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“No.”
“At last. I have found a hole in your education.” She then took him by the hand again. “Upstairs.”
There were two photographs of Albert laughing with dogs in the hallway: one with a stocky boxer held next to his face, and another with a hound between his shins. And yet Ruth oddly told Judd in passing, “Albert hates pets.”
At the south end was a bathroom that seemed to have been cleansed with the same 20 Mule Team Borax that Isabel used. Across from that was Lorraine’s room, which looked so much like Jane’s that he felt a pang. But Ruth pulled him to Josephine’s room, just above the front-door vestibule and foyer, with white, nineteenth-century furniture from the Old Country and a pink velour chair. And finally she opened the door to the northern master bedroom. She grinned. “And this is where you’ll be sleeping.”
“Don’t know that I like the twin beds,” he said.
“We can change that. Right now the gulf between those beds is just what the doctor ordered.”
Hanging high up on the wall and between the twin beds was an oval picture frame with a sculpted mahogany bow and inside it a studio photograph of what seemed to be a raven-haired Jessie Guischard as a girl.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Judd said.
“Albert says it’s not her, it’s just a picture he happens to like. But he stares at it as he’s having at me.”
Judd shook his head. “What a thoroughgoing cad he is.”
“Cad? Wha’ja do, walk out of some Dickens novel?”
Josephine called, “Luncheon, you two!”
Ruth asked the canary, “Wanna go night-night?” and Pip flew down to his first-floor cage.
Judd whispered, “This is sheer happiness, just being with you.” She took the fleeting opportunity to kiss him, and Judd’s palm cherished his lover’s sensuous hip as they went down to the dining room.
There Mrs. Brown served Ruth’s crab cakes with Ruth’s colesla
w and roasted potatoes and the Sauvignon Blanc that only Judd drank, and finally finished off. Josephine seemed untroubled by that, and Ruth abetted it.
Judd was generally a hit with older women, and Josephine, too, seemed prejudiced in his favor, noticing his good manners, his suave flattery, his handsomeness and fine tailoring. Josephine would much later claim she knew he was no gentleman from the first time she met him, that “he seemed like a slick fellow” to her, but that afternoon she enjoyed the way he focused his full attention on her when she spoke, how his hand touched hers whenever he teased, how he could make her laugh with his funny anecdotes about selling lingerie in farm villages or meeting the likes of Romney Brent, Sterling Holloway, and Libby Holman backstage at the Garrick Theatre.
Retiring to the music room so he could smoke, Josephine flirtingly sat on the sofa with him as Ruth went to the dining room to collect the glassware and dishes. But as she did so she called for him to tell Mama a Swedish joke.
Judd was drunk enough that he was forced to think hard, and then he told her, “A Swedish immigrant not in the least like you was hired to paint the white center stripes on a highway. His foreman carried over a bucket of white paint and put it on the ground and handed him a paintbrush and said, ‘Go to it!’ And he was very happy to note that the hardworking Swede completed a full mile of road on the first day! But the foreman was disappointed that the hired man only painted a hundred yards’ worth of stripes the next day, and he was fit to be tied when the Swede finished a mere thirty feet on the third. Catching up to him that afternoon, the foreman asked what the heck the problem was. Well, the Swede was panting as he straightened up and pointed his paintbrush backward to the horizon and said, ‘It just be dat da paint bucket ist getting so far a-vay.’”
Josephine hooted and slapped both hands on her thighs. She said, “Oh, that’s rich!” She noticed that his wineglass was empty and she took it with her to the kitchen. Judd felt forsaken. And then she returned with a square glass filled with Scotch for him. “I have to say I was leery at first, but you are such a delight, Mr. Gray. And it’s so nice to have a gentleman here instead of—” She left the sentence hanging as she glanced to the dining room to see that her daughter was out of earshot. “May’s so unhappy, and Albert don’t care. It just ain’t right.”
“Which reminds me,” Judd said. “Do you know how to keep a German sailor from drowning?”
Josephine wrinkled a smile as she warily answered, “No.”
And Judd said, “Good!”
Ruth heard that and found it hilarious.
And then the front door opened and it was Lorraine returning from grammar school. Seeing him, the affectionate eight-year-old grinned and without getting out of her cold overcoat ran into his hug, yelling, “Mr. Gray!” She kissed him on the mouth just as she’d seen her mother kiss him. “You’ll stay and play with me, won’t you?”
Judd said, “Just for a little bit, sweetie.” And he gazed over her pretty blonde pageboy haircut to Ruth, who was glorying over their happy, happy family and the grand future that was just in front of them.
The following Saturday in February, Albert hauled a sixteen-foot ladder to the front sidewalk and banged it up against the huge elm tree that was older than their house and taller than its roof beam. Jamming the ladder feet into frozen sod, he ascended with a ripsaw to get rid of some dead, shedding limbs that threatened to tear loose and crash on his car whenever flustered by the wind. Shifting his weight as he fought the binding of saw teeth and wood grain, he felt the ladder teeter and then fall from his foothold so that he had to lunge for a limb and hang there some twenty feet from the ground. Looking down he saw Ruth just below, holding a grocery bag and staring up with fascination.
“Don’t just stand there! Help me!”
She rested the groceries on the frosted sidewalk before gloomily heaving up the ladder again. “Lucky I chanced by,” she said.
She was soon recognized as Mrs. Gray by the staff at the Waldorf-Astoria and would be given their lockered honeymoon bag and their regular room, number 832, even before Judd could get there and register. The first time the concierge told him, “Mrs. Gray is waiting for you upstairs,” Judd felt a jolt of panic that his wife or mother had found out about his infidelity. But “Mrs. Gray” was gloriously naked on the hotel bed, like a glamorous concubine in a Turkish harem, and all thoughts of his wife or mother flew.
