by Howard Owen
“You are the first to know (assuming this letter reaches you in a timely manner),” she wrote. “I wasn’t sure when you left, didn’t want to be sure, I suppose. Now, there can be no doubt. Soon, I will have to tell my grandparents and the rest. Of course you are the father. Do not panic. (You do not seem the panicky kind. Neither am I. Do not think that I am running around like a chicken with my head chopped off.) I claim no hold on you. You had your life planned for you before you ever came to Saraw, before that September night a thousand years ago. When we said goodbye, at that awful train station, I meant goodbye. But we also said we would write, that we would ‘stay in touch,’ whatever that means.”
Ruth had already had three weeks to swallow the sometimes sobering, sometimes dizzying truth growing inside her. She was certain, at 17, that she had seen the one perfect complement leave her life on a northbound troop train. She had convinced herself, to stop the pain, that she would never, ever see Harry Stein again.
But still she wrote; she had to do something. And she did have a plan.
“I think,” she wrote that March, “we both know that we have met the Other Half, the half that would make the sum of us better than the parts. I know your family would never forgive you. I know you would break the heart of that girl back in Richmond. I know all that, and perhaps what I’m about to do is just my way of keeping a piece of you in my arms …”
Ruth wouldn’t know for another three weeks, when she finally received a letter from Harry, that he and Gloria had already married. They did it quickly on Harry’s two-day pass to Richmond before his unit was shipped to Texas for desert training that would never be used.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he wrote in that first letter to her, the one he had put off for weeks. “We could have done something.” But he wondered what, and a small, selfish part of him hoped she would take care of this, that it would somehow, magically take care of itself. He had met a girl he might love more than any other, ever, but life was long. He would, by dint of will, get over it.
“Why didn’t you tell ME?” she wrote back, three days later. But she knew it was inevitable that Harry would marry the girl everyone expected him to. It was only a question of when.
Harry has come to believe that every life has a defining moment when a person does either what is right or what is expedient, but he wonders how many have faced such a well-marked intersection and taken such a wrong turn as he did in that dark second winter of the war.
If Ruth had told him in February that she was pregnant, would he have done the right and honorable thing? He has always wanted to believe he was not the kind of man who would have let a 17-year-old orphan in a small North Carolina town endure the pain and humiliation that logically would follow, had he known all the facts.
He knows the range of possible answers:
He might have looked for an abortionist, not an easy or safe route.
He might have, with some thought, taken her across the South Carolina state line for a quick marriage that they would have quietly ended, long distance, without Gloria or the Tannebaums or the Steins ever knowing, just to give the baby its father’s last name.
Less likely, he might have done the thing he thought of doing a hundred times before he and Ruth parted at the train station, the thing you could look back on at the end of a long and eventful life and say, “When everything mattered, everyone told me I must not do this, but I knew in my heart I should, and so I did.” That is, he might have chanced the loss of his birth family and most of his friends and become a stranger in a strange land, the Jew who married the Crowder girl after he knocked her up.
He and Ruth both know, without ever expressing it, that the Harry Stein who lived in early 1943 would either have run away or, worse, stayed with regrets.
And so you have the riddle of Harry’s life. He could have chosen one of two potentially very pleasant futures.
One would have been with the one girl he remained sure (when he was sure of little else) would complete him. He knows that, if he could only have gone off and lived his life with Ruth, braced against the scorn of his whole community back in Richmond, knowing that his parents bore the brunt of all that disapproval, it would have been a good life. He can see that now. They would have had friends, they would have had money. They would have been forgiven, in time. They would have had, even failing all that, each other.
Or he could marry Gloria, whom he had loved and liked for three years, and settle into the bosom of his family and hers, forgetting that he had ever known a girl named Ruth Crowder.
Either choice, though, required the chooser to forgo remorse, to forget the other path.
