Harry & Ruth (17 page)

“Mmm,” she said when she was finished and had stepped back, her right hand on her hip. “Not too bad, Harry Stein. Worth waiting for.”

Harry had taken care of himself, after a fashion. He had a good tan, he worked out five days a week at the club. He was capable of being at least tolerated by women half his age.

Ruth turned him on more than any of them, though. He was so relaxed that they might have been sexual partners forever, and he marveled at the mind's ability to preserve what it wanted to preserve.

Ruth was amenable to just about anything Harry wanted, and he was more than willing to return the favor. She led the way when she thought he might be too timid, amazed at how their roles had switched over the years.

“I'm trying to make up for lost time,” she murmured, and later she would tell him how often she had imagined that he was with her, inside her.

“I've made love to you ten thousand times,” he said.

His second week there, they succeeded in breaking the double bed she had taken for her own when she moved back to her old home. A pine plank firming up the old mattress and box springs snapped like a twig, and even Harry blushed when they had to move the splintered wood and ancient bed down the stairs and later carry a new, queen-sized one up, aided by a poker-faced Hank.

It didn't continue like that forever. The tide receded, but slowly enough that neither of them ever felt out of step. They ebbed together.

The cancer brought a large dropoff. In remission, though, Harry's lust came back, along with his hair, for a while.

Even now, Harry marvels at the way physical attraction works. When he was 15, most girls and women between 13 and perhaps 30 were desirable to him, assuming they weighed less than 200 pounds. At 40, he was affected by a range of women that stretched from teens to approximately 50.

Now, at the unkind, unseemly age of 76, he is capable—or he was, until the last little setback—of being stirred by just about any marginally attractive woman born between 1920 and the late '70s.

He figures that, taking into account population growth, there are at least 10 times as many women capable of arousing him as there were when he was a teenager.

Life, he says only to himself, because nobody likes a whiner, is a bitch.

When they get back to the cottage, Harry feels strangely rejuvenated, as if at the end of his long, tiring day he has been granted an Indian summer.

He eats a sandwich of cold cuts and has some potato salad, even has room for a small slice of the cheesecake Tran bought. By then, it's 10:30, and Ruth tells the rest that she and Harry are going to bed.

In their room, she tells him that she has a small present for him. It is in a department-store bag, and she apologizes for not wrapping it.

“It's your birthday,” he tells her. “I should be wrapping presents for you.”

He takes out the dark blue shirt, exactly his size, the size to which he has of late shrunk. It is the perfect color, the shirt Harry would have bought for himself.

Harry used to make fun of shopping. Gloria would endure his jibes after an afternoon in a shopping center or a mall. It wasn't the money. He just couldn't understand the purpose. It never occurred to him that it might be fun, and if not spiritually uplifting, as least as intellectually stimulating and worthwhile as watching professional football, and that it might be driven by something so simple as generosity.

Now, this late, he has come to recognize shopping as a meaningful, even therapeutic activity, a leisuretime pursuit, almost a sport. He sees no reason why it shouldn't be one of the demonstration events in the Atlanta Olympics; surely it is the equal of bowling.

Women, Harry concedes, spend all their lives tolerating men. They endure massive doses of sports spectatorship passed off as male bonding. They forgive deep-sea fishing trips that yield no fish. They don't begrudge the happy hour. While men are ogling sports cars or younger females, women are making mental notes of what kind of shirt would look best on a dried-up old coot like him.

Harry is grateful to have learned this, but he wishes he had been a quicker study.

“Thank you,” he says, moved by her kindness, moved by all he never will be able to repay, his eternal debt. “It's beautiful.”

Her smile makes him believe anything is possible.

SEVENTEEN

Harry wondered, in a letter he wrote in the spring of 1959, how different things might have been if they had never met or, having met, never parted. She told him not to dwell on such things, as she admonished herself not to.

“Don't torture either of us,” she wrote. And then she told him a story about her earliest days as an orphan.

