A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Marion’s long, still-shapely legs were crossed; she sat almost primly on the couch. Her pretty scarf, which was the pearl-gray color of an oyster, perfectly separated her breasts, which Eddie could see were enduringly well formed. (Perhaps it was her bra.)

  Eddie took a deep breath before he rushed into what he had to say. “How about we split Ruth’s house, fifty-fifty? Actually,” he added quickly, “if you can afford to pay two thirds, I think one third might be more realistic for me than half.”

  “I can afford two thirds,” Marion told him. “Also, I’m going to die and leave you, Eddie. Eventually I’ll leave my two thirds to you !”

  “You’re not dying now, are you?” Eddie asked her—for it panicked him to think it might have been Marion’s impending death that had brought her back to him, just to say good-bye.

  “Goodness, no! I’m fine. At least I’m not dying of anything I know about, except old age. . . .”

  This was their inevitable conversation; Eddie had anticipated it. After all, he’d written this conversation so many times that he knew the dialogue by heart. And Marion had read all his books; she knew what the character of the devoted younger man said to the older-woman character in all of Eddie O’Hare’s novels. The younger man was eternally reassuring.

  “You’re not old, not to me, ” Eddie began. For so many years—and five books!—he had rehearsed this moment. Yet he was still anxious.

  “You’re going to have to take care of me, maybe sooner than you think,” Marion warned him.

  But for thirty-seven years Eddie had hoped that Marion would let him take care of her. If Eddie felt astonished, it was only because he’d been right the very first time—he’d been right to love Marion. Now he had to trust that she’d come back to him as soon as she could. Never mind that it had taken her thirty-seven years. Maybe she’d needed that long to make peace with her grief for Thomas and Timothy—not to mention making peace with whatever degree of ghost Ted had doubtless conjured up, just to haunt her.

  Here was a whole woman—for, true to her character, Marion had brought Eddie her entire life to contend with and to love. Was there anyone as capable of the task? The fifty-three-year-old author had loved her both in the literal and in the literary sense for all these years!

  One can’t blame Marion for telling Eddie all the times of the day and the week she avoided. For instance, when children got out of school—not to mention all museums, all zoos. And parks in any decent weather, when the children would be sure to be there with their nannies or their parents; and every daytime baseball game—all Christmas shopping, too.

  What had she left out? All summer and winter resorts, the first warm days of the spring, the last warm days of the fall—and every Halloween, of course. And on her list of things never to do: she never went out for breakfast, she gave up ice cream . . . Marion was always the well-dressed woman alone in a restaurant—she would ask for a table at the latest time they served. She ordered her wine by the glass and ate her meals with a novel.

  “I hate eating alone,” Eddie commiserated with her.

  “Eating with a novel is not eating alone, Eddie—I’m mildly ashamed of you,” she told him.

  He couldn’t help but ask her if she’d ever thought of picking up the phone.

  “Too many times to count,” Marion replied.

  And she’d never expected to make even a modest living from her books. “They were only therapy,” she said. Before the books, she had got from Ted what her lawyer had demanded: enough to live on. All Ted had wanted in return was that she let him have Ruth to himself.

  When Ted died, it had been too tempting to call. Marion had had her telephone disconnected. “And so I gave up the phone,” she told Eddie. “It was no harder to give up than weekends.” She’d stopped going out on weekends long before she gave up the phone. (Too many children.) And whenever she traveled, she tried to arrive after dark—even on Maple Lane.

  Marion wanted a drink before she went to bed. And she didn’t mean a Diet Coke—a can of which Eddie had been clutching in one hand, although it was empty. There was an open bottle of white wine in Eddie’s refrigerator, and three bottles of beer (in case someone stopped by). There was also a bottle of better stuff, a single-malt Scotch whiskey, which Eddie kept under the kitchen sink—for those more favored guests and his only occasional female company. He’d first and last had a drink of the good stuff in Ruth’s Sagaponack house, following Ted’s memorial service; on that occasion, he’d been surprised by how much he’d enjoyed the taste. (He kept a little gin on hand, too, although even the smell of gin made him gag.)