After a honeymoon weekend spent mostly with family and seldom alone, Harry and Gloria saw each other once more, in June, before his unit shipped out for England. He would spend a year there, in what seemed to Harry like an adult, black-comedy version of the summer camps of his youth, preparing for the vague something, the Plan that would save the world. They knew they could die, as much as young men ever believe such a thing, and it made their sorties into London, the courting and fighting in village pubs, all the more intense.
Harry was true to Gloria, though, in the flesh. He laughed at the stories of other officers, equally married, who came back to their base bragging of trysts in third-floor London walkups, with air-raid sirens going off in the distance, of drunken fistfights made comic by war’s shadow.
But he did cheat. The letters, once he worked up the nerve to write Ruth back after he knew her secret, never stopped. For a while, he would write Gloria every time he wrote Ruth, but he realized he had more to say to the girl he left than the woman he had married. Before long, he’d taken the path of least resistance and was writing Gloria twice a week, out of guilt, and Ruth four times a week, because six or seven would have been unseemly.
In April, Ruth wrote that everyone knew she was pregnant, and that it would no longer be possible for Harry to send letters to her grandparents’ address. No one knew who the father was, and no one, save Cousin Mercy, was going to know, if she could help it.
He was to send future letters to Mercy, who would tell her parents that she had met a soldier at Camp Warren who was crazy about her. It was meant to be a temporary solution, but Cousin Mercy never married. For many decades, people in Saraw were convinced that Mercy Crowder had a secret beau, who wrote her first from Army posts and then from Richmond, then later from Washington and Long Island. So the letters never stopped.
Mercy, generous and energetic, was never overly attracted to any of Saraw’s young men. After her siblings moved out, she stayed on and took care of her parents. She dated occasionally, but never very seriously. Once, she told Ruth that she couldn’t imagine a man as good as her father.
Ruth’s grandfather concocted the plan to save his family’s honor. Ruth had made it clear that she would have the baby, that she would keep the baby, and if they wanted to put her out in the cold, she would manage.
By May, T.D. Crowder had enlisted a cousin who was a judge. This judge arranged to produce a marriage license, back-dated to February. Ruth McNair Crowder had secretly married Randall Phelps on Feb. 14, 1943. Randall Phelps had then shipped out to North Africa in April, from where he wrote back and said he had changed his mind, that he didn’t want to be married any more. The judge, with T.D.’s help, invented a bridegroom and granted him a divorce on the same day. If anyone believed it, it was because Ruth had her secrets. If something like this could happen, it would happen to someone like Ruth. She hadn’t brought Harry Stein to any more church socials or dances in Saraw itself. People knew she was dating other boys as well. She was known to go to dances in Newport and meet other young men (although a cursory investigation would have revealed that most of them were named Harry Stein.)
Ruth had no intention of taking some fictional last name for either herself or her baby, and the family said Ruth wasn’t going to honor that sorry Randall Phelps by giving the child his name. If he wanted that baby to be a Phelps, the
y said, he could just come back and be a proper husband.
Ruth feared on occasion that one or the other of her grandparents had actually convinced themselves that Randall Phelps existed.
“The best I can tell,” Ruth wrote to Harry, “the departed Randall Phelps was a blond-haired Baptist womanizer from Ohio with a slight limp in his left leg, although Aunt Charlotte slipped up and said right leg the other day. He likes to play cards, and before the war he worked in a hardware store. He smokes Camels. It gets very confusing to Uncle Matty, who said the other day he wished I’d married ‘that pretty dark-haired boy’ instead of ‘that damn Randall Phelps.’ If Granddaddy hasn’t made the delinquent Mr. Phelps real to anyone else, he has apparently made him real to Matty. I rather fear for the safety of any stranger he might come across with the name of Randall or Phelps.”
Despite T.D. Crowder’s efforts, there was embarrassment enough when Ruth had a daughter on September 12. Even with the backdated marriage certificate, only seven months had passed since Valentine’s Day. And Ruth only fed the rumors with her silence. She stopped going to church, and in July she quit her job at the lumber yard. The other Crowders living next door on either side, T.D.’s brothers and their families, more or less stopped talking to her, although they closed ranks and didn’t talk about her, either.
