英文原版小说 寡居的一 A Widow for One Year道.doc

A Widow for One Year For Janet a love story quot. as for this little lady the best thing I can wish her is alittle misfortune.quot -WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY Acknowledgments I am grateful for my many visits to Amsterdam during the four years I spent writing this novel and Im especially indebted to the patience and generosity of brigadier Joep de Groot of the District 2 police without Joeps advice this book couldnt have been written. Im also indebted to the help given me by Margot Alvarez formerly of De Rode Draad-an organization for prostitutes rights in Amsterdam. And most of all-for the time and care that he devoted to the manuscript-I want to thank Robbert Ammerlaan my Dutch publisher. Regarding the Amsterdam sections in this book I owe these three Amsterdammers incalculable thanks. For what I may have managed to get right the credit belongs to them if there are errors the fault is mine. As for the numerous parts of this novelnotset in Amsterdam I have relied on the expertise of Anna von Planta in Geneva Anne Freyer in Paris Ruth Geiger in Zurich Harvey Loomis in Sagaponack and Alison Gordon in Toronto. I must also cite the attention to detail that was ably demonstrated by three outstanding assistants: Lewis Robinson Dana Wagner and Chloe Bland: I commend Lewis and Dana and Chloe for the irreproachable carefulness of their work. An oddity worth mentioning: the chapter called quotThe Red and Blue Air Mattressquot was previously published-in slightly different form and in German-in theS ddeutsche ZeitungJuly 27 1994 under the title quotDie blaurote Luftmatratze.quot - J.I. I SUMMER 1958 The Inadequate Lamp Shade One night when she was four and sleeping in the bottom bunk of her bunk bed Ruth Cole woke to the sound of lovemaking-it was coming from her parents bedroom. It was a totally unfamiliar sound to her. Ruth had recently been ill with a stomach flu when she first heard her mother making love Ruth thought that her mother was throwing up. It was not as simple a matter as her parents having separate bedrooms that summer they had separate houses although Ruth never saw the other house. Her parents spent alternate nights in the family house with Ruth there was a rental house nearby where Ruths mother or father stayed when they werent staying with Ruth. It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating but before they are divorced-when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination. When Ruth woke to the foreign sound she at first wasnt sure if it was her mother or her father who was throwing up then despite the unfamiliarity of the disturbance Ruth recognized that measure of melancholy and contained hysteria which was often detectable in her mothers voice. Ruth also remembered that it was her mothers turn to stay with her. The master bathroom separated Ruths room from the master bedroom. When the four-year-old padded barefoot through the bathroom she took a towel with her. When shed been sick with the stomach flu her father had encouraged her to vomit in a towel. Poor Mommy Ruth thought bringing her the towel. In the dim moonlight and in the even dimmer and erratic light from the night-light that Ruths father had installed in the bathroom Ruth saw the pale faces of her dead brothers in the photographs on thebathroom wall. There were photos of her dead brothers throughout the house on all the walls although the two boys had died as teenagers before Ruth was born before she was even conceived Ruth felt that she knew these vanished young men far better than she knew her mother or father. The tall dark one with the angular face was Thomas even at Ruths age when hed been only four Thomas had had a leading mans kind of handsomeness-a combination of poise and thuggery that in his teenage years gave him the seeming confidence of a much older man. Thomas had been the driver of the doomed car. The younger insecure-looking one was Timothy even as a teenager he was babyfaced and appeared to have just been startled by something. In many of the photographs Timothy seemed to be caught in a moment of indecision as if he were perpetually reluctant to imitate an incredibly difficult stunt that Thomas had mastered with apparent ease. In the end it was something as basic as driving a car that Thomas failed to master sufficiently. When Ruth Cole entered her parents bedroom she saw the naked young man who had mounted her mother from behind he was holding her mothers breasts in his hands and humping her on all fours like a dog but it was neither the violence nor the repugnance of the sexual act that caused Ruth to scream. The four-year-old didnt know that she was witnessing a sexual act-nor did the young man and her mothers activity strike Ruth as entirely unpleasant. In fact Ruth was relieved to see that her mother wasnotthrowing up. And it wasnt the young mans nakedness that caused Ruth to scream she had seen her father and her mother