by Ron Hansen
She tapped his left foot with her right as she said, “Al?”
“What?”
“I have some whisky for you with it so cold.”
The skate wheels on the trolley screeched on the concrete as he rolled himself out and frowned at the generosity she held in both hands. Sitting up, he took the whisky from his wife, swallowed an inch of it, and coughed. “Thank you.”
“What are you doing?”
Albert allotted that smile that was not a smile, that was like the blade of a fishing knife. “I could tell you in detail, Root, but you still wouldn’t understand.”
“I was just making conversation.”
Albert looked at the snow that the garage heat was easing down her gutta-percha overboots and the new water trickling onto the concrete. “You’re making a mess of my floor. You should stamp your feet before coming in.”
“I’ll stamp them going out,” she said, and did so.
Albert shook his head in annoyance, then seated the milk glass of whisky on a hubcap, reclined on his trolley, and skidded underneath the Buick again. He fixed the beam of his Eveready flashlight on the master cylinder and slowly followed the hydraulic oil tubing across to the left wheel’s drum brakes. He thought he saw the problem and delicately skimmed a fingertip back along the brake line until he felt a fracture in the copper and also felt a cold draft, as if his wife hadn’t fully shut the door. And then for some reason the car jack whanged to the floor and the Buick crashed down, slanting forward onto the left wheel drum so that his feet and ankles were free outside the car, but his shins were hurt and his chest was being squashed underneath the Buick’s full weight.
“Root!” he shouted. “Root, help me! I’m pinned! Root, help get me out!” Albert thought she could have heard him if she were in the kitchen, but she could have been anywhere in the house. Squeezing his torso out a few inches from under the transmission, he caught his breath and screamed for her until he was exhausted with screaming. And then he managed to turn his head and found those gutta-percha overboots standing near the fallen jack, as if she’d been watching for a while. And this time he took care with her name: “Ruth?”
She hesitated before walking forward. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m just stuck,” he said. “Jack up the car.”
She got down to her hands and knees and grinned when she saw his fury. “Say ‘please.’”
She and Lorraine shopped in the morning at the giant Macy’s in Herald Square and Ruth spent seventeen dollars on a girl’s red wool overcoat and matching hat for the winter. She confided, “Your daddy’s gonna have a cow. But what else is new?”
And then she telephoned the office of Benjamin & Johnes and invited Judd to join them for lunch at Henry’s.
Cold eddied from his camel’s-hair overcoat as he took off his tweed hat and enthusiastically sat with them, Lorraine on his right and Ruth on his left. He handed the girl a box he hadn’t had time to giftwrap, and she lifted the lid to find a pink pinafore inside.
“It’s so pretty!” she exclaimed. And she was so impressed that she wiped a tear from her cheek.
Ruth smiled. “She really likes it.”
Lora said, “I do! Thank you, Mr. Gray!”
“My pleasure.” And then he turned to Ruth. “It’s November sixteenth.”
She puzzled over it and said, “Oh. Your wedding anniversary.”
“Our tenth.”
Because Lora was there, they communicated in silence. Then Ruth asked, “So what are you doing tonight?”
“I have reservations at Claridge’s for dinner. And then we’re going to Dearest Enemy at the Knickerbocker. Rodgers and Hart. Their follow-up to The Garrick Gaieties.” Judd felt Lora watching him, so he turned back to her. “Have you heard why the broom was late?”
She was so confused she didn’t answer.
“Because it over-swept,” he said.
She snickered.
“What kind of hair does the ocean have?”
She was amused but said, “I don’t know.”
“Wavy.”
She giggled. “Like yours.”
“Where does the general keep his armies?” Judd asked. She smiled with puzzled expectation, and Judd answered, “Up his sleevies!”
Lorraine laughed wildly and Ruth felt Judd’s hand feel for hers under the checkered tablecloth. She held it and just relaxed in the calm of a luncheon as the man she loved won Lora over with zaniness.
“What has a bottom at the top?”
“Oh brother,” she said, and awaited him with a grin.
“Your legs.”
She guffawed.
“And why did the burglar take a bath?”
“I have it,” Ruth said. “To make a clean getaway?”
