A Widow for One Year (46 page)

“I got it,” Ruth said. “Tell me what happened to Thomas and Timothy.”

But all her father said was: “And if you’re upset—like something you’re thinking about suddenly upsets you, and you start to cry— and you can’t see the road clearly, because of your tears . . . just suppose you’re bawling your eyes out, for whatever reason . . .”

“Okay, okay—I got it!” Ruth told him.

“Well. If you ever get like that, crying so hard that you can’t see the road, you just pull over to the side of the road and
stop
.”

“What about the accident?” Ruth asked. “Were you there? Were you and Mommy in the car?”

In the shallow end of the swimming pool, Ruth felt the ice melting on her shoulder; the cold trickle followed the line of her collarbone and made its way across her chest into the warmer water of the pool. The sun had dropped below the towering privet.

She thought of Graham Greene’s father, the schoolmaster, whose advice to his former pupils (who adored him) was odd, but in its own way charming. “Remember to be faithful to your future wife,” he’d said to a boy who was leaving school to join the army in 1918. And to another, just prior to his confirmation, Charles Greene had said: “An army of women live on the lust of men.”

Where had this “army of women” gone? Ruth guessed that Hannah was one of the alleged army’s lost soldiers.

Since Ruth’s earliest memories—not only since she’d begun to read, but from the first time her father had told her a story—books, and the characters in them, had entered her life and remained fixed there. Books, and the characters in them, were more “fixed” in Ruth’s life than were her father and her best friend—not to mention the
men
in her life, who for the most part had proven themselves to be almost as unreliable as Ted and Hannah had.

“All life long,” Graham Greene had written in his autobiography,
A Sort of Life,
“my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent.” A good instinct, but were Ruth to put it into action, she would perforce have nothing further to do with
men
. Among the men she’d known, only Allan seemed admirable and constant; yet, as she sat in the pool, readying herself for her test with Scott Saunders, Allan’s lupine teeth were foremost on her mind. And the hair on the back of his hands . . . he had too much hair there.

She’d not enjoyed playing squash with Allan. He was a good athlete and a well-coached squash player, but Allan was too large for the court—too dangerous in his lunging, looping movements. Yet Allan would never try to hurt or intimidate her. And although she’d lost to him twice, Ruth didn’t doubt that she would eventually beat him. It was merely a matter of learning to keep out of his way—while at the same time not being afraid of his backswing. The two times she’d lost to him, Ruth had yielded the T. Next time, if there was a next time, Ruth was determined not to give up the preferred position on the court to him.

As she enjoyed the last of the melting ice, she thought: At worst, it might mean some stitches in an eyebrow or a broken nose. Besides, if Allan hit her with his racquet, he would feel terrible about it. Thereafter, Allan would yield the preferred position on the court to
her
. In no time, whether he hit her or not, she would be beating him easily. Then Ruth thought: Why
bother
to beat him?

How could she ever consider giving up
men
? To an even greater extent, it was
women
she didn’t trust.

She’d been sitting for too long in the swimming pool, in the chill of the late-afternoon shade—not to mention the clammy cold of the ice pack, which had melted on her shoulder. The chill gave her a touch of November in the Indian Summer weather; it reminded Ruth of that November night in 1969, when her father had given her what he called “the ultimate driving lesson” and “the penultimate driving test.”

She wouldn’t be sixteen until the spring of the following year, when she would get her learner’s permit—thereafter, she would pass her driver’s test without the slightest difficulty—but that November night her father, who didn’t give a damn about learner’s permits, had forewarned her: “For your sake, Ruthie, I hope you never have a tougher driving test than
this
one. Let’s go.”

“Go
where
?” she’d asked. It was the Sunday night of the long Thanksgiving weekend.

The pool was already covered for winter, the fruit trees denuded of fruit and leaves; even the privet was bare, standing skeletally, stiffly moving in the wind. On the northern horizon was a glow: the headlights of the cars that were already at a standstill in the westbound lane of the Montauk Highway; the weekenders on their way back to New York. (Normally the drive took two hours—at the most, three.)

