Harry & Ruth (12 page)

In truth, though, her peace ebbed and flowed. Sometimes, a month would pass between letters, and the letter that arrived would have a note of worry to it: “Henry grows increasingly exasperated with the VA hospital, which can't seem to get him the proper treatment and medicine.” “I have made it clear to Henry that Naomi is not to work in the tobacco fields. He says that he was working in them when he was 5, and I tell him that I don't care if he worked in them when he was 2.”

Even now, Ruth remembers that there were good times, too. She really did love the land and the life, and Henry Flood, and she thought everything would end well, that she could grab it and shake it and make it end well.

Hank was born in March of 1949. Henry Crowder Flood. Naomi ran away when he was five weeks old. They found her walking along the Beach Road, already across the river bridge in Saraw. The move to the Flood farm was traumatic for her anyhow; she was adored by her aunts. And while Naomi liked Henry, Ruth wrote that she sometimes rebelled against him, even telling him once, “You're not my daddy.” Henry just smiled, according to Ruth, and said, “Well, then, little girl, who is?”

“Randall Phelps,” Naomi told him. “He didn't come back from the war.” Ruth had told her that.

“Someday,” he said, “we're going to go to Germany, so we can find out where your daddy is buried. It's a shame to leave him like that, all alone in the cold, cold ground where he doesn't know anybody.”

Naomi bit her lip and left the room.

He was still smiling, but Ruth knew at that moment that she might someday be expected to explain more about Randall Phelps than she wanted to.

ELEVEN

In a letter dated Aug. 5, 1950, Ruth told Harry that the family who lived on Henry Flood's land and did most of the farm's manual labor had departed one hot summer night, with no warning, in the middle of tobacco cropping, before they had even been paid for that season. The stress of losing the Farrises seemed to have made Henry's headaches worse. He could hardly get out of bed some days.

Ruth ached for him, for the pain in his damaged legs, for the headaches and nightmares. She tried to make sure that she and Naomi gave Henry Flood every reason to be of good cheer. Hank was 17 months old, and often it fell to Naomi, only 7 herself, to take care of her step-brother.

“Speaking of Naomi,” Ruth wrote, “can you imagine the daughter of Ruth Crowder Flood and the granddaughter of Theron and Belle Crowder winning medals for swimming? Is this not more amazing than pigs flying?”

That year, the YMCA in Newport had held swimming competitions by age group for the first time. Those 8 and under competed together.

Ruth had known that her daughter could swim well, seemingly against all genetic odds. The instructor the previous summer had pulled Ruth aside one day and told her that Naomi was better than any of the little boys her age and many of the older ones. After that, Ruth would observe Naomi swimming when she could, amazed at the perfect way she glided across the water, with almost no wasted motion.

“She's like a little fish,” Ruth told Henry, who did not seem as impressed as she had hoped he would be.

Naomi, who kept her own counsel, had casually mentioned at supper one night that there was going to be a swim meet, and she supposed she ought to be in it, because her teacher wanted her to.

Ruth called the instructor, who said that by all means they wanted Naomi to compete, that they thought she was pretty special.

Ruth told the man that she thought Naomi was pretty special, too, although she had no idea where she got her swimming ability. The coach said maybe from her father.

In the swim meet that made Naomi's talent impossible to ignore, Naomi won every race she entered, against girls one and two years older. She beat the best boys' times in three events.

“Were you a fast swimmer, Harry?” Ruth asked in her next letter.

Yes, Harry wrote back, as it turns out there were some swimming genes in the Stein family pool. The 1935 Virginia state age-group breaststroke champion was none other than Harold Martin Stein. And Freda had a trophy case full of medals before she quit.

“We've always been good swimmers,” he wrote, and he told her the story of Hyman Stein, who swam his way to America.