She had brooded over her lost mother and father, and she became an angry, resentful child. She would tell T.D. and Sudie, when she was in a particularly hurtful mood, that they weren't her real parents.

One day, after she had said this, reducing her grandmother to tears, T.D. pulled his chair up next to hers, facing her. She was 7 at the time. Her grandfather leaned over and down so they were eye to eye.

“Ruthie,” he told her, “you know the Bible stories you hear about in Sunday School? You know about Jonah and the whale, and Moses parting the Red Sea, and Jesus raising that dead man up after three days?”

Ruth was silent.

“Well, those are just stories, ain't nothin' but stories. They might have been true once upon a time, but they ain't true now. And even when they were true, the dead that rose back up hadn't been dead long.”

He put both her hands in one of his.

“Your momma and daddy are gone. They are not ever coming back. All you have is today, and tomorrow if you're lucky.”

Tears were rolling down T.D.'s cheeks by then. Even at 7, Ruth sensed that he didn't believe in anything much any more. Even if it was directly in front of him, so that he could touch it, he was afraid it would disappear the next minute.

“And I guess some of that has rubbed off on me,” she wrote to Harry in 1959. “I know for a certainty that I didn't mention my mother or father again to him or my grandmother, even when we would go out to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves. We remembered mostly in silence. And I haven't done very much looking back. It hurts too much, Harry.

“Besides, things are better around here now. We seem to have reached some kind of truce. Either that, or the VA has finally gotten Henry's medication right.”

Harry had come to believe, by that spring, that he and Gloria had settled on the rules by which they would live the rest of their lives. They hardly ever argued anymore, and never in front of the kids (although Harry came to understand later, from a grown Martin and Nancy, that his children had missed less than he had hoped they had).

Harry would go on weekend deep-sea fishing trips off Hatteras; Gloria would take the kids to the beach for the week while Harry worked and played bachelor back in the city. Gloria and her friends would go to Charleston or New York and leave their husbands to play poker, drink, burn burgers on the grill and keep the children.

Sex was comfortable, predictable. Sometimes Harry would wake with an erection and want Gloria. When the children were younger, waking at dawn, sex in the sunlight was impossible. Now, it seemed exciting, something different. Gloria preferred the night, though, when Harry was sometimes too tired. Three times a week became twice, well on the way to once. But, Harry thought, they had it at least as good as most of their friends. Wouldn't it be selfish to demand more?

Then, one week that spring, Gloria went to New York for four days to meet some old classmates from college for shopping and the theater, as they did once or twice a year. On the second night, Martin, who had been bothered for a week with a cough that resisted treatment, woke up and couldn't breathe. When he coughed up some phlegm, there was blood in it.

Harry took him to the emergency room at 2 on a Saturday morning and sat there trying to talk the pain away from his son as the drunken fight-losers and car-wreckers filled the room with their blood-ruined shirts and thoughtless cursing. Finally, a doctor saw them. Martin had pleurisy. “Probably pneumonia as well,” he added. “We probably ought to hospitalize him.”

Harry went home and slept a few hours after Martin was admitted. When he awoke, he thought at first he would be noble and let Gloria enjoy her carefree weekend with the girls, but by visiting hours he had convinced himself that she would want to know her son was languishing in a Richmond hospital, would want to rush home.

But he didn't even know what hotel she was staying at, hadn't bothered to ask. He did know the names of the other women. He got the address book and called Teresa Linder in Rochester, N.Y., figuring Teresa's husband could tell him where their wives were staying.

Teresa Linder herself answered the phone. Harry had not spoken with her in 10 years, and she seemed surprised to hear from him.

No, she said, she wasn't supposed to be in New York. But, she added too quickly, she did recall Gloria inviting her, wished that she could have gone, darnit. Harry thanked her and hung up.

He called the other two women and found that they were spending quiet weekends in the Boston suburbs and a small Pennsylvania town.

