by Ron Hansen
Eventually, she brought two quarts of ersatz Scotch whisky up to their room in the Waldorf-Astoria and affectionately watched him as he finished a water glass of it.
She asked, “How is it?”
Judd coughed. “That’s the strongest, queerest stuff I ever tasted.”
“This will help,” she said. She got her green alligator handbag and took out two small vials of powder. She dumped one vial into the water glass and filled it with more whisky. “Bottoms up,” she said.
Judd hesitated. “What is it?”
“Remember that Johnny at Creedmoor Psychiatric? The orderly? He stole it for me. We know what it does to his patients. I want to see what effect it has on you.”
He held up the glass, inspecting its contents. Some fine grains of powder still swirled and clouded the whisky and descended in it like flakes of snow. “And I do that for what reason?”
She was all sweetness as she said, “Because I asked you to.”
Judd drank it down.
She asked, “Aftertaste?”
He winced. “Yes, it’s bitter.”
“Here,” she said, and repeated the earlier process with the other powder. “Sample it first,” she said.
Judd just dipped his tongue to it.
“Can you detect it?”
“Yes. Like that sweet syrup in Chinese food.”
“Okay, maybe that’s better. Drink it down.”
“But what will it do to me?”
Her face was innocent, even daft. “I’m not sure.”
“I could be poisoned.”
She fiercely told him, “Oh, just do it, Judd!”
Judd obeyed. And soon he was affected. At first he couldn’t stop pacing the room, but he felt he was on stilts and he finally had to lie down. Wherever he looked, the hotel room seemed acres wide and as high as a cathedral. Air molecules struck his eyes like cold raindrops. His hearing changed so that Ruth’s sentences seemed to find him from a great distance. She was telling him she had to get home to Queens Village that night. Judd gallantly walked her to the hotel room’s door but then fell onto the bed, and he was sitting by the telephone and staring at the intriguing topography of his fingertips when Ruth called up from the lobby to find out how he was.
Hearing his slurred sentences and senselessness, she said, “Don’t leave the room! Stay there! Sleep! I’ll be back for you in the morning.”
But Judd must have gone out because he had a faint memory of a funny little lunchroom and a Reuben sandwich, and around four in the morning he found himself back in the room offering the Waldorf-Astoria’s night porter all his dollar bills.
Ruth called him at nine on Saturday morning. “And now how do you feel?”
“Terrible. Everything’s veiled. I can hardly navigate.”
“Well, you need to snap out of it. Don’t go to work. Call in sick. I’ll be there in a jiffy.”
An hour later she found him sleeping in a filled bathtub, its hot water now cold and his head just inches away from drowning. She woke and washed and toweled him. Judd got his Gillette safety razor and insisted on shaving himself, but she felt his face and informed him he already had. She ordered room service coffee and Bayer aspirin for his headache as he dressed. And then she smiled. “Well, I nearly finished you, didn’t I?” And to his silence she said, “Oh, don’t pout!”
Judd was a wreck, but he could totter forward if his hand braced him against the wall. Ruth hugged his waist as if he were an invalid and gave him instructions about each shift and forward movement. She paid a cashier eight dollars for the room and the chipper girl said, “Please join us again, Mrs. Gray.”
Walking frailly down to Pennsylvania Station with her, Judd said, “You have achieved supremacy, you know. I have relinquished my will and judgment. Because I’m so helplessly in love.”
She disdainfully said, “You’re mewling.”
“And you’re demeaning!”
She deflected that by noticing a fierce orange chow chow that was leashed to a fire hydrant and was snarling and leaping at shying passersby, his jaws and fangs chomping at the air near their bodies until the taut leash hauled him by the neck to the sidewalk and he got up even angrier. “Oh, look at the doggie!” Ruth said. “Want to pet him?”
Hearing her, a shocked man said, “That chow’s vicious, lady!”
“Oh, applesauce!” she said. And she called in that soothing, silken stroke of a voice, “Hi, sweetie! Hi, baby!” as she crouched toward the bulky dog that now cocked his head with curiosity. She got on her knees and face-to-face with him, and he sniffed her hair and then licked her. She giggled to Judd, “Don’t you love dog kisses?”
