A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen Page B

didn’t call to him, but ascended the staircase and saw Albert was kneeling next to their clawfoot bathtub and gently lowering a steaming, three-gallon copper kettle of beer wort into a foot of ice water. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. A hank of sandy brown hair fell over his forehead. She asked, “What are you brewing now?”
    Albert glanced up at her. “I lucked onto some Saaz noble hops. I’m making a fine Pilsener lager.” He dipped a thermometer into the wort and watched the temperature gradually change. “Was the moving-picture show good?”
    “Lots of action. Douglas Fairbanks in
The Three Musketeers”
    “Was the plot impossible to follow?”
    It was his standard complaint. “Not really.”
    “And how’s your nutty cousin?”
    “Ethel’s fine.”
    “I have to get this down to forty-five degrees,” Albert said.
    She went into Lorraine’s room, kissed the sleeping girl’s cheek, and she woke. “Mommy?”
    Ruth petted Lora’s straw-blonde hair and softly whispered, “Hey there, lovergirl. I’m home. Sweet dreams.”
    On Saturday afternoon, Judd found a table for five clients at the gala that followed the Très Parisien fashion show, but he was too woozy with shock and guilt to stay. Each greeting and jibe seemed to carry an undercurrent of irony, as if his friends and associates detected his adultery, his coveting of another’s wife, and were grandly pretending to forgive him. At last he felt he needed his family more than sales commissions, and he offered a hurried goodbye in order to catch a train for New Jersey and his Craftsman bungalow in East Orange.
    His house was havoc’s opposite and contained very little of him. The
Vanity Fair
and
Success
magazines he’d left scattered on the cocktail table had been overcome by
Radio Digest
in his absence. The Tiffany floor lamp he’d shifted for his reading was now reestablished to its seemingly fixed position. His high school mandolin was probably in its scarred case in the closet; the lid on the Priest upright piano was locked. And installed on the yielding, purple mohair sofa was his mother-in-law, Rebecca Kallenbach, whom he called Mrs. K. She’d divorced her husband, Ferdinand, a lithographer, just before Judd married Isabel, and she increasingly seemed to find her ex’s vices in her son-in-law. But now she wasinvolved in crocheting a chair cushion as she listened to “Every Morn I Bring Thee Violets” on the phonograph, and she failed to notice his entrance.
    But little Jane was at the dining room table in a yellow sundress, furiously coloring an apple orchard on butcher paper with the box of Crayolas he’d bought her in Easton. He softly laid a hand on her chocolate-brown hair as he said, “Hello, sweetie.”
    She failed to look up. “Hi, Daddy.”
    “Whose farm is that?”
    “It’s imaginary.”
    “Who’s that stick man standing way off in the distance?”
    Jane frankly said, “You,” and his fathering heart felt stabbed.
    “I
have
been gone a lot, haven’t I?”
    Unprompted, Mrs. Kallenbach snidely offered, “Oh, we manage to get by without you.” She pulled red yarn taut with her hooked needle.
    Isabel walked out of their spic-and-span kitchen, drying her hands on her apron. She forgot to smile as she said, “Hi, Bud. You’re home early.”
    “I had enough.”
    She kissed him and wrinkled her nose at the hint of railway whisky. “Smells like you had plenty.”
    “And so it begins,” he said.
    Judd Gray was sixteen and in the rigorous college preparatory course at William Barringer High School in Newark, intent on attending Cornell medical school. He was president of his high school fraternity, chairman of the Dance Committee, a Newark high schools sports reporter, manager of the basketball team, and in spite of his scrawniness, the quarterback on the football team. Yet he was high-strung and giddy around girls; he thought they could read his dirty mind. And then he met a considerate, pious,