A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Ruth had long believed that the only interesting thing about herself was her writing. She was deeply leery of the idea of Hannah interviewing her, because Hannah was more interested in Ruth’s personal life than she was in Ruth’s novels. And what did interest Hannah in Ruth’s writing was what was personal—what Hannah would have called “real”—about it.

  Hannah will probably hate Allan, Ruth suddenly thought. Allan had already admitted that Ruth’s fame was, if not a burden, a nuisance to him. He had edited a number of famous authors, but he would submit to an interview only on the grounds that his remarks were “not for attribution.” Allan was so private that he didn’t even permit his writers to dedicate their books to him; when one writer had insisted, Allan said, “Only if you use my initials, just my initials.” Thus the book was dedicated: TO A.F.A. It struck Ruth as disloyal that she couldn’t recall what the F. stood for.

  “I gotta go—I think I hear him,” Hannah was whispering.

  “You’re not going to stand me up in Sagaponack, are you?” Ruth asked. “I’m counting on you to save me from my father.”

  “I’ll be there. I’ll get myself there somehow,” Hannah whispered. “I think it’s your father who needs saving from you —the poor man.”

  Since when had her father become “the poor man”? But Ruth was tired; she let Hannah’s remark pass.

  After she’d hung up the phone, Ruth reconsidered her plans. Since she was not seeing Allan for dinner the next night, she could leave for Sagaponack after her last interview, a day earlier than she’d planned; then she would have one night alone with her father. One night alone with him might be tolerable. Hannah would arrive the next day, and they would have a night together—just the three of them.

  Ruth couldn’t wait to tell her father how much she had liked Eddie O’Hare—not to mention some of the things that Eddie had told her about her mother. It would be best if Hannah was not there when Ruth told her father that her mother had thought of leaving him before the boys had been killed. Ruth didn’t want Hannah around for that conversation, because Hannah always stood up for Ruth’s father—maybe just to provoke her.

  Ruth was still so irritated with Hannah that she had some difficulty falling back to sleep. Lying awake, she found herself remembering the time she lost her virginity. It was impossible for her to recall the event without considering Hannah’s contribution to the minor disaster.

  Although she was a year younger than Ruth, Hannah had always seemed older, not only because Hannah had had three abortions before Ruth managed to lose her virginity but also because Hannah’s greater sexual experience lent her an air of maturity and sophistication.

  Ruth had been sixteen, Hannah fifteen when they’d met—yet Hannah had demonstrated greater sexual confidence. (And this was before Hannah had had sex!) In her diary, Ruth once wrote of Hannah: “She projected an aura of worldliness long before she’d been in the world.”

  Hannah’s parents, who were happily married—she called them “boring” and “staid”—had brought up their only child in a fine old house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hannah’s father, a professor at Harvard Law School, had a patrician demeanor; his deportment bespoke a steadfast inclination to remain uninvolved, which Hannah said suited a man who’d married a wealthy and utterly unambitious woman.

  Ruth had always liked Hannah’s mother, who was good-natured and gracious to the point of being utterly benign. She also read a great deal—one never saw her without a book. Mrs. Grant had once told Ruth that she’d had only one child because, after Hannah was born, she missed all the time she’d once had to read. Hannah told Ruth that her mother couldn’t wait for Hannah to be old enough to amuse herself so that Mrs. Grant could get back to her books. And “amuse herself,” Hannah did. (Perhaps it was her mother who’d made Hannah the superficial and impatient reader that she was.)

  While Ruth thought Hannah was fortunate to have a father who was faithful to his wife, Hannah said that a little womanizing might have made her father less predictable; to Hannah, “less predictable” meant “more interesting.” She claimed that her father’s remoteness was the result of his years in the law school, where his abstract ruminations on the theoretical levels of the law appeared to have distanced him from any appreciation of the practice of law itself. He had a great disdain for lawyers.

  Professor Grant had urged the study of foreign languages on his daughter; his highest hope for Hannah was for her to pursue a career in international banking. (International banking had been where the best and the brightest of his students at Harvard Law School had ended up.)

