A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of people she had met. In the unseemly collection from the porn shop, now closed

Allan’s first present to Ruth had been volume one of the Norman Sherry biography of Graham Greene. Ruth had been reading it with a deliberate slowness, both savoring it and afraid of what she might learn about

“And my scar will always be there?” Ruth asked him, as she had asked him thirty-two years ago, when she was four. “Your scar will be part of you forever,” Eddie promised her, as he had promised her then. “Yes,” Ruth whispered, “I remember. I remember almost everything,” she told him through her tears. Later, alone

Karl and Melissa—and, most remarkably, himself —to another table in the restaurant. And Allan had insisted to the maître d’ that it be a faraway table, not within hearing distance of Ruth and Eddie. Ruth was unaware of when Allan and Karl and Melissa left the restaurant. Finally, while she and Eddie were debating the subject of which of them would pay for their dinner—Ruth had drunk an entire bottle of wine, and Eddie didn’t drink—the waiter interrupted their debate by telling them that Allan had

When Eddie had told her that her father had purposely brought him and Marion together, Ruth had been shocked. That her father had connived to make her mother feel that she was unfit to be a mother was not what shocked Ruth; she already knew that her father was a conniver. What shocked Ruth was that her father had wanted her all to himself, that he’d wanted to be her father so badly! At thirty-six, both loving and hating her father as she now did, it tormented Ruth to know how much her father loved her.

her diary, Ruth once wrote of Hannah: “She projected an aura of worldliness long before she’d been in the world.” Hannah’s parents,

“Young lady,” Per’s father said, “my words have had no discernible effect on my wife for years.” Ruth would remember the elder Swede’s stately sadness better than she would ever remember the craven Per. And when Per’s father had stared at her nakedness,

felt okay, I guess,” Ruth had said. “It just wasn’t what I expected.” “Did you expect worse or better?” Hannah had asked her. “I think I expected worse and better,” Ruth had replied. “That’ll happen,” Hannah had told her. “You can count on it: you’ll definitely have worse and better.” At least Hannah had been right about that. At last

But Ruth’s theory, in regard to how her father had failed to age, was separate from her father’s physical fitness or his size. Ted’s forehead was unlined; there were no pouches under his eyes. Ruth’s crow’s-feet were almost as pronounced as his. The skin of her father’s face was so smooth and clean that it might have been the face of a boy who’d only begun to shave, or who needed to shave only twice a week. Since Marion had left him, and—retching

“I’m crying too much—I can’t see where I’m going, Daddy,” Ruth told him again. “But that’s the test, Ruthie. The test is, sometimes there’s no place to pull over—sometimes you can’t stop, and you have to find a way to keep going. You got it?” “Got it,” she said. “So,” her father said, “now you know everything.” Ruth realized later that she’d also passed that part of the test which had not been mentioned. She’d never looked at him; he’d sat unseen in the passenger seat. All the while that

He’d gone to considerable trouble, as a young man, not to be drafted during the Vietnam War—but the book had struck him as what he called a “women’s novel.” The phrase never failed to make Ruth think of a wide array of feminine-hygiene products. “About female friendship, wasn’t it?” he asked. But his ex-wife had read everything Ruth Cole had written. “She’s your biggest fan,” Scott Saunders said. (The ex-wife again!)

“How does that passage from George Eliot go? I once liked it so much that I wrote it down,” Ruth told him. “ ‘What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life . . .’ But . . .” “Did he stay married?” Scott asked her. “Who?” Ruth said. “George Eliot. Did he stay married?” Maybe if I just get up and start doing the dishes, he’ll get bored and go home, Ruth thought.

depressed her that she had almost as much contempt for a man who drove a car with automatic transmission as she did for a man who hit women. God, look at me—I’m my father’s child! Ruth thought.

