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Ruthie.”
    “If you cared about your nudes—I mean the drawings —you would have chosen professional models,” Ruth said to him. “But I guess you always cared more for the women themselves than for your nudes.”
    “This is a difficult thing for a father to explain to his daughter, Ruthie. But . . . if nakedness—I mean the feeling of nakedness—is what a nude must convey, there is no nakedness that compares to what it feels like to be naked in front of someone for the first time.”
    “So much for professional models,” Ruth replied. “Jesus, Daddy, do you have to?” By then she knew, of course, that he didn’t care enough about his nudes, or his portraits of the mothers with their children, to keep them; he didn’t sell them privately or give them to his gallery, either. When the affair was over—and it was usually over quickly—Ted Cole would give the accumulated drawings to the young mother of the moment. And Ruth used to ask herself: If the young mothers were, generally, so unhappily married—or just plain unhappy—did the gift of art make them, at least momentarily, happier? But her father would never have called what he did “art,” nor did he ever refer to himself as an artist. Ted didn’t call himself a writer, either.
    “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