A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  The other problem with author photos was that they were often composed of no more than heads and shoulders. Harry wanted to see what the writers’ bodies looked like. In Ruth’s case, you couldn’t even see her breasts.

  On his days off, Harry often left the Athenaeum and sat reading in one of the cafés on the Spui, but he felt inclined to read Ruth Cole at home.

  What could be better? A new Ruth Cole novel and two days off !

  When he got to the part of the story about an older woman with a younger man, he was disappointed. Harry was almost fifty-eight; he didn’t want to read about a woman in her thirties with a younger man. Nevertheless, Harry was intrigued by the Amsterdam setting. And when he got to the part about the younger man persuading the older woman to pay a prostitute to watch her with a customer . . . aha, one can imagine Sergeant Hoekstra’s surprise. “It was a room all in red, which the stained-glass lamp shade made redder,” Ruth Cole had written. Harry knew the room she had in mind.

  “I was so nervous that I wasn’t of much use,” Ruth Cole wrote. “I couldn’t even help the prostitute turn the shoes toes-out. I picked up only one of the shoes, and I promptly dropped it. The prostitute scolded me for being such a nuisance to her. She told me to hide myself behind the curtain; then she lined up the rest of the shoes, on either side of my own. I suppose my own shoes must have been moving a little, because I was trembling.”

  Harry could imagine her trembling, all right. He marked the place in the novel where he stopped reading; he would finish the book tomorrow. It was already late at night, but what did it matter? He had the whole next day off.

  Sergeant Hoekstra rode his bicycle from the west of Amsterdam to deWallen in record time. He’d paused only to take a pair of scissors and remove Ruth Cole’s photo from the book jacket; there was no reason for anyone else to know who his witness was.

  He found the two fat women from Ghana first. When he showed them the picture, Harry had to remind them of the mystery woman from the United States who’d paused on the Stoofsteeg and asked them where they were from.

  “That was a long time ago, Harry,” one of the women said.

  “Five years,” he said. “Is it her?”

  The prostitutes from Ghana stared at the photograph. “You can’t see her breasts,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, she had nice breasts,” the other one said.

  “Is it her?” Harry asked them again.

  “It’s been five years, Harry!” the first one said.

  “Yeah, it’s been too long,” the other one said.

  Harry next found the young, heavyset Thai prostitute on the Barndesteeg. The older one, the sadist, was asleep, but Harry had more trust in the younger prostitute’s judgment, anyway.

  “Is it her?” he asked again.

  “It could be,” the Thai slowly said. “I remember the boy better.”

  Two younger policemen, in uniform, were on the Gordijnensteeg, breaking up a brawl outside one of the Ecuadorans’ window rooms. There was always a lot of fighting where the Ecuadoran transvestites were. In another year, they would all be deported. (They’d been deported from France a few years before.)

  The young cops seemed surprised to see Sergeant Hoekstra; they knew he had the night off. But Harry told them he had a little business to attend to with the man with the rock-hard breasts the size of baseballs. The Ecuadoran transvestite sighed deeply when he looked at Ruth Cole’s picture.

  “It’s a pity you can’t see her breasts—she had nice ones,” he told Harry.

  “Then it’s her—you’re sure?” Harry asked him.

  “She looks older,” the prostitute said with disappointment.

  She is older, Harry knew. And she’d had a baby, and her husband had died; there was a lot to account for why Ruth Cole looked older.

  Harry couldn’t find the Jamaican prostitute who’d led Ruth by her arm out of the Slapersteeg; she was the one who’d said that Harry’s witness had a strong right arm for such a small woman. Is she some kind of athlete ? Harry was thinking.

  The Jamaican prostitute was sometimes missing for a week or more at a time. She must have had some other life that was giving her trouble, maybe in Jamaica. But it didn’t matter—Harry didn’t need to see her.