naked-nakedness was not hidden among the Coles. It was the young man himself who made Ruth scream because she was certain he was one of her dead brothers he looked so much like Thomas the confident one that Ruth Cole believed she had seen a ghost. A four-year-olds scream is a piercing sound. Ruth was astonished at the speed with which her mothers young lover dismounted indeed he removed himself from both the woman and her bed with such a combination of panic and zeal that he appeared to bepropelled-it was almost as if a cannonball had dislodged him. He fell over the night table and in an effort to conceal his nakedness removed the lamp shade from the broken bedside lamp. As such he seemed a less menacing sortof ghost than Ruth had first judged him to be furthermore now that Ruth took a closer look at him she recognized him. He was the boy who occupied the most distant guest room the boy who drove her fathers car-the boy who worked for her daddy her mommy had said. Once or twice the boy had driven Ruth and her babysitter to the beach. That summer Ruth had three different nannies each of them had commented on how pale the boy was but Ruths mother had told her that some people just didnt like the sun. The child had never before seen the boy without his clothes of course yet Ruth was certain that the young mans name was Eddie and that hewasnta ghost.Nevertheless the four-year-old screamed again. Her mother still on all fours on her bed looked characteristically unsurprised she merely viewed her daughter with an expression of discouragement edged with despair. Before Ruth could cry out a third time her mother said quotDont scream honey. Its just Eddie and me. Go back to bed.quot Ruth Cole did as she was told once more passing those photographs-more ghostly-seeming now than her mothers fallen ghost of a lover. Eddie while attempting to hide himself with the lamp shade had been oblivious to the fact that the lamp shade being open at both ends afforded Ruth an unobstructed view of his diminishing penis. At four Ruth was too young to ever remember Eddieorhis penis with the greatest detail but he would remember her. Thirty-six years later when he was fifty-two and Ruth was forty this ill-fated young man would fall in love with Ruth Cole. Yet not even then would he regret having fucked Ruths mother. Alas that would be Eddies problem. This is Ruths story. That her parents had expected her to be a third son was not the reason Ruth Cole became a writer a more likely source of her imagination was that she grew up in a house where the photographs of her dead brothers were a stronger presence than any quotpresencequot she detected in either her mother or her father-and that after her mother abandoned herandher father and took with her almostallthe photos of her lost sons Ruth would wonder why her father left the picture hooks stuck in the bare walls. The picture hooks were part of the reason she became a writer-for years after her mother left Ruth would try to remember which of the photographs had hung from which of the hooks.And failing to recall the actual pictures of her perished brothers to her satisfaction Ruth began to invent all the captured moments in their short lives which she had missed. That Thomas and Timothy were killed before she was born was another part of the reason Ruth Cole became a writer from her earliest memory she was forced to imagine them. It was one of those automobile accidents involving teenagers that in the aftermath revealed that both boys had been quotgood kidsquot and that neither of them had been drinking. Worst of all to the endless torment of their parents the coincidence of Thomas and Timothy being in that car at that exact time and in that specific place was the result of an altogether avoidable quarrel between the boys mother and father. The poor parents would relive the tragic results of their trivial argument for the rest of their lives. Later Ruth was told that she was conceived in a well-intentioned but passionless act. Ruths parents were mistaken to even imagine that their sons were replaceable-nor did they pause to consider that the new baby who would bear the burden of their impossible expectations might be agirl. That Ruth Cole would grow up to be that rare combination of a well-respected literary novelistandan internationally best-selling author is not as remarkable as the fact that she managed to grow up at all. Those handsome young men in the photographs had stolen most of her mothers affection however her mothers rejection was more bearable to Ruth than growing up in the shadow of the coldness that passed between her parents. Ted Cole a best-selling author and illustrator of books for children was a handsome man who was better at writing and drawing for children than he was at fulfilling the daily responsibilities of fatherhood. And until Ruth was four-and-ahalf while Ted Cole was not always drunk he frequently drank too much. Its also true that while Ted was not a womanizer