“Patience, Ruthie, patience,” her father would repeat and repeat to her.
“I am patient, Daddy,” Ruth would tell him. “I’m still waiting for you to tell me the story, aren’t I?”
“I mean, be a patient driver, Ruthie—always be a patient driver.”
The Volvo—like all of Ted’s Volvos, which he began buying in the sixties—was a stick shift. (Ted told Ruth to never trust a boy who drove an automatic transmission.) “And if you’re in the passenger seat and I’m the driver, I never look at you—I don’t care what you say, or what kind of fit you’re having. Even if you’re choking,” Ted said. “If I’m driving the car, I can talk to you, but I don’t look at you—not ever. And when you’re the driver, you don’t look at me, or at anyone who might be in the passenger seat. Not until you get off the road and stop the car. You got it?”
“Got it,” Ruth said.
“And if you’re out on a date and the boy is driving, if he looks at you, for whatever reason, you tell him not to look at you or else you’ll get out and walk. Or you tell him to let you drive the car. You got that, too?” her father asked.
“I got it,” Ruth said. “Tell me what happened to Thomas and Timothy.”
But all her father said was: “And if you’re upset—like something you’re thinking about suddenly upsets you, and you start to cry— and you can’t see the road clearly, because of your tears . . . just suppose you’re bawling your eyes out, for whatever reason . . .”
“Okay, okay—I got it!” Ruth told him.
“Well. If you ever get like that, crying so hard that you can’t see the road, you just pull over to the side of the road and stop .”
“What about the accident?” Ruth asked. “Were you there? Were you a
nd Mommy in the car?”
In the shallow end of the swimming pool, Ruth felt the ice melting on her shoulder; the cold trickle followed the line of her collarbone and made its way across her chest into the warmer water of the pool. The sun had dropped below the towering privet.
She thought of Graham Greene’s father, the schoolmaster, whose advice to his former pupils (who adored him) was odd, but in its own way charming. “Remember to be faithful to your future wife,” he’d said to a boy who was leaving school to join the army in 1918. And to another, just prior to his confirmation, Charles Greene had said: “An army of women live on the lust of men.”
Where had this “army of women” gone? Ruth guessed that Hannah was one of the alleged army’s lost soldiers.
Since Ruth’s earliest memories—not only since she’d begun to read, but from the first time her father had told her a story—books, and the characters in them, had entered her life and remained fixed there. Books, and the characters in them, were more “fixed” in Ruth’s life than were her father and her best friend—not to mention the men in her life, who for the most part had proven themselves to be almost as unreliable as Ted and Hannah had.
“All life long,” Graham Greene had written in his autobiography, A Sort of Life, “my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent.” A good instinct, but were Ruth to put it into action, she would perforce have nothing further to do with men . Among the men she’d known, only Allan seemed admirable and constant; yet, as she sat in the pool, readying herself for her test with Scott Saunders, Allan’s lupine teeth were foremost on her mind. And the hair on the back of his hands . . . he had too much hair there.
She’d not enjoyed playing squash with Allan. He was a good athlete and a well-coached squash player, but Allan was too large for the court—too dangerous in his lunging, looping movements. Yet Allan would never try to hurt or intimidate her. And although she’d lost to him twice, Ruth didn’t doubt that she would eventually beat him. It was merely a matter of learning to keep out of his way—while at the same time not being afraid of his backswing. The two times she’d lost to him, Ruth had yielded the T. Next time, if there was a next time, Ruth was determined not to give up the preferred position on the court to him.
As she enjoyed the last of the melting ice, she thought: At worst, it might mean some stitches in an eyebrow or a broken nose. Besides, if Allan hit her with his racquet, he would feel terrible about it. Thereafter, Allan would yield the preferred position on the court to her . In no time, whether he hit her or not, she would be beating him easily. Then Ruth thought: Why bother to beat him?
How could she ever consider giving up men ? To an even greater extent, it was women she didn’t trust.
She’d been sitting for too long in the swimming pool, in the chill of the late-afternoon shade—not to mention the clammy cold of the ice pack, which had melted on her shoulder. The chill gave her a touch of November in the Indian Summer weather; it reminded Ruth of that November night in 1969, when her father had given her what he called “the ultimate driving lesson” and “the penultimate driving test.”
She wouldn’t be sixteen until the spring of the following year, when she would get her learner’s permit—thereafter, she would pass her driver’s test without the slightest difficulty—but that November night her father, who didn’t give a damn about learner’s permits, had forewarned her: “For your sake, Ruthie, I hope you never have a tougher driving test than this one. Let’s go.”
“Go where ?” she’d asked. It was the Sunday night of the long Thanksgiving weekend.
The pool was already covered for winter, the fruit trees denuded of fruit and leaves; even the privet was bare, standing skeletally, stiffly moving in the wind. On the northern horizon was a glow: the headlights of the cars that were already at a standstill in the westbound lane of the Montauk Highway; the weekenders on their way back to New York. (Normally the drive took two hours—at the most, three.)
“I feel like the lights of Manhattan tonight,” Ted told his daughter. “I want to see if the Christmas decorations are already in place on Park Avenue. I want to have a drink at the Stanhope bar. I had a 1910 Armagnac there once. Of course I don’t drink Armagnac anymore, but I’d like to have something as good as that again. A really good glass of port, maybe. Let’s go.”
“You want to drive to New York tonight, Daddy?” Ruth asked. Short of the end of the Labor Day weekend, or immediately following the Fourth of July (and maybe Memorial Day weekend), it was arguably the worst night of the year to drive to New York.
“No, I don’t want to drive to New York, Ruthie—I can’t drive to New York, because I’ve been drinking. I’ve had three beers and a whole bottle of red wine. The one thing I promised your mother was that I’d never drink and drive, at least not with you in the car. You’re the driver, Ruthie.”
“I’ve never driven to New York,” Ruth said. It wouldn’t have been much of a test if she had .
When they finally got on the Long Island Expressway at Manorville, Ted said, “Get in the passing lane, Ruthie. Maintain the speed limit. Remember your rearview mirror. If someone’s coming up behind you and you have enough time to move to the center lane, and if you have enough room, then move over. But if someone’s coming up on you, hog-wild to pass, let him pass you on the right.”
“Isn’t this illegal, Daddy?” she asked him. She thought that learning to drive had some restrictions—like maybe she wasn’t supposed to drive at night, or not beyond a fifteen-mile radius of where she lived. She didn’t know she’d already been driving illegally because she didn’t have a learner’s permit.