Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  He thought seriously about trying to arrange a tryst with Beth Daniels, a revenge fuck. But she wasn’t his type at all, and he wondered if he could even get aroused for her.

  Throughout the summer of 1959, Harry and Gloria danced around each other. They never really talked everything out, because they knew what was down there at the bottom of the bottle if they threw the cap away, started drinking and really opened up. So, they pretended everything was all right, and soon, it seemed to be.

  That summer, something took hold of Harry’s life, and by extension Gloria’s, and for a while they thought it would be their salvation.

  Harry had always had a peripheral interest in politics, but after they made him a partner in the firm in 1958, doors were opened. And the times were with him.

  Peyton Rives had been a mover and shaker in Virginia state Democratic politics—one of the old boys who decided who ran the state—for 20 years. With the world changing, though, with Eisenhower leaving office and the whole world coming out of its self-satisfied ’50s slumber, it didn’t seem appropriate for Rives, head of the commonwealth’s largest investment firm, to be backing John Kennedy. Besides, Rives was uncomfortable with Kennedy, could see already that he himself wasn’t really going to be a true believer in this new Democratic party.

  Harry Stein, though, might do. He would never, Peyton Rives knew, be on the real inside of Virginia politics. It might, however, be good for Martin & Rives to have someone on the Kennedy inside, “just in case the sonofabitch wins,” he explained to his wife.

  It was arranged, then, for Harry Stein, already a minor functionary, to direct the presidential fortunes of Jack Kennedy in Virginia.

  “A Jew and a Catholic,” Rives said one night, having bourbon after dinner, with two old friends, one of them a U.S. senator, in their deep leather chairs within the bowels of the Commonwealth Club. “That’s about right.”

  Nineteen-fifty-nine was a good year for Ruth. Henry applied himself to farming and appeared, most of the time, to be relatively sane and stable. Hank and Paul were growing up bright and strong.

  The whole Flood family looked as if it was recovering from the bad years after Susanna’s death. Their repaired house was more substantial than the original. There was more hope in Ruth’s letters than Harry had seen in years.

  Ruth’s only real worry was Naomi, her pride and joy. There was a distance there that hurt and puzzled her. Naomi was withdrawn, then irritable when her mother tried to draw her out. Ruth figured it was something she would outgrow; Naomi would be 16 in September.

  “In some ways,” Ruth wrote, “it seems I have never been without her, and in others, it seems only yesterday I brought her home from the hospital.

  “But now, she doesn’t talk to me. We used to talk about everything. If Henry was in one of his moods, she and I would just exchange a look and know what the other was thinking: Better tread lightly today. We laughed at the same things. And she just threw herself into helping with the grill, always trying to make it easier on me.

  “Now, she avoids my eyes. And she gets irritated with me when I try too hard to cheer her up. I am sure it is a stage, Harry, and that it will pass, but I miss my old Naomi.”

  Still, there was relative peace. And, with the Fairweather Grill a success almost from the start, Ruth didn’t have to be there every minute of every day.

  She didn’t squander the extra time.

  There was nowhere in Saraw for children to swim, except the muddy river. There was nowhere to play basketball indoors in the winter. The only baseball field was a flat, grassy spot by the lumber yard where thousands of hurrying feet had carved out basepaths, with feedbag bases and a chicken-wire backstop. It had bothered Ruth for years that Naomi had to go all the way to Newport to swim, and now her boys had nowhere decent to play.

  She petitioned the town council, but there was no money for such frivolity, so she took matters in her own hands, as much out of pique as public-spiritedness.

  She had been an active member of Crowders Presbyterian Church since she returned to Saraw, gradually settling into acceptance among her old friends and her extended family. She knew the congregations at the Baptist and Methodist churches in town, where almost everyone else in the white community worshiped.

  “I am no public speaker, Harry,” she wrote, “but this was important.”

  So she went around to each of the churches, soliciting money.

