A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (20 page)

W
aking just before sunrise on March 19th, she gazed through a northern window at the yellow halo of the arc light across the street. Even as she watched, the glow was strangled and then snuffed. She softly rolled right and stared across the chasm between their beds that was not wide enough. Albert was sleeping on his side in his flannel nightshirt, too unfairly strong for her to handle by herself. She hated the gargled sighs as he inhaled and exhaled, hated the stink of his breathing, hated the hoarse shouts he’d use when he called her name to fetch or cook something.

She felt the ache of menstruation and went into the bathroom. But she was ending her period. She found just a spot of blood on the Kotex, and she took that as an affirming sign that she’d be rid of Albert soon. She wakened Lorraine to say they’d be shopping for Easter clothes in Manhattan, and then she hurried over to Kitty Kaufman’s house to have her hair bleached as blonde as Mae West’s.

Judd woke at eight in Syracuse and took a hot bath with Epsom salts. Soaked until his fingertips pruned. Shaved with a new razor blade. Each item of clothing he wore would have to last a full day and night, so he chose fresh skivvies, a new pair of knee-high black stockings, a starched white shirt, the gray wool suit and vest that were faintly threaded with blue, and a navy blue foulard necktie. Lacing up his shoes, he caught himself thinking,
The killer wore black, high-grade Oxfords.

Carefully establishing himself in Syracuse, he went down to the Onondaga Hotel’s basement coffee shop and ordered waffles with whipped cream and cherries for breakfast. “After all, it’s Saturday,” he told the waitress. She regarded him strangely.
Was he too loud?
Each sentence, each gesture and glance, was thrilling to him. He signed for the bill in a florid hand and included a quarter tip.

Kitty drizzled hydrogen peroxide into a saucepan of bleaching powder with great seriousness and stirred until she’d concocted a perfect mixture. Ruth wrapped an old towel around her neck and stooped over the kitchen sink as Kitty tugged on rubber chemist’s gloves and then dabbed on the stinking mixture with a paintbrush.

“What’s the special occasion?” she asked.

Ruth was thinking there would soon be a candid rotogravure portrait of the grieving widow in the papers, but she instead said they were going to the Fidgeons’ house to play contract bridge.

“Oh,” Kitty said. “Them.”

“Albert seeks out friends who drink like he does.”

“He could always spit out the window. There’s plenty like him since Prohibition.”

And Ruth thought,
Judd.

Kitty painted the wet hair forward, then back, and then handed Ruth a rubber bathing cap. “This stuff’s poison and nasty, so we
can’t let it stay on your skin too long.” She glanced at a wall clock to get the time as Ruth put on the bathing cap and tucked her cooking hair inside.

Kitty snapped off the chemist’s gloves and they sat at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee. She flipped open the New York
Daily Mirror
and hunted a middle page. “Have you read Betty Clift today?” Seeing Ruth shake her head, Kitty scanned Clift’s column and then went back some sentences to read aloud: “‘Heed this advice, men. It is born in woman to long for your praise, for your attentions, for your demonstrations. When you withhold them she suffers an actual starvation. If she is a strong character, she worries along without them. If she is of lighter caliber, you suddenly find yourself without a sweetheart, or even a wife, for some other more accomplished adorer has circumvented you.’”

Ruth smiled. “When she says ‘lighter caliber’ she means bleached blonde, right?”

“Yep,” Kitty said. “Betty’s got you pegged.” She sipped from her mug and slyly grinned as she asked, “And speaking of adorers, how’s Judd?”

She’d hoped Kitty would mention him. “I haven’t seen him in a while. Upstate on his sales route, I guess.”

“Any action on that front?”

Seeking to lay out an alternate version of the night’s events in case things went awry, Ruth said, “Nah. I’m slowing it down. I have to make sure Judd stays far away from Al—he’s threatening to kill him.”

“Oh, guys are always saying stuff like that,” Kitty said.

“Well, I’m scared he’ll do something rash.”

Kitty checked the clock and looked underneath the bathing cap. “We’ve got to rinse off the bleach and shampoo you,” she said. “Bleach too long and you’ll burn off your hair.”

