by Howard Owen
Occasionally, he will take one from the chest and read it now, and they still stir him. Did he ever engender such heat?
“I am in bed now,” she wrote him late that year, in response to a fantasy he had shared with her involving an act that was illegal in either of their states at that time. “I am naked beneath the covers, and I am wet. The sheet below sticks to me. It is so dark I can’t see my hand in front of my face, except of course it isn’t in front of my face. I hear the doorknob turn and then the sound of your clothes as you take them off and drop them roughly, hurriedly on the floor beside my bed; the rustle of a shirt, the heavy clump of your pants.
“Then you’re beside me. I open to you. I reach to feel you with my free hand and you’re as big as I remember. You kiss me all over—my mouth, my ears, my breasts—while your fingers explore me. My nipples ache from your nibbling. Then you go lower and lower, to my bellybutton and lower still, and now I can’t stop. I know others can hear me. I don’t care.
“You give me no mercy, spending the rest of the night penetrating me in every way possible with your tongue and your fingers and especially the part of you I particularly like. You make me do things I will blush to think of in the morning. Now, though, I only want more.…”
In 1947, though, her letters got more demure. Harry sensed a pulling back, and then he read what he’d already deduced.
“Harry,” she wrote him that spring, “I’ve met this man.…”
Like half of any couple attuned to each other’s rhythms, he pulled back, too. He didn’t want to lose her entirely.
By late summer, Gloria was pregnant again. They had never had the kind of sexual rapport he would have preferred; despite her outward worldliness, she was reserved in private. She didn’t like what she called “the dirty talk,” she tried to accommodate his tastes, but he could tell her heart just wasn’t in it. He wished he could show her one of Ruth’s letters and say, “Here. This is what I want you to do. Be like this.”
Still, they seldom argued. They had a million friends in common. They loved their children and, they were sure, each other. Gloria was thrilled with Harry’s ascending stardom at Martin & Rives, enough so that she was willing to have dinner alone a couple of nights a week, content to share a nightcap with a man who didn’t need one.
NINE
On Sunday afternoon, Harry, Freda and Artie sit on the back deck, where the October sun warms them. Harry nods off and wakes up again at irregular intervals, and no one seems to mind. The three of them talk about the things they have in common—the old neighborhood, the synagogue, their parents, their friends, living and dead. Freda starts every other sentence with, “Remember, Harry?” Usually, he does.
Lately, the temperature is almost always too hot or too cold for Harry Stein, or the wind’s blowing, or there’s ragweed in the air, or his stomach is upset, or he’s depressed for no discernible reason other than the major one.
Today, though, on the sun-kissed back deck of Freda and Artie Marks, he has reached an equilibrium. The chaise longue fits his contour like a mold. The small table alongside is at the perfect spot for his slowly-sipped beer.
“Remember, Harry?” Freda says. “Remember how I used to send those letters, those checks down to North Carolina during the war? And nobody knew?”
And Harry nods and chuckles. It was so serious at the time, but it seems like the stuff of childhood pranks now, no more or less momentous than terrorizing the neighbors with bottle rockets.
“Nancy and Alan and the kids came by last month,” Artie says. “Nancy doesn’t look a day over 40.”
Harry will nod and say something kind about the Marks boys, both living outside Washington now, a lawyer and an accountant. Artie has mentioned a visit by Harry and Gloria’s daughter twice now, but Harry finds comfort in the way their conversations loop back on themselves, the words less important than the way they’re said.
It is all so sweet to him, a balm. Sometimes, he hears them out of a half-dream asking him something, one of them, and the other will mutter, “I think he’s sleeping,” and they let it go at that.
Just after 3 o’clock, though, the sun dips below the top of the oaks and the wind comes up immediately, and they have to go inside. Harry tries to stick it out, tries to make rare perfection last a little longer, but soon he is shivering.
“Come on,” Artie says. “Let’s see how the damn Redskins are doing.”
