by Howard Owen
Ruth’s strategy toward Hank’s “spells,” at this late date, is to just let them slide. She knows he’ll be better soon, and she knows how much it hurts him to be pitied.
They ride the rest of the way in silence, Ruth staring out the window and wondering why she couldn’t have just had a nice quiet birthday back in Saraw.
The plane lands, and Harry Stein waits, obedient as a child, until they have come to a complete stop before unbuckling his seat belt.
He reaches into his pocket to make sure he hasn’t left his key ring, with his car and house keys on it, back at Freda’s. These days, he’s forever double- and triple-checking. He’s almost worn out his plane ticket by now, pulling it in and out of his coat.
He fishes out his keys, and the piece of bright plastic attached to the ring catches his eye, an old friend. The letters on the garish, orange-and-yellow rectangle are almost worn off. The establishment itself has been out of business for years.
Everything he touches lately, even this cheap trinket barely bearing the name of the Fairweather Grill, reminds him of Ruth.
He feels, from somewhere, a surge of energy.
He is glad to be here.
FIFTEEN
In 1956, Ruth became, out of sheer necessity, a business-woman.
Between then and 1990, when the interstate was completed and immediately siphoned most of the traffic off the Beach Road, the Fairweather Grill would be an essential stop for almost anyone going to White Oak Beach or the other resorts along the coast below Newport. It offered simple fare: grilled hot dogs and hamburgers and what many considered to be the cheapest, best ice cream in the state—only five flavors—plus produce from Henry’s farm. It became famous for the Fairburger, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top that Ruth had been making for her family for years.
Ruth’s cousin told everyone how he had skinned her on the deal. But she had done her homework. Her old friend Roy McGinnis assured her that the Beach Road would only get more crowded, that all the hurricanes in the world wouldn’t keep people from wanting a place by the ocean. Even Ruth didn’t believe Turpentine Creek Road, which joined the main highway there and was barely paved, would be a state road one day.
Ruth did not completely and clearly foresee a day when people would laugh at Ben Crowder for selling the Saraw Diner for only $15,000, but she did think it had promise.
“And we do need the money, Harry,” she wrote that summer, “whether Henry admits it or not. This land is played out. If it wasn’t for the tobacco allotment, we’d be better off selling the farm right now, but it would kill Henry, I believe. He still thinks he can support three children, and ourselves, with a farm that’s about one generation past going.”
They opened on the Fourth of July, 1956. Ruth changed the name to the Fairweather Grill, gave it a paint job, hired good help and spent most of her waking hours there.
Henry, who had never fully gotten over Susanna’s death, seemed to take Ruth’s new venture as a betrayal, an insult to his manhood. He accused her of “carrying on” with Roy McGinnis, because he couldn’t see why else Roy’s bank would loan a woman of Ruth’s limited means $15,000 with almost no collateral, and she couldn’t tell him about the $5,000 she had saved and the rest that was loaned to her by an unnamed party in another state.
More and more, Henry would go off into the swamp by himself. Ruth knew he had built a cabin of some sort in a part of Kinlaw’s Hell she had never seen, and sometimes he would spend the night out there.
“But he hasn’t hit me since we lost Susanna,” Ruth wrote that summer, “and we have some good times. There are days when he seems as bright as a new penny. He and I will sit and laugh and talk, and afterward, when the children are in bed, we’ll make love, and it seems, at times like that, as if I can get the old Henry back, that I can fix whatever’s broken.
“Some days, he’ll play with Naomi and the boys, but they know it won’t last, and it makes me cringe to see them cringe, because I know he sees it, too. All five of us try to pretend that Henry Flood won’t have any more bad days.”
The Fairweather Grill was just far enough from the beach to justify stopping on the way there or on the way home, and a family of beach-goers or -comers could not miss the orange and yellow cinder block triangle (Ruth let Naomi and the boys pick the colors).
