Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

She looked at him as if he were a child asking why water is wet or the sky is blue.

  “I don’t have any choice,” she said. “What I have back there is gone. Only one way for me to go.”

  And then she went back to cleaning the kitchen counter, which to Harry already looked extremely clean. She was humming a tune he didn’t recognize.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Tuesday night, Ruth and Harry stay outside until after 11, cool but not cold in their sweaters. Harry tells her that they must look like a couple of old geezers on the deck of a cruise liner.

  He is amazed at how energized he is—relatively speaking, of course. The days when Harry Stein could dance and party all night and then work the next day are so far gone that he believes sometimes he must have stolen another man’s memories. He doesn’t like to tell stories from those salad days any more, because he is afraid that the listener, if he didn’t know Harry then, will see a sad old man trying to impress those who still possess what he might or might not have once had.

  Ruth turns and catches him staring at something she can’t see.

  “What?” she asks. “What’re you thinking about, Harry?”

  He shakes his head and tells her it’s nothing of great importance, just ruminations on a life pissed away.

  “Hush,” she says. “You have not peed your life away.”

  “Ruth, you cannot interchange pissed and peed in that context.”

  “I can if I want to. I can’t help it if I haven’t had the benefit of a lifetime of foul language. It’s hard to teach an old dog new cusswords.”

  Harry laughs, and is hit with a stab of pain. He wonders if God is punishing him for filching a last mouthful of enjoyment from life’s great buffet.

  “Are you OK?” He and Ruth are holding hands, and he realizes that he has been squeezing too hard.

  “I’m OK. Not great, but at least OK. Don’t let go; your warmth feels good.”

  “Have you taken your pills?”

  “Enough to sedate King Kong,” he says.

  Harry has not minded at all basking in Ruth’s late-blooming glory these past few years. Usually, he accompanies her to Raleigh when the legislature is in session, and until recently, he enjoyed more than his share of free food and drink at the lobbyists’ parties.

  There is usually something to keep him entertained there. He’ll waste an entire morning in a bookstore; he’s fond of ones that smell of old paper instead of coffee. Sometimes, he just wanders the campus at Duke or Chapel Hill, perhaps spending an hour or two under one of the old trees that are held up with wires (and remind him of himself), reading a book or tracking the market.

  He did have a few favorite bars in the Triangle area, but his doctors have for the past four months absolutely banned alcohol. He has gotten to know some of the coaches at North Carolina State and UNC, and they usually let him hang around at basketball or football practice. In exchange, he gives them tips on the stock market. There is an assistant basketball coach who was able to buy a new Acura mostly on what he claims he made on an up-and-coming computer stock. He calls it “Harry’s car.” Harry told him he shouldn’t have sold so soon. And, he swims at the YMCA.

  Ruth has said this will be her last term. She would like the opportunity, she tells Harry, to emulate him and do nothing except waste time. “It isn’t as easy as you think,” he warns her. “I’ve had almost 20 years of practice.”

  They talk about the inconsequential. Finally, Harry sees an opening.

  “I’ve had a wonderful time,” Ruth says. “Paul and Tran are so sweet to do this. I am so lucky to have such a loving family.”

  “So,” Harry asks, “how are things with Naomi? Better?”

  A frown. “I don’t know, Harry. I guess so. She still seems so edgy when I’m around, nervous as a cat.”

  “I had a talk with her this afternoon.”

  Ruth looks over at him. From the corner of his eye, he can see her frown.

  “I thought maybe so,” she says. “About what?” Her inflection rises on the last word, a perceived weakness she usually avoids.

  “About her and Henry.”

  They are both silent then.

  While Harry was rotting comfortably, dividing his year between Richmond and Safe Harbor and dating women who were all approximately the same age but, from Harry’s vantage point, seemed younger and younger, Ruth was making her mark.

  And enduring Henry Flood.

