A Widow for One Year (40 page)

Naturally Ruth had heard the theory of how her dead brothers had robbed her mother of her capacity to love another child; there was also the theory that Marion had been afraid to love Ruth, out of fear of losing her only daughter to some calamity of the kind that had claimed her sons.

But Eddie had told Ruth the story of the moment when Marion recognized that Ruth had a flawed eye—that hexagon of bright yellow, which her mother also had in
her
eye. Eddie told Ruth how Marion had cried in fear—for this yellow flaw meant to her that Ruth might be
like
her, and her mother hadn’t wanted Ruth to be like her.

For Ruth, there was suddenly more love in her mother—for
not
wishing anything of herself on her daughter—than Ruth could bear.

Ruth and Eddie had talked about whether Ruth was more like her mother or her father. (The more he listened to Ruth, the more Eddie saw of Marion in her.) The subject mattered greatly to Ruth, because she didn’t want to be a mother if she was going to be a bad one.

“That’s just what your mother said,” Eddie told her.

“But what
worse
thing could a mother do than leave her child?” Ruth had asked him.

“That’s what your father says, isn’t it?” Eddie asked her.

Her father was a “sexual predator,” Ruth told Eddie, but he’d been “halfway decent” as a father. He’d never neglected her. It was as a woman that she loathed him. As a child, she had doted on him—at least he was
there
.

“He would have been a terrible influence on those boys, had they lived,” Eddie told her. Ruth instantly agreed. “That’s why your mother had already thought of leaving him—I mean,
before
the boys were killed,” Eddie added.

Ruth hadn’t known that. She expressed considerable bitterness toward her father for withholding that information from her, but Eddie explained that Ted
couldn’t
have told her because Ted hadn’t
known
that Marion might leave him.

Ruth and Eddie had talked about so much that Ruth couldn’t begin to describe it in her diary. Eddie had even called Marion “the sexual beginning
and
the sexual peak” of his life. (Ruth
did
manage to write that down.)

And in the taxi ride to the Stanhope, with that awful old woman’s shopping bag of books between his knees, Eddie had said to Ruth: “That ‘awful old woman,’ as you call her, is about your mother’s age. Therefore, she’s not an ‘awful old woman’ to
me
.”

It was staggering to Ruth that a forty-eight-year-old man was
still
carrying a torch for a woman who was now seventy-one!

“Supposing that my mother lives into her nineties, will you be a lovestruck
sixty
-eight-year-old?” Ruth had asked Eddie.

“I’m absolutely certain of it,” Eddie had told her.

What Ruth Cole also wrote in her diary was that Eddie O’Hare was the antithesis of her father. At seventy-seven, Ted Cole was now chasing women who were Ruth’s age, although he was less and less successful at it. His more common successes were with women in their late forties—women who were Eddie’s age!

If Ruth’s father lived into his nineties, he might finally be pursuing women who at least
looked
closer to his age—namely, women who were “merely” in their seventies!

The phone rang. Ruth couldn’t help being disappointed that it was Allan. She’d picked up the phone with the hope that it might be Eddie. Maybe he’s remembered something else to tell me! Ruth had wished.

“Not asleep, I hope,” Allan said. “And you’re
alone,
I trust.”

“Not asleep, definitely alone,” Ruth answered him. Why did he have to spoil what a favorable impression he’d made by sounding the jealousy note?

“How’d it go?” Allan asked her.

She felt suddenly too tired to tell him the details, which, only moments before he called, had so excited her.

“It was a very special evening,” Ruth said. “It’s given me so much more of a picture of my mother—actually, both of her
and
of myself,” she added. “Maybe I
shouldn’t
be afraid that I’d be a rotten wife. Maybe I
wouldn’t
make a bad mother.”

“
I’ve
told you that,” Allan reminded her. Why couldn’t he just be grateful that she was possibly coming around to the idea of what he wanted?

That was when Ruth knew that she would not have sex with Allan the next night, either. What sense did it make to sleep with someone and then go off to Europe for two, almost three weeks? (As much sense as it made to keep putting off sleeping with him, Ruth reconsidered. She wouldn’t agree to marry Allan without sleeping with him first—at least once.)

