by Ron Hansen
“That’s Audrey Munson,” Judd said. “She was the highest-paid model in New York. All the great sculptors used her. You can find her everywhere in the city. And she appeared in moving picture shows, fully nude. Inspiration was one. And Purity. She was breathtaking. But a doctor she knew crazily murdered his wife to have Audrey, and at first the police suspected her of conspiring with him. She was finally cleared, but the gossip was devastating. She changed her lodgings to Mexico, New York, near where I was born, in Cortland, and tried to take her own life by swallowing bichloride of mercury tablets.”
Ruth was concentrating hard on what he’d just said. “She’s still alive?”
“But no longer right in the head, I’m afraid.”
“I feel so sorry for her.”
Was that where he was steering with that story? Sympathy? Judd wondered if he just wanted to use the word “nude” in Ruth’s presence.
“She is beautiful,” Ruth said.
“Like you,” Judd said.
In a gesture that was both friendly and condescending, Ruth patted his cheek. “I have to go,” she said, and was off to a one o’clock train heading across the East River to Queens and Jamaica Station.
Writing later of their first meeting in his penciled memoir, Doomed Ship, Judd claimed Mrs. Snyder was vague in his reveries then, that he remembered only the charming good nature, the winsome personality, and the soft gray fur slipping so gracefully from one shoulder. I realized that a frank, sincere character lurked behind that radiant and healthy loveliness. But there was no anticipation of ever seeing Ruth again.
That June afternoon, H. Judd Gray filled out an inventory sheet and a hefty expense report for his last sales trip, skimmed through a stack of mail, stood in front of the office’s floor fan to scan the factory information on the new pink Bien Jolie corselettes that would be introduced in August, and, feeling chipper, jokingly chatted with founders Alfred Benjamin and Charles Johnes just to show his face. And then he took a southbound train for the short haul to East Orange, New Jersey, and his brick Craftsman bungalow at 37 Wayne Avenue, and to the emotional starvation of his sane, successful, monotonous life.
Scott Fitzgerald would name the twenties “the Jazz Age” and note that it “raced along under its own power served by great filling stations full of money.” Wealth began to seem available to anyone then. Chrysler was founded. Scotch Tape was invented. The first-ever motel opened. RCA’s shares were soaring in price and the stock market itself was high-flying due to an optimistic and gambling middle class that had formerly bought only Liberty Bonds.
The five boroughs of New York City constituted the largest city in the world, and the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway was the earth’s tallest skyscraper. There were thirty-two thousand speakeasies, and hard liquor could be found for sale even in dry cleaners and barbershops.
Calvin Coolidge was president, a man so dour, orderly, and parsimonious that he was joked about as “the nation’s shopkeeper.” Whereas in the fall of 1925, New York City would elect as its mayor the flamboyant, debonair Jimmy Walker, who flouted the laws and flaunted the high life in a way that overworked laborers fancied they could one day.
Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Americans hockey team, was under construction on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets on the former site of the city’s trolley barns. The New York Giants and four other teams joined the National Football League. Rochester’s Walter Hagen was the world’s finest professional golfer and winner of the 1925 PGA Championship. Because of a lingering illness caused by tainted bootleg liquor, Babe Ruth was having his worst season as a Yankee, and the team would finish next to last in the American League despite having a rookie named Lou Gehrig at first base.
George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Grand Ole Opry premiered in Nashville. The fiction bestsellers included The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy and Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. The Great Gatsby was a financial disappointment. The hit movies were Ben-Hur, starring Ramón Novarro, and The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney. Al Jolson was onstage in Big Boy, George Gershwin’s Lady, Be Good was still running, and Louise Brooks was still just a half-naked chorus girl in George White’s Scandals at the Apollo Theatre, where the seats went as steep as $4.40.
Judd Gray treated six clients from Albany to Scandals’s twenty-seven scenes of hoofer solos; juvenile skits; songs by the Williams Sisters, Richard Talbot, Helen Hudson, and Winnie Lightner; and seemingly hundreds of George White Girls high-stepping in otherworldly costumes by the Russian fashion designer Erté. The Elm City Four sang “Lovers of Art” as the spotlights played over stiffly posed girls in flesh-colored bathing suits that made them seem nude statues. And in a gala ending, the girls of the chorus wore only, as one scandalized reviewer put it, clothing “from the neck up and shoes down.”
