A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

“I want to see your face again, when you’re a widow,” the angry widow said. “I can’t wait for that.”

  “Hey,” Hannah told the elderly lady, “by the time she’s a widow, you’ll be dead. You look like you’re dying already.”

  Hannah took Ruth’s arm out of Allan’s hand and started pulling her toward their car. “Come on, baby—it’s your wedding day!”

  Allan briefly glared at the old woman; then he followed Ruth and Hannah. Hannah’s bad boyfriend, although he looked like an enforcer, was actually an ineffectual wimp. He just scuffed his feet and glanced at Eddie.

  And Eddie O’Hare, who’d never met an older woman who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be charmed, thought he would try again with the angry widow, who was staring after Ruth as if she were memorizing the moment.

  “Wouldn’t you agree that weddings are sacred, or that they should be?” Eddie began. “Aren’t they among those days that we are meant to remember all our lives?”

  “Oh, yes —I agree!” the old widow said eagerly. “She’ll surely remember this day. When her husband’s dead, she’ll remember it more than she wants to. There’s not an hour that goes by that I don’t remember my wedding day!”

  “I see,” Eddie said. “Can I walk you to your car?”

  “No, thank you, young man,” the widow told him.

  Eddie, defeated by her righteousness, turned away and hurried after the wedding party. All of them were hurrying, perhaps because of the rawness of the November weather.

  There was a small dinner party in the late afternoon. The local booksellers came, and Kevin Merton (Ruth’s caretaker) with his wife. Allan and Ruth had arranged no honeymoon. As for the new couple’s plans, Ruth had told Hannah that they would probably use the Sagaponack house more frequently than they would get to Vermont. Eventually they would have to choose between Long Island and New England, which—once they had a child—would be an obvious choice, Ruth had said. (When the child was old enough to go to school, she would want the child to be in Vermont.)

  “And when will you know if there’s gonna be a kid?” Hannah had asked Ruth.

  “When I get pregnant, or when I don’t,” Ruth had replied.

  “But are you trying ?” Hannah had asked.

  “We’re going to start trying after the New Year.”

  “So soon!” Hannah said. “You’re not wasting any time.”

  “I’m thirty-six, Hannah. I’ve wasted enough time.”

  The fax machine in the Vermont house rang throughout her wedding day, and Ruth kept leaving her dinner party to check the messages. (Congratulations from her foreign publishers, for the most part.) There was a sweet message from Maarten and Sylvia in Amsterdam. (WIM WILL BE BROKENHEARTED! Sylvia had written.)

  Ruth had asked Maarten to keep her informed of any developments in the case of the murdered prostitute. Maarten had told Ruth that there was no news about the prostitute’s murder. The police weren’t talking about it.

  “Did she have any children?” Ruth had earlier faxed Maarten. “I wonder if that poor prostitute had any children.” But there had been nothing in the news about the prostitute’s daughter, either.

  Ruth had got on an airplane, she’d crossed an ocean, and what had happened in Amsterdam had all but vanished. Only in the dark, when she lay awake, did she feel the touch of a dress on a hanger or smell the leather of the halter top that had hung in Rooie’s closet.

  “You’re gonna tell me when you’re pregnant, aren’t you?” Hannah asked Ruth, when they were doing the dishes. “You’re not gonna try to keep that a secret, too, are you?”

  “I have no secrets, Hannah,” Ruth lied.

  “You’re the biggest secret I know,” Hannah told her. “The only way I know what’s going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book.”

  “But I don’t write about myself, Hannah,” Ruth reminded her.

  “So you say,” Hannah said.

  “Of course I’ll tell you when I’m pregnant,” Ruth said, changing the subject. “You’ll be the first to know, after Allan.”

  When she went to bed with Allan that night, Ruth felt only half at peace with herself; she also felt exhausted.

  “Are you okay?” Allan asked her.

  “I’m okay,” Ruth told him.

  “You seem tired,” Allan said.

  “I am tired,” Ruth admitted.

  “You seem different, somehow,” Allan told her.

