A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  “ ‘There’s the sound again!’ Tom whispered to his father. ‘Did you hear that?’ This time, Tim woke up, too. It was a sound like something caught inside the headboard of the bed. It was eating its way out—it was gnawing through the wood.”

  And here Ruth had interrupted her father again; her bunk bed didn’t have a headboard, and she didn’t know what “gnawing” was. Her father explained.

  “It seemed to Tom that the sound was definitely the sound of an armless, legless monster dragging its thick, wet fur. ‘It’s a monster!’ Tom cried.

  “ ‘It’s just a mouse, crawling between the walls,’ his father said.

  “Tim screamed. He didn’t know what a ‘mouse’ was. It frightened him to think of something with wet, thick fur—and no arms and no legs—crawling between the walls. How did something like that get between the walls, anyway?

  “But Tom asked his father, ‘It’s just a mouse?’

  “His father thumped against the wall with his hand and they listened to the mouse scurrying away. ‘If it comes back again,’ he said to Tom and Tim, ‘just hit the wall.’

  “ ‘A mouse crawling between the walls!’ said Tom. ‘That’s all it was!’ He quickly fell asleep, and his father went back to bed and fell asleep, too, but Tim was awake the whole night long, because he didn’t know what a mouse was and he wanted to be awake when the thing crawling between the walls came crawling back. Each time he thought he heard the mouse crawling between the walls, Tim hit the wall with his hand and the mouse scurried away—dragging its thick, wet fur and its no arms and no legs with it.

  “And that . . .” Ruth’s father said to Ruth, because he ended all his stories the same way.

  “And that . . .” Ruth said aloud with him, “that is the end of the story.”

  When her father stood up from the edge of the bathtub, Ruth heard his knees crack. She watched him stick the piece of paper back between his teeth. He turned out the light in the guest bathroom, where Eddie O’Hare would soon be spending an absurd amount of time— taking long showers until the hot water ran out, or some other kind of teenage thing.

  Ruth’s father turned out the lights in the long upstairs hall, where the photographs of Thomas and Timothy were perfectly all in a row. To Ruth, especially in that summer when she was four, there seemed to be an abundance of photographs of both Thomas and Timothy at about the age of four. She would later speculate that her mother might have preferred four-year-olds to children of any other age; Ruth would wonder if that was why her mother had left her at the end of the summer when she was four.

  When her father had tucked her back into her bunk bed, Ruth asked him, “Are there mice in this house?”

  “No, Ruthie,” he said. “There’s nothing crawling between our walls.” But she lay awake after he’d kissed her good night, and although the sound that had followed her from her dream didn’t return—at least not that same night—Ruth already knew there was something crawling between the walls of that house. Her dead brothers did not restrict their residence to those photographs. They moved about, and their presence could be detected in a variety of unseen ways.

  That same night, even before she heard the typewriter, Ruth knew that her father was still awake and that he wasn’t going back to bed. First she listened to him brushing his teeth, then she heard him getting dressed—the zip of his zipper, the clump of his shoes.

  “Daddy?” she called to him.

  “Yes, Ruthie.”

  “I want a drink of water.”

  She didn’t really want a drink of water, but it intrigued her that her father always let the water run until it was cold. Her mother took the first water that ran from the tap; it was warm and tasted like the inside of the pipe.

  “Don’t drink too much or you’ll have to pee,” her father would say, but her mother would let her drink as much as she wanted—sometimes not even watching her drink.

  When Ruth handed the cup back to her father, she said, “Tell me about Thomas and Timothy.” Her father sighed. In the last half-year, Ruth had demonstrated an unquenchable interest in the subject of death—little wonder why. From the photographs, Ruth had been able to distinguish Thomas from Timothy since she’d been three; only their pictures when they were infants occasionally confused her. And, by both her mother and her father, Ruth had been told the circumstances surrounding each of the photos—whether Mommy or Daddy had taken this one, whether Thomas or Timothy had cried. But that the boys were dead was a concept that Ruth was newly trying to grasp.

  “ Tell me,” she repeated to her father. “Are they dead?”

  “Yes, Ruthie.”

  “And dead means they’re broken ?” Ruth asked.

  “Well . . . their bodies are broken, yes,” Ted said.

  “And they’re under the ground?”

  “Their bodies are, yes.”

  “But they’re not all gone?” Ruth asked.

  “Well . . . not as long as we remember them. They’re not gone from our hearts or from our minds,” her father said.

  “They’re kind of inside us?” Ruth asked.

  “Well.” Her father left it at that, but this was more than Ruth would get, in the world of answers, from her mother—her mother would never say “dead.” And neither Ted nor Marion Cole was religious. Providing the necessary details for the concept of heaven wasn’t an option for them, although each of them, in other conversations with Ruth on this subject, had referred mysteriously to the sky and to the stars; they had implied that something of the boys lived somewhere other than with their broken bodies, under the ground.

  “So . . .” Ruth said, “tell me what dead is.”

  “Ruthie, listen to me . . .”

  “Okay,” Ruth said.

  “When you look at Thomas and Timothy in the photographs, do you remember the stories of what they were doing?” her father asked her. “In the pictures, I mean—do you remember what they were doing in the pictures?”

