A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  “Oh, you’re going this way . . .” he said in a whisper.

  “Why are you whispering?” Effie asked him.

  On Gin Lane, Mrs. Mountsier was forced to slow the car to a crawl. The street was littered with paper; it hung from the hedges. As Mrs. Mountsier’s car passed, the paper swirled around it. A piece stuck to the windshield. Mrs. Mountsier considered stopping the car.

  “Don’t stop!” Ted told her. “Just use your windshield wipers!”

  “Talk about backseat drivers . . .” Effie remarked.

  But, to Ted’s relief, the windshield wipers worked. The offending scrap of paper flew on. (Ted had briefly seen what he was sure was Mrs. Vaughn’s armpit; it was from one of the most compromising series, when she was on her back with her hands crossed behind her head.)

  “What is all this stuff ?” Glorie asked.

  “Someone’s trash, I guess,” her mother replied.

  “Yes,” Ted said. “Someone’s dog must have got into someone’s trash.”

  “What a mess,” Effie observed.

  “They should fine whoever it is,” Mrs. Mountsier said.

  “Yes,” Ted agreed. “Even if the culprit is a dog—fine the dog!” Everyone but Effie laughed.

  As they neared the end of Gin Lane, a spirited gathering of shredded paper flew all around the moving car; it was as if the ripped drawings of Mrs. Vaughn’s humiliation didn’t want to let Ted go. But the corner was turned; the road ahead was clear. Ted felt a surge of wild happiness, but he made no attempt to express it. A rare moment of reflection overcame him; it was something almost biblical. In his undeserved escape from Mrs. Vaughn, and in the stimulating company of Mrs. Mountsier and her daughter, Ted Cole’s overriding thought repeated itself in his mind like a litany. Lust begets lust, begets lust, begets lust—over and over again. That was the thrill of it.

  The Authority of the Written Word

  The story that Eddie told Ruth in the car was something she would always remember. When she even momentarily forgot it, she had only to look at the thin scar on her right index finger, which would always be there. (When Ruth was in her forties, the scar was so small that it was visible only to her, or to someone who already knew it was there— someone who was looking for it.)

  “There was once a little girl,” Eddie began.

  “What was her name?” Ruth asked.

  “Ruth,” Eddie replied.

  “Yes,” Ruth agreed. “Go on.”

  “She cut her finger on some broken glass,” Eddie continued, “and her finger bled and bled and bled. There was much more blood than Ruth thought could possibly be in her finger. She thought the blood must be coming from everywhere, from her whole body.”

  “Right,” Ruth said.

  “But when she went to the hospital, she needed only two shots and two stitches.”

  “Three needles,” Ruth reminded him, counting the stitches.

  “Oh, yes,” Eddie agreed. “But Ruth was very brave, and she didn’t mind that, for almost a week, she couldn’t swim in the ocean or even get her finger wet when she took a bath.”

  “Why didn’t I mind?” Ruth asked him.

  “Okay, maybe you minded a little, ” Eddie admitted. “But you didn’t complain about it.”

  “I was brave?” the four-year-old asked.

  “You were—you are brave,” Eddie told her.

  “What does brave mean?” Ruth asked him.

  “It means that you don’t cry,” Eddie said.

  “I cried a little,” Ruth pointed out.

  “A little is okay,” Eddie told her. “ Brave means that you accept what happens to you—you just try to make the best of it.”

  “Tell me more about the cut,” the child said.

  “When the doctor took out the stitches, the scar was thin and white and a perfect straight line,” Eddie told her. “In the whole rest of your life, if you ever need to feel brave, just look at your scar.”

  Ruth stared at it. “Will it always be there?” she asked Eddie.

  “Always,” he told her. “Your hand will grow bigger, and your finger will grow bigger, but the scar will stay the same size. When you’re all grown up, the scar will look smaller, but that will be because the rest of you has grown bigger—the scar will always be the same. It will just not be as noticeable, which means that it will become harder and harder to see. You’ll have to show it to people in good light, and you’ll have to say, ‘Can you see my scar?’ And they’ll have to look really closely; only then will they be able to see it. You’ll always be able to see it because you’ll know where to look. And, of course, it will always show up on a fingerprint.”

