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

never dream of calling upon these strangers, even if he were in the most dire need. Exonians! he almost cried aloud.
    Eddie knew many faculty families at Exeter; most of them, while never taking the qualities of the academy for granted, did not inflate beyond all reason what it meant to be an Exonian. It seemed so unfair that his father could, out of the blue, make him feel that he hated Exeter; in truth, the boy knew he was lucky to be at the school. He doubted that he would have qualified for the academy if he hadn’t been a faculty child, and he felt fairly well adjusted among his peers—as well adjusted as any boy who bears an indifference to sports can be at an all-boys’ school. Indeed, given Eddie’s terror of girls his own age, he was not unhappy to be in an all-boys’ school.
    For example, he was careful to masturbate on his own towel or on his own washcloth, which he then washed out and hung back in the family bathroom where it belonged; nor did Eddie ever wrinkle the pages of his mom’s mail-order catalogs, where the various models for women’s undergarments provided all the visual stimulation his imagination needed. (What most appealed to him were the more mature women in girdles.) Without the catalogs, he had also happily masturbated in the dark, where the salty taste of Mrs. Havelock’s hairy armpits seemed on the tip of his tongue—and where her heaving breasts were the soft and rolling pillows that held his head and rocked him to sleep, where he would often dream of her. (Mrs. Havelock doubtless performed this valuable service for countless Exonians who passed through the academy in her prime years.)
    But in what way was Mrs. Cole a zombie ? Eddie was watching the clamtruck driver consume a hot dog, which the driver washed down with a beer. Although Eddie was hungry—he’d not eaten since breakfast—the slightly sideways drift of the ferry and the smell of the fuel did not incline him toward food or drink. At times the upper deck would shudder, and the entire ferry swayed. And there was the added factor of where he was seated, directly downwind of the smokestack. He began to turn a little green. It made him feel better to walk around the deck, and he decidedly perked up when he found a trash can and seized the moment to throw away his father’s envelope with the names and addresses of every living Exonian in the Hamptons.
    Then Eddie did something that made him feel only a little ashamed of himself: he strolled over to where the clam-truck driver sat suffering the agonies of digestion, and boldly apologized for his father. The clam-truck driver suppressed a belch.
    “Don’t sweat it, kid,” the man said. “We all got dads.”
    “Yes,” Eddie replied.
    “Besides,” the clam-truck driver philosophized, “he’s probably just worried about you. It don’t sound easy to me, being no writer’s assistant. I don’t get what it is you’re supposed to do .”
    “I don’t get it, either,” Eddie confessed.
    “You wanna beer?” the driver offered, but Eddie politely declined; now that he was feeling better, he didn’t want to turn green again.
    There were no women or girls worth looking at on the upper deck, Eddie thought; his observation was apparently not shared by the clamtruck driver, who proceeded to roam the ferry, looking intently at all the women and girls. There were two girls who had driven a car on board; they were full of themselves, and despite being not more than a year or two older than Eddie, or only Eddie’s age, it was evident that they regarded Eddie as too young for them. Eddie looked at them only once.
    A European couple approached him and asked in heavily accented English if he would take their picture as they stood at the bow—it was their honeymoon, they said. Eddie was happy to do it. Only afterward did it occur to him that the woman, being a European, might have had unshaven armpits. But she’d been wearing a long-sleeved jacket; Eddie also hadn’t been able to