Harry's fraternal grandfather emigrated from Germany in 1882, when he was 23. He had grown up in a village along the Rhine, between Bonn and Koblenz. A Jewish man from his village had gone to America many years before and had gotten relatively rich. The man sent back word that he needed a bright, hard-working young Jew to work in his garment factory, that he would sponsor a man from the village and help him become an American citizen, because he only really trusted the families from the place where he grew up.

A cousin still living in the village, a wealthy merchant who saw no reason to leave Germany, was empowered with the choice. Money was sent for passage by ship (and more, Hyman Stein would always claim, that the merchant kept for himself). The cousin who was to decide which young man would get a ticket to the promised land was of a sporting nature. He announced that all who were interested should be at his shop at a certain time, on a certain day.

Six men, all in their teens or early 20s, came to the cousin's shop, and he led them down the street, to the water's edge. There, where Hyman Stein always would claim the river was at least a mile wide, the cousin told them how he would choose. Half the town had followed them, for the entertainment.

He pointed toward the water and said, Swim. On the other side, there would be a tree with six ribbons (and here he gave to each of the young men a different color). The one who swims across the river and returns first with his ribbon, he told them, will go to America. Hyman Stein's color was red.

He was the youngest of eight children, and there was little for him to do in Germany other than stay and take care of his parents and work for his brothers. So he swam. It was early in the morning, in May, before the fog had even lifted, and the water was very cold.

One man went home, but the other five took off their clothes and dove in. They all swam in their long underwear, to the amusement of the crowd that gathered. Harry's grandfather couldn't see the other shore until he was almost there, already exhausted but ahead of all the others. He came up through the mud and found the tree, a good 50 yards from the water's edge, and he took his ribbon, the red. A witness was there to be sure no one cheated.

He said, years later, that his underwear felt as if it weighed 50 pounds. On the way back to the river, the man just behind him, a fast runner, passed him and jumped back into the water first. Hyman Stein, perhaps more desperate to reach America than the others, took off his remaining clothing and started back across, naked, as slick as a seal.

He passed his main rival somewhere in the middle of the river and was never caught. One of those behind him was pulled down by the current and drowned. Hyman Stein got his ticket, leaving behind all the family he knew and a legend that would outlive them, of the boy who swam to America.

He did not get rich in his new world; most of his energy and intellect was required merely to set the stage for his seven children, to place success within their grasp. He never admitted any regrets, though, and he seldom talked about Germany and the family he left there. He had been dead three years, having expired quietly in his own bed in his son's home in Richmond, when the Nazis came to his old village in 1942 and took every Jew there to a pit outside of town and murdered them all.

So, Harry wrote, tell Naomi to swim on. Travel light and don't look back, as my grandfather always advised.

Naomi, in the picture Ruth sent, is grinning from ear to ear. Her teeth are too large, and Harry could see that someday his surreptitious money would help pay for braces.

When Naomi was young, she smiled all the time. Around the house, she and Ruth would sing together. She wasn't really shy, Ruth believed; she just didn't say anything unless there was something to say. But everyone could see that she was happy.

Ruth would send clippings from the Newport paper as Naomi won one swimming competition after another. By the time she was 10, she owned four state age-group records. She was no larger than the other children, although she would grow to be 5-foot-9. But she was always in the middle of the picture, always the star.

By the time Gloria was back in swimsuit shape after Martin, she was pregnant with Nancy. After Nancy, she seemed to accept the fact that she wasn't a girl any more, and she displayed a maturity that Harry wasn't able or willing to match. It irritated him.

He was 29 when Nancy was born. She was pretty in the way of the Steins; Nancy and Naomi, were they to appear in the same room today, might easily pass as cousins, even sisters.

Harry saved all his maturity for his job, where he was thriving. He still wanted Gloria to do the spontaneous, hedonistic things they once did (and he still did). Too often, she couldn't find a babysitter, or she was too tired, or she just found the things that used to make her giggle now made her shake her head.

They still had good times, but Gloria was forcing it, trying to be a good sport, Harry could see. More and more, she was wrapped up in Martin and Nancy. Harry was jealous. He can see that now. He was the much-admired center of attention all day at work, then at happy hour, and then he came home to a world of diapers, home repair and need.

