A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Of the three nannies, the nighttime nanny was the only one who was friendly to Eddie, but Eddie went out every night. And when he was home, he tended to stay in his room. His guest bedroom and bathroom were at the far end of the long upstairs hall; when Eddie wanted to write letters to his mom and dad, or just write in his notebooks, he was almost always left alone there. In his letters home, he neglected to tell his parents that Ted and Marion were separated for the summer—not to mention that he regularly masturbated to Marion’s scent while clinging to her slinky clothes.

  On the morning when Marion caught Eddie in the act of masturbating, Eddie had elaborately arranged upon the bed a veritable reassembly of Marion herself. There was a peach-colored blouse of a thin, summer-weight material—suitable for the stifling carriage house— and a bra of a matching color. Eddie had left the blouse unbuttoned. The bra, which was positioned roughly where one would expect a bra to be, was partially exposed but still caught up in the blouse—as if Marion were in this specific stage of undress. This gave to her clothes the appearance of passion, or at least of haste. Her panties, which were also peach-colored, were placed the right way (waist up, crotch down) and they were the correct distance from the bra—that is, if Marion had actually been wearing the bra and the panties. Eddie, who was naked— and who always masturbated by rubbing his penis with his left hand against the inside of his right thigh—had pressed his face into the open blouse and bra. With his right hand, he stroked the unimaginable silky softness of Marion’s panties.

  Marion needed only a fraction of a second to realize that Eddie was naked, and to recognize what he was doing—and with what visual and tactile aids!—but when Eddie first spotted her, she was neither entering nor leaving the bedroom. She was standing as still as an apparition of herself, which Eddie must have hoped she was; also, it was not exactly Marion herself but rather her reflection in the bedroom mirror that Eddie saw first. Marion, who could see Eddie in the mirror and Eddie himself, had been given the unique opportunity of seeing two of him masturbate at once.

  She was gone from the doorway as quickly as she’d appeared. Eddie, who had not yet ejaculated, knew not only that she’d seen him, but also that, in a split second, she’d understood everything about him.

  “I’m sorry, Eddie,” Marion was saying from the kitchen, as he struggled to put away her clothes. “I should have knocked.”

  When he’d dressed himself, he still didn’t dare leave the bedroom. He half-expected to hear her footsteps on the stairs down to the garage—or, more mercifully, to hear her Mercedes driving away. Instead she was waiting for him. And since he hadn’t heard her footsteps come up the stairs from the garage, he knew that he must have been moaning.

  “Eddie, it’s my fault,” Marion was saying. “I’m not angry. I’m just embarrassed.”

  “I’m embarrassed, too,” he mumbled from the bedroom.

  “It’s all right—it’s natural, ” Marion said. “I know boys your age. . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  When he finally got up his nerve to go to her, she was sitting on the couch. “Come here—at least look at me!” she said, but he stood frozen, staring at his feet. “Eddie, it’s funny . Let’s call it funny and leave it at that.”

  “It’s funny,” he said miserably.

  “Eddie! Come here!” she ordered.

  He shuffled slowly in her direction, his eyes still downcast.

  “Sit!” she commanded, but the best he could do was perch rigidly at the far end of the couch—away from her. “No, here .” She patted the couch between them. He couldn’t move.

  “Eddie, Eddie—I know boys your age,” she said again. “It’s what boys your age do, isn’t it? Can you imagine not doing it?” she asked him.

  “No,” he whispered. He started to cry—he couldn’t stop.

  “Oh, don’t cry !” Marion insisted. She never cried now—she had cried herself out.

  Then Marion was sitting so close to him that he felt the couch cave in, and he found himself leaning against her. He kept crying while she talked and talked. “Eddie, listen to me, please, ” she said. “I thought one of Ted’s women was wearing my clothes—sometimes my clothes looked wrinkled, or they were on the wrong hangers. But it was you, and you were actually being nice —you even folded my underwear! Or you tried to. I never fold my panties or my bras. I knew Ted wasn’t touching them,” she added, while Eddie wept. “Oh, Eddie—I’m flattered . Really, I am ! It’s not been the best summer—I’m happy to know that someone is thinking about me.”

