by Ron Hansen
Judd exhaled smoke. “And that makes me happy.”
“I have never felt sexual pleasure with Albert, just disgust and … what’s that word for making you feel lousy about yourself?”
“Degradation?”
She snuggled into him. “Whenever he gets into bed with me, I feel like killing him.”
Judd was silent.
“Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
She felt the shift in the mattress as he rotated to stub out his cigarette. “I feel like killing him,” she repeated. Judd’s thoughts hung like his cigarette smoke. She could feel his sentences forming but in his hesitation they soon deteriorated, and he finally offered only, “I have to get to sleep.”
She woke with him kissing her forehead, fully dressed and shaved and scented with Eau de Cologne. “I’m off,” he said.
“Oh, please, won’t you stay here and play?”
Rather sternly, he said, “This is a business trip, Ruth. I owe it to my employers.”
She noticed then that he held a tumbler that was half-filled with whisky. “Are you drinking?”
“Hair of the dog that bit me,” he said, and swallowed all of it before he left the hotel room.
With Judd for full days now, she realized just how much liquor he consumed. Something to get over his hangover the first thing in the morning, then something in his breakfast cup to “give his coffee legs,” a hit from his flask and Sen-Sen licorice breath fresheners before he carried his sample cases into a shop, gin and ginger ale with his lunch, more hits from his flask through the afternoon, and then a full-on job of drinking after five.
She worried so much about his intake that after sleeping through their first days in Kingston, Albany, and Troy, she decided to accompany him on his Thursday sales calls in Schenectady, just waiting outside in the Chevrolet at the first shop, but getting so bored—the car radio had not yet been invented—that she described her mouth with Kissproof Lipstick and strolled into the other shops with him. She was introduced as his wife, which excited her, but then Judd added other lies that she found less delightful: that she graduated from Smith College, that she was a high-paid fashion model, that “You’ll see that hourglass figure of Mrs. Gray’s in our next Bien Jolie catalogue.” It was like she wasn’t good enough as is.
She considered Judd’s spiel too formal: “Your choicest gowns,” he’d say. “Don’t they deserve a foundation no less perfect than that afforded by this exquisite one-piece corsette?” And he could be overly teacherly: “Excuse me, miss, but our line is pronounced Be-Ann Jo-Lee.” But he flirted with even the not-pretty clerks and shopkeepers, and he could seem so intrigued and compassionate, frowning as if he were listening hard and feeling each of their joys and sorrows. Judd congratulated them on their changed hairstyles, flattered them for their shaped and painted fingernails, their choice of perfume, and those jujus and fashion accessories that other men failed to notice. And even though Ruth was watching, the women were so affectionate, each joyfully hugging Judd in greeting, kissing his handsome face, their hands fondly finding his forearms and chest as he conversed in his sane and soothing baritone.
She fidgeted. She felt she was suffocating, even that her throat was shutting. And her heart was hammering so loudly that she felt sure people even a few feet away must have wondered at its noise. And then Ruth fainted.
She woke on the floor some minutes later and found Judd kneeling over her, fanning her face with his fedora. Oh so concerned. “You son of a bitch,” she said.
“Ruth, please, darling. Don’t say that. You’re hysterical.”
All his adoring women were glaring down at her. Ugly sluts, the lot of them.
Ruth got some rest that afternoon, but she was still plagued with the certainty that he would not have resisted the solace and reward of sex given so many opportunities on his route. After all, Henry Judd Gray had established himself as a man who cheats on his wife. And Ruth was jealous enough that after he’d registered them into the Montgomery Hotel in Amsterdam, she sought to get even with his presumed infidelities by insisting she expensively call home on the Benjamin & Johnes account. As she heard the Queens phone ringing, she asked, “Where would I be by now?”
“Oh, Quebec somewhere, I suppose.”
