Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  Harry was treated well by the six older Crowders. When he wasn’t there, though, they tried to gently warn Ruth against getting too deeply involved with someone “not of your religion.” She never told them that they had nothing to worry about, that the elegant Harry Stein was not about to marry some little country Presbyterian girl. She allayed their fears mainly by telling them that she was playing the field. She would go out occasionally with some boy from town, and she claimed she dated other soldiers whom she met at the various dances and socials that some church or civic group was always having that winter.

  But Ruth had no other prospects; she wasn’t looking for any. It seemed to her and Harry that they had lived the same lives in very different worlds. They were both their class salutatorians, laughed at the same jokes, had the same doubts about the existence of God that few, especially before and during the war, voiced. They never talked about it much, but they had the same physical needs, the same sexual timing and appetites. They had been together no more than a month when they started noticing how often they had the same thoughts at the same time.

  I was kidnapped from a good Presbyterian home, Harry would tell her, and forced to live a life without barbecue or bacon, a life of circumscription and circumcision. Pity me, Ruth would say, born to a wealthy Jewish family and spirited away by Protestant gypsies, sold to a family that forced me to learn all the books of the New Testament, to dress Christmas trees and boil Easter eggs.

  The weeks and months passed quickly, between the warm September night they met and that freezing, frantic February day at the train station in Newport, when they promised to write and to love and to remember.

  It had all happened so fast. Harry remembers being more or less force-marched to his destiny—the hurried, excited news that his platoon was moving out, the call home, the instant wedding plans that seemed to suck him into their vortex. Until that weekend, he had switched his mind from one future to the other, lying in the barracks and staring at the pale ceiling in the dark, never letting go of either option, not really. Now, suddenly, he realized he was more ready for war than for this split. He couldn’t move and was thus moved by others.

  Harry didn’t really deceive Ruth. She knew he was engaged. But she didn’t know that, within 48 hours, he would be married.

  And she didn’t really withhold the truth, either. Hanging on to him that cheerless day, she only suspected, and she wasn’t sure yet whether to fear or hope.

  SIX

  Everyone is talking at once around the dining-table cold cuts, and Hank feels dizzy, as if the words were spinning him around. When Naomi slips outside, he soon follows her, unnoticed. He craves the quiet and cool as much as the rare chance to talk with his older sister.

  When he closes the sliding-glass door, Naomi jumps, short and quick as if she’s just run across a carpet and touched metal.

  “Oh,” she says, “it’s you.”

  It is strange to Hank, an athlete himself once, that someone of Naomi’s caliber could be so nervous. How, he wonders, did she bear the strain of competition at that level? The least unexpected movement seems to unhinge her. Maybe the hair-trigger reflexes were an aid to a swimmer, maybe they got her into the water a hundredth of a second before anyone else. And the jumpiness hasn’t just happened. Hank can barely remember her not being like this, although she’s gotten a little worse. She seems, even to Hank, like one large exposed nerve.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She’s dropped some of her cigarettes out of the package. The brand advertises on billboards all around Saraw and Newport: A young woman, carefree, perky and athletic, cavorts above large green letters that say “Slim and cool.”

  Naomi is slim, and she is cool. With her dark hair pulled back and the makeup and arched eyebrows, she looks as if frost might form on her forehead. To Hank, no rock himself, she seems to fluctuate between flustered and frozen.

  “That’s OK. It’s been a long day,” she says as he tries to help her pick up the rest of the cigarettes but mainly succeeds in bumping her head with his. “Any day that involves changing planes in the Atlanta airport is a long day. And that thing we’ve got in Denver—don’t get me started.”

  But she does get started, talking at great length and with great heat about the foibles of a distant airport into which Hank will never fly. He shakes his head sympathetically.

  She stops to take another drag. She’s leaning against the deck railing. Behind her, the Gulf is whispering in the dark, sending up waves too short to matter. There is barely enough wind for them to smell the salt.

  Hank asks about Thomas and Grace and Gary. They’re fine, she says. Thomas Ferrell III is raking it in. Grace is doing well in law school. Gary’s trying to find himself.

  Naomi and Tom met when she was the semi-famous Naomi Crowder and he was in law school. She went all the way across the country to UCLA to fall in love with another North Carolinian, Ruth said at the time. Although Naomi would graduate from law school, too, Thomas Ferrell’s skills as a corporate lawyer created a world in which she didn’t have to practice for long, and she didn’t.

  Hank and Naomi talk for a while, catching up.

  Finally, he can’t help himself.

  “So,” he says, “are you and Momma going to play well together?”

  She gives out a short burst of laughter; such mirth as there is doesn’t come anywhere near her eyes. Smoke floats out of her mouth.

  “Hell, Hank. You know her better than I do. Do you think we can play well together?”

  “You know she loves you, Naomi. You know she’d rather cut her tongue out than upset you.”

  Naomi stubs the butt out on the deck’s bourbon rail and flips it into the sand below.

  “Her tongue, huh? Then why does it always work out that way, Hank? Huh?”

  She turns away from him, toward the Gulf.

  “Want to go for a walk?” he asks. He’s tired, but he’s been cooped up in a car all day and would like to take big, long steps along the beach, stretch out and talk with his sister.

