A Widow for One Year

A Widow for One Year by John Irving Page B

Book: A Widow for One Year by John Irving Read Free Book Online
Authors: John Irving
Tags: Fiction
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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

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