A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  Albert was loudly saying, “I open with one heart and she says one spade. I haven’t the cards to help out in that suit so I bid two clubs. And what does she do but follow that with three no-trump!”

  George Hough was a hale, farmerish sort of man in his twenties. Hearing Albert, he winked across the dining room table at Ruth and loudly said, “My gosh! What husbands have to put up with! And she’s so ugly, too!”

  “You play a few hands, you’ll see,” Albert said. And he glared at him over his highball glass.

  Radiators were overheating the house and around eleven o’clock George helped Milton collect and hang the men’s jackets.

  Albert grinned and patted his thigh as he temptingly called to his wife in German, “Na Kleiner, komm doch mal rüber.” In English: Hey, sweetie, come over here. Ruth vaguely understood what the sentence meant, but she did not understand that in Germany it was the street invitation of a prostitute.

  She went over to the folding table and fell girlishly into Albert’s lap. She hugged him tight and asked, “How’s it going, honey?”

  He finished his highball. “I’m losing.”

  “Look at the lovebirds!” Serena called.

  Ruth kissed his head. “It’s so true. Cantankerous is just an act with him. Albert’s my sweet little lamb.”

  “Who’s she describing?” Dr. Stanford asked, to general laughter.

  “Are we going to play bridge or what?” Albert said.

  “Okay, okay,” George Hough said, sitting down again. “Don’t get your kidneys in an uproar.”

  “Kidneys? My kidneys are fine. Are you a wiseacre, George?”

  “Oh, calm down,” Ruth said, and walked back to the dining room.

  Albert filled his highball glass, failed at distinguishing clubs from spades in the next hand, then forgot what happened to his jacket.

  “I hung it up,” George reminded him.

  “Oh? Well, we’ll see about that,” Albert said. He swerved when he walked to the foyer closet.

  “Snyder!” Ruth called.

  But he was already rooting around, swatting overcoats aside. And then he was hunting through his jacket pockets and yelled, “Where’s my wallet?”

  “Look on the floor,” Milton called.

  Albert bent low inside the closet. “It’s gone! Who stole my wallet?”

  Milton stood. “I’m sure we’ll find it somewhere.”

  “But I had seventy-five dollars in it! And it’s gone! What kind of friends you got, Milt?”

  “Hey, watch it!” called Cecil Hough.

  And now his brother stood. “Are you talking about me?”

  “I don’t know,” Albert yelled. “Are you a thief?”

  Ruth just looked down at the dining room table and in exasperation called again, “Snyder!”

  “Would you like to mix it up?” George asked. “I’ll oblige.”

  Albert smiled as he unbuttoned his shirt cuffs. “Oh, fella, you are barking up the wrong tree.”

  But Milton Fidgeon intervened, and Serena put on a platter of Paul Whiteman hits, and within the hour Albert was laughing heartily at Dr. Stanford’s jokes.

  Walking to the railway station from his final sales call in Albany, Judd noticed his haggard, gloomy reflection in the front window of an old-fashioned apothecary. Your face says it all, he thought. You are being destroyed by all this. And yet he went in and purchased a half-pint of Duncan’s Pure Chloroform that had been imported from Scotland and a pair of green rubber chemist’s gloves that would conceal his fingerprints.

  And then, checking into the Stuyvesant Hotel in Kingston on March 3rd, he was given a short letter from Ruth. She began: My Own Loverboy, Gee, but I’m happy. Oh, ain’t I happy. I’m so very happy, dear, I can’t sit still enough to write what I’m thinking of. She mentioned that she’d seen the movie Johnny Get Your Hair Cut and thought Jackie Coogan was a sweet kid and a marvelous actor. She continued: All I keep thinking of is handling A.—and you, you darn loveable little cuss. I could eatcha all up. She ended with Hurry home, darling. I’ll be waiting for you. All my love, Your Gal. Judd studied it, then carried the letter over to the fireplace and watched the writing paper brown and warp and convulse into flame.

  Upstairs in his room he made a long-distance telephone call to Queens Village. Ruth answered. Judd asked, “Can you talk?”

  In a hushed voice, she said, “Carefully.”

  “We can’t use a hammer. Cops know that a burglar wouldn’t carry one. We need something that’ll do the trick but is hard to identify.”

  “Like what?” But before Judd could answer, she said, “I hear footsteps,” and hung up.

  The next afternoon, Judd walked into the L. S. Winne hardware store on Wall Street in Kingston and purchased a sash weight. The owner would remember Judd because his fine tailoring in a hardware store was like a flare that said Notice me, and because the owner could recall saying, “Don’t know as I’ve ever sold only the one. You sure you don’t want a pair?”

  Judd said, “I have just what I need.”

