A Widow for One Year Read online

  Praise for John Irving

  The World According to Garp

  “A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and horrifying and heartbreaking . . . You know The World According to Garp is true. It is also terrific.”

  —The Washington Post

  The Cider House Rules

  “Witty, tenderhearted, fervent, and scarifying. . . This novel is an example, now rare, of the courage of imaginative ardor.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  “Extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction. . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world.”

  —Stephen King for The Washington Post Book World

  The Hotel New Hampshire

  “A hectic, gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  The 158-Pound Marriage

  “Deft, hard-hitting. . . What he demonstrates beautifully is that a one-to-one relationship is more demanding than a free-for-all.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Setting Free the Bears

  “Truly remarkable. . . Encompasses the longings and agonies of youth . . . A complex and moving novel.”

  —Time

  A Son of the Circus

  “His most entertaining novel since Garp.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  The Water-Method Man

  “Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry.”

  —Time

  Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

  “Supple and energetic as a stylist, Mr. Irving also knows just how to create in the reader’s mind a vivid impression of an existing world-and just how to populate it.”

  —The New York Times Book Review.

  A Widow for One Year

  is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

  Excerpt from In One Person copyright © 2012 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  PENGUIN USA:

  Excerpt from

  Madeline’s Christmas

  by Ludwig Bemelmans.

  Copyright © 1956 by Ludwig Bemelmans. Copyright renewed 1984 by Madeline Bemelmans and Barbara B. Marciano. Copyright © 1985 by Madeline Bemelmans and Barbara B. Marciano. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

  A. P. WATT LTD. ON BEHALF OF MICHAEL YEATS:

  “When You Are Old” and excerpt from “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” from

  The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.

  Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Irving, John.

  A widow for one year : a novel / John Irving.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3559.R8W53 1998

  813'.54—dc21 97-49166

  Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com

  First Trade Edition

  This book contains an excerpt from In One Person by John Irving, published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-50447-1

  v3.0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for John Irving

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  I: Summer 1958

  The Inadequate Lamp Shade

  Summer Job

  A Sound Like Someone Trying Not To Make A Sound

  Unhappy Mothers

  Marion, Waiting

  Eddie Is Bored-And Horny, Too

  The Door In The Floor

  A Masturbating Machine

  Come Hither . . .

  The Pawn

  Ruth's Right Eye

  Dumping Mrs. Vaughn

  Why Panic At Ten O'Clock In The Morning?

  How The Writer's Assistant Became A Writer

  Something Almost Biblical

  The Authority Of The Written Word

  A Motherless Child

  The Leg

  Working For Mr. Cole

  Leaving Long Island

  II: Fall 1990

  Eddie At Forty-Eight

  Ruth At Thirty-Six

  The Red And Blue Air Mattress

  Allan At Fifty-Four

  Hannah At Thirty-Five

  Ted At Seventy-Seven

  Ruth Remembers Learning To Drive

  Two Drawers

  Pain In An Unfamiliar Place

  Ruth Gives Her Father A Driving Lesson

  A Widow For The Rest Of Her Life

  Ruth's Diary, And Selected Postcards

  The First Meeting

  Ruth Changes Her Story

  Not A Mother, Not Her Son

  The Moleman

  Followed Home From The Flying Food Circus

  Chapter One

  Missing Persons

  The Standoff

  Ruth's First Wedding

  III: Fall 1995

  The Civil Servant

  The Reader

  The Prostitute's Daughter

  Sergeant Hoekstra Finds His Witness

  In Which Eddie O'Hare Falls In Love Again

  Mrs. Cole

  Better Than Being In Paris With A Prostitute

  In Which Eddie And Hannah Fail To Reach An Agreement

  A Happy Couple, Their Two Unhappy Friends

  Marion At Seventy-Six

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by John Irving

  About The Author

  A Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with John Irving

  Reading Group Questions and Topics…

  Excerpt from In One Person

  a love story

  “. . . as for this little lady,

  the best thing I can wish her is

  a little misfortune. ”

  —WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

  I

  SUMMER

  1958

  The Inadequate Lamp Shade

  One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed, Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking—it was coming from her parents’ bedroom. It was a totally unfamiliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with a stomach flu; when she first heard her mother making love, Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up.

  It was not as simple a matter as her parents having separate bedrooms; that summer they had separate houses, although Ruth never saw the other house. Her parents spent alternate nights in the family house with Ruth; there was a rental house nearby, where Ruth’s mother or father stayed when they weren’t staying with Ruth. It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced—when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.

