A Widow for One Year

In the seventh illustration—“one for every day of the week,” Ted Cole had said—there is Ruth tucked into her bed. H

er father has left the door open to the master bathroom, so that its night-light is visible. Through a part in the window curtain, we can see the black of night and a distant moon. And on the outside window ledge, the moleman is curled up—as snugly asleep as if he were underground. His paddle-shaped paws with their broad claws hide his face, all but the fleshy-pink star of his nose; at least eleven of the twenty-two pink tentacle-like touch organs are pressed against the glass of Ruth’s bedroom window.

For months—among the other models posing for her father—a succession of dead star-nosed moles had made Ted’s workroom as unapproachable as the squid ink had ever made it. And once, in a plastic bag, Ruth had found a star-nosed mole in the freezer, where she’d gone looking for a Popsicle.

Only Eduardo Gomez hadn’t seemed to mind—for the gardener had an implacable hatred of moles of any kind. The job of providing Ted with sufficient numbers of star-nosed moles had soothed Eduardo’s disposition noticeably.

That had been the long fall after Ruth’s mother and Eddie O’Hare had left.

The story had been written, and rewritten, over the summer of ’58, but the illustrations had come later. All of Ted Cole’s publishers—and his translators, too—had begged Ted to change the title. They’d wanted him to call the book The Moleman, of course, but Ted had insisted that the book be called A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, because his daughter had given him the idea.

And now—in the small red room with Rooie’s murderer—Ruth Cole tried to calm herself by thinking about the brave little girl named Ruthie who had once shared the center landing of the stairs with a mole that was twice her size. At last Ruth dared to move her eyes, just her eyes. She wanted to see what the murderer was doing; his wheezing was driving her crazy, but she could also hear him moving around, and the dim room had become slightly dimmer.

The killer had unscrewed the lightbulb from the standing lamp beside the blow-job chair. It was such a low-wattage bulb that the loss of light was less noticeable than the fact that the room was markedly less red. (The murderer had removed the scarlet stained-glass lamp shade, too.)

Then, from the big briefcase in the blow-job chair, the moleman withdrew some kind of high-wattage floodlight, which he screwed into the socket of the standing lamp. Now Rooie’s room was ablaze with light. Neither the room nor Rooie was improved by this new light, which illuminated the wardrobe closet, too. Ruth could clearly see her ankles above her shoes. In the narrow part in the curtain, she could also see her face.

Fortunately, the murderer had ceased his survey of the room. It was strictly how the light fell on the prostitute’s body that interested him. He pointed the ultrabright light more directly at Rooie’s bed, taking care to light his subject as brightly as possible. He impatiently slapped Rooie’s unresponsive right arm, for it had failed to stay where he’d placed it; he seemed disappointed that her breasts had gone so slack, but what could he do? He liked her best on her side, with one but not both of her breasts in view.

In the glaring light, the killer’s bald head was gleaming with sweat. There was a grayness to his skin, which Ruth hadn’t noticed before, but his wheezing had lessened.

The murderer appeared more relaxed. He proceeded to scrutinize Rooie’s posed body through the viewfinder of his camera. It was a camera Ruth recognized: a Polaroid of the old-fashioned, large-format kind—the same camera that her father used to take pictures of his models. The resultant black-and-white print had to be preserved with the bad-smelling Polaroid print coater.

The killer wasted little time in taking one picture. Thereafter, he couldn’t have cared less about Rooie’s pose; he rolled her roughly off the bed so that he could use the towel under her to unscrew the floodlight, which he returned to his big briefcase. (The floodlight, although it had been on for only a short time, was clearly hot.) The murderer also used the towel to wipe his fingerprints off the small lightbulb he’d earlier unscrewed from the standing lamp; he wiped his prints off the stained-glass lamp shade, too.

He kept waving the developing film in one hand. The film was about the size of a business envelope. The killer didn’t wait more than twenty or twenty-five seconds before he opened the film; then he went to the window seat and parted the curtains slightly, so that he could judge the quality of the print in natural light. He seemed very satisfied with the picture. When he came back to the blow-job chair, he returned his camera to the big briefcase. As for the photograph, he carefully wiped it with the bad-smelling print coater; then he waved the photo in the air to dry.

In addition to his wheezing, which now was light, the murderer hummed an unfollowable tune—as if he were making a sandwich he was looking forward to eating alone. Still waving the already-dry print, the killer walked once to the door to the street, tested how to unlock it, and—opening the door a crack—peered briefly outside. He’d touched both the lock and the doorknob with his hand in the sleeve of his overcoat, leaving no fingerprints.

When he closed the door, the killer saw Ruth Cole’s novel Not for Children on the table where the prostitute had left her keys. He picked up the book, turned it over, and studied the author’s photograph. Then, without reading a word of the novel, he opened the book in the middle and placed the photograph between the pages. He put Ruth’s novel in his briefcase, but the briefcase sprang open when he picked it up from the blow-job chair. With the standing lamp unlit, Ruth couldn’t see which of the contents of the briefcase had fallen out on the rug, but the murderer dropped to all fours; picking things up and returning them to the briefcase affected his wheezing, which was once more at whistlepitch when he finally stood up and clasped the briefcase firmly closed.

