"My dear Dorothy," was all that Minty would say, "Mrs. Havelock is a European."
"I don't know what that's supposed to mean!" Eddie's mother commented. But Eddie's father would already have returned--as agreeably as if he had never been interrupted--to the subject of student indolence in the spring.
In Eddie's unexpressed opinion, only Mrs. Havelock's mobile breasts and furry armpits could ever relieve the sluggishness he felt--and it wasn't the spring that made Eddie feel indolent. It was his parents' unending and unconnected conversations; they left a veritable wake of slothfulness, a trail of torpor.
Sometimes Eddie's fellow students would ask him: "Uh, what's your dad's real name, anyway?" They knew the senior O'Hare only as Minty, or--to his face--Mr. O'Hare.
"Joe," Eddie would reply. "Joseph E. O'Hare." The E. was for Edward, the only name his father called him.
"I didn't name you Edward because I wanted to call you Eddie," his father periodically told him. But everyone else, even his mom, called him Eddie. One day, Eddie hoped, just plain Ed would do.
At the last family dinner before Eddie left for his first summer job, he had tried to interject some of his own conversation into his parents' endless non sequiturs, but it hadn't worked.
"I was at the gym today, and I ran into Mr. Bennett," Eddie said. Mr. Bennett had been Eddie's English teacher in the past school year. Eddie was very fond of him; his course included some of the best books that the boy had ever read.
"I suppose we can look forward to seeing her armpits at the beach all summer. I'm afraid I just may say something," Eddie's mother announced.
"I actually played a little squash with Mr. Bennett," Eddie added. "I told him that I'd always been interested in trying it, and he took the time to hit the ball with me for a while. I liked it better than I thought I would." Mr. Bennett, in addition to his duties in the English Department, was also the academy squash coach--quite a successful one, too. Hitting a squash ball had been something of a revelation to Eddie O'Hare.
"I think a shorter Christmas vacation and a longer spring break might be the answer," his father said. "I know the school year is a long haul, but there ought to be a way to bring the boys back in the spring with a little more pep in them--a little more get-up-and-go."
"I've been considering that I might try squash as a sport--I mean, next winter," Eddie announced. "I'd still run cross-country in the fall. I could go back to track in the spring. . . ." For a moment it seemed that the word "spring" had caught his father's attention, but it was only the indolence of spring that held Minty in its thrall.
"Maybe she gets a rash from shaving," Eddie's mom speculated. "Mind you, not that I don't get a rash occasionally myself--but it's no excuse."
Later Eddie did the dishes while his parents prattled away. Just before going to bed, he heard his mom ask his dad: "What did he say about squash ? What about squash?"
"What did who say?" his father asked.
"Eddie!" his mom replied. "Eddie said something about squash, and Mr. Bennett."
"He coaches squash," Minty said.
"Joe, I know that !"
"My dear Dorothy, what is your question?"
"What did Eddie say about squash?" Dot repeated.
"Well, you tell me," Minty said.
"Honestly, Joe," Dot said. "I sometimes wonder if you ever listen."
"My dear Dorothy, I'm all ears," the old bore told her. They both had a good laugh over that. They were still laughing as Eddie dragged himself through the requisite motions of going to bed. He was suddenly so tired--so indolent, he guessed--that he couldn't conceive of making the effort to tell his parents what he'd meant. If theirs was a good marriage, and by all counts it seemed to be, Eddie imagined that a bad marriage might have much to recommend it. He was about to test that theory, more strenuously than he knew.
The Door in the Floor
En route to New London, a journey that had been tediously over-planned--like Marion, they'd left much too early for the designated ferry--Eddie's father got lost in the vicinity of Providence.
"Is this the pilot's error or the navigator's?" Minty asked cheerfully. It was both. Eddie's father had been talking so much that he'd not been paying sufficient attention to the road; Eddie, who was the "navigator," had been making such an effort to stay awake that he'd neglected to consult the map. "It's a good thing we left early," his father added.
