Free Harry & Ruth by Howard Owen

hers, forgetting that he had ever known a girl named Ruth Crowder.
    Either choice, though, required the chooser to forgo remorse, to forget the other path.
    After a honeymoon weekend spent mostly with family and seldom alone, Harry and Gloria saw each other once more, in June, before his unit shipped out for England. He would spend a year there, in what seemed to Harry like an adult, black-comedy version of the summer camps of his youth, preparing for the vague something, the Plan that would save the world. They knew they could die, as much as young men ever believe such a thing, and it made their sorties into London, the courting and fighting in village pubs, all the more intense.
    Harry was true to Gloria, though, in the flesh. He laughed at the stories of other officers, equally married, who came back to their base bragging of trysts in third-floor London walkups, with air-raid sirens going off in the distance, of drunken fistfights made comic by war’s shadow.
    But he did cheat. The letters, once he worked up the nerve to write Ruth back after he knew her secret, never stopped. For a while, he would write Gloria every time he wrote Ruth, but he realized he had more to say to the girl he left than the woman he had married. Before long, he’d taken the path of least resistance and was writing Gloria twice a week, out of guilt, and Ruth four times a week, because six or seven would have been unseemly.
    In April, Ruth wrote that everyone knew she was pregnant, and that it would no longer be possible for Harry to send letters to her grandparents’ address. No one knew who the father was, and no one, save Cousin Mercy, was going to know, if she could help it.
    He was to send future letters to Mercy, who would tell her parents that she had met a soldier at Camp Warren who was crazy about her. It was meant to be a temporary solution, but Cousin Mercy never married. For many decades, people in Saraw were convinced that Mercy Crowder had a secret beau, who wrote her first from Army posts and then from Richmond, then later from Washington and Long Island. So the letters never stopped.
    Mercy, generous and energetic, was never overly attracted to any of Saraw’s young men. After her siblings moved out, she stayed on and took care of her parents. She dated occasionally, but never very seriously. Once, she told Ruth that she couldn’t imagine a man as good as her father.
    Ruth’s grandfather concocted the plan to save his family’s honor. Ruth had made it clear that she would have the baby, that she would keep the baby, and if they wanted to put her out in the cold, she would manage.
    By May, T.D. Crowder had enlisted a cousin who was a judge. This judge arranged to produce a marriage license, back-dated to February. Ruth McNair Crowder had secretly married Randall Phelps on Feb. 14, 1943. Randall Phelps had then shipped out to North Africa in April, from where he wrote back and said he had changed his mind, that he didn’t want to be married any more. The judge, with T.D.’s help, invented a bridegroom and granted him a divorce on the same day. If anyone believed it, it was because Ruth had her secrets. If something like this could happen, it would happen to someone like Ruth. She hadn’t brought Harry Stein to any more church socials or dances in Saraw itself. People knew she was dating other boys as well. She was known to go to dances in Newport and meet other young men (although a cursory investigation would have revealed that most of them were named Harry Stein.)
    Ruth had no intention of taking some fictional last name for either herself or her baby, and the family said Ruth wasn’t going to honor that sorry Randall Phelps by giving the child his name. If he wanted that baby to be a Phelps, they said, he could just come back and be a proper husband.
    Ruth feared on occasion that one or the other of her grandparents had actually convinced themselves that Randall Phelps existed.
    â€œThe