by Howard Owen
“The same reason you don’t,” she told him. He shrugged, but he let her start with just the $100 she brought. She added to it every month, keeping just enough in the bank to pay her bills. For a long time, it didn’t amount to much, but finally it did what Harry had told her money would do: It took on a life of its own. Then she finally let Harry manage her investments. Even for men who told Yid jokes to his face, Harry Stein made good money. For Ruth, he took advantage of every whispered, just-for-you-and-nobody-else inside tip.
Now, Harry considers the evil entity devouring him, two bad cells becoming four, then eight, 16, 32, 64. If his cancer were a stock, he thinks, he would certainly advise everyone to buy.
SIXTEEN
Harry knows that a wiser man might have chosen another road, the much-recommended straight-and-narrow.
A wiser man might have written Ruth Crowder off in 1943 as a casualty of the times.
But Harry stayed his brambly course. He wonders now if all his will could have pulled him off it.
And eventually (to his wonderment), he emerged stumbling and bleeding from the undergrowth to find that long-abandoned, long-yearned-for path, cool and smelling of honeysuckle and the ocean.
Paul lets everyone out at the terminal building, then drives away to park the minivan.
“Are you sure you want to walk all the way to the gate?” Hank asks his mother. “We can get him.”
She doesn’t even answer, just walks straight ahead. The others follow.
It takes Naomi three tries before she gets through the metal detector without setting it off. She wishes out loud that she had smoked another cigarette before they entered the terminal.
Finally, they’re at Gate 24, staring out into the darkness. Paul, who never leaves anything to chance, called ahead to make sure the flight from Atlanta would be on time.
Fifteen minutes later, the passengers start coming through the door in ones and twos. Ruth can’t believe a plane can hold so many people. It seems to her as if a thousand have departed before one tired-looking old man in a baseball cap and a tan suit emerges, an attendant by his side as if she expects him to fall presently.
Ruth half-runs to his side, almost knocking him over.
“Be careful, old lady,” Harry Stein says. “A good gust of wind would do me in right now.”
Some of the crowd at the terminal have never seen people their age kiss with such passion.
“Hey,” Hank says to the teen-age boys gawking next to him, “what’re you lookin’ at? That’s my momma.”
Even Naomi laughs.
It would have been easier, everyone agreed, if Harry had just paid someone to close the Safe Harbor cottage for the winter. He could have called Freda and told her he’d spend some other weekend with them in Richmond.
But by the time Paul came up with his idea for Ruth’s no-surprise surprise 70th birthday party, Harry had already bought the super-saver ticket. He always went back up for a few days by himself in late September, long after he and Ruth had returned to Saraw, long after Martin and Nancy and their kids had paid their last visits. It was a good time to be alone out there.
And he thought he might not have the luxury of rescheduling visits.
“I don’t think I can bear to ride in a car all the way from Saraw to Florida,” is the way he explained it to Ruth.
Now, she sees that the 10 days they’ve been apart have not been restorative for Harry. Maybe, she thinks, he looked this sickly when he left and I just wasn’t noticing. Maybe he’s just tired.
She leads him through the long hallway and down the escalator to the front door and the car. He eschews a wheelchair, and she doesn’t insist. They all take short, controlled steps, trying to pretend that he is not slowing them up.
“I think this is just what I needed,” Harry says as they step outside into the still-warm night air.
“Me, too,” Ruth says, squeezing his hand.
The second time around, she was 51 and he was 57. Harry had not been with a woman anywhere near his age for several years. He was becoming a little intimidated by the 30-somethings and 20-somethings who turned up at his beach place. He wondered when wit and charm and money and what was left of his looks would be overbalanced by the gray in his hair, the failure to pick up on everything currently, ever-changingly young, the general sag of age.
But the thought of being together again with Ruth after all that time was disorienting. He wondered if they would have some convenient friendship of the mind. He wondered if that was what Ruth wanted. He would have settled for that, until he saw her again. They had shared almost everything in their letters.
