A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  In Ted’s case, the young mothers who were available in the off-season were more troublesome to break up with; not all of them were as ongoingly friendly ( after the affair) as the Montauk fishmonger’s wife, whom Eddie had heretofore known only as the ever-faithful provider of Ted’s squid ink. At the end of the summer, Mrs. Vaughn would be back in Manhattan—where she could fall apart about a hundred miles from Ted. That the Vaughn residence was on Gin Lane in Southampton was ironic, considering Ted’s fondness for gin and posh neighborhoods.

  “I never have to wait,” Eddie observed. “He’s usually walking along the side of the road when it’s time for me to pick him up. But I wonder what she does with her kid.”

  “Probably tennis lessons,” Marion had remarked.

  But lately Ted’s trysts with Mrs. Vaughn were lasting no more than an hour. “And last week I left him there only once,” Eddie reported to Marion.

  “He’s almost finished with her,” Marion said. “I can always tell.”

  Eddie assumed that Mrs. Vaughn lived in a mansion, although the Vaughn property, which was on the ocean side of Gin Lane, was walled off from his view by towering hedges. The perfect pea-size stones in the hidden, disappearing driveway were freshly raked. Ted always told Eddie to let him out of the car at the entrance to the driveway. Maybe Ted liked the feel of walking to his assignations on those expensive stones.

  Compared to Ted, Eddie O’Hare was a mere fledgling at love affairs—a rank beginner—yet Eddie had quickly learned that the excitement of anticipation was almost equal to the thrill of lovemaking; in Ted’s case, Marion suspected that Ted enjoyed the anticipation more . When Eddie was in Marion’s arms, the sixteen-year-old found this possibility unimaginable.

  They made love in the carriage-house apartment every morning; when it was Marion’s turn to spend the night there, Eddie would stay with her until dawn. They didn’t care that the Chevy and the Mercedes would be parked in the driveway for anyone to see. They didn’t care that they were seen having dinner together in the same East Hampton restaurant every night. It was an unconcealed pleasure for Marion to watch Eddie eat. It also pleased her to touch his face or his hands or his hair, no matter who was looking. She even went with him to the barbershop to tell the barber how much to cut or when to stop cutting. She did his laundry. In August, she began to buy him clothes.

  And there were times when Eddie’s expression as he slept would so keenly resemble an expression of Thomas’s or Timothy’s that Marion would wake him up and bring him (still half asleep) to the specific photograph—just to show him how he had suddenly appeared to her. Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

  Marion couldn’t help herself. With every act she performed for Eddie, she thought of everything she’d ever done for Thomas and Timothy; she also attended to those pleasures that she imagined her lost sons had never enjoyed. However briefly, Eddie O’Hare had brought her dead boys back to life.

  Although Marion didn’t care whether Ted knew of her relationship with Eddie, she was puzzled that Ted hadn’t said something, for surely he must have known. He was as amiable to Eddie as ever; lately Ted was spending more time with Eddie, too.

  With a large portfolio of loosely held-together drawings, Ted had asked Eddie to drive him into New York. They took Marion’s Mercedes for the hundred-mile trip. Ted directed Eddie to his art gallery, which was either on Thompson near the corner of Broome, or on Broome near the corner of Thompson—Eddie couldn’t recall. After delivering the drawings, Ted had taken Eddie to lunch at a place he’d once taken Thomas and Timothy. The boys had liked it, Ted had said. Eddie liked it, too, although it made him uncomfortable when Ted told him—on the drive back to Sagaponack—that he was grateful to him for being such a good friend to Marion. She’d been so unhappy; it was wonderful to see her smiling again.

  “He said that?” Marion asked Eddie.

  “Exactly,” Eddie reported.

  “How odd,” Marion remarked. “I would have expected him to say something snide.”

  But Eddie detected next to nothing in Ted that was “snide.” There was one reference that Ted had made to Eddie’s physical condition, but Eddie couldn’t tell if Ted’s remark had or had not insinuated his knowledge of Eddie’s daily and nightly athletics with Marion.

