Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  Harry Stein digs in and waits for another day.

  Many years ago, Harry heard a man at a party in Richmond talk about the green light, a brief flash of pigment sometimes visible to the human eye at the exact split second when the first centimeter of the sun breaches the horizon. Harry read the scientific explanation, and for each of the next three summers at the beach, he would get up at dawn at least once, searching in vain for the green light. Friends and family would tease him when he came back, bleary-eyed and frustrated, from the pier.

  But now, expecting nothing, he sees it. The green flash is there and gone before he can blink, a hidden emerald not even a tenth of a second long, the length between night and day.

  Once, as Harry sat alone on the back porch of their new home in the Northern Virginia suburbs, a deer materialized in front of him, not 20 feet away. It was a beautiful buck, at least an eight-pointer. It made eye contact, showing neither fear nor surprise, then turned and crashed back into the woods, never to be seen again, witnessed only by Harry, who always afterward watched in vain for its return. Now, as then, he looks around for corroboration. Only the gulls are there to share his green light.

  He watches the sun rise. This near the horizon, he can actually see it move, if he looks long enough. Harry does look. He is not concerned about cataracts.

  When the sun is half-exposed, some bit of color makes him look out to sea again. This time, the flash is red.

  Harry’s eyes are still good, and he can see soon enough that it’s Naomi, out for a swim, alone in the Gulf of Mexico. She is doing the butterfly, which Harry thinks is one of the strangest athletic endeavors ever invented for humans. According to Ruth, Naomi chose it because it seemed an event that she could master by sheer hard work.

  Naomi’s one-piece red bathing suit lurches in and out of the water, resembling the dolphins he and Ruth see off the Carolina beaches. When he first spots her, she is far away, but in almost no time she is near the shore, swimming easily in the weak Gulf current.

  She doesn’t see Harry until she stands up in waist-deep water and starts walking toward the shore. Harry knows this because she jumps slightly. Even a mile swim after a night’s sleep, he thinks to himself, isn’t enough to rid his daughter of her tension.

  Naomi walks a few yards over and picks up her terry cloth robe where she left it in a protected pocket between two dunes. Then she comes over to where he’s sitting.

  “Jesus, Harry,” she says. “You ought to let somebody know you’re out here.”

  “I didn’t know you were such as early riser.”

  He wonders if she is reacting to his appearance, which he’s sure hasn’t improved since he looked into that 3 a.m. mirror. She is already fishing in her robe pocket for cigarettes and matches. She finds them, lights one, then sits, yoga-style, watching the sunrise with Harry.

  “Did you see the green light?”

  “The what?” She looks back at him as if he has reported a mermaid sighting. Then she remembers Harry explaining it to her, years before.

  “Oh, the green light. You finally saw the green light? That’s nice.”

  She smiles as if she might be humoring him.

  They are both quiet for a while as the sun slips into a cloud bank. To make conversation, he asks about Grace and Gary, not expecting much except the usual boilerplate. But Naomi surprises him.

  “Well,” she says, putting out a spent cigarette in the sugar-white sand and reaching for another one, “it isn’t a picnic, Harry. It definitely is not a picnic.”

  Harry observes that it usually isn’t. At best, he adds, you’ve got ants. Feeling a rare moment of kinship with his oldest child, he tries not to frighten the moment away with overeagerness.

  He talks about Martin and Nancy, more than he has before—about how, after things fell apart, Martin seemed to choose him while Nancy chose Gloria, like kids picking players for a softball team.

  “And then there’s me,” she says, turning and smiling with a little mischief, Harry thinks, a little life. “Should I want you on my side?”

  Harry puts his hand on her shoulder. At least she doesn’t jump.

  “You’re entitled not to,” he says. “You’ve got a grudge coming to you.”

  She turns toward him and rubs his foot, which looks bruised and swollen although he doesn’t remember running into anything recently.

  “Does that hurt?”

  “Only when I laugh,” he starts to tell her, but his throat catches, and it takes all his strength to keep from crying. Where the hell, he wonders, did that come from?

