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She went into Lorraine’s room, kissed the sleeping girl’s cheek, and she woke. “Mommy?”
Ruth petted Lora’s straw-blonde hair and softly whispered, “Hey there, lovergirl. I’m home. Sweet dreams.”
On Saturday afternoon, Judd found a table for five clients at the gala that followed the Très Parisien fashion show, but he was too woozy with shock and guilt to stay. Each greeting and jibe seemed to carry an undercurrent of irony, as if his friends and associates detected his adultery, his coveting of another’s wife, and were grandly pretending to forgive him. At last he felt he needed his family more than sales commissions, and he offered a hurried goodbye in order to catch a train for New Jersey and his Craftsman bungalow in East Orange.
His house was havoc’s opposite and contained very little of him. The Vanity Fair and Success magazines he’d left scattered on the cocktail table had been overcome by Radio Digest in his absence. The Tiffany floor lamp he’d shifted for his reading was now reestablished to its seemingly fixed position. His high school mandolin was probably in its scarred case in the closet; the lid on the Priest upright piano was locked. And installed on the yielding, purple mohair sofa was his mother-in-law, Rebecca Kallenbach, whom he called Mrs. K. She’d divorced her husband, Ferdinand, a lithographer, just before Judd married Isabel, and she increasingly seemed to find her ex’s vices in her son-in-law. But now she was involved in crocheting a chair cushion as she listened to “Every Morn I Bring Thee Violets” on the phonograph, and she failed to notice his entrance.
But little Jane was at the dining room table in a yellow sundress, furiously coloring an apple orchard on butcher paper with the box of Crayolas he’d bought her in Easton. He softly laid a hand on her chocolate-brown hair as he said, “Hello, sweetie.”
She failed to look up. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Whose farm is that?”
“It’s imaginary.”
“Who’s that stick man standing way off in the distance?”
Jane frankly said, “You,” and his fathering heart felt stabbed.
“I have been gone a lot, haven’t I?”
Unprompted, Mrs. Kallenbach snidely offered, “Oh, we manage to get by without you.” She pulled red yarn taut with her hooked needle.
Isabel walked out of their spic-and-span kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. She forgot to smile as she said, “Hi, Bud. You’re home early.”
“I had enough.”
She kissed him and wrinkled her nose at the hint of railway whisky. “Smells like you had plenty.”
“And so it begins,” he said.
Judd Gray was sixteen and in the rigorous college preparatory course at William Barringer High School in Newark, intent on attending Cornell medical school. He was president of his high school fraternity, chairman of the Dance Committee, a Newark high schools sports reporter, manager of the basketball team, and in spite of his scrawniness, the quarterback on the football team. Yet he was high-strung and giddy around girls; he thought they could read his dirty mind. And then he met a considerate, pious, slender, solemn, not-pretty brunette named Isabel Kallenbach, of Van Siclen Avenue in New York City. She had a too-prominent nose and a jutting chin and he initially dated her out of chivalry and pity. His first and only sweetheart, Isabel married him in November 1915, when he was twenty-three and she twenty-four. Because of pneumonia, Judd had been forced to quit high school in his senior year, and when he was healthy again he took a job in his father’s jewelry factory, and then became a jewelry salesman, serving as a volunteer for the Red Cross during the Great War though he’d wanted to join the Army. His grandfather was an investor in the Empire Corset Compa
ny and offered Judd the greater freedom of a job with that firm, and later, in 1921, Judd shifted over to Benjamin & Johnes. And Isabel became a devoted but dowdy housewife, finicky in her cooking and cleaning, priggish, overweight, acting ever more disgraced by his job in lingerie sales, and in reaction given to wearing frowzy dresses and farmerish shoes.
“We’re having meat loaf and fresh sliced tomatoes,” Isabel said from the kitchen, verging on disgust as she added, “And you’re having your Scotch first, I suppose.”
Judd fetched his bottle of Johnnie Walker from the dining room sideboard. “Wouldn’t do without it.”
Mrs. Kallenbach would later state for journalists that she was “very close” to her son-in-law and hardly ever saw him drink, but she watched Judd flee into the back yard with his liquor and stridently called, “You have broken the law, buying that!”
“I’ll have to get rid of the evidence then!” he yelled back.
Judd sat in the Adirondack chair with the Johnnie Walker and a glass in the high bluegrass of the yard he’d need to mow. He brooded as he remembered how as a boy in his teens he used to go outside in Newark and sit on a wicker settee between his father and mother, holding their hands, watching the poetry of a sunset. And now no one in the East Orange house seemed inclined to sit with him in the twilight that his mother called “the gloaming,” and he felt hurt and wronged and liable to do anything.
Writing of that Saturday evening later, he stated he was surging with remorse, self-condemnatory, lashing myself with feverish contempt one minute, then remembering Ruth’s tenderness, her loveliness, the next. My thoughts would go back and back again to her. Then regrets and that inner turmoil of a conscience that was burning hot with shame.
Judd maniacally used his reel mower on the lawn at sunrise, washed his purple Hupmobile with its sporty black roof and black fenders, then took a bath and drove the family to Trinity Presbyterian Church in South Orange. Jane went to Sunday school, Isabel and her mother found their usual pew, and Judd took his familiar place in the choir to sing “When Morning Gilds the Skies,” “O Gladsome Light,” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” And, as if word was out about him, he heard a sermon from Reverend Victor Likens on a passage from the Gospel of Mark: “And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth him. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”
Scorching himself for his hypocrisy, Judd made a secret oath that he would never have sexual congress with Mrs. Snyder again, and right after that he visited his mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, in West Orange, alone.
She was a frail, dignified, courtly woman whom he adored almost to the edge of weirdness. Welcoming him as if he were long lost, she hugged him close and rocked with him, saying, “Oh, my Bud! My darling boy!” She then gave him a grilled cheese sandwich and Coca-Cola and hovered over him as she gladly watched him eat. She said Bud looked exhausted. She wondered if dresses could get any shorter. She inquired of Bud if Mrs. Kallenbach was giving him anything for her share of the room and board. She said, “Don’t let her walk all over you.” Bud asked if she had any jobs that needed doing, but she only ordered him sternly to get his family and go on a nice vacation somewhere.
Judd did, as always, as he was told and called Alfred Benjamin at his home, then left Mrs. K to her needlework and motored across Long Island with Isabel and Jane to an ocean-view inn in Sagaponack for Jane’s ninth birthday and a week’s vacation, the three of them swimming in the Atlantic surf and hollering from the cold, or horseback riding in jodhpurs and English saddles on the white sand roads linking villages there. Alone he went to the public golf course with his hickory-shafted clubs, his argyle sweaters and plus fours, his flailing, uninstructed swing. And at night there was fine food and dancing and games of bridge.
Because Isabel and Jane hated having the vacation end, but Judd was required in the office, he booked them for another week; left the Hupmobile Eight with his wife, who’d just learned to drive; and took a jitney into the city on the third Monday in August.
And he was walking into Rigg’s Restaurant on 33rd Street for ham and eggs when he ran into Harry Folsom as he was leaving. The hosiery man tarried long enough to wedge around in his mouth with a toothpick as he said he wasn’t a kid anymore and he was through with wild parties, through with the hangovers from bathtub gin, and for sure he was through with fast women. “They can’t keep secrets, you know.”
