Harry & Ruth (16 page)

The next morning, he waited until Naomi and the boys had left for school. Then he went down to the Fairweather Grill, where Ruth had been since 6 a.m. and where the breakfast crowd was thinning out enough so that the one waitress Ruth could afford would be able to handle things for a while.

As soon she saw Henry jerk open the door and walk inside, not even bothering to close it, Ruth was slipping out of her apron. She guided him out into the parking lot without a word. Her hands were shaking when she closed the door behind them.

Once outside, he was leading her, to his pickup truck parked on the side of the building that had no windows. He even opened the door for her. Then he got in and started to turn the ignition key, but she put her hand over his and told him that whatever he had to say, he ought to say it there.

“All right,” he told her, and he took the key out. “Here's what I have to say. I think you're a goddamn liar and a whore. I think you slept with half of Camp Warren and don't have any idea who your little bastard's father is, unless it's that pansy-ass McGinnis. Can queers have children?”

He said it all in a calm voice, almost no inflection at all. Ruth could barely hear him. In the background, the Sam and Willie's lone engine was creaking back and forth along the lumber yard's spur rail, occasionally clanging hard like an anvil into a flatcar.

Ruth knew this moment would come some day, but she still was not prepared for it. She pointed out that she had a perfectly good marriage certificate, to say nothing of divorce papers.

“Bullshit,” Henry told her. “I don't know how the Crowders pulled it off, but I don't believe a word of it. It's time to tell the truth. Lyin' time is over.” He moved closer and reached across the seat as if to put his arm around her. Instead, he grabbed Ruth's right arm and, before she could move, he twisted it around behind her, pushing her forward so that her head hit the metal dashboard.

“Time to tell the truth,” he whispered.

She almost gave it away then. She had seen little boys do that to each other in the schoolyard, but she never knew how much it hurt. Henry eased up enough so that she could sit back up and get her breath, and talk. He was close enough to her that she could smell the liquor that the VA doctors had told him to stop drinking.

When the pain subsided, she realized that she had been through worse, and she was damned if she was going to give in. She had fought for too many years. She had created a world in which even those who knew perfectly well at one time that there was no such person as Randall Phelps had conveniently “forgotten,” the way people can, Ruth understood, if they like you. It was worth a lot, she concluded sitting there next to Henry Flood, to keep that world intact.

He still held her arm behind her back, but his grip was light now. Without even thinking, she yanked her right arm free and simultaneously reached over with her left hand and grabbed him by the testicles. His face grew beet-red as he tried to pry her hand loose. Then she reached into her dress pocket and pulled out the little paring knife she kept there when she worked, just in case. She stuck it into his thigh, not far from where her left hand was squeezing. She let him know she could push the knife a little deeper, squeeze a little harder.

Henry Flood finally did what Ruth told him to do: He sat still and listened, blood forming a dark spot on the fabric of his work pants. Later, she would start shaking so hard from the memory of it that the cook thought she was coming down with the flu.

She told Henry that there weren't going to be any more questions about Naomi's father.

Henry Flood had never really had it all spelled out to him before then. Ruth had long ago made sure that the lawyers put everything related to the Fairweather Grill in her name. She had made sure that her business with the brokers in Newport and later with Harry Stein himself was hers and nobody else's, and especially not Henry Flood's.

“You want the truth?” she asked him. “Here's the truth, and you had better heed it.”

She explained to Henry, as to a child, chapter and verse, just how quickly the farm would be taken away from him without the money the Fairweather Grill brought in. It was explained to him that Ruth had “other money” that was none of his business and not in his name, money that could sustain her and the children, if need be. It was explained, although Ruth never wanted to bring it down to that level, how little he would have in the world, how quickly he might find himself alone and broke if he continued to press the issue.

“I don't ever,” she told him, “want to hear about Naomi's father again. Naomi's father was before your time. You are not to concern yourself with him any more.”

