Harry & Ruth (28 page)

Shortly after that they said goodbye. Harry drove into East Hampton and drank away a few hours of the endless northern night, brooding, examining every word she'd said, every word he'd said.

At one point, he leaned forward, unable to resist the urge, and banged his head on the wooden bar, twice. The bartender cut him off, and he went back to his cold, dark home.

He didn't write for two weeks afterward. He remembers that December now as a time of insomnia and long walks, broken by a short visit to see his children and grandchildren. By the time he got her next letter, the one he wasn't sure he would get, it was New Year's Eve. There was a return address, something Ruth had never employed before, in their clandestine days. He saw that she had returned to the home of her childhood.

“I'm glad you're still my friend, Harry,” she began. “It was so strange hearing you on the telephone. Forgive me if I sounded distracted. Believe it or not, I have wanted, more than once over the years, to call you, sure that you could talk my blues away. But there was always something holding me back, some feeling that calling you from some pay phone or from Mercy's would spoil it all. I don't know. Maybe we're meant to just keep on the way we've been. You seem to have a good life up there. And an impartial observer would have to say things are going well for me down here.…”

There wasn't much hope in that letter for a man who saw his one last chance to alter the past slipping away. But there was enough.

Harry didn't really think innocence could be regained; he knew that nothing duplicated was as good as the original. But he was willing, at this point, to try almost anything. The idea of Ruth, all of Ruth, had slipped into his brain in the last month, and he knew he couldn't live on letters any more.

And so, he packed all he could into the trunk and back seat of his BMW that New Year's Eve. Then he locked the door and left. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Moet et Chandon, a Styrofoam cooler and five pounds of ice. After that, he headed west and south, into the unknown.

He knew she could tell him to turn right around and go back to New York. She owed him nothing more, really. Still, he had to try.

It was nearly dark by the time he left. Almost anything would have been smarter than driving, he knew later, when he was rational. To get from Safe Harbor to Saraw required getting past New York City, and then the trip was just getting started.

Two hours past the city, nothing about it made sense to him, as he hummed along in 1975's last hours, listening to reality's mean whispers. She'd probably send him back, or at best tolerate him for a few hours. He might be appalled by the inroads time had made into his dream, and what would she think of Harry Stein at 56? They would be as tongue-tied as they had been on the phone five weeks before. He should have called first (but then she might have said, Don't come). He should have taken the train (but that was next to impossible on New Year's Eve). He should have flown (but he was still spooked by the Eastern crash at Kennedy a few months before). He should have, he told himself, forgotten the whole damn stupid idea.

“Philadelphia Freedom” had been big on the radio that year, and he heard it at least 10 times in the 13 hours between Safe Harbor and Saraw. Even now, Harry can't hear the song without a sense of excitement and foreboding.

He had a late dinner at a state-run hamburger joint in Maryland, popped two more No-Doz, filled the car up with gas and headed back into the night. He drove through Richmond, where many of his family would be at one party or another, without slowing down, the clock in the old train station beside the interstate eyeing him at car level. Somewhere in Southside Virginia, 1976 began. As he crossed under a bridge near Emporia, a shotgun blast from overhead greeted the new year and gave him a free half-hour of adrenaline.

He left the interstate sometime after 2 and realized he was exhausted. This was the longest drive he'd ever made in his life, and there was at least a three-hour stretch of mostly two-lane road between him and Ruth.

At the exit, he pulled into a Texaco station that had shut down for the night. He parked the car and went to sleep sitting up behind the wheel. He knew that if he lay down he'd be out until some irate mechanic or state trooper woke him sometime after dawn.

He did not even know he was asleep until he was awakened by the car horn after his forehead fell against it. He looked at his watch, its hands glowing in the dark like fox fire. 3:30.

