Harry & Ruth (2 page)

Even now, Harry could not tell you.

A door slammed and the car moved on. Then, as the engine noise faded, he heard a tinkling sound, like bells. He had moved to one side, farther out of the light. Leaning on a white pillar that still smelled of its last coat of paint, he watched as she came into view.

Maybe it was some property of the church light that hit her as she walked toward it in the night-wet grass, making her Gibson-girl face look flush and slightly damp, almost as if she had a skim of dew on her, too. Maybe it was the confident way she walked, striding enough to make the bracelet on her left wrist jingle. Maybe it was the tune she was whistling: “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” It was very popular that year. When she got to the boom-boom-boom-boom part, she would shake her wrist four times.

She reached that part the second time as she was walking up the front steps. Without thinking, Harry clapped four times and then croaked out (he was not a singer), “deep in the heart of Texas.”

She hadn't seen him until then, and she gave a small, violent jump, as if she had the hiccups. Harry stepped out of the shadows.

“You nearly scared me to death,” she said. “Didn't anybody ever teach you not to lurk? I hate it when people lurk.”

She didn't look scared to Harry. She looked capable. And beautiful. She had hazel eyes that seemed at least three-dimensional, dirty-blonde hair that tumbled down to her shoulders, full, expressive eyebrows that danced up and down when she talked. She was wearing a white dress with straps that might have earned her a sharp look or a warning from some deacon's wife had she walked inside the church hall that night.

Harry apologized and introduced himself, holding out his hand. Hers was warm to the touch. He tried to disguise the fact that he wanted to fall to his knees and kiss that hand, and the wrist, and the elbow, and the soft skin of her upper arm, and her shoulder, eventually stopping when a couple of elders dragged him off her.

“Harry Stein,” she said, arching one of those eyebrows and sizing him up. “There are some Steins in Newport. They own Stein's Men's Store. The Jews own just about all the clothing stores in …”

She stopped and shook her head.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. She was blushing. “I'm just assuming you're Jewish. And even if you were Jewish, it wouldn't matter. I mean … Please tell me to shut up before I dig myself in any deeper.”

“If I told you to shut up,” Harry said, “I wouldn't have the pleasure of hearing you any more. Say anything you want. Just talk.”

He told her she sounded mellifluous, which made her laugh.

She was tan and witty and sensual. When she talked, she would put her right hand behind her head, rub her neck and close her eyes as if she were giving herself an immense amount of pleasure.

She had that voice some Southern girls had, back in Richmond, sweet and feminine, while at the same time hinting strongly of desire and abandon. Harry was sure, lying on his bunk in the barracks that night, that he never had been so affected by another human being. And it would be part of the bittersweet mystery of his life that he never could have told you exactly why.

He asked her if she would like a cigarette. She declined.

They moved into the shadows again. A few other couples had slipped out, but Harry and Ruth were unseen. They talked quietly, about the war and weather, and his eyes never left her.

At one point, she frowned.

“You're making me nervous,” she said. “You're looking at me like you want to have me for dinner.”

“I have X-ray vision,” he told her, taking a last drag and dropping the cigarette to the concrete porch.

He had used that particular line often, back home. It tended to pleasantly discombobulate women, if they liked him to start with. Ruth Crowder, though, stared him down, looking him over from top to bottom, and said, “So do I.”

This time, Harry blushed, and laughed.

He began asking her questions, about herself and her rough-edged little town, stalling for time, trying to drink in as much of her as he could. They stayed right there, Harry leaning against the pillar, Ruth standing two feet away. When she wasn't rubbing her neck, she kept her hands folded in front of her, the way, he supposed at the time, her mother had taught her, but she answered straight, with none of the country backwardness of the other girls.

He asked her what she was doing in a place like Saraw, and she told him that she considered Saraw, North Carolina, plenty good enough for her. He doubted that, but he kept his doubts to himself.

Far too soon for Harry's liking, it was 9:30, and the deacons were walking around the grounds, rousting everyone and trying to prevent sacrilege.

