A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“And why did the burglar take a bath?”

“I have it,” Ruth said. “To make a clean getaway?”

Judd smiled as she squeezed his hand. “Your Momsie’s very clever, isn’t she?”

FOUR

LOVESICK

She confessed to Judd that she saw other men. But he was on the road so often and so long, and she’d get stir-crazy at home with the Old Crab hanging around and grousing, and handsome saps were always noticing her, and she just liked to have a good time.

She’d gotten into a navy blue silk kimono after their afternoon sex, and Judd was sitting up in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel bed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. With more wonder than jealousy, Judd let the newspaper fall and asked, “Who?”

“Oh, lots of fellas.” She grinned. “I’ve been on more laps than a dinner napkin.” Seeing his vexation, she said, “Don’t worry, Loverboy.” And she smiled as she used his language. “There’s no one besides you that I have congress with.”

She told him she and Kitty Kaufman still lunched with Harry Folsom at Henry’s when Judd was on the road. And some of Harry’s friends would insist the gals join them at the “21” Club or Club de Vingt. Her cousin’s ex was a patrolman in the 23rd Precinct in the Bronx and she met lots of policemen through him. She’d even cruised all the way to West Point in the roadster convertible of a portly detective. She couldn’t remember his name—Peter something—but he was a hoot. She flirted with the fountain boys at Spindler’s Drugstore and the fresh new pharmacist there flushed with desire whenever she noticed him. And she was strolling by Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital one sultry afternoon and ended up chatting through the jail bars outdoors with a white-uniformed guard. She’d told him how fascinated she was by crazy people, and he’d gazed back at this girl on a bench whose hands waved in front of her face as if she were food for flies, and he’d said yes, they were very honest about their feelings. And Ruth just had to let him kiss her. Johnny. Johnny would do anything for her. “Each of them is so hungry. It’s like they can’t get enough.”

“Well, they can’t help it, really. It’s biological. You’re incredibly beautiful.”

“But I feel so sorry for men. Wanting all the time.”

Judd found it strangely exciting and a source of vanity to imagine those many wolves and jackals lurking around his lover, fawning over her, desiring her, slavishly doing her bidding, as she preserved herself solely for him. But it was in January 1926 that he gradually began to recognize that she was controlling him. At first it was just that Ruth’s letters became irregular. There could be four waiting for him when he got to his Buffalo hotel, but there could be no communication at all during his stays in Rochester or Scranton, and he would find himself in a panic of fear and loss and heartache as he finally telephoned her in the morning when the husband he called “The Governor” was certain to be out of the house. She’d soothe him then, the soft velvet of her voice giving him assurances or scolding him for being such a silly pup—she’d simply been busy; in fact she’d written him that morning.

Ecstatic or at least serene whenever he was with Ruth, there were ever more snarling feelings of hopelessness and despondency when she was away and his thoughts could rage, his insecurities grow fangs. She’d gone two days without writing when he got a brutally expensive toll call from her in his Binghamton hotel room. She?

?d whispered, “Don’t go home tonight. Zari’s. Eight o’clock.” And hung up.

Racing through his downtown sales calls, he managed to telephone his wife to say he wouldn’t get home until Saturday, then caught an afternoon train into Grand Central Station and hauled his luggage and trunk of samples with him into Zari’s. The hat-check girl gave him an indignant glare, as though he were a country goober hawking Fuller brushes, and scraped the floor as she tugged his things out of sight.

Ruth waved to him from a rectangular table for four under the mezzanine gallery, and he was introduced to her cousin, Mrs. Ethel Anderson Pierson, and to a heavyset physician in his forties who would give only his first name: Sydney. His tuxedo and white spats hinted at wealth. A fat finger was indented where his wedding ring ought to have been. Ethel was a zesty, fun-loving, pretty housewife of twenty-seven. She had greenish eyes and flaming red hair, but she had a famished look that was the first sign of the still undiagnosed tuberculosis that would kill her in September 1927.

“We aren’t eating,” Ruth said. “We have to go.”

Dr. Syd filled his own highball glass of ginger ale and ice with bourbon from his flask and slid the hooch across to Judd as Ethel instructed him on their scheme for the night. She said she was in love with Syd and was separated from her husband, Eddie. She had no grounds for divorce yet because New York courts required proof of either extreme physical brutality or sexual infidelity. Eddie was not a smack-a-woman kind of guy, but Ethel guessed he was like a lot of bimbos on the force, extracting sex from whores instead of cuffing them, only she’d never caught him at it. She wanted to nail Eddie for alimony, so she needed a camera shot of her ex as he was entangled with some doll.

Dr. Syd translated, “In the very act of committing the offense.”

“And that’s where you come in,” Ruth said.

Ethel reached under her chair and hauled up a rectangular leather holster containing an Autographic Kodak camera that she handed across to Judd. “We’ll get in Syd’s car, you’ll hire a prostitute—”

“I beg your pardon?”

Syd inserted, “I can’t risk losing my medical license.”

“But what about my reputation?”

Ethel screamed, “You’re a corset salesman!”

Ruth laid a hand of solace atop his. “We get some hotsy-totsy girl and take her to Eddie’s apartment. She’ll knock on his door and say she got stood up or something and it’s freezing outside.”

Judd felt offended but oddly excited. “Have you any idea how insane this is?” And yet he stayed there with Syd’s bourbon.

Ethel said, “Eddie will let her in, maybe give her a highball, and we’ll have her say how grateful she is, how can she ever repay him? Eddie’s easily tempted. And when things get hot and heavy, you’ll burst in and snap a picture.”

“Et voilà,” Syd said.

“Easy as pie,” Ethel said.