A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  “Died persons don’t have faces,” Ruth said.

  “Why not, honey?” Ted asked her.

  “Because they got buried. They’re under the ground,” Ruth told him.

  Ted pointed to the mounds that weren’t mountains. “So this is the ground, right?”

  “Right,” Ruth said. “The died persons are under it.”

  “I see,” Ted said.

  Pointing to the middle stick figure with the melon head, Ruth said: “That one is Mommy.”

  “But your mommy isn’t dead, sweetheart,” Ted said. “Mommy isn’t a died person.”

  “And this is Thomas, and this is Timothy,” Ruth continued, pointing to the other skeletons.

  “Ruthie, Mommy isn’t dead—she’s just gone away.”

  “That one is Mommy,” Ruth repeated, pointing again to the skeleton in the middle.

  “How about a grilled-cheese sandwich with French fries?” Eddie asked Ruth.

  “And ketchup,” Ruth said.

  “Good idea, Eddie,” Ted told the sixteen-year-old.

  The French fries were frozen, the oven had to be preheated, and Ted was too drunk to find the skillet he preferred to use for grilled-cheese sandwiches; yet all three of them managed to eat this lamentable food—the ketchup helped. Eddie did the dishes while Ted tried to put Ruth to bed. Under the circumstances, it had been a civilized supper, Eddie was thinking as he listened to Ruth and her father go through the upstairs of the house, describing the missing photographs to each other. Sometimes Ted made one up—at least Ted described a photograph that Eddie couldn’t recall having seen—but Ruth didn’t seem to mind. Ruth also made up one or two photographs.

  One day, when she couldn’t remember many of the photos, she would make up nearly everything. Eddie, long after he’d forgotten almost all the photographs, would make them up, too. Only Marion would be free of inventing Thomas and Timothy. Ruth, of course, would soon learn to invent her mother as well.

  All the while that Eddie was packing, Ruth and Ted were going on and on about the photographs—real and imagined. They made it difficult for Eddie to concentrate on his immediate problem. Who was going to drive him to the ferry at Orient Point? That was when he happened upon the list of every living Exonian in the Hamptons; the most recent addition to the list, a Percy S. Wilmot from the class of ’46, lived in nearby Wainscott.

  Eddie would have been Ruth’s age when Mr. Wilmot graduated from Exeter, but possibly Mr. Wilmot would remember Eddie’s father. Surely every Exonian had at least heard of Minty O’Hare! But was the Exeter connection worth a ride to Orient Point? Eddie doubted it. Yet he thought it would be at least educative to call Percy Wilmot—if only to spite his father. If only for the thrill of telling Minty: “Listen, I called every living Exonian in the Hamptons and begged for a ride to the ferry, and they all turned me down!”

  But when Eddie went downstairs to the telephone in the kitchen, he glanced at the kitchen clock. It was almost midnight; it would be wiser to call Mr. Wilmot in the morning. However, as late as it was, he didn’t hesitate to call his parents; Eddie could have a short conversation with his father only if his father was half asleep. Eddie wanted to keep the conversation short. Even when half asleep, Minty was excitable.

  “Everything’s fine, Dad. No, there’s nothing wrong,” Eddie said. “I just wanted you or Mom to be around the phone tomorrow, in case I call. If I can get a ride to the ferry, I’ll call before I leave.”

  “Have you been fired ?” Minty asked. Eddie heard his father whisper to his mom: “It’s Edward—I think he’s been fired !”

  “No, I haven’t been fired,” Eddie lied. “I just finished the job.”

  Naturally Minty went on and on—on the subject of how he’d never imagined that it was the sort of job one ever, exactly, “finished.” Minty also calculated that he needed thirty more minutes to drive to New London from Exeter than Eddie would need to drive to Orient Point from Sagaponack— and take the ferry to New London.

  “Then I’ll just wait for you in New London, Dad.”

  Knowing Minty, Eddie knew that—even on short notice—Minty would be waiting at the dock in New London. His father would take his mom along, too; she would be the “navigator.”

  That done, Eddie wandered into the yard. He needed to escape the murmuring from the upstairs of the house, where Ted and Ruth were still reciting the stories of the missing photographs—from both their memories and their imaginations. In the cool of the yard, their voices were lost to Eddie in the cacophony of crickets and tree frogs, and in the distant thumping of the surf.

