A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  “Sweetie, you can sleep with me,” Ruth told him.

  “Or you can sleep in my bedroom, with me, ” Amanda offered helpfully—anything to get Graham off the subject of his father’s death.

  “Okay. Fine,” Graham said in the tone of voice he used when something was wrong. “But where is Daddy now ?” His eyes welled with tears. For half a year, or more, he hadn’t asked that question.

  Oh, how stupid of me to bring him here ! Ruth thought, hugging the child while he cried.

  Ruth was still in the bathtub when Hannah came to the suite, bringing with her a lot of presents for Graham of the kind not suitable for taking on a plane to Europe: an entire village of interlocking blocks, and not just one stuffed animal, but a whole family of apes. They would have to ask the Stanhope to keep the village and the apes for them, which would make it a major inconvenience if they chose to stay in a different hotel.

  But Graham seemed completely recovered from how the hotel had triggered his memory of Allan’s death. Children were like that— suddenly heartbroken, and then as quickly over it—whereas Ruth now felt resigned to the memories that being in the Stanhope evoked in her . She kissed Graham good night; the child was already discussing the room-service menu with Amanda when Ruth and Hannah left for Ruth’s reading.

  “I hope you’re gonna read the good part,” Hannah said.

  The “good part” to Hannah was the deeply disturbing sex scene with the Dutch boyfriend in the prostitute’s window room. Ruth had no intention of ever reading that scene.

  “Will you see him again, do you think?” Hannah asked her, en route to the Y. “I mean, he’s gonna read the book. . . .”

  “Will I see whom again?” Ruth asked, although she knew very well the “him” Hannah had meant.

  “The Dutch boy, whoever he is,” Hannah replied. “And don’t tell me there wasn’t a Dutch boy!”

  “Hannah, I never had sex with a Dutch boy.”

  “My bet is, he’s gonna read the book,” Hannah went on.

  By the time they got to Ninety-second Street and Lexington Avenue, Ruth was almost looking forward to Eddie O’Hare’s introduction—at least that would put an end to her having to listen to Hannah.

  Of course Ruth had considered that Wim Jongbloed would read My Last Bad Boyfriend; she was prepared to be as icy to him as she had to be. If he approached her . . . But what had both surprised and relieved Ruth, albeit in an anticlimactic fashion, was that Maarten had informed her that Rooie’s murderer had been caught in Zurich. Soon after his capture, the killer had died !

  Maarten and Sylvia had mentioned this to Ruth rather casually. “I don’t suppose they ever found that prostitute’s killer, did they?” Ruth had asked them, with feigned indifference. (She’d put the question to them in a recent weekend phone call, together with the usual questions regarding the itinerary for her upcoming trip.) Maarten and Sylvia had explained how they’d missed the news: they were away from Amsterdam—thus the story was secondhand for them—and by the time they heard the details, they’d forgotten that Ruth had been interested in the story.

  “In Zurich?” Ruth had asked. So that had been the moleman’s German-sounding accent—he’d been Swiss !

  “I think it was Zurich,” Maarten had replied. “And the guy had killed other prostitutes, all over Europe.”

  “But only one in Amsterdam,” Sylvia had said.

  Only one! Ruth had thought. She’d struggled to make her interest in the case seem enduringly offhand. “I wonder how they caught him,” she’d mused aloud.

  But the details weren’t fresh in Maarten’s or Sylvia’s memory; the killer had been caught, and then he’d died, a number of years ago.

  “A number of years !” Ruth had repeated.

  “I think there was a witness,” Sylvia said.

  “I thought there were fingerprints, too—and the guy was very sick,” Maarten added.

  “Was it asthma?” Ruth asked, suddenly not caring if she gave herself away.

  “I think it was emphysema,” Sylvia said.

  Yes, that could have been it! Ruth thought, but all that really mattered to her was that the moleman had been caught. The moleman was dead ! And his death made it bearable for Ruth to revisit Amsterdam— the scene of the crime. It was her crime, as she remembered it.

