A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  And if Eddie had shunned younger women, he seemed not to know (in the slightest) what to do with children. He behaved awkwardly, even foolishly, in Graham’s company. Eddie was so nervous around Graham that he made Graham nervous, and Graham was not a nervous child.

  By the time they got back to the Stanhope, Allan and Ruth were both drunk. They kissed their baby boy good night. (Graham was asleep on a roll-away bed in their bedroom.) They bid Conchita Gomez good night, too. Before Ruth had finished brushing her teeth and readying herself for bed, Allan was already sleeping soundly.

  Ruth noticed that he’d left the window open. Even if the air that night was special, it was never a good idea to leave a window open in New York—the noise of the early-morning traffic would wake the dead. (It would not wake Allan.)

  In every marriage there are designated chores; there is always someone who is largely responsible for putting out the trash, and someone who is principally in charge of not running out of coffee or milk or toothpaste or toilet paper. Allan was in charge of temperature: he opened and closed the windows, he fiddled with the thermostat, he built up the fire or he let it die down. And so Ruth left the window open in their bedroom at the Stanhope. And when the early-morning traffic woke her at five, and when Graham crawled into bed between his parents, because he was cold, Ruth said: “Allan, if you close the window, I think we can all go back to sleep.”

  “I’m cold, Daddy,” Graham said. “Daddy’s really cold,” the child added.

  “We’re all really cold, Graham,” Ruth replied.

  “Daddy’s colder,” Graham said.

  “Allan?” Ruth started to say. She knew. She reached cautiously around Graham, who was cuddled against her, and touched Allan’s cold face without looking at him. She slipped her hand under the covers, where her own body and Graham’s were warm, but even under the covers Allan was cold to her touch—as cold as the bathroom floor in Vermont on a winter morning.

  “Sweetie,” Ruth said to Graham, “let’s go in the other room. We’ll let Daddy sleep a little more.”

  “I want to sleep a little more, too,” Graham told her.

  “Let’s go in the other room,” Ruth repeated. “Maybe you can sleep with Conchita.”

  They traipsed through the living room of the suite, Graham dragging his blanket and his teddy bear, Ruth in her T-shirt and panties; not even marriage had altered what she wore to bed. She knocked on the door of Conchita’s bedroom, waking the old woman.

  “I’m sorry, Conchita, but Graham would like to sleep with you,” Ruth told her.

  “Sure, honey—you just come on in,” Conchita said to Graham, who marched past her to her bed.

  “It’s not as cold in here,” the child observed. “It’s so cold in our room—Daddy is freezing.”

  “Allan is dead,” Ruth whispered to Conchita.

  Then, alone in the living room of the suite, she worked up the nerve to go back into her bedroom. She closed the bedroom window before she went into the bathroom, where she hastily washed her hands and face, and brushed her teeth, ignoring her hair. She then stumbled into her clothes without once looking at Allan or touching him again. Ruth didn’t want to see his face. For the rest of her life, she would prefer to imagine him as he’d looked when he was alive; it was bad enough that she would take to her grave the memory of his unnatural coldness.

  It was not yet six in the morning when she called Hannah.

  “You better be a friend of mine,” Hannah said when she answered the phone.

  “Who the fuck is it?” Ruth heard the ex-goalie ask.

  “It’s me. Allan’s dead. I don’t know what to do,” Ruth told Hannah.

  “Oh, baby, baby—I’ll be right there!” Hannah said.

  “Who the fuck is it?” the former hockey star asked again.

  “Oh, go find yourself another puck !” Ruth heard Hannah tell him. “It’s none of your fucking business who it is . . . .”

  By the time Hannah arrived at the Stanhope, Ruth had already called Eddie at the New York Athletic Club. Between them, Eddie and Hannah made all the arrangements. Ruth didn’t have to talk to Graham, who’d fortunately fallen back to sleep in Conchita’s bed; the child didn’t wake up until after eight, by which time Allan’s body had already been removed from the hotel. Hannah, who took the boy to breakfast, was amazingly resourceful in answering Graham’s questions about where his father was. It was too soon for Allan to be in heaven, Ruth had decided; she meant it was too soon to have the heaven conversation, which there would be so many of later. Hannah stuck to more practical untruths: “Your daddy went to the office, Graham”; and, “Your daddy might have to take a trip.”

