Jack and Susan in 1913

by Michael McDowell

  After the theater, Susan expected that Jack would take her to one of the small restaurants in the area, but instead they climbed into a second cab and headed south from Forty-second Street. They got out on Sixth Avenue, just below Twenty-eighth Street and Susan was astonished to find that the awning above the door bore the name Mouquin’s in flowing script. It was a place she’d only heard about, but she knew it was the oldest and best French restaurant in the city.

  Jack had found a suit of clothes that did not look as if they’d been patched to death, but Susan was nervous about his passing muster in such a sophisticated and well heeled a crowd as would most certainly be found in such a place as this. So she was actually glad, as the waiter led them to a table, that those who stared, stared not at Jack’s worn suit, but rather at her crutch and the strange bulge the cast made beneath her skirt.

  They were certainly not being mistaken for out-of-town Mellons or Huntingtons.

  But once they were seated, and the waiter had hidden Susan’s crutch behind a potted palm and, incidentally, quite out of her reach, Susan was astonished to find that Jack had no difficulty in deciphering the menu. And to his evident amazement, neither did she—though she had only a few remnants of high school French left at her command.

  Susan had consommé printanier, roast teal duck, chicory salad, and crème en mousse. Jack had oysters, pilaf of chicken à la Creole, haricots verts à l’Anglaise, barbe de Capucin salad, and charlotte russe. The bill came to more than eighteen dollars, an amount greater than Susan generally spent on food over the period of three weeks.

  It was a wonderful sensation, to be in the midst of such fashion and elegance, and to feel almost as if she and Jack truly belonged there. Even if the money Jack was spending was borrowed, even if at the end of the evening they would have to return to cheap lodgings on West Sixtieth Street, even if it might be a very long time before they were able to reproduce the extravagance of these happy hours, when they two, struck with poverty, lived as the rich perpetually lived, Susan was deliriously happy.

  Jack had saved his good news for dinner, and Susan pretended to be full of wonder at Hosmer’s generosity. She did not think that Jack saw that her surprise was feigned, for she was, after all, an actress. They toasted the cameraman’s perspicacity with champagne. They further toasted Hosmer’s uncle who had lent Hosmer the money for this obviously wise investment. They toasted Mr. Fane’s sound aesthetic and business judgment in purchasing so many scenarios from the Young Lady in High Society. Jack would have ordered another bottle of champagne with full expectation of finding other persons worthy of commemoration, but Susan declined.

  They went home in a third taxi, and tonight, Jack kissed Susan in her sitting room.

  But he did not ask her to marry him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HE WAS SHY AND reticent, that was all. He was hiding behind that great brown beard, hiding beneath that old hat the brim of which always shadowed his face, hiding inside the old wardrobe she helped to keep together with a clumsy needle. Maybe there would come a time when it would be enough for a woman simply to write well. Susan wished it were now, for she was little better with a needle than she was with the directions in Mrs. Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook.

  Within Susan grew the certainty that Jack would not ask her to marry him till he was assured of her affection. That meant she should simply say, “Jack Beaumont, I am hopelessly in love with you.”

  She couldn’t. Something in her upbringing prevented her. She knew that she loved Jack, she was sure that Jack loved her, but she could not force herself to be the first to say those words aloud.

  But Susan had a plan.

  She stayed up all one night, scribbling and typewriting. She sat bundled, for beside her the window was wide open in the hope that the noise of the machine would be spilled out into the night rather than disturbing Jack below.

  At six o’clock the next morning, she knocked excitedly at Jack’s door. He came blearily to her summons in a threadbare green silk dressing gown with the initials JAB on the pocket.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked. “It’s so early.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Susan, thrusting a thick, sealed envelope at him. “But I’d like you to take this to Mr. Fane this morning first thing and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss you. It’s just another story, but this time I don’t want you to read it.”

  “You’ve always told me my reading your work brought you good luck.”

