Jack and Susan in 1913

by Michael McDowell

  Jack gave the driver an address through the window, and Susan did not hear it. The sly smile Jack wore when he climbed in beside her told her he had meant to keep it a secret. In the back of the taxicab, Jack took Susan’s hand and squeezed it between his, and suddenly it occurred to Susan what the secret was: Today was the day Jack Beaumont was going to ask her to marry him!

  Susan decided to feign indifference. She didn’t press or ask why this day was to be so important to him. She even pretended not to take too much note of the taxicab’s route, as if to indicate to Jack, I trust you completely.

  The taxi drew up in front of 27 West Twenty-seventh Street—the Cosmic Film studios. Susan felt a slight twinge of disappointment, but still she asked no questions.

  As he was paying the driver, the lining of Jack’s blue jacket caught on the cab’s door handle and a great piece of it ripped out in a long flap as the vehicle took off toward Broadway.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MR. FANE DID NOT remember that he’d once met Susan Bright. He scarcely glanced at her when Jack introduced them again and was brusque with Jack. “I’m quite behind schedule this afternoon, Mr. Beaumont,” he said, gesturing sharply to one of the crews who were setting up a scene in one corner of the skylighted studio at the top of the Cosmic building. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient. Watch anything you like, just stay out of the way, you and Miss—” And with that he hurried off, rubbing the side of his forefinger against his mustache in a gesture that suggested he was too important a character to be burdened with inconsequentialities.

  Jack looked chagrined.

  The studio was much busier than at the time of Susan’s first visit. A fourth “stage” area had been set up, and Junius Fane was now filming four productions at a time, in hope of recovering from the recent set-backs. To be out of the way of scurrying workmen, Jack gently pulled her back out of the way against a wall. On one side of them were sections of a rustic fence covered with paper morning glories and on the other was a cardboard cannon that stank of shellac.

  Susan looked up at Jack and gently squeezed his elbow. “Don’t be disappointed.” Jack said nothing. “You were going to tell Mr. Fane today that I am the Young Lady in Society, weren’t you?” Jack looked down at her in surprise. “You see, I did guess your secret, didn’t I?” she said.

  Jack beat the brim of his hat against his thigh and looked around the studio. Susan watched a blush creep up his neck, disappear for a few moments beneath his beard, and then mount to his eyes and brow.

  “Not exactly,” said Jack. “I had an appointment with Fane today to show him the results of my invention.”

  “Oh.”

  “The laboratory here is working again, and Hosmer was kind enough to get our experimental reel processed. It’s done now, and Mr. Fane has agreed to look at it. I thought you might enjoy seeing yourself on celluloid, Susan. And of course, if Mr. Fane is pleased with the results…”

  “I’m certain he will be,” said Susan, thinking of something else. After a moment she added, “Then you still don’t think it’s the right time for Susan Bright to step forward?”

  “No…I don’t,” said Jack slowly.

  And then like a light going on, Susan realized that there was something more to this pseudonymous charade than she had realized. There was some piece of deception she suddenly realized, something that was beyond the simple matter of a false name. And Jack was behind it, she knew, and Jack didn’t want her to find it out, and Jack also feared that she would.

  She stared at him as if she might be able to read the answer to this riddle on the underside of his chin. He was turned away from her, and that was all of his face she could see. But what was he hiding? And how could she find it out? She knew he’d not tell her directly.

  Well, if he was going to be devious, so could she be.

  “Let’s watch some of the filming,” Susan suggested. She thought her voice sounded natural. She’d been an actress, after all, though never in a mystery play.

  Nearest them was a set built to resemble an apartment kitchen. The camera was set up at one corner of the open end of the three-walled room, and two lines of white tape forming a wide “V” on the floor marked the limits of the camera’s angle of view.

  “Now stay within those lines, Miss Songar, or else the camera won’t catch you,” the director warned her.

