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“I felt so embarrassed about forgetting.”
He importantly tapped cigar ash into his chrome pedestal ashtray. “Well, you should be embarrassed, but not for that.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
There were mathematics in his smile. “Oh, whatever you like.”
After letting Ruth off on Wednesday evening, Judd headed to East Orange, feeling gloomier and more lost with each minute she was gone. And he was surprised when he saw parked in front of his house the Cadillac V-63 that belonged to his sister’s husband, Harold Logan. Worrying that Isabel or Mrs. Kallenbach had died, Judd rushed into the house but found nothing wrong. And he hated himself for feeling let down.
Although Harold Logan was the general manager of the jewelry firm Judd’s father founded, he still fancied himself a handyman, and Isabel had called him over to fix a double-hung window that was seizing when she tried to lift it. Harold was now just reassembling the window sash. Judd watched him hammer the trim and lifted a five-pound, foot-and-a-half-long bar of pig iron with a broken eyelet on one end.
“What’s this, Harold?”
Harold glanced to Judd’s hands. “Old sash weight. You got one hiding on each side, hanging on pulley rope. Helps raise it up once you get it started.” Harold banged a nail into the trim, indenting the wood with his hammerhead. “There you go. Looks like hell, but it’ll work.”
Judd got out his wallet. “How much do I owe you?”
“Oh, just for the hardware. Eighty cents oughta do it.”
“We’ll say a dollar,” Judd said, but in retrieving the bill, Ruth Snyder’s wedding snapshot fluttered to the floor.
And Isabel was there to lift it up. She studied the face. “Who’s the girl?”
Judd pretended surprise that it was even there, and said, “Oh, that’s Maisie. She’s a clerk at a shop in Binghamton. She just got married and gave that to me as a memento.”
Isabel accepted that lie with the languid disinterest she’d adopted for all his job-related explanations. And yet as she went to the food that was steaming in the kitchen, Judd found himself wondering how it would have been had he told Isabel the truth. Would he have felt freedom and relief? But then he was fairly certain of the outcome: a financially ruinous divorce, ill fame in his job, his faithful little mother devastated.
Judd saw his brother-in-law grimly interpreting the situation. But Harold loftily quoted Jesus: “‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.’”
Albert went out on his regular bowling night on Thursday, October 28th, and when he got home excited Ruth by saying Harry Folsom invited them to join the Halloween festivities at his New Canaan address the next night. But Albert decided they weren’t going.
“Why not?”
Walking past her into the kitchen, he said, “Have you any idea how far New Canaan is from here? Thirty-three miles. Wearing humiliating costumes. Seeing people I despise.”
“Well, can I go?”
Albert shot a cold look. “With whom?”
“Kitty?”
Albert poured some of his homemade Pilsener into a porcelain Zimmerman stein. “Kitty wasn’t invited. Harry’s wife rightly distrusts her.”
“We’re just staying home then?”
Albert leaned back against the kitchen counter and swallowed some beer. “Try it,” he said. “You might like it.”
“You are so frustrating!”
“Yes,” he said. “Well …” But he found a new interest in his stein and failed to continue his thought.
She and Judd still regularly met at Henry’s or the Waldorf-Astoria lounge, Ruth rehearsing The Governor’s latest infamy and Judd criticizing the vileness she was forced to endure. And she was increasingly concerned about her cousin Ethel’s ill health and Ethel’s continuing failure to find grounds for divorce from her Bronx policeman. “Eddie always had a thing for me. You know—I’d catch him catching a peek of the goods. So I told Ethel I’d get alone with him. Work him up for a telltale photograph.”
Judd fell back against a Waldorf sofa. “But that’s insane, Ruth! Ethel would gain an adultery charge against her husband, bu
t Albert would also have photographic evidence of the same charge against you. You could get divorced but lose Lorraine.”
She looked at him solemnly. “Are you telling me not to do it? Because if you insist, I won’t do it.”