Judd smiled as she squeezed his hand. “Your Momsie’s very clever, isn’t she?”
FOUR
LOVESICK
She confessed to Judd that she saw other men. But he was on the road so often and so long, and she’d get stir-crazy at home with the Old Crab hanging around and grousing, and handsome saps were always noticing her, and she just liked to have a good time.
She’d gotten into a navy blue silk kimono after their afternoon sex, and Judd was sitting up in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel bed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. With more wonder than jealousy, Judd let the newspaper fall and asked, “Who?”
“Oh, lots of fellas.” She grinned. “I’ve been on more laps than a dinner napkin.” Seeing his vexation, she said, “Don’t worry, Loverboy.” And she smiled as she used his language. “There’s no one besides you that I have congress with.”
She told him she and Kitty Kaufman still lunched with Harry Folsom at Henry’s when Judd was on the road. And some of Harry’s friends would insist the gals join them at the “21” Club or Club de Vingt. Her cousin’s ex was a patrolman in the 23rd Precinct in the Bronx and she met lots of policemen through him. She’d even cruised all the way to West Point in the roadster convertible of a portly detective. She couldn’t remember his name—Peter something—but he was a hoot. She flirted with the fountain boys at Spindler’s Drugstore and the fresh new pharmacist there flushed with desire whenever she noticed him. And she was strolling by Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital one sultry afternoon and ended up chatting through the jail bars outdoors with a white-uniformed guard. She’d told him how fascinated she was by crazy people, and he’d gazed back at this girl on a bench whose hands waved in front of her face as if she were food for flies, and he’d said yes, they were very honest about their feelings. And Ruth just had to let him kiss her. Johnny. Johnny would do anything for her. “Each of them is so hungry. It’s like they can’t get enough.”
“Well, they can’t help it, really. It’s biological. You’re incredibly beautiful.”
“But I feel so sorry for men. Wanting all the time.”
Judd found it strangely exciting and a source of vanity to imagine those many wolves and jackals lurking around his lover, fawning over her, desiring her, slavishly doing her bidding, as she preserved herself solely for him. But it was in January 1926 that he gradually began to recognize that she was controlling him. At first it was just that Ruth’s letters became irregular. There could be four waiting for him when he got to his Buffalo hotel, but there could be no communication at all during his stays in Rochester or Scranton, and he would find himself in a panic of fear and loss and heartache as he finally telephoned her in the morning when the husband he called “The Governor” was certain to be out of the house. She’d soothe him then, the soft velvet of her voice giving him assurances or scolding him for being such a silly pup—she’d simply been busy; in fact she’d written him that morning.
Ecstatic or at least serene whenever he was with Ruth, there were ever more snarling feelings of hopelessness and despondency when she was away and his thoughts could rage, his insecurities grow fangs. She’d gone two days without writing when he got a brutally expensive toll call from her in his Binghamton hotel room. She�
�d whispered, “Don’t go home tonight. Zari’s. Eight o’clock.” And hung up.
Racing through his downtown sales calls, he managed to telephone his wife to say he wouldn’t get home until Saturday, then caught an afternoon train into Grand Central Station and hauled his luggage and trunk of samples with him into Zari’s. The hat-check girl gave him an indignant glare, as though he were a country goober hawking Fuller brushes, and scraped the floor as she tugged his things out of sight.
Ruth waved to him from a rectangular table for four under the mezzanine gallery, and he was introduced to her cousin, Mrs. Ethel Anderson Pierson, and to a heavyset physician in his forties who would give only his first name: Sydney. His tuxedo and white spats hinted at wealth. A fat finger was indented where his wedding ring ought to have been. Ethel was a zesty, fun-loving, pretty housewife of twenty-seven. She had greenish eyes and flaming red hair, but she had a famished look that was the first sign of the still undiagnosed tuberculosis that would kill her in September 1927.
“We aren’t eating,” Ruth said. “We have to go.”
