A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  That, together with the Polaroid print coater, was Ruth’s complete eyewitness account. It might have worried her, a week or so later, to hear Harry Hoekstra’s comment to a colleague in the Warmoesstraat police station.

  Harry was not a detective; more than a half-dozen detectives were already looking for Rooie’s murderer. Harry Hoekstra was just a street cop, but the red-light district and the area of the Bergstraat had been Harry’s beat for more than thirty years. No one in de Wallen knew the prostitutes and their world better than he did. Besides, the eyewitness account had been addressed to Harry. It had at first seemed safe to assume that the witness was someone who knew Harry—most likely a prostitute.

  Harry Hoekstra, however, never assumed . Harry had his own way of doing things. The detectives had made the murderer their job; they’d left the lesser matter of the witness to Harry. When asked if he was making any progress with his investigations concerning the prostitute’s murder—was he any closer to finding the killer?—almost-a-sergeant Hoekstra replied: “The killer isn’t my job. I’m looking for the witness .”

  Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus

  If you’re a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can’t shut it off.

  Thus Ruth Cole sat on the plane from Amsterdam to New York, composing opening sentences in spite of herself. “I suppose I owe at least a word of thanks to my last bad boyfriend.” Or: “His awfulness notwithstanding, I am grateful to my last bad boyfriend.” And so on, as the pilot made some mention of the Irish coast.

  She would have liked to linger over the land a little longer. With nothing but the Atlantic beneath her, Ruth discovered that if she stopped thinking about her new book, even for a minute, her imagination plunged her into more inhospitable territory—namely, what would happen to Rooie’s daughter? The now-motherless girl might be as young as seven or eight, or as old as Wim, or older—but not if Rooie had still been picking her up after school!

  Who would take care of her now? The prostitute’s daughter . . . the very idea occupied the novelist’s imagination like the title of a novel she wished she’d written.

  To stop herself from obsessing any further, Ruth looked through her carry-on bag for something to read. She’d forgotten about the books that had traveled with her from New York to Sagaponack, and then to Europe. She’d read enough (for the time being) of The Life of Graham Greene —and, under the circumstances, she couldn’t bear to reread Eddie O’Hare’s Sixty Times . (The masturbation scenes alone would have pushed her over the edge.) Instead, Ruth again began the Canadian crime novel that Eddie had given her. After all, hadn’t Eddie told her that the book was “good airplane reading”?

  Ruth resigned herself to the irony of reading a murder mystery; but, at the moment, Ruth would have read anything to escape her own imagination.

  Once more Ruth was irritated by the purposeful obscurity of the author photo; that the unknown author’s name was a nom de plume also irked her. The author’s pen name was Alice Somerset, which meant nothing to Ruth. However, if Ted Cole had seen that name on a book jacket, he would have looked at the book—and especially at the author photo, as obscure as it was—very closely.

  Marion’s maiden name was Somerset, and Alice was Marion’s mother’s name. Mrs. Somerset had opposed the marriage of her daughter to Ted Cole. Marion had always regretted her estrangement from her mother, but there had been no way to put an end to it. And then, before the deaths of Thomas and Timothy, her mother had died; Marion’s father died shortly thereafter, also before the deaths of Marion’s beloved boys.

  On the back flap of the book jacket, all it said about the author was that she’d emigrated to Canada from the United States in the late fifties; and that, during the time of the Vietnam War, she’d served as a counselor to young American men who were coming to Canada to evade the draft. “While she would hardly claim it as her first book,” the back flap said about the author, “Ms. Somerset is rumored to have made her own contribution to the invaluable Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada .”

  The whole thing put Ruth off: the coy back flap, the sneaky author photo, the precious nom de plume—not to mention the title. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus sounded to Ruth like the title of a country-western song she would never want to hear.

  She couldn’t have known that the Flying Food Circus had been a popular restaurant in Toronto in the late seventies, or that her mother had worked as a waitress there; in fact, it had been something of a triumph for Marion, who was then a woman in her late fifties, to be the only waitress in the restaurant who wasn’t a young woman. (Marion’s figure had still been that good.)

  Nor could Ruth have known that her mother’s first novel, which had not been published in the United States, had been modestly successful in Canada. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus had been published in England, too; it, and two subsequent novels by Alice Somerset, had also enjoyed several very successful publications in foreign languages. (The German and the French translations, especially—Marion had sold many more copies of her novels in German and in French than she’d sold in English.)

  But Ruth would need to read to the end of Chapter One of Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus before she realized that Alice Somerset was the nom de plume for Marion Cole, her modestly successful mother.

  Chapter One

  A salesgirl who was also a waitress had been found dead in her apartment on Jarvis, south of Gerrard. It was an apartment within her means, but only because she had shared it with two other salesgirls. The three of them sold bras at Eaton’s.

  For the dead girl, the department-store position had been a step up. She’d formerly sold lingerie in a shop called the Bra Bar. She used to say that the Bra Bar was so far out Avenue Road that it was halfway to the zoo, which was an exaggeration. She once joked to her roommates that the customers at the Bra Bar were more often from the zoo than from Toronto, which of course was an exaggeration, too.

