A Widow for One Year (32 page)

The wet briefcase knocked the woman’s glasses off; she was fortunate to catch them in her lap, but she caught them too hard. She popped one of the lenses out of the frame. She looked blindly up at Eddie with a lunacy born of many disappointments and sorrows. “What you wanna be makin’ trouble for
me
for?” she asked.

The throbbing song about the truth sitting on someone’s face instantly stopped. The young black man seated across the aisle stood up, the silent boom box hugged to his chest like a boulder.

“That my mom,” the boy said. He was short—the top of his head came only to the knot in Eddie’s tie—but the boy’s neck was as big around as Eddie’s thigh, and the boy’s shoulders were twice as broad and thick as Eddie’s. “Why you makin’ trouble for my
mom
?” the powerful-looking young man asked.

Since Eddie had left the New York Athletic Club, it was the fourth mention of “trouble” that he had heard. It was why he’d never wanted to live in New York.

“I was just trying to see my stop—where I get out,” Eddie said.

“This here your stop,” the brutish boy told him, pushing the signal cord. The bus braked, throwing Eddie off balance. Again his heavy briefcase slipped off his shoulder; this time it hit no one, because Eddie clutched it in both his hands. “This here where you get out,” the squat young man said. His mother, and several surrounding passengers, agreed.

Oh, well, Eddie thought as he got off the bus—maybe it was
almost
Ninety-second Street. (It was Eighty-first.) He heard someone say “Good riddance!” just before the bus moved on.

Minutes later, Eddie ran along Eighty-ninth Street, crossing to the east side of Park Avenue, where he spotted an available taxi. Without thinking that he was now only three uptown blocks and one crosstown block from his destination, Eddie hailed the cab; he got into the taxi and told the cabbie where to go.

“Ninety-second and
Lex
?” the taxi driver said. “Christ, you shoulda
walked
—you’re already wet!”

“But I’m late,” Eddie lamely replied.

“Everyone’s late,” the cabbie told him. The fare was so small, Eddie tried to compensate the taxi driver by giving him his entire ball of change.

“Christ!” the cabbie shouted. “What do I want with all that?”

At least he didn’t say “trouble,” Eddie thought, stuffing the coins into his jacket pocket. All the bills in Eddie’s wallet were wet; the taxi driver disapproved of them, too.

“You’re worse than late,
and
wet,” the driver told Eddie. “You’re fuckin’
trouble
.”

“Thank you,” Eddie said. (In one of his more philosophical moments, Minty O’Hare had told his son to never look down his nose at a compliment—there might not be all that many.)

Thus did a muddied and dripping Eddie O’Hare present himself to a young woman taking tickets in the crowded lobby of the 92nd Street Y. “I’m here for the reading. I know I’m a little late. . . .” Eddie began.

“Where’s your ticket?” the girl asked him. “We’re sold out. We’ve been sold out for weeks.”

Sold out !
Eddie had rarely seen a sell-out crowd at the Kaufman Concert Hall. He’d heard several famous authors read there; he’d even introduced a couple of them. When Eddie had given a reading in the concert hall, of course, he had never read alone; only well-known writers, like Ruth Cole, read alone. The last time Eddie had read there, it had been billed as An Evening of Novels of Manners—or maybe it was An Evening of
Comic
Novels of Manners. Or Comic Manners? All Eddie could remember was that the other two novelists who read with him had been funnier than
he
had been.

“Uh . . .” Eddie said to the girl taking tickets, “I don’t need a ticket because I’m the introducer.” He was fishing through his drenched briefcase for the copy of
Sixty Times
that he’d inscribed to Ruth. He wanted to show the girl his jacket photo, to prove he was really who he said he was.

“You’re the
what
?” the girl said. Then she saw the sodden book that he held out to her.

Sixty Times
A NOVEL
Ed O’Hare

(It was only on his books that Eddie finally got to be called Ed. His father still called him Edward, and everyone else called him Eddie. Even in his not-so-good reviews, Eddie was pleased when he was referred to as just plain Ed O’Hare.)

“I’m the
introducer,
” Eddie repeated to the girl taking tickets. “I’m Ed O’Hare.”

“Oh, my
Gawd
!” the girl cried. “You’re Eddie O’Hare! They’ve been waiting and
waiting
for you. You’re very late.”