  Her father had a great disdain for journalists, too. Hannah was at Middlebury, where she was majoring in French and German, when she decided that journalism was the career for her. She knew this with the same certainty that Ruth had known, at an earlier age, that she wanted to be a novelist. Hannah announced with a most matter-of-fact surety that she would go to New York and make her way in the world of magazines. To that end, upon her graduation from college, she asked her parents to send her to Europe for a year. There she could practice her French and German, and she would keep a journal; her “powers of observation,” as Hannah put it, “would be honed.”

  Ruth, who’d applied (and been accepted) to the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Iowa, had been caught off guard by Hannah’s suggestion that Ruth come to Europe with her. “If you’re going to be a writer, you need something to write about, ” Hannah had told her friend.

  Ruth already knew that it didn’t work that way—at least not for her. She needed only time to write; what she would write about already awaited her in her imagination. But she deferred her acceptance to Iowa. After all, her father could afford it. And a year in Europe with Hannah would be fun .

  “Besides,” Hannah told her, “it’s high time you got laid. If you stick with me, it’s bound to happen.”

  It had not happened in London, the first city on their tour, but Ruth was groped by a boy in the bar of the Royal Court Hotel. She’d met him at the National Portrait Gallery, where Ruth had gone to see the portraits of several of her favorite writers. The young man took her to the theater, and to an expensive Italian restaurant off Sloane Square. He was an American who lived in London; his father was a diplomat of some kind. He was the first boy she’d gone out with who’d had credit cards, although Ruth suspected that the cards belonged to his father.

  They’d got drunk in the bar of the Royal Court, instead of getting laid, because Hannah was already “using” Ruth and Hannah’s room at the Royal Court by the time Ruth got up the nerve to bring the young man to her hotel. Hannah was noisily making love to a Lebanese she’d picked up in a bank; she’d met him when she was cashing a traveler’s check. (“My first experience in the field of international banking,” she’d written in her journal. “My father would finally have been proud of me.”)

  The second city on their European tour was Stockholm. Contrary to Hannah’s prediction, not all Swedes were blond. The two young men who picked up Hannah and Ruth were dark-haired and handsome; they were still at the university, yet they were very sure of themselves, and one of them—the one who ended up with Ruth—spoke excellent English. The slightly better-looking one, who spoke hardly a word of English, had immediately latched on to Hannah.

  Ruth’s designated young man drove the four of them to his parents’ house, which was three quarters of an hour from Stockholm. His parents were away for the weekend.

  It was a modern house with lots of light-colored wood. Ruth’s young man, whose name was Per, poached a salmon with some dill, which they ate with new potatoes and a salad of watercress and hard-boiled eggs with chives. Hannah and Ruth drank two bottles of white wine while the boys drank beer, and then the slightly better-looking boy took Hannah off to one of the guest bedrooms.

  It was not the first time that Ruth had overheard Hannah making love, but it was somehow different, knowing that the young man with Hannah couldn’t speak Eng
lish—and because, the entire time that Hannah was grunting away, Ruth and Per were washing the dishes.

  Per kept saying, “I’m awfully glad your friend is having such a grand time.”

  And Ruth kept saying, “Hannah always has a grand time.”

  Ruth wished there were more dishes to wash, but she knew she had stalled long enough. Finally she said: “I’m a virgin.”

  “Do you still want to be?” Per asked her.

  “No, but I’m very nervous,” she warned him.

  She also thrust a condom at him before he had even begun to take off his clothes. Hannah’s three pregnancies had taught Ruth a thing or two; albeit belatedly, they had even taught a thing or two to Hannah.

  But when Ruth thrust a condom at Per, the young Swede looked surprised. “Are you sure you’re a virgin?” he asked her. “I’ve never been with a virgin.”