  The only actual argument Eddie had ever overheard between Ted and Marion had been there, in the spacious but unmanaged yard. Marion had called it a yard-in-progress, but it was more accurately a yard that had been halted by disagreement and indecision. Ted had wanted a swimming pool. Marion had said that a swimming pool would spoil Ruth, or else the child would drown in it.

  “Not with all the nannies she has looking after her,” Ted had argued, which Marion had interpreted as a further indictment of her as a mother.

  Ted had also wanted an outdoor shower—something handy to the squash court in the barn, but near enough to the swimming pool so that children returning from the beach could rinse the sand off before going in the pool.

  “ What children?” Marion had asked him.

  “Not to mention before going in the house,” Ted had added. He hated sand in the house. Ted never went to the beach, except in the winter after storms. He liked to see what the storms washed up; sometimes there were things he brought home to draw. (Driftwood in peculiar shapes; the shell of a horseshoe crab; a skate with its face like a Halloween mask, and its barbed tail; a dead seagull.)

  Marion went to the beach only if Ruth wanted to go, and if it was a weekend—or if, for some reason, there was no nanny to take the child. Marion didn’t like too much sun; at the beach she would cover herself in a long-sleeved shirt. She wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, so that no one ever knew who she was, and she sat watching Ruth play by herself at the water’s edge. “Not like a mother, more like a nanny,” Marion had described herself at the beach to Eddie. “Like someone even less interested in a child than a good nanny would be,” Marion had said.

  Ted had wanted multiple showerheads for the outdoor shower; that way, he and his squash opponent could take a shower together—“like in a locker room,” Ted had said. “Or all the children can shower together.”

  “ What children?” Marion had repeated.

  “Ruth and her nanny, then,” Ted had replied.

  The lawn in the presently unmanaged yard gave way to an untended field of tall grass and daisies. There should be more lawn, Ted had decided. And some sort of barrier to keep the neighbors from seeing you when you were in the pool.

  “ What neighbors?” Marion had asked.

  “Oh, there will be lots more neighbors one day,” Ted had told her. (He was right about that.)

  But Marion had wanted a different sort of yard. She liked the field of tall grass, and the daisies; more wildflowers would have suited her. She liked the look of an untamed garden. And maybe a grape arbor, but with the vines allowed to run unchecked. And there should be less lawn, not more—and more flowers, but not prissy flowers.

  “ ‘Prissy . . .’ ” Ted had said scornfully.

  “Swimming pools are prissy,” Marion had said. “And if there’s more lawn, it will look like an athletic field. What do we need an athletic field for? Is Ruth going to be throwing or kicking a ball with an entire team ?”

  “You’d want more lawn if the boys were alive,” Ted had told her. “The boys liked to play ball.”

  That had been the end of it. The yard had stayed as it was—if not exactly a yard-in-progress, at least an unfinished yard.

  In the dark, listening to the crickets and the tree frogs and the distant percussion of the surf, Eddie was imagining what would become of the yard. He heard the ice cubes rattling in Ted’s glass before he saw T
ed, and before Ted saw him.

  There were no lights on in the downstairs of the house, only the light from the upstairs hall, and from the guest bedroom, where Eddie had left his light on, and from the feeble night-light in the master bathroom, which was always left on for Ruth. Eddie marveled how Ted had managed to make himself another drink in the dark kitchen.

  “Is Ruth asleep?” Eddie asked him.

  “Finally,” Ted said. “The poor kid.” He went on shaking the ice cubes in his glass; he kept sucking his drink. For a third time, Ted offered Eddie a drink and Eddie declined.

  “At least have a beer, for Christ’s sake,” Ted said. “Jesus . . . just look at this yard.”

  Eddie decided to have a beer. The sixteen-year-old had never had a beer before. His parents, on special occasions, drank wine with dinner, and Eddie had been permitted to have wine with them. Eddie had never liked the wine.

  The beer was cold but bitter-tasting—Eddie wouldn’t finish it. Yet going to the refrigerator to get it, and turning on (and leaving on) the kitchen light, had broken Ted’s train of thought. Ted had forgotten about the yard; he was thinking more directly of Marion instead.

