Read Online A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen - Free Book Online

slender, solemn, not-pretty brunette named Isabel Kallenbach, ofVan Siclen Avenue in New York City. She had a too-prominent nose and a jutting chin and he initially dated her out of chivalry and pity. His first and only sweetheart, Isabel married him in November 1915, when he was twenty-three and she twenty-four. Because of pneumonia, Judd had been forced to quit high school in his senior year, and when he was healthy again he took a job in his father’s jewelry factory, and then became a jewelry salesman, serving as a volunteer for the Red Cross during the Great War though he’d wanted to join the Army. His grandfather was an investor in the Empire Corset Company and offered Judd the greater freedom of a job with that firm, and later, in 1921, Judd shifted over to Benjamin & Johnes. And Isabel became a devoted but dowdy housewife, finicky in her cooking and cleaning, priggish, overweight, acting ever more disgraced by his job in lingerie sales, and in reaction given to wearing frowzy dresses and farmerish shoes.
    “We’re having meat loaf and fresh sliced tomatoes,” Isabel said from the kitchen, verging on disgust as she added, “And you’re having your Scotch first, I suppose.”
    Judd fetched his bottle of Johnnie Walker from the dining room sideboard. “Wouldn’t do without it.”
    Mrs. Kallenbach would later state for journalists that she was “very close” to her son-in-law and hardly ever saw him drink, but she watched Judd flee into the back yard with his liquor and stridently called, “You have broken the law, buying that!”
    “I’ll have to get rid of the evidence then!” he yelled back.
    Judd sat in the Adirondack chair with the Johnnie Walker and a glass in the high bluegrass of the yard he’d need to mow. He brooded as he remembered how as a boy in his teens he used to go outside in Newark and sit on a wicker settee between his father and mother, holding their hands, watching the poetry of a sunset. And now no one in the East Orange house seemed inclined to sit withhim in the twilight that his mother called “the gloaming,” and he felt hurt and wronged and liable to do anything.
    Writing of that Saturday evening later, he stated he was
surging with remorse, self-condemnatory, lashing myself with feverish contempt one minute, then remembering Ruth’s tenderness, her loveliness, the next. My thoughts would go back and back again to her. Then regrets and that inner turmoil of a conscience that was burning hot with shame.
    Judd maniacally used his reel mower on the lawn at sunrise, washed his purple Hupmobile with its sporty black roof and black fenders, then took a bath and drove the family to Trinity Presbyterian Church in South Orange. Jane went to Sunday school, Isabel and her mother found their usual pew, and Judd took his familiar place in the choir to sing “When Morning Gilds the Skies,” “O Gladsome Light,” and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” And, as if word was out about him, he heard a sermon from Reverend Victor Likens on a passage from the Gospel of Mark: “And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that defileth him. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.”
    Scorching himself for his hypocrisy, Judd made a secret oath that he would never have sexual congress with Mrs. Snyder again, and right after that he visited his mother, Mrs. Margaret Gray, in West Orange, alone.
    She was a frail, dignified, courtly woman whom he adored almost to the edge of weirdness. Welcoming him as if he were long lost, she hugged him close and rocked with him, saying, “Oh, my Bud! My darling boy!” She then gave him a grilled cheesesandwich and Coca-Cola and hovered over him as she gladly watched him eat. She said Bud looked exhausted. She wondered if dresses could get any