by Ron Hansen
As a state senator, Jimmy Walker got legislation passed that allowed attendance at movies, plays, and public sporting events on Sunday afternoons. So Judd could take his daughter to the Orpheum theater and a matinee showing of The Lost World. He asked her as he bought the nickel tickets, “Have you heard of the famous English sleuth Sherlock Holmes?”
Jane nodded uncertainly.
“Well, this movie we’re going to see is based on an original novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” She seemed mystified.
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes.”
“Oh.” Jane seemed downcast. “Is this a mystery?”
“No, it’s science fiction.”
“I hate science.”
“Don’t say ‘hate.’” Judd guided his daughter inside the theater and found she disliked the seats he chose, so they moved. Seeking to get her to smile, he asked, “Where does the general keep his armies?”
She sighed.
“Have I told you that one?”
Improbably bored, Jane asked, “Up his sleevies?”
She’s been poisoned, he thought, and ran out of things to say to her. But for more than half an hour he just watched her watch the movie, loving how flashes of on-screen light flared in her widened eyes and how the raging dinosaurs scared Jane enough that she once clutched his hand and cowered into him so that half her face hid in his overcoat sleeve. But the scene ended too soon and she sat up again and she coolly extricated her hand from his, just as Isabel would have.
Ruth finished the Sunday-night dishes thinking of Judd, and she was thinking of Judd as she wiped the kitchen stove’s white enamel, the humming Frigidaire, the soft suede of the kitchen’s maple countertops, then tossed the damp dish towel down the laundry chute. She felt addicted to Judd and desperate for him, and when she heard Albert whistling in his basement workshop she hated the noise so much she held her hands to her ears as she hurried to the foyer. She failed in the effort to calm herself as she called in Swedish, “Moder?”
Josephine Brown was upstairs helping Lora with her multiplication tables. She walked out to the hallway and quizzically looked down.
“How about a luncheon here tomorrow?”
“You mean with a guest?”
Ruth was queasy with urgency, but she fashioned a smile. “Winter’s gotten so dreary.”
With solemnity, her mother said, “But, May, it’s wash day!”
Ruth felt herself getting faint and held on to the staircase banister. She was lovesick and afraid she’d either scream or whine. She shook as she said, “We can finish that in the morning. There’s not much. I’ll cook.”
Josephine fell into Swedish. “Vilken?” Who?
“My friend, Mr. Gray? The Bien Jolie salesman? The baby’s met him.”
Lorraine heard her mother and called out, “Yes. He’s nice.”
“Another one of your men?” Josephine asked.
Hinting broadly, Ruth said, “Mama, he sells lingerie.”
Josephine shrugged and said, “Fint.” Okay.
Worried about seeming impatient, Ruth slowed her walk as she went to the kitchen telephone.
Mrs. Kallenbach answered. Judd was reading The Saturday Evening Post and heard his mother-in-law say, “Hello,” and “Yes, he is.” And he was getting up from his purple mohair armchair when his mother-in-law called, “Bud? Your secretary?”
He hesitated with the intimation that it was Ruth. She’d never called him at home. Rarely did so at work. Judd took the earpiece from Mrs. K with a “Thank you” that he hoped would dismiss her, but she stayed in the kitchen, busying herself with tidying up in order to overhear. Tilting into the wall phone’s mouthpiece, he said, “Hello, Rachel. What’s up?”
Ruth asked, “Will you come to lunch at my house tomorrow?”
Judd framed his answer with Mrs. K in mind. “Who’s going to be there?”
“Just my mother and me. Oh please, won’t you?”
Watchful of his tone, he said, “I could.”
“Oh, I’m so excited! One o’clock. Was that Isabel who answered?”
“No. My mother-in-law.”
“Is she listening now?”
“Yes.”
“Because I wanted you to say how much you love me.”
Without inflection he said, “I do.”
“Shall I give you instructions on how to get here?”
“I’ll handle it. See you tomorrow.”
She softly whispered, “I’m so horny for you.”
