Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  By June, the interminable winter had finally moved on, leaving the earth fresh and emerald. Gone with the cold was the routine of daily walks to class, faces nettled by snowy blasts, minds dull from long nights of study. Summer vacation was upon them. Students hauled battered trunks and suitcases, straggling from dormitories to waiting cars, joyous at reprieve and pained at good-byes.

  Billy’s Plymouth was packed for Florida, where he was to hold youth revival services for several weeks. Before leaving, he asked Ruth to marry him. She paused, then said she could not answer him. She could not stop crying, and he would not leave without knowing what was wrong. She reminded him again of her lifelong belief that she was meant to be a missionary. She wasn’t sure she should give this up. Worse, she had a terrible sense of foreboding about being Mrs. Billy Graham. She was terrified of losing her identity.

  “Ruth,” he remarked, “I think it would be a very good idea if you would forget your girlhood ideals, your crazy ideas, and the advice of your friends. Forget it all. And just be Ruth Bell for a while.”

  He headed south with a heavy heart.

  1. Ruth Bell Graham, Sitting by My Laughing Fire (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977), 54.

  2. Untitled personal scrapbook, Collection 15, Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton, Illinois.

  3. Untitled personal scrapbook, Collection 15, Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton, Illinois.

  4. Ruth also had a practice of placing a white sticker over faces in photographs of people out of favor with her.

  8

  CHAPTER

  The Ring

  THE RING, 1941

  It was so very good of God

  to let my dreams come true,

  to note a young girl’s cherished hopes

  then lead her right to you.

  —Ruth Bell Graham

  From the war-torn cities of China came the cries for mercy: “Ko lien! Ko lien!” Starving peasants wandered aimlessly amid collapsed buildings and rubble-covered streets, their eyes vacant, the stench of death clinging to the earth like fog. They pummeled tree bark and skimmed slime off ponds for food, and there were rumors of cannibalism. The climate was restive and ready for propagandizing and organizing in the name of change, as the Communists continued to undermine the Nationalist regime.

  In Qingjiang, the missionaries were imperiled, and their work was overwhelming. Occupying Japanese soldiers were becoming overtly resentful of what they conceived of as the Americans’ influence over the local Chinese. The Japanese were embittered by the United States government’s willingness to sell fighter planes to China. It didn’t surprise Nelson Bell when the American consul entreated him to flee. At first, Dr. Bell refused. He could not abandon the people when they needed him most. He soon reconsidered when he learned that his wife was suffering from malaria and a kidney infection and that Rosa had been admitted to Zace Sanatorium in Winfield, Illinois, with both lungs tubercular.

  In May 1941, the Bells set sail for home. A month later Germany would attack Russia, scotching Soviet military aid to China and speeding the economy’s downward spiral. In August, Japanese would capture the remaining Qingjiang missionaries and, without explanation, imprison them in the attic of the Bells’ house for a month. Many of the Bells’ colleagues had already been sent to concentration camps to face starvation, torture, disease, and death.

  Ruth was elated over her parents’ return. At last they were safe and would meet Billy Graham. She wrote them June 2 while they were yet aboard ship, failing to mention that he had asked her to marry him. During the summer, her letters and diaries were a tangle of emotions as she and Billy continued their clash of wills. Putting it in perspective more than half a century later, she said, “When Bill was young he wanted to play professional baseball, and I wanted to go to Tibet. In truth, neither of us had any business doing either, and physically could not have.”

  The Bells arrived at Wheaton July 4 for a brief visit with Ruth and Rosa. Then they traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for thorough medical examinations. Dr. Bell purchased a car and drove his wife, daughter Virginia, and son Clayton to Waynesboro, where they would live with his mother for a month. Ruth remained at Wheaton with her ailing older sister. Billy meanwhile was preaching in Tampa and checking daily for a letter from Ruth. One morning, a thick envelope postmarked July 6 arrived. It bore her familiar unique script, and he sequestered himself in his manse bedroom before eagerly ripping it open. He felt a rush of joy as he read her words. God, she believed, would have her say yes to his proposal of marriage.

