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. 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. 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. 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 'presence' she detected in either her mother or her father-and that, after her mother abandoned her and her father (and took with her almost all the photos of her lost sons), Ruth would wonder why her father left the picture hooks stuck in the bare walls. Yet not even then would he regret having fucked Ruth's mother.

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. 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.Īt four, Ruth was too young to ever remember Eddie or his penis with the greatest detail, but he would remember her. Ruth Cole did as she was told, once more passing those photographs-more ghostly-seeming now than her mother's fallen ghost of a lover. Before Ruth could cry out a third time, her mother said, 'Don't scream, honey.

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.

Nevertheless, the four-year-old screamed again. The child had never before seen the boy without his clothes, of course yet Ruth was certain that the young man's name was Eddie and that he wasn't a ghost. That summer, Ruth had three different nannies each of them had commented on how pale the boy was, but Ruth's mother had told her that some people just didn't like the sun.

A widow for one year by john irving