Harry & Ruth (21 page)

“Shit,” the aide said, and turned to one side. Harry couldn't look away, though. In the shade of the truck, he got a quick glimpse of the monk's blackened face, the gritted teeth. He saw a soldier stick a bayonet into the monk's body and realized that he was still alive.

A Vietnamese officer advanced on them, shouting and pointing, but the aide flashed his identification, and the officer, a short, round man, became instantly obsequious, ushering them away from the scene as gently as if they had been the next of kin. Behind them, the young soldiers dispersed the crowd with threats and rifle butts.

Harry thought he might pass out in the still heat. He wondered how much hotter the fire could have felt to the monk than the actual air did. He and the aide walked two blocks and retreated beneath an awning, where they ordered beers beneath a slow-moving fan.

The aide had to explain to Harry that no one set the monk on fire; he did it himself. Harry would see photographs, later, but they didn't have the impact of that one hot July day in Saigon—the smell, and the little dark place where the monk patiently melted into the pavement.

For some reason, the state department man explained, the Communists had gotten to the monks.

Harry thought about that monk, and when he got back home, he did some reading about the French occupation of Indochina. When he was asked for his assessment of Vietnam, he was not as optimistic about America's chances of success as were the others in the mission.

Kennedy sent for Harry one day two weeks later. With Dean Rusk and two other state department officials in the office, he read an undersecretary of state's report, full of optimism, promising that a six-month campaign would fix everything, and then Harry's more pessimistic note.

Kennedy put down the reports and looked at Harry.

“Harry,” he said, “may I ask you something? Were you two gentlemen in the same country?”

Everyone laughed, and it was generally understood that this was the kind of misinformed jeremiad you might get when you sent amateurs on a fact-finding mission.

Martin was 16 that summer, with two years of high school left. Not long after Harry sent his report on Vietnam to the president, he paid a visit to a National Guard major, an old friend of his, to make sure Martin Stein would never set foot in a country where the enemy would set themselves on fire and peacefully burn to death rather than submit. He was abusing what little power he had, and he didn't care.

When they got word that Kennedy had been shot, Harry and one of his assistants, a young woman from Oberlin, had just returned from lunch. As soon as they knew he was dead, everyone went home.

Harry would always remember the traffic jam on the Shirley Highway that afternoon, and the sight of two grown men, in suits and white shirts, fighting in the median strip, apparently as the result of a minor accident. Both men were flailing away, doing almost no harm. Both were weeping openly.

Nothing much changed for Harry after Kennedy's death, at least not professionally.

He wondered that he could get along with two men as different as Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and perhaps if he had been closer to the fire, he might not have. He saw more than one high-level official cowed and humiliated by Johnson's tantrums and bullying. Harry never took what Johnson did or said personally, though. In fact, his greatest fear was that he might break out laughing while in some small group that was the momentary target of LBJ's wrath. He knew Johnson could send him back to Richmond in two seconds, but he always had the strange feeling that the president was on the verge of stopping in mid-diatribe and winking at them. And this lack of fear seemed to carry back to Johnson, who saw in Harry Stein a man who respected him with an unaverted eye. They got along well enough.

Then, in the summer of 1966, the ambassador to The Netherlands stepped down unexpectedly. A week later, Harry answered a summons from Walter Padgett in the state department. Padgett had been a year behind Harry at Princeton and had created over the years the myth of a college-days friendship.

“Harry,” Padgett said when they were both seated, “how would you like to move to the Hague?”

Harry would be amazed, throughout his life, at the odd directions from which opportunity came at him. Padgett, who probably called him a Hebe behind his back in college, was pushing him for a European ambassadorship, supported by a Virginia senator whose politics were anathema to Harry and by a member of Johnson's cabinet to whom Harry had never, to his knowledge, spoken.

