Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  She finished near the top of her law class, meeting and falling in love with Thomas Ferrell III, a classmate and fellow North Carolinian, along the way. They were married in 1969, and by 1972, when Grace was born, Naomi had almost completely retired from the law. Ruth confined her disappointment, for the most part, to letters.

  “She is so good at everything,” she wrote Harry. “Why can’t she stay with it?”

  If I can stay with Henry Flood, Ruth wondered only to herself, why can’t Naomi stay with swimming or law? How hard can that be?

  TWENTY

  Several times in early 1961, Gloria and their children came up to see the trilevel on Balsa Drive as it slowly rose from the red clay to become their home for the next six years. The chain stores and strip malls and gridlock would overtake them soon, but in the beginning, Harry thought of himself and his family as pioneers, starting over.

  He worried that Gloria wouldn’t bond. Since college, she had never lived anywhere except Richmond. But she enjoyed the country, while it lasted, and she came to love the Washington scene that beckoned at the other end of Shirley Highway.

  During his extended leave of absence from Martin & Rives, Harry more and more came to think of himself as a Washingtonian.

  He felt he was making a difference. The Economic Advisory Board was committed to stimulating the economy, and to educating a president who never quite saw where they were headed but sometimes, with the aid of his advisors, did what they wanted anyhow.

  And, Harry had to admit to himself, he did love the power, the clout that came from others knowing you had JFK’s ear.

  Gloria was always running into old Seven Sisters acquaintances. She amazed Harry with how well she blended into the social scene, how much she loved being invited to Hickory Hill by Bobby and Ethel, how she shone at Perle Mesta’s parties. She was still, Harry had come to realize during those months when he went without seeing her for five days at a time, a very attractive woman. He was less inclined to take her for granted.

  “Harry,” Jack Kennedy said when he was introduced to Gloria, “are all the men in Richmond ugly? They must be, for you to land a woman this beautiful. The competition there must be minimal.”

  Harry would retell the story at parties, perfectly mimicking Kennedy. “The competition theah must be, ah, minimal,” Harry would say, and everyone would crack up, delighted to be one degree from the president.

  Gloria was as happy as Harry had seen her in years, and it made things better, he felt, not just for him but for Martin and Nancy, too. She laid it on a little thicker than he might have liked at times, reveling too much in what he felt deep down they couldn’t sustain. He knew they were in a town where all the jobs changed in the time it took your kids to get through high school. But what was the harm?

  Martin and Nancy were adapting well to their new schools, which were full of the sons and daughters of congressmen and cabinet staffers. In their neighborhood, every kid was a new kid on the block. The outsiders were the ones who had been there all along, now outnumbered and badly outspent.

  “Harry,” Gloria said to him often that heady first year, “I’m so proud of you.”

  He pointed out that he had taken a rather large cut in pay to go to Washington and couldn’t be sure he’d be there forever.

  “Money,” she said, shaking her head at his inability to grasp the big picture. “We’ve got enough money, Harry. What money did for us is give us a chance to get into all this. You can be somebody, Harry.”

  Harry, under the impression he already was somebody, knew Gloria meant somebody in Washington, not somebody in Richmond. He wondered if he had created a monster, but he was pleased that at least they were both enjoying their lives at present, that their children seemed to be enjoying theirs.

  By November of 1963, he was assistant director of the EAB. He played a key role in getting Kennedy to lower taxes and enlarge the budget, and it occurred to him often in years to come that the national debt actually started with him and a few other idealists whose original plan mutated into something they had never envisioned, helped along by a war and then by greed and short-sightedness. He imagined his obituary reading, “Harold Martin Stein, who helped his country take the first small steps toward fiscal irresponsibility.…” How, he would wonder over the years, did such a high-minded, simple-ass desire to make America the land of opportunity for everyone get so screwed up?

