Harry & Ruth (15 page)

That's what Harry thinks he understands about the old guys he doesn't want to be like: They don't want the party to end, and they're too big to cry in public.

He saw his father turn old friends away toward the end, and he promised himself, right then, that he would take every scrap life offered rather than sit home and watch the second hand steal from him.

I've given up on living forever, he told Freda, but I haven't given up on living.

When the plane landed, Harry was escorted to his connecting flight in one of the airport golf carts that used to annoy the hell out of him, coming up behind him and beeping him out of the way so some codger could keep from walking a few steps. Now, he was the beeper instead of the beepee. He was embarrassed, and grateful. It was at least half a mile from his inbound terminal to his outbound one.

After a 90-minute wait, in which Harry was afraid to drift away from his uncomfortable seat into the hard-charging traffic that would lead him to a hot dog or a newspaper, he was ushered on to another plane, again at the head of the line.

Then there was an hour wait for takeoff. It was 6:30 by the time they cleared the ground. Wedged against the window by the overweight businessman next to him, Harry wondered why he wasn't asleep. An attendant had brought him some water to take with his pills, and the pain had subsided, but yet he was awake.

And then, he wasn't.

The dream is on him, has him right back in that same bloody stream. He is thrashing to get away from Sergeant Stevens.

“Sir! Hey, sir!”

The attendant is looming over him, and the people in front are sneaking furtive glances at him.

“Bad dream,” Harry mumbles.

“Are you OK, sir?” The attendant, a middle-aged woman with reddish hair, looks concerned that he might die before they land.

“Fine,” is all Harry can say, and then they finally leave him alone, with one last admonition: Fasten your seatbelt.

Harry takes his baseball cap off and rubs his head, where the hair is only coming back as stubble, not long enough to comb, too coarse to be pleasant to the touch. Who, he wonders, would want to see such a person?

When they first met, Ruth loved to say his name. Later, she sometimes would write it out three times—“Harry Stein, Harry Stein, Harry Stein”—usually as prelude to commiseration over some confessed misdeed on Harry's part. Reading such letters, he could imagine a slight shake of the head, a small smile, a certain tolerant exasperation.

In his letters to Ruth, Harry unburdened himself, admissions and complaints that might better have been directed to Gloria.

Ruth responded in kind, although Harry came to know finally that she soft-pedaled the bad times more than he had.

When her world with Henry Flood began to tilt dangerously on its axis, she hinted more than told.

“What's the use in whining?” she asked Harry years later, when he knew what she hadn't written.

“If you've got a good whine in you,” he told her, “you have to let it out. Otherwise, it just turns to venom and kills you. Self-pity should not be hoarded.”

She told enough, though. Maybe her store of self-pity was not as massive as Harry's, but such unburdening as she did, she did in her letters. He likes to think he was there, if only in the form of clandestine mail.

Hank seems calm now, at least calm enough to continue their trip.

Ruth knows that Naomi remembers Hank as he was before he couldn't bear to be in tight spaces with other people. She never really lived at home after everything changed for Hank, and in some ways, she has never accepted it.

Ruth's strategy toward Hank's “spells,” at this late date, is to just let them slide. She knows he'll be better soon, and she knows how much it hurts him to be pitied.

They ride the rest of the way in silence, Ruth staring out the window and wondering why she couldn't have just had a nice quiet birthday back in Saraw.

The plane lands, and Harry Stein waits, obedient as a child, until they have come to a complete stop before unbuckling his seat belt.

He reaches into his pocket to make sure he hasn't left his key ring, with his car and house keys on it, back at Freda's. These days, he's forever double- and triple-checking. He's almost worn out his plane ticket by now, pulling it in and out of his coat.

He fishes out his keys, and the piece of bright plastic attached to the ring catches his eye, an old friend. The letters on the garish, orange-and-yellow rectangle are almost worn off. The establishment itself has been out of business for years.

Everything he touches lately, even this cheap trinket barely bearing the name of the Fairweather Grill, reminds him of Ruth.

He feels, from somewhere, a surge of energy.