Dr. Syd filled his own highball glass of ginger ale and ice with bourbon from his flask and slid the hooch across to Judd as Ethel instructed him on their scheme for the night. She said she was in love with Syd and was separated from her husband, Eddie. She had no grounds for divorce yet because New York courts required proof of either extreme physical brutality or sexual infidelity. Eddie was not a smack-a-woman kind of guy, but Ethel guessed he was like a lot of bimbos on the force, extracting sex from whores instead of cuffing them, only she’d never caught him at it. She wanted to nail Eddie for alimony, so she needed a camera shot of her ex as he was entangled with some doll.
Dr. Syd translated, “In the very act of committing the offense.”
“And that’s where you come in,” Ruth said.
Ethel reached under her chair and hauled up a rectangular leather holster containing an Autographic Kodak camera that she handed across to Judd. “We’ll get in Syd’s car, you’ll hire a prostitute—”
“I beg your pardon?”
Syd inserted, “I can’t risk losing my medical license.”
“But what about my reputation?”
Ethel screamed, “You’re a corset salesman!”
Ruth laid a hand of solace atop his. “We get some hotsy-totsy girl and take her to Eddie’s apartment. She’ll knock on his door and say she got stood up or something and it’s freezing outside.”
Judd felt offended but oddly excited. “Have you any idea how insane this is?” And yet he stayed there with Syd’s bourbon.
Ethel said, “Eddie will let her in, maybe give her a highball, and we’ll have her say how grateful she is, how can she ever repay him? Eddie’s easily tempted. And when things get hot and heavy, you’ll burst in and snap a picture.”
“Et voilà,” Syd said.
“Easy as pie,” Ethel said.
Six drinks later and Judd was drunk enough to do it, strolling up to a chilly girl in a raccoon coat in what was called “the Circus” around 42nd Street. Weaving a little, he too loudly inquired, “Say there, are you a harlot?”
She gave him a You have got to be kidding me—harlot? look, but flashed open her raccoon coat to show she wore nothing underneath it. Judd escorted her to Syd’s Packard and the five of them headed across the East River to Eddie’s apartment in the Bronx.
But Eddie wasn’t there. Syd and Ethel and the girl waited in the heated Packard as Ruth and Judd hung out inside the building and were so publicly affectionate in the hallway that renters were able to identify them a full year later. And when Ethel went inside again she threatened to take a Kodak picture of Judd’s “hands on the prowl.” They were still all over each other when Ethel kidded her older cousin, “Have you heard the saying that a man’s kiss is his signature?”
Ruth unclenched and shifted her dress as she answered, “Mae West, right?”
“How’s Judd sign his name?”
She smiled at him. “Legibly.”
At ten Eddie still hadn’t shown and the harlot reminded them that her meter was still running, so Syd ferried them back to 42nd Street and paid the girl for her time. Judd found a tailor shop with a backroom speakeasy where they sold him a 1911 quart bottle of Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey, and he swallowed a third of it as Ethel snuggled into Syd in the front seat and Syd drove Ruth and Judd to the Waldorf-Astoria. Looking into the rearview mirror at Judd, the physician said, “Every man has his own code of sexual morality, his own instincts of right and wrong toward womanhood. I happened to meet Ethel at the right psychological moment and our souls and beings were thrown into a turmoil of love. Those passions demand reciprocation. And so, like you, we have lavished affections upon each other despite commitments elsewhere. There is no possible weighing of responsibility to others in such a thrall as ours, and no way for me to justify termination.”
Ruth joked, “Don’t he talk good?”
Judd leaned forward to tell Syd in a slurred way, “It’s not just lust or passion for me.”
“I haven’t made that accusation.”
But Judd would not be overruled. “Ruth, she’s my ideal of womanhood. She’s a goddess.”
After that he blacked out. Waking up fully dressed in a corner of the hotel room the next morning, he saw he’d vomited on his shirt and shoes. Ruth was in her silk kimono and sunshine filled the room. Room service had delivered coffee and cinnamon toast that morning. Holding his aching neck, he said, “I feel awful.”
She glanced fleetingly at him, then sourly added cream to her coffee.
He got out of his jacket and began unbuttoning his foul shirt. “Why did you let me stay like this?”
“We argued.”
“About?”
Ruth told him they’d discussed heading down to Elkton, Maryland, where lax marriage regulations meant they could have gotten hitched.
