A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

  “I’ll have to get rid of the evidence then!” he yelled back.

  Judd sat in the Adirondack chair with the Johnnie Walker and a glass in the high bluegrass of the yard he’d need to mow. He brooded as he remembered how as a boy in his teens he used to go outside in Newark and sit on a wicker settee between his father and mother, holding their hands, watching the poetry of a sunset. And now no one in the East Orange house seemed inclined to sit with him in the twilight that his mother called “the gloaming,” and he felt hurt and wronged and liable to do anything.

  Writing of that Saturday evening later, he stated he was surging with remorse, self-condemnatory, lashing myself with feverish contempt one minute, then remembering Ruth’s tenderness, her loveliness, the next. My thoughts would go back and back again to her. Then regrets and that inner turmoil of a conscience that was burning hot with shame.

  Judd maniacally used his reel mower on the lawn at sunrise, washed his purple Hupmobile with its sporty black roof and black fenders, then took a bath and drove the family to Trinity Presbyterian Church in South Orange. Jane went to Sunday school, Isabel and her mother found their usual pew, and Judd took his familiar place in the choir to sing “When Morning Gilds the Skies,” “O Gladsome Light,” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” And, as if word was out about him, he heard a sermon from Reverend Victor Likens on a passage from the Gospel of Mark: “And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth him. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”

  Scorching himself for his hypocrisy, Judd made a secret oath that he would never have sexual congress with Mrs. Snyder again, and right after that he visited his mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, in West Orange, alone.

  She was a frail, dignified, courtly woman whom he adored almost to the edge of weirdness. Welcoming him as if he were long lost, she hugged him close and rocked with him, saying, “Oh, my Bud! My darling boy!” She then gave him a grilled cheese sandwich and Coca-Cola and hovered over him as she gladly watched him eat. She said Bud looked exhausted. She wondered if dresses could get any shorter. She inquired of Bud if Mrs. Kallenbach was giving him anything for her share of the room and board. She said, “Don’t let her walk all over you.” Bud asked if she had any jobs that needed doing, but she only ordered him sternly to get his family and go on a nice vacation somewhere.

  Judd did, as always, as he was told and called Alfred Benjamin at his home, then left Mrs. K to her needlework and motored across Long Island with Isabel and Jane to an ocean-view inn in Sagaponack for Jane’s ninth birthday and a week’s vacation, the three of them swimming in the Atlantic surf and hollering from the cold, or horseback riding in jodhpurs and English saddles on the white sand roads linking villages there. Alone he went to the public golf course with his hickory-shafted clubs, his argyle sweaters and plus fours, his flailing, uninstructed swing. And at night there was fine food and dancing and games of bridge.

  Because Isabel and Jane hated having the vacation end, but Judd was required in the office, he booked them for another week; left the Hupmobile Eight with his wife, who’d just learned to drive; and took a jitney into the city on the third Monday in August.

  And he was walking into Rigg’s Restaurant on 33rd Street for ham and eggs when he ran into Harry Folsom as he was leaving. The hosiery man tarried long enough to wedge around in his mouth with a toothpick as he said he wasn’t a kid anymore and he was through with wild parties, through with the hangovers from bathtub gin, and for sure he was through with fast women. “They can’t keep secrets, you know.”

  Judd tried to act shocked. And because Harry’s chocolaty eyes had the solemn, baleful look of a hound, Judd asked, “Are you in the doghouse?”

  “Not in, under. Whatever’s on the doghouse floor, that’s my roof.”

  “Because of?”

  Harry lit a Raleigh cigarette. “Dames. What else? I have been ordered by the Mrs. not to talk about it.”

  Hoping to seem merely conversational, Judd asked, “Say, have you heard from Mrs. Snyder recently?”

  Harry tweezed a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “Well, she’s not getting along with the old wet blanket at home, is all I hear. I know Albert, too, through bowling. Have you met him?”

  “No.”