He went home in a daze. When he told Gloria about it, she had a brief moment of anxiety, and then she became, in her mind, the wife of the ambassador to The Netherlands, and she realized this would make her life complete. Martin was a junior at the University of Virginia; Nancy was getting ready to start her freshman year at Mary Baldwin. The timing seemed perfect. Harry, whose first thought upon being approached was that Gloria never would give up Washington, the same as he thought she never would give up Richmond, knew that she would be the perfect ambassador's wife, that she was born to play this role, the one she had been honing in Washington society the past five years.

There were no major objections to Harry Stein as ambassador to Holland. No wealthy industrialist or retiring senator coveted the post. Harry had been sent on the occasional junket to foreign lands and had become known, in his circle, as a loyal Democrat and a charming generalist.

By September, when Nancy left for college, there was almost nothing standing between Harry Stein and what he and Gloria had come to see as their destiny.

TWENTY-ONE

“Dear Harry,” Ruth wrote on a wet, cold February day in 1964, “Isn't it amazing the way, no matter how much you try to anticipate disaster, it always sneaks up on you anyhow?

“It never occurred to me to worry about Hank, any more than I would worry about the sun not coming up in the east.”

The previous Tuesday, she and the rest were just starting to clean up after lunch when she heard the door open. Thinking that they had one more hungry truck driver to feed, she looked up and saw Hank. He was moving toward her very slowly, tentatively, like the stray dogs out back who weighed fear against the chance for a free meal from a stranger's hand. Hank usually wore his confidence like a neon sign.

Ruth came from behind the counter, ready to ask him what was wrong.

“Momma,” he told her, “I can't go back to school.”

She assured him that he most certainly could go back to school, not knowing what else to say.

“You haven't been expelled, have you?”

The idea of Hank Flood being expelled was beyond Ruth's belief. He had never even gotten a spanking.

“No,” he said, “I haven't been expelled. But I can't go back. I really can't, Momma.”

He had been in fourth-period algebra class. He had not felt well all day, and there had been a ringing in his ears since he got to school.

Hank had never liked tight spaces. Once, when he was 5, Naomi shut him up in one of the closets, thinking they were just playing, and he almost tore the door off trying to get out.

But that day in algebra, it occurred to him, suddenly, just how small the classroom was, how there wasn't enough space and how he didn't think he could bear to be in a room like that any longer. He told Ruth that if anyone had tried to stop him from leaving, right then, he was afraid of what he might have done.

She left the grill with him. They walked down to the river and back, in the freezing cold, and they talked. Hank told her he could not stand even to sit inside a car, that he did not know if he could bear staying in his room at home. He wasn't crying, but he was shaking so hard his teeth rattled.

“I have set up an appointment with Dr. Sherman, a psychiatrist that Roy McGinnis recommended in Newport,” Ruth wrote. “We are to go see him day after tomorrow, and I pray he will be able to find some way to fix what's wrong with my boy. I am so scared, Harry.…

Eventually, Ruth would take Hank to two psychiatrists in Newport, then to the university hospital in Chapel Hill, then to Johns Hopkins.

To have done otherwise, Ruth felt, would have been like quitting.

Nobody in Saraw had ever heard of agoraphobia. Neither of the first two doctors even mentioned the word.

Hank was the golden boy, as promising as Naomi in his own way. He had never made anything except A's until the grading period before he came home from school that last time. On that one, he was given a B-minus in algebra, mainly because he was up the night before the midterm exam helping Ruth keep Henry from beating Paul with a belt.

In Saraw, where everyone knows everyone else's business, much was made of the hard-hearted teacher whose B-minus was generally given as the cause for Hank Flood's “breakdown.” Ruth was not among those affixing blame. If all it took was one B-minus, she wrote to Harry, then he must have been very close to the edge, anyhow, and she blamed herself for not noticing. She had been relieved, in a way, when he made something less than an A; she thought it would help him live with the reality that no one is perfect, that even the perfect are done in by an imperfect world.

Hank was a starter on the junior varsity football and basketball teams, and he was even better in baseball. The day he told Ruth he couldn't return to school, all that ended, too.