  Eventually, the churches raised enough to build a gym and then a pool. And then Ruth petitioned the county to put a branch of the public library in Saraw after a child was hit by a car as she crossed the road to reach the bookmobile on its weekly run.

  Ruth never planned to be a mover and shaker, in Saraw or anywhere else, although she admits now, to herself and to Harry, that she does relish being recognized in a restaurant, being able to call powerful people and have them put other calls on hold. She pleads guilty to misdemeanor vanity.

  Mainly, though, she came to understand that she had more courage than many of those who lived around her. If she thought she could do some good, she wasn’t afraid to take on much of anything. In Saraw, a person could become important just by having the nerve and energy to take on the fraternity of farmers and small-businessmen who made the decisions.

  In 1960, Ruth (who was spending a good deal of her own time working toward a better Saraw) was persuaded to run unopposed for a vacant seat on the town council.

  Most of those serving on the council didn’t take their jobs as seriously as Ruth would, and some came to rue the day she joined them.

  “Harry,” she wrote not long after she was sworn in, “I know that this can be a better town than it is. And I mean to make it so. What you are doing in Washington, I can help to do down here.”

  Harry Stein had shown a great talent for raising money and votes on behalf of John Kennedy. It was a labor of—at least—respect. He believed in what Kennedy promised, and he felt empathy for a man who might be denied the presidency because of his religion.

  Harry was not able to carry Virginia for John Kennedy. but he gave the Byrd machine and the old Episcopal money a scare. And when it was over, Harry Stein, seen as a hardened capitalist with a social conscience and an Ivy League education, was offered a chance to go Washington as part of a pre-inauguration task force.

  His firm sent him with its best wishes, basking in the reflected glow of Harry Stein’s sudden stardom. Peyton Rives exchanged winks with bourbon friends.

  For more than six months, Harry commuted up U.S. 1, eyeing with impatience the piles of Virginia dirt and the caravan of heavy equipment that marked the achingly slow progress of the new Interstate 95.

  He rented an apartment near a bus line, close to George Washington University, and that was his home, most weeks, from Sunday night until Friday afternoon.

  Harry missed his family, and especially his children. In June of 1961, he would move them all to a suburb just inside the nascent Beltway, to a new tri-level brick house in a hilly neighborhood of hardwoods where everyone was from somewhere else. Around them, the red clay was always being gouged to accommodate another housing development, another shopping center. They had traded Richmond, where nothing seemed to change, for a place where six-month-old street maps were obsolete.

  He worked in wooden, World War II barracks at first, with some of the finest minds the new administration could gather from throughout the country. When Kennedy was sworn in, Harry was asked to join the Economic Advisory Board, and his office improved.

  He knew the powerful people who thought they were creating a new world: Larry O’Brien, Kenneth O’Donnell, Harris Wofford, Ted Sorenson, Robert McNamara. He became a protege of Douglas Dillon. Dillon, 10 years Harry’s senior, was head of one of the country’s premier investment banking companies when Kennedy made him secretary of the treasury.

  The tall, balding Dillon, who had been ambassador to France in the early ’50s, took Harry sailing and introduced him to people far above Harry’s workday Washington s
tation.

  Harry and the other members of the Economic Advisory Board spent much of their time trying to find ways to make Kennedy, who had little interest in either meetings or economics, understand the importance of kick-starting the economy. The recession that Kennedy inherited ended more or less on its own in the spring of 1961, but no one on the EAB thought it was either permanent or the result of anything the new administration had done.

  Harry, who could make money or raise it with equal ease, part economist and part entertainer, became known for being able somehow to get Kennedy’s ear. Jack Kennedy liked him, remembered him. He teased Harry for his Princeton ties, his Southern accent, his Jewishness.

  “I would like to present Harry Stein,” he told Jacqueline upon introducing her to the starstruck Harry. “His great-grandfather was the only man in the Confederate Army to get a two-day pass for Yom Kippur.”

