by Howard Owen
Harry’s father would have called that meshuggah. But over the years, without even noticing its insidious creep into his brain, Harry has come to believe in the Ruth Crowder Flood Theory of Human Behavior.
Late Tuesday morning, after he’s napped for a couple of hours, Harry finally is coaxed into some surf fishing by Hank and Paul.
The sky is almost white, the watery-yellow sun warming them through the thin cloud cover. The storm is reported to be on course for a landfall somewhere in Louisiana, but it might as well be in China for all its apparent effect.
“Doesn’t a ring around the sun mean it’s going to rain?” Hank asks as he reels in an empty line.
Paul looks up at the circular rainbow prism.
“It always rains down here,” he says. “You don’t need any signs.” He’s drinking a beer, his left hand on his hip. He’s screwed his fishing rod deep into the wet sand. Harry is the only one catching anything, a couple of red snappers that Paul judges to be large enough to eat. It is not a good time of day for surf fishing, but when they asked, he didn’t want to hurt their feelings.
Hank cuts off another half a shrimp, then asks if Harry doesn’t want to see if anything’s taken his bait. Harry shakes his head. Hank shrugs, loads the hook and tries again. It is beyond Harry’s ability this day to cast past the waves, so he wants to make very sure there’s a reason to reel his line in. He can barely even hold the rod up, and he considers planting his in the ground, too. Ruth’s sons really seemed to want him to come with them, though, and Harry appreciates the gesture.
“Don’t worry,” Paul says, looking seaward. “If the storm changes course, we can get off this island in five minutes flat, I guaran-damn-tee. And there isn’t much chance of it sneaking up on us as long as Momma’s here and The Weather Channel stays on the air.”
Hank smiles.
“I guess I’d hate ’em, too, if I’d been her. You know, I caught her yesterday standing on the back upstairs deck looking over at the sound, like she was trying to figure out exactly how long it would take to get across that bridge.”
Paul goes over to get another beer.
“Well, there are maybe 200 cottages out here. I’ll bet you not more than 50 of them are occupied right now, with the storm out there and all. That’s the best part about being out here during a hurricane panic; it keeps the riff-raff out. I’m not expecting any major traffic jams.
“Besides, tomorrow’s her birthday. We’ve got to stay long enough to light the cake and blow out the candles.”
Hank reels in his line.
They stay for perhaps an hour, maybe, Harry thinks, the best hour of the day. Hank and Paul are both experienced anglers, having lived all their lives near the coast. Paul claims he even managed to get some gear and go fishing when he was in Vietnam. They make a big deal, when they all return, over the fact that the ancient mariner Harry Stein has led the way, with three fish to their one each.
Tran, the only one in the cottage who actually studies the Bible as a source of wisdom and guidance, picks up one of the smaller fish, looking dubiously at it. “All we need now, Harry, are two loaves of bread,” she says.
“That I can’t manage,” he tells her. “You need a New Testament guy for the fish trick.”
Later, after lunch, Ruth and Harry are alone on the deck. He went outside because sometimes if he can get away by himself and be very still and quiet, he can lull the pain to sleep like a fussy baby. Ruth went outside because she knows it helps if she just sits beside him and holds his hand, without saying a word, a conduit drawing away the pain.
Harry knows Ruth treasures this time with her children and grandchildren, and he doesn’t really want to take her away from them, but there is a growing childishness in him that wants her to kiss it and make it well.
Harry Stein’s inner child, he knows, has never been far from the surface.
Harry likes to say that Ruth didn’t choose politics; politics chose Ruth.
By 1965, she was the elder stateswoman on the town council. When it was discovered that the mayor had been using municipal funds and the town’s two maintenance men to help build his beach cottage, they named Ruth to fill the rest of his term. She was elected to a second term in 1968.
“Harry,” she wrote in the fall of 1966, “if I were to walk into one of these meetings with a loaded gun and shoot a couple of councilmen, I don’t believe God would look too harshly upon me.”