He found enough change to buy a Coke from the vending machine outside, then washed down two more No-Doz and drove the last two-and-a-half hours into Saraw with the driver's-side window rolled halfway down to keep him awake. Two miles outside town, on the edge of Kinlaw's Hell, he passed a blur in the road and was two hundred yards away when he realized that it was some farmer's mule, solid as an oak tree, standing dead center on the white line, parallel to the side of the road. Two more feet, Harry thought, and I'm dead. He felt it was either a good sign or a bad one, but it surely was a sign.

He tried to convince himself that it would soon be light, or that the mule would wander off the road on its own. But Harry, if not religious, was at least superstitious, and he knew it was no day to let good deeds go undone. He turned his car around, hating the idea of going anywhere except forward, and parked beside the animal, which was standing as still as a statue. The mule was not easy to shoo, but after 10 minutes of clapping his hands and throwing rocks and pine cones, Harry managed to get it off the road and past the ditch, temporarily out of harm's way.

Returning from his good deed, he found that his car wouldn't start. The BMW, as stubborn as the mule in its refusal to obey Harry's pleas and threats, had been ridden hard and was willing to go no farther. There was nothing to do except walk.

It was not a bad morning for a walk, Harry conceded. After Long Island, it felt almost balmy with his heavy coat on; it was just chilly enough to clear his mind. He took the champagne from the cooler and finished his journey.

He soon crossed the northern tip of Turpentine Creek and passed the optimistic city-limit sign—“Welcome to Saraw. A Town on the Move.” Here and there, a light, perhaps not yet doused from the night before, broke the darkness between Harry and the swamp. It was 7 by the time he reached the town itself. He had been there once in 33 years, and it occurred to him that, while his memories of Ruth were enduring, he had only the most vague sense of where, specifically, she lived. He remembered it was on the west side of the Beach Highway, and he knew it was north of the river. Saraw had not grown much, in spite of the sign, but it had grown enough to confuse Harry momentarily.

Just when he thought he must have taken a wrong turn, somehow, or dreamed it all, he saw the church. The first light of the new year caught the tin of its steeple, in front of him and to his right, a Presbyterian beacon to guide Harry Stein.

He climbed the church steps, lugging his champagne, to where everything began. There he sat and watched day seep down the pillars of the sanctuary, then cover the frosted ground. Finally he saw it illuminate the old Crowder place, Ruth's house, not 200 yards away.

He leaned back on the cold stone to rest for just a moment, to wait for full light and get his second wind.

In his next moment of consciousness, she was there, over him like a dream. He thought he might have died, looking up at Ruth with pastel-bordered morning clouds scurrying past in the background.

“Harry? Harry Stein? Is it you? Have you lost your mind?”

Yes, yes, yes, he thought, I probably have.

He told her, his mouth feeling as if it were full of cotton, what exactly had brought him to Saraw, what he meant to do, how happy he could make her if she would let him. He did not say it smoothly, but like a man who is about to find out how the rest of his life turns out, who needs food, sleep and the right answer, in reverse order.

Ruth was wearing a red jogger's suit and large running shoes that made her look so capable and modern that Harry wondered if his dream wasn't already beyond him. But she was still beautiful, backlit by the sun, some gray in her blonde hair, a few wrinkles but otherwise an amazing likeness of the young woman he had last seen in that train-station cafeteria in 1954. She had been on her morning walk, and the first thing she saw when she turned the corner onto the lane was Harry, laid out on the steps as if dead or drunk, a bottle of champagne sitting beside him.

Harry Stein, his dice rolled, his cards played, his hash about to be settled, sat up and looked at his watch. 10:30.

“Help me,” he said, because he could think of nothing else. He held out his right arm. She bent and took his hand, and he rose unsteadily to embrace her. They fit each other when they hugged, as they once had. And she still smelled like Ruth. Once, in Safe Harbor, he had spent two weeks with a woman who had no discernible charms other than the fact that she smelled like Ruth Crowder.

Ruth had not expected this. She had spent December convincing herself that it was her self-imposed punishment to stay in the house of her childhood and grow old gracefully, dryly, if fate and the authorities allowed her to do even that much. She couldn't allow herself to think of sinful extravagances such as Harry Stein. She was not allowed that, she told herself. She didn't deserve that. Not if there was a God.

