A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  She stopped only because she thought her right arm was going to fall off. Then Ruth took off all her clothes and sat on the bottom step in the shallow end of the pool, enjoying the ice pack that perfectly conformed to her right shoulder. In the glorious Indian Summer weather, the sun at midday was warm on her face. The cool water of the pool covered her body, except for her shoulders; the right one was excruciatingly cold from the ice, but in a few minutes it would be wonderfully numb.

  The terrific thing about hitting a ball that hard, and for that long, was that when she was done, she had absolutely nothing on her mind. Not Scott Saunders, and what she was going to do with him after they had played squash. Not her father, and what was possible or not possible to do about him. Ruth had not even thought about Allan Albright, whom she should have called. She hadn’t thought about Hannah, either—not a single thought.

  In the pool, in the sun—at first feeling but now not feeling the ice— Ruth’s life vanished around her. (The way night falls, or the way the night gives way to the dawn.) When the phone rang, which it did repeatedly, she didn’t think about that, either.

  If Scott Saunders had seen Ruth’s morning workout, he would have suggested that they play tennis instead—or maybe just have dinner. If Ruth’s father had seen the last twenty balls she’d served, he would have known enough not to come home. If Allan Albright had even imagined how far Ruth had removed herself from thought, he would have been very, very worried. And if Hannah Grant, who was still Ruth Cole’s best friend—Hannah, at least, knew Ruth better than anyone else knew her—had witnessed her friend’s mental and physical preparations, Hannah would have known that Scott Saunders, the strawberry-blond lawyer, was facing a day (and a night) of far more demanding performances than he would be called upon to display in a few fast-paced games of squash.

  Ruth Remembers Learning to Drive

  That afternoon, after she hit her soft shots, she sat in the shallow end of the pool, icing her shoulder and reading The Life of Graham Greene .

  Ruth was fond of the story of young Graham’s first words, which allegedly were “Poor dog,” a reference to his sister’s dog, which had been run over in the street. Greene’s nanny had put the dead dog in the baby carriage with Greene.

  Of Greene as a child, his biographer wrote: “However young he was he must have had an instinctive awareness of death from the carcass, the smell, perhaps blood, perhaps the mouth pulled back over the teeth in the snarl of death. Wouldn’t there be a growing sense of panic, even nausea on finding himself shut in, irrevocably committed to sharing the limited confines of a pram with a dead dog?”

  There are worse things, Ruth Cole thought. “In childhood,” Greene himself had written (in The Ministry of Fear ), “we live under the brightness of immortality—heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Beside the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock.”

  That hadn’t been her childhood. Ruth’s mother had left her when she was four; there was no God; her father didn’t tell the truth, or he wouldn’t answer her questions—or both. And as for justice, her father had slept with so many women that Ruth couldn’t keep count.

  On the subject of childhood, Ruth preferred what Greene had written in The Power and the Glory: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” Oh, yes—Ruth agreed. But sometimes, she would have argued, there is more than one moment, because there is more than one future. For example, there was the summer of ’58, the most obvious moment when the alleged “door” had opened and the alleged “future” had been let in. But there was also the spring of ’69, when Ruth turned fifteen and her father had taught her to drive.

  For more than ten years, she’d been asking her father to tell her about the accident that killed Thomas and Timothy; her father had refused. “When you’re old enough to hear it, Ruthie—when you know how to drive,” he’d always said.

  They drove every day, usually first thing in the morning—even on the summer weekends, when the Hamptons were overcrowded. Her father wanted her to get used to bad drivers. That summer, on Sunday nights—when the traffic would be backed up in the westbound lane of the Montauk Highway, and the weekend people would already be behaving impatiently, some of them (literally) dying to get back to New York—Ted would take Ruth out in the old white Volvo. He would drive around until he found what he called “a pretty good mess.” The traffic would be at a standstill, and some idiots would already have begun passing on the right, in the soft shoulder of the road, and others would be trying to break out of the line of cars, to turn around and go back to their summer homes—just to wait for an hour or two, or to have a really stiff drink before starting out again.