She was a master at getting her way. She always kept her temper, and she never backed down. If she occasionally lost a battle, she didn’t do something heedless that would alienate people and keep her from winning the war.
To her, running Saraw was like raising children. She would wait them out, make them abide by the rules and sometimes convince them that her idea was actually theirs.
The year Ruth became mayor of Saraw, Hank was 16 and Paul was 14. Christmas eve that year, Henry got spectacularly drunk, even by his standards. He drank all afternoon and left the house after dinner, not even bothering to answer Ruth’s entreaties. She and the boys didn’t wait up for him; they knew it was just as well not to be around when Henry Flood had had an evening of hard drinking to stoke his fires. Usually, they could wait him out, lying low until sobriety’s welcome return.
Ruth was especially excited that Christmas, because Naomi was coming in the next day with the boyfriend she would later marry. It would be her first Christmas in Saraw in three years. They were even forgoing the Crowder tradition of opening all the presents at or before dawn, because Naomi wouldn’t be there until mid-afternoon.
Sometime before 1 a.m., Henry Flood came stumbling into his house and saw the Christmas tree with its lights still on. Hank and Paul, the last to bed, had left them burning, thinking it would be a nice effect when they came downstairs the next morning.
“Who left this goddamn Christmas tree on!” Ruth heard him screaming. “Are you trying to burn the fucking house down? What’s wrong with you people?”
Then they heard the crash. They all leapt from their beds to see what was the matter, although they were reasonably certain what was the matter was Henry Flood.
He was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs. He had knocked over the tree and was stomping on it, breaking ornaments and ripping up presents, tearing open packages and strewing their contents all over the room. He wasn’t even saying words any more, just screaming, red-eyed, drool running down his chin.
Hank got down the stairs first and tried to calm him, but Henry swung at him, knocking him to the floor with a glancing blow to the jaw. Paul jumped his father from behind, gripping his neck tightly, hanging on for his life while Hank got up and shook out the cobwebs.
“Hit him!” Paul was screaming. “Hit the son of a bitch. I can’t hold him much longer.”
Years later, relating the story to Harry, Hank said that he didn’t really want to hit his father, but he was afraid if he didn’t disable him, Henry might kill Paul when he finally got him off his back.
“So I swung just as hard as I could, right to the gut. And when he doubled over, I got him again under the chin. I was afraid I had murdered him; he dropped like he’d been shot.”
He went backwards, Paul breaking his fall. They had to turn him on his stomach because he had started vomiting when Hank hit him the first time, and they didn’t want him to choke on it.
The floor was a melange of half-opened presents, regurgitated food and bourbon, Christmas tree and ornaments, and Ruth Crowder Flood’s family. The boys were trying to figure, before he came to, how to keep their father from harming them or himself. Ruth wondered if everyone’s family was insane and just didn’t talk about it in public.
Hank checked his unconscious father’s pulse and saw that he had one. Ruth stood frozen, hands on the bannister rail, too horrified to move.
“What’ll we do?” Paul asked. “When he wakes up, he’s going to kill us.” It was not, Ruth feared, a figure of speech.
Finally they determined that he didn’t
seem to need a doctor. Hank sent Paul out to the barn for some rope, and they tied Henry up in the corner, hands and feet, while they tried to salvage what was left of the tree and the presents.
When they got the tree up again, it was listing badly to the right, because Henry had almost broken it in half. They had to tie it to a hook on the wall with twine to keep it from falling over. The balls and lights, broken and scarred, hung sadly from the mangled branches. Ruth and her sons set about rewrapping presents and trying to save Christmas.
When Henry regained consciousness, still drunk and cursing everyone near to him, they decided they would have to gag him, too. They used a tie that the boys had bought him for Christmas, already ruined by the would-be recipient. Ruth made hot coffee and tried to force her husband to drink some, but every time they took the gag off, he would start ranting again.
