three guest bedrooms with two guest bathrooms—each with more photos. They turned on all the lights, and looked in the closets and behind the shower curtains.
    “Come out, sound!” Ted commanded.
    “Come out, sound!” Ruth repeated.
    “Maybe it’s downstairs,” her father suggested.
    “No, it was upstairs with us,” Ruth told him.
    “I think it’s gone, then,” Ted said. “What did it sound like?”
    “It was a sound like someone trying not to make a sound,” Ruth told him.
    He put her down on one of the guest-room beds; then he took a pad of paper and a pen off the night table. He liked so much what she’d said that he had to write it down. But he had no pajamas on—hence no pockets for the piece of paper, which he held in his teeth when he picked Ruth up again. As usual, she took only a passing interest in his nakedness. “Your penis is funny,” she said.
    “My penis is funny,” her father agreed. It was what he always said. This time, with a piece of paper between his teeth, the casualness of his remark seemed even more casual.
    “Where did the sound go?” Ruth asked him. He was carrying her through the guest bedrooms and the guest bathrooms, turning off the lights, but he stopped so suddenly in one of the bathrooms that Ruth imagined that Thomas or Timothy, or both of them, had reached out from one of the photographs and grabbed him.
    “I’ll tell you a story about a sound,” her father said, the piece of paper flapping in his teeth. He immediately sat down on the edge of the bathtub, still holding her in his arms.
    The photograph that had caught his attention was one that included Thomas at the age of four—Ruth’s age exactly. The photo was awkwardly posed: Thomas was seated on a large couch upholstered in a confused floral pattern; the botanical excess appeared to completely overwhelm Timothy, who, at the age of two, was unwillingly being held in Thomas’s lap. It would have been 1940, two years before Eddie O’Hare was born.
    “One night, Ruthie, when Thomas was your age—Timothy was still in diapers—Thomas heard a sound,” Ted began. Ruth would always remember her father in the act of taking the piece of paper from his mouth.
    “Did they both wake up?” Ruth asked,