A Widow for One Year Read Online Free PDF

father’s workroom was the only room in the house where not a single photograph of Thomas or Timothy adorned the walls. Ruth wondered if maybe her father couldn’t work or think in the sight of his departed boys.
    And unless her father was in his workroom, it was the only room in the house that was off-limits to Ruth. Was there anything that could hurt her in there? Was there an infinite number of sharp tools? There were countless (and swallowable) nibs for the pens, although Ruth was not a child who ever put strange objects in her mouth. But regardless of the dangers of her father’s workroom—if, indeed, there were dangers—it was unnecessary to impose any physical restraints on the four-year-old, nor was there need for a lock on the workroom door. The smell of squid ink was sufficient to keep the child out.
    Marion never ventured near Ted’s workroom, but Ruth would be in her twenties before she realized that it was more than squid ink that had kept her mother away. Marion didn’t want to meet, or so much as see, Ted’s models—not even the children, for the children never came to model without their mothers. It was only after the children had modeled a half-dozen times (or more), that the mothers would come to model alone. As a child, Ruth never questioned why so few of the drawings of the mothers with their children were ever printed in any of her father’s books. Of course, since his books were for children, there were never any nudes in his books, although Ted drew a lot of nudes; those young mothers accounted for literally hundreds of drawings of nudes.
    Of the nudes, her father would say: “A requisite, fundamental exercise for anyone who draws, Ruthie.” Like landscapes, she at first supposed, although Ted did few of those. Ruth used to think the reason for his relative lack of interest in landscapes might be the sameness and the extreme flatness of the land that lay like a tarmac running to the sea, or what seemed to her to be the sameness and the extreme flatness of the sea itself—not to mention the huge, frequently dull expanse of sky above.
    Her father appeared to be so unconcerned with landscapes that it later surprised her when he would complain about the new houses— the “architectural monstrosities,” he called them. Without announcement, the new houses would rise up and intrude upon the flatness of the potato fields that had once been the Coles’ principal view.
    “There’s no justification for a building of such experimental ugliness as that,” Ted would pronounce over dinner to anyone who’d listen. “We’re not at war. There’s no need to construct a deterrent for parachutists.” But her father’s complaint grew stale; the summer people’s architecture in that part of the world called the Hamptons was not of comparable interest—to either Ruth or her father—as the more abiding nudes.
    Why young married women? Why all these young mothers ? When she was in college, Ruth was in the habit of asking her father more direct questions than at any other time in her life. It was also when she was in college that a troubling thought first occurred to her. Who else would be his models, or, more briefly, his lovers? Who else was he always meeting? The young mothers were the ones who recognized him and approached him, of course.
    “Mr. Cole? I know you—you’re Ted Cole! I just wanted to say, because my daughter is too shy, that you’re my daughter’s favorite author. You wrote her absolutely best-loved book. . . .” And then the reluctant daughter (or the embarrassed son) would be pushed forward to shake Ted’s hand. If Ted was attracted to the mother, he would suggest that the child, together with the mother, might like to model for him— maybe for the next book. (The subject of the mother posing alone, and nude, would be broached at a later time.)
    “But they’re usually married women, Daddy,” Ruth would say.
    “Yes . . . I guess that’s why they’re so unhappy,