  Harry and Gloria seemed to know all of Washington socially and, in his case, professionally. He came to be seen as a man who could cut across boundaries, an economist with an English degree, an Ivy Leaguer who could talk Southern, a facile fund-raiser who really believed in making a better world. Gloria complemented him well and was happy enough to be known to most as the wife of Handsome Harry Stein. In a city where youth and glamour were suddenly in, the Steins’ timing was perfect.

  They were accustomed to seeing their names mentioned in Washington’s daily newspapers, Harry’s in the A section, both of theirs in the society pages. Gloria would clip out each mention and put it in a scrapbook that she kept hidden from everyone except Harry, ashamed to let any of their new friends know how proud she was.

  In the summer of 1963, a group of Kennedy insiders was sent on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam. Harry was included; the word was, he was recommended by the president himself.

  The war looked, from that vantage point, not like a war at all. Maybe it would, in time, become another Korea; maybe it would be some small exercise like the one in the Dominican Republic. Harry, like all his friends in the World War II alumni club, had a rather straightforward approach to Vietnam: The Commies are trying to take over the world; we’ve got to get them out, save the planet for democracy. The idea of a war not being “right” was a concept none of them had really considered.

  It was unbearable when they landed. They had not listened sufficiently to the warnings about the heat and humidity. After all, they were only going to be there four days.

  “Hell,” Harry had said to Gloria at the airport, “how can anything be worse than Richmond in July?”

  They got the royal tour of Saigon, which Harry conceded might be a pleasant place on days when the temperature was under 100 degrees. They all shook hands with Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be shot to death three weeks before Jack Kennedy. They saw what they were meant to see of the army. They heard what they were meant to hear. Even Harry could understand that there was no way he or any of the other Americans on this miserable junket was going to peel back even the first layer of jungle that hid whatever Vietnam really was.

  “Can you believe,” asked a state department aide with whom he shared a hotel room, “that anybody is willing to die for this shithole?”

  The last day there, Harry and the aide went out walking by themselves in Saigon, against orders. They turned on to one of the broad avenues the French had built. Harry thought, not for the first time, how it really was a beautiful city, if he could only breathe. Up ahead, a crowd was gathered, and Vietnamese soldiers were wading through the civilians.

  The two Americans walked up, knowing they shouldn’t be there but unable to resist.

  Harry didn’t see much, just what appeared to be a charred leg as three of the teen-age soldiers threw the monk’s body in the back of a truck. The smell, burned skin and gasoline, was nauseating in the heat. The charred remains of the dead man’s clothes were burned into the surface of the street.

  “Shit,” the aide said, and turned to one side. Harry couldn’t look away, though. In the shade of the truck, he got a quick glimpse of the monk’s blackened face, the gritted teeth. He saw a soldier stick a bayonet into the monk’s body and realized that he was still alive.

  A Vietnamese officer advanced on them, shouting and pointing, but the aide flashed his identification, and the officer, a short, round man, became instantly obsequious, ushering them away from the scene as gently as if they had been the next of kin. Behind them, the young soldiers dispersed the crowd with threats and rifle butts.


  Harry thought he might pass out in the still heat. He wondered how much hotter the fire could have felt to the monk than the actual air did. He and the aide walked two blocks and retreated beneath an awning, where they ordered beers beneath a slow-moving fan.

  The aide had to explain to Harry that no one set the monk on fire; he did it himself. Harry would see photographs, later, but they didn’t have the impact of that one hot July day in Saigon—the smell, and the little dark place where the monk patiently melted into the pavement.

  For some reason, the state department man explained, the Communists had gotten to the monks.

  Harry thought about that monk, and when he got back home, he did some reading about the French occupation of Indochina. When he was asked for his assessment of Vietnam, he was not as optimistic about America’s chances of success as were the others in the mission.

  Kennedy sent for Harry one day two weeks later. With Dean Rusk and two other state department officials in the office, he read an undersecretary of state’s report, full of optimism, promising that a six-month campaign would fix everything, and then Harry’s more pessimistic note.

