by Ron Hansen
Josephine hooted and slapped both hands on her thighs. She said, “Oh, that’s rich!” She noticed that his wineglass was empty and she took it with her to the kitchen. Judd felt forsaken. And then she returned with a square glass filled with Scotch for him. “I have to say I was leery at first, but you are such a delight, Mr. Gray. And it’s so nice to have a gentleman here instead of—” She left the sentence hanging as she glanced to the dining room to see that her daughter was out of earshot. “May’s so unhappy, and Albert don’t care. It just ain’t right.”
“Which reminds me,” Judd said. “Do you know how to keep a German sailor from drowning?”
Josephine wrinkled a smile as she warily answered, “No.”
And Judd said, “Good!”
Ruth heard that and found it hilarious.
And then the front door opened and it was Lorraine returning from grammar school. Seeing him, the affectionate eight-year-old grinned and without getting out of her cold overcoat ran into his hug, yelling, “Mr. Gray!” She kissed him on the mouth just as she’d seen her mother kiss him. “You’ll stay and play with me, won’t you?”
Judd said, “Just for a little bit, sweetie.” And he gazed over her pretty blonde pageboy haircut to Ruth, who was glorying over their happy, happy family and the grand future that was just in front of them.
The following Saturday in February, Albert hauled a sixteen-foot ladder to the front sidewalk and banged it up against the huge elm tree that was older than their house and taller than its roof beam. Jamming the ladder feet into frozen sod, he ascended with a ripsaw to get rid of some dead, shedding limbs that threatened to tear loose and crash on his car whenever flustered by the wind. Shifting his weight as he fought the binding of saw teeth and wood grain, he felt the ladder teeter and then fall from his foothold so that he had to lunge for a limb and hang there some twenty feet from the ground. Looking down he saw Ruth just below, holding a grocery bag and staring up with fascination.
“Don’t just stand there! Help me!”
She rested the groceries on the frosted sidewalk before gloomily heaving up the ladder again. “Lucky I chanced by,” she said.
She was soon recognized as Mrs. Gray by the staff at the Waldorf-Astoria and would be given their lockered honeymoon bag and their regular room, number 832, even before Judd could get there and register. The first time the concierge told him, “Mrs. Gray is waiting for you upstairs,” Judd felt a jolt of panic that his wife or mother had found out about his infidelity. But “Mrs. Gray” was gloriously naked on the hotel bed, like a glamorous concubine in a Turkish harem, and all thoughts of his wife or mother flew.
Ruth’s thirty-first birthday, on March 27th, 1926, fell on a Saturday and she’d made arrangements with her stodgy husband to celebrate it with an all-too-uncommon party at their house, to which, of course, Judd could not be invited. So she met him at Henry’s Restaurant on that Friday. But Lorraine’s school was out, and Josephine Brown was nursing someone in Brooklyn, so the little girl accompanied her mother. Judd had already registered for a room at the Waldorf but hid his disappointment with friendly affection and jokes. Lorraine ate a grilled cheese sandwich. The lovers ordered lobster Newburg on points of toast and Judd gave Ruth a birthday gift of Parfum Madame by the house of D’Orsay. And then, on the walk to Penn Station, Ruth sweetly asked, “Baby, could you stay in the Waldorf lobby while Mr. Gray and I go upstairs?”
Judd was shocked, as was the jury later, but up to their room he went, with Ruth waving gaily to her daughter as the elevator doors closed. Lorraine slumped in an overlarge chair under the lobby’s golden chandeliers, watching the hands on the huge bronze clock until it was one fifteen and the Westminster chimes rang. She’d have been frightened or bored but it was afternoon and the guests around her seemed so jubilant. A bellhop bent down to say, “Hi, little girl. You like that clock?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was created for the Chicago World’s Fair.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t kick your shoes against the chair,” he said.
