Read A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion for Free Online Page A

four other teams joined the National Football League. Rochester’s Walter Hagen was the world’s finest professional golfer and winner of the 1925 PGA Championship. Because of a lingering illness caused by tainted bootleg liquor, Babe Ruth was having his worst season as a Yankee, and the team would finish next to last in the American League despite having a rookie named Lou Gehrig at first base.
    George Bernard Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Grand Ole Opry premiered in Nashville. The fiction bestsellers included
The Constant Nymph
by Margaret Kennedy and
Arrowsmith
by Sinclair Lewis.
The Great Gatsby
was a financial disappointment. The hit movies were
Ben-Hur,
starring Ramón Novarro, and
The Phantom of the Opera,
starring Lon Chaney. Al Jolson was onstage in
Big Boy,
George Gershwin’s
Lady, Be Good
was still running, and Louise Brooks was still just a half-naked chorus girl in
George White’s Scandals
at the Apollo Theatre, where the seats went as steep as $4.40.
    Judd Gray treated six clients from Albany to
Scandals
’s twenty-seven scenes of hoofer solos; juvenile skits; songs by the Williams Sisters, Richard Talbot, Helen Hudson, and Winnie Lightner; and seemingly hundreds of George White Girls high-stepping in otherworldly costumes by the Russian fashion designer Erté. The Elm City Four sang “Lovers of Art” as the spotlights played over stiffly posed girls in flesh-colored bathing suits that made them seem nude statues. And in a gala ending, the girls of the chorus wore only, as one scandalized reviewer put it, clothing “from the neck up and shoes down.”
    Even Albany’s lingerie buyers were shocked, while Judd himself was mostly offended that each glass of White Rock seltzer his party ordered as set-ups cost him a full dollar, and regular tapwater cost him two. But when he got home to East Orange, there was a nightlong fray with Isabel over Judd’s entertaining clients at such a risqué revue, and in a fury over his wife’s condemnations, he stormed from the house for an earlier, July departure to eastern Pennsylvania.
    Half a week later, after a hectic round of the ladies clothing stores, he’d toured the Crayola factory in Easton and purchased a box of school crayons for little Jane, then poked around the city farmer’s market, marveling at how the weathered growers silently stood behind their cases of fruits and vegetables with no effort to sell them. No exaggerations, no conniving or entertaining, no sentimental manipulation, just frank presentation of goods. And immediately he felt overwhelmed by his own unimportance.
    Judd returned to the Huntington Hotel and the front desk clerk handed him a letter. At first he thought it would be from his wife, a continuation of the quarrels and humiliations of the night before he left. But it was a penned letter from Queens Village that had been forwarded from his office.
Dear Mr. Gray:
We met at Henry’s Resturant with my hairdresser friend and Mr. Harry Folsom a few weeks ago. I would like to buy as a gift your Grecian-Treco Classic Corset for my mother Mrs. Josephine Brown. I have used a measuring tape and she is 38” up top, 30” at the waste, and 40” around the hips. (Excuse my frankness, but your used to such female intimacies I guess.) Would you be so kind as to send it please to: 9327 222nd Avenue, Queens Village, New York? I have inclosed a blank cheque which amount you can fill out for the undergarment plus shipping and handle-ing.
I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.
Ruth Snyder
“also known as” Mrs. A. E. Snyder
    Even the childish misspellings delighted him. Judd filled out an order form that he sent to his secretary, then tore up the check. And he found himself dwelling on
I so enjoyed meeting you and hope to do so again.
    Albert Snyder rented a gray saltbox cottage and a sleek, two-masted yawl for their July vacation on Shelter Island. Another editor at
Motor Boating
magazine found him a sailboat berth at the