  He pedaled his bicycle over to the Bergstraat last. He had to wait for Anneke Smeets to be finished with a customer. Rooie had left her window room to Anneke in her will. It had probably helped to keep the overweight young woman off heroin, but the luxury of Anneke owning Rooie’s room had done a lot of damage to Anneke’s diet. She was too fat to fit into the leather halter top anymore.

  “I want to come in,” Harry told Anneke, although he generally preferred to talk to her in the open air of the street; he had never liked how Anneke smelled. And it was now very late at night; Anneke smelled awful when she was ready to call it quits and go home.

  “Is this a business call, Harry?” the overweight young woman asked. “Your business or mine?”

  Sergeant Hoekstra showed her the author photo.

  “That’s her. Who is she?” Anneke asked.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure—it’s her. But what do you want with her? You got the killer.”

  “Good night, Anneke,” Harry said. But when he stepped outside on the Bergstraat, he saw that someone had stolen his bicycle. This small disappointment was in the nature of the missing Jamaican prostitute being missing again. What did it really matter? Harry had the whole day off tomorrow: time enough to finish Ruth Cole’s new novel and buy a new bicycle.

  There were no more than twenty or thirty murders in Amsterdam a year, most of them not domestic, but whenever the police dragged one of the canals (looking for a body), they found hundreds of bicycles. Harry couldn’t have cared less about his stolen bicycle.

  Near the Hotel Brian, on the Singel, there were girls in window rooms where there had never been girls in the windows before. More “illegals,” but Harry was off duty; he left the girls alone and went into the Brian to ask the man at the reception desk to call him a taxi.

  In a year’s time, the police would crack down on the “illegals”; soon there would be empty window rooms around the red-light district. Maybe Dutch women would once more be working in the windows. But by then Harry would be retired—it hardly mattered to him anymore.

  Back in his apartment, Harry built a fire in his bedroom. He couldn’t wait to read the rest of Ruth Cole’s novel. With some Scotch tape, Sergeant Hoekstra stuck Ruth’s author photo on the wall beside his bed. The firelight flickered there as he read into the night; he only occasionally got out of bed, to build up the fire. In the flickering light, Ruth’s anxious face seemed more alive to Harry than it had seemed on the back of her book. He could see her purposeful, athletic walk, her alert presence in the red-light district, where he’d followed her with at first fleeting, then renewed interest. She had nice breasts, Harry remembered.

  At last, five years after his friend’s murder, Sergeant Hoekstra had found his witness.

  In Which Eddie O’Hare Falls in Love Again

  As for Alice Somerset’s fourth and apparently final Margaret McDermid mystery— McDermid, Retired —if Harry Hoekstra had been disappointed in the ending, Eddie O’Hare had been devastated. It was not merely what Marion had written about the photographs of her lost boys: “One day she would find the courage to destroy them, she hoped.” More depressing was the overall fatalism of the retired detective. Sergeant McDermid was resigned to the permanence of the boys being lost. Even Marion’s effort to breathe a fictional life into the death of her sons had deserted her. Alice Somerset sounded as if she was finished with writing; McDermid, Retired struck Eddie O’Hare as an announcement that the writer in Marion had retired, too.

  At the time, all Ruth had said to Eddie was: “Lots of people retire before they’re seventy-two.”

  But now, four and a half years later, in the fall of ’95, there’d been no word from Marion—Alice Somerset had not written,
or at least not published, another book—and neither Eddie nor Ruth gave half as much thought to Marion as they used to. It sometimes seemed to Eddie that Ruth had written her mother off. And who could blame her?

  Ruth was unquestionably (and deservedly) angry that neither Graham’s birth nor any of his subsequent birthdays had prompted an appearance from her mother. And Allan’s death a year ago, which might have inspired Marion to come forward and offer her condolences, had resulted in another no-show.

  Although Allan had never been religious, he’d left very careful and specific instructions regarding what he wanted done in the event of his death. He wanted to be cremated and he’d asked to have his ashes scattered in Kevin Merton’s cornfield. Kevin, their Vermont neighbor and the caretaker for Ruth’s house in her absence, had a lovely, rolling cornfield—it was the principal view from Ruth’s master bedroom.

