A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Here Eddie paused. The houselights were so low that he couldn’t see a single face in the vast audience. Without thinking, he took a sip from Ruth’s water glass.

  In fact, Ruth had graduated from Exeter in the same year as the Roe v. Wade decision. In her novel, two Exeter girls get pregnant; they are expelled from school without ever identifying the would-be father—it turns out that they had the same boyfriend. The twenty-six-year-old author once joked in an interview that “the working title” for The Same Orphanage was The Same Boyfriend .

  Eddie O’Hare, who was doomed to be only autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that. But, in several interviews, Ruth had admitted to having had a close friendship at Exeter—namely, a girlfriend with whom she’d shared a crush on the same boy. Eddie didn’t know that Ruth’s roommate and best friend at Exeter had been Hannah Grant—nor did he know that Hannah was expected to attend Ruth’s reading. Hannah had heard Ruth read before, many times; what made this reading special to her, and to Ruth, was that the two friends had spent much of their time together talking about Eddie O’Hare. Hannah had been dying to meet Eddie.

  As for the two friends having once had a “crush” on the same boy at Exeter, Eddie couldn’t have known, but he guessed—correctly—that Ruth had never had sex at Exeter. In fact—and this was no easy accomplishment in the seventies—Ruth managed to get through her college years without having had sex, either. (Hannah, of course, hadn’t waited. She’d had sex several times at Exeter, and her first abortion before she graduated.)

  In Ruth’s novel, the expelled Exeter girls with a boyfriend in common are taken by one of the girls’ parents to the same orphanage of the title. One of these young women has her baby delivered in the orphanage, but she elects to keep the baby; she can’t bear to let it be adopted. The other young woman has an illegal abortion. The Exeter boy, twice a would-be father—and now graduated from the academy—marries the girl with the baby. The young couple make an effort to stay married for the sake of the child, but the marriage fails—after a mere eighteen years! The girl who chose the abortion, now an unmarried woman in her late thirties, is reunited with her ex-boyfriend; she marries him.

  Throughout the novel, the friendship between the Exeter women is tested. The abortion-or-adoption decision, and the changing moral climate of the times, will haunt them as they grow older. While Ruth portrays both women sympathetically, her personal views on abortion (she supported the pro-choice position) were heralded by feminists. And, notwithstanding that it was a didactic novel, The Same Orphanage was critically acclaimed—in more than twenty-five languages.

  It had its dissenters, too. That the novel concludes with the bitter dissolution of the two women’s friendship did not make every feminist happy. That the woman who chooses to have the abortion is unable to get pregnant with her ex-boyfriend was denounced by some prochoice feminists as “anti-abortion mythology,” although Ruth never implies that the woman can’t get pregnant because of her previous abortion. “Maybe she can’t get pregnant because she’s thirty-eight,” Ruth said in an interview, which was denounced by several women who said they were speaking on behalf of all those women over forty who are able to get pregnant.

  It was that kind of novel—it wasn’t going to escape scot-free. The divorced woman in The Same Orphanage —the one who has the baby soon after she’s expelled from Exeter—offers to have another baby and give it to her friend. She’ll be a surrogate mom—with her ex-husband’s sperm! But the woman who can’t conceive declines the offer; she settles for childlessness instead. In the novel, the motivation of the ex-wife to play the role of “surrogate mom” is suspect; yet, unsurprisingly, a few pioneer surrogate mothers attacked the book for misrepresenting them .

  Ruth Cole, even at twenty-six, never went to great lengths to defend herself from her critics. “Look—it’s a novel,” she said. “They’re my characters—they do what I want them to do.” She was similarly dismissive of the most common description of The Same Orphanage: namely, that it was “about” abortion. “It’s a novel, ” Ruth repeated. “It’s not ‘about’ anything. It’s a good story. It’s a demonstration of how the choices two women make will affect the rest of their lives. The choices we make do affect us, don’t they?”