  “A trip where?” Graham asked.

  Conchita Gomez was a wreck. Ruth was just numb. Eddie volunteered to drive them all back to Sagaponack, but Ted Cole had not taught his daughter to drive for nothing. Ruth knew that she could drive in or out of Manhattan whenever she had to. It was enough that Eddie and Hannah had spared her having to deal with Allan’s body .

  “I can drive,” Ruth told them. “Whatever happens, I can drive.” But she couldn’t bear to search through Allan’s clothes for the car keys. Eddie found the keys. Hannah packed Allan’s clothes.

  In the car, Hannah sat in back with Graham and Conchita. Hannah was in charge of conversing with Graham—that was her role. Eddie sat in the passenger seat. It was unclear to everyone, Eddie included, what his role was, but he occupied himself by staring at Ruth’s profile; Ruth never took her eyes off the road, except to look in the side-view or rearview mirror.

  Poor Allan—it must have been cardiac arrest, Eddie was thinking. It was; he got that right. But what Eddie got wrong was more interesting. What he got wrong was that he imagined he’d fallen in love with Ruth, just by staring at her sorrowful profile; what he didn’t realize was how much, at that moment, she had forcefully reminded him of her unhappy mother.

  Poor Eddie O’Hare! What had befallen him was most unkind: the bewildering illusion that he was now in love with the daughter of the only woman he’d ever loved! But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

  “Where is Daddy now ?” Graham began. “Is he still at the office?”

  “I think he has a doctor’s appointment,” Hannah told the child. “I think he went to see the doctor because he wasn’t feeling very well.”

  “Is he still cold?” the boy asked.

  “Maybe,” Hannah replied. “The doctor will know what’s wrong with him.”

  Ruth’s hair remained unbrushed—it looked slept-on—and her pale face had no makeup. Her lips were dry, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes were more prominent than Eddie had ever seen them. Marion had had crow’s-feet, too, but Eddie had momentarily lost sight of Marion; he was transfixed by Ruth’s face, with its emanating sadness.

  Ruth at forty was in the first numbness of mourning. Marion at thirty-nine, when Eddie had last seen her, had been grieving for five years; her face, which her daughter’s face now so closely resembled, had reflected an almost eternal grief.

  As a sixteen-year-old, Eddie had fallen in love with Marion’s sadness, which seemed a more permanent part of her than her beauty. Yet beauty is remembered after beauty leaves; what Eddie saw reflected in Ruth’s face was a departed beauty, which was another measure of the love Eddie truly felt for Marion.

  But Eddie didn’t know that he was still in love with Marion; he truly believed that he’d fallen in love with Ruth.

  What the hell is the matter with Eddie? Ruth was thinking. If he doesn’t stop staring at me, I’m going to drive off the road!

  Hannah had also noticed that Eddie was staring at Ruth. What the hell is the matter with Eddie? Hannah was thinking. Since when did the asshole take an interest in a younger woman?

  Mrs. Cole

  “She’d been a widow for one year,” Ruth Cole had written. (A mere four years before she became a widow herself
!) And a year after Allan’s death—just as she’d written of her fictional widow—Ruth was still struggling “to keep her memories of the past under control, as any widow must.”

  How had she known almost everything about it? the novelist now wondered—for although she’d always claimed that a good writer could imagine anything (and imagine it truly), and although she’d often argued that real-life experience was overvalued, even Ruth was surprised by how accurately she’d imagined being a widow.

  A whole year after Allan’s death, exactly as she’d written of her fictional widow, Ruth was “as prone to being swept away by a so-called flood of memories as she was on that morning when she’d awakened with her husband dead beside her.”

  And where was the angry old widow who’d assaulted Ruth for writing un truthfully about being a widow? Where was the harpy who’d called herself a widow for the rest of her life? In retrospect, Ruth was disappointed that the old witch had not made an appearance at Allan’s memorial service. Now that she was a widow, Ruth wanted to see the miserable old hag—if only to shout in her face that everything she’d written about being a widow was true !

