Jack and Susan in 1933

by McDowell, Michael

  “Yes. Louise.”

  So you’re not too lonely?

  “Except for you, of course. But I rub along.”

  As do I. I’m going out with Barbara and Jack tonight to some dreadful O’Neill thing. It should be over by Saturday or so, I suppose, and as they’re driving up, perhaps I’ll come along.

  “Oh do,” said Susan, wishing he wouldn’t. In just a few weeks she’d grown accustomed to life at the Quarry. Despite what she’d told her husband, Susan hardly felt alone. Scotty and Zelda frolicked at her heels, Louise was always in the kitchen, making sandwiches or polishing her revolver, dinner was always with Marcellus, alternating evenings at the Quarry and at the Cliffs. And, at either place, music afterward. Marcellus, Susan discovered, was a fair accompanist himself, and sometimes he’d even sing one of the Verdi arias he usually reserved for the last wee, drunken hours of the nightwatch. Though he was her husband, and though the Quarry was his home, Harmon’s coming seemed very much an intrusion to Mrs. Dodge.

  Marcellus Rhinelander felt the same, and he didn’t hesitate to tell Susan as much.

  “Why doesn’t the man leave you alone?”

  “He’s my husband,” Susan pointed out. “And he probably wouldn’t have thought of coming at all if Barbara and Jack weren’t driving up for the weekend.”

  “Barbara never spends Easter in New York. She’s deathly afraid she’ll come across someone who’s more outlandishly dressed than she, I think.”

  “I can’t imagine she’d be afraid of that,” remarked Susan. “In any case, I have rather missed Harmon. He’s always in good spirits, and he’s someone who does exactly what he wants to do in life, and I have always found that a delightful quality in anyone.” Susan found herself in the uncomfortable position of defending a desire to see her husband of only two months.

  “What about our dinners? Our diversions at the piano? Your husband is going to cause considerable disruption in our lives. You’ve told me how Harmon feels about those two pets of yours. And I certainly know how Barbara feels about you. Most important, when Harmon goes back, I’m certain that he’s going to want you to return to Manhattan with him. That may make you happy, but it certainly won’t do anything to improve my humor,” he added with a little of his old testiness.

  Susan didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.

  Harmon told her they’d be in by noon on Saturday, so Susan didn’t bother to look out for them till five. They got there at six. Barbara Beaumont climbed languidly out of the backseat of Jack’s new car. A bright green beret was perched over her right ear, and a leopard jacket was flung negligently over her shoulders.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed in a tone that managed to suggest both surprise and boredom in equal parts. “You’re here. When Harmon didn’t appear with you today, I just assumed he’d forgotten and left you behind in the city. Jack,” she said languidly to her husband as he climbed awkwardly out of the car—those legs! “Jack, you remember Susan, don’t you?” Barbara managed to suggest that Susan was the sort of person you forgot unless you were daily reminded of her existence and shown photographs of her face.

  “Hello, Jack,” said Susan coolly as she leaned in the passenger window and kissed her husband.

  “Hello,” said Jack. Then, turning to his wife, he said, “Of course I remember her, Barbara.”

  Harmon kissed Susan, drew back, and smiled at her, and then kissed her again. “Get in the back, Susan,” he said. “We’ll go on up to the Cliffs with Jack and Barbara. Marcellus is bound to have something decent to drink. It’s these last days before the repeal that are getting me down. Do you think we’ll live to see that damned thing out of our lives?” Then he leaned over and called to Jack. “We’re all going up with you!” He stretched in the narrow seat, thrusting one arm out the window and behind Susan’s back. He drew her in closer and kissed her again. “Those damned dogs dead yet?” he asked.

  Without having conferred on the matter, Susan and Marcellus Rhinelander made no mention of their recent friendship. Barbara, thinking it a barb, had even made the comment, “I’d no idea that Susan was up here, Father. The houses being so close, I hope you two have seen a great deal of each other.”

  “Now and again,” said Marcellus, glancing at Susan. “Harmon asked me to look after her.”

  “Your father sent Louise over,” said Susan, as if that had been the extent of his protection.

  “Has she murdered anyone yet?” Barbara asked in a tone that suggested her disappointment that Louise hadn’t yet turned her revolver on her new mistress.

