A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (6 page)

Ruth and Lora stayed to themselves, hunting seashells and clams on the shore, reading children’s books together in the Adirondack chair under the wide shade of the hemlock tree, finding a beach far away from the crowds where they could swim in their matching Jantzen tank suits and mobcaps until the knitted black wool became too heavy for them to freely stroke and they would fall back on sand as warm as toast and giggle over nonsense rhymes as the hot sun dried them.

Each evening when Albert got back to the cottage, all three of them would dine outside in the cool air, barbecuing fresh corn on the cob and filets of the fish he’d caught, and Ruth would watch him laughing with Lora in his white Top-Siders and white flannel trousers, and he would look every inch a yachtsman and seem so manly, dashing, and fun to be with that Ruth felt she could fall in love with him all over again.

On July 24th, 1925, she got a sitter for Lora and the couple
celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary at a nightclub on North Ferry Road. Ruth gave him Shutz prism binoculars; Albert gave her a French, floral-beaded, silk evening bag with a matching compact. She kissed him and told him he had excellent taste; he agreed. Albert was in his white dinner jacket, drinking martinis in the 1920s formula of half gin and half Martini & Rossi vermouth, and as soon as he finished one he’d shield his bottles from fellow diners and the waiters as he mixed another. Because he was deaf in his right ear, she sat to his left, but still he sometimes seemed not to hear her. She noticed again that his tawny hair was receding from his temples, that his jacket was getting tight on him, that he wasn’t fat but had the broad shoulders and fullback torso of a man who ought to have been half a foot taller. The orchestra was playing songs the Paul Whiteman Orchestra popularized: “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “Linger a While.” She wanted to dance; Albert didn’t. The sun that had tanned him had also tired him. She filled his silence by mentioning a friend she’d just made on Shelter Island and how her husband, a Wall Street stockbroker, would be racing in the regatta with a ketch just like theirs.

Albert glanced up. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it, Ruth?” And in the overly calm, patronizing tone he used for all his instructions, he said, “A ketch cannot be like a yawl because they are
dissimilar.
A ketch is a sailboat with the same mainmast, yes, you are so very right to notice this, but it is rigged aft with its mizzenmast stepped forward of the rudderpost. A
yawl’s
mizzenmast is stepped abaft the sternpost.”

“And blah, blah, blah,” she said.

Albert lifted up his martini. “But how can I expect you to know these things when you take so little interest in my hobbies?”

“Oh, are they hobbies? I thought they were just chances for you to yell at me.”

Albert sipped the martini, slanting a little off balance even
though he was sitting, so that his free hand had to hastily seek the chair cushion. “You and your disappointing education,” he said. “You give me so many opportunities for—what is it?—
keen
and
pitched
correction.”

“You know everybody is ignorant, it’s just the subjects that are different.”

Albert sneered. “With you there are not subjects, there are
chasms.”

She felt her mouth tremble. She looked away as her vision blurred.

“Are those tears?” he asked. “Aren’t you used to my teasing by now?”

She felt his hard, callused hand fall onto hers and she turned. “You hurt my feelings, Albert.”

“Oh posh. You’re too sensitive.”

She swiveled away from him and watched the orchestra’s handsome crooner hold on to the microphone and face her with a smile as he sang “What’ll I Do.”

August was the month when women retailers from cities like Utica, Ithaca, and Binghamton visited Manhattan for a first look at the fall fashions and to fill out order sheets, a job that Judd Gray generally put off until the morning after he’d affably dined with them and escorted them to hit movies like Charlie Chaplin’s
The Gold Rush
or revues like
The Garrick Gaieties
and then on to nightclubs like the Monte Carlo and Frivolity Club in Manhattan. Benjamin & Johnes even got him a room in the tony Waldorf-Astoria, just a block away on Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street, so he would have the freedom of entertaining without having to deal with railway schedules and his wife’s worries about his drinking.

On Saturday, August 8th, Judd would be treating a gang
of Pennsylvania buyers to a fashion show and gala called Très Parisien, featuring the clothing designs of Jean Patou and Coco Chanel, but on that Friday night he was just going to have room service and finish reading P. C. Wren’s
Beau Geste.
But there was a note for him at the Waldorf’s front desk:

I’m footing the bill for some friends at Zari’s. Will you join us? Informal, of course. Harry Folsom

Despite his weariness, Judd changed into a fresh shirt and gray flannel suit and took the Waldorf’s elevator down.
Adventuring,
he thought.