  He would jibe Harry about Harvard and Princeton football games, gloating when Harvard won, making a great show of mock-avoidance when the Crimson lost.

  Harry knew his place. He saw himself as a trim, Jewish Falstaff, Puck perhaps, but he also had timing. Once, catching JFK in a rare quiet moment at a banquet, he was able to explain in two short minutes why the EAB felt the minimum wage should be raised. It was accepted wisdom within the EAB that Harry, certainly not the classic economist, could do one very important thing: He could, sometimes, make Jack Kennedy listen.

  Back home in Richmond, Harry would tell Gloria and the kids stories about his brushes with people they saw on the evening news. By the end of the school year, Gloria, who had already gotten a taste of high-rolling politics during the campaign, was eager to move north, and Martin and Nancy were grudgingly willing to trade off a lifetime of friends for having a full-time father again.

  The woman with whom Harry spent an occasional lonely night, a high-ranking aide for a Democratic senator from the Midwest, understood about his family and its imminent move to Washington. They hardly ever saw each other again after June of 1961. She was 28 that year, and if she had been transported across time and space to a certain railway station in Newport, North Carolina, one late fall day in 1954, Harry Stein might have mistaken her for Ruth Crowder Flood.

  “I don’t think the federal government ought to be telling us what to do.” Ruth wrote in March of 1961, “but something has to be done, by someone. We’ve always said we could take care of our own mess down here, Harry, but we never have.”

  The week before, the council had listened to the pastor of Bethany AME Zion Church as he pleaded with them to allocate money for Armstrong School, where 12 grades of black children got such education as they would get. There was no more oil for heat and no money to buy any more. Warren Tabor, who had been on the council for more than 20 years, told the Reverend Waller that he supposed they would have to wait until fall for more oil.

  “After all,” he had said, “We don’t have but three more weeks of winter.”

  Ruth heard a couple of the other councilmen laugh quietly. The minister said all he could say, and then he thanked them and left. He didn’t lose his temper, never showed any emotion at all. But as he reached the front door, Ruth saw him jerk the coat of his suit tightly around him as he stepped out into the cold, his large, grayish hands clenched into fists. She doubted if the rest of the council members even noticed.

  She argued the school’s case, but she was voted down 4–1.

  The next week, Ruth went by Armstrong School. It felt colder to her inside the building than it had outside, with cracks so large that she could feel the wind coming through if she stood near a wall. All the children and teachers were wearing their jackets. The rooms were half-empty, and one teacher told her many of the parents wouldn’t send their children again until it got warmer.

  From the town’s only hardware store, Ruth bought a thermometer. She went home and got her camera, and she went back to the school. She took photographs of the children bundled in their winter clothes inside, and of the cracks admitting daylight and wind. The temperature in the classroom where she left the thermometer was 54 degrees.

  Then she went back to the Fairweather Grill and put a jar by the cash register with the pictures beside it and a sign taped to the jar: Emergency Relief for Armstrong School.

  Pembroke County, and Newport in particular, had been the site of several lynchings in the first half of the 20th century. Harry wrote Ruth and warned her to be careful. The violence that would soon immortalize the names of previously anonymous Southern hamlets was just starting to bubble to the top.

  But people knew Ruth, and they knew what they saw in those pictures, and the school had heat two days later, paid for by the patrons of the Fairweather Grill. None of the four men on the town council spoke to Ruth unless necessary for the next two meetings.

  It was too early to think seriously about school integration in Saraw, but Ruth could see that coming, too. Part of her rebelled at the idea of others imposing their will on her town and her state, but she knew it was inevitable if justice was to be done, and she saw a way to get her neighbors used to the idea.

  “These are not bad people,” she wrote. “But they are set in their ways, and sometimes you have to give them a little nudge.”

  The “nudge” was the athletic complex for which the white churches had paid. What if, Ruth wondered, the AME Zion church was to contribute time and money? (“They have more time than they have money, I’m sure,” she wrote.) If the white congregations could be persuaded to share time at the gym and the baseball fields and swimming pool, it would be a step.