  “Uh, no. I don’t think so, Hank. I’m really tired. Maybe later. I think I’m going to turn in.” She walks toward the door, then turns, as an afterthought, and says, “It was nice talking with you, though. And don’t worry, we’ll be fine. We’ll play well together.”

  And she graces him with a smile, the first one he’s seen from his sister in some time.

  Ruth has been watching from inside, half engaged in conversation with Paul and Tran as she wonders what her other two children are talking about. Me, probably, she’s thinking. She hopes that, if nothing else comes of this visit, she will at some point be alone on a quiet deck with Naomi Crowder Ferrell, just the two of them.

  Back inside, Naomi moves toward her mother, who has turned momentarily to the table. She reaches to put her arm around Ruth’s shoulder, amazed at what an awkward, unnatural thing this seems to be. At that moment, Ruth leans over to pick up a deviled egg. Upon being touched, she looks up and reaches, too quickly, to put her arm around her daughter’s waist. They wind up in an ungainly, uncomfortable knot, side by side with arms patting each other’s shoulders for a few long seconds before Naomi moves away.

  Like two cats in a room full of rocking chairs, Hank thinks, watching from outside.

  The weight of the day lands on Harry suddenly, with a force that makes standing a task. He can barely keep his eyes open.

  “Harry,” Freda says, “do you need to sit down?”

  You don’t look so good, he can almost hear her thinking. But they don’t say things like that to Harry these days.

  Artie takes his elbow, more gently than Bob the Driver and just as depressingly. Artie Marks, for God’s sake. Harry used to babysit for Artie Marks.

  Harry’s guest room is the good one, away from the street, facing the carriageway behind Freda and Artie’s brick Victorian house on Monument Avenue. It has a nice, high ceiling. It is chilly, though, and Harry hurries into his old-man’s pajamas and wo
rks his way under the covers. He looks up at that ceiling for a few seconds. It seems so far away, and so blue, that it might be sky. Before he can reach over to turn out the bedside light, he is asleep.

  “Harry,” Freda says. “Wake up, Harry. Wake up.”

  She looks worried.

  It takes a few seconds for him to regain full consciousness.

  “What? What was I … Was I talking in my sleep?”

  “Yelling would be more like it.”

  She looks down at him, frowning.

  “You kept saying you’re sorry, that you tried.”

  Harry is silent. Maybe he should share this dream with someone other than Ruth, but he doesn’t know if he’s up to it. Freda gets him a glass of water.

  Now Harry’s wide awake. It’s 2:30 a.m., he’s in pain, and experience tells him there is little use in trying to go back to sleep. He knows he’ll just toss and turn, then do a facedown in his breakfast cornflakes.

  “Harry?”

  “What?”

  “Does it scare you? It shouldn’t, you know.”

  He realizes his face is wet. It is difficult for him to explain even to his sister that it isn’t the future that makes him sad; it is the past.

  She puts her hand on his head. Her smell reminds Harry of Freda as a little girl, tagging along after her big brother. Amazing, he thinks, how that basic scent, that basic Fredaness, hasn’t changed. He wishes he could say the same for himself, but even though he’s heard that a person can’t smell his own stink, he can tell that his night sweats are the odor of decay, of rot.

  He decides to go ahead and tell her about the dream, without revealing its source.

  “Oh, Harry,” smoothing his dwindling hair as if he were a child, “it’s only a dream. There isn’t anything to dreams but dreams. You dream about what you think about.”

  He knows she’s probably right, but as he has more or less accepted The End and its smirking, scythe-wielding inevitability, all things great and small have become portents. This acceptance did not come easily or quickly; it just came, until one day he woke up and could swallow it. What Harry would like to tell everyone: You think you have accepted death? You think you’re a big boy or girl now, well aware that you won’t live forever? Just wait. Wait until you make the victory tour, going around one last time to visit everybody you don’t think you’re ever going to see again.

  When Harry appeared unexpectedly two months ago on the doorstep of the former Gloria Tannebaum Stein, mother of his children, forgiver of so much, he found that neither of them had the words to tie it all up neatly. They had their nervous cup of coffee. They talked, with her present husband in the next room, about the good times, pretending the bad never existed. Finally, silently, they agreed to not voice regret, to not curse fate or second-guess. To just get on with it. To compare notes on “the kids” and let it go at that.

  When Harry left, telling Gloria that he could walk himself to the car (she didn’t protest very much), his “See you later” sounded like a curse.

  He knows he may as well get up. There is no sense in lying here in his own sweat, sleep moving farther and farther away.

  He takes his pain pills and waves off his sister’s halfhearted offer to accompany him. She goes back to her and Artie’s bedroom while Harry, in his bathrobe and slippers, walks down the hall, stopping to give his aching bladder some relief. He continues into the living room, stubbing his toe on a chair and almost relishing some new, cleaner kind of pain.

  It’s chilly in the living room, the only illumination a streetlight shining through the bay window, but Harry has always had great night vision. He feels it kept him alive in France and Germany; his men tried to stay close by him when they were on the move after dark and before light, even after Stevens was lost. Some of his superior officers mistook this for devotion, but the men knew that, if anyone was going to see something move that wasn’t supposed to move in those cold, murderous woods, it would be Lieutenant Harry Stein.