At halftime of the 1 o’clock game, Hank, Paul and Stephen go outside to throw a football around.
Paul stands to one side, beer bottle hanging loosely from his right hand, and watches Hank hit Stephen perfectly in stride with a 40-yard spiral as the boy sprints down the hard, wet sand beyond the dunes. Hank Flood was as good a natural athlete as Paul ever saw. The family line on Hank: He could have done anything.
Paul still sees Hank the way he did when they were kids, still thinks in some irrational corner of his own brain that his brother really could do anything, still could.
Paul knows he will always be a source of amused pride for Hank, who can’t quite believe his little brother is rich enough to afford a large home outside Atlanta and a beach cottage, too.
He also knows Hank would readily give the good right arm he’s exercising now to be the way he once was.
Shortly after the second-half kickoff, they go back inside. Paul and his son settle in to watch the rest of the game; Hank goes in the other room to check on the race, then joins them for the fourth quarter. Earnhardt, he informs them, has won again.
Paul has the remote control and switches back and forth between the Tampa and Miami games, checking other scores when they appear across the bottom of the screen. He has a $50 bet riding on Atlanta, and every time anything happens to change the score, he either curses or cheers. He needs the excitement, needs for something to happen.
The 4 o’clock game has just started when the shoppers return. Naomi, Tran, Leigh and Ruth come walking in with only a few inconsequential purchases in their arms. Ruth looks happy, even though she’s only carrying one bag that could hold, at most, a blouse or a shirt, some early Christmas gift.
Ruth tells them that she is tired, that she needs to take a short nap. Tran and Naomi are busy in the kitchen, putting out sandwiches and paper plates, along with cold steamed shrimp and cocktail sauce.
They eat an early supper, and Ruth says she would like to walk along the beach. Hank offers to join her; Naomi says maybe later.
The wind has picked up as they walk along the flat, seemingly endless coast. They get their bearings from a flash of red in the far distance, the roof of the Sugar Beach Inn.
“They said on the radio that the hurricane is stalled out there,” Ruth says, looking toward the horizon as if she can see it.
“Looks pretty clear to me.”
“Well, they can come up quick. We ought to tune in the Weather Channel when we get back to the house. That is, if all the football games are off.”
He tells her there is a one-hour window of opportunity between the end of the 4 o’clock game and the start of the 8 o’clock game.
The sun is within an hour of the horizon, and the sky is already starting to show orange and yellow. This is the perfect time of day to be at the beach, Ruth believes. Even she can find beauty in it now.
“Did you find anything worth buying?” Hank asks his mother.
“No, but I bought something anyhow.”
“Well, as long as you’re happy.”
They walk along the Gulf beach with its miniature waves and sand dunes. Even the shells, Hank notices, are smaller than life.
About half an hour out, Ruth says she’s tired, that she wants to turn around.
Where they are, the island juts out into the water in a dogleg, and they turn away from the setting sun into a rising moon, almost full. By the time they get back to the cottage, it’s dark enough that the moon and sky are bright orange and deep purple.
They stop at the steps leading up from the beach to admire the colors
for a moment before the chill drives them indoors.
Ruth stares out at the approaching night.
She’s quiet for a while, then she says, “Does Naomi seem a little distant to you?”
“No,” Hank lies, “she just needs time to get settled. We don’t see her that often. It takes a while to get so you can just talk normal.”
Ruth sighs.
“It’s been a long, long time since we could do that. I know parents and children grow apart, that you can’t keep them with you forever, but I never thought it would be that way with me and Naomi.”
“We are two women against the world,” Ruth wrote once to Harry, when Naomi was 4. She was so proud of her: how early she walked and talked, how quickly she took to swimming, how pretty she was.
Even after Ruth’s marriage, she wrote more about her daughter than she did her two sons combined, as much as she loved them. She had always thought, without even having to actively imagine it, that they would be the mother and daughter who lived in the same town, went out to lunch together, grew old and very old together, best friends for life. She had believed what they’d built in that cheap Newport apartment and then on Henry Flood’s farm would outlive the years, the men, everything else.