But Judd was thinking, My God. That’s me.
FIVE
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
In June 1926, Albert Snyder rented a gray vacation cottage on Shore Road just off Setauket Harbor on Long Island Sound. Around that time, Judd Gray matched him by renting a waterfront house on the Atlantic Ocean that was less than an hour’s drive southeast at Shinnecock Bay. Each husband took the train to the hot streets of Manhattan on Monday mornings, stayed alone at home for three nights, then journeyed back to his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law on Thursday evenings for salt air and sunshine on three-day weekends.
Each morning as Judd went into the city, and each evening when he went out to the cedar-shingled waterfront house, he realized there was a good chance The Governor would be a passenger with him for at least half the jostling ride, and Judd would find himself strolling through each of the railroad cars like a conductor, scanning the faces for some glimpse of Ruth’s offensive husband. But there were so many gruff, haggard, and indignant men in nearly identical suits and hats that it was impossible to interpret who could have been the tweed-jacketed Albert in that prewar photograph Judd had seen. Had he encountered him, Judd thought he would say, You are hateful and unjust or She deserves so much better. But in rehearsal each sentence embarrassed him with its melodrama, was like those gaudy, white-lettered snatches of dialogue in heart-wrenching motion pictures.
Selling for Bien Jolie in the city, Judd once found himself in front of 119 West 40th Street and recalled that the Hearst offices for Cosmopolitan and Motor Boating were there. Looking ridiculous, he knew, with his corset sample cases weighting down his hands, he took the elevator up and found the temerity to inquire of the Motor Boating receptionist if the art director was there. She glanced to the far end of the room, where a muscular, wide-shouldered man was hunched over a slanted drafting table, his Oxford-shirted back to the office entrance and his left hand raking his sandy hair as his right sketched the dummy of a page layout. “Looks like he is,” the girl said, and she turned back to the salesman, saying, “Shall I—?” But she halted midsentence when she saw that he was already hurrying out.
The Grays hosted a clambake on July 4th on Shinnecock Bay, but as their friends and Isabel retired for the night, Judd stayed out under the silver pepper of the stars, facing not seaward but northwest toward Port Jefferson and the Sound, imagining the glorious evening that would have been his had Ruth been there, an evening that now was forever lost.
Ruth seemed to pine for him, too, and each day sent his office at Benjamin & Johnes hasty notes or sepia postcards that were without inscriptions but featured shy, grinning beauties in clinging wet bathing suits that were intended to conjure pictures of her. And there was one she sent of a blond, brawny, Albert-like lifeguard, scanning the horizon, and on the back she’d written, What if he drowned?
And Judd found himself thinking, All our problems would be solved.
In July, Ruth’s friend and hairdresser Kitty Kaufman and her husband, Bill, lifted Ruth’s spirits by renting a saltbox just next door to the Snyders. Because of Bill, Albert was happily joined on his full-day fishing runs for cod, fluke, ling, and striped bass, and the wives, Lorraine, and Josephine swam and suntanned and read Woman’s Home Companion and Photoplay magazines in the shade. Ruth and Josephine spoke Swedish to heap comical abuse on the
bodies and beach attire they saw. And through Albert’s motorboating connections at the Setauket Marina, the Snyders also found new friends in Milton Fidgeon and his wife, Serena, whose permanent address was not far from theirs on Hollis Court in Queens Village. The Fidgeons were party-loving extroverts addicted to contract bridge and martinis, and each night they invited the Snyders and Kaufmans over so Serena could instruct them in the intricacies of the card game as Milton served enough gin and vermouth from his cocktail shaker that all but Ruth stumbled with intoxication.
In August, when Albert and Bill were hunting skimmer clams for bait, Ruth went to Port Jefferson to mail a letter that she’d written on a page she’d ripped out of Lorraine’s The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad. But she could say little more than We are having so much fun! I hope summer never ends! She forgot to say she loved or missed Judd, and she failed to consider that in his forlorn mooning he would infer hints of mockery in a children’s book page about Old Mr. Toad.
