Harry & Ruth (8 page)

Mercy, generous and energetic, was never overly attracted to any of Saraw's young men. After her siblings moved out, she stayed on and took care of her parents. She dated occasionally, but never very seriously. Once, she told Ruth that she couldn't imagine a man as good as her father.

Ruth's grandfather concocted the plan to save his family's honor. Ruth had made it clear that she would have the baby, that she would keep the baby, and if they wanted to put her out in the cold, she would manage.

By May, T.D. Crowder had enlisted a cousin who was a judge. This judge arranged to produce a marriage license, back-dated to February. Ruth McNair Crowder had secretly married Randall Phelps on Feb. 14, 1943. Randall Phelps had then shipped out to North Africa in April, from where he wrote back and said he had changed his mind, that he didn't want to be married any more. The judge, with T.D.'s help, invented a bridegroom and granted him a divorce on the same day. If anyone believed it, it was because Ruth had her secrets. If something like this could happen, it would happen to someone like Ruth. She hadn't brought Harry Stein to any more church socials or dances in Saraw itself. People knew she was dating other boys as well. She was known to go to dances in Newport and meet other young men (although a cursory investigation would have revealed that most of them were named Harry Stein.)

Ruth had no intention of taking some fictional last name for either herself or her baby, and the family said Ruth wasn't going to honor that sorry Randall Phelps by giving the child his name. If he wanted that baby to be a Phelps, they said, he could just come back and be a proper husband.

Ruth feared on occasion that one or the other of her grandparents had actually convinced themselves that Randall Phelps existed.

“The best I can tell,” Ruth wrote to Harry, “the departed Randall Phelps was a blond-haired Baptist womanizer from Ohio with a slight limp in his left leg, although Aunt Charlotte slipped up and said right leg the other day. He likes to play cards, and before the war he worked in a hardware store. He smokes Camels. It gets very confusing to Uncle Matty, who said the other day he wished I'd married ‘that pretty dark-haired boy' instead of ‘that damn Randall Phelps.' If Granddaddy hasn't made the delinquent Mr. Phelps real to anyone else, he has apparently made him real to Matty. I rather fear for the safety of any stranger he might come across with the name of Randall or Phelps.”

Despite T.D. Crowder's efforts, there was embarrassment enough when Ruth had a daughter on September 12. Even with the backdated marriage certificate, only seven months had passed since Valentine's Day. And Ruth only fed the rumors with her silence. She stopped going to church, and in July she quit her job at the lumber yard. The other Crowders living next door on either side, T.D.'s brothers and their families, more or less stopped talking to her, although they closed ranks and didn't talk about her, either.

Each grandparent assured her that her willful behavior would bring about the death of the other, and that she would pay for her sins on Judgment Day. Charlotte and Jane were kinder, and Matty only harbored a grudge against the Randall Phelps he couldn't quite remember, but whom he was ready to travel to England, by car if necessary, to kill.

When T.D.'s sister Goldie, then in her 69th year, died from pneumonia the following winter, Ruth's heedlessness was considered to be a contributing cause.

It was not Ruth's intention to make her family suffer, but she wasn't going to have an abortion, and she wasn't going to give the baby up. She did her crying mostly in private. By the time she told them all, in April, she had reached her own crossroads. For a week, when it was still her secret—hers and Harry's—she imagined herself not going to college, not moving to a big city, not living the life she could if she traveled alone. And she knew, after a week, that she could forgo all that. She just wanted the baby.

She narrated the various phases of her pregnancy for Harry, even as Gloria was filling him in on the week's social highlights in Richmond. It was not fair, Harry told himself, to think Gloria frivolous for this. He was sure she could be heroic, too, if circumstances had forced her to be.

If the Crowders suspected Harry was the father, they never said so outright, burying any suspicions under the ruse T.D. and the judge had invented. Ruth continued to withhold the father's name, and no one ever again mentioned the name of Harry Stein in the Crowder household.