Harry sees his marriage, the whole of what he thinks of as his first life—the first one that he himself crafted—in terms of the race his grandfather swam. Hyman Stein gave it everything he had; he held nothing back. He never hesitated that day, never thought of the embarrassment he'd face as he came running out of the water with his red ribbon tied around his wrist, stark naked. He never thought about how foolish he would look if he took off all his clothes and still lost the race. He never hesitated or second-guessed himself. He never considered quitting, never wondered if another plan for getting to America might work better and require less risk.

Harry loved his grandfather dearly. People used to say they were much alike. The old man would lecture him about duty and responsibility and tenacity, and Harry took it to heart. He is sure that someone in Richmond in the 1930s would have observed young Harry Stein and said to his neighbor or his wife, “There's a young man with some backbone, some stick-to-itiveness. There's a young man who won't let you down.” Harry kept the same paper route for six years. He never missed a basketball practice in four years of high school, despite not starting until halfway through his senior year. He went eight years once without missing a day of school.

Was he more susceptible than most, Harry wonders now, because of that single-mindedness? When he did look back, and see that there were alternatives, that there was some other way, probably a happier way, for his life to proceed, was he more vulnerable for never questioning his path before? Until he met Ruth Crowder, Harry's path had seemed relatively straight, with few side trails beckoning.

He thought, for a long time, that the path he took, away from Ruth, would eventually come to seem the straight and right one, that with a fine and loveable (though not loved enough) woman, he eventually would learn not to look back.

TWELVE

“The thing that makes me so sad,” Ruth wrote, early in 1953, “is that Henry is a sweet man. He knows he's doing wrong, even when he's doing it, but it's as if he can't stop himself. Later, he sometimes cries like a small child, when we're alone together.

“He scares the boys sometimes. He even scares Naomi. Now that she gets her picture in the paper now and then, she sometimes acts as though she thinks the sun and moon revolve around her. But even she gets scared when Henry has one of his spells. Thank God they don't last long.”

He struck Ruth for the first time in March of that year, when she was two months pregnant with Susanna.

“Last night, Henry did something he's never done before,” she wrote. “We were alone, at the end of a hard day. (With this farm, hard days seem to be in the majority.) I mentioned a bill that was overdue at the store, not intending to nag, but not sure that he was aware that the payment was late.

“I didn't even see it coming, Harry. We were sitting beside each other, on the end of the bed, and he must have backhanded me. It knocked me over. I remember putting my hands over my face and closing my eyes; when I opened them, he had gone into the bathroom and locked the door. I looked in the mirror, and there was no blood, just the mark of his hand, a red splotch that went away within a few minutes …”

He apologized, begging her forgiveness and promising never to do it again.

At the end of the letter, she wrote, “I wonder, Harry, if things ever get better. I would like to hope so.”

The first time Gloria left, it was late June of 1954. Martin had just finished second grade; Nancy would start first grade in the fall.

The specific, obvious reason was Marianne Nobles. She was 23, not long out of Westhampton College and working for a law firm just down Main Street from Martin & Rives. She was blonde, she had a heartbreakingly perfect body, and she could handle the sometimes rough give-and-take of the after-work drinkers at the bar most favored by the lawyers and brokers in its vicinity.

She attracted Harry in some way he couldn't define, some combination of how she moved her hands when she pushed her hair out of her face, the way she smelled, the color of her eyes. He never really gave it much thought at the time, just knew, somewhere below the surface, that she had his number. One night in March, she asked him for a ride to her apartment because her car was in the shop.

He could have stayed in the car, could have declined her invitation to have “one for the road,” could have turned away from those lips instead of meeting them halfway. He made love to her at least two afternoons a week that spring and early summer. She would sometimes not even bother making her bed in the morning, and they would fall into sheets already smelling of her. He saw this carelessness as a kind of intimacy, of letting go, and it aroused him further.