Judd blushed as he hung up the earpiece. Mrs. K was scowling. “We have buyers in town now because of the spring line,” he said. “I have to see some clients for lunch.”
“She sounds pretty.” She knew Rachel was not.
“Oh, that wasn’t Rachel. She has someone filling in for her.”
“But you called her that.”
“She corrected me.” And then he sneered. “Women do that.”
On Monday, Josephine Brown lifted the lid on the basement washing machine, and Ruth plunged a broomstick into the hot water to heave out a heavy weight of towels that her mother fed into the electric wringer so that sheets of soapy water slid back into the drum for the next load. They did not speak. It was far too cold to hang things in the yard, so Ruth collected the wringings and hung them on the white rope clotheslines that Albert had strung from the ceiling joists. She’d already clothespinned on the lines his dress shirts and what Mrs. Brown called his “unmentionables.” Albert’s whites were always the first wash. Then Josephine’s and Lora’s colors. And new piping-hot water and Fels-Naptha soap for the household sheets and towels. Ruth took her own clothing to the Chinese dry cleaners on Springfield Boulevard or laundered them by hand in the upstairs bathroom sink and rinsed them with vinegar and boiling water from a kettle.
With the hamper things drying, she went upstairs and waxed the furniture, vacuumed, and put out Tiffany ashtrays for Judd’s cigarettes wherever he was likely to sit. She was as persnickety a housekeeper as Isabel was, she took pride in her cooking, she even put up preserves each summer, but she knew Judd had never seen her that way. She was just a flapper he partied with, his sex partner in the Waldorf. And he was born to be a husband.
She hadn’t yet learned how to drive, so although Albert’s Buick was still in his garage she phoned for a Yellow Cab that took her to Jamaica Avenue and waited as she bought a pound of lump crabmeat at the Fishmongery. She had the taxi idle in front of Paper & Pens while she hunted through the bootlegged wines in the storeroom and found a pricey bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Bordeaux. She then got cash from the secret “Ruth M. Brown” account at the Queens-Bellaire bank and hand-delivered to Leroy Ashfield the weekly payment for the Prudential insurance policies on Albert’s life.
At home, she pinched shell fragments from the crabmeat and mixed it with an egg white, flour, chives, cayenne pepper, and kosher salt, and formed it into eight patties that she chilled with the wine in the Frigidaire. She went up to the bedroom to change as Mrs. Brown set the dining room table.
Judd took the Long Island Rail Road from Pennsylvania Station to Jamaica and a taxi to a cream-yellow house with green trim on the corner of 222nd Street and 93rd Road. And he was just getting out when he saw Ruth dashing from the front door to him in just her shoes and navy blue housedress, though it was stingingly cold. She grinned as she called out, “Oh, I’m so happy!” She hugged him, saying she regretted she could do no more because of the neighbors. She linked a forearm inside his as they headed toward the white Colonial front door. She pointed to the one-car garage to the right. “We used to have a bigger side yard,” she said, “but Albert wanted a hospital for his automobile, so he built that one from a Sears, Roebuck kit. He likes to use his hands, and not just for hitting me.”
Was she joking? Judd was going to ask when the front door opened and a dour but friendly Mrs. Josephine Brown called in greeting, “Välkommen!” Welcome.
Judd took off his gray buckskin gloves to shake her hand and she said
formally, “I have heard May speak so much about you and your fine dancing.” She took his overcoat and hat to the foyer closet as generalities about his job and the January weather were exchanged. She frankly said, “You are not very tall, are you?”
“Oh, I can reach just about anything I need.”
She listened longer than necessary and asked, “Are you the reaching sort?”
Judd felt like a thief in their house. Was she calling him that? “Well, no,” he said. “Things just generally fall to me.”
She evaluated him for a moment, and then she privately confided, “May must be careful not to get the Mister jealous with you.”
Judd sought to change the subject so he asked how old she was when she first learned English.
“Sixteen.”
She still spoke in the metronomic cadence of Swedish, and with a certain daintiness to the t sound, but he said, “Well, you’re very easy to understand.”