  As she and the Fairweather Grill prospered, Ruth tried to include Henry in her life, but by the 1970s, she came to see that the most she could hope for was that he would not scare the customers away.

  Finally, by mutual consent, he quit coming to the grill altogether. Even when he was drunk and looking for trouble, he would avoid it. Ruth appreciated this consideration, and she made sure that Henry had enough drinking money.

  A better person, she told herself later, would have sent him somewhere to dry out. But she knew that he wasn’t much if any better sober. Sometimes, when he was drunk, he seemed temporarily happy.

  No one at the VA hospital or among the many doctors to whom Ruth sent him ever really stopped the headaches, and old shrapnel was causing other pain to join forces, an army growing ever stronger.

  She wished sometimes that she could be inside Henry’s body for just one minute, to feel the pain. Then, she thought, she might appreciate it more and be more sympathetic.

  Ruth, from the grill and her investments, was becoming prosperous. Henry would never find out about the Richmond money, and Ruth made sure he never knew exactly how well her stocks were doing.

  What Henry finally seemed to do, to Ruth’s relief and sadness, was surrender. By 1970, Paul was gone, but Hank was far too strong to absorb any more physical punishment from his father. Ruth had her own defenses. Henry soon found that his wife didn’t mind having him thrown in jail if the occasion warranted it, and that, unlike other women with less clout, she had the sympathetic ear of the sheriff and the local judge. And she was willing to endure the embarrassment of having all of Saraw know that her husband was in jail again.

  “Harry,” she wrote, “what do you think is more embarrassing: to have your Sunday School class know your husband is in jail, or to have to lie about a black eye when everybody knows you’re lying?”

  After a few nights in jail, including one episode in which he had to be beaten into submission by a couple of deputies, Henry began finding ways to keep his devils away from Ruth.

  Since Harry’s fall from grace, Ruth had suspected that her husband knew about the letters and sensed Randall Phelps was still lurking somewhere, ready to take away his only thin link to sanity.

  He would cry sometimes and beg her forgiveness, plead with her not to leave him. He would turn over new leaves and be a changed man until the next “spell.”

  What Harry Stein wanted, after 1966, was for her to leave him. He knew she would be happier without Henry Flood. “What do you owe him?” he wrote once. He had married her, Harry conceded, but wouldn’t any of a dozen others, equally handsome and steady as a rock, have done the same?

  “I want you,” Harry wrote, more than once, and described this want in great detail.

  “I want you, too,” she responded once. “I think of you when I am alone in my bed at night, alone even when Henry is here. I think of you and me, in that hotel room at White Oak Beach, on the railroad tracks, everywhere. I think of all the things we did …” Her letters, more demure in the earlier years of her marriage, were now racy enough, when the subject was desire, that Harry would have an erection reading them.

  But she wouldn’t leave Henry Flood.

  “Where would he go, without me?” she asked in a letter not two years before Henry died. “What would he do? I promised, Harry. I don’t mean it to seem sanctimonious, but Henry Flood is my husband, the one who asked me to marry him, the one I said yes to. If he was a sane, solid man and I found out one day he’d been having an affair with his secretary, that would be different. I might not forgive him th
at. But Henry Flood cannot help himself.”

  Later, she would feel differently.

  “Probably, the best thing I could have done would have been to just pack up the kids and leave,” she would say then, after she’d told Harry how it all ended. “Maybe then he would have gotten help and all this could have been avoided.”

  Eventually, the rest of the family comes outside, except for Naomi, who’s already gone to bed.

  Paul tells them that there has been a “weather development.” Ruth, half asleep, jerks her head toward him.

  The storm might turn in our direction, he says, but it won’t be a factor until mid-afternoon tomorrow at the earliest.

  “We’ve got to have Momma’s party tomorrow; it’s her birthday,” he says.

  “Can’t we just light a candle or two at midnight and be done with it?” Ruth asks plaintively.

  “Can’t do that at night. The fire department might see all those candles and think the house is burning up.”

