by Howard Owen
“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.
T.D. Crowder dropped dead in late June of 1945, halfway between VE Day and VJ Day. He was sitting in his office at the mill, and for a couple of hours, they thought he was just sleeping. They could see him through the glass, his chin down on his chest. But he had been known to nod off after lunch. He was entitled, being 75 years old and still showing up every day for work. He and Matty would walk over, T.D. going to his office, Matty to his own special woodworking shop in a little add-on building next to the railroad spur line.
After T.D. died, Sudie started having memory lapses, and she turned over most of the cooking and housekeeping to Jane, who served a dutiful daughter’s lifetime labor of love and was taken for granted as a reward.
There was no one left with the interest or know-how to look after the mill, and the Crowders soon sold it to Pembroke Lumber, which would keep it open for 10 more years of diminishing returns from forests whose oldest, best trees had long been replaced by scrubby pines.
Without T.D., his lifelong protector and friend, Matty got worse.
During the war, one of Ruth’s older cousins built a triangular diner to fit the three-sided lot where Turpentine Creek Road joined the Beach Road at a 45-degree angle from the northeast. Matty began spending time there, wandering over when no one was looking and sometimes making a nuisance of himself. Inevitably, he would launch into a tirade about “that damn Randall Phelps,” about how he was going to find him and kill him, even if he had to go all the way to Germany. To the end, Matty had it in his mind that Randall Phelps was hiding out in Germany.
When the war ended, so did Ruth’s tenure in Newport. “The problem is,” she wrote, “I did my job too well. When they promoted me to office manager, I replaced Will McLaurin, who went to the Navy. Will McLaurin, whom I have never even met, got back to Newport last week. Mr. Harper called me in two days ago and said he’d love to keep me, and there probably would be something else for me soon, back in bookkeeping.”
Bookkeeping, though, would have meant a step backwards and a cut in pay. And Ruth had something else she needed to do.
“When Momma and Daddy died, the rest of my family was all that stood between me and the orphanage,” she wrote Harry. “They did their duty, and now it’s my turn.”
Don’t do it, Harry wrote back. You could be so much, you could do such great things. Don’t plant yourself in Saraw.
But Ruth had made up her mind.
She had spent a week imagining life in Saraw, reading magazines for culture and taking care of her older relatives, raising Naomi in the same house in which she herself had been raised, reconnecting with the people who were her girlhood playmates.
And she thought she could do it. Ruth could, she was coming to believe, do anything if she had a little time to steel herself. She knew that those around her had always thought of her as flighty and a little spoiled, “used to getting her way,” but she knew more than they did. She had developed an orphan’s self-sufficiency, able to do whatever was needed, able to imagine great disappointment or hardship and then imagine living through it. It carried her through the loss of Harry, carried her through unwed pregnancy and single parenting, carried her back to Saraw and duty.
“I know what you’ve written me before,” she told Harry, “that I should get out of here and move to a real city somewhere. I know I could take care of Naomi whether I was in New York City or Saraw, and it sounds conceited, but I know I could make a living anywhere. I’ve seen enough dimwits making good government salaries around the shipyard to know that.”
She knew Harry was right when he told her no one would think any worse of her if she stayed in Newport or moved to a bigger city. Charlotte had told her as much.
Ruth was not returning to Saraw because she had to. She was returning because she ought to, and she knew the difference.
When she moved back, Ruth Crowder was 20 years old. Despite being as attractive as any girl in Newport, she had not dated since Harry left. When she lived in her small apartment with Naomi, she was constantly turning down offers to go out with the best of what men the war had not taken. She knew eventually she’d say yes, but not yet.
She had learned to sew well enough to make most of Naomi’s clothes. She filled her letters to Harry with the various firsts that would never excite her as much with her other children. She worried about pushing Naomi too hard, but she couldn’t stop herself. She wanted her to be the first to walk, the first to talk, the first to be toilet trained. She never had to scold her much, because Naomi seemed to be born sensing how much was expected. Harry expressed the opinion that first children were practice, and Ruth wrote back that she didn’t think that was one damn bit funny.
“Next thing up for Naomi,” she wrote Harry in early 1946, “is swimming lessons. I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but I am determined that my daughter is not going to live right next to the Atlantic Ocean and be afraid of it like I was. And the younger the better.”
She forswore many possibilities when she packed her belongings into the back of a pickup truck, with the help of a couple of male cousins, and moved back to Saraw.
Martin was born the day before Christmas, 1946. The Stein and Tannebaum families joked about the fecundity of the Stein seed. Harry had been home less than 11 months.