  Her roommates said that the dead girl had had a great sense of humor. She’d moonlighted as a waitress, her roommates reported, because she used to say that you didn’t meet many guys while you were selling bras. For five years she’d worked nights at the Flying Food Circus, where she’d been hired—like the other women who worked there—because she looked good in a T-shirt.

  The waitresses’ T-shirts at the Flying Food Circus were tight and low-cut, with a hamburger in the bottommost part of the décolletage. The hamburger had wings, which were spread over the waitresses’ breasts. When her roommates found her body, that was all the dead young woman was wearing: the tight, low-cut T-shirt with the flying hamburger covering her breasts. Moreover, the T-shirt had been put on her after she’d been murdered. There were fourteen stab wounds in the dead girl’s chest, but not one hole in the flying-hamburger T-shirt.

  Neither of the victim’s roommates believed that the murdered salesgirl had been “seeing anyone” at the time. But the apartment had not been broken into—the young woman had let someone in. She’d offered whoever it was a glass of wine, too. There were two full glasses of wine on the kitchen table—no lip marks on either glass, and the only fingerprints on both glasses were hers. There was no fabric of any kind in any of the stab wounds—in other words, she’d been naked when she was stabbed. Either she’d let someone into the apartment when she was naked, in which case it must have been someone she’d known rather well, or she’d been talked out of her clothes without an apparent struggle—possibly at knifepoint. If she’d been raped, it was without her offering any detectable resistance—probably at knifepoint, too—or else she’d had sex willingly, which seemed less likely. In either case, she had had sex shortly before she was killed.

  Whoever it was hadn’t worn a condom. The murdered girl’s roommates told the policewoman who first talked to them that their dead friend always used a diaphragm. She hadn’t used it this time, which was further indicati
on that she’d been raped. And the flying-hamburger T-shirt pointed to someone who knew her from the Flying Food Circus— not someone who’d met her at Eaton’s, or at the Bra Bar. After all, the murderer had not stabbed the salesgirl and then dressed her in a bra.

  The homicide detectives who were partners for this investigation had not been partners for long. The man, Staff Sergeant Michael Cahill, had come to Homicide from the critical-incident team. Although Cahill liked it in Homicide, he was at heart a critical-incident kind of man. He had a still-life mentality, which naturally inclined him to investigate things—not people. He would rather search for hairs on a rug, or semen stains on a pillowcase, than talk to anyone.

  The woman, Cahill’s partner, was well matched with him. She’d started as a constable in uniform, with her shoulder-length auburn hair, which had since turned gray, tucked up under her cap. Detective Sergeant Margaret McDermid was good at talking to people and finding out what they knew; she was a virtual vacuum cleaner when it came to sucking up information.

  It was Staff Sergeant Cahill who found the congealed trickle of blood in a fold of the shower curtain. He deduced that the murderer had calmly taken the time to have a shower after he’d murdered the salesgirl and had dressed her in the flying-hamburger T-shirt. Detective Cahill also found a bloodstain on the soap dish—it was a smudged print that had been made by the heel of the murderer’s right hand.

  It was Detective Sergeant Margaret McDermid who talked to the roommates. She focused on the Flying Food Circus, which anyone would have focused on. The detective was fairly sure that the principal suspect would turn out to be a man with a special feeling for the waitresses in those winged T-shirts—at least he would turn out to be someone who’d had a special feeling for one of them. Perhaps he’d been a co-worker of the dead girl’s, or a frequent customer. Maybe a new boyfriend. Yet clearly the murdered salesgirl had not known the murderer as well as she thought.

  From the restaurant, it was too far to walk to the waitress’s apartment. If the murderer had followed her home from work to learn where she lived, he would have had to follow her taxi by car—or in another taxi. (The murdered waitress always took a taxi home from the Flying Food Circus, her roommates said.)

  “It must have been messy fitting her into that T-shirt,” Cahill told his partner.

  “Hence the shower,” Margaret said. She was liking Homicide less and less, but it wasn’t because of Cahill’s unnecessary remarks. She liked Cahill well enough. What she wished was that she’d had a chance to talk to the murdered salesgirl.

  Sergeant McDermid always found herself more interested in the victim than in the murderer—not that finding the murderer was without gratification for her. She just would rather have had the opportunity to tell the salesgirl not to let whoever it was in her door. These were unsuitable or at least impractical sentiments for a homicide detective to have, Margaret knew. Maybe she would be happier in Missing Persons, where there was some hope of finding the person before he or she became a victim.

  Margaret concluded that she would rather look for potential victims than for murderers. When she told Cahill her thoughts, the staff sergeant was phlegmatic. “Maybe you should try Missing Persons, Margaret,” he told her.

  Later, in the car, Cahill said that the sight of that blood-soaked flying hamburger was enough to make a vegetarian out of him, but Margaret didn’t allow herself to be distracted by the remark. She was already imagining herself in Missing Persons, looking for someone to save instead of someone to catch. She speculated that many of the missing would be young women, and that more than a few of these would turn out to be homicides.

