A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  And George Hough fell back into grammar school. “Darn right, says me,” he said. “Would you like to try and stop me?”

  Albert sneered. “I could be coaxed.” But he was so drunk he had difficulty in getting up from his chair and dropped back into it again.

  “Here now!” Milton said. “We don’t want any fisticuffs.”

  “I’m fine with it,” Albert said.

  “Me too,” said George. Words were failing him.

  Serena cautioned her brother. “We can’t have the police here again.”

  Cecil Hough had gotten up from the folding table and was crouched so he could talk sternly into his brother’s ear. George listened and was helped up from his chair by Cecil and Howard and guided over to the sofa, falling down into it and against Ruth. Albert failed to notice because Milton was humoring him with flattery about his musculature and boxing skill.

  Woozily, George Hough glanced up at Ruth and managed to say, “Are you treated right at home?”

  She shook her head just a little, as if she were afraid to say more.

  “Somebody oughta kill that Old Crab,” he said.

  She smiled.

  Judd wakened to a hand shaking his shoulder and heard the bus driver instruct him that this was the Queens Village stop he’d wanted. And then he found himself with rain hitting his face on the sidewalk of Jamaica Avenue at the corner of 222nd Street. Still tipsy, he tilted off balance but caught himself on the arc-light pole before he could fall. His briefcase surprised him by being firmly gripped in his left hand. He patted his overcoat pockets and found his buckskin gloves tucked inside them. The pair had cost him eleven dollars. Couples were hurrying by him in the rain, but he was, he knew, the sort of insignificant fellow that people failed to notice, and so he felt safe in strolling the few blocks north to the Snyder residence.

  And then he just stood in front of the cream-yellow corner home for a while, seeing lights on in the kitchen, the music room, and the second-floor hallway, and watching for movement. She’d said Josephine would be nursing in Kew Gardens. The large white Colonial door that faced west would be locked, Ruth had said, and he drunkenly remembered he was to go to the kitchen door on the south, next to Albert’s one-car garage. Albert’s Buick wasn’t inside it.

  On the kitchen porch, his shin banged the hinged wooden milkman’s box and he ouched, then checked the neighborhood to see if he’d been heard. The households were sleeping.

  Judd tried the side door and found it unlocked, just as Ruth had promised. On the kitchen table she’d placed a fresh pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes—she’d forgotten his favorite brand—which was to have been a signal to him that the family was not at home. Or did it mean just the opposite? He listened and found that the house was silent but for the faint whisper of the furnace consuming coal just below him. Still he hushed himself when a kitchen chair shrieked as he yanked it out to heavily sit on. His head ached. He hunched forward with his elbows on his widened knees and held his face in his hands. Sleep would have been so nice.

  But the canary Pip cheeped from his cage in the front of the house, waking Judd enough that he stood and stared at the cigarette pack: Lucky Strike: “It’s toasted.” And I’m toasted, he thought as he swayed there. Remembering that Albert smoked only cigars and would notice it, Judd pocketed the cigarette pack, then trudged up the oaken stairway between the dining and music rooms, teetering on some steps, and at the upstairs hallway went down it into the bathroom to urgently urinate. His face in the medicine cabinet mirror was so shaded, sickly, and gruesome that he felt pity for its owner and smiled at his joke. He tilted back down the hallway for Ruth’s mother’s room above the foyer and front door, his right shoulder banging and sliding along the floral wallpaper. Heat was breathing through the vents and the house was hot as blood. Remembering not to switch on Josephine’s ceiling light fixture, he struggled out of his fedora, overcoat, and gray woolen suit coat, threw them with aggravation into Josephine’s closet, and fell down on the soft velour chair beside the white Swedish bed. With effort he checked the Ingersoll clock on Josephine’s vanity table, twisting the clock’s face to catch some of the hallway light and guessing that the hands illustrated that it was about one o’clock on Sunday morning.