  She paused; she seemed suddenly more embarrassed than Eddie. She quickly said: “Oh, I don’t mean to assume that you were thinking about me. Goodness, that’s rather conceited of me, isn’t it? Maybe it was just my clothes. I’m still flattered, even if it was just my clothes. You probably have lots of girls to think about . . .”

  “I think about you !” Eddie blurted out. “Only you.”

  “Then don’t be embarrassed,” Marion said. “You’ve made an old lady happy !”

  “You’re not an old lady!” he cried.

  “You’re making me happier and happier, Eddie.” She stood up quickly, as if she were about to go. At last he dared to look at her. When she saw his expression, she said, “Be careful how you feel about me, Eddie. I mean, take care of yourself,” she warned him.

  “I love you,” he said bravely.

  She sat down beside him, as urgently as if he’d begun to cry again. “ Don’t love me, Eddie,” she said, with more gravity than he’d expected. “Just think about my clothes . Clothes can’t hurt you.” Leaning closer to him, but not flirtatiously, she said: “Tell me. Is there something you especially like—I mean something that I wear ?” He stared at her in such a way that she repeated, “Just think about my clothes, Eddie.”

  “What you were wearing when I met you,” Eddie told her.

  “Goodness!” Marion said. “I don’t remember . . .”

  “A pink sweater—it buttons up the front.”

  “ That old thing!” Marion shrieked. She was on the verge of laughter; Eddie realized that he’d never seen her laugh. He was totally absorbed by her. If at first he hadn’t been able to look at her, now he couldn’t stop looking. “Well, if that’s what you like,” Marion was saying, “maybe I’ll surprise you!” She stood up again—again quickly. Now he felt like crying because he could see that she was going to go. By the door to the stairs, she took a tougher tone. “Not so serious, Eddie—not so serious.”

  “I love you,” he repeated.

  “Don’t,” she reminded him. Needless to say, he would have a distracted day.

  And not long after their encounter, he returned one night from a movie in Southampton to find her standing in his bedroom. The nighttime nanny had gone home. He knew instantly, with a broken heart, that she was not there to seduce him. She began talking about some of the photographs in his guest bedroom and bathroom; she was sorry to intrude, but—out of respect for his privacy—she didn’t allow herself to come in his room and look at the pictures unless he was out. She had been thinking about one of the pictures in particular—she wouldn’t tell him which one—and she had stayed to look at it a little longer than she’d intended.

  When she said good night, and left him, he was more miserable than he’d thought humanly possible. But just before he went to bed, he realized that she’d folded his stray clothes. She’d also taken a towel from its customary position on the shower-curtain rod, and she’d returned it, neatly, to the towel rack, where it belonged. Finally, although it was the most obvious, Eddie noticed that his bed was made. He never made it—nor, at least at the rental house, did Marion ever make her own!

  Two mornings later, after he deposited the mail on the kitchen table of the carriage house, he started to make coffee. While the coffee was brewing, he entered the bedroom. At first he thought it was Marion on the bed, but it was only her pink cashmere cardigan. ( Only ! ) She had left the buttons unbuttoned and the long sleeves of the sweater pulled back,
as if an invisible woman in the cardigan had clasped her invisible hands behind her invisible head. Where the buttons were open, a bra showed itself; it was a more seductive display than any arrangement of her clothing Eddie had made. The bra was white—as were the panties, which Marion had placed exactly where Eddie liked them.

  Come Hither . . .

  In that summer of ’58, Ted Cole’s young mother of the moment—the furtive Mrs. Vaughn—was small and dark and feral-looking. For a month, all Eddie had seen of her was in Ted’s drawings. And Eddie had seen only those drawings where Mrs. Vaughn was posed with her son, who was also small and dark and feral-looking, which strongly suggested to Eddie that the two of them might be inclined to bite people. The elfin features of Mrs. Vaughn’s face and her too-youthful pixie haircut could not conceal something violent, or at least unstable, in the young mother’s temperament. And her son seemed on the verge of spitting and hissing like a cornered cat—maybe he didn’t like to pose.