Even Albany’s lingerie buyers were shocked, while Judd himself was mostly offended that each glass of White Rock seltzer his party ordered as set-ups cost him a full dollar, and regular tap water cost him two. But when he got home to East Orange, there was a nightlong fray with Isabel over Judd’s entertaining clients at such a risqué revue, and in a fury over his wife’s condemnations, he stormed from the house for an earlier, July departure to eastern Pennsylvania.
Half a week later, after a hectic round of the ladies clothing stores, he’d toured the Crayola factory in Easton and purchased a box of school crayons for little Jane, then poked around the city farmer’s market, marveling at how the weathered growers silently stood behind their cases of fruits and vegetables with no effort to sell them. No exaggerations, no conniving or entertaining, no sentimental manipulation, just frank presentation of goods. And immediately he felt overwhelmed by his own unimportance.
Judd returned to the Huntington Hotel and the front desk clerk handed him a letter. At first he thought it would be from his wife, a continuation of the quarrels and humiliations of the night before he left. But it was a penned letter from Queens Village that had been forwarded from his office.
Dear Mr. Gray:
We met at Henry’s Resturant with my hairdresser friend and Mr. Harry Folsom a few weeks ago. I would like to buy as a gift your Grecian-Treco Classic Corset for my mother Mrs. Josephine Brown. I have used a measuring tape and she is 38” up top, 30” at the waste, and 40” around the hips. (Excuse my frankness, but your used to such female intimacies I guess.) Would you be so kind as to send it please to: 9327 222nd Avenue, Queens Village, New York? I have inclosed a blank cheque which amount you can fill out for the undergarment plus shipping and handle-ing.
I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.
Ruth Snyder
“also known as” Mrs. A. E. Snyder
Even the childish misspellings delighted him. Judd filled out an order form that he sent to his secretary, then tore up the check. And he found himself dwelling on I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.
Albert Snyder rented a gray saltbox cottage and a sleek, two-masted yawl for their July vacation on Shelter Island. Another editor at Motor Boating magazine found him a sailboat berth at the Shelter Island Yacht Club on Chequit Point, and when he wasn’t on the water with the yawl, Albert made himself a hearty regular at the yacht club, slumping with highballs and new friends in the stout wicker rocking chairs on the piazzas overlooking Dering Harbor, gladly accepting invitations for deep-sea fishing and helping out like a mate on the boats, even agreeing to race his yawl in the August regatta.
Ruth and Lora stayed to themselves, hunting seashells and clams on the shore, reading children’s books together in the Adirondack chair under the wide shade of the hemlock tree, finding a beach far away from the crowds where they could swim in their matching Jantzen tank suits and mobcaps until the knitted black wool became too heavy for them to freely stroke and they would fall back on sand as warm as toast and giggle over nonsense rhymes as the hot sun dried them.
Each evening when Albert got back to the cot
tage, all three of them would dine outside in the cool air, barbecuing fresh corn on the cob and filets of the fish he’d caught, and Ruth would watch him laughing with Lora in his white Top-Siders and white flannel trousers, and he would look every inch a yachtsman and seem so manly, dashing, and fun to be with that Ruth felt she could fall in love with him all over again.
On July 24th, 1925, she got a sitter for Lora and the couple celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary at a nightclub on North Ferry Road. Ruth gave him Shutz prism binoculars; Albert gave her a French, floral-beaded, silk evening bag with a matching compact. She kissed him and told him he had excellent taste; he agreed. Albert was in his white dinner jacket, drinking martinis in the 1920s formula of half gin and half Martini & Rossi vermouth, and as soon as he finished one he’d shield his bottles from fellow diners and the waiters as he mixed another. Because he was deaf in his right ear, she sat to his left, but still he sometimes seemed not to hear her. She noticed again that his tawny hair was receding from his temples, that his jacket was getting tight on him, that he wasn’t fat but had the broad shoulders and fullback torso of a man who ought to have been half a foot taller. The orchestra was playing songs the Paul Whiteman Orchestra popularized: “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Linger a While.” She wanted to dance; Albert didn’t. The sun that had tanned him had also tired him. She filled his silence by mentioning a friend she’d just made on Shelter Island and how her husband, a Wall Street stockbroker, would be racing in the regatta with a ketch just like theirs.