As Naomi was becoming a teen-ager, Ruth started hinting in her letters to Harry that all was not right, wondering if it was just a phase.
Ruth was just starting out with the diner, and between that and the usual uproar of life with Henry Flood, she knew that she had sometimes taken capable Naomi for granted.
Then came the Olympics, and then college out West, and Naomi was gone permanently. And then Hank’s problems caught Ruth like a thunderstorm out of a clear blue sky.
“Harry,” Ruth wrote in early 1963, “there are times I think there will never be a moment when I can just sit back in my easy chair, take a deep breath, and say ‘Everything’s safe. Everybody’s all right. Nothing is wrong. There is nothing to worry about.’ Nothing is safe. Hardly anybody seems all right, and everything is wrong. There is everything in the world to worry about.”
It was about as close as she came to visible despair, and she closed the letter with an apology and a promise that she would be in better spirits the next time she wrote. And she was, ready again to fight nature and bad luck.
Harry and his sister sit up late, by his standards. Artie has gone to bed. Harry is leaving in the morning, and he supposes his brother-in-law—old golfing buddy, winking co-conspirator against “the girls,” excellent dirty-joke teller Artie—knows he and Freda would like to be alone for a while.
They chit-chat for a few minutes, the TV turned down low. Harry is back in the seat of honor, the one in which he slept so well in the pre-dawn. Freda, who walks three miles a day, sits up straight in a wing chair 10 feet away, facing him.
“So,” Freda says, at last, “have you seen Gloria?”
He tells her of his last visit.
“She was a good girl,” Freda says. “But you were a good boy, too, Harry.”
“Thank God for little sisters,” is all he can think to say, and suddenly they’re both crying.
They talk some more, about their children, about Ruth, about the place in Safe Harbor. Freda asks him, in a low, conspiratorial voice, how he’s doing, really.
“I’m hanging in there,” he tells her, unwilling to either lead her on with false promises or fall on the floor, hug his knees with his arms and moan, “I’m dying, Freda. I’m dying!” Better for all concerned, he feels, to be “hanging in there.”
Too soon, it is after midnight.
“Well,” Harry says, trying to rise, “I guess I’d better get to bed.”
“You’ve got a big day tomorrow,” Freda says, helping him up. There is something in her voice like doubt, perhaps about Harry Stein’s ability to weather a big day.
He shuffles off to bed, then lies there in sleepless pain, wondering why they didn’t just stay up all night, talking about the good times.
TEN
“I guess,” he wrote, “that I’m going to have to come down there and marry you myself, just to save you. Give me a week to take care of the divorce.”
“Harry,” Ruth wrote back, “don’t even joke about something like that. I am not going to be a homewrecker. And besides, I’ve already got a fella, haven’t I?”
That was in April of 1947. Three months later, after a letter in which Harry presumed to advise her against marrying the young war veteran to whom she had become engaged, she put her foot down.
“You seem to believe only what you want to believe,” she wrote. “Well, believe this, Harry Stein. I am going to marry Henry Bullock Flood on the eighth of September, in the living room of my grandmother’s house, in Saraw, North Carolina. He is a fine man. He is the most courageous man I have ever known. He will be a good husband and a good father. I’m sorry, Harry, but it is time for strong words.”
Ruth had become somewhat exasperated with Harry Stein. She had put from her mind any thoughts of his ever returning, no matter how much he hinted of it. She knew she loved him, but she was a sensible woman. It was time to get on with her life, and she knew Henry Flood was the man with whom she was supposed to do that.
She is sometimes amazed these days, when she thinks back to those clear-eyed, certain times, at how much she “knew.”
“You dismiss my plans as if they were the dreams of a child,” she wrote. “I know he’s 10 years older than I am. I know he’s a farmer and I’ll be a farmer’s wife. I can do that, Harry. I can be a farmer’s wife.”
