A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  She telephoned Judd in his office and confessed that homicide attempt as if it were funny. But he stiffly asked in his snooty way, “Are you aware they electrocute people for murder in New York?”

  “Not if they don’t get caught.” And before he could say anything more, she shifted the conversation by inviting him to the house for a Wednesday luncheon. She’d be alone. She asked him to bring along twenty or so of the little one-shot bottles of various liquors that Benjamin & Johnes gave as treats to their lingerie buyers. She would be having family for Thanksgiving.

  And so Judd walked over from the Jamaica Avenue bus stop in Queens, his filled briefcase clinking with liquors, and went up to the kitchen stoop, where he whistled the waltz tune to “Always.”

  The kitchen door opened and Ruth happily greeted him by yanking wide her muskrat overcoat. She was naked underneath. Like the harlot he’d hired on 42nd Street. Judd worriedly glanced behind him, but she said, “Oh, don’t be such a scaredy-cat.”

  She kissed him in the kitchen but removed his avid hands, then took his fedora and coat. Hanging them up in the foyer closet, she indicated the joint to the gas piping that she’d wrenched apart.

  Judd found himself laughing at the outrageousness. “What a dolt!”

  “Who?”

  “The Governor. Could he really be that clueless?”

  “Oh, he was so schnockered that morning he didn’t know what he did.” She hung up her fur overcoat and presented her gorgeous body to him, then took him up to Lorraine’s room.

  Judd could later recall no precise time when he told Ruth he would help kill her husband. And if only for that reason he felt she’d hypnotized him. But he could recall mentioning sedatives that Wednesday afternoon with his feet hanging off Lora’s too-short bed, the hot breath of the furnace on their love-flushed skin, and Ruth cuddling into his chest, her right hand gently arranging his sleeping penis, then fondly holding his scrotum as he talked. “You could try to get a barbital,” he said. “The only brand name I’m familiar with is Veronal. Highly addictive and calms a person by quieting the respiratory system. Chloral hydrate works on the central nervous system. You could expect deep sleep in a half an hour. Whiskey exaggerates its effect. Chloral hydrate and whiskey is called a ‘Mickey Finn.’ I guess Mickey was a Chicago bartender who used the concoction to rob his customers.”

  “Nice lesson. What else?”

  His high school hankering to be a doctor was excited. “Well, there’s a variety of salts available from a pharmacist. Sodium bromide, potassium, ammonium—”

  “Who’d need them?”

  “Well, I believe bromides are used as anticonvulsants for those with epilepsy.”

  “My father was epileptic. I could be, too.”

  “But you’d need a doctor’s say-so. That’s the hitch with any sedative.”

  She rolled onto him, her round breasts saucering at his waist. She folded her hands on his chest and rested her chin on them as she gazed up at him with dazzling, magnetic eyes. “Anything you don’t need a prescription for?”

  “Well, chloroform. It’s an anesthetic.”

  “Which means?”

  “‘Without feeling.’ ‘Senseless.’ You can render a man unconscious with it. Even kill him with too much.”

  “And it’s available?”

  “Strangely, yes.”

  She flicked his left nipple with her tongue and grinned. “Would you get some for me?”

  Judd heard himself saying he would. And when he was in his office after Thanksgiving, he urgently telephoned Ruth to say he definitely would not.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” she said, as if he’d simply refused a second helping of succotash. And she patiently moved on to a wholesome conversation about housecleaning, making it seem his ethical dilemma was insignificant.

  She knows me so well, Judd thought.

  At first he pretended that his plotting was just an entertainment on sleepless nights. Ignoring the fact that murder was their intention, Judd concentrated on getting to the house and getting away, on establishing an alibi, not accomplishing the act. The act was his term for it, just as it was for intercourse. And his reveries about it were just as erotic.

