Word: widower
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wise still does his best work at night. Every evening after dinner he picks up where he left off at work. "My wife is a computer widow," he confesses. During the past month, he has been working until dawn with increasing regularity. "When I'm done, we're taking a vacation," says the 29-year-old programmer. "I'm almost getting too old for this." -By Philip Elmer-DeWrtt
Mitterrand flew first to Atlanta to place a wreath on the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. and meet with his widow. He charmed Mayor Andrew Young by claiming that when he read about the Deep South as a youth, Louis Armstrong's version of Georgia on My Mind kept running through his head...
...sometime in the 1950s, perhaps the last decade when fidelity counted for more than fulfillment, Jack Henna, an Italian immigrant insurance salesman, makes a routine visit to the Waspy widow of a policyholder. He falls passionately, inexplicably in love. Some days later, Henna leaves his family for a night and moves in, uninvited, to the ram shackle farm of the widow and her resentful son. His every at tempt, from seduction to cooking, fails to move his beloved to commitment. The next morning, resigned to the impossibility of escaping a wife whom he no longer desires and two sons...
...novel. Even the reticence of his characters may reflect home truths: Henna's officemates have Italian surnames, but they scarcely discuss ethnicity. In time with their times, they share his fervor for feeling American. Yet there are hints of the conscious ness of decades to come: the widow realizes she wants to learn to fend for herself...
Still, demographic accuracy remains a modest virtue in fiction. Giardina possesses greater gifts, notably in creating children who sound and act like children, and in compressing plot into homespun metaphor. Henna prepares a dinner of spaghetti topped with broccoli and garlic; the widow's son bursts out, "This is not what we eat." When Henna gazes at the woman he believes he loves, he thinks, "You are like an open book, always open to the wrong pages, revealing information no one is prepared for." Occasions like these easily give a glum and sometimes predictable story the air of authenticity...