A Widow for One Year (83 page)

“Fucking Vermont!” Hannah said again, her teeth chattering.

The sound of someone splitting wood drew their attention. Two or three cords of unsplit hardwood were dumped in the yard by the kitchen entrance; beside them was a smaller, neater woodpile-in-progress. At first Eddie thought that the man splitting wood and stacking the split logs was Ruth’s caretaker, Kevin Merton—that’s who Hannah thought he was, too, until something about the wood-splitter invited her to give him a closer look.

He was so intent on his task that he’d not noticed the arrival of Eddie’s car. The man, in just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, was working hard enough so that he didn’t feel the cold; in fact, he was sweating. And he had a system for splitting and stacking the wood. If a log wasn’t too big around, he would set it vertically on the chopping block and split it lengthwise with an ax. If it was too big—and he knew this at a glance—he would set the log on the block and then split it with a wedge and a maul. Although handling the tools seemed to be second nature to him, Harry Hoekstra had been splitting wood for only a week or two; he’d never done it before.

Harry loved doing it. With each powerful stroke of his ax or his maul, he envisioned the fires he would build. And he appeared to Hannah and Eddie to be both strong enough and sufficiently engaged by his task to have gone on splitting wood all day. He looked as if he could go on doing
anything
all day—or all night, Hannah thought. She suddenly wished she’d waxed her lip, or at least washed her hair and put on a little makeup; she wished she’d worn a bra, and some better clothes.

“It must be the Dutchman, Ruth’s cop!” Eddie whispered to Hannah.

“No shit,” Hannah whispered back. She momentarily forgot that Eddie didn’t know her private game with Ruth. “Didn’t you hear that sound?” Hannah asked Eddie, who looked bewildered—as usual. “My panties, sliding to the ground,” Hannah told him. “
That
sound.”

“Oh,” Eddie said. What a vulgar woman Hannah was! Thank God he wouldn’t be sharing a house with her!

Harry Hoekstra had heard their voices. He dropped his ax and approached them; they stood like children, afraid to stray from the car, as the ex-cop walked up and took Hannah’s suitcase from her shivering hand.

“Hello, Harry,” Eddie managed to say.

“You must be Eddie and Hannah,” Harry said to them.

“No shit,” Hannah said, but her voice was uncharacteristically little-girlish.

“Ruth said you’d say that!” Harry told her.

Okay,
now
I get it—who
wouldn’t
get it? Hannah was thinking. I wish I’d met him first! Hannah was
really
thinking. But a part of her, which always undermined her outward and only
seeming
self-confidence, told Hannah that even if she
had
met Harry first, he wouldn’t have been interested in her—at least not for more than one night.

“It’s nice to meet you, Harry,” was all that Hannah was able to say.

Eddie saw Ruth coming outside to greet them, her arms wrapped around herself in the cold. She’d spilled some flour on her jeans, and there was a touch of flour on her forehead, where she’d pushed aside her hair with the back of her hand.

“Hi!” Ruth called to them.

Hannah had never seen Ruth look like this; it was something beyond being happy.

It’s what love is, Eddie realized; he’d never felt so depressed. Looking at Ruth, Eddie wondered what had ever made him think she resembled Marion—how had he even imagined he could be in love with her?

Hannah glanced back and forth; at first covetously, at Harry—then enviously, at Ruth. They’re in fucking love! she realized, hating herself.

“You’ve got flour on your forehead, baby,” Hannah told Ruth, kissing her. “Did you hear that sound?” Hannah whispered to her old friend. “My panties, sliding to the ground—no, actually
hitting
the ground!”

“Mine, too,” Ruth told her, blushing.

Ruth’s got it, Hannah thought—the life she’s always wanted. She’s got it. But all Hannah said to Ruth was: “I gotta wash my hair, baby. And maybe put on a little makeup.” (Hannah had stopped looking at Harry—she simply couldn’t look at him.)

Then Graham burst out the kitchen door and ran to them. He grabbed Hannah around her hips, almost knocking her down; it was a welcome distraction. “Who’s this brat?” Hannah cried. “This can’t be my very own
godkid
—he’s too big! Who
is
this brat!”

“It’s me! It’s
Graham
!” Graham yelled.

“
You
can’t be Graham—you’re too
big
!” Hannah told him, picking him up and kissing him.

