Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  “She’s beautiful,” Johnny Streater said one afternoon as the truck bounced through the Wheaton streets. “She’s the second nicest girl on campus, the nicest being my girl, of course.”

  Streater and his fiancée, Carol Lane, were studying Chinese and planned to go to China as missionaries after graduation. He was an eager matchmaker, and often as he and Billy made their rounds in the truck, Streater would vividly describe Ruth’s physical and spiritual merits. One day this mounted to the hyperbolic clincher: “She’s so spiritual that she gets up at four o’clock each morning to read her Bible and pray.” Though Ruth did have devotions first thing in the morning, in truth she was usually staggering out of bed that early to study Greek, a course she would later describe as her academic Waterloo.

  “I want you to meet her,” Streater concluded.

  “Well then,” Billy said, “let’s go!”

  His opportunity came in November of 1940 when he and Streater strolled from the library to Williston Hall for lunch and discovered Ruth in the hallway chatting with friends. Streater introduced them. Ruth smiled, slightly startled by Billy’s intense blue eyes. He acknowledged her with a courteous reserve that masked his sudden rush of interest.

  “I fell in love right that minute,” he later claimed.

  At the time, he managed to hide his feelings so well that it would be a while before Ruth was aware of them. Indeed, in later years she would never quite recall the first time she met Billy, but she thought it might have been when he and Streater were playing chess on a table beside a window.

  Billy wrote his mother right away and told her he had found the woman he would one day marry. He loved Ruth because she looked just like her, he ardently said in his letter. Morrow, knowing blarney when she saw it, burned the letter years later for fear that Ruth might discover it and be insulted. Nothing happened until early December, when Billy, Streater, and several friends were studying in Frost Library and noticed Ruth sitting at an empty table on the other side of the room.

  “Go ask her! Go ask her!” the men urged, as they jogged Billy to his feet.

  Quietly, he walked across the painfully silent library and slipped into the chair beside her as the librarian scowled her warning against socializing. He waved off her disapproval and invited Ruth to accompany him to the school’s presentation of Handel’s Messiah. She accepted and watched his retreating back with interest.

  The day of the concert a steady snow fluttered against the windowpanes of the beige frame house at 304 North Main Street, four blocks off campus. Ruth and seven other coeds lived upstairs in tidy rooms furnished with honey maple desks, dressers, and beds covered with firm new mattresses. Her room was directly to the right after climbing the stairs. Its two windows overlooked a Baptist church, and the boyhood home of Harold “Red” Grange, the acclaimed Chicago Bears running back. Downstairs lived the elderly maiden sisters Julia and Cornelia Scott, who had become more than a bit fond of Ruth after learning that she was the mysterious do-gooder who had been sneaking out before daylight on snowy mornings to shovel the walks cornering the house. Ruth Bell filled the women’s world with unexpected pleasures. At Christmas, she left stockings bulging with nuts, sweets, and trinkets, and throughout the year circulated humor through the house.

  It was a minor matter for Ruth to pick just the right dress to wear on her first date with Billy Graham. She had only one good dress, a plain black wool sheath that she had made herself.

  “Which dress shall I wear?” she asked her roommate with mock seriousness, “my black one or my black one?”

  “Neither,” she replied. “For a change, why don’t you wear your black one?”

  Ruth pinned up her hair, slid into her one pair of pumps, and looped a strand of dime-store pearls around her neck. Billy arrived at the front door, spruced up in a blue tweed suit he had bought for fifteen dollars at a Maxwell Street bazaar in Chicago.

  Billy was unlike anyone Ruth had ever met. Weeks earlier she had overheard him praying with a group of students and had marveled. He wasn’t unctuous or pious, nor did his words emerge in the smooth reverential tone of a Christian elder statesman. He was earnest, quietly confident, and personal. Clearly, he spoke as one who knew God, and knew Him well, she decided. He was a man who seemed to comprehend the amplitude of God’s might and authority. He seemed to comprehend it so thoroughly, in fact, that it had become part of him. Ruth wrote at the time:

  Bill is a real inspiration—because, I suppose, he is a man of one purpose & that one purpose controls his whole heart & life. He is dead in earnest yet richly endowed with the fruit of the Spirit…. Humble, thoughtful, unpretentious, courteous.