It was in need of repair the first time Harry Stein saw it. By 1956, it was temporarily closed and had become an eyesore even to a town with forgiving standards. But Ruth knew it had potential. Harry’s letters were full of news about the ways in which the world was booming.
“Anything anybody starts now,” he wrote her, “is only going to get bigger and bigger, assuming it is not run by idiots.”
Ruth did not think she was an idiot, and she could see from the vantage point of almost a decade where Henry Flood’s farm was headed. She visited her cousin, who hemmed and hawed in the careful, phlegmatic way that always defined Saraw’s nickel-and-dime business transactions, then sold her a property for $15,000 that he had despaired of unloading for 12.
Under Ruth’s careful yet imaginative management, it thrived. Not even the chain fast-food restaurant that opened a mile away 15 years later could make a dent in the Fairweather Grill.
Ruth had never imagined herself an entrepreneur. Such dreams as she had in those hard early years on the farm mostly starred her children, and after Susanna’s death, she hardly dreamed at all. And Harry never meant to push her into the business world, but he started her thinking about ways to save her family from a life that she could see was becoming more and more second-rate.
Ruth didn’t mind the long hours; Hank was in school, and Paul would be the next year. Some days, she was able to get by with a few hours and a couple of scowling walkthroughs to make sure the help wasn’t cleaning out the cash registers, but there were many others when she had to depend on Naomi and Henry to look after the boys and the house, days when she left before sunrise and fell into bed exhausted after 10.
“I would rather be with my children all day, waiting with milk and cookies when they get home from school,” she wrote Harry, “but I do not have the luxury of doing that, if we are to thrive.”
She resisted all entreaties to build another Fairweather Grill or two in Newport or at the beach itself. By the time she had gotten the grill up and running, McDonald’s and its emulators were starting to devour the market, but Ruth knew she would dilute what she had if she branched out.
She told all who offered to make her a franchise queen that she didn’t think the world could support more than one Fairweather Grill. Ruth knew she could make more money, in the short term, by doing this, but she knew she would never sleep well knowing that someone somewhere, some ambitious but inexperienced young couple yearning to get rich in a hurry or some business-school graduate willing to cut corners, was playing fast and loose with the name of the Fairweather Grill.
“You’re right,” she wrote Harry. “I am too particular. I know that. I can’t help it.”
She worried, when she had time to worry, about Naomi, who never seemed to be satisfied, who was always trying to swim a little faster, work a little harder. Where, Harry asked her once in a letter, do you think she could have gotten that from?
The grill didn’t make them rich, but it did allow Henry Flood to keep his farm, and it did keep the Floods from sinking to the next level down, where they would be receiving rather than giving hand-me-down clothing. Henry, the boys and such help as he could hire took care of the tobacco, their only real cash crop. They would make a few dollars more selling watermelons, cantaloupes and tomatoes at the grill’s produce stand. Ruth had spared Henry’s pride, although she got little credit for it. In the first year, he twice came to the grill, half-drunk and listening to the demons who were whispering louder and more frequently into his tortured ears, and accused Ruth of cheating on him.
Finally, she told him what the rules were. He could rant and rave all he wanted in the privacy of their home, but if he persisted in emb
arrassing her in public, to say nothing of endangering the prime source of their livelihood, she would leave him. For a time, this seemed to work.
Harry gently suggested that she leave her husband anyhow. In her return letter, Ruth asked who would take care of Henry Flood if she didn’t.
“I am here,” she wrote, “for the long haul. Sickness and health, Harry.”
In 1956, Naomi swam the fastest time of any 12-year-old girl in the country in the butterfly, her specialty. “In four years,” a sportswriter reported in the Newport paper, “Pembroke County will not just be pulling for the red, white and blue in the Olympic Games. We’ll be pulling for one of our own, Naomi Jane Crowder.”
Naomi’s success, though, seemed to irritate Henry.
He badgered Ruth to have Naomi’s last name changed to Flood, but Ruth said that was up to Naomi, who would prefer to remain Naomi Jane Crowder.