Still, they had not seen each other undressed since Hitler ruled Europe. Harry thought it might be like the marriages of his mother’s and father’s generation, when the bride and groom had yet to see each other naked.
The first night, Harry was not sure where he was supposed to sleep. Ruth had taken him in like an abandoned puppy, as he had hoped she would, but that evening, he wasn’t sure at all about where he stood.
When Ruth yawned and said it was time for bed, he followed her up the stairs, uncertain as a teen-ager and just as aroused.
Then, Ruth Crowder Flood reached out to him, gently and unexpectedly. He jumped back, startled, then let her caress his penis through his pants.
“You seem glad to see me,” she said, and he could only nod, speechless for once.
She began stroking him and led into her bedroom, the same one where they had made illicit, delicious love so many years before. She pulled Harry to her and kissed him for a very long time, and then she stepped back.
She was wearing a red-and-black kimono. With one motion of her right hand, she undid it and threw it off. She was wearing nothing underneath. Harry looked at her breasts, sagging a little, at her pubic hair going slightly to gray, at her stomach, not so much the worse for the wear after four children. And he thought she was beautiful.
“If I looked as good as you after all this time, I’d do that, too,” he told her, his voice as unsteady as the rest of him.
“Let’s see,” she said, and she started undressing him.
“Mmm,” she said when she was finished and had stepped back, her right hand on her hip. “Not too bad, Harry Stein. Worth waiting for.”
Harry had taken care of himself, after a fashion. He had a good tan, he worked out five days a week at the club. He was capable of being at least tolerated by women half his age.
Ruth turned him on more than any of them, though. He was so relaxed that they might have been sexual partners forever, and he marveled at the mind’s ability to preserve what it wanted to preserve.
Ruth was amenable to just about anything Harry wanted, and he was more than willing to return the favor. She led the way when she thought he might be too timid, amazed at how their roles had switched over the years.
“I’m trying to make up for lost time,” she murmured, and later she would tell him how often she had imagined that he was with her, inside her.
“I’ve made love to you ten thousand times,” he said.
His second week there, they succeeded in breaking the double bed she had taken for her own when she moved back to her old home. A pine plank firming up the old mattress and box springs snapped like a twig, and even Harry blushed when they had to move the splintered wood and ancient bed down the stairs and later carry a new, queen-sized one up, aided by a poker-faced Hank.
It didn’t continue like that forever. The tide receded, but slowly enough that neither of them ever felt out of step. They ebbed together.
The cancer brought a large dropoff. In remission, though, Harry’s lust came back, along with his hair, for a while.
Even now, Harry marvels at the way physical attraction works. When he was 15, most girls and women between 13 and perhaps 30 were desirable to him, assuming they weighed less than 200 pounds. At 40, he was affected by a range of women that stretched from teens to approximately 50.
Now, at the unkind, unseemly age of 76,
he is capable—or he was, until the last little setback—of being stirred by just about any marginally attractive woman born between 1920 and the late ’70s.
He figures that, taking into account population growth, there are at least 10 times as many women capable of arousing him as there were when he was a teenager.
Life, he says only to himself, because nobody likes a whiner, is a bitch.
When they get back to the cottage, Harry feels strangely rejuvenated, as if at the end of his long, tiring day he has been granted an Indian summer.
He eats a sandwich of cold cuts and has some potato salad, even has room for a small slice of the cheesecake Tran bought. By then, it’s 10:30, and Ruth tells the rest that she and Harry are going to bed.
In their room, she tells him that she has a small present for him. It is in a department-store bag, and she apologizes for not wrapping it.
“It’s your birthday,” he tells her. “I should be wrapping presents for you.”
He takes out the dark blue shirt, exactly his size, the size to which he has of late shrunk. It is the perfect color, the shirt Harry would have bought for himself.
