Harry & Ruth (20 page)

Ruth was not yet 35 years old. She was mistaken for Naomi's older sister on two occasions. She had studied Italian for six months beforehand, and she took great pride in bailing language-challenged compatriots out of tight spots. The others from Newport started calling her “the great Floodini.”

She didn't get to spend as much time with Naomi as she would have liked, though. Naomi preferred to be with friends and competitors her own age. The two of them went shopping twice and had dinner together three times. Ruth had hoped for more.

But she was thrilled when Naomi's relay team won the gold medal, especially after her disappointment in the 100 butterfly.

Naomi wasn't expected to win the butterfly. She wasn't even the fastest American. And then she got sick before her semifinal heat, Ruth suspected from nerves, and didn't qualify for the final. Hearing about it and then reading about it in the paper the next morning, Harry felt sick for her.

So the relay was Naomi's last chance. The night before the final, Ruth was able to have dinner with her, at an outdoor cafe near Ruth's hotel. Naomi was so nervous she could hardly eat.

Ruth tried to calm her, with little success. Finally, Ruth paid the bill, and they walked to the Spanish Steps. They climbed halfway up and found a quiet spot in the sea of young people there.

Ruth told her that she loved her, that she couldn't be more proud of her, that nothing was going to change whether she won or lost.

“Well,” Naomi asked, “what was all this about then? What have I been working my tail off for?”

Ruth looked across at the crowds filling the Via Condotti. She had always taken it as an article of faith that you worked hard for what you wanted, if you were to have any chance of getting it. Talent, she had told Naomi after the girl won her first state championship, can't get you all the way there.

“Nothing you ever do with a full effort and a good heart comes to nothing,” she told her that night in Rome. It was a speech she had been giving since Naomi was old enough to listen. Naomi just rolled her eyes, but Ruth thought it was a good sign that she didn't reject the weatherbeaten wisdom outright.

The next day, with Ruth and the rest of the cheering section from Pembroke County screaming encouragement at the natatorium on the banks of the Tiber, Naomi turned a short American lead into a long one and got her gold medal. She told Ruth that they ought to only give her one-fourth since it was a relay, but Ruth could tell she was proud.

After that, they had four days left in Rome. Naomi, with the weight lifted off her shoulders, partied every night with her teammates. Ruth didn't see much more of her until the trip back.

Naomi was to return with the Pembroke County contingent. On the last morning, Ruth took a taxi to the Olympic village, and she could tell, as soon as she saw Naomi sitting on her bags outside the compound, that something was wrong. She never found out what. Maybe, she thought, it was just the letdown after all that work.

There was an incident checking the luggage. The security guards wanted to open one of Naomi's bags, and Naomi made such a fuss about it that she almost got them arrested.

She was in tears by the time things were smoothed over by Ruth and others. They made the flight with 10 minutes to spare.

On board, a doctor from Newport got Naomi to take two sleeping pills, and she slept most of the way to New York.

There, Ruth and two of the men had to virtually carry Naomi through customs and then to the terminal where they were to catch the connecting flight. She cursed Ruth, and then she sank into a crying jag. Ruth was able to strong-arm her into the women's bathroom, where she made her wash her face. Then she waited while Naomi vomited what little she had eaten in the last 12 hours into one of the toilets. On the flight to Newport, Naomi cried softly on Ruth's shoulder.

Ruth, looking out at the water as they banked toward Newport, knew that she might never again feel so much like Naomi's mother, so needed. She stroked her daughter's hair and wondered at the perversity of a mother who could enjoy, even a little, such misery.

When they landed, and Ruth reminded her that there might be a crowd waiting for her, Naomi snapped back as if nothing had happened. She looked, to Ruth's amazement, like anyone else who had been on a long flight from Europe.

There were a couple of hundred people at the terminal. Naomi, very patiently and with great composure, signed autographs and shook hands, smiling all the time. Some of those in the party from Rome wondered if they had dreamed Naomi Crowder's bad behavior.

