A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  But all Ruth said was: “Thank you for coming.” She would have gone on, babbling insincerities, but Hannah stopped her.

  “Baby, you look better with the veil on,” Hannah whispered. “ Graham, this is an old friend of your daddy’s,” Hannah told the boy. “Say ‘Hello.’ ”

  “Hello,” Graham said to Allan’s ex-wife. “But where is Daddy? Where is he now ?”

  Ruth slipped the veil back on; her face felt so numb that she was unaware she was crying again.

  It was for children that one wanted heaven, Ruth thought. It was only for the sake of being able to say: “Daddy’s in heaven, Graham,” which was what she’d said then.

  “And heaven is nice, isn’t it?” the boy began. They’d had many discussions of heaven, and what it was like, since Allan had died. Possibly heaven meant more to the boy because the discussion of it was so new; as neither Ruth nor Allan was religious, heaven had not been a part of Graham’s first three years on earth.

  “I’ll tell you what heaven is like,” the ex–Mrs. Albright said to the boy. “It’s like your best dreams.”

  But Graham was of an age where he more frequently had nightmares. Dreams were not necessarily heaven-sent. Yet if the boy was to believe the Yeats poem, he would be forced to envision his daddy pacing the mountains overhead and hiding his face in a crowd of stars ! (Is that heaven or a nightmare? Ruth would wonder.)

  “She’s not here, is she?” Ruth suddenly said to Eddie, through her veil.

  “I don’t see her,” Eddie admitted.

  “I know she’s not here,” Ruth said.

  “Who’s not here?” Hannah asked Eddie.

  “Her mother,” Eddie replied.

  “It’s gonna be okay, baby,” Hannah whispered to her best friend. “Fuck your mother.”

  In Hannah Grant’s opinion, Fuck Your Mother would have been a more appropriate title for Eddie O’Hare’s fifth novel, A Difficult Woman, which was published that same fall of ’94 when Allan died. But Hannah had given up on Ruth’s mother long ago, and—not yet being an older woman herself, at least not in her own mind—Hannah was sick to death of Eddie’s younger-man-with-older-woman theme. Hannah was thirty-nine—as Eddie had pointed out, exactly the age Marion had been when he’d fallen in love with her.

  “Yeah, but you were sixteen, Eddie,” Hannah reminded him. “That’s one category I’ve eliminated from my sexual lexicon—I mean fucking teenagers.”

  While Hannah had accepted Eddie as Ruth’s newfound friend, there was more about Eddie that troubled Hannah than the natural jealousy that friends often feel toward friends of friends. She’d had boyfriends who were Eddie’s age, and older—Eddie was fifty-two in the fall of ’94 —and while Eddie was hardly Hannah’s cup of tea, he was nonetheless a physically attractive older man who was not a homosexual; yet he’d never made a pass at her. Hannah found this more than troubling.

  “Look—I like Eddie,” she would say to Ruth, “but you’ve got to admit that there’s something wrong with the guy.” What Hannah found “wrong” was that Eddie had eliminated younger women from his sexual lexicon.

  Ruth still found Hannah’s “sexual lexicon” more disturbing than Eddie’s. If Eddie’s enduring attraction to older women was weird, at least it was weird in a selective way.

  “I suppose I’m some kind of sexual shotgun—is that what you mean?” Hannah asked.

  “Different folks, different strokes,” Ruth replied tactfully.

  “Look, baby, I saw Eddie on Park Avenue and Eighty-ninth—he was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair,” Hannah said. “I also saw him one night in the Russian Tea Room—he was with an old lady in a neck brace !”

  “They might have had accidents. They didn’t necessarily succumb to old age,” Ruth responded. “ Young women break their legs—the one in the wheelchair might have been skiing. There are automobile accidents. There’s always whiplash. . . .”

  “Baby,” Hannah pleaded. “This old woman was confined to a wheelchair. And the one with the neck brace was a walking skeleton —her neck was too thin to hold up her head!”

  “I think Eddie’s sweet,” was all Ruth would say. “You’re going to get old, too, Hannah. Wouldn’t you like to have someone like Eddie in your life then ?”

