Harry & Ruth (7 page)

When Harry appeared unexpectedly two months ago on the doorstep of the former Gloria Tannebaum Stein, mother of his children, forgiver of so much, he found that neither of them had the words to tie it all up neatly. They had their nervous cup of coffee. They talked, with her present husband in the next room, about the good times, pretending the bad never existed. Finally, silently, they agreed to not voice regret, to not curse fate or second-guess. To just get on with it. To compare notes on “the kids” and let it go at that.

When Harry left, telling Gloria that he could walk himself to the car (she didn't protest very much), his “See you later” sounded like a curse.

He knows he may as well get up. There is no sense in lying here in his own sweat, sleep moving farther and farther away.

He takes his pain pills and waves off his sister's halfhearted offer to accompany him. She goes back to her and Artie's bedroom while Harry, in his bathrobe and slippers, walks down the hall, stopping to give his aching bladder some relief. He continues into the living room, stubbing his toe on a chair and almost relishing some new, cleaner kind of pain.

It's chilly in the living room, the only illumination a streetlight shining through the bay window, but Harry has always had great night vision. He feels it kept him alive in France and Germany; his men tried to stay close by him when they were on the move after dark and before light, even after Stevens was lost. Some of his superior officers mistook this for devotion, but the men knew that, if anyone was going to see something move that wasn't supposed to move in those cold, murderous woods, it would be Lieutenant Harry Stein.

There's a recliner over in the corner, and there's a wool blanket lying on the couch beside it. Harry manages to ease himself into Artie's favorite chair, covers himself to the chin and lies there looking out into the darkness. After five minutes, he can see every detail of the room.

This new position, half sitting and half lying, somehow suits him. He gives the blanket a yank and reclines there, unable to sleep just yet (although the pain has lessened some) but glad to just lie still and see things.

Being still is something that has come late to Harry. One of the great, abiding forces of his adult life has been the fidgety sense that he was missing something, somewhere. Sometimes it worked for him, sometimes it didn't. Law school, he soon knew, would be too boring, but his energy level was a large part of the making of a young stockbroker. Going full tilt all day, always looking for the edge, never satisfied, then sometimes partying half the night with clients and other brokers—the restlessness defined his life and was the blame and credit for much that happened to it.

Gloria was a good sport for a long time, Harry sees clearly now, willing to forget a lot for a man she loved, a man who swore he loved her, a man with a future.

Part of it, he knew, was that nothing ever seemed as glamorous as a bar in the money district of a city, with everybody full of energy, everybody late in the afternoon just as they once were after a big game in high school, all full of themselves—look at me: I just made some schmuck $10,000 because I am the smartest, quickest guy who ever read the
Wall Street Journal
.

It wasn't a drinking problem, not in the sense of being unable to stop, not in the sense of drunk-driving citations or scenes in public places. Harry could stop. Harry could hold it. What Harry knew he had—and how could he tell Gloria this?—was an excitement problem.

He came to understand, slowly and painfully, that something was missing, that the past would be with him, would not recede.

Sometime before sunrise, Harry does drift off to sleep. At times like this, he is seldom granted unconsciousness until he abandons hope of achieving it. Then, it sandbags him. Later, he wakes up flat on his back, snoring.

This time, though, his slumber is interrupted by the voices of Freda and Artie. They are in the kitchen, down the hall, trying to quietly get Sunday breakfast going. Harry hears Artie curse softly, as if he's just spilled orange juice or dropped the toast.

Harry is undiscovered. They haven't gone into the living room yet, and he left his bedroom door closed. From where he sits, he can hear them well enough.

“… That's all I know.” Freda's voice. “He's pretty close to the vest, you know. Maybe I should call Ruth.”

As he hears Artie walking toward the living room, Harry feigns sleep.