  “Well. I’m married to you, Allan,” Ruth replied. “ That’s different, isn’t it?”

  By the end of the first week of January 1991, Ruth would be pregnant, which would be different, too.

  “Boy, that was fast!” Hannah would remark. “Tell Allan not every guy his age is still shooting live ammunition.”

  Graham Cole Albright—seven pounds, ten ounces—was born in Rutland, Vermont, on October 3, 1991. The boy’s birthday coincided with the first anniversary of German reunification. Although she hated to drive, Hannah drove Ruth to the hospital. She’d been staying with Ruth for the final week of Ruth’s pregnancy, because Allan was working in New York; he drove to Vermont on the weekends.

  It was two in the morning when Hannah left Ruth’s house for the hospital in Rutland, which was about a forty-five-minute drive. Hannah had called Allan as they were leaving for the hospital. The baby wasn’t born until after ten in the morning. Allan arrived in plenty of time for the actual delivery.

  As for the baby’s namesake, Graham Greene, Allan remarked that he hoped his little Graham would never share the novelist’s reputed habit of frequenting brothels. Ruth, who for more than a year had been bogged down near the end of volume one of The Life of Graham Greene, felt a far greater anxiety about one of Greene’s other habits: his inclination to travel to the world’s trouble spots in search of firsthand experience. This was nothing Ruth would wish upon her little Graham, nor would she ever again seek such experiences for herself. After all, she’d seen a prostitute murdered by her customer, and it appeared that the murderer had got away with it.

  Ruth’s novel-in-progress would suffer a yearlong hiatus. She moved with her baby boy back to Sagaponack, which meant that Conchita Gomez could be Graham’s nanny. This also made the weekends easier for Allan. He could take the jitney or the train from New York to Bridgehampton in half the time it took him to drive from the city to Vermont; he could also work on the train.

  In Sagaponack, Allan used Ted’s former workroom for an office. Ruth claimed that the room still smelled of squid ink, or of a decomposing star-nosed mole—or of the Polaroid print coater. The photographs were gone now, although Ruth said she could still smell them, too.

  But what could she smell (or otherwise detect) in her office on the second floor of the barn—the remodeled Sagaponack squash court, which Ruth chose as her workroom? The ladder and trap door had been replaced by a normal flight of stairs and a normal door. Ruth’s new office had baseboard heating; there was a window where the dead spot on the front wall of the squash court had been. When the novelist sat typing on her old-fashioned typewriter, or—as she more often did— writing by hand on the long yellow pads of lined paper, she never heard the reverberation that the squash ball used to make against the telltale tin. And the T on the former court, which she’d been taught to take possession of (as if her life depended on it), was carpeted now. Ruth couldn’t see it.

  She could smell, from time to time, the exhaust fumes from the cars that were still parked on the ground floor of the old barn. It wasn’t a smell that bothered her.

  “You’re a weird one!” Hannah would say to her, again. “It would give me the creeps to work here!”

  But, at least until Graham was old enough to go to preschool, the Sagaponack house would be fine for Ruth; it was fine for Allan and for Graham, too. They would go to Vermont for the summers, when the Hamptons were overrun—and when Allan didn’t so much mind the long drive from the city and back. (It was a four-hour drive from New York to Ruth’s house
in Vermont.) Ruth would worry, then, about Allan driving such a distance at night—there were deer on the roads, and drunken drivers—but she was happily married; and, for the first time, she loved her life.

  Like any new mother—especially, like any new older mother—Ruth worried about her baby. She’d been unprepared for how much she was going to love him. But Graham was a healthy child. Ruth’s anxieties about him were entirely the product of her imagination.

  At night, for example, when she thought that Graham’s breathing was strange or different—or worse, when she couldn’t hear him breathing—she would rush from the master bedroom to the nursery, which had been her own bedroom as a child. There, Ruth would often curl up on the rug beside the crib. She kept a pillow and a quilt in Graham’s closet for such occasions. Allan would often find her on the floor of the nursery in the mornings—sound asleep beside her sleeping child.

