But Judd was thinking, My God. That’s me.
FIVE
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
In June 1926, Albert Snyder rented a gray vacation cottage on Shore Road just off Setauket Harbor on Long Island Sound. Around that time, Judd Gray matched him by renting a waterfront house on the Atlantic Ocean that was less than an hour’s drive southeast at Shinnecock Bay. Each husband took the train to the hot streets of Manhattan on Monday mornings, stayed alone at home for three nights, then journeyed back to his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law on Thursday evenings for salt air and sunshine on three-day weekends.
Each morning as Judd went into the city, and each evening when he went out to the cedar-shingled waterfront house, he realized there was a good chance The Governor would be a passenger with him for at least half the jostling ride, and Judd would find himself strolling through each of the railroad cars like a conductor, scanning the faces for some glimpse of Ruth’s offensive husband. But there were so many gruff, haggard, and indignant men in nearly identical suits and hats that it was impossible to interpret who could have been the tweed-jacketed Albert in that prewar photograph Judd had seen. Had he encountered him, Judd thought he would say, You are hateful and unjust or She deserves so much better. But in rehearsal each sentence embarrassed him with its melodrama, was like those gaudy, white-lettered snatches of dialogue in heart-wrenching motion pictures.
Selling for Bien Jolie in the city, Judd once found himself in front of 119 West 40th Street and recalled that the Hearst offices for Cosmopolitan and Motor Boating were there. Looking ridiculous, he knew, with his corset sample cases weighting down his hands, he took the elevator up and found the temerity to inquire of the Motor Boating receptionist if the art director was there. She glanced to the far end of the room, where a muscular, wide-shouldered man was hunched over a slanted drafting table, his Oxford-shirted back to the office entrance and his left hand raking his sandy hair as his right sketched the dummy of a page layout. “Looks like he is,” the girl said, and she turned back to the salesman, saying, “Shall I—?” But she halted midsentence when she saw that he was already hurrying out.
The Grays hosted a clambake on July 4th on Shinnecock Bay, but as their friends and Isabel retired for the night, Judd stayed out under the silver pepper of the stars, facing not seaward but northwest toward Port Jefferson and the Sound, imagining the glorious evening that would have been his had Ruth been there, an evening that now was forever lost.
Ruth seemed to pine for him, too, and each day sent his office at Benjamin & Johnes hasty notes or sepia postcards that were without inscriptions but featured shy, grinning beauties in clinging wet bathing suits that were intended to conjure pictures of her. And there was one she sent of a blond, brawny, Albert-like lifeguard, scanning the horizon, and on the back she’d written, What if he drowned?
And Judd found himself thinking, All our problems would be solved.
In July, Ruth’s friend and hairdresser Kitty Kaufman and her husband, Bill, lifted Ruth’s spirits by renting a saltbox just next door to the Snyders. Because of Bill, Albert was happily joined on his full-day fishing runs for cod, fluke, ling, and striped bass, and the wives, Lorraine, and Josephine swam and suntanned and read Woman’s Home Companion and Photoplay magazines in the shade. Ruth and Josephine spoke Swedish to heap comical abuse on the
bodies and beach attire they saw. And through Albert’s motorboating connections at the Setauket Marina, the Snyders also found new friends in Milton Fidgeon and his wife, Serena, whose permanent address was not far from theirs on Hollis Court in Queens Village. The Fidgeons were party-loving extroverts addicted to contract bridge and martinis, and each night they invited the Snyders and Kaufmans over so Serena could instruct them in the intricacies of the card game as Milton served enough gin and vermouth from his cocktail shaker that all but Ruth stumbled with intoxication.
In August, when Albert and Bill were hunting skimmer clams for bait, Ruth went to Port Jefferson to mail a letter that she’d written on a page she’d ripped out of Lorraine’s The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad. But she could say little more than We are having so much fun! I hope summer never ends! She forgot to say she loved or missed Judd, and she failed to consider that in his forlorn mooning he would infer hints of mockery in a children’s book page about Old Mr. Toad.
Rather than heading out to Shinnecock that August evening, Judd worriedly took the train to Port Jefferson and then a taxi to Shore Road, wandering up to strangers in his straw boater and seersucker suit and inquiring about the whereabouts of the Snyder family until a fisherman told him, “Heard there’s a go-to-hell dinner party at the Setauket Marina.”
Walking to it after ten, Judd saw a half-dozen automobiles heading away and stirring up dust from the parking lot, couples in evening gowns and tuxedos drunkenly singing as they exited a huge circus tent, and others getting onto their motor yachts to continue the party at sea.
Judd went inside the circus tent and found waiters collecting leftover food and dishware and rolling the round folding tables out to idling vans. But an orchestra was still playing and there was a gang of loud, hulking college-age men vying for the chance to get closer to Ruth. She’d shockingly cut her hair in the boyish fashion that was newly popular and she seemed to Judd to be flirting outrageously, heckling one lad for his shyness and twirling so wildly away from some kidding hands that her organdy gown slunk off her right shoulder and her full white breast was exposed. Ruth just laughed at the howls and cheers as she readjusted her gown, and Judd heard a woman insist, “Albert’s not here. You rescue her.”
Judd turned and recognized Kitty Kaufman being tugged from the dinner party by a man who was probably her husband. Judd hurried through a work crew onto the planks of the dance floor as a lovely girl in a shimmering gown tilted toward an orchestra microphone to credit Irving Berlin for the next song, and then she sang the introduction to “Always.”
Judd firmly caught hold of Ruth’s right shoulder and she spun with surprise that changed to glee as Judd asked, “May I have this dance, madam?”
She grinned and said, “Of course,” and she fell into the rhythm of his graceful waltz.
“Have you been drinking?” Judd asked.
“Just a little. Was I being noisy? Albert says I’m noisy when I drink. Because that’s one reason I don’t drink. Noisiness. And I get sick.”
“You’ve cut your hair,” he said.
“Vogue calls it ‘the Eton Crop.’ The Old Crab says it’s too mannish. Kitty and I were bored.”
“And you’re very brown.”
“You too.”
“Tennis, golf.” He scowled at the college boys scowling at them. Liking the pun, he said, “I haven’t ever seen you as boisterous as that.”
“Oh, they’re nothing to me. You know that, don’t you?”
“I frankly needed reassurance.”
Ruth listened to the singer and tipsily smiled. “Let’s make this our song. ‘Always.’ Okay?”
And then Judd sang in his baritone that he’d be loving Ruth forever, that his love would be true forever, and when the things she planned needed a helping hand, he would understand. Always.
She didn’t want to go back to Himself with it not yet midnight, so they strolled to West Meadow Beach, where they necked like kids and she tipped into Judd as they sat on fish-scented slabs of rock. She watched high tide flow over a sloping shelf below them and slide along it like a hand along an ebony table, wiping off silver dust. Judd drank from his flask and Ruth said, “I nearly became a widow this week.” Judd’s face was without reaction. She told him Albert had the Buick’s engine running in their Setauket garage as he adjusted the tappets and timing, and he felt himself weakening and getting faint, when he saw that the garage doors he’d flung open had somehow shut. Reeling, he got into fresh air. “The jerk has nine lives,” she said.