  “Solid guy, fine artist, but sort of a stick-in-the-mud. She’s not the right girl for a killjoy like him. Anyways, I’m not going to take either one’s side. But I guess there’s another friend gone.”

  “Which friend?” Judd asked.

  “Al, of course,” Harry said, as if Judd were dense. “You don’t abandon a doll like that.”

  Abandonment, Judd thought. That’s what it was. “I have a hard time fathoming how anyone could treat such a lovely woman so badly.”

  Harry’s stare was long and interrogatory, and then he got out a postcard invitation from his vest pocket and handed it to Judd. “Are you aware of this ‘Bon Voyage’ party? Hosted bar and everything. Some big fashion-month shebang.” And he added dismissively, “You’re supposed to look nautical.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Nah. I’m through with shebangs, too.” And then he winked. “But you should definitely go.”

  Waiting for him in his Benjamin & Johnes office were retailer inquiries, order forms, an announcement from the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State, a notice of an increase in dues from his Elks lodge, and three neatly typed letters lacking a sender’s name or return address. The first, dated Tuesday of last week, read:

  Dear Judd,

  Hate to bother you on the job but I have no one in whom to confide, no one but you to whom I can unburdun myself and speak of my troubles, my husband’s neglec, our night after night of arguments, Albert’s cruellty toward our baby. Won’t you see me for lunch sometime? We can just talk.

  Judd slit open another that was postmarked on a Wednesday evening:

  Dear Judd,

  I have been investigating an Ursuline convent for Lora to get her out of this din of inequity Albert has created. She could learn and be safe and far away from a father who has no regards for her. But I cannot bare to part with her. She is all I have of love and happyness.

  I feel certain I could get a job in business. Selling stocks and bonds maybe. I need financial advice, your smarts. Oh please won’t you call me? Orchard 8591. Each night I pray, “Dear God, give me back the past.” I would do so much so different. You have shown me all that is possible.

  The final letter was postmarked on Saturday:

  Dear Darling Mr. Gray,

  You must think I’m some loon since you haven’t answered. Please accep my apologies for the desparate tone of my letters. They would certainly scare me if I were a man! I have not wanted to call your office for fear people there will talk, and that would be distructive. I have no other expectations beyond speaking to you since I value your intelligence and mastery of situations. Won’t you call when Al is gone? Eight in the morning to 6 at night. Orchard 8591. We can meet at Henry’s if you’d like to.

  Judd did nothing.

  Earlier, in 1924, Albert Snyder had felt certain his wife was having an extramarital affair. C. F. Chapman, the publisher of Motor Boating magazine, recommended Albert initiate actions for a divorce and forced him to leave their offices on West 40th Street to have a conversation with Judge Nathan Lieberman, a New York state assemblyman and a high-paid Broadway attorney. The judge reviewed New York’s divorce laws with Albert, urged him to hire a private detective to find proof of Ruth’s infidelity, and then introduced him to an ex-cop named Jacob Sanacory. She was investigated for a week, and at its conclusion Sanacory wrote Judge Lieberman, “We have incontestable evidence on this man’s wife.” And that same afternoon Sanacory telephoned Albert to say, “She’s in your house with a guy right now.”

  Albert stood in the front yard
with the gumshoe and vaguely heard a Brooklyn voice and Ruth’s giggling in Lorraine’s bedroom, but though Sanacory got his camera out and egged Mr. Snyder to hurry inside, saying they needed a photograph of the lovers in flagrante delicto, Albert hesitated. “And then what?” he said. “End it? She’s an adequate mother and domestic. With Root I can at least be sure that the house and the girl are being taken care of.”

  Sanacory shook his head as he went off, and Albert sat on the front porch for a full hour, inventing ever-bloodier ways to destroy the diddler’s face. And then he did not even do that. “I could have done a lot,” he told C. F. Chapman, “but I would have had to be in love.”

  Soon after that the Snyders established an unspoken accommodation: Albert would ignore Ruth’s nights out or counterfeit an acceptance of the lies she told, and she would affect a nonchalance about him.