  But he finally did recall the functional plot in Ruth’s letter to him of a week earlier. Which he’d burned. He lifted Josephine’s pillow with interest and found underneath it, as promised, electrician’s pliers, the five-pound window sash weight, and a half-pint bottle of rye whiskey that Judd unscrewed and sniffed. She’d meant it for Albert, just in case, and she’d spiked it with bichloride of mercury. The chemical scent put him off and he instead discovered that Ruth, sweet lady, had left on the floor by the pink velour chair a new bottle of Tom Dawson whisky, one of five quarts she’d purchased for next Saturday’s party on the eve of her thirty-second birthday. Judd cracked it open and took some swills of that, tasting the Scotch flavors of iodine and seaweed, his throat burning in just the right way. Although he was instructed to use the electrician’s pliers to cut the telephone wires, when he tried to stand up from the chair he flopped against the wall in his drunkenness and slid to the floor like a rag doll, losing the pliers under Josephine’s bed.

  Judd tilted the bottle and the whisky had some more of him. Soon his shirt was soaking with sweat. Waiting made him think of fishing with his father and sister, the glub of water under the boat as he bobbed and watched his line bleed across Lake Skaneateles. A nibble, a yank, and then nothing. Everything was fuzzy now but for the fact that he was there to murder a man he’d never even met, whose first name he could not then remember. The Governor; that was all. His willingness to kill for Ruth mystified and scared him, just as it had earlier in the month. The Ingersoll clock read two o’clock. Soon the family would be home and he would have to go through with it or Ruth would give up on him and find a stronger man. And then he had a wild impulse to run away and he tried to, fighting hard to scrabble upright and forgetting his things as he fled downstairs. But he’d gotten only onto the landing when he heard a rare automobile on 222nd Street and saw its high beams sling yellowish light across the dining room windows. Judd clawed and stumbled back up the stairs in a panic.

  The coroner would find that Albert Snyder’s blood-alcohol level was .3 percent, almost four times the police department’s measure for intoxication. Had Ruth and Judd done nothing at all, Albert may have died in his sleep. But still he insisted on driving his wife and daughter home, gloomily silent as he wove his big Buick down the streets, just missing other cars and overcorrecting on his turns as Ruth quietly offered him needed directions like the most forgiving of wives. At their house he swerved a hard right toward the one-car garage and banged into the curb. Albert gave Ruth a vengeful stare, as if daring her to criticize him.

  “We’ll get out here,” was all she said, and Albert said nothing as she got a sleeping Lorraine out of the back seat. The girl was, at nine, too heavy to carry, but Ruth let her huddle under her arm as she helped the girl to the front door. Ruth unlocked it and hesitated in the foyer, listening for Judd, but there was no sound but the tick-tocking grandfather clock and Pip chirping his hello.

  Ruth took off her black satin turban and lynx-trimmed polo coat and hung them in the foyer closet. She said, “Let me get you some water, Lora,” and went into the lighted kitchen without her. She saw the cigarette pack was gone, a kitchen chair turned out. She filled a water glass from the faucet and carried it back to the foyer with her. Lorraine’s school shoes were off and her new lamé and fur-trimmed coat was pooled at her feet. She was wobbling there with her eyes shut, close to fainting with exhaustion. She’d sleep through anything now. “Will you climb the stairs for me, baby? I can’t lift you.”

  Lorraine held on to the handrail and on to her mother’s waist as she trudged upstairs just as Judd had. “Where’s Granny?” she asked.

  “Working,” Ruth said.

  “Oh. Right,” the girl said. She angled straight into her bedr
oom without switching on the ceiling light.

  Ruth rested the water glass on the vanity. “Will you get into your pajamas, please?”

  Lorraine said nothing but started.

  Ruth went to Josephine’s door and softly whispered, “Are you there?”

  She heard Judd hiss, “Yes, go away.” And she saw the dark boulder of him squatting in a corner, seemingly hugging his knees. She left him.

  Lorraine’s pajamas were a girl’s version of a sailor’s uniform but she hadn’t finished buttoning the blouse before she drooped to her side with overdue sleep. Ruth jerked the blankets out from under Lorraine and tucked her in and kissed her forehead just as she would on any night. She gently shut the girl’s door behind her, locked Lorraine inside with a skeleton key, and went to Josephine’s doorway to say only, “I’ll be in shortly.”