  As Billy escorted her through the milky, snowy air, leading her over the frosted walk to the concert, he seemed completely unaware of his uniqueness, his poignancy, his gift. This intrigued her. In his mind he was an uncertain freshman who longed to win souls for Christ and win Ruth Bell for himself. He felt inadequate to do either. To Ruth, he was the cool, self-assured gentleman who, much to her fascination, was neither obsequious nor flirtatious. Indeed, because he kept his emotions tightly cloaked, he politely ignored her. She pondered this as they sat side by side in the triumphant flow of Handel’s music, never imagining that at that moment he was, as he recalled years later, “a bundle of nerves” inside a bargain-basement suit.

  Afterward, she entered her room, and the windowpanes were cold and clear. Beyond the arborvitae-covered porch, the lawn and the elm-bordered street were round with snow, the night blanked out and noiseless. Ruth knelt on the carpet beside her bed and prayed, “God, if You let me serve You with that man, I’d consider it the greatest privilege in my life.”

  For the next month Ruth and Billy’s relationship went nowhere. Ruth began 1941 by flunking Greek and ancient history. “How will you hold up your head around school?” she lamented in her journal the last day in January. She wanted to tell Billy and ask him what to do, and instead acted silly to cover up. She spent time alone in her room, shedding tears and scanning the Psalms for comfort, her lifelong way of dealing with disappointments and depression.

  Johnny Streater was convinced that his friend Billy was hopelessly in love, and warned him, “Whoa boy, you’d better slow down!” Billy listened, much against his will, and avoided Ruth altogether until the first of February, when she wrote him, inviting him to her house party, one week before the event and two months after her friends had gotten their dates. He accepted and invited her to go to church with him on that Friday night, February 7. He preached, and in her journal she wrote of “the authority with which he spoke—The humility, the fearlessness.” When the service ended, “The star, seen and admired from afar, became a human, personal thing—within reach.”

  Afterward, he drove her home and parked his 1937 green Plymouth at the curb. Unable to sleep, she sat up until the early hours of Saturday, writing:

  I watched his profile as he guided us thru the Chicago traffic (tho he didn’t know it). Noted the steel of it marked the glint in his eyes where the streetlights flashed past. Felt the masterful firmness of his hand beneath my arm as he guided me thru the crowd at the church. Was impressed by his unaffected thoughtfulness … Something big has happened.

  When Billy walked her to the door that night, he had hesitated. “There’s something I’d like you to make a matter of definite prayer,” he began as they stood on the porch, their breath vaporizing in the cold, brittle air. “I have been taking you out because I am more than interested in you and have been since the day Johnny Streater introduced us last fall. But I know you have been called to the mission field and I’m not definite.”

  Billy had been surrounded by would-be missionaries ever since his arrival at Wheaton. He had never felt pulled in that direction, until recently. He went on to explain, “And not all because of you either, though I have wondered if the Lord has been speaking to me through you.” Many years later he would admit that he had been so in love with her that he was tempted to consider spending his l
ife in the arid mountains of Tibet if that was the only way he could be with her.

  Ruth, however, had no idea what he was thinking or why he was standing on her porch on a bitterly cold night talking about the mission field. Baffled, she watched his car disappear in a swirl of exhaust. She didn’t see him again for several days, and she filled the pages of her journal with ruminations of love and what marriage was all about. When she and Billy finally passed each other, he seemed preoccupied, almost indifferent. Ruth could only assume that he was reacting to her. “The strange creature waits ‘till I begin wondering if he’s changed his mind,” she complained in a letter to her parents, “then he asks me out.”

  On March 3, after studying in the library and attending a student council meeting, he walked her home in a snowstorm. Late that night, she wrote:

  How wildly it blew the snow into swirls and sheets and drifts! It was slippery too, and I would have fallen but for the strong hand beneath my arm where it was needed. (I think I’m just stalling for time.) He asked me if I had been praying and if I was thinking seriously about what he had said He hasn’t mentioned caring for me yet.

