Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  When he learned about Susanna, he had to be restrained and then sedated. He cursed Ruth loudly and bitterly before they took him away to the hospital.

  Ruth and her three living children stayed at her grandparents’ old house, where now only Charlotte and Jane lived, Matty having died in his sleep the previous year without ever getting to lay his hands on the rascal Randall Phelps. That first night, the four of them slept together on the bed of her childhood.

  It would be six months before they could move back into part of their damaged home, and Ruth didn’t want to go back at all. Always afterward, she was aware of an acrid underscent no amount of cleaning could erase. Henry, though, insisted. It was the only home he had ever had, he said. And there was no way that he could get along with Ruth’s aunts. For most of the six months, he slept in a tent in the old farmhouse’s front yard. He turned down many offers of shelter, saying he preferred the outdoors.

  From Mercy’s letter, Harry knew only the bare essentials: Ruth had lost her youngest daughter in a fire. Ruth needed him.

  He could have called her aunts’ home, but he hesitated, even then, to break what he had come to regard as a spell.

  Instead, he called Mercy.

  She didn’t seem surprised to hear from him.

  “She has given up, Mr. Stein,” she said, and he told her to call him Harry. “Ruth Crowder Flood has more life in her than anyone I know, but she’s just quit. She acts like the boys and Naomi aren’t even there.”

  And so, almost 12 years after he had watched Ruth Crowder shrink from his vision on the Newport depot platform, Harry Stein made hurried, furtive plans to return, if briefly.

  He told Gloria he had to go down to North Carolina the next day, to Newport for God’s sake, to check out the viability of an up-and-coming company that was making cheap furniture out of the local pine. He told her he would be back late that evening.

  The trip down was a blur of self-doubt, plans of action routed by restlessness and nerves. There had been an unwritten but understood contract between Harry and Ruth: They would live the rest of their mutual life secretly, on paper. What if the Ruth who waited at the Saraw station couldn’t match the one he remembered? What if he didn’t match her memories? He almost left the train at Rocky Mount, prepared to catch the next one back north.

  As the Saraw platform grew larger, Harry could make out individual people. He studied every woman there, trying to find her.

  He got off the train with no Ruth in sight. Then, he felt a tap on his shoulder and spun around. For a second, he thought it was her, more drab and washed-out than he remembered.

  It was Mercy.

  “Come with me,” was all she said, taking his arm and hustling him into the station itself, then through a side door into a poorly-lighted, dingy train-station cafeteria.

  At first, he didn’t see her. He looked to Mercy for guidance, then followed her eyes to the back corner, where a lone woman sat stiffly in one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs and stared straight ahead, out one of the windows opening on to the platform. Harry knew that, if she was actually looking, she had already seen the 1954 version of Harry Stein. This knowledge might have been all that kept him from running out the door.

  Ruth had not aged much, outwardly. Even in her despair, she was as beautiful to Harry as she had been the day he left her there. He didn’t see any way a woman could look that good and want to die.

  Mercy nudged him forward, and then he was standing directly in front of her, blocking her unblinking view.

  Ruth looked up. He could see the dark circles under her eyes.

  “Hello, Harry,” she said. She tried to smile, but her eyes, already red, teared up, and then they were crying together. Harry hoped Mercy was right about no one from Saraw being there; they were far from inconspicuous.

  “You haven’t lost much, Harry,” she said, motioning for him to sit. “It’s a wonder you don’t have to carry a stick around Richmond to beat them off you.”

  He told her she hadn’t lost much either, then colored as he realized how it sounded.

  “It’s OK,” she said, patting his hand. “The way everyone tiptoes around me, whispering outside doors like I can’t hear … Sometimes, I wish they’d just say, ‘Look, you lost your child. Now get ahold of yourself.’”

