A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (15 page)

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.

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   

I
n 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.”