A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Eddie wrote: “We’ve been doing it for six, almost seven weeks, and we usually do it twice a day—often more than twice a day. But there was the time she had an infection, and we couldn’t do it. And when you take into consideration her period . . .”

  “I see—about sixty times, then,” Penny Pierce said. “Go on.”

  “Okay,” Eddie wrote. “While Marion and I have been lovers, Mr . Cole—his name is Ted—has had a mistress. She was his model, actually. Do you know Mrs. Vaughn?”

  “The Vaughns on Gin Lane? They have quite a . . . collection,” the frame-shop manager said. (Now there was a framing job she would have liked!)

  “Yes—that Mrs. Vaughn,” Eddie wrote. “She has a son, a little boy.”

  “Yes, yes—I know!” said Mrs. Pierce. “Please go on.”

  “Okay,” Eddie wrote. “This morning Ted—that is, Mr. Cole—has broken up with Mrs. Vaughn. I don’t imagine that there could have been a very happy resolution to their affair. Mrs. Vaughn seemed pretty upset about it. And, meanwhile, Marion is packing up—she’s leaving. Ted doesn’t know she’s leaving, but she is. And Ruth—this is Ruth, she’s four.”

  “Yes, yes!” Penny Pierce interjected.

  “Ruth doesn’t know her mother is leaving, either,” Eddie wrote. “Both Ruth and her father are going to go back home to the house in Sagaponack and realize that Marion is gone. And all the photographs, those pictures that you framed—every one of them, except the one you have here, in the shop.”

  “Yes, yes—my God, what ?” Penny Pierce said. Ruth scowled at her. Mrs. Pierce tried her best to smile at the child.

  Eddie wrote: “Marion is taking the pictures with her. When Ruth gets home, both her mother and all the pictures will be gone. Her dead brothers and her mother will be gone. And the thing about those photographs is that there’s a story that goes with all of them—there are hundreds of stories, and Ruth knows each and every one of them by heart.”

  “What do you want from me?” Mrs. Pierce cried.

  “Just the photograph of Ruth’s mother,” Eddie said aloud. “She’s in bed in a hotel room, in Paris . . .”

  “Yes, I know the picture—of course you can have it!” Penny Pierce said.

  “That’s it, then,” Eddie said. He wrote: “I just thought that the child would probably really need to have something to put near her bed tonight. There won’t be any other pictures—all those pictures she’s been used to. I thought that if there was one of her mother, especially . . .”

  “But it’s not a good picture of the boys—only their feet, ” Mrs. Pierce interrupted.

  “Yes, I know,” Eddie said. “Ruth particularly likes the feet.”

  “Are the feet ready?” the four-year-old asked.

  “Yes, they are, dear,” Penny Pierce said solicitously to Ruth.

  “Do you want to see my stitches?” the child asked the manager. “And . . . my scab?”

  “The envelope is in the car, Ruth—it’s in the glove compartment,” Eddie explained.

  “Oh,” Ruth said. “What’s a glove department?”

  “I’ll go check to be sure that the photograph is ready,” Penny Pierce announced. “It’s almost ready, I’m sure.” Nervously, she scooped up the pages of stationery from the countertop, although Eddie still held the pen. Before she could leave his side, Eddie caught her by the arm.

  “Excuse me,” he said, handing her the pen. “The pen is yours, but could I please have my writing back?”

  “Yes, of course!” the manager replied. She handed him all the paper, even the blank sheets.

  “What did you did?” Ruth asked Eddie.

  “I told the lady a story,” the sixteen-year-old explained.

  “Tell me the story,” the child said.

  “I’ll tell you another story, in the car,” Eddie promised her. “After we get the picture of your mommy.”

  “And the feet !” the four-year-old insisted.

  “The feet, too,” Eddie promised.

  “What story are you going to tell me?” Ruth asked him.

  “I don’t know,” the boy admitted. He would have to think of one; surprisingly, he wasn’t in the least bit worried about it. One would come, he was sure. Nor was he worried anymore about what he had to say to Ted. He would tell Ted everything that Marion had told him to say—and anything else that came into his mind. I can do it, he believed. He had the authority.

