A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  That Ted would live to see another day must be credited to the regular and rigorous exercise he gained on the squash court that was designed to give him an unfair advantage. Even at forty-five, Ted Cole could run. He cleared some rosebushes without breaking stride and raced across a lawn, in full view of a gawking but silent man who was vacuuming a swimming pool. Ted was then chased by a dog, fortunately a small and cowardly dog; by grabbing a woman’s bathing suit off a clothesline and lashing the dog in the face with it, Ted drove the craven animal away. Naturally Ted was hollered at by several gardeners and maids and housewives; undeterred, he climbed three fences and scaled one fairly high stone wall. (He trampled only two flower beds.) And he never saw Mrs. Vaughn’s Lincoln cut the corner of Gin Lane onto South Main Street, where she flattened a road sign in the eagerness of her pursuit; however, through the slats of a wooden fence on Toylsome Lane, Ted saw the black-as-a-hearse Lincoln rush parallel to him as he traversed two lawns, a yard full of fruit trees, and something resembling a Japanese garden—where he stepped into a shallow pool of goldfish, soaking his shoes and his jeans (to his knees).

  Ted doubled back on Toylsome. Daring to cross that street, he saw the flicker of the black Lincoln’s brake lights and feared that Mrs. Vaughn had spotted him in her rearview mirror and was stopping to double back on Toylsome herself. But she hadn’t spotted him—he’d lost her. Ted entered the town of Southampton, looking much the worse for wear but walking boldly into the heart of the shops and the stores on South Main Street. If he hadn’t been so energetically on the lookout for the black Lincoln, he might have seen his own ’57 Chevy, which was parked by the frame shop on South Main; but Ted walked right past his car without recognizing it, and entered a bookstore diagonally across the street.

  They knew him in the bookstore; they knew Ted Cole in every bookstore, of course, but Ted made periodic visits to this particular bookstore, where he routinely autographed however many copies of his backlist titles were in stock. The bookseller and his attendant staff were not used to seeing Mr. Cole look quite as bedraggled as he appeared before them on this Friday morning, but they had known him to be unshaven—and he was often dressed more in the manner of a college student, or a workingman, than in whatever fashion was customary among best-selling authors and illustrators of children’s books.

  It was chiefly the blood that lent a novelty to Ted’s appearance. His scratched and bleeding face, and the dirtier blood on the backs of his hands, where he had clawed his way into and out of a hundred-year-old hedge, indicated mishap or mayhem to the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: “Not Felix.”)

  On this Friday, whether it was the sight of Ted’s blood that excited him, or the fact that Ted’s jeans were dripping on the floor of the bookstore—Ted’s shoes actually squirted water in several directions whenever Ted took a step—Mendelssohn grabbed Ted by the dirty tails of his untucked and unbuttoned flannel shirt and exclaimed in a too-loud voice: “Ted Cole!”

  “Yes, it is Ted Cole,” Ted admitted. “Good morning, Mendelssohn.”

  “It’s Ted Cole—it is, it is !” Mendelssohn repeated.

  “I’m sorry I’m bleeding,” Ted told him calmly.

  “Oh, don’t be silly—it’s nothing to be sorry about!” Mendelssohn shouted. Then he turned to a dumbstruck young woman on his staff; she was standing nearby, with a look of both awe and horror. Mendelssohn commanded her to bring Mr. Cole a chair. “Can’t you see he’s bleeding ?” Mendelssohn said to her.

  But Ted asked if he could use the washroom first—he’d just been in an accident, he solemnly said. Then he shut himself in a small bathroom with a sink and toilet. He assessed the damage in the mirror, while composing—as only a writer can—a story of surpassing simplicity regarding what sort of “accident” he’d just had. He saw that a branch of the evil hedge had lashed one eye and left it weepy. A deeper scratch was the source of the bleeding from his forehead; a scrape that bled less but looked harder to heal stood out on one cheek. He washed his hands; the cuts stung, but the bleeding from the backs of his hands had largely stopped. He removed his flannel shirt and tied the muddy sleeves—one had also been dipped in the goldfish pool—around his waist.

