A Widow for One Year (74 page)

Hannah had carried Graham, Eddie slinking alongside them. Eddie looked especially sheepish, as if he regretted having read the poem—or else he was silently berating himself in the belief that his introduction should have been longer and clearer.

“Take off the pail, Mommy,” Graham had said.

“It’s a
veil,
baby—not a pail,” Hannah told the boy. “And Mommy wants to keep it on.”

“No, I’ll take it off now,” Ruth said; she’d finally stopped crying. A numbness enclosed her face; she felt impervious to crying or to any form of showing how upset she was. Then she remembered that dreadful old woman who’d called herself a widow for the rest of her life. Where was she now? Allan’s memorial service would have been the perfect place for her to reappear!

“Do you remember that terrible old widow?” Ruth asked Hannah and Eddie.

“I’m on the lookout for her, baby,” Hannah had replied. “But she’s probably dead.”

Eddie was still in the throes of being overcome by the Yeats poem, yet he’d never stopped being the constant observer. Ruth was looking for Marion, too; then she thought she saw her mother.

The woman wasn’t old enough to be Marion, but Ruth didn’t realize this at first. What struck Ruth was the woman’s elegance, and what had seemed to be her heartfelt sympathy and concern. She was looking at Ruth not in a threatening or invasive way, but with both pity and an anxious curiosity. She was an attractive older woman, only Allan’s age—not even sixty. Also, the woman
wasn’t
looking at Ruth at all as closely as she appeared to be looking at
Hannah
. That was when Ruth realized that the woman wasn’t really looking at Hannah, either; it was
Graham
who was drawing the woman’s attention.

Ruth touched the woman’s arm and asked, “Excuse me . . . do I know you?”

The woman, embarrassed, averted her eyes. But whatever had shamed her passed; she gathered her courage and squeezed Ruth’s forearm.

“I’m sorry. I know I was staring at your son. It’s just that he doesn’t look at all like Allan,” the woman said nervously.

“Who
are
you, lady?” Hannah asked her.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” the woman said to Ruth. “I’m the
other
Mrs. Albright. I mean the
first
Mrs. Albright.”

Ruth didn’t want Hannah to be rude to Allan’s ex-wife, and Hannah looked as if she were about to ask: “Were you invited?”

Eddie O’Hare saved the day.

“I’m so glad to meet you,” Eddie said, squeezing the ex-wife’s arm. “Allan always spoke so highly of you.”

The ex–Mrs. Albright was stunned; she was easily as overcome as Eddie had been by the Yeats poem. Ruth had never heard Allan speak “highly” of his ex-wife; sometimes he’d spoken
pityingly
of her— specifically, because he felt certain she would rue her decision never to have children. Now here she was, staring at Graham! Ruth was sure that the ex–Mrs. Albright had come to Allan’s memorial service
not
to pay her respects to Allan, but to get a look at his child!

But all Ruth said was: “Thank you for coming.” She would have gone on, babbling insincerities, but Hannah stopped her.

“Baby, you look better with the veil on,” Hannah whispered. “ Graham, this is an old friend of your daddy’s,” Hannah told the boy. “Say ‘Hello.’ ”

“Hello,” Graham said to Allan’s ex-wife. “But where
is
Daddy? Where is he
now
?”

Ruth slipped the veil back on; her face felt so numb that she was unaware she was crying again.

It was for children that one wanted heaven, Ruth thought. It was only for the sake of being able to say: “Daddy’s in
heaven,
Graham,” which was what she’d said then.

“And heaven is nice, isn’t it?” the boy began. They’d had many discussions of heaven, and what it was like, since Allan had died. Possibly heaven meant more to the boy because the discussion of it was so new; as neither Ruth nor Allan was religious, heaven had not been a part of Graham’s first three years on earth.

“I’ll tell you what heaven is like,” the ex–Mrs. Albright said to the boy. “It’s like your best dreams.”

But Graham was of an age where he more frequently had nightmares. Dreams were not necessarily heaven-sent. Yet if the boy was to believe the Yeats poem, he would be forced to envision his daddy
pacing the mountains overhead and hiding his face in a crowd of stars
! (Is that heaven or a nightmare? Ruth would wonder.)

“She’s not here, is she?” Ruth suddenly said to Eddie, through her veil.

