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Riding in the elevator, Lorraine watched the hand on the floor indicator halt at eight and the old, blue-jacketed operator slid the doors open. The little girl was surprised and pleased to find her mother and Mr. Gray standing there, though Mr. Gray seemed unhappy. “Hi!” she said.
Ruth smiled. “Were you having fun, baby?”
“She was my company,” the old operator said. “We’ve been riding up and down.”
“We’ve been doing that, too,” Judd said.
Ruth’s health was affected that spring. She went to Dr. Harry Hansen, a family physician in the neighborhood, and complained of fainting spells, occasional loud and rapid heartbeats followed by a lingering soreness, occasional swellings in the throat that made her feel she was being strangled, increasingly scarce monthly periods, and a horrible depression or melancholy that could cause her to become hot-tempered or disintegrate into a flood of tears. Dr. Hansen’s workup found her heart weakened, her thyroid enlarged, and her system anemic, but he failed to diagnose that Ruth was in fact describing the first stage of Graves’ disease. He gave her iron and iodine tablets and a box of Midol. He turned away as she got into her clothing and he heard her say, “I also have these queer feelings of doom, like something tragic is going to happen.”
“Oh, it will,” the doctor said. “We all die.”
Office work on Saturdays was standard for even high-level jobs then, and Ruth and her daughter frequently met Judd at Henry’s at one o’clock and joined him for the Ziegfeld Follies, children’s theater, or motion picture matinees afterward. But on one afternoon when the baby stayed home with her father, Ruth insisted on riding the trolley to East Orange with Judd, squeezing his hand with giggling excitement that she might be recognized as “the other woman” if Judd’s friends or neighbors got on board, and then just kissing Judd good-bye at his stop and riding an eastbound trolley back to the city.
And one night in April when it was still light at seven, he got to his front door and felt watched, and he saw Ruth in the grim black clothing of a widow, far down Wayne Avenue, just observing his nightly routine. Judd initiated a move toward her, but Ruth turned away and walked off.
Because of his Elks club membership in Orange, Judd was permitted entrance to the Elks lodge in downtown Syracuse and he invited a Barringer High School classmate, Haddon Jones, to join him for a luncheon after Judd made his morning sales calls. Haddon was a tall, rail-thin man with slicked-back hair, horsey ears, and a pen-line mustache. He sold insurance and real estate for Hills and Company and was, as he said, “doing quite well, thank you. The business, she booms.”
Sitting at the Elks club bar, Judd ordered, “Medicinal whiskeys for both of us, Doctor.”
The Elks bartender disdainfully said, “I’m no doctor.”
“I tell a lie,” Judd said. “You are a pharmacist with a limited inventory!”
Haddon grinned and said, “I seem to have some catching up to do.”
“Emptied my flask by eleven.”
“Burying your sorrows?”
“Exactly the otherwise, my good man. I’m belated. Excuse me, elated. I have a paramour of great beauty who is not my wife and to whom I am now affianced. Without sanctification of God or state, mind you.” Judd tapped his forehead. “But mentally. Have I showed you her picture?”
“This is the first we talked about it.”
Judd struggled with his trousers as he got out his wallet and flattened its wings on the bar with both hands. Then he meticulously pinched a photograph of Ruth out and put it next to Haddon’s rye whiskey. “I shall not tell you her name for she is legally spoken for. But I would like your frankest evolution—evaluation, excuse me—and we shall determine if you need your eyeses examined.”
Haddon held up the photograph and turned on his bar stool to find better light. “She’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful, yes. Entirely just assessment. But you are too moderate in your opinion because you have not drunken enough the alchemy of the poet. And, I must be frank, the picture does not do her justice. She is a goddess”
“You guys on the road. You got ’em coming and going, don’t you?”
Judd shook his head and wagged a finger. “But there you are wrong, sir. She has me.”
Ruth preheated the kitchen oven and simmered a cup of pitted prunes in a saucepan until they were soft. Mrs. Brown was in her nurse’s whites, heading out to a five-dollar job night-watching an old woman who’d broken her hip. Scowling at the ingredients on the counter, she asked Ruth, “Are you making a prune whip?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t like prunes. Lora won’t eat them.”
“Albert does.”
Josephine linked shut the neck of her brown cape as she said, “Well, don’t hold your breath waiting for his thank-you.” She went out the kitchen door.
Ruth pureed the prunes in the saucepan and used a hand egg beater to stir in and dissolve one-third of a cup of sugar. She added a teaspoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of vanilla, then hand-mixed six egg whites in a separate bowl and dripped some cream of tartar into the froth and hand-mixed again until the froth stiffened. She found her purse on the kitchen table and got out a packet of gray powder. Her hand circled the froth of egg whites as she poisoned it with the powder, and then she folded in the prune puree and poured the mixture into a buttered and sugared baking dish. She baked the dessert for forty minutes, chilled it, and after that night’s dinner served it to Albert with whipped cream.
She confessed what she’d done the next afternoon at Henry’s. She told Judd she and The Governor fell into a gruesome argument and she’d become so incensed that she’d poisoned him.
Judd exclaimed in a hushed way, “You didn’t!”