  Penny Pierce knew he had it, too. When the manager re-emerged from the back rooms of the frame shop, she brought more than the rematted, reframed photograph with her. Although Mrs. Pierce had not changed her clothes, she had somehow transformed herself; she brought with her a substantially revised presence —not merely a fresh scent (a new perfume), but a change in attitude that made her almost alluring. To Eddie, she was borderline seductive—he’d not really noticed her as a woman before.

  Her hair, which had been up, was down. There’d been some alterations in her makeup, too. Exactly what Mrs. Pierce had done to herself was not hard for Eddie to pinpoint. Her eyes were darker and more pronounced; her lipstick was darker, too. Her face, if not more youthful, was more flushed. And she’d opened her suit jacket, and pushed up the sleeves—and the top two buttons of her blouse were unbuttoned. (Only the topmost button had been unbuttoned before.)

  In bending down to show Ruth the photograph, Mrs. Pierce revealed a depth of cleavage that Eddie would never have guessed at; when she stood up, she whispered to Eddie: “There’s no charge for the photograph, of course.”

  Eddie nodded and smiled, but Penny Pierce was not through with him. She showed him a page of stationery; she had a question for him—in writing, because it wasn’t a question that Mrs. Pierce would ever have asked out loud in front of the child.

  “Is Marion Cole leaving you, too?” Penny Pierce had written.

  “Yes,” Eddie told her. Mrs. Pierce gave his wrist a comforting little squeeze.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Eddie didn’t know what to say.

  “Did the blood get all gone?” Ruth asked. It was a miracle to the four-year-old that the photograph had been so completely restored. As a result of the accident, she herself bore a scar.

  “Yes, dear—it’s as good as new!” Mrs. Pierce told the child. “Young man,” the manager added, as Eddie took Ruth by the hand, “if you’re ever interested in a job . . .” Since Eddie had the photograph in one hand, and Ruth’s hand in his other hand, he had no hand free to take the business card that Penny Pierce held out to him. In a move that reminded Eddie of Marion putting the ten-dollar bill in his right rear pocket, Mrs. Pierce deftly inserted the card into the left front pocket of the boy’s jeans. “Perhaps next summer, or the summer after that—I’m always looking for help in the summer,” the manager said.

  Again, Eddie didn’t know what to say; once more, he nodded and smiled. It was a posh place, the frame shop. The display room was tasteful; there were mostly examples of customized frames. The poster art, always a favorite in the summer, featured movie posters of the thirties—Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina, Margaret Sullavan as the woman who dies and becomes a ghost at the end of Three Comrades . Also, liquor and wine advertisements were popular poster material: there was a dangerous-looking woman sipping a Campari and soda, and a man as handsome as Ted Cole was drinking a martini made with just the right amount and the right brand of vermouth.

  Cinzano, Eddie nearly said aloud—he was trying to imagine what it might be like to work there. It would take him about a year and a half to realize that Penny Pierce had been offering him more than a job. His newfound “authority” was so new to him, Eddie O’Hare hadn’t yet comprehended the extent of his power.

  Something Almost Biblical

  Meanwhile, back in the bookstore, Ted Cole was reaching calligraphic heights at the autographing table. His penmanship was perfect; his slow, seemingly carved signature was a thing of beauty. For someone whose books were so short—and he wrote so little—Ted’s autograph was a labor of love.
(“A labor of self -love,” Marion had once described Ted’s signature to Eddie.) To those booksellers who often complained that the signatures of authors were messy scrawls, as indecipherable as doctors’ prescriptions, Ted Cole was the king of autographers. There was nothing dashed-off about his signature, not even on checks. The cursive script was more like italicized print than handwriting.

  Ted complained about the pens. He had Mendelssohn hopping around the shop searching for the perfect pen; it had to be a fountain pen, one with just the right nib. And the ink had to be either black or the proper shade of red. (“More like blood than like a fire engine,” Ted explained to the bookseller.) As for blue, any shade of blue was an abomination to Ted.

  And so Eddie O’Hare was lucky. While Eddie took Ruth’s hand and walked with her to the Chevy, Ted took his time. He knew that every autograph-seeker who approached him at the signing table was a potential ride home, but he was picky; he didn’t want to be just anyone’s passenger.