Judd relaxed on the hotel bed and finished what was left in his flask as Ruth shouted over the long-distance line, “Hello, Mama? I’m in Quebec! Montreal! Yes, it’s very beautiful! In fact it’s bien jolie! And everyone here is so intelligent! Even the little children speak French!” Ruth’s palm covered the mouthpiece as she told Judd, “She didn’t get the joke.” And then she shouted, “But, Mama, how are things there? How’s the baby?”
Judd shot up from the bed and got back into his jacket and hat. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked a few blocks in Amsterdam’s downtown before he found the still-open hardware store where he knew he could purchase whisky in the basement. A hijacked quart of Johnnie Walker Scotch cost him a full day’s commissions, but he thought high-end whisky would give him gentler hangovers.
She was getting off the telephone when he got back. “Albert’s ill,” she said.
“Very?”
“Josephine says so.”
Judd filled a water glass with Scotch as he asked as a formality, “Would you like to go back?”
“Nah. Let the Old Crab die.” She was afraid she’d shocked him, but she found he was smiling.
“Wow,” he said, reflecting on it. “We could have a real celebration then.”
She walked to him and held him close as she whispered into his ear. “Oh, I love you so much right now. Shall we have sex all night long? Wouldn’t that be swell? Would you like that?”
“Would it be manly to object?”
She stared into his flannel-blue eyes with grave sincerity. “Are there wild fantasies you’ve had? Anything at all you’d like to try out?”
With a hint of shame, he said, “Yes.”
She grinned. “Then let’s.”
Each night on Judd’s sales route they stayed up later until Judd was waking at noon, still exhausted and in a whisky haze. After Amsterdam there was a sales call in Gloversville, followed by a jaunt through the gaudy woods alongside the Black River to a ladies’ everything shop in Boonville and three lingerie stores in Watertown. And on Saturday evening it was Syracuse, where Joseph Grogan, the front-desk manager of the Onondaga Hotel, was familiar with Judd and so pleased at finally meeting Mrs. Gray that he rewarded them with a palatial room that seemed fit for a Spanish grandee. Judd woke the next morning to the chiding of church bells but found jazz on the radio and ordered up coffee and apple pie for them both. Lounging in their matching silk pajamas, he confessed to Ruth that he would have liked to take her on a Sunday drive south to Cortland, where he was born, but he still had relatives there who might see them. And he told Ruth that when he was in Syracuse he generally looked up a high school classmate named Haddon Jones who sold insurance there, but though Judd’s old friend had been told she was in a gruesome marriage and he even had seen Ruth’s photograph, Haddon had not yet been given her name, and Judd felt it was not the right time to introduce them.
She fetched his cheek with the tenderness of her hand. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said. “We’ll have time for greetings when we’re married. We’re just a golden world of two now. That’s paradise enough.”
She liked chop suey so they went to a Chinese restaurant Sunday night. She gifted Judd with all her cash—thirty-four dollars—because he’d exhausted his. Waiting for the food, she asked, “Remember telling me about Audrey Munson when we first met? She’s from around here, isn’t she?”
“Close. Up north, near Lake Ontario.” Judd bent over a match to light a cigarette.
“And how was it she tried to commit suicide?”
Exhaling smoke, he said, “Bichloride of mercury tablets.”
“Well, I was reading about them, and there are so many household uses! You can swish it in your mouth
for gum diseases. You can swallow tiny amounts for chronic diarrhea and dysentery. It’s a skin lotion, a gargle—”
“And it’s poison,” Judd said. His face was a sheriff’s.
She smiled. “Oh. You caught on.”
“With jars on my hands, I could catch on.”
“But just think of all the accidents you could have with it if you weren’t careful.”
“Oh, Albert,” he said. “You poor bastard.”
“Won’t you take me seriously?”
Judd looked off to the kitchen. “Ah,” he said. “Our food.”
She watched him pour whisky into his water glass, then wedge his cigarette into the notch of an ashtray. She ate in silence, fuming, and Judd fumed over that. A five-member band was there, playing hits like “Linger a While,” “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “There’s a Yes! Yes! In Your Eyes.” And suddenly Ruth grinned, with sparks in her own flashing, yes-yes eyes, as if her mood had been chemically altered. She said, “Hasn’t this week been heavenly? Please say this is how happy we’ll be from now on.”
