Harry & Ruth (24 page)

So finally Ruth told Naomi the short version of what happened in Saraw, North Carolina, that war winter, and left the rest, the “heavy lifting,” to Harry. What was arranged, through Ruth, was a meeting at a neutral site.

Naomi and Thomas already were living in Denver, but she was with a law firm that did occasional work in Manhattan. Harry came to New York on business from time to time and had a membership at the Princeton Club. Naomi was scheduled to fly to New York in mid-July, arriving on a Tuesday and returning on Friday evening.

And so, it was arranged that they should meet at the bar in the Algonquin Hotel at 5:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. Harry told the professional student with whom he was living at the time, a woman one year younger than Naomi herself, a lie about an important meeting in Manhattan, strictly business, apologizing for not taking her with him. She shrugged her shoulders, as Harry noticed women were doing more and more in his presence, and said, “Whatever,” the word that seemed to sum up her philosophy of life.

He took the train from Richmond on Wednesday and checked into his room before 3, just in time to wash up and put on something that the heat hadn't wilted. He was as nervous as he'd ever been on any teenage first date.

Here was one woman who had his number, who had always had his number. With others, he could excuse himself for almost anything. Some misdeed on their part, some failing, real or imagined, could be invented to justify almost anything.

But where, he asked himself, is your upper hand when the woman in question is the daughter you never acknowledged? Sometimes he could even justify what he did to Ruth by telling himself she could have had him back on a platter at any time after 1966, if she had only left the combustible piece of garbage to whom she was married. But Harry could not excuse himself for Naomi. He felt she was entitled to spit in his face and walk away forever, to fall on him and try to claw his eyes out. Harry was nervous.

He passed the Algonquin twice before going in. He might have circled another time or two, working on his story, but it was a blistering day on the pavement. It was still only 5:15, but he felt it might be a good idea to get settled, to be perhaps one scotch ahead when she walked in.

Naomi had in her possession a photograph of her father, one Ruth wanted back. Harry knew she probably would recognize him immediately, and he was sure he would know her. So he secured a wing chair out of the light, where he could see her when she walked in but she couldn't see him.

For half an hour he waited. He had ordered his second scotch and soda and was wondering if Naomi had even less nerve than he did. And then, she was there. Her silhouette was all Harry could see at first, but he knew it was her, even before she stepped into the interior light. There was some gesture, something about the way she stood, hesitating, looking. It might have been a memory of Ruth.

Grown, Naomi resembled the Steins more than the Crowders. She was very pretty, but in a dark, quick way. Ruth had always had—and still does, on the last day of her seventh decade—a languid air about her, an economy and ease that make what she does appear much more simple than it really is. Harry could see, in those first few seconds, that Naomi had the more theatrical genes of the Steins—more movement, a face less able to hide anything.

Naomi was already smoking a cigarette when she came inside, and Harry wondered how an ex-Olympic champion could take up such a habit. Already he wanted to lecture her, before his fatherhood was even acknowledged.

She looked harried, and there was a slight sheen of perspiration on her high brow. She didn't take a seat right away, but asked a waiter something and then disappeared in the direction of the ladies' room, her quick searching glance missing Harry in his dark corner.

Five minutes later she came out, not smoking now, better composed. In those five minutes, the last two tables in the room were taken, and she was standing there, probably debating whether to take a seat at the bar, maybe wondering if her father had stood her up again.

Harry left his half-empty scotch at the table and walked the 20 feet that separated them. Her back was to him, and she jumped when he tapped her lightly, hesitantly, on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” he said in a voice as unsteady as his legs despite all the times he had rehearsed the moment in his mind, “but can Randall Phelps buy you a drink?”

She took the hand he extended and followed him silently back to his table.

