Harry & Ruth (26 page)

“I have promised myself,” she wrote to Harry after the elections that year, “never to look back, but as I get older, my mind turns more and more to the rear-view mirror. You don't know how frustrating it was to me when you and Gloria divorced. I felt as if I hadn't done the right thing at all, after telling myself for years that I had. If I was going to give you up, there at least ought to have been some happiness somewhere. You and Gloria owed me that, Harry. Otherwise, it was a sacrifice for nothing …”

By the time she wrote that, the careers of Harry Stein and Ruth Crowder Flood were headed in decidedly different directions.

After the breakup, after Harry left Washington and returned to Richmond, he began what he came to think of as his Moses years: wandering around in the wilderness, never at home anywhere. The cottage in Safe Harbor became his refuge, and he would move a little more of himself there every year, but he didn't feel truly comfortable in either place. He found that a man of his age who was heterosexual, had his own teeth, made a good salary and weighed less than 250 pounds would never want for female companionship, but he never stayed with one woman more than eight months, and, usually, she left before Harry did, aware of what a dead-end street she was on.

Harry spent as much time as he could with Martin and Nancy, but he sensed, without either of them ever actually saying it, that they felt (Nancy more than Martin) some of the betrayal that had driven Gloria from him, a belief that Harry Stein had endured his wife and children while wishing he were elsewhere. Harry thinks it would have been better if one of them would have just come out and said it, so that he could have told them how untrue it is, how much he cherishes all the Little League games and dance recitals, how much he regrets all the ones he missed.

The post-Washington years were flush times for Harry, if money was the gauge. His time in Washington had ended badly, but few knew even the barest details of how he lost his ambassadorship. He found that he was greeted back in the Richmond financial community, by peers and investors alike, as a bright star that had voluntarily come back to shine upon them once again.

How, Harry often wondered, when he thought of his long-ago career choice, did you not become rich if you were a white male, got into the stock market right at the end of World War II and followed it through the 1970s? He figured a broker had to be either an alcoholic, a drug addict or a hopeless gambler, and these were not his vices. Gloria remarried, Martin and Nancy finished college, his parents both died and left him and Freda a considerable sum of money, and Ruth was so well-off she could have sent money back to him. In Harry's darkest days, he had the not-inconsequential solace of wealth.

He followed the fortunes of Ruth Crowder Flood, like some soaring stock that once he could have owned if he'd only had the courage.

Never did he surrender, squirreled away in the back of his mind and never expressed to anyone but her, his dream of them, together.

And he drew bittersweet pleasure, like some football fan watching through binoculars from the cheap seats, in the rise of Ruth.

She had always wanted to go back to college. In 1966, with Paul already a freshman in high school, she started taking classes. The farm by then was more of a hobby, something that brought in a few dollars, worked by a man who rented it and four others nearby.

Henry grew vegetables for the grill and to sell at a roadside stand, but the main source of income was the grill itself, which thrived with the vacation traffic that caused the state to four-lane the beach highway in 1963.

The roads were full of newly-minted middle-class families headed for the ocean, the fathers steering late-model Buicks with one hand, pointing out prominent landmarks like the Fairweather Grill and moaning about how easy it would have been to buy that lot at White Oak Beach back in '55, envying the prescient ones (or the ones with money) who did so. The old, old story that Harry heard so often from the would-be wealthy, of how the poor don't get rich: What seems like a million now will seem like a hundred someday, but it still seems like a million now, and few ever discern what's going on until later.

And so, Ruth sent herself to college. It wasn't a full-blown midlife crisis; she still had to be around most of the time, just to make sure the help didn't walk off with the Fairweather Grill, bit by bit. She took a couple of courses a semester at the Newport branch of the state university and a couple of summer-school classes each year, some on campus, some by correspondence. She spent much of her waking time on schoolwork and at the grill.

Ruth's major, which Harry considered to be as worthless as a sand pit in the Sahara, was English, the same one he had chosen more than 30 years before. Why, he wrote, would you choose English? Why not business administration? Why not computer science?

