A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (5 page)

“If I’m not intruding,” Judd said.

Ruth smiled and said, “Please do.”

His thigh slightly touched Ruth’s as he sat and she let hers stay as it was. His closeness to her made his handshake awkward as he affably said, “Hello there. I’m Judd Gray.”

“I thought your name was Henry.”

“It is in the birth register,” the hosiery salesman said.

Judd explained, “I’m formally Henry Judd Gray but I just use the initial H. Harry likes to flaunt his detective work.”

“So it’s Judd,” Kitty said.

“My friends call me Bud.”

Ruth smiled again. “So many choices!”

“I haven’t one for you yet.”

“Mrs. Snyder,” she said. “Ruth.”

Imitating her, Kitty said, “Mrs. Kaufman. Karin. But they call me Kitty.” She shook his hand. “She’s also called Tommy.”

Judd grinned. “Oh. Are you a tom-boy?”

“Kitty calls me that because my friends are mostly men.”

“And why’s that?”

She said with that silky caress of a voice, “Oh, who knows? I guess because they’re so safely predictable in some ways. And unpredictable in others.”

Harry called out, “Olaf! A ginger ale for Mr. Gray.”

“Me too,” Kitty said.

Seeing Ruth’s highball glass was still full, Harry called out, “Three,” and finished his own. And then, out of nowhere, Harry hiked up Kitty’s calf as high as his chest. “Wouldja look at the shapely ankles on this gal?”

Kitty just laughed and swatted his hands off. Judd was sure, then, that these were fast “delicatessen” ladies, and he looked at Ruth so intently her face got hot. “You’re very tan,” he said.

“We just got back from a weekend sailing on the Atlantic.”

“We?”

“The husband, me, and the baby.” Ruth looked at his nicely manicured left hand. “I see you’re manacled too.”

Judd glanced at his gold wedding ring. “Almost ten years now. Isabel. And I have an eight-year-old. Jane. She’ll be nine in August.”

“Mine’s seven. Lorraine.”

“Oh. You said ‘baby.’ I was imagining a child—”

“The size of a shoebox?”

Judd laughed, and the ginger ales were served, again two-thirds full and with a spoon. Harry screwed off the cap on his hammered silver flask. “Shall I?”

Judd shoved his highball glass forward. “Homemade?”

Harry filled the glasses. “Certainly not, old fellow! Shipped from the Beefeater distillery by way of our friends in Canada.”

Judd lifted his glass. “Well, here’s to the Eighteenth Amendment.”

Harry rejoined, “And may Congress prohibit sex just as effectively.”

Kitty giggled, and Harry gave Judd a lewd wink.

Ruth angled her head. “Are you employed, Mr. Gray?”

Harry told the ladies, “Judd sells for Benjamin and Johnes.”

“Sells what?” Kitty asked.

“The Bien Jolie line,” Judd said. “Corselettes and brassieres.
I handle the retailers in eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Our corporate offices are just a stone’s throw from here—Thirty-fourth and Fifth.”

Harry’s hand heavily fell on Ruth’s as he said, “And I’ll make sure his office gets you anything you want, sweetie. How about it, Bud?”

Judd felt forced to say, “Always glad to be of service.”

Kitty already seemed tipsy as she asked, “What kind of fella sells corsets?”

Judd told her, “A fellow who’s fond of the female form.”

Ruth smiled. “You must get asked that question a lot.”

“Oh, did that sound practiced?”

Kitty asked what “Bien Jolie” meant.

“‘Very pretty,’” Judd said.

Kitty frowned. “Isn’t that
très jolie?”

“Aren’t you the smart one,” Harry said, and grabbed her torso more tightly to him. Because of the heat, she wriggled away.

“I haven’t any French,” Judd said. “But I’m told the
bien
makes the
jolie
more intense.”

“Like ‘very, very pretty’?” Ruth asked.

Judd grinned. “Like you.”

Ruth shied from the sultry pleasure of his gaze.

“And flattery like that is why he hauls in five thousand dollars a year,” Harry said.

Kitty gasped. “Five thousand dollars! Jeepers!”

“It’s just a number,” Judd said, and noticed Ruth’s interest. Judd noticed, too, that Ruth still had not lifted a glass with them, that her first iced drink was sweating onto the homey blue-and-white checkered tablecloth. “Are you a teetotaler, Mrs. Snyder?”