“I’m sorry . . .” he began, but the girl was already pulling him through the crowd.

Sold out !
Eddie was thinking. What a mob it was. And how
young
they were. Most of them looked as if they were still in college. It wasn’t the typical audience at the Y, although Eddie began to see that the usual people were also there. In Eddie’s estimation, the “usual people” were a grave-looking literary crowd, frowning in advance of what they were about to hear. It was not Eddie O’Hare’s kind of audience: absent were those fragile-looking older women who were always alone, or with a deeply troubled woman friend; and those traumatized, self-conscious younger men who always struck Eddie as too pretty, in an unmanly sort of way. (It was the way Eddie saw himself: too pretty, in an unmanly sort of way.)

Jesus God, what am I
doing
here? Eddie thought.
Why
had he agreed to introduce Ruth Cole? Why had they
asked
him? he wondered desperately. Had it been
Ruth’s
idea?

The backstage of the concert hall was so muggy that Eddie couldn’t tell the difference between his sweat and the rain damage to his clothes—not to mention the remains of the giant mud puddle. “There’s a washroom just off the greenroom,” the girl was saying, “in case you want to . . . uh, clean up.”

I’m a mess and I have nothing interesting to say, Eddie concluded. For
years
he had imagined meeting Ruth again. But he had pictured a meeting vastly different from this—something more private, maybe lunch or dinner. And Ruth must have at least
occasionally
imagined meeting him. After all, Ted would have
had
to tell his daughter about her mother and the circumstances of that summer of ’58; Ted could never have restrained himself. Naturally Eddie would have been a part of the story, if not the principal villain.

And wasn’t it fair to anticipate that Eddie and Ruth would have much to talk about, even if their chief interest in common was Marion? After all, they both wrote novels, although their novels were worlds apart—Ruth was a superstar and Eddie was . . . God, what
am
I? Eddie considered. Compared to Ruth Cole, I’m a nobody, he concluded. Maybe
that
was the way to begin his introduction.

Yet, when he’d been invited to introduce her, Eddie had fervently believed he had the best of all reasons to accept the invitation. For six years, he’d harbored a secret that he wanted to share with Ruth. For six years, he’d kept the evidence to himself. Now, on this miserable night, he carried the evidence with him in his bulky brown briefcase. What did it matter that the evidence had got a little
wet
?

In his briefcase there was a second book, a book of much more importance to Ruth, Eddie believed, than his personally inscribed copy of
Sixty Times
. Six years ago, when Eddie had first read this
other
book, he’d been tempted to tell Ruth
then;
he’d even considered bringing the book to Ruth’s attention by some anonymous means. But then he’d seen a TV interview with Ruth, and something she’d said had prevented Eddie from pressing the matter.

Ruth never talked in depth about her father—or about whether or not she ever intended to write a book for children. When interviewers asked if her father had taught her to write, she said: “He taught me something about storytelling, and squash. But about writing . . . no, he taught me nothing about writing, really.” And when they would ask her about her mother—if her mother was still “missing,” or if being “abandoned” as a child had had any great effect on her (either as a writer
or
as a woman)—Ruth would seem fairly indifferent to the question.

“Yes, you might say that my mother is still ‘missing,’ although I’m not looking for her. If she were looking for me, she would have found me. Since she’s the one who left, I would never press myself on her. If she wants to find me, I’m the one who’s easy to find,” Ruth had said.

And in the particular TV interview that had stopped Eddie from making contact with Ruth six years ago, the interviewer had pursued a personal interpretation of Ruth Cole’s novels. “But, in your books—in
all
your books—there are no mothers.” (“There are no fathers, either,” Ruth had replied.) “Yes,
but
. . .” the interviewer had gone on, “your women characters have women friends, and they have boyfriends— you know,
lovers
—but they are
women
characters who have
no
relationship with their mothers. We rarely even
meet
their mothers. Don’t you think that’s . . . um,
unusual
?” the interviewer had asked. (“Not if you don’t have a mother,” Ruth had answered.)

Ruth didn’t
want
to know about her mother, Eddie had surmised. And so he had kept his “evidence” to himself. But then, when he’d received the invitation to introduce Ruth Cole at the 92nd Street Y, Eddie had decided that
of course
Ruth wanted to know about her mother! And so he’d agreed to introduce her. And in his soggy briefcase he now carried this mysterious book, which, six years ago, he had come close to forcing on Ruth.