That evening, first at the Algonquin and then at dinner, they talked for hours, both amazed that they were so easy with one another, although they were aided by alcohol, and they did keep one subject, The Subject, safely locked away for the most part. The Princeton Club and the Algonquin were right off the diamond district, and Harry had bought her a gift, a necklace she opened and then said she couldn't keep, for fear her husband would think she was having an affair. (In reality, she told Thomas about the real nature of Randall Phelps as soon as she returned. She kept the necklace and he kept the secret from Hank and Paul, whom Thomas hardly ever saw.)

She smoked half a pack of cigarettes and drank a little. Harry kept the scotches coming.

“Do you always drink so much?” she finally asked him, as blunt as any Stein aunt at a family gathering.

“Do you always smoke so much?” he asked back. They looked at each other and started laughing. They fed off each other's laughter until the people at the nearest tables began giving them sideways glances of irritation. It occurred to Harry that it was the first time he had seen his eldest child either laugh or smile.

“I asked you first,” she said when they had composed themselves, so he told her no one in Richmond, Virginia, could drink as much as Harry Stein without getting knee-walking drunk. And she told him no one in Denver, Colorado, could smoke as much as Naomi Crowder Ferrell without dying of lung cancer.

They talked of Ruth more than anything else, she being their common bond. The only time the conversation drifted dangerously close to the Great Unspoken was when Naomi made a disparaging remark about how hard Ruth had driven her as a child.

“If I have children,” she said, stubbing out a cigarette hard in the ashtray, “I swear to God I am not going to push them. I am going to let them have a real childhood.”

Without thinking, sucker-punched by the scotch, Harry noted that Ruth had been trying to do the work of two parents.

“And whose fault would that be?” Naomi said, registering what seemed to Harry very close to a sneer.

There was nothing he could say.

Naomi shook her head.

“I'm sorry, Mister … Harry … Mister Dad, whoever the hell you are. You've told me how it happened. Mom's told me how it happened. I don't blame you, not really. It's just that I've been pissed off about this for so long, just mad at the world. I've had this image of some worthless bum who left Mom and me to shift for ourselves. Then, when she told me about you, and about the money and all, it required some rethinking.

“And then I meet you, and you're not a monster or anything. But dammit, you should've been there. You really should've been there. I need to be angry at something.”

By then, they had finished dinner and were having a couple of cognacs.

He moved his chair so that he was sitting right beside her. He offered her his right arm.

“Hit me,” he said.

“Hit you? Why?”

He took off his jacket.

“Just hit me, right here on the arm, as hard as you can.”

“Why?”

“Well, you look like you need to hit something, and maybe I need to be hit.”

He wasn't sure she would do it, and when she did, he wasn't prepared for the strength of a woman who had spent the majority of her life engaged in serious physical activity. The chairs in the Park Avenue restaurant were more stylish than sturdy, and Harry had, even by his standards, drunk a prodigious amount. When she punched him, it rocked him backward hard enough that he lost his balance, and then he was on the floor, scrambling to pick up his jacket while Naomi tried to help him up.

They got the bill and paid it almost as quickly as the maitre d' wanted them to and then staggered, weak with laughter, out the door.

They walked for 20 blocks, in places where Harry figured they shouldn't have been walking after dark. They agreed to be friends. They had dinner again the next night and then saw each other twice more the next six years. They would talk occasionally, though, office to office and then at her home after Grace was born. They wrote. They stayed in touch.

They did not become best friends, nor did they become father and daughter in any traditional sense. It is appropriate to Harry that she calls him by his first name. Nowadays, they sometimes talk on the phone. He does get Father's Day cards, and he does remember her birthday, but he always did.

Tuesday afternoon, Harry goes to take his much-coveted afternoon nap. Paul and Tran are planning to drive the rest of them down the coast to Seaside, an instant-Victorian village on the Gulf east of Sugar Beach.

Naomi claims she isn't feeling well, though, and says she thinks she'll pass. Harry can see that Ruth is disappointed. Maybe we shouldn't go, either, she says to Paul. That hurricane is out there somewhere. Paul reminds her, though, that the Weather Channel has the storm pointing more toward Louisiana, maybe even Texas, and a good day out to sea even from there.