  “This looks like a pretty good mess, Ruthie,” her father would say.

  And Ruth would change seats with him—sometimes while the furious driver behind them honked and honked his horn. There were side roads, of course; she knew them all. She could inch ahead on the Montauk Highway, and then break free of the traffic and race parallel to the highway on the connecting back roads, always finding a way to break back into the lineup of cars again. Her father would look behind them, then, saying, “It appears that you gained on about seven cars, if that’s the same dumb Buick back there that I think it is.”

  Sometimes she’d drive all the way to the Long Island Expressway before her father would say, “Let’s call it a night, Ruthie, or the next thing we know, we’ll be in Manhattan!”

  On other Sunday nights, the traffic might be so bad that her father considered it a sufficient demonstration of her driving skills if Ruth merely executed a U-turn and drove them home.

  He emphasized her constant awareness of the rearview mirror, and of course she knew that when she was stopped and waiting to turn left, across a lane of oncoming traffic, she must never, ever turn her wheels to the left in anticipation of the turn she was waiting to make. “Never—not ever !” her father had told her, from her very first driving lesson. But he still hadn’t told her the story of what had actually happened to Thomas and Timothy. Ruth knew only that Thomas had been driving.

  “Patience, Ruthie, patience,” her father would repeat and repeat to her.

  “I am patient, Daddy,” Ruth would tell him. “I’m still waiting for you to tell me the story, aren’t I?”

  “I mean, be a patient driver, Ruthie—always be a patient driver.”

  The Volvo—like all of Ted’s Volvos, which he began buying in the sixties—was a stick shift. (Ted told Ruth to never trust a boy who drove an automatic transmission.) “And if you’re in the passenger seat and I’m the driver, I never look at you—I don’t care what you say, or what kind of fit you’re having. Even if you’re choking,” Ted said. “If I’m driving the car, I can talk to you, but I don’t look at you—not ever. And when you’re the driver, you don’t look at me, or at anyone who might be in the passenger seat. Not until you get off the road and stop the car. You got it?”

  “Got it,” Ruth said.

  “And if you’re out on a date and the boy is driving, if he looks at you, for whatever reason, you tell him not to look at you or else you’ll get out and walk. Or you tell him to let you drive the car. You got that, too?” her father asked.

  “I got it,” Ruth said. “Tell me what happened to Thomas and Timothy.”

  But all her father said was: “And if you’re upset—like something you’re thinking about suddenly upsets you, and you start to cry— and you can’t see the road clearly, because of your tears . . . just suppose you’re bawling your eyes out, for whatever reason . . .”

  “Okay, okay—I got it!” Ruth told him.

  “Well. If you ever get like that, crying so hard that you can’t see the road, you just pull over to the side of the road and stop .”

  “What about the accident?” Ruth asked. “Were you there? Were you a
nd Mommy in the car?”

  In the shallow end of the swimming pool, Ruth felt the ice melting on her shoulder; the cold trickle followed the line of her collarbone and made its way across her chest into the warmer water of the pool. The sun had dropped below the towering privet.

  She thought of Graham Greene’s father, the schoolmaster, whose advice to his former pupils (who adored him) was odd, but in its own way charming. “Remember to be faithful to your future wife,” he’d said to a boy who was leaving school to join the army in 1918. And to another, just prior to his confirmation, Charles Greene had said: “An army of women live on the lust of men.”

  Where had this “army of women” gone? Ruth guessed that Hannah was one of the alleged army’s lost soldiers.

  Since Ruth’s earliest memories—not only since she’d begun to read, but from the first time her father had told her a story—books, and the characters in them, had entered her life and remained fixed there. Books, and the characters in them, were more “fixed” in Ruth’s life than were her father and her best friend—not to mention the men in her life, who for the most part had proven themselves to be almost as unreliable as Ted and Hannah had.

