Harry & Ruth (6 page)

When Harry got back to Camp Warren, he resolved to see Ruth one more time, to do the brave, hard thing and end it. Even before he saw her face, he knew he couldn't. She was standing there at the train station, looking the wrong way, at soldiers exiting the next car. Just the tilt of her head, the way she stood on tiptoes so as not to miss anyone, the cut of her hair and the memory of the way it had smelled when he kissed her goodbye before he left—these alone were enough to stop him, to convince him that no matter how real Gloria Tannebaum was, this was more real. He called her name and she ran into his arms, and he never told her goodbye until he had to.

Sometimes, Harry can't help but look back.

If he had married Ruth, his parents and the Tannebaums would've gotten over it; he's sure of that now. Gloria would have married some other nice Jewish boy who would have become a lawyer like her father. They would have lived happily ever after, all of them.

It didn't seem that easy in 1942, though. It was much easier to go with the majority vote.

All Harry could think of was his third cousin, Stuart Schapiro, who was nine years older. He fell in love with a gentile girl from Petersburg, and they dated for nine years before his parents would let them marry. There was always a Stuart Schapiro argument at family gatherings, with a younger cousin taking Stuart's case, in absentia, and an older aunt or uncle screaming that such a thing could never be allowed to happen.

Harry could rationalize by telling himself, truthfully, that the Crowders would not be popping any buttons over Ruth marrying a Jew, either. But he knew in his heart that Ruth had a way with her family, that she did what she made up her mind to do, that her surrogate parents never seemed to put their feet completely down when it came to Ruth.

Ruth writes her willfulness off to the conditions of her childhood. She might not have turned out better if her parents had lived, but she knows it would have been different.

The day they drowned, she remembers her grandfather coming back home, and then his brothers Harwood and Fred helping him out of the truck and walking him up to the front steps the way they sometimes had to when they all had been drinking. The front yard was full of felled trees and broken limbs.

When he got inside, he blurted it out, as if he had to say it quickly or not at all: “Theron and Belle are gone.” Ruth's grandmother fell back into her chair and began screaming. Ruth asked “Gone where?” and it was up to her Aunt Charlotte to take her into the back sitting room and explain, although it only became clear to her gradually, in terrible flashes large and small—seeing their salvaged but unreal faces at the funeral home, waiting for her mother to come read her a story, the realization that there were two less Crowders walking to their church the next Sunday. Gradually, two steps forward, one step back, the pain came, then receded and hardened.

She slept with her grandparents for two years after that, before they finally got her back to her own room. They bought her a pony. They humored her so much, buying her any candy or treat she wanted, that she was plump for the first and only time in her life when she started school.

When Harry first met them, T.D.'s sister Goldie was well into her 60s, recently widowed, and Charlotte and Jane were in their mid-40s. Charlotte had never married. Jane's husband had died in 1921, of the flu. Neither was as attractive as Ruth, but they were both pretty, pleasant women. Jane told her, when she was 7 or 8, that there was only one man out there for every woman, and she had lost hers.

The Crowder house's other resident was Uncle Matty. Uncle Matty was T.D.'s brother, eight years his junior. He was in his mid-60s when Harry met him, but his simple nature made him seem younger. He was an accomplished furniture-maker, he was dependable, and he was as loyal as a German shepherd. Since he was six feet, six inches tall and had T.D.'s dark, dangerous looks, he could be an imposing figure to those who didn't know him, but he would never harm anyone unless he felt he or his family was threatened.

Harry was treated well by the six older Crowders. When he wasn't there, though, they tried to gently warn Ruth against getting too deeply involved with someone “not of your religion.” She never told them that they had nothing to worry about, that the elegant Harry Stein was not about to marry some little country Presbyterian girl. She allayed their fears mainly by telling them that she was playing the field. She would go out occasionally with some boy from town, and she claimed she dated other soldiers whom she met at the various dances and socials that some church or civic group was always having that winter.