  “It’s OK, Harry. It’s OK.” She strokes his ankles and feet, and he’s grateful that she looks away, as if she has seen him naked, until he can pull himself together.

  “So,” he says finally, trying to pick up the thread, “what’s not a picnic?”

  She scoops up a handful of white sand and lets it sift through her fingers.

  “Well, Grace is OK, I suppose, although she’s a little too much like me for my liking, if you know what I mean.”

  “She should be so lucky.”

  “I mean, she’s breezing through law school, not a problem in the world, but she doesn’t have, I don’t know, a lot of sympathy, a lot of compassion. I really wanted her to come east with me for Mom’s birthday, but she said she didn’t really know anybody back here anymore.

  “Do you think I’m hard-hearted, Harry?” she asks, looking right up into his face now. “Do you think I’ve passed that on to Grace?”

  Harry tells her he thinks she’s passed a damn good work ethic on to Grace and, no, he doesn’t think she’s hardhearted; he just wishes she and Ruth were better friends.

  “We used to be,” she mutters.

  “What she said about, you know, gays …” Harry had been there, too, that day, was left to deal with Ruth’s self-recrimination afterward.

  Naomi bats away his sentence with her right hand before it is even completed. It is so much like the gesture Harry’s father used to deflect compliments or apologies.

  “She didn’t know. Hell, I was in denial at the time, myself. Thomas is still in denial. He claims he believes the boy Gary is living with is just a friend, a buddy, a roommate. We can’t even talk about it, Harry. I’m afraid it’s going to tear us apart. You think I’m hard-hearted? No, don’t deny it; let me finish. Well, I can’t shut my child out of my life because of something he’s got no more damn control over than he does red hair.

  “But Thomas, he’ll never accept it. He’s got to know, though. He’s gotten into all this macho stuff—mountain-climbing, dirt-biking. He’s talking about taking up parachuting. It’s like he’s trying to prove that, by God, it wasn’t anything he did, not something wrong with his family’s chromosomes. Thomas likes to control, and he can’t control this.”

  It occurs to Harry that Gary has a tough row to hoe, if Naomi is the flexible, sympathetic parent.

  He decides to make a small leap.

  “Are you afraid,” he asks her, “that you and your kids will wind up with the kind of relationship you’ve got with Ruth? Are you afraid of history repeating itself? Things can change, you know.”

  He feels so helpless. He should be able to say it better. If he could say all he knew, it might come out right.

  She looks up at him and frowns. She doesn’t speak for so long that Harry wonders if it’s still his turn.

  “Harry,” she says finally, “you and I both love my mother, but even you don’t know everything. You weren’t there, and I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I just mean, you weren’t there. You didn’t live through the reign of Henry Flood. You didn’t pray for deliverance and have that prayer answered with lectures on how ‘you’ve got to try and get along with him.’”

  She’s never before opened up this much. Maybe, Harry thinks, it’s because soon-to-be-dead men tell no tales. And maybe he should tell one of his own, one he swore he never would. Whatever the reason, he’s glad for the moment. First the green light and now this. He is s
truck, not for the first time, with how any given day, no matter now large the odds against it, can be worth the effort.

  Naomi says the winter before the Olympics was the worst. It should have been the time of her life, but it wasn’t. She was working harder than she’d ever worked or ever would again. She felt her whole life would be a failure if she didn’t make the U.S. team and go to Rome. She had skipped a grade in school and would graduate that summer, before she was 17. And Ruth was determined that Naomi would be the valedictorian Ruth always thought she should have been.

  “Nobody around Saraw knew how hard it was,” she says, “just to get on the U.S. team. You look around and there are—what?—several hundred big-league baseball players, over a thousand pro football players. But we were competing for just two spots, two lousy spots out of the whole country, for each event. And afterwards, you might get a college scholarship, maybe a parade back home if you won the gold. It probably wasn’t worth it, Harry. But it was something I had to do. Who needs a childhood, anyway?”