  To make matters worse, Ruth told him before their brief visit was over, her husband didn’t seem to have the will or desire to say anything at all, except to blame everyone, himself included, for Susanna’s death. After the funeral, he came to Charlotte and Jane’s, where she and the children were. He said not a word that day, and by nightfall he had gathered what belongings he could salvage and moved into his tent.

  Two hours was all the time Harry Stein had before another Atlantic Coast Line train would take him back to Richmond. He could have stayed overnight, cooking up some excuse, enlisting an ally to deceive Gloria, but he knew it was better this way. They had talked, had reconnected with each other instantly. They had promised to try to look out for each other, to be each other’s friend, for as long as they lived, speaking the words as solemnly as a wedding vow. What was left to say?

  She had already told him that she was not going to divorce Henry Flood. And he knew that, despite the bruises, he was not going to leave Gloria and his children. Henry loved her, in his way, Ruth said, and he needed her desperately. He was her husband.

  She showed Harry some recent photographs of Naomi and told him how proud he should be of her.

  Harry said he had no right to be proud, and she let him off the hook, the way she always had, telling him he was doing what he could.

  “Someday, I’d like to meet her.”

  Ruth thought about it for a few seconds.

  “Yes,” she said at last, “I’d like that, too, someday. Right now, though, Naomi thinks her father is some man named Randall Phelps, who died in Germany. I’d like her to be a little older before she finds out about Harry Stein.”

  Harry imparted no timeless wisdom to Ruth to get her up off her spiritual sickbed and walking among the living again. All he did was talk with her a little, like the old friends they had already become, like the lovers they had been and, in some world parallel to their everyday lives, still were. They held hands while they talked, and when he embraced her, that scent came back, that same sweet smell that was her rather than her perfume, something he had always associated with autumn and the ocean.

  He wanted so much for her to ask him to stay. He wanted so much to say that he would.

  But that wasn’t even on the table. She couldn’t. He couldn’t.

  They talked about old times, about new times. Ruth had managed to be as well-read as anyone Harry knew, despite not yet having taken one college course. In a farmhouse full of the needs of children and a half-crazed husband, on the edge of a desolate swamp, she found time to educate herself.

  Harry had known friends who went away for six months and came back as different people, but he and Ruth never missed a beat.

  He told her that he loved her, although he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t do that. What if she didn’t respond in kind? But she did. He made her promise that she would somehow get over Susanna, and she promised that she would, somehow.

  “If you don’t get better,” he said, leaning down to kiss her forehead, “I’ll just have to keep coming down here.”

  Tell me to keep coming down here, he willed her to say. Tell me to keep coming. But she said nothing, just held tightly to him, and the moment passed.

  Ruth did, though, allow him to see Naomi.

  Her elementary school let out at 3. If Harry would take a later train back to Richmond, he could be there, parked across the street, when she exited. So he rented a car at the station and drove inland, to Saraw.

  He waited alone. Ruth had to return, and it would have been unwise for her to be sitting in Saraw, in a strange man’s car. Their leaving was hurried, and neither of them could find a fitting punctuation for their visit.

  Harry had
a photograph of Naomi that was less than a year old. She reminded him of his sister Freda at that age.

  When she did finally emerge from the old wooden school building, he had to restrain himself. What he wanted was to rush out of his car, run up to her and tell her he was her daddy. But he had promised Ruth he would not do that.

  What he saw, even from a distance, disturbed him a little, though. He had assumed that Naomi would be surrounded by friends, as would befit the girl who wins all the swimming championships, the girl who saved her brothers from the fire. He had figured that she would be smiling.

  But she wasn’t smiling, and she left to walk home by herself. She didn’t look sure to Harry, not the way he would have wanted a kid of his to look at 11.

  She was a pretty girl, tall and thin with dark hair and the great tan that bespoke the Southern sun and the Stein genes. But she didn’t seem confident. He wondered if she would have been more confident if her father hadn’t caught a train long ago.