Harry used to make fun of shopping. Gloria would endure his jibes after an afternoon in a shopping center or a mall. It wasn’t the money. He just couldn’t understand the purpose. It never occurred to him that it might be fun, and if not spiritually uplifting, as least as intellectually stimulating and worthwhile as watching professional football, and that it might be driven by something so simple as generosity.
Now, this late, he has come to recognize shopping as a meaningful, even therapeutic activity, a leisuretime pursuit, almost a sport. He sees no reason why it shouldn’t be one of the demonstration events in the Atlanta Olympics; surely it is the equal of bowling.
Women, Harry concedes, spend all their lives tolerating men. They endure massive doses of sports spectatorship passed off as male bonding. They forgive deep-sea fishing trips that yield no fish. They don’t begrudge the happy hour. While men are ogling sports cars or younger females, women are making mental notes of what kind of shirt would look best on a dried-up old coot like him.
Harry is grateful to have learned this, but he wishes he had been a quicker study.
“Thank you,” he says, moved by her kindness, moved by all he never will be able to repay, his eternal debt. “It’s beautiful.”
Her smile makes him believe anything is possible.
SEVENTEEN
Harry wondered, in a letter he wrote in the spring of 1959, how different things might have been if they had never met or, having met, never parted. She told him not to dwell on such things, as she admonished herself not to.
“Don’t torture either of us,” she wrote. And then she told him a story about her earliest days as an orphan.
She had brooded over her lost mother and father, and she became an angry, resentful child. She would tell T.D. and Sudie, when she was in a particularly hurtful mood, that they weren’t her real parents.
One day, after she had said this, reducing her grandmother to tears, T.D. pulled his chair up next to hers, facing her. She was 7 at the time. Her grandfather leaned over and down so they were eye to eye.
“Ruthie,” he told her, “you know the Bible stories you hear about in Sunday School? You know about Jonah and the whale, and Moses parting the Red Sea, and Jesus raising that dead man up after three days?”
Ruth was silent.
“Well, those are just stories, ain’t nothin’ but stories. They might have been true once upon a time, but they ain’t true now. And even when they were true, the dead that rose back up hadn’t been dead long.”
He put both her hands in one of his.
“Your momma and daddy are gone. They are not ever coming back. All you have is today, and tomorrow if you’re lucky.”
Tears were rolling down T.D.’s cheeks by then. Even at 7, Ruth sensed that he didn’t believe in anything much any more. Even if it was directly in front of him, so that he could touch it, he was afraid it would disappear the next minute.
“And I guess some of that has rubbed off on me,” she wrote to Harry in 1959. “I know for a certainty that I didn’t mention my mother or father again to him or my grandmother, even when we would go out to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves. We remembered mostly in silence. And I haven’t done very much looking back. It hurts too much, Harry.
“Besides, things are better around here now. We seem to have reached some kind of truce. Either that, or the VA has finally gotten Henry’s medication right.”
Harry had come to believe, by that spring, that he and Gloria had settled on the rules by which they would live the rest of their lives. They hardly ever argued anymore, and never in front of the kids (although Harry came to understand later, from a grown Martin and Nancy, that his children had missed less than he had hoped they had).
Harry would go on weekend deep-sea fishing trips off Hatteras; Gloria would take the kids to the beach for the week while Harry worked and played bachelor back in the city. Gloria and her friends would go to Charleston or New York and leave their husbands to play poker, drink, burn burgers on the grill and keep the children.
Sex was comfortable, predictable. Sometimes Harry would wake with an erection and want Gloria. When the children were younger, waking at dawn, sex in the sunlight was impossible. Now, it seemed exciting, something different. Gloria preferred the night, though, when Harry was sometimes too tired. Three times a week became twice, well on the way to once. But, Harry thought, they had it at least as good as most of their friends. Wouldn’t it be selfish to demand more?