  Though Ruth’s ambivalence had not disappeared, she believed the relationship was “of the Lord,” she explained to her parents in a letter July 7, after telling them what she had done. “I almost stand in awe of him and yet I’m not afraid of him,” she wrote. “To be with Bill in this type work won’t be easy. There will be little financial backing, lots of obstacles and criticism, and no earthly glory whatsoever. But somehow I need Bill. I don’t know what I’d do if, for some reason, he should suddenly go out of my life.”

  Around this same time, she wrote in her journal, casting an eerily accurate future:

  If I marry Bill I must marry him with my eyes open. He will be increasingly burdened for lost souls and increasingly active in the Lord’s work. After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights—and his forever, I will slip into the background…. In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill’s.

  In late July, Ruth rode the train to Waynesboro and Billy, thinner and drawn, drove northwest in his Plymouth, prepared to meet his future in-laws for the first time.

  “When you see me,” he wrote Ruth, “don’t expect too much. Although I may be thin, remember, I lost the weight pointing souls to the way of salvation.”

  The Blue Ridge rolled like a hazy frozen ocean to Billy’s left, wrapping closer with each mile before setting him down in the Shenandoah Valley. Old gnarled apple trees with hard green fruit flanked whitewashed fences on the roadsides. Beyond, velvety pasture land was freckled with white-faced cows. On July 30, a hot, cloudless Wednesday afternoon, he nosed through Waynesboro and parked at Grandmother Bell’s house, discovering that there was no room for him there.

  Dreading the unexpected drain on his already thin wallet, he registered at the nearby Hotel Wayne. At sunset, he and Ruth went for a spin along the Skyline Drive, and “thru the dusk lay blue mist and a tiny light or two—and far above, the young moon,” Ruth wrote. “All was ours that night—The mountains, the wind, and the moon.—All was ours and now, I am his.”

  At dinner Billy found to his delight that the reception was warmer than he had even hoped. He thawed in the steady flow of the Bells’ humor. By dessert, the two men had struck up a friendship that would lead to Dr. Bell’s being Billy’s closest adviser for the next thirty-three years. The next morning, Thursday, Billy checked out of his hotel and discovered that his future father-in-law had paid the three-dollar room charge. Billy, Ruth, and her family left for Washington, D.C., where Dr. Bell had an appointment with Far Eastern officials at the State Department, whom he planned to warn that the Japanese intended to attack the United States. Friday morning the medical missionary braved the capital and was politely ignored.

  Saturday, Billy left for Charlotte, relaxed of mind and soul, for the Bells had accepted him. Ruth would join him in several weeks to meet his family, which by now was more than a little curious about Ruth. For months, Morrow Graham had urged her son to bring home a snapshot of this young woman who was alleged to look like her. Melvin, not privy to that description and knowing only that she was from China, expected her to have straight black hair and Asian features. Billy’s sisters didn’t strenuously exercise their imaginations over the matter because they assumed she “was probably just another one of Billy Frank’s girlfriends,” as Jeannie later explained.

  At the brink of summer Billy had finally coerced Ruth into relinquishing a photograph, something she never did gracefully, or honestly, for that
matter. There were few things in life she disliked more than having a lens leering in her face and its owner coaxing her in a cloying voice to “say cheese.” It wasn’t unusual for her to enlist her sense of humor just before the shutter clicked, resulting in any number of comical contortions. Nor was it out of the ordinary for her to surgically remove her likeness with scissors, leaving gaping holes in yearbooks and group portraits.

  Having no idea what he was up against, Billy patiently waited while she rummaged through her belongings to fill his request. Explaining innocently that it was “all I could find,” she handed him a snapshot taken when she was a thirteen-year-old frump, with long hair pulled back and fastened in a barrette. Demurely holding a hollyhock at her waist, she looked like a parody of a cemetery monument. His first morning home his family passed the picture around the table in silence.