  Ted took this moment to admire his waist; at forty-five, he was still a man who could wear a pair of jeans and tuck in his T-shirt and be proud of the overall effect. However, the T-shirt was white and its appearance was not improved by the pronounced grass stains on the left shoulder and the right breast—Ted had fallen on at least two lawns— and his jeans, which were soaked below the knees, continued to drip into his water-filled shoes.

  As composed as he could be under the circumstances, Ted emerged from the bathroom and was once more effusively greeted by last-name-only Mendelssohn, who’d already prepared a chair for the visiting author. The chair was drawn up to a table, where a few dozen copies of Ted Cole’s books were waiting to be signed.

  But first Ted wanted to make a phone call, actually two. He tried the carriage house to find out if Eddie was there; there was no answer. And of course there was no answer at Ted’s own house—Marion knew better than to answer the phone on this well-rehearsed Friday. Had Eddie crashed the car? The sixteen-year-old had been driving erratically earlier that morning. Doubtless Marion had fucked the boy’s brains out! Ted concluded.

  Regardless of how well Marion had rehearsed this Friday, she had been mistaken to think that Ted’s only recourse for a ride home would be to walk all the way to his squash opponent’s office and wait for Dr. Leonardis, or for one of the doctor’s patients, to drive him to Sagaponack. Dave Leonardis’s office was on the far side of Southampton, on the Montauk Highway; the bookstore was not only closer to Mrs. Vaughn’s mansion—it was a much more obvious place for Ted to expect to be rescued. Ted Cole could have walked into almost any bookstore in the world and asked for a ride home.

  He promptly did so, no sooner than he’d sat down at the autographing table to sign his books.

  “To put it simply, I need a ride home,” the famous author said.

  “A ride!” cried Mendelssohn. “Yes, of course! No problem! You live in Sagaponack, don’t you? I’ll take you myself ! Well . . . I’ll have to call my wife. She may be shopping, but not for long. You see, my car is in the shop.”

  “I hope it’s not in the same shop my car was in,” Ted told the enthusiast. “I just got mine back from the shop. They forgot to reattach the steering column. It was like that cartoon we’ve all seen—the steering wheel was in my hands but it was not attached to the wheels. I steered one way and the car went off the road in another. Fortunately, all I hit was privet—a vast hedge. Climbing out the driver’s-side window of the car, I was scratched by the bushes. And then I stepped in a goldfish pool,” Ted explained.

  He had their attention now; Mendelssohn, poised by the phone, delayed the call to his wife. And the formerly dumbstruck young woman who worked there was smiling. Ted was not generally attracted to what he thought of as her type, but if she offered him a ride home, maybe something would come of it.

  She was probably not long out of college; in her no-makeup, straight-hair, no-tan way, she was a precursor of the decade ahead. She was not pretty—truly, she was just plain dull—but her paleness represented a kind of sexual frankness to Ted, who recognized that a part of the young woman’s no-frills appearance reflected an openness to experiences she might call “creative.” She was the kind of young woman who was seduced intellectually. (Ted’s particularly scruffy appearance at the moment might actually have elevated him in her eyes.) And sexual encounters, because the woman was still young enough to find them novel, were doubtless an area of experience she might call “ authentic”—especially with a famous writer.

  Sadly, she didn’t have a car. “I use a bicycle
,” she told Ted, “or else I’d take you home.”

  Too bad, Ted thought, but he rationalized that he didn’t really like the discrepancy between the thinness of her lower lip and the exaggerated puffiness of her upper.

  Mendelssohn fretted because his wife was still out shopping. He would keep calling—she would be back soon, Mendelssohn assured Ted. A boy with an indescribable speech impediment—the only other staff in the bookstore on this Friday morning—offered an apology, for he had lent his car to a friend who’d wanted to go to the beach.

  Ted just sat there, slowly signing books. It was only ten. If Marion had known where Ted was, and how close he could be to getting a ride home, she might have panicked. If Eddie O’Hare had known that Ted was autographing books across the street from the frame shop—where Eddie was insisting that the “feet” photograph should be ready for Ruth to take home today—Eddie might have panicked, too.