  For example, Mendelssohn introduced him to a woman who lived in Wainscott. Mrs. Hickenlooper said she would be happy to drop Ted at his house in Sagaponack. It really wasn’t out of her way. However, she did have some other shopping to do in Southampton. It would take her a little more than an hour, after which she didn’t mind stopping back at the bookstore. But Ted told her not to trouble herself; he said he was sure another ride would come his way within the hour.

  “But I really don’t mind, ” Mrs. Hickenlooper said.

  I mind! Ted thought to himself; amiably, he waved the woman away. She went off with an inscribed copy of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, which Ted had painstakingly dedicated to Mrs. Hickenlooper’s five children. She should have bought five copies, Ted believed, but he dutifully signed the one, fitting all five names of the Hickenlooper progeny on a single, crowded page.

  “My kids are all grown up now,” Mrs. Hickenlooper told Ted, “but they sure loved you when they were little ones.”

  Ted just smiled. Mrs. Hickenlooper was pushing fifty. She had hips like a mule. There was a farmlike solidity to her. She was a gardener, or so it appeared; she wore a broad denim skirt, and her knees were red and stained with soil. “There’s no way to be a good weeder without kneeling!” Ted had overheard her telling another man in the bookstore. He was a fellow gardener, apparently—they were comparing gardening books.

  It was ungenerous of Ted to take a disparaging view of gardeners. After all, he owed his life to Mrs. Vaughn’s gardener—for if the courageous man hadn’t warned Ted to run, Ted might not have escaped the black Lincoln. Nevertheless, Mrs. Hickenlooper just wasn’t the ride home that Ted Cole was looking for.

  Then he spotted a more promising candidate. A standoffish young woman—she was at least of legal driving age—had hesitated in her approach to the autographing table; she was observing the famous author and illustrator with the characteristic combination of shyness and frolicsomeness that Ted associated with girls who stood on the threshold of attaining more womanly qualities. In a few years, what was now hesitant about her would turn calculating, even shrewd. And what was now coltish, even daring, soon would be better contained. She had to be at least seventeen, but not yet twenty; she was both frisky and awkward, both unsure of herself and eager to test herself. She was a little clumsy, but she was bold. Probably a virgin, Ted was thinking; at least she was very inexperienced—he was sure.

  “Hi,” he said.

  The pretty girl who was almost a woman was so startled by Ted’s unexpected attention that she was speechless; she also turned a prominent shade of red, midway between blood and a fire engine. Her friend—a vastly plainer, deceptively stupid-looking girl—exploded into snorts and giggles. Ted had failed to notice that the pretty girl was in the company of an ugly friend. With any interesting-looking young woman who was sexually vulnerable, wasn’t there always an oafish, unappealing companion to contend with?

  But Ted was undaunted by the sidekick. If anything, he saw her as an intriguing challenge; if her presence meant it was unlikely that he would get laid today, the potential seduction of the pretty young woman was no less inviting to him. As Marion had pointed out to Eddie, it was less the occurrence of sex than the anticipation of it that titillated Ted; he seemed driven less to do it than to look forward to it.

  “Hi,” the pretty girl finally managed to reply.

  Her pear-shaped friend couldn’t contain herself. To the embarrassment of the pretty girl, the ugly one said: “She wrote her freshman English term paper on you!”

  “Shut up, Effie!” the pretty girl said.

  So she’s a college girl, Ted Cole concluded; he guessed that she worshiped The Door in the Floor.

  “What was the title of your term paper?” Ted asked.

  “ ‘An Analysis of the Atavistic Symbols of Fear in The Door in the Floor, ’ ” the pretty girl, who was clearly mortified, said. “You know, like the boy not being sure that he wants to be born—and the mother not being sure that she wants to have him. That’s very tribal. Primitive tribes have those fears. And the myths and fairy tales of primitive tribes are full of images like magic doors, and children disappearing, and people being so frightened that their hair turns white overnight. And in myths and fairy tales there are lots of animals that can suddenly change their size, like the snake—the snake is very tribal, too, of course. . . .”

  “Of course,” Ted agreed. “How long was this paper?”

  “Twelve pages,” the pretty girl informed him, “not counting the footnotes and the bibliography.”