  “What’s a fingerprint?” Ruth asked.

  “It’s kind of hard to show you while we’re in the car,” Eddie said.

  When they got to the beach, Ruth asked him again, but even in the wet sand, Ruth’s fingers were too small to leave clear fingerprints—or else the sand was too coarse. As Ruth played in the shallow water, the yellow-brown antiseptic was completely washed away; but the scar remained a bright white line on her finger. Not until they went to a restaurant could she see what a fingerprint was.

  There, on the same plate with her grilled-cheese sandwich and her French fries, Eddie poured out a spreading puddle of ketchup. He dipped the index finger of Ruth’s right hand in the ketchup and gently pressed her finger on a paper napkin. Beside the fingerprint of her right index finger, Eddie made a second print—this time using the index finger from Ruth’s left hand. Eddie told her to look at the napkin through her water glass, which magnified the fingerprints so that Ruth could see the unmatched whorls. And there it was—as it would be, forever: the perfectly vertical line on her right index finger; seen through the water glass, it was nearly twice the size of the scar itself.

  “Those are your fingerprints—nobody else will ever have fingerprints like yours,” Eddie told her.

  “And my scar will always be there?” Ruth asked him again.

  “Your scar will be a part of you forever,” Eddie promised her.

  After their lunch in Bridgehampton, Ruth wanted to keep the napkin with her fingerprints. Eddie put it in the envelope with her stitches and her scab. He saw that the scab had shriveled up; it was a quarter the size of a ladybug, but of a similar russet color and spotted black.

  At about 2:15 on that Friday afternoon, Eddie O’Hare turned onto Parsonage Lane, Sagaponack. When he was still some distance from the Coles’ house, he was relieved to see that the moving truck and Marion’s Mercedes were nowhere in sight. However, an unfamiliar car—a dark-green Saab—was parked in the driveway. As Eddie slowed the Chevy to a crawl, Ted, the obdurate womanizer, was saying goodbye to the three women in the Saab.

  Ted had already shown his workroom to his future models—Mrs. Mountsier and her daughter, Glorie. Effie had refused to leave the backseat of the car. Poor Effie was ahead of her time: she was a young woman of integrity and insight and intelligence, trapped in a body that most men either ignored or spurned; of the three women in the dark-green Saab on that Friday afternoon, Effie was the only one with the wisdom to see that Ted Cole was as deceitful as a damaged condom.

  For a heart-stopping second Eddie thought that the driver of the dark-green Saab was Marion, but as Eddie turned into the driveway he saw that Mrs. Mountsier did not as closely resemble Marion as he’d thought. For just a second, Eddie had hoped that Marion had had a change of heart. She’s not leaving Ruth, he thought—or me . But Mrs. Mountsier was not Marion; nor did Mrs. Mountsier’s daughter, Glorie, resemble Alice—the pretty college-girl nanny whom Eddie despised. (Eddie had also jumped to the conclusion that Glorie was Alice.) Now Eddie realized that they were merely a bunch of women who’d given Ted a ride home. The boy wondered which one Ted had taken an interest in—certainly not the one in the backseat.

  As the dark-green Saab pulled out of the driveway, Eddie could instantly tell from Ted’s innocent, only mildly puzzled expression that he didn’t know Marion was gone.
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br />   “Daddy! Daddy!” Ruth cried. “Do you want to see my stitches? There are four pieces. And I got a scab. Show Daddy the scab!” the four-year-old told Eddie, who handed Ted the envelope.

  “Those are my fingerprints,” the child explained to her father. He was staring at the paper napkin with the ketchup stains.

  “Careful the scab doesn’t blow away in the wind,” Eddie warned Ted. The scab was so small that Ted peered at it without taking it out of the envelope.

  “That’s really neat, Ruthie,” Ruth’s father said. “So . . . you were at the doctor, getting her stitches taken out?” Ted asked Eddie.

  “And we went to the beach, and we had lunch,” Ruth told her father. “I had a grilled-cheese sandwich and French fries with ketchup. And Eddie showed me my fingerprints. I’m going to keep my scar forever.”

