A Widow for One Year (45 page)

She was sure her father would come back. She half-expected to see his car in the driveway in the morning. Ted enjoyed the martyr role; he would have loved to give Ruth the impression that he’d slept in the Volvo all night.

But in the morning the car wasn’t there. The phone started ringing at seven
A.M.,
and Ruth still wouldn’t answer it. Now she tried to find her father’s answering machine, but it was not in his workroom, where it usually was. Perhaps it had broken and he’d taken it somewhere to have it repaired.

Ruth regretted being in her father’s workroom. Above his writing desk, where he wrote only letters nowadays, was the tacked-up list of names and phone numbers of his current squash opponents. Scott Saunders was at the top of the list. Oh, God—here I go again, she thought. There were two numbers for Saunders: his number in New York and a Bridgehampton number. She dialed the Bridgehampton number, of course. It was not yet seven-thirty; Ruth could tell by the sound of his voice that she’d awakened him.

“Are you still thinking about playing squash with me?” Ruth asked him.

“It’s early,” Scott said. “Have you beaten your father already?”

“I want to beat you first,” Ruth told him.

“You can
try,
” the lawyer said. “How about dinner after we play?”

“Let’s see how the game goes,” Ruth said.

“What time?” he asked her.

“The usual time—the same time you play with my father.”

“I’ll see you at five, then,” Scott told her.

That would give Ruth the whole day to get ready for him. There were specific shots and serves she liked to practice before she played a left-hander. But her father was the lefty of all lefties; in the past, she had never been able to adequately prepare herself for him. Now she believed that playing Scott Saunders would be the perfect warm-up for playing her father.

Ruth began by calling Eduardo and Conchita. She didn’t want them around the house. She told Conchita she was sorry that she wouldn’t see her this visit, and Conchita did what she always did when she talked to Ruth—she cried. Ruth promised she would see Conchita when she was back from Europe, although Ruth doubted she would be visiting her father in Sagaponack then.

Ruth told Eduardo that she was going to write all day; she didn’t want him mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges or doing whatever he did to the swimming pool. She needed to have a quiet day. On the outside chance that her father wouldn’t come back in time to drive her to the airport tomorrow, Ruth told Eduardo that she would call him. Her flight to Munich left early Thursday evening; she wouldn’t need to leave Sagaponack before two or three tomorrow afternoon.

It was like Ruth Cole to try to organize everything, to try to give her life the structure of her novels. (“You always think you can cover any contingency,” Hannah had told her once. Ruth thought she could, or that she
should
.)

The one thing she should have done, but didn’t, was call Allan. Instead she let the phone keep ringing, unanswered.

The two bottles of white wine had not given her a hangover, but they had left a sour taste in her mouth, and her stomach did not welcome the idea of any solid food for breakfast. Ruth found some strawberries, a peach, a banana. She put these in the blender with orange juice and three heaping tablespoons of her father’s favorite protein powder; the drink tasted like cold, liquid oatmeal, but it made her feel as if she were bouncing off the walls, which was how she wanted to feel.

There were only four good shots in squash, she dogmatically believed.

In the morning, she’d practice her rail and her cross-court—good and deep, both of them. Also, there was a dead spot on the front wall of the barn; it was about thigh-high and a little to the left of center, well below the service line. Her father had sneakily marked the spot with a smudge of colored chalk. She would practice her aim at that spot. You could hit the ball as hard as you wanted, but if you hit that spot, the ball just died; it came off the wall like a drop shot. She would work on her hard serve in the morning, too. She wanted to hit all her hard shots in the morning. Afterward, she could ice her shoulder—maybe while sitting in the shallow end of the pool, both before
and
after she made herself a little lunch.

In the afternoon, she’d practice her drop shot. Ruth also had two good corner shots—one from midcourt and the other when she was close to one of the side walls. She rarely played a reverse corner; she thought of it as a low-percentage or a trick shot, and she didn’t like trick shots.

