A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Jesus God, what am I doing here? Eddie thought. Why had he agreed to introduce Ruth Cole? Why had they asked him? he wondered desperately. Had it been Ruth’s idea?

  The backstage of the concert hall was so muggy that Eddie couldn’t tell the difference between his sweat and the rain damage to his clothes—not to mention the remains of the giant mud puddle. “There’s a washroom just off the greenroom,” the girl was saying, “in case you want to . . . uh, clean up.”

  I’m a mess and I have nothing interesting to say, Eddie concluded. For years he had imagined meeting Ruth again. But he had pictured a meeting vastly different from this—something more private, maybe lunch or dinner. And Ruth must have at least occasionally imagined meeting him. After all, Ted would have had to tell his daughter about her mother and the circumstances of that summer of ’58; Ted could never have restrained himself. Naturally Eddie would have been a part of the story, if not the principal villain.

  And wasn’t it fair to anticipate that Eddie and Ruth would have much to talk about, even if their chief interest in common was Marion? After all, they both wrote novels, although their novels were worlds apart—Ruth was a superstar and Eddie was . . . God, what am I? Eddie considered. Compared to Ruth Cole, I’m a nobody, he concluded. Maybe that was the way to begin his introduction.

  Yet, when he’d been invited to introduce her, Eddie had fervently believed he had the best of all reasons to accept the invitation. For six years, he’d harbored a secret that he wanted to share with Ruth. For six years, he’d kept the evidence to himself. Now, on this miserable night, he carried the evidence with him in his bulky brown briefcase. What did it matter that the evidence had got a little wet ?

  In his briefcase there was a second book, a book of much more importance to Ruth, Eddie believed, than his personally inscribed copy of Sixty Times . Six years ago, when Eddie had first read this other book, he’d been tempted to tell Ruth then; he’d even considered bringing the book to Ruth’s attention by some anonymous means. But then he’d seen a TV interview with Ruth, and something she’d said had prevented Eddie from pressing the matter.

  Ruth never talked in depth about her father—or about whether or not she ever intended to write a book for children. When interviewers asked if her father had taught her to write, she said: “He taught me something about storytelling, and squash. But about writing . . . no, he taught me nothing about writing, really.” And when they would ask her about her mother—if her mother was still “missing,” or if being “abandoned” as a child had had any great effect on her (either as a writer or as a woman)—Ruth would seem fairly indifferent to the question.

  “Yes, you might say that my mother is still ‘missing,’ although I’m not looking for her. If she were looking for me, she would have found me. Since she’s the one who left, I would never press myself on her. If she wants to find me, I’m the one who’s easy to find,” Ruth had said.

  And in the particular TV interview that had stopped Eddie from making contact with Ruth six years ago, the interviewer had pursued a personal interpretation of Ruth Cole’s novels. “But, in your books—in all your books—there are no mothers.” (“There are no fathers, either,” Ruth had replied.) “Yes, but . . .” the interviewer had gone on, “your women characters have women friends, and they have boyfriends— you know, lovers —but they are women characters who have no relationship with their mothers. We rarely even meet their mothers. Don’t you think that’s . . . um, unusual ?” the interviewer had asked. (“Not if you don’t have a mother,” Ruth had answered.)

  Ruth didn’t want to know about her mother, Eddie had surmised. And so he had kept his “evidence” to himself. But then, when he’d received the invitation to introduce Ruth Cole at the 92nd Street Y, Eddie had decided that of course Ruth wanted to know about her mother! And so he’d agreed to introduce her. And in his soggy briefcase he now carried this mysterious book, which, six years ago, he had come close to forcing on Ruth.

  Eddie O’Hare was convinced that the book had been written by Marion.

  It was already past eight o’clock. Like a large, restless animal in a cage, the enormous audience in the concert hall made their impatient presence felt, although Eddie could no longer see them. The girl led him by his wet arm through a dark, mildewy hall, up a spiral staircase, past the towering curtains behind the dim stage. There Eddie saw a stagehand seated on a stool. The sinister-looking young man was transfixed by the TV monitor; the camera was trained on the podium on the stage. Eddie singled out the waiting water glass and the microphone. He made a mental note not to drink from the water glass. The water was for Ruth, not for her lowly introducer.