  And when Graham was no longer sleeping in a crib, and he was old enough to climb in and out of his bed by himself, Ruth would lie in the master bedroom, hearing her child’s feet padding across the floor of the master bathroom on his way to her. It was exactly how Ruth had crossed that bathroom floor as a child, padding on her way to her mother’s bed . . . no, to her father’s bed, more often, except for that memorable night when she’d surprised her mother with Eddie.

  This is closure, if there ever is closure, the novelist thought to herself. Something had come full circle. Here was an ending and a beginning. (Eddie O’Hare was Graham’s godfather. Hannah Grant was the boy’s godmother—a more responsible and reliable godmother than one might have thought.)

  And on those nights when she lay curled on the nursery floor, listening to her child breathe, Ruth Cole would be thankful for her good luck. Rooie’s murderer, who had clearly heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound, had not found her. Ruth often thought of him. She not only wondered who he was, and if he had a habit of killing prostitutes; she wondered if he’d read her novel—for she’d seen him take Rooie’s copy of Not for Children . Maybe he’d only wanted the book as a place to keep his Polaroid picture of Rooie safe from harm.

  On those nights, curled on the rug beside Graham’s crib (later, his bed), Ruth surveyed the dimly lit nursery in the glow of the feeble night-light. She saw the familiar part in the window curtain; through the narrow slit, a black streak of night sky was visible—sometimes starry, sometimes not.

  Usually it was a catch in Graham’s breathing that would make Ruth get up off the floor and look closely at her sleeping son. Then she would peek through the part in the curtain to see if the moleman was where she half-expected him to be: curled asleep on the window ledge with some of the pink tentacles of his star-shaped nose pressed against the glass.

  The moleman was never there, of course; yet Ruth would sometimes wake with a start, because she was sure she’d heard him wheeze. (It was only Graham, who’d made a curious sigh in his sleep.)

  Then Ruth would fall back to sleep—often wondering why her mother hadn’t made an appearance, now that her father was dead. Didn’t she want to see the baby? Ruth would wonder. Not to mention me !

  It made her so angry that she tried to stop wondering.

  And because Ruth was often alone with Graham in the Sagaponack house—at least on those nights when Allan was staying in the city— there were times when the house made peculiar sounds. There was the mouse-crawling-between-the-walls sort of sound, and the sound-like-someone-trying-not-to-make-a-sound sort of sound, and the whole range of sounds between those sounds—the opening-of-the-door-in-the-floor sort of sound, and the absence of sound that the moleman made when he held his breath.

  He was out there, somewhere, Ruth knew; he was still waiting for her. In the moleman’s eyes, she was still a little girl. Trying to sleep, Ruth could see the moleman’s small, vestigial eyes—the furry dents in his furry face.

  As for Ruth’s new novel, it was waiting for her, too. One day she wouldn’t be a new mother, and she would write again. So far, she’d written only about a hundred pages of My Last Bad Boyfriend . She hadn’t yet come to the scene when the boyfriend persuades the woman writer to pay a prostitute to watch her with a customer—Ruth was still working up to it. That scene was waiting for her, too.

  III

  FALL

  1995

  The Civil Servant

  Sergeant Harry Hoekstra, formerly hoofdagent or almost-a-sergeant Hoekstra, was avoiding the task of cleaning out his desk. His office, on the second floor of the District 2 police station, overlooked the Warmoesstraat. Harry, while he did nothing about his desk (which had never been cleaned out before), distracted himself by regarding the changes in the street—for the Warmoesstraat, like the rest of the redlight district, had undergone some changes. As a street cop who was now looking forward to an early retirement, Sergeant Hoekstra knew that very little had ever escaped his attention.

  Opposite the station, there’d once been a flower shop, the Jemi, but the shop had moved to the corner of the Enge Kerksteeg. Still within Harry’s view was a place called La Paella, and an Argentinean restaurant called Tango, but the Jemi flower shop had been replaced by Sanny’s Bar. Were Harry as prescient as many of his colleagues thought he was, he might have seen sufficiently into the future to know that, within a year of his retirement, Sanny’s Bar would itself be replaced by the unfortunately named café Pimpelmée. But even the powers of a good policeman do not extend into the future with such specific detail. Like many men who choose to retire early, Harry Hoekstra believed that most of the changes in his neighborhood of business were not changes for the better.