“Harry,” she wrote back, “I'm going at this with a good heart and all my strength.” Enough said, he responded.

She took six years to graduate, finishing in the summer of 1972. She studied for her final exams while she was campaigning for the state legislature.

She was a small-town mayor with little money behind her, and even mediocre Republicans were riding Richard Nixon's coattails into office. But the incumbent, a Democrat, was retiring, and Ruth was the obvious choice to run. Her opponent, a lawyer from the city, spent more, but Ruth had built up a lifetime of trust and good will, even among many who had fought her over integration.

And, she had the support of the
Newport Times
, the only daily newspaper in the county. The editor had gone to high school with Ruth. Over the years, he had lunch with her perhaps twice a year and called her from time to time to get her read of issues. Bobby Guy was a liberal, by Pembroke County standards. He picked his spots, and when he endorsed Ruth Crowder Flood, it made the difference.

“Where would I be, Harry,” she wrote that year, “without old friends?”

And so, it was a good time for Ruth, Henry Flood notwithstanding. In the same year, her first grandchild, Geneva Grace, was born, she received her college degree, and she was elected to state office. Hank was coping better and was able to take a couple of correspondence courses a semester. And Paul was back from Vietnam, unscathed, married and going to North Carolina State on the GI bill, despite Ruth's protestations that she should be paying his way.

“You know,” she wrote Harry that summer, “I feel bad about Paul. With all the uproar that always seemed to hover over this place like a thundercloud, Paul just sort of got lost. It was because he didn't need the attention, but just because you don't need it doesn't mean you don't want some once in a while. Sometimes, with all the squeaky wheels in the Flood household, little Paul just got overlooked. It isn't fair, how your reward for not being a bother is being ignored. Oh, I wish I could go back and do some things differently.”

Don't we all, Harry wrote back.

Paul enlisted in the Marines immediately after high school in 1969. Ruth was dead set against it; she and her friends could have gotten him into any National Guard unit he wanted. Better yet, she told him, why not go to college and wait it out? Or the Navy or Air Force—even the Army would be better. Very few were willingly going into the Marines in 1969. There were the brave and the foolhardy, and the ones who, without thinking, did what their fathers had done in 1942 and their grandfathers had done in 1917.

Harry remembers stories about Marine recruiters reduced to showing up at Army induction centers and going through, like jackals stealing bits and pieces of the lions' prey, snatching every fourth or fifth boy. Draftees under the mistaken impression that their luck couldn't get any worse were tagged for Parris Island.

But Paul wanted the Marines. He was the third child, trying to carve his own niche. He had been a B student, strong in math and science, a boy who never read a book unless it was assigned. He was a tenacious athlete, but he knew in his heart that Hank would have been much better. He was nearly as sick of that knowledge as Hank was.

Henry Flood, the old Marine, was all for it. Hank had never been a serious consideration for the draft, and Henry would sometimes, when he had been drinking, remind him of that. Henry at last had someone in his family aiming for the one occupation at which he had truly succeeded. And he had some basis for doing the final, unforgivable thing an old hero can do: He bragged. He told stories he'd kept corked inside him for years. And kept telling them.

“Harry,” Ruth wrote, “when he first told a bunch of his cronies at Payton's Billiards about what it was like going into those holes, not knowing whether there were Japanese in there or not, everybody stopped and listened. Nobody had ever heard him tell those stories before. Even drunk, he wouldn't tell them.

“Roy McGinnis was there, and he told me nobody said a thing at any of the six tables, and you could see people edging closer so they could hear. Next day, it was all over town, and I think it was good. It reminded people of what Henry Flood was, and what made him how he is now.

“But that one telling, or maybe Paul going to another jungle in another war, opened up some kind of dam, and now he can't stop talking about it. He'll take his medals out, the ones he's had put away for years and guarded like I guard your letters, and show them to people, and sometimes he forgets he's already shown them. He tells the same stories over and over, and they are starting to stretch a little bit, the way stories do sometimes. He's started getting interested in the American Legion and the VFW. He used to shun those people, said they were just a bunch of braggarts and blowhards.

