Jack and Susan in 1913

by Michael McDowell

“OH, MR. BEAUMONT,” exclaimed Susan, “a sparrow flew in your window, and I was chasing it out when the wind blew the door shut.”

  “Then this is my room, and not yours.”

  “Yes of course, I—”

  “I understand perfectly,” said Mr. Beaumont, and it was apparent to Susan that his understanding was perfect. He did not believe a word she’d said.

  Out in the hall, the phone rang.

  “Perhaps that’s the call you’re waiting for,” said Mr. Beaumont, and Susan scuttled out of the room as quickly and as unobtrusively as a thirty-pound cast and acute embarrassment would allow her.

  The door was slammed shut behind her.

  “Suss?” inquired the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Ida?”

  “Mr. Fane don’t like us to have calls.”

  “I’m sorry, but I had to thank you.”

  Ida made no reply to this. Susan understood that Ida was following Mr. Austin’s instructions not to acknowledge her part in delivering the money.

  “You were very kind to assist Mr. Austin,” Susan went on hesitantly, “but of course I could never accept his money.”

  “Did something heavy fall on your chapeau?” asked Ida after a moment.

  “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Sure,” Ida said.

  “What’s his address then?”

  “Whose?”

  “Mr. Austin’s. I want to find him.”

  “Have you tried an insane asylum?” Ida asked, in a tone which suggested that Susan might well be acquainted with such a place.

  Susan realized there was no help to be got from Ida on this point. “All right, Ida, I know you must have made your promises. And I thank you, but I don’t thank him. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Oh, perfectly,” Ida concurred. “Clear as mud.”

  “And thank you again. I know you meant well.”

  “Always do,” said Ida imperturbably. “Have to scat, Suss, they’re calling me.” Abruptly, she broke the connection.

  Susan returned to her room and, despite the fact that Mr. Austin’s note had said the account was closed, she penned a letter to the bank in Wall Street, and dispatched it by messenger—a dirty little boy who played hookey from school every day, and loitered about on West Sixtieth Street in hope of obtaining a dime and carfare for just such random errands as this. She got back an immediate reply, with the expected news that Mr. Austin no longer had an account there, and the disappointing addendum that there was no forwarding address.

  She momentarily considered putting the bills into an envelope addressed, “Mr. Jay Austin, General Delivery, Chicago, Illinois,” but then realized how foolhardy a move that would be. Instead, she simply wrote out a receipt:

  Received of Mr. Jay Austin, the sum of $500 (five hundred dollars), on February 10th, 1913, which sum is payable on demand, with added interest of three and one-half percent per annum.

  (Signed) Susan Bright

  Susan wasn’t quite sure that the form was regular, having had no experience whatever in taking out loans, but it seemed quite proper to her.

  The next morning, Susan hobbled downstairs with Tripod on a leash and walked around the corner to a branch office of the Bank of New York. She opened a savings account with four hundred and fifty dollars, hoping that she would never be forced to touch another penny of Jay Austin’s money and further, that someday she’d be able to replace the missing fifty dollars. On the way home she dropped the envelope containing the one-sided loan agreement into a postal box. Even if she didn’t consider it really hers, Susan felt better knowing that she had such a comfortable sum in an interest-bearing account.

  That evening, about seven o’clock, Hosmer Collamore stopped by Susan’s room to bring Tripod some scraps of meat he’d picked up at the butcher’s, and to tell Susan about Ida’s triumphs before the camera.

  “We’re doing this splendid drawing-room drama,” said Hosmer, “and Ida is a secretary who stays up all night in order to help her sister finish a ball gown. The next day at work she falls asleep at her desk after everyone else has gone home and when she wakes up she overhears a group of ruffians planning a bank robbery. She calls her boss, but before he can inform the police the ruffians capture him and so it’s up to Ida—and her boss’s rich and handsome son—to foil the bank robbery, only the boss’s son is shot trying to protect Ida from the gang’s bullets. She is then kidnapped and taken to a farmhouse in New Jersey, where her purity and innocence convinces the old man who’s guarding her to allow her to escape. She returns to New York and there’s a breathless rescue on the top of a building, and the boss’s son calls out for her in his delirium and his life won’t be saved unless he marries her, so he does.”