“I feel like the lights of Manhattan tonight,” Ted told his daughter. “I want to see if the Christmas decorations are already in place on Park Avenue. I want to have a drink at the Stanhope bar. I had a 1910 Armagnac there once. Of course I don’t drink Armagnac anymore, but I’d like to have something as good as that again. A really good glass of port, maybe. Let’s go.”

“You want to drive to New York
tonight,
Daddy?” Ruth asked. Short of the end of the Labor Day weekend, or immediately following the Fourth of July (and maybe Memorial Day weekend), it was arguably the worst night of the year to drive to New York.

“No,
I
don’t want to drive to New York, Ruthie—I
can’t
drive to New York, because I’ve been drinking. I’ve had three beers and a whole bottle of red wine. The one thing I promised your mother was that I’d never drink and drive, at least not with you in the car.
You’re
the driver, Ruthie.”

“I’ve never driven to New York,” Ruth said. It wouldn’t have been much of a test if she
had
.

When they finally got on the Long Island Expressway at Manorville, Ted said, “Get in the passing lane, Ruthie. Maintain the speed limit. Remember your rearview mirror. If someone’s coming up behind you and you have enough time to move to the center lane,
and
if you have enough room, then move over. But if someone’s coming up on you, hog-wild to pass, let him pass you on the right.”

“Isn’t this illegal, Daddy?” she asked him. She thought that learning to drive had some restrictions—like maybe she wasn’t supposed to drive at night, or not beyond a fifteen-mile radius of where she lived. She didn’t know she’d already been driving illegally because she didn’t have a learner’s permit.

“You can’t learn everything you need to know legally,” her father told her.

She had to concentrate hard on the driving; it was one of the few times they’d been out in the old white Volvo together when she
didn’t
ask him to tell her about what had happened to Thomas and Timothy. Ted waited until they were approaching Flushing Meadows; then, without any warning, he began to tell her the story in exactly the same way that he’d told it to Eddie O’Hare, with Ted Cole in the third person—as if Ted were just another character in the story, and a minor character at that.

Ted interrupted the part about how much he and Marion had had to drink, and why Thomas had been the obvious choice—the only sober driver—to tell Ruth to get out of the passing lane and into the far-right lane instead. “You get on the Grand Central Parkway here, Ruthie,” her father casually said. She had to change lanes a little too fast, but she managed it. Soon she saw Shea Stadium, off to her right.

At the part in the story where he and Marion were arguing about the best place to make a left turn, Ted interrupted himself again—this time to tell Ruth to take Northern Boulevard, through Queens.

She knew that the old white Volvo tended to overheat in stop-and-go-traffic, but when she mentioned it, her father said, “Just don’t ride the clutch, Ruthie. If you’re stopped for a while, take it out of gear, put it in neutral, and step on your brake. Keep your foot off your clutch as much as you can. And remember your rearview mirror.”

By then, she was crying. It was after the snowplow scene, when her mother knew that Thomas was dead, but she didn’t yet know about Timothy. Marion kept asking Ted if Timmy was all right, and Ted wouldn’t tell her—he’d just watched Timmy die, but he couldn’t speak.

They came over the Queensboro Bridge, into Manhattan, at the moment in the story when her father was explaining about Timothy’s left leg—how the snowplow had severed it at midthigh, and that when they tried to take the body away, they had to leave the leg behind.

“I can’t see the road, Daddy,” Ruth told him.

“Well. There’s no place to pull over, is there?” her father asked her. “You’ll just have to keep going, won’t you?” Then he told her the part where her mother had noticed her brother’s shoe. (“Oh, Ted, look— he’s going to need his shoe,” Marion had said, not realizing that Timmy’s shoe was still attached to Timmy’s leg. And so on . . .)

Ruth headed uptown on Third Avenue.

“I’ll tell you when to cut over to Park,” her father told her. “There’s a place on Park Avenue where the Christmas decorations are especially worth seeing.”

“I’m crying too much—I can’t see where I’m going, Daddy,” Ruth told him again.

“But that’s the test, Ruthie. The test is, sometimes there’s no place to pull over—sometimes you
can’t
stop, and you have to find a way to keep going. You got it?”

“Got it,” she said.