  Eddie O’Hare was not only on time for Ruth’s reading; he was so early that he sat for over an hour in the greenroom, alone. He was much preoccupied with the events of the past few weeks, in which both his mother and father had died—his mother of cancer, which had mercifully moved swiftly, and his father (not as suddenly) upon the occurrence of his fourth stroke within the past three years.

  Poor Minty’s third stroke had rendered him almost blind, his view of a page narrowed to what he described as “the world as seen through a telescope if you look through the wrong end.” Dot O’Hare had read aloud to him before the cancer took her away; thereafter Eddie had read aloud to his father, who complained that his son’s diction was inferior to his late wife’s.

  There was no question regarding what to read aloud to Minty. His books were dutifully marked, the pertinent passages underlined in red, and the books themselves were so familiar to the old teacher that no plot summary was necessary. Eddie merely leafed through the pages, reading only the underlined passages. (In the end, the son had not escaped the father’s soporific method in the classroom.)

  Eddie had always believed that the long opening paragraph of The Portrait of a Lady, in which Henry James describes “the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” was entirely too ceremonious for its own good; yet Minty declared that the passage deserved countless rereadings, which Eddie accomplished with the same shut-down portion of his brain he’d once called upon to get him through his first sigmoidoscopy.

  And Minty adored Trollope, who Eddie thought was a sententious bore. Minty loved this passage from Trollope’s autobiography best of all: “I do believe that no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before, and that some may have learned from them that modesty is a charm well worth preserving.”

  Eddie believed that no girl had ever risen from reading Trollope at all; he was sure that every girl who fell into Trollope never rose again. An army of girls had perished while reading him—all of them dying in their sleep !

  Eddie would forever remember walking his father to the bathroom and back after his father couldn’t see. Since his third stroke, Minty’s fuzzy slippers were held to his unfeeling feet with rubber bands; they squeaked on the floor under his flattened insteps. The slippers, which were pink, had belonged to Eddie’s mom, because Minty’s feet had shrunk to the degree that his own slippers could not be kept on his feet—not even with rubber bands.

  There then came the last sentence of Chapter 44 of Middlemarch, which the old schoolteacher had underlined in red, and which his son read aloud in a gloomy voice. Eddie was thinking that George Eliot’s sentence might apply to his feelings for Marion or Ruth—not to mention their imagined feelings for him . “He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

  So what if his father had been a boring teacher? At least he’d marked all the pertinent passages. A student could have done a lot worse than to have taken a course from Minty O’Hare.

  The memorial service for Eddie’s father, which was held in the nondenominational church on the academy campus, was better attended than Eddie had expected. Not only did Minty’s colleagues come—the doddering emeriti among the faculty, those hearty souls who’d outlasted Eddie’s father—but there were two generations of Exeter students on hand. They might have all been bored by Minty, at one time or another, but their humble presence suggested to Eddie that his father had been a pertinent passage in all their lives.

  Eddie was glad to have found, among his father’s uncountable underlinings, a passage that seemed to please Minty’s former students. Eddie chose the last paragraph from Vanity Fair, for Minty had always been a Thackeray man. “Ah! V
anitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?— come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

  Then Eddie returned to the matter of his parents’ small house; they’d bought it upon Minty’s retirement from the academy, when he and Dot (for the first time) had been forced out of faculty housing. The nondescript house was in a part of town Eddie was unfamiliar with—a narrow, claustrophobic street that might have been any street in any small town. His parents must have been lonely there, away from the academy’s impressive architecture and the old school’s sweeping grounds. The nearest neighbors’ house had an unmown lawn, strewn with castaway children’s toys; a giant, rusted corkscrew, to which a dog had once been chained, was screwed into the ground. Eddie had never seen the dog.

  It seemed cruel to Eddie that his parents had spent their twilight years in such surroundings—their nearest neighbors did not appear to be Exonians. (Indeed, the domestic squalor of the offending lawn had often suggested to Minty O’Hare that his neighbors were the very embodiment of that which the old English teacher most abhorred: a subpar secondary-school education.)