Each grandparent assured her that her willful behavior would bring about the death of the other, and that she would pay for her sins on Judgment Day. Charlotte and Jane were kinder, and Matty only harbored a grudge against the Randall Phelps he couldn’t quite remember, but whom he was ready to travel to England, by car if necessary, to kill.
When T.D.’s sister Goldie, then in her 69th year, died from pneumonia the following winter, Ruth’s heedlessness was considered to be a contributing cause.
It was not Ruth’s intention to make her family suffer, but she wasn’t going to have an abortion, and she wasn’t going to give the baby up. She did her crying mostly in private. By the time she told them all, in April, she had reached her own crossroads. For a week, when it was still her secret—hers and Harry’s—she imagined herself not going to college, not moving to a big city, not living the life she could if she traveled alone. And she knew, after a week, that she could forgo all that. She just wanted the baby.
She narrated the various phases of her pregnancy for Harry, even as Gloria was filling him in on the week’s social highlights in Richmond. It was not fair, Harry told himself, to think Gloria frivolous for this. He was sure she could be heroic, too, if circumstances had forced her to be.
If the Crowders suspected Harry was the father, they never said so outright, burying any suspicions under the ruse T.D. and the judge had invented. Ruth continued to withhold the father’s name, and no one ever again mentioned the name of Harry Stein in the Crowder household.
Harry worried more about Ruth than about himself. Boredom and anxiety attacks were the imminent dangers. They would drill for hours at a time, trying to lose themselves in minutiae. They would hear of the Allied victories in North Africa and Sicily, and then the Italian mainland. The Italians surrendered by early September, and, trying to be tough outside so they might build up some calluses where it mattered, the college boys and store clerks and farmers complained bitterly about the lack of Krauts to kill.
Once in a while, though, Harry would turn a corner and there would be a young man, his age, just looking up into the sky, clearly wondering if he could do whatever had to be done.
Outwardly, Harry was impatient to kill. Inwardly, he couldn’t always stop himself from thinking of what death the Nazis would reserve for a captured soldier who was also a Jew.
Usually, Harry saved Ruth’s letter for last. This day, it took all his discipline not to tear it open while he was still among the anxious men hoping to be remembered. He knew her due date was near. He was stationed near Tiverton, in the southwest of England, when the letter came at last, the same day as one from Gloria.
It was her handwriting, on the envelope.
“Dearest Harry,” she wrote. “I (or we, I suppose, if you want to be precise) have a daughter. She weighs five pounds, eight ounces. Not so big, but then Grandma says I was no larger than that.
“The naming is all up to me, it seems, so I have named her Naomi. Naomi Jane Crowder. Ruth and Naomi, in the Bible (your part of it, Harry), were such good friends, and I know that this little girl and I are going to be just like that. With one true parent, I must be her friend.
“Oh, Harry. I wish you could know how good it feels, here holding her. It’s as if I finally have a family. Some people would tell you I have been raised by six parents, but it isn’t the same. There is a feeling, really just a memory of a feeling I can barely recall, of being in my father’s arms or snuggling in bed with my mother, when she would let me, that all this has brought back. It isn’t much family, by some standards, but it, or she, is my family.
“She looks like you. I don’t tell anyone that, of course, and there is a certain amount of whispering about the baby being born with a full head of jet-black hair, since, as we all know, Randall Phelps was blond. Some day, maybe when she is 16, the two of us will take the train to Richmond and find where you work. We’ll sit at a soda fountain across the street, and when you come out of your big building, I’ll know it’s you. And I’ll point you out to Naomi. Maybe I will tell her you’re her daddy, or maybe I’ll just tell her there’s a handsome man I used to know, but I don’t want him to see me now.”