  The evil old woman who’d tried to spoil her wedding with her hateful threats, the resentful old harridan who’d so shamelessly let herself go . . . where was she now? Probably she was dead, as Hannah had declared. If so, Ruth felt cheated; now that the conventional wisdom of the world granted her the authority to speak, Ruth would have liked to give the bitch a piece of her mind.

  For hadn’t the hag bragged to Ruth about the superiority of her love for her husband? The very idea of someone saying to someone else, “You don’t know what grief is,” or, “You don’t know what love is,” struck Ruth as outrageous.

  This unforeseen anger toward the old widow without a name had provided Ruth with an inexhaustible fuel for her first year as a widow. In the same year, also unforeseen, Ruth had experienced a softening in her feelings toward her mother. Ruth had lost Allan, but she still had Graham. With her heightened awareness of how much she loved her only child, Ruth found herself sympathizing with Marion’s efforts not to love another child—since Marion had already lost two .

  How her mother had managed not to take her own life was a matter of amazement to Ruth, as was how Marion had even been able to have another child. All at once, why her mother had left her began to make sense. Marion hadn’t wanted to love Ruth because she couldn’t stand the idea of losing a third child. (Ruth had heard all this from Eddie, five years ago, but until she’d had a child and lost a husband, she didn’t have either the experience or the imagination to believe it.)

  Yet Marion’s Toronto address had sat for a year in a prominent place on Ruth’s desk. Pride and cowardice—now there was a title worthy of a long novel!—prevented Ruth from writing to her. Ruth still believed that it was Marion’s role to reintroduce herself to her daughter, since Marion had been the one who had left. As a relatively new mother and an even newer widow, Ruth was a newcomer to both grief and the fear of an even greater loss.

  It was Hannah’s suggestion that Ruth give her mother’s Toronto address to Eddie.

  “Let her be Eddie’s problem,” Hannah said. “Let him agonize over whether to write her or not.”

  Of course Eddie would agonize over whether or not to write Marion. Worse, he had on several occasions tried to write her, but none of his efforts had made it into the mail.

  “Dear Alice Somerset,” he’d begun, “I have reason to believe that you are Marion Cole, the most important woman in my life.” But that struck him as too jaunty a tone, especially after almost forty years, and so he’d tried again, taking a more straightforward approach. “Dear Marion: For Alice Somerset could only be you—I have read your Margaret McDermid novels with”—uh, with what ? Eddie had asked himself, and that had stopped him. With fascination? With frustration? With admiration? With despair? With all of the above? He couldn’t say.

  Besides, after carrying a torch for Marion for thirty-six years, Eddie now believed he had fallen in love with Ruth. And after a year of imagining he was in love with Marion’s daughter, Eddie still didn’t realize that he’d never stopped loving Marion; he still believed he loved Ruth. Thus Eddie’s efforts to write Marion became tortured in the extreme. “Dear Marion: I loved you for thirty-six years before I fell in love with your daughter.” But Eddie couldn’t even bring himself to say that to Ruth !

  As for Ruth, in her year of mourning, she often wondered what had happened to Eddie O’Hare. Yet her grief, and her constant concerns for young Graham, distracted Ruth from Eddie’s obvious but puzzling agonies. She’d always thought he was a sweet, odd man. Was he now a sweet man who’d grown odder? He could spend an entire dinner party in her company without uttering more than monosyllables; yet whenever she so much as looked at him, he was staring at her. Then, always, he would instantly look away.

  “What is it, Eddie?” she’d asked him once.

  “Oh, nothing,” he’d replied. “I was just wondering how you were doing.”

  “Well, I’m doing all right—thank you,” Ruth had said.

  Hannah had her own theories, which Ruth dismissed as absurd. “He looks like he’s fallen in love with you, but he doesn’t know how to hit on younger women,” Hannah had said. For a year, the thought of anyone hitting on her had struck Ruth as grotesque.

