Most of all, Eddie had assured her that her mother had loved her. (One might write a whole book about that!) Ruth’s father had tried to reassure her of that—for thirty-two years—but her father, given his cynicism about her mother, had failed to convince her.
Naturally Ruth had heard the theory of how her dead brothers had robbed her mother of her capacity to love another child; there was also the theory that Marion had been afraid to love Ruth, out of fear of losing her only daughter to some calamity of the kind that had claimed her sons.
But Eddie had told Ruth the story of the moment when Marion recognized that Ruth had a flawed eye—that hexagon of bright yellow, which her mother also had in her eye. Eddie told Ruth how Marion had cried in fear—for this yellow flaw meant to her that Ruth might be like her, and her mother hadn’t wanted Ruth to be like her.
For Ruth, there was suddenly more love in her mother—for not wishing anything of herself on her daughter—than Ruth could bear.
Ruth and Eddie had talked about whether Ruth was more like her mother or her father. (The more he listened to Ruth, the more Eddie saw of Marion in her.) The subject mattered greatly to Ruth, because she didn’t want to be a mother if she was going to be a bad one.
“That’s just what your mother said,” Eddie told her.
“But what worse thing could a mother do than leave her child?” Ruth had asked him.
“That’s what your father says, isn’t it?” Eddie asked her.
Her father was a “sexual predator,” Ruth told Eddie, but he’d been “halfway decent” as a
father. He’d never neglected her. It was as a woman that she loathed him. As a child, she had doted on him—at least he was there .
“He would have been a terrible influence on those boys, had they lived,” Eddie told her. Ruth instantly agreed. “That’s why your mother had already thought of leaving him—I mean, before the boys were killed,” Eddie added.
Ruth hadn’t known that. She expressed considerable bitterness toward her father for withholding that information from her, but Eddie explained that Ted couldn’t have told her because Ted hadn’t known that Marion might leave him.
Ruth and Eddie had talked about so much that Ruth couldn’t begin to describe it in her diary. Eddie had even called Marion “the sexual beginning and the sexual peak” of his life. (Ruth did manage to write that down.)
And in the taxi ride to the Stanhope, with that awful old woman’s shopping bag of books between his knees, Eddie had said to Ruth: “That ‘awful old woman,’ as you call her, is about your mother’s age. Therefore, she’s not an ‘awful old woman’ to me .”
It was staggering to Ruth that a forty-eight-year-old man was still carrying a torch for a woman who was now seventy-one!
“Supposing that my mother lives into her nineties, will you be a lovestruck sixty -eight-year-old?” Ruth had asked Eddie.
“I’m absolutely certain of it,” Eddie had told her.
What Ruth Cole also wrote in her diary was that Eddie O’Hare was the antithesis of her father. At seventy-seven, Ted Cole was now chasing women who were Ruth’s age, although he was less and less successful at it. His more common successes were with women in their late forties—women who were Eddie’s age!
If Ruth’s father lived into his nineties, he might finally be pursuing women who at least looked closer to his age—namely, women who were “merely” in their seventies!
The phone rang. Ruth couldn’t help being disappointed that it was Allan. She’d picked up the phone with the hope that it might be Eddie. Maybe he’s remembered something else to tell me! Ruth had wished.
“Not asleep, I hope,” Allan said. “And you’re alone, I trust.”
“Not asleep, definitely alone,” Ruth answered him. Why did he have to spoil what a favorable impression he’d made by sounding the jealousy note?
“How’d it go?” Allan asked her.
She felt suddenly too tired to tell him the details, which, only moments before he called, had so excited her.
“It was a very special evening,” Ruth said. “It’s given me so much more of a picture of my mother—actually, both of her and of myself,” she added. “Maybe I shouldn’t be afraid that I’d be a rotten wife. Maybe I wouldn’t make a bad mother.”
“ I’ve told you that,” Allan reminded her. Why couldn’t he just be grateful that she was possibly coming around to the idea of what he wanted?
That was when Ruth knew that she would not have sex with Allan the next night, either. What sense did it make to sleep with someone and then go off to Europe for two, almost three weeks? (As much sense as it made to keep putting off sleeping with him, Ruth reconsidered. She wouldn’t agree to marry Allan without sleeping with him first—at least once.)
“Allan, I’m awfully tired—and there’s too much that’s too new on my mind,” Ruth began.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“I don’t want to have dinner with you tomorrow night—I don’t want to see you until I’m back from Europe,” she told him. She half-hoped that he would try to dissuade her, but he was silent. Even his patience with her was irritating.