  When Mrs. Vaughn first came to model alone, her movements—from her car to the Coles’ house, and back to her car again—were especially furtive. She shot a glance toward any sound and in every direction like an animal anticipating an attack. Mrs. Vaughn was on the lookout for Marion, of course, but Eddie, who didn’t yet know that Mrs. Vaughn was posing nude —not to mention that it was Mrs. Vaughn’s strong smell that he ( and Marion) had detected on the pillows in the carriage-house apartment—mistakenly concluded that the little woman was nervous to the point of derangement.

  Besides, Eddie was too consumed by his thoughts of Marion to pay much attention to Mrs. Vaughn. Although Marion had not repeated the mischief of creating that replica of herself so alluringly arranged on the bed in the rental house, Eddie’s own manipulations of Marion’s pink cashmere cardigan, which was redolent of her delectable scent, continued to satisfy the sixteen-year-old to a degree that he had never been satisfied before.

  Eddie O’Hare inhabited a kind of masturbatory heaven. He should have stayed there—he should have taken up permanent residence. As Eddie would soon discover, to have more of Marion than what he already possessed would not content him. But Marion was in control of their relationship; if anything more was to happen between them, it would happen only upon Marion’s initiation.

  It began by her taking him out to dinner. She drove, without asking him if he wanted to drive. To his surprise, Eddie was grateful to his father for insisting that he pack some dress shirts and ties and an “ all-purpose” sports jacket. But when Marion saw him in his traditional Exeter uniform, she told him that he could dispense with either the tie or the jacket—where they were going, he didn’t need both. The restaurant, in East Hampton, was less fancy than Eddie had expected, and it was clear that the waiters were used to seeing Marion there; they kept bringing her wine—she had three glasses—without her having to ask.

  She was more talkative than Eddie had known her to be. “I was already pregnant with Thomas when I married Ted—when I was only a year older than you are,” she told him. (The difference in their ages was a recurrent theme for her.) “When you were born, I was twenty-three. When you’re my age, I’ll be sixty-two,” she went on. And twice she made a reference to her gift to him: the pink cashmere cardigan. “How did you like my little surprise?” she asked.

  “Very much!” he stammered.

  Quickly changing the subject, she told him that Ted had not really dropped out of Harvard. He’d been asked to take a leave of absence— “for ‘nonperformance,’ I think he called it,” Marion said.

  On every book jacket, in the part about the author, it always stated that Ted Cole was a Harvard dropout. Apparently this half-truth pleased him: it conveyed that he had been smart enough to get into Harvard and original enough not to care about staying there. “But the truth is, he was just lazy,” Marion said. “He never wanted to work very hard.” After a pause, she asked Eddie: “And how’s the work going for you?”

  “There’s not much to do,” he confided to her.

  “No, I can’t imagine that there is,” she replied. “Ted hired you because he needed a driver.”

  Marion had not finished high school when she met Ted and he got her pregnant. But over the years, when Thomas and Timothy were growing up, she had passed a high-school equivalency exam; and, on various college campuses around New England, she’d completed courses part-time. It had taken ten years for her to graduate, from the University of New Hampshire in 1952—only a year before her sons were killed. She took mostly literature and history courses, many more than were necessary for a college degree; her unwillingness to enroll in the other courses that were required had delayed her getting a diploma. “Finally,” she told Eddie, “I wanted a college degree only because Ted didn’t have one.”

  Thomas and Timothy had been proud of her for graduating. “I was just getting ready to be a writer when they died,” Marion confided to Eddie. “That finished it.”

  “You were a writer ?” Eddie asked her. “Why’d you stop?”