  It was a strange evening. Susan and Marcellus were distant. Though Susan knew—or thought she knew—that his coldness was a sham, she couldn’t help but be pained by it. Too, Harmon seemed a stranger. Not a disagreeable stranger, and he still was handsome and charming, but it was very odd to think that she was actually married to him. Barbara was her usual thorny self, but Susan no longer felt the need to match barb for barb against this florid hothouse rose. Jack seemed out of sorts, distracted, and even clumsier than usual.

  She didn’t think she disliked Jack Beaumont any longer. Not after her experience with Marcellus Rhinelander, who had turned out to be someone quite nice. Certainly, to be married to Barbara was, in itself, a kind of penance for any minor faults the man might have. He was handsome, too, when you forgot that he was a lawyer, and if you tried to imagine him without his wife.

  Barbara tried to make Susan and Harmon stay after dinner. Probably because none of her nicks had drawn blood, Susan thought. Harmon said, “I haven’t said hello to my wife properly,” and he produced a grin that was one part drunkenness and three parts embarrassing lasciviousness. Susan wasn’t wont to blush, but did so. Jack Beaumont blushed harder. Susan liked him for that, too.

  Richard Grace drove them home in the touring car. As she and Harmon were getting out, the chauffeur said quietly, “I missed our music tonight, Mrs. Dodge.”

  “So did I,” said Susan evenly. She wanted to say it quietly, so that Harmon wouldn’t hear, but her sense of fair play to Grace wouldn’t allow that. She didn’t want the chauffeur to imagine, even for a moment, that she might be ashamed of him before her husband.

  Harmon had heard his remark anyway. As she was opening the front door, Harmon said, “Been serenading the help?”

  Susan was displeased. “Not only did Marcellus lend me an armed domestic, he accompanied me several times at the Cliffs. I wanted to keep my voice in practice. Mr. and Mrs. Grace listened.”

  “Ah,” said Harmon, squeezing her, “thought you might have grown tired of me. Me absent. Him there. All that sort of thing.”

  Susan was good at interpreting Harmon Dodge, even though she had been married to him for only a short time, and most of that time they had spent apart. This series of remarks told her quite plainly that he had not been faithful to her in New York. She was glad of it. If he hadn’t betrayed her, she would have felt more of an obligation to feel more for him than she felt now.

  He sat in a low, deep, deeply upholstered chair and watched her undress. Scotty and Zelda were relegated to the bedroom next to theirs. Harmon drank off a large glass of what he called unpotable brandy, and he told Susan once more how much he missed her.

  “I missed you,” said Susan, thinking, I missed certain things about you. If Harmon was invariably charming at cocktails, the most amusing possible companion at a dinner table, the very midnight sun of the gathering afterward, then he was also an accomplished gentleman when the lights went out. Susan really had missed that part of the marriage, and if Harmon had consoled his loneliness during Susan’s absence from New York, he was a most agreeable liar in the way that he now showed her how much he had missed her.

  On Easter Sunday they all went to church, and Barbara’s outfit was considerably more astonishing to the congregation than was the rolling away of the stone on the sacred tomb. The minister, who was very high church, was duly introduced to Susan. Afterward, Susan saw, Barbara took the gentleman aside and whis
pered a few chosen words in his ear. Probably he heard the bit about Sue Sudan and Her Educated Sheepdogs, and the assertion that in order to get him to the altar, Harmon had been drugged, bound, and threatened with the Shanghai death. Susan didn’t care. The Brights had been Unitarian anyway, and had been taught to consider High Church Episcopal as but one ill-disguised step from the worst sort of Neapolitan idolatry.

  That night, the two couples went to the Café d’Esprit in Albany. Barbara made frequent allusion to Susan’s career as a “crooness” in similar places, and at one point, when Harmon had wandered away in search of a place to relieve himself, Barbara wondered aloud what would happen when the laws against liquor were repealed. “There’ll be ten times as many places, and each one will have a dreary crooness with a voice that is passable only because it’s midnight and we’re all drunk and all she wants anyway is a rich husband, or just someone—anyone—to pay her rent and provide her a decent wardrobe.”

  “Barbara,” said Jack Beaumont, “I’m tired of hearing it.”