  Miss Songar could not have been more than sixteen, Susan thought, a slip of a thing in a print dress and a light blue apron. On film, Hosmer had explained to Susan once, light blue would show up as pristine white; whereas a truly white apron would have shown up blindingly bright. In order to avoid the harsh shadows that the lights produced, the young actress’s face was heavily powdered and her lips emphasized with bright lip paint. Her eyes were lined with green pencil, making them preternaturally large and expressive. Miss Songar’s long thick hair was wound up atop her head and she was vigorously applying a broom to the plank floor of the stage. The little crippled girl with the accordion played “Home Sweet Home” off to one side.

  “Now sweep, sweep, Miss Songar. Your husband is about to come home, and he’s promised to bring you a gift. You’ve prepared him his favorite supper. God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world. Yes, that’s it.”

  The director reached out and slapped the crippled girl on the arm, and she immediately stopped playing the accordion and cried out in a nasal voice, “Waa! Waa!”

  “That’s your precious baby, Miss Songar!” shouted the director.

  Miss Songar thrust out one hand—the one holding the broom—as far as she could and leaned in the other direction, her other hand cupping her ear. An expression of attention overtook her face, and her large eyes widened.

  “That’s right!” cried the director. “Now concern for your baby. Register, Miss Songar!”

  Miss Songar registered concern, then love, and then she hurried off to the side of the stage, crossing the white line.

  The director handed her a bundle of blue linen, arranged it in her arms, and then pushed her back across the white line.

  “Waa! Waa!” cried the crippled girl, and then began playing a lullaby on the accordion. Miss Songar sang along in an accent that suggested to Susan that she came from Brooklyn.

  The director banged a block of wood on the floor three times. “Turn left!” he commanded. Miss Songar turned left. “Love. Expectation. Your husband is at the door. He loves you. You love him. You both love the baby. Here he comes. Hold out your arms, but don’t drop the baby.”

  A young man who had been slouching listlessly near the white line suddenly leapt into the range of the camera with his arms spread wide. He grabbed Miss Songar and embraced her. He looked at the baby, registered love, and looked at his wife again with devotion, pride, and pleasure. The two then looked at the baby and registered hope in the future of the human race. The young man’s face was painted white with lips the color of cherries.

  “Stop the camera!” cried the director.

  Miss Songar’s arms drooped, and the blue linen slipped from around the “baby,” a block of scrap wood about a foot long with nails pounded into it. The accordion gave a sour, deflating squeal, and the young man took a brush out of his pocket and brushed off some powder that had spilled from Miss Songar’s face on to his shoulders.

  “How many feet are left?” the director asked the cameraman.

  “Two hundred,” said the cameraman, peering at a small counter at the side of the camera box.

  “That’s plenty,” said the director, then speaking to the young actor with the white cheeks and the cherry lips, added, “Clear out, Bob, and take that whining block of wood with you. That was very good, Miss Songar, and as long as we have film in the camera, we’re going to do another scene. Put on that other apron, please, and disarrange your hair. This will be a little later in the story. Here is the situation: Your husband is in jail, having been framed for the murder of an industrialist. Your younger brother has been abducted by the gang that ac
tually committed the crime. The landlord has sold all of your furniture—Mr. Cox, remove that table—and a deranged neighbor has flung your infant out the window. So when the camera begins to turn, I’d like you to register distress. A fair amount of distress, I think, Miss Songar, would be appropriate.”

  To get Miss Songar in the mood, the accordion player began a somber rendition of “Just Before the Battle, Mother.”

  “One of yours?” Jack asked quietly as they moved away.

  “Not one of mine,” said Susan, heading for another set. As she looked across the studio she saw Mr. Fane directing Ida Conquest, and was hit by a sudden realization. Wasn’t it just her fate—her stupid typical fate—that she and Jack should arrive on a day when Mr. Fane was filming a scene from that picture she’d written? She’d better keep Jack away from there, she thought.

  But Jack was heading directly toward the set in question—three walls defining a space about the size of Susan’s sitting room. Susan followed helplessly, hoping that perhaps they wouldn’t do the whole scene, or else that she could get Jack away before the end if they did.

