A Widow for One Year by John Irving
Random House
Web posted on: Wednesday, May 13, 1998 4:23:18 PM EDT
(CNN) -- "A Widow for One Year" is a multilayered love story. Both ribald and erotic, it is a richly comic and disturbing novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
This first chapter contains profanity that may be offensive to some readers.
CHAPTER ONE
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 unfamiliarity 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 nakednakedness 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 world.
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.
Copyright© 1998 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. All rights reserved
ISBN: 0-375-50137-1
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