The plan they finally devised was to lift Henry and carry him out the front door to the car, bound and gagged. Then, under cover of darkness, they drove him to the diner, where they dragged him inside and put him in the storage room, making very sure he was securely tied.
Then, they went back home to a bleary-eyed Christmas.
At 3 in the afternoon, Naomi arrived with her boyfriend. Ruth and the boys had napped through the morning in the reclaimed living room but were still groggy. Naomi asked them, two hours after she arrived, where Henry was, and Hank told her he was called away on business. Paul grinned and winked. She just nodded; she didn’t want her beau to hear whatever the true story was, because she knew how bad the truth could get when it came to Henry Flood.
Hank had gone back to the diner at 2, taking his father some turkey sandwiches and tea. He untied Henry’s hands and let him up to go to the bathroom. He had already wet himself once, and the concrete floor smelled of urine. Henry was still out of control, and Hank had to hit him again before his father would let him retie his hands behind his back.
It bothered Hank to do this to his father, and it bothered Ruth to let him, but they decided that the only possible salvation for Christmas at the Flood house was to keep Henry away.
At 8 o’clock Christmas night, Hank went back to the grill, taking Paul this time. Their father had bottomed out by then and was getting the blues, which always followed his outbursts. They took him into the bathroom and got him cleaned up the best they could, made him put on the clean clothes they had brought and told him they still wanted him to be with them for Christmas.
“All the fight was out of him by now,” Hank told Harry years later. “Hell, he was probably weak from hunger. It’s a wonder we didn’t kill him. But he let us clean him and shave him and then lead him home.
“You know what he did? As we’re coming up the front steps, he puts an arm around each of us and says, ‘Boys, I don’t deserve you all.’
“And I know he meant it. Nobody was more mortified than my father when he realized the damage he had done. He tried as hard as he could to make up for the bad times, but he just kept getting deeper and deeper in the hole, so deep that after a while you knew he’d never get out.”
“It doesn’t scare me or bother me any more,” Ruth wrote Harry in the summer of 1967, when his own life was in the sort of free-fall he had never anticipated. “Henry will come home drunk and try to start something, and if I don’t set him straight, Hank or Paul will. He knows when he’s slipping out of control, and sometimes he’ll go missing for two days at a time, and I think he’s just trying to stay away from us until the other Henry Flood comes back.
“Why don’t I just leave him? You more than hint about it, and I know to you it seems to be your answer and perhaps mine also. He’s given me reason enough, more reason I’m sure than you gave Gloria.
“But you have had some control over your fate, Harry. You were not, like Henry, being dragged into hell by some devil not even of your own making. You would have to be here and see what I see, the good and the bad, to understand.
“Why not leave Henry? Well, why bother with Hank? He’s broken my heart more than Henry, believe it or not, because I long ago gave up hope of Henry being more than he is, but Hank was going to do great things, and now he is barely able to venture outside this house some days. Every time we go see some new psychiatrist, and he fails to cure this curse, it rips me up all over again. Sometimes I’ll see him in the den, watching TV, and I think that I can just go in there and shake him and he’ll wake up and go back to being the old, normal, brilliant Hank. But I know it doesn’t work like that.
“Neither Henry nor Hank can help it. Hank’s illness takes a more passive course and is easier to live with (once you get past the disappointment of promise lost), but Henry’s is just as much beyond his control.
“I am here, Harry, for the long run.”
TWENTY-TWO
On the day things started falling apart, Harry was second in command in an agency that he believed was powerful enough, if it used those powers wisely, to almost wipe out poverty. His move from the Economic Advisory Board had been nearly seamless. Lyndon Baines Johnson had come to feel that Harry was one of “his” people.
Now, though, Harry Stein allowed his mind to wander to the appointment that everyone knew was just a rubber stamp away, a poorly-kept secret even by Washington standards. People were stopping by and calling, people whose names and likenesses were in national magazines and on the evening news, to congratulate him and wish him well. He would miss fighting the good fight, he told them, but it was time to move on. He implied that becoming an ambassador was a sacrifice he must, regretfully, make. He wondered if the glow he felt inside was visible to the naked eye.
