A Widow for One Year

For four years at Middlebury, Ruth and Hannah had complained about the isolation of Vermont—not to mention the winters, because neither of them was a skier. Now Ruth loved Vermont, even the winters, and she enjoyed having a house in the country. But she liked going away, too. Her traveling was the simple answer she gave to the question of why she hadn’t married, and why she didn’t want children.

Allan Albright was too smart to accept the simple answer. They had talked and talked about Ruth’s more complex reasons for saying no to marriage, and to children; except with Hannah, Ruth had never before discussed the more complex reasons. She particularly regretted that she’d never discussed them with her father.

Back in the greenroom, Ruth thanked Eddie for his welcome and timely interference with Mrs. Benton.

“It seems I have a way with her age group,” Eddie admitted— without irony, Ruth observed. (She’d also observed that Eddie had returned with Mrs. Benton’s bag of books.)

Even Allan managed some gruff congratulations, which amounted to his overmanly approval of Eddie’s heroics with the relentless autograph-seeker.

“Well done, O’Hare,” Allan heartily exclaimed. He was one of those bluff men who called other men by their last names. (Hannah would have cited the last-name usage as a distinguishing habit of Allan’s “generation.”)

Finally it had stopped raining. As they left by the stage-entrance door, Ruth told Allan and Eddie how grateful she was to them.

“I know that you both did your best to save me from myself,” she told them.

“It’s not yourself you need saving from,” Allan said to Ruth. “It’s the assholes.”

No, it’s myself I need saving from, Ruth thought, but she just smiled at Allan and squeezed his arm. Eddie, who was silent, was thinking that Ruth needed saving from herself and from the assholes—and possibly from Allan Albright.

Speaking of assholes, there was one waiting for Ruth on Second Avenue between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth; he must have guessed the restaurant they were going to, or he’d been clever enough to follow Karl and Melissa there. It was the impudent young man from the rear of the concert hall, the one with the needling questions.

“I want to apologize,” he said to Ruth. “It wasn’t my intention to make you angry.” He didn’t sound very apologetic.

“You didn’t make me angry at you, ” Ruth told him, not entirely truthfully. “I get angry with myself every time I go out in public. I shouldn’t let myself go out in public.”

“But why is that?” the young man asked.

“You’ve asked enough questions, fella,” Allan told him. When Allan called someone “fella,” he was willing to pick a fight.

“I get angry with myself when I expose myself in public,” Ruth said. Suddenly she added: “Oh, God—you’re a journalist, aren’t you?”

“You d

on’t like journalists, do you?” the young journalist asked.

Ruth left him outside the restaurant, where he went on arguing with Allan for an interminable amount of time. Eddie stayed with Allan and the journalist, but only briefly. He then came into the restaurant and joined Ruth, who was sitting with Karl and Melissa.

“They’re not going to get into a fight,” Eddie assured Ruth. “If they were going to have a fight, they already would have.”

It turned out that the journalist was someone who’d not been granted an interview with Ruth the following day. Apparently the publicist at Random House hadn’t thought he was important enough, and Ruth always put a limit on how many interviews she would do.

“You don’t have to do any, ” Allan had told her, but she’d yielded to the publicity people.

Allan was notorious at Random House for undermining the efforts of the publicity people. His idea of a novelist—even of a best-selling novelist, like Ruth Cole—was that he or she should stay home and write. What his authors appreciated about Allan Albright was that he didn’t burden them with all the other expectations publishers have. He was devoted to his authors; sometimes Allan was more devoted to his authors’ actual writing than the authors themselves were. Ruth never doubted that she loved that aspect of Allan. But that he was unafraid to criticize her, about anything, was an aspect of Allan that Ruth did not so wholeheartedly adore.

While Allan was still out on the sidewalk, arguing with the aggressive young journalist, Ruth quickly signed the books in Mrs. Benton’s shopping bag, including the one she had “spoiled.” (On that one she wrote “Sorry!” in parentheses.) Then Eddie hid the shopping bag under the table, because Ruth told him that Allan would be disappointed in her for signing the self-assertive grandmother’s books. The way Ruth said it, Eddie surmised that Allan took more than an editorial interest in his renowned author.

When Allan at last joined them at the table, Eddie was alert to Allan’s other interest in Ruth. Ruth was alert to Allan’s other interest in her, too.

During the editing of her novel, including their bitter argument about the title, she’d not sensed Allan’s romantic inclination toward her; he’d been strictly business, an absolute professional. Nor had she seen, at the time, that his dislike of her chosen title had grown curiously personal; that she wouldn’t yield to him—she wouldn’t even consider his suggested alternative—had affected him oddly. He bore the title like a grudge. He referred to it obdurately, in the manner that a vexed husband might repeatedly mention an enduring disagreement in a long and otherwise successful marriage.

She’d called her third novel Not for Children . (Indeed, it was not.) In the novel, it is a slogan favored by the anti-pornography picketers; the slogan is the invention of Mrs. Dash’s enemy (who would eventually become her friend) Eleanor Holt. However, in the course of the novel, the phrase comes to mean something quite different from its original intent. In their mutual need to love and raise their orphaned grandchildren, Eleanor Holt and Jane Dash realize that their expressed disapproval of each other must be set aside; their old antagonisms are also “not for children.”

Allan had wanted to call the novel For the Children’s Sake . (He’d said that the two adversaries make friends in the manner of a couple who endure a bad marriage “for the children’s sake.”) But Ruth wanted to keep the anti-pornography connection that was both explicit and implicit in Not for Children . It mattered to her that her own political opinion about pornography was strongly voiced in the title—her political opinion being that she feared censorship more than she disliked pornography, which she disliked a great deal.

As for protecting children from pornography, that was everyone’s responsibility; it was a matter of common sense, not censorship, to protect children from everything that was unsuitable for them. (“Including,” Ruth had said in several interviews, “any novel by Ruth Cole.”)

Ruth basically hated arguing with men. It reminded her of arguing with her father. If she let her father win, he had a puerile way of reminding her that he’d been right. But if Ruth clearly won, either Ted wouldn’t admit it or he’d be petulant.