Jack and Susan in 1933

by McDowell, Michael

  “Oh yes, of course,” said Harmon as if he’d just remembered who he was, who Jack was, what they did for a living, and why this black man in a red uniform should be carrying bags into a building with the numbers 128 over the doors. It all came together at once for him.

  “Harmon really is a little peculiar,” Jack sighed when he got back in the car.

  “A little? Anyone who would marry that pale-faced simpering hypocritical gold digger is a candidate for the lunatic asylum so far as I’m concerned.”

  “She is pale-faced,” Jack conceded. “But she certainly doesn’t simper, and I don’t see that she’s particularly hypocritical.”

  “She most certainly is. She obviously hates me because I see right through her,” said Barbara hotly. “And yet she’s always so polite.”

  “That’s not so much hypocrisy as good manners, I think.”

  “You can’t deny she’s a gold digger though, can you? She married Harmon for his money. She obviously doesn’t love him. If she loved him, she wouldn’t be spending all her time in the country. Leaving Harmon alone here to fend for himself.”

  “That’s the strange thing about it,” said Jack.

  “What is?”

  “I thought, too, that she was a gold digger. But most women like that, when they’ve married good money, the last thing they want to do is hide themselves away in the country. They stay in the city, they run up bills in the shops, they go out every night to expensive restaurants, they sail along in new cars with new furs and new dogs and new jeweled bracelets. I’ve heard Harmon complain that Susan doesn’t spend enough money.”

  “You see? She is a hypocrite. She’s a gold digger but she won’t act like one. There’s perfidy for you,” said Barbara complacently.

  It was obvious Barbara wasn’t to be convinced. But Jack didn’t know what to think. He wondered what was going on in that marriage. The two when together seemed romantic and happy, but they were also content to live apart. Harmon said three times a day how desperately he missed his wife, but so far as Jack knew, he had never asked her to return to New York, and she had never begged Harmon to come to the country. But every marriage was a mystery, and the happy ones more enigmatic than the unhappy ones.

  Barbara and Jack went out to dinner that night. Barbara chose El Morocco, which is where they always went when Barbara wanted to talk about something.

  Tonight Barbara didn’t want to talk about anything.

  She pushed bits of meat about on her plate. She sipped at a glass of water. She smoked a cigarette and dropped the ashes on the zebra-striped fabric of their banquette. She tugged at the fronds of the silly cellophane palm trees on the dark blue walls.

  “Harmon was making a joke,” said Barbara at last. “But do you think he was right?”

  So they were going to talk about Harmon and Susan after all. But there was something different here. Barbara very rarely asked Jack’s opinion.

  “What joke are you talking about? Harmon never says anything seriously.”

  “The joke he made to Susan when we first got to the Quarry. He accused her of having an affair with the gardener. Do you think that’s why she stays up there?”

  Jack stared. “No, I don’t think that at all. I think that’s ludicrous. Harmon doesn’t even keep a gardener up there.”

  “Then with someone else. She could be having an affair with anybody. It doesn’t have to be the gardener, per se. But someone with muscles beneath his shirt and sweat on his brow. Someone who doesn’t use proper grammar. Susan’s the type to die for the type.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The way she talks to the servants. You can tell. Maybe she’s seeing Richard Grace. I don’t think I’d doubt it for a minute. A chauffeur is the next best thing to a gardener when you’re starved for love.”

  “I wasn’t aware,” said Jack. “But I don’t think the reason Susan is staying at the Quarry has anything to do with her being, as you put it, starved for love. In fact, I think it much more likely that Harmon is occupying himself with the equivalent to your gardener-chauffeur. A girl in the hat check, or one of these”—he nodded to the gowned young woman with silver hair in the style of Harlow who sidled between tables with a tray of cigarettes and cigars around her neck—“would be very much to Harmon’s taste.”

  “Probably you’re right,” said Barbara dismissively. “Luckys,” she said to the gowned girl with the tray around her neck. When she’d ripped the foil from the pack, and Jack had lighted her cigarette, Barbara went on. “But if Susan were having an affair, and she were discovered—”

  “How?”

  “It doesn’t matter how. But if she were discovered, then it would be grounds for divorce, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Jack. “But husbands don’t generally file. Only wives file.”

  “But husbands can file?”

  “Yes, of course. But it looks bad.”

  Barbara shrugged. “It looks worse to keep a wife like that.”

  “Why are you so concerned with this?”

  “I’m not a bit concerned,” said Barbara. “Do I look concerned?”

  She didn’t. She looked bored, but then, Barbara always looked bored.

  “But Father’s concerned,” said Barbara. “He thinks that Harmon made a terrible mistake. He’d like to see Harmon freed of that dreadful crooness. Do you know any detectives?”

  Jack blinked. “Why do you ask?”

  “A detective could get evidence that Susan is sharing her bed with Father’s chauffeur. Do you know any?”

  “Yes,” answered Jack reluctantly.

  “Hire him then.”

  “No,” said Jack.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s none of our business.”

  “It’s very much our business. Harmon is our best friend. He’s your employer. He’s Father’s favorite person in the world next to me. We owe it to him.”