Harry’s tent was facing a large open area, and soldiers were always walking back and forth; it was as if a never-ending parade was going past, people bound to save the world, somehow.
Harry Stein put his head down and really knew, for the first time, what he had done.
He started sending the money that day. Ruth never asked him to.
He wrote to Freda, in care of Mrs. Cameron’s boarding house. She was five years younger, but even when he was in junior high, skipping the occasional day of school, swimming the dangerous currents of the James River with his friends, he could trust Freda not to tell.
He instructed the paymaster to send a certain amount to his sister every payday. At first, it was only 10 dollars a month, which Freda would forward to North Carolina. He explained about Ruth, although no more than he had to.
At first, Freda thought Harry was being “shaken down,” as she expressed it to him, but she always sent the money south, to Miss Mercy Crowder of Saraw, N.C. And she never breathed a word about it to anyone until after she married Artie Marks. Old Harry and Ella never knew about Ruth Crowder, or their first grandchild.
Harry’s other gift, beyond ink on paper and the ten dollars a month that later grew to fifteen, then twenty and beyond, was the kind of advice only a person of will and vision could use.
A friend from Princeton had come through Richmond in the spring of 1942, not long before Harry enlisted. They had lunch at a diner downtown. Bobby Weinberg had become a stockbroker, and he was filled with the gospel of the dollar.
Bobby Weinberg took a paper napkin and a pencil and filled up row after row with numbers, showing Harry what it meant to invest while you were young. With the Depression only lately beaten back by war’s prosperity, Harry had little use for such advice. No one trusted the stock market, and Harry had youth’s contempt for thrift.
But Bobby did get his attention with one deceptively hard fact: If you invested a certain amount of money between 18 and 29, he said, you would have more money at 65 than if you started at 29 and invested until you were 65. This Harry could understand. He didn’t do anything about it, having not yet developed either the need for or the love of money that drove Bobby Weinberg.
It seemed a good thing to tell Ruth about, though.
“I know you need money for many things right now, but if you can spare anything of what you earn or what I send,” he began, then told her what Bobby Weinberg had said.
In her next letter, Ruth thanked Harry for the advice. She had worked it out on th
e office adding machine, and Bobby Weinberg was right. She appreciated the inevitability of numbers. She never mentioned it again, just kept thanking Harry for the money that she didn’t spend.
Harry’s fall and winter and spring passed in the damp of England, while the day itself was hinted at, then rumored, then expected, and then finally there. On June 6, he was far enough back to avoid the worst. Several men who served with him died, on Omaha Beach and in the hedgerow hell that would haunt him worse than D-Day itself. They seldom seemed to have a plan that could fully withstand the reality of German artillery, but somehow enough of them would survive and make it from Point A to Point B. War, as Harry saw it, required belief in a strategy coupled with the knowledge that it would, at some point, have to be utterly, hopelessly abandoned.
Harry Stein’s luck seemed always to hold, though. He was only shot the one time, he didn’t step on a land mine, he didn’t freeze to death or even lose a hand or a foot in the coldest winter any of them would ever live through. The days never seemed to end, but then, all at once, a whole season would be gone. Summer, fall, winter, another spring. Harry can remember the cold, the second-hand foxholes that still smelled like someone else’s death, the killing. Other than the clinging hands of Sergeant Eldridge Stevens, though, it has all blended into a merciful haze, a melange of mud and ice, fatigue and fear.
And he remembers when it all ended, deep in Germany. They stayed drunk for two days, and when he woke up one morning, staring at a rainy sky, he saw that it was almost summer again.
Ruth’s letters kept her alive in his mind, made her grow, even. Without them, she might have receded into his memory, an imagined creature who once seemed perfect only because the world was so new. And already, he was finding that there were things he needed to express that were best revealed to someone other than Gloria, whom he loved, God knows, but sometimes it was better just to tell Ruth instead.
Where was the harm in that?
EIGHT