A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  During the editing of her novel, including their bitter argument about the title, she’d not sensed Allan’s romantic inclination toward her; he’d been strictly business, an absolute professional. Nor had she seen, at the time, that his dislike of her chosen title had grown curiously personal; that she wouldn’t yield to him—she wouldn’t even consider his suggested alternative—had affected him oddly. He bore the title like a grudge. He referred to it obdurately, in the manner that a vexed husband might repeatedly mention an enduring disagreement in a long and otherwise successful marriage.

  She’d called her third novel Not for Children . (Indeed, it was not.) In the novel, it is a slogan favored by the anti-pornography picketers; the slogan is the invention of Mrs. Dash’s enemy (who would eventually become her friend) Eleanor Holt. However, in the course of the novel, the phrase comes to mean something quite different from its original intent. In their mutual need to love and raise their orphaned grandchildren, Eleanor Holt and Jane Dash realize that their expressed disapproval of each other must be set aside; their old antagonisms are also “not for children.”

  Allan had wanted to call the novel For the Children’s Sake . (He’d said that the two adversaries make friends in the manner of a couple who endure a bad marriage “for the children’s sake.”) But Ruth wanted to keep the anti-pornography connection that was both explicit and implicit in Not for Children . It mattered to her that her own political opinion about pornography was strongly voiced in the title—her political opinion being that she feared censorship more than she disliked pornography, which she disliked a great deal.

  As for protecting children from pornography, that was everyone’s responsibility; it was a matter of common sense, not censorship, to protect children from everything that was unsuitable for them. (“Including,” Ruth had said in several interviews, “any novel by Ruth Cole.”)

  Ruth basically hated arguing with men. It reminded her of arguing with her father. If she let her father win, he had a puerile way of reminding her that he’d been right. But if Ruth clearly won, either Ted wouldn’t admit it or he’d be petulant.

  “You always order the arugula,” Allan said to her now.

  “I like arugula,” Ruth told him. “It’s not always available.”

  To Eddie, they sounded as if they’d been married for years. Eddie wanted to talk to Ruth about Marion, but he would have to wait. When he excused himself from the table—to go to the men’s room, when he didn’t really need to go—he hoped that Ruth would take this as an opportunity to visit the women’s; they could at least have a few words together, if only in a corridor. But Ruth stayed at the table.

  “My God,” Allan said, when Eddie was gone. “Why was O’Hare the introducer?”

  “I thought he was fine,” Ruth lied.

  Karl explained that he and Melissa often asked Eddie O’Hare to be the introducer. Because he was reliable, Karl said. And he’d never refused to introduce anybody, Melissa added.

  Ruth smiled to hear this about Eddie, but Allan said, “My God—‘ reliable’? He was late ! He looked like he’d been run over by a bus !”

  He had gone on a little too long, Karl and Melissa agreed; they’d never heard him go on too long before.

  “But why did you want him to introduce you?” Allan asked Ruth. “You told me you liked the idea.” (In fact, Eddie had been her idea.)

  Who was it who said that there was no better company for an especially personal revelation than the company of virtual strangers? (Ruth herself had written that—in The Same Orphanage .)

  “Well.” Ruth was aware that Karl and Melissa were the “virtual strangers” in this case. “Eddie O’Hare was my mother’s lover,” she announced. “It was when he was sixteen and my mother was thirty-nine. I haven’t seen him since I was four, but I’ve always wanted to see him again. As you might imagine . . .” She waited.

  No one said a word. Ruth knew how hurt Allan would be—that she’d not told him before, and that when she’d finally told him, it was in front of Karl and Melissa.

  “May I ask,” Allan began—formally, for him, “if the older woman in all of O’Hare’s novels is your mother?”

  “No, not according to my father,” Ruth replied. “But I believe that Eddie truly loved my mother, and that his love for her, as an older woman, is in all of his novels.”

  “I see,” Allan said. He’d already picked some of Ruth’s arugula off her salad plate with his fingers. For a gentleman, which he was—and a lifelong New Yorker, a sophisticated man—Allan’s table manners were atrocious. He ate off everybody’s plate—he was not above expressing his dislike of your food after he’d eaten it, either—and food had a way of getting caught between his teeth.

