A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

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.

Walking up the gangplank, Judd encountered perhaps a hundred nautically costumed guests in the fashion business gabbling and laughing underneath the hanging ship’s lanterns and taking weenies, canapés, and Taittinger champagne from waiters attired like seamen. Judd was greeted by a buyer for Bloomingdale’s and hugged by a buyer at Macy’s, but there were few others he knew. The haute couture models—who were then known as mannequins—strutted around the schooner to parade the finest of the fall designs, but no lingerie was on display and he did little more than feel the fabric and inquire if one girl was wearing a Bien Jolie. She was not.

A gaudy flag of sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres had been laid out and he filched a few. And then he saw Ruth there, far off near the prow. Alone and dismally staring at him, but glamorous in a filmy, lyrical white evening gown encrusted with fiery little beads that were like dewdrops. She saw he’d seen her and she became demure, glancing away.

Judd noticed a few men watching her, getting up the courage to approach, and he stole two tulip glasses of champagne from a passing tray and affably strolled over.

“Hello, Ruth. You look exquisite.”

She smiled. “Really? I’m feeling self-conscious in this fashion crowd. I have no idea what the fall styles are.”

“Hemlines up; higher waistlines; straight silhouettes.” He held out a champagne glass but she shook her head, so he drank it down and handed it on to a waiter. “How’d you get in?”

“I still have friends at Cosmopolitan.” She squinted beyond him. “I was expecting Harry—he invited me, too.”

“I guess I’m his stand-in.”

“Well, you’re quite an improvement.” She shyly glanced down. “You got my ravings?”

“Oh, they weren’t that. I couldn’t reply because I was on vacation in Sagaponack that week. And then when I got back I was swamped with work.”

She faced him solemnly as she said, “And you were feeling guilty. You worried about your hoity-toity reputation, and you wondered if you’d lose Jane if your wife found out about us.”

Judd laughed in a high-strung way, but she seemed to find nothing funny. She looked him flush in the eye. Ruth’s were intent and glistening and electric, and he felt cowed by them. “So,” he said. “You can read minds.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

Judd instantly felt foolish for his skipper’s cap and finished his second glass of champagne. And then he leaned on the starboard railing and gazed out at the scraps of moonlight writhing on the night of the river. “I haven’t been able to rid myself of you, Ruth. All I have to do is shut my eyes and your gorgeous face and figure are there. I find myself just wanting to say your name aloud. There was a time when my office phone rang and I imagined how glad I would be to hear your lovely voice in the earpiece.”

Just as Jane would often imitate his stance and manner, Ruth crossed her forearms on the railing, and she leaned slightly into him, giving him some of her weight in a delicacy of acknowledgment. His hand slid around a waist far more taut than his wife’s.

Judd continued, “I felt ashamed of myself for our fornication and my disloyalty to Isabel, and I was too much a coward to call you or agree to see you because I find you so irresistible I couldn’t govern my emotions or good behavior. But now I feel ashamed of my disloyalty to you, to the joy you give me.” He twisted his head to her. “I’m crazy about you, Ruth.”

“I have a yen for you, too,” she said. But she retreated from the railing and hurried aft so hastily in her high heels that he was forced to scurry like a terrier to catch up. “Don’t talk,” she warned, and he honored that caution as they strolled the deck.

Judd looked out at a ferry slowly churning up the East River toward the Sound, the swift traffic and glittering lights of the Queensboro Bridge, the flicker and iridescence of the city skyline overlooking all the racy adventures of a sultry August night. She seemed not to notice the tribute of masculine stares as she walked past. There were glints of moonlight on her tears.

She finally recited sentences that seemed lifted from Romance or True Story magazine. “I have stayed up late just recalling how I fell in love with you at Zari’s. With your sweetness, your sympathy, your interest in me. My life has become intolerable, Judd. All the happiness that I have lacked for years is now completely lost. Albert calls upon my body only for his own needs. But I indulge him because then I can fantasize that it’s you, my Loverboy.” She was crying but she was trying to smile as she turned to him. “Are you aware I’m yours? Really, do whatever you want with me. I’ll run away with you. Anything.”

There was some hooting festivity near the mizzenmast as five half-naked showgirls from Earl Carroll’s Vanities were wickedly introduced by the acidic celebrity Peggy Hopkins Joyce, who was then thirty-two and on her fourth wealthy husband. Joyce was saying in an aside, “You know, I sometimes lie awake in the afternoon—because we do not generally rise before two—and I gaze at Gustave in the other bed and My God, I think, whatever made me marry that?”

There were gales of laughter, but Ruth just said, “She’s hitting too close to home.”