  But, that fall of ’95, Hannah would say to her: “It’s been a year, baby—it’s time you got back in circulation again.”

  The very idea of being “back in circulation” repelled Ruth. Not only was she still in love with Allan and her memory of their life together, but Ruth felt chilled at the prospect of confronting her own bad judgment again .

  As she’d written in the very first chapter of Not for Children, who knew when it was time for a widow to re-enter the world? There was no such thing as a widow re-entering the world “safely.”

  The publication of Ruth Cole’s fourth novel, My Last Bad Boyfriend, was delayed until the fall of 1995, which was the earliest possible date that Ruth could conceive of making her first public appearance since her husband’s death—not that Ruth was as available as her publishers would have liked. She’d agreed to a reading at the 92nd Street Y, where she’d not read since Eddie O’Hare’s marathon introduction in 1990, but Ruth had refused to give any interviews in the U.S.—on the grounds that she was spending only one night in New York, en route to Europe, and that she never wanted to conduct any interviews at her home in Vermont. (Since the first of September, the Sagaponack house had been on the market.)

  Hannah maintained that Ruth was crazy to isolate herself in Vermont; according to Hannah, Ruth should sell the Vermont house instead. But Allan and Ruth had agreed: Graham should grow up in Vermont.

  Besides, Conchita Gomez was too old to be Graham’s principal nanny. And Eduardo was too old to be a caretaker. In Vermont, Ruth would have available babysitters close to home. Kevin Merton had three daughters of babysitting age; one of them, Amanda, was a high-school student who was permitted a limited amount of travel. (The high school had agreed that a book tour with Ruth Cole fell into the category of an educational trip; hence Ruth was taking Graham and Amanda Merton with her to New York and Europe.)

  Not all of her European publishers were satisfied by Ruth’s plans to promote My Last Bad Boyfriend . But Ruth had fairly warned everyone: she was still in mourning, and she would go nowhere without her four-year-old son; moreover, neither her son nor his nanny should be kept out of school for longer than two weeks.

  The trip Ruth planned would be as easy on herself and Graham as possible. She was flying to London on the Concorde, and she would fly back to New York from Paris—again on the Concorde. Between London and Paris, she would bring Graham and his babysitter to Amsterdam; she couldn’t not go to Amsterdam, she’d decided. The novel’s partial setting there—that humiliating scene in the red-light district— made the book of special interest to the Dutch; and Maarten was her favorite European publisher.

  It
was not Amsterdam’s fault that Ruth now dreaded going there. Surely she could promote her new novel for Maarten without visiting the red-light district. Every unoriginal journalist who interviewed her, not to mention every photographer assigned to take her picture, would insist on Ruth returning to de Wallen —the setting of the novel’s most notorious scene—but Ruth had resisted the lack of originality in journalists and photographers before.

  And perhaps it was a form of penance that she should have to go back to Amsterdam, the novelist thought—for wasn’t her fear a form of penance? And why wouldn’t she be afraid every second she was in Amsterdam—for how could the city not remind her of the eternity of her hiding in Rooie’s closet? Wouldn’t the wheezing of the moleman be the background music in her sleep? If she could sleep . . .

  In addition to Amsterdam, the only part of Ruth’s book tour that she was dreading was her one night in New York, and she was dreading that only because, once again, Eddie O’Hare was introducing her before her reading at the 92nd Street Y.

  She’d unwisely chosen to stay at the Stanhope; she and Graham had not been there since Allan’s death, and Graham remembered the last place he’d seen his father better than Ruth had thought he would. They were not staying in the same two-bedroom suite, but the configuration of the rooms and the decor were strikingly similar.

  “Daddy was sleeping on this side of the bed, Mommy on that side,” the boy explained to his babysitter, Amanda Merton. “The window was open,” Graham went on. “Daddy had left it open, and I was cold. I got out of my bed . . .” Here the boy stopped. Where was his bed? With Allan gone, Ruth hadn’t asked the hotel to provide a roll-away for Graham; there was more than enough room in her king-size bed for her and her small son. “Where’s my bed?” the boy now asked.