  Everything seemed to feed into their plans. She and Judd went to the movies and saw Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo, in which John Gilbert is an Army officer and illicit lover who kills Garbo’s husband in a duel over the vamp. Onstage, they saw Alan Dinehart and Claiborne Foster in Sinner, Judd’s view of himself, and just before the show was shut down for being lewd and obscene, they saw Mae West in Sex, the hottest farce on Broadway. Theodore Dreiser’s controversial novel An American Tragedy was adapted for the stage and Judd took Ruth to a hit performance at the Longacre on West 40th Street. Afterward, in the Ritz, they discussed Clyde’s murder of Roberta, the pregnant mother of his child. Clyde left too much to chance, Ruth thought; if he needed to do it he ought to have thoroughly prepared rather than act instinctively. Ruth said, “Hitting her with a camera and letting her drown? What a goof! That’s not a murder, it’s a flip of the coin.”

  Because there was a cat burglar in Queens who’d been getting into houses through upstairs windows, Albert had purchased a .32-caliber handgun and Ruth said he flourished it whenever she crossed him, shouting once, “Any day I choose, I can blow your brains out!”

  Judd never wondered if she was lying to incite a reaction from him. Rather, he worried that Ruth would be dead the next time he called.

  Lorraine was discovered to have the condition called “lazy eye,” and every other Saturday Ruth brought her into the city for examinations and exercises. Judd would meet them at Henry’s and always give Lorraine a dime and some candy. Ruth coached Lorraine to sneak her hand into his and affectionately say how much she loved him. Lorraine once smiled as she asked, “Are you sure you’re not my father?”

  Albert, Judd thought, is as bad as that.

  “Tell him about this morning,” Ruth said.

  The girl was puzzled. She cocked her head. “What?”

  “Daddy grabbed your English muffin from you and …”

  “Oh, and he scraped off some of the peanut butter. Because I was wasteful, he said.”

  Ruth prodded, “And what happened next?”

  She smiled. “I cried and said I wanted lots of peanut butter.”

  “And he got angry …,” Ruth said.

  “Yes, then he got angry and slapped me. I hid behind the dining room chair because I was afraid of him and then Mommy stood right up to him and yelled things.” The nine-year-old seemed to have trouble recalling the morning, and then she recited, “But then Daddy rushed upstairs and ran back down a few minutes later with a gun in his hand, yelling, ‘I’ll kill the both of you!’ Only he used some swearwords. And he shoved the gun into Mommy’s chest.”

  Judd petted the pretty girl’s head. “Oh, sweetie. I’m so sorry,” he said. And he was dismayed that she would be just as direly affected if he did what Ruth was hounding him to do.

  But Ruth winked at him and said, “All’s well that ends well.”

  On Christmas Eve 1926, the three met at the Waldorf-Astoria to exchange presents, and Judd widened Lorraine’s eyes with a girl’s very adult-seeming pink silk lingerie that she was thrilled by. Ruth, too, was in high spirits as he gave her a jeweled blue purse that she liked enough to carry into the courtroom four months later. Lorraine presented him with a silk Brooks Brothers tie of the sort he favored, and Ruth handed him a gleaming silver grooming set for the road. And next to the hairbrush he found a check for two hundred dollars, or two weeks’ wages, written against the account of Mr. and Mrs. A. E. Snyder.

  Because Lorraine was there, Ruth could only say, “You’ve been so generous to us. We need you to stay out of hock.”

  “But how can you afford it?”

  With the seriousness of a tutor, she said, “I have great expectations.”

  Judd cashed it, and the canceled check with his signature on it would be found by detectives
on March 20th.

  In January 1927, in Buffalo, Judd dreamed that a faceless Albert was crouching toward him in a corridor, seething with hatred. Huddled behind a curtain beside Judd were Ruth and Lorraine, Isabel and Jane. Judd was teasing Albert forward, hoping his rage would let him bypass the mothers and daughters, but the curtain was fluttering out and tangling and Ruth’s fair calves and thighs were exposed. Albert turned in vengeance and lifted an ax and Judd woke in a scream.

  But he knew it was not just a nightmare that scared him. Albert represented everything wrong in his life: Judd’s negligence of his job, his worry over conditions at home, his failing physical stamina, and the ever greater excess of alcohol that was wrecking his health and his future. Judd did not fall asleep, he passed out; he did not wake up, he came to. Even the fine memory of which he was proud was becoming so faulty that he was forced to scribble notes about whatever he’d done or had to do.