She’d work on her soft serve in the afternoon, too. In the low-ceilinged barn, she wouldn’t even try her lob serve, but her chip serve had lately been improving. When she sliced through the serve, which she hit low to the front wall—barely above the service line—the ball caught the side wall very low and its bounce off the floor was very flat.

It was still early in the morning when Ruth climbed the ladder from the floor area of the barn—where her father parked his car in the cold-weather months—and pushed open the trap door above her head. (The trap door was usually kept closed so that wasps and other insects would not rise to the top of the barn and end up in the squash court.) Outside the squash court, on the second floor of the barn—it had once been a hayloft—were a collection of racquets and balls and wristbands and protective eyewear. Tacked to the outside door of the court was a gray photocopy of Ruth’s Exeter team; it had been copied from the pages of the ’73
PEAN,
her yearbook. Ruth was in the front row, far right, with the boys’ varsity. Her father had copied the yearbook picture and proudly tacked the photocopy on the door.

Ruth crumpled up the photocopy after she’d ripped it off the squash-court door. She entered the court and stretched for a while— first her hamstrings, then her calves, last, her right shoulder. She always started by facing the side wall in the left-hand court; she liked to begin with her backhand. She hit her volleys and her cross-courts before she went to work on her hard serves. She hit nothing but hard serves for the last half hour; she hit them until they were all landing where she wanted them to.

Fuck you, Hannah! Ruth thought. The ball flew off the front wall like something alive. Goddamn you, Daddy! she said to herself—the ball flying like a wasp or a bee, only much faster. Her imaginary opponent could never return that ball on the fly. It would be all he could do just to get out of the way.

She stopped only because she thought her right arm was going to fall off. Then Ruth took off all her clothes and sat on the bottom step in the shallow end of the pool, enjoying the ice pack that perfectly conformed to her right shoulder. In the glorious Indian Summer weather, the sun at midday was warm on her face. The cool water of the pool covered her body, except for her shoulders; the right one was excruciatingly cold from the ice, but in a few minutes it would be wonderfully numb.

The terrific thing about hitting a ball that hard, and for that long, was that when she was done, she had absolutely nothing on her mind. Not Scott Saunders, and what she was going to do with him
after
they had played squash. Not her father, and what was possible or not possible to do about him. Ruth had not even thought about Allan Albright, whom she should have called. She hadn’t thought about Hannah, either—not a single thought.

In the pool, in the sun—at first feeling but now not feeling the ice— Ruth’s life vanished around her. (The way night falls, or the way the night gives way to the dawn.) When the phone rang, which it did repeatedly, she didn’t think about that, either.

If Scott Saunders had seen Ruth’s morning workout, he would have suggested that they play tennis instead—or maybe just have dinner. If Ruth’s father had seen the last twenty balls she’d served, he would have known enough not to come home. If Allan Albright had even imagined how far Ruth had removed herself from
thought,
he would have been very, very worried. And if Hannah Grant, who was still Ruth Cole’s best friend—Hannah, at least, knew Ruth better than anyone else knew her—had witnessed her friend’s mental and physical preparations, Hannah would have known that Scott Saunders, the strawberry-blond lawyer, was facing a day (and a night) of far more demanding
performances
than he would be called upon to display in a few fast-paced games of squash.

Ruth Remembers Learning to Drive

That afternoon, after she hit her soft shots, she sat in the shallow end of the pool, icing her shoulder and reading
The Life of Graham Greene
.

Ruth was fond of the story of young Graham’s first words, which allegedly were “Poor dog,” a reference to his sister’s dog, which had been run over in the street. Greene’s nanny had put the dead dog in the baby carriage with Greene.

Of Greene as a child, his biographer wrote: “However young he was he must have had an instinctive awareness of death from the carcass, the smell, perhaps blood, perhaps the mouth pulled back over the teeth in the snarl of death. Wouldn’t there be a growing sense of panic, even nausea on finding himself shut in, irrevocably committed to sharing the limited confines of a pram with a dead dog?”

