Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  He was a man who knew his best damage from then on would be done not by rage but by stealth.

  He copied the letter by hand and put it away for the day he was almost sure would come, determined to learn all he could about the man whose name was on the letterhead, Harry Stein, the man who signed the letter to his wife “Love (as always), Harry.” He seemed to be some kind of Washington big shot, and he was almost certainly the long-sought, long-loathed Randall Phelps (who Henry had not imagined, in his wildest paranoia, was still communicating with Ruth). Then he taped up the original envelope, with the letter inside. The next time he went out, he stopped and placed it in Mercy’s mailbox.

  Henry was amazed to find that Harry Stein was important enough to be listed among the Johnson administration’s movers and shakers in the book he found at the public library. For days, he considered his revenge, pondered how he could do the most damage.

  Finally, Henry Flood wrote his congressman. U.S. Representative James Nicholson was, Henry knew, an old-school ultra-conservative Southern Democrat who might be able and willing to use the kind of information he was offering. He might be able to bring a certain high-flying Harry Stein down a notch or two. Maybe put Ruth in her place, too.

  “Did you know,” the letter began, “that a high-ranking member of the Johnson administration had a bastard child in 1943 by a woman in Saraw, North Carolina? That he continues to send support to this child and her mother while he raises another family in Washington, D.C.?” Henry gave Ruth’s name, and Naomi’s, and Harry Stein’s, along with enough educated guesses to give the congressman’s office a head start.

  Nicholson’s staffers checked out what came to them in that envelope with no return address. They were able to track down a World War II veteran named Lawrence Olkewicz in Greensburg, Pa., who remembered a wartime romance almost a quarter-century earlier. They found a birth certificate in Newport, along with a rather suspicious-looking marriage certificate for Ruth Crowder and Randall Phelps, the latter for whom no records existed anywhere else.

  They were able, with the help of an accommodating FBI agent, to determine that a certain amount of money had, for many years, found its way south from Richmond and then Washington to Saraw.

  James Nicholson, confronted with this wealth of circumstantial information, did not act immediately. He did not necessarily want to scuttle the career of a small-town mayor whom he had met once and actually liked, a woman who was, after all, part of his home state’s Democratic machinery.

  “But this fella in Washington?” he said at the meeting where all the evidence was presented. “He’s maybe not worth it now, but they tell me he’s on the rise. Let’s wait a little bit. We got all the bullets. We don’t have to shoot his liberal ass until he’s worth killing.”

  And so the congressman waited. In late August, he heard about the almost inevitable appointment of Harry Stein as ambassador to The Netherlands, and he considered the man’s age and credentials and potential for future damage to a party already torn apart by Communist sympathizers and draft-dodgers. A few days later, he called Malcolm Summers, who had interned for him when he was in law school.

  “Mac,” he’d told him, “I want you to read this. You’re his friend. You can advise him as to what to do. I don’t want to make a big to-do about this, don’t even want to bring Missus Flood into it if I don’t have to, you know what I mean?”

  Summers read the report, swallowed hard, thanked Nicholson and left. That afternoon, he made an appointment to see his old friend Harry Stein.

  Harry knew about scandals but, despite Ruth, he had never considered himself a target. He had been faithful to Gloria in the recent past; he didn’t drink or use drugs, although marijuana was already becoming a regular element at some of the Capitol Hill parties he attended. He did not believe he was associating with Communists.

  He didn’t expect Ruth to be his downfall, and he found it ironic that what he considered to be this one faithful thing he had persisted in doing month after month, year after year, would undo him.

  Harry knew that he could expect to read everything about Ruth and Naomi in the newspapers if he persisted. He knew he could count on his embarrassment staining all those he loved.

  He realized, sitting in his office after Summers left, his hand still bleeding from where he had slammed it into the side of his mahogany desk, just exactly how much he loved the life he was leading, the life that was possible for him. Outside, later, he tried to convince himself that he would not be ruining the lives of people he loved, that he owed it to himself and Gloria to not decline the ambassadorship.

  By the time he went home, he had convinced himself of exactly what he owed both Ruth and Gloria.

  “Time to go,” he said to himself as he rose slowly from the bench, scattering pigeons. “Time to be a big boy, Harry.”

  Before he left the city, he paid a quick visit to the head of the antipoverty program and told him most of the story, how an ongoing affair, involving a child, would make his departure for Europe highly unlikely.

  His boss, a cool, tall, stately man whose Harvard credentials had carried more weight under Kennedy than Johnson, and who counted on Harry to do most of the actual day-to-day decision-making, listened patiently, quietly. Harry wondered if he already knew.

  “Take a few days off,” he said, putting an arm around his shoulder, a gesture so uncharacteristically affectionate that it, along with the day’s earlier revelations, almost moved Harry to tears.

  Gloria was in the garage. Harry almost lost his nerve when he saw how energized she was, as happy as he’d ever known her to be. She had gone to an ABC store nearby and gotten as many empty liquor boxes as she could cram into her station wagon, in anticipation of packing. She was stacking them neatly in the rear of the garage.