Harry worried more about Ruth than about himself. Boredom and anxiety attacks were the imminent dangers. They would drill for hours at a time, trying to lose themselves in minutiae. They would hear of the Allied victories in North Africa and Sicily, and then the Italian mainland. The Italians surrendered by early September, and, trying to be tough outside so they might build up some calluses where it mattered, the college boys and store clerks and farmers complained bitterly about the lack of Krauts to kill.

Once in a while, though, Harry would turn a corner and there would be a young man, his age, just looking up into the sky, clearly wondering if he could do whatever had to be done.

Outwardly, Harry was impatient to kill. Inwardly, he couldn't always stop himself from thinking of what death the Nazis would reserve for a captured soldier who was also a Jew.

Usually, Harry saved Ruth's letter for last. This day, it took all his discipline not to tear it open while he was still among the anxious men hoping to be remembered. He knew her due date was near. He was stationed near Tiverton, in the southwest of England, when the letter came at last, the same day as one from Gloria.

It was her handwriting, on the envelope.

“Dearest Harry,” she wrote. “I (or we, I suppose, if you want to be precise) have a daughter. She weighs five pounds, eight ounces. Not so big, but then Grandma says I was no larger than that.

“The naming is all up to me, it seems, so I have named her Naomi. Naomi Jane Crowder. Ruth and Naomi, in the Bible (your part of it, Harry), were such good friends, and I know that this little girl and I are going to be just like that. With one true parent, I must be her friend.

“Oh, Harry. I wish you could know how good it feels, here holding her. It's as if I finally have a family. Some people would tell you I have been raised by six parents, but it isn't the same. There is a feeling, really just a memory of a feeling I can barely recall, of being in my father's arms or snuggling in bed with my mother, when she would let me, that all this has brought back. It isn't much family, by some standards, but it, or she, is my family.

“She looks like you. I don't tell anyone that, of course, and there is a certain amount of whispering about the baby being born with a full head of jet-black hair, since, as we all know, Randall Phelps was blond. Some day, maybe when she is 16, the two of us will take the train to Richmond and find where you work. We'll sit at a soda fountain across the street, and when you come out of your big building, I'll know it's you. And I'll point you out to Naomi. Maybe I will tell her you're her daddy, or maybe I'll just tell her there's a handsome man I used to know, but I don't want him to see me now.”

Harry's tent was facing a large open area, and soldiers were always walking back and forth; it was as if a never-ending parade was going past, people bound to save the world, somehow.

Harry Stein put his head down and really knew, for the first time, what he had done.

He started sending the money that day. Ruth never asked him to.

He wrote to Freda, in care of Mrs. Cameron's boarding house. She was five years younger, but even when he was in junior high, skipping the occasional day of school, swimming the dangerous currents of the James River with his friends, he could trust Freda not to tell.

He instructed the paymaster to send a certain amount to his sister every payday. At first, it was only 10 dollars a month, which Freda would forward to North Carolina. He explained about Ruth, although no more than he had to.

At first, Freda thought Harry was being “shaken down,” as she expressed it to him, but she always sent the money south, to Miss Mercy Crowder of Saraw, N.C. And she never breathed a word about it to anyone until after she married Artie Marks. Old Harry and Ella never knew about Ruth Crowder, or their first grandchild.

Harry's other gift, beyond ink on paper and the ten dollars a month that later grew to fifteen, then twenty and beyond, was the kind of advice only a person of will and vision could use.

A friend from Princeton had come through Richmond in the spring of 1942, not long before Harry enlisted. They had lunch at a diner downtown. Bobby Weinberg had become a stockbroker, and he was filled with the gospel of the dollar.

Bobby Weinberg took a paper napkin and a pencil and filled up row after row with numbers, showing Harry what it meant to invest while you were young. With the Depression only lately beaten back by war's prosperity, Harry had little use for such advice. No one trusted the stock market, and Harry had youth's contempt for thrift.

But Bobby did get his attention with one deceptively hard fact: If you invested a certain amount of money between 18 and 29, he said, you would have more money at 65 than if you started at 29 and invested until you were 65. This Harry could understand. He didn't do anything about it, having not yet developed either the need for or the love of money that drove Bobby Weinberg.