As a married couple, he and Gloria had so far known only war and pregnancy. They missed the newlywed phase where the attractive, charming, lovestruck young couple drinks champagne from shoes and dances until dawn, the way they did before the war. Gloria had a difficult pregnancy, and Harry went to a few parties by himself.
His father kept trying to interest him in law school again, but Harry had given up on that
in 1942, and four years in uniform had only made him more determined to go his own way. He’d made one grand concession for the general good, he thought but couldn’t say, and he was damned if he’d make another.
By May of 1946, with fatherhood approaching, Harry had to accept that the world was not going to forever buy him drinks and throw him parties because he’d once lived in a foxhole.
Harry had majored in English, but he had neither the talent for writing nor the patience for academia. Renaissance man that he was, he minored in mathematics; he’d always liked numbers. But what could he do with that? The idea of never going back to school, law or otherwise, appealed to him greatly. The family business was always a fallback position, but neither Harry nor his father really wanted him to spend the rest of his life in men’s furnishings.
“This I did so you could be something bigger,” Old Harry told him. Actually, it seemed to Harry that his father’s life had been a rather pleasant endeavor, hardly the orgy of abnegation recounted with damp eyes for the benefit of Freda and himself.
In June, opportunity came calling in the form of the return of Bobby Weinberg. He spent a weekend with Harry and Gloria, the three of them talking about the now-distant good times at Princeton and in New York before the war. Bobby had gone back to Wall Street after he was mustered out and claimed he was on the verge of making “a killing, an absolute killing.” Harry thought he saw something he might want to do, might be able to do. Bobby Weinberg wasn’t that smart, and even he was getting rich.
The day his friend left, Harry talked it over with Gloria and then made an appointment with Martin & Rives, one of Richmond’s oldest investment firms. He chose Martin & Rives because it was one of two firms in the city that possibly would employ a Jew to invest gentiles’ money. This Harry knew, without even asking, without having any idea where he’d first heard it.
Bobby and Harry actually had little in common except that they were approximately one-eighth of the Jewish population of their class at Princeton.
Jews roomed with Jews. If this was not so at the outset, it soon was corrected. There were no fights, no direct confrontations, nothing unpleasant, unless you objected to catching the punch line of a Yid joke as you came around the corner.
“We are the elite of the elite,” he once wrote Gloria at Mt. Holyoke in an uncustomary fit of bitterness. “Private clubs might be OK for the great majority, but we Sons of Israel, we’ll have none of it. I’m sure they hesitate to invite us only because they know we would turn them down. We are the utility infielders on the World Series champs, the cheap bungalows on Country Club Lane, the world’s tallest midgets.”
In June of 1946, Harry Stein was 27 years old, and other than working in his father’s stores and drawing a paycheck in World War II, his experience was almost nil. But Martin & Rives’ only Jewish broker, Mo Green, had been killed in the war, so there was an opening. Harry had a handsome face, a face Richmond’s old money could be comfortable with. He had a winning personality and Ivy League credentials. By the end of the week, he had begun his chosen profession: making other people’s money grow.
Harry was the fastest learner anyone in the firm had ever seen. And he could charm the clients, and his bosses. His years of being immersed in the clothing business, of listening to his father talk at the dinner table and on those long trips across the state, had given him a sense of style that had everyone else at Martin & Rives aping his choices in suits and shirts and shoes.
He could explain and understand the beauty of numbers, and he could recite Shakespeare and Milton. He could tell a joke, and he always knew which joke to tell to which client. They enjoyed talking to him even when they were losing money, which wasn’t often, because Harry was good. If the market dropped dangerously, Harry could keep the anxious from stampeding; he could convince them that it would come back stronger than ever. If there was a new trend in human life that promised a profit, Harry was soon an expert on it. He would see computers coming before anyone else; he would see Detroit going.
Even Old Harry had to concede, the day in 1957 when they made his son a partner, that Harry Stein was born to make people money.
“If it weren’t for your name,” Peyton Rives told him that day as they shared some very old Scotch, “I wouldn’t know you were Jewish.”
Harry knew he meant it as a compliment.
Harry and Gloria decided that Martin would remain Martin until he got big and rowdy, and then he would be Marty. He was a colicky baby, then an easy, large-eyed child who wanted to please, who cringed at raised voices. Harry thought at times that he was too malleable, that he ought to do something really bad once in a while—break a window, say “fuck,” something. But how do you encourage your child to misbehave?
When they get together now, Martin is still Martin. To Harry’s knowledge, he has never been Marty to anyone.
