Harry & Ruth (33 page)

Next comes Paul, guiding Hank. Something Paul told Harry one time bobs to the surface of his memory. Paul had said swimming was the only sport at which he was sure he could beat his brother, probably because Hank couldn't bear the momentary terror of being completely underwater. Now, Paul is trying to jolly his brother along and avoid a full-scale panic attack in the water by a large, powerful man.

Tran swims beside Leigh, speaking to her in a language Harry has never heard before but which the girl seems to understand. She nods and paddles forward confidently in her life jacket.

Stephen and Harry come last. Harry manages to roll off the raft; he had just as soon stay, to see where they wind up, but they won't let him. His hands don't seem to work; he is having difficulty hanging on to the orange collar that lets him float in this unfriendly sea. His swimming days seem to be over.

The others are in front of them when Harry realizes, through the mist of his self-absorption, that Stephen is in trouble. Whatever he has broken is impairing his swimming to the point that he is losing ground against the current. The others are moving away, and Harry is too weak to make himself heard by the bobbing figures ahead.

Every time Stephen kicks, he cries out. He's trying to make it on his arms alone, and Harry can see it isn't going to be enough. Everything his father could teach him won't get him through this. Goddammit, Harry thinks, why couldn't you see your son needed help? Why are you putting this on me?

There just isn't enough, Harry sees. Not enough life preservers, time, luck, able bodies. What we're going for here, he thinks to himself, is the best possible outcome, trying to do the best we can.

Harry wants to tell someone he's far overdue for a nap. He giggles and swallows some saltwater.

Still, it is not an easy thing—mentally or physically—to slip the life jacket over his head and hand it to the boy.

“Here,” he says. Stephen shakes his head, swallowing Gulf water and coughing, but something makes him reach out for it anyhow. Harry summons the strength to help him slide it on.

Harry tells him, two or three ragged, breathless words at a time, that he will be alongside, that the old man is twice the swimmer he is. Just aim for the red roof, he says, and don't look back.

Harry wishes there were time to tell Stephen the story of his grandfather, the man who swam a river to get to America.

He stays above water for some seconds, long enough to see Stephen turn and follow the other bobbing forms in front of him. He looks back once, and Harry can swear that the face he sees there belongs to a sergeant who's been dead more than half a century. The sergeant, like Harry Stein himself, appears to be finally at peace.

THIRTY-TWO

Nov. 10, 1995

Saraw, N.C
.

Dearest Harry
,

We are home now
.

It's been so long since I've written you a letter that I hardly remember how to start
.

They let me out of the hospital last week, and Paul and Tran wanted me to stay with them in Atlanta for a while, or at least they said they did. But I'll recuperate better back here, in my very own house
.

They want me to eat more, but there's not a thing in the world that I want right now. I wish you could see me; yesterday, I walked into the bathroom, turned around and there was this starved skeleton of an old hag. I made Hank take that mirror down
.

The pneumonia seems to be gone. I'm not coughing up blood any more, although they insist that I keep taking these dreadful pills for two more weeks. My wrist has healed
.

But you know, Harry, it isn't the same. I don't think it ever will be
.

I'm resentful, Harry. This is supposed to help. The doctor, the psychiatrist they sent me to after they were able to move me from Florida up to the hospital in Atlanta, said it might. I told her about our letters on the third visit; she must have listened to me for an hour. I guess that's what they get paid to do
.

The next time, she suggested that I write you one more letter. I didn't see how that made much sense, and I think I called her a quack. This morning, though, I got up at dawn, and I saw the first real frost, turning the dead grass from here to Kinlaw's Hell into a diamond field in the first light. And I turned around to call it to your attention. That's when I started thinking about doing what that psychiatrist suggested
.

It's mid-morning now. I'm back in bed, sitting up and using the lap table. The light is playing on the wall we used to face together, and the naked pecan tree is making patterns on it with its brittle old branches
.

It's a good day for writing
.

Naomi swears we weren't in the water more than 15 minutes, but it seemed like hours. Nothing has ever frightened me so, Harry. I needed a lifetime worth of courage to keep going, although I'm not sure Naomi wouldn't have just carried me in on her back if it had come to that
.

There wasn't time to think of anything for a while. I'd swallowed so much water that when I came to, I was vomiting it and everything else up. They said Naomi gave me mouth-to-mouth. They had to carry me up the hill to the motel
—
I think Hank did that
—
because the storm was coming back
.

Lying across his shoulder like a sack of flour, I was looking backward, from where we'd just come. I saw Leigh standing, looking out at the waves. Tran was at her feet, where Stephen was lying, the life jacket still around him. Two men with a board were trying to move him. I wondered why Paul was still in the water, almost neck deep in it. Tran was calling to him, and I couldn't make out what she said at first. Finally, I understood
.

Leave him, she was shouting. It's too late. You'll drown, too
.

Hank wouldn't let me down. From his voice, I knew he was crying. You've got to come on, Momma, he said. There isn't anything we can do. Come on, Momma
.

We rode out the lesser half of the storm in that motel. There were others in there who had lost family, and there were others there more beaten up than Stephen. The people inside made more noise than the hurricane, grief feeding on itself
.

If it makes you feel any better, the doctor said he's pretty sure Stephen never would have made it to shore without that life jacket. Even with it, Paul had to help him in. He's still using a cane, but his hip will be fine
.

We all blame ourselves, Harry. We can't help it. The doctor, the one who told me to write to you, says it's normal, it'll pass
.

Stephen swears he's never going to the ocean again. He wants to move to Colorado and live with Naomi's family, as far away from the beach as he can get
.

