A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (8 page)

Isabel walked out of their spic-and-span kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. She forgot to smile as she said, “Hi, Bud. You’re home early.”

“I had enough.”

She kissed him and wrinkled her nose at the hint of railway whisky. “Smells like you had plenty.”

“And so it begins,” he said.

Judd Gray was sixteen and in the rigorous college preparatory course at William Barringer High School in Newark, intent on attending Cornell medical school. He was president of his high school fraternity, chairman of the Dance Committee, a Newark high schools sports reporter, manager of the basketball team, and in spite of his scrawniness, the quarterback on the football team. Yet he was high-strung and giddy around girls; he thought they could read his dirty mind. And then he met a considerate, pious, slender, solemn, not-pretty brunette named Isabel Kallenbach, of
Van Siclen Avenue in New York City. She had a too-prominent nose and a jutting chin and he initially dated her out of chivalry and pity. His first and only sweetheart, Isabel married him in November 1915, when he was twenty-three and she twenty-four. Because of pneumonia, Judd had been forced to quit high school in his senior year, and when he was healthy again he took a job in his father’s jewelry factory, and then became a jewelry salesman, serving as a volunteer for the Red Cross during the Great War though he’d wanted to join the Army. His grandfather was an investor in the Empire Corset Company and offered Judd the greater freedom of a job with that firm, and later, in 1921, Judd shifted over to Benjamin & Johnes. And Isabel became a devoted but dowdy housewife, finicky in her cooking and cleaning, priggish, overweight, acting ever more disgraced by his job in lingerie sales, and in reaction given to wearing frowzy dresses and farmerish shoes.

“We’re having meat loaf and fresh sliced tomatoes,” Isabel said from the kitchen, verging on disgust as she added, “And you’re having your Scotch first, I suppose.”

Judd fetched his bottle of Johnnie Walker from the dining room sideboard. “Wouldn’t do without it.”

Mrs. Kallenbach would later state for journalists that she was “very close” to her son-in-law and hardly ever saw him drink, but she watched Judd flee into the back yard with his liquor and stridently called, “You have broken the law, buying that!”

“I’ll have to get rid of the evidence then!” he yelled back.

Judd sat in the Adirondack chair with the Johnnie Walker and a glass in the high bluegrass of the yard he’d need to mow. He brooded as he remembered how as a boy in his teens he used to go outside in Newark and sit on a wicker settee between his father and mother, holding their hands, watching the poetry of a sunset. And now no one in the East Orange house seemed inclined to sit with
him in the twilight that his mother called “the gloaming,” and he felt hurt and wronged and liable to do anything.

Writing of that Saturday evening later, he stated he was
surging with remorse, self-condemnatory, lashing myself with feverish contempt one minute, then remembering Ruth’s tenderness, her loveliness, the next. My thoughts would go back and back again to her. Then regrets and that inner turmoil of a conscience that was burning hot with shame.

Judd maniacally used his reel mower on the lawn at sunrise, washed his purple Hupmobile with its sporty black roof and black fenders, then took a bath and drove the family to Trinity Presbyterian Church in South Orange. Jane went to Sunday school, Isabel and her mother found their usual pew, and Judd took his familiar place in the choir to sing “When Morning Gilds the Skies,” “O Gladsome Light,” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” And, as if word was out about him, he heard a sermon from Reverend Victor Likens on a passage from the Gospel of Mark: “And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth him. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”

Scorching himself for his hypocrisy, Judd made a secret oath that he would never have sexual congress with Mrs. Snyder again, and right after that he visited his mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, in West Orange, alone.

She was a frail, dignified, courtly woman whom he adored almost to the edge of weirdness. Welcoming him as if he were long lost, she hugged him close and rocked with him, saying, “Oh, my Bud! My darling boy!” She then gave him a grilled cheese
sandwich and Coca-Cola and hovered over him as she gladly watched him eat. She said Bud looked exhausted. She wondered if dresses could get any shorter. She inquired of Bud if Mrs. Kallenbach was giving him anything for her share of the room and board. She said, “Don’t let her walk all over you.” Bud asked if she had any jobs that needed doing, but she only ordered him sternly to get his family and go on a nice vacation somewhere.

Judd did, as always, as he was told and called Alfred Benjamin at his home, then left Mrs. K to her needlework and motored across Long Island with Isabel and Jane to an ocean-view inn in Sagaponack for Jane’s ninth birthday and a week’s vacation, the three of them swimming in the Atlantic surf and hollering from the cold, or horseback riding in jodhpurs and English saddles on the white sand roads linking villages there. Alone he went to the public golf course with his hickory-shafted clubs, his argyle sweaters and plus fours, his flailing, uninstructed swing. And at night there was fine food and dancing and games of bridge.

Because Isabel and Jane hated having the vacation end, but Judd was required in the office, he booked them for another week; left the Hupmobile Eight with his wife, who’d just learned to drive; and took a jitney into the city on the third Monday in August.

And he was walking into Rigg’s Restaurant on 33rd Street for ham and eggs when he ran into Harry Folsom as he was leaving. The hosiery man tarried long enough to wedge around in his mouth with a toothpick as he said he wasn’t a kid anymore and he was through with wild parties, through with the hangovers from bathtub gin, and for sure he was through with fast women. “They can’t keep secrets, you know.”

Judd tried to act shocked. And because Harry’s chocolaty eyes had the solemn, baleful look of a hound, Judd asked, “Are you in the doghouse?”

“Not in, under. Whatever’s on the doghouse floor, that’s my roof.”

“Because of?”

Harry lit a Raleigh cigarette. “Dames. What else? I have been ordered by the Mrs. not to talk about it.”

Hoping to seem merely conversational, Judd asked, “Say, have you heard from Mrs. Snyder recently?”