  “That’s nice, Ruthie.” Ted was watching Eddie take the beach bag out of the Chevy. On top were the pages of stationery from the frame shop in Southampton—the story of the summer of ’58, which Eddie had written for Penny Pierce. Seeing the pages gave Eddie an idea. He went to the trunk of the Chevy and took out the rematted, reframed photograph of Marion in Paris. Ted was now watching Eddie’s every move with increasing unease.

  “I see the photograph was ready, finally,” Ted observed.

  “We got the feet back, Daddy! The picture is all fixed,” Ruth said.

  Ted picked up his daughter and held her, kissing her forehead. “You’ve got sand in your hair, and salt water to rinse out. You need a bath, Ruthie.”

  “But not a shampoo!” Ruth cried.

  “Well, yes, Ruthie—you need a shampoo, too.”

  “But I hate shampoos—they make me cry!” Ruth exclaimed.

  “Well.” Ted stopped as usual. He couldn’t take his eyes off Eddie. To Eddie, Ted said: “I waited quite a while for you this morning. Where were you?”

  Eddie handed him the pages he’d written for Penny Pierce. “The lady in the frame shop asked me to write this,” Eddie began. “She wanted me to explain to her, in writing, why I wouldn’t leave the shop without the photograph.”

  Ted didn’t take the pages, but he put Ruth down and stared at his own house. “Where’s Alice?” he asked Eddie. “Isn’t it Alice who’s here in the afternoons? Where’s the nanny? Where’s Marion ?”

  “I’ll give Ruth a bath,” Eddie answered him. Once again the sixteen-year-old handed Ted the pages. “Better read this,” Eddie told him.

  “Answer me, Eddie.”

  “Read that first,” Eddie said. He picked up Ruth and started carrying her toward the house with the beach bag slung over his shoulder. He held Ruth with one arm, carrying the photo of Marion and the feet in his free hand.

  “You haven’t given Ruth a bath before,” Ted called after him. “You don’t know how to give her a bath!”

  “I can figure it out. Ruth can tell me,” Eddie called back to him. “Read that,” Eddie repeated.

  “Okay, okay,” Ted told him. He started reading aloud: “ ‘Do you have a picture of Marion Cole in your mind?’ Hey! What is this?”

  “It’s the only good writing I’ve done all summer,” Eddie answered, carrying Ruth inside the house. Once inside, Eddie wondered how he could get Ruth in a bath—in any of the house’s several bathtubs— without her noticing that the photographs of her dead brothers were gone.

  The phone was ringing. Eddie hoped it was Alice. Still carrying Ruth, he answered the phone in the kitchen. There had never been more than three or four photos of Thomas and Timothy in the kitchen; Eddie hoped that Ruth might not notice they were gone. And, because of the ringing phone, Eddie had rushed through the front hall with Ruth in his arms. Ruth might not have noticed the darker rectangles of unfaded wallpaper; the bare walls were also distinguished by the picture hooks, which Marion had left behind.

  It was Alice on the phone. Eddie told her to come over right away. Then he put Ruth over his shoulder, and—holding her tight—he ran with her up the stairs. “It’s a race to the bathtub!” Eddie said. “ Which bathtub do you want? Your mommy and daddy’s bathtub, my bathtub, another bathtub . . .”

  “ Your bathtub!” Ruth shrieked.

  He veered into the long upstairs hall, where he was surprised to see how vividly the picture hooks stood out against the walls. Some of the hooks were black; some were the color of gold or silver. All of them were somehow ugly. It was as if the house had suffered an infestation of metallic beetles.

  “Did you saw that?” Ruth asked.

  But Eddie, still running, carried her into his bedroom at the far end of the hall—and then into his bathroom, where he hung the photograph of Marion in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire exactly where it had been when the summer began.

  Eddie started the bath running as he helped Ruth out of her clothes, which was a struggle because Ruth kept trying to look at the bathroom walls while Eddie was pulling her T-shirt off. Except for the photo of Marion in Paris, the walls were bare. The other photographs were missing. The naked picture hooks seemed more numerous than they were. To Eddie, the beetlelike picture hooks seemed to be crawling on the walls.

  “Where are the other pictures?” Ruth asked, as Eddie lifted her into the filling tub.

  “Maybe your mommy moved them,” Eddie told her. “Look at you— there’s sand between your toes, and in your hair, and in your ears!”