Henry Flood seemed glad to have his wife and stepdaughter back with him. The aunts had kept Hank and Paul, but Henry had persuaded them to let the boys come home and stay with him the last week, and they appeared to have enjoyed this time with their father.

But the next day, at the Naomi Crowder Day parade in Newport, Henry turned up drunk, cursing spectators from his seat in the convertible behind the one in which Naomi and Ruth rode. Ruth wondered if anything ever really changed for good.

“It often seems to me,” she wrote Harry that September, “that the best times for Henry are the times when nothing at all is happening. He hasn't been this bad since I bought the Fairweather Grill, four years ago. It doesn't matter whether it's good news or bad news. Henry Flood simply is not equipped to handle the extraordinary.”

Naomi slept for the better part of the next two days, and then she packed and took another trip, by plane again, to Los Angeles, where her freshman classes had already begun.

“I don't expect to see her that often from here on out,” Ruth wrote to Harry. “This was our last big thing together, like a graduation before she entered the big, wide world. It does seem as if she tried to get a scholarship at the school farthest away from me in the whole country, doesn't it?

“But she is bright and talented, and I am sure that she will succeed. Whether she will be happy, though: Well, that's another question, I suppose.”

Naomi would graduate from UCLA in four years. She was a member of one of the nation's best swim teams, full of kids—many of them much younger than she—who were lured to Southern California from all over the country so that they might compete against the best.

But Naomi lost interest in swimming her junior year and didn't even go to the Olympic trials in 1964. She put all her effort into her studies and, that year, was admitted to law school.

She finished near the top of her law class, meeting and falling in love with Thomas Ferrell III, a classmate and fellow North Carolinian, along the way. They were married in 1969, and by 1972, when Grace was born, Naomi had almost completely retired from the law. Ruth confined her disappointment, for the most part, to letters.

“She is so good at everything,” she wrote Harry. “Why can't she stay with it?”

If I can stay with Henry Flood, Ruth wondered only to herself, why can't Naomi stay with swimming or law? How hard can that be?

TWENTY

Several times in early 1961, Gloria and their children came up to see the trilevel on Balsa Drive as it slowly rose from the red clay to become their home for the next six years. The chain stores and strip malls and gridlock would overtake them soon, but in the beginning, Harry thought of himself and his family as pioneers, starting over.

He worried that Gloria wouldn't bond. Since college, she had never lived anywhere except Richmond. But she enjoyed the country, while it lasted, and she came to love the Washington scene that beckoned at the other end of Shirley Highway.

During his extended leave of absence from Martin & Rives, Harry more and more came to think of himself as a Washingtonian.

He felt he was making a difference. The Economic Advisory Board was committed to stimulating the economy, and to educating a president who never quite saw where they were headed but sometimes, with the aid of his advisors, did what they wanted anyhow.

And, Harry had to admit to himself, he did love the power, the clout that came from others knowing you had JFK's ear.

Gloria was always running into old Seven Sisters acquaintances. She amazed Harry with how well she blended into the social scene, how much she loved being invited to Hickory Hill by Bobby and Ethel, how she shone at Perle Mesta's parties. She was still, Harry had come to realize during those months when he went without seeing her for five days at a time, a very attractive woman. He was less inclined to take her for granted.

“Harry,” Jack Kennedy said when he was introduced to Gloria, “are all the men in Richmond ugly? They must be, for you to land a woman this beautiful. The competition there must be minimal.”

Harry would retell the story at parties, perfectly mimicking Kennedy. “The competition theah must be, ah, minimal,” Harry would say, and everyone would crack up, delighted to be one degree from the president.

Gloria was as happy as Harry had seen her in years, and it made things better, he felt, not just for him but for Martin and Nancy, too. She laid it on a little thicker than he might have liked at times, reveling too much in what he felt deep down they couldn't sustain. He knew they were in a town where all the jobs changed in the time it took your kids to get through high school. But what was the harm?