  “Yes,” Ruth answered, although she wasn’t sure she could remember what they were doing in every picture.

  “Well, then . . . Thomas and Timothy are alive in your imagination, ” her father told her. “When you’re dead, when your body is broken, it just means that we can’t see your body anymore—your body is gone.”

  “It’s under the ground,” Ruth corrected him.

  “We can’t see Thomas and Timothy anymore,” her father insisted, “but they are not gone from our imaginations. When we think of them, we see them there.”

  “They’re just gone from this world,” Ruth said. (For the most part, she was repeating what she’d heard before.) “They’re in another world?”

  “Yes, Ruthie.”

  “Am I going to get dead?” the four-year-old asked. “Will I get all broken?”

  “Not for a long, long time!” her father said. “ I’m going to get broken before you are, and not even I am going to get broken for a long, long time.”

  “Not for a long, long time?” the child repeated.

  “I promise, Ruthie.”

  “Okay,” Ruth said.

  They had a conversation of this kind almost every day. With her mother, Ruth had similar conversations—only shorter. Once, when Ruth had mentioned to her father that thinking about Thomas and Timothy made her sad, her father had admitted that he too was sad.

  Ruth had said: “But Mommy’s sadder.”

  “Well . . . yes,” Ted had said.

  And so Ruth lay awake in the house with something crawling between the walls, something bigger than a mouse, and she listened to the only sound that would ever succeed in comforting her—at the same time that it made her melancholic. This was before she even knew what “melancholic” meant. It was the sound of a typewriter—the sound of storytelling. In her life as a novelist, Ruth would never be converted to the computer; she would write either in longhand or with a typewriter that made the most old-fashioned noise of all the typewriters she could find.

  She did not know then (that summer ni
ght in 1958) that her father was beginning what would be her favorite of his stories. He would work on it all that summer; it would be the only piece of writing that Ted Cole’s soon-to-arrive writer’s assistant, Eddie O’Hare, would actually get to “assist” Ted with. And while none of Ted Cole’s books for children would ever enjoy the commercial success or the international renown of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, the book Ted began that night was the one Ruth would like the best. It was called, of course, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, and it would always be special to Ruth because she was its inspiration.

  Unhappy Mothers

  Ted Cole’s books for children could not be categorized with respect to the age of his audience. The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was marketed as a book to be read aloud to children between the ages of four and six; the book succeeded in that market, as did Ted’s later books. But, for example, twelve-year-olds often experienced a second appreciation of Ted Cole. These more sophisticated readers frequently wrote to the author, telling him that they used to think he was a writer for children—that is, before they discovered the deeper levels of meaning in his books. These letters, which displayed a variety of competence and incompetence in penmanship and spelling, became the virtual wallpaper in Ted’s workroom.

  He called it his “workroom”; later Ruth would wonder if this didn’t define her father’s opinion of himself more sharply than she’d perceived it as a child. The room was never called a “studio,” because her father had long ago stopped thinking of his books as art; yet a “ workroom” was more pretentious-sounding than an “office,” which it was also never called, because her father appeared to have considerable pride in his creativity. He was sensitive to the widely held belief that his books were merely a business. Later Ruth would realize that it was his ability to draw that her father valued more than his writing, although no one would have said that The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls or Ted Cole’s other books for children were successful or distinguished because of the illustrations.

  Compared to whatever magic existed in the stories themselves, which were always scary and short and lucidly written, the illustrations were rudimentary—and there were too few of them, in every publisher’s opinion. Yet Ted’s audience, those millions of children from four to fourteen, and sometimes slightly older—not to mention the millions of young mothers who were the principal buyers of Ted Cole’s books—never complained. These readers could never have guessed that Ruth’s father spent much more time drawing than he spent writing; there were hundreds of drawings for every illustration that appeared in his books. As for his storytelling, for which he was famous . . . well, Ruth was accustomed to hearing the typewriter only at night.

  Imagine poor Eddie O’Hare. In 1958, on a summery June morning, he was standing near the Pequod Avenue docks in New London, Connecticut, waiting for the ferry that would bring him to Orient Point, Long Island. Eddie was thinking about his job as a writer’s assistant, never suspecting that there would be precious little writing involved. (Eddie had never contemplated a career in the graphic arts.)

  Ted Cole was alleged to have dropped out of Harvard to attend a not very prestigious art school—truly, a design school that was chiefly populated with students of mediocre talent and modest ambitions in the commercial arts. He never gave etching or lithography a chance; he preferred just plain drawing. He used to say that darkness was his favorite color.

  Ruth would always associate her father’s physical appearance with pencils and erasers. There were black and gray smudges on his hands, and eraser crumbs were a constant accessory to his clothes. But Ted’s more permanent identifying marks—even when he was freshly bathed and cleanly dressed—were his ink-stained fingers. His choice of ink would change from book to book. “Is this a black book or a brown one, Daddy?” Ruth would ask him.