  She was surprised to see Harry, always faithful to his work and never home this early. He led her inside, through the house and out to the back porch, which almost touched the unbroken woods where the red of the sumac was already promising cooler weather.

  And there, he told her what he thought he never would have to tell her. He knew what was at risk. He knew that he would have been better off telling her years before, when his secret transgression would not have also been the death of their shared dream.

  He could have come up with some barely plausible lie, but Harry Stein was tired. He knew the ambassadorship, the bauble he had come to look upon as proof of his worth, was gone.

  Watching Gloria’s face register the pain for which he was responsible, Harry wondered if he even cared any more about his present position, so glittering a short while ago, now a dingy job in a dingy office far from the glamour he thought soon would be his and Gloria’s.

  If Gloria had been confronted with the reality of Ruth and Naomi many years before, without the consequences that now leaked from it, she might have forgiven Harry, although not without some terrible price, he was sure.

  Even if he had lost the ambassadorship because of some dalliance with a co-worker or secretary, their marriage might have been saved. Affairs can be—had been—forgiven. New leaves had been turned over, also for a price.

  But what she could not forgive, when he told her about it, was the secret life he had led, almost completely on paper and in the minds of two people. That betrayal, the knowledge of the clandestine letters and the longing they implied, was what finally made Gloria leave for good.

  “You should have told me,” she said after Harry had explained why they would not be packing for Europe after all.

  “I just did tell you,” Harry said, knowing what she meant.

  “No. You should have told me a long time ago, right at the start.”

  Harry had to concede that she probably was right.

  “What is her name?” Gloria asked.

  “I told you. Ruth.”

  “Ruth what?”

  Harry sat silently, looking through a window at a Dali print he had long detested. He never answered her.

  “I think y
ou ought to leave,” Gloria said, stubbing out her cigarette and not looking at him. “You are such a bastard, Harry.”

  Right you are, he thought. Right you are.

  Maybe, if their children hadn’t been in college, safe from the unfriendly fire of home, grown enough—they each hoped separately—to weather this, Harry and Gloria both would have tried harder. Now, though, neither of them could work up all the energy they knew from experience it took to heal wounds. And there had never been anything this large before. This was a major artery.

  Harry never slept another night in the house on Balsa Drive.

  He would spent nine more months in Washington. By then, the divorce was almost final. Gloria stayed after he went home, still in the thrall of Potomac Fever, unwilling to return to Richmond. With the career diplomat who eventually became her second husband, she would live in Paris and Brussels for a time. Harry supposed that she was enjoying at least a measure of what he had once cost her.

  After the settlement, Harry invested some of his still-impressive nest egg in the house at Safe Harbor. He would, for the next eight years, split his time between Long Island and Richmond, where he resumed making money more or less full time for the still-appreciative firm of Martin & Rives.

  By the time he quit his job with the agency he once thought could change the world, he had become almost as disillusioned with Washington as he was with life in general. The two wars, on poverty and the North Vietnamese, were going badly. He feared, in the midst of riots and chaos, that the American people would prove less generous and idealistic than he had hoped and give up on the first, and he had long since come to loathe the second.

  Their Capitol Hill friends and some acquaintances were vaguely aware of the circumstances of Harry Stein’s demise. After he left Washington, neither he nor they found the time to keep in touch.

  When Harry Stein thinks back on his years in Washington, it is with nostalgia and regret, for all the bright, shining days, and all the ones that should have followed.

  He wondered, and Ruth wondered, what had happened, how the cover of their long, secret life had been breached. They, and especially Ruth, suspected Henry.

  He never let on, though, and Ruth did not then fully realize, would not for most of another decade, all Henry Flood was capable of concealing.

  TWENTY-THREE

  For a very long time, Harry Stein thought he and his first daughter would never meet. Too much water over the damn lie, he told himself, too much invested in the face-saving fabrication T.D. Crowder had offered so many years before.

  Randall Phelps had developed into an acceptable and accepted story. By 1970, Ruth had not heard anyone except Henry Flood say anything for at least 10 years indicating doubt about the identity of Naomi’s father.

  By then, Harry wondered what good he possibly could do his oldest child, or anyone else. These were the drifting years, the disappointing years when he weighed what he’d done against all he’d lost, when he fully understood that nothing is as good the second time as the first, and knew he’d already done everything once.

  He had Naomi’s photographs and Ruth’s letters, plus the image of a little girl, walking home from school, who should have had more confidence in herself, and the image of an older girl competing for her gold medal. Other than Martin and Nancy, there was no one from whom Harry needed to hide the letters any more, no one whose approbation he so valued or whose ridicule he so feared that Ruth couldn’t send her letters straight to his Richmond town-house or the cottage in Safe Harbor. Whoever might be sharing his bed at the moment might look curiously at the well-formed cursive script from Saraw, North Carolina, and briefly wonder what that was all about, but nobody really cared enough to ask, and if they had asked, Harry would have told them to mind their own damned business.

  So, on the subject of meeting Naomi, Harry had doubts. The idea of being confronted with one more example of and witness to what he had come to accept as his failed life held no charm whatsoever.

  Let sleeping parents lie, he and Ruth had long since agreed.

  But then Naomi became unexpectedly interested in her family tree.