  And Albert’s health, too, seemed ever more precarious. In January, Ruth wrote Judd that The Governor couldn’t stop hiccupping and Judd replied in his letter that a customer in Geneva, New York, recommended pineapple juice. Ruth laced the juice with bichloride of mercury tablets, and instead of dying Albert just vomited all day and was cured. With a mixture of dashed hopes and renewed admiration, Ruth wrote her lover that she’d never seen anyone so deathly ill pull through.

  Judd primly wrote back that he felt she was behaving in a monstrous manner. But when they dined at Zari’s the next weekend he confidentially said, “I find it so mysterious. Had you said you wanted to kill a dog or cat, I would have broken all connections with you. And yet I have to confess to an excitement I don’t understand. I’m entranced by your bravery. Your outlawry.” Judd unscrewed the silver cap to his flask, filled his glass with juniper-flavored grain alcohol, and finished half of it. “I have two beings inhabiting my skin, Ruth. One strives to act normally but is wildly incompetent, while the other seeks the outlandish and forbidden and is gaining influence over me. I’m becoming a mess. I hunt hither and yon for my jacket and find I’m wearing it. I twist on the bath’s faucet handles and forget them and flood the floor. I feel like I’m in a coma. Yesterday Isabel and Jane were there to meet my train, and I was in such a haze that I failed to recognize them and walked right by.”

  Ruth laughed.

  “But it feels so unfunny, Ruth! We have known each other for only a year and a half, and by whatever measure you choose, my life is in what the biplane pilots call a ‘death spiral.’ And yet I wouldn’t change a thing. You are an enormity—”

  “Well, thanks a lot.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean it that way, darling. I mean you have become the object of everything I do. The source of all that I am. Am I making any sense?”

  She held his hands in hers. “Only if you meant to compliment me.”

  “Really, it’s not flattery. It’s practically theology.”

  The orchestra started “Someone to Watch Over Me” and Ruth requested the dance even in his drunkenness. She took him out to Zari’s dance floor and clung to him. Alcohol’s depressant effect caused Judd to jealously notice other men watching Ruth’s body as she moved, but she just joked, “Hey, it’s better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked.”

  The skillful dancer he was could do nothing more than a box step, but that only caused Ruth to cling to Judd more tightly. After a while she shifted against his erection and slyly whispered, “I can feel Henry getting interested in me.”

  But Judd was in a wretched and romantic mood. “I have no idea how this story ends, do you? Are we just going to continue like this?”

  Seeming to ignore him, she sang along with the orchestra about a man who was not handsome but who carried the key to her heart. She sang that she wished the guy would get up to speed, because she was in need of his help.

  And then Judd fell off balance.

  Ruth caught him and said, “We need to plan.”

  They stayed overnight at the Waldorf-Astoria. Judd called Isabel and said he was too drunk to get home. She found it easy to believe him. Ruth failed to inform her husband of her whereabouts and Albert’s sisters would later claim that was a sign of his great love for his wife, that he so often gave her such freedom.

  Judd struggled out of his jacket but could do no more, so Ruth undressed him and asked what his plan for getting rid of The Governor was.

  Tilting off balance, Judd said, “I’ll confront him and we’ll get into a fight. Have it out.”

  “Well, no offense,” she said, “but you’re not strong enough.”

  “Prolly not.” Concentrating hard, Judd finally decided on, “Remember that one movie we saw?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you remember. That movie? The guy gets hit over the head?”

  She unbuckled and unzipped his trousers and yanked them down. “Lift up your right leg. And now your left.”

  “A bur-la-gry.”

  “Burglary.”

  “Right,” Judd said. “I hit him over the head. And we make it look like … that word.”