  She told him that she couldn’t keep turning to her innermost thoughts when all she thought about was the death of her boys; she couldn’t allow herself to imagine freely, because her imagination would inevitably lead her to Thomas and Timothy. “And to think that I used to like to be alone with my thoughts,” she told Eddie. Marion doubted Ted had ever liked to be alone with his. “That’s why he keeps his stories so short, and they’re for children. That’s why he draws and draws and draws.”

  Eddie, not realizing how sick he had become of hamburgers, ate an enormous meal.

  “Not even love can daunt the appetite of a sixteen-year-old boy!” Marion observed. Eddie blushed; he wasn’t supposed to say how much he loved her. She hadn’t liked that.

  And then she told him that when she’d displayed her pink cashmere cardigan on the bed for him, and especially as she’d chosen the accompanying bra and panties and was arranging these in their respective places—“for the imagined act,” as she put it—she had been aware that this was her first creative impulse since the death of her sons; it had also been her first and only moment of what she called “pure fun.” The alleged purity of such fun is debatable, but Eddie would never have questioned the sincerity of Marion’s intentions; it hurt his feelings only slightly that what was love to him was merely “fun” for her. Even at sixteen, he should have better understood the forewarning she was giving him.

  When Marion had met Ted, Ted introduced himself as a “recent” Harvard dropout who was writing a novel; in truth, he’d been out of Harvard for four years. He was taking courses in a Boston art school. He’d always known how to draw—he called himself “self-taught.” (The courses at the art school were not as interesting to him as the models.)

  In the first year they were married, Ted had gone to work for a lithographer; he’d instantly hated the job. “Ted would have hated any job,” Marion told Eddie. Ted had learned to hate lithography, too; nor was he interested in etching. (“I’m not a copper or stone sort of man,” he’d told Marion.)

  Ted Cole published his first novel in 1937, when Thomas was a year old and Marion was not yet pregnant with Timothy. The reviews were mostly favorable, and the sales were well above average for a first novel. Ted and Marion decided to have a second child. The reviews of the next novel—in ’39, a year after Timothy was born—were neither favorable nor numerous; the second book sold only half as many copies as the first. Ted’s third novel, which was published in 1941—“a year before you were born,” Marion reminded Eddie—was hardly reviewed at all, and only un favorably. The sales were so low that Ted’s publisher refused to tell him the final figures. And then, in ’42—when Thomas and Timothy were six and four— The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls was published. The war would delay the numerous foreign translations, but even before them it was clear that Ted Cole never had to hate a job or write a novel again.

  “Tell me,” Marion asked Eddie. “Does it give you the shivers to know that you and The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls
were born in the same year?”

  “It does,” Eddie admitted to her.

  But why so many college towns? (The Coles had lived all over New England.)

  Ted’s sexual pattern was behaviorally messy. Ted had told Marion that college and university towns were the best places to bring up children. The quality of the local schools was generally high; the community was stimulated by the cultural activities and the sporting events on campus. In addition, Marion could continue her education. And socially, Ted told her, the faculty families would be good company; at first Marion had not realized how many young mothers could be counted among those faculty wives.

  Ted, who eschewed anything resembling a real job on the faculty— also, he wasn’t qualified for one—nevertheless gave a lecture every semester on the art of writing and drawing for children; often these lectures were sponsored jointly by the Department of Fine Arts and the English Department. Ted would always be the first to say that the process of creating a book for children was not an art, in his humble opinion; he preferred to call it a craft.

  But Ted’s truest “craft,” Marion observed, was his systematic discovery and seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of the young mothers among the faculty wives; an occasional student would fall prey to Ted, too, but the young mothers were more vulnerable game.

  It is not unusual for love affairs to end bitterly, and as the marriages of the more unfortunate of these faculty wives were already frail, it was not surprising that many couples were permanently parted by Ted’s amorous adventures.

  “And that’s why we were always moving,” Marion told Eddie.

  In the college and university towns, they easily found houses to rent; there were always faculty on leave and there was a relatively high rate of divorce. The Coles’ only home of any permanence had been a farmhouse in New Hampshire that they used for school vacations, ski trips, and a month or two every summer. The house had been in Marion’s family since she could remember.