Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  Harry sees, from this distance, that much of what men brought home from the war was just a worse version of what they carried over. He has no interest in watching the old movies: good-hearted guys working out their problems in a foxhole. Nine-tenths of the men Harry knew before the war and after were less admirable human beings in 1945 than they were in 1941.

  Henry Flood was 10 years older, but Ruth was a very old 21 when they met. She was taken by his reserve and his good looks, but she also was touched by what she could only describe as need. She knew, in 1947, that she could cure the hunger inside this man she so admired and was learning to love.

  They went to church picnics. Ruth had started going back to the church of her youth, where no one ever said anything to her any more about Naomi’s murky nativity, although she was certain that some of them doubted the story her grandfather had planted four years earlier. They went to the beach; they took long boat trips back into Kinlaw’s Hell, which Henry Flood knew like no one else, having grown up on the edge of it just half a mile north of Ruth’s family. From the very first, she marveled over his knowledge of every turn in the vast, unmarked wilderness that had been his boyhood backyard.

  He didn’t ask her about Naomi’s father for some time.

  It occurred to Harry that Ruth might well be better off with her hometown hero, the boy from just up the road. When he urged her not to rush into anything, he was just trying to keep the door open.

  One night, a month before the wedding, Harry went out for drinks after work and didn’t get home until 9 o’clock. He had flirted some with a secretary, an agreeable brunette. He knew, for the price of some guilt and a little risk, he could arrange to have drinks and all that followed at her townhouse the next night, but he hadn’t cheated on Gloria yet, not really. He arranged nothing; he went home.

  That night, Gloria and he had the biggest fight they’d had yet. Gloria smelled the brunette’s perfume, from where they’d brushed faces when she leaned over to whisper the punch line of a dirty joke in the booth they shared with four other people.

  Her jealousy made Harry furious. He thought of how wicked he could be, he thought about the choice he’d made, alone and unappreciated. He thought about Ruth and Henry Flood.

  He stomped up the stairs, and he thought of just packing his bags and leaving. He’d stop and call Ruth from the phone at the bar on Belmont and then head south. He’d breeze into Saraw, North Carolina, and Ruth would forget that Henry Flood ever existed.

  Even as he thought it, though, his confidence collapsed. He did not doubt that Ruth loved Henry, although never, he was sure, the way they had loved each other. And, Ruth had her code. She kept promises.

  At the top of the stairs, he looked across the hall. A sliver of light spotlighted Martin’s cradle. He had his thumb in his mouth, and his eyes were wide open. He hadn’t started to cry yet, and Harry picked him up before he did. It was as if he knew what his father was considering.

  Harry held Martin, humming softly and rocking him back and forth in his arms. Gloria had followed, still full of argument, but when she saw her husband and son there, she walked over, without a word, and embraced Harry. It was as if the two adults were shielding their child from the outside world.

  That was the night, they both were certain later, when Nancy was conceived.

  By this time, Harry was sending Ruth $20 a month, faithfully slipping the money out of his account and mailing it to Mercy with a letter. Ruth told him more than once not to send it, but he wrote that it was not for her; it was for Naomi.

  On Ruth’s wedding day, Harry had white roses shipped to her home. Matty, by now on his last legs, so weakened by a bad heart that he was barely able to wander down to the diner, leaned over to sniff the flowers, which were a puzzle to everyone except Ruth, and muttered, “That damn Randall Phelps.”

  Ruth had her own bank account and stocks, something that Henry accepted at first without complaint. The same Ruth who didn’t give up her baby refused to surrender that little piece of independence, even for love. Henry Flood would learn the magnitude of her strength a little at a time. It would take him a lifetime to learn all of it.

  For years after she moved back to Saraw, Ruth never touched a cent of the money Harry sent her, and she added much of her own, after she was able. Occasionally, Henry would try to get control of Ruth’s account or her stock portfolio, or at least find out how much money she had in them, but Roy McGinnis, an old friend who had known her since high school, made sure he never knew, no matter how much he threatened.