  “Harry,” Ruth wrote June of that year, “you know that I have always dissuaded you from seeing Naomi. I have always felt that it would only do harm, that what’s done is done and best not undone. You have chided me from time to time for being too ‘uptight,’ and you could be right. (You see, I am capable of admitting that I am wrong from time to time.)

  “Naomi wants to know who her father is. She has doubted what we told her for a long time. If there is a Randall Phelps, she said, she has a right to know who her father is, dead or alive, drunk or sober, rich or poor. And I suppose she is right. And you surely aren’t as bad as what she must be imagining.”

  High praise, indeed, Harry wrote back, but after giving it some thought, he agreed that something could be arranged.

  Naomi did not necessarily want to bring her father into her life. But she was determined that, if he existed, she would meet him and know his name. Naomi liked structure, and the idea of her father as some loose thread hanging from her life’s fabric was a thought she could not let alone.

  So finally Ruth told Naomi the short version of what happened in Saraw, North Carolina, that war winter, and left the rest, the “heavy lifting,” to Harry. What was arranged, through Ruth, was a meeting at a neutral site.

  Naomi and Thomas already were living in Denver, but she was with a law firm that did occasional work in Manhattan. Harry came to New York on business from time to time and had a membership at the Princeton Club. Naomi was scheduled to fly to New York in mid-July, arriving on a Tuesday and returning on Friday evening.

  And so, it was arranged that they should meet at the bar in the Algonquin Hotel at 5:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. Harry told the professional student with whom he was living at the time, a woman one year younger than Naomi herself, a lie about an important meeting in Manhattan, strictly business, apologizing for not taking her with him. She shrugged her shoulders, as Harry noticed women were doing more and more in his presence, and said, “Whatever,” the word that seemed to sum up her philosophy of life.

  He took the train from Richmond on Wednesday and checked into his room before 3, just in time to wash up and put on something that the heat hadn’t wilted. He was as nervous as he’d ever been on any teenage first date.

  Here was one woman who had his number, who had always had his number. With others, he could excuse himself for almost anything. Some misdeed on their part, some failing, real or imagined, could be invented to justify almost anything.

  But where, he asked himself, is your upper hand when the woman in question is the daughter you never acknowledged? Sometimes he could even justify what he did to Ruth by telling himself she could have had him back on a platter at any time after 1966, if she had only left the combustible piece of garbage to whom she was married. But Harry could not excuse himself for Naomi. He felt she was entitled to spit in his face and walk away forever, to fall on him and try to claw his eyes out. Harry was nervous.

  He passed the Algonquin twice before going in. He might have circled another time or two, working on his story, but it was a blistering day on the pavement. It was still only 5:15, but he felt it might be a good idea to get settled, to be perhaps one scotch ahead when she walked in.

  Naomi had in her possession a photograph of her father, one Ruth wanted back. Harry knew she probably would recognize him immediately, and he was sure he would know her. So he secured a wing chair out of the light, where he could see her when she walked in but she couldn’t see him.

  For half an hour he waited. He had ordered his second scotch and soda and was wondering if Naomi had even less nerve than he did. And then, she was there. Her silhouette was all Harry could see at first, but he knew it was her, even before she stepped into the interior light. There was some gesture, something about the way she stood, hesitating, looking. It might have been a memory of Ruth.

  Grown, Naomi resembled
the Steins more than the Crowders. She was very pretty, but in a dark, quick way. Ruth had always had—and still does, on the last day of her seventh decade—a languid air about her, an economy and ease that make what she does appear much more simple than it really is. Harry could see, in those first few seconds, that Naomi had the more theatrical genes of the Steins—more movement, a face less able to hide anything.

  Naomi was already smoking a cigarette when she came inside, and Harry wondered how an ex-Olympic champion could take up such a habit. Already he wanted to lecture her, before his fatherhood was even acknowledged.

  She looked harried, and there was a slight sheen of perspiration on her high brow. She didn’t take a seat right away, but asked a waiter something and then disappeared in the direction of the ladies’ room, her quick searching glance missing Harry in his dark corner.

  Five minutes later she came out, not smoking now, better composed. In those five minutes, the last two tables in the room were taken, and she was standing there, probably debating whether to take a seat at the bar, maybe wondering if her father had stood her up again.

  Harry left his half-empty scotch at the table and walked the 20 feet that separated them. Her back was to him, and she jumped when he tapped her lightly, hesitantly, on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” he said in a voice as unsteady as his legs despite all the times he had rehearsed the moment in his mind, “but can Randall Phelps buy you a drink?”

  She took the hand he extended and followed him silently back to his table.

  That evening, first at the Algonquin and then at dinner, they talked for hours, both amazed that they were so easy with one another, although they were aided by alcohol, and they did keep one subject, The Subject, safely locked away for the most part. The Princeton Club and the Algonquin were right off the diamond district, and Harry had bought her a gift, a necklace she opened and then said she couldn’t keep, for fear her husband would think she was having an affair. (In reality, she told Thomas about the real nature of Randall Phelps as soon as she returned. She kept the necklace and he kept the secret from Hank and Paul, whom Thomas hardly ever saw.)