By New Year's Day of 1976, when Harry Stein first met the gentle, intelligent man he had only seen in one of Ruth's photographs, the damage had been contained. Accommodations had been made. He earned his high school degree via correspondence school. He would eventually graduate from the University of North Carolina's branch at Newport in 1978, taking some courses by mail, venturing like a skittish animal into college classrooms for others.

People wondered why a 29-year-old carpenter needed a college degree, but Ruth knew it was as important to Hank as it would have been to an aspiring doctor or lawyer. It had been a cornerstone of her life and his that you were rewarded for good, honest, well-intentioned effort, no matter how useless it might seem at the time.

For a very long time, Harry Stein was unconverted to this philosophy. It seemed too simple. Say you spend your entire life trying to find a cure for a form of cancer, he once wrote Ruth, and one day you realize that you've been on the wrong path of research for 40 years, that you turned left when you should have turned right somewhere in the distant past.

Ruth wrote back that the diligent researcher probably would have made several meaningful discoveries he never even meant to make, along the way. He probably would have developed a much greater understanding of mortality than most people ever have. His stubbornness and will might have inspired a younger scientist who would someday find that cure.

Harry's father would have called that meshuggah. But over the years, without even noticing its insidious creep into his brain, Harry has come to believe in the Ruth Crowder Flood Theory of Human Behavior.

Late Tuesday morning, after he's napped for a couple of hours, Harry finally is coaxed into some surf fishing by Hank and Paul.

The sky is almost white, the watery-yellow sun warming them through the thin cloud cover. The storm is reported to be on course for a landfall somewhere in Louisiana, but it might as well be in China for all its apparent effect.

“Doesn't a ring around the sun mean it's going to rain?” Hank asks as he reels in an empty line.

Paul looks up at the circular rainbow prism.

“It always rains down here,” he says. “You don't need any signs.” He's drinking a beer, his left hand on his hip. He's screwed his fishing rod deep into the wet sand. Harry is the only one catching anything, a couple of red snappers that Paul judges to be large enough to eat. It is not a good time of day for surf fishing, but when they asked, he didn't want to hurt their feelings.

Hank cuts off another half a shrimp, then asks if Harry doesn't want to see if anything's taken his bait. Harry shakes his head. Hank shrugs, loads the hook and tries again. It is beyond Harry's ability this day to cast past the waves, so he wants to make very sure there's a reason to reel his line in. He can barely even hold the rod up, and he considers planting his in the ground, too. Ruth's sons really seemed to want him to come with them, though, and Harry appreciates the gesture.

“Don't worry,” Paul says, looking seaward. “If the storm changes course, we can get off this island in five minutes flat, I guaran-damn-tee. And there isn't much chance of it sneaking up on us as long as Momma's here and The Weather Channel stays on the air.”

Hank smiles.

“I guess I'd hate 'em, too, if I'd been her. You know, I caught her yesterday standing on the back upstairs deck looking over at the sound, like she was trying to figure out exactly how long it would take to get across that bridge.”

Paul goes over to get another beer.

“Well, there are maybe 200 cottages out here. I'll bet you not more than 50 of them are occupied right now, with the storm out there and all. That's the best part about being out here during a hurricane panic; it keeps the riff-raff out. I'm not expecting any major traffic jams.

“Besides, tomorrow's her birthday. We've got to stay long enough to light the cake and blow out the candles.”

Hank reels in his line.

They stay for perhaps an hour, maybe, Harry thinks, the best hour of the day. Hank and Paul are both experienced anglers, having lived all their lives near the coast. Paul claims he even managed to get some gear and go fishing when he was in Vietnam. They make a big deal, when they all return, over the fact that the ancient mariner Harry Stein has led the way, with three fish to their one each.

Tran, the only one in the cottage who actually studies the Bible as a source of wisdom and guidance, picks up one of the smaller fish, looking dubiously at it. “All we need now, Harry, are two loaves of bread,” she says.