  “You do bring me luck,” she replied. “But I don’t need luck on this one. This one is special. Now go back to bed, and please knock on my door when you come back from the studio.”

  Hearing Jack’s distinctive tread on the stairs a few hours later, Susan threw down the Macy’s spring and summer catalogue—in which she’d been dreaming of Bozart rugs, McCray refrigerators and Apollo player pianos—thrust Tripod into the bedroom and firmly shut the door. She moved quickly to the hallway door, pulled it open, and said, “Well, did he buy it?”

  “He did.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “I did not, of course. And hello to you too, Miss Bright.”

  “Hello, Mr. Beaumont,” she returned with an apologetic laugh.

  “You have no intention of telling me what all this is about, do you?”

  “None whatever. Did you see Ida?”

  “She sends her love.”

  “I’m sure,” said Susan, with a doubtful glance.

  “She pretended not to remember me,” Jack admitted.

  “Ida doesn’t remember anyone below a certain established income,” said Susan easing herself into her chair. “I don’t know what she sees in Hosmer.”

  Jack had dropped into a chair himself, and now glanced idly at the bedroom door. It would repeatedly shudder, for with silent hysteria Tripod was throwing himself against it on the other side in an effort to get out and at Jack. “There is a certain type of woman,” he said, “who likes to think of herself as an idol. Miss Conquest is one, I believe. Hosmer is a worshipper at her shrine. Isis doesn’t kick away her priests.”

  He reached into his pocket and brought out a small white envelope. He leaned up out of his chair to offer it to Susan, and she leaned over to take it.

  She glanced inside.

  “There’s forty,” she said with surprise.

  “I bargained for higher wages for the Young Lady. I told Mr. Fane that the price of orchids on Fifth Avenue had just gone up.”

  “I don’t know about the price of orchids,” said Susan, “but carbon paper is now fifty cents a box.”

  Susan’s cast came off two weeks later.

  Jack took Susan back to Bellevue, and waited while the doctor attended her. Distressed by the appearance of her skin, which was white and slack and flaked, she reflected that long skirts would at least hide that temporary deformity. She suffered a few moments of panic when she tried to walk again, without the cast, and nearly fell. She was certain that her infirmity was permanent, but the doctor—catching her—assured her that it was only that she was unaccustomed to not carrying the weight of the cast. In time, she’d readjust, and if she exercised properly, there was no reason she would not walk perfectly normally. She would have to use her crutch for a while, but in time she’d be able to do without it.

  Susan determined to walk the limp out of her gait, and with the warm weather of spring, this was a pleasurable recuperation. Despite the inconvenience of the four flights of stairs, the crutch, and Tripod’s leash, Susan tried to spend an hour every morning in Central Park with Tripod, who threw himself at every other dog he encountered. By experimentation he discovered that his tapered wooden leg could be used as a weapon, and he perfected a sort of sideways offensive lunge that was as effective as it was peculiar-looking.

  In the afternoon, she occasionally went out—sometimes with Jack—and did errands. One of her favorite things to do was to look in shop windows to select the things she would buy when she had saved a truly secure amoun
t of money. She’d been in financial straits for so long that she still feared all her good fortune might end, and she would slip down that rough hill again. The hundred dollars of security she now possessed in the bank was going to stay there. No new wardrobe just yet.

  And then there was the matter of Jack. Susan couldn’t seriously make herself believe that he was inching toward a proposal of marriage. In fact, if anything, he seemed to be inching away.

  They still saw each other a lot, that was true, but he now seemed troubled in her presence. He would seem to grow discomfited by some casual remark she’d make in all innocence, particularly if she’d make any mention of money. He took to absenting himself at odd times and with unconvincing explanations. She couldn’t determine any real pattern in this new behavior, and she didn’t think it was anything as simple as, for instance, He’s afraid of getting married or He believes that his camera project will be a failure or He’s down to his last dollar and thirty-five cents.