  Ruth glanced at him now, expecting to see a telltale flag of arugula in the vicinity of one of his overlong canines. He had a long nose and a long chin, too, but they conveyed a remote elegance, which was offset by a broad, flat forehead and a closely cropped head of dark-brown hair. At fifty-four, Allan Albright showed no signs of baldness; he had not a single gray hair, either.

  He was almost handsome except for his long teeth, which lent him a lupine appearance. And although he was quite lean and fit, he ate with gusto. He occasionally drank with a little too much gusto, Ruth worried, assessing him. Now, always, it seemed, she was assessing him—and too often unkindly. I should sleep with him and make up my mind, she thought.

  Then Ruth remembered that Hannah Grant had stood her up. Ruth had intended to use Hannah as her excuse for not sleeping with Allan—that is, Hannah would be Ruth’s excuse this time. She was going to tell Allan that she and Hannah were such old friends that they always stayed up all night and talked and talked.

  When Ruth’s publisher wasn’t paying for her accommodations in New York, Ruth usually stayed with Hannah; Ruth even had her own set of keys to Hannah’s apartment.

  Now, without Hannah there, Allan would suggest that Ruth come back to his apartment, or he would ask to see her suite at the Stanhope, which Random House had provided for her. Allan had been very patient with her reluctance to sleep with him; he’d even construed her reluctance to mean that she was taking his affection for her with the utmost seriousness, which she was . It just hadn’t occurred to Allan that Ruth was reluctant because she thought she might hate sleeping with him. It had something to do with his habit of taking food off other people’s plates, and the haste with which he ate.

  It wasn’t because of his reputation as a former ladies’ man. He’d told her frankly that “the right woman,” which she apparently was, had changed all that; she had no reason not to believe him. It wasn’t his age, either. He was in better shape than many younger men; he didn’t look fifty-four, and he was intellectually stimulating. They had once stayed up all night—much more recently than Ruth and Hannah had stayed up all night—reading their favorite passages of Graham Greene to each other.

  Allan’s first present to Ruth had been volume one of the Norman Sherry biography of Graham Greene. Ruth had been reading it with a deliberate slowness, both savoring it and afraid of what she might learn about Greene that she wouldn’t like. It disturbed her to read biographies of writers she loved; she preferred not to know anything unlovable about them. Thus far, the Sherry biography had treated Greene with the honor Ruth thought Greene deserved. But Allan was more impatient with her for reading Norman Sherry slowly than he was impatient with her for her sexual reticence. (Allan had observed that Norman Sherry was sure to publish the second volume of The Life of Graham Greene before Ruth finished reading the first.)

  Now, with Hannah not present, Ruth realized that she could use Eddie O’Hare as her reason for not sleeping with Allan tonight. Before Eddie returned from the men’s room, Ruth said: “After dinner—I hope none of you will mind—I want to have Eddie all to myself.” Karl and Melissa waited for Allan to respond, but Ruth pressed ahead. “I can’t imagine what my mother saw in him,” Ruth said, “except that, at sixteen, I’m sure he must have been awfully pretty.�
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  “O’Hare is still ‘awfully pretty,’ ” Allan growled. Ruth thought: Oh, God—don’t tell me he’s going to be jealous !

  Ruth said: “My mother may not have cared for him as much as he cared for her. Even my father can’t read Eddie O’Hare’s books without failing to comment that Eddie must have worshiped my mother.”

  “Ad nauseam,” said Allan Albright, who couldn’t read a book by Eddie O’Hare without failing to make comments of that kind.

  “Please don’t be jealous, Allan,” Ruth said. It was her reading-aloud voice, her inimitable deadpan, which they all knew. Allan looked stung. Ruth hated herself. In one evening she’d said “Fuck you” to a grandmother, and to the old lady’s grandchildren, and now she’d wounded the only man she’d ever considered marrying.

  “Anyway,” Ruth told them at the table, “a chance to be alone with Eddie O’Hare is exciting for me.”

