"Well. My best friend fucked my father, then my father killed himself, and I found out that my mother is a journeyman sort of writer-- is that what you mean?"
"All right, all right--I deserve that," Hannah said. "But what happened to you ? You're different . Something happened to you."
"I've had my last bad boyfriend, if that's what you mean," Ruth replied.
"Okay, okay. Keep it to yourself," Hannah said. " Something happened. But I don't care. Go on and keep it to yourself."
Ruth poured her friend a little more of the single-malt Scotch whiskey. "This is good, isn't it?" Ruth asked.
"You're a weird one," Hannah told her. It struck a chord. It was what Rooie had told Ruth the first time Ruth refused to stand in the wardrobe closet among the shoes.
"Nothing happened, Hannah," Ruth lied. "Don't people simply come to a point when they want their lives to change, when they want a new life?"
"Yeah . . . I wouldn't know," Hannah answered. "Maybe they do. But only because something happens to them."
Ruth's First Wedding
Allan Albright and Ruth Cole were married over the long Thanksgiving weekend, which they spent at Ruth's house in Vermont. Hannah, together with a bad boyfriend, was a weekend-long houseguest, as was Eddie O'Hare, who gave the bride away. (Hannah was Ruth's maid of honor.) With Minty's help, Eddie had identified that George Eliot passage about marriage--Ruth wanted Hannah to read it at her wedding. Of course Minty couldn't resist a small lecture upon his success in locating the passage.
"You see, Edward," Minty informed his son, "a passage of this kind, which is a summation--both in its content and in its tone--is certain to be an opening passage to a chapter or, more likely, a concluding passage. And as it suggests some deeper finality, it is more likely a passage to be found near the end of a book than it is to be found near the beginning."
"I see," Eddie said. "What book is it from?"
"The hint of irony gives it away," Minty intoned. "That, and its bittersweet quality. It's like a pastoral, but more than a pastoral."
"Which novel is it, Dad?" Eddie begged his father.
"Why, it's Adam Bede, Edward," the old English teacher told his son. "And it's well suited for your friend's wedding, which is a November wedding, the same month Adam Bede himself was married to Dinah-- 'on a rimy morning in parting November,' " Minty quoted from memory. "That's from the first sentence of the last chapter, not counting the Epilogue," the old English teacher added.
Eddie felt exhausted, but he'd identified the passage, as Ruth had asked him to.
At Ruth's wedding, Hannah read from George Eliot with a lack of conviction, but the words themselves were alive for Ruth.
"What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"
What greater thing is there, indeed? Ruth wondered. She thought she had only begun to love Allan; she believed she was already loving him more than she'd ever loved anyone else, except her dad.
The civil ceremony, which was conducted by a local justice of the peace, was held in Ruth's favorite bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. The booksellers, a man and his wife who were old friends of Ruth's, were kind enough to close their store for a couple of hours on one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. After the wedding, the bookstore opened its doors to business-as-usual, but there seemed to be more than the expected numbers of book buyers waiting to be served. Among them were some curiosity seekers. As the new Mrs. Albright (which Ruth Cole would never be called ) left the store on Allan's arm, she averted her eyes from the bystanders.
"If there are any journalists, I'll handle them," Hannah had whispered to Ruth.
Eddie was looking all around for Marion, of course.
"Is she here? Do you see her?" Ruth asked, but Eddie just shook his head.
Ruth was looking for someone else, too. She was half-expecting that Allan's ex-wife would show up, although Allan had scoffed at her fears. The subject of children had been a bitter one between Allan and his former wife, but their divorce had been a joint decision. Harassment was not a part of his ex-wife's nature, Allan had said.
On that busy Thanksgiving weekend, they'd had to park at some distance from the bookstore. As they passed a pizza restaurant and a store that sold candles, Ruth realized that they were being followed; notwithstanding that Hannah's bad boyfriend had the appearance of a bodyguard, someone was following the small wedding party. Allan took Ruth's arm and hurried her along the sidewalk; they were now near the parking lot. Hannah kept turning to look at the elderly woman who was following them, but the woman was not one to be stared down.