“Doesn’t she want me to make her an honest woman, too?” he asked Ruth one morning after the children had gone to school, on a rare day when she didn’t have to open the grill herself.
“There aren’t anything except honest women in this house,” Ruth told him.
“Then tell me about Randall Phelps,” he’d thrown back at her.
He seemed to enjoy quizzing her in front of the children, especially Naomi, who still occasionally asked about her father.
Ruth was adept at preserving the integrity of the sacred family lie, although she knew the best policy was to say nothing at all. She worried more about Charlotte or Jane giving it away.
But one evening, when Naomi was hounding her for information, at the end of a long day when Ruth’s nerves were a little more frayed than usual, she slipped. Worse, she slipped within earshot of Henry. Ruth told Naomi that her father had dark hair, like hers. She was exhausted, she wrote to Harry later, and she just wanted to get Naomi off this tiresome subject. She thought that she had told the lie long enough that it came automatically, that the truth would never slip past her by accident.
Henry looked at Ruth for a couple of long seconds and then walked off, smiling a little. Randall Phelps, he knew, had yellow hair.
That night in bed, Ruth expected to be interrogated. Instead, Henry Flood just lay there. Ruth was afraid to go to sleep until she could hear her husband snoring.
The next morning, he waited until Naomi and the boys had left for school. Then he went down to the Fairweather Grill, where Ruth had been since 6 a.m. and where the breakfast crowd was thinning out enough so that the one waitress Ruth could afford would be able to handle things for a while.
As soon she saw Henry jerk open the door and walk inside, not even bothering to close it, Ruth was slipping out of her apron. She guided him out into the parking lot without a word. Her hands were shaking when she closed the door behind them.
Once outside, he was leading her, to his pickup truck parked on the side of the building that had no windows. He even opened the door for her. Then he got in and started to turn the ignition key, but she put her hand over his and told him that whatever he had to say, he ought to say it there.
“All right,” he told her, and he took the key out. “Here’s what I have to say. I think you’re a goddamn liar and a whore. I think you slept with half of Camp Warren and don’t have any idea who your little bastard’s father is, unless it’s that pansy-ass McGinnis. Can queers have children?”
He said it all in a calm voice, almost no inflection at all. Ruth could barely hear him. In the background, the Sam and Willie’s lone engine was creaking back and forth along the lumber yard’s spur rail, occasionally clanging hard like an anvil into a flatcar.
Ruth knew this moment would come some day, but she still was not prepared for it. She pointed out that she had a perfectly good marriage certificate, to say nothing of divorce papers.
“Bullshit,” Henry told her. “I don’t know how the Crowders pulled it off, but I don’t believe a word of it. It’s time to tell the truth. Lyin’ time is over.” He moved closer and reached across the seat as if to put his arm around her. Instead, he grabbed Ruth’s right arm and, before she could move, he twisted it around behind her, pushing her forward so that her head hit the metal dashboard.
“Time to tell the truth,” he whispered.
She almost gave it away then. She had seen little boys do that to each other in the schoolyard, but she never knew how much it hurt. Henry eased up enough so that she could sit back up and get her breath, and talk. He was close enough to her that she could smell the liquor that the VA doctors had told him to stop drinking.
When the pain subsided, she realized that she had been through worse, and she was damned if she was going to give in. She had fought for too many years. She had created a world in which even those who knew perfectly well at one time that there was no such person as Randall Phelps had conveniently “forgotten,” the way people can, Ruth understood, if they like you. It was worth a lot, she concluded sitting there next to Henry Flood, to keep that world intact.
He still held her arm behind her back, but his grip was light now. Without even thinking, she yanked her right arm free and simultaneously reached over with her left hand and grabbed him by the testicles. His face grew beet-red as he tried to pry her hand loose. Then she reached into her dress pocket and pulled out the little paring knife she kept there when she worked, just in case. She stuck it into his thigh, not far from where her left hand was squeezing. She let him know she could push the knife a little deeper, squeeze a little harder.