  Then Eddie was shoved into the greenroom, which was overbright with dazzling mirrors and the glare of makeup lights. Eddie had long rehearsed what he would say to Ruth when they met—“My goodness, how you’ve grown!” For a comic novelist, he was bad at jokes. Nevertheless, the line was on his lips—he freed his soaking right hand from the shoulder strap of his briefcase—but the woman who stepped forward to greet him was not Ruth, nor did she shake Eddie’s outstretched hand. It was that awfully nice woman who was one of the organizers at the Y. Eddie had met her several times. She was always friendly and sincere, and she did her best to put Eddie at ease, which was impossible. Melissa —that was her name. She kissed Eddie’s wet cheek and said to him, “We were so worried about you!”

  Eddie said: “My goodness, how you’ve grown!”

  Melissa, who had not grown—she was not pregnant at the time, either—was somewhat taken aback. But Melissa was such a nice person that she seemed more concerned for Eddie’s well-being than offended, although Eddie felt ready to burst into tears on Melissa’s behalf.

  Then someone shook Eddie’s outstretched hand; it was too large and vigorous a handshake to have been Ruth’s, and so Eddie managed to restrain himself from saying, “My goodness, how you’ve grown!” again . It was Karl, another of the good people who directed the activities at the Unterberg Poetry Center. Karl was a poet; he was also smart, and as tall as Eddie, and he’d always been immensely kind to Eddie. (It was Karl who was kind enough to include Eddie in many events at the 92nd Street Y, even those that Eddie felt unworthy of—like this one.)

  “It’s . . . raining,” Eddie told Karl. There must have been a half-dozen people crammed into the greenroom. At Eddie’s remark, they roared with laughter. This was vintage deadpan humor of the kind they would expect to encounter in a novel by Ed O’Hare! But Eddie simply hadn’t known what else to say. He just went on shaking hands, shedding water like a wet dog.

  That Very Important Person at Random House, Ruth’s editor, was there. (The editor of Ruth’s first two novels, a woman, had died recently, and now this man had succeeded her.) Eddie had met him three or four times, but could never recall his name. Whatever his name was, he never remembered that he’d met Eddie before. Not once had Eddie taken it personally, until now.

  The walls of the greenroom were studded with photographs of the world’s most important authors; Eddie was surrounded by writers of international stature and renown. He recognized Ruth’s photograph before he noticed Ruth; her picture was not out of place on a wall with several Nobel Prize winners. (It would never have occurred to Eddie to look for his own photograph there; indeed, he would not have found it.)

  It was her new editor who literally pushed Ruth forward to meet Eddie. The man from Random House had a hearty, aggressive air—an avuncular style. He placed a large, familiar hand squarely between Ruth’s shoulders and shoved her out of the corner of the room, where she appeared to have been holding herself back. Ruth was not shy; Eddie knew this about her from her many interviews. But seeing her, in person—for the first time as an adult—Eddie realized that there was something deliberately small about Ruth Cole. It was as if she had willed herself to be small.

  In fact, she was no shorter than the thug on the Madison Avenue bus. Although Ruth was her father’s height, which was not notably short for a woman, she wa
sn’t as tall as Marion. Yet her smallness was distinct from her height; like Ted, she was athletically compact. She was wearing her signature black T-shirt, in which Eddie could instantly discern the greater muscular development in Ruth’s right arm; both its forearm and biceps were noticeably bigger and stronger than their counterparts on her thin left arm. Squash, like tennis, did that to you.

  Eddie took one look at her and assumed that she could beat the shit out of Ted. Indeed, on any squash court of regulation size, she could have. Eddie could never have imagined how badly Ruth wanted to beat the shit out of her father, nor could Eddie have guessed that the old man still got the better of his hard-looking daughter in his barn of unfair advantages.

  “Hello, Ruth—I’ve been looking forward to seeing you,” Eddie said.

  “Hello . . . again,” Ruth said, shaking his hand. She had her father’s short, square fingers.

  “Oh,” said the Random House editor. “I didn’t know you two had met.” Ruth had her father’s wry smile, too; her smile arrested Eddie’s speech.