“They can change course, and they can speed up,” she mutters. But he points out that the sun is shining. How bad can it be?

Not wanting to be a poor guest, she goes along.

Paul leaves Harry the house key in case he wants to go for a walk along the beach. Fat chance, Harry thinks as he waves goodbye. He is dead on his feet; they are still backing out the driveway when he turns to head for the bedroom. Naomi is already inside, in her room.

Harry is not yet asleep, lying on his back the way he can't when he shares a bed with Ruth, because of his snoring, when he hears a tapping, so light he thinks at first he is dreaming it, and then he hears Naomi's voice.

He tells her to come in.

He can see why she begged out of the trip to Seaside. She doesn't look well at all.

Harry swings his legs off the side of the bed, and she sits down at the other end.

“Harry,” Naomi begins, “my shrink says I shouldn't hold things in.”

Suddenly, he is wide awake.

TWENTY-FOUR

Naomi asks Harry if she can light up. He tells her secondhand smoke holds no fear for him these days. She goes looking for something to use as an ashtray and comes back with a seashell.

When she has settled again on the foot of the bed, she says she isn't telling him this because he is her father.

“I guess,” she says, shrugging, “that I just need practice telling it to someone who isn't a psychiatrist. And I don't believe I could ever tell this to Thomas.”

She puts her left hand around her right wrist and guides the cigarette toward the shell on the bedspread.

Harry thinks he knows how this story ends, but he knows that Naomi needs to tell someone, and he is willing to be that someone.

“When I was a little girl,” she begins, talking slowly and stopping to clear her throat, “I thought that if I worked hard enough and always made straight A's and ate my vegetables and went to church every Sunday and never lost a swim meet, that everything would always be good. And I thought Momma would always be there to protect me, to make sure nothing bad happened. She said she and God would look after me.”

“Well,” Harry says, “nobody can be there all the time.”

Naomi shakes her head. He can feel the cold her smile transmits.

“Let me tell you how I lost my faith, Harry.”

The spring of 1957 was late in coming. There would be a deceptively warm spell, then it would turn rainy and cold, then warm, then cold again.

It rained so much that the swamp rose all the way up to the railroad tracks. If the bed for the Sam and Willie line hadn't been built four feet above the normal high-water point, a serendipitous levee, Kinlaw's Hell would have spilled out all the way to Henry and Ruth's front door, all the way past Jane and Charlotte's house into the Beach Road.

On the last Friday of April, some of the high school students downriver and along Turpentine Creek were cut off by flooding, so school was canceled. Since the elementary school to which Hank and Paul went was just for the town children, they were not spared.

“But then, the day cleared off and it seemed as if the temperature rose 20 degrees,” Naomi says, looking out the window. “Mom had already gone to work, but she didn't expect much business, with half of her customers bailing water from their houses, so it looked as if I had a day off. I didn't get many of those, let me tell you.”

Henry Flood was at loose ends that Friday, too. It was, as the expression went in Saraw, too wet to plow. There apparently wasn't enough action at the pool hall or the store to sustain his interest, because he was back home by 11 that morning.

“I'm not sure he even meant for it to happen,” Naomi says. “He might have, but I doubt it. He never seemed to plan much of anything.”

Naomi tried to stay out of his way. They didn't have a television yet, but she had been given a record player for Christmas. She was in her room; she remembers she was listening to “Blue Suede Shoes.” He didn't even bother to knock, simply walked in, the way he had always done. He had his tackle box with him.

“Let's go fishing,” he said. It was not a request. Naomi said she took the needle off as quickly and gently as she could. Henry, in his moods, was fond of breaking things.

Naomi had been fishing with Henry a few times, but always either with her mother or with Hank and Paul. Henry knew the waters of Kinlaw's Hell better than anyone else in or around Saraw, and the children never knew where he had taken them when they got there, but the fishing was always good.