The murderer gave a last look at the room, then. To Ruth’s surprise, he gave no last look at Rooie. It was as if the prostitute now existed only in the photograph. Then, almost as quickly as he’d killed her, the gray-faced mole departed. He opened the door to the street without pausing to see if anyone was passing in the Bergstraat—or if a neighboring prostitute was standing in her open doorway. Before he closed the door, he bowed to Rooie’s doorway, as if Rooie herself were standing only a few feet inside. He again covered his hand in his coat sleeve when he touched the door.

Ruth’s right foot was asleep, but she waited a minute or more in the wardrobe closet, in case the killer came back. Then Ruth stumbled over the shoes as she limped out of the closet; she also dropped her purse, which, typically, was unzipped, forcing her to grope around on the dark, poorly lit rug, searching by touch for anything that might have fallen out. She could feel, inside her purse, everything that she knew was important to her (or had her name on it). On the rug, her hand encountered a tube of something too fat to be her lip gloss, but she put it in her purse, anyway.

What she would later consider as her shameful cowardice—her craven immobility in the wardrobe closet, where she’d been frozen with fear—was now matched by a cowardice of another kind. Ruth was already covering her tracks, at once wishing and then pretending that she’d never been there.

She couldn’t bring herself to take a last look at Rooie. She did pause at the door to the street, and for an eternity she waited inside the room with the door ajar—until she couldn’t see a prostitute in any of the other doorways, and there were no pedestrians on the Bergstraat. Then Ruth walked briskly into the late-afternoon light, which she liked so much in Sagaponack but which here had only the chill of a waning fall day about it. She wondered who would notice when Rooie didn’t pick up her daughter after school.

For ten, maybe twelve minutes, Ruth tried to convince herself that she was not running away; that’s how long it took her to walk to the Warmoesstraat police station in de Wallen . Once she was back in the red-light district, Ruth’s pace slowed considerably. Nor did she approach the first two policemen she saw; they were on horseback—they towered above her. And at the door to the police station, at 48 Warmoesstraat, Ruth balked at going inside. She found herself returning to her hotel. She was beginning to realize not only what a coward but what an inadequate eyewitness she was.

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She’d made a point of not looking at him! The quality of his vestigial-like eyes, which had so forcefully reminded her of the moleman, was hardly an identifying characteristic. What Ruth had best retained of the killer was what was ordinary about him—his blandness.

How many bald businessmen with big briefcases were there? Not all of them wheezed or had large-format Polaroid cameras—nowadays, surely, the camera was at least one defining detail. Ruth guessed it was a system of photography of interest only to professionals. But how much did that narrow the field of suspects?

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she should prepare what she was going to tell the police—preferably in writing . But by the time she’d returned to her hotel, Ruth was aware of the precariousness of her position: a renowned novelist, an extremely successful (but unmarried) woman, is the cringing witness to the murder of a prostitute while hiding in the prostitute’s closet. And she would ask the police (and the public) to believe that she was observing the prostitute with a customer for “research”—this from a novelist on record as saying that real-life experience was second-rate in comparison to what one could imagine!

Ruth could easily foresee the response to that . At last she’d found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn’t write about.

By the time she’d taken a bath and readied herself for her dinner with Maarten and Sylvia and the book-club people, she’d already written some notes about what to tell the poli

ce. Yet, by her degree of distraction at the book-club dinner, Ruth knew that she’d failed to convince herself that merely writing her account of the murder was as correct as going to the police in person. Long before the conclusion of the meal, she was feeling responsible for Rooie’s daughter. And as Maarten and Sylvia drove her back to her hotel, Ruth felt more and more guilty; by then she knew that she had no intentions of ever going to the police.

The details of Rooie’s room, from the intimate point of view of the wardrobe closet, would stay with Ruth far longer than it would take the novelist to capture the appropriate atmosphere of a working prostitute’s chamber. The details of Rooie’s room would remain as near to Ruth as the moleman curled on the ledge outside her childhood window, his starry nose pressed against the glass. Her horror and fear of her father’s stories for children had come to life in an adult form.

“Well, there he is—your never-ending admirer,” Maarten said, when he saw Wim Jongbloed waiting at the taxi stand on the Kattengat.

“Oh, how tedious,” Ruth said wearily, thinking that she’d never been as glad to see anyone in her life. She knew what she wanted to tell the police, but she didn’t know how to tell them in Dutch. Wim would know. It was merely a matter of making the foolish boy think he was doing something else. When Ruth kissed Maarten and Sylvia good night, she was aware of the questioning look that Sylvia gave her. “No,” Ruth whispered, “I’m not going to sleep with him.”