Albert glanced up. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it, Ruth?” And in the overly calm, patronizing tone he used for all his instructions, he said, “A ketch cannot be like a yawl because they are dissimilar. A ketch is a sailboat with the same mainmast, yes, you are so very right to notice this, but it is rigged aft with its mizzenmast stepped forward of the rudderpost. A yawl’s mizzenmast is stepped abaft the sternpost.”
“And blah, blah, blah,” she said.
Albert lifted up his martini. “But how can I expect you to know these things when you take so little interest in my hobbies?”
“Oh, are they hobbies? I thought they were just chances for you to yell at me.”
Albert sipped the martini, slanting a little off balance even though he was sitting, so that his free hand had to hastily seek the chair cushion. “You and your disappointing education,” he said. “You give me so many opportunities for—what is it?—keen and pitched correction.”
“You know everybody is ignorant, it’s just the subjects that are different.”
Albert sneered. “With you there are not subjects, there are chasms.”
She felt her mouth tremble. She looked away as her vision blurred.
“Are those tears?” he asked. “Aren’t you used to my teasing by now?”
She felt his hard, callused hand fall onto hers and she turned. “You hurt my feelings, Albert.”
“Oh posh. You’re too sensitive.”
She swiveled away from him and watched the orchestra’s handsome crooner hold on to the microphone and face her with a smile as he sang “What’ll I Do.”
August was the month when women retailers from cities like Utica, Ithaca, and Binghamton visited Manhattan for a first look at the fall fashions and to fill out order sheets, a job that Judd Gray generally put off until the morning after he’d affably dined with them and escorted them to hit movies like Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush or revues like The Garrick Gaieties and then on to nightclubs like the Monte Carlo and Frivolity Club in Manhattan. Benjamin & Johnes even got him a room in the tony Waldorf-Astoria, just a block away on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street, so he would have the freedom of entertaining without having to deal with railway schedules and his wife’s worries about his drinking.
On Saturday, August 8th, Judd would be treating a gang of Pennsylvania buyers to a fashion show and gala called Très Parisien, featuring the clothing designs of Jean Patou and Coco Chanel, but on that Friday night he was just going to have room service and finish reading P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste. But there was a note for him at the Waldorf’s front desk:
I’m footing the bill for some friends at Zari’s. Will you join us? Informal, of course. Harry Folsom
Despite his weariness, Judd changed into a fresh shirt and gray flannel suit and took the Waldorf’s elevator down. Adventuring, he thought.
Zari’s restaurant was filled when he got there at eight. Electric fans whirred in slow semiarcs as he handed his fedora to the hat-check girl. All the wooden pillars and floor and furniture in Zari’s were cherry. At the far end was a stage with a twelve-instrument orchestra playing jazz above wide round dining tables that held parties of eight and a gleaming dance floor that was gradually gaining post-dinner couples trying out the fox-trot. Rectangular tables with white linens, rose electric candles, and chairs jacketed in red chintz were under overhanging mezzanine galleries on three sides of the great room, each gallery with more round dining tables and railings hung with cascades of ivy. And it was up there that Judd saw a grinning Harry Folsom wildly swinging his right arm to get his attention and probably yelling his name out over the music.
Judd took the circular staircase up and was introduced to Harry’s dinner party of two fat older men who seemed to be Rochester retailers in silks and hosiery; their female companions, whose day jobs were in Harry’s Madison Avenue shop; Harry’s homely wife, who glared at Judd as if he’d done something wrong; and Mrs. Albert E. Snyder in white pearls and an Alice-blue frock, prettily sitting with her elbows on the white linen and her fingers interlaced under her chin. She was still tan from her Shelter Island vacation and scented with Le Lilas perfume.
As Judd was shaking hands with the diners, Harry said, “We’ve already eaten, but I’ll get you a menu. We’re drinking screwdrivers.” He whistled to a waiter and ordered for his friend a menu and a highball glass of orange juice and cracked ice.
The orchestra began playing “It Had to Be You,” and one of the girls said, “Oh, I love this song! Can’t we dance, please, Harry?”