  Ruth’s security was further weakened when the wife of Professor Mortimer B. Lane dropped by to issue her a warning. Ruth was in bed, miserable with a cold, when Mummy Lane, as the students affectionately called her, appeared with a quart of freshly squeezed orange juice and a list of the young ladies Billy had dated and dropped over the years. “Ruth,” she concluded, “I don’t want to see you hurt.” Opening her Daily Light that night, Ruth read, “Meddle not with them given to change.” She and her roommate collapsed in a spasm of laughter.

  That winter she began describing Billy in letters to her parents: “He must be six-three or -four. Has blond wavy hair. Is very slender. All of which is quite immaterial. His great earnestness is what most deeply impresses those who know him. … More about that later. I know if I went on it would begin to sound allegorical. And why all the detail anyway?”

  A pattern began. She would describe Billy, then drop the subject only to reintroduce it, sometimes in the next paragraph. It seemed two voices were speaking. Her reason claimed that he was just another date, and her emotions could not let him go.

  “Despite Bill’s fearlessness and sometimes sternness,” she wrote, “he is just as thoughtful and gentle as one would want a man to be. Maybe it’s the South in him …. At any rate, he really makes you feel perfectly natural and looked-after without being showy or obnoxious. Sounds like I’m in love, doesn’t it? Don’t get worried. I’m not.”

  She changed the subject, only to resume telling her parents all about him in the next sentence, reminiscing about a date on a recent snowy evening:

  You know—funny how the little things pop up in the memory. His way of going about things, his self-control… the way he put both hands on the wheel and squared his shoulders when we began, the strength and keenness of his profile when the streetlight fell thru the snow sifting on the windshield and lit up his face. I wasn’t watching him directly, but one sees a lot out of the corner of one’s eye. Oh, I shouldn’t be writing all this. You’ll think me a romantic nitwit.

  Ruth’s college career was briefly interrupted in March of 1941, after doctors performed what they thought was a routine appendectomy on Rosa and discovered that she had tubercular peritonitis. Rosa began convalescing in the private home in Wheaton where she had been living. Ruth dropped out of school, eager for the chance to look after the sister who for so many years had looked after her. Ever since Ruth had left home for Korea, Rosa had demonstrated an almost motherly concern for her. During Ruth’s first winter in Wheaton, Rosa had noticed her sister shivering in her thin cloth overcoat and had promptly taken her to Marshall Field’s in Chicago. Using her own meager savings, she had bought Ruth a heavy beige wool coat, one that was much warmer, much more handsome than anything Rosa would ever have bought for herself.

  Though weak from her illness, Rosa was still hearty enough to employ her matchmaking skills. She urged Ruth to fall in love with Billy. The local consensus was the same. He and Ruth were suited for each other, and half the campus, it seemed, was “praying for the relationship.” Ruth was praying for it too, but sometimes she wasn’t sure whether she should petition for a win or a loss. In his enigmatic manner, Billy expended considerable energy ignoring her.

  Then he would materialize from the vacuum and ask a question like “Do you think I’m asking you out too much? Because I don’t want to embarrass you by taking you out too frequently.”

  Ruth suspected Billy was being overcautious, but would never have dared to broadside him with her suspicion. So the game played on, reaching its culmination later that spring when he said to her, “I haven’t tried to win you, Ruth. I haven’t asked you to fall in love with me. I haven’t sent you candy and flowers and lovely gifts. I have asked the Lord, if you are the one, to win you for me. If not, to keep you from falling in love with me.”

  After that remark, Ruth decided to start dating other men. The ensuing flurry of dates had predictable results.

  “Either you date just me or you can date everybody but me!” Billy announced.

  He became domineering, quizzing her about how much sleep she had gotten and whether she had exercised and had eaten properly. She was known to be whimsical about meals, and if he discovered she hadn’t eaten lunch, he’d march her downtown to buy her hot chocolate and a sandwich. Chin propped on folded hands, he’d grin at her from across the table while he forced her to swallow every crumb. On double dates he had the annoying habit of changing her order from iced tea to milk. As he watched after his woman in the manner of his ancestors, he harbored the notion that she had surrendered her career plans. This was a grave miscalculation, and it almost cost him the war.

