Jack and Susan in 1913 (2 page)

“Would you like to go out for a sandwich and cup of coffee?” Susan asked her companion. She was half-ashamed of the thoughts she'd entertained about Ida. After all, it wasn't Ida's fault she had been born beneath a conjunction of lucky stars.

“Lord no,” returned Ida with vigor—as if the idea of eating simply and cheaply were mad, unpatriotic, and salacious. “I've got a gentleman waiting for me at the door. We'll be motoring over to that hotel on Fifth Avenue, what's it called? The expensive one? Sherry's. Sherry's is very dear. I'm going to have oysters. Oysters always make my complexion very pink.”

“So does champagne,” said Susan.

“How would you know how champagne tasted?” returned Ida casually.

“I've tasted it,” said Susan but it was a lie and Ida knew it—and Susan knew Ida knew it.

“Maybe someday when you get a part that lets you wear some
real
clothes, maybe you'll attract somebody in the balcony—someone who can't see you too close up, I mean—and maybe he'll send you flowers and candy and ask you out to a restaurant where the champagne is already ordered.” Ida's tone suggested that this was a possibility about as likely as Susan's starting out for California in a covered wagon at dawn the next day. “It could—
possibly
—happen.”

“Ida, I'm very happy tonight, and I don't need champagne or flowers or candy to make me any happier.”

“So you'll run home alone to that dreary little flat and lie down in your narrow little bed and stare at the cracks in the ceiling and think how lucky you are to have a role in
He and She
. And you'll wonder, ‘What would they think of me back in Jersey now?' Ain't I hitting that nail square on its head?”

“Connecticut,” said Susan ruefully. But in other respects, although Susan certainly wouldn't admit it aloud, Ida was right. And some of Susan's happiness dissolved and puddled on the stone floor of the dressing room when she thought of her dreary flat, her narrow cot, and the Florida-shaped cracks in her ceiling. “Come,” she said loudly, answering a double knock on the door.

It was the doorman's daughter, who ran little errands in the theater. She was holding a square envelope, for which Ida automatically held out her hand.

“For Miss Bright,” said the sad, pinched girl, who'd gotten a coating of dusty snow on her shoulders when she passed an open air-shaft window on her way down.

Ida threw down the chamois cloth she'd been rubbing her nose with, fell back against her chair in apparent astonishment, and turned a disbelieving gaze on Susan. “For
you
?”

Susan smiled, and took the note as if she were long-accustomed to receiving them. Only admirers sent such notes; it was Susan's first.

“Perhaps he mistook you for me,” said Ida thoughtfully as the errand girl pulled shut the dressing room door. “Perhaps he thinks that
you
are Ida Conquest.”

“No,” said Susan. “I don't believe that's it at all.” Actually, that's exactly what she did believe.

She opened the letter and read:

Susan suspected that Mr. Austin was the gentleman in the third row who had ripped his jacket while applauding her.

“I
T'S CODE,” said Ida definitely, when she'd read the note.

“Code?”

“He's planning something wicked. I guess you know what I mean by
that
.”

“It seems quite straightforward to me,” returned Susan, a little hotly. She certainly did know what Ida meant by
something wicked
.

“
Supper
is the code word. Supper means
something very wicked
. It means ‘that which makes a woman fonder and a man more careless.' If ever I saw an invitation to a bedroom, this is it. The thing's clear as ice.”

Susan was dubious. Ida was not known for her generous heart, and it might be that she was simply trying to spoil Susan's simple pleasure in the admiring note. On the other hand, why would a woman with as many admirers as Ida Conquest bother about depriving Susan of one gentleman caller? Susan didn't know what to think.

“This is the scrawl of a fossil,” added Ida, tossing the note aside.

That
was jealousy.

“I'm going to see what he looks like,” said Susan.

“Sixty if he's a day. Two things on his mind. One of them is his digestion.”

Susan sighed. It was hard work being a single woman in New York. It would have been very pleasant to think of having supper with that young man in the third row. His face had been somewhat shadowed, and the footlights had been bright in her eyes, but she
thought
he was handsome.

“You're going to be disappointed,” Ida warned her.

A quarter of an hour later, protected against the snow by a cape, a wide-brimmed black hat, gloves, and boots, Susan headed for the front doors of the New Columbia Theater. The box-office keeper unlocked one of the doors for her. The snow that had been falling since morning was inches deep in those places where it had not already been swept up or trampled down. It was falling harder now, and the wind blew it horizontally across the glowing patches of streetlamps.

Holding the cape closed at her neck and lowering her head so that the brim of her hat shadowed her face, Susan crept to the corner of the building. She peered into the blind alleyway where the stage door was located.

A solitary man stood there at the concrete stoop.

He was not the man in the third row. That much Susan could tell from just his silhouette. The man in the theater, madly applauding, had been young and slender, and this man was definitely middle-aged and corpulent.

Perhaps sensing her presence he turned, and his face was illumined by the electric light beside the door.

Jay Austin was, in accordance with Ida's prediction, sixtyish. Moreover his complexion was red—probably from sharing too many bottles of champagne with young actresses.

Even from that distance of a dozen yards, and at night, in a driving snow, Susan could also tell that Mr. Austin was indeed the sort of gentleman to employ code words in notes sent backstage.

So Ida had been jealous—but Ida had also been right.