  Ruth shakes her head and laughs along with the rest.

  Before they go to sleep, Harry asks what he’s wanted to ask since the afternoon.

  “Ruth, can’t I please tell her? She needs to know. It’ll help; I’m sure it’ll help.”

  Ruth turns sideways, away from him. She is shaking her head. She puts the pillow over her ears so she can’t hear him any more.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nov. 27, 1975

  Saraw, N.C.

  Dear Harry,

  Please excuse me for not writing sooner, but I am sure you will understand when I tell you the reason.

  Henry went into Kinlaw’s Hell three weeks ago yesterday, and he never came out.

  They found his body eight days later, near his old camp. Roy McGinnis went with the sheriff and identified him; he said Henry’s body was lying next to his boat, in front of the cabin I’ve never seen and never want to, where he always went when he had to get away.

  There are people around here who are sure Henry was burying money at his secret hideaway, like some pirate, and now that someone knows where it is, I expect the swamp will be full of fools looking to get rich off Henry Flood’s hidden treasure. I don’t think I have to tell you, Harry, that unless Henry found a way to get into my investments or savings account since my last statement, it isn’t likely he’s been burying a lot of money in Kinlaw’s Hell.

  They said it was probably a heart attack.…

  Steady, Harry, he counseled himself, actually saying the words. Steady, steady. It can’t be this easy. If she had really wanted you, she wouldn’t have waited for Henry Flood to die.

  The day before, he had broken up with a woman approximately half his age. He couldn’t believe that his life had been reduced to “breaking up,” as if he and his female companion of the day, week or month were high school sweethearts instead of a couple of opportunists. This one, an artist, had been with him four months. She was a little less interesting to him than the one before, and, as best he could remember, that one was less interesting than the previous one.

  He had read the letter walking back from the mailbox that cold, dark Long Island morning. By the time he got to the front door, his hands were shaking.

  His first inclination was to pack a few essentials, catch a train to the airport and fly to Newport, rent a car and drive directly to Ruth’s house, where sympathy cards still lay on the kitchen table. But he talked himself out of it. He was too close, he told himself, to ruin it by doing something heedless.

  Instead, he did something that, by his and Ruth’s rules, seemed almost as rash.

  In all their years apart, he had never called, never broken the spell that he came to feel was cast by the written word. As long as their life was on paper, it was still somehow 1942, a year when he and the world were relatively young. By writing, he felt a small part of him stayed back in Saraw, with the hope of making everything turn out right. On paper, he could still be 23.

  So, even with Henry Flood some three weeks dead, Harry agonized over making that call. He saw himself as some cartoon character with a devil whispering in one ear and an angel in the other, except both were the same, and he couldn’t decide which one to heed.

  First he dialed information and got the number, available for the asking all along: H.B. Flood in Saraw, North Carolina. Just 11 numbers away.

  Then he ate lunch, barely tasting the cold sandwich. He tried to watch television. He took a walk to the pond on the back of his property.

  Finally, just after 4:30, he called Ruth.

  The phone rang four times, and he was going to hang up, relieved, when she answered.

  He knew her voice, though they had only talked once in all those years. It hadn’t changed so much, he thought. It was still Ruth.

  She said hello twice before he could speak.

  “This is Harry Stein,” he said, afraid her life was full of a variety of Harrys these days, so many Harrys that she would need further identification.

  “So it is,” she said after a long pause. “Harry Stein. Harry Stein. What a strange world it is, that I’m talking to Harry Stein.”

  He could not read her mood. He certainly did not feel free to speak his heart.

  They talked about the weather, Harry digging his nails into the meaty flesh in his other hand as he found himself babbling about frost and fog. He pretended sorrow for Henry’s passing, and she accepted his condolences without comment.

  By this time, Harry was sure he had made a mistake.

  Ruth had lost both her aunts the previous summer, within a month of each other, and for this loss Harry expressed genuine regret. He remembered their unwarranted kindness that long-ago winter.