  Kennedy put down the reports and looked at Harry.

  “Harry,” he said, “may I ask you something? Were you two gentlemen in the same country?”

  Everyone laughed, and it was generally understood that this was the kind of misinformed jeremiad you might get when you sent amateurs on a fact-finding mission.

  Martin was 16 that summer, with two years of high school left. Not long after Harry sent his report on Vietnam to the president, he paid a visit to a National Guard major, an old friend of his, to make sure Martin Stein would never set foot in a country where the enemy would set themselves on fire and peacefully burn to death rather than submit. He was abusing what little power he had, and he didn’t care.

  When they got word that Kennedy had been shot, Harry and one of his assistants, a young woman from Oberlin, had just returned from lunch. As soon as they knew he was dead, everyone went home.

  Harry would always remember the traffic jam on the Shirley Highway that afternoon, and the sight of two grown men, in suits and white shirts, fighting in the median strip, apparently as the result of a minor accident. Both men were flailing away, doing almost no harm. Both were weeping openly.

  Nothing much changed for Harry after Kennedy’s death, at least not professionally.

  He wondered that he could get along with two men as different as Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and perhaps if he had been closer to the fire, he might not have. He saw more than one high-level official cowed and humiliated by Johnson’s tantrums and bullying. Harry never took what Johnson did or said personally, though. In fact, his greatest fear was that he might break out laughing while in some small group that was the momentary target of LBJ’s wrath. He knew Johnson could send him back to Richmond in two seconds, but he always had the strange feeling that the president was on the verge of stopping in mid-diatribe and winking at them. And this lack of fear seemed to carry back to Johnson, who saw in Harry Stein a man who respected him with an unaverted eye. They got along well enough.

  Then, in the summer of 1966, the ambassador to The Netherlands stepped down unexpectedly. A week later, Harry answered a summons from Walter Padgett in the state department. Padgett had been a year behind Harry at Princeton and had created over the years the myth of a college-days friendship.

  “Harry,” Padgett said when they were both seated, “how would you like to move to the Hague?”

  Harry would be amazed, throughout his life, at the odd directions from which opportunity came at him. Padgett, who probably called him a Hebe behind his back in college, was pushing him for a European ambassadorship, supported by a Virginia senator whose politics were anathema to Harry and by a member of Johnson’s cabinet to whom Harry had never, to his knowledge, spoken.

  He went home in a daze. When he told Gloria about it, she had a brief moment of anxiety, and then she became, in her mind, the wife of the ambassador to The Netherlands, and she realized this would make her life complete. Martin was a junior at the University of Virginia; Nancy was getting ready to start her freshman year at Mary Baldwin. The timing seemed perfect. Harry, whose first thought upon being approached was that Gloria never would give up Washington, the same as he thought she never would give up Richmond, knew that she would be the perfect ambassador’s wife, that she was born to play this role, the one she had been honing in Washington society the past five years.

  There were no major objections to Harry Stein as ambassador to Holland. No wealthy industrialist or retiring senator coveted the post. Harry had been sent on the occasional junket to foreign lands and had become known, in his circle, as a loyal Democrat and a charming generalist.

  By September, when Nancy left for college, there was almost nothing standing between Harry Stein and what he and Gloria had come to see as their destiny.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Dear Harry,” Ruth wrote on a wet, cold February day in 1964, “Isn’t it amazing the way, no matter how much you try to anticipate disaster, it always sneaks up on you anyhow?

  “It never occurred to me to worry about Hank, any more than I would worry about the sun not coming up in the east.”

  The previous Tuesday, she and the rest were just starting to clean up after lunch when she heard the door open. Thinking that they had one more hungry truck driver to feed, she looked up and saw Hank. He was moving toward her very slowly, tentatively, like the stray dogs out back who weighed fear against the chance for a free meal from a stranger’s hand. Hank usually wore his confidence like a neon sign.