  Perhaps someday men and women would sit across from each other, look each other in the eye, and say what was on their minds—whether that something was love, money, religion, politics, or even sexual desire. Susan suspected she wouldn’t see it in her lifetime. Jack’s trouble was locked up in his breast and brain and the key was hidden under his tongue.

  On her practical-shopping forays she began stopping in shops that did ladies’ hair, asking if anyone knew who Irene Castle was and could cut her hair in the style of the actress’s. She had decided that a haircut was a luxury she could afford. Finally, she did find such a person—an old he-gossip with a smooth pink face and lacquered black hair in a tiny blue shop on Broadway between Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets. This gentleman assured her that he had seen Irene Castle many times on the stage, adored her, worshipped her appearance, and said that someday every woman in America would shear off their dreadful long tresses in favor of a style delicious and short. He would be pleased to shape Susan’s hair in imitation of Miss Castle’s. The crutch was leaned against a wall in one corner of his little shop, Tripod was tied to a chair, and Susan watched in the mirror as her long hair was snipped away.

  The feeling of weightlessness she experienced as she emerged from the shop, promising the old he-gossip to return, was exhilarating. She paused on the street and gazed at her reflection in a shop window. It was apparent that she was at the height of some sort of fashion—with bobbed hair (which was still rarely seen off the stage), a crutch under one arm, and a three-legged dog on a yellow leather leash.

  As she made her way up the stairs to her apartment she noticed that Jack’s door was wedged open, a sign that he hoped she’d stop in. This was just one of half a hundred small signals they’d devised, hardly recognizing that they had patterns—lovers’ patterns at that.

  She pushed open the door, and Tripod very nearly fractured his neck in trying to get at Jack, who was standing at the table by the window.

  Before Susan had a chance to say, “Do you like it?”—referring to her hair—she noticed a great change here, too. Gone were the greasy machine parts, the cogs and wheels and valves, that mélange of small industry. There was no longer the smell of oil permeating the atmosphere of the room. That odor had been replaced by the scent of pine soap—evidently even the floors had been scrubbed. The two tables, the divan, and a couple of chairs remained, but otherwise the room was almost bare. In one corner stood three moving-picture cameras, and spread out on one of the tables were the inner workings of a fourth. Indeed, even Jack looked newly scrubbed and neat, in woolen trousers, a clean white shirt, and a tweed jacket that hardly looked patched.

  “I’m devoting all my time to my invention,” Jack announced succinctly. “And your hair suits you splendidly.”

  Susan’s progress now was rapid, and within the apartment building she scorned use of the crutch. Now that Jack’s sitting room was presentable, Susan spent as much time there as Jack had previously spent on the floor above. Tripod did not approve of this arrangement, as he was not allowed to visit Mr. Beaumont’s apartments.

  While Jack tinkered with his cameras, Susan often read magazines. This was not an idle occupation. It was through the dreadful stories published in the ladies’ and general circulation magazines that Susan got many of her ideas for scenarios. For instance, a tiny scrap of dialogue in a story called “A Romance of Cash” suggested an entire two-reeler. And once after reading a small paragraph in the Sun relating a touching incident in the life of a washerwoman, Susan immediately sat down and penned the scenario for the melodramatic “Cotton Veils,” the saga of a washerwoman (played by Ida Conquest) who had once been proposed to by an English duke.

  So Susan read and scribbled, and Jack laboriously worked away at his mechanism. But despite all the time that the two spent together, not even a hint of a proposal of marriage fell from Jack Beaumont’s lips.

  One day Jack reported that he had made significant progress on his invention. No thing of beauty, he admitted—an awkward-looking collection of wheels and levers that wouldn’t even sit up on a table properly—but when hooked up to a moving-picture camera, it prevented the jiggling and flickering that was so annoying to viewers and gave moving pictures an unrealistic look.

