A Widow for One Year by John Irving

Author:John Irving
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375504471
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1999-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

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

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