There are worse things, Ruth Cole thought. “In childhood,” Greene himself had written (in
The Ministry of Fear
), “we live under the brightness of immortality—heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Beside the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock.”

That hadn’t been
her
childhood. Ruth’s mother had left her when she was four; there was no God; her father didn’t tell the truth, or he wouldn’t answer her questions—or both. And as for justice, her father had slept with so many women that Ruth couldn’t keep count.

On the subject of childhood, Ruth preferred what Greene had written in
The Power and the Glory:
“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” Oh, yes—Ruth agreed. But sometimes, she would have argued, there is more than
one
moment, because there is more than one future. For example, there was the summer of ’58, the most obvious moment when the alleged “door” had opened and the alleged “future” had been let in. But there was also the spring of ’69, when Ruth turned fifteen and her father had taught her to drive.

For more than ten years, she’d been asking her father to tell her about the accident that killed Thomas and Timothy; her father had refused. “When you’re old enough to hear it, Ruthie—when you know how to drive,” he’d always said.

They drove every day, usually first thing in the morning—even on the summer weekends, when the Hamptons were overcrowded. Her father wanted her to get used to bad drivers. That summer, on Sunday nights—when the traffic would be backed up in the westbound lane of the Montauk Highway, and the weekend people would already be behaving impatiently, some of them (literally) dying to get back to New York—Ted would take Ruth out in the old white Volvo. He would drive around until he found what he called “a pretty good mess.” The traffic would be at a standstill, and some idiots would already have begun passing on the right, in the soft shoulder of the road, and others would be trying to break out of the line of cars, to turn around and go back to their summer homes—just to wait for an hour or two, or to have a really stiff drink before starting out again.

“This looks like a pretty good mess, Ruthie,” her father would say.

And Ruth would change seats with him—sometimes while the furious driver behind them honked and honked his horn. There were side roads, of course; she knew them all. She could inch ahead on the Montauk Highway, and then break free of the traffic and race parallel to the highway on the connecting back roads, always finding a way to break back into the lineup of cars again. Her father would look behind them, then, saying, “It appears that you gained on about seven cars, if that’s the same dumb Buick back there that I think it is.”

Sometimes she’d drive all the way to the Long Island Expressway before her father would say, “Let’s call it a night, Ruthie, or the next thing we know, we’ll be in Manhattan!”

On other Sunday nights, the traffic might be so bad that her father considered it a sufficient demonstration of her driving skills if Ruth merely executed a U-turn and drove them home.

He emphasized her constant awareness of the rearview mirror, and of course she knew that when she was stopped and waiting to turn left, across a lane of oncoming traffic, she must never,
ever
turn her wheels to the left in anticipation of the turn she was waiting to make. “Never—not
ever
!” her father had told her, from her very first driving lesson. But he still hadn’t told her the story of what had actually happened to Thomas and Timothy. Ruth knew only that Thomas had been driving.

“Patience, Ruthie, patience,” her father would repeat and repeat to her.

“I
am
patient, Daddy,” Ruth would tell him. “I’m still waiting for you to tell me the story, aren’t I?”

“I mean, be a patient driver, Ruthie—always be a patient driver.”

The Volvo—like all of Ted’s Volvos, which he began buying in the sixties—was a stick shift. (Ted told Ruth to never trust a boy who drove an automatic transmission.) “And if you’re in the passenger seat and I’m the driver, I never look at you—I don’t care what you say, or what kind of fit you’re having. Even if you’re choking,” Ted said. “If I’m driving the car, I can talk to you, but I don’t look at you—not ever. And when you’re the driver, you don’t look at me, or at anyone who might be in the passenger seat. Not until you get off the road and stop the car. You got it?”

“Got it,” Ruth said.

“And if you’re out on a date and the boy is driving, if
he
looks at you, for whatever reason, you tell him not to look at you or else you’ll get out and walk. Or you tell him to let
you
drive the car. You got that, too?” her father asked.