“Excellent idea,” Harry’s wife said, getting up just as Judd was sitting. And after Harry handed on his flask, the whole dinner party, except for Mrs. Snyder, hurried downstairs.
“I seem to have occasioned a stampede,” Judd said.
“Well, I hate to eat and run, myself.”
Lacking a rejoinder, Judd dully asked, “How are you?”
She grinned. “I’m paralyzed with happiness.” And she indeed looked at him as if there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see.
“You’re a very pleasant surprise for me, too. Harry’s note didn’t mention you.”
“Well, he’s not a detail kind of guy.”
“Your mother. She liked the Grecian-Treco corset?”
“Oh, I don’t know. We don’t chat about our underthings like we should. But thank you for the gift.”
“Anytime,” he said, and found he meant it.
A highball glass half-filled with orange juice was delivered and Judd stirred in vodka from Harry’s hammered silver flask as he ordered a Shrimp Louie salad for his dinner.
Ruth’s golden hair was equal to the fiery chandelier hanging near them, and her stunning, ice-blue eyes were checkered with its light. He felt he would have been content to just fill the night gazing at her, but in the practiced way of a lady’s escort, he peppered her with questions about her upbringing.
She said she was born in a four-room apartment on Morning-side Avenue and 125th Street in New York City. Her father, Harry Sorenson, adopted the last name Brown when he emigrated from a fishing village in Norway. Josephine met him on Coney Island. Harry was a sailor then but became a carpenter who was often out of work because of a host of illnesses and epilepsy, so Josephine supported them as a practical nurse. Really a part-time housekeeper and sickroom attendant. Ruth graduated from Public School 11 at age thirteen and soon was hired by the New York Telephone Company as a relief operator. She was too young for the j
ob but the guy in charge became enchanted by her voice. She went to night school at the Berg Business Institute on 149th Street. She was certified as a stenographer and could type sixty-five words a minute, some of them not misspelled. “You can’t really be interested in all this.”
“But I am,” Judd said. “It’s fascinating.” A line from Laurence Sterne came to him: Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood. His highball glass was again half-filled with orange juice by the waiter and Judd completed it with vodka. “Say, I’m having a capital time,” he said.
“Me too. You’re a good listener.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Nah. Intoxicants don’t agree with me. But I love seeing everyone else having a good time.”
Slouching in his dining chair, he got his cigarettes out of an interior coat pocket and clumsily lit one.
She cocked her head like a child as she asked, “What kind?”
He exhaled gray smoke and faced the front of the package for her. “Sweet Caporals. I got hooked on them at fourteen when each pack carried a baseball trading card.”
“And weren’t there ‘Pretty Lady’ cards before that?”
Sheepishly grinning, he said, “Well, yes. I guess I got hooked on the cards at six.”
“And thus was a job in lingerie begun.”
Seeming embarrassed, he said, “So tell me how you met your husband.”
She said she was a secretary at the Tiffany Commercial Art Studio and was instructed to contact an art editor at Cosmopolitan but mistakenly placed the call to the art editor at Motor Boating in the same building. Albert was the lout who yelled that she’d interrupted him and she must be very stupid and just kept screaming insults until she hung up. But then she was called back and he was a changed man, apologetic and funny and suave, with a faint German accent. “Are you as pretty as your voice?” he’d asked. And he invited her to the magazine’s offices on West 40th Street. She was hired that afternoon as a stenographer, proofreader, and copyist in the secretarial pool shared by Motor Boating, Cosmopolitan, and The American Weekly. It was July 1914. She was nineteen years old. Soon Germany was involved in the Great War, and Albert changed the spelling of his last name from Schneider to Snyder, “as if that would fool anyone.” She was warned that he was a womanizer. But she dated him anyway, for he was cultured and educated, a manly connoisseur with a degree in art and graphic design from the famous Pratt Institute. And if he was hot-tempered and thirteen years older than she, and his favorite things to do, like fishing and sailing and going to the symphony, bored her to distraction, he also seemed the father she’d never had: a good provider who was vital and sensitive and very involved in her life. On Ruth’s twentieth birthday, Albert gifted her with a box of chocolates and she discovered inside a little jewelry box and a one-carat diamond solitaire fixed on a golden ring.