  “So,” he said, thrashing about for a way to keep the link alive, “what’s next?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Harry. I don’t know. The grill and politics keep me pretty busy. And Hank’s still here. We look after each other. And we’re moving.”

  With her aunts dead, she intended, as soon as she could, to return to the house where she had been born, where her parents and then her grandparents raised her.

  “Maybe you’d like to come up here and get away from everything for a little while,” Harry said, too much forced nonchalance in his voice. Please come, he willed. Please come.

  There was a short pause.

  “I don’t know, Harry. I can’t get away right now. There’s too much going on—Christmas, getting the estate settled, just getting my life back together.”

  “Well, maybe later then.”

  “Yes. Maybe later.”

  All those years, all the letters, seemed to Harry to mean nothing at that moment.

  He kept the conversation alive awhile longer, hoping for hope.

  “Well,” he said at last, full of false cheer, “maybe I’ll come see you, then, give you another surprise visit.”

  “Yes,” she said. She sounded distracted, but the phone line was becoming scratchy, conspiring against him. “That would be nice, Harry. That would be nice.” Her voice trailed off.

  Shortly after that they said goodbye. Harry drove into East Hampton and drank away a few hours of the endless northern night, brooding, examining every word she’d said, every word he’d said.

  At one point, he leaned forward, unable to resist the urge, and banged his head on the wooden bar, twice. The bartender cut him off, and he went back to his cold, dark home.

  He didn’t write for two weeks afterward. He remembers that December now as a time of insomnia and long walks, broken by a short visit to see his children and grandchildren. By the time he got her next letter, the one he wasn’t sure he would get, it was New Year’s Eve. There was a return address, something Ruth had never employed before, in their clandestine days. He saw that she had returned to the home of her childhood.

  “I’m glad you’re still my friend, Harry,” she began. “It was so strange hearing you on the telephone. Forgive me if I sounded distracted. Believe it or not, I have wanted, more than once over the years, to call you, sure
that you could talk my blues away. But there was always something holding me back, some feeling that calling you from some pay phone or from Mercy’s would spoil it all. I don’t know. Maybe we’re meant to just keep on the way we’ve been. You seem to have a good life up there. And an impartial observer would have to say things are going well for me down here.…”

  There wasn’t much hope in that letter for a man who saw his one last chance to alter the past slipping away. But there was enough.

  Harry didn’t really think innocence could be regained; he knew that nothing duplicated was as good as the original. But he was willing, at this point, to try almost anything. The idea of Ruth, all of Ruth, had slipped into his brain in the last month, and he knew he couldn’t live on letters any more.

  And so, he packed all he could into the trunk and back seat of his BMW that New Year’s Eve. Then he locked the door and left. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Moet et Chandon, a Styrofoam cooler and five pounds of ice. After that, he headed west and south, into the unknown.

  He knew she could tell him to turn right around and go back to New York. She owed him nothing more, really. Still, he had to try.

  It was nearly dark by the time he left. Almost anything would have been smarter than driving, he knew later, when he was rational. To get from Safe Harbor to Saraw required getting past New York City, and then the trip was just getting started.

  Two hours past the city, nothing about it made sense to him, as he hummed along in 1975’s last hours, listening to reality’s mean whispers. She’d probably send him back, or at best tolerate him for a few hours. He might be appalled by the inroads time had made into his dream, and what would she think of Harry Stein at 56? They would be as tongue-tied as they had been on the phone five weeks before. He should have called first (but then she might have said, Don’t come). He should have taken the train (but that was next to impossible on New Year’s Eve). He should have flown (but he was still spooked by the Eastern crash at Kennedy a few months before). He should have, he told himself, forgotten the whole damn stupid idea.

  “Philadelphia Freedom” had been big on the radio that year, and he heard it at least 10 times in the 13 hours between Safe Harbor and Saraw. Even now, Harry can’t hear the song without a sense of excitement and foreboding.