  In any case—in a wineglass, which was Eddie’s only glassware— Eddie offered Marion a drink of the single-malt whiskey. He even had a drink himself. Then, as Marion used the bathroom first and readied herself for bed, Eddie scrupulously washed the wineglasses in warm water and dish detergent (before redundantly putting the glasses in the dishwasher).

  Marion, in an ivory-white slip, and with her hair unpinned—it was shoulder-length, and of a whiter shade of gray than Eddie’s—surprised him in the kitchen by putting her arms around his waist and hugging him while his back was turned to her.

  For a while, this was the chaste position they maintained in Eddie’s bed, before Marion allowed her hand to stray to Eddie’s erection. “Still a boy!” she whispered, while she held him by what Penny Pierce had once called his “intrepid penis”—long ago, Penny had also made reference to his “heroic cock.” Marion would never have been so silly or so crass.

  Then they faced each other in the dark, and Eddie lay, as he’d once lain with her, with his head against Marion’s breasts; her hands ran through his hair as she clasped him to her. Thus they fell asleep, until the westbound 1:26 woke them.

  “Merciful heavens!” Marion cried, because the westbound early-morning train was probably the loudest of all the trains. Not only is one often dead asleep at twenty-six minutes past one in the morning, but the westbound train passed Eddie’s house before it reached the station. One not only felt the bed shake, and heard the rumbling of the train—one also heard the brakes.

  “It’s just a train,” Eddie reassured her, holding her in his arms. So what if her breasts had shriveled and sagged? Only a little! And at least she still had breasts, and they were soft and warm.

  “How can you get a penny for this house, Eddie? Are you sure you can sell it?” Marion asked.

  “It’s still the Hamptons,” Eddie reminded her. “You can sell anything out here.”

  In the pitch-dark night, and now that they were wide-awake again, Marion’s fears about seeing Ruth surfaced. “Does Ruth hate me?” Marion asked him. “I certainly have given her every reason to. . . .”

  “I don’t think Ruth hates you,” Eddie told her. “I think she’s just angry.”

  “Anger is all right,” Marion said. “You can get over anger more easily than you can get over some other things. But what if Ruth doesn’t want us to have the house?”

  “It’s still the Hamptons,” Eddie said again. “Regardless of who she is, and who you are, Ruth is still looking for a buyer.”

  “Do I snore, Eddie?” Marion asked him—seemingly apropos of nothing.

  “Not yet, not that I’ve heard,” he told her.

  “Please tell me if I do—no, kick me if I do. I’ve had no one to tell me if I do or don’t,” Marion reminded him.

  Marion indeed snored. Naturally Eddie would never tell her or kick her. He slept blissfully through the sound of her snoring, until the eastbound 3:22 woke them again.

  “Dear God, if Ruth won’t sell us the house, I’ll take you to Toronto. I’ll take you anywhere but here,” Marion said. “Not even love could keep me here, Eddie. How do you stand it?”

  “My mind has always been somewhere else,” he confessed. “Until now.” He was amazed that her scent, where he lay at her breasts, was the same one he remembered; the scent that had long evaporated from Marion’s lost pink cashmere cardigan—the same scent tha
t was on her underwear, which he had taken with him to college.

  They were sound asleep again when the westbound 6:12 woke them.

  “That one was westbound, wasn’t it?” Marion asked.

  “Correct. You can tell by the brakes.”

  After the 6:12, they made love very carefully. They’d fallen back to sleep when the eastbound 10:21 wished them a sunny, cold, clear-skied good morning.

  It was Monday. Ruth and Harry had a reservation on a Tuesday-morning ferry sailing from Orient Point. The real estate agent—that hefty woman easily given to tears of failure—would let the movers in and lock up the Sagaponack house after Ruth and Harry and Graham were back in Vermont.

  “It’s now or never,” Eddie said to Marion, over breakfast. “They’ll be gone tomorrow.” He could tell that Marion was nervous by how long she took to get dressed.

  “Who does he look like?” Marion asked Eddie, who misunderstood her; he thought she meant who did Harry look like, but Marion was asking about Graham. Eddie had understood that Marion was afraid of seeing Ruth, but Marion was also afraid of seeing Graham.

