Harry & Ruth (19 page)

As he leans forward toward the mirror with both hands on the counter, the vision facing him is almost too much to bear.

One night two months ago, on his and Ruth's yearly late-summer return to Safe Harbor, at the end of what he considered to be a good day, they risked a party, given by friends in Sagaponack with enough money to possess an ocean view. Harry slipped out on their deck around 11 to smell the salt air and to relish and mourn one more sweet evening. There weren't any lights, and Harry was very quiet. After about five minutes, he heard the sliding glass door at the other end of the deck open. Two younger men whose voices he recognized, friends of friends, walked outside.

Harry could only pick up parts of their conversation, but he heard clearly as one, an intense, tough-talking Wall Streeter out for the weekend, said he'd been told “the best way is to just drive up to Vermont on a January day, hike up a mountain, take your coat off, and leave the trail. They find you in the spring.”

Then he heard the other man say something about “quality of life … Never let it get that far, I swear to God.”

Harry tried to disappear into the weathered wood, but then the younger man's voice stopped in mid-sentence, and a few seconds later the door at the far end softly opened and closed, and Harry was alone again.

Quality, my ass, Harry thought to himself. Quality is in the mind of the beholder.

He figures that if he can keep a couple of meals a day down, if he can keep his eyes on the sunrises and sunsets and off the mirror, he has quality enough.

If you get close enough to smell the brimstone, Harry Stein wishes he had told both of them, you'll trade 10 pounds of quality for a gram of quantity.

It's chilly on Paul and Tran's deck, but Harry has a blanket, and there is something soothing about being here, with the darkness and silence in front of him broken only by the put-putting progress of one small, sad shrimp boat, trying to find its way home.

EIGHTEEN

It is almost dawn. Harry figures he might as well give in to consciousness. It hurts, but he's loath to miss another sunrise at the beach.

He goes down to water's edge in his robe and slippers. Far to the left, he can see light creeping up from the place where the sun will soon appear. He hobbles back up to the deck and fetches one of the short chairs that Paul and his family like to plant in the sand so the incoming tide can wash over them.

Harry Stein digs in and waits for another day.

Many years ago, Harry heard a man at a party in Richmond talk about the green light, a brief flash of pigment sometimes visible to the human eye at the exact split second when the first centimeter of the sun breaches the horizon. Harry read the scientific explanation, and for each of the next three summers at the beach, he would get up at dawn at least once, searching in vain for the green light. Friends and family would tease him when he came back, bleary-eyed and frustrated, from the pier.

But now, expecting nothing, he sees it. The green flash is there and gone before he can blink, a hidden emerald not even a tenth of a second long, the length between night and day.

Once, as Harry sat alone on the back porch of their new home in the Northern Virginia suburbs, a deer materialized in front of him, not 20 feet away. It was a beautiful buck, at least an eight-pointer. It made eye contact, showing neither fear nor surprise, then turned and crashed back into the woods, never to be seen again, witnessed only by Harry, who always afterward watched in vain for its return. Now, as then, he looks around for corroboration. Only the gulls are there to share his green light.

He watches the sun rise. This near the horizon, he can actually see it move, if he looks long enough. Harry does look. He is not concerned about cataracts.

When the sun is half-exposed, some bit of color makes him look out to sea again. This time, the flash is red.

Harry's eyes are still good, and he can see soon enough that it's Naomi, out for a swim, alone in the Gulf of Mexico. She is doing the butterfly, which Harry thinks is one of the strangest athletic endeavors ever invented for humans. According to Ruth, Naomi chose it because it seemed an event that she could master by sheer hard work.

Naomi's one-piece red bathing suit lurches in and out of the water, resembling the dolphins he and Ruth see off the Carolina beaches. When he first spots her, she is far away, but in almost no time she is near the shore, swimming easily in the weak Gulf current.

She doesn't see Harry until she stands up in waist-deep water and starts walking toward the shore. Harry knows this because she jumps slightly. Even a mile swim after a night's sleep, he thinks to himself, isn't enough to rid his daughter of her tension.