  “A burglary.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Alcohol poisoning finally felled him where he stood and Judd woke up in his underwear and gartered stockings six hours later. He found Ruth kneeling in the half-filled hotel bathtub and rounding forward to rinse an avalanche of white foam from her hair. An amber bottle of Blondex shampoo was on the floor. She rose, twisting a tawny hank, and gasped with shock when she glimpsed Judd slouched against the doorway. “Oh! You scared me.”

  “I scare myself sometimes.” He raked his hand through his hair and excused his exit to unconsciousness by saying, “The drink took a drink.”

  She sat back on her heels, water gleaming on her breasts, and she grinned at his attention as she soaped a washrag. “Are you going to keep your promise?”

  Judd knelt beside her and stole the washrag. “Which was?”

  She allowed him to bathe her right arm, hand, and fingers. She smiled. “Like they say, give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”

  Judd stayed with his question. “What did I promise?”

  “You vowed your passion for me was so immense that you would go to infinite depths for me, even if it meant giving up your own life or erasing another’s. At least, that was the gist of it.”

  “I’m guessing I was less coherent.”

  “But you are going to keep your promise?”

  Judd meekly said he would. And the plot developed.

  At home, no one spoke to him. Even Jane left the front room at his entrance. Judd heard whispers of conspiracy being hissed behind closed doors. And so in a late February snow, and earlier than he’d planned, he left for upstate New York to sell the Bien Jolie fashions for spring.

  Ruth secretly went to the Queens-Bellaire Bank and got out the safety deposit box registered to Ruth M. Brown. She’d told no one, not even Judd, about the Prudential insurance policies on Albert’s life. She scoured the fine print again, jotting on a scratch pad $1,000 + $5,000 + $45,000 x 2 = $96,000. She could do the arithmetic without a pencil, but reading the numbers was more thrilling.

  She then went home and called Judd in his office. When she was told he was on the road, she said she was a lingerie buyer calling from Batavia. Would he be there this week? The office secretary said she knew only that Judd was first heading to Albany. Ruth consulted the hotel list he’d given her and she wrote Judd at the Morgan State House Inn, saying she was so miserable she was going into Manhattan to find its highest building and end it all, and by the time he received this letter she would be dead. She gave the stamped envelope to the postman, George Marks, just as he was walking next door. The postman smiled at seeing the sender’s name was Mrs. Jane Gray. “I’ll see he gets it, Tommy.”

  “You think tomorrow morning?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Judd frantically called Queens Village the following night, and she answered in the foyer. “Are you free to talk?” he asked.

  She wh
ispered, “They’re all upstairs right now.”

  “Your last letter frightened me.”

  “Which was that?”

  “About suicide.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That was just a mood I was in.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to give way to such moods.”

  “There’s only one thing you need to do.”

  “Look, I’m going to rescue you from your dire straits very soon.”

  Ruth loudly called to no one, “Just a salesman!” And then she softly said, “I have to hang up.”

  Albert Snyder and his wife were invited to a Saturday-night card party at Milton and Serena Fidgeon’s home on Hollis Court in Queens Village on February 26th, 1927. Joining them were Serena’s brothers, George and Cecil Hough, and Dr. Arthur W. Stanford and his wife—Ruth forgot her name. A folding table was placed in the front room and the dining room table was used for the second bridge game. Water pitchers filled with Gilbey’s gin and ginger ale were within hand’s reach, and jazz, Live from the Empire Room, played on the radio.

  The Snyders played north and south at the dining room table, with Milton and Serena in the east and west seats. Serena touched Ruth’s forearm as she said, “Won’t it be delightful being together on Shore Road again next summer?”

  “Oh. You’re going back?”

  “So are we,” Albert smugly said. “Same cottage. I just put the deposit down.”

  Ruth restrained a scream as she asked in a tight voice, “Weren’t you going to consult me, honey?”

  Albert seemed flummoxed. “When have I ever? And why?”

  “Careful, friend,” Milton said. “Thin ice.”

  Serena frowned at Albert as she dealt out the cards.

  Within an hour Albert became so vexed by Ruth’s unpredictable bidding that Milton invented a rule that some players needed to rotate, which sent Albert to the folding table as Milton invited George Hough to team with Ruth.