  But even Ruth had to confess that she found A Difficult Woman a serious stretch of the so-called willing suspension of her disbelief. A man in his early fifties, who bears remarkable similarities to Eddie, is the doting lover of a woman in her late seventies. They make love amid a daunting host of medical precautions and uncertainties. Not surprisingly, they meet in a doctor’s office, where the man is anxiously awaiting his first sigmoidoscopy.

  “What are you here for?” the older woman asks the younger man. “You look healthy enough.” The younger man admits his anxiety concerning the procedure he is about to undergo. “Oh, don’t be silly,” the older woman tells him. “Heterosexual men are such cowards when it comes to being penetrated. There’s really nothing to it. I must have had a half-dozen sigmoidoscopies. Mind you, be prepared—they do give you a little gas.”

  A few days later, the two encounter each other at a cocktail party. The older woman is so beautifully dressed that the younger man doesn’t recognize her. Moreover, she approaches him in an alarmingly coquettish manner. “I last saw you when you were about to be penetrated,” she whispers to him. “How’d it go?”

  Stammering, he replies: “Oh, very well, thank you. And you were right. It was nothing to be afraid of !”

  “I’ll show you something to be afraid of,” the woman whispers to him, which begins their disturbingly passionate love story, which is over only when the older woman dies.

  “For God’s sake,” Allan had said to Ruth about Eddie’s fifth novel. “You’ve got to hand it to O’Hare—nothing embarrasses him!”

  Despite his ongoing habit of calling Eddie by his last name, which Eddie intensely disliked, Allan had developed a genuine affection for him, if not for his writing —and Eddie, although Allan Albright was the antithesis of his kind of man, had grown far more fond of Allan than he had thought possible. They’d been good friends when Allan died, and Eddie had not taken his responsibilities at Allan’s memorial service lightly.

  Eddie’s relationship with Ruth—especially the limited degree to which he understood her feelings for her mother—was a different matter.

  While Eddie had observed the enormous changes in Ruth upon her becoming a mother, he’d not realized how being a mother had persuaded her to take an even more unforgiving view of Marion.

  Simply put, Ruth was a good mother. At the time of Allan’s death, Graham would be only a year younger than Ruth had been when Marion had left her. Ruth could not conceive of the lack of love Marion had felt for her daughter. Ruth would sooner die than leave Graham; she could never imagine leaving her son.

  And if Eddie was obsessed with Marion’s state of mind—or what he could fathom of it from McDermid, Retired —Ruth had read her mother’s fourth novel with impatience and disdain. (There is a point when sorrow becomes self-indulgent, she thought.)

  As a publisher, Allan had done his homework on Marion; he’d found out as much as he could about the Canadian crime writer who called herself Alice Somerset. According to her Canadian publisher, Alice Somerset was not enough of a success in Canada to support herself from her book sales within her own country; however, her French and German translations were far more popular. She made quite a comfortable living from her translations. In addition to maintaining a modest apartment in Toronto, Ruth’s mother spent the worst months of the Canadian winter in Europe. Her German and French publishers were happy to find her suitable apartments to rent.

  “An agreeable woman, but somewhat aloof,” Marion’s German publisher had told Allan.

  “Charming in a standoffish way,” the French publisher had said.

  “I don’t know why she bothers with the nom de plume—she just strikes me as a very private person,” Marion’s Canadian publisher told Al
lan; the publisher also provided Allan with Marion’s Toronto address.

  “For God’s sake,” Allan would repeatedly say to Ruth; in fact, he’d had one such conversation with Ruth only a few days before he died. “Here’s your mother’s address. You’re a writer—just write her a letter! You could even go see her, if you wanted to. I’d be happy to go with you, or you could go alone. You could take Graham—surely she’d be interested in Graham !”

  “ I’m not interested in her !” Ruth had said.

  Ruth and Allan had come into New York for Eddie’s publication party, which was held on an October evening not long after Graham’s third birthday. It had been one of those warm, sunny days that felt like summer—and when the evening came, the night air brought a contrasting coolness that epitomized the very best of autumn. “An unbeatable day!” Ruth would remember Allan saying.