Henry Flood finally did what Ruth told him to do: He sat still and listened, blood forming a dark spot on the fabric of his work pants. Later, she would start shaking so hard from the memory of it that the cook thought she was coming down with the flu.
She told Henry that there weren’t going to be any more questions about Naomi’s father.
Henry Flood had never really had it all spelled out to him before then. Ruth had long ago made sure that the lawyers put everything related to the Fairweather Grill in her name. She had made sure that her business with the brokers in Newport and later with Harry Stein himself was hers and nobody else’s, and especially not Henry Flood’s.
“You want the truth?” she asked him. “Here’s the truth, and you had better heed it.”
She explained to Henry, as to a child, chapter and verse, just how quickly the farm would be taken away from him without the money the Fairweather Grill brought in. It was explained to him that Ruth had “other money” that was none of his business and not in his name, money that could sustain her and the children, if need be. It was explained, although Ruth never wanted to bring it down to that level, how little he would have in the world, how quickly he might find himself alone and broke if he continued to press the issue.
“I don’t ever,” she told him, “want to hear about Naomi’s father again. Naomi’s father was before your time. You are not to concern yourself with him any more.”
Henry, his hand over the flesh wound Ruth had inflicted, told her that she was bluffing. She said to try her, then, and he was silent for a very long time, just the two of them sitting in the truck looking straight ahead while the sun worked its way up in the sky. And then he said, “Get out,” which she did. And Henry drove away.
“Harry,” she wrote when she told him about it, “it bought me some time, at least.”
They had been married nine years almost when she bought the Grill. They would stay married for 19 more. It wasn’t all bruises and silence. Henry was “good” for some time after Ruth explained how things were.
Ruth’s letters to Harry emphasized the sunny days, days when Henry was a gracious, smiling presence at the grill as he pretended to be the part-owner he never was, evenings when he would play baseball or basketball with his sons until dark, nights when he would beg her forgiveness for the other times.
For a very long time, she always forgave him.
By the time Ruth opened the grill, she was receiving $15 a week from Harry Stein, who had it to spend. Even wi
th Gloria, Martin and Nancy to consider, his ability to make money for others, and himself, had allowed him the luxury of painless generosity. The Steins only became more affluent when Gloria’s mother and father died within eight months of each other and their only child inherited three-quarters of a million dollars.
Harry and Gloria got along. They made their own peace in the aftermath of Marianne Nobles and found enough substance in their lives to keep their marriage anchored. They never doubted that they loved their children, and they supposed that they loved each other as well.
They took solace in the comforts of family and a lifetime of friends in Richmond. Gloria became more fond of her upward mobility than Harry ever would have imagined, and there was an unspoken covenant between them, he felt: As long as Harry could provide all this—a life that opened almost all of Jewish and Christian Richmond society to them—she was able to forget the past and sometimes turn a blind eye to the present. Harry knew he was to blame, that he was the one who forced the woman he had loved and married to either lower her expectations or leave, but still he couldn’t forgive her, not really, for selling her acquiescence and forgiveness.
At Martin & Rives, they called Harry “The King of the Jews,” and he laughed right along with them. There was still only one other Jewish broker working in the city of Richmond.
Harry made money for many people whose clubs he could enter only as a guest. This bothered Gloria more than it did him, but she was thrown enough crumbs—a charity chairmanship, an invitation to join a lesser women’s club, what she felt were genuine friendships with some of the old-line Anglophiles in the boxwood-and-azalea neighborhoods—to pacify her.
Ruth never forgot what Harry told her about the way money grows. She had been almost 19, with a one-year-old daughter in tow, when she walked into the oldest brokerage house in Newport, wearing her best dress, and told them she wanted to buy some stock, something not too safe, not too risky.
“Why don’t you just put it in the bank?” an amused broker asked her.