A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  When the source of his fiction was autobiographical, Eddie could write with authority and authenticity. But when he tried to imagine— to invent, to create—he simply could not succeed as well as when he remembered. This is a serious limitation for a fiction writer ! (At the time, when he was still a student at Exeter, Eddie didn’t know how serious.)

  Eventually, Eddie would be afforded a small but literary reputation; he would play a little-known but respected role. He would never have the impact on the American psyche that Ruth Cole would; he would not have her command of the language, or ever approach the magnitude and complexity of her characters and plots—not to mention her narrative momentum.

  But Eddie would make a living as a novelist, nonetheless. One can’t deny him his existence as a writer simply because he would never be, as Chesterton once wrote of Dickens, “a naked flame of mere genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions and philosophies or from the great foreign schools.”

  No, that wouldn’t be Eddie O’Hare. (It would be overly generous to extend Chesterton’s praise to Ruth Cole, too.) But at least Eddie would be published.

  The point is: Eddie wrote familiar, autobiographical novels—all of them variations on an overworked theme —and despite the carefulness with which he wrote (he had a lucid prose style), and a faithfulness to time and place (and to characters who were credible, and who stayed in character), his novels lacked imagination; or else, when he made an effort to allow his imagination looser rein, his novels lacked believability.

  His first novel, while generally well received, would not escape those pitfalls that his good teacher Mr. Havelock had pointed out to Eddie at the earliest opportunity. Titled Summer Job, the novel was basically another version of the stories Eddie wrote at Exeter. (Its publication, in 1973, coincided almost exactly with Ruth Cole’s graduation from the former all-boys’ school.)

  In Summer Job, the poet is deaf rather than blind, and his need of a writer’s assistant comes closer to the truth of Ted’s need for hiring Eddie: namely, the deaf poet is a drunk. But while the relationship between the younger and older man is convincing, the poems are not credible poems—Eddie could never write poetry—and what is allegedly pornographic about them is neither raw nor invasive enough to qualify as pornography. The deaf, drunk poet’s angry lover, the Mrs. Vaughn character (who is still called Mrs. Wilmot), is a skillful portrait of heightened ugliness, but the poet’s long-suffering wife, the Marion character, is not convincing; she is neither Marion nor Penny Pierce.

  Eddie tried to make her a most ethereal but universal older woman; as such, she is entirely too vague to be believable as the love object of the writer’s assistant. Nor is her motivation sufficiently established; the reader can’t understand what she sees in the sixteen-year-old. What Eddie left out of Summer Job were the lost sons; those dead boys make no appearance in Eddie’s novel, nor is there a Ruth character.

  Ted Cole, who would be amused to read Summer Job, which he smugly recognized as a minor work of fiction, would also be grateful to Eddie for the altered reality of the thirty-one-year-old author’s first novel. Ruth, who, when she was old enough, had been told by her father that Eddie O’Hare and her mother were lovers, was no less grateful to Eddie for excluding her from the story. Nor did it occur to Ruth that the Marion character even remotely resembled her mother; Ruth would know only that her mother was still missing.

  On that August Saturday in 1958, when he crossed Long Island Sound with the clam-truck driver, Eddie O’Hare had no telescope trained on the future. He could never have foreseen his career as a faintly praised, little-known novelist. Yet Eddie would never be without a small but loyal following of readers; it would depress him, at times, that his fans were chiefly older women and, albeit less frequently, younger men. Nevertheless, there was evidence of literary effort in his writing— Eddie would never be out of a job. He would eke out a living by teaching at the university level—a job he did honorably, if without much flair or distinction. He would be respected by his students and his fellow faculty members, if never adored.

  When the clam-truck driver asked him, “If you’re not gonna be a writer’s assistant, what are you gonna be?” Eddie didn’t hesitate in replying to the forthright but smelly man.

  “I’m going to be a writer,” Eddie replied.

  Surely the sixteen-year-old couldn’t have imagined the grief he would occasionally cause. He would hurt the Havelocks, without ever meaning to—not to mention Penny Pierce, whom he had meant to hurt only a little. And the Havelocks had been so kind to him! Mrs. Havelock liked Eddie—in part because she sensed that he was beyond whatever lust he’d once felt for her. She could tell he was in love with someone else, and it didn’t take her long to come out and ask him. Both Mr. and Mrs. Havelock knew that Eddie was not a good enough writer to have imagined those scenes of sexual explicitness between a younger man and an older woman. Too many of the details were just right.

