A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Hannah had got Allan’s message; she’d returned his call, but he’d been brief with her. He’d told Hannah that there was nothing wrong, that he’d spoken to Ruth and that Ruth was “fine.” Hannah had suggested that they meet for lunch, or for a drink—“just to talk about Ruth”—but Allan had told Hannah that he was looking forward to meeting her, with Ruth, when Ruth was back from Europe.

  “I never talk about Ruth,” he’d told her.

  It was the closest Ruth had come to telling Allan that she loved him, but she could still hear something worried in his voice and it troubled her; as her editor, he’d withheld nothing.

  “What’s wrong, Allan?” Ruth asked.

  “Well . . .” he began, sounding like her father, “nothing, really. It can wait.”

  “Tell me,” Ruth said.

  “There was something in your fan mail,” Allan told her. “Normally no one reads it—we just forward it to Vermont. But this was a letter addressed to me—to your editor, that is. And so I read it. It’s really a letter to you.”

  “Is it hate mail?” Ruth asked. “I get my share of it. Is that all it is?”

  “I suppose that’s all it is,” Allan said. “But it’s upsetting. I think you ought to see it.”

  “I will see it—when I get back,” Ruth told him.

  “Maybe I could fax it to your hotel,” Allan suggested.

  “Is it threatening? Is it a stalker?” she asked. The word “stalker” always gave her a chill.

  “No, it’s a widow—an angry widow,” Allan told her.

  “Oh, that, ” Ruth said. She’d expected that . When she wrote about abortion, not having had an abortion, she got angry letters from people who had had abortions; when she wrote about childbirth, not having had a child—or when she wrote about divorce, not having been divorced ( or married) . . . well, there were always those letters. People denying that imagination was real, or insisting that imagination wasn’t as real as personal experience; it was the same old thing. “For God’s sake, Allan,” Ruth said, “you’re not worried about another reader telling me to write about what I know, are you?”

  “This one is a little different,” Allan replied.

  “All right—fax it to me,” she told him.

  “I don’t want to worry you,” he said.

  “Then don’t fax it to me!” Ruth said. Then she added, because the thought suddenly occurred to her: “Is this a stalking widow or just an angry one?”

  “Look, I’ll fax it to you,” he told her.

  “Is this something you should show to the FBI—is it like that ?” Ruth asked him.

  “No, no—not really. I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Just fax it,” she told him.

  “It’ll be there when you arrive,” Allan promised her. “Bon voyage!”

  Why was it that women were absolutely the worst readers when it came to something that touched upon their personal lives? Ruth thought. What made a woman presume that her rape (her miscarriage, her marriage, her divorce, her loss of a child or a husband) was the only universal experience that there was? Or was it merely the case that most of Ruth’s readers were women—and that women who wrote to novelists, and told them their personal disaster stories, were the most fucked-up women of all?

  Ruth sat in the Delta Crown Room, holding a glass of ice water against her black eye. It must have been her faraway expression, in addition to her obvious injury, that prompted a fellow traveler—a drunken woman—to speak to her. The woman, who was about Ruth’s age, had a hardened expression on her pale, drawn face. She was too thin—a chain-smoker with a raspy voice and a southern accent, thickened by booze.

  “Whoever he was, sweetie, you’re better off without him,” the woman told Ruth.

  “It was a squash injury,” Ruth replied.

  “He hit you with a squash ?” the woman slurred. “Shit, it must have been a hard one!”

  “It was pretty hard,” Ruth admitted, smiling.

  On the plane, Ruth quickly drank two beers. When she had to pee, she was relieved that it hurt a little less. There were only three other passengers in first class, and no one in the seat beside her. She told the flight attendant not to serve her any dinner, but she asked to be awakened for breakfast.

  Ruth reclined in her seat; she covered herself with the thin blanket and tried to make her head comfortable on the small pillow. She would have to sleep on her back, or on her left side; the right side of her face was too sore to sleep on. Her last thought, before she fell asleep, was that Hannah had been right again: I am too hard on my father. (After all, as the song goes, he’s just a man.)

  Then Ruth was asleep. She would sleep all the way to Germany, trying in vain not to dream.

  A Widow for the Rest of Her Life

  It was Allan’s fault. Ruth would never have dreamt all night about her other hate mail, or her occasional stalkers, if Allan hadn’t told her about the angry widow.

  There’d been a time when she’d answered all her fan mail. There was so much of it—after her first novel, especially—but she’d made the effort. Oh, she’d never bothered with the bitchy letters; if the tone of any letter was even partially pissy, Ruth threw it away without answering it. (“For the most part—your incomplete sentences notwithstanding—I was mildly enjoying your book, but the repeated inconsistencies with serial commas and your misuse of the word ‘hopefully’ eventually wore down my tolerance. I stopped on page 385, where the most egregious example of your grocery-list style stopped me and sent me looking for better prose than yours.”) Who would bother to answer a letter like that?

  But the objections to Ruth’s writing were more often complaints about the content of her novels. (“What I detest in your books is that you sensationalize everything. In particular, you exaggerate the unseemly.”)