Zari’s restaurant was filled when he got there at eight. Electric fans whirred in slow semiarcs as he handed his fedora to the hat-check girl. All the wooden pillars and floor and furniture in Zari’s were cherry. At the far end was a stage with a twelve-instrument orchestra playing jazz above wide round dining tables that held parties of eight and a gleaming dance floor that was gradually gaining post-dinner couples trying out the fox-trot. Rectangular tables with white linens, rose electric candles, and chairs jacketed in red chintz were under overhanging mezzanine galleries on three sides of the great room, each gallery with more round dining tables and railings hung with cascades of ivy. And it was up there that Judd saw a grinning Harry Folsom wildly swinging his right arm to get his attention and probably yelling his name out over the music.

Judd took the circular staircase up and was introduced to Harry’s dinner party of two fat older men who seemed to be Rochester retailers in silks and hosiery; their female companions, whose day jobs were in Harry’s Madison Avenue shop; Harry’s homely wife, who glared at Judd as if he’d done something wrong; and Mrs. Albert E. Snyder in white pearls and an Alice-blue frock, prettily sitting with her elbows on the white linen and her fingers interlaced under her chin. She was still tan from her Shelter Island vacation and scented with Le Lilas perfume.

As Judd was shaking hands with the diners, Harry said, “We’ve already eaten, but I’ll get you a menu. We’re drinking screwdrivers.” He whistled to a waiter and ordered for his friend a menu and a highball glass of orange juice and cracked ice.

The orchestra began playing “It Had to Be You,” and one of the girls said, “Oh, I love this song! Can’t we dance, please, Harry?”

“Excellent idea,” Harry’s wife said, getting up just as Judd was sitting. And after Harry handed on his flask, the whole dinner party, except for Mrs. Snyder, hurried downstairs.

“I seem to have occasioned a stampede,” Judd said.

“Well, I hate to eat and run, myself.”

Lacking a rejoinder, Judd dully asked, “How are you?”

She grinned. “I’m paralyzed with happiness.” And she indeed looked at him as if there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see.

“You’re a very pleasant surprise for me, too. Harry’s note didn’t mention you.”

“Well, he’s not a detail kind of guy.”

“Your mother. She liked the Grecian-Treco corset?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We don’t chat about our underthings like we should. But thank you for the gift.”

“Anytime,” he said, and found he meant it.

A highball glass half-filled with orange juice was delivered and Judd stirred in vodka from Harry’s hammered silver flask as he ordered a Shrimp Louie salad for his dinner.

Ruth’s golden hair was equal to the fiery chandelier hanging near them, and her stunning, ice-blue eyes were checkered with its light. He felt he would have been content to just fill the night gazing at her, but in the practiced way of a lady’s escort, he peppered her with questions about her upbringing.

She said she was born in a four-room apartment on Morning-side Avenue and 125th Street in New York City. Her father, Harry
Sorenson, adopted the last name Brown when he emigrated from a fishing village in Norway. Josephine met him on Coney Island. Harry was a sailor then but became a carpenter who was often out of work because of a host of illnesses and epilepsy, so Josephine supported them as a practical nurse. Really a part-time housekeeper and sickroom attendant. Ruth graduated from Public School 11 at age thirteen and soon was hired by the New York Telephone Company as a relief operator. She was too young for the job but the guy in charge became enchanted by her voice. She went to night school at the Berg Business Institute on 149th Street. She was certified as a stenographer and could type sixty-five words a minute, some of them not misspelled. “You can’t really be interested in all this.”

“But I am,” Judd said. “It’s fascinating.” A line from Laurence Sterne came to him:
Courtship consists in a number of quiet attentions, not so pointed as to alarm, nor so vague as not to be understood.
His highball glass was again half-filled with orange juice by the waiter and Judd completed it with vodka. “Say, I’m having a capital time,” he said.

“Me too. You’re a good listener.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Nah. Intoxicants don’t agree with me. But I love seeing everyone else having a good time.”