  And so it was to Mr. and Mrs. Havelock that Eddie would confess his six- or seven-week affair with Marion; he told them the awful things, too—the parts he’d been unable to write about. At first Mrs. Havelock responded by saying that Marion had virtually raped him; that Marion was guilty of taking criminal advantage of what Mrs. Havelock called “an underage boy.” But Eddie persuaded Mrs. Havelock that it hadn’t really been like that.

  As was his habit with older women, Eddie found it easy and comforting to cry in front of Mrs. Havelock, whose hairy armpits and mobile, uncontained breasts could still remind him of his former lust for her. Like an ex-girlfriend, Mrs. Havelock would only occasionally and halfheartedly arouse him—yet he was not above feeling a flicker of arousal in her warm, maternal presence.

  What a pity, then, that he would write about her as he did. It could be described as a worse-than-usual case of “second novelitis,” for Eddie’s second novel was his worst; indeed, following (as it did) upon the relative success of Summer Job, Eddie’s second novel would be the low point of his career. After it, his literary reputation would slightly improve and thereafter hold to its steady, undistinguished course.

  It seems certain that Eddie must have been thinking too much about Robert Anderson’s play Tea and Sympathy; it was later a movie, starring Deborah Kerr as the older woman, and it doubtless made a lasting impression on Eddie O’Hare. Tea and Sympathy was especially well known in the Exeter community because Robert Anderson, ’35, was an Exonian; this made it all the more embarrassing for Mrs. Havelock when Eddie’s second novel, Coffee and Doughnuts, was published.

  In Coffee and Doughnuts, an Exeter student is frequently overcome by fainting fits in the presence of the wife of his favorite English teacher. The wife—whose braless, pendulous breasts and furry, unshaven armpits forever identify her as Mrs. Havelock—begs her husband to take her away from the confines of the school. She feels humiliated to be the object of desire of so many boys—in addition to how sorry she feels for the particular boy whom her unintentional sexuality has completely undone.

  This was “much too close to home,” as Minty O’Hare would later tell his son. Even Dot O’Hare would look pityingly upon the stricken countenance of Anna Havelock after Coffee and Doughnuts was published. In his naïveté, Eddie had thought of the book as a kind of homage to Tea and Sympathy —and to the Havelocks, who had been such a help to him. But in the novel, the Mrs. Havelock character sleeps with the infatuated teenager; this is the only means she has to convince her insensitive husband to remove her from the school’s masturbatory atmosphere. (How Eddie O’Hare could have thought of his book as homage to the Havelocks is anybody’s guess.)

  For Mrs. Havelock, the publication of Coffee and Doughnuts did have at least one desired effect. Her husband took her back to Great Britain, just as she’d asked him to. Arthur Havelock ended up teaching somewhere in Scotland, the country where he and Anna had first met. But if the result of Eddie’s writing Coffee and Doughnuts was, unwittingly, a happy en
ding for the Havelocks, they never thanked Eddie for his embarrassing book; indeed, they never spoke to him again.

  About the only person who ever liked Coffee and Doughnuts was someone pretending to be Robert Anderson, ’35; the alleged author of Tea and Sympathy sent Eddie an elegant letter, expressing his understanding of both the intended homage and the intended comedy. (It was devastating to Eddie that, in the parentheses following Robert Anderson’s name, the imposter had written, “Just kidding!”)

  On that Saturday when he was sharing the upper deck of the Cross Sound Ferry with the clam-truck driver, Eddie’s mood was morose. It was almost as if he could foresee not only his summerlong affair with Penny Pierce but her bitter letter to him after she’d read Summer Job . Penny would not like the Marion character in that novel—Penny would see her as the Penny character, of course.

  To be fair, Mrs. Pierce would be disappointed in Eddie O’Hare long before she read Summer Job. In the summer of ’60, she would sleep with Eddie for three months; she would have almost twice as much time to sleep with him as Marion had had, yet Eddie wouldn’t come close to making love to Mrs. Pierce sixty times.