  But there was no cause for Ted to feel any panic. He didn’t know that his wife was leaving him—he still imagined that he was leaving her . And he was safely off the streets; therefore, he was out of immediate harm’s way (meaning Mrs. Vaughn). And even if Mendelssohn’s wife never came home from shopping, it was only a matter of minutes before someone would come into the bookstore who was a devoted Ted Cole reader. It would probably be a woman, and Ted would actually have to buy one of his own autographed books for her, but she would give him a ride home. And if she was good-looking, and so on, and so forth, who knew what might come of it? Why panic at ten o’clock in the morning? Ted was thinking.

  He had no idea.

  How the Writer’s Assistant

  Became a Writer

  Meanwhile, in the nearby frame shop, Eddie O’Hare was finding his voice. At first Eddie was unaware of the powerful change within him; he thought he was merely angry. There was reason to be angry. The saleswoman who waited on Eddie was rude to him. She was not much older than he, but she too brusquely estimated that a sixteen-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl asking about the matting and framing of a single eight-by-ten photograph were not high on the list of those well-heeled Southampton patrons of the arts whom the frame shop sought to serve.

  Eddie asked to speak to the manager, but the saleswoman was rude again; she repeated that the photograph was not ready. “Next time,” she told Eddie, “I suggest that you call before you come.”

  “Do you want to see my stitches?” Ruth asked the saleswoman. “I got a scab, too.”

  The saleswoman—a girl, really—clearly had no children of her own; she pointedly ignored Ruth, which raised Eddie’s anger to a higher level.

  “Show her your scar, Ruth,” Eddie said to the four-year-old.

  “Look . . .” the salesgirl began.

  “No, you look,” Eddie said, still not understanding that he was finding his voice. He’d never spoken to anyone in this manner before; now, suddenly, he was unable to stop. His newfound voice continued. “I’m willing to keep trying with someone who’s rude to me, but I won’t have anything to do with someone who’s rude to a child,” Eddie heard himself say. “If there’s no manager here, there must be someone else— whoever it is who does the actual work, for example. I mean, is there a back room where the mats are cut and the pictures are framed? There must be someone here besides you. I’m not leaving without that photograph, and I’m not talking to you.”

  Ruth looked at Eddie. “Did you got mad at her?” the four-year-old asked him.

  “Yes, I did,” Eddie replied. He felt unsure of who he was, but the salesgirl would never have guessed that Eddie O’Hare was a young man who was often full of doubt. To her, he was confidence itself—he was absolutely terrifying.

  Without a word, she retreated to the very same “back room” that Eddie had so confidently mentioned. Indeed, there were two back rooms in the frame shop—a manager’s office and what Ted would have called a workroom. Both the manager, a Southampton socialite and divorcée named Penny Pierce, and the boy who cut the mats and framed (and framed and framed) all day were there.

  The unpleasant salesgirl conveyed the impression that Eddie, despite his appearance to the contrary, was “scary.” While Penny Pierce knew who Ted Cole was—and she vividly remembered Marion, because Marion was beautiful—Mrs. Pierce did not know who Eddie O’Hare was. The child, she presumed, was the unlucky little girl Ted and Marion had had to compensate for their dead sons. Mrs. Pierce vividly remembered the sons, too. Who could forget the frame shop’s good fortune? There had been hundreds of photographs to mat and frame, and Marion had not chosen inexpensively. It had been an account in the thousands of dollars, Penny Pierce recalled; the shop really should have rematted and reframed the single photograph with the bloodstained mat promptly. We should probably have done it gratis, Mrs. Pierce now considered.

  But just who did this teenager think he was? Who was he to say he wasn’t leaving without the photograph?

  “He’s scary,” the fool salesgirl repeated.

  Penny Pierce’s divorce lawyer had taught her one thing: don’t let anyone who’s angry talk —make them put it in writing. She’d carried this policy with her into the framing business, which her ex-husband had bought for her as a part of the divorce settlement.

