A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Eddie did not open or read Ted’s mail, and most of the letters that Eddie retyped for Ted were Ted’s replies to children. Ted would write to the mothers himself. Eddie never saw what the mothers wrote to Ted, or Ted’s responses to them. (When Ruth would hear her father’s typewriter at night— only at night—what she was hearing, more often than a children’s-book-in-progress, was a letter to a young mother.)

  The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child. Notwithstanding that the four-year-old Ruth would witness her mother being mounted from behind by a sixteen-year-old boy, Ruth’s parents would never raise their voices in anger toward, or in hatred of, each other—nor would her mother or her father ever speak truly ill of the other to Ruth. In this aspect of their destroyed marriage, Ted and Marion were models of decent behavior. Never mind that the arrangements concerning the rental house were as seedy as the unfortunate dwelling itself. Ruth never had to inhabit that house.

  In the real estate parlance of the Hamptons in 1958, it was a socalled carriage house; in reality, it was an airless one-bedroom apartment that had been hastily assembled and cheaply furnished over a two-car garage. It was on Bridge Lane in Bridgehampton—not more than two miles from the Coles’ house on Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack—and, by night, it sufficed as a place for Ted or Marion to sleep far enough away from the other. By day, it was where the writer’s assistant worked.

  The kitchen of the carriage house was never used for cooking; the kitchen table—there was no dining room—was stacked with unanswered mail or letters-in-progress. It was Eddie’s desk by day, and Ted took his turn at that typewriter on the nights he stayed there. The kitchen was supplied with all sorts of booze, and with coffee and tea— period. The living room, which was simply an extension of the kitchen, had a TV and a couch, where Ted would periodically pass out while watching a baseball game; he never turned on the television unless there was a ball game or a boxing match. Marion, if she couldn’t sleep, would watch late-night movies.

  The bedroom closet contained nothing but an emergency ration of Ted’s and Marion’s clothes. The bedroom was never dark enough; there was an uncurtained skylight, which often leaked. Marion—both to keep out the light and to restrain the leak—tacked a towel over the skylight, but when Ted stayed there, he took the towel down. Without the skylight, he might not have known when to get up; there was no clock, and Ted often went to bed without knowing when or where he’d taken off his watch.

  The same maid who cleaned the Coles’ house would stop at the carriage house, too, but only to vacuum it and change the linen. Maybe because the carriage house was within smelling distance of the bridge where the crabbers fished for crabs—usually with raw chicken parts for bait—the one-bedroom apartment had a permanent odor of poultry and brine. And because the landlord used the two-car garage for his cars, Ted and Marion and Eddie would all comment on the permanence with which the odor of motor oil and gasoline lingered in the air.

  If anything improved the place, albeit slightly, it was the few photographs of Thomas and Timothy that Marion had brought along. She’d taken the photos from Eddie’s guest bedroom in the Coles’ house, and from the adjoining guest bathroom, which was also his. (Eddie couldn’t have known that the small number of picture hooks left in the bare walls was a harbinger of the greater number of picture hooks that would soon be exposed. Nor could he have predicted the many, many years he would be haunted by the image of the noticeably darker wallpaper where the photographs of the dead boys had been hung and then removed.)

  There were still some photographs of Thomas and Timothy left in Eddie’s guest bedroom and bathroom; he looked at them often. There was one with Marion that he looked at the most. In the photo, which had been taken in the morning sunlight in a hotel room in Paris, Marion is lying in an old-fashioned feather bed; she looks tousled and sleepy, and happy. Beside her head on the pillow is a child’s bare foot— with only a partial view of the child’s leg, in pajamas, disappearing under the bedcovers. Far away, at the other end of the bed, is another bare foot—logically belonging to a second child, not only because of the sizable distance between the bare feet but also because of a different pair of pajamas on this second leg.

  Eddie could not have known that the hotel room was in Paris—it was in the once-charming Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, where the Coles stayed when Ted was promoting the French translation of The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls . Nevertheless Eddie recognized that there was something foreign, probably European, about the bed and the surrounding furnishings. Eddie also assumed that the bare feet belonged to Thomas and Timothy, and that Ted had taken the photograph.

