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Lorraine said nothing but started.
Ruth went to Josephine’s door and softly whispered, “Are you there?”
She heard Judd hiss, “Yes, go away.” And she saw the dark boulder of him squatting in a corner, seemingly hugging his knees. She left him.
Lorraine’s pajamas were a girl’s version of a sailor’s uniform but she hadn’t finished buttoning the blouse before she drooped to her side with overdue sleep. Ruth jerked the blankets out from under Lorraine and tucked her in and kissed her forehead just as she would on any night. She gently shut the girl’s door behind her, locked Lorraine inside with a skeleton key, and went to Josephine’s doorway to say only, “I’ll be in shortly.”
Even in his acute drunkenness, Albert was cautious enough to inch his beloved automobile inside the garage until the windshield tapped the warning tennis ball that was hanging on string from a joist. Albert turned off the ignition and just sat there for a while as he generated the energy to get out. At last he forced himself to yank the handle and fell forward from the car, lurching into a garage wall before he righted himself and tottered toward the kitchen. Wanting a nightcap, he slammed open kitchen cabinets but found no alcohol and crashed his way upstairs.
Ruth was in their room, unclothed and, presuming there would be bloodshed, choosing a red nainsook nightgown from its satin hanger. She considered its beauty in the floor-length closet mirror and remembered that the embroidery style on its trim was called Lorraine, and she thought that would mean good luck in the night. Squirming into the nightgown, she felt oddly embarrassed that Judd was there, in the nearness and intimacy of their home. She heard her husband’s too-heavy, annoying footfalls and was giving her freshly bleached hair a brush when she saw Albert facing her in the floor-length mirror, irate and poisoned with alcohol, all language and intelligence gone, and seemingly with no notion that his lifetime now could be measured in minutes. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Albert said nothing and fell into the wall as he first yanked off his shoes and clothes, then jammed his arms into his pale blue flannel nightshirt. With his home so hot, Albert rammed up a window, its stiles screeching in the wooden casing, and Ruth watched with interest as he then crouched onto his mattress, scooched forward on his elbows and knees like a ridiculous old man, and floundered facedown as he sank into the blackout he called sleep.
Ruth went into the bathroom, brushed her teeth with Ipana, then went into Josephine’s room. Judd was still silently squatting there, seeming so Oriental. She stooped forward and kissed him. Her hand pressed the bed pillow as she asked, “Did you find everything?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been here long?”
He shrugged. “Hour. Don’t know.”
Whisky scented his speech. “Have you been drinking?”
“Plenty.”
“But you’re going through with it, aren’t you?”
“Don’t think I can.”
“Oh no,” she said. She stooped again and kissed him. “You can.” And once she’d felt his drunken pawing of her thigh, she disappeared from Josephine’s room.
Judd stood up as if ordered to and felt his sore knees and calves tingle with a fresh rush of blood. He unsnapped the lock on his briefcase, took off his owlish spectacles, and folded them neatly inside their case. He swallowed more whisky, then put on the green rubber chemist’s gloves and waited for Ruth, his head hanging like he was her victim, too.
She’d kept the curtains and Venetian blinds open as she got into the twin bed nearest the closet. She lay flat on her back as she watched her husband snore. The street’s arc light glared through the northern windows and seemed to cage them in stripes of shadow. Albert was facing her, which meant his left, hearing ear was muffled with the pillow and only his deaf, right ear was available for sound, but she could never recall which was the good ear, the right or the left, so she couldn’t be certain that he wasn’t listening whenever she shifted, whenever she and Judd talked.
She waited until a quarter to three, just staring at Albert, then felt safe enough to get up from bed and go to Judd. She was pleased to find him gloved, with the five-pound sash weight in his right hand. Judd was just staring at her. Sullen. She got the chloroform and navy blue handkerchief from his open briefcase as she said in a soft voice, “You know what’s funny? One of the guys at the party tonight said he would kill the Old Crab if he didn’t treat me better.”
“Me first,” Judd said.
She put on his gray buckskin gloves and winced at the chloroform’s sweet smell as she doused the handkerchief and some wads of cotton gauze, and then noticed Judd wrapping the sash weight in the front section of the Italian newspaper. She frowned. “Why are you doing that?”
“So it won’t hurt him so much.”
“You do realize you’re going to kill him?”
Judd meekly nodded.
Ruth took him by the hand, like a child. She guided him to the ajar bedroom door and then stood aside at the lintel as Judd entered.
Ruth’s husband was so immediately there, just a few feet inside the room, that Judd almost yelped in surprise. Suddenly, murder seemed an actual possibility and he assayed his target. Wide-shouldered. Muscular. Skewed hair receding from a high forehead. There was a chest of drawers, a dresser, a chiffonier. The headboards were not ornate; the linens were probably Sears, Roebuck. Hanging high up and between the twin beds was the oval picture frame with a sculpted mahogany bow and inside it the studio photograph of raven-haired Jessie Guischard as a girl. Seeing that, it was easier for Judd to sidle up and raise the sash weight high with both hands and chop down at the sleeping head with fierce hate.
But his trajectory was wrong and the sash weight glanced off the headboard, only injuring Albert, who jerked up and yelled with fury and flung an arm out as Judd struck down again, gashing the older man’s nose. Albert snatched at his assailant and hollered “Ruth!” and one hand caught Judd’s foulard necktie, choking him. To quell his yelling, Judd’s gloved left hand seized Albert’s throat so hard he left five finger gouges, and he flailed at Albert again, his weapon striking the pillow. And then he lost hold of the increasingly heavy sash weight and even as he was strangling the man, he was being strangled himself. Judd was so afraid he could lose the fight that he screamed out, “Momsie, for God’s sake, help me!”
Ruth was beside him then, and Albert was shocked and wide-eyed over his pretty wife’s betrayal as she squeezed the chloroformed handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Albert seemed to surrender to the anesthetic and then Ruth lifted up the fallen sash weight and hammered down hard—Judd would later say “she belabored him”—and there was a wild spray of blood that accompanied the gruesome sound of rain-sodden wood being struck. Albert lost consciousness.
Judd fell off him onto the floor.
“Is he dead?” Ruth asked.