  “I think being an old maid missionary,” Ruth informed him one day, “is the highest call there is.”

  “Woman was created to be a wife and mother,” he countered.

  “There are exceptions,” she said matter-of-factly, “and I believe I’m one of them.”

  “If that’s the case,” he announced, “we will just call a halt, during which time you should search the Scriptures and pray until you find out just what is God’s place for woman in this life. And when you find out and are willing to accept God’s place, you can let me know.”

  As Ruth would recall some fifty-five years later, “Billy was brought up in a house where the women did not question the men, while in the Bell house, that’s all we did.” In the rural world of Billy’s youth, the woman’s life revolved around her husband’s. Suppressed, the woman developed the facility of asserting herself invisibly. Morrow Graham was gentle and submissive, living eighty-nine years without ever owning a driver’s license because her husband did not think women should drive. Yet it was she who kept the books for the dairy farm and ran the household.

  Ruth, in contrast, was accustomed to strong-willed, outspoken women like her mother. Billy’s authoritativeness was galling and became the couple’s most volatile point. On April 23, 1941, Ruth and Billy got in their worst fight yet over this very notion, and he threatened to end the relationship. The degree of Ruth’s hurt surprised even her, and she wrote:

  I felt almost as if I were beating my fists against a wall. There was nothing to do but call it all off, he said, if I couldn’t see it that way. When he said that, I felt as though the bottom had dropped out of everything. Life lost its meaning. I crumpled under it…. For a moment, I lay my head against him—but that has little to do with it all. I recall the grip of his hands, the way the stars looked—so distant and so bright, the way the night wind blew thru his hair— the look on his face as he looked over me and far away. “What shall we do?” he asked. So until I understand more clearly what the Lord would have me do, and until I am in the center of His will, Billy won’t see any more of me. And he left.

  Five days of insomnia and misery passed, and on April 28, Ruth tried to call Billy, only to learn he was out of town. She had yet t
o admit she was in love, but certainly what she wrote at the time would lead one to believe exactly that:

  Night fell. A new moon hung in the west. Thru the branches of the trees it gleamed like thin silver. The woods were quiet. Somewhere within there came a terrible sense of loneliness. I wanted him. I needed him. He should be coming to me thru the woods and I would run to meet him and I would tell him I knew now, and I would yield—everything. And he would hold me close—but he would be very quiet. And it would be over with— all this struggling and thinking and reasoning—this feverish tossing to and fro in my mind.

  Ruth sent for him, and the next evening, Tuesday, she recorded hearing a car drive up, and firm, quick steps on the walk out front. He was tall and straight in a light tweed suit, and she went to him.

  “I think I know now, Bill. That’s why I sent for you” was all she could think to say.

  “When did you decide, Ruth?”

  They began to walk toward their favorite spot in the woods, his hand firm beneath her arm.

  “I don’t know …” Her voice dropped off. “But I thought it only fair, Bill, to tell you that…”

  She stood staring off, at a loss, and for an instant it seemed that the rustling trees, the frogs and crickets and the distant sounds of a train all waited in breathless anticipation of what else she might say. “I looked up at him,” she wrote in her journal, “and I wasn’t afraid.” Billy was standing still, looking down at her, waiting, his face stern.

  “That—I loved you,” Ruth finally finished.

  For a moment Billy stared at her in quiet disbelief.

  “Darling!” he exclaimed, and he crushed her to him.

  At last, she wrote, it was over:

  Only the terrific pounding of his heart told me he had not known what to expect. … It was such a perfect evening. We rode. The night wind blew past us. He reached for my hand. Whose hand do you wish it was now? I demanded impishly. I was just trying to decide which it felt the most like, he returned unabashed. I snatched my hand away and withdrew myself to the far corner of the seat. … We were under the pines by Old Lawson. The town clock struck eleven. Before we started for home … I looked up. He was looking toward the south. His face, clean and strong—had the look of one who knows where he is going and who he is to meet at the end of the way. It was the old strength of purpose which has awed me before. I waited. Looking down he smiled and gathered me to him a moment. I would like to kiss you, he said. But I think that should wait.