Ruth knew that she loved him, too; she loved him more than she loved Allan, and certainly more than she loved Hannah. There was nobody Ruth Cole loved or hated as much as she loved and hated her father, but all she said to him was: “Get your racquet.” “Can you

showering together in the outdoor shower, and swimming naked together in the pool . . . well, weren’t these activities merely family rituals? In the warm weather, anyway, they seemed to be the expected rituals, inseparable from playing squash. But, upon his defeat, her father looked old and tired; Ruth couldn’t bear the thought

“Ruthie, how are we ever going to put the Hannah episode behind us if we don’t talk about it?” “We’ll talk about Hannah later, Daddy. Maybe after I’m back from Europe.” For twenty years, she’d been trying to beat her father at squash. Now that she’d finally defeated him, Ruth found herself weeping in the bathtub. She wished she could feel even the slightest elation at her moment of victory; instead Ruth wept because her father had reduced her best friend to an “episode.” Or was it Hannah who’d reduced their friendship to something less than a fling with her father? Oh, don’t pick

“Okay, okay—I get it,” her father told her. He tried to wipe the tears off his face with the sleeve of his old flannel shirt. Ruth loved this particular shirt because her father had worn it when she was a little girl. Still, she was tempted to tell him to keep both his hands on the wheel. Instead she reminded him of what airline she was taking, and the terminal he should be looking for. “You can see, can’t you?” she asked.

When her father finally stopped the car, Ruth said, “Good driving, Daddy.” If she’d known then that it would be their last conversation, she might have tried to patch things up with him. But she could see that, for once, she’d truly defeated him. Her father was too badly beaten to be uplifted by a simple turn in their conversation. And besides, the pain in that unfamiliar place inside her was still bothering her. In retrospect, it would have to suffice that Ruth remembered to kiss her father good-bye.

“Oh, that,” Ruth said. She’d expected that. When she wrote about abortion, not having had an abortion, she got angry letters from people who had had abortions; when she wrote about childbirth, not having had a child—or when she wrote about divorce, not having been divorced ( or married) . . . well, there were always those letters. People denying that imagination was real, or insisting that imagination wasn’t as real as personal experience; it was the same old thing. “For God’s sake, Allan,” Ruth said, “you’re not worried about another reader telling me to write about what I know, are you?” “This one

“Whoever he was, sweetie, you’re better off without him,” the woman told Ruth. “It was a squash injury,” Ruth replied. “He hit you with a squash?” the woman slurred. “Shit, it must have been a hard one!” “It was pretty hard,” Ruth admitted, smiling.

The drive from Munich to Stuttgart; the pronunciation of Schwbische Alb; the farmland with red and blue and green cabbages. In Stuttgart, the hotel is on the Schillerstrasse—a modern hotel with lots

From my hotel room in Kiel, I can see the ferries in the bay. They are en route to and from Sweden and Denmark. Maybe one day I could go there with Allan. Maybe one day I could travel with a husband and a child, and with a nanny for the child. The woman

But the person I should really ask to do this with me is my father. [In a postcard to her father, which was of the prostitutes in their windows on the Herbertstrasse, the red-light district in the St. Pauli quarter of Hamburg.] THINKING OF YOU, DADDY. I’M SORRY ABOUT WHAT I SAID. IT WAS MEAN. I LOVE YOU! RUTHIE The flight from

“No, looking at you,” he begged her. “Please . . .” She turned over in bed to face him. Once she kissed his eyes, and the tip of his nose, but not his lips. He stared at her so intently that Ruth could almost believe she was his age again. And it was easy for her to imagine that this was how it had been with her mother and Eddie O’Hare. Eddie hadn’t told her this part, but Ruth had read all of Eddie’s novels. She knew perfectly well that Eddie hadn’t invented the masturbation scenes; poor Eddie could invent next to nothing.

He looked like a beaten dog who wanted to be beaten again. Ruth couldn’t have known then how glad she would be to see him waiting for her later. She had no idea that she was not through with him.

Rooie arranged the shoes on either side of Ruth’s feet. Ruth could have stopped her; she could have raised her voice, but she didn’t even whisper. Ruth later thought—for about four or five years—that she hadn’t spoken up because she was afraid that Rooie would be disappointed in her. It was like responding to a childhood dare. One day Ruth would realize that being afraid you’ll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything. Ruth instantly

moleman slowly stood up, scanning all the mirrors in the red room. Ruth knew very well what the killer thought he had heard: he’d heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound— that’s what

he’d heard. And so the murderer held his breath, and stopped wheezing, and looked all around. The way his nose twitched, it appeared to Ruth that the moleman was sniffing for