Henry, his hand over the flesh wound Ruth had inflicted, told her that she was bluffing. She said to try her, then, and he was silent for a very long time, just the two of them sitting in the truck looking straight ahead while the sun worked its way up in the sky. And then he said, “Get out,” which she did. And Henry drove away.

“Harry,” she wrote when she told him about it, “it bought me some time, at least.”

They had been married nine years almost when she bought the Grill. They would stay married for 19 more. It wasn't all bruises and silence. Henry was “good” for some time after Ruth explained how things were.

Ruth's letters to Harry emphasized the sunny days, days when Henry was a gracious, smiling presence at the grill as he pretended to be the part-owner he never was, evenings when he would play baseball or basketball with his sons until dark, nights when he would beg her forgiveness for the other times.

For a very long time, she always forgave him.

By the time Ruth opened the grill, she was receiving $15 a week from Harry Stein, who had it to spend. Even with Gloria, Martin and Nancy to consider, his ability to make money for others, and himself, had allowed him the luxury of painless generosity. The Steins only became more affluent when Gloria's mother and father died within eight months of each other and their only child inherited three-quarters of a million dollars.

Harry and Gloria got along. They made their own peace in the aftermath of Marianne Nobles and found enough substance in their lives to keep their marriage anchored. They never doubted that they loved their children, and they supposed that they loved each other as well.

They took solace in the comforts of family and a lifetime of friends in Richmond. Gloria became more fond of her upward mobility than Harry ever would have imagined, and there was an unspoken covenant between them, he felt: As long as Harry could provide all this—a life that opened almost all of Jewish and Christian Richmond society to them—she was able to forget the past and sometimes turn a blind eye to the present. Harry knew he was to blame, that he was the one who forced the woman he had loved and married to either lower her expectations or leave, but still he couldn't forgive her, not really, for selling her acquiescence and forgiveness.

At Martin & Rives, they called Harry “The King of the Jews,” and he laughed right along with them. There was still only one other Jewish broker working in the city of Richmond.

Harry made money for many people whose clubs he could enter only as a guest. This bothered Gloria more than it did him, but she was thrown enough crumbs—a charity chairmanship, an invitation to join a lesser women's club, what she felt were genuine friendships with some of the old-line Anglophiles in the boxwood-and-azalea neighborhoods—to pacify her.

Ruth never forgot what Harry told her about the way money grows. She had been almost 19, with a one-year-old daughter in tow, when she walked into the oldest brokerage house in Newport, wearing her best dress, and told them she wanted to buy some stock, something not too safe, not too risky.

“Why don't you just put it in the bank?” an amused broker asked her.

“The same reason you don't,” she told him. He shrugged, but he let her start with just the $100 she brought. She added to it every month, keeping just enough in the bank to pay her bills. For a long time, it didn't amount to much, but finally it did what Harry had told her money would do: It took on a life of its own. Then she finally let Harry manage her investments. Even for men who told Yid jokes to his face, Harry Stein made good money. For Ruth, he took advantage of every whispered, just-for-you-and-nobody-else inside tip.

Now, Harry considers the evil entity devouring him, two bad cells becoming four, then eight, 16, 32, 64. If his cancer were a stock, he thinks, he would certainly advise everyone to buy.

SIXTEEN

Harry knows that a wiser man might have chosen another road, the much-recommended straight-and-narrow.

A wiser man might have written Ruth Crowder off in 1943 as a casualty of the times.

But Harry stayed his brambly course. He wonders now if all his will could have pulled him off it.

And eventually (to his wonderment), he emerged stumbling and bleeding from the undergrowth to find that long-abandoned, long-yearned-for path, cool and smelling of honeysuckle and the ocean.

Paul lets everyone out at the terminal building, then drives away to park the minivan.

“Are you sure you want to walk all the way to the gate?” Hank asks his mother. “We can get him.”

She doesn't even answer, just walks straight ahead. The others follow.

