A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (13 page)

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
coleslaw 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.’”

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?”