With a sigh, Susan Bright turned away into the snow.

Back at the entrance to the theater she ran into the show's stage director, and several of the actors. This group was retiring to a small neighborhood restaurant to wait for the reviews, with a bottle or two or three of wine, and they asked Susan to join them. Without knowing exactly why she did so, she declined the invitation.

When this group had ambled out of sight, she pulled the veil of her hat over her face, just in case Mr. Jay Austin should come out of the alleyway. Susan crossed Eighth Avenue and looked up and down. She had decided that if she found a taxicab, she'd take it. With the moderate hope of several weeks of employment—she would be getting in excess of thirty dollars a week—she could afford the fifty-cent extravagance.

The streets were now filling up with snow considerably faster than the municipal authorities could remove it, and no taxicabs were to be seen. She could either walk home—twenty-two blocks—or she could walk to the subway station at Times Square. She decided that the subway was by far the wiser idea.

With Times Square as her goal, Susan headed straight across residential Thirty-eighth Street toward Seventh Avenue where she would turn north at the Hotel York. It was still a long walk through the driving snow, alone at so late an hour, a prey to footpads or likely to be mistaken for a prostitute.

Just then a small white dog—a wire-haired terrier—bounded down the sidewalk toward her, yapping ferociously, and diving into small snowbanks at the base of the streetlamps as if he thought rats might have taken refuge inside. The dog was obviously as delighted with the weather as Susan was inconvenienced by it, and that gave her a little perspective on the gloominess of her disposition. After all, this should be a night of celebration—an opening night, the possibility of weeks of work, a purse that was going to swell instead of shrink. Susan could not help wishing that Mr. Jay Austin had proved to be someone her own age, or perhaps a little older, comfortably situated, unmarried, and not predicating a friendship on her making certain amorous concessions. It was a great mistake on the part of the lay public, Susan thought, to imagine that theater people were any less lonely than the rest of humanity.

“Here, boy,” she cried with a snap of her fingers.

The dog ran up and leapt into the air, playfully snapping at her hand.

She caught him out of the air and hugged him and tossed him into a fluffy snowbank.

The dog burrowed down, shot back up again in a different place, ran around Susan three times, and leapt into the air again.

This play continued up the street as Susan made her way toward Seventh Avenue. If the collarless dog was a stray, then at least he was a happy stray.

At this late hour and in this weather the few people she passed were men, but she did not see their faces, they were so bundled against the driving snow. She knew that after they'd passed, they turned around and looked at her—a lone young woman on the snowy street at this hour. But Susan hurried along, laughing, with the white terrier.

As she rounded the Hotel York Susan became certain that she was being followed.

Just a feeling at first, confirmed a moment later by the noise of crunching snow in the silent city behind her. The dog, tossed into yet another snowbank, this time came up growling.

Susan quickly reached down and snatched up the animal. She shook the clumped snow off him; he was now all teeth and hot doggy breath. He dug his claws into the front of her cape, and climbed up her shoulder, snarling and growling at whoever followed.

Probably it was just another lonely soul like her, stranded in the snowy night, with no intention more sinister than getting home as quickly as possible.

The dog scraped and clawed, evidently with the intention of attacking the person who was steadily lessening the distance between them, but Susan held him tight. The dog was a weapon, and she didn't want those ferocious jaws out of her hands.

The dog scraped, and barked, and clawed—and finally began to howl in his frustration. Susan moved along as quickly as she could, without seeming to run, without risking a fall on the slippery snow. She watched for cabs, for policemen, for sympathetic passersby. She was alone on the dark streets of Manhattan in a snowstorm, with a recalcitrant dog, and a dogged pursuer.

As she was crossing Thirty-ninth Street, the man stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

The surprise of his touch loosened her grip on the terrier, and the dog flew over her shoulder and clawed his way through the air.

“Oh, Lord!” cried the attacker in a hoarse croaking voice, “Miss Bright—get him off!”

Susan turned, a bit less alarmed, but now confused. The man who'd been following her lay in the middle of the street—fortunately empty of traffic—keeping the terrier at bay with his feet.

“How do you know my name?” Susan asked, but just then she recognized her pursuer as the tall man in the third row and she knew the answer.

“I sent you a note this—”

“Yes, Mr. Austin. I looked for you—”

She grabbed up the terrier and held him close to her tightly to prevent him from making any further attack on her admirer.

“I waited for you outside the stage door. When you didn't—”

“Oh, I didn't see you. There was a fat man—”

“—waiting for Miss Conquest. She told me that you had already left, so I—”

“But I hadn't—”

They didn't seem to be able to finish a sentence properly, but it
was
a bit difficult to carry on a normal conversation, given the circumstances. On top of the fact that Mr. Austin was having some difficulty getting to his feet, and Susan was having even more difficulty in controlling the dog, from the croaking sound of Mr. Austin's voice, he seemed to be on the verge of coming down with the grippe. Lying for long in a snowy street wasn't going to help that very much.

But at least it was happily apparent to both that some sort of unintentional error had been made.

Mr. Jay Austin finally pulled himself to a standing position by grasping the fender of a parked automobile, took a breath and said, “You ought not be out alone, Miss Bright. May I see you safely to your home?”

The terrier, as if understanding this speech and objecting to it strenuously, made one more valiant lunge in the attempt to implant his sharp teeth into the man.