  “We owe it to Harmon not to interfere with his marriage. If it’s the wrong marriage for him, then he’ll get out of it of his own accord, in his own good time. I won’t hire a detective.”

  “All right,” said Barbara. “Then give me his name, and I’ll hire him, and I won’t even tell you I’ve done it.”

  “No,” said Jack.

  “I’m tired,” said Barbara, stabbing out her cigarette in Jack’s butter. “Let’s go home.”

  They went home, and Barbara said not another word about Harmon, about Susan, or about the detective.

  “Mr. Rhinelander is on the line,” Miss Clairville said next morning as Jack walked into the office.

  Jack took off his coat and dropped his brief case into a chair. He sat down behind his desk and picked up the telephone. Before he spoke to his father-in-law, he called out for the secretary to close the door. She did so. Jack listened till he had heard her hang up in the other office. Miss Clairville was fat and efficient and curious, and Jack had an intuition that this call was not about the normal business of the firm of Rhinelander, Rhinelander, and Dodge.

  I don’t suppose Harmon is there.

  Jack nearly laughed aloud. The only time Harmon could be found in the office at nine A.M. was when he’d passed out on the reception sofa the night before. “He’s not quite in yet,” said Jack.

  Good. I want you to do something for me. I want you to come to Albany today. Don’t tell Harmon you’re coming. And don’t tell Barbara either.

  This was one to handle carefully. Jack could tell that already.

  “Is this about Susan, by any chance?”

  It has nothing to do with her.

  Jack knew Marcellus Rhinelander was lying, but he also knew that that was not something he could say.

  “We’re very busy here,” Jack temporized.

  It doesn’t matter. Come anyway. You’ll be back in New York by ten tonight. Harmon probably won’t even notice you’ve gone, and if Barbara asks, just tell her you were on Long Island. Barbara hates Long Island so much, she’ll never question you fur
ther.

  There was nothing for Jack to do.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “It’s about Susan” was the first thing Marcellus Rhinelander said as he opened the door.

  “I suspected,” said Jack. “You want me to hire a detective.”

  “No,” said Marcellus, “I’ve taken care of that myself.”

  Grace Grace took care of Jack’s coat.

  “You have?” asked Jack in surprise.

  “A man named MacIsaac.”

  “He’s worked for us before. A scoundrel.”

  “Yes,” said Marcellus complacently. “He’s in the study now. And he brought photographs.”

  Jack’s eyes widened. He stared at the closed double doors of Marcellus’s study. “You mean—”

  Marcellus Rhinelander smiled. “Yes, exactly. Proof of infidelity. There won’t be any problem with a divorce. And that’s why you’re here. I’d like you to handle it.”

  Jack sighed. It was the sort of thing he’d feared, only he hadn’t expected the business to have proceeded so far, so quickly. But he wasn’t as surprised at that as he was to learn that Susan Dodge actually was carrying on with the gardener or the chauffeur or some other ungrammatical but muscular and sweaty gentleman.

  The study doors were opened from within by Malcolm MacIsaac. He was short and thin with shiny black hair and a shiny black suit. He had shiny black eyes and shiny white teeth and a bright red tongue which darted between his thin parched lips.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Beaumont,” said Mr. MacIsaac in a voice that was parched and thin and the least shiny thing about him. “You mustn’t call me a scoundrel. I only track scoundrels. I expose scoundrels. I turn scoundrels over like mossy wet rocks and I peer at the little horrors that have bred beneath their fat scoundrelly bellies. But no, I am not a scoundrel myself.”

  “If I called you a scoundrel, and you are not, in fact, a scoundrel, then I apologize for it,” said Jack. This was as far as he could go as an apology with Malcolm MacIsaac.

  “No offense taken, of course,” said the detective. “We have worked together before, Mr. Beaumont. We shall work together again. In the meantime, I have brought you a few scoundrelly photographs to peruse.”

  He stepped aside with a bright flourish of his shiny-suited arms. Marcellus pushed Jack inside the study.

  Most surprising of all was what Jack found in the study.

  Or rather, whom Jack found in the study.

  Susan Bright Dodge.

  She sat on the leather sofa, soberly leafing through a sheaf of photographs. From the way they stuck together, they were probably damply fresh from the darkroom.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SHE LOOKED UP at him from the sofa accusingly.

  Jack blushed violently. He turned right around and pulled Marcellus back out into the hallway. He slammed the doors shut, nearly crushing the shiny bright toe of Mr. MacIsaac’s bright new leathers.

  “This is very cruel,” said Jack to Marcellus, offended. “To show her those photographs.”

  “The infidelity had to be proved,” said Marcellus, smiling like a villain.

  “But to bring her here and show her photographs of herself and—and—and who was it? It wasn’t your chauffeur, was it? This is very cruel, Marcellus, and I’m ashamed to be here as if I were part of it.”

  Marcellus Rhinelander stared at Jack. Then he laughed. “Are you playing the simpleton, Jack? Or do you really not understand?”

  “Understand what?”

  “Those are certainly not photographs of Susan and Richard Grace—” He laughed loud and heartily at the idea, and Jack blushed again to think that the poor woman in the study could hear that laughter in the hallway. “Those are photographs of Harmon with another woman.”

