A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion

by Ron Hansen

  Within seconds, it seemed, he was there, dressed in a gray, pinstriped suit and a tieless, unbuttoned white silk shirt. The flower of a mauve handkerchief bloomed from his left chest pocket. Like Ruth he shushed along in felt slippers. His right trouser leg had been scissored for the electrode and it flapped when he strode in, but he seemed otherwise organized, efficient, and formidable in spite of being the smallest man in the room. His tortoiseshell glasses were off, as they’d been whenever he made love to Ruth and when he went in to kill The Governor. The Protestant minister, Anthony Peterson, was helping Judd cope by reciting the “Blessed are” halves of the Beatitudes while Judd supplied the latter halves. But Judd, like Ruth, was distracted by the sheer number of people there to watch him die, and he hesitated in disorientation until Warden Lawes held a hand out to the oaken chair like an overtipped waiter, and Judd went directly to it, wiping hot tears away with his shirt cuff.

  Judd flicked his trousers as if they were crumbed and was buckled down just as Ruth had been, and Reverend Peterson bent close to him to help in reciting the twenty-third psalm, cueing him with, “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.’”

  Holding his chin up to help the attendants affix the face mask, Judd overloudly responded, “‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’”

  Reverend Peterson recited, “‘He restoreth my soul.’” The helmet was fitted on. And Judd said, “‘He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.’” Sheehy cautioned Reverend Peterson to retreat from the rubber mat as Judd tremblingly said, “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for—’”

  And then, in midsentence, all air gone from his lungs so that they would not gurgle, the current shot through him with a sizzling sound, his body jerking up as if he could have flown had he not been belted. Elliott shocked him twice for a total of two minutes. His right sock flamed; his dark brown hair underneath the helmet sent up spirals of smoke. The face mask was removed. His eyes were half-shut and his mouth was wide, as if he were laughing.

  There was still some buzzing from the transformer.

  Dr. Sweet hunched over Judd’s body with his stethoscope and officially shouted, “I pronounce this man dead!”

  It was 11:14.

  Warden Lawes hitched his head toward the door and the gentlemen witnesses saw it was time to go and filed out.

  In the yard, an inmate yelled, “It’s over! It’s over!” and that heralded a ghoulish celebration that grew ugly and then just wearisome and finally caused the crowd to straggle off to their homes.

  The final remains of Mr. Henry Judd Gray were hoisted onto a gurney and shoved into “the icebox,” where his clothing was taken off, just as Mrs. Ruth May Brown Snyder’s had been, for New York’s mandated autopsy. As the doctors readied their trays and instruments, there Ruth and Judd lay, naked and side-by-side again, their arms hanging from the gurneys so that their hands almost touched. Calm now. Silent. Dispassionate. Loved.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a work of fiction based on fact, and though I hew closely to the history of the events, the majority of the narrative is, of course, invented. My sources for this novel have principally been the New York City newspapers of the period as well as the following: the memoir Doomed Ship by Judd Gray, The Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray by John Kobler, The “Double Indemnity” Murder by Landis MacKellar, Murderess! by Leslie Margolin, Trials and Other Tribulations by Damon Runyon, and My Own True Story—So Help Me God! by Ruth Snyder. I would like to express my gratitude to those authors for their information and guidance. And finally my thanks to my lovely wife, Bo Caldwell, and my old friend Jim Shepard, the first readers of these pages, whose encouragement, aesthetic judgment, and editorial advice have been invaluable over the years.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This is Ron Hansen’s eighth novel. He is married to the novelist Bo Caldwell and lives in northern California, where he teaches film, fiction writing, and literature at Santa Clara University.