A Widow for One Year

Sixty Times

A Difficult Woman

When Eddie O’Hare finally stepped up to the microphone onstage and addressed the jam-packed Kaufman Concert Hall, he astutely interpreted the reverential hush of the audience. They worshiped Ruth Cole, and the consensus was that this book was her best. The audience also knew that this was Ruth’s first public appearance since her husband’s death. Lastly, Eddie interpreted, there was an anxious hush throughout the audience—for there were many souls in the enormous crowd who knew how Eddie could go on and on.

Therefore, Eddie said: “Ruth Cole needs no introduction.”

He must have really meant it. He walked forthwith off the stage and took the seat that had been saved for him in the audience, beside Hannah. And throughout Ruth’s reading, Eddie stared stoically straight ahead, his gaze falling twelve or fifteen feet to the left of the podium, as if the only way he could endure to look at Ruth was to keep her in the periphery of his vision.

And he never stopped crying, Hannah would say later; Hannah’s right knee had got wet because she’d held his hand. Eddie had wept silently—as if every word Ruth uttered was a blow to his heart that he accepted as his due.

He was nowhere to be seen in the greenroom afterward; Ruth and Hannah went out to dinner alone.

“Eddie looked absolutely suicidal,” Ruth said.

“He’s gaga over you—it’s cracking him up,” Hannah told her.

“Don’t be silly—it’s my mother he’s in love with.”

“Christ! How old is your mother?” Hannah asked.

“Seventy-six,” Ruth replied.

“It would be obscene to be in love with a seventy-six-year-old!” Hannah said. “It’s you, baby. Eddie’s gaga over you—he is !”

“ That would be obscene,” Ruth said.

A man eating dinner with someone who appeared to be his wife kept staring at their table. Ruth said he was staring at Hannah, but Hannah said he was staring at Ruth. In either case, they agreed it was no way for a man eating with his wife to behave.

As they were paying the bill, the man awkwardly approached their table. He was in his thirties, younger than Hannah and Ruth, and he was good-looking despite his hangdog expression, which seemed to affect even his posture. The closer he came to them, the more he stooped. His wife still sat at their table, her head in her hands.

“Jesus! He’s gonna hit on you in front of his fucking wife!” Hannah whispered to Ruth.

“Excuse me,” the miserable wretch said.

“Yeah, what is it?” Hannah asked. She kicked Ruth under the table— an I-told-you-so sort of kick.

“Aren’t you Ruth Cole?” the man asked.

“No shit,” Hannah said.

“Yes,” Ruth replied.

“I’m embarrassed to bother you,” the wretched man mumbled, “but it’s my wife and my anniversary, and you’re my wife’s favorite writer. I know you don’t sign books, but I gave my wife your new novel for an anniversary present and we just happen to have it with us. I feel terrible asking you, but would you sign it?” (The wife, abandoned at their table, was on the verge of utter mortification.)

“Oh, for God’s sake . . .” Hannah started to say, but Ruth jumped to her feet. She wanted to shake the man’s hand—and his wife’s hand, too. Ruth even smiled as she signed her book. She couldn’t have been less like herself. But in the taxi, back to the hotel, Hannah said something to her—leave it to Hannah to make Ruth feel unready to re-enter the world.

“It may have been his anniversary, but he was looking at your breasts,” Hannah said.

“He was not!” Ruth protested.

“Everyone does, baby. You better get used to it.”

Later, in her suite at the Stanhope, Ruth resisted calling Eddie. Besides, at the New York Athletic Club, they probably refused to answer the phone after a certain hour. Or else they would demand to know, when you called, if you were wearing a coat and tie.

Instead Ruth wrote a letter to her mother, whose Toronto address had become fixed in her memory. “Dear Mommy,” Ruth wrote, “Eddie O’Hare still loves you. Your daughter, Ruth.”

The Stanhope stationery lent to the letter a formality, or at least a distance, that she hadn’t intended. Such a letter, Ruth thought, should begin “Dear Mother,” but “Mommy” was what she’d called her mother; and it was what Graham called Ruth, which meant more to Ruth than anything else in the world. She knew she’d re-entered the world the instant she handed the letter to the concierge at the Stanhope—just before leaving for Europe.