But Ruth had no other prospects; she wasn't looking for any. It seemed to her and Harry that they had lived the same lives in very different worlds. They were both their class salutatorians, laughed at the same jokes, had the same doubts about the existence of God that few, especially before and during the war, voiced. They never talked about it much, but they had the same physical needs, the same sexual timing and appetites. They had been together no more than a month when they started noticing how often they had the same thoughts at the same time.

I was kidnapped from a good Presbyterian home, Harry would tell her, and forced to live a life without barbecue or bacon, a life of circumscription and circumcision. Pity me, Ruth would say, born to a wealthy Jewish family and spirited away by Protestant gypsies, sold to a family that forced me to learn all the books of the New Testament, to dress Christmas trees and boil Easter eggs.

The weeks and months passed quickly, between the warm September night they met and that freezing, frantic February day at the train station in Newport, when they promised to write and to love and to remember.

It had all happened so fast. Harry remembers being more or less force-marched to his destiny—the hurried, excited news that his platoon was moving out, the call home, the instant wedding plans that seemed to suck him into their vortex. Until that weekend, he had switched his mind from one future to the other, lying in the barracks and staring at the pale ceiling in the dark, never letting go of either option, not really. Now, suddenly, he realized he was more ready for war than for this split. He couldn't move and was thus moved by others.

Harry didn't really deceive Ruth. She knew he was engaged. But she didn't know that, within 48 hours, he would be married.

And she didn't really withhold the truth, either. Hanging on to him that cheerless day, she only suspected, and she wasn't sure yet whether to fear or hope.

SIX

Everyone is talking at once around the dining-table cold cuts, and Hank feels dizzy, as if the words were spinning him around. When Naomi slips outside, he soon follows her, unnoticed. He craves the quiet and cool as much as the rare chance to talk with his older sister.

When he closes the sliding-glass door, Naomi jumps, short and quick as if she's just run across a carpet and touched metal.

“Oh,” she says, “it's you.”

It is strange to Hank, an athlete himself once, that someone of Naomi's caliber could be so nervous. How, he wonders, did she bear the strain of competition at that level? The least unexpected movement seems to unhinge her. Maybe the hair-trigger reflexes were an aid to a swimmer, maybe they got her into the water a hundredth of a second before anyone else. And the jumpiness hasn't just happened. Hank can barely remember her not being like this, although she's gotten a little worse. She seems, even to Hank, like one large exposed nerve.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.”

She's dropped some of her cigarettes out of the package. The brand advertises on billboards all around Saraw and Newport: A young woman, carefree, perky and athletic, cavorts above large green letters that say “Slim and cool.”

Naomi is slim, and she is cool. With her dark hair pulled back and the makeup and arched eyebrows, she looks as if frost might form on her forehead. To Hank, no rock himself, she seems to fluctuate between flustered and frozen.

“That's OK. It's been a long day,” she says as he tries to help her pick up the rest of the cigarettes but mainly succeeds in bumping her head with his. “Any day that involves changing planes in the Atlanta airport is a long day. And that thing we've got in Denver—don't get me started.”

But she does get started, talking at great length and with great heat about the foibles of a distant airport into which Hank will never fly. He shakes his head sympathetically.

She stops to take another drag. She's leaning against the deck railing. Behind her, the Gulf is whispering in the dark, sending up waves too short to matter. There is barely enough wind for them to smell the salt.

Hank asks about Thomas and Grace and Gary. They're fine, she says. Thomas Ferrell III is raking it in. Grace is doing well in law school. Gary's trying to find himself.

Naomi and Tom met when she was the semi-famous Naomi Crowder and he was in law school. She went all the way across the country to UCLA to fall in love with another North Carolinian, Ruth said at the time. Although Naomi would graduate from law school, too, Thomas Ferrell's skills as a corporate lawyer created a world in which she didn't have to practice for long, and she didn't.

Hank and Naomi talk for a while, catching up.

Finally, he can't help himself.

“So,” he says, “are you and Momma going to play well together?”

She gives out a short burst of laughter; such mirth as there is doesn't come anywhere near her eyes. Smoke floats out of her mouth.

“Hell, Hank. You know her better than I do. Do you think we can play well together?”

“You know she loves you, Naomi. You know she'd rather cut her tongue out than upset you.”