  They’d taken a two-bedroom suite at the Stanhope; they’d made love in their bedroom while Conchita Gomez had taken Graham to the hotel restaurant, where the boy was treated like a little prince. They’d all driven into the city from Sagaponack, although Conchita protested that she and Eduardo were too old to spend even a single night apart; one of them might die, and it would be terrible for a happily married person to die alone.

  The spectacular weather, not to mention the sex, had made such a favorable impression on Allan that he’d insisted on walking the fifteen blocks to Eddie’s publication party. In retrospect, Ruth would think that Allan had looked a little flushed upon their arrival; but she’d thought at the time it was only a sign of good health or the effect of the cool fall air.

  Eddie had been his usual self-deprecating self at the party: he gave a silly speech wherein he thanked his old friends for giving up whatever more entertaining plans they had had for the evening; he gave an overly familiar synopsis of the plot of his new novel; then he assured his audience that they needn’t bother to read the book, now that they already knew the story. “And the main characters will be fairly recognizable . . . from my previous novels, that is,” Eddie had mumbled. “They’ve just grown a little older.”

  Hannah was there with an undeniably awful man, a former professional hockey goalie who’d just written a memoir about his sexual exploits—and who took an unsavory pride in the unimpressive fact that he’d never been married. His terrible book was called Not in My Net, and his humor was principally demonstrated by his charmless habit of referring to the women he’d slept with as pucks, thus enabling him to crack the joke “She was a great puck.”

  Hannah had met him when she’d interviewed him for a magazine article she was writing; her subject was what jocks did when they retired. As far as Ruth could tell, they tried to be either actors or writers; she’d remarked to Hannah that she liked it better when they tried to be actors.

  But Hannah was increasingly defensive on the matter of her bad boyfriends. “What does an old married lady know?” Hannah would ask her friend. Nothing, Ruth would have been the first to admit. Ruth just knew that she was happy. (She knew she was lucky to be happy, too.)

  Even Hannah would have acknowledged that Ruth’s marriage to Allan had worked. If Ruth would never have confessed that their sex life had been only tolerable at the start, she later would have described even this aspect of her life with Allan as something she’d learned to enjoy. Ruth had found a companion she could talk to, and he was someone she liked to listen to as well; furthermore, he was a good father to the only child she would ever have. And the child . . . ah, her whole life had changed because of Graham, and for that, too, she would always love Allan.

  As an older mother—she was thirty-seven when Graham was born— Ruth worried about her son’s safety more than younger mothers did. She also spoiled Graham, but it had been her choice to have an only child. What are only children for, if not for spoiling? To dote on Graham had become the most sustaining part of Ruth’s life. The boy was two before Ruth went back to being a writer.

  Now Graham was three. His mother had finally finished her fourth novel, although she continued to describe the novel as un finished—for the expressed reason that she’d not yet thought the book was finished enough to show to Allan. Ruth was being disingenuous, even to herself, but she couldn’t help it. She was worried about Allan’s reaction to the novel—for reasons that had nothing to do with how finished or un finished the book was.

  It had long been her understanding with Allan that she would never show him anything she’d written until she believed it was as finished as she could make it. Allan had always urged his authors to do this. “I can best be an editor only when you think you’ve done everything you can,” he’d tell his writers. (How could he urge an author to take another step if the author was still walking? Allan always said.)

  If she’d fooled Allan into accepting that her novel was not yet ready to show him because she said it was not quite finished, Ruth hadn’t fooled herself. She’d already rewritten the novel as much as she could; she sometimes doubted she could re read the book, much less pretend that she was still re writing it. Nor did she doubt that it was a good novel; she believed it was her best work.

  In truth, the only thing that bothered Ruth about her newest novel, My Last Bad Boyfriend, was her fear that the book would insult her husband. The main character of the book was entirely too close to one aspect of Ruth herself before she was married: her main character was prone to involving herself with the wrong sort of man. Furthermore, the titular bad boyfriend in her novel was an unlikely and unlikable combination of Scott Saunders and Wim Jongbloed. That this sexual lowlife persuades the Ruth character (as Hannah would doubtless call her) into watching a prostitute with a customer might be less disturbing to Allan than the fact that the so-called Ruth character is uncontrollably overcome with sexual desire. And the resultant shame she feels—for sexually losing control of herself—is what convinces her to accept a marriage proposal from a man who is sexually unexciting to her.