“Allan, I’m awfully tired—and there’s too much that’s too new on my mind,” Ruth began.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“I don’t want to have dinner with you tomorrow night—I don’t want to see you until I’m back from Europe,” she told him. She half-hoped that he would try to dissuade her, but he was silent. Even his patience with her was irritating.

“I’m still listening,” he said, because she had paused.

“I
want
to sleep with you—I
must
sleep with you,” Ruth assured him. “But not just before I go away. And not just before I see my father,” Ruth added, which she knew was apropos of nothing. “I want the time away to think about us.” That was finally how she put it.

“I understand,” Allan said. It broke her heart to know he was a good man, but not to know if he was the
right
one. And how would “time away” help her to determine
that
? What she needed, in order to know, was more time
with
Allan.

But what she said was: “I knew you’d understand.”

“I love you very much,” Allan told her.

“I know you do,” Ruth said.

Later, as she struggled to fall asleep, she tried not to think of her father. Although Ted Cole had told his daughter about her mother’s affair with Eddie O’Hare, Ted had neglected to tell Ruth that their affair had been
his
idea. When Eddie had told her that her father had
purposely
brought him and Marion together, Ruth had been shocked. That her father had connived to make her mother feel that she was unfit to be a mother was
not
what shocked Ruth; she already knew that her father was a conniver. What shocked Ruth was that her father had wanted her all to himself, that he’d
wanted
to be her father so badly!

At thirty-six, both loving and hating her father as she now did, it tormented Ruth to know how much her father loved her.

Hannah at Thirty-Five

Ruth couldn’t sleep. The cause of her insomnia was the cognac—in combination with what she had confessed to Eddie O’Hare, which was something she’d not told even Hannah Grant. At every important passage in her life, Ruth had anticipated that she would hear from her mother. Upon her graduation from Exeter, for example, but it didn’t happen. And there came and went her graduation from Middlebury, without a word.

Nevertheless, Ruth had gone on expecting to hear from Marion— especially in 1980, upon the publication of her first novel. And there were then the publications of two more novels, the second in ’85 and the third right now—in the fall of 1990. That was why, when the presumptuous Mrs. Benton had attempted to pass herself off as Ruth’s mother, Ruth had been so angry. For years she’d imagined that Marion might suddenly announce herself in exactly that way.

“Do you think she ever
will
make an appearance?” Ruth had asked Eddie in the taxi.

Eddie had disappointed her. In the course of her thrilling evening with him, Eddie had done much to contradict Ruth’s first, unfair impression of him, but in the taxi he’d fumbled badly.

“Uh . . .” he began, “I imagine that your mother must make peace with herself before she can . . . uh, well, re-enter your life.” Eddie paused—as if he hoped that the taxi had already arrived at the Stanhope. “Uh . . .” he said again, “Marion has her demons—her
ghosts,
I suppose—and she must somehow try to deal with them before she can make herself available to you.”

“She’s my
mother,
for Christ’s sake!” Ruth had cried in the cab. “
I’m
the demon she should be trying to deal with!”

But all that Eddie had managed to say was: “I almost forgot! There was a book—actually,
two
books—that I wanted to give you.”

Here she’d asked him the most important question in her life: Was it reasonable for her to hope that her mother would
ever
contact her? And Eddie had pawed around in his wet briefcase, producing two water-damaged books.

One of them was the inscribed copy of his litany of sexual bliss to Marion,
Sixty Times
. And the other? He’d been at a loss to say what the other book was. He’d simply thrust it into her lap in the taxi.

“You said you were going to Europe,” Eddie told her. “This is good airplane reading.”

At such a time, and in answer to Ruth’s all-important question, he’d offered her “airplane reading.” Then the taxi had stopped at the Stanhope. Eddie had given Ruth the clumsiest of handshakes. She’d kissed him, of course, and he’d blushed—like a sixteen-year-old boy!

“We must get together when you’re back from Europe!” Eddie had called from the departing cab.