“Maybe he should …” Harry hears his brother-in-law stop in midsentence. Then there's a long pause before Artie Marks tiptoes back to the kitchen and says something Harry's ears can't pick up. Before long, he can hear, feel Freda walking softly toward him, then stopping and whispering to Artie, “Look at him,” the way you might point out a child or a dog in unguarded repose. He feels the blanket being pulled to his chin.

Freda and Artie go back to the kitchen. Harry squints one eye open to see that they are out of sight, then shifts position slightly. In seconds, he is asleep again.

The next thing he knows, they're waking him.

“Hey, Harry,” Artie says. “Want some breakfast?”

“Sure. Yeah, thanks.”

“What's the matter? Is that guest bed too hard for you?”

“Nah. Sometimes I just need to move around, find another spot. Sneak up on the sandman.”

Harry yawns. He smells french toast and bagels and cream cheese. He is, he realizes, hungry.

They go back into the kitchen, and Harry untangles himself and shuffles back to his bedroom, where he tries to comb his sad hair and brushes his teeth.

When he comes back out, finding them in the breakfast nook overlooking a yard full of birdfeeders and hardwoods, Freda looks at him and frowns.

“Are you OK?”

“Sure. Slept like a baby.”

Freda knows he's lying. He appreciates that she doesn't cry, and he's glad he will only be making a short visit. He wanted to see Freda again, although they no longer seem to have much to talk about. He guesses he did it because he felt he ought to.

Old age, son of a bitch that it is, is not without its consolations, thinks Harry Stein. People care, more than he reckons they should. He revels in the balm of that care; he would not forfeit an ounce of it, no matter how ill-gotten.

SEVEN

Ruth still remembers most of what she wrote to Harry Stein that March day in 1943.

She tells herself that she tried not to make it sound pitiful, and that she tried not to make him feel guilty, although a larger part of her than she would admit wanted him to go AWOL, renounce all other encumbrances, to women and family and armies, and rush back to her side, tears streaming from his cheeks, vowing never to leave again.

“It seems a good time to write (if there is a good time to write someone who never writes back),” she began, then begged his forgiveness (but didn't throw the paper away and start again). She knew he might already have been shipped overseas. “At least, Harry,” she wrote, “let me know you are alive.”

She saw no point in telling him before he left. She despised girls who traded on weakness.

“What we did,” she wrote, “we did for my pleasure as well as yours. I knew it was foolish. (It makes me blush to think of some censor somewhere reading this, but it must be told.)”

She did tell him, though. She could not bear to do otherwise.

“You are the first to know (assuming this letter reaches you in a timely manner),” she wrote. “I wasn't sure when you left, didn't want to be sure, I suppose. Now, there can be no doubt. Soon, I will have to tell my grandparents and the rest. Of course you are the father. Do not panic. (You do not seem the panicky kind. Neither am I. Do not think that I am running around like a chicken with my head chopped off.) I claim no hold on you. You had your life planned for you before you ever came to Saraw, before that September night a thousand years ago. When we said goodbye, at that awful train station, I meant goodbye. But we also said we would write, that we would ‘stay in touch,' whatever that means.”

Ruth had already had three weeks to swallow the sometimes sobering, sometimes dizzying truth growing inside her. She was certain, at 17, that she had seen the one perfect complement leave her life on a northbound troop train. She had convinced herself, to stop the pain, that she would never, ever see Harry Stein again.

But still she wrote; she had to do something. And she did have a plan.

“I think,” she wrote that March, “we both know that we have met the Other Half, the half that would make the sum of us better than the parts. I know your family would never forgive you. I know you would break the heart of that girl back in Richmond. I know all that, and perhaps what I'm about to do is just my way of keeping a piece of you in my arms …”

Ruth wouldn't know for another three weeks, when she finally received a letter from Harry, that he and Gloria had already married. They did it quickly on Harry's two-day pass to Richmond before his unit was shipped to Texas for desert training that would never be used.