  “All life long,” Graham Greene had written in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, “my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent.” A good instinct, but were Ruth to put it into action, she would perforce have nothing further to do with men . Among the men she’d known, only Allan seemed admirable and constant; yet, as she sat in the pool, readying herself for her test with Scott Saunders, Allan’s lupine teeth were foremost on her mind. And the hair on the back of his hands . . . he had too much hair there.

  She’d not enjoyed playing squash with Allan. He was a good athlete and a well-coached squash player, but Allan was too large for the court—too dangerous in his lunging, looping movements. Yet Allan would never try to hurt or intimidate her. And although she’d lost to him twice, Ruth didn’t doubt that she would eventually beat him. It was merely a matter of learning to keep out of his way—while at the same time not being afraid of his backswing. The two times she’d lost to him, Ruth had yielded the T. Next time, if there was a next time, Ruth was determined not to give up the preferred position on the court to him.

  As she enjoyed the last of the melting ice, she thought: At worst, it might mean some stitches in an eyebrow or a broken nose. Besides, if Allan hit her with his racquet, he would feel terrible about it. Thereafter, Allan would yield the preferred position on the court to her . In no time, whether he hit her or not, she would be beating him easily. Then Ruth thought: Why bother to beat him?

  How could she ever consider giving up men ? To an even greater extent, it was women she didn’t trust.

  She’d been sitting for too long in the swimming pool, in the chill of the late-afternoon shade—not to mention the clammy cold of the ice pack, which had melted on her shoulder. The chill gave her a touch of November in the Indian Summer weather; it reminded Ruth of that November night in 1969, when her father had given her what he called “the ultimate driving lesson” and “the penultimate driving test.”

  She wouldn’t be sixteen until the spring of the following year, when she would get her learner’s permit—thereafter, she would pass her driver’s test without the slightest difficulty—but that November night her father, who didn’t give a damn about learner’s permits, had forewarned her: “For your sake, Ruthie, I hope you never have a tougher driving test than this one. Let’s go.”

  “Go where ?” she’d asked. It was the Sunday night of the long Thanksgiving weekend.

  The pool was already covered for winter, the fruit trees denuded of fruit and leaves; even the privet was bare, standing skeletally, stiffly moving in the wind. On the northern horizon was a glow: the headlights of the cars that were already at a standstill in the westbound lane of the Montauk Highway; the weekenders on their way back to New York. (Normally the drive took two hours—at the most, three.)

  “I feel like the lights of Manhattan tonight,” Ted told his daughter. “I want to see if the Christmas decorations are already in place on Park Avenue. I want to have a drink at the Stanhope bar. I had a 1910 Armagnac there once. Of course I don’t drink Armagnac anymore, but I’d like to have something as good as that again. A really good glass of port, maybe. Let’s go.”

  “You want to drive to New York tonight, Daddy?” Ruth asked. Short of the end of the Labor Day weekend, or immediately following the Fourth of July (and maybe Memorial Day weekend), it was arguably the worst night of the year to drive to New York.

  “No, I don’t want to drive to New York, Ruthie—I can’t drive to New York, because I’ve been drinking. I’ve had three beers and a whole bottle of red wine. The one thing I promised your mother was that I’d never drink and drive, at least not with you in the car. You’re the driver, Ruthie.”

  “I’ve never driven to New York,” Ruth said. It wouldn’t have been much of a test if she had .

  When they finally got on the Long Island Expressway at Manorville, Ted said, “Get in the passing lane, Ruthie. Maintain the speed limit. Remember your rearview mirror. If someone’s coming up behind you and you have enough time to move to the center lane, and if you have enough room, then move over. But if someone’s coming up on you, hog-wild to pass, let him pass you on the right.”

  “Isn’t this illegal, Daddy?” she asked him. She thought that learning to drive had some restrictions—like maybe she wasn’t supposed to drive at night, or not beyond a fifteen-mile radius of where she lived. She didn’t know she’d already been driving illegally because she didn’t have a learner’s permit.

  “You can’t learn everything you need to know legally,” her father told her.

