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through the grand entrance, Judd noted for Ruth the Corinthian columns, and then the huge clock framed by a pink granite pair of sculpted females. “Day” was fully dressed in the flowing drapery of ancient Greece and was carrying a harvest of giant sunflowers, while “Night” was shaded by a shrouding cape she held over her head and she was naked from the waistup, the firm breasts inspiring some men there to become clock watchers.
    “That’s Audrey Munson,” Judd said. “She was the highest-paid model in New York. All the great sculptors used her. You can find her everywhere in the city. And she appeared in moving picture shows, fully nude.
Inspiration
was one. And
Purity.
She was breathtaking. But a doctor she knew crazily murdered his wife to have Audrey, and at first the police suspected her of conspiring with him. She was finally cleared, but the gossip was devastating. She changed her lodgings to Mexico, New York, near where I was born, in Cortland, and tried to take her own life by swallowing bichloride of mercury tablets.”
    Ruth was concentrating hard on what he’d just said. “She’s still alive?”
    “But no longer right in the head, I’m afraid.”
    “I feel so sorry for her.”
    Was that where he was steering with that story? Sympathy? Judd wondered if he just wanted to use the word “nude” in Ruth’s presence.
    “She
is
beautiful,” Ruth said.
    “Like you,” Judd said.
    In a gesture that was both friendly and condescending, Ruth patted his cheek. “I have to go,” she said, and was off to a one o’clock train heading across the East River to Queens and Jamaica Station.
    Writing later of their first meeting in his penciled memoir,
Doomed Ship,
Judd claimed Mrs. Snyder was vague in his reveries then, that he remembered only
the charming good nature, the winsome personality, and the soft gray fur slipping so gracefully from one shoulder. I realized that a frank, sincere character lurked behind thatradiant and healthy loveliness.
But there was no anticipation of ever seeing Ruth again.
    That June afternoon, H. Judd Gray filled out an inventory sheet and a hefty expense report for his last sales trip, skimmed through a stack of mail, stood in front of the office’s floor fan to scan the factory information on the new pink Bien Jolie corselettes that would be introduced in August, and, feeling chipper, jokingly chatted with founders Alfred Benjamin and Charles Johnes just to show his face. And then he took a southbound train for the short haul to East Orange, New Jersey, and his brick Craftsman bungalow at 37 Wayne Avenue, and to the emotional starvation of his sane, successful, monotonous life.
    Scott Fitzgerald would name the twenties “the Jazz Age” and note that it “raced along under its own power served by great filling stations full of money.” Wealth began to seem available to anyone then. Chrysler was founded. Scotch Tape was invented. The first-ever motel opened. RCA’s shares were soaring in price and the stock market itself was high-flying due to an optimistic and gambling middle class that had formerly bought only Liberty Bonds.
    The five boroughs of New York City constituted the largest city in the world, and the fifty-seven-story Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway was the earth’s tallest skyscraper. There were thirty-two thousand speakeasies, and hard liquor could be found for sale even in dry cleaners and barbershops.
    Calvin Coolidge was president, a man so dour, orderly, and parsimonious that he was joked about as “the nation’s shopkeeper.” Whereas in the fall of 1925, New York City would elect as its mayor the flamboyant, debonair Jimmy Walker, who flouted the laws and flaunted the high life in a way that overworked laborers fancied they could one day.
    Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Americans hockey team, was under construction on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets on the former site of the city’s trolley barns. The New York Giants and