Rather than heading out to Shinnecock that August evening, Judd worriedly took the train to Port Jefferson and then a taxi to Shore Road, wandering up to strangers in his straw boater and seersucker suit and inquiring about the whereabouts of the Snyder family until a fisherman told him, “Heard there’s a go-to-hell dinner party at the Setauket Marina.”
Walking to it after ten, Judd saw a half-dozen automobiles heading away and stirring up dust from the parking lot, couples in evening gowns and tuxedos drunkenly singing as they exited a huge circus tent, and others getting onto their motor yachts to continue the party at sea.
Judd went inside the circus tent and found waiters collecting leftover food and dishware and rolling the round folding tables out to idling vans. But an orchestra was still playing and there was a gang of loud, hulking college-age men vying for the chance to get closer to Ruth. She’d shockingly cut her hair in the boyish fashion that was newly popular and she seemed to Judd to be flirting outrageously, heckling one lad for his shyness and twirling so wildly away from some kidding hands that her organdy gown slunk off her right shoulder and her full white breast was exposed. Ruth just laughed at the howls and cheers as she readjusted her gown, and Judd heard a woman insist, “Albert’s not here. You rescue her.”
Judd turned and recognized Kitty Kaufman being tugged from the dinner party by a man who was probably her husband. Judd hurried through a work crew onto the planks of the dance floor as a lovely girl in a shimmering gown tilted toward an orchestra microphone to credit Irving Berlin for the next song, and then she sang the introduction to “Always.”
Judd firmly caught hold of Ruth’s right shoulder and she spun with surprise that changed to glee as Judd asked, “May I have this dance, madam?”
She grinned and said, “Of course,” and she fell into the rhythm of his graceful waltz.
“Have you been drinking?” Judd asked.
“Just a little. Was I being noisy? Albert says I’m noisy when I drink. Because that’s one reason I don’t drink. Noisiness. And I get sick.”
“You’ve cut your hair,” he said.
“Vogue calls it ‘the Eton Crop.’ The Old Crab says it’s too mannish. Kitty and I were bored.”
“And you’re very brown.”
“You too.”
“Tennis, golf.” He scowled at the college boys scowling at them. Liking the pun, he said, “I haven’t ever seen you as boisterous as that.”
“Oh, they’re nothing to me. You know that, don’t you?”
“I frankly needed reassurance.”
Ruth listened to the singer and tipsily smiled. “Let’s make this our song. ‘Always.’ Okay?”
And then Judd sang in his baritone that he’d be loving Ruth forever, that his love would be true forever, and when the things she planned needed a helping hand, he would understand. Always.
She didn’t want to go back to Himself with it not yet midnight, so they strolled to West Meadow Beach, where they necked like kids and she tipped into Judd as they sat on fish-scented slabs of rock. She watched high tide flow over a sloping shelf below them and slide along it like a hand along an ebony table, wiping off silver dust. Judd drank from his flask and Ruth said, “I nearly became a widow this week.” Judd’s face was without reaction. She told him Albert had the Buick’s engine running in their Setauket garage as he adjusted the tappets and timing, and he felt himself weakening and getting faint, when he saw that the garage doors he’d flung open had somehow shut. Reeling, he got into fresh air. “The jerk has nine lives,” she said.
“Eight now,” Judd said, and tilted his flask again.
She grinned. “That’s it. Albert’s just a problem in subtraction, right?”
Judd said nothing. Alcohol had stolen his vocabulary.
There were flashes of light and the mutter of thunder far off on the Sound. There was a tang of rain on the breeze.
“You’d better hurry,” she said.
Judd got on all fours and then hesitantly managed to get upright. “I fine,” he said.
She stood and hugged him. “I’m so glad you got jealous and found me.”
But Judd just turned away and lopsidedly tottered toward Port Jefferson in search of a taxicab.