  The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was a black book—the original drawings were in India ink, Ted’s favorite black. A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound would be a brown book, which was responsible for the prevailing odor of the summer of 1958—Ted’s favorite brown was fresh squid ink, which, although more black than brown, is sepia-like in tone and has (under certain conditions) a fishy smell.

  Ted’s experiments with keeping the squid ink fresh were a strain on his already strained relationship with Marion, who learned to avoid the blackened jars in the refrigerator; they were also in the freezer, where they stood perilously close to the ice trays. (Later that same summer, Ted tried preserving the ink in the ice trays—with comedic, if harrowing, results.)

  And one of Eddie O’Hare’s earliest responsibilities—not as a writer’s assistant but as Ted Cole’s designated driver—would be to drive three quarters of an hour each way to Montauk and back; only the fish store in Montauk would save squid ink for the famous author and illustrator of children’s books. (When the fishmonger himself was beyond hearing distance, the fishmonger’s wife would repeatedly tell Eddie that she was Ted’s “biggest fan.”)

  Ruth’s father’s workroom was the only room in the house where not a single photograph of Thomas or Timothy adorned the walls. Ruth wondered if maybe her father couldn’t work or think in the sight of his departed boys.

  And unless her father was in his workroom, it was the only room in the house that was off-limits to Ruth. Was there anything that could hurt her in there? Was there an infinite number of sharp tools? There were countless (and swallowable) nibs for the pens, although Ruth was not a child who ever put strange objects in her mouth. But regardless of the dangers of her father’s workroom—if, indeed, there were dangers—it was unnecessary to impose any physical restraints on the four-year-old, nor was there need for a lock on the workroom door. The smell of squid ink was sufficient to keep the child out.

  Marion never ventured near Ted’s workroom, but Ruth would be in her twenties before she realized that it was more than squid ink that had kept her mother away. Marion didn’t want to meet, or so much as see, Ted’s models—not even the children, for the children never came to model without their mothers. It was only after the children had modeled a half-dozen times (or more), that the mothers would come to model alone. As a child, Ruth never questioned why so few of the drawings of the mothers with their children were ever printed in any of her father’s books. Of course, since his books were for children, there were never any nudes in his books, although Ted drew a lot of nudes; those young mothers accounted for literally hundreds of drawings of nudes.

  Of the nudes, her father would say: “A requisite, fundamental exercise for anyone who draws, Ruthie.” Like landscapes, she at first supposed, although Ted did few of those. Ruth used to think the reason for his relative lack of interest in landscapes might be the sameness and the extreme flatness of the land that lay like a tarmac running to the sea, or what seemed to her to be the sameness and the extreme flatness of the sea itself—not to mention the huge, frequently dull expanse of sky above.

  Her father appeared to be so unconcerned with landscapes that it later surprised her when he would complain about the new houses— the “architectural monstrosities,” he called them. Without announcement, the new houses would rise up and intrude upon the flatness of the potato fields that had once been the Coles’ principal view.

  “There’s no justification for a building of such experimental ugliness as that,” Ted would pronounce over dinner to anyone who’d listen. “We’re not at war. There’s no need to construct a deterrent for parachutists.” But her father’s complaint grew stale; the summer people’s architecture in that part of the world called the Hamptons was not of comparable interest—to either Ruth or her father—as the more abiding nudes.

  Why young married women? Why all these young mothers ? When she was in college, Ruth was in the habit of asking her father more direct questions than at any other time in her life. It was also when she was in college that a troubling thought first occurred to her. Who else would be his models, or, more briefly, his lovers? Who else was he always
meeting? The young mothers were the ones who recognized him and approached him, of course.

  “Mr. Cole? I know you—you’re Ted Cole! I just wanted to say, because my daughter is too shy, that you’re my daughter’s favorite author. You wrote her absolutely best-loved book. . . .” And then the reluctant daughter (or the embarrassed son) would be pushed forward to shake Ted’s hand. If Ted was attracted to the mother, he would suggest that the child, together with the mother, might like to model for him— maybe for the next book. (The subject of the mother posing alone, and nude, would be broached at a later time.)

  “But they’re usually married women, Daddy,” Ruth would say.

  “Yes . . . I guess that’s why they’re so unhappy, Ruthie.”

  “If you cared about your nudes—I mean the drawings —you would have chosen professional models,” Ruth said to him. “But I guess you always cared more for the women themselves than for your nudes.”

  “This is a difficult thing for a father to explain to his daughter, Ruthie. But . . . if nakedness—I mean the feeling of nakedness—is what a nude must convey, there is no nakedness that compares to what it feels like to be naked in front of someone for the first time.”

  “So much for professional models,” Ruth replied. “Jesus, Daddy, do you have to?” By then she knew, of course, that he didn’t care enough about his nudes, or his portraits of the mothers with their children, to keep them; he didn’t sell them privately or give them to his gallery, either. When the affair was over—and it was usually over quickly—Ted Cole would give the accumulated drawings to the young mother of the moment. And Ruth used to ask herself: If the young mothers were, generally, so unhappily married—or just plain unhappy—did the gift of art make them, at least momentarily, happier? But her father would never have called what he did “art,” nor did he ever refer to himself as an artist. Ted didn’t call himself a writer, either.