  In his workroom, by the telephone, Ted had posted a list of a half-dozen names and numbers; these were his regular squash opponents, who (Marion told Eddie) were Ted’s only male friends. One afternoon, when one of Ted’s regular opponents had canceled a match, Ted asked Eddie to play. Eddie had earlier expressed his newfound interest in squash, but he’d also confessed to Ted that he was a player of less-than-beginner status.

  The barn adjacent to the Coles’ house had been restored; in the loft, above what served as a two-car garage, an almost regulation-size squash court had been built to Ted’s specifications. Ted claimed that a town ordinance had restricted him from raising the roof of the barn—hence the ceiling of the squash court was lower than regulation size—and dormer windows on the ocean side of the barn had caused one side wall of the court to be irregular in shape and offer notably less playing surface than did the opposing wall. The resulting peculiar shape and dimensions gave Ted a distinct home-court advantage.

  Actually, there had been no town ordinance restricting Ted from raising the roof; he had saved a considerable sum of money, however, and the eccentricity of a squash court of his own specifications had pleased him. Among the local squash players, Ted was considered unbeatable in his odd barn, which was ferociously hot (and poorly ventilated) in the summer months; in the winter, because the barn was unheated, the court was often unbearably cold—the ball would have little more bounce than a stone.

  In their one match, Ted warned Eddie of the oddities of the court, but Eddie had played the game only once before; to him, the court in the barn presented the same difficulties as any other squash court. Ted had him running from corner to corner. Ted himself would take a position in the center T of the court; he never needed to stray more than a half-step in any direction. Eddie, sweating and breathless, couldn’t score a point, but Ted wasn’t even flushed.

  “Eddie, you look like a boy who will sleep well tonight,” Ted told him after they’d finished five games. “Maybe you need to catch up on your sleep, anyway.” Ted gave the sixteen-year-old a pat on the butt with the head of his racquet. He might or might not have been “snide,” Eddie reported to Marion, who no longer knew what to make of her husband’s behavior.

  A more pressing problem for Marion was Ruth. In the summer of ’58, the four-year-old’s sleeping habits bordered on the bizarre. Often she would sleep through the night, and so soundly that she could be found in the morning in the exact same position in which she had fallen asleep—and still perfectly tucked in. But other nights she would toss and turn. She would lie sideways in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed until her feet would get stuck in the guard rails; then she would wake up crying for help. Worse, at times her trapped feet would become an integral part of an ongoing nightmare; Ruth would wake up with the conviction that a monster had attacked her and was holding her in its terrifying grasp. On these occasions the child would not only cry to be rescued from the guard rails; she would also need to be carried into the master bedroom, where she would fall back to sleep, sobbing, in her parents’ bed—with either Marion or Ted.

  When Ted tried removing the guard rails, Ruth fell out of bed. There was a rug; it wasn’t a bad fall. But, disoriented, the child once wandered into the hall. And with or without the guard rails, Ruth had nightmares. In short, for the uninterrupted pleasure of Eddie and Marion’s sexual endeavors, Ruth could not be relied upon to sleep through the night. The child might wake up screaming or she might silently appear at her mo
ther’s bedside, which made it risky for Eddie and Marion to make love in the master bedroom—or for Eddie, drifting heavenward in Marion’s arms, to fall asleep there. But when they made love in Eddie’s room, which was a considerable distance from Ruth’s bedroom, Marion worried that she would not hear Ruth calling to her or crying, or that the child would wander into the master bedroom and be frightened that her mother wasn’t there.

  Thus, when they were in bed in Eddie’s room, they would take turns running out in the hall to listen for Ruth. And when they lay in Marion’s bed, the patter of the child’s feet on the floor of the bathroom would send Eddie diving out of bed. He once lay naked on the floor on the far side of the bed for half an hour, until Ruth finally fell asleep next to her mother. Then Eddie crept out on all fours. Just before he opened the door to the hall and tiptoed away to his own room, Marion whispered, “Good night, Eddie.” Apparently Ruth was only half asleep, for the child (in a sleepy voice) quickly echoed her mother: “Good night, Eddie.”