  In Toronto, women who were abducted were rarely found in the city. The bodies would turn up somewhere off the 401, or—after the ice had broken up in Georgian Bay, and the snow had melted in the forests— the human remains would be discovered off Route 69 between Parry Sound and Pointe au Baril, or nearer Sudbury. Maybe a farmer would find something in a field off the 11th Line in Brock. In the States, someone snatched in a city would often be found in the same city—in a Dumpster, say, or a stolen car. But in Canada there was all this land.

  Some of the young women who were missing would turn out to be runaways. From rural Ontario, they would likely end up in Toronto, where many of them were easily found. (Not infrequently, they would have become prostitutes.) But the missing persons who would interest Margaret the most would be children. What Detective Sergeant McDermid was unprepared for was how much of the business of Missing Persons would entail studying the photographs of children. She was also unprepared for how much the photographs of these missing children would haunt her.

  Case by case, the photographs were filed, and as the unfound missing children grew older than their last available photographs, Margaret would mentally revise their appearance. Thus she learned that you needed a good imagination in order to have any success in Missing Persons. The photographs of the missing children were important, but they were only the first drafts—they were pictures of children-in-progress. The ability that the sergeant shared with the parents of these missing children was truly a special but torturous gift: namely, that of seeing, in the mind’s eye, what the six-year-old would look like at the age of ten or twelve, or what the teenager would look like in his or her twenties—“torturous,” because to imagine your missing child grown older, or even entirely grown up, is one of the more painful things that the parents of missing children do. The parents can’t help themselves—they have to do it. But Sergeant McDermid discovered that she had to do it, too.

  If this gift made her good at her job, it also kept her from having much of a life. The children she couldn’t find became her children. When they were no longer an active case in Missing Persons, she took their photos home.

  Two boys especially haunted her. They were Americans who had disappeared during the Vietnam War. The boys’ parents thought that they’d escaped to Canada in 1968—probably the midpoint of Vietnam “war resisters,” as they were called, coming across the border. At the time, the boys would have been seventeen and fifteen. The seventeen-year-old was a year away from being eligible for the draft, but a student deferment would have kept him safe for at least another four years. His younger brother had run away with him—the boys had always been inseparable.

  The seventeen-year-old’s flight was probably a mask to hide his deeper disillusionment with his parents’ divorce. To Sergeant McDermid, both boys were more the victims of the hatred that had developed between their parents than they were victims of the war in Vietnam.

  Anyway, the boys’ case in Missing Persons was no longer under active investigation. If that seventeen-year-old and fifteen-year-old were alive today, they would be in their early thirties! Yet their case was not “retired” for either of their parents, or for Margaret.

  The father, who’d said he was “something of a realist,” had provided Missing Persons with the boys’ dental records. The mother had sent the photographs that Sergeant McDermid had taken home.

  That Margaret was unmarried, and past the age of ever having children of her own, doubtless contributed to her obsession with the handsome boys she saw in those photographs—and to her equally enduring obsession with what might have become of them. If they were alive, where were they now? What did they look like? What women might have loved them? What children of their own might they have fathered? What would their lives be like? If they still lived . . .

  Over time, the bulletin board on which Margaret tacked the boys’ photos had been moved from the combination living-dining room in her apartment—where it had occasionally drawn comment from dinner guests—to her bedroom, which no one but Margaret ever saw.

  Sergeant McDermid was almost sixty, although she could still successfully lie about her age. In a few years, she would be as retired as the case of the missing young Americans. In the meantime, she was past the age of inviting anyone to see her bedroom, where the bulletin board with the unfound boys’ pictures was the principal view from h
er bed.

  There were times, when she couldn’t sleep at night, that she regretted moving the many images of those boys this close to her. And the alternately anxious and grieving mother still sent photographs. Of these, the mother would comment: “I know they don’t look like this anymore, but there’s something about William’s personality that comes through in this picture.” (William was the older of the boys.)

  Or the mother would write: “I realize you can’t see their faces clearly in this one—I mean, you can’t see their faces at all, I know—but there is something about Henry’s mischievousness that might be useful to you in your search.” The particular photograph that accompanied this note was of the mother herself as a young, attractive woman.

  She’s in bed, in a hotel room somewhere. From the look of it, Margaret guessed that the hotel was in Europe. The young mother is smiling, perhaps laughing, and both her boys are in bed with her—only they’re under the covers. All you can see of the boys is their bare feet. She thinks I can identify them by their feet ! Margaret thought despairingly. Yet she could not stop looking at the photograph.

  Or at the one of William as a little boy, playing doctor to Henry’s knee. Or the one where the boys, at the ages of about five and seven, are both dismantling lobsters—William with a certain technical ease and zeal, while Henry is finding the task both gruesome and beyond his abilities. (To their mother, this also demonstrated the boys’ different personalities.)

  But the best photograph of the boys, taken near the time of their disappearance, was after a hockey game—presumably at the boys’ school. William is taller than his mother—he’s holding a hockey puck in his teeth—and Henry is still shorter than his mom. Both boys are wearing their hockey uniforms, but they have traded their skates for high-top basketball shoes.