A Widow for One Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

this didn’t define her father’s opinion of himself more sharply than she’d perceived it as a child. The room was never called a “studio,” because her father had long ago stopped thinking of his books as art; yet a “ workroom” was more pretentious-sounding than an “office,” which it was also never called, because her father appeared to have considerable pride in his creativity. He was sensitive to the widely held belief that his books were merely a business. Later Ruth would realize that it was his ability to draw that her father valued more than his writing, although no one would have said that The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls or Ted Cole’s other books for children were successful or distinguished because of the illustrations.
    Compared to whatever magic existed in the stories themselves, which were always scary and short and lucidly written, the illustrations were rudimentary—and there were too few of them, in every publisher’s opinion. Yet Ted’s audience, those millions of children from four to fourteen, and sometimes slightly older—not to mention the millions of young mothers who were the principal buyers of Ted Cole’s books—never complained. These readers could never have guessed that Ruth’s father spent much more time drawing than he spent writing; there were hundreds of drawings for every illustration that appeared in his books. As for his storytelling, for which he was famous . . . well, Ruth was accustomed to hearing the typewriter only at night.
    Imagine poor Eddie O’Hare. In 1958, on a summery June morning, he was standing near the Pequod Avenue docks in New London, Connecticut, waiting for the ferry that would bring him to Orient Point, Long Island. Eddie was thinking about his job as a writer’s assistant, never suspecting that there would be precious little writing involved. (Eddie had never contemplated a career in the graphic arts.)
    Ted Cole was alleged to have dropped out of Harvard to attend a not very prestigious art school—truly, a design school that was chiefly populated with students of mediocre talent and modest ambitions in the commercial arts. He never gave etching or lithography a chance; he preferred just plain drawing. He used to say that darkness was his favorite color.
    Ruth would always associate her father’s physical appearance with pencils and erasers. There were black and gray smudges on his hands, and eraser crumbs were a constant accessory to his clothes. But Ted’s more permanent identifying marks—even when he was freshly bathed and cleanly dressed—were his ink-stained fingers. His choice of ink would change from book to book. “Is this a black book or a brown one, Daddy?” Ruth would ask him.
    The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was a black book—the original drawings were in India ink, Ted’s favorite black. A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound would be a brown book, which was responsible for the prevailing odor of the summer of 1958—Ted’s favorite brown was fresh squid ink, which, although more black than brown, is sepia-like in tone and has (under certain conditions) a fishy smell.
    Ted’s experiments with keeping the squid ink fresh were a strain on his already strained relationship with Marion, who learned to avoid the blackened jars in the refrigerator; they were also in the freezer, where they stood perilously close to the ice trays. (Later that same summer, Ted tried preserving the ink in the ice trays—with comedic, if harrowing, results.)
    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