They stopped at a gas station, where Joe O'Hare made his best attempt to engage in small talk with a member of the working class. "So, how's this for a predicament?" the senior O'Hare said to the gas-station attendant, who appeared to Eddie to be a trifle retarded. "Here's a couple of lost Exonians in search of the New London ferry to Orient Point."
Eddie died a little every time he heard his father speak to strangers. (Who but an Exonian knew what an Exonian was?) As if stricken by a passing coma, the gas-station attendant stared at an oily stain on the pavement a little to the right of Minty's right shoe. "You're in Rhode Island" was all that the unfortunate man was able to say.
"Can you tell us the way to New London?" Eddie asked him.
When they were back on the road again, Minty regaled Eddie on the subject of the intrinsic sullenness that was so often the result of a subpar secondary-school education. "The dulling of the mind is a terrible thing, Edward," his father instructed him.
They arrived in New London in enough time for Eddie to have taken an earlier ferry. "But then you'll have to wait in Orient Point all alone!" Minty pointed out. The Coles, after all, were expecting Eddie to be on the later ferry. By the time Eddie realized how much he would have preferred to wait in Orient Point alone, the earlier ferry had sailed.
"My son's first ocean voyage," Minty said to the woman with the enormous arms who sold Eddie his passenger ticket. "It's not the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen Mary; it's not a seven-day crossing; it's not Southampton, as in England, or Cherbourg, as in France. But, especially when you're sixteen, a little voyage at sea to Orient Point will do!" The woman smiled tolerantly through her rolls of fat; even though her smile was slight, one could discern that she was missing a few teeth.
Afterward, standing at the waterfront, Eddie's father philosophized on the subject of the dietary excesses that were often the result of a subpar secondary-school education. In one short trip away from Exeter, they kept running across examples of people who would have been happier or thinner (or both) if they'd only had the good fortune to attend the academy!
Occasionally Eddie's father would interject, at random, sprinkles of advice that, out of nowhere, pertained to Eddie's upcoming summer job. "Don't be nervous just because he's famous," the senior O'Hare said, apropos of nothing. "He's not exactly a major literary figure. Just pick up what you can. Note his work habits, see if there's a method to his madness--that kind of thing." As Eddie's designated ferry approached, it was Minty who was suddenly growing anxious about Eddie's job.
They loaded the trucks first, and the first in line was a truck full of fresh clams--or, empty, it was on its way to be filled up with fresh clams. It smelled like less-than-fresh clams, in either case, and the clamtruck driver, who was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the fly-spattered grille of the clam truck while the incoming ferry docked, was the next victim of Joe O'Hare's impromptu conversation.
"My boy here is on his way to his very first job," Minty announced, while Eddie died a little more.
"Oh, yeah?" the clamtruck driver replied.
"He's going to be a writer's assistant," proclaimed Eddie's father. "Mind you, we're not exactly sure what that might entail, but it will doubtless be more demanding than sharpening pencils, changing the typewriter ribbon, and looking up those difficult words that not even the writer himself knows how to spell! I look at it as a learning experience, whatever it turns out to be."
The clamtruck driver, suddenly grateful for the job he had, said: "Good luck, kid."
At the last minute, just before Eddie boarded the ferry, his father ran to the car
and then ran back again. "I almost forgot!" he shouted, handing Eddie a fat envelope wrapped with a rubber band and a package the size and softness of a loaf of bread. The package was gift-wrapped, but something had crushed it in the backseat of the car; the present looked abandoned, unwanted. "It's for the little kid--your mother and I thought of it," Minty said.
" What little kid?" Eddie asked. He clutched the present and the envelope under his chin, because his heavy duffel bag--and a lighter, smaller suitcase--required both his hands. Thus he staggered on board.
"The Coles have a little girl--I think she's four!" Minty hollered. There was the rattling of chains, the chug of the boat's engine, the intermittent blasts of the ferry horn; other people were shouting their good-byes. "They had a new child to replace the dead ones!" Eddie's father yelled. This seemed to get the attention of even the clamtruck driver, who had parked his truck on board and now leaned over the rails of the upper deck.
"Oh," Eddie said. "Good-bye!" he cried.