  After that, it was inevitable that one night neither Eddie nor Marion would hear the approaching patter of little feet. Therefore, on the night when Ruth appeared with a towel in her mother’s bedroom— because the child was convinced that her mother (from the sound of her) was throwing up—Marion was unsurprised. And since she’d been mounted from behind, and her breasts were held in Eddie’s hands, there was little that Marion could do about the matter; she did manage to stop moaning.

  Eddie, however, reacted to Ruth’s sudden appearance in an astonishingly acrobatic but inept fashion. His withdrawal from Marion was so abrupt that Marion felt both empty and abandoned, but with her hips still moving. Eddie, who flew but a short distance in reverse, was suspended only momentarily in midair; his failure to clear the bedside lamp brought both the boy and the destroyed lamp crashing to the carpet, where the sixteen-year-old’s spontaneous but doomed effort to hide his private parts with an open-ended lamp shade provided Marion with at least an instant of passing comedy.

  Her daughter’s screams notwithstanding, Marion understood that this would be an episode of longer-lasting trauma for Eddie than it would be for Ruth. This conviction was what prompted Marion to say to her daughter, with seeming nonchalance, “Don’t scream, honey. It’s just Eddie and me. Go back to bed.”

  To Eddie’s surprise, the child dutifully did as she was told. When Eddie was once again in bed beside Marion, Marion whispered, as if to herself, “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? Now we can stop worrying about that .” But then she rolled onto her side, with her back to Eddie, and although her shoulders shook slightly, she was not crying—or she was crying only inwardly. However, Marion would not respond to Eddie’s touch or his endearments; he knew well enough to leave her alone.

  The episode prompted the first clarifying response from Ted. With unflinching hypocrisy, Ted chose the moment when Eddie was driving him to Southampton for a visit with Mrs. Vaughn. “I presume it was Marion’s mistake,” Ted stated, “but that surely was a mistake for the two of you—to let Ruth see you together.” Eddie said nothing.

  “I’m not threatening you, Eddie,” Ted added, “but I must tell you that you may be called upon to testify.”

  “Testify?” the sixteen-year-old said.

  “In the event of a custody dispute, regarding which of us is more fit as a parent,” Ted replied. “I would never let a child see me with another woman, whereas Marion really has made no effort to protect Ruth from seeing . . . what she saw. And if you were called upon to testify to what happened, I trust that you wouldn’t lie —not in a court of law.” But Eddie still said nothing.

  “From the sound of it, it was a rear-entry position—mind you, not that I have a personal problem with that, or with any other position,” Ted was quick to say, “but for a child I imagine that doing it doggishly must seem especially . . . animalistic.” For only a second did Eddie imagine that Marion had told Ted; then Eddie realized, with a sinking feeling, that Ted had been talking to Ruth.

  Marion concluded that Ted must have been asking Ruth all along, from the very beginning: Had the child seen Eddie and her mother together? And if together, how together? Suddenly, everything that Marion had misunderstood was clear.

  “So that’s why he hired you!” she cried. He’d known that Marion would take Eddie as a lover, and that Eddie could never have resisted her. But that Ted thought he knew Marion that well was contradicted by the fact that Ted didn’t know her well enough to understand that she would never have battled him for custody of Ruth. Marion had always known that the child was lost to her. She had never wanted Ruth.

  Now Marion was insulted that Ted didn’t think well enough of her to realize that she would never claim—not even in passing conversation, not to mention in a court of law—that Ruth would be better off with her mother than with her deceitful, feckless father. Even Ted would do a better job with the child than Marion could do, or so Marion thought.

  “I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do, Eddie,” Marion told the boy. “Don’t worry. Ted’s not going to make you testify to anything— there isn’t going to be any court of law. I know a lot more about Ted than he knows about me.”

  For a seemingly endless three days, they couldn’t make love because Marion had an infection—sex was painful for her. She nevertheless lay beside Eddie and held his face against her breasts while he masturbated to his heart’s content. Marion teased Eddie by asking him if he didn’t like masturbating next to her nearly as much (if not more) than making love to her. When Eddie denied this, Marion teased him further; she sincerely doubted that the women in his future would be as understanding of his preference as she was. She found it rather sweet, she told him.

