ough to be Marion, but Ruth didn’t realize this at first. What struck Ruth was the woman’s elegance, and what had seemed to be her heartfelt sympathy and concern. She was looking at Ruth not in a threatening or invasive way, but with both pity and an anxious curiosity. She was an attractive older woman, only Allan’s age—not even sixty. Also, the woman wasn’t looking at Ruth at all as closely as she appeared to be looking at Hannah . That was when Ruth realized that the woman wasn’t really looking at Hannah, either; it was Graham who was drawing the woman’s attention.
Ruth touched the woman’s arm and asked, “Excuse me . . . do I know you?”
The woman, embarrassed, averted her eyes. But whatever had shamed her passed; she gathered her courage and squeezed Ruth’s forearm.
“I’m sorry. I know I was staring at your son. It’s just that he doesn’t look at all like Allan,” the woman said nervously.
“Who are you, lady?” Hannah asked her.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” the woman said to Ruth. “I’m the other Mrs. Albright. I mean the first Mrs. Albright.”
Ruth didn’t want Hannah to be rude to Allan’s ex-wife, and Hannah looked as if she were about to ask: “Were you invited?”
Eddie O’Hare saved the day.
“I’m so glad to meet you,” Eddie said, squeezing the ex-wife’s arm. “Allan always spoke so highly of you.”
The ex–Mrs. Albright was stunned; she was easily as overcome as Eddie had been by the Yeats poem. Ruth had never heard Allan speak “highly” of his ex-wife; sometimes he’d spoken pityingly of her— specifically, because he felt certain she would rue her decision never to have children. Now here she was, staring at Graham! Ruth was sure that the ex–Mrs. Albright had come to Allan’s memorial service not to pay her respects to Allan, but to get a look at his child!
But all Ruth said was: “Thank you for coming.” She would have gone on, babbling insincerities, but Hannah stopped her.
“Baby, you look better with the veil on,” Hannah whispered. “ Graham, this is an old friend of your daddy’s,” Hannah told the boy. “Say ‘Hello.’ ”
“Hello,” Graham said to Allan’s ex-wife. “But where is Daddy? Where is he now ?”
Ruth slipped the veil back on; her face felt so numb that she was unaware she was crying again.
It was for children that one wanted heaven, Ruth thought. It was only for the sake of being able to say: “Daddy’s in heaven, Graham,” which was what she’d said then.
“And heaven is nice, isn’t it?” the boy began. They’d had many discussions of heaven, and what it was like, since Allan had died. Possibly heaven meant more to the boy because the discussion of it was so new; as neither Ruth nor Allan was religious, heaven had not been a part of Graham’s first three years on earth.
“I’ll tell you what heaven is like,” the ex–Mrs. Albright said to the boy. “It’s like your best dreams.”
But Graham was of an age where he more frequently had nightmares. Dreams were not necessarily heaven-sent. Yet if the boy was to believe the Yeats poem, he would be forced to envision his daddy pacing the mountains overhead and hiding his face in a crowd of stars ! (Is that heaven or a nightmare? Ruth would wonder.)
“She’s not here, is she?” Ruth suddenly said to Eddie, through her veil.
“I don’t see her,” Eddie admitted.
“I know she’s not here,” Ruth said.
“Who’s not here?” Hannah asked Eddie.
“Her mother,” Eddie replied.
“It’s gonna be okay, baby,” Hannah whispered to her best friend. “Fuck your mother.”
In Hannah Grant’s opinion, Fuck Your Mother would have been a more appropriate title for Eddie O’Hare’s fifth novel, A Difficult Woman, which was published that same fall of ’94 when Allan died. But Hannah had given up on Ruth’s mother long ago, and—not yet being an older woman herself, at least not in her own mind—Hannah was sick to death of Eddie’s younger-man-with-older-woman theme. Hannah was thirty-nine—as Eddie had pointed out, exactly the age Marion had been when he’d fallen in love with her.
“Yeah, but you were sixteen, Eddie,” Hannah reminded him. “That’s one category I’ve eliminated from my sexual lexicon—I mean fucking teenagers.”
While Hannah had accepted Eddie as Ruth’s newfound friend, there was more about Eddie that troubled Hannah than the natural jealousy that friends often feel toward friends of friends. She’d had boyfriends who were Eddie’s age, and older—Eddie was fifty-two in the fall of ’94 —and while Eddie was hardly Hannah’s cup of tea, he was nonetheless a physically attractive older man who was not a homosexual; yet he’d never made a pass at her. Hannah found this more than troubling.
“Look—I like Eddie,” she would say to Ruth, “but you’ve got to admit that there’s something wrong with the guy.” What Hannah found “wrong” was that Eddie had eliminated younger women from his sexual lexicon.
Ruth still found Hannah’s “sexual lexicon” more disturbing than Eddie’s. If Eddie’s enduring attraction to older women was weird, at least it was weird in a selective way.
“I suppose I’m some kind of sexual shotgun—is that what you mean?” Hannah asked.