  Per was nearly as nervous as Ruth was, which Ruth appreciated. He’d also had too much beer, which he remarked on, mid-coitus. “÷l,” he said in her ear, which Ruth mistook as an announcement that he was coming. On the contrary, he was apologizing for why it was taking him so long to come. ( ÷l is Swedish for beer .)

  But Ruth had no experience to compare this to; their lovemaking was neither too long nor too short for her. Her principal motivation was to have the experience behind her, to simply (at last) have done it. She felt nothing.

  So, thinking it proper sex etiquette in Sweden, Ruth said “÷l,” too, although she wasn’t coming.

  When Per withdrew from her, he seemed disappointed that there was not more blood. He’d expected a virgin to bleed a lot . Ruth assumed this meant that the whole experience had been less than he’d expected.

  It was definitely less than she’d expected. Less fun, less passion, even less pain. It had all been less. It made it hard to imagine what Hannah Grant had been so fiercely grunting about for all these years.

  But what Ruth Cole learned from her very first experience in Sweden was that the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself. For Hannah, there were no consequences that she considered worth remembering; not even her three abortions had deterred her from repeating and repeating the act, which she apparently found to be of far greater importance than whatever its consequences were.

  But on the morning when Per’s parents returned home, greatly ahead of schedule, Ruth was alone and naked in Per’s parents’ bed. Per was taking a shower when his mother walked into her bedroom and began speaking Swedish to Ruth.

  In addition to not understanding the woman, Ruth could not find her clothes—nor could Per hear his mother’s sharply rising voice over the sound of his shower.

  Then Per’s father walked into the bedroom. While Per may have been disappointed in how little Ruth had bled, Ruth saw that she had bled on the towel she’d spread on the bed. (She had conscientiously taken pains, in advance, not to stain Per’s parents’ sheets.) Now, as she hastily tried to cover herself with the bloodstained towel, she was aware that Per’s mother and father had seen all of her and her blood.

  Per’s father, a dour-looking man, was speechless; yet his staring at Ruth was as unremitting as his wife’s mounting hysteria.

  It was Hannah who helped Ruth find her clothes. Hannah also had the presence of mind to open the bathroom door and yell at Per to get out of the shower. “Tell your mother to stop shouting at my friend!” Hannah had yelled at him. Then she’d yelled at Per’s mother, too. “Shout at your son, not at her —you dumb cunt!”

  But Per’s mother could not stop herself from shouting at Ruth, and Per was too cowardly—or too easily convinced that he and Ruth were in the wrong—to oppose his mother.

  As for Ruth, she was as incapable of decisive movement as she was of coherent speech. She mutely let Hannah dress her, like a child.

  “Poor baby,” Hannah said to her. “What lousy luck for your first time. It usually ends up better than this.”

  “The sex was okay,” Ruth mumbled.

  “Just ‘okay’?” Hannah asked her. “Did you hear that, you limp dick?” Hannah shouted at Per. “She says you were just ‘okay.’ ”

  Then Hannah noticed that Per’s father was still staring at Ruth, and she shouted at him. “Hey, you—fuckface!” she called him. “Do you get off on gawking, or what?”

  “Shall I call you and your companion a cab?” Per’s father asked Hannah, in English even better than his son’s.

  “If you can understand me,” Hannah said to him, “tell your abusive bitch of a wife to stop shouting at my friend—tell her to shout at your jerk-off son instead!”

  “Young lady,” Per’s father said, “my words have had no discernible effect on my wife for years.”

  Ruth would remember the elder Swede’s stately sadness better than she would ever remember the craven Per. And when Per’s father had stared at her nakedness, it was not lust that Ruth saw in his eyes—only his crippling envy of his lucky son.

  In the taxi riding back to Stockholm, Hannah had asked Ruth: “Wasn’t Hamlet’s father a Swede? And his bitch of a mother, too— and the bad uncle, I suppose. Not to mention the dumb girl who drowns herself. Weren’t they all Swedes?”

  “No, they were Danes,” Ruth replied. She took a grim satisfaction from the fact that she was still bleeding, if only a little.

  “Swedes, Danes—same difference,” Hannah said. “They’re all assholes.”