  Before he returned to Newport and then to Richmond, he couldn’t resist taking a slow drive down the street, past the church and then right by the old house where they had been so happy for a while, Ruth’s past and present home.

  As he eased along the dead-end lane, amazed that he could still find what he needed in Saraw, North Carolina, he saw a woman standing at the open front door. It was Ruth, waiting for Naomi, leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded. The afternoon sun reflected off her hair and made it shine back, golden. She and Harry made eye contact across the long front yard, and he almost stopped. But then he saw her shake her head, fiercely, and he kept going.

  At the end of the lane he turned around. When he came back by the Crowder house, Ruth was still there, and Harry could see Naomi approaching, a block away.

  So much of my life, he thought. Right here.

  He looked left once more, and Ruth Crowder Flood, standing a little back, out of sight of anyone but him, seemed to blow a kiss.

  When he passed Naomi, she lifted her eyes briefly to his, and then lowered them again as she walked on to her waiting mother.

  FOURTEEN

  Monday night, coming from an early dinner at Gumbo Jim’s Oyster Shack, they drive into a cloud of moths. Paul has his brights on, and to Ruth it looks as if they’re in the middle of a blizzard. Instead of snowflakes, though, thousands and thousands of bugs splatter against the windshield of Paul’s minivan. The wipers only succeed in smearing the protein in semicircular streaks across the glass.

  Ruth is sometimes undone by Florida’s fauna. There is a cockroach in her room so large that she can see under its body as it scurries along the floor. Every time she goes into the bathroom, she instinctively looks to the ceiling, to find out what kind of large insect is perched there, ready to pounce.

  The air is heavy outside, and Ruth is wishing they were headed for the cottage instead of away from its superior air conditioning when she realizes Paul is slowing down.

  They ease onto the sand shoulder, less than a mile from the causeway bridge, and Ruth first thinks they must have a flat tire, or engine trouble.

  Then she sees that it’s Hank.

  He’s out the door before the minivan has completely stopped, walking off in a straight line toward an abandoned gas station turned into a roadside bar 100 yards ahead.

  Everyone is quiet at first.

  “Too many people, too crowded,” Ruth says at last, breaking the silence and shaking her head.

  Naomi gets out and goes to walk with him, but he doesn’t seem to want her company. She has to move fast to keep up with him. Her shoes are not made for walking in powdery sand.

  Hank stops beside a live oak tree. He’s leaning against it, breathing as hard as if he had just run five miles. Naomi stays with him for another minute, then comes back and returns to her seat.

  “Poor Hank,” she says as she lights a cigarette. Naomi’s hand, in the neon light of the bar, is shaking. The air-conditioning is going and the windows are rolled up, but they can all feel the beat of the roadhouse’s country band working its way up through the dirt. Leigh and Stephen, who have never seen their uncle like this, are as quiet as the rest.

  Harry finally drifts off to sleep half an hour before his plane touches down, after he has given up all hope of catching a nap on this long, airborne day.

  First he had to get up and get dressed and packed and, with help from Freda and Artie, on the 2 p.m. flight out of Richmond. Sitting there in front of his gate, flanked by his sister and her husband, he felt like a kid going off to camp. He saw Freda have a furtive word with the woman behind the counter, who looked his way and nodded.

  They let him get on first, with the halt and lame and mothers with young children. Freda hugged him so hard when he stood up to go that he almost fell over.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, sweetie. I’ll be back. I will.”

  “Damn right you will,” Artie chipped in, but even Artie, salesman deluxe, wasn’t doing such a good job of selling, it seemed to Harry, who hugged the big oaf anyhow.

  “Take care,” was what they said to each other at last, in unison, and then he was walking down the ramp to his plane.

  He’s seen men, younger than he is now, who didn’t handle it so well when they found out they weren’t going to live forever. He’s seen them just stop doing anything, pull down the blinds and close the store. Harry feels their pain. It makes him sad to go out to a favorite restaurant and order a favorite dish for maybe the last time, to see the state of his health reflected for half a second in the maitre d’s face. But Harry isn’t ready to go home, sit in the dark and watch television.

