A Widow for One Year (66 page)

“You see, Edward,” Minty informed his son, “a passage of this kind, which is a summation—both in its content and in its tone—is certain to be an opening passage to a chapter or, more likely, a concluding passage. And as it suggests some deeper finality, it is more likely a passage to be found near the end of a book than it is to be found near the beginning.”

“I see,” Eddie said. “What book is it from?”

“The hint of irony gives it away,” Minty intoned. “That, and its bittersweet quality. It’s like a pastoral, but more than a pastoral.”

“Which novel is it, Dad?” Eddie begged his father.

“Why, it’s
Adam Bede,
Edward,” the old English teacher told his son. “And it’s well suited for your friend’s wedding, which is a November wedding, the same month Adam Bede himself was married to Dinah— ‘on a rimy morning in parting November,’ ” Minty quoted from memory. “That’s from the first sentence of the last chapter, not counting the Epilogue,” the old English teacher added.

Eddie felt exhausted, but he’d identified the passage, as Ruth had asked him to.

At Ruth’s wedding, Hannah read from George Eliot with a lack of conviction, but the words themselves were alive for Ruth.

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”

What greater thing is there, indeed? Ruth wondered. She thought she had only begun to love Allan; she believed she was already loving him more than she’d ever loved anyone else, except her dad.

The civil ceremony, which was conducted by a local justice of the peace, was held in Ruth’s favorite bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. The booksellers, a man and his wife who were old friends of Ruth’s, were kind enough to close their store for a couple of hours on one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. After the wedding, the bookstore opened its doors to business-as-usual, but there seemed to be more than the expected numbers of book buyers waiting to be served. Among them were some curiosity seekers. As the new Mrs. Albright (which Ruth Cole would never be
called
) left the store on Allan’s arm, she averted her eyes from the bystanders.

“If there are any journalists, I’ll handle them,” Hannah had whispered to Ruth.

Eddie was looking all around for Marion, of course.

“Is she here? Do you see her?” Ruth asked, but Eddie just shook his head.

Ruth was looking for someone else, too. She was half-expecting that Allan’s ex-wife would show up, although Allan had scoffed at her fears. The subject of children had been a bitter one between Allan and his former wife, but their divorce had been a joint decision. Harassment was not a part of his ex-wife’s nature, Allan had said.

On that busy Thanksgiving weekend, they’d had to park at some distance from the bookstore. As they passed a pizza restaurant and a store that sold candles, Ruth realized that they were being followed; notwithstanding that Hannah’s bad boyfriend had the appearance of a bodyguard, someone was following the small wedding party. Allan took Ruth’s arm and hurried her along the sidewalk; they were now near the parking lot. Hannah kept turning to look at the elderly woman who was following them, but the woman was not one to be stared down.

“She’s not a journalist,” Hannah said.

“Fuck her—she’s just some old lady,” Hannah’s bad boyfriend said.

“I’ll handle this,” said Eddie O’Hare. But this older woman was immune to Eddie’s charms.

“I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to
her,
” the elderly woman told Eddie; she was pointing at Ruth.

“Look, lady—it’s her wedding day. Take a fucking hike,” Hannah said.

Allan and Ruth stopped walking and faced the old lady, who was out of breath from hurrying after them. “It’s
not
my ex-wife,” Allan whispered, but Ruth knew this as surely as she knew that the old woman wasn’t her mother.

“I wanted to see your face,” the elderly lady said to Ruth. In her own way, she was as nondescript as Rooie’s murderer. She was just another older woman who’d let herself go. And with that thought, even before the woman spoke again, Ruth suddenly knew who she was. Who else but a widow for the rest of her life would be so inclined to let herself go?

“Well, now you’ve seen my face,” Ruth told her. “What next?”

“I want to see your face again, when you’re a widow,” the angry widow said. “I can’t wait for that.”

“Hey,” Hannah told the elderly lady, “by the time she’s a widow, you’ll be dead. You look like you’re dying already.”

Hannah took Ruth’s arm out of Allan’s hand and started pulling her toward their car. “Come on, baby—it’s your wedding day!”