  “I imagine,” she wrote, “that the black children would just as soon have their own gym and their own swimming pool, but I can’t see the white churches building them one of their own, or the black churches being able to afford one. And I surely can’t see our town council building them one, so we ought to share ours.”

  Ruth had to cajole and badger the white churches, whose charity did not extend as far as she had hoped it would. It wasn’t so difficult to sell them on the idea of letting the AME Zion church baseball and softball teams use the fields occasionally, as long as the black deacons helped with the upkeep and maintenance, and they finally relented and allowed the black church teams to use the gym on occasion.

  The pool, though, was the sticking point. Even the city pools, such as the one in Newport, were segregated, and there was great force brought to bear by the white community to keep them that way. The whites were sure the blacks would urinate in the water, transmit unspeakable diseases and lust after their bathing-suited daughters.

  It took Ruth four years to integrate the Saraw pool, and she lost some friends along the way. She was even afforded the Southern white liberal’s ultimate Croix de Guerre, which was burned in her front yard one night in the fall of 1962.

  Harry looks over at the bedside table, where the travel alarm clock glows the same soft green as the one back in Saraw, the color of insomnia. He can feel it burning through his eyelids when he awakens at 3 a.m. and tries to will himself back to sleep. The pain diminishes when he sits up, something he is always loath to concede, because it involves admitting that the night is shot to hell, that he will spend the rest of it in an easy chair in the den or, in this case, the chaise longue on the deck.

  He staggers down the hall like a man on a small, unsteady boat, stopping at the guest bathroom to get some water to help him swallow his pills.

  Standing over the toilet as he urinates, he is hit with a sudden and frightening nausea that would have served him better if it had come all the way up rather than leaving him with the taste of bile.

  As he leans forward toward the mirror with both hands on the counter, the vision facing him is almost too much to bear.

  One night two months ago, on his and Ruth’s yearly late-summer return to Safe Harbor, at the end of what he considered to be a good day, they risked a party, given by friends in Sagaponack with enough money to possess an ocean view. Harry slipped out on their deck around 11 to smell
the salt air and to relish and mourn one more sweet evening. There weren’t any lights, and Harry was very quiet. After about five minutes, he heard the sliding glass door at the other end of the deck open. Two younger men whose voices he recognized, friends of friends, walked outside.

  Harry could only pick up parts of their conversation, but he heard clearly as one, an intense, tough-talking Wall Streeter out for the weekend, said he’d been told “the best way is to just drive up to Vermont on a January day, hike up a mountain, take your coat off, and leave the trail. They find you in the spring.”

  Then he heard the other man say something about “quality of life … Never let it get that far, I swear to God.”

  Harry tried to disappear into the weathered wood, but then the younger man’s voice stopped in mid-sentence, and a few seconds later the door at the far end softly opened and closed, and Harry was alone again.

  Quality, my ass, Harry thought to himself. Quality is in the mind of the beholder.

  He figures that if he can keep a couple of meals a day down, if he can keep his eyes on the sunrises and sunsets and off the mirror, he has quality enough.

  If you get close enough to smell the brimstone, Harry Stein wishes he had told both of them, you’ll trade 10 pounds of quality for a gram of quantity.

  It’s chilly on Paul and Tran’s deck, but Harry has a blanket, and there is something soothing about being here, with the darkness and silence in front of him broken only by the put-putting progress of one small, sad shrimp boat, trying to find its way home.

  EIGHTEEN

  It is almost dawn. Harry figures he might as well give in to consciousness. It hurts, but he’s loath to miss another sunrise at the beach.

  He goes down to water’s edge in his robe and slippers. Far to the left, he can see light creeping up from the place where the sun will soon appear. He hobbles back up to the deck and fetches one of the short chairs that Paul and his family like to plant in the sand so the incoming tide can wash over them.