  And so it was that in August 1925, both of them could be going out on the town, but alone. Thursday was Albert’s night for duck-pin bowling in his Flatbush summer league, so he came home from work earlier to get his six-inch ball and high-top bowling shoes. But he also took a bath and changed his shirt and necktie.

  Ruth carried in a stein of his Pilsener as he hunched toward the dresser mirror and tied a Windsor knot. She got his royal blue Jacquard from the closet tie rack and said, “She’ll like you better in this one.”

  Albert frowned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But he tugged the plaid necktie off and took the Jacquard from his wife. “So what are your plans?”

  She told him Josephine was staying home and could watch the baby, so she was going out with Ethel. “She wants to see that new Rudolph Valentino movie. The Eagle?”

  Albert swallowed some beer and said, “I have no idea why you females swoon over that foolish, effeminate Italian.”

  “Could it be we find manliness overrated?”

  “Well, it’s like they say. Women have the last word in any argument. Anything the man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.” Admiring himself and tying a Windsor knot in the Jacquard, he said, “I’ll be late.”

  And she said, “Me too.”

  Judd rented a skipper’s hat from a costume shop and avoided Mrs. K at home as he collected his blue cashmere blazer and white flannel slacks, then telephoned Isabel and Jane at the inn as he tanked up with a full glass of Scotch and got back to the city for the Bon Voyage party on a sultry August night. It was being held on a three-masted schooner moored on the East River. Judd held up his postcard invitation and was whistled aboard the schooner by a security guard who was pretending to be a naval petty officer.

  Walking up the gangplank, Judd encountered perhaps a hundred nautically costumed guests in the fashion business gabbling and laughing underneath the hanging ship’s lanterns and taking weenies, canapés, and Taittinger champagne from waiters attired like seamen. Judd was greeted by a buyer for Bloomingdale’s and hugged by a buyer at Macy’s, but there were few others he knew. The haute couture models—who were then known as mannequins—strutted around the schooner to parade the finest of the fall designs, but no lingerie was on display and he did little more than feel the fabric and inquire if one girl was wearing a Bien Jolie. She was not.

  A gaudy flag of sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres had been laid out and he filched a few. And then he saw Ruth there, far off near the prow. Alone and dismally staring at him, but glamorous in a filmy, lyrical white evening gown encrusted with fiery little beads that were like dewdrops. She saw he’d seen her and she became demure, glancing away.

  Judd noticed a few men watching her, getting up the courage to approach, and he stole two tulip glasses of champagne from a passing tray and affably strolled over.

  “Hello, Ruth. You look exquisite.”

  She smiled. “Really? I’m feeling self-conscious in this fashion crowd. I have no idea what the fall styles are.”

  “Hemlines up; higher waistlines; straight silhouettes.” He held out a champagne glass but she shook her head, so he drank it down and handed it on to a waiter. “How’d you get in?”

  “I still have friends at Cosmopolitan.” She squinted beyond him. “I was expecting Harry—he invited me, too.”

  “I guess I’m his stand-in.”

  “Well, you’re quite an improvement.” She shyly glanced down. “You got my ravings?”

  “Oh, they weren’t that. I couldn’t reply because I was on vacation in Sagaponack that week. And then when I got back I was swamped with work.”

  She faced him solemnly as she said, “And you were feeling guilty. You worried about your hoity-toity reputation, and you wondered if you’d lose Jane if your wife found out about us.”

  Judd laughed in a high-strung way, but she seemed to find nothing funny. She looked him flush in the eye. Ruth’s were intent and glistening and electric, and he felt cowed by them. “So,” he said. “You can read minds.”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

  Judd instantly felt foolish for his skipper’s cap and finished his second glass of champagne. And then he leaned on the starboard railing and gazed out at the scraps of moonlight writhing on the night of the river. “I haven’t been able to rid myself of you, Ruth. All I have to do is shut my eyes and your gorgeous face and figure are there. I find myself just wanting to say your name aloud. There was a time when my office phone rang and I imagined how glad I would be to hear your lovely voice in the earpiece.”