  The wedding was large. Ruth had many friends, Henry was a war hero, and it was something of an oddity in Saraw to attend a ceremony in which the bride’s daughter was the flower girl. Ruth thought the main sadness she would feel would be over moving out of the only true home she had ever known. Her grandmother had passed away just two weeks before the wedding, and the knowledge that Ruth would be only half a mile away did not seem to ease Charlotte’s and Jane’s anguish.

  “I wish we had never set you up with that Henry Flood,” Charlotte told Ruth at the wedding, her face red and raw from crying. “Now he’s stolen you away from us.”

  The morning of the wedding, Ruth did something she really couldn’t explain. She picked two petals from one of Harry’s roses and kept them in her left hand. She carried them to the church, set them aside while she dressed, then picked them up again. She had them as she walked down the aisle, her left hand in a light fist. When she held that hand up to receive Henry Flood’s ring, the wilted petals fell lightly and unseen to the carpeted church floor. The ache that hit her made her hesitate, a slight bump in an otherwise seamless event. She found her place again and didn’t think about Harry Stein again for most of the day.

  The farm to which Ruth and Naomi moved had more history than promise.

  “As soon as the loan comes through from the bank,” she wrote Harry in early 1948, “I am sure we will be more secure financially. Henry has such great plans for the future.” Most of the letters Ruth sent in those days dealt more with the future, the if and when of it, than with the present.

  They raised tobacco, along with corn and soybeans. Henry had inherited 120 acres from his father. His mother, after his father’s death, had moved in with one of Henry’s sisters in Laurinburg. A tenant family, living in a wooden shotgun shack out back beside the railroad line, did much of the hard work.

  Henry and Ruth had hogs and chickens and a pair of mules that wouldn’t be replaced with a tractor for many years.

  Ruth had grown up in approximately the same world as Henry Flood, but she knew little about farming. She had not correctly gauged the difficulty in switching from town life to the cooking-canning-cleaning existence that awaited her at Henry Flood’s. It was harder, she soon knew, than her years as a single working mother.

  At first, Ruth kept her job at the sawmill office. She made relatively good money there, and she could still get most of her work done at home, although Henry already was complaining about the quality of her cooking and housekeeping.

  But when she became pregnant with Hank in 1948, and the morning sickness hit her harder than it had with Naomi, she had to quit and devote what energy she had left to helping Henry keep the farm afloat.

  It wasn’t all work. They would go on picnics, to places only Henry knew. On long winter days when there wasn’t so much to do around the farm, just repairs and preparation, sometimes they would talk for hours on end. Henry was a book, although not easily opened, when it came to the natural life of Kinlaw’s Hell, and Ruth loved to hear him when he got carried away describing the swamp’s beauty and mysteries. Sometimes, he would have a bad day, when the headaches would squeeze him so hard that he couldn’t get out of bed. And there were a few nights when his screaming would scare Naomi in the next room, and Ruth would have to soothe them both. Mostly, though, she was optimistic.

  “Harry,” she wrote when she had quit her job and was seven months pregnant with Hank, “this is all I ask of life: a good man, a
wonderful little girl, another child on the way, a clean, comfortable home with enough space that you can hardly see the next house beyond the line of pine trees that bounds our property. I work harder than I have ever worked in my life, but Naomi is with me until school starts for her next fall, and there is always time for talking and reading and listening to the radio in the evening. I hope your life brings you such peace.”

  In truth, though, her peace ebbed and flowed. Sometimes, a month would pass between letters, and the letter that arrived would have a note of worry to it: “Henry grows increasingly exasperated with the VA hospital, which can’t seem to get him the proper treatment and medicine.” “I have made it clear to Henry that Naomi is not to work in the tobacco fields. He says that he was working in them when he was 5, and I tell him that I don’t care if he worked in them when he was 2.”

  Even now, Ruth remembers that there were good times, too. She really did love the land and the life, and Henry Flood, and she thought everything would end well, that she could grab it and shake it and make it end well.

