“ What did you say to me?” she asked. She had an imperiousness that Hannah would have called “generational,” but which Ruth thought was more a matter of the obnoxious old woman’s wealth and privilege; surely the woman’s pushiness wasn’t strictly a matter of her age.
Ruth reached into the shopping bag and took out one of her own novels. “Do you have a pen?” she asked Eddie, who fumbled inside his damp jacket and produced a red pen—his teacher’s favorite.
As Ruth inscribed the old woman’s book, she repeated aloud the words as she wrote them: “Fuck you and your grandchildren.” She put the book back in the bag and would have withdrawn another—she would have inscribed them all in that fashion, and left them all unsigned—but the old woman grabbed the shopping bag away from her.
“How dare you?” the elderly lady cried.
“Fuck you and your grandchildren,” Ruth repeated flatly. It was her voice for reading aloud. She went back inside the greenroom, saying to Allan, in passing, “ Fuck being nice twice. Fuck being nice once .”
Eddie, who knew that his introduction had been too long and too academic, saw a way to atone. Whoever the old woman was, she was about Marion’s age; Eddie did not look upon women of Marion’s age as “old.” They were older women, of course, but they were not elderly—not in Eddie’s opinion.
Eddie had seen a printed bookplate on the inside title page that Ruth had inscribed for the aggressive grandmother.
ELIZABETH J. BENTON
“Mrs. Benton?” Eddie asked the older woman.
“What?” Mrs. Benton said. “Who are you?”
“Ed O’Hare,” Eddie said, offering the older woman his hand. “That’s an admirable brooch you have.”
Mrs. Benton stared at the lapel of her plum
-colored suit jacket; her brooch was a scallop shell of silver, studded with pearls. “It was my mother’s,” the older woman told Eddie.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Eddie said. “ My mother had one just like it— in fact, she was buried with it,” Eddie lied. (Eddie’s mom, Dot O’Hare, was still very much alive.)
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Benton said. “I’m sorry.”
Eddie’s long fingers seemed suspended above the older woman’s intensely ugly brooch. Mrs. Benton, swelling her breast in the direction of Eddie’s hovering hand, allowed him to touch the scallop shell of silver; she let him finger her pearls.
“I never thought I’d see a brooch like this again,” Eddie said.
“Oh . . .” Mrs. Benton said. “Were you very close to your mother? You must have been very close.”
“Yes,” Eddie lied. (Why can’t I do this in my books ? he wondered. It was a mystery where the lies came from, and why he couldn’t summon them when he wanted them; it was as if he could only wait and hope for a good enough lie to appear at the opportune moment.)
Minutes later, Eddie had walked the older woman to the stage-entrance door. Outside, in the steady rain, a small but determined gathering of young people were waiting for a glimpse of Ruth Cole—and to ask her to sign their books.
“The author has already left. She went out the front door,” Eddie lied. It amazed him that he’d been incapable of lying to the woman at the registration desk in the Plaza. If only he’d been able to lie to her, he’d have got change for the bus a little sooner; he might even have had the good luck to catch an earlier bus.
Mrs. Benton, who was more in command of her capabilities as a liar than Eddie O’Hare, basked for a moment longer in Eddie’s company before she bid him a lilting good night; she made a point of thanking him for his “gentlemanly behavior.”
Eddie had volunteered to get Ruth Cole’s autograph for Mrs. Benton’s grandchildren. He’d persuaded the older woman to leave her shopping bag of books with him, including the book that Ruth had “spoiled.” (That was how Mrs. Benton thought of it.) Eddie knew that if he couldn’t get Ruth’s signature, he could at least provide Mrs. Benton with a reasonably convincing forgery.
Eddie would have confessed to a fondness for Mrs. Benton’s boldness: her assertion that she was Ruth’s mother notwithstanding, Eddie had admired the way she’d stood up to Allan Albright. There was also something bold about Mrs. Benton’s amethyst earrings—something too bold, perhaps. They were not quite right with the more muted plum color of her suit. And the big ring that hung a little too loosely from her right middle finger . . . perhaps it had once fit the ring finger of that hand.
Eddie had a soft spot for the thinning and caving-in of Mrs. Benton’s body, too—for he could tell that Mrs. Benton still thought of herself as a younger woman. How could she not think of herself as younger, sometimes? How could Eddie not be moved by her? And, like most writers (Ted Cole excluded), Eddie O’Hare believed that a writer’s autograph was intrinsically unimportant. Why not do for Mrs. Benton what he could?
What did it matter to Mrs. Benton that Ruth Cole’s reasons for avoiding public book-signings were well founded? Ruth hated how exposed she felt when she was signing books for a mob. There was always someone who just stared at her; often it was someone standing to one side of the line, usually without a book.
Publicly, Ruth had said that when she was in Helsinki, for example, she would sign books—her Finnish translations—because she couldn’t speak Finnish. In Finland, or in many other foreign countries, there was nothing she could do but autograph her books. But in her own country, she would rather read to an audience, or just talk to her readers— anything rather than sign books. Yet, in truth, she didn’t like talking to her readers, either, as had been painfully apparent to anyone observing her agitation during the disastrous Q and A at the Y. Ruth Cole was afraid of her readers.
She’d had her share of stalkers. Usually Ruth’s stalkers were creepy young men. They presumed they already knew her, because of how obsessively they’d read her novels. They presumed they would be good for her, in some way—as lovers, they often implied, or merely as like-minded literary correspondents. (Many of them were would-be writers, of course.)
Yet the few women who’d stalked her had upset Ruth more than the creepy young men. They were often women who wanted Ruth to write their stories; they thought they belonged in a Ruth Cole novel.
Ruth wanted her privacy. She traveled frequently; she could happily write in hotels, or in a variety of rented houses and apartments, surrounded by other people’s photographs and furniture and clothes, or even caring for other people’s pets. Ruth owned only one home—an old farmhouse in Vermont, which she was halfheartedly restoring. She’d bought the farmhouse only because she needed to have a place to keep coming back to, and because a caretaker had virtually come with the property. A tireless man and his wife and family lived nearby on a working farm. They were a couple with a seemingly uncountable number of children; Ruth tried to keep them busy with odd jobs, and with the larger task of “restoring” her farmhouse—one room at a time, and always when Ruth was traveling.