A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

Six drinks later and Judd was drunk enough to do it, strolling up to a chilly girl in a raccoon coat in what was called “the Circus” around 42nd Street. Weaving a little, he too loudly inquired, “Say there, are you a harlot?”

She gave him a You have got to be kidding me—harlot? look, but flashed open her raccoon coat to show she wore nothing underneath it. Judd escorted her to Syd’s Packard and the five of them headed across the East River to Eddie’s apartment in the Bronx.

But Eddie wasn’t there. Syd and Ethel and the girl waited in the heated Packard as Ruth and Judd hung out inside the building and were so publicly affectionate in the hallway that renters were able to identify them a full year later. And when Ethel went inside again she threatened to take a Kodak picture of Judd’s “hands on the prowl.” They were still all over each other when Ethel kidded her older cousin, “Have you heard the saying that a man’s kiss is his signature?”

Ruth unclenched and shifted her dress as she answered, “Mae West, right?”

“How’s Judd sign his name?”

She smiled at him. “Legibly.”

At ten Eddie still hadn’t shown and the harlot reminded them that her meter was still running, so Syd ferried them back to 42nd Street and paid the girl for her time. Judd found a tailor shop with a backroom speakeasy where they sold him a 1911 quart bottle of Old Overholt Straight Rye Whiskey, and he swallowed a third of it as Ethel snuggled into Syd in the front seat and Syd drove Ruth and Judd to the Waldorf-Astoria. Looking into the rearview mirror at Judd, the physician said, “Every man has his own code of sexual morality, his own instincts of right and wrong toward womanhood. I happened to meet Ethel at the right psychological moment and our souls and beings were thrown into a turmoil of love. Those passions demand reciprocation. And so, like you, we have lavished affections upon each other despite commitments elsewhere. There is no possible weighing of responsibility to others in such a thrall as ours, and no way for me to justify termination.”

Ruth joked, “Don’t he talk good?”

Judd leaned forward to tell Syd in a slurred way, “It’s not just lust or passion for me.”

“I haven’t made that accusation.”

But Judd would not be overruled. “Ruth, she’s my ideal of womanhood. She’s a goddess.”

After that he blacked out. Waking up fully dressed in a corner of the hotel room the next morning, he saw he’d vomited on his shirt and shoes. Ruth was in her silk kimono and sunshine filled the room. Room service had delivered coffee and cinnamon toast that morning. Holding his aching neck, he said, “I feel awful.”

She glanced fleetingly at him, then sourly added cream to her coffee.

He got out of his jacket and began unbuttoning his foul shirt. “Why did you let me stay like this?”

“We argued.”

“About?”

Ruth told him they’d discussed heading down to Elkton, Maryland, where lax marriage regulations meant they could have gotten hitched.

“And what did I say?”

“Well, actually you couldn’t get the words right, but I think you thought that would be bigamy.”

Judd was untying his shoes. “Even drunk I’m law-abiding,” he said.

“Oh yeah. To a fault.”

“Meaning?”

Ruth told him she’d confessed she wanted Albert out of her life, gone, buried, dead, and Judd had yelled that she was insane. Raged that she could go to jail for that. Asked if she had any idea what a homicide meant in the eyes of God.

Stripping off his stockings, Judd asked, “And what did you say?”

Ruth focused her stunning blue eyes on him and said, “I don’t believe in a heaven or hell and anything like that.”

“Well, that makes all this easy for you then.”

“And ‘all this’ makes you a hypocrite.”

“That’s true,” he said, and he went to the bathroom in his skivvies.

“Oh, let’s not fight,” she said.

But he was sulking. “I have to get to the office.”