  Before Mrs. Pierce confronted Eddie, she instructed the boy in the workroom to stop what he was doing and immediately remat and reframe the photograph of Marion in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire. Penny Pierce had not seen this particular photo in—what was it now?—about five years. Mrs. Pierce remembered Marion bringing in all the snapshots; some of the negatives were scratched. When the boys had been alive, the old pictures of them had been taken for granted and had not been very well cared for. After the boys had died, Penny Pierce assumed, almost every snapshot of them had struck Marion as worthy of enlarging and framing—scratched or not.

  Knowing the story of the accident, Mrs. Pierce had not been able to restrain herself from looking closely at all the photographs. “Oh, it’s this one,” she said when she saw the picture of Marion in bed with her boys’ feet. What had always struck Penny Pierce about this photograph was the evidence of Marion’s distinct happiness—in addition to her unmatched beauty. And now Marion’s beauty was unchanged while her happiness had fled. This fact about Marion was universally striking to other women. While neither beauty nor happiness had entirely abandoned Penny Pierce, she felt that she’d never known either to the extent that Marion had.

  Mrs. Pierce gathered a dozen or more sheets of stationery from her desk before she approached Eddie. “I understand that you’re angry. I’m very sorry about that,” she said pleasantly to the handsome sixteen-year-old, who looked to her incapable of frightening anyone. (I have got to get better help, Penny Pierce was thinking to herself as she went on, visually underestimating Eddie. The closer she looked at him, the more she thought he was too pretty to qualify as handsome.) “When my customers are angry, I ask them to voice their complaints in writing—if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Pierce added, again pleasantly. The sixteen-year-old saw that the manager had presented him with paper and a pen.

  “I work for Mr. Cole. I’m a writer’s assistant,” Eddie said.

  “Then you won’t mind writing, will you?” Penny Pierce replied.

  Eddie picked up the pen. The manager smiled at him encouragingly—she was neither beautiful nor brimming with happiness, but she was nevertheless not un attractive and she was good-natured. No, he wouldn’t mind writing, Eddie realized. It was exactly the invitation that Eddie needed; it was what his voice, long trapped inside him, wanted. He wanted to write. After all, that was why he had sought the job. What he’d got, instead of writing, was Marion. Now that he was losing her, he was finding what he’d wanted before the summer started.

  And it wasn’t Ted who’d taught him anything. What Eddie O’Hare had learned from Ted Cole, he’d learned from reading him. It was from just a few sentences that any writer learned anything from another writer. From The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, Eddie had learned somethin
g from only two sentences. The first one was this: “Tom woke up, but Tim did not.” And then there was this sentence: “It was a sound like, in the closet, if one of Mommy’s dresses came alive and it tried to climb down off the hanger.”

  If, because of that sentence, Ruth Cole would think differently of closets and dresses for the rest of her life, Eddie O’Hare could hear the sound of that dress coming alive and climbing down off that hanger as clearly as any sound he’d ever heard; he could see the movement of that slithery dress in the half-dark of that closet in his sleep.

  And from The Door in the Floor there was another first sentence that wasn’t half bad: “There was a little boy who didn’t know if he wanted to be born.” After the summer of ’58, Eddie O’Hare would finally understand how that little boy felt. There was this sentence, too: “His mommy didn’t know if she wanted him to be born, either.” It was only after he’d met Marion that Eddie understood how that mommy felt.

  That Friday in the frame shop in Southampton, Eddie O’Hare had a life-changing realization: if the writer’s assistant had become a writer, it was Marion who’d given him his voice. If when he’d been in her arms—in her bed, inside her—he’d felt, for the first time, that he was almost a man, it was losing her that had given him something to say . It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O’Hare with the authority to write.

  “Do you have a picture of Marion Cole in your mind?” Eddie wrote. “I mean, in your mind’s eye, can you see exactly what she looks like?” Eddie showed his first two sentences to Penny Pierce.

  “Yes, of course—she’s very beautiful,” the manager said.

  Eddie nodded. Then he kept on writing, as follows: “Okay. Although I am Mr. Cole’s assistant, I have been sleeping with Mrs. Cole this summer. I would estimate that Marion and I have made love about sixty times.”

  “Sixty? ” Mrs. Pierce said aloud. She’d come around the countertop so that she could read what he wrote over his shoulder.