“Oh yes. She manages to be clothed at all times. She even wears these hideous, mannish pajamas that she must find in some sort of neuter shop. She’s afraid a glimpse of her flesh will get me, as she puts it, ‘riled up.’”
She waggled him. “So that’s what he was earlier? Riled up?”
“But you soothed the savage beast,” Judd said.
Ruth rolled over onto him and softly laid her head on his hairless, alabaster chest. “Tell me about Isabel so I won’t be like her.”
“I frankly don’t know a lot. And I have been connected to Isabel in one way or another for sixteen years. Yet I can’t honestly say what Isabel’s ambitions are, or her hopes, her fears, her ideals. We seldom talk about heady things. We’re raising Jane, we go to the occasional party, play contract bridge with our friends, dance. Always ostensibly together. Married. But not.”
A finger abstractly doodled on his skin as she said, “Albert is stingy and I’m generous. He has a horrible temper. He criticizes and accuses. He hates movies or dancing. And he has a slew of hobbies so he’s always puttering in the basement or garage when he’s home, or haunting the attic with his books, like some old fogy.” She gazed up at Judd’s face. “I despise him.”
“Don’t say that!”
She seemed bewildered. “But why not if it’s true?”
“Say you’re ill matched, Ruth. Say you disagree and your marriage is stagnant. But hating eats away at you.”
She stared hard, as if he’d oddly launched into Russian and consigned his opinions to strange irrelevance. And then she slid into another emotion and girlishly asked, “Oh please, can we come here again, Bud?”
He smiled. “Anytime.”
“And Henry’s. That will be our place, too.”
I faced Isabel with dread. I wanted to tell her, throw myself on her mercy, ask her aid before it was too late. I had not the courage. I kept insisting to myself: “This cannot go on. It would mean a breach in my family, disgrace, unhappiness for us all.” I told myself Ruth did not really love me, could not. Our affair would have to end.
But it did not. She called their meetings “trysts,” Judd thought of them as “sinning,” and weekly stays in the Waldorf-Astoria became so regular that Judd purchased a red leather suitcase to have available for Mr. and Mrs. Gray in the hotel’s storage room. Ruth filled it with essentials they bought together: a gentleman’s silk pajamas and bathrobe and a matching set for her, white satin slippers, hairbrushes, a hair-curling iron, a blue eye pencil, a pearl-handled nail file, five shades of nail enamel, three toothbrushes, bicarbonate of soda, a box of needles and thread, three shades of Helena Rubinstein lipsticks, Richard Hudnut rouge, perfumed soaps from Erasmic of London, Kotex sanitary napkins, a box of Midas tablets, Amolin deodorant powder, a box containing Day Dream powder and Day Dream cream, Mavis talcum powder, a powder puff, a Gillette safety razor and a tube of Colgate’s Rapid Shaving Cream, and the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, with the inscription As if you didn’t know! Your Bud. But also included in what Judd referred to as their “honeymoon bag” were items that would heighten the scandal of their relationship when newspapers published the inventory: Trojan condoms, K-Y Lubricating Jelly, vaginal suppositories, and a green rubber douche. Each item could be found in many American households but was invariably concealed, and to find them all listed so graphically on a front page made the couple, not the press, seem outrageous.
Elaborate efforts were in fact made by Ruth and Judd to hide what they were doing. To protect their frequent, even compulsive, correspondence, Ruth arranged for Judd to send mail to her care of Spindler’s drugstore in Queens, and she instructed her regular postman, George Marks, to hand-deliver solely to her both their telephone bills and letters to “Mrs. Jane Gray.”
Judd sought to disguise his identity by altering his handwriting from the Palmer Method, which was gaining currency in business practice, to the loopier Zaner-Bloser style he’d learned as a boy. He had supplied Ruth with his fall sales travel schedule and the address of each hotel on his eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York routes. Often when he checked in at a front desk there was already a handful of letters waiting for him. “Looks like someone’s in love,” a girl once said.
And he needlessly lied, “We’re just good friends.”
But he would write: It is but this morning that I knelt by my hotel bed and swore my allegiance to my wife while promising I would never contact you again. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer for the sake of its closing plea of not being led into temptation, I felt in mastery of our situation. But having got so near you through your last perfumed letter, I feel drawn into a vortex of emotions that upsets all rationality, all quests for honor and moral integrity. Let others name it shameful and scandalous, but a love as glorious as ours cannot be wrong.
You have become as essential as breath to me.
Ruth was generally in a chirrupy mood in her letters, filling them not just with passion and endearments but with short reviews of the movies she’d seen and flighty particulars of her days rendered in the latest slang or in parodies of immigrant accents. But in one letter she was more practical, objecting that Albert carried only a one-thousand-dollar policy on his life. Was that enough?
Judd wrote, “Life insurance is a good investment for a family man.” And with the dullness of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Judd detailed the estate Isabel would inherit if “something perchance happened to me.” She’d be the beneficiary of around six thousand dollars in stocks and bonds, whatever real estate equity there was in 37 Wayne Avenue, and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar policy from the Union Life Insurance Company of Cincinnati. She and Jane would be well set. Ruth should demand the same.
Consequently, in the second week of November 1925, Ruth invited to the Snyder home Mr. Leroy Ashfield, a salesman employed by the Prudential Life Insurance Company. He was a fat, round-faced man in his twenties. His trousers were too short for him and hinted at the union suit he wore underneath. His cheeks were redly patched with the sudden cold.
Albert was sitting on a stool at his easel in the northern sunroom, drinking Pilsener from his stein and executing a rather good oil painting of salmon-pink skies and a spew of zinc-white wave rising high into mist as it crashed onto a shoreline ridge that was mostly raw sienna. Ruth held a hand over her nose because of the turpentine smell and introduced the salesman to him. Albert dabbed his sable brush into linseed oil and mixed three colors on his palette as he ignored Ashfield’s offer of a handshake and said, “But you are interrupting me.”
“He hates that,” Ruth said. She crossed her eyes and Ashfield snorted a laugh as he sneakily glanced at the fullness of her chest.
Albert let his hands fall in his lap and glared frostily at the salesman. “What?”
Speeding up his sales pitch, Ashfield nervously said, “You have a thousand-dollar policy on your life that’s up for renewal, and yet you make over five thousand dollars a year.”
Albert shifted his glare to Ruth. “She told you that?”
Ashfield continued, “Were you to die, and I hope you never do, your family would be penniless in a few months.” Reaching into his valise, he said, “I have some graphs here from the company—”
Albert sighed. “What are you proposing?”
“We recommend at a minimum a twenty-five-thousand-dollar policy. Five times your yearly income. Even better would be fifty thousand.”