  “I can’t believe she doesn’t want custody of her own daughter,” Ted said.

  “I don’t know if that’s it,” Eddie replied. “It’s not that she doesn’t want Ruth. Marion just doesn’t want to be a bad mother—she thinks she’ll do a bad job.”

  “What kind of mother leaves her daughter?” Ted asked the boy. “Talk about ‘a bad job’!”

  “She said she wanted to be a writer, once,” Eddie said.

  “Marion is a writer—she just doesn’t do it,” Ted told him.

  Marion had told Eddie that she couldn’t keep turning to her innermost thoughts when all she thought about was the death of her boys. Eddie said cautiously to Ted: “I think Marion still wants to be a writer, but the death of the boys is her only subject. I mean that it’s the only subject that keeps presenting itself to her, and she can’t write about it.”

  “Let me see if I follow you, Eddie,” Ted said. “So . . . Marion takes every existent photograph of the boys that she can lay her hands on— and all the negatives, too—and she goes off to be a writer, because the boys’ death is the only subject that keeps presenting itself to her, although she can’t write about it. Yeah . . .” Ted said, “that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddie said. Whatever theory there was about Marion, the theory had a hole in it; there was a gap in what anybody knew or said about her. “I don’t know her well enough to judge her,” Eddie told Ted.

  “Let me tell you something, Eddie,” Ted said. “ I don’t know her well enough to judge her, either.”

  Eddie could believe that, but he wasn’t about to let Ted feel virtuous. “Don’t forget—it’s you she’s really leaving,” Eddie told him. “I guess she knew you pretty well.”

  “Well enough to judge me, you mean? Oh, certainly!” Ted agreed. His drink was already more than half gone. He kept sucking on the ice cubes and spitting them back in the glass; then he’d drink a little more. “But she’s leaving you, too, isn’t she, Eddie?” Ted asked the sixteen-year-old. “You don’t expect her to ring you up for a rendezvous, do you?”

  “No—I don’t expect to hear from her,” Eddie admitted.

  “Well . . . me neither,” Ted said. He spat a few more ice cubes into his glass. “Jesus, this drink tastes terrible,” he said.

  “Do you have any drawings of Marion?” Eddie suddenly asked him. “Didn’t you ever draw her ?”

  “It was long, long ago,” Ted began. “Do you want to see?” Even in the half-dark—the only light in the yard was coming from the kitchen windows—Eddie could sense Ted’s reluctance.

  “Sure,” Eddie said. He followed Ted into the house. Ted flicked on the light in the front hall, and then they were standing together in Ted’s workroom, the overhead fluorescent lamps unnaturally bright after the dark yard.

  In all, there were fewer than a dozen drawings of Marion. At first Eddie thought it was the fault of the light that the drawings looked unnatural.

  “These are the only ones I kept,” Ted said defensively. “Marion never liked to pose.” It was apparent to Eddie that Marion hadn’t wanted to undress, either—there were no nudes. (None that Ted had kept, anyway.) In the drawings where Marion was seated with Thomas and Timothy, she must have been very young—because the boys were very young—but Marion’s beauty was without age to Eddie. Beyond her prettiness, all that Ted had truly caught of Marion was her aloofness. Especially when she was seated alone, she seemed remote, even cold.

  Then Eddie realized what was different about the drawings of Marion from Ted’s other drawings, most notably the drawings of Mrs. Vaughn. There was nothing of Ted’s restless lust in them. As old as the drawings of Marion were, Ted had already lost his desire for her. That was why Marion didn’t look like Marion—at least not to Eddie, whose desire for Marion was limitless.

  “Do you want one? You can have one,” Ted said.

  Eddie didn’t want one; none of them was the Marion he knew. “I think Ruth should have them,” Eddie answered.

  “Good idea. You’re full of good ideas, Eddie.”

  They both noticed the color of Ted’s drink. The contents of the near-empty glass were as sepia-like as the water in Mrs. Vaughn’s fountain. In the dark kitchen, Ted had used the wrong ice tray; he’d made a whiskey and water with cubes of frozen squid ink, which had half-melted in his glass. Ted’s lips and tongue, and even his teeth, were brownish-black.