  When Judd returned to Manhattan from upstate, he hid his purchases with his golf clubs in his office. Arranging to meet Ruth for lunch at Henry’s on Monday, March 7th, he got a few yards of butcher paper from the mail room and wrapped the murder items as if each were fragile, including with them a socket and electric cord, an empty Pinch bottle of Scotch whisky, and a piece of green felt because she’d read instructions in McCall’s on how to make a cute lamp. Judd carried the paper-wrapped bundle into Henry’s at noon and waited thirty minutes for Ruth to arrive. When she did, she was joined by Lorraine. Judd was vexed that the nine-year-old was being involved.

  Ruth forgot to apologize for her tardiness as she shoved his package into a soft-sided tapestry bag. But she did say, “You look terrible, Judd.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  Ruth glanced at Lorraine beside her and penned on a paper napkin that she passed across to him: But you’ll do it tonight?

  Judd nodded.

  Lorraine lifted to watch as Ruth took the napkin back and penned: Still trying to get chloral hydrate.

  Judd asked, “What’s it say, Lora?”

  She told him, “I can’t read cursive.”

  Judd penned: We don’t need that stuff now.

  She wrote: Just you hit A. + chloroform?

  In a frenzy, Judd looked around the restaurant as if the handwriting could be heard. There was a squat red candle on their dining table and Judd set the writing on their napkin aflame. Lorraine was solemnly considering him. Judd squeezed a hand inside his trouser pocket and exclaimed, “But I’m forgetting! There’s a dime in here for New York’s prettiest girl. And that’s you.”

  She fisted the coin and said, “You’re so nice, Uncle Judd.” But now it sounded scripted. As did he, Judd admitted.

  A bovine old waiter with a handlebar mustache ambled to their table and leaned on his knuckles to inquire if they were ready to order.

  Judd said, “I’m sorry but I won’t be eating. I have to get back to work.”

  Ruth scanned his face with panic. “But you’ll be there?”

  Lorraine scowled in confusion.

  “Don’t forget your bag,” Judd said, and left them.

  If I had possessed any mind at all, I certainly would have acknowledged the wrong that was being evidenced in my very soul and would have come out like a man and told her so. But I never recall it coming to my mind, that this is the wrong or right thing to do. It was simply a question of whether I could go through with it, or hoping something would happen to prevent it.

  If I had not lost all consciousness of God and drifted away, I could have stepped from the abyss and deterred her, too. Certainly, God was prompting my spiritual self to do right. But if that self has been quelled to the extent mine was, it is a hail from a friend unrecognized.

  That night, March 7th, Judd took the bus up Jamaica Avenue to 222nd Street and soldiered north, intending to finally get it done. She’d told him that if
he saw a lamplight at her mother’s window just above the front door, Judd was to go around to the kitchen stoop and she’d meet him there. But there was no light on and Judd couldn’t recall another contingency plan. He took some hits from his flask and just watched the house for a while.

  Crouching forward, Judd looked through a cellar window and watched Albert filling a fifty-gallon steel drum with water from a garden hose, then hefting his Johnson outboard motor into his shipshape workshop. Albert spun the motor’s propeller, seemingly hearing faint problems; softly ran his hand along the keel-like skeg; then hauled up the Johnson and dunked it into the drum water as he tightened the transom bracket on the drum rim. Albert tested the tiller, unscrewed the gas tank lid and looked in, then exchanged an old spark plug for a new one. He yanked on the starter rope just once and the motor throbbed alive, churning up blisters on the water’s surface and puffing smoke into the workshop until Albert jammed off the choke. Each of his motions was confident, efficient, perfectly mechanical. And he smiled through it all, with complete serenity and purposefulness. Such a man could pass hours in this way, could glance at his wristwatch, be nicely unprepared for midnight, and trudge with happy weariness up the stairs.

  Judd walked around the block, working up his courage, feeling the nettles of conscience. The collisions of sport were familiar to him until his right eye was harmed when a friend flung a handful of seaside sand at his face and almost blinded him. And since then he could not recall even the hint of injury from anyone, let alone recall himself rousing a fanatical aggression for an ordinary man. The Henry Judd Gray he hoped to present to the world was affable and ingratiating; he ignored slights, forgave wrongs, sought always to make friends even of strangers; and he felt Ruth had misjudged him if she thought he was the type to lash out in fury, let alone kill.

  Judd was not aware of how many times he walked the perimeter of the block the Snyders lived in, but others were, and a woman telephoned the police to say there was a burglar or Peeping Tom in the neighborhood and he’d just strolled by her house for the third time. But before a patrol car could get there, Judd had finally determined, I cannot, and at eleven o’clock when he passed 9327 a fourth time, he heard from inside the Snyder house a rapping on the kitchen window.