  She had to concentrate hard on the driving; it was one of the few times they’d been out in the old white Volvo together when she didn’t ask him to tell her about what had happened to Thomas and Timothy. Ted waited until they were approaching Flushing Meadows; then, without any warning, he began to tell her the story in exactly the same way that he’d told it to Eddie O’Hare, with Ted Cole in the third person—as if Ted were just another character in the story, and a minor character at that.

  Ted interrupted the part about how much he and Marion had had to drink, and why Thomas had been the obvious choice—the only sober driver—to tell Ruth to get out of the passing lane and into the far-right lane instead. “You get on the Grand Central Parkway here, Ruthie,” her father casually said. She had to change lanes a little too fast, but she managed it. Soon she saw Shea Stadium, off to her right.

  At the part in the story where he and Marion were arguing about the best place to make a left turn, Ted interrupted himself again—this time to tell Ruth to take Northern Boulevard, through Queens.

  She knew that the old white Volvo tended to overheat in stop-and-go-traffic, but when she mentioned it, her father said, “Just don’t ride the clutch, Ruthie. If you’re stopped for a while, take it out of gear, put it in neutral, and step on your brake. Keep your foot off your clutch as much as you can. And remember your rearview mirror.”

  By then, she was crying. It was after the snowplow scene, when her mother knew that Thomas was dead, but she didn’t yet know about Timothy. Marion kept asking Ted if Timmy was all right, and Ted wouldn’t tell her—he’d just watched Timmy die, but he couldn’t speak.

  They came over the Queensboro Bridge, into Manhattan, at the moment in the story when her father was explaining about Timothy’s left leg—how the snowplow had severed it at midthigh, and that when they tried to take the body away, they had to leave the leg behind.

  “I can’t see the road, Daddy,” Ruth told him.

  “Well. There’s no place to pull over, is there?” her father asked her. “You’ll just have to keep going, won’t you?” Then he told her the part where her mother had noticed her brother’s shoe. (“Oh, Ted, look— he’s going to need his shoe,” Marion had said, not realizing that Timmy’s shoe was still attached to Timmy’s leg. A
nd so on . . .)

  Ruth headed uptown on Third Avenue.

  “I’ll tell you when to cut over to Park,” her father told her. “There’s a place on Park Avenue where the Christmas decorations are especially worth seeing.”

  “I’m crying too much—I can’t see where I’m going, Daddy,” Ruth told him again.

  “But that’s the test, Ruthie. The test is, sometimes there’s no place to pull over—sometimes you can’t stop, and you have to find a way to keep going. You got it?”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “So,” her father said, “now you know everything.”

  Ruth realized later that she’d also passed that part of the test which had not been mentioned. She’d never looked at him; he’d sat unseen in the passenger seat. All the while that her father was telling the story, Ruth had never taken her eyes from the road, or from the rearview mirror. That had been part of the test, too.

  That November night in ’69, her father had made her drive up Park Avenue, all the while commenting on the Christmas decorations. Somewhere in the upper eighties, he’d told her to cut over to Fifth. Then they’d come down Fifth Avenue to the Stanhope, which was opposite the Met. It was the first time she’d heard the flags at the Met snapping in the wind. Her father had told her to give the keys of the old white Volvo to the doorman; his name was Manny. Ruth had been impressed that the doorman knew her father.

  But they all knew her father at the Stanhope. He must have been a frequent guest. It’s where he brings women ! Ruth realized. “Always stay here—when you can afford it, Ruthie,” her father had told her. “It’s a good hotel.” (Since 1980, she’d been able to afford it.)

  That night they’d gone into the bar and her father changed his mind about the port. He’d ordered a bottle of an excellent Pommard instead; Ted finished the wine while Ruth drank a double espresso, knowing that she had to drive back to Sagaponack. All the time they sat in the bar, Ruth felt that she was still gripping the steering wheel. And although it would have been permissible to look at her father in the bar—before they got back in the old white Volvo—she couldn’t look at him. It was as if he were still telling her the terrible story.