“Yeah, it’s me—it’s Graham!” Graham shouted.

“Say ‘yes’ not ‘yeah,’ baby,” Hannah whispered to the boy.

“Yes, it’s me—it’s Graham!” the boy repeated.

“Come show me to my room, Graham,” Hannah said to him. “And help me turn on the shower, or the bathtub—I gotta wash my hair.”

“Have you been crying, Hannah?” the boy asked. Ruth looked at Hannah, who looked away. Harry and Eddie were standing by the kitchen door, admiring Harry’s woodpile-in-progress.

“Are you okay?” Ruth asked her friend.

“Yeah. Eddie just asked me to live with him, only he didn’t mean it that way,” Hannah added. “He just wanted me to be his roommate.”

“That’s odd,” Ruth remarked.

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it!” Hannah told her, kissing Graham again.

Graham felt heavy in Hannah’s arms—she wasn’t used to carrying a four-year-old. Hannah turned toward the house to find her room, to take a shower or a bath, to soak herself in her freshest memory of what love looked like—just in case it might one day happen to her.

It wouldn’t happen, Hannah knew.

A Happy Couple, Their Two Unhappy Friends

Ruth Cole and Harry Hoekstra were married on Thanksgiving morning in the hardly used living room of Ruth’s Long Island house. Ruth could think of no better way to say good-bye to the house than to get married in it. The front and upstairs halls were lined with stacks of cardboard boxes, which were labeled for the movers. Every piece of furniture was tagged with either a red or a green tag; red meant that the movers should leave it, green meant they should take it to Vermont.

In the event that the Sagaponack house was still not sold by the summer, Ruth would rent it. She’d tagged most of the furniture to stay; she didn’t even
like
most of it. The house in the Hamptons had never been a happy one for Ruth, except when she’d lived there with Allan. (She rarely associated Allan with the Vermont house, which was just as well.)

Eddie saw that all the photographs had been taken down from the walls; they must have been packed in some of the cardboard boxes. Unlike the last time Eddie had seen the house stripped of photographs, the picture hooks had also been removed; the holes in the walls had been filled, and the walls had been freshly painted over or newly wallpapered. A potential buyer would never know how many photographs had once hung there.

Ruth told Eddie and Hannah that she’d “borrowed” the minister for the wedding service from one of the Bridgehampton churches. He was a big, baffled-looking man with a hearty handshake and a booming baritone voice, which resonated throughout the downstairs of the house and caused the settings on the dining-room table to rattle. Conchita Gomez had already set the table for Thanksgiving dinner.

Eduardo gave the bride away. Eddie was Harry’s best man. Hannah was Ruth’s maid of honor, which she’d now been twice. At Ruth’s first wedding, it had been Eddie who’d given the bride away; he was relieved not to do so again. Eddie preferred being best man; even though he’d known Harry for less than a month, Eddie had grown very fond of the Dutchman. Hannah was also very fond of Harry, but she still had trouble looking at him.

Harry had picked a poem to read. Not knowing that Allan had instructed Eddie to read a Yeats poem at Allan’s own memorial service, Harry chose a Yeats poem for his and Ruth’s wedding. Although the poem made Ruth and Hannah
and
Eddie cry, Ruth loved Harry all the more for it. It was the poem about “being poor,” which (compared to Ruth) Harry certainly was; and Harry read it with the uncompromising vigor with which a first-time policeman might read a criminal his rights.

The poem was called “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” and Eduardo and Conchita held hands during Harry’s recitation—as if they were being married all over again.

Graham was the ring bearer, but he’d misheard the word. The boy expected to be the ring
burier
. Thus, when it came time for him to hand over the rings, Graham was outraged that an important part of the wedding had been forgotten. When was he supposed to
bury
the rings, and where? After the service, since Graham was in despair over what he believed was the botched symbolism of the rings, Ruth let the boy bury her and Harry’s rings at the roots of the privet that towered over the swimming pool. Harry paid close attention to the burial site, so that after a certain solemn passage of time, Graham could be shown where to dig the rings up.

Otherwise, Ruth’s second wedding went without a hitch. Only Hannah noticed that neither Ruth nor Eddie seemed to be on the lookout for Ruth’s mother. If Marion was on their minds, they weren’t showing it. Marion had rarely been much on Hannah’s mind; Hannah, of course, had never met Ruth’s mother.