He thought of his relatives back in Richmond, of all the rich Episcopal boys who had shunned him there and at Princeton. He imagined, for a moment, coming back to America, back to Virginia, in three or four years, still a young man by political standards, with credentials enough to change things that had long needed changing. He could see his life ahead of him, and he liked what he saw.
The phone call came just before noon on a pleasant September day. It was from Malcolm Summers, a man Harry had known since his earliest days in Washington. Summers was a North Carolinian with whom Harry shared a kinship based on region and age, a Duke graduate who had warmed the bench for the basketball team before going to law school after the war, then had risen to prominence in the State Department. They had lunch together perhaps once a year and sought each other out at parties. Their wives were compatible. Mac Summers’ inclusion in the informal committee that nominated the new Dutch ambassador had, Harry suspected, been a prime reason for his selection.
“Harry,” he said, “can I come by and see you about something? It won’t take long.”
He wouldn’t be more specific; Harry assumed that it concerned his impending appointment.
“How’s 9 tomorrow?” he asked, and Summers said that would be fine.
The next morning, Harry and Gloria were up at 5:15, making calls to The Netherlands, already into their new life.
They were running on adrenaline, barely able to keep up with their lives. They had gotten Nancy off for her freshman year of college and Martin for his junior year. They had just put the house on the market; the agent estimated they could double their initial investment after five boom years.
Harry, punctual despite the D.C. traffic, walked into the outer office at 8:50. He had forgotten about Mac Summers until he saw him there, a tall, thin, gray-haired man seated on the edge of one of the visitors’ chairs. It flashed through Harry’s mind that he had never known Mac to be early for a meeting.
Harry, though, greeted him with genuine enthusiasm, delighted to have such a pleasant appointment to start his day. Perhaps they could have lunch afterward if Mac was free.
“Maybe later,” Summers said. He seemed nervous; Harry had never seen Mac Summers nervous.
He invited him into his office and closed the door. They were barely seated when Summers opened his briefcase and took out two sheets of mimeographed typing paper. He put them on H
arry’s desk.
Mac Summers did not stay long. By 9:30, he was back in the rising early-September heat, without even a token promise of future social get-togethers from either man.
Harry waited another half-hour, and then he left, too. He told his secretary he would not be back, that she should take the rest of the day off. She noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were bleeding.
He walked down a dark corridor, out the front of the building, across a couple of streets and then to the Mall, where he sat on a bench, looking at nothing except the humid air in front of him for the next four hours.
Once, in 1957, Harry had been mildly upbraided by Ruth for absent-mindedly putting the wrong name on his most recent letter. Instead of addressing it to Miss Mercy Crowder, he had put “Ruth Crowder,” followed by Mercy’s address. It had been delivered to Mercy’s anyhow, the postman guessing correctly.
The second time he did it was the February before Mac Summers’ visit. This time, the same postman, who had handled Saraw’s mail for a quarter of a century and knew everyone in town, delivered the letter not to Mercy Crowder’s address but to the farmhouse of Ruth Crowder Flood, noting to himself that the writer had neglected to include her married name.
Ruth was working at the grill that day. Henry came home at 2 and checked the mail. He almost put the letter with no return address, just a Washington postmark, back in the box, replacing Ruth’s name with Mercy’s, but he didn’t. He took it inside, and then he sat down at the kitchen table, opened it and read it.
He could not have felt more betrayed if he had come home and found Ruth naked in bed with another man.
A younger, less-defeated Henry Flood might have reacted to what he deduced by tearing up a couple of rooms, saving some energy for Ruth when she returned.
But the Henry Flood of 1966 had seen better days. He knew, by then, that Ruth held the high cards, knew what his life might be without her. He was also a man whose sons were old enough to humiliate him if they had to. And then there was Naomi. He did not want to upset Naomi, now a grown woman, stronger now than she once was.