She got up and wandered down the glamorous, mirrored hallway called Peacock Alley that connected the old Waldorf mansion to the Astoria. Lorraine took after her mother in the joy of liberty and movement. She twirled underneath the grand chandelier in the Empire Room, where the Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra was rehearsing for its Saturday-night radio program. She touched all the floral greens in a Palm Garden that was being arranged for a dinner, and she stepped into the gray cloud of cigarette smoke in the North Café, where it seemed a hundred loud businessmen stood at the four-sided bar and a waiter finally shooed her away.
Upstairs in the overheated room, Judd fell back against the headboard, still naked and wheezing with exhaustion. “Oh, Momsie!” he said. “That was wonderful!”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “You were.” She grazed her large breasts against his stomach as she tenderly tugged his condom off him and tossed it into a tin trash can. And then she groused, “It’s so hot!” She got up to lift the sash on a double-hung window.
Judd watched. “What a gorgeous derrière you’ve got. It’s like an upside-down heart on a valentine.” He put his thumbs and forefingers together to imitate the shape and held them out to spy her buttocks within them. “So sexy. So perfect.”
Cold air gave her gooseflesh and she crawled onto him, resting her chin on his chest. She watched as he reached for his cigarettes, lit a Sweet Caporal, then coughed as he exhaled it. She said, “I’m fascinated by whatever you do. Each action, each word you use. Like ‘derrière.’ It’s all so different and odd—in a good way.”
“Oh, I’m a wowser of an entertainer. That’s how I make my sales.”
She laid her head to the side and skimmed her fingertip along a bulging vein in his wrist. “I have these wild dreams. We find a little bamboo hut in Tahiti, right on the South Pacific. White sand and soft breezes. We’re like this. Without clothes. Like Adam and Eve. And we find our food hanging on trees.” She got up to her forearms. “And I have this other one. Wisconsin. I haven’t ever been there, but I imagine this pretty little farm. We raise peaches and grapes and apples and take them to market in these great big baskets. Would it be a dairy farm, too? We’d have cows you and Lora could milk and there’d be white and blue pans in the kitchen and willow trees overhanging this sweet little brook. We’d have chickens and eggs and homemade bread …”
“Wisconsin seems rather grueling.”
“Don’t you see, Bud? We could be happy there, or Burma, or Timbuktu.” She got distracted as she twisted his forelock with a finger. She tucked a tuft of hair behind his ear.
“Are you grooming me?”
She petted his head. “We just need to be together. With Albert gone so he won’t get in the way. Really, Judd, whatever you do, wherever you want to go, I’ll go with you.”
Judd smiled. “Have you read The Book of Ruth?”
She felt accused. “I don’t think so.”
Judd slid open the drawer in the side table to seek a Gideon Bible. “It’s in the Old Testament.”
“Then definitely not.”
Riffling through the pages, he said, “It’s right after The Book of Judges.” He turned a few more. “Here. Chapter one, verses sixteen and seventeen. ‘And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.’”
“Oh, that’s so beautiful,” she said, as if it wasn’t. She angrily got up from him and curtsied to get her clothing from the floor. “Lorraine will be waiting for us.”
“Is there something wrong?”
She skewered him with a fierce glare as she said, “Intreat me not.”
“I have no idea what I’ve done, Ruth.”
She was seething as she got into her underwear. “You d
on’t take me seriously, that’s what. ‘Where thou diest, will I die’? Well, I am dying, Loverboy. And you’re watching it happen. Because you’re lazy and weak and it’s easier that way. All you can think of is how oh-so-pleased you are to get your piece of ‘upside-down heart’ on a regular basis.”
Judd stabbed out his cigarette and stood to get his own clothing on. “But, really, what am I supposed to do?”
She raged, “Albert! Gone! Get it?”
Riding in the elevator, Lorraine watched the hand on the floor indicator halt at eight and the old, blue-jacketed operator slid the doors open. The little girl was surprised and pleased to find her mother and Mr. Gray standing there, though Mr. Gray seemed unhappy. “Hi!” she said.
Ruth smiled. “Were you having fun, baby?”
“She was my company,” the old operator said. “We’ve been riding up and down.”
“We’ve been doing that, too,” Judd said.