  As for the so-called unseemly, Ruth knew that it was of sufficient offense to some of her readers that she even contemplated it—not to mention that she exaggerated it. Nor was Ruth Cole entirely sure that she did exaggerate the unseemly. Her worst fear was that the unseemly had become so commonplace that one couldn’t exaggerate it.

  What got Ruth in trouble was that she used to answer her good mail; but it was the good mail that you had to be most careful about not answering. Particularly dangerous were those letters in which the letter writer claimed not only that he or she had loved a book by Ruth Cole but that the book had changed his or her life.

  There was a pattern. The letter writer always professed an undying love for one or more of Ruth’s books; usually there was some personal identification with one or more of Ruth’s characters, too. Ruth would write, thanking the person for his or her letter. The second time the person wrote to Ruth, the letter writer was much more needy; often the second letter was accompanied by a manuscript. (“I loved your book; I know you’re going to love mine”—that kind of thing.) Commonly, the letter writer would suggest a meeting. The third letter would express how hurt the letter writer felt, because Ruth hadn’t responded to the second letter. Whether Ruth responded to the third letter or not, the fourth letter would be the angry one—or the first of many angry ones. That was the pattern.

  In a way, Ruth thought, her former fans—those fans who were disappointed that they couldn’t get to know her personally—were more frightening than the creeps who hated her from the beginning. The writing of a novel demanded privacy; it called for a virtually isolated existence. In contrast, the publication of a book was an alarmingly public experience. Ruth had never been good at the public part of the process.

  “Guten Morgen,” the flight attendant whispered in her ear. “Fr¸hst¸ck . . .” Ruth was wrecked by her dreams, but she was hungry and the coffee smelled good.

  Across the aisle, a gentleman was shaving. He sat leaning over his breakfast, peering into a small hand-held mirror; the sound of his electric razor droned like an insect against a screen. Below the breakfast eaters lay Bavaria, growing greener as the clouds lifted; the fog was burned away by the first
rays of the morning sun. It had rained overnight; the tarmac would still be wet when the plane landed in Munich.

  Ruth liked Germany, and her German publishers. It was her third trip; as always, everything on her itinerary had been explained to her beforehand. And her interviewers would actually have read her book.

  At the registration desk in her hotel, they were expecting her early arrival; her room was ready. The publisher had sent flowers—and photocopies of her early reviews, which were good. Ruth’s German was not good, but she could at least understand her reviews. At Exeter, and at Middlebury, it had been her only foreign language. The Germans seemed to like her for trying to speak their language, even though she spoke it badly.

  This first day, she would force herself to stay awake until noon. Then she would take a nap; two or three hours were about right for the jet lag. Her first reading was that evening—it was out in Freising. Later that weekend, after her interviews, she would be driven from Munich to Stuttgart. Everything was clear.

  Clearer than it ever is at home! Ruth was thinking, when the woman at the reception desk said, “Oh—and there’s a fax for you.” The hate mail from the angry widow—for a moment, Ruth had forgotten all about it.

  “Willkommen in Deutschland!” the woman at the desk called to her, as Ruth turned and followed the bellman to the elevator. (“Welcome to Germany!”)

  “My dear,” the widow’s letter began, “this time you have gone too far. It may be true, as I have read in one of your reviews, that you have ‘a satirical gift for choreographing an unusual number of society’s ills and human foibles in one book,’ or ‘for gathering the innumerable moral calamities of our time into the life of a single character.’ But not everything in our lives is comic material; there are certain tragedies that resist a humorous interpretation. You have gone too far.

  “I was married for fifty-five years,” the widow continued. (Her late husband was a mortician, Ruth decided.) “When my husband died, my life stopped. He meant the world to me. When I lost him, I lost everything. And what about your own mother? Do you imagine that she found a way to put a comic spin on the death of your brothers? Do you think you were abandoned by a woman who left you and your father to pursue a life in satire ?” (How dare she? thought Ruth Cole.)

  “You write about abortion and childbirth and adoption, but you’ve never even been pregnant. You write about being a divorcée and a widow, but you’ve never even been married. You write about when it’s safe for a widow to re-enter the world, but there is no such thing as a widow for one year. I will be a widow for the rest of my life!

  “Horace Walpole once wrote: ‘The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’ But the real world is tragic to those who think and feel; it is only comic to those who’ve been lucky.”

  Ruth flipped to the end of the letter, and then back to the beginning, but there was no return address; the angry widow hadn’t even signed her name.

  Her letter ended as follows: “All I have left is prayer. I will include you in my prayers. What does it say about you that, at your age, you have never been married? Not even once. I will pray for you that you get married. Maybe you will have a child, maybe not. My husband and I loved each other so much that we never wanted children; children might have spoiled it. More important, I will pray that you will truly love your husband—and that you will lose him. What I will pray for you is that you become a widow for the rest of your life. Then you will know how untruthfully you have written about the real world.”