  “Do you want to use the bathroom first?” she asked Eddie. And there again came the avuncular editor’s large hand, this time a little too familiarly between Eddie’s shoulders.

  “Yes, yes—let’s allow Mr. O’Hare a minute for some hasty repairs,” Ruth’s new editor said.

  It was not until he was alone in the bathroom that Eddie realized the degree to which “repairs” were in order. He was not just wet and dirty: a cellophane package, like something from a pack of cigarettes, clung to his tie; a gum wrapper, which upon closer inspection revealed a well-chewed piece of gum, had adhered to his fly. His shirt was soaked through. In the mirror, Eddie at first failed to recognize his nipples; he tried to brush them off, as if they were more chewing gum.

  He decided that his best recourse was to remove his jacket and his shirt and wring them out in his hands; he wrung the excess water from his tie, too. But when he redressed himself, he saw that he’d created the most extraordinary wrinkles in both his tie and his shirt, and that his shirt, which had formerly been dress-white, was now a streaked and faded pink . He looked at his hands, which were stained from the familiar red ink of his correcting pen (his so-called teacher’s favorite), and—even before he peered in his briefcase—he knew that the revisions in red on the manuscript of his speech would have first run red and then turned to pink on the wet pages.

  When he looked at his introductory speech, he saw that all his handwritten revisions were erased or blurred beyond recognition, and that the original typescript, which was now offset against a pink background, was notably less clear than it had been. After all, it had once stood out against a clean, white page.

  The ball of coins pulled his jacket askew. Eddie could find no wastebasket in the bathroom; at what he hoped was the height of his ill-advised behavior for the day, he dumped all his change into the toilet. After he flushed, and the water cleared, he saw with his usual resignation that the quarters had remained in the bottom of the toilet bowl.

  Ruth used the bathroom after Eddie. When he was following her backstage—while most of the others found their way into the audience and to their seats—she looked over her shoulder and said to him, “An odd place for a wishing well, wasn’t it?” It took him a second or two to realize that she was referring to the coins in the toilet bowl; he couldn’t tell, of course, if she knew it was his money.

  Then, more straightforwardly—without mischief—she said, “We’ll have dinner after this, I hope—a chance to talk.”

  Eddie’s heart jumped. Had she meant that they would have dinner alone ? Even Eddie knew better than to hope so. She’d meant with Karl, and with Melissa, and doubtless with her avuncular new editor from Random House—not to mention with his large, too-familiar hands. Yet maybe Eddie could steal a moment alone with her; if not, he might be able to suggest a later, more private meeting.

  He was smiling idiotically, transfixed as he was by her handsome, some would say pretty, face. Ruth’s thin upper lip was Marion’s upper lip; her full breasts, which were slightly pendulous, were her mother’s, too. However, without Marion’s long waist, Ruth’s breasts appeared too big for the rest of her. And she had her father’s short, sturdy legs.

  Ruth’s black T-shirt was an expensive one. It fit her very nicely. It was made of some silky material—something finer than cotton, Eddie supposed. Her jeans were something better than jeans, too. They were also black; they also fit her nicely. And Eddie had seen her give her jacket to her editor; it was a tailored black cashmere jacket that dressed up the T-shirt and the jeans. For her reading, Ruth hadn’t wanted the jacket; her fans expected the T-shirt, Eddie concluded. And she was definitely a writer with more than mere readers. Ruth Cole had fans . Eddie was frankly frightened to be speaking to them.

  When Eddie noticed that Karl was at that moment engaged in introducing him, he chose not to listen. The sinister-looking stagehand had offered Ruth his stool, but she chose to stand, shifting her weight from foot to foot—as if she were about to play squash rather than give a reading.

  “My speech . . .” Eddie said to Ruth. “I’m not very pleased with it. All the ink ran.”

  She put one of her short, square index fingers to her lips. When he stopped talking, she leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “Thank you for not writing about me,” she whispered. “I know you could have.” Eddie couldn’t speak. Until he heard her whisper, he’d not realized that Ruth had her mother’s voice.

  Then Ruth was pushing him toward the stage. Since he hadn’t been listening to Karl’s introduction, Eddie didn’t know that Karl and the audience, which was Ruth Cole’s audience, were waiting for him.