“The sad thing is, a part of me doesn't want to shut him up, even when he's boring me, even when I can see other people trying to find some excuse to get away. You see, it's the only time in years that I've seen him really happy, the way he was when we were dating and for a while after we were married.”

Ruth worried herself sick over Paul. “God forgive me,” she wrote, “but almost as much as death I fear him coming back like his father.”

Paul saw many others get killed, and he did some killing himself. He doesn't talk much about Vietnam now, but to Harry's eyes he doesn't seem to have suffered much if any for his days in the jungle. Harry believes there are some who do, in spite of everything, become better for having their lives placed in daily jeopardy at an early age.

In World War II, Harry had fought alongside lawyers and plumbers, accountants and farm boys. Paul's platoon was mostly peopled by the ones who couldn't get out or the rare ones who didn't exercise that precious option. That's what Vietnam was, for Paul and for Harry's own Martin—optional. Harry's war was as compulsory as breathing.

If every mother's son had been fair game for Vietnam, Harry has argued more than once, the U.S. might have won, might have dropped the Big One and had a confetti parade down Fifth Avenue.

We'd still have been wrong as hell, he thinks, but at least we might have won.

Paul came home in 1972 somewhat older than his chronological years, ready for college, and married.

“Paul has married a Vietnamese girl,” Ruth wrote that spring. “At first, I was taken aback, but who couldn't love Tran? She won my heart right away, although I am afraid she does too much for Paul. She has lost most of her family to that damnable war. If I'd lost all she has, I'd be locked up in a room somewhere, no windows, just me and my strait-jacket. But she just goes on, learning English, smiling, working until somebody makes her stop.”

Paul majored in computer engineering when few others were. His fortune, after all the years of Henry Flood's terrorism, of existing in the shadow of his big brother and big sister, of tiptoeing past land mines and working his way through college while married to a woman who depended on him for everything in her strange new world, was made rather quickly.

He seems to Ruth to be unfazed by either Vietnam or his early life. There are no traumas for Paul, no flashbacks to little Susanna's death or friends' heads exploding from sniper bullets.

“Momma,” he said once, “if I ever take the time to sit back and think about everything, maybe I'll have myself a nice little nervous breakdown.”

He was laughing when he said it.

Ruth says Paul is the Flood family glue, although Harry argues he is only Son of Glue.

As for Tran, she has changed little in the 23 years Ruth has known her. She abides little nonsense from her children, but it is obvious she would chew her arm off to save either one of them from harm or pain. Voices seldom have to be raised at Paul and Tran's.

Harry envies them their courage and judgment. Often he thinks that Paul and he were faced with the same dilemma: A young man, a soldier, in a strange land meets and falls in love with a woman who is so different from anything in his previous life that he doubts his instincts, hesitates to do what he feels is right, teeters there on the edge like a baby bird peering out over the lip of the nest.

Once Harry asked Tran, in a rare moment alone, if it wasn't hard, coming to another country where she didn't know the language or the culture, leaving everything behind.

She looked at him as if he were a child asking why water is wet or the sky is blue.

“I don't have any choice,” she said. “What I have back there is gone. Only one way for me to go.”

And then she went back to cleaning the kitchen counter, which to Harry already looked extremely clean. She was humming a tune he didn't recognize.

TWENTY-SIX

Tuesday night, Ruth and Harry stay outside until after 11, cool but not cold in their sweaters. Harry tells her that they must look like a couple of old geezers on the deck of a cruise liner.

He is amazed at how energized he is—relatively speaking, of course. The days when Harry Stein could dance and party all night and then work the next day are so far gone that he believes sometimes he must have stolen another man's memories. He doesn't like to tell stories from those salad days any more, because he is afraid that the listener, if he didn't know Harry then, will see a sad old man trying to impress those who still possess what he might or might not have once had.