  It was in ’66 when the hashish had first come to Amsterdam in noticeably larger amounts. In the seventies, the heroin came; first with the Chinese, but by the end of the Vietnam War, the Chinese had lost the heroin market to the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. Many of the addicted prostitutes were couriers for the heroin.

  Nowadays, more than sixty percent of the addicts were known to the health department—and there were Dutch police officers stationed in Bangkok. But more than seventy percent of the prostitutes in the redlight district were illegal aliens; basically, there was no keeping track of the “illegals.”

  As for the cocaine, it had come from Colombia via Suriname in small planes. The Surinamese brought it to the Netherlands in the late sixties and early seventies. The Surinamese prostitutes had not been that much of a problem, and their pimps had caused only a little trouble; the problem had been the cocaine. Now the Colombians themselves brought it, but the Colombian prostitutes were not a problem, either, and their pimps made even less trouble than the Surinamese pimps.

  In his more than thirty-nine years of service on the Amsterdam police force, thirty-five of which he’d spent in de Wallen, Harry Hoekstra had only once had a gun pointed at him. It was Max Perk, a Surinamese pimp, who’d pointed the gun at Harry, which had prompted Harry to show Max his gun. Had there been a shootout of the quick-draw variety, Harry would have lost—Max had drawn his gun first. But the display of weapons was more in the nature of a show of force, which Harry had won. Harry’s gun was a Walther nine-millimeter.

  “It’s made in Austria,” Harry had explained to the pimp from Suriname. “The Austrians really know their guns. This will blow a bigger hole in you than yours will blow in me, and mine will blow more holes in you in a hurry.” Whether this was true or not, Max Perk had put down his gun.

  Yet, notwithstanding Sergeant Hoekstra’s personal experiences with the Surinamese, he believed that the days ahead were fairly certain to be worse. Criminal organizations were bringing young women from the former Soviet bloc into Western Europe; thousands of women from Eastern Europe were now working involuntarily in the red-light districts of Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich, Paris, and other Western European cities. The owners of nightclubs, striptease joints, peep shows, and brothels commonly traded these young women for a fee.

  As for the Dominicans, the Colombians, the Brazilians, and the Thais,
most of these young women knew what they were coming to Amsterdam for; they understood what they were going to do . But the young women from Eastern Europe often were under the impression that they were going to be waitresses in respectable restaurants. They had been students and shop girls and housewives before they’d accepted these misleading job offers in the West.

  Among these newcomers to Amsterdam, the window prostitutes were the best off. But now the girls in the windows were being undersold by the girls on the streets; everyone was more desperate for work. The prostitutes whom Harry had known the longest were either retiring or threatening to retire—not that prostitutes didn’t often threaten to retire. It was a business of what Harry called “short-term thinking.” The hookers were always telling him that they were stopping “next month” or “next year”—or else one of the women would say, “I’m taking next winter off, anyway.”

  And now, more than ever, many prostitutes had admitted to Harry that they’d had what they called a moment of doubt; this meant that they’d let in the wrong man.

  There were simply more wrong men than there used to be.

  Sergeant Hoekstra remembered one Russian girl who’d accepted a socalled waitressing job at the Cabaret Antoine. The Cabaret Antoine was no restaurant. It was a brothel, and the brothel owner had immediately seized the Russian girl’s passport. She was told that even if a customer didn’t want to use a condom, she couldn’t refuse to have sex with him—unless she wanted to find herself out on the street. Her passport had been phony, anyway, and she soon found a seemingly sympathetic client, an older man, who procured another phony passport for her. But by then her name had been changed—in the brothel, they’d reduced her name to Vratna because her real name was too difficult to pronounce—and her first two months of “salary” were withheld because her so-called debts to the brothel had to be deducted from her earnings. The alleged “debts” were described to her as agency fees, taxes, food, and rent.