“Why didn't you tell me?” he wrote in that first letter to her, the one he had put off for weeks. “We could have done something.” But he wondered what, and a small, selfish part of him hoped she would take care of this, that it would somehow, magically take care of itself. He had met a girl he might love more than any other, ever, but life was long. He would, by dint of will, get over it.

“Why didn't you tell ME?” she wrote back, three days later. But she knew it was inevitable that Harry would marry the girl everyone expected him to. It was only a question of when.

Harry has come to believe that every life has a defining moment when a person does either what is right or what is expedient, but he wonders how many have faced such a well-marked intersection and taken such a wrong turn as he did in that dark second winter of the war.

If Ruth had told him in February that she was pregnant, would he have done the right and honorable thing? He has always wanted to believe he was not the kind of man who would have let a 17-year-old orphan in a small North Carolina town endure the pain and humiliation that logically would follow, had he known all the facts.

He knows the range of possible answers:

He might have looked for an abortionist, not an easy or safe route.

He might have, with some thought, taken her across the South Carolina state line for a quick marriage that they would have quietly ended, long distance, without Gloria or the Tannebaums or the Steins ever knowing, just to give the baby its father's last name.

Less likely, he might have done the thing he thought of doing a hundred times before he and Ruth parted at the train station, the thing you could look back on at the end of a long and eventful life and say, “When everything mattered, everyone told me I must not do this, but I knew in my heart I should, and so I did.” That is, he might have chanced the loss of his birth family and most of his friends and become a stranger in a strange land, the Jew who married the Crowder girl after he knocked her up.

He and Ruth both know, without ever expressing it, that the Harry Stein who lived in early 1943 would either have run away or, worse, stayed with regrets.

And so you have the riddle of Harry's life. He could have chosen one of two potentially very pleasant futures.

One would have been with the one girl he remained sure (when he was sure of little else) would complete him. He knows that, if he could only have gone off and lived his life with Ruth, braced against the scorn of his whole community back in Richmond, knowing that his parents bore the brunt of all that disapproval, it would have been a good life. He can see that now. They would have had friends, they would have had money. They would have been forgiven, in time. They would have had, even failing all that, each other.

Or he could marry Gloria, whom he had loved and liked for three years, and settle into the bosom of his family and hers, forgetting that he had ever known a girl named Ruth Crowder.

Either choice, though, required the chooser to forgo remorse, to forget the other path.

After a honeymoon weekend spent mostly with family and seldom alone, Harry and Gloria saw each other once more, in June, before his unit shipped out for England. He would spend a year there, in what seemed to Harry like an adult, black-comedy version of the summer camps of his youth, preparing for the vague something, the Plan that would save the world. They knew they could die, as much as young men ever believe such a thing, and it made their sorties into London, the courting and fighting in village pubs, all the more intense.

Harry was true to Gloria, though, in the flesh. He laughed at the stories of other officers, equally married, who came back to their base bragging of trysts in third-floor London walkups, with air-raid sirens going off in the distance, of drunken fistfights made comic by war's shadow.

But he did cheat. The letters, once he worked up the nerve to write Ruth back after he knew her secret, never stopped. For a while, he would write Gloria every time he wrote Ruth, but he realized he had more to say to the girl he left than the woman he had married. Before long, he'd taken the path of least resistance and was writing Gloria twice a week, out of guilt, and Ruth four times a week, because six or seven would have been unseemly.

In April, Ruth wrote that everyone knew she was pregnant, and that it would no longer be possible for Harry to send letters to her grandparents' address. No one knew who the father was, and no one, save Cousin Mercy, was going to know, if she could help it.

He was to send future letters to Mercy, who would tell her parents that she had met a soldier at Camp Warren who was crazy about her. It was meant to be a temporary solution, but Cousin Mercy never married. For many decades, people in Saraw were convinced that Mercy Crowder had a secret beau, who wrote her first from Army posts and then from Richmond, then later from Washington and Long Island. So the letters never stopped.