Naomi stubs the butt out on the deck's bourbon rail and flips it into the sand below.

“Her tongue, huh? Then why does it always work out that way, Hank? Huh?”

She turns away from him, toward the Gulf.

“Want to go for a walk?” he asks. He's tired, but he's been cooped up in a car all day and would like to take big, long steps along the beach, stretch out and talk with his sister.

“Uh, no. I don't think so, Hank. I'm really tired. Maybe later. I think I'm going to turn in.” She walks toward the door, then turns, as an afterthought, and says, “It was nice talking with you, though. And don't worry, we'll be fine. We'll play well together.”

And she graces him with a smile, the first one he's seen from his sister in some time.

Ruth has been watching from inside, half engaged in conversation with Paul and Tran as she wonders what her other two children are talking about. Me, probably, she's thinking. She hopes that, if nothing else comes of this visit, she will at some point be alone on a quiet deck with Naomi Crowder Ferrell, just the two of them.

Back inside, Naomi moves toward her mother, who has turned momentarily to the table. She reaches to put her arm around Ruth's shoulder, amazed at what an awkward, unnatural thing this seems to be. At that moment, Ruth leans over to pick up a deviled egg. Upon being touched, she looks up and reaches, too quickly, to put her arm around her daughter's waist. They wind up in an ungainly, uncomfortable knot, side by side with arms patting each other's shoulders for a few long seconds before Naomi moves away.

Like two cats in a room full of rocking chairs, Hank thinks, watching from outside.

The weight of the day lands on Harry suddenly, with a force that makes standing a task. He can barely keep his eyes open.

“Harry,” Freda says, “do you need to sit down?”

You don't look so good, he can almost hear her thinking. But they don't say things like that to Harry these days.

Artie takes his elbow, more gently than Bob the Driver and just as depressingly. Artie Marks, for God's sake. Harry used to babysit for Artie Marks.

Harry's guest room is the good one, away from the street, facing the carriageway behind Freda and Artie's brick Victorian house on Monument Avenue. It has a nice, high ceiling. It is chilly, though, and Harry hurries into his old-man's pajamas and works his way under the covers. He looks up at that ceiling for a few seconds. It seems so far away, and so blue, that it might be sky. Before he can reach over to turn out the bedside light, he is asleep.

“Harry,” Freda says. “Wake up, Harry. Wake up.”

She looks worried.

It takes a few seconds for him to regain full consciousness.

“What? What was I … Was I talking in my sleep?”

“Yelling would be more like it.”

She looks down at him, frowning.

“You kept saying you're sorry, that you tried.”

Harry is silent. Maybe he should share this dream with someone other than Ruth, but he doesn't know if he's up to it. Freda gets him a glass of water.

Now Harry's wide awake. It's 2:30 a.m., he's in pain, and experience tells him there is little use in trying to go back to sleep. He knows he'll just toss and turn, then do a facedown in his breakfast cornflakes.

“Harry?”

“What?”

“Does it scare you? It shouldn't, you know.”

He realizes his face is wet. It is difficult for him to explain even to his sister that it isn't the future that makes him sad; it is the past.

She puts her hand on his head. Her smell reminds Harry of Freda as a little girl, tagging along after her big brother. Amazing, he thinks, how that basic scent, that basic Fredaness, hasn't changed. He wishes he could say the same for himself, but even though he's heard that a person can't smell his own stink, he can tell that his night sweats are the odor of decay, of rot.

He decides to go ahead and tell her about the dream, without revealing its source.

“Oh, Harry,” smoothing his dwindling hair as if he were a child, “it's only a dream. There isn't anything to dreams but dreams. You dream about what you think about.”

He knows she's probably right, but as he has more or less accepted The End and its smirking, scythe-wielding inevitability, all things great and small have become portents. This acceptance did not come easily or quickly; it just came, until one day he woke up and could swallow it. What Harry would like to tell everyone: You think you have accepted death? You think you're a big boy or girl now, well aware that you won't live forever? Just wait. Wait until you make the victory tour, going around one last time to visit everybody you don't think you're ever going to see again.