  Hosmer turned the camera as Ida Conquest sat alone in the “room,” leaning over a desk, scribbling away on a pad of yellow paper. Pushed aside on the table was an old typewriting machine with a sheet of yellow paper stuck awry in the bale.

  “Throw down the pen,” said Mr. Fane.

  Ida threw down the pen.

  “Register frustration. Register weariness.”

  Ida tore at her hair and stretched her neck.

  “Get up and go to the window.”

  Ida went to the window, then leaned out and gazed longingly up at the sky. She wore a blue jacket and a blue skirt, with a wide expanse of shirtwaist, the uniform of the office girl.

  “Now you get a terrific idea for a new story,” said Mr. Fane. “Register excitement.”

  Ida pulled her head back inside, then her mouth dropped open and her eyes brightened.

  Jack sneaked a questioning look at Susan.

  “Go back to the table, now,” Mr. Fane said. “You want to get your brilliant idea down on paper. That’s right. Now pull over the typewriting machine, and go to it.”

  “Don’t know how,” hissed Ida without moving her lips. Hosmer was still turning the camera and Ida couldn’t appear to be speaking when no one else was in the room.

  “Press down the keys,” said Mr. Fane, with no trace of sarcasm in his voice, “one after the other.”

  Ida tried it, and looked no less efficient than most office girls confronted with a typewriting machine for the first time.

  “Faster,” said Mr. Fane.

  Ida tried faster, but then the keys jammed, and Ida went into a charming flurry to get them unstuck.

  “Good business,” said Mr. Fane as Ida wiped her fingers delicately on a scrap of paper.

  “Knock, knock, knock,” cried the director. Then turning to a young boy nearby, he said, “Dog.”

  The boy opened a basket that he held in his arms. A small spaniel instantly leapt out of it, ran on to the stage, and threw himself against the door of Ida’s sitting room.

  Jack turned and looked at Susan hard. “I guess they couldn’t find a dog with three legs.”

  Yes, Susan had to admit, it was quite obvious that this was her story.

  “Hide your work, quick. He’s at the door,” Mr. Fane hissed in a stage whisper.

  Ida stood up, looked about the room, clapped her hands at the dog, and then dragged a folding screen across the floor and set it up in front of the table. She grabbed the dog, gripped it beneath her arm, glanced at herself in the mirror, straightened her hair—

  “Knock, knock, knock.”

  —and hurried to the door.

  She opened it. Outside the door stood a tall man in old trousers and jacket.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Ida,” the man said aloud.

  “Call her Susan, dammit,” said the director. “Audiences read lips. In the play her name is Susan, not Ida.”

  “Could you sew this on for me?” the actor finished without a pause. The mistake wasn’t so great that the camera had to be stopped. Then he held up his arm and showed that the flap of his jacket pocket had been half torn off in some mishap.

  Jack cleared his throat and glanced at Susan again. He tugged at the ripped lining of his own jacket. “Is his name Jack?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Ah—” Susan began.

  “Jack,” said Ida/Susan with a gaiety that seemed entirely inappropriate, “you are very clumsy.” She took hold of the flap and tugged it playfully. The dog made a lunge at the actor Jack, but Ida pulled the dog back and wagged a warning finger at him, at the same time frowning and shaking her head left and right. Actor Jack threw himself into an easy chair and draped the edge of his coat over the arm.

  “Now you be good,” said Ida/Susan to the dog, pushing him beyond the white line, where he was grabbed up again by the young boy and thrust back into the basket.

  Susan now could see that they were going to do the whole scene, so she tried to pull Jack away.

  “No,” he said, “let’s watch.”

  What had seemed such a wonderful idea when she’d thought of it was turning into just about the most dreadful idea ever born in Susan’s fevered brain. Her plan had been simple. Write a scenario about Jack and Susan—Jack a handsome, impoverished inventor and Susan a would-be writer turning out serials for monthly magazines. Jack lived in a room directly below Susan’s. Susan had a dog that disliked Jack. There was a little contretemps when Jack grew jealous of another man who lived in the same building. Just as the contretemps was about to be resolved, Susan discovered an actress in Jack’s sitting room, and now she was jealous. Everything turned out well in the end. In fact—

  Ida/Susan knelt girlishly at the side of the easy chair. With exaggerated flowing arm movements, she pantomimed sewing the pocket flap back on to the jacket.