Surprised, he said, “Yes. Always.”
She noticed that the dance floor was still empty, and when the band started “Somebody Loves Me,” Ruth stood and yanked at Judd’s hand, saying, “Okay, Bud. You’re up. We haven’t danced since we left.”
Judd joined her in a fox-trot, but the Chinese manager hurried over and told Judd, “There no dancing allow Sundays.”
Reddening with fury, Ruth screamed, “Why are you getting in the way, you Chink? Why can’t you let us alone for one night? Why are people always interfering?” She scurried over to their table, collected her muskrat coat and purse, and ran off, jaggedly crying, as Judd worriedly paid the bill.
But she was waiting for him just outside the front door. Ha-haing. “Wasn’t that funny?” she said. “See his face?” She squinted and formed buck teeth and skewed her face grotesquely.
“The fellow was just following rules,” Judd said.
She frowned in another kind of infuriation and said, “You can be so dull and disappointing, Mr. Gray.” She quickly stalked ahead of him on her clacking high heels toward the Onondaga and Judd did not want to tag along, so he found the Elks club, where he calmed himself with four rounds of liquor. An hour later, he let himself into the hotel room and found Ruth tilting into the telephone on the dresser. She genially wiggled her fingers at him in hello as she said, “Oh, that’s so nice, Lora! I’m so glad you had a good time. Mommy has, too. But I’ll be back home very soon.”
Albert was reading Field & Stream magazine in his attic roost when she concluded ten days with Judd on Wednesday evening. Although he noticed his wife’s ascent on the stairs, he just smoked his cigar and flipped the page on a freshwater fishing article. There was gray in his hair, and hours of squinting on the sea had caused wrinkles to flare out from those steel-blue eyes, but Albert seemed more handsome now than when he first halted in front of Ruth’s typewriter at Cosmopolitan and invited the pretty nineteen-year-old to dinner. She’d said yes and he’d swiftly left, and she grinned at the hoots and envy of the other office girls. All of them so ignorant of Galahads like him.
Albert finally seemed to notice her and inquired, “Was Canada all you dreamed it would be?”
She caught an insinuation in the question but airily answered, “It was lovely.”
“You’ll have to tell me all about it,” he said, still reading.
“Are you feeling okay now?” Ruth asked.
“It was just a bad cold.”
“I’m glad.” She’d prepared for an inquisition but it seemed there would be none. “I hope you got my birthday card.”
“Yes,” Albert said, and as he took the cigar from his mouth he seemed to try to slay his wife with a scowl. “And you sent it Special Delivery? You seem to think I’m made out of money.”
“I felt so embarrassed about forgetting.”
He importantly tapped cigar ash into his chrome pedestal ashtray. “Well, you should be embarrassed, but not for that.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
There were mathematics in his smile. “Oh, whatever you like.”
After letting Ruth off on Wednesday evening, Judd headed to East Orange, feeling gloomier and more lost with each minute she was gone. And he was surprised when he saw parked in front of his house the Cadillac V-63 that belonged to his sister’s husband, Harold Logan. Worrying that Isabel or Mrs. Kallenbach had died, Judd rushed into the house but found nothing wrong. And he hated himself for feeling let down.
Although Harold Logan was the general manager of the jewelry firm Judd’s father founded, he still fancied himself a handyman, and Isabel had called him over to fix a double-hung window that was seizing when she tried to lift it. Harold was now just reassembling the window sash. Judd watched him hammer the trim and lifted a five-pound, foot-and-a-half-long bar of pig iron with a broken eyelet on one end.
“What’s this, Harold?”
Harold glanced to Judd’s hands. “Old sash weight. You got one hiding on each side, hanging on pulley rope. Helps raise it up once you get it started.” Harold banged a nail into the trim, indenting the wood with his hammerhead. “There you go. Looks like hell, but it’ll work.”
Judd got out his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”
“Oh, just for the hardware. Eighty cents oughta do it.”
