Harry & Ruth Read Free Page A

underneath her dress.
    At Virginia Beach, where Harry went as a child, it might already be too late for swimming, but here, it was perfect. The water was cooling more slowly than the air; it felt warmer than it would some days in July. Farther off into the darkness, a Tommy Dorsey tune was playing.
    Harry went rushing in, as he always did, diving headfirst into a wave. When he surfaced and looked back, Ruth was still standing where he’d left her, going no farther than the very tip of the tide’s boundary. She reminded Harry of a little girl at the ocean for the first time, fearful every time the water crept up to her. She was so beautiful in the white one-piece bathing suit. For the rest of his life, string bikinis and clothing-optional beaches notwithstanding, no girl on any beach would stir him so. She had the kind of tan that she accepted as her birthright, merely for living that far south and being young. On that night, in that place, he thought perfection had temporarily been achieved.
    The spell lasted a few seconds. Then, dragging her into the water seemed like the only thing to do. But when Harry came out, grinning his intentions, stooped in front of her and lifted her over his shoulder, then started walking back into the water, she went suddenly and completely berserk. Before Harry could put her down, she had managed to give him what would turn into a rather impressive black eye.
    â€œI can’t swim!” she kept screaming, and by the time he put her down, she was crying so hard she could barely catch her breath.
    Harry knew people who couldn’t swim. In Richmond, no summer passed without some luckless child diving into the river on a dare and never again touching dry land. He himself learned in stages, with his father’s hand growing lighter and lighter every time they tried at a lake or the pool. One day, the water was holding him and he was moving forward, all of 20 feet.
    â€œSee, Harry,” his father had said, putting a sunburned arm around him while he used the other to keep his cigar from getting wet, “now you can swim. Now you’re a big boy.” Old Harry had even smiled.
    â€œCan’t swim” did not properly describe Ruth’s relationship with water, though. Harry was just beginning to fully understand that she feared it the way other children feared fire.
    In a letter the next day, Ruth apologized, and tried to explain.
    â€œMore than anything else,” she wrote, “I remember the day of the big hurricane, the one in 1928. You see, it hit on October 6. I should have told you about it before, but it gets treated like some deep, dark secret around here. We don’t talk about it among ourselves, even on October 6. When I was a little girl, I would ask my grandparents about it, or one of my aunts, and they’d shut up tight. If you asked Uncle Matty, he’d start to cry. After a while, I stopped asking.
    â€œThat day, I remember my grandfather arguing with Momma and Daddy, trying to keep them from going to the beach. It was windy, but the sun was shining, and I was crying because they wouldn’t take me with them. After they left, Grandma let me help’ her make biscuits, and by the time we were finished, late that morning, it had gotten very dark. Granddaddy wouldn’t come away from the window. He was looking toward the ocean …”
    Before he fell in love with Ruth Crowder, before he became immersed in a girl and a family and a place to which only a war could have led him, Harry was unfamiliar with the concept of family secrets.
    Among the Steins, there were no secrets, no subtext. Until the day she died, Harry’s mother was liable, at any family gathering, to launch into a monologue about what exactly went wrong between Harry and Gloria, with aunts and uncles and cousins freely volunteering their opinions, pro-Harry and con.
    The Crowders, though, not only could keep a secret, they had trouble letting go of