every waking minute at no time in his life was he ever entirelynota womanizer. Granted this made him more unreliable with women than he was with children. Ted had ended up writing for children by default. His literary debut was an overpraised adult novel of an indisputably literary sort. The two novels that followed arent worth mentioning except to say that no one-especially Ted Coles publisher-had expressed any noticeableinterest in a fourth novel which was never written. Instead Ted wrote his first childrens book. CalledThe Mouse Crawling Between the Wallsit was very nearly not published at first glance it appeared to be one of those childrens books that are of dubious appeal to parents and remain memorable to children only because children remember being frightened. At least Thomas and Timothy were frightened byThe Mouse Crawling Between the Wallswhen Ted first told them the story by the time Ted told it to RuthThe Mouse Crawling Between the Wallshad already frightened about nine or ten million children in more than thirty languages around the world. Like her dead brothers Ruth grew up on her fathers stories. When Ruth first read these stories in a book it felt like a violation of her privacy. Shed imagined that her father had created these stories for her alone. Later she would wonder if her dead brothers had felt thattheirprivacy had been similarly invaded. Regarding Ruths mother: Marion Cole was a beautiful woman she was also a good mother at least until Ruth was born. And until the deaths of her beloved sons she was a loyal and faithful wife-despite her husbands countless infidelities. But after the accident that took her boys away Marion became a different woman distant and cold. Because of her apparent indifference to her daughter Marion was relatively easy for Ruth to reject. It would be harder for Ruth to recognize what was flawed about her father it would also take a lot longer for her to come to this recognition and by then it would be too late for Ruth to turn completely against him. Ted had charmed her-Ted charmed almost everyone up to a certain age. No one was ever charmed by Marion. Poor Marion never tried to charm anyone not even her only daughter yet it was possible toloveMarion Cole. And this is where Eddie the unlucky young man with the inadequate lamp shade enters the story.Heloved Marion-he would never stop loving her. Naturally if hed known from the beginning that he was going to fall in love with Ruth he might have reconsidered falling in love with her mother. But probably not. Eddie couldnt help himself. Summer Job His name was Edward OHare. In the summer of 1958 he had recently turned sixteen-having his drivers license had been a prerequisite of his first summer job. But Eddie OHare was unaware that becoming Marion Coles lover would turn out to be hisrealsummer job Ted Cole had hired him specifically for this reason and it would have lifelong results. Eddie had heard of the tragedy in the Cole family but-as with most teenagers-his attention to adult conversation was sporadic. Hed completed his second year at Phillips Exeter Academy where his father taught English it was an Exeter connection that got Eddie the job. Eddies father ebulliently believed in Exeter connections. First a graduate of the academy and then a faculty member the senior OHare never took a vacation without his well-thumbed copy of theExeter Directory.In his view the alumni of the academy were the standardbearers of an ongoing responsibility-Exonians trusted one another and they did favors for one another when they could. In the view of the academy the Coles had already been generous to Exeter. Their doomed sons were successful and popular students at the school when they died despite their grief or probably because of it Ted and Marion Cole had funded an annual visiting lecturer in English literature-Thomas and Timothys best subject. quotMintyquot OHare as the senior OHare was known to countless Exeter students was addicted to breath mints which he lovingly sucked while reading aloud in class he was inordinately fond of reciting his favorite passages from the books hed assigned. The so-called Thomas and Timothy Cole Lectures had been Minty OHares idea. And when Eddie had expressed to his father that his first choice for a summer job would be to work as an assistant to awriter-the sixteen-year-old had long kept a diary and had recently written some short stories-the senior OHare hadnt hesitated to consult hisExeter Directory.To be sure there were many moreliterarywriters than Ted Cole among the alumni-Thomas and Timothy had gone to Exeter because Ted was an alumnus-but Minty OHare who had managed only fouryears earlier to persuade Ted Cole to part with 82000 knew that Ted was an easy touch. quotYou dont have to pay him anything to speak ofquot Minty told Ted on the telephone. quotThe boy could type things for you or answer letters run errands-whatever you want. Its mainly for the experience. I mean if he think