He is glad to be here.

FIFTEEN

In 1956, Ruth became, out of sheer necessity, a business-woman.

Between then and 1990, when the interstate was completed and immediately siphoned most of the traffic off the Beach Road, the Fairweather Grill would be an essential stop for almost anyone going to White Oak Beach or the other resorts along the coast below Newport. It offered simple fare: grilled hot dogs and hamburgers and what many considered to be the cheapest, best ice cream in the state—only five flavors—plus produce from Henry's farm. It became famous for the Fairburger, a cheeseburger with a fried egg on top that Ruth had been making for her family for years.

Ruth's cousin told everyone how he had skinned her on the deal. But she had done her homework. Her old friend Roy McGinnis assured her that the Beach Road would only get more crowded, that all the hurricanes in the world wouldn't keep people from wanting a place by the ocean. Even Ruth didn't believe Turpentine Creek Road, which joined the main highway there and was barely paved, would be a state road one day.

Ruth did not completely and clearly foresee a day when people would laugh at Ben Crowder for selling the Saraw Diner for only $15,000, but she did think it had promise.

“And we do need the money, Harry,” she wrote that summer, “whether Henry admits it or not. This land is played out. If it wasn't for the tobacco allotment, we'd be better off selling the farm right now, but it would kill Henry, I believe. He still thinks he can support three children, and ourselves, with a farm that's about one generation past going.”

They opened on the Fourth of July, 1956. Ruth changed the name to the Fairweather Grill, gave it a paint job, hired good help and spent most of her waking hours there.

Henry, who had never fully gotten over Susanna's death, seemed to take Ruth's new venture as a betrayal, an insult to his manhood. He accused her of “carrying on” with Roy McGinnis, because he couldn't see why else Roy's bank would loan a woman of Ruth's limited means $15,000 with almost no collateral, and she couldn't tell him about the $5,000 she had saved and the rest that was loaned to her by an unnamed party in another state.

More and more, Henry would go off into the swamp by himself. Ruth knew he had built a cabin of some sort in a part of Kinlaw's Hell she had never seen, and sometimes he would spend the night out there.

“But he hasn't hit me since we lost Susanna,” Ruth wrote that summer, “and we have some good times. There are days when he seems as bright as a new penny. He and I will sit and laugh and talk, and afterward, when the children are in bed, we'll make love, and it seems, at times like that, as if I can get the old Henry back, that I can fix whatever's broken.

“Some days, he'll play with Naomi and the boys, but they know it won't last, and it makes me cringe to see them cringe, because I know he sees it, too. All five of us try to pretend that Henry Flood won't have any more bad days.”

The Fairweather Grill was just far enough from the beach to justify stopping on the way there or on the way home, and a family of beach-goers or -comers could not miss the orange and yellow cinder block triangle (Ruth let Naomi and the boys pick the colors).

It was in need of repair the first time Harry Stein saw it. By 1956, it was temporarily closed and had become an eyesore even to a town with forgiving standards. But Ruth knew it had potential. Harry's letters were full of news about the ways in which the world was booming.

“Anything anybody starts now,” he wrote her, “is only going to get bigger and bigger, assuming it is not run by idiots.”

Ruth did not think she was an idiot, and she could see from the vantage point of almost a decade where Henry Flood's farm was headed. She visited her cousin, who hemmed and hawed in the careful, phlegmatic way that always defined Saraw's nickel-and-dime business transactions, then sold her a property for $15,000 that he had despaired of unloading for 12.

Under Ruth's careful yet imaginative management, it thrived. Not even the chain fast-food restaurant that opened a mile away 15 years later could make a dent in the Fairweather Grill.

Ruth had never imagined herself an entrepreneur. Such dreams as she had in those hard early years on the farm mostly starred her children, and after Susanna's death, she hardly dreamed at all. And Harry never meant to push her into the business world, but he started her thinking about ways to save her family from a life that she could see was becoming more and more second-rate.