  There are Marion’s bare shoulders—only the shoulder straps of her slip or camisole are showing—and one of her bare arms. A partial view of its armpit suggested that Marion kept her armpits cleanly shaven. Marion must have been twelve years younger in the photograph—still in her twenties, although she looked much the same to Eddie now. (Only not so happy.) Maybe it was the effect of the morning sunlight slanting across the pillows of the bed that made her hair appear more blond.

  Like all the other photographs of Thomas and Timothy, it was an eight-by-ten enlargement that had been expensively matted and framed under glass. By removing the photograph from the wall, Eddie could prop it on the chair beside his bed in such a way that Marion was facing him as he lay on the bed and masturbated. To enhance the illusion that her smile was meant for him, Eddie had only to remove from his mind the children’s bare feet. The best way to accomplish this was to remove their bare feet from his sight as well; two scraps of notepaper, which he affixed to the glass with Scotch tape, did the trick.

  This activity had become his nightly ritual when, one night, Eddie was interrupted. Just as he’d begun to beat off, there was a knock on the bedroom door, which had no lock, and Ted said, “Eddie? Are you awake? I saw the light. May we come in?”

  Eddie, understandably, scrambled. He jumped into a still-wet and exceedingly clammy bathing suit that had been drying on the arm of the bedside chair, and he hastily rushed into the bathroom with the photograph, which he crookedly returned to its place on the bathroom wall. “Coming!” he cried. Only as he opened the door did he remember the two scraps of notepaper that were still taped to the glass, hiding from view the existence of Thomas’s and Timothy’s feet. And he’d left the door to the bathroom open. It was too late to do anything about it; Ted, with Ruth in his arms, was already standing in the doorway of the guest bedroom.

  “Ruth had a dream,” her father said. “Didn’t you, Ruthie?”

  “Yes,” the child said. “It wasn’t very nice.”

  “She wanted to be sure that one of the photographs was still here. I know it isn’t one that her mommy took to the other house,” Ted explained.

  “Oh,” said Eddie, who could feel the child staring right through him.

  “There’s a story to every picture,” Ted told Eddie. “Ruth knows all the stories—don’t you, Ruthie?”

  “Yes,” the child said again. “There it is!” the four-year-old cried, pointing to the photograph that hung above the night table, near Eddie’s rumpled bed. The bedside chair, which had been pulled close to the bed (for Eddie’s purposes), was not where it should have been; Ted, holding Ruth, had to step awkwardly around it in order to look more closely at the photograph.

  In the picture, Timothy, who has skinned his knee, is sitting on the countertop in a large kitchen. Thomas, demonstrating a clinical interest in his brother’s injury, is standing beside him, a roll of gauze in one hand, a roll of adhesive tape in the other, playing doctor to the bloody knee. Maybe Timothy (at the time) was a year older than Ruth. Maybe Thomas was seven.

  “His knee is bleeding, but he’s going to be all right?” Ruth asked her father.

  “He’s going to be fine—he just needs a bandage,” Ted told the child.

  “No stitch
es? No needle?” Ruth asked.

  “No, Ruthie. Just a bandage.”

  “He’s just a little broken, but he’s not going to die—right?” Ruth asked.

  “Right,” Ted said.

  “Not yet,” the four-year-old added.

  “That’s right, Ruthie.”

  “There’s just a little blood,” Ruth observed.

  “Ruth cut herself today,” Ted explained to Eddie. He showed Eddie the Band-Aid on the child’s heel. “She stepped on a shell at the beach. And then she had a dream. . . .”

  Ruth, satisfied with the skinned-knee story and with that photograph, was now looking over her father’s shoulder; something in the bathroom had caught her attention.

  “Where are the feet?” the four-year-old asked.

  “ What feet, Ruthie?”

  Eddie was already moving to block their view of the bathroom.

  “What did you did?” Ruth asked Eddie. “What happened to the feet?”

  “Ruthie, what are you talking about?” Ted asked. He was drunk; but even drunk, Ted was reasonably steady on his feet.

  Ruth pointed at Eddie. “Feet!” she said crossly.

  “Ruthie—don’t be rude!” Ted told her.

  “Is pointing rude?” the child asked.