She seemed demure as she said, “I just pace myself. There’s nothing worse than a full day of drinking, then waking up next to some guy and not being able to remember how you met or why he’s dead.”

She shocked them into raucous laughter and the fat waiter took that as an invitation to finally take their food orders. But Harry Folsom noted that the four of them seemed to be having so much fun together that they all should flee the torrid city and head up to his shady porch in New Canaan, Connecticut. Mrs. Kaufman liked the idea, but Judd excused himself to go back to work, and on a glancing hint from Kitty, Ruth said she wanted to catch the train to Queens Village.

Exiting the booth, Judd asked, “Are you taking the Long Island line?”

Ruth said she was.

“I’ll walk you to Penn Station.”

She said nothing as they strolled west to Seventh Avenue. Looking at their reflections in the shop windows, Judd noticed that she would be at least two inches taller than he even without high heels. But she was glamorous, too, and the gin had made him zesty and loquacious, so as they walked down to 33rd Street, Judd filled the silence with chatter and facts about Pennsylvania Station. Did she know it took up seven acres and was the largest indoor space in America? And the enormous waiting room? Judd had heard it was inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla.

She seemed amused. “You know a lot, don’t you?” It did not seem a compliment.

“I have no idea why I’m so nervous around you.”

She wryly said, “Well, I’m ‘very, very pretty.’ Any man would be.”

Walking through the grand entrance, Judd noted for Ruth the Corinthian columns, and then the huge clock framed by a pink granite pair of sculpted females. “Day” was fully dressed in the flowing drapery of ancient Greece and was carrying a harvest of giant sunflowers, while “Night” was shaded by a shrouding cape she held over her head and she was naked from the waist
up, the firm breasts inspiring some men there to become clock watchers.

“That’s Audrey Munson,” Judd said. “She was the highest-paid model in New York. All the great sculptors used her. You can find her everywhere in the city. And she appeared in moving picture shows, fully nude.
Inspiration
was one. And
Purity.
She was breathtaking. But a doctor she knew crazily murdered his wife to have Audrey, and at first the police suspected her of conspiring with him. She was finally cleared, but the gossip was devastating. She changed her lodgings to Mexico, New York, near where I was born, in Cortland, and tried to take her own life by swallowing bichloride of mercury tablets.”

Ruth was concentrating hard on what he’d just said. “She’s still alive?”

“But no longer right in the head, I’m afraid.”

“I feel so sorry for her.”

Was that where he was steering with that story? Sympathy? Judd wondered if he just wanted to use the word “nude” in Ruth’s presence.

“She
is
beautiful,” Ruth said.

“Like you,” Judd said.

In a gesture that was both friendly and condescending, Ruth patted his cheek. “I have to go,” she said, and was off to a one o’clock train heading across the East River to Queens and Jamaica Station.

Writing later of their first meeting in his penciled memoir,
Doomed Ship,
Judd claimed Mrs. Snyder was vague in his reveries then, that he remembered only
the charming good nature, the winsome personality, and the soft gray fur slipping so gracefully from one shoulder. I realized that a frank, sincere character lurked behind that
radiant and healthy loveliness.
But there was no anticipation of ever seeing Ruth again.

That June afternoon, H. Judd Gray filled out an inventory sheet and a hefty expense report for his last sales trip, skimmed through a stack of mail, stood in front of the office’s floor fan to scan the factory information on the new pink Bien Jolie corselettes that would be introduced in August, and, feeling chipper, jokingly chatted with founders Alfred Benjamin and Charles Johnes just to show his face. And then he took a southbound train for the short haul to East Orange, New Jersey, and his brick Craftsman bungalow at 37 Wayne Avenue, and to the emotional starvation of his sane, successful, monotonous life.

Scott Fitzgerald would name the twenties “the Jazz Age” and note that it “raced along under its own power served by great filling stations full of money.” Wealth began to seem available to anyone then. Chrysler was founded. Scotch Tape was invented. The first-ever motel opened. RCA’s shares were soaring in price and the stock market itself was high-flying due to an optimistic and gambling middle class that had formerly bought only Liberty Bonds.

The five boroughs of New York City constituted the largest city in the world, and the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway was the earth’s tallest skyscraper. There were thirty-two thousand speakeasies, and hard liquor could be found for sale even in dry cleaners and barbershops.