"She's not a journalist," Hannah said.
"Fuck her--she's just some old lady," Hannah's bad boyfriend said.
"I'll handle this," said Eddie O'Hare. But this older woman was immune to Eddie's charms.
"I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to her, " the elderly woman told Eddie; she was pointing at Ruth.
"Look, lady--it's her wedding day. Take a fucking hike," Hannah said.
Allan and Ruth stopped walking and faced the old lady, who was out of breath from hurrying after them. "It's not my ex-wife," Allan whispered, but Ruth knew this as surely as she knew that the old woman wasn't her mother.
"I wanted to see your face," the elderly lady said to Ruth. In her own way, she was as nondescript as Rooie's murderer. She was just another older woman who'd let herself go. And with that thought, even before the woman spoke again, Ruth suddenly knew who she was. Who else but a widow for the rest of her life would be so inclined to let herself go?
"Well, now you've seen my face," Ruth told her. "What next?"
"I want to see your face again, when you're a widow," the angry widow said. "I can't wait for that."
"Hey," Hannah told the elderly lady, "by the time she's a widow, you'll be dead. You look like you're dying already."
Hannah took Ruth's arm out of Allan's hand and started pulling her toward their car. "Come on, baby--it's your wedding day!"
Allan briefly glared at the old woman; then he followed Ruth and Hannah. Hannah's bad boyfriend, although he looked like an enforcer, was actually an ineffectual wimp. He just scuffed his feet and glanced at Eddie.
And Eddie O'Hare, who'd never met an older woman who couldn't (or wouldn't) be charmed, thought he would try again with the angry widow, who was staring after Ruth as if she were memorizing the moment.
"Wouldn't you agree that weddings are sacred, or that they should be?" Eddie began. "Aren't they among those days that we are meant to remember all our lives?"
"Oh, yes --I agree!" the old widow said eagerly. "She'll surely remember this day. When her husband's dead, she'll remember it more than she wants to. There's not an hour that goes by that I don't remember my wedding day!"
"I see," Eddie said. "Can I walk you to your car?"
"No, thank you, young man," the widow told him.
Eddie, defeated by her righteousness, turned away and hurried after the wedding party. All of them were hurrying, perhaps because of the rawness of the November weather.
There was a small dinner party in the late afternoon. The local booksellers came, and Kevin Merton (Ruth's caretaker) with his wife. Allan and Ruth had arranged no honeymoon. As for the new couple's plans, Ruth had told Hannah that they would probably use the Sagaponack house more frequently than they would get to Vermont. Eventually they would have to choose between Long Island and New England, which--once they had a child--would be an obvious choice, Ruth had said. (When the child was old enough to go to school, she would want the child to be in Vermont.)
"And when will you know if there's gonna be a kid?" Hannah had asked Ruth.
"When I get pregnant, or when I don't," Ruth had replied.
"But are you trying ?" Hannah had asked.
"We're going to start trying after the New Year."
"So soon!" Hannah said. "You're not wasting any time."
"I'm thirty-six, Hannah. I've wasted enough time."
The fax machine in the Vermont house rang throughout her wedding day, and Ruth kept leaving her dinner party to check the messages. (Congratulations from her foreign publishers, for the most part.) There was a sweet message from Maarten and Sylvia in Amsterdam. (WIM WILL BE BROKENHEARTED! Sylvia had written.)
Ruth had asked Maarten to keep her informed of any developments in the case of the murdered prostitute. Maarten had told Ruth that there was no news about the prostitute's murder. The police weren't talking about it.
"Did she have any children?" Ruth had earlier faxed Maarten. "I wonder if that poor prostitute had any children." But there had been nothing in the news about the prostitute's daughter, either.
Ruth had got on an airplane, she'd crossed an ocean, and what had happened in Amsterdam had all but vanished. Only in the dark, when she lay awake, did she feel the touch of a dress on a hanger or smell the leather of the halter top that had hung in Rooie's closet.
"You're gonna tell me when you're pregnant, aren't you?" Hannah asked Ruth, when they were doing the dishes. "You're not gonna try to keep that a secret, too, are you?"