  “You know it is,” her father replied. “I’m sorry to bother you, Eddie. We have this habit of showing Ruth the photographs when she wants to see them. But, not wanting to intrude upon your privacy . . . she hasn’t seen much of them lately.”

  “You can come see the pictures whenever you want,” Eddie said to the child, who kept scowling at him.

  They were in the hall outside Eddie’s bedroom when Ted said, “Say ‘Good night, Eddie’—okay, Ruthie?”

  “Where are the feet?” the four-year-old repeated to Eddie. She kept staring right through him. “What did you did?”

  They went off down the hall with her father saying, “I’m surprised at you, Ruthie. It’s not like you to be rude.”

  “I’m not rude,” Ruth said crossly.

  “Well.” That was all Eddie heard Ted say. Naturally, after they left, Eddie went straight to the bathroom and removed the scraps of notepaper from the dead boys’ feet; with a wet washcloth he rubbed any trace of the Scotch tape off the glass.

  For the first month of that summer, Eddie O’Hare would be a masturbating machine, but he would never again take Marion’s photograph off the bathroom wall—nor would he again consider concealing Thomas’s and Timothy’s feet. Instead, he masturbated almost every morning in the carriage house, where he thought he would not be interrupted—or caught in the act.

  On the mornings after Marion had slept there, Eddie was pleased to discover that her scent was still on the pillows of the unmade bed. Other mornings, the feel and smell of some article of her clothing would sufficiently arouse him. In the closet, Marion kept a slip or some sort of nightie that she slept in; there was a drawer with her bras and panties. Eddie kept hoping that she would leave her pink cashmere cardigan in the closet, that one she’d been wearing when he first met her; he often dreamed of her in it. But the cheap apartment above the two-car garage had no fans, and the stifling heat of the place was unrelieved by any worthwhile cross ventilation. While the Coles’ house in Sagaponack was usually cool and breezy even in the warmest weather, the rental house in Bridgehampton was claustrophobic and hot. It was too much for Eddie to hope that Marion would ever have any need of that pink cashmere cardigan there.

  Notwithstanding the drives to Montauk and back for the evil-smelling squid ink, Eddie’s job as a writer’s assistant amounted to an easy nine-to-five day, for which Ted Cole paid him fifty dollars a week. Eddie charged the gas for Ted’s car, which was not nearly as much fun to drive as Marion’s Mercedes. Ted’s ’57 Chevy was black and white, which perhaps reflected the graphic artist’s narrow range of interests.

  In the evenings, around five or six, Eddie often went to the beach to swim—or else to run, which he did infrequently and halfheartedly. Sometimes the surf casters were fishing; they raced their trucks along the beach, chasing after the schools of fish. Driven ashore by the bigger fish, minnows were flopping on the wet, hard-packed sand—yet another reason why Eddie had little interest in running there.

  Every evening, with Ted’s permission, Eddie would drive to East Hampton or Southampton to see a movie or just eat a hamburger. He paid for the movies (and for everything he ate) out of the salary that Ted gave him, and he still saved more than twenty dollars every week. One evening, at a movie in Southampton, he saw Marion.

  She was alone in the audience, and she was wearing the pink cashmere cardigan. It was not a night when it was her turn to stay in the carriage house, so it was not likely that the pink cashmere cardigan would end up in the closet of the seedy apartment above the two-car garage. Yet after that sighting of Marion alone, Eddie would look for her car in both Southampton and East Hampton. Although he spotted it once or twice, he never saw Marion in a movie theater again.

  She went out nearly every evening; she rarely ate with Ruth and she never cooked for herself. Eddie presumed that if Marion was going out to dinner, she was eating in a better class of restaurant than he usually chose. He also knew that if he started looking for her in the good restaurants, his fifty dollars per week wouldn’t last long.

  As for how Ted spent his nights, it was clear only that he couldn’t drive. He kept a bicycle at the rental house, but Eddie had never seen him ride it. Then one night, when Marion was out, the phone rang in the Coles’ house and the nighttime nanny answered; the caller was the bartender of a bar and restaurant in Bridgehampton, where (the bartender said) Mr. Cole ate and drank almost every night. On this particular night, Mr. Cole had looked atypically unsteady on his bicycle when he’d left. The bartender was calling to express his hope that Mr. Cole was now safe at home.