  “What happens to the ruffians?” asked Susan, who saw several holes in the story.

  “Oh, Ida throws them off the top of the building. It’s a two-reeler. In twenty-eight minutes you can tell a lot more story than you can in just fourteen.”

  “I guess you can,” said Susan uncertainly.

  “Cosmic is in the forefront,” said Hosmer proudly, “because we’re hardly doing one-reelers anymore. People want more for their nickels. They’re tired of pictures ending just minutes after they’ve begun. They want real life, and they want stars.”

  “Like Ida?”

  “Yes,” Hosmer agreed anxiously. “Ida will be the greatest of them all. Wouldn’t you like to visit the studio and see her at work, Suss?”

  “Please call me Susan, Hosmer.”

  “At the studio they call me Colley,” said Hosmer, “and everybody seems to have a nickname there. But won’t you visit us? And watch Ida be shot?”

  “I’d love to come sometime,” said Susan, “but…” She raised her skirt, revealing a little bit of her plaster cast.

  “But you get around very well with your crutches. Please do come tomorrow. I’ve invited Mr. Beaumont as well, and I’m sure that he wouldn’t mind escorting you, if you’re—”

  “Mr. Beaumont?”

  “Yes, he’s—”

  “I know very well who he is. But why did you invite him, Hosmer? He is not—from what I can tell—a very friendly person.”

  “He’s been quite pleasant to me,” said Hosmer, surprised. “He’s offered me cigars—even though I don’t smoke. And last evening he asked if I wouldn’t go with him to the theater. And I went. We saw the new Irish play, Peg o’ My Heart. He asked about you, in fact.”

  “About me?”

  “He asked who lived in the room above him, is what I mean to say.”

  “I fail to see what business it is of his.”

  “He asked your story, your history—not snooping-like, but casual,” Hosmer hastened to add.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Told him you’d been splendid in He and She and other things, and about how you’d broken your leg—saving the life of the Russian consul. He seemed very impressed by that.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “He’s an inventor, he says. Can’t make much money at it, by the look of his clothes.” Here Hosmer preened just a little, taking pride in what sartorial elegance a man might achieve on limited means.

  “Where does he come from?”

  “Upstate,” he said. “Elmira.”

  “And why did he come here?”

  “To be nearer the people who pay money for inventions, I suppose. He may be poor now, but in a few years, if he’s able to invent something that will make people happier than they are now, well, then, I suppose he could make himself very rich. Just as you could be very rich once you’re able to go back on the stage,” he added with a little of the deliberate flattery of old—of old being the time before he’d transferred his affections to Ida Conquest.

  “And just as Ida will become very rich as the Cosmic star,” said Susan with a smile, having more confidence in Ida’s dramatic future than in her own. Hosmer readily agreed to this assessment.

  Hav
ing finally said yes to Hosmer’s invitation to visit his studio, and to do so in the company of Mr. Beaumont, Susan was up and about early the next morning. Somehow Tripod seemed to understand that he was about to be left home alone, and he became quite distressed. He fawned and wheedled, and when this didn’t work, he barked threateningly. When this also failed, he climbed on to a chair and gazed forlornly out the window, appearing to suggest that he would throw himself out if Susan did not take him along on her expedition. Susan dragged the chair away from the window, and Tripod skulked into the bedroom.

  But as soon as she opened the hallway door, out the dog ran, barking and happy—as if he assumed that she had been playing a joke on him all the while. When she closed the door behind her, however, Tripod began a ferocious barking, and from the thumps against the door, Susan knew that he was repeatedly flinging himself against the wooden panels.

  She went down the stairs, slowly and clumsily maneuvering with both crutches beneath her left arm.

  Mr. Beaumont was waiting outside his door, ready to go.

  “The dog alerted me,” he explained, not as sourly as she’d expected.