Allan briefly glared at the old woman; then he followed Ruth and Hannah. Hannah’s bad boyfriend, although he
looked
like an enforcer, was actually an ineffectual wimp. He just scuffed his feet and glanced at Eddie.

And Eddie O’Hare, who’d never met an older woman who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be charmed, thought he would try again with the angry widow, who was staring after Ruth as if she were memorizing the moment.

“Wouldn’t you agree that weddings are sacred, or that they should be?” Eddie began. “Aren’t they among those days that we are meant to remember all our lives?”

“Oh,
yes
—I agree!” the old widow said eagerly. “She’ll surely remember this day. When her husband’s dead, she’ll remember it more than she wants to. There’s not an hour that goes by that I don’t remember
my
wedding day!”

“I see,” Eddie said. “Can I walk you to your car?”

“No, thank you, young man,” the widow told him.

Eddie, defeated by her righteousness, turned away and hurried after the wedding party. All of them were hurrying, perhaps because of the rawness of the November weather.

There was a small dinner party in the late afternoon. The local booksellers came, and Kevin Merton (Ruth’s caretaker) with his wife. Allan and Ruth had arranged no honeymoon. As for the new couple’s plans, Ruth had told Hannah that they would probably use the Sagaponack house more frequently than they would get to Vermont. Eventually they would have to choose between Long Island and New England, which—once they had a child—would be an obvious choice, Ruth had said. (When the child was old enough to go to school, she would want the child to be in Vermont.)

“And when will you know if there’s gonna be a kid?” Hannah had asked Ruth.

“When I get pregnant, or when I don’t,” Ruth had replied.

“But are you
trying
?” Hannah had asked.

“We’re going to start trying after the New Year.”

“So soon!” Hannah said. “You’re not wasting any time.”

“I’m thirty-six, Hannah. I’ve wasted enough time.”

The fax machine in the Vermont house rang throughout her wedding day, and Ruth kept leaving her dinner party to check the messages. (Congratulations from her foreign publishers, for the most part.) There was a sweet message from Maarten and Sylvia in Amsterdam. (WIM
WILL BE BROKENHEARTED!
Sylvia had written.)

Ruth had asked Maarten to keep her informed of any developments in the case of the murdered prostitute. Maarten had told Ruth that there was no news about the prostitute’s murder. The police weren’t talking about it.

“Did she have any children?” Ruth had earlier faxed Maarten. “I wonder if that poor prostitute had any children.” But there had been nothing in the news about the prostitute’s daughter, either.

Ruth had got on an airplane, she’d crossed an ocean, and what had happened in Amsterdam had all but vanished. Only in the dark, when she lay awake, did she feel the touch of a dress on a hanger or smell the leather of the halter top that had hung in Rooie’s closet.

“You’re gonna tell me when you’re pregnant, aren’t you?” Hannah asked Ruth, when they were doing the dishes. “You’re not gonna try to keep
that
a secret, too, are you?”

“I have no secrets, Hannah,” Ruth lied.

“You’re the biggest secret I know,” Hannah told her. “The only way I know what’s going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book.”

“But I don’t write about myself, Hannah,” Ruth reminded her.

“So you say,” Hannah said.

“Of course I’ll tell you when I’m pregnant,” Ruth said, changing the subject. “You’ll be the first to know, after Allan.”

When she went to bed with Allan that night, Ruth felt only half at peace with herself; she also felt exhausted.

“Are you okay?” Allan asked her.

“I’m okay,” Ruth told him.

“You seem tired,” Allan said.

“I
am
tired,” Ruth admitted.

“You seem
different,
somehow,” Allan told her.

“Well. I’m married to you, Allan,” Ruth replied. “
That’s
different, isn’t it?”

By the end of the first week of January 1991, Ruth would be pregnant, which would be different, too.

“Boy, that was fast!” Hannah would remark. “Tell Allan not every guy his age is still shooting live ammunition.”

Graham Cole Albright—seven pounds, ten ounces—was born in Rutland, Vermont, on October 3, 1991. The boy’s birthday coincided with the first anniversary of German reunification. Although she hated to drive, Hannah drove Ruth to the hospital. She’d been staying with Ruth for the final week of Ruth’s pregnancy, because Allan was working in New York; he drove to Vermont on the weekends.