Ruth stooped over the kitchen sink again and Kitty noticed the
excess mixture in the saucepan as she ran water from the tap. “Darn it,” she said. “I made too much again.”

Ruth said to the hairdresser, “Just bottle it up and I’ll serve it to my husband.”

Kitty laughed.

The Syracuse
Post-Standard
predicted the Saturday temperature could get as high as sixty degrees, so Judd left his herringbone overcoat and gray buckskin gloves behind in the hotel room as he strolled the few blocks to Haddon’s insurance office in the Guerney Building, his face finding the sun and holding itself in that heat. A horse team and hay wagon stood between an old Ford Model T and a Hudson Essex parked at a slant on the street.

In the first-floor offices of Hills and Company, “Real Estate & Insurance,” Haddon Jones was selling a fire insurance policy to a skeptical farmer and his wife, his slick black hair parted in the middle, his jaunty mustache glistening with beeswax, his hands widening over the array of brochures on his oaken desk in a gesture that seemed to say the universe had been laid out beneath their frowns. And then he noticed his friend and excused himself to shake Judd’s hand.

Haddon seemed even taller, reedier, and more looming than he’d been at William Barringer High School when the unmatched friends were nicknamed, after the newly popular comic strip, Mutt and Jeff. “Have a seat out here,” he said. “I have a feeling this could be a while. But good to see you, Bud.”

“You too.”

Judd lingered for a half hour more in the office parlor, paging through a
Saturday Evening Post,
his gray fedora on his knee. His mind was an aviary, his thoughts flitting and screaming. He could not recall one item he’d read. He heard Haddon’s voice coaxing a
choice that the farmer seemed unwilling to make, and Judd finally stood up.

“Lunch?” he called to the next room.

Haddon nodded.

It was ten thirty.

Judd strolled by shops and in a five-and-dime purchased a sixty-cent navy blue bandanna that he felt sure was like the one Tom Mix had worn in
Riders of the Purple Sage.
The shopgirl at the cash register failed to lift her gaze to him as he mentioned that impression and offered his dollar bill. She said she hadn’t seen that movie as she gave him his change.

Walking into an alley, he finished his flask and hunted a gin mill where he could refill it.

The Snyder house’s three females left through the front door just after eleven and found Albert outside in a cardigan sweater, vigorously raking life into a tan yard flattened by winter. Some Jewish children in Halloween costumes who’d hesitated over interrupting the father in his angry work scurried forward on the sidewalk when they saw the pretty mother and child and they recited in chorus: “Today is Purim! There can’t be any doubt! Give us a penny and throw us out!”

“Aren’t you cute,” Ruth said, and found a penny in her purse for each.

Albert watched the transaction with a mixture of inquisitiveness and Scrooge-like disdain. Curdling clouds were on the eastern horizon and the evening would be cold and wet, but there were still zephyrs that seemed almost sultry and the hints of spring lightened his mood. When the children had raced away, he asked, “Where to now, you three?”

Mrs. Josephine Brown said, “Oh, that nursing job for Mr. Code in Kew Gardens.”

“All night then?”

“Noon to noon.”

Albert frowned at his wife with confusion. “Lora will be joining us?”

Ruth sighed. “We
discussed
it last week. Remember?”

Albert didn’t. “And now I suppose you’re going shopping?”

“The baby needs Easter clothes.”

“Clothes, clothes, clothes!” he said, but tilted the rake against the house. “In the car, the all of you. I’ll give you a lift.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Lorraine said.

Albert hatted her blonde head with his hand.
“There’s
a good girl.”

Josephine and Ruth got into the back seat and Lorraine into the front. Ruth stared at his sandy hair and hawkish profile and realized she hated his head, too, the fine wrinkles in his neck, the gray whiskers on his shaveless weekends, the steel in his eyes when he concentrated, the way he occupied so much space. After he stepped on the floor starter and shifted gears to reverse onto the street, Albert forced Lorraine to reach her hands out to the glove box and tiringly hold them there as a brace against potential accidents. Looking into the rearview mirror, Albert said, “I’m thinking of putting in a flower bed out front this April. Assorted colors of peonies.”

