AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ruth’s thirty-first birthday, on March 27th, 1926, fell on a Saturday and she’d made arrangements with her stodgy husband to celebrate it with an all-too-uncommon party at their house, to which, of course, Judd could not be invited. So she met him at Henry’s Restaurant on that Friday. But Lorraine’s school was out, and Josephine Brown was nursing someone in Brooklyn, so the little girl accompanied her mother. Judd had already registered for a room at the Waldorf but hid his disappointment with friendly affection and jokes. Lorraine ate a grilled cheese sandwich. The lovers ordered lobster Newburg on points of toast and Judd gave Ruth a birthday gift of Parfum Madame by the house of D’Orsay. And then, on the walk to Penn Station, Ruth sweetly asked, “Baby, could you stay in the Waldorf lobby while Mr. Gray and I go upstairs?”
Judd was shocked, as was the jury later, but up to their room he went, with Ruth waving gaily to her daughter as the elevator doors closed. Lorraine slumped in an overlarge chair under the lobby’s golden chandeliers, watching the hands on the huge bronze clock until it was one fifteen and the Westminster chimes rang. She’d have been frightened or bored but it was afternoon and the guests around her seemed so jubilant. A bellhop bent down to say, “Hi, little girl. You like that clock?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It was created for the Chicago World’s Fair.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t kick your shoes against the chair,” he said.
She got up and wandered down the glamorous, mirrored hallway called Peacock Alley that connected the old Waldorf mansion to the Astoria. Lorraine took after her mother in the joy of liberty and movement. She twirled underneath the grand chandelier in the Empire Room, where the Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra was rehearsing for its Saturday-night radio program. She touched all the floral greens in a Palm Garden that was being arranged for a dinner, and she stepped into the gray cloud of cigarette smoke in the North Café, where it seemed a hundred loud businessmen stood at the four-sided bar and a waiter finally shooed her away.
Upstairs in the overheated room, Judd fell back against the headboard, still naked and wheezing with exhaustion. “Oh, Momsie!” he said. “That was wonderful!”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “You were.” She grazed her large breasts against his stomach as she tenderly tugged his condom off him and tossed it into a tin trash can. And then she groused, “It’s so hot!” She got up to lift the sash on a double-hung window.
Judd watched. “What a gorgeous derrière you’ve got. It’s like an upside-down heart on a valentine.” He put his thumbs and forefingers together to imitate the shape and held them out to spy her buttocks within them. “So sexy. So perfect.”
Cold air gave her gooseflesh and she crawled onto him, resting her chin on his chest. She watched as he reached for his cigarettes, lit a Sweet Caporal, then coughed as he exhaled it. She said, “I’m fascinated by whatever you do. Each action, each word you use. Like ‘derrière.’ It’s all so different and odd—in a good way.”
“Oh, I’m a wowser of an entertainer. That’s how I make my sales.”
She laid her head to the side and skimmed her fingertip along a bulging vein in his wrist. “I have these wild dreams. We find a little bamboo hut in Tahiti, right on the South Pacific. White sand and soft breezes. We’re like this. Without clothes. Like Adam and Eve. And we find our food hanging on trees.” She got up to her forearms. “And I have this other one. Wisconsin. I haven’t ever been there, but I imagine this pretty little farm. We raise peaches and grapes and apples and take them to market in these great big baskets. Would it be a dairy farm, too? We’d have cows you and Lora could milk and there’d be white and blue pans in the kitchen and willow trees overhanging this sweet little brook. We’d have chickens and eggs and homemade bread …”
“Wisconsin seems rather grueling.”
“Don’t you see, Bud? We could be happy there, or Burma, or Timbuktu.” She got distracted as she twisted his forelock with a finger. She tucked a tuft of hair behind his ear.
“Are you grooming me?”
She petted his head. “We just need to be together. With Albert gone so he won’t get in the way. Really, Judd, whatever you do, wherever you want to go, I’ll go with you.”
Judd smiled. “Have you read The Book of Ruth?”
She felt accused. “I don’t think so.”
Judd slid open the drawer in the side table to seek a Gideon Bible. “It’s in the Old Testament.”
“Then definitely not.”
Riffling through the pages, he said, “It’s right after The Book of Judges.” He turned a few more. “Here. Chapter one, verses sixteen and seventeen. ‘And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.’”
“Oh, that’s so beautiful,” she said, as if it wasn’t. She angrily got up from him and curtsied to get her clothing from the floor. “Lorraine will be waiting for us.”
“Is there something wrong?”
She skewered him with a fierce glare as she said, “Intreat me not.”
“I have no idea what I’ve done, Ruth.”
She was seething as she got into her underwear. “You d
on’t take me seriously, that’s what. ‘Where thou diest, will I die’? Well, I am dying, Loverboy. And you’re watching it happen. Because you’re lazy and weak and it’s easier that way. All you can think of is how oh-so-pleased you are to get your piece of ‘upside-down heart’ on a regular basis.”
Judd stabbed out his cigarette and stood to get his own clothing on. “But, really, what am I supposed to do?”
She raged, “Albert! Gone! Get it?”