  Jack blinked. “It’s Harmon’s infidelity?”

  “Of course. Is it such a surprise?”

  “Yes,” Jack had to admit. “But why was MacIsaac following Harmon? Last night Barbara wanted me to find a detective to prove Susan’s infidelity. She said you felt Harmon had made a disastrous match.”

  “Harmon is the luckiest man in the world. It was Susan who made the disastrous match. It’s that error I intend to rectify—with those photographs.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jack. “You’re right about that much at least.”

  “It’s very simple,” said Marcellus, employing the tone of voice with which he addressed children and Communists. “Proof of Harmon’s infidelity will allow Susan to file for divorce. And when she has obtained her freedom, I will marry her.”

  Jack stared. “This is a very elaborate practical joke,” he said at last. “Very elaborate, and so far as I can determine, pointless. It is certainly in bad taste.”

  Marcellus’s villainous smile faded. “Don’t annoy me,” he said in a low voice. “This is not a practical joke. I want you to go in there, look at the photographs, and then talk to Susan about the divorce. We can do the entire business quietly, or we can do it loudly. I would suggest for Harmon’s sake that it be done quietly. But it will be done, and if not by you, then by another.”

  Jack said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “Do you know how Barbara will take this?”

  “I’ve an inkling,” said Marcellus. “And if she prefers to call Susan ‘Susan’ rather than ‘Mother,’ I’ll understand.”

  Jack felt that the matter would neither begin nor end there so far as Barbara was concerned.

  “May I speak to Susan alone?” Jack asked at last.

  “Of course. She’s your client now,” said Marcellus. “I’ll take Mr. MacIsaac out to the kennels. Perhaps he’ll be bitten. He’s quite useful, but on the whole I agree with you, he is a scoundrel.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” said Susan as she handed Jack the photographs.

  She smiled faintly.

  “Ah, yes…” said Jack.

  The first photograph made him blush.

  It was of George, holding open the door of the apartment building for Harmon and a young blond woman in a tight cloth coat.

  The second photograph made him wonder why he’d blushed at the first.

  It was of Harmon kissing the same young blond woman in a corner booth of a restaurant that looked vaguely familiar to Jack.

  The third photograph was a relief. Merely a series of identical brownstones on an anonymous side street. Probably in the west forties, Jack thought. An X in purple ink was marked across a set of windows on the third floor of one of the brownstones.

  The fourth photograph made Jack turn pale and tremble. He had no doubt they were inside the room behind the windows marked with the purple X. The room was furnished the way he’d always imagined rooms on the upper floors of anonymous brownstones in the west forties would be furnished. A couple of mismatched chairs, a scuffed dresser, faded prints behind dusty glass—and, hardly surprisingly, one of those beds that was not quite wide enough for two. Despite that narrowness, two persons occupied that bed. The young blond woman’s lipstick was smeared. Harmon hadn’t removed his socks and garters.

  “She worked at the Villa Vanity,” said Susan. “In the cloak check room. Her name is Dorothy. Her father lost his leg in the War, and her mother was once arrested in a suffragette march.”

  Jack laid the photographs facedown on the sofa. He hardened his heart.

  “This is very distasteful,” he said at last.

  “I agree,” said Susan.

  “What Harmon did is reprehensible,” Jack went on, “but I cannot refrain from saying that I think what you’re doing is worse.”

  Susan looked surprised. Or at any rate, Jack decided, she feigned surprise.

  “Go on,” she said with interest. Or at any rate, feigned interest.

  “Barbara—”

  “Ah,” said Susan. “Barbara.”

  “Barbara has always felt you were a gold digger. Perhaps I thought so, too, at first. One is bound to think so, in these times, whenever a poor girl marries a rich man.
But I had come to think Barbara wrong in her assessment.”

  “Oh yes?” said Susan placidly. “What altered your opinion in my favor?”

  “Your failure to spend Harmon’s money. Harmon’s failure to complain about you, or your behavior, in any fashion. Your marked and proper attention to him in public. Your apparent desire to make a home of the Quarry. All these things suggested that you had married Harmon primarily for love.”

  “It’s always interesting,” Susan remarked, “to see ourselves as others see us.”

  “You’ve been cleverer than I could have given you credit for.”

  “Oh yes?” She took up the proof of her husband’s infidelity and aligned the photographs neatly. “In what way did I exceed your expectations in the matter of cleverness?”

  “You saw Harmon, and you snared him, but once you’d met Marcellus, you realized there was a bigger fish to fry. So you lured him, and snared him, and now you’re throwing Harmon back, and you’re reeling in Marcellus. You’ll get a settlement out of the smaller fish at the same time you’re landing the bigger one.”

  “Extended metaphors are very boring,” Susan remarked languidly, sounding very much like Barbara. “Especially extended piscatory metaphors.”

  “I may as well tell you now,” said Jack. “I don’t intend to involve myself in this sordid affair. You can procure a divorce, I’m sure, with the aid of these photographs, but you won’t procure it by my assistance.”

  “What makes you think I want a divorce?” Susan asked, smiling.

  “You can’t marry my father-in-law without one,” responded Jack.