  “I’m the one should be on my knees,” said actor Jack.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I mean to propose to you, Susan.”

  Ida/Susan registered surprise.

  Actor Jack registered sheepish modesty.

  Ida/Susan registered love.

  Actor Jack registered increasing hope.

  “Let us change places,” he said.

  Ida/Susan registered maidenly modesty.

  “Get up from the chair,” said the director. “Now, Ida, you sit down in the chair. Kneel, Jack. Now look in your left pocket. No, it’s not there. So look in your right pocket. That’s it—take out the ring. Show the ring.”

  “It’s so big,” squealed Ida/Susan.

  “I sold my invention today. I am rich. Will you marry me, Susan?”

  “Oh yes, Jack. Yes.” Ida/Susan fairly gushed.

  “Let him put the ring on your finger, Ida. Embrace, you two. Dog!”

  The boy with the basket let the spaniel out again, and it rushed on to the set and began tearing at the tail of actor Jack’s coat.

  But so great was the happiness of actor Jack and Ida/Susan that the exertions of the dog went entirely unnoticed.

  “Stop the camera!” cried the director.

  Hosmer ground the camera to a halt.

  Ida/Susan and actor Jack got to their feet.

  Actor Jack kicked the spaniel away.

  It was a pity, thought Susan, that moving-picture studios did not have trapdoors the way stage theaters did. She would have been very pleased at that moment to simply drop out of sight. She dared not look at Jack. How could she have come up with a plan so stupid? Jack, she had thought, had merely been unsure of her feelings toward him. He wouldn’t ask her to marry him simply because he didn’t understand the nature of her feelings for him. Susan thought she had figured out a way to tell him she loved him without appearing to throw herself at him. Jack was to have seen the photoplay in the theater and been so convinced of Susan’s love for him that he’d return to the Fenwick and immediately drop to his knee before he
r chair, and beg her to marry him.

  A witless, charmless idea altogether. It would have failed in any case. What must he be thinking standing there beside her, beneath these bright lights, with workmen hammering in the background, and an accordion playing over across the room, and a dog barking crazily.

  She looked up at him.

  He was not blushing. In fact, all the blood seemed to have drained from his face.

  “Does it have a title?” he asked, looking straight forward.

  “I called it Susan’s Serial.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JACK AND SUSAN walking hand in hand in Central Park.

  Jack stealing a kiss from Susan.

  Jack fending off an unleashed Tripod.

  Jack falling off a borrowed bicycle and ripping the knee of his trousers.

  These were the images moving across a stretched sheet tacked to the wall of a windowless room in the laboratory of the Cosmic Film Company.

  Jack sat next to Mr. Fane, and Susan sat farther back near Hosmer Collamore at the projector. The day’s filming had ended only a quarter-hour before.

  It was the first time Susan had seen herself on celluloid, and the experience was unsettling. She looked thinner than she had imagined herself to be, and her skin looked pale and her hair intensely black. She cringed to see the hitch in her right leg, though she knew it had improved since that day in the park. But most of all, she was embarrassed to see herself and Jack together, cavorting in playful innocence—an innocence that had now been spoiled by the revelation in that dreadful scenario, Susan’s Serial, that she loved him. Women simply did not declare their love. Women were like puppies in a shop window. They could frolic in their cages; they could gaze moonily at passersby; they could be adorable and irresistible. But they weren’t allowed to choose with whom they’d go home. Like puppies in a shop window, women were chosen.

  An altogether disgusting state of affairs. She was also angry that Jack was displeased with her gesture—he’d not even spoken to her. Angry with herself that she had made it. Angry with life, and fate, and damned Hosmer Collamore now running a moving picture that mocked her misery. She and Jack and Tripod would never be as happy as on that innocent Sunday in Central Park.