In September 1926, Judd and Isabel spent Labor Day weekend visiting automobile dealerships in Newark and East Orange and purchased, for $595, a new, cream-colored, four-door Chevrolet Series V Touring convertible with whitewall tires, black fenders and running boards, and a black canvas top. Isabel finally consented to its extravagance when Judd mentioned how much fun Jane and her friends would have on jaunts with the roof down—“It would be like a hay ride,” he said—but he was in fact fantasizing about Ruth snuggling into him in the crisp autumn air, the front brim of his hat blown upright, and both of their woolen scarves sailing behind them.
Hearing about the convertible, Ruth pleaded girlishly over the phone, “Oh, I want to go with you on your next trip! Oh, can I, please—pretty please with sugar on it?” And in order that she could join Judd on his ten-day sales route through upstate New York in October, she convinced her husband she was going to Canada with friends, Mr. and Mrs. Kehoe. It was just a name she’d seen on a mailbox, but the lie scarcely mattered, for Albert took so little notice of what she did by then that he failed to cross-examine her; in fact, except for his worries about handling school days with Lorraine, he seemed relieved she’d be gone.
She was late, but on Monday, October 11th, she exited the subway in Newark in a green cloche hat and a knee-length coat of soft muskrat fur dyed to resemble mink. And she saw Judd smugly relaxing against his jazzy convertible in a raccoon coat and Yankees baseball cap. She asked, “What fraternity you pledging, college boy?”
He took the Hartmann suitcase from her and grinned as he swung it into the back seat. “Which one has the hosted bar?”
Riding north through the Hudson River Valley with Judd, she grimly told him The Governor and she had been arguing without letup since they returned from Setauket, and then she shifted to another mood, gladly reacting to the fall foliage as if she were seeing it for the first time, laughing as she called out the leaf colors as “carrot orange,” “saffron yellow,” “harlot red,” or “horse pee.” She was gay, hectic, joshing, tender, and so sexually insatiable that the judge at their Queens County trial threatened to forbid ladies to be seated in the courtroom when Judd gave his testimony about that jaunt through upstate New York.
Early on Ruth gave him fellatio as he drove, and after their luncheon in a village above Newburgh, she went with him into the wet moss and crackling leaves of the woods. Judd joked, “To err is human, but it feels divine.” And when they got in the car again, Judd was charmed to see her fling off her hat and lie down in the front seat, hugging her knees. She tranquilly slept just as Jane would on long trips, waking up, as Judd later wrote, pink and refreshed and happy as a baby.
At four thirty, Judd checked them into the Stuyvesant Hotel in historic Kingston, introducing Ruth as “Mrs. Gray,” and then sitting as formally upr
ight as a bailiff as he used the hotel room’s telephone to arrange the next morning’s sales calls. They strolled along Rondout Creek after dinner, Judd found a speakeasy that sold Taittinger champagne, and she wore him out with lovemaking until two in the morning.
She woke him in the middle of the night by saying, “Albert’s birthday!”
“Hmm?”
“It’s October twelfth, isn’t it?”
“I guess so.”
“He’s forty-four today. I forgot to leave him a gift. Even a card.”
“Don’t feel guilty, darling.”
“Actually, I feel just the opposite. Ain’t that somethin’?”
Wanting sleep, Judd lit a cigarette instead, and Ruth held him in the night of the room, liking the softness of his English skin, the traffic of his breathing, the male scent that was not Albert’s. She said, “We married in my mother and father’s place in front of some minister I’d never met. Walking from the kitchen in my grandmother’s ugly old bridal gown and Al’s sister banging Wagner’s ‘Wedding March’ on the piano. And me thinking, Aren’t you supposed to love the groom? But I didn’t at all. I mean, Al was handsome and smart and talented, and I was full of admiration for him, but there was nothing else. And even as the minister was having us repeat the wedding vows, I was thinking, This doesn’t have to be permanent. I can divorce him. And then I got violently ill. Mama told Albert I had the flu so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt, and he went home alone that night. And I realized how jubilant that made me. After a few days I had to admit I was well again, and I found out the old grouch gave up on the idea of our Poconos vacation after canceling our hotel reservations, so we never had a honeymoon.” She kissed Judd’s cool shoulder. “This is my first. And I’m overjoyed.”