  In packing up his father’s books—for he’d already put the house up for sale—Eddie discovered his own novels, which were unsigned; he’d neglected to inscribe them to his own parents! The five of them were on a shelf together; it pained Eddie to note that his father hadn’t underlined a single passage. And beside his life’s work, on the same shelf, Eddie spotted the O’Hare family’s copy of Ted Cole’s The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, which the clam-truck driver had autographed to near perfection.

  It’s no wonder Eddie was a wreck when he arrived in New York for Ruth’s reading. It had also been a burden to him that Ruth had given him Marion’s address. Inevitably, he’d at last reached out to Marion. He had sent her his five novels, which he’d failed to inscribe to his parents; instead he inscribed them to her, as follows: “To Marion—Love, Eddie.” And with the package, together with the little green form he’d filled out for Canadian customs, he enclosed a note.

  “Dear Marion,” Eddie wrote, as if he’d been writing her his whole life, “I don’t know if you’ve read my books, but—as you can see— you’ve never been far from my thoughts.” Under the circumstances— namely, that he believed he was in love with Ruth—that was all Eddie had mustered the courage to say, but it was more than he’d said in thirty-seven years.

  Upon his arrival in the greenroom at the 92nd Street Y, the loss of his parents, not to mention his pathetic effort to make contact with Marion, had left Eddie virtually speechless. He already regretted sending Marion his books; he was thinking that it would have been more than enough to send her just the titles. (The titles alone now struck him as wretched excess.)

  Summer Job

  Coffee and Doughnuts

  Leaving Long Island

  Sixty Times

  A Difficult Woman

  When Eddie O’Hare finally stepped up to the microphone onstage and addressed the jam-packed Kaufman Concert Hall, he astutely interpreted the reverential hush of the audience. They worshiped Ruth Cole, and the consensus was that this book was her best. The audience also knew that this was Ruth’s first public appearance since her husband’s death. Lastly, Eddie interpreted, there was an anxious hush throughout the audience—for there were many souls in the enormous crowd who knew how Eddie could go on and on.

  Therefore, Eddie said: “Ruth Cole needs no introduction.”

  He must have really meant it. He walked forthwith off the stage and took the seat that had been saved for him in the audience, beside Hannah. And throughout Ruth’s reading, Eddie stared stoically straight ahead, his gaze falling twelve or fifteen feet to the left of the podium, as if the only way he could endure to look at Ruth was to keep her in the periphery of his vision.

  And he never stopped crying, Hannah would say later; Hannah’s right knee had got wet because she’d held his hand. Eddie had wept silently—as if every word Ruth uttered was a blow to his heart that he accepted as his due.

  He was nowhere to be seen in the greenroom afterward; Ruth and Hannah went out to dinner alone.

  “Eddie looked absolutely suicidal,” Ruth said.

  “He’s gaga over you—it’s cracking him up,” Hannah told her.

  “Don’t be silly—it’s my mother he’s in love with.”

  “Christ! How old is your mother?” Hannah asked.

  “Seventy-six,” Ruth replied.

  “It would be obscene to be in love with a seventy-six-year-old!” Hannah said. “It’s you, baby. Eddie’s gaga over you—he is !”

  “ That would be obscene,” Ruth said.

  A man eating dinner with someone who appeared to be his wife kept staring at their table. Ruth said he was staring at Hannah, but Hannah said he was staring at Ruth. In either case, they agreed it was no way for a man eating with his wife to behave.

  As they were paying the bill, the man awkwardly approached their table. He was in his thirties, younger than Hannah and Ruth, and he was good-looking despite his hangdog expression, which seemed to affect even his posture. The closer he came to them, the more he stooped. His wife still sat at their table, her head in her hands.

  “Jesus! He’s gonna hit on you in front of his fucking wife!” Hannah whispered to Ruth.

  “Excuse me,” the miserable wretch said.

  “Yeah, what is it?” Hannah asked. She kicked Ruth under the table— an I-told-you-so sort of kick.