  Poor Karl and Melissa! Ruth thought. But they were used to writers and had doubtless been exposed to more inappropriate behavior than hers.

  “Your mother clearly didn’t leave your father for O’Hare,” Allan said; he spoke more carefully than he usually did. He was trying to behave himself. He was a good man. Ruth saw that she’d made him afraid of her temper, for which she hated herself anew.

  “That must be true,” Ruth replied, with equal care. “But any woman would have had just cause to leave my father.”

  “Your mother left you, too,” Allan interjected. (Of course they had talked and talked about that.)

  “That’s also true,” Ruth replied. “That’s precisely what I want to talk to Eddie about. I’ve heard what my father has to say about my mother, but my father doesn’t love her. I want to hear what someone who loves her has to say about that.”

  “You think O’Hare still loves your mother?” Allan asked.

  “You’ve read his books,” Ruth answered.

  “Ad nauseam,” Allan said again. He’s an awful snob, Ruth thought. But she liked snobs.

  Then Eddie came back to the table.

  “We’ve been talking about you, O’Hare,” Allan said in a cavalier fashion. Eddie looked nervous.

  “I told them about you and Mother,” Ruth said to Eddie.

  Eddie tried to look composed, although the wet wool of his jacket clung to him like a shroud. In the candlelight he saw the bright yellow hexagon shining in the iris of Ruth’s right eye; when the light flickered, or when she turned her face toward the light, her eye changed color— from brown to amber—in the same way that the same hexagon of yellow could turn Marion’s right eye from blue to green.

  “I love your mother,” Eddie began, without embarrassment. He’d needed only to think of Marion and he at once regained his composure, which he’d lost on the squash court while losing three games to Jimmy; Eddie’s composure had not seemed to him recoverable until now.

  Allan looked astonished when Eddie asked the waiter for some ketchup and a paper napkin. It was not the kind of restaurant where ketchup was served, nor was there a paper napkin in the place. Allan took charge; it was one of his likable qualities. He went out on Second Avenue and quickly located a cheaper sort of restaurant; he was back at the table in five minutes with a half-dozen paper napkins and a ketchup bottle that was less than a quarter full.

  “I hope it’s enough,” he said. He’d paid five dollars for the nearly empty ketchup bottle.

  “It’s plenty, for my purposes,” Eddie told him.

  “Thank you, Allan,” Ruth said warmly. Gallantly, he blew her a kiss.

  Eddie poured a spreading puddle of the ketchup on his butter plate. The waiter looked on with grave distaste.

  “Stick your right index finger in the ketchup,” Eddie said to Ruth.

  “ My finger?” Ruth asked him.

  “Please,” Eddie said to her. “I just want to see how much you remember.”

  “How much I remember . . .” Ruth said. She dabbed her finger in the ketchup, wrinkling her nose—like a child.

  “Now touch the napkin,” Eddie told her, sliding the paper napkin toward her. Ruth hesitated, but Eddie took her hand and gently pressed her right index finger on the napkin.

  Ruth licked the rest of the ketchup off her finger while Eddie positioned the napkin exactly where he wanted it: on the far side of Ruth’s water glass, so that the glass magnified the fingerprint. 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.

  “Do you remember?” Eddie asked her. The yellow hexagon in Ruth’s right eye was dulled with tears. She couldn’t speak. “Nobody else will ever have fingerprints like yours,” Eddie told her, as he’d told her on the day her mother left.

  “And my scar will always be there?” Ruth asked him, as she had asked him thirty-two years ago, when she was four.

  “Your scar will be part of you forever,” Eddie promised her, as he had promised her then.

  “Yes,” Ruth whispered, “I remember. I remember almost everything,” she told him through her tears.

  Later, alone in her suite at the Stanhope, Ruth remembered that Eddie had held her hand while she cried. She also recalled how wonderfully understanding Allan had been. Without a word, which was so uncharacteristic of him, Allan had ushered Karl and Melissa—and, most remarkably, himself —to another table in the restaurant. And Allan had insisted to the maître d’ that it be a faraway table, not within hearing distance of Ruth and Eddie. Ruth was unaware of when Allan and Karl and Melissa left the restaurant. Finally, while she and Eddie were debating the subject of which of them would pay for their dinner—Ruth had drunk an entire bottle of wine, and Eddie didn’t drink—the waiter interrupted their debate by telling them that Allan had already paid for everything.

