Free Harry & Ruth by Howard Owen Page B

stationed near Tiverton, in the southwest of England, when the letter came at last, the same day as one from Gloria.
    It was her handwriting, on the envelope.
    â€œDearest Harry,” she wrote. “I (or we, I suppose, if you want to be precise) have a daughter. She weighs five pounds, eight ounces. Not so big, but then Grandma says I was no larger than that.
    â€œThe naming is all up to me, it seems, so I have named her Naomi. Naomi Jane Crowder. Ruth and Naomi, in the Bible (your part of it, Harry), were such good friends, and I know that this little girl and I are going to be just like that. With one true parent, I must be her friend.
    â€œOh, Harry. I wish you could know how good it feels, here holding her. It’s as if I finally have a family. Some people would tell you I have been raised by six parents, but it isn’t the same. There is a feeling, really just a memory of a feeling I can barely recall, of being in my father’s arms or snuggling in bed with my mother, when she would let me, that all this has brought back. It isn’t much family, by some standards, but it, or she, is my family.
    â€œShe looks like you. I don’t tell anyone that, of course, and there is a certain amount of whispering about the baby being born with a full head of jet-black hair, since, as we all know, Randall Phelps was blond. Some day, maybe when she is 16, the two of us will take the train to Richmond and find where you work. We’ll sit at a soda fountain across the street, and when you come out of your big building, I’ll know it’s you. And I’ll point you out to Naomi. Maybe I will tell her you’re her daddy, or maybe I’ll just tell her there’s a handsome man I used to know, but I don’t want him to see me now.”
    Harry’s tent was facing a large open area, and soldiers were always walking back and forth; it was as if a never-ending parade was going past, people bound to save the world, somehow.
    Harry Stein put his head down and really knew, for the first time, what he had done.
    He started sending the money that day. Ruth never asked him to.
    He wrote to Freda, in care of Mrs. Cameron’s boarding house. She was five years younger, but even when he was in junior high, skipping the occasional day of school, swimming the dangerous currents of the James River with his friends, he could trust Freda not to tell.
    He instructed the paymaster to send a certain amount to his sister every payday. At first, it was only 10 dollars a month, which Freda would forward to North Carolina. He explained about Ruth, although no more than he had to.
    At first, Freda thought Harry was being “shaken down,” as she expressed it to him, but she always sent the money south, to Miss Mercy Crowder of Saraw, N.C. And she never breathed a word about it to anyone until after she married Artie Marks. Old Harry and Ella never knew about Ruth Crowder, or their first grandchild.
    Harry’s other gift, beyond ink on paper and the ten dollars a month that later grew to fifteen, then twenty and beyond, was the kind of advice only a person of will and vision could use.
    A friend from Princeton had come through Richmond in the spring of 1942, not long before Harry enlisted. They had lunch at a diner downtown. Bobby Weinberg had become a stockbroker, and he was filled with the gospel of the dollar.
    Bobby Weinberg took a paper napkin and a pencil and filled up row after row with numbers, showing Harry what it meant to invest while you were young. With the Depression only lately beaten back by war’s prosperity, Harry had little use for such advice. No one trusted the stock market, and Harry had youth’s contempt for thrift.
    But Bobby did get his attention with one deceptively hard fact: If you invested a certain amount of money between 18 and 29, he said, you would have more money at 65 than if you started at 29 and invested until you were 65. This Harry could understand. He