It was two in the morning when Hannah left Ruth’s house for the hospital in Rutland, which was about a forty-five-minute drive. Hannah had called Allan as they were leaving for the hospital. The baby wasn’t born until after ten in the morning. Allan arrived in plenty of time for the actual delivery.

As for the baby’s namesake, Graham Greene, Allan remarked that he hoped
his
little Graham would never share the novelist’s reputed habit of frequenting brothels. Ruth, who for more than a year had been bogged down near the end of volume one of
The Life of Graham Greene,
felt a far greater anxiety about one of Greene’s other habits: his inclination to travel to the world’s trouble spots in search of firsthand experience. This was nothing Ruth would wish upon
her
little Graham, nor would she ever again seek such experiences for herself. After all, she’d seen a prostitute murdered by her customer, and it appeared that the murderer had got away with it.

Ruth’s novel-in-progress would suffer a yearlong hiatus. She moved with her baby boy back to Sagaponack, which meant that Conchita Gomez could be Graham’s nanny. This also made the weekends easier for Allan. He could take the jitney or the train from New York to Bridgehampton in half the time it took him to drive from the city to Vermont; he could also work on the train.

In Sagaponack, Allan used Ted’s former workroom for an office. Ruth claimed that the room still smelled of squid ink, or of a decomposing star-nosed mole—or of the Polaroid print coater. The photographs were gone now, although Ruth said she could still smell them, too.

But what could she smell (or otherwise detect) in
her
office on the second floor of the barn—the remodeled Sagaponack squash court, which Ruth chose as
her
workroom? The ladder and trap door had been replaced by a normal flight of stairs and a normal door. Ruth’s new office had baseboard heating; there was a window where the dead spot on the front wall of the squash court had been. When the novelist sat typing on her old-fashioned typewriter, or—as she more often did— writing by hand on the long yellow pads of lined paper, she never heard the reverberation that the squash ball used to make against the telltale tin. And the T on the former court, which she’d been taught to take possession of (as if her life depended on it), was carpeted now. Ruth couldn’t see it.

She
could
smell, from time to time, the exhaust fumes from the cars that were still parked on the ground floor of the old barn. It wasn’t a smell that bothered her.

“You’re a weird one!” Hannah would say to her, again. “It would give me the creeps to work here!”

But, at least until Graham was old enough to go to preschool, the Sagaponack house would be fine for Ruth; it was fine for Allan and for Graham, too. They would go to Vermont for the summers, when the Hamptons were overrun—and when Allan didn’t so much mind the long drive from the city and back. (It was a four-hour drive from New York to Ruth’s house in Vermont.) Ruth would worry, then, about Allan driving such a distance at night—there were deer on the roads, and drunken drivers—but she was happily married; and, for the first time, she loved her life.

Like any new mother—especially, like any new
older
mother—Ruth worried about her baby. She’d been unprepared for how much she was going to love him. But Graham was a healthy child. Ruth’s anxieties about him were entirely the product of her imagination.

At night, for example, when she thought that Graham’s breathing was strange or different—or worse, when she couldn’t hear him breathing—she would rush from the master bedroom to the nursery, which had been her own bedroom as a child. There, Ruth would often curl up on the rug beside the crib. She kept a pillow and a quilt in Graham’s closet for such occasions. Allan would often find her on the floor of the nursery in the mornings—sound asleep beside her sleeping child.

And when Graham was no longer sleeping in a crib, and he was old enough to climb in and out of his bed by himself, Ruth would lie in the master bedroom, hearing her child’s feet padding across the floor of the master bathroom on his way to her. It was exactly how Ruth had crossed that bathroom floor as a child, padding on her way to her mother’s bed . . . no, to her
father’s
bed, more often, except for that memorable night when she’d surprised her mother with Eddie.

This
is closure, if there ever is closure, the novelist thought to herself. Something had come full circle. Here was an ending
and
a beginning. (Eddie O’Hare was Graham’s godfather. Hannah Grant was the boy’s godmother—a more responsible and reliable godmother than one might have thought.)