  Even in his acute drunkenness, Albert was cautious enough to inch his beloved automobile inside the garage until the windshield tapped the warning tennis ball that was hanging on string from a joist. Albert turned off the ignition and just sat there for a while as he generated the energy to get out. At last he forced himself to yank the handle and fell forward from the car, lurching into a garage wall before he righted himself and tottered toward the kitchen. Wanting a nightcap, he slammed open kitchen cabinets but found no alcohol and crashed his way upstairs.

  Ruth was in their room, unclothed and, presuming there would be bloodshed, choosing a red nainsook nightgown from its satin hanger. She considered its beauty in the floor-length closet mirror and remembered that the embroidery style on its trim was called Lorraine, and she thought that would mean good luck in the night. Squirming into the nightgown, she felt oddly embarrassed that Judd was there, in the nearness and intimacy of their home. She heard her husband’s too-heavy, annoying footfalls and was giving her freshly bleached hair a brush when she saw Albert facing her in the floor-length mirror, irate and poisoned with alcohol, all language and intelligence gone, and seemingly with no notion that his lifetime now could be measured in minutes. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Albert said nothing and fell into the wall as he first yanked off his shoes and clothes, then jammed his arms into his pale blue flannel nightshirt. With his home so hot, Albert rammed up a window, its stiles screeching in the wooden casing, and Ruth watched with interest as he then crouched onto his mattress, scooched forward on his elbows and knees like a ridiculous old man, and floundered facedown as he sank into the blackout he called sleep.

  Ruth went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth with Ipana, then went into Josephine’s room. Judd was still silently squatting there, seeming so Oriental. She stooped forward and kissed him. Her hand pressed the bed pillow as she asked, “Did you find everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been here long?”

  He shrugged. “Hour. Don’t know.”

  Whisky scented his speech. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Plenty.”

  “But you’re going through with it, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t think I can.”

  “Oh no,” she said. She stooped again and kissed him. “You can.” And once she’d felt his drunken pawing of her thigh, she disappeared from Josephine’s room.

  Judd stood up as if ordered to and felt his sore knees and calves tingle with a fresh rush of blood. He unsnapped the lock on his briefcase, took off his owlish spectacles, and folded them neatly inside their case. He swallowed more whisky, then put on the green rubber chemist’s gloves and waited for Ruth, his head hanging like he was her victim, too.

  She’d kept the curtains and Venetian blinds open as she got into the twin bed nearest the closet. She lay flat on her back as she watched her husband snore. The street’s arc light glared through the northern windows and seemed to cage them in stripes of shadow. Albert was facing her, which meant his left, hearing ear was muffled with the pillow and only his deaf, right ear was available for sound, but she could never recall which was the good ear, the right or the left, so she couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t listening whenever she shifted, whenever she and Judd talked.

  She waited until a quarter to three, just staring at Albert, then felt safe enough to get up from bed and go to Judd. She was pleased to find him gloved, with the five-pound sash weight in his right hand. Judd was just staring at her. Sullen. She got the chloroform and navy blue handkerchief from his open briefcase as she said in a soft voice, “You know what’s funny? One of the guys at the party tonight said he would kill the Old Crab if he didn’t treat me better.”

  “Me first,” Judd said.

  She put on his gray buckskin gloves and winced at the chloroform’s sweet smell as she doused the handkerchief and some wads of cotton gauze, and then noticed Judd wrapping the sash weight in the front section of the Italian newspaper. She frowned. “Why are you doing that?”

  “So it won’t hurt him so much.”

  “You do realize you’re going to kill him?”

  Judd meekly nodded.

  Ruth took him by the hand, like a child. She guided him to the ajar bedroom door and then stood aside at the lintel as Judd entered.

  Ruth’s husband was so immediately there, just a few feet inside the room, that Judd almost yelped in surprise. Suddenly, murder seemed an actual possibility and he assayed his target. Wide-shouldered. Muscular. Skewed hair receding from a high forehead. There was a chest of drawers, a dresser, a chiffonier. The headboards were not ornate; the linens were probably Sears, Roebuck. Hanging high up and between the twin beds was the oval picture frame with a sculpted mahogany bow and inside it the studio photograph of raven-haired Jessie Guischard as a girl. Seeing that, it was easier for Judd to sidle up and raise the sash weight high with both hands and chop down at the sleeping head with fierce hate.