  In lieu of a signature, the woman had written: A Widow for the Rest of Her Life. And there was a P.S., which gave Ruth the shivers: “I have a lot of time for prayers.”

  Ruth would fax Allan in New York and ask him if the angry widow’s name or address had appeared on the envelope—or, failing that, from what city or town had the letter been mailed? But the answer would be as disturbing as the letter. The letter had been hand-delivered to the Random House building on East Fiftieth Street. The receptionist could not remember the woman, or if it even was a woman, who’d brought the letter to the editorial floor.

  If the praying widow had been married for fifty-five years, she had to be in her seventies—if not in her eighties or her nineties! Maybe the angry old woman did have a lot of time for prayers, but she didn’t have a lot of time left to live .

  Ruth slept for most of the afternoon. The ranting widow’s letter was not that upsetting. And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone . An angry old woman’s letter is not going to ruin my trip, Ruth decided.

  She would walk, she would send postcards, she would write in her diary. Except for in Frankfurt at the book fair, where it was impossible to relax, Ruth was determined to restore herself in Germany. Her diary entries and her postcards suggest that, to some degree, she did. Even in Frankfurt!

  Ruth’s Diary, and Selected Postcards

  Not a bad reading in Freising, but either I or the audience was duller than I expected. Dinner afterward in a former monastery with vaulted ceilings—I drank too much.

  Each time I’m in Germany I’m reminded of the contrast, in a place like the lobby of the Vier Jahreszeiten, between the expensively dressed hotel guests—the business class, who are so formal—and the deliberately disreputable appearance of the journalists, who appear to revel in their grubbiness like teenagers intent on offending their parents. A society in ugly confrontation with itself—so much like ours, but at the same time in advance of ours and even more deteriorated.

  Either I’m not over the jet lag or a new novel is beginning in the back of my mind—I absolutely cannot read anything without skipping ahead. The room-service menu; the list of the hotel’s amenities; Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene, volume one, which I did not intend to bring with me—I must have put it in my carry-on without thinking. All I can read are the last lines of paragraphs that seem important, those final sentences before space breaks on the page. Only occasionally will there be a sentence in the heart of a paragraph that stands out. And I’m incapable of reading anything consecutively; my mind keeps jumping ahead.

  Sherry writes of Greene: “His seeking out of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual and the deviant took him in many directions, as his diary shows.” I wonder if my diary shows it, too. I hope so. It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves—as if they’re bragging.

  Suppose I paid a prostitute to let me watch her with a customer, to absorb every detail of the most furtive encounters . . . isn’t this, in a way, what a writer should do? Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It’s not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one’s sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she’d better keep quiet about it.

  I must be beginning a new novel; my distraction is too focused for jet lag. I’m thinking about a woman writer, someone more extreme than I am—more extreme as a writer and as a woman. She makes every effort to observe everything, to absorb every detail; she doesn’t necessarily want to be single, but she believes that marriage will impose restraints on her. It’s not that she needs to experience everything—she’s not a sexual adventurer—but she does want to see everything.

  Suppose she pays a prostitute to let her watch her with a customer. Suppose she doesn’t dare do that alone—let’s say she does it with a boyfriend. (A bad boyfriend, of course.) And what transpires with the boyfriend, as a result of observing the prostitute, is so degrading (so shameful) that it’s enough to make the woman writer change her life.

  Something happens that’s more than seedy—something too sordid, too devi
ant. This novel is a demonstration of one kind of sexual inequality: the woman writer, in her need to observe, goes too far. As for exactly what happens—the specific experience with the prostitute—if the writer were a man, there would be no guilt, no degradation.

  Norman Sherry, Greene’s biographer, writes of “the novelist’s right—and need—to use his own and others’ experience.” Mr. Sherry thinks there is a ruthlessness to this “right” of the novelist, to this terrible “need.” But the relationship between observation and imagination is more complicated than mere ruthlessness. One must imagine a good story; then one must make the details seem real. It helps, when making the details seem real, if some of the details are real. Personal experience is overrated, but observation is essential.

  It’s definitely not jet lag; it’s a novel. It begins with paying a prostitute, an act traditionally contaminated with shame. No, stupid—it begins with the bad boyfriend! No doubt I’ll make him left-handed. A strawberry-blond boyfriend . . .

  I’m so sick of Hannah telling me that I should shut off my biological clock and get married (or not) for the “right” reasons, not “merely” because my body thinks it wants to have a baby. Hannah may have been born without a biological clock, but she certainly responds to all the other things her body thinks it wants—if not a baby.

  [In a postcard to Hannah, which was a display of sausages in Munich’s Viktualienmarkt.]

  I FORGIVE YOU, BUT YOU FORGIVE YOURSELF A LITTLE TOO EASILY. YOU ALWAYS HAVE.

  LOVE,

  RUTH

  The drive from Munich to Stuttgart; the pronunciation of Schwbische Alb; the farmland with red and blue and green cabbages. In Stuttgart, the hotel is on the Schillerstrasse—a modern hotel with lots of glass. The pronunciation of Schlossgarten .