“And what did I say?”
“Well, actually you couldn’t get the words right, but I think you thought that would be bigamy.”
Judd was untying his shoes. “Even drunk I’m law-abiding,” he said.
“Oh yeah. To a fault.”
“Meaning?”
Ruth told him she’d confessed she wanted Albert out of her life, gone, buried, dead, and Judd had yelled that she was insane. Raged that she could go to jail for that. Asked if she had any idea what a homicide meant in the eyes of God.
Stripping off his stockings, Judd asked, “And what did you say?”
Ruth focused her stunning blue eyes on him and said, “I don’t believe in a heaven or hell and anything like that.”
“Well, that makes all this easy for you then.”
“And ‘all this’ makes you a hypocrite.”
“That’s true,” he said, and he went to the bathroom in his skivvies.
“Oh, let’s not fight,” she said.
But he was sulking. “I have to get to the office.”
That evening Judd journeyed home to East Orange by trolley instead of the train, not because it was cheaper, but because he felt he needed the extra hour to find his role and rehearse his lines. He recalled his freshman year in high school when he first looked up the word: “adultery,” from the Latin adulterare, to defile. The generality of the definition had called up a host of fantasies, and Ruth was doing the same: calling out his vices, torturing him with affection, exhausting him with liquor and schemes and secrecy and shocking sexual practices until he felt dirtied and defiled. She’d seduced and dominated him, he thought, held his yearning heart in her hands, fondly and expertly played his frailties and hankerings as if he were her pet, her toy.
And yet he found it impossible to stop desiring her, and if there was any infidelity, he thought, it was in his grim and loveless marriage to Isabel, a wedding of unequals that was now not just defiled but dead. All he could offer his wife in the future were the leftover scraps of an old friendship. And all she could offer him was his daughter. But that was enough. Jane was the gl
ue.
Walking up Wayne Avenue to his house, he was still inventing a night in which he told Isabel all about his affair and of his plans to end it, acknowledging that he would have to endure his wife’s wretched tears and full-throated screaming, Mrs. K’s interference and scorn, little Jane’s worries and pain.
But when he got to number 37, he found the front sidewalk and driveway had not been shoveled, just shuffled through by overboots during the week, and he went back to the garage with his heavy luggage, his shoes crunching in the snow, his ears and nose smarting in the near-zero cold as he hauled down the snow shovel from its nail on a wall. And then he saw all three females skeptically watching him through the kitchen window, without gratitude or even welcome, as if whatever slavish job he carried out was a job long overdue. Judd demonstrated his insolence by hanging the wide shovel back on its nail and trudging through snow to the kitchen and the scandal of his Scotch whisky.
There were, finally, some pleasantries after that, some journalism at dinner about the past week’s doings, Jane’s joyless acceptance of the gift of a jeweled barrette, and Isabel’s quiet accommodation of his imaginary lust that night. It all seemed unreal, like the alliances of hotel guests sharing a restaurant table or some radio voice in the club room. Waking in the middle of the night, Judd saw his luggage on the floor, the hinged jaws opened, his blue canvas laundry bag now gone to the basement but his toiletries still there and much of his clothing still neatly folded, as if this were just another stay-over and he’d soon be ready to journey onward.
In the morning, Judd took Jane to Sunday school but let Isabel and Mrs. Kallenbach go to the church service without him, as shame caused him to lie that his mother wanted him sooner than noon.
Mrs. Margaret Gray was surprised by his earliness and not yet fully dressed, but she gave him fresh coffee and a slice of hot apple pie that she’d made from a jar of preserves. And then, as always, she just watched him eat. She said she didn’t know if she’d be putting up fruits and vegetables next summer. It was so hard on her hands and arms. She wondered if he was getting enough sleep. Was he losing weight? Bud seemed kind of mopey to her; he seemed to have something on his mind. She didn’t see the point of his visiting if he wasn’t going to chat. Oh no, she didn’t have errands for him or anything else that needed doing. “You go have a nice afternoon with that little girl of yours,” Margaret Gray said. “She’s been missing her daddy, I’ll bet.”