  And Ruth distanced herself from not a few of her more avid readers by admitting that she’d never had an abortion. It was insulting to some of her readers who’d had abortions that Ruth had “just imagined” having one. “I’m certainly not opposed to having an abortion, or to anyone else having one,” Ruth said. “In my case, it just never came up.”

  As Ruth well knew, an abortion “came up” on two more occasions for Hannah Grant. They had applied to the same colleges—only the best ones. When Hannah didn’t get into most of them, they’d attended Middlebury. What mattered to both of them, or so they said, was staying together, even if it meant spending four years in Vermont.

  In retrospect, Ruth wondered why “staying together” had mattered to Hannah, who had spent most of her time at Middlebury with a hockey player with a removable false tooth; he got her pregnant twice, and when they broke up, he tried to date Ruth. It had prompted Ruth’s now-notorious remark to Hannah on the subject of “rules for relationships.”

  “ What rules?” Hannah had asked. “There are no rules among friends, surely.”

  “Rules among friends are especially necessary,” Ruth had told her friend. “For example, I don’t go out with anyone who ever went out with you—or who asked you first.”

  “And vice versa?” Hannah had asked.

  “Well.” (It was a habit Ruth had picked up from her father.) “That’s your choice,” she’d told Hannah, who had never tested the rule—at least not that Ruth knew. For Ruth’s part, she’d stuck to her own rule absolutely.

  And now Hannah was late! While Ruth tried to watch the TV monitor, where Eddie O’Hare was struggling on and on, she was aware that the sneaky-looking stagehand was watching her. He was the kind of guy Hannah would have called “cute”; doubtless Hannah would have flirted with him, but Ruth rarely flirted. Besides, he was not her type— if she had a type. (She did have a type, and the type bothered her about herself more than she could say.)

  Ruth looked at her watch. Eddie was still talking about her first novel. With two more novels to go, we’ll be here all night! Ruth was thinking, as she again watched Eddie drink her water. And if he’s got a cold, I’ll catch it, she thought to herself.

  Ruth considered trying to get Eddie’s attention. Instead she looked up at the stagehand, who was ogling her breasts. If Ruth had to pick one thing that most men were utterly stupid about, it was that they didn’t seem to know that it was obvious to a woman when a man was staring at her breasts.

  “I wouldn’t say that was my pet peeve with men,” Hannah had told Ruth. Hannah’s breasts were rather small—at least in Hannah’s estimation. “With boobs like yours, what else are men going to stare at?” Hannah had asked Ruth.

  Yet, whenever Ruth and Hannah were together, men generally looked at Hannah first. She was tall and blond; she had a slinky figure. She was sexier than Ruth, Ruth thought.

  “It’s just my clothes—my clothes are sexier,” Hannah had told her. “If you’d try dressing like a woman, men might notice you more.”

  “It’s enough that they notice my boobs,” Ruth had replied.

  Maybe they’d managed so well as roommates, and had on numerous occasions traveled together, which is even harder than being roommates, because they wouldn’t—indeed, couldn’t —wear the same clothes.

  It was not because she had grown up without a mother that Ruth Cole preferred to wear men’s clothes; as a child, she’d been dressed in an exceedingly girlish fashion by Conchita Gomez, who had sent Ruth off to Exeter with a trunk full of little-girl skirts and dresses, which Ruth hated.

  She liked jeans, or pants that fit her as
snugly as jeans. She liked T-shirts, and boys’ or men’s dress shirts—not turtlenecks, because she was short and had no neck to begin with, and not sweaters, which were too bulky and made her look fat. She was not fat and she only seemed short. Regardless, Ruth had tested the dress code at Exeter by conforming to the dress code for boys; since then, it had become her style.

  Now, of course, her jackets—even if they were men’s jackets—were tailored to fit her figure. For black-tie occasions, Ruth wore a woman’s tuxedo, which was tailored to her figure, too. She did own the so-called standard little black dress, but Ruth never (except on the hottest summer days) wore a dress. Her most frequent substitute for a dress was a navy-blue pinstriped pantsuit, which she preferred for cocktail parties and fancy restaurants; it was her uniform for funerals, too.