Slouching in his dining chair, he got his cigarettes out of an interior coat pocket and clumsily lit one.

She cocked her head like a child as she asked, “What kind?”

He exhaled gray smoke and faced the front of the package for her. “Sweet Caporals. I got hooked on them at fourteen when each pack carried a baseball trading card.”

“And weren’t there ‘Pretty Lady’ cards before that?”

Sheepishly grinning, he said, “Well, yes. I guess I got hooked on the
cards
at six.”

“And thus was a job in lingerie begun.”

Seeming embarrassed, he said, “So tell me how you met your husband.”

She said she was a secretary at the Tiffany Commercial Art Studio and was instructed to contact an art editor at
Cosmopolitan
but mistakenly placed the call to the art editor at
Motor Boating
in the same building. Albert was the lout who yelled that she’d interrupted him and she must be very stupid and just kept screaming insults until she hung up. But then she was called back and he was a changed man, apologetic and funny and suave, with a faint German accent. “Are you as pretty as your voice?” he’d asked. And he invited her to the magazine’s offices on West 40th Street. She was hired that afternoon as a stenographer, proofreader, and copyist in the secretarial pool shared by
Motor Boating, Cosmopolitan,
and
The American Weekly.
It was July 1914. She was nineteen years old. Soon Germany was involved in the Great War, and Albert changed the spelling of his last name from Schneider to Snyder, “as if that would fool anyone.” She was warned that he was a womanizer. But she dated him anyway, for he was cultured and educated, a manly connoisseur with a degree in art and graphic design from the famous Pratt Institute. And if he was hot-tempered and thirteen years older than she, and his favorite things to do, like fishing and sailing and going to the symphony, bored her to distraction, he also seemed the father she’d never had: a good provider who was vital and sensitive and very involved in her life. On Ruth’s twentieth birthday, Albert gifted her with a box of chocolates and she discovered inside a little jewelry box and a one-carat diamond solitaire fixed on a golden ring.

Ruth dangled her left hand in front of Judd’s intent and myopic stare, his owlish round glasses lifted up to his forehead so he could inspect the jewel.

“Lovely,” he said.

“I had lots of misgivings, but I said finally yes to getting
hitched. Mostly because I wouldn’t have given up this goddamned ring for anything once I had it on my hand.”

His Shrimp Louie had arrived, and he’d finished it as she talked. And now he poured the final inch of Harry’s vodka as a waiter took the dishes and cutlery away. She glanced over Judd Gray’s shoulder to find Harry Folsom there, loosening his tie, his hair a wreck and his face flushed with sweat. “Are you kids going to join us on the floor or are you just going to make goo-goo eyes all night?”

“Are you up for it?” she asked Judd.

Harry intervened. “Up for it? The guy’s … What’s that fancy word, Judd?”

“Terpsichorean?”

“That’s him.”

Ruth was lost. Judd got up, the vodka tipping him off balance, and took her golden-ringed hand as she rose. He slurred, “Terpsichore is the goddess of dancing and choral song.”

She smiled. “How flattering for you to be likened to a goddess!”

His hand friended her back in a foretaste of waltzing. “Harry means well,” he said. “We all do.”

She loved dancing and Judd could do them all: the fox-trot, tango, Castle Walk, even the Charleston and American rumba, which he taught her there on Zari’s floor. Held by him, she felt the knotted muscles of his back, the jump and bunch of his upper arms, the shift of his deft thighs against hers. She liked it that she was taller than he. She could smell his hair and hair tonic and just a hint of his cigarettes. She grazed her nose on his neck. She asked, “Is that aftershave?”

“Eau de Cologne,” he said. “Jean Marie Farina’s fragrance. Worn by royalty throughout Europe.”

“Albert wouldn’t dream of smelling like anything but hand soap.”

“Well, it comes with the territory. Selling women’s undergarments.”

“And being a clotheshorse?”

Judd fell back so she could see his face and the hurt he was faking. “But I’m not that, I’m just ‘tailorish.’”

“Anything ‘-ish’ isn’t good.”

Corny as a yokel, he said, “And yet you rav-ish me.”

“I was thinking ‘fiendish.’ And ‘piggish.’ Like my husband.”