He and I were in the same hospital, and one day he came to see me, hobbling down the hall on the crutches they'd just turned him loose with
.

We talked some, about this and that. He's not much of a talker, and I've been a little terse of late. Finally, he just burst out crying, sitting in the chair beside my bed, and told me how sorry he was that he took that life jacket
.

I told him what I think you probably would have told him, Harry, that you knew he wasn't going to make it without some help, and that you were too weak to make it anyway, even with the life jacket. “Why throw good money after bad?” you might have said. I told him you were a good man and a smart one, that you had figured all the angles. I told him what you always told me: Harry Stein doesn't make a play if he doesn't know how it will turn out (although we both know you broke that rule on occasion). The only way to pay Harry back, I told Stephen, was to live long and well with the life he gave you. We held on to each other for a while and then he left
.

Someday, Harry, and although this just came to me, I know it just as well as I know I'm sitting here in this bed, Stephen will marry and have a son, and he'll name him Harry. Maybe not Harold Stein Flood, but Harry for sure. I know that just as sure as I knew there was another hurricane in my life
.

Paul feels guilty about everything. I don't know if he'll ever get over this. But Harry, the only way he'd have taken it any worse would have been if Stephen had drowned. How could he have lived with that? We've all told him that it could have happened to anyone. Who could have predicted such a thing as that barge breaking loose? We tell him 12 people drowned on the island, and if the Sugar Beach Inn had been built a little more shoddy, it would have been a lot worse than that
.

By the way, you'd get a laugh out of this: They're already talking about another link, a drawbridge, for the other side of the island, a back door out. And you know what they're talking about naming it? The Harry Stein Memorial Bridge. They made so much of it in the papers and on TV. They interviewed Tran on CNN, and she did such a fine job of telling the whole world what you did. I don't suppose a state senator from North Carolina carries a lot of clout in Florida, but I have a few friends of friends, Harry. It could happen
.

I took Paul aside before we left. Look, I told him, I've spent my whole life afraid of the sea, terrified. I don't want you to be like that. What I want you to do is take that insurance money and build yourself another cottage at the beach. Maybe not right here, but on some beach somewhere. I promised him I'd visit him just like always, that the water was just the water and not some curse or ghost out there to haunt us. Truth is, I'm less afraid of it now than I've ever been. It's done its worst with me and mine. It can have me, if it wants me. Paul's fearlessness, his love of danger and challenge, is what has made him what he is. He wouldn't be worth a hoot as a father or a husband or a man if he changed from that. Paul will get better, although it may take some more prodding to get him back to the beach. I might let someone else do the rest of the prodding, though; my heart's just not in it, Harry
.

Hank punishes himself for not being a better swimmer. If he had been a better swimmer, there would have been one more life jacket, is how he figures it. I've told him, over and over, that you weren't going to make it, that I saw it in the look you gave me before I went over. That's my story, as they say, and I'm sticking to it
.

I told him the last thing I saw Harry Stein do was laugh
.

It was really fine of your family to let you be buried here, in the same cemetery with my parents, the same one I'll be in someday. I was glad Martin and Nancy came
.

There were some in my little church, maybe, who tisktisked about a Jew in the Crowder family cemetery, but they're the same ones who disapproved of us living together in our terrible sin, and nobody has the nerve to criticize me to my face anymore. I'm too old and too mean
.

One day, it will make me comfortable to look out my window and see your headstone, hard as it is now. I couldn't bear to think of you under some horizontal piece of rock, the kind people can step on or their dogs can go to the bathroom on, in some place far away. I didn't want you cremated in a vase in one of those little drawers. I'd have to visit you once or twice a year, no matter where you were, and it would make me sad all over again. Having you here every day will eventually make me immune to the pain
.

Eventually
.

And Naomi. Poor Naomi takes the blame, too
.

She wishes she had been nicer to you. (I tell her she was as nice as could be expected, under the circumstances.) She wishes she hadn't kept you outside until almost dawn (as if a couple of hours' sleep one the way or the other could have changed things; as if, I'm sure, you weren't the one doing all the talking). She wishes she would have insisted on getting you to a hospital when she first saw you at Sugar Beach, because she knew you were at death's door. (Why not spend the last few days with your family, I told her, at a nice beach?)

Of course, while I'm trying to make everyone else feel normal and halfway good again, my own guilt is like a sack of bricks on my back. Why didn't I marry you, when you came back to me and made my life worth living? Why didn't I take better care of you?

I've always been too stubborn, too proud of sticking with something just because I decided to stick with it, as if changing for the better would be a sign of weakness. “I'm not going to make Harry Stein feel like he has to marry me because I'm pregnant, and that's it.” “I'm going to have the baby, and that's it.” “I'm not going to leave my husband just because he beats me and terrorizes the children, and that's it.” “I'm not going to get married again, because the first one was such a disaster, and that's it.” My life has been defined by “that's it.”

After my parents died, my grandfather decreed that I would never be allowed anywhere near the ocean again. I was 14 and on a secret date before I ever returned to the beach. My grandfather's favorite expression, his response to any questioning of his authority, was “Because I said so.” People thought he was a strong man because he never relented. They say my father was like that, too. Heredity? Environment? Surely there's something I can blame
.

I realize that, as much as we talked and wrote, all those years, there are still things I never said
.

I never said how hurt I really was, beneath all the pride, that you didn't somehow deduce my pregnancy, my need for you, my willingness to stand beside you no matter what anyone might say, in your family or mine. I never totally forgave you for that
.

I never said how big a part that hurt pride played in my refusing to marry you when you came back
.

I never told you how secretly, maliciously glad I was, in that dark little corner of my heart where selfishness blots out all else, when your marriage didn't work out
.