Ruth was content, had made herself content, with the fact of living her life in Saraw, North Carolina. She was settling down with a man who did not care that she had a young daughter of somewhat-mysterious provenance, who was brave and hard-working and kind, a man who needed her.
“You have your life, Harry,” she concluded that letter. “Let me have mine …”
Harry’s next letter begged forgiveness.
“If you truly love this man,” he wrote, “I am as happy for you as you are for yourself.” They both knew he was lying, but the thread between them had never seemed so fragile, and above all he didn’t want to sever it.
She forgave him, and the letters continued.
When Ruth came back to Saraw, she went to work again at the mill, keeping the books for the company her grandfather had owned. She met Henry Flood in December of 1946, at a party given by some of her old high school classmates. She rarely went to parties, she said, but this night Jane and Charlotte insisted, told her they would take care of Naomi.
Her friends and her aunts had conspired to bring her and Henry together. He was not an unattractive man. He was six-foot-three, with curly hair that had been blond in 1942 and turned mostly gray somewhere in the Solomon Islands. He had a strong chin, the hint of a dimple, a long, patrician nose and piercing eyes.
If a soldier had managed to stay alive long enough in Europe or the Pacific, he probably had brought home some medals, the way Harry saw it. He had a few himself, earned just by being there. You kept your head down. You tried to look out for your men. You definitely looked out for yourself.
Henry Flood, though, was different.
He was a North Carolina country boy who joined the Marines two weeks after Pearl Harbor. He was already 26 years old, already running the family farm. He might not have been drafted for a long while, might have avoided combat.
He spent most of the war in the South Pacific. Ruth learned his stories mostly from newspaper clippings, his family, a war buddy who came through Saraw to visit, and then through relentless questioning of a man who was an uncooperative witness to more than he wanted to remember. She fell in love with the sweet, shy killer Henry Flood had become in his late 20s.
Twice, he had gone into caves to flush out Japanese soldiers who were somewhere within. He went in voluntarily when no one else was willing. He killed three enemy soldiers with a knife. Henry Flood was not afraid to get blood on his hands, wasn’t afraid to feel flesh yield to st
eel.
He told Ruth that the big guns were so loud and were fired so close that his ears often bled. The headaches that would get worse were already bothering him when he came home in 1946. Ruth had to be careful not to make any loud noises around him. Once, at a cousin’s birthday party after they had started seeing each other, a child popped a balloon and Henry dove and landed flat on the floor, face down, his large hands covering his ears and much of his head. In the quiet that settled on them, broken only by a child’s question and a mother’s whispered “hush,” Ruth helped Henry up and led him away.
He was injured three times, and he came home with so much shrapnel in his legs that the doctors in Newport called him “Scrap.” He would start a lifetime of pain medication at the VA hospital where they shipped him when they decided he’d done his share.
Harry knew he and Henry Flood had much in common, the way many men of a certain age did after the war. In 1947, they both walked and talked, lived and breathed in a world each thought, more than once, he would never see again. They were into their second and third lives. They came back to parades and adulation that was gone before they had a chance to grow tired of it. They had lived to see a world where all things were possible. They were part of the greatest fraternity in the greatest country on Earth.
And yet, Harry wondered sometimes if anything had changed, really. He went back to his life and Henry Flood went back to his. There were plenty of farm boys like Henry in Harry’s unit, sergeants and corporals and privates who helped keep an Ivy League lieutenant alive. They had shared chores and food, fear and misery, enough so that it would seem they were bound together for life, blood and bloodied brothers.
But that wasn’t how it was. If one of those bus drivers or cotton-mill workers who shared a bottle with him on VE Day had looked him up in Richmond, he knows he probably would have taken him out for a drink, but not to the same bars the other stockbrokers frequented. A sick child or an early appointment the next day would have made an overnight invitation improbable.