Ruth’s health was affected that spring. She went to Dr. Harry Hansen, a family physician in the neighborhood, and complained of fainting spells, occasional loud and rapid heartbeats followed by a lingering soreness, occasional swellings in the throat that made her feel she was being strangled, increasingly scarce monthly periods, and a horrible depression or melancholy that could cause her to become hot-tempered or disintegrate into a flood of tears. Dr. Hansen’s workup found her heart weakened, her thyroid enlarged, and her system anemic, but he failed to diagnose that Ruth was in fact describing the first stage of Graves’ disease. He gave her iron and iodine tablets and a box of Midol. He turned away as she got into her clothing and he heard her say, “I also have these queer feelings of doom, like something tragic is going to happen.”
“Oh, it will,” the doctor said. “We all die.”
Office work on Saturdays was standard for even high-level jobs then, and Ruth and her daughter frequently met Judd at Henry’s at one o’clock and joined him for the Ziegfeld Follies, children’s theater, or motion picture matinees afterward. But on one afternoon when the baby stayed home with her father, Ruth insisted on riding the trolley to East Orange with Judd, squeezing his hand with giggling excitement that she might be recognized as “the other woman” if Judd’s friends or neighbors got on board, and then just kissing Judd good-bye at his stop and riding an eastbound trolley back to the city.
And one night in April when it was still light at seven, he got to his front door and felt watched, and he saw Ruth in the grim black clothing of a widow, far down Wayne Avenue, just observing his nightly routine. Judd initiated a move toward her, but Ruth turned away and walked off.
Because of his Elks club membership in Orange, Judd was permitted entrance to the Elks lodge in downtown Syracuse and he invited a Barringer High School classmate, Haddon Jones, to join him for a luncheon after Judd made his morning sales calls. Haddon was a tall, rail-thin man with slicked-back hair, horsey ears, and a pen-line mustache. He sold insurance and real estate for Hills and Company and was, as he said, “doing quite well, thank you. The business, she booms.”
Sitting at the Elks club bar, Judd ordered, “Medicinal whiskeys for both of us, Doctor.”
The Elks bartender disdainfully said, “I’m no doctor.”
“I tell a lie,” Judd said. “You are a pharmacist with a limited inventory!”
Haddon grinned and said, “I seem to have some catching up to do.”
“Emptied my flask by eleven.”
“Burying your sorrows?”
“Exactly the otherwise, my good man. I’m belated. Excuse me, elated. I have a paramour of great beauty who is not my wife and to whom I am now affianced. Without sanctification of God or state, mind you.” Judd tapped his forehead. “But mentally. Have I showed you her picture?”
“This is the first we talked about it.”
Judd struggled with his trousers as he got out his wallet and flattened its wings on the bar with both hands. Then he meticulously pinched a photograph of Ruth out and put it next to Haddon’s rye whiskey. “I shall not tell you her name for she is legally spoken for. But I would like your frankest evolution—evaluation, excuse me—and we shall determine if you need your eyeses examined.”
Haddon held up the photograph and turned on his bar stool to find better light. “She’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful, yes. Entirely just assessment. But you are too moderate in your opinion because you have not drunken enough the alchemy of the poet. And, I must be frank, the picture does not do her justice. She is a goddess”
“You guys on the road. You got ’em coming and going, don’t you?”
Judd shook his head and wagged a finger. “But there you are wrong, sir. She has me.”
Ruth preheated the kitchen oven and simmered a cup of pitted prunes in a saucepan until they were soft. Mrs. Brown was in her nurse’s whites, heading out to a five-dollar job night-watching an old woman who’d broken her hip. Scowling at the ingredients on the counter, she asked Ruth, “Are you making a prune whip?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t like prunes. Lora won’t eat them.”
“Albert does.”
Josephine linked shut the neck of her brown cape as she said, “Well, don’t hold your breath waiting for his thank-you.” She went out the kitchen door.