The Thanksgiving turkey, which Ruth and Harry had brought from Vermont, would have fed another family in addition to Ruth and Harry and Hannah and Eddie and Eduardo and Conchita; Ruth sent Eduardo and Conchita home with half the leftovers. Graham, suspicious of turkey, demanded a grilled-cheese sandwich instead.

In the course of the long dinner, Hannah casually inquired of Ruth how much she was asking for the Sagaponack house. The sum was so staggering that Eddie spilled a generous portion of cranberry sauce in his lap, whereas Hannah coolly said to Ruth: “Maybe that’s why you haven’t sold it yet. Maybe you oughtta drop the price down, baby.”

Eddie had already given up hope that the house would ever be his; he’d certainly given up wanting to share it with Hannah, who was still “between boyfriends” but who nonetheless managed to make herself beautiful for the entire Thanksgiving weekend. (Ruth had noticed that Hannah went to considerable efforts to make herself pretty around Harry.)

Now that Hannah was once more paying attention to her appearance, Eddie ignored her—her prettiness meant little to him. And Ruth’s unmistakable happiness had dampened Eddie’s yearlong ardor for her; he was back in love with Marion, where he belonged. But what hope had he of seeing or even hearing from Marion? It had been about two months since he’d sent her his books—he’d not heard a word. Eddie had given up expecting to hear from Marion, as had Ruth. ( Marion also hadn’t answered Ruth’s letter.)

Yet, after almost forty years, what was there to expect? That Marion would deliver a testimonial to her conduct in Toronto? That she would send them an essay on her experiences with expatriation? Surely not even Ruth and Eddie could have
expected
Marion to show up for Ruth’s second wedding. “After all,” as Hannah whispered to Harry while he refilled her wineglass, “she didn’t show up for the first one.”

Harry knew when to leave a subject alone. He simply began, in his best impromptu fashion, a kind of unstoppable ode to firewood. No one knew how to respond. All that anyone could do was listen. In fact, Harry had borrowed Kevin Merton’s pickup truck and hauled a half-cord of Vermont hardwood to Long Island.

Harry was a trifle obsessed with firewood, Eddie had observed. Eddie had not been exactly fascinated by Harry’s wood discussion, which Harry had carried on, at length, over what remained of Thanksgiving dinner. (Harry was still talking about firewood when Eduardo and Conchita went home.) Eddie vastly preferred it when Harry talked about books. Eddie hadn’t met many people who’d read as many books as Harry had—excepting Eddie’s departed father, Minty.

After dinner, while Harry and Eddie did the dishes, and Hannah got Graham ready for bed and prepared to read him a bedtime story, Ruth stood outside under the stars by the swimming pool; the pool had been partially drained and covered for the coming winter. In the darkness, the U-shaped border of privet that surrounded the pool served as a vast window frame that enclosed her view of the stars.

Ruth could scarcely remember when the swimming pool and the encircling hedge hadn’t been there, or when the lawn had been the unmown field that her father and mother had argued about. Now it occurred to Ruth that, on other cold nights—when someone else was doing the dishes, and her father or a babysitter had been putting
her
to bed with a story—her mother must have stood in this yard, under these same pitiless stars. Marion would not have looked to the heavens and thought herself as lucky as her daughter was.

Ruth knew she’d been lucky. My next book should be about fortune, she thought: about how fortune and misfortune were unequally distributed, if not at birth then in the course of circumstances beyond our control; and in the seemingly random pattern of colliding events—the people we meet, when we meet them, and if or when these important people might chance to meet someone else. Ruth had had only a
little misfortune
. Why was it that her mother had had such
a lot
?

“Oh, Mommy,” Ruth said, to the cold stars, “come enjoy your grandson while you still can.”

Upstairs in the master bedroom—in fact, on the same king-size bed where she’d made love to the late Ted Cole—Hannah Grant was still
trying
to read a bedtime story to the grandson Ted never knew. Hannah hadn’t made much progress; the rituals of teeth-brushing and pajamachoosing had taken longer than she’d expected. Ruth had told Hannah that Graham was crazy about the Madeline books, but Graham wasn’t so sure.

“Which one am I crazy about?” Graham inquired.

“All of them,” Hannah said. “Pick the one you want and I’ll read it.”

“I don’t like
Madeline and the Gypsies,
” Graham informed her.