"I have no secrets, Hannah," Ruth lied.
"You're the biggest secret I know," Hannah told her. "The only way I know what's going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book."
"But I don't write about myself, Hannah," Ruth reminded her.
"So you say," Hannah said.
"Of course I'll tell you when I'm pregnant," Ruth said, changing the subject. "You'll be the first to know, after Allan."
When she went to bed with Allan that night, Ruth felt only half at peace with herself; she also felt exhausted.
"Are you okay?" Allan asked her.
"I'm okay," Ruth told him.
"You seem tired," Allan said.
"I am tired," Ruth admitted.
"You seem different, somehow," Allan told her.
"Well. I'm married to you, Allan," Ruth replied. " That's different, isn't it?"
By the end of the first week of January 1991, Ruth would be pregnant, which would be different, too.
"Boy, that was fast!" Hannah would remark. "Tell Allan not every guy his age is still shooting live ammunition."
Graham Cole Albright--seven pounds, ten ounces--was born in Rutland, Vermont, on October 3, 1991. The boy's birthday coincided with the first anniversary of German reunification. Although she hated to drive, Hannah drove Ruth to the hospital. She'd been staying with Ruth for the final week of Ruth's pregnancy, because Allan was working in New York; he drove to Vermont on the weekends.
It was two in the morning when Hannah left Ruth's house for the hospital in Rutland, which was about a forty-five-minute drive. Hannah had called Allan as they were leaving for the hospital. The baby wasn't born until after ten in the morning. Allan arrived in plenty of time for the actual delivery.
As for the baby's namesake, Graham Greene, Allan remarked that he hoped his little Graham would never share the novelist's reputed habit of frequenting brothels. Ruth, who for more than a year had been bogged down near the end of volume one of The Life of Graham Greene, felt a far greater anxiety about one of Greene's other habits: his inclination to travel to the world's trouble spots in search of firsthand experience. This was nothing Ruth would wish upon her little Graham, nor would she ever again seek such experiences for herself. After all, she'd seen a prostitute murdered by her customer, and it appeared that the murderer had got away with it.
Ruth's novel-in-progress would suffer a yearlong hiatus. She moved with her baby boy back to Sagaponack, which meant that Conchita Gomez could be Graham's nanny. This also made the weekends easier for Allan. He could take the jitney or the train from New York to Bridgehampton in half the time it took him to drive from the city to Vermont; he could also work on the train.
In Sagaponack, Allan used Ted's former workroom for an office. Ruth claimed that the room still smelled of squid ink, or of a decomposing star-nosed mole--or of the Polaroid print coater. The photographs were gone now, although Ruth said she could still smell them, too.
But what could she smell (or otherwise detect) in her office on the second floor of the barn--the remodeled Sagaponack squash court, which Ruth chose as her workroom? The ladder and trap door had been replaced by a normal flight of stairs and a normal door. Ruth's new office had baseboard heating; there was a window where the dead spot on the front wall of the squash court had been. When the novelist sat typing on her old-fashioned typewriter, or--as she more often did-- writing by hand on the long yellow pads of lined paper, she never heard the reverberation that the squash ball used to make against the telltale tin. And the T on the former court, which she'd been taught to take possession of (as if her life depended on it), was carpeted now. Ruth couldn't see it.
She could smell, from time to time, the exhaust fumes from the cars that were still parked on the ground floor of the old barn. It wasn't a smell that bothered her.
"You're a weird one!" Hannah would say to her, again. "It would give me the creeps to work here!"
But, at least until Graham was old enough to go to preschool, the Sagaponack house would be fine for Ruth; it was fine for Allan and for Graham, too. They would go to Vermont for the summers, when the Hamptons were overrun--and when Allan didn't so much mind the long drive from the city and back. (It was a four-hour drive from New York to Ruth's house in Vermont.) Ruth would worry, then, about Allan driving such a distance at night--there were deer on the roads, and drunken drivers--but she was happily married; and, for the first time, she loved her life.
Like any new mother--especially, like any new older mother--Ruth worried about her baby. She'd been unprepared for how much she was going to love him. But Graham was a healthy child. Ruth's anxieties about him were entirely the product of her imagination.
