Jack and Susan in 1933

by Michael McDowell

  Barbara looked at Jack as if he were mad. “Pain? You feel pain? Didn’t you see the doctor?” Then, knowing very well that Jack had seen the doctor, and that his pain must therefore be quite imaginary, Barbara returned to the matter at hand: Susan Bright, and what Jack had said to her. “You were there for over an hour, you said, so you must have had plenty of opportunity to talk to her. You warned her away from Harmon, I hope. You made it very clear that nothing was to come of this infatuation of his, I trust. May I assume that you had the good sense to threaten her a little?”

  Jack looked at Barbara for a moment, and then replied, “Yes, I think I can say that Susan felt a little threatened. She was particularly afraid that the car would explode.”

  “Lincoln LeBarons never explode,” retorted Barbara. “Every schoolgirl knows that. I can imagine the entire situation now. You had that girl where you wanted her— trapped in the entrance of that building—and you might have applied any amount of pressure. But the fact is— Jack, I do know this as if I had been there—she wrapped you around her little finger. I should have handled this.” Barbara dropped her cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table, and then stalked out of the room.

  “I wish you had,” said Jack sincerely. He spent the next few minutes trying to find a way to reach Barbara’s burning cigarette without jarring any portion of his upper body. It proved not to be possible. Finally he gave up, simply reached for the cigarette, stretching every one of the three-hundred-odd muscles that were involved in that mighty piece of work that was the bruise that used to be his chest, screamed a mighty scream, and stabbed out the cigarette with his bare thumb.

  Jack was in no condition to return to work. Because Jack did not go to work, Harmon Dodge saw no reason to go to work. As he explained amiably to Jack, sitting on the edge of Jack’s bed, and bouncing up and down in a way that made Jack’s ribs prod their serrated edges against his lungs, “If a client came in and saw me there, he might ask my advice, and what the hell do I know about bankruptcies?”

  “I hope you’re not seeing that girl,” said Jack dutifully. Barbara had told Jack several dozen times that he was to quiz Harmon unmercifully. Jack felt that he had recently attained new understanding of the adverb.

  “What girl?” returned Harmon amiably. Then he considered for a moment. “Oh yes, the redhead from the Purple Porcupine Tea Shop. No, certainly not. Haven’t seen her for ages. She went back to her boyfriend in Philadelphia. The boyfriend promised to marry her mother, or some such thing. Very romantic, and I was very happy for her.”

  “No,” said Jack suspiciously, “not the girl from the Purple Porcupine, but the girl from Villa Vanity. Susan Bright.”

  Harmon grinned and smote Jack familiarly on the shoulder. Jack felt as if his internal organs had just undergone some sort of improbable and dangerous rearrangement. “You’ve had more to do with that one than I, Jackie my boy, Jackie my gentleman. I wasn’t the one who put her in certain danger of death just so that I could rescue her. No, Jackie my gentle gentleman, it wasn’t I.”

  “Then you haven’t seen her?” Jack persisted, and surreptitiously stuck a finger into his pajamas to see if his bandages were becoming soaked with blood.

  “The Villa Vanity is closed,” said Harmon.

  That wasn’t quite the answer that would have satisfied Barbara.

  “So you haven’t heard her sing,” said Jack. “But perhaps you’ve seen her elsewhere?”

  Harmon smiled. “When this damned Depression is over, we’re going into criminal law. You’ll beat those witnesses down, Jackie, won’t you Jock?” Harmon bounced up from the bed, putting Jack’s organs into their proper place. Then he wagged a finger at the groaning Jack. “Tell Barbara not to worry about me, Jockie Jack, for I’ll be seeing no more of Miss Bright. Miss Bright will cease to exist for me. Miss Bright, I have learned, has vacated her establishment on the Hudson, and it will know her no more. I will know her no more. Can I be plainer?”

  “No,” said Jack, and thought, Even Barbara would be satisfied with this. Harmon Dodge didn’t think lying worth his trouble. If he said Miss Bright existed for him no more, then there wasn’t anything else to it—she didn’t exist.

  “Well,” said Barbara when she returned to the apartment that evening, “something was done right for a change.”