  Eddie drove to Bridgehampton and followed the route he guessed Ted would take to the rental house. Sure enough, there was Ted, pedaling at first in the middle of Ocean Road, and then—as Eddie’s headlights illuminated him—veering off the road onto the soft shoulder. Eddie stopped the car and asked if he wanted a ride. Ted had less than a half-mile to go.

  “I have a ride!” Ted told him, waving him on.

  And one morning, after Ted had slept in the carriage house, there was another woman’s smell on the bedroom pillows; it was much stronger than Marion’s scent. So he has another woman! Eddie thought, not yet knowing Ted’s pattern with the young mothers. (The pretty young mother of the moment came to model three mornings a week— at first with her child, a little boy, but then alone.)

  In explanation of his and Marion’s separation, all Ted had said to Eddie was that it was unfortunate that his coming to work had to coincide with “such a sad time in such a long marriage.” Although the statement implied that the so-called sad time might pass, the more the boy saw of the distance that Ted and Marion maintained, the more he believed that the marriage was finished. Besides, Ted had claimed only that it was a “long” marriage; he hadn’t said the marriage was ever good or happy.

  Yet, if only in the many photographs of Thomas and Timothy, Eddie saw that something had been both good and happy, and that the Coles had once had friends. There were pictures of dinner parties with other families, couples with children; Thomas and Timothy had had birthday parties with other children, too. Although Marion and Ted made infrequent appearances in the photographs—Thomas and Timothy (even if only their feet) were the main subject of every photo— there was sufficient evidence that Ted and Marion had once been happy, if not necessarily happy with each other. Even if their marriage had never been good, Ted and Marion had had a multitude of good times with their boys.

  Eddie O’Hare could not personally remember as many good times as he saw excessively depicted in those photographs. But what had happened to Ted and Marion’s friends? Eddie wondered. Excepting the nannies, and the models (or model), there was never anyone around.

  If, as a four-year-o
ld, Ruth Cole already understood that Thomas and Timothy now inhabited another world, as far as Eddie was concerned, those boys had come from another world as well. They’d been loved.

  Whatever Ruth was learning to do, she was learning it from her nannies; for the most part, the nannies had failed to impress Eddie. The first one was a local girl with a thuggish-looking boyfriend who was a local, too—or so Eddie, from his Exonian perspective, assumed. The boyfriend was a lifeguard who possessed the essential imperviousness to boredom that all lifeguards must have. The thug dropped the nanny off every morning, glowering at Eddie if he chanced to see him. This was the nanny who regularly took Ruth to the beach, where the lifeguard was tanning himself.

  In the first month of that summer, Marion, who usually drove the nanny and Ruth to the beach and later picked them up, asked Eddie to perform the chore only once or twice. The nanny had not spoken to him, and Ruth—to Eddie’s shame—had asked him (once again), “Where are the feet?”

  The afternoon nanny was a college girl who drove her own car. Her name was Alice, and she was too superior to Eddie to speak to him— except to say that she’d once known someone who’d gone to Exeter. Naturally he’d graduated from the academy before Eddie had started, and Alice knew only his first name, which was either Chickie or Chuckie.

  “Probably a nickname,” Eddie had said stupidly.

  Alice had sighed and looked pityingly upon him. Eddie feared that he had inherited his father’s penchant for saying the obvious—and that he would soon be spontaneously dubbed with a name like Minty, which would stick to him for the rest of his life.

  The college-girl nanny also had a summer job in one of the restaurants in the Hamptons, but it was not a place where Eddie ever ate. She was pretty, too, so that Eddie could never look at her without feeling ashamed.

  The nighttime nanny was a married woman whose husband had a daytime job. She sometimes brought her two kids, who were older than Ruth but played respectfully with Ruth’s innumerable toys—mostly dolls and dollhouses, which were largely ignored by the four-year-old. Ruth preferred to draw, or to have stories read to her. She had a professional artist’s easel in her nursery; the easel had the legs sawed off. The only doll Ruth was attached to was a doll missing a head.