The Lady and the Panda Read Free Page B

qualities and is a friend worth having.” If few people in northwest Pennsylvania really understood her, that was fine by Ruth. Like her older siblings, Jim and Helen, she planned to cut loose at the first possible opportunity.
    After a semester at the University of Colorado and an experiment teaching English in Cuba, Ruth, with twenty-five dollars as her war chest, headed north to New York City.
    Raven-haired and slim, Ruth Elizabeth McCombs was twenty-three years old when she first remade herself. Powdered and dressed up, she took on Manhattan, finding a job in fashion, where she could design and sew dresses for a population that bought up all the Paris knockoffs Seventh Avenue could produce. She took to her new life like a natural— utterly at ease at the center of a party, rarely seen without a smoke in one hand and a highball in the other. She became as quintessential a flapper as Clara Bow, one of the brassy, fun-loving girls in shimmering cocktail dresses who were, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “impudent” and “hard-berled,” who flouted convention and danced with abandon. Ruthsaid there were only two things in the world she hated: going to bed at night and getting up in the morning.
    She might have been in great demand, but it wasn't because she was pretty (she always said her face was not her fortune, and that it took an expensive photographer to bring out her best). She was so striking, though, that when she walked into a room, men noticed, and Bill Harkness was no exception.

    Ruth Harkness could fill a room with her presence.
LOTTE JACOBI/COURTESY MARY LOBISCO
    It didn't matter that she came from working folks in a small town, and he from big-city upper crusters. It meant nothing that she “had to work like the devil for a bare living,” and that he maintained his comfort without a thought to employment. He was intrigued.
    Together, they knew how to enjoy themselves, to kick up their heels at naughty, high-toned soirées and low-down speakeasies alike. During the postwar era of sexual freedom, the two bohemians became a full-fledged couple. They were as good as married, without the traditional, stodgy sanctity of a wedding. Neither was a prude, and both loved physical pleasure. Ruth even joked about scandalous notions like being spanked on “a bare derriere.”

    Bill Harkness, Ruth said, “spent most of his life on game trails in remote corners of the globe.”
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO
    At the beginning of their courtship, they found themselves constantly tucked away in some corner, slugging back bootleg booze and lost in intense conversation. Addicted to reading, they soon began swapping books on their favorite subject—exotic travel. Their leather-bound volumes were filled with high adventure and glimpses of strange cultures. Often they contained delicate fold-out maps shaded in beautiful colors, veined with blue rivers and dappled by the shadowy wrinkles of mountain ranges. The most captivating among these atlases were the half-finished ones, those in which the dense, busy portions would end abruptly, leaving blank whole uncharted territories—regions of the world still steeped in mystery. Here were the places that had not given up their secrets to Western travelers and mapmakers. Sitting together in the haze of cigarette smoke, warmed by a glass of whiskey, their imaginations racing, Bill and Ruth always found themselves drawn to those patches of the unknown.
    Bill had spent most of his short adulthood “on game trails in remote corners of the globe,” Ruth said, visiting India and China, Java, Borneo, and other islands of the Dutch East Indies. He thrived on the rough-andtumble life in the field leavened by stints of footloose merriment in exotic cities. In long letters home, and then in intimate getting-reacquainted sessions on his return, he entranced Ruth with his tales of treks abroad.
    His accounts, no doubt, were as gracefully told as the sagas the couple read together. For Bill was