Naomi walks a few yards over and picks up her terry cloth robe where she left it in a protected pocket between two dunes. Then she comes over to where he's sitting.

“Jesus, Harry,” she says. “You ought to let somebody know you're out here.”

“I didn't know you were such as early riser.”

He wonders if she is reacting to his appearance, which he's sure hasn't improved since he looked into that 3 a.m. mirror. She is already fishing in her robe pocket for cigarettes and matches. She finds them, lights one, then sits, yoga-style, watching the sunrise with Harry.

“Did you see the green light?”

“The what?” She looks back at him as if he has reported a mermaid sighting. Then she remembers Harry explaining it to her, years before.

“Oh, the green light. You finally saw the green light? That's nice.”

She smiles as if she might be humoring him.

They are both quiet for a while as the sun slips into a cloud bank. To make conversation, he asks about Grace and Gary, not expecting much except the usual boilerplate. But Naomi surprises him.

“Well,” she says, putting out a spent cigarette in the sugar-white sand and reaching for another one, “it isn't a picnic, Harry. It definitely is not a picnic.”

Harry observes that it usually isn't. At best, he adds, you've got ants. Feeling a rare moment of kinship with his oldest child, he tries not to frighten the moment away with overeagerness.

He talks about Martin and Nancy, more than he has before—about how, after things fell apart, Martin seemed to choose him while Nancy chose Gloria, like kids picking players for a softball team.

“And then there's me,” she says, turning and smiling with a little mischief, Harry thinks, a little life. “Should I want you on my side?”

Harry puts his hand on her shoulder. At least she doesn't jump.

“You're entitled not to,” he says. “You've got a grudge coming to you.”

She turns toward him and rubs his foot, which looks bruised and swollen although he doesn't remember running into anything recently.

“Does that hurt?”

“Only when I laugh,” he starts to tell her, but his throat catches, and it takes all his strength to keep from crying. Where the hell, he wonders, did that come from?

“It's OK, Harry. It's OK.” She strokes his ankles and feet, and he's grateful that she looks away, as if she has seen him naked, until he can pull himself together.

“So,” he says finally, trying to pick up the thread, “what's not a picnic?”

She scoops up a handful of white sand and lets it sift through her fingers.

“Well, Grace is OK, I suppose, although she's a little too much like me for my liking, if you know what I mean.”

“She should be so lucky.”

“I mean, she's breezing through law school, not a problem in the world, but she doesn't have, I don't know, a lot of sympathy, a lot of compassion. I really wanted her to come east with me for Mom's birthday, but she said she didn't really know anybody back here anymore.

“Do you think I'm hard-hearted, Harry?” she asks, looking right up into his face now. “Do you think I've passed that on to Grace?”

Harry tells her he thinks she's passed a damn good work ethic on to Grace and, no, he doesn't think she's hardhearted; he just wishes she and Ruth were better friends.

“We used to be,” she mutters.

“What she said about, you know, gays …” Harry had been there, too, that day, was left to deal with Ruth's self-recrimination afterward.

Naomi bats away his sentence with her right hand before it is even completed. It is so much like the gesture Harry's father used to deflect compliments or apologies.

“She didn't know. Hell, I was in denial at the time, myself. Thomas is still in denial. He claims he believes the boy Gary is living with is just a friend, a buddy, a roommate. We can't even talk about it, Harry. I'm afraid it's going to tear us apart. You think I'm hard-hearted? No, don't deny it; let me finish. Well, I can't shut my child out of my life because of something he's got no more damn control over than he does red hair.

“But Thomas, he'll never accept it. He's got to know, though. He's gotten into all this macho stuff—mountain-climbing, dirt-biking. He's talking about taking up parachuting. It's like he's trying to prove that, by God, it wasn't anything he did, not something wrong with his family's chromosomes. Thomas likes to control, and he can't control this.”

It occurs to Harry that Gary has a tough row to hoe, if Naomi is the flexible, sympathetic parent.