  Allan hadn’t considered that Kevin and his wife might object; the cornfield was not Ruth’s property. But the Mertons had raised no objections. Kevin philosophized that Allan’s ashes would be good for the cornfield. And Kevin had told Ruth that if he ever had to sell his farm, he would sell her or Graham the cornfield first. (It was typical of Allan to have presumed on Kevin’s kindness.)

  As for the house in Sagaponack, in the year that followed Allan’s death, Ruth would often think of selling it.

  Allan’s memorial service was held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, on West Sixty-fourth Street. His colleagues at Random House made all the arrangements. A fellow editor spoke first—a fond remembrance of Allan’s often intimidating presence at the venerable publishing house. Then four of Allan’s authors spoke; as his widow, Ruth was not among the speakers.

  She’d worn an unfamiliar hat with a more unfamiliar veil. The veil had frightened Graham; she’d needed to beg the three-year-old’s permission before he allowed her to wear it at all. The veil had seemed essential to her—not out of reverence or because of tradition, but to mask her tears.

  The majority of mourners and friends who’d come to pay their respects to Allan were of the opinion that the child clung to his mother throughout the service, but it was more the case that his mother clung to him. Ruth had held the three-year-old on her lap. Her tears were probably more disturbing to him than was the reality of his father’s death—at three, his sense of death was inexact. After several pauses in the memorial service, Graham whispered to his mother: “Where is Daddy now ?” (It was as if, in the child’s mind, his father were away on a journey.)

  “It’s gonna be okay, baby,” Hannah, who was seated next to Ruth, whispered throughout the service. This irreligious litany was a surprisingly welcome irritation to Ruth. It distracted her from her grief. The mindlessness of Hannah’s repetition made Ruth wonder if Hannah thought she was consoling the child who’d lost his father or the woman who’d lost her husband.

  Eddie O’Hare had been the last to speak. Allan’s colleagues had not chosen him, nor had Ruth.

  Given Allan’s low opinion of Eddie as a writer and speaker, it frankly astonished Ruth that Allan had designated a role for Eddie at the memorial service. Just as Allan had chosen the music and the location— the latter for its nonreligious atmosphere—and just as emphatically as Allan had insisted on no flowers (he’d always hated the smell of flowers), Allan had left instructions that Eddie should speak last. Allan had even told Eddie what to say.

  As always, Eddie was a little faltering. He fumbled about for some sort of introduction, which made it clear that Allan hadn’t told him everything that he was supposed to say—Allan hadn’t anticipated that he would die so young.

  Eddie explained that, at fifty-two, he was only six years younger than Allan had been. The age factor was important, Eddie struggled to say, because Allan had left instructions for Eddie to read a certain poem— Yeats’s “When You Are Old.” What was embarrassing was that Allan had imagined that Ruth would already be an old woman when he died. He’d quite correctly assumed that, given the eighteen-year difference in their ages, he would die before she would. But, typical of Allan, he’d never imagined that he would die and leave his widow still a young woman.

  “Jesus, this is excruciating,” Hannah had whispered to Ruth. “Eddie should just read the fucking poem!”

  Ruth, who already knew the poem, would have been happier never to hear it. The poem always made her cry—even removed from the context of Allan’s death and Ruth herself being left a widow. She had no doubt that it would make her cry now.

  “It’s gonna be okay, baby,” Hannah whispered again, as Eddie finally read the Yeats poem.

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

  How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true,

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

  And bending down beside the glowing bars,

  Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

  And paced upon the mountains overhead

  And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

  Understandably, everyone in attendance assumed that Ruth cried so bitterly because of how much she’d loved her husband. She had loved Allan, or at least she’d learned to. But even more, Ruth had loved her life with him. And while it pained her that Graham had lost his father, it was at least better for Graham that the boy was young enough not to be permanently scarred. In time, Graham would hardly remember Allan at all.

