A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

“Well, I’m scared he’ll do something rash.”

Kitty checked the clock and looked underneath the bathing cap. “We’ve got to rinse off the bleach and shampoo you,” she said. “Bleach too long and you’ll burn off your hair.”

Ruth stooped over the kitchen sink again and Kitty noticed the excess mixture in the saucepan as she ran water from the tap. “Darn it,” she said. “I made too much again.”

Ruth said to the hairdresser, “Just bottle it up and I’ll serve it to my husband.”

Kitty laughed.

The Syracuse Post-Standard predicted the Saturday temperature could get as high as sixty degrees, so Judd left his herringbone overcoat and gray buckskin gloves behind in the

hotel room as he strolled the few blocks to Haddon’s insurance office in the Guerney Building, his face finding the sun and holding itself in that heat. A horse team and hay wagon stood between an old Ford Model T and a Hudson Essex parked at a slant on the street.

In the first-floor offices of Hills and Company, “Real Estate & Insurance,” Haddon Jones was selling a fire insurance policy to a skeptical farmer and his wife, his slick black hair parted in the middle, his jaunty mustache glistening with beeswax, his hands widening over the array of brochures on his oaken desk in a gesture that seemed to say the universe had been laid out beneath their frowns. And then he noticed his friend and excused himself to shake Judd’s hand.

Haddon seemed even taller, reedier, and more looming than he’d been at William Barringer High School when the unmatched friends were nicknamed, after the newly popular comic strip, Mutt and Jeff. “Have a seat out here,” he said. “I have a feeling this could be a while. But good to see you, Bud.”

“You too.”

Judd lingered for a half hour more in the office parlor, paging through a Saturday Evening Post, his gray fedora on his knee. His mind was an aviary, his thoughts flitting and screaming. He could not recall one item he’d read. He heard Haddon’s voice coaxing a choice that the farmer seemed unwilling to make, and Judd finally stood up.

“Lunch?” he called to the next room.

Haddon nodded.

It was ten thirty.

Judd strolled by shops and in a five-and-dime purchased a sixty-cent navy blue bandanna that he felt sure was like the one Tom Mix had worn in Riders of the Purple Sage. The shopgirl at the cash register failed to lift her gaze to him as he mentioned that impression and offered his dollar bill. She said she hadn’t seen that movie as she gave him his change.

Walking into an alley, he finished his flask and hunted a gin mill where he could refill it.

The Snyder house’s three females left through the front door just after eleven and found Albert outside in a cardigan sweater, vigorously raking life into a tan yard flattened by winter. Some Jewish children in Halloween costumes who’d hesitated over interrupting the father in his angry work scurried forward on the sidewalk when they saw the pretty mother and child and they recited in chorus: “Today is Purim! There can’t be any doubt! Give us a penny and throw us out!”

“Aren’t you cute,” Ruth said, and found a penny in her purse for each.

Albert watched the transaction with a mixture of inquisitiveness and Scrooge-like disdain. Curdling clouds were on the eastern horizon and the evening would be cold and wet, but there were still zephyrs that seemed almost sultry and the hints of spring lightened his mood. When the children had raced away, he asked, “Where to now, you three?”

Mrs. Josephine Brown said, “Oh, that nursing job for Mr. Code in Kew Gardens.”

“All night then?”

“Noon to noon.”

Albert frowned at his wife with confusion. “Lora will be joining us?”

Ruth sighed. “We discussed it last week. Remember?”

Albert didn’t. “And now I suppose you’re going shopping?”

“The baby needs Easter clothes.”

“Clothes, clothes, clothes!” he said, but tilted the rake against the house. “In the car, the all of you. I’ll give you a lift.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Lorraine said.

Albert hatted her blonde head with his hand. “There’s a good girl.”

Josephine and Ruth got into the back seat and Lorraine into the front. Ruth stared at his sandy hair and hawkish profile and realized she hated his head, too, the fine wrinkles in his neck, the gray whiskers on his shaveless weekends, the steel in his eyes when he concentrated, the way he occupied so much space. After he stepped on the floor starter and shifted gears to reverse onto the street, Albert forced Lorraine to reach her hands out to the glove box and tiringly hold them there as a brace against potential accidents. Looking into the rearview mirror, Albert said, “I’m thinking of putting in a flower bed out front this April. Assorted colors of peonies.”