  Fortunately (in Eddie’s opinion), Graham had been spared Allan’s lupine appearance; the boy definitely looked more like Ruth.

  “Graham looks like his mother,” Eddie said, but that wasn’t what Marion had meant, either. She’d meant which of her boys did Graham resemble, or did he resemble either of them? It wasn’t Graham himself whom Marion was afraid of seeing—it was any reincarnation of Thomas or Timothy.

  The grief over lost children never dies; it is a grief that relents only a little. And then only after a long while. “Please be specific, Eddie. Would you say that Graham looks more like Thomas or like Timothy? I just need to be prepared for him,” Marion said.

  Eddie wished he could say that Graham looked like neither Thomas nor Timothy, but Eddie had a better memory of the photographs of Ruth’s dead brothers than Ruth had. In Graham’s round face, and in his widely spaced dark eyes, there was that babylike sense of wonder and expectation that Marion’s younger son had reflected.

  “Graham looks like Timothy,” Eddie admitted.

  “Just a little like Timothy, I suppose,” Marion said, but Eddie knew it was another question.

  “No, a lot. He looks a lot like Timothy,” Eddie told her.

  This morning Marion had chosen the same long gray skirt, but a different cashmere crewneck; it was burgundy-colored, and in place of a scarf she wore a simple necklace—a thin platinum chain with a single bright-blue sapphire that matched her eyes.

  First she’d put her hair up; now she let it down on her shoulders, with a tortoiseshell band to keep it off her face. (It was a windy day, cold but beautiful.) Finally, when she thought she was ready for the meeting, Marion refused to wear a coat. “I’m sure we won’t be standing outside for long,” she said.

  Eddie tried to distract her from the momentousness of the meeting by discussing how they might remodel Ruth’s house.

  “Since you don’t like stairs, we could convert Ted’s former workroom into a downstairs bedroom,” Eddie started to say. “The bathroom across the front hall could be enlarged, and if we made the kitchen entrance the main entrance to the house, then the downstairs bedroom would be pretty private.” He wanted to keep talking—anything to distract her from imagining how much Graham might resemble Timothy.

  “Between climbing the stairs and sleeping in Ted’s so-called work room . . . well, I’ll have to think about that,” Marion told him. “It might eventually feel like a personal triumph, to be sleeping in the very room where my former husband seduced so many unfortunate women—not to mention where he drew them and photographed them. That might be most pleasurable, now that I think of it.” Marion had suddenly brightened to the idea. “To be loved in that room—even, later, to be cared for in that room. Yes, why not? Even to die in that room would be okay with me. But what do we do with the goddamn squash court?” she then asked him.

  Marion hadn’t known that Ruth had already converted the second floor of the barn—Marion also hadn’t known that Ted had died there. She’d known only that he’d committed suicide in the barn, by carbonmonoxide poisoning; she’d always assumed that he’d been in his car, not in the goddamn squash court.

  These and other trivial details preoccupied Eddie and Marion as they turned off Ocean Road in Bridgehampton; they took Sagaponack Road to Sagg Main Street. It was almost midday, and the sun fell on Marion’s fair skin, which was still remarkably smooth; the sun caused her to shade her eyes with her hand, before Eddie reached across her and lowered the sun visor. The bright-yellow hexagon of incalculable light shone like a beacon in her right eye; in the sun, this spot of gold turned her right eye from blue to green, and Eddie knew that he would never again be separated from her.

  “Till death do us part, Marion,” he said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Marion told him. She put her thin left hand on his right thigh, and kept it there while Eddie turned right off Sagg Main onto Parsonage Lane.

  “Good Lord!” Marion said. “Look at all the new houses!”

  Many of the houses were not all that “new,” but Eddie couldn’t imagine how many so-called new houses had been built on Parsonage Lane since 1958. And when Eddie slowed his car at the driveway of Ruth’s house, Marion was shocked by the towering privet; the hedges loomed behind the house and surrounded the swimming pool, which she couldn’t see from the driveway but which she assumed was there.