  “Please don’t light a cigarette,” said Jack. “And please don’t jump up and down on the side of the bed.”

  “I had no intention of doing either,” said Barbara, rolling her head on her neck in a way that made the bones crack loudly enough to be heard across the room.

  “And don’t make your neck crack like that,” said Jack. “It brings back painful memories.”

  “You’re a perfectly wretched invalid,” said Barbara.

  “As a nurse…” Jack began, but then didn’t finish. The best thing that could be said about Barbara Beaumont as a nurse was the best that could be said about certain doctors—they stayed away.

  “I’ve no aptitude for nursing,” Barbara conceded. “I’m a Christian Scientist at heart, I suppose. I don’t really believe in illness.”

  “Except when it’s your own,” said Jack.

  “Well, of course I believe in it then,” she returned, “for I can feel it. Can’t I?” She lit a cigarette and studied Jack for a few moments. “You’re no good here,” she said at last.

  “No,” he agreed with all the heartiness that a dozen yards of bandages would allow.

  “It’s quite dreadful sleeping with you,” she went on. “That smell of camphor and mending bones never leaves the bed.”

  “What do mending bones smell like?”

  “A little like rancid butter,” Barbara replied with an air that suggested she’d thought about an appropriate comparison for some time. “And this apartment really is a little too small for two persons at the best of times, but when one of them is claiming to be ill—”

  “Barbara, I broke two ribs—”

  “—it is entirely too small, and therefore I’ve decided that we should spend a few weeks in the country with Father.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. Usually when Barbara spent this much time working up to a proposal of some course of action, the idea was harebrained. Jack tended to object to it as a matter of course. But this one sounded pleasant. Jack liked Barbara’s father. Jack liked the country, and he liked Barbara’s father’s mansion. Jack disliked their short, hard bed in New York, and he liked the long, soft bed in their bedroom at the Cliffs. Jack disliked the way that windows rattled in the January wind in New York, and he hated the blasting dry heat of New York radiators. He liked the coziness of country winters and the crackling heat of enormous stone fireplaces.

  “Harmon will be there,” said Barbara, rather as if Jack had objected to yet another of her odious schemes. Harmon had the Dodge mansion, which was called the Quarry, and was situated only a few hundred yards downriver from the Cliffs. “The office will be closed for a few weeks, and we’ll all be jolly and cozy, and Daddy will ask why we haven’t any children, and you’ll make up some excuse the way you always do.”

  Jack didn’t know why he and Barbara didn’t have children. It wasn’t a bad idea, though as far as the possible offspring were concerned, Jack as a father was probably a slightly more pleasant proposition than Barbara as a mother.

  “Yes,” said Jack, “that would probably be a very good idea.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MARCELLUS RHINELANDER sent the touring car down to New York to fetch his daughter and Jack back to the Cliffs. The Rhinelander driver was a thin, middle-aged man named Richard Grace who was a Communist. Rhinelander kept Grace on, not despite his political beliefs, but precisely because of them. It delighted the old man to throw his capitalistic wealth into Grace’s face at every turn. Grace kept the job because he took a kind of grim pleasure in seeing at first hand what terrible ravages unearned wealth made on the character and the social system, and also because the pay was very good. Richard Grace had a wife named Gr
ace, who was cook to Marcellus Rhinelander and had no political beliefs whatever.

  Grace (the driver, not the cook) disliked Barbara on account of her being Barbara, and disliked Jack on account of his being yet another of the privileged classes who would be swept away in the coming Socialist revolution. Grace saw it his duty, in the time before the revolution, to make Jack’s life as miserable as possible. This was accomplished amply in the drive from New York to Albany. Grace, who was a very good chauffeur, did not now drive like one, but bumped into every hole, took every possible detour over gravel, made unnecessary and very sudden stops, and accelerated afterward so quickly that Jack yearned for a nation of entirely public transportation.

  The trip took seven hours. Jack sweated in a cocoon of four lap blankets, which did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the bumps and batterings. Barbara lounged in the opposite corner, alternately smoking cigarettes (which filled the closed compartment with smoke) and yelling at Grace (who couldn’t hear her through the glass partition anyway).