  “Mr. Beaumont,” said Susan, “I fear I’m going to be such an impediment—”

  “Nonsense,” he said with a shrug, and a little more than five minutes later they were down three more flights of stairs, standing at the front door.

  She smiled at him tentatively. “Perhaps we simply got off on the wrong footing—”

  He smiled, and blushed more deeply than even Hosmer Collamore did at the extremity of his embarrassment. “Yes, of course—” he began, then tugged at his collar as to allow a little of the blood that suffused his face to spill back down into his body. He really was quite handsome, Susan decided, and in contrast to the thinning of his hair, his beard was quite lush and covered a great expanse of cheek and chin. There was even a certain endearing clumsiness in his movements that she hadn’t noticed before. When he tried to help her out the front door, he succeeded only in getting one of her crutches caught, and then—in releasing it—kicking it down into the street.

  “Let’s call a cab,” said Susan, “or else we’ll be all day getting down there. I have the money here,” she added quickly, to spare him the embarrassment of thinking that perhaps he could ill afford such extravagance. She had already figured out the probable tariff: thirty cents for the first half-mile, ten cents for each quarter-mile after that. A trip of approximately three miles, doubtless with some waiting time, came to one dollar and thirty cents plus a ten-cent gratuity to the driver. Which is to say, forty percent of her weekly allowance to herself—an extravagance indeed. Would there be any time, Susan wondered, when she wouldn’t have to labor over such melancholy calculations?

  Jack Beaumont thought for a moment about Susan’s decision to pay for the cab, then nodded. He loped around the corner to Columbus Avenue in search of a vehicle that was free. Susan did not allow herself to be disappointed that Mr. Beaumont did not insist on paying himself. She was certain that he was as financially strapped as she.

  The day was bright for February. It was also warm for February, and all the snow that had lingered for weeks had melted. Everything was quite dirty with soot from the coal fires that burned throughout the city, but it had been so long since Susan had gone on an excursion for pleasure that she was not disposed to find fault with anything that the sky above or the ground beneath had to offer her today.

  A few minutes later a cab swung around the corner and came to a stop in front of the Fenwick. Mr. Beaumont climbed out to help Susan inside. This was no easy task, owing to an inconvenient combination of the height of the cab door, the weight of Susan’s cast, and the length of her skirt. But at last it was accomplished when Mr. Beaumont simply put his strong hands about her waist and lifted her inside, then climbed in behind her. He picked up the speaker tube and instructed the driver to take them to number 27 West Twenty-seventh Street.

  On the way Susan tried not to think of the extravagance of this cab, but turned in the seat so that she could peer out the back flap of the closed compartment, which Mr. Beaumont gallantly held open for her. It seemed as if she had never seen a crowd before, so entranced was she by the sheer numbers of people on the streets. She had never considered Seventh Avenue to be particularly splendid, but today she thought there was no street in the world to match it. At least she held that opinion until the cab turned on Forty-fourth Street, and then continued on down Fifth Avenue. For nothing was more splendid than that.

  “You’ve been hiding away in that room too long,” Mr. Beaumont said, a trifle hesitantly, as if afraid that he might have made too personal a remark.

  “Sometimes I think I’m going mad up there,” Susan admitted, still gazing out the back flap. “That’s why you hear me pacing so. That’s why I sometimes find myself doing a tarantella at eight in the morning—”

  “—with a three-legged dog for a partner?” Mr. Beaumont said with a laugh, then blushed again.

  “I’m entirely mad,” said Susan. “And I do thank you for allowing me to come along today. I’m not sure—in fact, I know I wouldn’t have ventured so far away from home—”

  She broke off, for that admission made her sound like such a timid creature! The fact was that her hibernation had nothing to do with fear or an unwillingness to exert herself. Now she felt as if for the past several weeks she had been a pathetic, trapped creature, imprisoned not by a broken leg but by depression and a lack of self-confidence. The thought made her ashamed, even though she knew that one couldn’t be strong all the time.