Then, one week that spring, Gloria went to New York for four days to meet some old classmates from college for shopping and the theater, as they did once or twice a year. On the second night, Martin, who had been bothered for a week with a cough that resisted treatment, woke up and couldn’t breathe. When he coughed up some phlegm, there was blood in it.
Harry took him to the emergency room at 2 on a Saturday morning and sat there trying to talk the pain away from his son as the drunken fight-losers and car-wreckers filled the room with their blood-ruined shirts and thoughtless cursing. Finally, a doctor saw them. Martin had pleurisy. “Probably pneumonia as well,” he added. “We probably ought to hospitalize him.”
Harry went home and slept a few hours after Martin was admitted. When he awoke, he thought at first he would be noble and let Gloria enjoy her carefree weekend with the girls, but by visiting hours he had convinced himself that she would want to know her son was languishing in a Richmond hospital, would want to rush home.
But he didn’t even know what hotel she was staying at, hadn’t bothered to ask. He did know the names of the other women. He got the address book and called Teresa Linder in Rochester, N.Y., figuring Teresa’s husband could tell him where their wives were staying.
Teresa Linder herself answered the phone. Harry had not spoken with her in 10 years, and she seemed surprised to hear from him.
No, she said, she wasn’t supposed to be in New York. But, she added too quickly, she did recall Gloria inviting her, wished that she could have gone, darnit. Harry thanked her and hung up.
He called the other two women and found that they were spending quiet weekends in the Boston suburbs and a small Pennsylvania town.
He took Nancy to the hospital with him and spent two hours with Martin, who was resting comfortably, on penicillin, still coughing up blood, already getting bored. Harry had time to think while his son dozed and his daughter went down the hall to watch television in the lounge.
He spent the weekend going between home and the hospital. He told her family and his that he didn’t want to disturb Gloria in New York; she had a long weekend coming to her.
Monday afternoon, he met her at the train station. She gave him a quick kiss on the lips, and then he drew away, holding on to her hands.
“Martin’s in the hospital,” he told her. “He has pneumonia. I tried to call you, but nobody knew where you were
.”
He could see it in her eyes.
The room, had Harry been able to remember the hotel, would have been in another name anyhow: Thomas Gray Daniels. Gloria was so stricken with guilt and embarrassment and almost physical pain that she never even bothered to ask Harry who it was he tried to call. She would find out later, when three old college friends all phoned her, each during the day, when Harry wasn’t home.
They had to pick up Nancy from school and then go to the hospital, where Martin was in better shape and would be released in two more days. They didn’t have a real moment to themselves until late that evening.
Harry knew she would tell him, and she did.
Thomas Gray Daniels was descended from two United States presidents. His grandfather had been a senator. Harry knew Tommy Daniels, had made him a lot of money over the years, had been Tommy’s guest at the Commonwealth Club, one of the many of which Harry could never be a member. He was a lawyer in an old Richmond firm; they had played golf together.
Gloria had gone away with Tommy Daniels twice before, she told Harry. He would discover that many of his friends knew about it long before he did, and he had to finally admit to himself, and Ruth, that the humiliation of having the brokers and golfers and drinkers with whom he spent much of his time know his wife was being screwed by Tommy Daniels hurt him worse than the betrayal itself.
Harry wondered, not for the first time, if it was worth it. Nothing had been the same since the days of Marianne Nobles, although he had slipped only once since then.
He asked Gloria if she wanted a divorce, and she shook her head violently, no. She never again, to Harry’s knowledge, slept with Tommy Daniels.
“Why Tommy Daniels?” he asked her. “He’s got a face like a horse and he can’t hold his liquor. What was it? His money? His dick?” but Harry knew. He knew the lure of those serpentine gentile walls, those soft old bourbon-soaked accents that they both should have hated. He knew how much Gloria loved all the trappings, especially the ones they couldn’t have. He also knew Tommy Daniels would never leave his cool blonde wife, at least not for a Jew.