“Tack,” she said regally. Thanks. She asked his own nationality and he told her English, that his forebears landed in Connecticut on the Mary and John in 1630. She took that in and said, “So your folk, they are aristocrats?”
“We’re just established, is all.”
She said he could call her “Granny,” just as Lora and Albert did.
Judd didn’t; he called her Josephine. She wore severe round spectacles and was his own mother’s age, sixty, though she would claim to be four years younger when the lot of them became famous. She went off and Judd plinked a child’s tune on the Aeolian, then lit a cigarette as he sat alone on a floral chintz armchair. Reading the jacket upside down, he noted a booklet on the coffee table entitled The Modern Home: How to Take Advantage of Mechanical Servants. A newly purchased Bible, Emily Post’s Etiquette, and The Outline of History by H. G. Wells were the odd family of books on a shelf. And Josephine seemed to have been reading a McCall’s magazine when he got there. Looking at the contents, he saw an article about the incompatibility of “the stay-at-home husband and the delicatessen wife,” and he was paging to it when Ruth called him to the kitchen.
It had the hospital-clean, impeccable look he associated with Scandinavia, with a polished linoleum floor, brilliant snow-white tile, and a new refrigerator and gas range in newly fashionable white enamel, with some pretty accents of Delft blue in the curtains and accessories. Judd said, “This must require no end of work to keep in such spotless condition.”
“Oh, it’s not work,” Ruth said. “We love to scrub and scour and make everything shine, don’t we, Mama?”
She agreed by quoting, “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” Josephine put the crab cakes in a skillet and said, “I’ll finish the cooking, Maisie. You let your friend see the house.”
Ruth took him down to the basement to proudly display rack after rack of widemouthed mason jars filled with the fruit preserves and garden vegetables she’d put up in August. She said, “You may not have noticed, but in this part of the tour we see what a good wife I am.”
But vying for Judd’s attention were Albert’s dress shirts and boxers, hanging on the clothesline like flags of ownership. And then to the left there was Albert’s workshop and its organized tools, his glass tank of fermenting wort, his poster of a naked Josephine Baker dancing in Paris’s Folies Bergère. Resisting her husband’s ghostly presence, Judd fitted himself behind Ruth and kissed her neck, and she grabbed his hands to her breasts and felt him hardening before she moaned, “We’d better not get started.”
She took his right hand and urged him upstairs and through the kitchen to the gleaming dining room, where she held up a glinting silver spoon. She vainly stated, “Chambly, from France.” She then gently touched a crystal wineglass and said, “Baccarat.”
“Lovely things,” Judd said.
“And that vase on the sideboard is a Lalique.”
Josephine heard and called from the kitchen, “But she’s thrifty, too! May sewed all the drapes and curtains her own self!”
Judd winked and called back, “I just knew she’d have to be good with her hands!”
Ruth smiled but swatted his forearm to hush him. She took him into the foyer and held up a photograph of a simpering, sweet-faced woman in the full covering of a white Victorian gown, her great length of black hair piled up on her head in a fashion from before the Great War. She was sitting beside a tweed-suited, bow-tied, ruminative man in his twenties with wavy, receding, sand-colored hair, his hands knitted as he reclined on his left forearm on a rough altar of flat stone, seemingly near the ocean.
“I presume that’s The Governor,” Judd said.
“And his first love, Jessie Guischard. A public-school teacher and, as he puts it, ‘the finest woman’ he’s ever met. Which means finer than me. She died of pneumonia in nineteen-twelve, just before he could marry her. The dead are difficult rivals.” Ruth put the photograph back. “Al’s got a scrapbook filled with his captioned pictures of her: ‘Jessie relaxing in the Catskills,’ ‘Jessie blowing a kiss in the Adirondacks.’ Albert used to own a motor yacht with the name ‘Jessie’ painted on its transom. After we married, I forced him to rename it ‘Ruth’ and he did, but then he lost interest and sold it. Each day when he gets into his suit jacket, his finishing touch is a stickpin with the initials ‘J.G.’ so he can hold her next to his heart.”