  Ruth spent a fair amount of money on clothes, but they were always the same clothes. She spent more money on shoes. Because she liked a low, sturdy heel—something that made her ankles feel almost as secure as they did in her squash shoes—her shoes tended to have a sameness about them, too.

  Ruth let Hannah tell her where to get her hair cut, but she wouldn’t listen to Hannah’s advice that she should grow her hair longer. And aside from lip gloss and a certain kind of colorless lipstick, Ruth didn’t wear makeup. A good moisturizer, the right shampoo, and the right deodorant—these would do. She let Hannah buy her underwear, too. “Jesus, it kills me to buy you your goddamn thirty-four D!” Hannah would complain. “Both of my boobs could fit in one of your fucking cups!”

  Ruth thought that she was too old to consider breast-reduction surgery. But as a teenager she’d begged her father to allow her to have the operation. Not just the size but the weight of her breasts had bothered her; Ruth despaired that her nipples (and the surrounding areolae) were too low and too large. Her father would hear none of it; he said it was nonsense to “mutilate” her “God-given good figure.” (Breasts could never be too large for Ted Cole.)

  Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! Ruth thought angrily, as the gaze of the single-minded stagehand remained riveted to her breasts.

  She sensed that Eddie O’Hare overpraised her; he said something about her well-publicized claim that she did not write autobiographical fiction. But Eddie was still mired in Ruth Cole’s first novel. This was the longest introduction in the world! By the time it was her turn, the audience would be fast asleep.

  Hannah Grant had told Ruth that she should get off her high horse about not writing autobiographical fiction. “For Christ’s sake, aren’t I autobiographical?” Hannah had asked her. “You always write about me !”

  “I may borrow from your experiences, Hannah,” Ruth had replied. “After all, you’ve had many more experiences than I’ve had. But I assure you, I do not write ‘about’ you. I make up my characters and their stories.”

  “You make me up again and again,” Hannah had argued. “It may be your version of me, but it’s me —always me. You’re more autobiographical than you think you are, baby.” (Ruth hated Hannah’s usage of “baby.”)

  Hannah was a journalist. She presumed that all novels were substantially autobiographical. Ruth was a novelist; she looked at her books and saw what she had invented. Hannah looked at them and saw what was real—namely, variations of Hannah herself. (The truth, of course, lay somewhere in between.)

  In Ruth’s novels, there was usually a woman character who was an adventurer—the Hannah character, Hannah called her. And there was always another woman character who held herself back; the less-bold character, Ruth called her—the Ruth character, Hannah said.

  Ruth both admired and was appalled by Hannah’s boldness. For her part, Hannah both looked up to Ruth and constantly criticized her. Hannah respected Ruth’s success while at the same time she reduced Ruth’s novels to a form of nonfiction. Ruth was extremely sensitive to her friend’s Ruth-character, Hannah-character interpretations.

  In Ruth’s second novel, Before the Fall of Saigon (1985), the so-called Ruth and Hannah characters are roommates at Middlebury during the Vietnam War. The Hannah character, who is boldness personified, makes a deal with her boyfriend: she’ll marry him and have his baby, so that when he graduates and his student draft deferment expires, he will be protected from the draft under his new draft status—3A, married with child. She makes him promise that, if the marriage doesn’t work out, he’ll divorce her—on her terms. (She gets custody of the child; he pays child support.) The problem is, she can’t get pregnant.

  “How dare you call her ‘the Hannah character’?” Ruth demanded of Hannah repeatedly. “You went through college trying not to get pregnant while managing to get pregnant every minute!” But Hannah said that the character’s “capacity for risk-taking” was entirely hers.

  In the novel, the woman who can’t get pregnant (the Hannah character) makes a new deal—this time with her roommate (the Ruth character). The Hannah character convinces the Ruth character to sleep with the Hannah character’s boyfriend and get pregnant with the boyfriend’s baby; the deal is that the roommate (the Ruth character) will then marry the Hannah character’s boyfriend, thus keeping him out of Vietnam. When the war (or the draft) is over, the dutiful roommate, who is a virgin before this dreadful experience, will divorce the boyfriend; he will immediately marry the Hannah character, and together they will raise the roommate’s baby.