  Now, in the bedroom of her hotel, Ruth considered calling Allan and thanking him, but he would probably be asleep. It was almost one A.M. And she had been so stimulated to talk and listen to Eddie that she didn’t want to feel let down—as she might, if she talked to Allan.

  Allan’s sensitivity had impressed her, but the subject of her mother, which Eddie had instantly taken up, was too much on her mind. Although she hardly needed more to drink, Ruth opened one of those lethal little bottles of cognac that always lurk in minibars. She lay in her bed, sipping the strong drink and wondering what to write in her diary; there was so much she wanted to say.

  Most of all, Eddie had assured her that her mother had loved her. (One might write a whole book about that!) Ruth’s father had tried to reassure her of that—for thirty-two years—but her father, given his cynicism about her mother, had failed to convince her.

  Naturally Ruth had heard the theory of how her dead brothers had robbed her mother of her capacity to love another child; there was also the theory that Marion had been afraid to love Ruth, out of fear of losing her only daughter to some calamity of the kind that had claimed her sons.

  But Eddie had told Ruth the story of the moment when Marion recognized that Ruth had a flawed eye—that hexagon of bright yellow, which her mother also had in her eye. Eddie told Ruth how Marion had cried in fear—for this yellow flaw meant to her that Ruth might be like her, and her mother hadn’t wanted Ruth to be like her.

  For Ruth, there was suddenly more love in her mother—for not wishing anything of herself on her daughter—than Ruth could bear.

  Ruth and Eddie had talked about whether Ruth was more like her mother or her father. (The more he listened to Ruth, the more Eddie saw of Marion in her.) The subject mattered greatly to Ruth, because she didn’t want to be a mother if she was going to be a bad one.

  “That’s just what your mother said,” Eddie told her.

  “But what worse thing could a mother do than leave her child?” Ruth had asked him.

  “That’s what your father says, isn’t it?” Eddie asked her.

  Her father was a “sexual predator,” Ruth told Eddie, but he’d been “halfway decent” as a
father. He’d never neglected her. It was as a woman that she loathed him. As a child, she had doted on him—at least he was there .

  “He would have been a terrible influence on those boys, had they lived,” Eddie told her. Ruth instantly agreed. “That’s why your mother had already thought of leaving him—I mean, before the boys were killed,” Eddie added.

  Ruth hadn’t known that. She expressed considerable bitterness toward her father for withholding that information from her, but Eddie explained that Ted couldn’t have told her because Ted hadn’t known that Marion might leave him.

  Ruth and Eddie had talked about so much that Ruth couldn’t begin to describe it in her diary. Eddie had even called Marion “the sexual beginning and the sexual peak” of his life. (Ruth did manage to write that down.)

  And in the taxi ride to the Stanhope, with that awful old woman’s shopping bag of books between his knees, Eddie had said to Ruth: “That ‘awful old woman,’ as you call her, is about your mother’s age. Therefore, she’s not an ‘awful old woman’ to me .”

  It was staggering to Ruth that a forty-eight-year-old man was still carrying a torch for a woman who was now seventy-one!

  “Supposing that my mother lives into her nineties, will you be a lovestruck sixty -eight-year-old?” Ruth had asked Eddie.

  “I’m absolutely certain of it,” Eddie had told her.

  What Ruth Cole also wrote in her diary was that Eddie O’Hare was the antithesis of her father. At seventy-seven, Ted Cole was now chasing women who were Ruth’s age, although he was less and less successful at it. His more common successes were with women in their late forties—women who were Eddie’s age!

  If Ruth’s father lived into his nineties, he might finally be pursuing women who at least looked closer to his age—namely, women who were “merely” in their seventies!

  The phone rang. Ruth couldn’t help being disappointed that it was Allan. She’d picked up the phone with the hope that it might be Eddie. Maybe he’s remembered something else to tell me! Ruth had wished.