  Naomi looks as if she is either trying to remember something or forget something, and before Harry can find a way to make this, the most real conversation he’s had in years with his oldest child, last a little longer, Hank and Paul come walking toward them, surfcasting rods in hand.

  “What are you all doing, looking for the hurricane?” Paul asks.

  “No,” Naomi says, standing. “I’ve just been telling him what a couple of little assholes you two were as children.”

  “Oooh,” Paul flinches. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She throws a shell at him.

  He tells Harry that they intend, sometime today, to get him out in the surf with a rod and reel in his hands.

  “Maybe later,” he says. Naomi is brushing sand off her legs and bottom. Harry finds that the only way he can get out of Paul’s sawed-off chair is by half-falling forward on his knees and then rising.

  “I’ve already had enough excitement for one morning,” he tells them. “First I see the green light, and then I get to talk to a mermaid in a red bathing suit. Who deserves to be so lucky?”

  Naomi shakes her head, walking back ahead of him. Ruth is standing on the deck, looking out to sea.

  NINETEEN

  Naomi, who was still specializing in the butterfly, finished second in the 1960 national championships and then in the Olympic trials in Detroit, where she also made the 400-meter relay team. She almost qualified in the breaststroke, as well. Harry, reading this, wondered if his grandfather was smiling somewhere.

  Naomi was upset that she didn’t finish first and had to be convinced that making the United States Olympic team did not qualify as failure.

  Ruth’s portfolio had continued to grow, aided by smart investments and the Fairweather Grill; she was independent. She didn’t have to ask Henry’s permission to fly to Rome that September.

  Harry, unable to tell anyone what he wanted to scream out, that his daughter was an Olympic swimmer, grew distracted at Martin’s baseball games, Nancy’s recitals. He felt himself splitting a little, like the pear tree in their backyard that was coming apart at the crotch where the two dominant branches pulled north and south. Only his work on the Kennedy campaign kept him focused.

  He almost told Gloria everything, but he didn’t.

  The Games began late that year and ran well into September. Ruth, who had never flown before, was with a small group from Newport, all richer than she and treating her like royalty, to her amusement. In Rome, they stayed in a small hotel near the Spanish Steps and had tickets to several venues other than swimming. She met Rafer Johnson, and Naomi introduced her to the great Australian swimmer, Dawn Fraser.

  Ruth was not yet 35 years old. She was mistaken for Naomi’s older sister on two occasions. She had studied Italian for six months beforehand, and she took great pride in bailing language-challenged compatriots out of tight spots. The others from Newport started calling her “the great Floodini.”

  She didn’t get to spend as much time with Naomi as she would have liked, though. Naomi preferred to be with friends and competitors her own age. The two of them went shopping twice and had dinner together three times. Ruth had hoped for more.

  But she was thrilled when Naomi’s relay team won the gold medal, especially after her disappointment in the 100 butterfly.

  Naomi wasn’t expected to win the butterfly. She wasn’t even the fastest American. And then she got sick before her semifinal heat, Ruth suspected from nerves, and didn’t qualify for the final. Hearing about it and then reading about it in the paper the next morning, Harry felt sick for her.

  So the relay was Naomi’s last chance. The night before the final, Ruth was able to have dinner with her, at an outdoor cafe near Ruth’s hotel. Naomi was so nervous she could hardly eat.

  Ruth tried to calm her, with little success. Finally, Ruth paid the bill, and they walked to the Spanish Steps. They climbed halfway up and found a quiet spot in the sea of young people there.

  Ruth told her that she loved her, that she couldn’t be more proud of her, that nothing was going to change whether she won or lost.

  “Well,” Naomi asked, “what was all this about then? What have I been working my tail off for?”

  Ruth looked across at the crowds filling the Via Condotti. She had always taken it as an article of faith that you worked hard for what you wanted, if you were to have any chance of getting it. Talent, she had told Naomi after the girl won her first state championship, can’t get you all the way there.

