A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (10 page)

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.”

“Yes. Even better for you.” Albert resumed painting. “And next thing you’ll tell me I need earthquake insurance and lightning insurance and hail insurance.”

“We could just concentrate on the one.”

“But then I’d be gambling against myself, wouldn’t I? I’d be betting I’m going to die soon, and you’d be betting I’m going to live.”

Ashfield had heard that frequently and was about to give the company line when Ruth placatingly offered, “With old Winslow Homer here so busy, could you just leave the forms for us to fill out?”

Ashfield seemed deflated. “But you won’t know what the premiums would be. I haven’t the basis—”

Albert clacked his paintbrush against his palette and sighed again. “What
is
it you require, chum?”

Ashfield hurried to sit on the plump arm of the sunroom’s easy chair, got a pencil from his jacket, and placed a fresh insurance form on his knee. “Your full name?”

“Albert Edward Snyder,” he said.

“Spelled the easy way,” said Ruth. “Like ‘snide.’”

Ashfield printed as quickly as he could. “And your birth date?”

Albert said, “Exactly three hundred ninety years after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.”

Ruth said with scorn, “Oh, you are so stuck-up!”

“And you are stupid,” Albert said. “Evidently, so is he.”

Ashfield said, “No, I’m getting it.” Ruth could see concentration in his forehead and his lips humming through the children’s nursery rhyme until he said with achievement, “October twelfth! Eighteen eighty-two!”

Ruth helped out by saying, “He just turned forty-three.”

Ashfield wrote down the birthday.

“Congratulations on your arithmetic,” Albert said. “And now I’m finished with you for the evening.” And he was squinting at his painting as he said, “Would you leave me a form to renew the thousand-dollar policy in case I decide to do just that?”

Ruth took the insurance forms and gave the Prudential salesman one of those
It’ll be okay, honey
looks.

She found her husband in the sunroom the next morning, fully dressed and ready to leave for the
Motor Boating
office but examining the problems and successes in his seascape as he finished a cup of coffee. She called upstairs, “Lora! Breakfast!” and then she said, “I agree.”

Albert grinned. “You could stop right there.”

“No, I gave it some thought last night and you’re so healthy we’d just be throwing premium money away on some gargantuan policy. Let’s just renew the cheapest one.”

“Exactly what I wanted to do.”

“Will you sign?” She put the Prudential one-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the front lid of the Aeolian player piano and handed him a fountain pen. Albert bent over to precisely execute his fine signature and was about to give the fountain pen back to Ruth when she lifted the form to another signature block. “You have to sign a duplicate copy for the agent’s files.”

Albert shook his head. “Duplicates. Triplicates.” But he signed.

“Thanks, sweetie,” she said, and kissed his cheek. She said, “Your painting’s the berries.”

“Which means?”

“It’s slang. Like ‘the bee’s knees.’ Like ‘nifty.’”

Albert studied his seascape and said, “I agree.”

She found Ashfield in his Queens office that afternoon and said, “We’re going to renew that thousand-dollar policy we have.” She handed it to him and he found Albert’s signature there. “And my husband has decided on the fifty-thousand-dollar policy, too.” She gave him the form the salesman had started in their house and he saw Albert’s fountain pen signature on it.

“Well, great!”

“We were confused about the double-indemnity part.”

Ashfield rocked back in his oak chair, glorying in the superiority of an instructor. “An indemnity is just a fancy way of saying ‘compensation for a loss.’ Since the vast majority of people pass away through natural causes rather than accidents, it’s a good deal for the insurance company to entice buyers by making a policy seem like it’s worth twice as much. Is what I’m saying over your head?”

She smiled indulgently but said nothing.

With self-importance, Ashfield got out a slide rule for some calculations and then groaned. “We got a problem with the disability clause. Because of your husband’s income, my company cannot pay more than five hundred dollars a month, and the fifty-thousand-dollar policy works out to pay five hundred twenty.”

She moped. “Oh.”

“But if you’ll indulge me,” Ashfield said, “we could fill out a policy for forty-five thousand that would include the clauses for disability and double indemnity, and another policy for five thousand, without those clauses, and everything’s hunky-dory.”

