A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

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.

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 cot

tage, 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.”