  “It got in my crack, too—it always does,” Ruth remarked.

  “Oh, yes . . .” Eddie said. “It’s a good time to have a bath, all right!”

  “No shampoo,” Ruth insisted.

  “But the sand is in your hair,” Eddie told her. The bathtub had a European fixture, a movable hose with which Eddie began to spray the child while she shrieked.

  “No shampoo!”

  “Just a little shampoo,” Eddie told her. “Just close your eyes.”

  “It’s going in my ears, too!” the four-year-old screamed.

  “I thought you were brave. Aren’t you brave?” Eddie asked her. As soon as the shampooing was finished, Ruth stopped crying. Eddie let her play with the hose until she sprayed him.

  “Where did Mommy move the pictures?” Ruth asked.

  “I don’t know,” Eddie admitted. (By tonight, even before it was dark, this would become a refrain.)

  “Did Mommy move the pictures from the halls, too?” the child asked.

  “Yes, Ruth.”

  “Why?” the four-year-old asked.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated.

  Pointing at the bathroom walls, Ruth said: “But Mommy didn’t move those things. What are those things called?”

  “Picture hooks,” Eddie said.

  “Why didn’t Mommy move them?” Ruth asked.

  “I don’t know,” Eddie repeated. The child was standing in the emptying tub, which was filled with sand. Ruth began to shiver as soon as Eddie lifted her to the bath mat.

  As he was drying her off, he wondered how he was supposed to untangle the little girl’s hair; it was quite long and full of knots. Eddie was distracted by trying to remember, word for word, what he’d written for Penny Pierce; he was also trying to imagine Ted’s reaction to certain sentences. For example: “I would estimate that Marion and I have made love about sixty times.” And following that sentence, there were these sentences, too: “When Ruth gets home, both her mother and all the pictures will be gone. Her dead brothers and her mother will be gone.”

  Remembering his conclusion, word for word, Eddie wondered if Ted would appreciate the understatement. “I just thought that the child would probably really need to have something to put near her bed tonight,” Eddie had written. “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 . . .”

  Eddie had already wrapped Ruth up in a towel before he noticed Ted standing in the bathroom doorway. In a wordless exchange, Eddie picked up the child and handed her to her father while Ted gave Eddie back the pages he’d written.


  “Daddy! Daddy!” Ruth said. “Mommy moved all the pictures! But not the . . . what are they called?” she asked Eddie.

  “The picture hooks.”

  “Right,” Ruth said. “Why did she did that?” the four-year-old asked her father.

  “I don’t know, Ruthie.”

  “I’m going to take a quick shower,” Eddie told Ted.

  “Yes, make it a quick one,” Ted told him. He carried his daughter into the hall.

  “Look at all the . . . what are they called?” Ruth asked Ted.

  “Picture hooks, Ruthie.”

  Only after he’d showered did Eddie realize that Ted and Ruth had taken the photograph of Marion off the bathroom wall; they must have moved it to Ruth’s room. It was fascinating to Eddie to realize that what he’d written was coming true. He wanted to be alone with Ted, to tell him everything that Marion had instructed him to say—and anything that Eddie could add. He wanted to hurt Ted with as many truths as he could summon. But at the same time Eddie wanted to lie to Ruth. For thirty-seven years he would want to lie to her, to tell her anything that might make her feel better.

  When Eddie had dressed, he put the pages he’d written into his empty duffel bag. He would be packing soon, and he wanted to be sure to take his writing with him. But, to his surprise, the duffel bag wasn’t empty. At the bottom was Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan; she’d also included her lilac-colored silk camisole and matching panties, despite her observation that pink with lilac was an unwise combination. She knew it was the décolletage (and the lace) that had appealed to Eddie.

  Eddie rummaged through the bag, hoping to find more; maybe Marion had written him a letter. What he found surprised him as much as the discovery of her clothing. It was the crushed, bread loaf–shaped present that Eddie’s father had given him as he’d boarded the ferry for Long Island; it was Ruth’s present, the wrapping much the worse for its summerlong residence in the bottom of the duffel bag. Eddie didn’t think now was the right time to give Ruth the present, whatever it was.