“What a good idea,” Ruth said, as if it were idiotic. “So festive.”

Josephine slapped her wrist. “Don’t take that tone with your husband.”

“What tone?”

Josephine settled more deeply in the seat. “You know very well, May.”

Albert ignored his wife, shifted into third gear, and smiled as he hummed the tune from Puccini’s
Gianni Schicchi,
his cue for his daughter to sing the aria he’d taught her.

She thought a little and sang in Italian the opening verses of
“O mio babbino caro.”

Ruth interrupted. “Is that a lullaby, baby?”

Lorraine said, “A girl is telling her papa she’s in love with a handsome boy and she wants to get a wedding ring.”

Albert said in his teacherly way,
“Mio babbino caro
means ‘my dear papa.’ Lovely melody, isn’t it? And if she can’t have him, she’ll throw herself into the river Arno.” Albert jumped to the end of the aria and Lorraine laughed as she joined her father in singing the Italian.

Ruth said, “Well,
I
feel left out. How about you, Ma?”

“The lyrics mean ‘Oh God, I want to die,’” Albert said, and grinned into the rearview mirror. “Remember when Florence Easton first sang it at the Metropolitan Opera? In 1918? Were you with me?”

“I hate opera,” Ruth said.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said, and then he was stonily silent the rest of the way to Jamaica Station. And he continued to say nothing, as if he were hurt, when Ruth and Lorraine slid out of the Buick Eight and he headed west with Josephine to Kew Gardens.

The nine-year-old watched as the family car growled away. She asked, “Was Daddy mad at us?”

“Oh, he’s just moody,” Ruth said. “Daddy’s fine.”

Ambling into the downtown Elks lodge, Judd offered a fraternal hello to Chester, the porter, and was cheered that he was remembered from earlier visits to Syracuse. Straddling a bar stool, Judd ordered a gin martini with two green olives, then held the folded blue handkerchief to his nose, a hint of sweet chloroform in its newness. He avoided his face in the wide and distorting mirror that doubled the liquor array. Within a minute he was ordering another martini. He heard the clack of billiard balls in the adjoining room and when he’d gotten the martini, he heard some
men protesting a card play. Judd tipsily twirled on his stool like Jane or Lorraine would have and saw at the far end of the lounge four men in their shirtsleeves and ties at a green felt table, earnestly listening as one of them announced the scores thus far in a gin rummy game. Each of them seemed so normal, the salt of the earth. But bored and boring, old before his time, and vaguely irritated with his lot in life. Like he was before Ruth May.

Judd turned back to the bar to order a third martini and announced his intention by saying, “You know, sometimes too much to drink isn’t enough.” But the bartender was avoiding him as he inventoried his cityscape of liquor, his pencil tinking each bottle as he counted it.

So there was nothing for Judd to do but chain-smoke Sweet Caporals in the gentlemen’s club room at the Onondaga. An RCA radio with a gooseneck loudspeaker was tuned to New York City’s WRNY and a soprano named Nita Nadine was singing. A few other commercial salesmen he’d noticed in weeks past were loudly there, but he feared he might give something away if he joined in their conversation. At twelve thirty he requested permission to tune the radio to WEAF for the Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra and forced himself to ignore the night’s scheme by recalling the luxury of so many glorious nights at the Waldorf-Astoria with his lover. And then he thought of their first time. July, was it? In the offices of Benjamin & Johnes. She’d had a sunburn; he took her upstairs. She’d said,
I feel like a child on an escapade.
And he’d said,
We’re not doing anything wrong.

At one, he went upstairs to room 743, and he nestled inside his tan leather briefcase the half-pint of Duncan’s Pure Chloroform and the green rubber chemist’s gloves he’d bought in Kingston, the navy blue farmer’s handkerchief he’d gotten that morning, and
a wreath of circled picture wire he’d stolen from the New York office. And he was just snapping the briefcase shut when Haddon Jones rapped on the door with his familiar shave-and-a-haircut, six-bits.