A Widow for One Year (76 page)

Poor Eddie O’Hare! What had befallen him was most unkind: the bewildering illusion that he was now in love with the daughter of the only woman he’d ever loved! But who can distinguish between falling in love and
imagining
falling in love? Even
genuinely
falling in love is an act of the imagination.

“Where is Daddy
now
?” Graham began. “Is he still at the office?”

“I think he has a doctor’s appointment,” Hannah told the child. “I think he went to see the doctor because he wasn’t feeling very well.”

“Is he still cold?” the boy asked.

“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
.

As she’d written in the very first chapter of
Not for Children,
who knew when it was time for a widow to re-enter the world? There was no such thing as a widow re-entering the world “safely.”

The publication of Ruth Cole’s fourth novel,
My Last Bad Boyfriend,
was delayed until the fall of 1995, which was the earliest possible date that Ruth could conceive of making her first public appearance since her husband’s death—not that Ruth was as available as her publishers would have liked. She’d agreed to a reading at the 92nd Street Y, where she’d not read since Eddie O’Hare’s marathon introduction in 1990, but Ruth had refused to give any interviews in the U.S.—on the grounds that she was spending only one night in New York, en route to Europe, and that she
never
wanted to conduct any interviews at her home in Vermont. (Since the first of September, the Sagaponack house had been on the market.)

Hannah maintained that Ruth was crazy to isolate herself in Vermont; according to Hannah, Ruth should sell the Vermont house instead. But Allan and Ruth had agreed: Graham should grow up in Vermont.

Besides, Conchita Gomez was too old to be Graham’s principal nanny. And Eduardo was too old to be a caretaker. In Vermont, Ruth would have available babysitters close to home. Kevin Merton had three daughters of babysitting age; one of them, Amanda, was a high-school student who was permitted a limited amount of travel. (The high school had agreed that a book tour with Ruth Cole fell into the category of an educational trip; hence Ruth was taking Graham and Amanda Merton with her to New York and Europe.)

Not all of her European publishers were satisfied by Ruth’s plans to promote
My Last Bad Boyfriend
. But Ruth had fairly warned everyone: she was still in mourning, and she would go nowhere without her four-year-old son; moreover, neither her son nor his nanny should be kept out of school for longer than two weeks.

The trip Ruth planned would be as easy on herself and Graham as possible. She was flying to London on the Concorde, and she would fly back to New York from Paris—again on the Concorde. Between London and Paris, she would bring Graham and his babysitter to Amsterdam; she couldn’t
not
go to Amsterdam, she’d decided. The novel’s partial setting there—that humiliating scene in the red-light district— made the book of special interest to the Dutch; and Maarten was her favorite European publisher.

It was not Amsterdam’s fault that Ruth now dreaded going there. Surely she could promote her new novel for Maarten without visiting the red-light district. Every unoriginal journalist who interviewed her, not to mention every photographer assigned to take her picture, would insist on Ruth returning to
de Wallen
—the setting of the novel’s most notorious scene—but Ruth had resisted the lack of originality in journalists and photographers before.

And perhaps it was a form of penance that she should have to go back to Amsterdam, the novelist thought—for wasn’t her fear a form of penance? And why wouldn’t she be afraid every second she was in Amsterdam—for how could the city
not
remind her of the eternity of her hiding in Rooie’s closet? Wouldn’t the wheezing of the moleman be the background music in her sleep?
If
she could sleep . . .

In addition to Amsterdam, the only part of Ruth’s book tour that she was dreading was her one night in New York, and she was dreading that only because, once again, Eddie O’Hare was introducing her before her reading at the 92nd Street Y.

She’d unwisely chosen to stay at the Stanhope; she and Graham had not been there since Allan’s death, and Graham remembered the last place he’d seen his father better than Ruth had thought he would. They were not staying in the same two-bedroom suite, but the configuration of the rooms and the decor were strikingly similar.

“Daddy was sleeping on
this
side of the bed, Mommy on
that
side,” the boy explained to his babysitter, Amanda Merton. “The window was open,” Graham went on. “Daddy had left it open, and I was cold. I got out of my bed . . .” Here the boy stopped. Where
was
his bed? With Allan gone, Ruth hadn’t asked the hotel to provide a roll-away for Graham; there was more than enough room in her king-size bed for her and her small son. “Where’s
my
bed?” the boy now asked.

“Sweetie, you can sleep with me,” Ruth told him.

“Or you can sleep in
my
bedroom, with
me,
” Amanda offered helpfully—anything to get Graham off the subject of his father’s death.

“Okay. Fine,” Graham said in the tone of voice he used when something was wrong. “But where is Daddy
now
?” His eyes welled with tears. For half a year, or more, he hadn’t asked that question.

Oh, how
stupid
of me to bring him
here
! Ruth thought, hugging the child while he cried.

Ruth was still in the bathtub when Hannah came to the suite, bringing with her a lot of presents for Graham of the kind
not
suitable for taking on a plane to Europe: an entire village of interlocking blocks, and not just one stuffed animal, but a whole family of apes. They would have to ask the Stanhope to keep the village and the apes for them, which would make it a major inconvenience if they chose to stay in a different hotel.

But Graham seemed completely recovered from how the hotel had triggered his memory of Allan’s death. Children were like that— suddenly heartbroken, and then as quickly over it—whereas Ruth now felt resigned to the memories that being in the Stanhope evoked in
her
. She kissed Graham good night; the child was already discussing the room-service menu with Amanda when Ruth and Hannah left for Ruth’s reading.