“I don’t see her,” Eddie admitted.

“I know she’s not here,” Ruth said.

“Who’s not here?” Hannah asked Eddie.

“Her mother,” Eddie replied.

“It’s gonna be okay, baby,” Hannah whispered to her best friend. “Fuck your mother.”

In Hannah Grant’s opinion,
Fuck Your Mother
would have been a more appropriate title for Eddie O’Hare’s fifth novel,
A Difficult Woman,
which was published that same fall of ’94 when Allan died. But Hannah had given up on Ruth’s mother long ago, and—not yet being an older woman herself, at least not in her own mind—Hannah was sick to death of Eddie’s younger-man-with-older-woman theme. Hannah was thirty-nine—as Eddie had pointed out, exactly the age Marion had been when he’d fallen in love with her.

“Yeah, but you were sixteen, Eddie,” Hannah reminded him. “That’s one category I’ve eliminated from my sexual lexicon—I mean fucking teenagers.”

While Hannah had accepted Eddie as Ruth’s newfound friend, there was more about Eddie that troubled Hannah than the natural jealousy that friends often feel toward friends of friends. She’d had boyfriends who were Eddie’s age, and older—Eddie was fifty-two in the fall of ’94 —and while Eddie was hardly Hannah’s cup of tea, he was nonetheless a physically attractive older man who was not a homosexual; yet he’d never made a pass at her. Hannah found this more than troubling.

“Look—I
like
Eddie,” she would say to Ruth, “but you’ve got to admit that there’s something wrong with the guy.” What Hannah found “wrong” was that Eddie had eliminated younger women from
his
sexual lexicon.

Ruth still found Hannah’s “sexual lexicon” more disturbing than Eddie’s. If Eddie’s enduring attraction to older women was weird, at least it was weird in a selective way.

“I suppose I’m some kind of sexual shotgun—is that what you mean?” Hannah asked.

“Different folks, different strokes,” Ruth replied tactfully.

“Look, baby, I saw Eddie on Park Avenue and Eighty-ninth—he was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair,” Hannah said. “I also saw him one night in the Russian Tea Room—he was with an old lady in a
neck brace
!”

“They might have had accidents. They didn’t necessarily succumb to old age,” Ruth responded. “
Young
women break their legs—the one in the wheelchair might have been skiing. There are automobile accidents. There’s always whiplash. . . .”

“Baby,” Hannah pleaded. “This old woman was
confined
to a wheelchair. And the one with the neck brace was a walking
skeleton
—her neck was too
thin
to hold up her head!”

“I think Eddie’s sweet,” was all Ruth would say. “You’re going to get old, too, Hannah. Wouldn’t you like to have someone like Eddie in your life
then
?”

But even Ruth had to confess that she found
A Difficult Woman
a serious stretch of the so-called
willing
suspension of her disbelief. A man in his early fifties, who bears remarkable similarities to Eddie, is the doting lover of a woman in her late seventies. They make love amid a daunting host of medical precautions and uncertainties. Not surprisingly, they meet in a doctor’s office, where the man is anxiously awaiting his first sigmoidoscopy.

“What are you here for?” the older woman asks the younger man. “You look healthy enough.” The younger man admits his anxiety concerning the procedure he is about to undergo. “Oh, don’t be silly,” the older woman tells him. “Heterosexual men are such cowards when it comes to being penetrated. There’s really nothing to it. I must have had a half-dozen sigmoidoscopies. Mind you, be prepared—they do give you a little gas.”

A few days later, the two encounter each other at a cocktail party. The older woman is so beautifully dressed that the younger man doesn’t recognize her. Moreover, she approaches him in an alarmingly coquettish manner. “I last saw you when you were about to be penetrated,” she whispers to him. “How’d it go?”

Stammering, he replies: “Oh, very well, thank you. And you were right. It was nothing to be afraid of !”

“I’ll show you something to be afraid of,” the woman whispers to him, which begins their disturbingly passionate love story, which is over only when the older woman dies.

“For God’s sake,” Allan had said to Ruth about Eddie’s fifth novel. “You’ve got to hand it to O’Hare—nothing embarrasses him!”