  Marion would have appreciated it: Ted on his knees before the toilet in the front-hall washroom. The sound of his vomiting reached Eddie in Ted’s workroom, where the sixteen-year-old still stared at the drawings. “Jesus . . .” Ted was saying, between heaves. “This is it for me and the hard stuff—from now on, I’m sticking to wine and beer.” He made no mention of the squid ink, which Eddie thought was odd; it was the ink, not the whiskey, that had made him sick.

  And it hardly mattered to Eddie that Ted would keep this promise. However, ridding himself of hard liquor was either consciously or unconsciously in keeping with Marion’s caveat that he watch his drinking. Ted Cole would not suffer a drunk-driving conviction again. If his driving wasn’t always alcohol-free, he at least never drank and drove when he was with Ruth.

  Sadly, any moderation in Ted’s drinking served only to exacerbate his womanizing; the long-term effects of Ted’s womanizing would prove more hazardous to him than his drinking.

  At the time, it seemed a fitting ending to what had been a long and trying day: Ted Cole on his knees, puking into a toilet. Eddie bid Ted a superior-sounding good night. Of course Ted could not respond, because of the violence of his barfing.

  Eddie also checked on Ruth, never intending that his brief glimpse of the four-year-old, who was sleeping peacefully, would be his last for more than thirty years. He couldn’t have known that he would be leaving before Ruth was awake.

  In the morning, Eddie assumed, he would give Ruth his parents’ present and kiss her good-bye. But Eddie assumed too many things. His experience with Marion notwithstanding, he was still a sixteen-year-old who had underestimated the emotional rawness of the moment—after all, he hadn’t known such moments. And, standing in the four-year-old’s room watching her sleep, Eddie found it easy to speculate that everything would be all right.

  There are few things as seemingly untouched by the real world as a child asleep.

  The Leg

  This happened on the penultimate Saturday in August, in the summer of 1958. At about three in the morning, the wind shifted from the southwest to the northeast. Eddie O’Hare, in the half-dark of his bedroom, could no longer hear the surf; only a southerly wind could carry the sound of the sea as far inland as Parsonage Lane. And Eddie knew it was a northeast wind because he was cold. While it seemed fitting that his last night on Long Island should feel like the fall, Eddie could not wake up enough to
get out of bed and close his bedroom windows. Instead, he pulled the scant covers more closely around him; he drew his body into a ball, and, breathing into his cold, cupped hands, he tried to fall more deeply asleep.

  Seconds, maybe minutes later, he dreamed that Marion was still sleeping beside him, but that she’d got out of bed to close the windows. He extended his arm, expecting to find the warm spot that Marion would surely have left, but the bed was cold. Then, having heard the windows being closed, Eddie heard the curtains closing, too. Eddie never closed the curtains; he’d persuaded Marion to leave them open. He had loved seeing Marion asleep in the predawn glow.

  Even in the dead of night, and three in the morning is about as dead as the night ever gets, there was some faint light in Eddie’s bedroom; at least the clumped-together outlines of the furniture were visible in the half-dark. The shape of the gooseneck lamp on the bedside table cast a dull shadow of itself on the headboard of the bed. And the bedroom door, which was always left ajar—so that Marion could hear Ruth calling for her, if Ruth called—was edged with a dark-gray light. This was whatever light was able to penetrate the long hall, even if it was only the distant light from the feeble night-light in the master bathroom— even that light found its dim way to Eddie’s room, because the door to Ruth’s room was always open, too.

  But on this night someone had closed the windows and the curtains, and when Eddie opened his eyes to an unnatural and total darkness, someone had closed his bedroom door. When Eddie held his breath, he could hear someone breathing.

  Many sixteen-year-olds see only the persistence of darkness. Everywhere they look, they see gloom. Blessed by more hopeful expectations, Eddie O’Hare tended to look for the persistence of light. In the total darkness of his bedroom, Eddie’s first thought was that Marion had come back to him.

  “Marion?” the boy whispered.

  “Jesus . . . aren’t you the optimist?” Ted Cole said. “I thought you’d never wake up.” His voice came from everywhere, or from nowhere in particular, in the surrounding blackness. Eddie sat up in bed and groped for the bedside lamp, but he was unaccustomed to being unable to see it—he couldn’t find it. “Forget the light, Eddie,” Ted told him. “This story is better in the dark.”