“We’ll say a dollar,” Judd said, but in retrieving the bill, Ruth Snyder’s wedding snapshot fluttered to the floor.
And Isabel was there to lift it up. She studied the face. “Who’s the girl?”
Judd pretended surprise that it was even there, and said, “Oh, that’s Maisie. She’s a clerk at a shop in Binghamton. She just got married and gave that to me as a memento.”
Isabel accepted that lie with the languid disinterest she’d adopted for all his job-related explanations. And yet as she went to the food that was steaming in the kitchen, Judd found himself wondering how it would have been had he told Isabel the truth. Would he have felt freedom and relief? But then he was fairly certain of the outcome: a financially ruinous divorce, ill fame in his job, his faithful little mother devastated.
Judd saw his brother-in-law grimly interpreting the situation. But Harold loftily quoted Jesus: “‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.’”
Albert went out on his regular bowling night on Thursday, October 28th, and when he got home excited Ruth by saying Harry Folsom invited them to join the Halloween festivities at his New Canaan address the next night. But Albert decided they weren’t going.
“Why not?”
Walking past her into the kitchen, he said, “Have you any idea how far New Canaan is from here? Thirty-three miles. Wearing humiliating costumes. Seeing people I despise.”
“Well, can I go?”
Albert shot a cold look. “With whom?”
“Kitty?”
Albert poured some of his homemade Pilsener into a porcelain Zimmerman stein. “Kitty wasn’t invited. Harry’s wife rightly distrusts her.”
“We’re just staying home then?”
Albert leaned back against the kitchen counter and swallowed some beer. “Try it,” he said. “You might like it.”
“You are so frustrating!”
“Yes,” he said. “Well …” But he found a new interest in his stein and failed to continue his thought.
She and Judd still regularly met at Henry’s or the Waldorf-Astoria lounge, Ruth rehearsing The Governor’s latest infamy and Judd criticizing the vileness she was forced to endure. And she was increasingly concerned about her cousin Ethel’s ill health and Ethel’s continuing failure to find grounds for divorce from her Bronx policeman. “Eddie always had a thing for me. You know—I’d catch him catching a peek of the goods. So I told Ethel I’d get alone with him. Work him up for a telltale photograph.”
Judd fell back against a Waldorf sofa. “But that’s insane, Ruth! Ethel would gain an adultery charge against her husband, bu
t Albert would also have photographic evidence of the same charge against you. You could get divorced but lose Lorraine.”
She looked at him solemnly. “Are you telling me not to do it? Because if you insist, I won’t do it.”
“I insist.”
“And you’d do likewise for me, right?”
“What?”
“Like if I insisted you do or not do something.”
“Certainly,” he said.
In mid-November Josephine was hired for a weekend job nursing an old woman, and Lorraine went off to a Saturday-afternoon birthday party with third-grade friends. Ruth found Albert lying on the sofa in the music room and announced she was going grocery shopping, but when he failed to reply she realized he was drunkenly asleep. She noticed, too, the floor pipe that fueled the zone heaters with natural gas. She went from room to room, fastening the windows shut, then hustled down into his shop and chose a monkey wrench. She got into her overcoat and hat and then crouched to quietly joggle and jam the joint of the floor pipe until it fell apart and she could smell the foul odor of rotten eggs streaming underneath the sofa. She held her nose as she walked out the front door, locked it behind her, and laid the monkey wrench on Albert’s garage workbench. She then went grocery shopping.
She was gone an hour. She didn’t worry that the natural gas would be ignited by a pilot light. She could fix that ruin. But she realized that she’d forgotten Pip in his golden cage in the sunroom, and she began to worry that the canary would die. She’d heard that canaries fell out of the air, dead, hours before humans in coal mines sniffed a problem.
She hailed a taxicab and was sitting in the back seat with two sacks of groceries when the cab turned onto 222nd Street. And there she was stricken at seeing Albert tottering on their front sidewalk, his hands on his hips and gasping for air. “Oh shoot,” she said.