  She felt happy today, and seeing so many people all about who quite demonstrably got by in life suggested to Susan that she would be able to get by as well. But what was she to do with herself? And where was her life to go? The question wasn’t one that was going to melt like January snow.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SUSAN’S EXPECTATIONS concerning the appearance of the Cosmic Film Company were not fulfilled. She’d assumed, rather laughably, she guessed, that moving pictures were made in a theater. But the building at 27 West Twenty-seventh Street was much more like a factory, plain and brick. It did not possess posters outside the entrance, only a small placard announcing that on the third, fourth, and fifth floors were located the premises of the Cosmic Film Company. No marble foyer with gilt and mirrors and crimson carpeting greeted them inside, but only a grimy granite entranceway and a growling elevator, the door to which Mr. Beaumont held open for her.

  They rose to the third floor and emerged into a large low room that was quite reminiscent of a factory, with a strong odor of chemicals. Men in long dirty white aprons ran about in a general air of barely controlled frenzy. One of these men stopped long enough to stare at them in a way that plainly asked their business. “We’re here to see Mr. Collamore,” said Mr. Beaumont.

  The man stuck out an upraised thumb, which signified up. Susan and Mr. Beaumont got back into the elevator.

  “Shall we try four?” Susan suggested.

  On the fourth floor was clearly the business end of the operation, for here telephones were ringing—five of them on a single desk, behind which sat a sullen young boy. Susan was certain it was he who had been so rude to her the previous day. Messenger boys in blue uniforms waited about, apparently for canisters of film to be taken out to the various theaters, while several harried-looking young women clattered away at typewriters. Two fat men stood in one corner in close conversation, punctuating their exchange with lighted cigars. Obviously they were the most important people in the room, since they were the only ones not working.

  “Mr. Collamore,” said Jack to the boy at the telephone desk.

  He wordlessly held up a hand with all his fingers splayed. Fifth floor.

  The fifth floor was at the top of the building, and there skylights were set at a height of over thirty feet. As a result, the space was filled with intense sunlight. The room was, in its way, as active as the floors below, but here there was a difference. Susan was acqua
inted with the back-stage area of a legitimate theater, so she was not surprised to see bits of scenery about: drawing-room interiors, stone walls, great bushes in tiny pots, corners of city buildings, doorways of rustic cottages, and flats and canvases representing a seashore, a majestic mountain chain, a field of growing cotton.

  The sense of being in a factory was enhanced, not lessened, by her perception of how moving pictures were made here. The only thing that looked the same to her as in the legitimate theater were the actors going through their scenes—but in what a peculiar fashion!

  In one corner was a couple spooning in a rowboat set in a tin tub of water hardly larger than the boat itself, and the passing scenery unrolled behind them on a painted canvas. Only ten feet away a desperate struggle ensued in what looked like an opium den, with a dissolute woman defending her lover against the police, the latter having just broken through a pasteboard door with axes and shotguns. And ten feet away on the other side a quadrille was being performed, in old-fashioned costumes, to the tune of “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow” played on an accordion just out of camera range by a very young girl with a shriveled leg.

  In front of each of these varied scenes were the strange moving-picture cameras. They looked rather like big boxes with a tube at the front and a handle at the side. Behind each camera hunched a young man, earnestly turning the crank and watching the action through some sort of viewer. Susan recognized the man filming the opium den scene as Hosmer Collamore, and after a moment she picked out Ida Conquest as the lady in the yellow panniers and powdered wig at the center of the quadrille.

  Besides the cameraman, each scene had a kind of stage director, shouting directions at the players, and a musician, to set the mood of the piece. Above the music and the shouted commands of the directors and the improvised dialogue of the players, was the hissing of the massive arc lamps that supplemented the daylight coming through the glass roof. In another portion of the room, carpenters built more sets and painters worked on various canvases. Everything was noise and confusion. It was a wonder to Susan that the actors could concentrate at all, or convey with any conviction the sense that they were trapped in an opium den deep beneath a city street.