  Ruth had been waiting her whole life to meet Eddie O’Hare; from the first time she’d been told about Eddie and her mother, Ruth had wanted to meet him. Now she couldn’t bear to watch him walk out on the stage, because he was walking away from her. Instead she watched him on the TV monitor. From the camera’s perspective, which was the view from the audience, Eddie wasn’t walking away—he was walking toward the audience; he was facing the audience and the crowd. He is coming to meet me, at last! Ruth was imagining.

  But what on earth could my mother ever have seen in him? Ruth wondered. What a pathetic, unfortunate man! On the small screen of the TV monitor, she studied Eddie in black and white. The primitive image made Eddie appear youthful; she could see what a beautiful boy he must have been. But, in a man, prettiness had only a temporary appeal.

  As Eddie O’Hare began to speak about her and her writing, Ruth distracted herself with a familiar and troublesome question: What permanently appealed to her in a man?

  Ruth at Thirty-Six

  A man should be confident, Ruth thought; after all, men were designed to be aggressive. Yet her attraction to confident, aggressive men had led her into some questionable relationships. She would never tolerate physical aggression; so far she’d been spared any violent episodes, some of which had befallen her friends. Ruth held her friends at least partially responsible for these abusive relationships. Given how little she liked or trusted her instincts with men, Ruth surprisingly believed that she could detect a man’s capacity for violence against women on the very first date.

  In the confounding world of sex, it was one of the few things Ruth was proud of about herself, although Hannah Grant, who was Ruth’s best friend, had repeatedly told Ruth that she’d simply been lucky. (“You just haven’t met the right guy—I mean the wrong guy,” Hannah had told her. “You just haven’t had that date.”)

  A man should respect my independence, Ruth believed. She never concealed the fact that she was uncertain about marriage, and more uncertain about motherhood. Yet those men who acknowledged her so-called independence often exhibited the most unacceptable form of lack of commitment. Ruth wouldn’t tolerate infidelity; indeed, she demanded faithfulness from even the newest boyfriend. Was she merely old-fashioned?

  Hannah had often ridiculed Ruth for what Hannah called “ contrad
ictory behavior.” At thirty-six, Ruth had never lived with a man; yet Ruth expected any boyfriend-of-the-moment to be faithful to her while not living with her. “I fail to see anything ‘contradictory’ in that,” Ruth had told Hannah, but Hannah presumed a superiority to Ruth in matters of male-female relationships. (On the basis of having had more of them, Ruth supposed.)

  By Ruth’s standards—even by more liberal sexual standards than Ruth’s—Hannah Grant was promiscuous. At the moment, as Ruth waited to read from her new novel at the 92nd Street Y, Hannah was also late. Ruth had expected Hannah to meet her in the greenroom before the event; now Ruth worried that Hannah would arrive too late to be admitted, although a seat had been reserved for her. It was just like Hannah—she’d probably met a guy and got to talking. (Hannah would have got to more than talking.)

  Returning her attention to the small black-and-white screen of the TV monitor, Ruth tried to concentrate on what Eddie O’Hare was saying. She had been introduced on many occasions, but never by her mother’s former lover; while this certainly distinguished Eddie, there was nothing distinguished about Eddie’s introduction.

  “Ten years ago,” Eddie had begun, and Ruth lowered her chin to her chest. This time, when the young stagehand offered her his stool, she accepted; if Eddie was going to begin at the beginning, Ruth knew she had better sit down.

  “Published in 1980, when she was only twenty-six,” Eddie intoned, “Ruth Cole’s first novel, The Same Orphanage, was set in a rural New England village that was renowned for its history of supporting alternative lifestyles. Both a socialist and a lesbian commune had prospered there, but they eventually disbanded. A college with questionable admissions standards had briefly flourished; it existed solely to provide a four-year student deferment for those young men seeking not to be drafted into the war in Vietnam. When the war was over, the college folded. And, throughout the sixties and the early seventies—prior to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which legalized abortion in 1973—the village also supported a small orphanage. In those years when the procedure was still illegal, it was well known—at least locally—that the orphanage physician would provide abortions.”