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grief better than she could absorb hers. What Marion could only guess was that Ted might have hated her for the superiority of her sadness.
    Marion believed that they had been wrong to have Ruth. At every phase of growing up, the child was a painful reminder of the corresponding phases of Thomas’s and Timothy’s childhoods. The Coles had never needed nannies for their boys; Marion had been a complete mother then. But they had virtually nonstop nannies for Ruth—for although Ted demonstrated a greater willingness to be with the child than Marion demonstrated, he was inadequate at performing the necessary daily tasks. However incapable Marion was at performing these, she at least knew what they were and that someone responsible had to perform them.
    By the summer of ’58, Marion herself had become her husband’s principal unhappiness. Five years after the deaths of Thomas and Timothy, Marion believed she caused Ted more grief than their dead sons did. Marion also feared that she might not always be able to keep herself from loving her daughter. And if I let myself love Ruth, Marion thought, what will I do if something happens to her ? Marion knew that she could not go through losing a child again.
    Ted had recently told Marion that he wanted to “try separating” for the summer—just to see if they might both be happier apart. For years, long before the deaths of her beloved boys, Marion had wondered if she should divorce Ted. Now he wanted to divorce her ! If they’d divorced when Thomas and Timothy were alive, there could have been no question about which of them would have kept the children; they were her boys—they would have chosen her. Ted could never have contested such an obvious truth.
    But now . . . Marion didn’t know what to do. There were times when she couldn’t bear even to talk to Ruth. Understandably, this child would want her father.
    So is that the deal? Marion wondered. He takes all that’s left: the house, which she loved but didn’t want—and Ruth, whom she either couldn’t or wouldn’t allow herself to love. Marion would take her boys. Of Thomas and Timothy, Ted could keep what he could remember. (I get to keep all the photographs, Marion decided.)
    The sound of the ferry horn startled her. Her index finger, which had continued to trace the borders of Eddie O’Hare’s bare shoulders, bore down on the page of the yearbook too hard; she broke her nail. She began to bleed. She noticed the groove her nail had left in an area of Eddie’s shoulder. A pinpoint of blood had spotted the page, but she wet her finger in her mouth and wiped the blood away. Only then did Marion remember that Ted had hired Eddie on the condition that the boy had a driver’s license, and that Eddie’s summer job had been arranged before Ted had told her that he wanted to “try separating.”
    The ferry horn blew again. It was so deep a sound that it announced to her what was now the obvious: Ted had known for some time that he was leaving her! To Marion’s surprise, her awareness of his deceit failed to rouse any anger in her; she could not even be sure if she felt sufficient hatred for him to indicate that she had ever loved him. Had everything stopped, or changed for her, when Thomas and Timothy died? Until now, she’d assumed that Ted, in his fashion, still loved her; yet he was the one who was initiating their separation, wasn’t he?
    When she opened her car door and stepped outside to have a closer look at those passengers disembarking the ferry, she was as sad a woman as she’d been at any moment in the past five years; yet her mind was clearer than it had ever been. She would let Ted go—she would even let her daughter go with him. She would leave them both before Ted had a chance to leave her. As Marion walked toward the ferry slip, she was thinking: Everything but the photographs. For a woman who’d just come to these momentous conclusions, her step was inappropriately steady. To everyone who saw