  But Ruth had been so angry with Allan for dying, and when Eddie read the Yeats poem, it only made her angrier to hear how Allan had assumed she would be an old woman when he died! Ruth, of course, had always hoped she would be an old woman when Allan died. Now here she was, just turned forty—and with a three-year-old son.

  And there was yet a meaner, more selfish reason for Ruth’s tears. It was that reading Yeats had discouraged her from even trying to be a poet; hers were the tears a writer cried whenever a writer heard something better than anything he or she could have written.

  “Why is Mommy crying?” Graham had asked Hannah—for the hundredth time, because Ruth had been on-and-off inconsolable since Allan’s death.

  “Your mommy’s crying because she misses your daddy,” Hannah whispered to the child.

  “But where is Daddy now ?” Graham asked Hannah; he’d not yet had a satisfactory answer from his mother.

  After the service, a crush of people had pressed around Ruth; she lost count of the number of times her arms were squeezed. She kept her hands clasped at her waist; most people didn’t try to touch her hands—just her wrists and her forearms and her upper arms.

  Hannah had carried Graham, Eddie slinking alongside them. Eddie looked especially sheepish, as if he regretted having read the poem—or else he was silently berating himself in the belief that his introduction should have been longer and clearer.

  “Take off the pail, Mommy,” Graham had said.

  “It’s a veil, baby—not a pail,” Hannah told the boy. “And Mommy wants to keep it on.”

  “No, I’ll take it off now,” Ruth said; she’d finally stopped crying. A numbness enclosed her face; she felt impervious to crying or to any form of showing how upset she was. Then she remembered that dreadful old woman who’d called herself a widow for the rest of her life. Where was she now? Allan’s memorial service would have been the perfect place for her to reappear!

  “Do you remember that terrible old widow?” Ruth asked Hannah and Eddie.

  “I’m on the lookout for her, baby,” Hannah had replied. “But she’s probably dead.”

  Eddie was still in the throes of being overcome by the Yeats poem, yet he’d never stopped being the constant observer. Ruth was looking for Marion, too; then she thought she saw her mother.

  The woman wasn’t old en
ough to be Marion, but Ruth didn’t realize this at first. What struck Ruth was the woman’s elegance, and what had seemed to be her heartfelt sympathy and concern. She was looking at Ruth not in a threatening or invasive way, but with both pity and an anxious curiosity. She was an attractive older woman, only Allan’s age—not even sixty. Also, the woman wasn’t looking at Ruth at all as closely as she appeared to be looking at Hannah . That was when Ruth realized that the woman wasn’t really looking at Hannah, either; it was Graham who was drawing the woman’s attention.

  Ruth touched the woman’s arm and asked, “Excuse me . . . do I know you?”

  The woman, embarrassed, averted her eyes. But whatever had shamed her passed; she gathered her courage and squeezed Ruth’s forearm.

  “I’m sorry. I know I was staring at your son. It’s just that he doesn’t look at all like Allan,” the woman said nervously.

  “Who are you, lady?” Hannah asked her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” the woman said to Ruth. “I’m the other Mrs. Albright. I mean the first Mrs. Albright.”

  Ruth didn’t want Hannah to be rude to Allan’s ex-wife, and Hannah looked as if she were about to ask: “Were you invited?”

  Eddie O’Hare saved the day.

  “I’m so glad to meet you,” Eddie said, squeezing the ex-wife’s arm. “Allan always spoke so highly of you.”

  The ex–Mrs. Albright was stunned; she was easily as overcome as Eddie had been by the Yeats poem. Ruth had never heard Allan speak “highly” of his ex-wife; sometimes he’d spoken pityingly of her— specifically, because he felt certain she would rue her decision never to have children. Now here she was, staring at Graham! Ruth was sure that the ex–Mrs. Albright had come to Allan’s memorial service not to pay her respects to Allan, but to get a look at his child!