  “You know what I remember, kid?” the clam-truck driver was saying. To be sure he had the boy’s attention, the driver extended his beer bottle beyond the protecting wall of the pilothouse; the wind made the bottle toot .

  “No, what do you remember?” Eddie asked the driver.

  “That broad you was with,” the clam-truck driver said. “The one in the pink sweater. She picked you up in that sweet little Mercedes. You wasn’t her assistant, were you?”

  Eddie paused. “No, her husband’s,” Eddie said. “Her husband was the writer.”

  “Now there’s a lucky guy!” the clam-truck driver said. “But don’t get me wrong. I just look at other women, I don’t mess around. I been married for almost thirty-five years—my high-school sweetheart. We’re pretty happy, I guess. She’s not great-looking but she’s my wife. It’s like the clams.”

  “Excuse me?” Eddie said.

  “The wife, the clams . . . I mean, maybe it’s not the most exciting choice, but it works,” the clam-truck driver explained. “I wanted my own trucking business, at least my own truck. I didn’t want to drive for nobody else. I used to haul lots of things—other stuff. But it was complicated. When I saw I could make it with just the clams, it was easier. I kind of lapsed into the clams, you might say.”

  “I see,” Eddie said. The wife, the clams . . . it was a tortured analogy, no matter how you expressed it, the future novelist thought. And it would be unfair to say that Eddie O’Hare, as a writer, would become the literary equivalent of lapsing into clams. He wasn’t that bad.

  The clam-truck driver once more extended his beer bottle beyond the pilothouse wall; the bottle, which was now empty, tooted at a lower pitch than before. The ferry slowed as it approached the slip.

  Eddie and the driver walked to the bow of the upper deck, where they faced into the wind. Eddie’s mother and father were waving madly from the docks; their dutiful son waved back. Both Minty and Dot were weeping; they hugged each other and wiped each other’s wet faces, as if Eddie were returning safely from a war. Rather than feel his usual embarrassment, or even the slightest shame at his parents’ hysterical behavior, Eddie realized how much he loved them and how fortunate he was to have the kind of parents Ruth Cole would never know.

  Then the gangplank chains, lowering the ferry’s ramp, commenced their usual loud grinding; the stevedores were shouting to one another above the clamor. “Nice talking to you, kid!” the clam-truck driver was calling.

  Eddie took what he imagined was a last look out of the harbor at the choppy water of Long Island Sound. He had no idea that the trip on the Cross Sound Ferry would one day be as familiar to him as passing through the doorway of the Main Academy Building, under that Latin inscription which bid him to come hither and become a man.

  “Edward! My Edward!” his father was bawling. Eddie’s mom was weeping too copiously to speak. One look at them and Eddie knew that he could never tell them what had happened to him. With more powers of premonition than he possessed, Eddie might—at this very moment—have recognized his limitations as a fiction writer: he would always be an unreliable liar. Not only could he never tell his parents the truth about his relationship with Ted and Marion and Ruth; neither could he make up a satisfying lie.

  Eddie would lie largely by omission, saying simply that it had been a sad summer for him because Mr. and Mrs. Cole were caught up in the prelude to a divorce; now Marion had left Ted with the little girl, and that was that. A more challenging opportunity to lie would present itself to Eddie when his mother discovered Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan hanging in her son’s closet.

  Eddie’s lie was more spontaneous and more convincing than most of what was imperfectly imagined in his fiction. He told his mom that once when he’d been shopping with Mrs. Cole, she’d pointed out the sweater in an East Hampton boutique and had told him that she’d always liked the particular garment and had hoped her husband would buy it for her; now that they were divorcing, Mrs. Cole had implied to Eddie, there was good reason for her husband to save his money.

  Eddie had returned to the store and bought the expensive sweater. But Mrs. Cole had left—the marriage, the house, her child, everything — before Eddie had had the chance to give the sweater to her! Eddie told his mother that he wanted to keep the sweater in case he ever ran into Marion again.