Martin and Nancy were adapting well to their new schools, which were full of the sons and daughters of congressmen and cabinet staffers. In their neighborhood, every kid was a new kid on the block. The outsiders were the ones who had been there all along, now outnumbered and badly outspent.

“Harry,” Gloria said to him often that heady first year, “I'm so proud of you.”

He pointed out that he had taken a rather large cut in pay to go to Washington and couldn't be sure he'd be there forever.

“Money,” she said, shaking her head at his inability to grasp the big picture. “We've got enough money, Harry. What money did for us is give us a chance to get into all this. You can be somebody, Harry.”

Harry, under the impression he already was somebody, knew Gloria meant somebody in Washington, not somebody in Richmond. He wondered if he had created a monster, but he was pleased that at least they were both enjoying their lives at present, that their children seemed to be enjoying theirs.

By November of 1963, he was assistant director of the EAB. He played a key role in getting Kennedy to lower taxes and enlarge the budget, and it occurred to him often in years to come that the national debt actually started with him and a few other idealists whose original plan mutated into something they had never envisioned, helped along by a war and then by greed and short-sightedness. He imagined his obituary reading, “Harold Martin Stein, who helped his country take the first small steps toward fiscal irresponsibility.…” How, he would wonder over the years, did such a high-minded, simple-ass desire to make America the land of opportunity for everyone get so screwed up?

Harry and Gloria seemed to know all of Washington socially and, in his case, professionally. He came to be seen as a man who could cut across boundaries, an economist with an English degree, an Ivy Leaguer who could talk Southern, a facile fund-raiser who really believed in making a better world. Gloria complemented him well and was happy enough to be known to most as the wife of Handsome Harry Stein. In a city where youth and glamour were suddenly in, the Steins' timing was perfect.

They were accustomed to seeing their names mentioned in Washington's daily newspapers, Harry's in the A section, both of theirs in the society pages. Gloria would clip out each mention and put it in a scrapbook that she kept hidden from everyone except Harry, ashamed to let any of their new friends know how proud she was.

In the summer of 1963, a group of Kennedy insiders was sent on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam. Harry was included; the word was, he was recommended by the president himself.

The war looked, from that vantage point, not like a war at all. Maybe it would, in time, become another Korea; maybe it would be some small exercise like the one in the Dominican Republic. Harry, like all his friends in the World War II alumni club, had a rather straightforward approach to Vietnam: The Commies are trying to take over the world; we've got to get them out, save the planet for democracy. The idea of a war not being “right” was a concept none of them had really considered.

It was unbearable when they landed. They had not listened sufficiently to the warnings about the heat and humidity. After all, they were only going to be there four days.

“Hell,” Harry had said to Gloria at the airport, “how can anything be worse than Richmond in July?”

They got the royal tour of Saigon, which Harry conceded might be a pleasant place on days when the temperature was under 100 degrees. They all shook hands with Ngo Dinh Diem, who would be shot to death three weeks before Jack Kennedy. They saw what they were meant to see of the army. They heard what they were meant to hear. Even Harry could understand that there was no way he or any of the other Americans on this miserable junket was going to peel back even the first layer of jungle that hid whatever Vietnam really was.

“Can you believe,” asked a state department aide with whom he shared a hotel room, “that anybody is willing to die for this shithole?”

The last day there, Harry and the aide went out walking by themselves in Saigon, against orders. They turned on to one of the broad avenues the French had built. Harry thought, not for the first time, how it really was a beautiful city, if he could only breathe. Up ahead, a crowd was gathered, and Vietnamese soldiers were wading through the civilians.

The two Americans walked up, knowing they shouldn't be there but unable to resist.

Harry didn't see much, just what appeared to be a charred leg as three of the teen-age soldiers threw the monk's body in the back of a truck. The smell, burned skin and gasoline, was nauseating in the heat. The charred remains of the dead man's clothes were burned into the surface of the street.