  When Ruth woke to the foreign sound, she at first wasn’t sure if it was her mother or her father who was throwing up; then, despite the unfam
iliarity of the disturbance, Ruth recognized that measure of melancholy and contained hysteria which was often detectable in her mother’s voice. Ruth also remembered that it was her mother’s turn to stay with her.

  The master bathroom separated Ruth’s room from the master bedroom. When the four-year-old padded barefoot through the bathroom, she took a towel with her. (When she’d been sick with the stomach flu, her father had encouraged her to vomit in a towel.) Poor Mommy! Ruth thought, bringing her the towel.

  In the dim moonlight, and in the even dimmer and erratic light from the night-light that Ruth’s father had installed in the bathroom, Ruth saw the pale faces of her dead brothers in the photographs on the bathroom wall. There were photos of her dead brothers throughout the house, on all the walls; although the two boys had died as teenagers, before Ruth was born (before she was even conceived), Ruth felt that she knew these vanished young men far better than she knew her mother or father.

  The tall, dark one with the angular face was Thomas; even at Ruth’s age, when he’d been only four, Thomas had had a leading man’s kind of handsomeness—a combination of poise and thuggery that, in his teenage years, gave him the seeming confidence of a much older man. (Thomas had been the driver of the doomed car.)

  The younger, insecure-looking one was Timothy; even as a teenager, he was baby-faced and appeared to have just been startled by something. In many of the photographs, Timothy seemed to be caught in a moment of indecision, as if he were perpetually reluctant to imitate an incredibly difficult stunt that Thomas had mastered with apparent ease. (In the end, it was something as basic as driving a car that Thomas failed to master sufficiently.)

  When Ruth Cole entered her parents’ bedroom, she saw the naked young man who had mounted her mother from behind; he was holding her mother’s breasts in his hands and humping her on all fours, like a dog, but it was neither the violence nor the repugnance of the sexual act that caused Ruth to scream. The four-year-old didn’t know that she was witnessing a sexual act—nor did the young man and her mother’s activity strike Ruth as entirely unpleasant. In fact, Ruth was relieved to see that her mother was not throwing up.

  And it wasn’t the young man’s nakedness that caused Ruth to scream; she had seen her father and her mother naked—nakedness was not hidden among the Coles. It was the young man himself who made Ruth scream, because she was certain he was one of her dead brothers; he looked so much like Thomas, the confident one, that Ruth Cole believed she had seen a ghost.

  A four-year-old’s scream is a piercing sound. Ruth was astonished at the speed with which her mother’s young lover dismounted; indeed, he removed himself from both the woman and her bed with such a combination of panic and zeal that he appeared to be propelled —it was almost as if a cannonball had dislodged him. He fell over the night table, and, in an effort to conceal his nakedness, removed the lamp shade from the broken bedside lamp. As such, he seemed a less menacing sort of ghost than Ruth had first judged him to be; furthermore, now that Ruth took a closer look at him, she recognized him. He was the boy who occupied the most distant guest room, the boy who drove her father’s car—the boy who worked for her daddy, her mommy had said. Once or twice the boy had driven Ruth and her babysitter to the beach.

  That summer, Ruth had three different nannies; each of them had commented on how pale the boy was, but Ruth’s mother had told her that some people just didn’t like the sun. The child had never before seen the boy without his clothes, of course; yet Ruth was certain that the young man’s name was Eddie and that he wasn’t a ghost. Nevertheless, the four-year-old screamed again.

  Her mother, still on all fours on her bed, looked characteristically unsurprised; she merely viewed her daughter with an expression of discouragement edged with despair. Before Ruth could cry out a third time, her mother said, “Don’t scream, honey. It’s just Eddie and me. Go back to bed.”

  Ruth Cole did as she was told, once more passing those photographs—more ghostly-seeming now than her mother’s fallen ghost of a lover. Eddie, while attempting to hide himself with the lamp shade, had been oblivious to the fact that the lamp shade, being open at both ends, afforded Ruth an unobstructed view of his diminishing penis.

  At four, Ruth was too young to ever remember Eddie or his penis with the greatest detail, but he would remember her. Thirty-six years later, when he was fifty-two and Ruth was forty, this ill-fated young man would fall in love with Ruth Cole. Yet not even then would he regret having fucked Ruth’s mother. Alas, that would be Eddie’s problem. This is Ruth’s story.