He decides to make a small leap.

“Are you afraid,” he asks her, “that you and your kids will wind up with the kind of relationship you've got with Ruth? Are you afraid of history repeating itself? Things can change, you know.”

He feels so helpless. He should be able to say it better. If he could say all he knew, it might come out right.

She looks up at him and frowns. She doesn't speak for so long that Harry wonders if it's still his turn.

“Harry,” she says finally, “you and I both love my mother, but even you don't know everything. You weren't there, and I don't mean that in a nasty way. I just mean, you weren't there. You didn't live through the reign of Henry Flood. You didn't pray for deliverance and have that prayer answered with lectures on how ‘you've got to try and get along with him.'”

She's never before opened up this much. Maybe, Harry thinks, it's because soon-to-be-dead men tell no tales. And maybe he should tell one of his own, one he swore he never would. Whatever the reason, he's glad for the moment. First the green light and now this. He is struck, not for the first time, with how any given day, no matter now large the odds against it, can be worth the effort.

Naomi says the winter before the Olympics was the worst. It should have been the time of her life, but it wasn't. She was working harder than she'd ever worked or ever would again. She felt her whole life would be a failure if she didn't make the U.S. team and go to Rome. She had skipped a grade in school and would graduate that summer, before she was 17. And Ruth was determined that Naomi would be the valedictorian Ruth always thought she should have been.

“Nobody around Saraw knew how hard it was,” she says, “just to get on the U.S. team. You look around and there are—what?—several hundred big-league baseball players, over a thousand pro football players. But we were competing for just two spots, two lousy spots out of the whole country, for each event. And afterwards, you might get a college scholarship, maybe a parade back home if you won the gold. It probably wasn't worth it, Harry. But it was something I had to do. Who needs a childhood, anyway?”

Naomi looks as if she is either trying to remember something or forget something, and before Harry can find a way to make this, the most real conversation he's had in years with his oldest child, last a little longer, Hank and Paul come walking toward them, surfcasting rods in hand.

“What are you all doing, looking for the hurricane?” Paul asks.

“No,” Naomi says, standing. “I've just been telling him what a couple of little assholes you two were as children.”

“Oooh,” Paul flinches. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She throws a shell at him.

He tells Harry that they intend, sometime today, to get him out in the surf with a rod and reel in his hands.

“Maybe later,” he says. Naomi is brushing sand off her legs and bottom. Harry finds that the only way he can get out of Paul's sawed-off chair is by half-falling forward on his knees and then rising.

“I've already had enough excitement for one morning,” he tells them. “First I see the green light, and then I get to talk to a mermaid in a red bathing suit. Who deserves to be so lucky?”

Naomi shakes her head, walking back ahead of him. Ruth is standing on the deck, looking out to sea.

NINETEEN

Naomi, who was still specializing in the butterfly, finished second in the 1960 national championships and then in the Olympic trials in Detroit, where she also made the 400-meter relay team. She almost qualified in the breaststroke, as well. Harry, reading this, wondered if his grandfather was smiling somewhere.

Naomi was upset that she didn't finish first and had to be convinced that making the United States Olympic team did not qualify as failure.

Ruth's portfolio had continued to grow, aided by smart investments and the Fairweather Grill; she was independent. She didn't have to ask Henry's permission to fly to Rome that September.

Harry, unable to tell anyone what he wanted to scream out, that his daughter was an Olympic swimmer, grew distracted at Martin's baseball games, Nancy's recitals. He felt himself splitting a little, like the pear tree in their backyard that was coming apart at the crotch where the two dominant branches pulled north and south. Only his work on the Kennedy campaign kept him focused.

He almost told Gloria everything, but he didn't.

The Games began late that year and ran well into September. Ruth, who had never flown before, was with a small group from Newport, all richer than she and treating her like royalty, to her amusement. In Rome, they stayed in a small hotel near the Spanish Steps and had tickets to several venues other than swimming. She met Rafer Johnson, and Naomi introduced her to the great Australian swimmer, Dawn Fraser.