  There’s a recliner over in the corner, and there’s a wool blanket lying on the couch beside it. Harry manages to ease himself into Artie’s favorite chair, covers himself to the chin and lies there looking out into the darkness. After five minutes, he can see every detail of the room.

  This new position, half sitting and half lying, somehow suits him. He gives the blanket a yank and reclines there, unable to sleep just yet (although the pain has lessened some) but glad to just lie still and see things.

  Being still is something that has come late to Harry. One of the great, abiding forces of his adult life has been the fidgety sense that he was missing something, somewhere. Sometimes it worked for him, sometimes it didn’t. Law school, he soon knew, would be too boring, but his energy level was a large part of the making of a young stockbroker. Going full tilt all day, always looking for the edge, never satisfied, then sometimes partying half the night with clients and other brokers—the restlessness defined his life and was the blame and credit for much that happened to it.

  Gloria was a good sport for a long time, Harry sees clearly now, willing to forget a lot for a man she loved, a man who swore he loved her, a man with a future.

  Part of it, he knew, was that nothing ever seemed as glamorous as a bar in the money district of a city, with everybody full of energy, everybody late in the afternoon just as they once were after a big game in high school, all full of themselves—look at me: I just made some schmuck $10,000 because I am the smartest, quickest guy who ever read the Wall Street Journal.

  It wasn’t a drinking problem, not in the sense of being unable to stop, not in the sense of drunk-driving citations or scenes in public places. Harry could stop. Harry could hold it. What Harry knew he had—and how could he tell Gloria this?—was an excitement problem.

  He came to understand, slowly and painfully, that something was missing, that the past would be with him, would not recede.

  Sometime before sunrise, Harry does drift off to sleep. At times like this, he is seldom granted unconsciousness until he abandons hope of achieving it. Then, it sandbags him. Later, he wakes up flat on his back, snoring.

  This time, though, his slumber is interrupted by the voices of Freda and Artie. They are in the kitchen, down the hall, trying to quietly get Sunday breakfast going. Harry hears Artie curse softly, as if he’s just spilled orange juice or dropped the toast.

  Harry is undiscovered. They haven’t gone into the living room yet, and he left his bedroom door closed. From where he sits, he can hear them well enough.

  “… That’s all I know.” Freda’s voice. “He’s pretty close to the vest, you know. Maybe I should call Ruth.”

  As he hears Artie walking toward the living room, Harry feigns sleep.

  “Maybe he should …” Harry hears his brother-in-law stop in midsentence. Then there’s a long pause before Artie Marks tiptoes back to the kitchen and says something Harry’s ears can’t pick up. Before long, he can hear, feel Freda walking softly toward him, then stopping and whispering to Artie, “Look at him,” the way you might point out a child or a dog in unguarded repose. He feels the blanket being pulled to his chin.

  Freda and Artie go back to the kitchen. Harry squints one eye open to see that they are out of sight, then shifts position slightly. In seconds, he is asleep again.

  The next thing he knows, they’re waking him.

  “Hey, Harry,” Artie says. “Want some breakfast?”

  “Sure. Yeah, thanks.”

  “What’s the matter? Is that guest bed too hard for you?”

  “Nah. Sometimes I just need to move around, find another spot. Sneak up on the sandman.”

  Harry yawns. He smells french toast and bagels and cream cheese. He is, he realizes, hungry.

  They go back into the kitchen, and Harry untangles himself and shuffles back to his bedroom, where he tries to comb his sad hair and brushes his teeth.

  When he comes back out, finding them in the breakfast nook overlooking a yard full of birdfeeders and hardwoods, F
reda looks at him and frowns.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Sure. Slept like a baby.”

  Freda knows he’s lying. He appreciates that she doesn’t cry, and he’s glad he will only be making a short visit. He wanted to see Freda again, although they no longer seem to have much to talk about. He guesses he did it because he felt he ought to.

  Old age, son of a bitch that it is, is not without its consolations, thinks Harry Stein. People care, more than he reckons they should. He revels in the balm of that care; he would not forfeit an ounce of it, no matter how ill-gotten.

  SEVEN

  Ruth still remembers most of what she wrote to Harry Stein that March day in 1943.

  She tells herself that she tried not to make it sound pitiful, and that she tried not to make him feel guilty, although a larger part of her than she would admit wanted him to go AWOL, renounce all other encumbrances, to women and family and armies, and rush back to her side, tears streaming from his cheeks, vowing never to leave again.

  “It seems a good time to write (if there is a good time to write someone who never writes back),” she began, then begged his forgiveness (but didn’t throw the paper away and start again). She knew he might already have been shipped overseas. “At least, Harry,” she wrote, “let me know you are alive.”

  She saw no point in telling him before he left. She despised girls who traded on weakness.

  “What we did,” she wrote, “we did for my pleasure as well as yours. I knew it was foolish. (It makes me blush to think of some censor somewhere reading this, but it must be told.)”

  She did tell him, though. She could not bear to do otherwise.