  “Are you certain it was only two broken ribs?” Marcellus Rhinelander asked Jack as he staggered up the low steps to the front of the mansion. “You look rather worse. Barbara, are you two children keeping something from me? Some wasting disease, perhaps?” Marcellus Rhinelander was hale and sixty, red in the face, white in the hair, and a vivid blue in the eye.

  “I’ll be all right,” Jack tried to whisper in a seizure of racking cough that was one part cigarette smoke and one part a blast of frigid air that suddenly blew up off the frozen Hudson River especially for him.

  “Grace,” Jack’s father-in-law said with a smile of suppressed glee, “just after you left, you had a visitor here. One of your Communist friends claiming to be your brother. I told him you’d died trying to put together an anarchist bomb.”

  Grace glowered at his employer. “If I put together a bomb,” he said darkly, “I won’t be the one to die.”

  “And,” said Rhinelander with a relish less well disguised, “I took the liberty of telephoning your friend’s description to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Marcellus turned on his heel and roundly thumped Jack on the back with the length of his ebony cane. “That’ll show the scarlet scoundrels!”

  The Cliffs was a large neo-colonial mansion built in 1893. It had more rooms than any proper colonial mansion, and those rooms had larger dimensions, and higher ceilings, and quainter wallpaper than the originals. The house had a splendid view, from most rooms, of the Hudson—and, on the other side of the Hudson, of half a dozen more neo-colonial mansions. (In this, the reaches of the Hudson just south of Albany were rather like Park Avenue.) The Cliffs got its name not from a promontory over the river, but from an escarpment pitched high above a slate quarry to the south. Jack and Barbara were installed in a suite at the opposite end of the second floor from Marcellus Rhinelander’s rooms. The old man played the piano loudly at night with more enthusiasm than precision. As he played, he drunkenly sang tenor arias from the worst of Verdi’s operas. To Jack’s knowledge, no one had ever mentioned this peculiarity in Marcellus Rhinelander. For all he knew, it might not be the old man at all, but the ghost of an Indian tenor who had been buried on ground the house now occupied.

  Outside the windows, the limbs of the trees were slickly black and sheeted with ice. It was a hard winter. Inside, one of the servants had built a fire in Jack’s bedroom, and Jack, thinking that nothing could be worse than an ebony cane across his back, pushed one of a pair of green velvet Recamiers before the blaze. The Recamier, Jack discovered, was like a chaise longue with all the comfort taken out of it and replaced with angles that had nothing to do with the human body. Jack wrapped himself in a red velvet smoking jacket and reflected that a layer of velvet over bandages made a very fine cushion indeed, better than half a dozen thick woolen lap robes. Grace Grace brought Jack tea and threw another log onto the fire. She said it was a pleasure to see him and ventured the opinion that perhaps it wasn’t going to be such a dull winter after all.

  As if on cue, they heard the noise of a fast car pulling up with a sudden stop on the icy gravel directly beneath the windows of the bedroom.

  Grace, who was fat and wore a red star on her black uniform to show her husband’s sympathy with the Russian workers, went to the window and looked out.

  “No!” she cried happily. “Not a dull winter at all. For here’s Mr. Harmon and his new wife!”

  Jack, fearing and expecting the worst, hopped up from the Recamier and leapt to the window beside Grace Grace. A few seconds before this would have seemed an impossible action. He looked down.

  As he was sauntering around the car, Harmon looked up, saw Jack’s face in the window, and waved. Jack did not wave back. Harmon opened the door of the snappy yellow roadster. Susan Bright stepped out.

  Not Susan Bright, of course.

  Susan Dodge.

  “Find Barbara,” cried Jack, pushing Grace away from the window. Or, rather, putting his arms against her shoulders and making a pushing motion. Grace’s bulk and Jack’s weakened musculature didn’t accomplish much in the way of propulsion. “Tell her to come here and speak to me. For God’s sake, don’t let her go downstairs before she’s spoken to me. Hurry!”

  Grace hurried out in search of Barbara.

  Barbara was on the staircase landing with the large oval window overlooking the gravel driveway. Jack knew this because of her scream. It was loud, long, and echoing. Before the last echoes had died away, bounding off the walls of the hallways of the first and second floors of the mansion, Barbara had collided with Grace on the way to Jack’s suite.

