A Widow for One Year (87 page)

“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 left 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. . . .”

The front door opened behind them, and Harry stood sweating in the doorway, holding his beloved splitting wedge. Eddie would have introduced Marion to Harry, but suddenly—at the kitchen-end of the front hall—there was Ruth. She’d just washed her hair. “Hi!” Ruth said to Eddie. Then she saw her mother.

From the doorway, Harry said: “It’s a buyer for the house. An
actual
buyer.” But Ruth didn’t hear him.

“Hello, honey,” Marion said to Ruth.

“Mommy . . .” Ruth managed to say.

Graham ran to Ruth. The four-year-old was still the age for clinging to her hips, which he did, and Ruth instinctively bent to pick him up. But her whole body stopped; she simply didn’t have the strength to lift him. Ruth rested one hand on Graham’s small shoulder; with the back of her other hand, she made a halfhearted attempt to wipe away her tears. Then she stopped trying—she let the tears come.

In the doorway, the artful Dutchman didn’t move. Harry knew better than to move.

Hannah was wrong, Eddie knew. There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments.

“Don’t cry, honey,” Marion told her only daughter. “It’s just Eddie and me.”

A Widow for One Year

JOHN IRVING

A Reader’s Guide

A Conversation with John Irving

Harvey Ginsberg has been John Irving’s close friend and editor for more than fifteen years. He edited the manuscripts of Mr. Irving’s last four novels, beginning with
The Cider House Rules,
and including
A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Son of the Circus,
and
A Widow for One Year.

HG:
What made you decide to write a novel in which the central character is both a woman and a novelist?

JI:
   The decision to make Ruth Cole a novelist was secondary. She was always a woman, and one who was successful in her career; for a while, in the first few months of taking notes for the novel, I was uncertain of her profession. But everything that haunts her and fills her with self-doubt is something that women think about and worry about more than men. Men don’t hold themselves accountable for sexual misjudgment—or they don’t hold themselves
as
accountable as women do. Many men have made countless bad-girlfriend choices; they tend to shrug them off.

We live in a world where it’s permitted for a man to have a sexual history, a sexual past; provided he doesn’t keep repeating it, a sexual past often enhances a man’s image. But if a woman has a sexual past, she’d better keep quiet about it.
Ted Cole kills himself because he sees how his own sexual misconduct has influenced his daughter’s sexual choices—
not
because he feels guilty for sleeping with his daughter’s best friend. How many men kill themselves because their sons have made bad-girlfriend decisions?
And everything Ruth witnesses in Amsterdam, even what she only intends to witness, is more self-damaging (in her mind)
because
she is a woman. As Ruth observes of Graham Green: it’s entirely permissible for a man to explore the sordid and the unseemly—it’s even expected territory for male writers to explore. For women, it’s forbidden. Ruth feels ashamed.
So many women today have careers that are in advance of their personal lives, or at the expense of their personal lives. Men, too—but men concern themselves about this less. If a man is successful, and has been married three times, and has not a single speaking relationship with any of his children from these fallen marriages, the foremost thing about him is still his success. But a woman, no matter how successful she is—in
any
career—sees herself as a failure if her personal life is unsatisfying, or if she’s ashamed of it. Other people, men
and
women, tend to look upon such a woman as a failure, too.
And Ruth’s mother, Marion, cannot recover from a tragedy that (relatively speaking) Ruth’s father, Ted, allows to roll off his back. What amount to superficial wounds to men are often mortal injuries to women.
As for Ruth’s being a novelist, I began with her father as a successful children’s book author and illustrator. I knew I wanted Ruth to be better than her father, and to feel driven to compete with him—to have conflicted feelings for him, too. (The squash was only one area of competition between them.) Why not make Ruth a better writer than her father? I thought. Why not make her less superficial than he is, in every way?

HG:
At least four of your major characters—Ruth and Ted, of course, but also
Eddie and Marion—are writers of fiction, and you quote and summarize their works at length. Is this merely a plot device, or did you have something else in mind?

JI:  
Once I made Ruth and her father writers, I thought that everyone should be a writer—partly out of mischief, knowing what fun I would have comparing and contrasting the kinds of writers they are, but also because making the four of them writers allowed me to intertwine their lives with what they wrote about. Ted’s stories for children are arguably stories for young mothers: the young mothers are Ted’s principal targets—both his principal book buyers
and
his sexual prey. The creepiness of Ted’s children’s-story voice was also a way of setting up the detachment with which he tells Eddie and Ruth the story of the death of his sons.

Ruth is more autobiographical as a novelist than she is willing to admit, but her fiction goes far beyond her personal life; it is much more imagined than it is strictly autobiographical. Eddie, of course, cannot imagine anything. And Ruth’s mother, Marion . . . well, her writing is painful. It’s storytelling as therapy. I say, if it does her good, let her do it.
I tried not to be condescending. Eddie may be a bad, even (at times) a
laughably
bad writer, but he is a decent guy, a compassionate man, and a good friend. (He’s certainly a lot warmer than Ruth is!) And Ted, despite his creepiness—both as a writer for children and as a man—is a riveting storyteller. He gets your attention and keeps it. And, as a father, he’s halfway decent; as Ruth says, at least he was there.
By making four of the principal characters fiction writers, I was able not only to connect their lives but also to connect their various
interpretations
of their lives. D. H. Lawrence once said that a novel was the most subtle form we had to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things. Well, that’s true, but a novel needn’t be subtle.
A Widow for One Year
(or any other novel by John Irving) isn’t subtle.

HG: 
Apart from the facts that you moved from Sagaponack to Vermont, and that you have a son exactly Graham’s age (and Ruth’s age as a child), what other autobiographical elements are there in the novel?

JI:  
There are many autobiographical elements in the novel. Like Eddie, I went to Exeter, and my father taught there. He was one of the school’s most popular teachers, however; unlike Minty O’Hare, my father never bored anyone. And, like Ruth, I found my love story somewhat later in my life. I was forty-four when I met my second wife; I’d been divorced from my first wife for five years. (Like Ruth, I’m not proud of my sexual past—I mean the years between my first marriage and my second, but not exclusively. I don’t think I should elaborate.)

As for the choice to make Ruth the age she is when the novel begins—she’s four—it was calculated
not
because I had a four-year-old at the time but because four is the age when memory begins. Most children don’t remember much about being three. Four is when memory starts, but the memories from one’s fourth year are not complete. I wanted Ruth’s memories of the summer of ’58, when her mother has the affair with Eddie and then leaves, to be present but incomplete.
Regarding Graham, it’s true that my son Everett was exactly that age as I was writing the novel—hence I felt qualified to write Graham’s dialogue (and Ruth’s, as a child). Children of that age are impressively perceptive, but their language hasn’t caught up with their perceptions.
It was vital to the novel that Ruth have a child the same age she was when her mother left her, because I wanted Marion to have to come back and face that child.