“Another one of your men?” Josephine asked.
Hinting broadly, Ruth said, “Mama, he sells lingerie.”
Josephine shrugged and said, “Fint.” Okay.
Worried about seeming impatient, Ruth slowed her walk as she went to the kitchen telephone.
Mrs. Kallenbach answered. Judd was reading The Saturday Evening Post and heard his mother-in-law say, “Hello,” and “Yes, he is.” And he was getting up from his purple mohair armchair when his mother-in-law called, “Bud? Your secretary?”
He hesitated with the intimation that it was Ruth. She’d never called him at home. Rarely did so at work. Judd took the earpiece from Mrs. K with a “Thank you” that he hoped would dismiss her, but she stayed in the kitchen, busying herself with tidying up in order to overhear. Tilting into the wall phone’s mouthpiece, he said, “Hello, Rachel. What’s up?”
Ruth asked, “Will you come to lunch at my house tomorrow?”
Judd framed his answer with Mrs. K in mind. “Who’s going to be there?”
“Just my mother and me. Oh please, won’t you?”
Watchful of his tone, he said, “I could.”
“Oh, I’m so excited! One o’clock. Was that Isabel who answered?”
“No. My mother-in-law.”
“Is she listening now?”
“Yes.”
“Because I wanted you to say how much you love me.”
Without inflection he said, “I do.”
“Shall I give you instructions on how to get here?”
“I’ll handle it. See you tomorrow.”
She softly whispered, “I’m so horny for you.”
Judd blushed as he hung up the earpiece. Mrs. K was scowling. “We have buyers in town now because of the spring line,” he said. “I have to see some clients for lunch.”
“She sounds pretty.” She knew Rachel was not.
“Oh, that wasn’t Rachel. She has someone filling in for her.”
“But you called her that.”
“She corrected me.” And then he sneered. “Women do that.”
On Monday, Josephine Brown lifted the lid on the basement washing machine, and Ruth plunged a broomstick into the hot water to heave out a heavy weight of towels that her mother fed into the electric wringer so that sheets of soapy water slid back into the drum for the next load. They did not speak. It was far too cold to hang things in the yard, so Ruth collected the wringings and hung them on the white rope clotheslines that Albert had strung from the ceiling joists. She’d already clothespinned on the lines his dress shirts and what Mrs. Brown called his “unmentionables.” Albert’s whites were always the first wash. Then Josephine’s and Lora’s colors. And new piping-hot water and Fels-Naptha soap for the household sheets and towels. Ruth took her own clothing to the Chinese dry cleaners on Springfield Boulevard or laundered them by hand in the upstairs bathroom sink and rinsed them with vinegar and boiling water from a kettle.
With the hamper things drying, she went upstairs and waxed the furniture, vacuumed, and put out Tiffany ashtrays for Judd’s cigarettes wherever he was likely to sit. She was as persnickety a housekeeper as Isabel was, she took pride in her cooking, she even put up preserves each summer, but she knew Judd had never seen her that way. She was just a flapper he partied with, his sex partner in the Waldorf. And he was born to be a husband.
She hadn’t yet learned how to drive, so although Albert’s Buick was still in his garage she phoned for a Yellow Cab that took her to Jamaica Avenue and waited as she bought a pound of lump crabmeat at the Fishmongery. She had the taxi idle in front of Paper & Pens while she hunted through the bootlegged wines in the storeroom and found a pricey bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Bordeaux. She then got cash from the secret “Ruth M. Brown” account at the Queens-Bellaire bank and hand-delivered to Leroy Ashfield the weekly payment for the Prudential insurance policies on Albert’s life.
At home, she pinched shell fragments from the crabmeat and mixed it with an egg white, flour, chives, cayenne pepper, and kosher salt, and formed it into eight patties that she chilled with the wine in the Frigidaire. She went up to the bedroom to change as Mrs. Brown set the dining room table.
Judd took the Long Island Rail Road from Pennsylvania Station to Jamaica and a taxi to a cream-yellow house with green trim on the corner of 222nd Street and 93rd Road. And he was just getting out when he saw Ruth dashing from the front door to him in just her shoes and navy blue housedress, though it was stingingly cold. She grinned as she called out, “Oh, I’m so happy!” She hugged him, saying she regretted she could do no more because of the neighbors. She linked a forearm inside his as they headed toward the white Colonial front door. She pointed to the one-car garage to the right. “We used to have a bigger side yard,” she said, “but Albert wanted a hospital for his automobile, so he built that one from a Sears, Roebuck kit. He likes to use his hands, and not just for hitting me.”
Was she joking? Judd was going to ask when the front door opened and a dour but friendly Mrs. Josephine Brown called in greeting, “Välkommen!” Welcome.