  “The bastard put in a pool, didn’t he?” she asked Eddie.

  “Actually, it’s sort of a nice pool—no diving board.”

  “And of course there’s an outdoor shower, too,” Marion guessed. Her hand trembled against Eddie’s thigh.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he assured her. “I love you, Marion.”

  Marion sat in the passenger seat and waited for Eddie to open the car door for her; because she’d read all his books, she knew it was the kind of thing that Eddie liked to do.

  A handsome but rough-looking man was splitting wood outside the kitchen door. “Goodness, he looks strong!” Marion said, as she got out of the car and took Eddie’s arm. “Is that Ruth’s policeman? What’s his name?”

  “Harry,” Eddie reminded her.

  “Oh, yes— Harry . It doesn’t sound very Dutch, but I’ll try to remember it. And the little boy’s name? My own grandson, and I can’t even remember his name!” Marion exclaimed.

  “It’s Graham,” Eddie told her.

  “Yes, Graham —of course.” On Marion’s still-exquisite face, which was as monumentally chiseled as the face of a Greco-Roman statue, there was a look of inestimable grief. Eddie knew the photograph that Marion must have been remembering. Timothy at four, at the wasted Thanksgiving dinner table, holding an uneaten turkey drumstick, which he viewed with a distrust comparable to that suspicion with which Graham had regarded Harry’s presentation of the roast turkey only four days before.

  In Timothy’s innocent expression, there was nothing that even remotely forecast how the boy would be killed in a mere eleven years— not to mention that, in dying, Timothy would be separated from his leg, which his mother would discover only when she tried to retrieve her dead son’s shoe.

  “Come on, Marion,” Eddie whispered. “It’s cold outside. Let’s go in and meet everybody.”

  Eddie waved to the Dutchman, who instantly waved back. Harry then hesitated. The ex-cop didn’t recognize Marion, of course, but he’d heard all about Eddie’s reputation with older women—Ruth had told him. And Harry had read all of Eddie’s books. Therefore, Harry gave a tentative wave to the older woman on Eddie’s arm.

  “I’ve brought a buyer for the house!” Eddie called to him. “An actual buyer!”

  That got the former Sergeant Hoekstra’s attention. He sunk his ax into the chopping block—that way Graham couldn’t cut himself on it. He picked up the splitting wedge, which was also sharp; Harry didn’t want Graham to cut himself on the wedge, either. He lef
t the maul lying on the ground. The four-year-old could barely have lifted the maul.

  But Eddie and Marion were already entering the house—they hadn’t waited for Harry.

  “Hello? It’s me!” Eddie called from the front hall.

  Marion was staring at Ted’s workroom with a renewed enthusiasm— more accurately, with an enthusiasm she’d never known she had. But the bare walls in the front hall had also caught her attention; Eddie knew that Marion must have been remembering every photograph that used to hang there. Now there were no photos, no picture hooks, no anything . Marion also saw the cardboard boxes stacked on top of one another—not entirely unlike the way the house must have looked when she’d last seen it, in the company of her movers.

  “Hello!” they heard Ruth call, from the kitchen.

  Then Graham ran into the hall to greet them. It must have been hard for Marion to meet Graham, but Eddie thought she managed it well. “You must be Graham,” Marion said. The child was shy around strangers; he stood beside and a little behind Eddie—at least he knew Eddie.

  “This is your grandmother, Graham,” Eddie told the boy.

  Marion held out her hand. Graham shook it with an exaggerated formality. Eddie kept looking at Marion; she seemed to be holding herself together.

  Graham, unfortunately, had never known any grandparents. What he knew about grandmothers, he knew from books, and in books the grandmothers were always very old. “Are you very old?” the boy asked his grandmother.

  “Oh, yes—I certainly am!” Marion told him. “I’m seventy-six!”

  “Do you know what?” Graham asked her. “I’m only four, but I already weigh thirty-five pounds.”

  “Goodness!” Marion said. “Once I used to weigh a hundred and thirty-five pounds, but that was quite a while ago. I’ve lost a little weight. . . .”