The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (11 page)

“Ruthie said, ‘What are you doing with my number?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about,” says Mike. “She said, ‘That’s mine.’ I said no, I just took it out of my backpack. She took off running to the back of the house, and came back with hers. They were exactly alike, with the number 709.”

She thought these kinds of things were like God winking at us, letting us know that there is a hidden order running deeply beneath the surface of the world.

“My car died after Mike went back,” Abby says. “I had to buy a new vehicle so she let me borrow Mike’s truck while I was shopping. I was headed out to her house one day and she was headed into town. We passed each other going opposite directions. In front of me was a van from the penitentiary with the number 709 on the grille.”

Adds Mike, “The weird thing was that my rotation in Iraq was officially called OIF—for Operation Iraqi Freedom—07-09. In her mind, that meant something. And believe it or not, I just happened to arrive back home in the US from Kuwait on July 9—another 07-09.”

After a few days of demobilization Mike and his men made the last leg of their journey home, to the Baton Rouge airport. Dignitaries and the media awaited them on the tarmac, but more important, so did their families. A photographer from the
Advocate
shot the moment Ruthie and the girls embraced Mike. It would be on the front page of the next day’s newspaper.

Because Mike was an officer the Lemings lingered at the airport for an hour, until he had seen all his men off safely home. Meanwhile Abby was frantic. They had planned a surprise party for Mike in Starhill, but Abby’s flight home from a Florida vacation had been delayed into New Orleans. She threw her luggage into her car and flew north, hoping to beat the Lemings to Starhill.

As Abby sped past the on ramp near the airport, Mike and his family were at that moment pulling onto the interstate.

“That’s a 709 moment right there,” Mike said. Then they looked at the truck’s digital clock.

It read 7:09.

As the Lemings reached Starhill, Mike beheld yellow ribbons tied to trees lining the country road on the last mile home. A sheriff’s deputy had parked his car at the top of the gravel driveway, which struck Mike as odd. Seconds later Mike saw a pair of fire trucks on either side of the driveway, firing their deck guns to create a triumphal water arch for their returning hero—Mike had been awarded the Bronze Star for “exceptional meritorious service”—to pass under in his glory.

“The whole community was in the yard, waiting for us to get home,” Mike recalls. “They took time to come out for me and my family. It gave me an incredible feeling.”

Mike made it home in time for a serious community crisis, but one that, by Ruthie’s lights, turned into an unexpected blessing. On September 1 Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana. New Orleans was not hard hit, but the Baton Rouge area, which had come through
Katrina without big problems, was devastated. In Starhill the power went out for days. Everyone pulled together to help each other remove fallen trees and make food, ice, and gas runs into Mississippi.

Naturally everyone got together on those hot nights at Mam and Paw’s.

“They had two generators going, and the fans were blowing at your mom and dad’s house,” John Bickham remembers. “Good company and moving air, let’s go. It was a good time. There was no TV. Nothing to do but sit in the dark with everybody else. We all just focused on each other. When you take distractions away, you realize that other people, that’s what’s important. It’s not what you have in life, it’s who you have.”

About two grueling weeks later the lights came back on in Starhill. When she called me to tell me the power was back, Ruthie confessed that she was almost sorry to see it happen. “It was so nice to be with each other every night, just sitting around the grill, drinking beer and telling stories, just being together. Now we’re all back in our houses, watching TV. It’s kind of too bad.”

My return to DC, the city I thought would be my new home, did not last. I moved again, in 1995, to Fort Lauderdale, to take a job as a film critic with the South Florida
Sun Sentinel
newspaper. The job was great, the people wonderful, but my romantic life was a desert. One autumn weekend in 1996 I flew to Austin to meet my writer friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, who had just published a book about her conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and was giving a couple of talks in the Texas capital. My friend Jason McCrory, whom I’d grown up with and then gone to boarding school with, lived there as well.

That Friday night, at the Logos Bookstore in northwest Austin, Jason introduced me to an undergraduate journalism student who had
come out to hear Frederica speak. Her name was Julie Harris. She had read and admired Frederica’s writing, and considered her a professional role model.

The college girl Jason escorted over had large, lively eyes, high cheekbones, impossibly full lips, and thick brown hair cut in a stylish bob. There I stood, wearing faded olive chinos, a
Trainspotting
T-shirt, and scuffed combat boots, suddenly feeling like the biggest fake hipster nerd in Austin.

After the reading Julie and I had dinner with Frederica and a group from the bookstore. Funnily enough Julie paid no attention to her journalism idol, only to the gabby Florida journalist on her left hand. The next night, a Saturday, we met with Frederica under the live oak tree at the Shady Grove restaurant. On Sunday, after church, Julie and I met again, and spent the afternoon together before my flight back to Florida. In the parking lot of Waterloo Records, I kissed Julie Harris, and we fell in love. On Monday, halfway across the country from each other, we were trading delirious e-mails. Four months, several visits, and countless letters later, I flew to Austin with a ring in my pocket and proposed. We decided to marry that December in New Orleans, after her college graduation.

Julie and I met in Louisiana one weekend that spring and spent a day driving around the city looking for a Catholic parish to book for our December wedding. We finally found one at the far end of Esplanade Avenue, near City Park. As soon as we walked in, we knew in our bones that this must be the place. It was free on the day we needed it, so we made our reservation. Four-year-old Hannah would be our flower girl.

Shortly after we returned to Florida to begin our lives as husband and wife, the
New York Post
offered me a job as its chief film critic. In the spring of 1998 we moved to Manhattan and became New Yorkers.