He asked Ruth if he could see her again, and she said yes. She said it casually, as if it didn't mean that much. They agreed to meet at White Oak Beach, on the boardwalk by the dance hall, the next Friday night.

Harry shook her hand, and then, unable to restrain himself from touching her somewhere with his lips, he leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. It was warm and a little damp. She had brought the scent of the ocean back with her.

He forced himself to step back, afraid of doing anything that might scare her away. She looked up, surprised but not angry, not skittish. She blew him a kiss.

That's when Harry took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote down his address at camp, then handed it to her. “Write me,” he said, and it sounded like a plea.

“I'm going to see you Friday night,” she said, smiling and shaking her head.

“Write me,” he said again. “Tell me everything you can think of about yourself. I want to know everything.”

“I don't have that much time.… OK, Harry Stein. I'll write you, then. I just hope it gets there before I see you again.”

And she turned and left, jingling as she disappeared into the darkness.

By the time Harry got back to the car, the girl with bad teeth was leaving. She seemed offended.

Olkewicz had a reddish mark on the side of his face.

“Can't we give you a ride?” he asked, undiscouraged.

The girl did not look back.

“Jeez,” Olkewicz whined, “I wish you coulda waited a little longer, Stein. I almost had her going.”

Harry Stein said nothing, and they departed in what he thought was silence. About halfway back to camp, his traveling companion thought to ask him how his evening had gone.

Pretty well, Harry said, all things considered.

“I thought so,” Olkewicz said. “You've been whistling ever since we left that damn church.”

THREE

On a warm fall night, the sixth of October, Harry Stein and Ruth Crowder went to White Oak Beach, where they'd had their first actual date. They parked a hundred yards past the last inhabited houses and went over the dunes to the water.

Ruth preferred to stay along the boardwalk, where the ocean was only background noise and a cool, salty breeze. But there might not be a night this perfect again until spring, and she did want to please Harry Stein, so she wore her bathing suit underneath her dress.

At Virginia Beach, where Harry went as a child, it might already be too late for swimming, but here, it was perfect. The water was cooling more slowly than the air; it felt warmer than it would some days in July. Farther off into the darkness, a Tommy Dorsey tune was playing.

Harry went rushing in, as he always did, diving headfirst into a wave. When he surfaced and looked back, Ruth was still standing where he'd left her, going no farther than the very tip of the tide's boundary. She reminded Harry of a little girl at the ocean for the first time, fearful every time the water crept up to her. She was so beautiful in the white one-piece bathing suit. For the rest of his life, string bikinis and clothing-optional beaches notwithstanding, no girl on any beach would stir him so. She had the kind of tan that she accepted as her birthright, merely for living that far south and being young. On that night, in that place, he thought perfection had temporarily been achieved.

The spell lasted a few seconds. Then, dragging her into the water seemed like the only thing to do. But when Harry came out, grinning his intentions, stooped in front of her and lifted her over his shoulder, then started walking back into the water, she went suddenly and completely berserk. Before Harry could put her down, she had managed to give him what would turn into a rather impressive black eye.

“I can't swim!” she kept screaming, and by the time he put her down, she was crying so hard she could barely catch her breath.

Harry knew people who couldn't swim. In Richmond, no summer passed without some luckless child diving into the river on a dare and never again touching dry land. He himself learned in stages, with his father's hand growing lighter and lighter every time they tried at a lake or the pool. One day, the water was holding him and he was moving forward, all of 20 feet.

“See, Harry,” his father had said, putting a sunburned arm around him while he used the other to keep his cigar from getting wet, “now you can swim. Now you're a big boy.” Old Harry had even smiled.

“Can't swim” did not properly describe Ruth's relationship with water, though. Harry was just beginning to fully understand that she feared it the way other children feared fire.

In a letter the next day, Ruth apologized, and tried to explain.