  Not counting the illustrations—just manuscript pages, in ordinary double-spaced typescript— The Door in the Floor was only a page and a half long; yet it had been published as if it were a whole book, and college students were permitted to write term papers about it. What a joke! Ted was thinking.

  He liked the girl’s lips; her mouth was round and small. And her breasts were full—they were almost fat. In a few years, she would have to struggle with her weight, but now her plumpness was appealing and she still had a waist. Ted was fond of assessing women by their body types; with most women, Ted believed he could visualize what the future would do to their bodies. This one would have one baby and lose her waist; she would also run the risk of her hips taking over her body, whereas now her voluptuousness was contained—if barely. By the time she’s thirty, she’ll be as pear-shaped as her friend, Ted was thinking, but all he said was, “What’s your name?”

  “Glorie—not with a y but with an i-e,” the pretty girl replied. “And this is Effie.”

  I’ll show you something atavistic, Glorie, Ted was thinking. Weren’t forty-five-year-old men and eighteen-year-old girls frequently paired together in primitive tribes? I’ll show you something tribal, Ted Cole thought, but what he said was: “I don’t suppose you girls have a car. Believe it or not, I need a ride.”

  Believe it or not, Mrs. Vaughn, having lost Ted, had irrationally directed her considerable anger toward her brave but defenseless gardener. She’d parked the Lincoln—facing out, motor running—in the entrance of her driveway; the black nose of the car’s sleek hood and its gleaming-silver grille were poking into Gin Lane. Poised at the steering wheel, where she sat for almost half an hour (until the Lincoln ran out of gas), Mrs. Vaughn waited for the ’57 black and white Chevy to make the turn onto Gin Lane from either Wyandanch Lane or South Main Street. She thought that Ted would not stray far from the vicinity, for she, along with Ted, still assumed that Marion’s lover—“the pretty boy,” as Mrs. Vaughn thought of Eddie—remained Ted’s chauffeur. Therefore, Mrs. Vaughn turned up the tune on the radio and waited.

  Inside the black Lincoln, the music throbbed; the sheer volume, and the degree to which the bass vibrated the speakers in the car, almost concealed from Mrs. Vaughn that the Lincoln had run out of gas. Had the car not shuddered so violently at that moment, Mrs. Vaughn might have gone on waiting at the steering wheel until her son was brought home from his afternoon tennis lesson.

  More import
ant, that the Lincoln finally ran out of gas may have spared Mrs. Vaughn’s gardener a cruel death. The poor man, whose ladder had been knocked from under him, had all this while been trapped in the remorseless privet, where the carbon-monoxide fumes from the Lincoln’s exhaust had at first made him sick and then nearly killed him. He was half asleep, but conscious of the fact that he was half dead, when the car conked out and a fresh sea breeze revived him.

  In his earlier effort to climb down from the top of the hedge, the heel of his right foot had become stuck in a twisted notch of the privet. In attempting to free his boot from the notch, the gardener had lost his balance and fallen upside down in the thick hedge—thus wedging his boot heel more snugly than before in the tenacious privet. His ankle was sorely twisted in the fall, and—hanging by his heel in the tangled hedge—he had pulled an abdominal muscle while trying to untie his boot.

  A small man of Hispanic descent, with an appropriately small potbelly, Eduardo Gomez was not used to performing upside-down sit-ups in a hedge. His boots were of the above-ankle sort, and although he’d struggled to sit up long enough to untie the laces, he had not been able to bear the pain of the position long enough to loosen the laces. The boot would not slip off.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Vaughn couldn’t hear Eduardo’s calls for help above the volume and the throbbing bass of her car radio. The miserable hanging gardener, aware of the rising fumes from the Lincoln’s exhaust, which were gathering in the dense and seemingly airless hedge, was convinced that the privet would be his final resting place. Eduardo Gomez would be the victim of another man’s lust, and of another man’s proverbial “woman scorned.” Nor did the dying gardener miss the irony that it was the shredded pornographic drawings of his employer that had led him to his position in the murderous privet. Had the Lincoln not run out of gas, the gardener might have become Southampton’s first fatality ever ascribed to pornography—but doubtless not the last, Eduardo was thinking, as he drifted off in the carbonmonoxide fumes. It crossed his poisoned mind that Ted Cole deserved to die this way, but not an innocent gardener.