  “Aren’t you Ruth Cole?” the man asked.

  “No shit,” Hannah said.

  “Yes,” Ruth replied.

  “I’m embarrassed to bother you,” the wretched man mumbled, “but it’s my wife and my anniversary, and you’re my wife’s favorite writer. I know you don’t sign books, but I gave my wife your new novel for an anniversary present and we just happen to have it with us. I feel terrible asking you, but would you sign it?” (The wife, abandoned at their table, was on the verge of utter mortification.)

  “Oh, for God’s sake . . .” Hannah started to say, but Ruth jumped to her feet. She wanted to shake the man’s hand—and his wife’s hand, too. Ruth even smiled as she signed her book. She couldn’t have been less like herself. But in the taxi, back to the hotel, Hannah said something to her—leave it to Hannah to make Ruth feel unready to re-enter the world.

  “It may have been his anniversary, but he was looking at your breasts,” Hannah said.

  “He was not!” Ruth protested.

  “Everyone does, baby. You better get used to it.”

  Later, in her suite at the Stanhope, Ruth resisted calling Eddie. Besides, at the New York Athletic Club, they probably refused to answer the phone after a certain hour. Or else they would demand to know, when you called, if you were wearing a coat and tie.

  Instead Ruth wrote a letter to her mother, whose Toronto address had become fixed in her memory. “Dear Mommy,” Ruth wrote, “Eddie O’Hare still loves you. Your daughter, Ruth.”

  The Stanhope stationery lent to the letter a formality, or at least a distance, that she hadn’t intended. Such a letter, Ruth thought, should begin “Dear Mother,” but “Mommy” was what she’d called her mother; and it was what Graham called Ruth, which meant more to Ruth than anything else in the world. She knew she’d re-entered the world the instant she handed the letter to the concierge at the Stanhope—just before leaving for Europe.

  “It’s to Canada, ” Ruth pointed out. “Please be sure you use the right postage.”

  “Of course,” the concierge said.

  They were in the lobby of the Stanhope, which was dominated by an ornate grandfather’s clock; it had been the first thing Graham recognized when they’d come into the hotel from Fifth Avenue. Now the porter was wheeling their luggage past the imposing face of the clock. The porter’s name was Mel. He’d always been especially attentive to Graham; he’d also been the porter on duty when Allan’s body had been removed from the
hotel. Probably Mel had helped with the body, but Ruth didn’t really want to remember everything .

  Graham, holding Amanda’s hand, followed their luggage out of the Stanhope, onto Fifth Avenue, where their limousine was waiting.

  “Good-bye, clock!” Graham said.

  As the car was pulling away, Ruth called good-bye to Mel.

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Cole,” Mel replied.

  So that’s who I am! Ruth Cole decided. She’d never changed her name, of course—she was too famous to change her name. She’d never actually become Mrs. Albright. But she was a widow who still felt married; she was Mrs . Cole. I’ll be Mrs. Cole forever, Ruth thought.

  “Good-bye, Mel’s hotel!” Graham called.

  They drove away from the fountains in front of the Met, and the flapping flags, and the dark-green awning of the Stanhope, under which a waiter was rushing to attend to the only couple who didn’t find the day too cold to be sitting at one of the sidewalk tables. From Graham’s view, sunk into the backseat of the dark limo, the Stanhope reached into the sky—maybe even to heaven itself.

  “Good-bye, Daddy!” the little boy called.

  Better Than Being in Paris with a Prostitute

  Traveling internationally with a four-year-old requires a devout attention to basic idiocies that may be taken for granted at home. The taste (even the color) of the orange juice demands an explanation. A croissant is not always a good croissant. And the device for flushing a toilet, not to mention exactly how the toilet flushes or what sort of noise it makes, becomes a matter of grave concern. While Ruth was fortunate that her son was toilet-trained, she was nonetheless exasperated that there were toilets the boy didn’t dare sit on. And Graham could not comprehend jet lag, yet he had it; the boy was constipated, but he couldn’t understand that this was a direct result of what he refused to eat and drink.