  One Sunday afternoon Jack, Susan, Hosmer Collamore, and Tripod made an expedition to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. With the new device installed in a camera, Hosmer photographed Jack and Susan walking hand in hand; Jack stealing a kiss from Susan; Jack fending off an unleashed Tripod; Jack falling off a bicycle and ripping the knee of his trousers; Susan sitting on the ground with Jack’s leg thrown across her lap as she mended the rip; Susan throwing Tripod high into the air and the dog spinning around and around in a way that dogs with four legs are utterly incapable of; and Jack snaring the sleeve of his jacket on a thorny bush while attempting to pick a bouquet of flowers for Susan.

  Hosmer planned to have the film developed the following day, but that proved impossible. That Sunday night, Patents Trust hooligans once more broke into the laboratories of the Cosmic Film Company, overturned containers of chemicals, slashed or exposed film, and generally made a wreck of the place. Mr. Fane told Hosmer that he felt certain the ruffians would have set fire to the laboratory if the building had been exclusively the property of the film company. Fortunately, there were unrelated businesses on the first two floors of the building, and the ruffians apparently had some honor.

  This latest vandalization by the Patents Trust was a real blow for Cosmic. Four two-reel features, three one-reel shorts, and the completed portions of Susan’s “Cotton Veils” were completely lost. Everything would have to be reshot, and the studio would have to reoutfit the laboratories completely. This meant that there would be a week and a half in which no new Cosmic Film Company photodrama could appear in the theaters of the country. There would be no income to offset these extraordinary losses.

  “I overheard Mr. Fane tell his friend that Cosmic couldn’t take another setback like this—the company would go under,” Hosmer confided dismally to Jack and Susan.

  “I was under the impression that the Patents Trust was on its last legs,” said Jack. “I thought they were losing their power—that the independents were just too strong for them.”

  “That’s so,” said Hosmer. “That’s probably why this last attack was so vicious. They’re desperate. It would be just my kind of luck that the last nefarious act of the Patents Trust would be to drive Mr. Fane out of business—and put me out of a job, and send Miss Conquest back to the stage, just when she is about to become a true star in the moving-picture firmament.”

  Jack and Susan exchanged glances over Hosmer’s head. They both realized that if Cosmic went out of business, Susan would lose her source of income as well. Maybe she could sell her work to other studios, but it wouldn’t be easy, and only after some time spent scouting around.

  How typical of her life to now throw this in her face, Susan thought. All her eggs had gone into the one basket, and that basket was labeled Cosmic Film C
ompany, and now she was going to watch as Thomas Alva Edison and his friends in the Patents Trust hurled that basket against a brick wall. It really was very aggravating. The only consolation she could think of was that when poverty came knocking, she’d greet it at the door with a leg that wasn’t in a cast and a becoming style of hair.

  On the first of April, the weather was surprisingly warm. Susan had donned a gray silk sweater over a white shirt-waist, a long gray linen skirt, a pair of gray Burpon hose (without seams), and a pair of brand-new Niagara Maid silk gloves. With unwonted mystery and one of those blushes that turned his face the color of embers in a dying fire, Jack had promised her “something very special” this afternoon.

  He appeared at her door wearing light blue flannel trousers and a dark blue jacket. For once his collar was stiff, and he’d shaved his neck right up to his chin. Looking at him dressed like this, she could very nearly imagine him a young broker or businessman—and not merely an impecunious inventor.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’m taking you?” he asked, once they were on the street.

  “I’ll let it be a surprise,” said Susan. She had decided not to let anything bother her this afternoon. Any troubles she had seemed miles away as she thought what a very handsome couple Jack and she made. She rather hoped that their destination could be reached by walking. She leaned on Jack’s arm in such a way that her limp became almost invisible, then turned and waved to Tripod, who was barking ferociously in the fourth-floor window.

  “This is an important day for me,” said Jack solemnly. “It will determine the course of the rest of my life.” With that he hailed a passing taxicab, and Susan climbed in as he opened the door for her.