“So,” her father said, “now you know everything.”

Ruth realized later that she’d also passed that part of the test which had not been mentioned. She’d never looked at him; he’d sat unseen in the passenger seat. All the while that her father was telling the story, Ruth had never taken her eyes from the road, or from the rearview mirror. That had been part of the test, too.

That November night in ’69, her father had made her drive up Park Avenue, all the while commenting on the Christmas decorations. Somewhere in the upper eighties, he’d told her to cut over to Fifth. Then they’d come down Fifth Avenue to the Stanhope, which was opposite the Met. It was the first time she’d heard the flags at the Met snapping in the wind. Her father had told her to give the keys of the old white Volvo to the doorman; his name was Manny. Ruth had been impressed that the doorman knew her father.

But they
all
knew her father at the Stanhope. He must have been a frequent guest. It’s where he brings
women
! Ruth realized. “Always stay here—when you can afford it, Ruthie,” her father had told her. “It’s a good hotel.” (Since 1980, she’d been able to afford it.)

That night they’d gone into the bar and her father changed his mind about the port. He’d ordered a bottle of an excellent Pommard instead; Ted finished the wine while Ruth drank a double espresso, knowing that she had to drive back to Sagaponack. All the time they sat in the bar, Ruth felt that she was still gripping the steering wheel. And although it would have been permissible to look at her father in the bar—before they got back in the old white Volvo—she couldn’t look at him. It was as if he were still telling her the terrible story.

It was after midnight when her father directed her up Madison Avenue; somewhere in the upper nineties, he told her to turn east. They took the F.D.R. Drive to the Triborough; then the Grand Central Parkway to the L.I.E., where her father fell asleep. Ruth remembered that Manorville was the exit she wanted; she didn’t have to wake her father to ask him how to get home.

She was driving against the holiday traffic—the headlights of the horde returning to the city were constantly in her eyes—but there was almost no one headed in her direction. A couple of times, she opened up the old white Volvo, just to see how fast it could go. She reached eighty-five twice, and ninety once, but at those speeds a shimmy in the front end frightened her. Most of the way, she stuck to the speed limit and thought about the story of how her brothers had died—especially the part about her mother trying to save Timmy’s shoe.

Her father didn’t wake up until she was driving through Bridgehampton. “How come you didn’t take the back roads?” he asked.

“I felt like having all the town lights around me, and the headlights of the other cars,” Ruth said.

“Oh,” her father said, as if he were falling back to sleep.

“What kind of shoe was it?” Ruth asked.

“It was a basketball shoe, Timmy’s favorite.”

“High-tops?” she guessed.

“Right.”

“Got it,” Ruth said, turning onto Sagg Main. Although, at that moment, there were no other cars in sight of the Volvo, Ruth put her directional signal on; a full fifty yards before she turned, she put on her blinker.

“Good driving, Ruthie,” her father told her. “If you ever have a tougher drive than this, I trust you to remember what you’ve learned.”

Ruth was shivering when she finally got out of the pool. She knew she should warm up before she started playing squash with Scott Saunders, but both her memories of learning to drive and the Graham Greene biography had depressed her. It wasn’t Norman Sherry’s fault, but the Greene biography had taken a turn that Ruth opposed. Mr. Sherry was convinced that, for every major character in a Graham Greene novel, there existed a real-life counterpart. In an interview in
The Times,
Greene himself had told V. S. Pritchett: “I cannot invent.” Yet, in the same interview, while admitting that his characters were “an amalgam of bits of real people,” Greene also denied taking his characters from real life. “Real people are crowded out by imaginary ones. . . .” he’d said. “Real people are too limiting.” But, for too many pages of the biography, Mr. Sherry went on and on about the “real people.”

Ruth was particularly saddened by Greene’s early love life. What his biographer called “his obsessional love” for the “ardent Catholic” who would eventually become Greene’s wife was precisely the kind of thing Ruth didn’t want to know about a writer whose writing she loved. “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer,” Greene had written in
A Sort of Life
. But in the daily letters that young Graham wrote to Vivien, his wife-to-be, Ruth saw only the familiar pathos of a man who was smitten.