“The Governor’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”
“You ain’t kiddin’.” Ruth looked toward the Aeolian player piano and chintz furniture, a sunroom beyond them. She found nothing to say but, “Those are his paintings on the walls.” And she crossed her ice-blue eyes in a funny estimation of the artistry. She whistled sharply once and a yellow canary instantly sailed from its golden cage in the sunroom and roosted on her right shoulder, where it furtively sidled over to nuzzle its beak below her ear.
“You trained it to do that?”
She smiled. “I have a way with animals.” She kissed the air and the canary tapped its beak against her pursed lips. “This is Pip,” she said. “Pip’s the canary in Little Women. Have you read it?”
“No.”
“At last. I have found a hole in your education.” She then took him by the hand again. “Upstairs.”
There were two photographs of Albert laughing with dogs in the hallway: one with a stocky boxer held next to his face, and another with a hound between his shins. And yet Ruth oddly told Judd in passing, “Albert hates pets.”
At the south end was a bathroom that seemed to have been cleansed with the same 20 Mule Team Borax that Isabel used. Across from that was Lorraine’s room, which looked so much like Jane’s that he felt a pang. But Ruth pulled him to Josephine’s room, just above the front-door vestibule and foyer, with white, nineteenth-century furniture from the Old Country and a pink velour chair. And finally she opened the door to the northern master bedroom. She grinned. “And this is where you’ll be sleeping.”
“Don’t know that I like the twin beds,” he said.
“We can change that. Right now the gulf between those beds is just what the doctor ordered.”
Hanging high up on the wall and between the twin beds was an oval picture frame with a sculpted mahogany bow and inside it a studio photograph of what seemed to be a raven-haired Jessie Guischard as a girl.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Judd said.
“Albert says it’s not her, it’s just a picture he happens to like. But he stares at it as he’s having at me.”
Judd shook his head. “What a thoroughgoing cad he is.”
“Cad? Wha’ja do, walk out of some Dickens novel?”
Josephine called, “Luncheon, you two!”
Ruth asked the canary, “Wanna go night-night?” and Pip flew down to his first-floor cage.
Judd whispered, “This is sheer happiness, just being with you.” She took the fleeting opportunity to kiss him, and Judd’s palm cherished his lover’s sensuous hip as they went down to the dining room.
There Mrs. Brown served Ruth’s crab cakes with Ruth’s colesla
w and roasted potatoes and the Sauvignon Blanc that only Judd drank, and finally finished off. Josephine seemed untroubled by that, and Ruth abetted it.
Judd was generally a hit with older women, and Josephine, too, seemed prejudiced in his favor, noticing his good manners, his suave flattery, his handsomeness and fine tailoring. Josephine would much later claim she knew he was no gentleman from the first time she met him, that “he seemed like a slick fellow” to her, but that afternoon she enjoyed the way he focused his full attention on her when she spoke, how his hand touched hers whenever he teased, how he could make her laugh with his funny anecdotes about selling lingerie in farm villages or meeting the likes of Romney Brent, Sterling Holloway, and Libby Holman backstage at the Garrick Theatre.
Retiring to the music room so he could smoke, Josephine flirtingly sat on the sofa with him as Ruth went to the dining room to collect the glassware and dishes. But as she did so she called for him to tell Mama a Swedish joke.
Judd was drunk enough that he was forced to think hard, and then he told her, “A Swedish immigrant not in the least like you was hired to paint the white center stripes on a highway. His foreman carried over a bucket of white paint and put it on the ground and handed him a paintbrush and said, ‘Go to it!’ And he was very happy to note that the hardworking Swede completed a full mile of road on the first day! But the foreman was disappointed that the hired man only painted a hundred yards’ worth of stripes the next day, and he was fit to be tied when the Swede finished a mere thirty feet on the third. Catching up to him that afternoon, the foreman asked what the heck the problem was. Well, the Swede was panting as he straightened up and pointed his paintbrush backward to the horizon and said, ‘It just be dat da paint bucket ist getting so far a-vay.’”