"I love you, Edward!" his father bellowed. Then Minty O'Hare began to cry. Eddie had never seen his father cry, but Eddie had not left home before. Probably his mother had cried, too, but Eddie hadn't noticed. "Be careful !" his father wailed. The passengers who overhung the rails of the upper deck were all staring now. "Watch out for her !" his father screamed to him.
"Who?" Eddie cried.
" Her! I mean Mrs . Cole!" the senior O'Hare shouted.
"Why?" Eddie screamed. They were pulling away, the docks falling behind; the ferry horn was deafening.
"I hear she never got over it!" Minty roared. "She's a zombie !"
Oh, great-- now he tells me! Eddie thought. But he just waved. He had no idea that the so-called zombie would be meeting his ferry at Orient Point; he didn't yet know that Mr . Cole was not allowed to drive. It peeved Eddie that his dad had not allowed him to drive on the trip to New London--on the grounds that the traffic they would be facing was "different from Exeter traffic." Eddie could still see his father on the receding Connecticut shore. Minty had turned away, his head in his hands--he was weeping.
What did he mean, a zombie ? Eddie had expected Mrs. Cole to be like his own mother, or like the many unmemorable faculty wives who comprised almost everything he knew about women. With any luck, Mrs. Cole might have a little of what Dot O'Hare would call " bohemianism" in her nature, although Eddie hardly dared to hope for a woman who gave such voyeuristic pleasure as Mrs. Havelock so amply provided.
In 1958, Mrs. Havelock's furry pits and swaying breasts were absolutely all that Eddie O'Hare thought about when he thought about women. As for girls his own age, Eddie had been unsuccessful with them; they also terrified him. Since he was a faculty brat, his few dates had been with girls from the town of Exeter, awkward acquaintances from his junior-high-school days. These town girls were more grown up now, and generally wary of the town boys who attended the academy--understandably, they were anticipating being condescended to.
On Exeter dance weekends, the out-of-town girls struck Eddie as unapproachable. They arrived on trains and in buses, often from other boarding schools or from cities like Boston and New York. They were much better dressed, and seemingly more like women, than most of the faculty wives--excepting Mrs. Havelock.
Before leaving Exeter, Eddie had leafed through the pages of the '53 PEAN, looking for pictures of Thomas and Timothy Cole--it was their last yearbook. What he found had intimidated him greatly. Those boys had not belonged to a single club, but Thomas was pictured with both the Varsity Soccer and the Varsity Hockey teams, and Timothy, lagging not far behind his brother, was captured in the photographs of J.V. Soccer and J.V. Hockey. That they could kick and skate wasn't what had intimidated Eddie. It was the sheer number of snapshots, throughout the yearbook, in which both boys appeared--in the many candid photos that make up a yearbook, in all those shots of the students who are unquestionably having fun . Thomas and Timothy always appeared to be having a ball. They'd been happy ! Eddie realized.
Wrestling in a pile of boys in a dormitory butt room (the smokers' lounge), clowning on crutches, posing with snow shovels, or playing cards--Thomas often with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his handsome mouth. And on the academy dance weekends, the Cole boys were pictured with the prettiest girls. There was a picture of Timothy not dancing with but actually embracing his dance partner; there was another of Thomas kissing a girl--they were outdoors on a cold, snowy day, both of them in camel-hair overcoats, Thomas pulling the girl to him by the scarf around her neck. Those boys had been popular ! (And then they had died.)
The ferry passed what looked like a shipyard; some naval vessels were in a dry dock, others floated in the water. As the ferry moved away from land, it passed a lighthouse or two. There were fewer sailboats farther out in the sound. The day had been hot and hazy inland--even earlier that morning, when Eddie had left Exeter--but on the water the wind from the northeast was cold, and the sun went in and out of the clouds.