We were newlyweds in Manhattan during the city’s best decade
of the twentieth century, and we were deliriously happy. I worked for a New York City tabloid, the most purely pleasurable newspaper job I ever held. There was the nutball editor Vinnie Musetto, author of the infamous “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline, three desks over. I could tipple with the tabloid god Steve Dunleavy at his perch at Langan’s, the Midtown bar across the street from the
Post.
Mafia goddess Victoria Gotti kept a desk at the paper, where she alighted once a week to write her column. Julie, meanwhile, worked as an editorial assistant at
Commentary
, a magazine she had read and admired in college. There she worked with a number of the leading intellectual polemicists and essayists of our time.

Every week or two a cable news channel would phone asking me to be a guest. The phone rang off the hook in Starhill when that would happen. “Dorothy, Ray, turn on CNN, Rod’s on!” My new job took us both to premieres and film festivals, and to cocktail parties with movie stars. The film producer Ismail Merchant once taught us both how to cook shrimp in a mustard dill sauce, and invited us to his country house for the weekend (alas, we had other plans). Weekends meant dinner at trendy restaurants, drinks at cool bars, and wandering, hand in hand, around Central Park or wherever our curiosity took us. Once I spotted Woody Allen on the Upper West Side, and thought,
well, there you go.
This was the urban paradise a younger version of myself dreamed of finding.

What I did not perceive was that something over that exciting year for me had taken root in Ruthie’s mind, a seed of resentment that I was unable to discern, much less fathom.

The thing showed itself over the Christmas break in 1998, when Julie and I came south for our first holiday visit as husband and wife. Eager to do something nice for my family, and to show them that we had taught ourselves how to cook, like a responsible couple, we had asked if we could make them a bouillabaisse. It was simply a French-style seafood soup, something I figured they would appreciate as
Louisianans. Had I called it a court bouillon, the Cajun version of bouillabaisse, maybe none of it would have happened.

But it did happen. Julie and I spent all day buying various kinds of fish for the bouillabaisse, cooking it in the garlic, tomato, and herb broth, making the special red pepper sauce that goes on the baguette, and setting the table for a big family dinner. When the soup came to the table, no one reached for the ladle in the bowl.

“What’s wrong?” I asked

Nobody said a word. Finally Paw asked for a coffee cup, into which he ladled a taste of the soup, but only that. His bowl sat empty.

Mam wouldn’t taste the stuff. Neither would Ruthie. This beautiful tureen of saffron-colored stew, fat with shrimp and chunks of halibut, catfish, and red snapper, sat untouched in the center of the table.

“Mama, do you know who I ran into in town the other day?” Ruthie said, then mentioned the woman’s name. “She’s a good cook. A good
country
cook.”

So that was it: we had insulted them by coming down with our New York attitudes and making some uppity French soup that they had never heard of. Never mind that it tasted exactly like the kinds of things people in south Louisiana eat all the time. Never mind that we had asked before we bought the first ingredient if they would be interested in having this for dinner. Never mind that they had let us work all afternoon on this dinner, knowing that they wouldn’t even taste it.

It was rude and it was hurtful. It was also the first moment I became aware that something had gone seriously wrong between Ruthie and me. That kind of behavior was uncharacteristic of her. After the New Year we returned to Manhattan, angry and confused. What I only learned many years later, when Mam and Paw told me, was that Ruthie and Mike were struggling at tough jobs that didn’t pay much, while I was making twice their salary combined (at least on paper) to go see movies all day, write reviews, and sometimes get on national TV to
talk about them. Ruthie had no idea how high taxes and the cost of living were in New York, and how I actually made less than it seemed. Nor did she have much understanding of or respect for the idea of being paid money to write.

To her my New York adventure was the most galling instance yet of everything coming easily for Rod.

I didn’t grasp any of that then, nor did Ruthie ever talk to me about her feelings. That wasn’t Ruthie’s way. I might have pushed harder to confront her on this, and to resolve our differences, had I known that some version of that bouillabaisse scene would play itself out on visits home for years to come. As it happened I contented myself with tolerating the tension on those short visits home, and never pressing too hard to resolve them, for fear of disturbing the peace on those brief interludes when we were all in the same geographical place as a family.

After a year and a half of living in an Upper East Side studio apartment, Julie and I swam across the East River to Brooklyn to spawn. We took an apartment on Hicks Street, in the brownstone Cobble Hill section. Our front door opened onto an unobstructed view of the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. Coming home from work at night, the last thing I would see before going in were the glittering towers, especially the twin spires of the World Trade Center. Once, when Mike and Ruthie came up to visit, we stood on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade taking in the view of the Manhattan skyline. I asked Mike what he thought about it. He was quiet for a moment, then said, with awe in his voice, “What has man created?”

Despite the physical distance I stayed in close phone contact with my folks and with Ruthie. For most of my adult life rarely three days will go by without my speaking to Mam and Paw. Ruthie and I touched base every week or two. Though I spoke far more often with my family back home than any of my peers seemed to with their relatives, the emotional insufficiency of telephone calls became clear to me when our first child came into the world. Matthew was born
in 1999. Mam and Paw came to Brooklyn to see their first grandson not long after we brought him home. Because air travel was expensive, we could only visit Louisiana twice a year, but I would lull little Matty to sleep at night by telling him stories of Paw’s adventures as a young man.

We would lie in our bedroom above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and I would tell my boy about the time his Paw roped calves and wrestled steers in the rodeo. There was the time Paw was in the Coast Guard and rode out a hurricane in Mobile Bay, lashed to the wheel of his cutter. Then there was the time during my childhood when I saw Paw find a chicken snake stealing eggs from our coop, grab it by its tail as it was trying to get away, whirl it around his head like a lasso, and crack the snake like a whip. Its head went flying across the yard.