Harry tweezed a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “Well, she’s not getting along with the old wet blanket at home, is all I hear. I know Albert, too, through bowling. Have you met him?”

“No.”

“Solid guy, fine artist, but sort of a stick-in-the-mud. She’s not the right girl for a killjoy like him. Anyways, I’m not going to take either one’s side. But I guess there’s another friend gone.”

“Which friend?” Judd asked.

“Al, of course,” Harry said, as if Judd were dense. “You don’t abandon a doll like that.”

Abandonment,
Judd thought.
That’s what it was.
“I have a hard time fathoming how anyone could treat such a lovely woman so badly.”

Harry’s stare was long and interrogatory, and then he got out a postcard invitation from his vest pocket and handed it to Judd. “Are you aware of this ‘Bon Voyage’ party? Hosted bar and everything. Some big fashion-month shebang.” And he added dismissively, “You’re supposed to look
nautical.”

“Are you going?”

“Nah. I’m through with shebangs, too.” And then he winked. “But
you
should definitely go.”

Waiting for him in his Benjamin & Johnes office were retailer inquiries, order forms, an announcement from the Club of Corset
Salesmen of the Empire State, a notice of an increase in dues from his Elks lodge, and three neatly typed letters lacking a sender’s name or return address. The first, dated Tuesday of last week, read:

Dear Judd,

Hate to bother you on the job but I have no one in whom to confide, no one but you to whom I can unburdun myself and speak of my troubles, my husband’s neglec, our night after night of arguments, Albert’s cruellty toward our baby. Won’t you see me for lunch sometime? We can just talk.

Judd slit open another that was postmarked on a Wednesday evening:

Dear Judd,

I have been investigating an Ursuline convent for Lora to get her out of this din of inequity Albert has created. She could learn and be safe and far away from a father who has no regards for her. But I cannot bare to part with her. She is all I have of love and happyness.

I feel certain I could get a job in business. Selling stocks and bonds maybe. I need financial advice, your smarts. Oh please won’t you call me? Orchard 8591. Each night I pray, “Dear God, give me back the past.” I would do so much so different. You have shown me all that is possible.

The final letter was postmarked on Saturday:

Dear Darling Mr. Gray,

You must think I’m some loon since you haven’t answered. Please accep my apologies for the desparate tone of my letters. They would certainly scare me if I were a man! I have not
wanted to call your office for fear people there will talk, and that would be distructive. I have no other expectations beyond speaking to you since I value your intelligence and mastery of situations. Won’t you call when Al is gone? Eight in the morning to 6 at night. Orchard 8591. We can meet at Henry’s if you’d like to.

Judd did nothing.

Earlier, in 1924, Albert Snyder had felt certain his wife was having an extramarital affair. C. F. Chapman, the publisher of
Motor Boating
magazine, recommended Albert initiate actions for a divorce and forced him to leave their offices on West 40th Street to have a conversation with Judge Nathan Lieberman, a New York state assemblyman and a high-paid Broadway attorney. The judge reviewed New York’s divorce laws with Albert, urged him to hire a private detective to find proof of Ruth’s infidelity, and then introduced him to an ex-cop named Jacob Sanacory. She was investigated for a week, and at its conclusion Sanacory wrote Judge Lieberman, “We have incontestable evidence on this man’s wife.” And that same afternoon Sanacory telephoned Albert to say, “She’s in your house with a guy right now.”

Albert stood in the front yard with the gumshoe and vaguely heard a Brooklyn voice and Ruth’s giggling in Lorraine’s bedroom, but though Sanacory got his camera out and egged Mr. Snyder to hurry inside, saying they needed a photograph of the lovers in flagrante delicto, Albert hesitated. “And then what?” he said. “End it? She’s an adequate mother and domestic. With Root I can at least be sure that the house and the girl are being taken care of.”

Sanacory shook his head as he went off, and Albert sat on the front porch for a full hour, inventing ever-bloodier ways to destroy
the diddler’s face. And then he did not even do that. “I could have done a lot,” he told C. F. Chapman, “but I would have had to be in love.”

Soon after that the Snyders established an unspoken accommodation: Albert would ignore Ruth’s nights out or counterfeit an acceptance of the lies she told, and she would affect a nonchalance about him.

And so it was that in August 1925, both of them could be going out on the town, but alone. Thursday was Albert’s night for duck-pin bowling in his Flatbush summer league, so he came home from work earlier to get his six-inch ball and high-top bowling shoes. But he also took a bath and changed his shirt and necktie.

Ruth carried in a stein of his Pilsener as he hunched toward the dresser mirror and tied a Windsor knot. She got his royal blue Jacquard from the closet tie rack and said, “She’ll like you better in this one.”

Albert frowned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But he tugged the plaid necktie off and took the Jacquard from his wife. “So what are your plans?”

She told him Josephine was staying home and could watch the baby, so she was going out with Ethel. “She wants to see that new Rudolph Valentino movie.
The Eagle?
”

Albert swallowed some beer and said, “I have no idea why you females swoon over that foolish, effeminate
Italian
.”

“Could it be we find manliness overrated?”

“Well, it’s like they say. Women have the last word in any argument. Anything the man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.” Admiring himself and tying a Windsor knot in the Jacquard, he said, “I’ll be late.”

And she said, “Me too.”

Judd rented a skipper’s hat from a costume shop and avoided Mrs. K at home as he collected his blue cashmere blazer and white flannel slacks, then telephoned Isabel and Jane at the inn as he tanked up with a full glass of Scotch and got back to the city for the Bon Voyage party on a sultry August night. It was being held on a three-masted schooner moored on the East River. Judd held up his postcard invitation and was whistled aboard the schooner by a security guard who was pretending to be a naval petty officer.