“More than anything else,” she wrote, “I remember the day of the big hurricane, the one in 1928. You see, it hit on October 6. I should have told you about it before, but it gets treated like some deep, dark secret around here. We don't talk about it among ourselves, even on October 6. When I was a little girl, I would ask my grandparents about it, or one of my aunts, and they'd shut up tight. If you asked Uncle Matty, he'd start to cry. After a while, I stopped asking.

“That day, I remember my grandfather arguing with Momma and Daddy, trying to keep them from going to the beach. It was windy, but the sun was shining, and I was crying because they wouldn't take me with them. After they left, Grandma let me help' her make biscuits, and by the time we were finished, late that morning, it had gotten very dark. Granddaddy wouldn't come away from the window. He was looking toward the ocean …”

Before he fell in love with Ruth Crowder, before he became immersed in a girl and a family and a place to which only a war could have led him, Harry was unfamiliar with the concept of family secrets.

Among the Steins, there were no secrets, no subtext. Until the day she died, Harry's mother was liable, at any family gathering, to launch into a monologue about what exactly went wrong between Harry and Gloria, with aunts and uncles and cousins freely volunteering their opinions, pro-Harry and con.

The Crowders, though, not only could keep a secret, they had trouble letting go of one—provided it was important enough. With the trivial ones, they have proved themselves, even at this late date, to be completely untrustworthy.

The party for Ruth's 70th birthday, meant to be a surprise, had no chance whatsoever of remaining one. Her younger son, Paul, must have known that when he enlisted Hank's aid in luring her down to Florida under the guise of an ordinary week at the beach. It took Ruth all of five minutes to worm the truth from Hank. But she still agreed, somewhat hesitantly, to go.

“Paul,” she wrote to her younger son, “thank you for thinking of me, but I just don't like surprises. I have never gained much pleasure from them.”

Three weeks after they met, Harry told Ruth about failing to get into law school, and about his lukewarm plans to try again after the war. He told her not to tell anyone else. Three weeks later, he stopped at the small general store in Saraw, beside the river, to buy cigarettes. The store owner, a man who (Harry thought) didn't even know his name, said, in his most conspiratorial tone, “Don't worry, son. You'll get into that lawyers' college next time for sure.”

With the important and central mysteries, though, such as the story of Belle and Theron Crowder and The One in '28, information was not so easily obtained. Some of this reticence might have grown from an inability or unwillingness to deal with trouble and heartache, a fear of the uncomfortable. Or it might have had its seeds in the belief that knowledge is power, that if you know the old, old stories and no one else does, you have something of value, something not to be given away to every meddlesome stranger.

Once, when Harry expressed his theories on Crowder secrets in a letter, Ruth wrote him back that all it was, was good manners. Sometimes, though, it was maddening to her as well. What would the South be, she asked Harry once in another letter, without its idiosyncracies? He wrote back: Sane.

Harry did, though, before the spring of 1943 took him away, hear most of the story of Belle and Theron and the One in '28.

Theron Crowder IV was a handsome man. He had a brooding, unflinching, angular look, even in the wedding picture, not hungry-seeming like some underfed tenant farmer but more the haughty, high-cheekboned look of the country patrician, king of an undemanding hill. He was the last of three children, born in 1902 into what passed for a well-to-do family in a small North Carolina town. His father owned the lumber mill and turpentine works that were the only reason the Saraw and Wallace Railroad, all 34 miles of it, was built. Timber was shipped from the forests farther inland to the mill. Lumber and supplies went back up the same way, or down the Saraw River, before it silted over. Young Theron's father, whom everyone called T.D., was a stubborn man when Harry knew him. In his prime, before The One in '28, his inflexibility was his strength.

Theron IV had two older sisters, Charlotte and Jane, and it is still accepted dogma among older Saraw residents who remember the stories that he was “spoiled rotten.” (Harry has a theory: There are approximately six times as many boys whose siblings are all older sisters as there are girls with all older brothers, or at least there were at that time and in that place. The husbands made their wives keep having babies until they either died or produced something on which a Roman numeral could be hung.)