  “Well,” Morrow Graham said, clearing her throat, “she doesn’t look like that now, does she?”

  On a Saturday afternoon in August, Billy ushered Ruth into his home. Dressed smartly in a navy suit, a flower in her lapel, she entered the sunroom where Mrs. Graham sat regally beside a crystal bowl of white petunias. “Oh,” Billy’s mother recalled thinking with pleasure, “she’s beautiful.”

  During the week that followed, ten-year-old Jeannie roared Ruth around the countryside in a black pickup truck, instructing her in the art of driving, which culminated in Ruth’s backing through a hedge in front of the house. Evenings were spent on a hard pew inside Sharon Presbyterian Church where Billy was preaching each night that week. What Ruth witnessed was the opening scene of her life with him, the reel of film snapping into place and beginning to spin.

  On Saturday night after the service they retreated to the fishpond behind the house, where the air was warm and fragrant with the smell of new-mown grass. Their romantic moment was abruptly ended when a man named Herbert began pounding on the front door, pleading to see Billy. An alcoholic who had known Billy since childhood, Herbert had attended that night’s service and resisted the altar call. After downing several stiff drinks, he found himself staggering to the Graham farm, unable to stand his misery a moment longer.

  He was weeping when Billy led him into the parlor and gently shut the door. He had tried to stop drinking in the past, but each time he stayed away from the bottle for several days, one of his friends would hand him a glass and off he’d go on another binge. His wife and children feared him. Throughout his angry, drunken years, something beyond him—he figured it was God—had followed him quietly and relentlessly like the moon over a traveler’s shoulder. Herbert was tired of running.

  Ruth and Billy’s mother sat in the family room, pretending not to notice the man’s loud sobbing and wild talk. Then Billy invited them to pray with him and Herbert. Quietly, Ruth listened to the cascade of self-mortification pouring from the man. “I had never heard a broken-down sinner pleading for forgiveness,” she wrote at the time.

  On Sunday, after dinner, Billy led Ruth through woods and pasture to the red-banked Sugar Creek where he had spent so many hours in his youth basking in the warmth and peace he craved. It was his sanctuary, the place for his most private self, and he was sharing it with her. They sat on a boulder, the shallow water running sluggishly below their feet, the sun working highlights into their hair. They entreated God to save his childhood friends, to redeem people like Herbert. “As I listened while he prayed,” Ruth recorded, “I realized a little bit the burden weighing on his heart.” They lingered until the sun burned obliquely through trees and the shadows were long.

  That night’s service was somewhat disconcerting. Billy’s delivery was too fast, his gestures so exaggerated that he looked like a caricature of himself. It was a bit much for a staunch Presbyterian whose idea of worship was a dignified delivery and a quiet reverence in the congregation. As the organist began playing the familiar hymns for the altar call, Ruth closed her eyes and, almost apologetically, asked God to overlook the frailties of man and touch the hearts of at least one or two people around her.

  A quiet creaking fluttered down rows as more than forty stood. In a steady stream they moved forward, eyes fixed on the bare wood beneath their feet, tissues dabbing tears. Ruth watched in disbelief, filled with awe as she stared at Billy standing at the end of the aisle, head bowed, hands folded beneath his chin. He did not wear the pious face of a spiritual salesman who had just delivered a slick pitch. His power was in the message he had faithfully presented. He was the instrument, not the musician. She saw that then.

  On their way home, he was quiet, disappointed that the high school friend he had prayed for most had remained firmly planted in his seat during the altar call. She too was silent, knowing that there were and always would be times when he was silent, absorbed, almost unaware of her existence. This would never get any easier, really. The distance she felt may not have been intended, but it bit and she would struggle with it always.

  Monday Ruth rode the bus to Montreat, where her parents were buying a house. Then the first week in September, the Bells drove to Waynesboro, leaving Ruth to stay in a rustic summer cabin in Black Mountain with her friend Gay Currie, who had grown up with her in China. They invited Billy to spend the day. On September 5, while he was making the two-hour drive, Gay blacked out Ruth’s front teeth, unfastened her long hair, and helped her select a homemade, flower-print dress that was at least two sizes too big. Kicking off her shoes, Ruth set out to meet her beau, her bare feet patting along the country road winding downtown.