  “He told me that Miss Bright no longer existed for him,” Jack pleaded.

  “Of course Miss Bright no longer existed for him!” Barbara screeched. “He married her! And Miss Bright turned into Mrs. Dodge! This unfortunate union is your doing. We owe it to Harmon to see that it’s annulled. This will kill Father. Father loves Harmon. Father wanted me to marry Harmon. When I married you, it nearly killed Father. When he sees who and what Harmon married, he’ll die for sure.”

  Barbara flounced out and left Jack to figure out just how much and what part of her last speech had been exaggeration.

  Jack oiled and brushed his hair and put on a proper shirt and jacket as introductions were made downstairs. Marcellus Rhinelander already knew of the marriage, it turned out, and had himself invited Harmon and his new wife over. Downstairs, with low frosted windows overlooking the icy brown lawn and the river, was a parlor furnished with chairs and sofas that were deeply cushioned and covered with chintz. They were as soft and plush and cold as the interior of an expensive coffin. Here sat Harmon and Susan Dodge on either ends of a small sofa. There sat Barbara across from them, looking both bored and scandalized. Rhinelander at a side table poured real liquor into old cut-glass tumblers.

  Jack looked at Susan Bright first, just to make sure it was Susan Bright. It was. Or wasn’t. It was Susan Dodge.

  He looked at Harmon. Harmon smiled a smile that said I didn’t lie, did I now? And knowing Barbara as we both do, do you blame me, Jackie my boy, for telling the truth in so underhanded a fashion? Jack didn’t blame Harmon. Jack would probably have done the same. But it didn’t make life with Barbara any easier.

  He looked at Barbara. Barbara frowned at him, then smiled, and the smile was worse than the frown. The smile said, Whatever happens, I blame you.

  “Jack,” said Marcellus, bringing him a tumbler of brandy. Jack knew it was real brandy by the way it sloshed against the clear side of the glass. “You’ve already met Susan, I understand.”

  “I wish you happiness,” said Jack with a politeness studied and cold, and he raised his glass in a gesture that he hoped was distant and ironical. This was all to appease Barbara, of course. He didn’t feel particularly studied, cold, distant, or ironical when he looked at Susan Dodge. He rather pitied her. He could imagine that being married to Harmon Dodge was, in its way, rather like being married to Barbara Rhinelander, though differen
t in details.

  “I congratulate you,” he said with a little smile of cold mischief to Harmon. The cold mischief was for Barbara, too. Actually, Jack did feel like congratulating Harmon. Possibly Susan could make him happy. She looked like the sort.

  “I was just telling Susan that though I’d never met her, I found her face familiar,” Marcellus went on. He moved very close to Susan and peered at her.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, Father, if her face were familiar,” said Barbara in her bland, dangerous voice. “Susan was an entertainer on the variety stage.”

  “Harmon did say you’d studied music,” said Barbara’s father in the same tone of voice he might remark to an ax murderer, I’d heard you’d been employed by a slaughterhouse.

  “Yes,” said Barbara, smiling a brilliantly bland, dangerous smile at Susan, “she was known as Sue Sudan and Her Educated Sheepdogs.”

  Jack choked on his brandy. Marcellus’s eyes widened.

  Susan Dodge sat very still in the corner of the sofa. Her husband smiled a smile that might mean almost anything. “I played Albany only once,” Susan said at last.

  “Did they wear little outfits?” Barbara persisted. “I’ve always longed to see a sheepdog en costume.”

  “They had costumes,” said Susan. “Yes.”

  “Did you sew them yourself?” asked Barbara in that voice of patronizing interest that royalty employs when addressing the lower classes.

  “Yes,” said Susan.

  Barbara leaned forward in her chair as if this were quite the most enthralling thing she’d ever heard in her life. “Perhaps—” Then she paused dramatically. “Perhaps you have some photographs of this most interesting period of your life.”

  “Not with me,” said Susan darkly.

  Jack looked at Harmon, who was smiling contentedly and actually seemed to enjoy this sparring. Perhaps sparring was the wrong word, for it was Barbara who delivered all the blows, while Susan only parried and flinched.