  When he was 7, his parents threw him a birthday party. All his friends were there; his relatives all gave wonderful gifts. There were pony rides and a clown. No kid on the North Side of Richmond had ever had such a birthday party. Harry felt loved by everyone. But late in the afternoon, it hit him that it would soon be over, and the next day couldn’t possibly be as good as the one he was living right then. They found him in his room, crying. No one knew what to do, and the party broke up soon afterward. His parents were upset; Old Harry kept bringing up the cost, and neither Harry nor Freda ever had such a party again. But he couldn’t find the words, at 7, to tell them he just couldn’t bear to see the party end.

  That’s what Harry thinks he understands about the old guys he doesn’t want to be like: They don’t want the party to end, and they’re too big to cry in public.

  He saw his father turn old friends away toward the end, and he promised himself, right then, that he would take every scrap life offered rather than sit home and watch the second hand steal from him.

  I’ve given up on living forever, he told Freda, but I haven’t given up on living.

  When the plane landed, Harry was escorted to his connecting flight in one of the airport golf carts that used to annoy the hell out of him, coming up behind him and beeping him out of the way so some codger could keep from walking a few steps. Now, he was the beeper instead of the beepee. He was embarrassed, and grateful. It was at least half a mile from his inbound terminal to his outbound one.

  After a 90-minute wait, in which Harry was afraid to drift away from his uncomfortable seat into the hard-charging traffic that would lead him to a hot dog or a newspaper, he was ushered on to another plane, again at the head of the line.

  Then there was an hour wait for takeoff. It was 6:30 by the time they cleared the ground. Wedged against the window by the overweight businessman next to him, Harry wondered why he wasn’t asleep. An attendant had brought him some water to take with his pills, and the pain had subsided, but yet he was awake.

  And then, he wasn’t.

  The dream is on him, has him right back in that same bloody stream. He is thrashing to get away from Sergeant Stevens.

  “Sir! Hey, sir!”

  The attendant is looming over him, and the people in front are sneaking furtive glances at him.

  “Bad dream,” Harry mumbles.

  “Are y
ou OK, sir?” The attendant, a middle-aged woman with reddish hair, looks concerned that he might die before they land.

  “Fine,” is all Harry can say, and then they finally leave him alone, with one last admonition: Fasten your seatbelt.

  Harry takes his baseball cap off and rubs his head, where the hair is only coming back as stubble, not long enough to comb, too coarse to be pleasant to the touch. Who, he wonders, would want to see such a person?

  When they first met, Ruth loved to say his name. Later, she sometimes would write it out three times—“Harry Stein, Harry Stein, Harry Stein”—usually as prelude to commiseration over some confessed misdeed on Harry’s part. Reading such letters, he could imagine a slight shake of the head, a small smile, a certain tolerant exasperation.

  In his letters to Ruth, Harry unburdened himself, admissions and complaints that might better have been directed to Gloria.

  Ruth responded in kind, although Harry came to know finally that she soft-pedaled the bad times more than he had.

  When her world with Henry Flood began to tilt dangerously on its axis, she hinted more than told.

  “What’s the use in whining?” she asked Harry years later, when he knew what she hadn’t written.

  “If you’ve got a good whine in you,” he told her, “you have to let it out. Otherwise, it just turns to venom and kills you. Self-pity should not be hoarded.”

  She told enough, though. Maybe her store of self-pity was not as massive as Harry’s, but such unburdening as she did, she did in her letters. He likes to think he was there, if only in the form of clandestine mail.

  Hank seems calm now, at least calm enough to continue their trip.

  Ruth knows that Naomi remembers Hank as he was before he couldn’t bear to be in tight spaces with other people. She never really lived at home after everything changed for Hank, and in some ways, she has never accepted it.