On the upper deck, still struggling with his heavy duffel bag and the lighter, smaller suitcase--not to mention the already-mangled present for the child--Eddie repacked. The gift wrapping would suffer further abuse when Eddie shoved the present to the bottom of the duffel bag, but at least he wouldn't have to carry it under his chin. Also, he needed socks; he'd begun the day in loafers with no socks, but his feet were cold. He found a sweatshirt to wear over his T-shirt, too. Only now, his first day away from the academy, did he realize he was wearing an Exeter T-shirt and an Exeter sweatshirt. Embarrassed at what struck him as such shameless advertising of his revered school, Eddie turned the sweatshirt inside out. Only then did it occur to him why some of the seniors at the academy were in the habit of wearing their Exeter sweatshirts inside out; his new awareness of this height of fashion indicated to Eddie that he was ready to encounter the so-called real world-- provided that there really was a world where Exonians were well advised to put their Exeter experiences behind them (or turn them inside out).
It was further heartening to Eddie that he was wearing jeans, despite his mother's advice that khakis would be more "appropriate"; yet although Ted Cole had written Minty that the boy could forget about a coat and tie--Eddie's summer job didn't require what Ted called the "Exeter uniform"--Eddie's father had insisted that he pack a number of dress shirts and ties, and what Minty called an "all-purpose" sports jacket.
It was when he repacked on the upper deck that Eddie first took notice of the fat envelope his father had handed him without explanation, which in itself was odd--his father explained everything . It was an envelope embossed with the Phillips Exeter Academy return address, and with O'HARE written in his father's neat hand. Inside the envelope were the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons. It was the senior O'Hare's idea of being prepared for any emergency--you could always call on a fellow Exeter man for help! At a glance Eddie could see that he didn't know any of these people. There were six names with Southampton addresses, most of them from graduating classes in the thirties and forties; one old fellow, who'd graduated with the class of 1919, was doubtless retired and probably too old to remember that he'd ever gone to Exeter. (The man was only fifty-seven, in fact.)
There were another three or four Exonians in East Hampton, only a couple in Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor, and one or two others in Amagansett and Water Mill and Sagaponack--the Coles lived in Sagaponack, Eddie knew. He was dumbfounded. Did his dad know nothing about him? Eddie would never dream of calling upon these strangers, even if he were in the most dire need. Exonians! he almost cried aloud.
Eddie knew many faculty families at Exeter; most of them, while never taking the qualities of the academy for granted, did not inflate beyond all reason what it meant to be an Exonian. It seemed so unfair that his father could, out of the blue, make him feel that he hated Exeter; in truth, the boy knew he was lucky to be at the school. He doubted that he would have qualified for the academy if he hadn't been a faculty child, and he felt fairly well adjusted am
ong his peers--as well adjusted as any boy who bears an indifference to sports can be at an all-boys' school. Indeed, given Eddie's terror of girls his own age, he was not unhappy to be in an all-boys' school.
For example, he was careful to masturbate on his own towel or on his own washcloth, which he then washed out and hung back in the family bathroom where it belonged; nor did Eddie ever wrinkle the pages of his mom's mail-order catalogs, where the various models for women's undergarments provided all the visual stimulation his imagination needed. (What most appealed to him were the more mature women in girdles.) Without the catalogs, he had also happily masturbated in the dark, where the salty taste of Mrs. Havelock's hairy armpits seemed on the tip of his tongue--and where her heaving breasts were the soft and rolling pillows that held his head and rocked him to sleep, where he would often dream of her. (Mrs. Havelock doubtless performed this valuable service for countless Exonians who passed through the academy in her prime years.)
But in what way was Mrs. Cole a zombie ? Eddie was watching the clamtruck driver consume a hot dog, which the driver washed down with a beer. Although Eddie was hungry--he'd not eaten since breakfast--the slightly sideways drift of the ferry and the smell of the fuel did not incline him toward food or drink. At times the upper deck would shudder, and the entire ferry swayed. And there was the added factor of where he was seated, directly downwind of the smokestack. He began to turn a little green. It made him feel better to walk around the deck, and he decidedly perked up when he found a trash can and seized the moment to throw away his father's envelope with the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons.
Then Eddie did something that made him feel only a little ashamed of himself: he strolled over to where the clamtruck driver sat suffering the agonies of digestion, and boldly apologized for his father. The clamtruck driver suppressed a belch.
"Don't sweat it, kid," the man said. "We all got dads."