  But Eddie protested: he couldn’t imagine that he would ever be interested in other women. “Other women will be interested in you,” Marion told the boy. “They may not be secure enough about themselves to let you masturbate, instead of demanding that you make love to them. I’m just warning you, as a friend. Girls your own age are going to find it neglectful of you.”

  “I will never be interested in girls my own age,” said Eddie O’Hare, with the kind of misery in his voice that Marion had grown fond of. And although Marion teased Eddie about this, too, it would turn out to be true. He never would be interested in a woman his own age. (This was not necessarily a disservice that Marion had done him.)

  “You just have to trust me, Eddie,” she told him. “You mustn’t be afraid of Ted. I know exactly what we’re going to do.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said. He lay with his face pressed against her breasts, knowing that his time with her was coming to an end—for how could it not end? In less than a month he would be back at Exeter; not even a sixteen-year-old could imagine maintaining a thirty-nine-year-old mistress under boarding-school rules.

  “Ted thinks that you’re his pawn, Eddie,” Marion told the boy. “But you’re my pawn, not Ted’s.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said, but Eddie O’Hare did not yet realize the extent to which he truly was a pawn in the culminating discord of a twenty-two-year marital war.

  Ruth’s Right Eye

  For a pawn, Eddie asked a lot of questions. When Marion had recovered sufficiently from her infection so that they could make love again, Eddie asked her about what sort of “infection” she’d had.

  “It was a bladder infection,” she told him. She was still more of a natural mother than she knew—she spared him the potentially upsetting news that the infection had been the result of his repeated sexual attentions.

  They had just finished making love in the position that Marion favored. She liked sitting on Eddie—“riding” him, Marion called it— because she enjoyed seeing his face. It was not only that Eddie’s expressions haunted her pleasantly because of their ceaseless associations with Thomas and Timothy. It was also that Marion had begun the process of saying good-bye to the boy, who had affected her more intimately than she’d ever thought he would.

  She knew, of course, how stron
gly she had affected him—this worried her. But in looking at him, and in making love to him—especially in looking at him while making love to him—Marion imagined that she could see her sexual life, which had been so ardently (albeit briefly) rekindled, coming to an end.

  She had not told Eddie that, before him, she’d never had sex with anyone except Ted. Nor had she told Eddie that she’d had sex with Ted only once since her sons had died, and that one time—entirely at Ted’s initiation—had been strictly for the purpose of getting her pregnant. (She had not wanted to get pregnant, but she’d been too despondent to resist.) And since Ruth had been born, Marion had not been tempted to have sex at all. With Eddie, what had begun on Marion’s part as a kindness toward a shy boy—in whom she saw so much of her sons—had blossomed into a relationship that had been deeply rewarding to her. But if Marion had been surprised by the excitement and gratification Eddie had provided, her enjoyment of the boy had nevertheless not persuaded her to alter her plans.

  She was leaving more than Ted and Ruth. In saying good-bye to Eddie O’Hare, she was also saying good-bye to a sexual life of any kind. Here she was, saying good-bye to sex, when, for the first time, at thirty-nine, she was finding sex pleasurable!

  If Marion and Eddie were the same height in the summer of ’58, Marion was aware that she outweighed him; Eddie was excruciatingly thin. In the top position, bearing down on the boy, Marion felt that all her weight and strength were concentrated in her hips; with Eddie pinned beneath her, Marion sometimes felt that it was she who was penetrating him . Indeed, the motion of her hips was the only motion between them—Eddie wasn’t strong enough to lift her weight off him. There was an instant when Marion not only felt as if she’d entered the boy’s body; she was fairly certain she had paralyzed him.

  When she could tell by how he held his breath that he was about to come, she would drop her weight on his chest and, holding tight to his shoulders, roll him on top of her, because she couldn’t stand to see the look that transformed his face when he came. There was something too close to the anticipation of pain in it. Marion could hardly bear to hear him whimper—and he whimpered every time. It was the sound of a child crying out in a half-sleep before falling sound asleep again. Only this repeated split second, in her entire relationship with Eddie, ever caused Marion a half-moment of doubt. When the boy made this infantile sound, it made Marion feel guilty.