Ruth didn't mind the long hours; Hank was in school, and Paul would be the next year. Some days, she was able to get by with a few hours and a couple of scowling walkthroughs to make sure the help wasn't cleaning out the cash registers, but there were many others when she had to depend on Naomi and Henry to look after the boys and the house, days when she left before sunrise and fell into bed exhausted after 10.

“I would rather be with my children all day, waiting with milk and cookies when they get home from school,” she wrote Harry, “but I do not have the luxury of doing that, if we are to thrive.”

She resisted all entreaties to build another Fairweather Grill or two in Newport or at the beach itself. By the time she had gotten the grill up and running, McDonald's and its emulators were starting to devour the market, but Ruth knew she would dilute what she had if she branched out.

She told all who offered to make her a franchise queen that she didn't think the world could support more than one Fairweather Grill. Ruth knew she could make more money, in the short term, by doing this, but she knew she would never sleep well knowing that someone somewhere, some ambitious but inexperienced young couple yearning to get rich in a hurry or some business-school graduate willing to cut corners, was playing fast and loose with the name of the Fairweather Grill.

“You're right,” she wrote Harry. “I am too particular. I know that. I can't help it.”

She worried, when she had time to worry, about Naomi, who never seemed to be satisfied, who was always trying to swim a little faster, work a little harder. Where, Harry asked her once in a letter, do you think she could have gotten that from?

The grill didn't make them rich, but it did allow Henry Flood to keep his farm, and it did keep the Floods from sinking to the next level down, where they would be receiving rather than giving hand-me-down clothing. Henry, the boys and such help as he could hire took care of the tobacco, their only real cash crop. They would make a few dollars more selling watermelons, cantaloupes and tomatoes at the grill's produce stand. Ruth had spared Henry's pride, although she got little credit for it. In the first year, he twice came to the grill, half-drunk and listening to the demons who were whispering louder and more frequently into his tortured ears, and accused Ruth of cheating on him.

Finally, she told him what the rules were. He could rant and rave all he wanted in the privacy of their home, but if he persisted in embarrassing her in public, to say nothing of endangering the prime source of their livelihood, she would leave him. For a time, this seemed to work.

Harry gently suggested that she leave her husband anyhow. In her return letter, Ruth asked who would take care of Henry Flood if she didn't.

“I am here,” she wrote, “for the long haul. Sickness and health, Harry.”

In 1956, Naomi swam the fastest time of any 12-year-old girl in the country in the butterfly, her specialty. “In four years,” a sportswriter reported in the Newport paper, “Pembroke County will not just be pulling for the red, white and blue in the Olympic Games. We'll be pulling for one of our own, Naomi Jane Crowder.”

Naomi's success, though, seemed to irritate Henry.

He badgered Ruth to have Naomi's last name changed to Flood, but Ruth said that was up to Naomi, who would prefer to remain Naomi Jane Crowder.

“Doesn't she want me to make her an honest woman, too?” he asked Ruth one morning after the children had gone to school, on a rare day when she didn't have to open the grill herself.

“There aren't anything except honest women in this house,” Ruth told him.

“Then tell me about Randall Phelps,” he'd thrown back at her.

He seemed to enjoy quizzing her in front of the children, especially Naomi, who still occasionally asked about her father.

Ruth was adept at preserving the integrity of the sacred family lie, although she knew the best policy was to say nothing at all. She worried more about Charlotte or Jane giving it away.

But one evening, when Naomi was hounding her for information, at the end of a long day when Ruth's nerves were a little more frayed than usual, she slipped. Worse, she slipped within earshot of Henry. Ruth told Naomi that her father had dark hair, like hers. She was exhausted, she wrote to Harry later, and she just wanted to get Naomi off this tiresome subject. She thought that she had told the lie long enough that it came automatically, that the truth would never slip past her by accident.

Henry looked at Ruth for a couple of long seconds and then walked off, smiling a little. Randall Phelps, he knew, had yellow hair.

That night in bed, Ruth expected to be interrogated. Instead, Henry Flood just lay there. Ruth was afraid to go to sleep until she could hear her husband snoring.