It seemed a good thing to tell Ruth about, though.

“I know you need money for many things right now, but if you can spare anything of what you earn or what I send,” he began, then told her what Bobby Weinberg had said.

In her next letter, Ruth thanked Harry for the advice. She had worked it out on the office adding machine, and Bobby Weinberg was right. She appreciated the inevitability of numbers. She never mentioned it again, just kept thanking Harry for the money that she didn't spend.

Harry's fall and winter and spring passed in the damp of England, while the day itself was hinted at, then rumored, then expected, and then finally there. On June 6, he was far enough back to avoid the worst. Several men who served with him died, on Omaha Beach and in the hedgerow hell that would haunt him worse than D-Day itself. They seldom seemed to have a plan that could fully withstand the reality of German artillery, but somehow enough of them would survive and make it from Point A to Point B. War, as Harry saw it, required belief in a strategy coupled with the knowledge that it would, at some point, have to be utterly, hopelessly abandoned.

Harry Stein's luck seemed always to hold, though. He was only shot the one time, he didn't step on a land mine, he didn't freeze to death or even lose a hand or a foot in the coldest winter any of them would ever live through. The days never seemed to end, but then, all at once, a whole season would be gone. Summer, fall, winter, another spring. Harry can remember the cold, the second-hand foxholes that still smelled like someone else's death, the killing. Other than the clinging hands of Sergeant Eldridge Stevens, though, it has all blended into a merciful haze, a melange of mud and ice, fatigue and fear.

And he remembers when it all ended, deep in Germany. They stayed drunk for two days, and when he woke up one morning, staring at a rainy sky, he saw that it was almost summer again.

Ruth's letters kept her alive in his mind, made her grow, even. Without them, she might have receded into his memory, an imagined creature who once seemed perfect only because the world was so new. And already, he was finding that there were things he needed to express that were best revealed to someone other than Gloria, whom he loved, God knows, but sometimes it was better just to tell Ruth instead.

Where was the harm in that?

EIGHT

“There were days,” Ruth wrote Harry after he went home to Richmond, “when I envied you, out there saving the world while I changed diapers and kept books.”

Ruth had moved into a one-bedroom apartment over McCrory's dime store in Newport in January of 1944, as soon as she felt she and the baby were strong enough. Jobs would be plentiful for the next couple of years.

No act of blatant cruelty drove her to seek her own way with a four-month-old in tow. It was the looks, even in her own home. She was tired of the women crying in their rooms and of T.D. going into another part of the house when she came in carrying Naomi. She had stopped going to church, her old friends didn't seem to know what to say to her, and they had already filled her job at the lumber mill. It was time to move.

“Naomi has never been a problem,” Ruth wrote Harry after he sent $50 for his daughter's second birthday. “I love her more by the day. She's already talking up a blue streak, and when I look at that curly jet-black hair of hers, I see Harry Stein, straight up and down.”

The letters weren't always so cheerful. Sometimes they just started out, “Harry,” and these would barely be legible, written by a young woman, half asleep, trying to do one more thing at the end of an 18-hour day.

In Newport, though, she thrived. She got a job as a bookkeeper in the shipyards and then was promoted to office manager. She was amazed then, as she would be all through her life, at how disorganized most people were. Even before the baby, even as a girl, she knew what she was doing and when she was doing it. She found it easy to direct others, because she came to understand that others needed directing.

She made friends with other young women, some also rearing children by themselves. In truth, they raised each other's children. She went to an occasional movie. She ate out once a week, three weeks out of four, at the Coastal Queen Hotel. The other week, she kept her friends' babies in addition to Naomi and they brought dinner back to her. After T.D. gave her a second-hand Plymouth for Christmas of 1944, as a peace offering, life got a degree or two easier.

By the end of the war, she was receiving $15 a month from Harry and saving at least half of it. She would, after that first year, go home to Saraw for Sunday dinner. They would cook ham, chicken, five vegetables and three desserts, and send half of it back to Newport with her on Sunday night.