A Widow for One Year Read Online Free Page B

this subject, had referred mysteriously to the sky and to the stars; they had implied that something of the boys lived somewhere other than with their broken bodies, under the ground.
    “So . . .” Ruth said, “tell me what dead is.”
    “Ruthie, listen to me . . .”
    “Okay,” Ruth said.
    “When you look at Thomas and Timothy in the photographs, do you remember the stories of what they were doing?” her father asked her. “In the pictures, I mean—do you remember what they were doing in the pictures?”
    “Yes,” Ruth answered, although she wasn’t sure she could remember what they were doing in every picture.
    “Well, then . . . Thomas and Timothy are alive in your imagination, ” her father told her. “When you’re dead, when your body is broken, it just means that we can’t see your body anymore—your body is gone.”
    “It’s under the ground,” Ruth corrected him.
    “We can’t see Thomas and Timothy anymore,” her father insisted, “but they are not gone from our imaginations. When we think of them, we see them there.”
    “They’re just gone from this world,” Ruth said. (For the most part, she was repeating what she’d heard before.) “They’re in another world?”
    “Yes, Ruthie.”
    “Am I going to get dead?” the four-year-old asked. “Will I get all broken?”
    “Not for a long, long time!” her father said. “ I’m going to get broken before you are, and not even I am going to get broken for a long, long time.”
    “Not for a long, long time?” the child repeated.
    “I promise, Ruthie.”
    “Okay,” Ruth said.
    They had a conversation of this kind almost every day. With her mother, Ruth had similar conversations—only shorter. Once, when Ruth had mentioned to her father that thinking about Thomas and Timothy made her sad, her father had admitted that he too was sad.
    Ruth had said: “But Mommy’s sadder.”
    “Well . . . yes,” Ted had said.
    And so Ruth lay awake in the house with something crawling between the walls, something bigger than a mouse, and she listened to the only sound that would ever succeed in comforting her—at the same time that it made her melancholic. This was before she even knew what “melancholic” meant. It was the sound of a typewriter—the sound of storytelling. In her life as a novelist, Ruth would never be converted to the computer; she would write either in longhand or with a typewriter that made the most old-fashioned noise of all the typewriters she could find.
    She did not know then (that summer night in 1958) that her father was beginning what would be her favorite of his stories. He would work on it all that summer; it would be the only piece of writing that Ted Cole’s soon-to-arrive writer’s assistant, Eddie O’Hare, would actually get to “assist” Ted with. And while none of Ted Cole’s books for children would ever enjoy the commercial success or the international renown of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, the book Ted began that night was the one Ruth would like the best. It was called, of course, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, and it would always be special to Ruth because she was its inspiration.

Unhappy Mothers
    Ted Cole’s books for children could not be categorized with respect to the age of his audience. The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was marketed as a book to be read aloud to children between the ages of four and six; the book succeeded in that market, as did Ted’s later books. But, for example, twelve-year-olds often experienced a second appreciation of Ted Cole. These more sophisticated readers frequently wrote to the author, telling him that they used to think he was a writer for children—that is, before they discovered the deeper levels of meaning in his books. These letters, which displayed a variety of competence and incompetence in penmanship and spelling, became the virtual wallpaper in Ted’s workroom.
    He called it his “workroom”; later Ruth would wonder if