A Widow for One Year - Page 143

“Maybe,” Hannah replied. “The doctor will know what’s wrong with him.”

Ruth’s hair remained unbrushed—it looked slept-on—and her pale face had no makeup. Her lips were dry, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes were more prominent than Eddie had ever seen them. Marion had had crow’s-feet, too, but Eddie had momentarily lost sight of Marion; he was transfixed by Ruth’s face, with its emanating sadness.

Ruth at forty was in the first numbness of mourning. Marion at thirty-nine, when Eddie had last seen her, had been grieving for five years; her face, which her daughter’s face now so closely resembled, had reflected an almost eternal grief.

As a sixteen-year-old, Eddie had fallen in love with Marion’s sadness, which seemed a more permanent part of her than her beauty. Yet beauty is remembered after beauty leaves; what Eddie saw reflected in Ruth’s face was a departed beauty, which was another measure of the love Eddie truly felt for Marion.

But Eddie didn’t know that he was still in love with Marion; he truly believed that he’d fallen in love with Ruth.

What the hell is the matter with Eddie? Ruth was thinking. If he doesn’t stop staring at me, I’m going to drive off the road!

Hannah had also noticed that Eddie was staring at Ruth. What the hell is the matter with Eddie? Hannah was thinking. Since when did the asshole take an interest in a younger woman?

Mrs. Cole

“She’d been a widow for one year,” Ruth Cole had written. (A mere four years before she became a widow herself

!) And a year after Allan’s death—just as she’d written of her fictional widow—Ruth was still struggling “to keep her memories of the past under control, as any widow must.”

How had she known almost everything about it? the novelist now wondered—for although she’d always claimed that a good writer could imagine anything (and imagine it truly), and although she’d often argued that real-life experience was overvalued, even Ruth was surprised by how accurately she’d imagined being a widow.

A whole year after Allan’s death, exactly as she’d written of her fictional widow, Ruth was “as prone to being swept away by a so-called flood of memories as she was on that morning when she’d awakened with her husband dead beside her.”

And where was the angry old widow who’d assaulted Ruth for writing un truthfully about being a widow? Where was the harpy who’d called herself a widow for the rest of her life? In retrospect, Ruth was disappointed that the old witch had not made an appearance at Allan’s memorial service. Now that she was a widow, Ruth wanted to see the miserable old hag—if only to shout in her face that everything she’d written about being a widow was true !

The evil old woman who’d tried to spoil her wedding with her hateful threats, the resentful old harridan who’d so shamelessly let herself go . . . where was she now? Probably she was dead, as Hannah had declared. If so, Ruth felt cheated; now that the conventional wisdom of the world granted her the authority to speak, Ruth would have liked to give the bitch a piece of her mind.

For hadn’t the hag bragged to Ruth about the superiority of her love for her husband? The very idea of someone saying to someone else, “You don’t know what grief is,” or, “You don’t know what love is,” struck Ruth as outrageous.

This unforeseen anger toward the old widow without a name had provided Ruth with an inexhaustible fuel for her first year as a widow. In the same year, also unforeseen, Ruth had experienced a softening in her feelings toward her mother. Ruth had lost Allan, but she still had Graham. With her heightened awareness of how much she loved her only child, Ruth found herself sympathizing with Marion’s efforts not to love another child—since Marion had already lost two .

How her mother had managed not to take her own life was a matter of amazement to Ruth, as was how Marion had even been able to have another child. All at once, why her mother had left her began to make sense. Marion hadn’t wanted to love Ruth because she couldn’t stand the idea of losing a third child. (Ruth had heard all this from Eddie, five years ago, but until she’d had a child and lost a husband, she didn’t have either the experience or the imagination to believe it.)

Yet Marion’s Toronto address had sat for a year in a prominent place on Ruth’s desk. Pride and cowardice—now there was a title worthy of a long novel!—prevented Ruth from writing to her. Ruth still believed that it was Marion’s role to reintroduce herself to her daughter, since Marion had been the one who had left. As a relatively new mother and an even newer widow, Ruth was a newcomer to both grief and the fear of an even greater loss.

It was Hannah’s suggestion that Ruth give her mother’s Toronto address to Eddie.

“Let her be Eddie’s problem,” Hannah said. “Let him agonize over whether to write her or not.”

Of course Eddie would agonize over whether or not to write Marion. Worse, he had on several occasions tried to write her, but none of his efforts had made it into the mail.

“Dear Alice Somerset,” he’d begun, “I have reason to believe that you are Marion Cole, the most important woman in my life.” But that struck him as too jaunty a tone, especially after almost forty years, and so he’d tried again, taking a more straightforward approach. “Dear Marion: For Alice Somerset could only be you—I have read your Margaret McDermid novels with”—uh, with what ? Eddie had asked himself, and that had stopped him. With fascination? With frustration? With admiration? With despair? With all of the above? He couldn’t say.

Besides, after carrying a torch for Marion for thirty-six years, Eddie now believed he had fallen in love with Ruth. And after a year of imagining he was in love with Marion’s daughter, Eddie still didn’t realize that he’d never stopped loving Marion; he still believed he loved Ruth. Thus Eddie’s efforts to write Marion became tortured in the extreme. “Dear Marion: I loved you for thirty-six years before I fell in love with your daughter.” But Eddie couldn’t even bring himself to say that to Ruth !

As for Ruth, in her year of mourning, she often wondered what had happened to Eddie O’Hare. Yet her grief, and her constant concerns for young Graham, distracted Ruth from Eddie’s obvious but puzzling agonies. She’d always thought he was a sweet, odd man. Was he now a sweet man who’d grown odder? He could spend an entire dinner party in her company without uttering more than monosyllables; yet whenever she so much as looked at him, he was staring at her. Then, always, he would instantly look away.

“What is it, Eddie?” she’d asked him once.

“Oh, nothing,” he’d replied. “I was just wondering how you were doing.”

“Well, I’m doing all right—thank you,” Ruth had said.

Hannah had her own theories, which Ruth dismissed as absurd. “He looks like he’s fallen in love with you, but he doesn’t know how to hit on younger women,” Hannah had said. For a year, the thought of anyone hitting on her had struck Ruth as grotesque.

But, that fall of ’95, Hannah would say to her: “It’s been a year, baby—it’s time you got back in circulation again.”

The very idea of being “back in circulation” repelled Ruth. Not only was she still in love with Allan and her memory of their life together, but Ruth felt chilled at the prospect of confronting her own bad judgment again .

Tags: John Irving Fiction
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