While Harry was in excellent health, he was taking no chances on his genetic predisposition. He wanted to travel; he also wanted to try living in the country. Although he’d read a lot of travel books, he’d taken few trips. And although Harry liked travel books, he liked novels still more. Looking at his desk, which he was loath to open, Sergeant Hoekstra thought: It’s about time for a new novel by Ruth Cole, isn’t it? It must have been five years since he’d read Not for Children. How long did it take her to write a novel, anyway? Harry had read all of Ruth’s novels in English,

When the stubble on his face began to resemble a beard, he shaved; Harry didn’t like beards. Sometimes he would shave every other day, sometimes only once a week; other times he would get up in the night and shave, so that the woman he was with would wake up to a different-looking man in the morning.

he was to shaving. He had it cut too short; then he let it grow too long. As for

He would rather read a book than listen. And regarding talk: Harry would rather build a fire and go to bed and watch the light flickering on the walls and on the ceiling. He also liked to read in bed. Harry wondered if only his women were jealous of books. It was their principal preposterousness, he believed. How could they be jealous of books? He found this all the more preposterous in the cases

Harry had reluctantly assented to the position taken by the prostitutes’ organization that the legal age for prostitutes be lowered from eighteen to sixteen. “No one likes the idea of minors working in prostitution,” Harry’s speech had begun, “but I like less the idea of minors working in dangerous places. Minors are going to be prostitutes, anyway. Many brothel owners won’t care if their prostitutes are only sixteen-year-olds. What’s important is that the sixteen-year-olds can make use of the same social services and health-care facilities that the older prostitutes use, without being afraid that they will be turned over to the police.”

was not cowardice that had prevented Harry from giving his speech; Harry had contradicted the “official” police position before. It was that he hated the whole idea of allowing sixteen-year-olds to be prostitutes only because you couldn’t stop them from being prostitutes. On the issue of accepting the real world and making an educated guess about how to make it marginally safer, even a social realist like Harry Hoekstra would have admitted that certain subjects depressed him. He had not given the speech because, in the long run, it would have been of no practical help to the underage prostitutes—just as the Thursday-afternoon meetings for first-time prostitutes were of no practical

was generally a good idea to tell the cops the truth. Harry hadn’t had a relationship with Rooie; he’d never taken a trip with her, either. That much was true. But the cops didn’t have to know everything. It wasn’t necessary for Nico Jansen to know that Harry had been tempted.

She had nice breasts, Harry remembered. At last, five years

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

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

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,

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! Vanitas 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’

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

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,

And it was awkward for Ruth when Amanda Merton asked if she could take Graham to see the Oude Kerk. (Amsterdam’s oldest church, which is thought to have been built in about 1300, is situated in the middle of the red-light district.) Amanda had read in a guidebook that the climb to the top of the Oude Kerk tower was recommended for children—the tower afforded a splendid view of the city.

Amanda wanted to buy a souvenir T-shirt that she’d spotted in the window of the Bulldog café; hence Graham got a good look at one of the girls, a prostitute who had briefly left her window on the Trompetterssteeg to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Bulldog. (A very surprised Amanda Merton got an inadvertent look at her, too.) The prostitute, a petite brunette, wore a lime-green teddy with a snap crotch; her high heels were a darker shade of green. “Look, Mommy,” Graham said. “A lady, still getting dressed.”

There was almost no hair on the backs of his smooth, muscular hands.

She was wearing a fitted olive-green shirt; it clung to her in the manner of a long-sleeved polo shirt, but it was more open at the throat, where Harry could see the cross of Lorraine that he’d given her—the two crosspieces glinting in the brilliant autumn sun. They drove west for close to three hours, across most of Massachusetts, before turning north into Vermont.

understand that Harry has taught Graham how to kick a soccer ball,” Eddie offered, in faint praise. “American kids should learn to throw balls,” Hannah replied. “It’s those fucking Europeans who like to kick them.” “Ruth

And he had a system for splitting and stacking the wood. If a log wasn’t too big around, he would set it vertically on the chopping block and split it lengthwise with an ax. If it was too big—and he knew this at a glance—he would set the log on the block and then split it with a wedge and a maul. Although handling the

The poem was called “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” and Eduardo and Conchita held hands during Harry’s recitation—as if they were being married all over again. Graham was the ring bearer, but he’d misheard

thought again of how lucky she’d been, how she’d suffered only a little misfortune.