  Ruth was at the kitchen stoop when he got there, holding a full glass of whisky. Judd took it and she asked with irritation, “Are you going to go through with it or not?”

  “I’ll miss my train to New Jersey,” Judd said.

  She glared at him for a half minute. But then she relented. “Shall I hold on to the things?” she asked.

  “No. Just the sash weight. Hide it.”

  “And then what?”

  Judd shrugged. “I have sales calls upstate for the next two weeks.”

  She frowned at him but heard a sound from the basement and hurried inside. Judd slunk into the darkness of Albert’s garage until she returned with the items in a grocery sack. She caustically asked, “Are you ever going to go through with it?” But she shut the kitchen door before he could answer.

  SIX

  THE MURDER OF ALBERT EDWARD SNYDER

  Waking just before sunrise on March 19th, she gazed through a northern window at the yellow halo of the arc light across the street. Even as she watched, the glow was strangled and then snuffed. She softly rolled right and stared across the chasm between their beds that was not wide enough. Albert was sleeping on his side in his flannel nightshirt, too unfairly strong for her to handle by herself. She hated the gargled sighs as he inhaled and exhaled, hated the stink of his breathing, hated the hoarse shouts he’d use when he called her name to fetch or cook something.

  She felt the ache of menstruation and went into the bathroom. But she was ending her period. She found just a spot of blood on the Kotex, and she took that as an affirming sign that she’d be rid of Albert soon. She wakened Lorraine to say they’d be shopping for Easter clothes in Manhattan, and then she hurried over to Kitty Kaufman’s house to have her hair bleached as blonde as Mae West’s.

  Judd woke at eight in Syracuse and took a hot bath with Epsom salts. Soaked until his fingertips pruned. Shaved with a new razor blade. Each item of clothing he wore would have to last a full day and night, so he chose fresh skivvies, a new pair of knee-high black stockings, a starched white shirt, the gray wool suit and vest that were faintly threaded with blue, and a navy blue foulard necktie. Lacing up his shoes, he caught himself thinking, The killer wore black, high-grade Oxfords.

  Carefully establishing himself in Syracuse, he went down to the Onondaga Hotel’s basement coffee shop and ordered waffles with whipped cream and cherries for breakfast. “After all, it’s Saturday,” he told the waitress. She regarded him strangely. Was he too loud? Each sentence, each gesture and glance, was thrilling to him. He signed for the bill in a florid hand and included a quarter tip.

  Kitty drizzled hydrogen peroxide into a saucepan of bleaching powder with great seriousness and stirred until she’d concocted a perfect mixture. Ruth wrapped an old towel around her neck and stooped over the kitchen sink as Kitty tugged on rubber chemist’s gloves and then dabbed on the stinking mixture with a paintbrush.

  “What’s the special occasion?” she asked.

  Ruth was thinking there would soon be a candid rotogravure portrait of the grieving widow in the papers, but she instead said they were going to the Fidgeons’ house to play contract bridge.

  “Oh,” Kitty said. “Them.”

  “Albert seeks out friends who drink like he does.”

  “He could always spit out the window. There’s plenty like him since Prohibition.”

  And Ruth thought, Judd.

  Kitty painted the wet hair forward, then back, and then handed Ruth a rubber bathing cap. “This stuff’s poison and nasty, so we can’t let it stay on your skin too long.” She glanced at a wall clock to get the time as Ruth put on the bathing cap and tucked her cooking hair inside.

  Kitty snapped off the chemist’s gloves and they sat at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee. She flipped open the New York Daily Mirror and hunted a middle page. “Have you read Betty Clift today?” Seeing Ruth shake her head, Kitty scanned Clift’s column and then went back some sentences to read aloud: “‘Heed this advice, men. It is born in woman to long for your praise, for your attentions, for your demonstrations. When you withhold them she suffers an actual starvation. If she is a strong character, she worries along without them. If she is of lighter caliber, you suddenly find yourself without a sweetheart, or even a wife, for some other more accomplished adorer has circumvented you.’”

  Ruth smiled. “When she says ‘lighter caliber’ she means bleached blonde, right?”

  “Yep,” Kitty said. “Betty’s got you pegged.” She sipped from her mug and slyly grinned as she asked, “And speaking of adorers, how’s Judd?”

  She’d hoped Kitty would mention him. “I haven’t seen him in a while. Upstate on his sales route, I guess.”

  “Any action on that front?”

  Seeking to lay out an alternate version of the night’s events in case things went awry, Ruth said, “Nah. I’m slowing it down. I have to make sure Judd stays far away from Al—he’s threatening to kill him.”

  “Oh, guys are always saying stuff like that,” Kitty said.

  “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!”