Maybe he was bad at good-byes. In all honesty, “pathetic” and “ unfortunate” did not do him justice. He’d made an art form of his modesty. “He wore his self-deprecation like a badge of honor,” Ruth wrote in her diary. “And there was nothing of the weasel about him.” (Ruth had heard her father call Eddie a weasel on more than one occasion.)

Also, when it was still early in their evening together, Ruth had understood something about Eddie: he never complained. In addition to his prettiness, his frail-looking beauty, what her mother might have seen in him was something that extended beyond his loyalty to her. Despite his appearance to the contrary, Eddie O’Hare was remarkably brave; he had accepted Marion as she was. And in the summer of ’58, Ruth imagined, her mother had not necessarily been at her psychological best.

Half naked, Ruth went looking through her suite at the Stanhope for the alleged “airplane reading” that Eddie had given her. She was too drunk to waste a word of
The Life of Graham Greene,
and she had already read
Sixty Times;
in truth, she’d read it twice.

To her dismay, the “airplane reading” appeared to be some kind of crime fiction. Ruth was immediately put off by the title,
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
. Both the author and the publisher were unknown to her. Upon closer inspection, Ruth saw that the publisher was Canadian.

Even the author photo was a mystery, for the woman—the unknown writer was a woman—was in profile to the camera, and what little could be seen of her face was backlit. The woman also wore a hat, which shaded the only eye that was exposed to the camera. All that could be seen of her face was a fine nose, a strong chin, a sharp cheekbone. Her hair—what of it that fell free of the hat—might have been blond or gray, or almost white. Her age was indeterminable.

It was an exasperating photograph, and Ruth was not surprised to read that the unknown author’s name was a nom de plume; a woman who hid her face
would
choose a pen name. So
this
was what Eddie called “airplane reading.” Even before she began the book, Ruth was unimpressed. And the beginning of the novel was not much better than Ruth’s initial judgment of the book (by its cover).

Ruth read: “A salesgirl who was also a waitress had been found dead in her apartment on Jarvis, south of Gerrard. It was an apartment within her means, but only because she had shared it with two other salesgirls. The three of them sold bras at Eaton’s.”

A detective novel! Ruth snapped the book shut. Where was there a Jarvis Street, or a Gerrard? What was Eaton’s? What did Ruth Cole care about girls who sold bras?

She’d finally fallen asleep—it was after two—when the telephone woke her.

“Are you alone? Can you talk?” Hannah asked her in a whisper.

“Definitely alone,” Ruth said. “But why would I want to talk to you? You traitor.”

“I knew you’d be angry,” Hannah said. “I almost didn’t call.”

“Is that an apology?” Ruth asked her best friend. She had never heard Hannah apologize.

“Something came up,” Hannah whispered.

“Something or some
one?”
Ruth asked.

“Same difference,” Hannah replied. “I was suddenly called out of town.”

“Why are you whispering?” Ruth asked her.

“I’d rather not wake him up,” Hannah said.

“You mean you’re with someone
now
?” Ruth asked. “Is he
there
?”

“Not exactly,” Hannah whispered. “I had to move to another bedroom because he snores. I never imagined that he would
snore
.”

Ruth refrained from comment. Hannah never failed to mention some intimacy involving her sexual partners.

“I was disappointed that you weren’t with me,” Ruth finally said. But, even as she spoke, it occurred to Ruth that if Hannah
had
been there, Hannah would never have let Ruth be alone with Eddie. Hannah would have been too curious about Eddie—she would have wanted Eddie all to herself ! “On second thought,” Ruth told her friend, “I’m glad you
weren’t
with me. I got to be alone with Eddie O’Hare.”

“So you still haven’t done it with Allan,” Hannah whispered.

“The main thing about this evening was
Eddie,
” Ruth replied. “I never saw my mother as clearly as I can see her now.”

“But when are you
gonna
do it with Allan?” Hannah asked.

“When I get back from Europe, probably,” Ruth said. “Don’t you want to hear about my mother?”

“When you get back from
Europe
!” Hannah whispered. “That’s what? In two or three
weeks
? God, he might meet someone else before you get back! And what about you? Even
you
might meet someone else!”