A Widow for One Year by John Irving Read Free Book Online

her, she seemed positively serene.
    The first driver off the ferry was a fool. He was so stunned by the beauty of the woman he saw walking toward him that he turned off the road into the stony sand of the beach; his car would be stuck there for over an hour, but even when he realized his predicament, he couldn’t take his eyes off Marion. He couldn’t help himself. Marion didn’t notice the accident—she just kept walking, slowly.
    For the rest of his life, Eddie O’Hare would believe in fate. After all, the second he set foot on shore, there was Marion.

Eddie Is Bored—and Horny, Too
    Poor Eddie O’Hare. To be in public with his father always caused him complete mortification. The occasion of Eddie’s long drive to the ferry docks in New London, or of his seemingly longer wait (with his dad) for the arrival of the Orient Point ferry, was no exception. Within the Exeter community, Minty O’Hare’s habits were as familiar as his breath mints; Eddie had learned to accept that both students and faculty unashamedly fled from his father. The senior O’Hare’s ability to bore an audience, any audience, was notorious. In the classroom, Minty’s soporific approach to teaching was renowned; the students whom the senior O’Hare had put to sleep were of legendary numbers.
    Minty’s method of boredom was never ornate; simple repetition was his game. He would read aloud from what he judged to be the significant passages of the previous day’s assignment—when presumably the material was fresh in the students’ minds. The freshness of their minds could be seen to wilt as the class wore on, however, for Minty always located many passages of significance, and he read aloud with great feeling, and with repeated pauses for effect; the lengthier pauses were required for sucking on his mints. Little discussion followed the ceaseless repetition of these overly familiar passages—in part because no one could argue against the obvious significance of each passage. One could only question the necessity of reading aloud such passages. Outside the classroom, Minty’s method of teaching English was so frequently a matter of discussion that Eddie O’Hare often felt as if he’d suffered through his father’s classes, although he never had.
    Eddie had suffered elsewhere. He was grateful that, since early childhood, he had eaten most of his meals in the school dining hall, first at a faculty table with another faculty family, and later with his fellow students. Therefore, school vacations were the only times when the O’Hares, as a family, dined at home. Dinner parties, which Dot O’Hare gave regularly—although there were few faculty couples who met with her reluctant approval—were another story. Eddie was not bored by such dinner parties because his parents restricted his presence at them to the briefest of polite appearances.
    But at family dinners during school vacations Eddie was exposed to the stultifying phenomenon of his parents’ perfect marriage: they did not bore each other because they never listened to each other. A tender politeness passed between them; the mom would allow the dad to speak, at length, and then it was the mom’s turn—almost always on an unrelated subject. Mr. and Mrs. O’Hare’s conversation was a masterpiece of non sequiturs; by not participating, Eddie could best entertain himself by trying to guess if anything of what his mother or father had said would ever be remembered by the other.
    Shortly before his departure for the ferry to Orient Point, an evening at home in Exeter became a case in point. The school year was over, the commencement exercises recently concluded, and Minty O’Hare was philosophizing on what he called the indolence of the students’ behavior in the spring term. “I know that they are thinking of their summer vacations,” Minty said for perhaps the hundredth time. “I realize that the return of warm weather is itself an invitation to sloth, but not to slothfulness