A Widow for One Year - Page 74

“I’m still listening,” he said, because she had paused.

“I want to sleep with you—I must sleep with you,” Ruth assured him. “But not just before I go away. And not just before I see my father,” Ruth added, which she knew was apropos of nothing. “I want the time away to think about us.” That was finally how she put it.

“I understand,” Allan said. It broke her heart to know he was a good man, but not to know if he was the right one. And how would “time away” help her to determine that ? What she needed, in order to know, was more time with Allan.

But what she said was: “I knew you’d understand.”

“I love you very much,” Allan told her.

“I know you do,” Ruth said.

Later, as she struggled to fall asleep, she tried not to think of her father. Although Ted Cole had told his daughter about her mother’s affair with Eddie O’Hare, Ted had neglected to tell Ruth that their affair had been his idea. 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.

Hannah at Thirty-Five

Ruth couldn’t sleep. The cause of her insomnia was the cognac—in combination with what she had confessed to Eddie O’Hare, which was something she’d not told even Hannah Grant. At every important passage in her life, Ruth had anticipated that she would hear from her mother. Upon her graduation from Exeter, for example, but it didn’t happen. And there came and went her graduation from Middlebury, without a word.

Nevertheless, Ruth had gone on expecting to hear from Marion— especially in 1980, upon the publication of her first novel. And there were then the publications of two more novels, the second in ’85 and the third right now—in the fall of 1990. That was why, when the presumptuous Mrs. Benton had attempted to pass herself off as Ruth’s mother, Ruth had been so angry. For years she’d imagined that Marion might suddenly announce herself in exactly that way.

“Do you think she ever will make an appearance?” Ruth had asked Eddie in the taxi.

Eddie had disappointed her. In the course of her thrilling evening with him, Eddie had done much to contradict Ruth’s first, unfair impression of him, but in the taxi he’d fumbled badly.

“Uh . . .” he began, “I imagine that your mother must make peace with herself before she can . . . uh, well, re-enter your life.” Eddie paused—as if he hoped that the taxi had already arrived at the Stanhope. “Uh . . .” he said again, “Marion has her demons—her ghosts, I suppose—and she must somehow try to deal with them before she can make herself available to you.”

“She’s my mother, for Christ’s sake!” Ruth had cried in the cab. “ I’m the demon she should be trying to deal with!”

But all that Eddie had managed to say was: “I almost forgot! There was a book—actually, two books—that I wanted to give you.”

Here she’d asked him the most important question in her life: Was it reasonable for her to hope that her mother would ever contact her? And Eddie had pawed around in his wet briefcase, producing two water-damaged books.

One of them was the inscribed copy of his litany of sexual bliss to Marion, Sixty Times . And the other? He’d been at a loss to say what the other book was. He’d simply thrust it into her lap in the taxi.

“You said you were going to Europe,” Eddie told her. “This is good airplane reading.”

At such a time, and in answer to Ruth’s all-important question, he’d offered her “airplane reading.” Then the taxi had stopped at the Stanhope. Eddie had given Ruth the clumsiest of handshakes. She’d kissed him, of course, and he’d blushed—like a sixteen-year-old boy!

“We must get together when you’re back from Europe!” Eddie had called from the departing cab.

Maybe he was bad at good-byes. In all honesty, “pathetic” and “ unfortunate” did not do him justice. He’d made an art form of his modesty. “He wore his self-deprecation like a badge of honor,” Ruth wrote in her diary. “And there was nothing of the weasel about him.” (Ruth had heard her father call Eddie a weasel on more than one occasion.)

Also, when it was still early in their evening together, Ruth had understood something about Eddie: he never complained. In addition to his prettiness, his frail-looking beauty, what her mother might have seen in him was something that extended beyond his loyalty to her. Despite his appearance to the contrary, Eddie O’Hare was remarkably brave; he had accepted Marion as she was. And in the summer of ’58, Ruth imagined, her mother had not necessarily been at her psychological best.

Half naked, Ruth went looking through her suite at the Stanhope for the alleged “airplane reading” that Eddie had given her. She was too drunk to waste a word of The Life of Graham Greene, and she had already read Sixty Times; in truth, she’d read it twice.

To her dismay, the “airplane reading” appeared to be some kind of crime fiction. Ruth was immediately put off by the title, Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus . Both the author and the publisher were unknown to her. Upon closer inspection, Ruth saw that the publisher was Canadian.

Even the author photo was a mystery, for the woman—the unknown writer was a woman—was in profile to the camera, and what little could be seen of her face was backlit. The woman also wore a hat, which shaded the only eye that was exposed to the camera. All that could be seen of her face was a fine nose, a strong chin, a sharp cheekbone. Her hair—what of it that fell free of the hat—might have been blond or gray, or almost white. Her age was indeterminable.

It was an exasperating photograph, and Ruth was not surprised to read that the unknown author’s name was a nom de plume; a woman who hid her face would choose a pen name. So this was what Eddie called “airplane reading.” Even before she began the book, Ruth was unimpressed. And the beginning of the novel was not much better than Ruth’s initial judgment of the book (by its cover).

Ruth read: “A salesgirl who was also a waitress had been found dead in her apartment on Jarvis, south of Gerrard. It was an apartment within her means, but only because she had shared it with two other salesgirls. The three of them sold bras at Eaton’s.”

A

detective novel! Ruth snapped the book shut. Where was there a Jarvis Street, or a Gerrard? What was Eaton’s? What did Ruth Cole care about girls who sold bras?

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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