It takes Naomi three tries before she gets through the metal detector without setting it off. She wishes out loud that she had smoked another cigarette before they entered the terminal.

Finally, they're at Gate 24, staring out into the darkness. Paul, who never leaves anything to chance, called ahead to make sure the flight from Atlanta would be on time.

Fifteen minutes later, the passengers start coming through the door in ones and twos. Ruth can't believe a plane can hold so many people. It seems to her as if a thousand have departed before one tired-looking old man in a baseball cap and a tan suit emerges, an attendant by his side as if she expects him to fall presently.

Ruth half-runs to his side, almost knocking him over.

“Be careful, old lady,” Harry Stein says. “A good gust of wind would do me in right now.”

Some of the crowd at the terminal have never seen people their age kiss with such passion.

“Hey,” Hank says to the teen-age boys gawking next to him, “what're you lookin' at? That's my momma.”

Even Naomi laughs.

It would have been easier, everyone agreed, if Harry had just paid someone to close the Safe Harbor cottage for the winter. He could have called Freda and told her he'd spend some other weekend with them in Richmond.

But by the time Paul came up with his idea for Ruth's no-surprise surprise 70th birthday party, Harry had already bought the super-saver ticket. He always went back up for a few days by himself in late September, long after he and Ruth had returned to Saraw, long after Martin and Nancy and their kids had paid their last visits. It was a good time to be alone out there.

And he thought he might not have the luxury of rescheduling visits.

“I don't think I can bear to ride in a car all the way from Saraw to Florida,” is the way he explained it to Ruth.

Now, she sees that the 10 days they've been apart have not been restorative for Harry. Maybe, she thinks, he looked this sickly when he left and I just wasn't noticing. Maybe he's just tired.

She leads him through the long hallway and down the escalator to the front door and the car. He eschews a wheelchair, and she doesn't insist. They all take short, controlled steps, trying to pretend that he is not slowing them up.

“I think this is just what I needed,” Harry says as they step outside into the still-warm night air.

“Me, too,” Ruth says, squeezing his hand.

The second time around, she was 51 and he was 57. Harry had not been with a woman anywhere near his age for several years. He was becoming a little intimidated by the 30-somethings and 20-somethings who turned up at his beach place. He wondered when wit and charm and money and what was left of his looks would be overbalanced by the gray in his hair, the failure to pick up on everything currently, ever-changingly young, the general sag of age.

But the thought of being together again with Ruth after all that time was disorienting. He wondered if they would have some convenient friendship of the mind. He wondered if that was what Ruth wanted. He would have settled for that, until he saw her again. They had shared almost everything in their letters.

Still, they had not seen each other undressed since Hitler ruled Europe. Harry thought it might be like the marriages of his mother's and father's generation, when the bride and groom had yet to see each other naked.

The first night, Harry was not sure where he was supposed to sleep. Ruth had taken him in like an abandoned puppy, as he had hoped she would, but that evening, he wasn't sure at all about where he stood.

When Ruth yawned and said it was time for bed, he followed her up the stairs, uncertain as a teen-ager and just as aroused.

Then, Ruth Crowder Flood reached out to him, gently and unexpectedly. He jumped back, startled, then let her caress his penis through his pants.

“You seem glad to see me,” she said, and he could only nod, speechless for once.

She began stroking him and led into her bedroom, the same one where they had made illicit, delicious love so many years before. She pulled Harry to her and kissed him for a very long time, and then she stepped back.

She was wearing a red-and-black kimono. With one motion of her right hand, she undid it and threw it off. She was wearing nothing underneath. Harry looked at her breasts, sagging a little, at her pubic hair going slightly to gray, at her stomach, not so much the worse for the wear after four children. And he thought she was beautiful.

“If I looked as good as you after all this time, I'd do that, too,” he told her, his voice as unsteady as the rest of him.

“Let's see,” she said, and she started undressing him.