  How Hannah dared to call the virgin roommate “the Ruth character” was vexing to Ruth, who had not lost her virginity at college— much less got herself pregnant by means of Hannah’s boyfriend! (And Hannah Grant was the only one of Ruth’s friends who knew how and when Ruth had lost her virginity, which was another story.) But Hannah said that the roommate’s “ anxiety about losing her virginity” was entirely Ruth’s.

  In the novel, naturally, the Ruth character despises her roommate’s boyfriend and is traumatized by their single sexual encounter; the boyfriend, on the other hand, falls in love with his girlfriend’s roommate and balks at divorcing her when the Vietnam War is over.

  The fall of Saigon, in April ’75, is the background to the end of the novel, when the roommate (who agrees to have her roommate’s boy-friend’s baby) realizes that she can’t give the baby up. Her loathing of her baby’s father notwithstanding, she accepts joint custody of their child upon their divorce. The Hannah character, who has instigated the match between her boyfriend and her best friend, loses both the boyfriend and the baby—not to mention the friendship with her former roommate.

  It is a sexual farce, but with bitter consequences, and its comic touches are offset by the darker rifts between the characters—which is a microcosm of how the country itself was divided by the war in Vietnam, and (for Ruth’s generation of young men) by what to do about the draft. “A woman’s quaint perspective on dodging the draft,” one male reviewer wrote of the novel.

  Hannah had told Ruth that she had slept with this particular reviewer at one time or another; she also happened to know his draft-dodging story. The man had claimed psychological damage from having sex with his mother. His mother had substantiated the claim; the telling of the lie had been the mother’s idea in the first place. And as a result of successfully evading the draft in this fashion, the man eventually had had sex with his mother.

  “I guess he knows a ‘quaint perspective’ when he encounters one,” Ruth had said. It irritated Hannah that Ruth didn’t rail against her negative reviews as vociferously as Hannah railed against them. “Reviews are free publicity,” Ruth liked to say. “Even the bad ones.”

  It was a measure of Ruth Cole’s international stature and renown that the anticipation of her third and most recent novel was so keen in those European countries where she was translated that two translations were being published simultaneously with the British and American editions.

  Following her reading at the Y, Ruth was spending a day in New York; she’d agreed to several interviews and to some related publicity. Then she was spending a day and a night in Sagaponack with her father, before leav
ing for Germany and the Frankfurt Book Fair. (After Frankfurt, and the promotion of the German translation, she was expected in Amsterdam, where the Dutch translation had just been published.)

  Ruth’s visits with her father in Sagaponack were few, yet she was frankly looking forward to this one. Doubtless there would be a little squash in the barn, and much arguing—about nearly everything—and even some rest. Hannah had promised to come to Sagaponack with her. It was always better for Ruth if she avoided spending time with her father alone; with a friend—even if it was one of Ruth’s infrequent but consistently ill-chosen boyfriends—there was someone to run interference.

  But Hannah flirted with Ruth’s father, which made Ruth cross. Ruth suspected Hannah of flirting with him because it made Ruth cross. And Ruth’s father, who knew of no other way to behave with women, flirted back.

  It had been Hannah to whom Ruth had made her vulgar remark about her father’s attractiveness to women—in which Ruth had said: “You could hear the women’s panties sliding to the floor.”

  When Hannah had first met Ted Cole, she’d said to Ruth: “What is that sound? Do you hear it?” Ruth rarely saw a joke coming; her first thought, always, was that everyone was totally serious.

  “ What sound? No, I don’t hear it,” Ruth had replied, looking around.

  “Oh, it’s just my panties sliding to the floor,” Hannah had told her. It had become a code between them.

  Whenever Ruth was introduced to one of Hannah’s many boyfriends, if Ruth liked him, she would ask Hannah: “Did you hear that sound?” If Ruth didn’t care for the boyfriend, which was often the case, Ruth would say: “I didn’t hear a thing. Did you ?”