Eddie O’Hare was convinced that the book had been written by Marion.

It was already past eight o’clock. Like a large, restless animal in a cage, the enormous audience in the concert hall made their impatient presence felt, although Eddie could no longer see them. The girl led him by his wet arm through a dark, mildewy hall, up a spiral staircase, past the towering curtains behind the dim stage. There Eddie saw a stagehand seated on a stool. The sinister-looking young man was transfixed by the TV monitor; the camera was trained on the podium on the stage. Eddie singled out the waiting water glass and the microphone. He made a mental note not to drink from the water glass. The water was for Ruth,
not
for her lowly introducer.

Then Eddie was shoved into the greenroom, which was overbright with dazzling mirrors and the glare of makeup lights. Eddie had long rehearsed what he would say to Ruth when they met—“My goodness, how you’ve grown!” For a comic novelist, he was bad at jokes. Nevertheless, the line was on his lips—he freed his soaking right hand from the shoulder strap of his briefcase—but the woman who stepped forward to greet him was not Ruth, nor did she shake Eddie’s outstretched hand. It was that awfully nice woman who was one of the organizers at the Y. Eddie had met her several times. She was always friendly and sincere, and she did her best to put Eddie at ease, which was impossible.
Melissa
—that was her name. She kissed Eddie’s wet cheek and said to him, “We were so worried about you!”

Eddie said: “My goodness, how you’ve grown!”

Melissa, who had
not
grown—she was not pregnant at the time, either—was somewhat taken aback. But Melissa was such a nice person that she seemed more concerned for Eddie’s well-being than offended, although Eddie felt ready to burst into tears on Melissa’s behalf.

Then someone shook Eddie’s outstretched hand; it was too large and vigorous a handshake to have been Ruth’s, and so Eddie managed to restrain himself from saying, “My goodness, how you’ve grown!”
again
. It was Karl, another of the good people who directed the activities at the Unterberg Poetry Center. Karl was a poet; he was also smart, and as tall as Eddie, and he’d always been immensely kind to Eddie. (It was Karl who was kind enough to include Eddie in many events at the 92nd Street Y, even those that Eddie felt unworthy of—like this one.)

“It’s . . . raining,” Eddie told Karl. There must have been a half-dozen people crammed into the greenroom. At Eddie’s remark, they roared with laughter. This was vintage deadpan humor of the kind they would expect to encounter in a novel by Ed O’Hare! But Eddie simply hadn’t known what else to say. He just went on shaking hands, shedding water like a wet dog.

That Very Important Person at Random House, Ruth’s editor, was there. (The editor of Ruth’s first two novels, a woman, had died recently, and now this man had succeeded her.) Eddie had met him three or four times, but could never recall his name. Whatever his name was, he never remembered that he’d met Eddie before. Not once had Eddie taken it personally, until now.

The walls of the greenroom were studded with photographs of the world’s most important authors; Eddie was surrounded by writers of international stature and renown. He recognized Ruth’s photograph before he noticed Ruth; her picture was not out of place on a wall with several Nobel Prize winners. (It would never have occurred to Eddie to look for his own photograph there; indeed, he would not have found it.)

It was her new editor who literally pushed Ruth forward to meet Eddie. The man from Random House had a hearty, aggressive air—an avuncular style. He placed a large, familiar hand squarely between Ruth’s shoulders and shoved her out of the corner of the room, where she appeared to have been holding herself back. Ruth was not shy; Eddie knew this about her from her many interviews. But seeing her, in person—for the first time as an adult—Eddie realized that there was something
deliberately
small about Ruth Cole. It was as if she had
willed
herself to be small.

In fact, she was no shorter than the thug on the Madison Avenue bus. Although Ruth was her father’s height, which was not notably short for a woman, she wasn’t as tall as Marion. Yet her smallness was distinct from her height; like Ted, she was athletically compact. She was wearing her signature black T-shirt, in which Eddie could instantly discern the greater muscular development in Ruth’s right arm; both its forearm and biceps were noticeably bigger and stronger than their counterparts on her thin left arm. Squash, like tennis, did that to you.