  Dot O’Hare had been proud of her son for his kind gesture. To Eddie’s embarrassment, Dot would occasionally display the pink cashmere cardigan to their faculty friends—the tale of Eddie’s thoughtfulness toward the unhappy Mrs. Cole was Dot’s idea of good dinner-party conversation. And Eddie’s lie would further backfire. In the summer of ’60, when Eddie was falling short of making love to Penny Pierce the requisite sixty times, Dot O’Hare would meet a woman among the Exeter faculty wives who was just the right size for Marion’s sweater. When Eddie came home from Long Island that second time, his mom had given Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan away.

  It was lucky for Eddie that his mother never found Marion’s lilac-colored camisole and matching panties, which Eddie kept buried in the drawer containing his athletic supporters and his squash shorts. It is doubtful that Dot O’Hare would have congratulated her son for his “thoughtfulness” in buying Mrs. Cole such suggestive underwear.

  At the docks in New London, on that Saturday in August ’58, there was something in the firmness of Eddie’s embrace that persuaded Minty to give his son the keys to the car. There was not a word about the traffic that lay ahead of them being “different from Exeter traffic.” Minty wasn’t worried; he saw that Eddie had matured. (“Joe—he’s all grown up!” Dot whispered to her husband.)

  Minty had parked the car at some distance from the docks, near the station platform for the New London railroad depot. After a small fuss between them concerning whether Dot or Minty would ride in the passenger seat and be Eddie’s “navigator” for the long ride home, Eddie’s parents settled into the car as trustingly as children. There was no question that Eddie was in charge.

  Only when he was leaving the railroad-depot parking lot did Eddie spot Marion’s tomato-red Mercedes; it was parked within easy walking distance of the station platform. Probably the keys were already in the mail to her lawyer, who would repeat to Ted the list of Marion’s demands.

  So she had probably not gone to New York. This awareness came as no more than a mild surprise to Eddie. And if Marion had left her car at the train station in New London, this didn’t necessarily mean she had gone back to New England—she might have been heading farther north. (Montreal, maybe. Eddie knew she could speak French.)

  But what was she thinking? Eddie wondered, as he would wonder about Marion for thirty-seven years. What was she doing? Where had she gone?

  II

  FALL

  1990

  Eddie at Forty-Eight

  It was early on a
rainy Monday evening in September. Eddie O’Hare stood stiffly at the bar in the tap room of the New York Athletic Club. He was forty-eight, his formerly dark-brown hair was heavily streaked with silver-gray, and—because he was trying to read while standing at the bar—a thick lock of his hair kept flopping over one of his eyes. He kept brushing his hair back, his long fingers like a comb. He never carried a comb, and his hair had a fluffy, just-washed wildness to it; it was the only wild thing about him, really.

  Eddie was tall and thin. Sitting or standing, he squared his shoulders in an unnatural way; his body maintained a tense, almost military overerectness. He suffered from chronic lower back pain. He had just lost three straight games of squash to a little bald man named Jimmy. Eddie could never remember Jimmy’s last name. Jimmy was retired— he was rumored to be in his seventies—and he spent every afternoon at the New York Athletic Club, waiting for pickup squash games with younger players whose would-be opponents had stood them up.

  Eddie, who was drinking a Diet Coke—it was all he ever drank— had lost to Jimmy before; naturally he’d been stood up before, too. Eddie had a few close friends in New York, but none of them played squash. He’d become a member of the club only three years earlier, in 1987, upon the publication of his fourth novel, Sixty Times . Despite favorable (if tepid) reviews, the novel’s subject matter had not appealed to the only member of the Membership Committee who’d read it. Another member on the committee had confided to Eddie that Eddie’s membership had finally been approved because of his name, not because of his novels. (There had been a long history of O’Hares at the New York Athletic Club, although none of them were related to Eddie.)

  Still, despite what Eddie perceived as the selective, grudging friendliness of the club, he enjoyed being a member. It was an inexpensive place to stay whenever he came into the city. For almost ten years now, since the publication of his third novel, Leaving Long Island, Eddie came into the city fairly frequently—if only for a night or two. In ’81, he had bought his first and only house—in Bridgehampton, about a fiveminute drive from Ted Cole’s house in Sagaponack. In his nine years as a taxpaying resident of Suffolk County, Eddie had not once driven by Ted’s house on Parsonage Lane.