  Hank was born in March of 1949. Henry Crowder Flood. Naomi ran away when he was five weeks old. They found her walking along the Beach Road, already across the river bridge in Saraw. The move to the Flood farm was traumatic for her anyhow; she was adored by her aunts. And while Naomi liked Henry, Ruth wrote that she sometimes rebelled against him, even telling him once, “You’re not my daddy.” Henry just smiled, according to Ruth, and said, “Well, then, little girl, who is?”

  “Randall Phelps,” Naomi told him. “He didn’t come back from the war.” Ruth had told her that.

  “Someday,” he said, “we’re going to go to Germany, so we can find out where your daddy is buried. It’s a shame to leave him like that, all alone in the cold, cold ground where he doesn’t know anybody.”

  Naomi bit her lip and left the room.

  He was still smiling, but Ruth knew at that moment that she might someday be expected to explain more about Randall Phelps than she wanted to.

  ELEVEN

  In a letter dated Aug. 5, 1950, Ruth told Harry that the family who lived on Henry Flood’s land and did most of the farm’s manual labor had departed one hot summer night, with no warning, in the middle of tobacco cropping, before they had even been paid for that season. The stress of losing the Farrises seemed to have made Henry’s headaches worse. He could hardly get out of bed some days.

  Ruth ached for him, for the pain in his damaged legs, for the headaches and nightmares. She tried to make sure that she and Naomi gave Henry Flood every reason to be of good cheer. Hank was 17 months old, and often it fell to Naomi, only 7 herself, to take care of her step-brother.

  “Speaking of Naomi,” Ruth wrote, “can you imagine the daughter of Ruth Crowder Flood and the granddaughter of Theron and Belle Crowder winning medals for swimming? Is this not more amazing than pigs flying?”

  That year, the YMCA in Newport had held swimming competitions by age group for the first time. Those 8 and under competed together.

  Ruth had known that her daughter could swim well, seemingly against all genetic odds. The instructor the previous summer had pulled Ruth aside one day and told her that Naomi was better than any of the little boys her age and many of the older ones. After that, Ruth would observe Naomi swimming when she could, amazed at the perfect way she glided across the water, with almost no wasted motion.

  “She’s like a little fish,” Ruth told Henry, who did not seem as impressed as she had hoped he would be.

  Naomi, who kept her own counsel, had casually mentioned at supper one night that there was going to be a swim meet, and she supposed she ought to be in it, because her teacher wanted her to.

  Ruth called the instructor, who said that by all means they wanted Naomi to compete, that they thought she was pretty special.

  Ruth told the man that she thought Naomi was pretty special, too, although she had no idea where she got her swimming ability. The coach said maybe from her father.

  In the swim meet that made Naomi’s talent impossible to ignore, Naomi won every race she entered, against girls one and two years older. She beat the best boys’ times in three events.

  “Were you a fast swimmer, Harry?” Ruth asked in her next letter.

  Yes, Harry wrote back, as it turns out there were some swimming genes in the Stein family pool. The 1935 Virginia state age-group breaststroke champion was none other than Harold Martin Stein. And Freda had a trophy case full of medals before she quit.

  “We’ve always been good swimmers,” he wrote, and he told her the story of Hyman Stein, who swam his way to America.

  Harry’s fraternal grandfather emigrated from Germany in 1882, when he was 23. He had grown up in a village along the Rhine, between Bonn and Koblenz. A Jewish man from his village had gone to America many years before and had gotten relatively rich. The man sent back word that he needed a bright, hard-working young Jew to work in his garment factory, that he would sponsor a man from the village and help him become an American citizen, because he only really trusted the families from the place where he grew up.

  A cousin still living in the village, a wealthy merchant who saw no reason to leave Germany, was empowered with the choice. Money was sent for passage by ship (and more, Hyman Stein would always claim, that the merchant kept for himself). The cousin who was to decide which young man would get a ticket to the promised land was of a sporting nature. He announced that all who were interested should be at his shop at a certain time, on a certain day.