But Harry looked so good to her, even in his unshaven, bleary-eyed, rumpled current state. When he held his arm up toward her, as if in supplication, she could not turn away.

In Ruth's arms, Harry started to cry, something he had not done even on the cold, bare nights after Gloria left. Ruth led him back to the house, where they began to talk. Harry chilled the champagne, and they drank it all at the kitchen table before noon, out of two coffee cups Ruth pulled from the dish drain, with the grandfather clock ticking the morning away down the hall, its bells the only thing to remind them that time had not stood completely still.

They didn't stop talking for a month, and even then, neither of them felt even mildly sated. Ruth noticed that she was constantly hoarse that January, but there was so much time to make up, so much to say. She had an irrational fear that she would awaken and find Harry gone, as if it had all been a dream, and she wanted as much of him as possible before that happened, in every way possible.

At first, Ruth told Hank that Harry was an old friend, and Hank was kind enough not to ask any probing questions. But gradually, in a few days, the truth was too obvious to hide in even a large house.

“Momma,” Hank said to her at breakfast one morning, before Harry came down and before he would officially move into Ruth's room, “I think it's time you and I had that talk. About the facts of life.”

She tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn't, and neither could Hank.

“People are going to think you're crazy, Momma,” he said, shaking his head, still smiling. “They're going to run you out of the church.”

So she told him who Harry Stein was. By the end of the week, she had told Paul as well.

Ruth waited another week to tell Naomi that Harry had returned to the scene of the crime. When Naomi made a rare, unplanned trip from Denver to Saraw a few days later, Paul and Tran came down from Raleigh, and they were all together, asking questions at first awkwardly and then with the kind of frankness that Harry usually encountered when the Steins got together.

“So,” Paul said when he was introduced, “we finally get to meet Randall Phelps.”

While Naomi was there, Ruth and she went for a long walk one afternoon. When they came back, they both seemed to have been crying, but neither would talk about it afterward. The next morning, Naomi went back to Denver.

Harry, once he returned, did make Ruth happy. These days, he is warmed by that thought. Weighed against the pain in which he has participated, he has made one person more or less permanently happy (two counting himself), even if it did take him 33 years.

“Why didn't you act more interested?” Harry asked Ruth once they had slowed down enough, in bed and out, to analyze things. “I almost didn't come. I was so afraid.”

She rolled over on her side and pulled the kimono over an exposed breast.

“I don't know,” she said after a pause. “I worried that nothing could beat what we had. You came to mean so much to me, Harry, and my experience with men in the day-after-day flesh and blood has not been so good. I thought maybe Harry Stein and I would both be better off if we kept going to bed with memories. And then, after Henry died … Well, let's just say I thought everything was over.”

“What if I hadn't come, though? What if we had missed this?”

Ruth frowned.

“If you hadn't come down, I wouldn't have known what I was missing. If you had stayed up there, in my dreams, we would have always wondered, but we would have survived. If you don't know what you're missing, you don't miss it.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said, as he pulled her body on top of his.

TWENTY-EIGHT

This time, in Harry's old, old dream, Sergeant Stevens' face has been replaced by that of grinning Henry Flood. When he awakes, breathing hard, he has kicked the sheets off his side of the bed.

The wind isn't howling or shaking the windows, but he can hear it now. Something has changed.

Harry's pain, his semi-constant companion, is back, and he wonders if its absence won't presage something worse.

He slips out of bed as quietly as he can, goes to the bathroom to relieve himself and take more pain medicine, avoiding the mirror, then shuffles into the living area. By the various small illuminations—microwave clock, VCR, a night light by the kitchen counter—he can soon make his way to the room's most comfortable chair.

He is settling into it when he sees one more small light, from the tip of a cigarette on the deck.

With the wind up, Harry knows it is bound to be chilly outside, and he wants to stay where he is, hunkered down and quiet as a mouse, hiding from the pain.