A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

Judd took off his gray buckskin gloves to shake her hand and she said

formally, “I have heard May speak so much about you and your fine dancing.” She took his overcoat and hat to the foyer closet as generalities about his job and the January weather were exchanged. She frankly said, “You are not very tall, are you?”

“Oh, I can reach just about anything I need.”

She listened longer than necessary and asked, “Are you the reaching sort?”

Judd felt like a thief in their house. Was she calling him that? “Well, no,” he said. “Things just generally fall to me.”

She evaluated him for a moment, and then she privately confided, “May must be careful not to get the Mister jealous with you.”

Judd sought to change the subject so he asked how old she was when she first learned English.

“Sixteen.”

She still spoke in the metronomic cadence of Swedish, and with a certain daintiness to the t sound, but he said, “Well, you’re very easy to understand.”

“Tack,” she said regally. Thanks. She asked his own nationality and he told her English, that his forebears landed in Connecticut on the Mary and John in 1630. She took that in and said, “So your folk, they are aristocrats?”

“We’re just established, is all.”

She said he could call her “Granny,” just as Lora and Albert did.

Judd didn’t; he called her Josephine. She wore severe round spectacles and was his own mother’s age, sixty, though she would claim to be four years younger when the lot of them became famous. She went off and Judd plinked a child’s tune on the Aeolian, then lit a cigarette as he sat alone on a floral chintz armchair. Reading the jacket upside down, he noted a booklet on the coffee table entitled The Modern Home: How to Take Advantage of Mechanical Servants. A newly purchased Bible, Emily Post’s Etiquette, and The Outline of History by H. G. Wells were the odd family of books on a shelf. And Josephine seemed to have been reading a McCall’s magazine when he got there. Looking at the contents, he saw an article about the incompatibility of “the stay-at-home husband and the delicatessen wife,” and he was paging to it when Ruth called him to the kitchen.

It had the hospital-clean, impeccable look he associated with Scandinavia, with a polished linoleum floor, brilliant snow-white tile, and a new refrigerator and gas range in newly fashionable white enamel, with some pretty accents of Delft blue in the curtains and accessories. Judd said, “This must require no end of work to keep in such spotless condition.”

“Oh, it’s not work,” Ruth said. “We love to scrub and scour and make everything shine, don’t we, Mama?”

She agreed by quoting, “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” Josephine put the crab cakes in a skillet and said, “I’ll finish the cooking, Maisie. You let your friend see the house.”

Ruth took him down to the basement to proudly display rack after rack of widemouthed mason jars filled with the fruit preserves and garden vegetables she’d put up in August. She said, “You may not have noticed, but in this part of the tour we see what a good wife I am.”

But vying for Judd’s attention were Albert’s dress shirts and boxers, hanging on the clothesline like flags of ownership. And then to the left there was Albert’s workshop and its organized tools, his glass tank of fermenting wort, his poster of a naked Josephine Baker dancing in Paris’s Folies Bergère. Resisting her husband’s ghostly presence, Judd fitted himself behind Ruth and kissed her neck, and she grabbed his hands to her breasts and felt him hardening before she moaned, “We’d better not get started.”

She took his right hand and urged him upstairs and through the kitchen to the gleaming dining room, where she held up a glinting silver spoon. She vainly stated, “Chambly, from France.” She then gently touched a crystal wineglass and said, “Baccarat.”

“Lovely things,” Judd said.

“And that vase on the sideboard is a Lalique.”

Josephine heard and called from the kitchen, “But she’s thrifty, too! May sewed all the drapes and curtains her own self!”

Judd winked and called back, “I just knew she’d have to be good with her hands!”

Ruth smiled but swatted his forearm to hush him. She took him into the foyer and held up a photograph of a simpering, sweet-faced woman in the full covering of a white Victorian gown, her great length of black hair piled up on her head in a fashion from before the Great War. She was sitting beside a tweed-suited, bow-tied, ruminative man in his twenties with wavy, receding, sand-colored hair, his hands knitted as he reclined on his left forearm on a rough altar of flat stone, seemingly near the ocean.

“I presume that’s The Governor,” Judd said.

“And his first love, Jessie Guischard. A public-school teacher and, as he puts it, ‘the finest woman’ he’s ever met. Which means finer than me. She died of pneumonia in nineteen-twelve, just before he could marry her. The dead are difficult rivals.” Ruth put the photograph back. “Al’s got a scrapbook filled with his captioned pictures of her: ‘Jessie relaxing in the Catskills,’ ‘Jessie blowing a kiss in the Adirondacks.’ Albert used to own a motor yacht with the name ‘Jessie’ painted on its transom. After we married, I forced him to rename it ‘Ruth’ and he did, but then he lost interest and sold it. Each day when he gets into his suit jacket, his finishing touch is a stickpin with the initials ‘J.G.’ so he can hold her next to his heart.”

“The Governor’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

“You ain’t kiddin’.” Ruth looked toward the Aeolian player piano and chintz furniture, a sunroom beyond them. She found nothing to say but, “Those are his paintings on the walls.” And she crossed her ice-blue eyes in a funny estimation of the artistry. She whistled sharply once and a yellow canary instantly sailed from its golden cage in the sunroom and roosted on her right shoulder, where it furtively sidled over to nuzzle its beak below her ear.

“You trained it to do that?”

She smiled. “I have a way with animals.” She kissed the air and the canary tapped its beak against her pursed lips. “This is Pip,” she said. “Pip’s the canary in Little Women. Have you read it?”