Ruth pureed the prunes in the saucepan and used a hand egg beater to stir in and dissolve one-third of a cup of sugar. She added a teaspoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of vanilla, then hand-mixed six egg whites in a separate bowl and dripped some cream of tartar into the froth and hand-mixed again until the froth stiffened. She found her purse on the kitchen table and got out a packet of gray powder. Her hand circled the froth of egg whites as she poisoned it with the powder, and then she folded in the prune puree and poured the mixture into a buttered and sugared baking dish. She baked the dessert for forty minutes, chilled it, and after that night’s dinner served it to Albert with whipped cream.
She confessed what she’d done the next afternoon at Henry’s. She told Judd she and The Governor fell into a gruesome argument and she’d become so incensed that she’d poisoned him.
Judd exclaimed in a hushed way, “You didn’t!”
She nodded, and hot tears fluently ran down her face.
“And Albert?”
She carelessly said, “Oh, he just vomited all night.”
“But why would you do such a thing?”
She shrugged and sobbed, “I wanted to see what effect it had on him.”
“How’d you get the poison?”
She caught her breath and said, “Actually, it was only an overdose of medicine I got at Spindler’s.”
“Still, it would have been murder!”
She couldn’t stanch her tears even with the linen table napkin. Restaurant staff were frowning and confiding about them. Harry Folsom was dining alone and filling out a hosiery order but heard Judd’s raised voice and scowled from across the room.
“Don’t yell at me,” Ruth said. “I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was just angry and irritated. And it was like an experiment.”
Judd fell back in the booth and stared at Ruth, fully appalled. “I find your experiment loathsome. Wild, thoughtless actions like that—it’s really beyond the pale.”
“I hate him so much, though. There’s no love, no friendship, no interest in me. He either treats me like his servant or his whore.”
And then she halted and her face changed, and it was as if he’d turned a page in a book, or rather, as if he’d been reading one book and then gone to another, for she glared at him with a ferocity he’d never seen before, stood up from the table, gripped her muskrat coat at her neck, and said with so much venom she seemed to hiss, “But I guess I had you figured wrong. I guess you’re a coward and a sissy. You won’t help or defend me because Albert’s a he-man, and you’re just a low, cringing sneak who’s out to get his jollies with me, nothing more.”
Judd was so hurt and astonished he could only gape as she spun away and hurried to the entra
nce. He was getting up to rush after her when she stopped with a hand reaching out to the door and then seemed to crumple. She fell to her knees in a faint before Judd could get to her. With jostling emotions, Judd crouched over Ruth as she lay unconscious on the floor and he saw a face that wore the innocence of a sleeping child.
Waiters and onlookers crowded around as Judd gently patted her cheek and said, “Ruth. Ruth, wake up.”
Harry Folsom scooped crushed ice from the smorgasbord and folded it inside a wet hand towel that he stooped to put on Ruth’s forehead.
She seemed to gradually feel it and fluttered her eyelids and then focused on Judd and smiled. “Hi,” she said.
“You fainted. You said hurtful things.”
She ignored that to say, “Hi, Harry.”
“Hiya, Tommy. You feel okay?”
She gazed up at all the strangers surrounding her. “I feel like a celebrity.”
Harry Folsom smiled. “Well, maybe that’s your destiny, toots.”
Judd later wrote in his memoir:
As to conditions in my home, we had reached the stage that so many couples reach in their married life. We were just floating with the tide. The overpowering consciousness of guilt caused me to lie awake night after night, trying to work out my problem until I exhaustedly fell asleep. And vowing that the thing could go on no longer. I did not know that I was so steeped in this poisonous infatuation that it ultimately would hold me in the grip of death.
Ruth knew he idolized her and she loved his infatuation. But she loved even more the exercise of power over Judd, an intoxicating authority and governance she’d never felt in school, on a job, with Albert, or even with Lorraine. She’d softly tease Judd’s naked torso with a pheasant feather until he was giggling and excited, and then she’d shock him with a hard slap to the face. She’d kiss him with great tenderness and then abruptly spit into his mouth. She called him cruel names during intercourse so he’d ram her in a hot rage. She made him grovel and feel off balance and then she’d coo and caress him as he rounded into a fetal position at her feet.