Mrs. Snyder seemed to him either confused or conflicted. “Would I need to get Albert’s signature again?”

“We have established that he wants fifty thousand dollars in coverage, have we not?”

She nodded.

“With your permission, then, I’ll just trace his signature on this
five-thousand-dollar policy and we’ll change the one for fifty to forty-five.”

Ruth smiled. “You’re a very handsome man, do you know that?”

He was not, but he blushed and got busy with his forms.

She said, “My husband worries about money and hates handling our bills. Would it be possible for you to personally contact me about the premiums?”

Ashfield leered as he said, “It would be my pleasure.” Within ten minutes the forms were finished, and with his commissions Ashfield was five hundred dollars richer. She collected the policies and immediately walked to the Queens-Bellaire Bank, where she locked them in a safe-deposit box that she registered under her maiden name of Ruth M. Brown.

The first accident occurred that weekend.

Lorraine Snyder celebrated her eighth birthday on Sunday, November 15th. After the noon meal, Josephine and Ruth were in the kitchen, lighting eight candles on the birthday cake, when they heard Albert yell in the dining room, “Don’t eat with your elbows on the table, Lora! This is not a cafeteria!”

She was still crying when her mother walked out with the cake. Ruth said, “I’ll take you to lunch in the city tomorrow, Lora. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She nodded. Ruth gifted her with an “I Say Ma-Ma” doll, a nainsook “princess” slip, and tap-dancing shoes; she got a dollar bill and A. A. Milne’s
Winnie-the-Pooh
from Mrs. Brown; and Albert, who still grieved that she was not a boy, gave Lora a jackknife and an Erector Set. Even as her father excitedly got down on all fours in the living room to help her bolt together the struts for an imaginary railway trestle, Lora lost interest and sat cross-legged on the floor in
order to chatter with the doll about the state of its pretty rompers and bonnet. Albert knelt upright and frowned at his child, then at Ruth. “Well, that went over like a lead balloon,” he said.

“Don’t blame me. It wasn’t my idea.”

Hurt, Albert went outside to the garage to tinker with his Buick.

Half an hour later, Ruth got into old gutta-percha overboots and her favorite leopard-skin coat, then filled a milk glass with Canadian whisky that she carried out through the first fall of snow. She was surprised at how warm it was inside the garage and saw that Albert had installed a natural-gas space heater and a stovepipe that vented through a chiseled-out windowpane. The Buick Eight was jacked up and the left front wheel was off, and Albert was lying on a trolley underneath the car so she could see only his grease-stained khaki trousers and his high-button shoes.

She tapped his left foot with her right as she said, “Al?”

“What?”

“I have some whisky for you with it so cold.”

The skate wheels on the trolley screeched on the concrete as he rolled himself out and frowned at the generosity she held in both hands. Sitting up, he took the whisky from his wife, swallowed an inch of it, and coughed. “Thank you.”

“What are you doing?”

Albert allotted that smile that was not a smile, that was like the blade of a fishing knife. “I could tell you in detail, Root, but you still wouldn’t understand.”

“I was just making conversation.”

Albert looked at the snow that the garage heat was easing down her gutta-percha overboots and the new water trickling onto the concrete. “You’re making a mess of my floor. You should stamp your feet before coming in.”

“I’ll stamp them going out,” she said, and did so.

Albert shook his head in annoyance, then seated the milk glass of whisky on a hubcap, reclined on his trolley, and skidded underneath the Buick again. He fixed the beam of his Eveready flashlight on the master cylinder and slowly followed the hydraulic oil tubing across to the left wheel’s drum brakes. He thought he saw the problem and delicately skimmed a fingertip back along the brake line until he felt a fracture in the copper and also felt a cold draft, as if his wife hadn’t fully shut the door. And then for some reason the car jack whanged to the floor and the Buick crashed down, slanting forward onto the left wheel drum so that his feet and ankles were free outside the car, but his shins were hurt and his chest was being squashed underneath the Buick’s full weight.