  She didn’t know that Billy was dressed in white from collar to shoes and had a surprise for her too. Tucked inside a pocket was a yellow-gold engagement ring, purchased with every penny of the sixty-five-dollar love offering he had received from Sharon Presbyterian Church. Thick red dust billowed from his car’s back tires as it lumbered up the grade, driving right past the “snaggle-toothed” mountain girl, as he later described her, staring at him from the roadside. Suddenly recognizing the quizzical face in his rearview mirror, he crunched to a halt and backed up. A bit unsettled by this unexpected scene in his romantic drama, he silently opened the car door for her. Then he began to laugh.

  The unpainted pine-board cabin was located in an isolated mountainous tract, wild with huckleberry bushes, mountain laurels, and rhododendrons. A slender stream whispered through the side yard, and a thick rope swing dangled from a tree. Ruth and Billy sat on the porch in bright sunshine, staring sleepily at the vista as they talked. The Black Mountains slumbered in the distance, their contours taking on human shapes as shadows moved across them during the waning afternoon. Blighted chestnut trees jutted from slopes and ridges like broken feathers, as though a tribe of giant Cherokee had reclined in various positions around the Swannanoa Valley a millennium before.

  Near dusk, the couple drove fifteen miles west to the top of Sunset Mountain, famous for its panoramic view of Asheville and for Beaucatcher Tunnel, which had been blasted through years earlier. As the molten sun set on one side of the ridge and the pale moon rose on the other, he gave her the ring,1and they kissed.

  Ruth’s exuberance would quickly fade when her life was temporarily interrupted that fall, and her health began a slow spiral toward exhaustion. Listless and fatigued, she often slept until noon in the house her parents were renting in Montreat while their new home on Assembly Drive was being renovated. Fearing that Ruth had a touch of malaria, they forbade her to return to Wheaton the first semester. They decided to send her with Rosa to a sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. On November 6, the Bells tucked her into a train bound for Wheaton to meet Rosa at Zace Sanatorium. Together the sisters boarded a train for Albuquerque.

  The Southwestern Presbyterian Sanatorium was a cluster of gray stucco buildings with red slate roofs. It was located on sparkling green grounds, interwoven with tidy gravel drives and stately Lombardy poplars. Rosa was restricted to the infirmary, and her sister moved into a building nearby. There Ruth spent the days in her glassed-in sun porch, absorbing clean hot light and
the majestic view. To the east, the Sandia and Manzano Mountains rose eleven thousand feet, and extinct volcanoes puckered to the north. She luxuriated in it all, curing like fruit in the sun until she felt weightless and absolved of all responsibility.

  “It rained yesterday and a cold wind was blasting,” she wrote her parents. “It blew all the clouds away last night and morning found us in a crisp cold world of dazzling sunshine and snow-capped mountains. The air is so clean and fresh like on board ship. I am feeling on top of the world. Such a respite,” she added, “is a blessing. It makes people stop rushing around and gives them time to stop and begin really enjoying life.”

  It’s not surprising that she would, at this moment of detachment, entertain second thoughts about the engagement. Doubts settled in with tenacity and Billy was not there to chase them away. She wrote him a crushing letter, saying she did not think she was in love with him and that marriage was, perhaps, unwise. Miserable, he could do nothing but wait until Ruth returned to Wheaton.

  In December, she returned to Montreat, believing that she was leaving her sister to die. Doctors had already performed a phrenicectomy on one lung, permanently collapsing it, and were giving Rosa weekly treatments to induce pneumothorax, or a temporary collapse, of the other to rest it. But in February, she announced that she would refuse further treatment. God would heal her, she decided. As a physician, her father realized that the consequences of Rosa’s actions might be death, but as her father and a man of great faith, he did not want to interfere with her act of Christian commitment.