  But his trajectory was wrong and the sash weight glanced off the headboard, only injuring Albert, who jerked up and yelled with fury and flung an arm out as Judd struck down again, gashing the older man’s nose. Albert snatched at his assailant and hollered “Ruth!” and one hand caught Judd’s foulard necktie, choking him. To quell his yelling, Judd’s gloved left hand seized Albert’s throat so hard he left five finger gouges, and he flailed at Albert again, his weapon striking the pillow. And then he lost hold of the increasingly heavy sash weight and even as he was strangling the man, he was being strangled himself. Judd was so afraid he could lose the fight that he screamed out, “Momsie, for God’s sake, help me!”

  Ruth was beside him then, and Albert was shocked and wide-eyed over his pretty wife’s betrayal as she squeezed the chloroformed handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Albert seemed to surrender to the anesthetic and then Ruth lifted up the fallen sash weight and hammered down hard—Judd would later say “she belabored him”—and there was a wild spray of blood that accompanied the gruesome sound of rain-sodden wood being struck. Albert lost consciousness.

  Judd fell off him onto the floor.

  “Is he dead?” Ruth asked.

  Judd looked at the faint rise of the chest and answered, “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s got to be dead,” Ruth said. “He saw us both. This has got to go through or I’m ruined.”

  Judd said, “I’m already ruined.”

  With cold efficiency, she went to the closet, carried back one of Albert’s silk, university-striped neckties, this one red and yellow, and commanded Judd, “His feet.”

  Snagging off the chemist’s gloves and hiking up the white linens, Judd hitched the ankles together with the necktie as Ruth tore off strips of the cotton gauze, shook more chloroform on them, and shoved roots of them inside Albert’s nostrils with her little finger. She then stuffed his mouth with chloroformed cotton and flattened the chloroformed handkerchief on the pillow before rolling her husband so that his face was smothered by it. Tying his wrists behind his back with a white hand towel, Ruth told Judd, “Look for his handgun.”

  That jarred him. “There was a gun?”

  Worried that his rising
voice could be heard, Ruth scowled and shut the open window. He could be such a child. She instructed, “Look under his pillow first.”

  The pillowcase was so soggy and reeking with blood that Judd had to turn his head. A Bien Jolie corset he’d given Ruth was on the floor, which meant she’d been wearing it. Which, in his drunkenness, pleased him. His fingers grazing a leather holster, he pulled it out and hinged open a .32-caliber revolver, pointlessly shook out three, but not all, of its bullets, imperfectly gripped Albert’s still-warm right hand around it, and flopped the pistol onto the bed next to Albert’s left elbow.

  The police could construct no scenario in which that tableau made sense.

  Ruth was in Josephine’s room, scouring Judd’s briefcase for something in the dark.

  “I’m frazzled,” Judd said. “I need a cigarette.”

  She gave him a scornful look but said nothing. She carried the coiled picture wire and Judd’s gold mechanical pencil into the bedroom. She wasn’t surprised that in spite of everything Albert was still very slowly and wheezily breathing. She could even admire him for that: a diehard. Wanting to be thorough, she jabbed an end of the picture wire under the cold skin of his neck, made a noose, snugged it and tied a granny knot, then twisted the noose so tight with Judd’s Cross pencil that Albert made a faint gargling sound and blood oozed over the indenting wire. Wife of his dying, she’d waited so long for this moment that she almost wanted it to linger. With her head just above his, she whispered, “How’s that, o mio babbino?” She turned an ear and listened until she was sure Albert’s breathing had ceased. And then she went out, forgetting the mechanical pencil, which the police would find and eventually match with the gold Cross fountain pen still snug in Judd’s inside jacket pocket.

  Judd had gotten his Sweet Caporals and gone downstairs into the darkened music room. He’d wrenched his knee in the wrestling with Albert and his limp would make him far too noticeable all that Sunday. He sat on the Aeolian player piano’s bench, massaging his knee and watching gray smoke untangle from the fiery red ash. When the cigarette was so short it singed his bloodstained fingers, he left it in a tin ashtray on the keyboard, as unsecret as a clue in a children’s party hunt.