  That her parents had expected her to be a third son was not the reason Ruth Cole became a writer; a more likely source of her imagination was that she grew up in a house where the photographs of her dead brothers were a stronger presence than any “presence” she detected in either her mother or her father—and that, after her mother abandoned her and her father (and took with her almost all the photos of her lost sons), Ruth would wonder why her father left the picture hooks stuck in the bare walls. The picture hooks were part of the reason she became a writer—for years after her mother left, Ruth would try to remember which of the photographs had hung from which of the hooks. And, failing to recall the actual pictures of her perished brothers to her satisfaction, Ruth began to invent all the captured moments in their short lives, which she had missed. That Thomas and Timothy were killed before she was born was another part of the reason Ruth Cole became a writer; from her earliest memory, she was forced to imagine them.

  It was one of those automobile accidents involving teenagers that, in the aftermath, revealed that both boys had been “good kids” and that neither of them had been drinking. Worst of all, to the endless torment of their parents, the coincidence of Thomas and Timothy being in that car at that exact time, and in that specific place, was the result of an altogether avoidable quarrel between the boys’ mother and father. The poor parents would relive the tragic results of their trivial argument for the rest of their lives.

  Later Ruth was told that she was conceived in a well-intentioned but passionless act. Ruth’s parents were mistaken to even imagine that their sons were replaceable—nor did they pause to consider that the new baby who would bear the burden of their impossible expectations might be a girl .

  That Ruth Cole would grow up to be that rare combination of a well-respected literary novelist and an internationally best-selling author is not as remarkable as the fact that she managed to grow up at all. Those handsome young men in the photographs had stolen most of her mother’s affection; however, her mother’s rejection was more bearable to Ruth than growing up in the shadow of the coldness that passed between her parents.

  Ted Cole, a best-selling author and illustrator of books for children, was a handsome man who was better at writing and drawing for children than he was at fulfilling the daily responsibilities of fatherhood. And until Ruth was four-and-a-half, while Ted Cole was not always drunk, he frequently drank too much. It’s also true that, while Ted was not a womanizer every waking minute, at no time in his life was he ever entirely not a womanizer. (Granted, this made him more unreliable with women than he was with children.)

  Ted had ended up writing for children by default. His literary debut was an overpraised adult novel of an indisputably literary sort. The two novels that followed aren’t worth mentioning, except to say that no one—especially Ted Cole’s publisher—had expressed any noticeable interest in a fourth novel, which was never written. Instead, Ted wrote his first children’s book. Called The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls, it was very nearly not published; at first glance, it appeared to be one of those children’s books that are of dubious appeal to parents and remain memorable to children only because children remember being frightened. At least Thomas and Timothy were frightened by The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls when Ted first told them the story; by the time Ted told it to Ruth, The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls had already frightened about nine or ten million children, in more than thirty languages, around the w
orld.

  Like her dead brothers, Ruth grew up on her father’s stories. When Ruth first read these stories in a book, it felt like a violation of her privacy. She’d imagined that her father had created these stories for her alone. Later she would wonder if her dead brothers had felt that their privacy had been similarly invaded.

  Regarding Ruth’s mother: Marion Cole was a beautiful woman; she was also a good mother, at least until Ruth was born. And until the deaths of her beloved sons, she was a loyal and faithful wife—despite her husband’s countless infidelities. But after the accident that took her boys away, Marion became a different woman, distant and cold. Because of her apparent indifference to her daughter, Marion was relatively easy for Ruth to reject. It would be harder for Ruth to recognize what was flawed about her father; it would also take a lot longer for her to come to this recognition, and by then it would be too late for Ruth to turn completely against him. Ted had charmed her—Ted charmed almost everyone, up to a certain age. No one was ever charmed by Marion. Poor Marion never tried to charm anyone, not even her only daughter; yet it was possible to love Marion Cole.

  And this is where Eddie, the unlucky young man with the inadequate lamp shade, enters the story. He loved Marion—he would never stop loving her. Naturally if he’d known from the beginning that he was going to fall in love with Ruth, he might have reconsidered falling in love with her mother. But probably not. Eddie couldn’t help himself.

  Summer Job

  His name was Edward O’Hare. In the summer of 1958, he had recently turned sixteen—having his driver’s license had been a prerequisite of his first summer job. But Eddie O’Hare was unaware that becoming Marion Cole’s lover would turn out to be his real summer job; Ted Cole had hired him specifically for this reason, and it would have lifelong results.