  Susan liked him for that, too.

  “Of hearing what?” Barbara asked innocently.

  “Of hearing you make remarks about Susan.” He glanced at Susan directly as he said it. In a way, that was a compliment. He wasn’t treating her with that cold politeness in the mode of Barbara’s class. “She married Harmon, and I suppose she loves him.”

  “I do,” said Susan simply. Barbara wasn’t the sort of person you trusted with the simple truth.

  “And I know he loves her,” said Mr. Beaumont, who wasn’t sounding at all like a lawyer. “For he’s told me so. We will be seeing one another all the time in New York, and here in the country, since there’s hardly anyone else we know. I’m not asking you two to make a truce, but the constant barrage of artillery makes my head ache.”

  Barbara stared at him. “I don’t believe you said that. I don’t believe you can accuse me of disliking Susan when she has married the man that I love like a brother. A favorite brother.” She turned to Susan. “I have nothing whatever against you.”

  “Then perhaps you should act that way,” said Susan.

  “I intend to. I always have. We’re to be bosom friends, it was meant to be. It was written in the book of our fates.”

  “I’ve always felt exactly the same,” returned Susan.

  “We must go shopping together when you come back to New York tomorrow. I’ll show you where you can find some clothes that will flatter your figure. Your coloring is almost unique—I am abysmally jealous of the paleness of your skin and the unmatched ebony of your hair—and you must be very careful what shades you select.”

  “Barbara…” said Jack warningly.

  “I’ll be glad of any help you can give me,” said Susan. She smiled, but she was troubled. Not by Barbara’s inference that nothing she wore now or had ever worn was in the least becoming to her, but rather by Barbara’s offhanded assertion that she would be returning to Manhattan with Harmon.

  Susan didn’t want to leave the Quarry.

  They got home at three in the morning. Harmon drank more of the unpotable brandy. He watched Susan undress once more. They saw the sun rise. When Harmon was just about to turn over and fall asleep, Susan asked, “Would you be horribly disappointed if I didn’t return to the city with you today?”

  He didn’t turn over. He faced away from her. She thought he might already be asleep. Finally, he asked, “Why would you want to stay here?”

  “I thought I might get the garden in order,” she replied carefully. “It’s been badly neglected. If it’s not done now, it will be too late. We’d have to wait till next year.”

  “I hardly see how I can do without you any longer,” he said. He was still turned away from her.

  “It would be dreadful,” she conceded. “I’ve missed you so much, and this has been such a splendid two days.”

  There was another pause.

  “Jack told me we’re to be horribly busy this coming week,” said Harmon after a moment. He turned over on his back. He looked at her, propped on her elbows. “Ever so many bankrupts. And it’s particularly difficult when they’ve committed suicide. Widows are dreadful to deal with. If you came back, we might have very little time together anyway…”

  If the firm had taken on the bankruptcies of Morgan Guaranty Trust, the United Fruit Company, and General Motors on the same day, Harmon wouldn’t have spent more than an hour in the office each afternoon. In short, Harmon was allowing her to stay. Better than that, by his lie he indicated he wanted her to stay. Susan was pleased—because she got to remain at the Quarry. But she was also saddened—because they’d so early come to this mutual understanding that the marriage was in name only. He’d miss her, but he liked the consolations he procured for his loneliness. She’d miss him, but she now preferred what she had in his absence.

  They were a very modern couple. It was chic, but it was melancholy, too.

  When she’d had money, Susan had hoped for romance and love. When she hadn’t money, she’d looked for security—and she’d daydreamed that romance and love might come with it. It hadn’t, but that wasn’t Harmon’s fault. He was still likeable, charming, affectionate, courtly, and generous. They both had a pleasurable life. He wasn’t begrudging her that, at least, and for that she was grateful.

  She kissed him tenderly. He smiled.

  “Every moment without you will be misery,” he said gallantly.