  Ruth came from behind the counter, ready to ask him what was wrong.

  “Momma,” he told her, “I can’t go back to school.”

  She assured him that he most certainly could go back to school, not knowing what else to say.

  “You haven’t been expelled, have you?”

  The idea of Hank Flood being expelled was beyond Ruth’s belief. He had never even gotten a spanking.

  “No,” he said, “I haven’t been expelled. But I can’t go back. I really can’t, Momma.”

  He had been in fourth-period algebra class. He had not felt well all day, and there had been a ringing in his ears since he got to school.

  Hank had never liked tight spaces. Once, when he was 5, Naomi shut him up in one of the closets, thinking they were just playing, and he almost tore the door off trying to get out.

  But that day in algebra, it occurred to him, suddenly, just how small the classroom was, how there wasn’t enough space and how he didn’t think he could bear to be in a room like that any longer. He told Ruth that if anyone had tried to stop him from leaving, right then, he was afraid of what he might have done.

  She left the grill with him. They walked down to the river and back, in the freezing cold, and they talked. Hank told her he could not stand even to sit inside a car, that he did not know if he could bear staying in his room at home. He wasn’t crying, but he was shaking so hard his teeth rattled.

  “I have set up an appointment with Dr. Sherman, a psychiatrist that Roy McGinnis recommended in Newport,” Ruth wrote. “We are to go see him day after tomorrow, and I pray he will be able to find some way to fix what’s wrong with my boy. I am so scared, Harry.…

  Eventually, Ruth would take Hank to two psychiatrists in Newport, then to the university hospital in Chapel Hill, then to Johns Hopkins.

  To have done otherwise, Ruth felt, would have been like quitting.

  Nobody in Saraw had ever heard of agoraphobia. Neither of the first two doctors even mentioned the word.

  Hank was the golden boy, as promising as Naomi in his own way. He had never made anything except A’s until the grading period before he came home from school that last time. On that one, he was given a B-minus in algebra, mainly because he was up the night before the midterm exam helping Ruth keep Henry from beating Paul with a belt.

  In Saraw, where everyone knows everyone else’s busine
ss, much was made of the hard-hearted teacher whose B-minus was generally given as the cause for Hank Flood’s “breakdown.” Ruth was not among those affixing blame. If all it took was one B-minus, she wrote to Harry, then he must have been very close to the edge, anyhow, and she blamed herself for not noticing. She had been relieved, in a way, when he made something less than an A; she thought it would help him live with the reality that no one is perfect, that even the perfect are done in by an imperfect world.

  Hank was a starter on the junior varsity football and basketball teams, and he was even better in baseball. The day he told Ruth he couldn’t return to school, all that ended, too.

  By New Year’s Day of 1976, when Harry Stein first met the gentle, intelligent man he had only seen in one of Ruth’s photographs, the damage had been contained. Accommodations had been made. He earned his high school degree via correspondence school. He would eventually graduate from the University of North Carolina’s branch at Newport in 1978, taking some courses by mail, venturing like a skittish animal into college classrooms for others.

  People wondered why a 29-year-old carpenter needed a college degree, but Ruth knew it was as important to Hank as it would have been to an aspiring doctor or lawyer. It had been a cornerstone of her life and his that you were rewarded for good, honest, well-intentioned effort, no matter how useless it might seem at the time.

  For a very long time, Harry Stein was unconverted to this philosophy. It seemed too simple. Say you spend your entire life trying to find a cure for a form of cancer, he once wrote Ruth, and one day you realize that you’ve been on the wrong path of research for 40 years, that you turned left when you should have turned right somewhere in the distant past.

  Ruth wrote back that the diligent researcher probably would have made several meaningful discoveries he never even meant to make, along the way. He probably would have developed a much greater understanding of mortality than most people ever have. His stubbornness and will might have inspired a younger scientist who would someday find that cure.