  “Nothing you ever do with a full effort and a good heart comes to nothing,” she told her that night in Rome. It was a speech she had been giving since Naomi was old enough to listen. Naomi just rolled her eyes, but Ruth thought it was a good sign that she didn’t reject the weatherbeaten wisdom outright.

  The next day, with Ruth and the rest of the cheering section from Pembroke County screaming encouragement at the natatorium on the banks of the Tiber, Naomi turned a short American lead into a long one and got her gold medal. She told Ruth that they ought to only give her one-fourth since it was a relay, but Ruth could tell she was proud.

  After that, they had four days left in Rome. Naomi, with the weight lifted off her shoulders, partied every night with her teammates. Ruth didn’t see much more of her until the trip back.

  Naomi was to return with the Pembroke County contingent. On the last morning, Ruth took a taxi to the Olympic village, and she could tell, as soon as she saw Naomi sitting on her bags outside the compound, that something was wrong. She never found out what. Maybe, she thought, it was just the letdown after all that work.

  There was an incident checking the luggage. The security guards wanted to open one of Naomi’s bags, and Naomi made such a fuss about it that she almost got them arrested.

  She was in tears by the time things were smoothed over by Ruth and others. They made the flight with 10 minutes to spare.

  On board, a doctor from Newport got Naomi to take two sleeping pills, and she slept most of the way to New York.

  There, Ruth and two of the men had to virtually carry Naomi through customs and then to the terminal where they were to catch the connecting flight. She cursed Ruth, and then she sank into a crying jag. Ruth was able to strong-arm her into the women’s bathroom, where she made her wash her face. Then she waited while Naomi vomited what little she had eaten in the last 12 hours into one of the toilets. On the flight to Newport, Naomi cried softly on Ruth’s shoulder.

  Ruth, looking out at the water as they banked toward Newport, knew that she might never again feel so much like Naomi’s mother, so needed. She stroked her daughter’s hair and wondered at the perversity of a mother who could enjoy, even a little, such misery.

  When they landed, and Ruth reminded her that there might be a crowd waiting for her, Naomi snapped back as if nothing had happened. She looked, to Ruth’s amazement, like anyone else who had been on a long flight from Europe.

  There were a couple of hundred people at the terminal.
Naomi, very patiently and with great composure, signed autographs and shook hands, smiling all the time. Some of those in the party from Rome wondered if they had dreamed Naomi Crowder’s bad behavior.

  Henry Flood seemed glad to have his wife and stepdaughter back with him. The aunts had kept Hank and Paul, but Henry had persuaded them to let the boys come home and stay with him the last week, and they appeared to have enjoyed this time with their father.

  But the next day, at the Naomi Crowder Day parade in Newport, Henry turned up drunk, cursing spectators from his seat in the convertible behind the one in which Naomi and Ruth rode. Ruth wondered if anything ever really changed for good.

  “It often seems to me,” she wrote Harry that September, “that the best times for Henry are the times when nothing at all is happening. He hasn’t been this bad since I bought the Fairweather Grill, four years ago. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good news or bad news. Henry Flood simply is not equipped to handle the extraordinary.”

  Naomi slept for the better part of the next two days, and then she packed and took another trip, by plane again, to Los Angeles, where her freshman classes had already begun.

  “I don’t expect to see her that often from here on out,” Ruth wrote to Harry. “This was our last big thing together, like a graduation before she entered the big, wide world. It does seem as if she tried to get a scholarship at the school farthest away from me in the whole country, doesn’t it?

  “But she is bright and talented, and I am sure that she will succeed. Whether she will be happy, though: Well, that’s another question, I suppose.”

  Naomi would graduate from UCLA in four years. She was a member of one of the nation’s best swim teams, full of kids—many of them much younger than she—who were lured to Southern California from all over the country so that they might compete against the best.

  But Naomi lost interest in swimming her junior year and didn’t even go to the Olympic trials in 1964. She put all her effort into her studies and, that year, was admitted to law school.