Harry thought Gloria was a good mother, and as good a wife as he deserved. She worried too much about everything with Martin, a little less with Nancy, who came two years later. At 4, Martin would cry when Gloria tried to discipline his sister, who was more of a handful than he had ever dared to be.
Gloria never knew about Ruth, until there was no option except to tell. Harry believed (would keep believing) that what he and his wife had was love, despite everything. Even now, he is almost certain, almost all the time, that it was a kind of love that they shared, and that he eventually ruined.
Harry had known Gloria Tannebaum since junior high. She was valedictorian at a rival high school, and she finished second in the school beauty pageant. She was graduated from Mount Holyoke (a member of her own excluded, exclusive group) in 1944, already married a year, robbed of her youth not so much by Harry as by everything.
They first dated when he was home between his sophomore and junior years at Princeton, but he had first noticed her when she was 13. Later, he would see her in her cheerleader’s outfit when his high school played hers, was aroused by her tan, perfect legs. They knew each other; they went to the same parties. But she always seemed to be going steady with one boy or another.
That summer, though, they found themselves both available and attracted. Everyone, in both families, was so pleased. Even if they had despised each other, it would have been hard to escape the path that led to that hurried wedding in February of 1943. Once they began dating steadily, neither Harry nor Gloria ever saw a point where not getting married was a feasible option, until he met Ruth.
If Harry’s life were a movie, he wrote to Ruth one day many years later, it would be entitled, “It Would Have Been a Wonderful Life If It Hadn’t Been For That Schmuck Harry Stein.” You’d have all the flashbacks, he told her, showing what everyone’s lives would have been like if Harry hadn’t been there to screw them up:
Here’s Gloria Tannebaum Wolff, married more than 50 years to the same devoted husband, the incredibly rich and loving capitalist Howard Wolff. She and her husband are surrounded by their four children and 11 adoring grandchildren, in front of their Georgian brick mansion overlooking the James River. Gloria has thrived as an interior designer, and she has never been to a therapist.
Here’s Ruth Crowder Johnston, still lovely and celebrating this year her 50th year of wedded bliss with Malcolm Barnwell Johnston, former governor of North Carolina, whom she met when she was a student at Flora MacDonald College and he was in law school at Duke. She’s beloved by an entire state, the Queen Mum, but most especially she’s loved by her husband, three children and nine grandchildren. None of her children holds a grudge against her; she has never been struck in anger.
“Don’t take me back, Clarence,” he concluded the letter. “Give everybody a break.”
By the summer of 1947, Harry and Gloria were more settled than he could have imagined. Their son was taking his first steps in the new brick Cape Cod with its treeless yard, theirs thanks to a downpayment by their parents, a mile from his old neighborhood. Harry was on the verge, already, of pulling down more money than good brokers 10 years his s
enior.
He had managed to compartmentalize Ruth. Every Thursday, he would stay 45 minutes after work, when he knew he should have been drinking with present and future clients, to write her. It wasn’t as if he planned to someday abandon Gloria and Martin, but still he couldn’t let go. He thought he would, in time; he was just hanging on to his options. During the week, reading the newspaper or sitting on a park bench, he would see something and think of how it would amuse or touch Ruth in his next letter.
At home, he was able to more or less shut her out of his life. Although the Crowders got a telephone after the war, neither he nor Ruth ever called. That would have broken the spell, Harry believed, and Ruth told him, decades later, that this was how she had felt, too.
She sent him a photograph, in 1945, and he sent her one from Germany.
In his, he was kneeling in front of a German sign, a friend on either side. His cap was off, and his black hair was long and bushy. He was squinting into the sun, the eyes Ruth loved squinched almost shut.
In hers, she was leaning against someone’s car in what appeared to be a churchyard, her hands primly together in front of her, smiling at someone to the photographer’s left. She was just as beautiful as he remembered, the baby fat in her face melted away but the beauty not diminished a whit.
She would put his photo, Harry at war, with the letters, under lock and key. Sometimes, over the years, she would take it out and look at it, when she was alone.
He would keep her picture, tucked away in the back of one wallet after another.
Most of the pictures she sent, though, were of Naomi. Those he kept in the locked trunk in his office.
Through the sober, back-to-work year of 1946, the letters got more daring, more full of the heat neither Harry nor Ruth had experienced since he left. He started it by writing about all the things he wanted to do with and to her, including some they’d never tried in their brief season together, some he’d never tried with Gloria. To his amazement, she responded in kind, sometimes going farther than he had. He would read them at his desk, often more than once, and they always made him hard.