Calvin Coolidge was president, a man so dour, orderly, and parsimonious that he was joked about as “the nation’s shopkeeper.” Whereas in the fall of 1925, New York City would elect as its mayor the flamboyant, debonair Jimmy Walker, who flouted the laws and flaunted the high life in a way that overworked laborers fancied they could one day.

Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Americans hockey team, was under construction on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets on the former site of the city’s trolley barns. The New York Giants and four other teams joined the National Football League. Rochester’s Walter Hagen was the world’s finest professional golfer and winner of the 1925 PGA Championship. Because of a lingering illness caused by tainted bootleg liquor, Babe Ruth was having his worst season as a Yankee, and the team would finish next to last in the American League despite having a rookie named Lou Gehrig at first base.

George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Grand Ole Opry premiered in Nashville. The fiction bestsellers included
The Constant Nymph
by Margaret Kennedy and
Arrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis.
The Great Gatsby
was a financial disappointment. The hit movies were
Ben-Hur,
starring Ramón Novarro, and
The Phantom of the Opera,
starring Lon Chaney. Al Jolson was onstage in
Big Boy,
George Gershwin’s
Lady, Be Good
was still running, and Louise Brooks was still just a half-naked chorus girl in
George White’s Scandals
at the Apollo Theatre, where the seats went as steep as $4.40.

Judd Gray treated six clients from Albany to
Scandals
’s twenty-seven scenes of hoofer solos; juvenile skits; songs by the Williams Sisters, Richard Talbot, Helen Hudson, and Winnie Lightner; and seemingly hundreds of George White Girls high-stepping in otherworldly costumes by the Russian fashion designer Erté. The Elm City Four sang “Lovers of Art” as the spotlights played over stiffly posed girls in flesh-colored bathing suits that made them seem nude statues. And in a gala ending, the girls of the chorus wore only, as one scandalized reviewer put it, clothing “from the neck up and shoes down.”

Even Albany’s lingerie buyers were shocked, while Judd himself was mostly offended that each glass of White Rock seltzer his party ordered as set-ups cost him a full dollar, and regular tap
water cost him two. But when he got home to East Orange, there was a nightlong fray with Isabel over Judd’s entertaining clients at such a risqué revue, and in a fury over his wife’s condemnations, he stormed from the house for an earlier, July departure to eastern Pennsylvania.

Half a week later, after a hectic round of the ladies clothing stores, he’d toured the Crayola factory in Easton and purchased a box of school crayons for little Jane, then poked around the city farmer’s market, marveling at how the weathered growers silently stood behind their cases of fruits and vegetables with no effort to sell them. No exaggerations, no conniving or entertaining, no sentimental manipulation, just frank presentation of goods. And immediately he felt overwhelmed by his own unimportance.

Judd returned to the Huntington Hotel and the front desk clerk handed him a letter. At first he thought it would be from his wife, a continuation of the quarrels and humiliations of the night before he left. But it was a penned letter from Queens Village that had been forwarded from his office.

Dear Mr. Gray:

We met at Henry’s Resturant with my hairdresser friend and Mr. Harry Folsom a few weeks ago. I would like to buy as a gift your Grecian-Treco Classic Corset for my mother Mrs. Josephine Brown. I have used a measuring tape and she is 38” up top, 30” at the waste, and 40” around the hips. (Excuse my frankness, but your used to such female intimacies I guess.) Would you be so kind as to send it please to: 9327 222nd Avenue, Queens Village, New York? I have inclosed a blank cheque which amount you can fill out for the undergarment plus shipping and handle-ing.

I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.

Ruth Snyder

“also known as” Mrs. A. E. Snyder

Even the childish misspellings delighted him. Judd filled out an order form that he sent to his secretary, then tore up the check. And he found himself dwelling on
I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.

Albert Snyder rented a gray saltbox cottage and a sleek, two-masted yawl for their July vacation on Shelter Island. Another editor at
Motor Boating
magazine found him a sailboat berth at the Shelter Island Yacht Club on Chequit Point, and when he wasn’t on the water with the yawl, Albert made himself a hearty regular at the yacht club, slumping with highballs and new friends in the stout wicker rocking chairs on the piazzas overlooking Dering Harbor, gladly accepting invitations for deep-sea fishing and helping out like a mate on the boats, even agreeing to race his yawl in the August regatta.