Despite his ongoing habit of calling Eddie by his last name, which Eddie intensely disliked, Allan had developed a genuine affection for him, if not for his
writing
—and Eddie, although Allan Albright was the antithesis of his kind of man, had grown far more fond of Allan than he had thought possible. They’d been good friends when Allan died, and Eddie had not taken his responsibilities at Allan’s memorial service lightly.

Eddie’s relationship with Ruth—especially the limited degree to which he understood her feelings for her mother—was a different matter.

While Eddie had observed the enormous changes in Ruth upon her becoming a mother, he’d not realized how being a mother had persuaded her to take an even more unforgiving view of Marion.

Simply put, Ruth was a good mother. At the time of Allan’s death, Graham would be only a year younger than Ruth had been when Marion had left her. Ruth could not conceive of the
lack
of love Marion had felt for her daughter. Ruth would sooner
die
than leave Graham; she could never
imagine
leaving her son.

And if Eddie was obsessed with Marion’s state of mind—or what he could fathom of it from
McDermid, Retired
—Ruth had read her mother’s fourth novel with impatience and disdain. (There is a point when sorrow becomes self-indulgent, she thought.)

As a publisher, Allan had done his homework on Marion; he’d found out as much as he could about the Canadian crime writer who called herself Alice Somerset. According to her Canadian publisher, Alice Somerset was not enough of a success in Canada to support herself from her book sales within her own country; however, her French and German translations were far more popular. She made quite a comfortable living from her translations. In addition to maintaining a modest apartment in Toronto, Ruth’s mother spent the worst months of the Canadian winter in Europe. Her German and French publishers were happy to find her suitable apartments to rent.

“An agreeable woman, but somewhat aloof,” Marion’s German publisher had told Allan.

“Charming in a standoffish way,” the French publisher had said.

“I don’t know why she bothers with the nom de plume—she just strikes me as a very private person,” Marion’s Canadian publisher told Allan; the publisher also provided Allan with Marion’s Toronto address.

“For God’s sake,” Allan would repeatedly say to Ruth; in fact, he’d had one such conversation with Ruth only a few days before he died. “Here’s your mother’s address. You’re a writer—just write her a letter! You could even go see her, if you wanted to. I’d be happy to go with you, or you could go alone. You could take Graham—surely she’d be interested in
Graham
!”

“
I’m
not interested in
her
!” Ruth had said.

Ruth and Allan had come into New York for Eddie’s publication party, which was held on an October evening not long after Graham’s third birthday. It had been one of those warm, sunny days that felt like summer—and when the evening came, the night air brought a contrasting coolness that epitomized the very best of autumn. “An unbeatable day!” Ruth would remember Allan saying.

They’d taken a two-bedroom suite at the Stanhope; they’d made love in their bedroom while Conchita Gomez had taken Graham to the hotel restaurant, where the boy was treated like a little prince. They’d all driven into the city from Sagaponack, although Conchita protested that she and Eduardo were too old to spend even a single night apart; one of them might die, and it would be terrible for a happily married person to die alone.

The spectacular weather, not to mention the sex, had made such a favorable impression on Allan that he’d insisted on walking the fifteen blocks to Eddie’s publication party. In retrospect, Ruth would think that Allan had looked a little flushed upon their arrival; but she’d thought at the time it was only a sign of good health or the effect of the cool fall air.

Eddie had been his usual self-deprecating self at the party: he gave a silly speech wherein he thanked his old friends for giving up whatever more entertaining plans they had had for the evening; he gave an overly familiar synopsis of the plot of his new novel; then he assured his audience that they needn’t bother to read the book, now that they already knew the story. “And the main characters will be fairly recognizable . . . from my previous novels, that is,” Eddie had mumbled. “They’ve just grown a little older.”

Hannah was there with an undeniably awful man, a former professional hockey goalie who’d just written a memoir about his sexual exploits—and who took an unsavory pride in the unimpressive fact that he’d never been married. His terrible book was called
Not in My Net,
and his humor was principally demonstrated by his charmless habit of referring to the women he’d slept with as
pucks,
thus enabling him to crack the joke “She was a great puck.”

Hannah had met him when she’d interviewed him for a magazine article she was writing; her subject was what jocks did when they retired. As far as Ruth could tell, they tried to be either actors or writers; she’d remarked to Hannah that she liked it better when they tried to be actors.