  “Perfect misery,” she echoed. “I don’t know what I’ll do…”

  Barbara and Jack picked up Harmon at the Quarry on Monday afternoon. Barbara smiled knowingly when Susan said she wouldn’t be coming along. She made a smart remark about lovebirds that pecked each other to death, but Susan affected not to hear it. Barbara Beaumont could think what she pleased. Susan was, however, disturbed by the look of curiosity on Jack’s face, when Harmon remarked, “I think Susan must be in love with a gardener, or the postman, or someone of that brawny ilk, and that of course is the reason why she’s not coming back to Manhattan. As for me, why, I intend on making violent love to Audrey as soon as I can get home. As the months go by, I find I’ve become deeply attracted to her asthmatics.”

  “Good-bye, darling,” said Susan, kissing Harmon.

  “Utter misery,” he replied easily. “Utter, utter, utter.”

  She walked a few dozen yards down the driveway, waving to them. When the automobile disappeared behind a stand of birch, just showing the first hint of spring green, Susan turned back toward the house. Suddenly she heard the sound of another car behind her.

  The Rhinelander touring car pulled up beside her, and Marcellus stepped out. He waved his chauffeur on. “Are you relieved?” he asked Susan, taking her arm and guiding her across the lawn. For the first time, the ground felt soft beneath her feet and no longer frozen.

  “Yes,” Susan admitted. “I must admit that I am. It’s going to be spring here soon. I told Harmon I wanted to work on the gardens here. I do, in fact.”

  “It’s very modern of you,” Marcellus Rhinelander remarked.

  “Gardening? I should have thought that would be considered fairly old-fashioned.”

  “No, not that. Allowing Harmon to return to New York and his paramour.”

  “His what?”

  “Your husband is”—he sought for a delicate way of putting this indelicate matter—“is occupying himself with another woman.”

  Susan stopped short and stared at Marcellus Rhinelander. This might just be one step too far, even though Susan had every suspicion, no, every confidence that what he said was true.

  “You look surprised,” said Marcellus Rhinelander with a broad smile and a twinkle in his eye.

  “I’m a little surprised to hear you say it to me with such apparent satisfaction, and with such—”

  “With such what?” Marcellus Rhinelander asked with a broader smile and a brighter twinkle in that eye.

  “With such certainty, I suppose.”

  “I am perfectly certain of it,
” said Marcellus Rhinelander. “The detective I hired is entirely trustworthy in such matters.”

  Previous astonishment had already stopped Susan. Now greater astonishment propelled her onward again. “You hired a detective? Why?”

  “To obtain proof of Harmon’s infidelity to you.”

  “Why on earth would I want that?”

  “You want it so you can get a divorce.”

  “Why on earth would I want that?” Susan repeated.

  Marcellus Rhinelander laughed heartily at her apparent obtuseness. “Why, so you can marry me, of course!”

  Part III

  JACK AGAIN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HARMON ALMOST immediately fell asleep in the backseat. He snored. Barbara complained about life in the country with the same intensity as she complained about life in the city. Jack kept his eyes on the road, the mileage gauge, and his watch, but he might as well have been in one of those infinitely frustrating dreams in which the road never led anywhere, the mileage gauge went backward, and time stood still. New York seemed never to come closer.

  “Susan looked very pale, didn’t you think?” said Barbara. That was how Barbara initiated a conversation about any other woman. She remarked the other woman had looked pale. If she had wanted to talk about Hottentot Venus, Barbara would have started off remarking, “She looked very pale, didn’t you think?”

  Jack hadn’t thought so. “No more pale than usual,” he said. He didn’t need to glance over into the backseat to see if Harmon was listening. The man was snoring loudly. He wouldn’t hear anything Barbara said about his wife, though Jack still didn’t want Barbara to say it.

  “Let’s talk about Susan later,” said Jack quietly.

  Barbara looked at him sharply. “There’s something to talk about?”

  “Yes,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “Hmmm…” said Barbara, and was quiet for a while.

  They let Harmon off at his building. Harmon stood on the sidewalk, looking about vaguely in the twilight, as if wondering in what city on what continent he now found himself. Jack pulled Harmon’s bags out of the back and placed them beside the front door. “This is New York,” said Jack. Harmon stared at Jack as if he weren’t quite sure who Jack was that he should be telling him this. “And this is where you live,” Jack added, pointing at the wide double doors of the building. “And here comes George to take up your bags. Hello, George,” said Jack carefully, in case Harmon had forgotten the elevator man’s name, too. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Jack slowly to Harmon. “At the office.”