  Just as Jane would often imitate his stance and manner, Ruth crossed her forearms on the railing, and she leaned slightly into him, giving him some of her weight in a delicacy of acknowledgment. His hand slid around a waist far more taut than his wife’s.

  Judd continued, “I felt ashamed of myself for our fornication and my disloyalty to Isabel, and I was too much a coward to call you or agree to see you because I find you so irresistible I couldn’t govern my emotions or good behavior. But now I feel ashamed of my disloyalty to you, to the joy you give me.” He twisted his head to her. “I’m crazy about you, Ruth.”

  “I have a yen for you, too,” she said. But she retreated from the railing and hurried aft so hastily in her high heels that he was forced to scurry like a terrier to catch up. “Don’t talk,” she warned, and he honored that caution as they strolled the deck.

  Judd looked out at a ferry slowly churning up the East River toward the Sound, the swift traffic and glittering lights of the Queensboro Bridge, the flicker and iridescence of the city skyline overlooking all the racy adventures of a sultry August night. She seemed not to notice the tribute of masculine stares as she walked past. There were glints of moonlight on her tears.

  She finally recited sentences that seemed lifted from Romance or True Story magazine. “I have stayed up late just recalling how I fell in love with you at Zari’s. With your sweetness, your sympathy, your interest in me. My life has become intolerable, Judd. All the happiness that I have lacked for years is now completely lost. Albert calls upon my body only for his own needs. But I indulge him because then I can fantasize that it’s you, my Loverboy.” She was crying but she was trying to smile as she turned to him. “Are you aware I’m yours? Really, do whatever you want with me. I’ll run away with you. Anything.”

  There was some hooting festivity near the mizzenmast as five half-naked showgirls from Earl Carroll’s Vanities were wickedly introduced by the acidic celebrity Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who was then thirty-two and on her fourth wealthy husband. Joyce was saying in an aside, “You know, I sometimes lie awake in the afternoon—because we do not generally rise before two—and I gaze at Gustave in the other bed and My God, I think, whatever made me marry that?”

  There were gales of laughter, but Ruth just said, “She’s hitting too close to home.”

  And Judd asked, “Shall we go?”

  She nodded.

  Judd hailed a horse-drawn carriage for a romantic ride to the Waldorf-Astoria on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. She wanted to kiss him out there in public but he primly insisted, “We cannot lose our head
s.”

  She noticed the green patina of the hotel’s oxidized copper roofing, and Judd told her it was called verdigris.

  She asked, “Have you heard that expression ‘Ignorance is bliss’?” Then she smiled as she held up a shushing finger to his lips.

  She admitted she’d never been inside the neighboring, brown-stone, Victorian hotels that the Astor family had joined into one. The famous George C. Boldt, who was said to have invented the modern hotel, had retired as general manager and was replaced by a gregarious Norwegian woman whose name, Jorgine, had been Americanized to Georgia. She’d talked with Judd before, and she grinned as she said, “Hey, sailor. What ship?”

  Judd took off his skipper’s hat and said he didn’t believe she’d met his wife, introducing Ruth as Mrs. Jane Gray and signing the register that way.

  Walking up the staircase, Ruth whispered, “Aren’t you feeling naughty?”

  “Deliciously so,” Judd said.

  She looked down and said with amazement, “This carpeting is soft as a sponge!”

  “John Jacob Astor called it the most luxurious hotel in the world. Of course, that was thirty years ago.”

  She grazed her fingers along the flocked wallpaper, then stooped to praise a tazza urn on a hallway credenza. When they reached their room, she fondled the silken draperies, the tapestried furniture, and the woven fabric on the wide bed. She flipped off her high heels and flopped down on it and smiled. “The springs don’t creak!”

  “Were you excruciatingly poor as a child?” he asked.

  She seemed to take that as an insult. “Was I too dizzy?”

  “Oh no, darling. It just makes me feel so good to give you things you haven’t had.”