He took Nancy to the hospital with him and spent two hours with Martin, who was resting comfortably, on penicillin, still coughing up blood, already getting bored. Harry had time to think while his son dozed and his daughter went down the hall to watch television in the lounge.

He spent the weekend going between home and the hospital. He told her family and his that he didn't want to disturb Gloria in New York; she had a long weekend coming to her.

Monday afternoon, he met her at the train station. She gave him a quick kiss on the lips, and then he drew away, holding on to her hands.

“Martin's in the hospital,” he told her. “He has pneumonia. I tried to call you, but nobody knew where you were.”

He could see it in her eyes.

The room, had Harry been able to remember the hotel, would have been in another name anyhow: Thomas Gray Daniels. Gloria was so stricken with guilt and embarrassment and almost physical pain that she never even bothered to ask Harry who it was he tried to call. She would find out later, when three old college friends all phoned her, each during the day, when Harry wasn't home.

They had to pick up Nancy from school and then go to the hospital, where Martin was in better shape and would be released in two more days. They didn't have a real moment to themselves until late that evening.

Harry knew she would tell him, and she did.

Thomas Gray Daniels was descended from two United States presidents. His grandfather had been a senator. Harry knew Tommy Daniels, had made him a lot of money over the years, had been Tommy's guest at the Commonwealth Club, one of the many of which Harry could never be a member. He was a lawyer in an old Richmond firm; they had played golf together.

Gloria had gone away with Tommy Daniels twice before, she told Harry. He would discover that many of his friends knew about it long before he did, and he had to finally admit to himself, and Ruth, that the humiliation of having the brokers and golfers and drinkers with whom he spent much of his time know his wife was being screwed by Tommy Daniels hurt him worse than the betrayal itself.

Harry wondered, not for the first time, if it was worth it. Nothing had been the same since the days of Marianne Nobles, although he had slipped only once since then.

He asked Gloria if she wanted a divorce, and she shook her head violently, no. She never again, to Harry's knowledge, slept with Tommy Daniels.

“Why Tommy Daniels?” he asked her. “He's got a face like a horse and he can't hold his liquor. What was it? His money? His dick?” but Harry knew. He knew the lure of those serpentine gentile walls, those soft old bourbon-soaked accents that they both should have hated. He knew how much Gloria loved all the trappings, especially the ones they couldn't have. He also knew Tommy Daniels would never leave his cool blonde wife, at least not for a Jew.

He thought seriously about trying to arrange a tryst with Beth Daniels, a revenge fuck. But she wasn't his type at all, and he wondered if he could even get aroused for her.

Throughout the summer of 1959, Harry and Gloria danced around each other. They never really talked everything out, because they knew what was down there at the bottom of the bottle if they threw the cap away, started drinking and really opened up. So, they pretended everything was all right, and soon, it seemed to be.

That summer, something took hold of Harry's life, and by extension Gloria's, and for a while they thought it would be their salvation.

Harry had always had a peripheral interest in politics, but after they made him a partner in the firm in 1958, doors were opened. And the times were with him.

Peyton Rives had been a mover and shaker in Virginia state Democratic politics—one of the old boys who decided who ran the state—for 20 years. With the world changing, though, with Eisenhower leaving office and the whole world coming out of its self-satisfied '50s slumber, it didn't seem appropriate for Rives, head of the commonwealth's largest investment firm, to be backing John Kennedy. Besides, Rives was uncomfortable with Kennedy, could see already that he himself wasn't really going to be a true believer in this new Democratic party.

Harry Stein, though, might do. He would never, Peyton Rives knew, be on the real inside of Virginia politics. It might, however, be good for Martin & Rives to have someone on the Kennedy inside, “just in case the sonofabitch wins,” he explained to his wife.

It was arranged, then, for Harry Stein, already a minor functionary, to direct the presidential fortunes of Jack Kennedy in Virginia.

“A Jew and a Catholic,” Rives said one night, having bourbon after dinner, with two old friends, one of them a U.S. senator, in their deep leather chairs within the bowels of the Commonwealth Club. “That's about right.”