  Six men, all in their teens or early 20s, came to the cousin’s shop, and he led them down the street, to the water’s edge. There, where Hyman Stein always would claim the river was at least a mile wide, the cousin told them how he would choose. Half the town had followed them, for the entertainment.

  He pointed toward the water and said, Swim. On the other side, there would be a tree with six ribbons (and here he gave to each of the young men a different color). The one who swims across the river and returns first with his ribbon, he told them, will go to America. Hyman Stein’s color was red.

  He was the youngest of eight children, and there was little for him to do in Germany other than stay and take care of his parents and work for his brothers. So he swam. It was early in the morning, in May, before the fog had even lifted, and the water was very cold.

  One man went home, but the other five took off their clothes and dove in. They all swam in their long underwear, to the amusement of the crowd that gathered. Harry’s grandfather couldn’t see the other shore until he was almost there, already exhausted but ahead of all the others. He came up through the mud and found the tree, a good 50 yards from the water’s edge, and he took his ribbon, the red. A witness was there to be sure no one cheated.

  He said, years later, that his underwear felt as if it weighed 50 pounds. On the way back to the river, the man just behind him, a fast runner, passed him and jumped back into the water first. Hyman Stein, perhaps more desperate to reach America than the others, took off his remaining clothing and started back across, naked, as slick as a seal.

  He passed his main rival somewhere in the middle of the river and was never caught. One of those behind him was pulled down by the current and drowned. Hyman Stein got his ticket, leaving behind all the family he knew and a legend that would outlive them, of the boy who swam to America.

  He did not get rich in his new world; most of his energy and intellect was required merely to set the stage for his seven children, to place success within their grasp. He never admitted any regrets, though, and he seldom talked about Germany and the family he left there. He had been dead three years, having expired quietly in his own bed in his son’s home in Richmond, when the Nazis came to his old village in 1942 and took every Jew there to a pit outside of town and murdered them all.

  So, Harry wrote, tell Naomi to swim on. Travel light and don’t look back, as my grandfather always advised.

  Naomi, in the picture Ruth sent, is grinning from ear to ear. Her
teeth are too large, and Harry could see that someday his surreptitious money would help pay for braces.

  When Naomi was young, she smiled all the time. Around the house, she and Ruth would sing together. She wasn’t really shy, Ruth believed; she just didn’t say anything unless there was something to say. But everyone could see that she was happy.

  Ruth would send clippings from the Newport paper as Naomi won one swimming competition after another. By the time she was 10, she owned four state age-group records. She was no larger than the other children, although she would grow to be 5-foot-9. But she was always in the middle of the picture, always the star.

  By the time Gloria was back in swimsuit shape after Martin, she was pregnant with Nancy. After Nancy, she seemed to accept the fact that she wasn’t a girl any more, and she displayed a maturity that Harry wasn’t able or willing to match. It irritated him.

  He was 29 when Nancy was born. She was pretty in the way of the Steins; Nancy and Naomi, were they to appear in the same room today, might easily pass as cousins, even sisters.

  Harry saved all his maturity for his job, where he was thriving. He still wanted Gloria to do the spontaneous, hedonistic things they once did (and he still did). Too often, she couldn’t find a babysitter, or she was too tired, or she just found the things that used to make her giggle now made her shake her head.

  They still had good times, but Gloria was forcing it, trying to be a good sport, Harry could see. More and more, she was wrapped up in Martin and Nancy. Harry was jealous. He can see that now. He was the much-admired center of attention all day at work, then at happy hour, and then he came home to a world of diapers, home repair and need.

  Harry sees his marriage, the whole of what he thinks of as his first life—the first one that he himself crafted—in terms of the race his grandfather swam. Hyman Stein gave it everything he had; he held nothing back. He never hesitated that day, never thought of the embarrassment he’d face as he came running out of the water with his red ribbon tied around his wrist, stark naked. He never thought about how foolish he would look if he took off all his clothes and still lost the race. He never hesitated or second-guessed himself. He never considered quitting, never wondered if another plan for getting to America might work better and require less risk.