  Later Hannah had announced: “I’m sorry your sex was just ‘okay’— mine was terrific. He had the biggest schlong I’ve ever seen, so far,” she added.

  “Why is bigger better?” Ruth had asked. “I didn’t look at Per’s,” she’d admitted. “Was I supposed to?”

  “Poor baby. Don’t worry,” Hannah had told her. “Remember to look at it the next time. Anyway, it’s how it feels that matters.”

  “It felt okay, I guess,” Ruth had said. “It just wasn’t what I expected.”

  “Did you expect worse or better?” Hannah had asked her.

  “I think I expected worse and better,” Ruth had replied.

  “That’ll happen,” Hannah had told her. “You can count on it: you’ll definitely have worse and better.”

  At least Hannah had been right about that. At last Ruth fell back to sleep.

  Ted at Seventy-Seven

  He didn’t look a day over fifty -seven, of course. It was not merely a matter of the squash keeping him fit, although it troubled Ruth that her father’s trim, compact body, which was the prototype of her own body, had established itself in her mind’s eye as the model of the male form. Ted had kept himself small. (In addition to Allan Albright’s habit of eating off other people’s plates, there was the problem of Allan’s size: he was much taller and a little heavier than the men Ruth generally preferred.)

  But Ruth’s theory, in regard to how her father had failed to age, was separate from her father’s physical fitness or his size. Ted’s forehead was unlined; there were no pouches under his eyes. Ruth’s crow’s-feet were almost as pronounced as his. The skin of her father’s face was so smooth and clean that it might have been the face of a boy who’d only begun to shave, or who needed to shave only twice a week.

  Since Marion had left him, and—retching squid ink into a toilet— he’d sworn off hard liquor (he drank only beer and wine), Ted slept as soundly as a child. And however much he’d suffered from the loss of his sons—and, later, from losing their photographs—he appeared to have put his suffering to rest. Maybe the man’s most infuriating gift was how soundly, and for how long, he could sleep !

  In Ruth’s view, her father was a man without a conscience or the usual anxieties; he felt no stress. As Marion had observed, Ted did almost nothing; as an author and illustrator of children’s books, he had already succeeded (as long ago as 1942) in excess of his small ambitions. He hadn’t written anything in years, but he didn’t have to; Ruth wondered if he had ever really wanted to.

  The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, The Door in the Floor, A Sound Like So
meone Trying Not to Make a Sound . . . there wasn’t a bookstore anywhere in the world (with a decent children’s section) that didn’t carry Ted Cole’s backlist. There were videocassettes, too; Ted had provided the drawings for the animation. About all Ted did now was draw.

  And if his celebrity status had dimmed in the Hamptons, Ted was in demand elsewhere. Every summer he seduced at least one mother at a fair-weather writers’ conference in California, and another at a conference in Colorado, and another in Vermont. He was also popular on college campuses—especially at state universities in out-of-the-way states. With occasional exceptions, today’s college students were too young to be seduced by even as ageless a man as Ted was, but the neglected loneliness among faculty wives whose children had grown up and left home was unabated; those women were still younger women to Ted.

  Between the writers’ conferences and the college campuses, it was surprising that, in thirty-two years, Ted Cole had never crossed paths with Eddie O’Hare, but Eddie had taken pains to avoid such an encounter. For him, it was merely a matter of inquiring who comprised the guest faculty and the visiting lecturers; whenever Eddie had heard Ted’s name, he’d declined the invitation.

  And, if her crow’s-feet were any indication, Ruth despaired that she was showing her age more than her father showed his. Worse, she was deeply concerned that her father’s low opinion of marriage might have made a lasting impression on her.

  On the occasion of her thirtieth birthday, which she’d celebrated with her father and Hannah in New York, Ruth had made an uncharacteristically lighthearted remark on the subject of her few and fast-failing relationships with men.

  “Well, Daddy,” she’d said to him, “you probably thought I’d be married by now, and that you could stop worrying about me.”