  How could Allan not be insulted by what Ruth’s new novel implied about the author’s reasons for marrying him ? That her marriage to Allan had been the happiest four years of her life, which Allan surely knew, did not mitigate what Ruth feared was her novel’s more cynical message.

  Ruth had fairly accurately imagined everything that Hannah would conclude from My Last Bad Boyfriend: namely, that her less adventurous friend had had a fling with a Dutch boy, who’d fucked her brains out while a prostitute watched ! It was a brutally humiliating scene for any woman, even for Hannah. But Ruth wasn’t worried about Hannah’s reaction; Ruth had a history of ignoring or rejecting Hannah’s interpretations of her fiction.

  Yet here Ruth was: she’d written a novel that would surely offend many readers and critics—especially the women among them—but so what? The only person she cared about not offending, Allan, might be the very person whom My Last Bad Boyfriend was most likely to offend!

  The night of Eddie’s publication party struck Ruth as the best possible time for her to confess her fears to Allan. She had even gone so far as to imagine that she was getting up the nerve to tell Allan what had happened to her in Amsterdam. Ruth believed her marriage was that unassailable.

  “I don’t want to have dinner with Hannah,” she whispered to her husband at Eddie’s party.

  “Aren’t we having dinner with O’Hare?” Allan asked her.

  “No, not even with Eddie—not even if he asks us,” Ruth had replied. “I want to have dinner with you, Allan—just you.”

  From the party, they’d caught a cab uptown to the restaurant where Allan had so gallantly left her alone with Eddie O’Hare—that seemingly long-ago night after her reading at the 92nd Street Y, and Eddie’s never-ending introduction.

  There was no reason for Allan not to drink a lot of wine; they’d already had sex, and neither of them had to drive. But Ruth silently wished that her husband wouldn’t get drunk. She didn’t want him to be drunk when she told him about Amsterdam.

  “I’m dying for you to read my book,” she beg
an.

  “I’m dying to read it—when you’re ready,” Allan told her. He was so relaxed. It really was the perfect time to tell him everything.

  “It’s not just that I love you and Graham,” Ruth said. “It’s that I will appreciate forever the life you’ve spared me from, the life I had . . .”

  “I know—you’ve told me.” He sounded slightly less patient with her now, as if he didn’t want to hear her say, again, how she’d repeatedly got herself in trouble as a single woman; how, until Allan, her judgment (when it came to men) was not to be trusted.

  “In Amsterdam . . .” she tried to say, but then she thought that, to be honest, she should begin with Scott Saunders and the squash game— not to mention the aprés-squash game. But her voice had stopped. “It’s just more difficult to show you this novel,” she began again, “because your opinion means so much more than it ever did, and your opinion has always meant a lot.” Already she was evading what she wanted to say! She felt as crippled by cowardice as she had in Rooie’s wardrobe closet.

  “Ruth, relax, ” Allan told her, holding her hand. “If you think having another editor would be better for you—I mean for our relationship . . .”

  “No!” Ruth cried. “That’s not what I mean!” She’d not meant to pull her hand away, but she had. Now she tried to take back his hand, but he’d put it in his lap. “I mean that it’s all because of you that I’ve had my last bad boyfriend—it’s not just a title, you know.”

  “I know—you’ve told me,” he said again.

  What they’d ended up talking about was the scary and oft-repeated subject of who Graham’s guardian should be, should anything happen to both of them. It was so unlikely that anything could happen to both of them that would leave Graham an orphan; Graham went absolutely everywhere with them. If their plane crashed, the boy would die, too.

  But it was a matter that Ruth couldn’t let rest. As it stood, Eddie was Graham’s godfather, Hannah his godmother. Neither Ruth nor Allan could imagine Hannah as anybody’s mother. Her devotion to Graham notwithstanding, Hannah had a life that made being a parent unthinkable. While she’d impressed both Ruth and Allan by her attentiveness to Graham—in that eager manner that women who’ve chosen not to have children of their own can sometimes exhibit with other people’s children—Hannah was not a good choice for Graham’s guardian.