At night, for example, when she thought that Graham's breathing was strange or different--or worse, when she couldn't hear him breathing--she would rush from the master bedroom to the nursery, which had been her own bedroom as a child. There, Ruth would often curl up on the rug beside the crib. She kept a pillow and a quilt in Graham's closet for such occasions. Allan would often find her on the floor of the nursery in the mornings--sound asleep beside her sleeping child.
And when Graham was no longer sleeping in a crib, and he was old enough to climb in and out of his bed by himself, Ruth would lie in the master bedroom, hearing her child's feet padding across the floor of the master bathroom on his way to her. It was exactly how Ruth had crossed that bathroom floor as a child, padding on her way to her mother's bed . . . no, to her father's bed, more often, except for that memorable night when she'd surprised her mother with Eddie.
This is closure, if there ever is closure, the novelist thought to herself. Something had come full circle. Here was an ending and a beginning. (Eddie O'Hare was Graham's godfather. Hannah Grant was the boy's godmother--a more responsible and reliable godmother than one might have thought.)
And on those nights when she lay curled on the nursery floor, listening to her child breathe, Ruth Cole would be thankful for her good luck. Rooie's murderer, who had clearly heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound, had not found her. Ruth often thought of him. She not only wondered who he was, and if he had a habit of killing prostitutes; she wondered if he'd read her novel--for she'd seen him take Rooie's copy of Not for Children . Maybe he'd only wanted the book as a place to keep his Polaroid picture of Rooie safe from harm.
On those nights, curled on the rug beside Graham's crib (later, his bed), Ruth surveyed the dimly lit nursery in the glow of the feeble night-light. She saw the familiar part in the window curtain; through the narrow slit, a black streak of night sky was visible--sometimes starry, sometimes not.
Usually it was a catch in Graham's breathi
ng that would make Ruth get up off the floor and look closely at her sleeping son. Then she would peek through the part in the curtain to see if the moleman was where she half-expected him to be: curled asleep on the window ledge with some of the pink tentacles of his star-shaped nose pressed against the glass.
The moleman was never there, of course; yet Ruth would sometimes wake with a start, because she was sure she'd heard him wheeze. (It was only Graham, who'd made a curious sigh in his sleep.)
Then Ruth would fall back to sleep--often wondering why her mother hadn't made an appearance, now that her father was dead. Didn't she want to see the baby? Ruth would wonder. Not to mention me !
It made her so angry that she tried to stop wondering.
And because Ruth was often alone with Graham in the Sagaponack house--at least on those nights when Allan was staying in the city-- there were times when the house made peculiar sounds. There was the mouse-crawling-between-the-walls sort of sound, and the sound-like-someone-trying-not-to-make-a-sound sort of sound, and the whole range of sounds between those sounds--the opening-of-the-door-in-the-floor sort of sound, and the absence of sound that the moleman made when he held his breath.
He was out there, somewhere, Ruth knew; he was still waiting for her. In the moleman's eyes, she was still a little girl. Trying to sleep, Ruth could see the moleman's small, vestigial eyes--the furry dents in his furry face.
As for Ruth's new novel, it was waiting for her, too. One day she wouldn't be a new mother, and she would write again. So far, she'd written only about a hundred pages of My Last Bad Boyfriend . She hadn't yet come to the scene when the boyfriend persuades the woman writer to pay a prostitute to watch her with a customer--Ruth was still working up to it. That scene was waiting for her, too.
III
FALL
1995
The Civil Servant
Sergeant Harry Hoekstra, formerly hoofdagent or almost-a-sergeant Hoekstra, was avoiding the task of cleaning out his desk. His office, on the second floor of the District 2 police station, overlooked the Warmoesstraat. Harry, while he did nothing about his desk (which had never been cleaned out before), distracted himself by regarding the changes in the street--for the Warmoesstraat, like the rest of the redlight district, had undergone some changes. As a street cop who was now looking forward to an early retirement, Sergeant Hoekstra knew that very little had ever escaped his attention.