Jack and Susan in 1933 (11 page)

Susan slept.

Susan wakened to the barking of dogs. She sat up suddenly in bed, pointing an accusing finger at the fireplace. Scotty and Zelda were silent and still, but there was something nervous and uneasy about them. The barking came from outside.

“Sorry,” said Susan to Scotty and Zelda.

Susan went to the window and looked out. A large touring car had stopped in front of the house, and two barking dalmatians ran around and around it.

Richard Grace, Marcellus Rhinelander's Communist chauffeur, got slowly out of the car with a broom. He used the broom to fend off the dalmatians as he inched to the front door. Susan was already on her way downstairs when she heard the bell.

She opened the door quickly and jerked the man inside.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dodge,” said Richard Grace, leaning the broom into a corner.

“Where did those dogs come from?” Susan wanted to know.

“Oh, they're Mr. Rhinelander's,” replied the chauffeur. “He sets them on me, you know.”

“No, I didn't.”

“It's a war between the upper classes and the workers, according to Mr. Rhinelander,” said Richard Grace. “And them two dogs is one of his weapons.”

Susan considered this for a moment, and then asked, “May I do something for you?”

“Mr. Rhinelander sent me over with an invitation to dinner tonight, Mrs. Dodge, that's all, and wants to know if it will be convenient for me to fetch you at seven o'clock this evening.”

“Tell Mr. Rhinelander that I'd be happy—”

“Mr. Rhinelander ain't just against the workers, Mrs. Dodge,” said the chauffeur abruptly, “he's got something against you, too.”

“Oh yes?” said Susan uncomfortably. Uncomfortably not because Richard Grace was a chauffeur, but because she didn't like to receive confidences of any sort.

“He don't like you as much as he don't like me,” said Richard Grace, “which, as you may notice from the spotted dogs outside, is considerable. He don't like you and his daughter don't like you even more. If I have my way,” he added in an undertone, “Miss Barbara will be one of the first what is swept away in the coming social upheaval. But as that time is not yet, my advice to you would be not to come, Mrs. Dodge.”

“We don't win wars by running from our enemies,” said Susan as the quickest way to end this conversation. “So please tell Mr. Rhinelander that I'll be glad to dine with him this evening, and you needn't trouble yourself to fetch me, Mr. Grace. I'll drive over myself. But thank you for coming.”

Mr. Grace, taking his broom, edged back out the door and crept toward the car. The dalmatians raced after the vehicle as it headed back toward the Cliffs.

When Susan turned from watching this spectacle through the lintel windows, she found Scotty and Zelda waiting patiently for her on the bottom step of the stairs.

“You came down to protect me against those other dogs, didn't you?”

Scotty bared his teeth. Zelda produced one genteel bark.

“You are both turning into very good dogs,” said Susan, but didn't think it prudent for further praise.

I
T WAS THE SECOND
unpleasant dinner she'd had in the Cliffs dining room, a long, high chamber with heavily curtained windows looking out on the black winter night. A massive mahogany table with a cloth that looked like a hallway runner ran across it lengthwise. Marcellus Rhinelander sat at one end of the table, and Susan at the other. Two candelabra and a vase of dried autumn flowers kept Susan from even seeing her host unless she leaned considerably to the right or the left.

The meal was another embalmed chicken, a salad of tinned asparagus and third-pressing olive oil, with a tomato pie for dessert. Susan had never had a tomato pie before, and she understood, after she'd tasted it, why it had never become a national delicacy. The wine was good and plentiful.

Marcellus Rhinelander's conversation was chiefly politics. He deplored the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the presidency, and dreaded the day—only weeks distant—when the man would take office. He deplored the assassination attempt on the President-elect, which had taken place the week before, on two grounds. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks were behind it, as they were behind all the unrest, all the troubles, and all the degeneracy of this country. On the other hand, he was disappointed that Roosevelt hadn't been killed. Mr. Rhinelander almost gleefully anticipated the total disintegration of the noble experiment that was the United States of America, beneath the hand of that turncoat, that blue-blooded scalawag, Franklin Roosevelt. “A man born with every advantage,” Marcellus Rhinelander reminded Susan, “who has chosen to throw in his lot with Bolshevik scoundrels, the impoverished and the unwashed, and the—the—”

He faltered for completion of the triumvirate.

“—the badly dressed?” Susan suggested.

“More pie?” Grace Grace inquired, and Susan declined.

Susan hoped she'd be able to leave soon. She didn't like this man. She declined coffee, but Marcellus Rhinelander pressed. “We'll go into the study, if you don't mind, Susan. You don't mind that either, do you, if I call you Susan? Harmon's almost a son to me, you know. Almost a son.”

Susan acquiesced politely but with no glad heart. Somehow this house felt lonelier, even with servants, than did the Quarry when she was there with only Scotty and Zelda.

Susan sat in a corner of a wine-red sofa and sipped coffee. Without being asked, Grace brought a rose-colored shawl for her shoulders. When Grace was gone, Marcellus Rhinelander poured himself a glass of port and stood at the fireplace, with one arm stretched along the mantel in lord-of-the-manor style.

“You're very beautiful,” he said after a moment.

“Thank you,” said Susan. She didn't startle. She'd sung in clubs long enough to have heard this remark from a hundred men, in a hundred different tones of voice, but with a single motive prompting the compliment. Not here though. She wasn't sure what he was getting at. But she did remember the dalmatians that Marcellus Rhinelander had bought for the sole purpose of fretting Richard Grace.

“I can see why Harmon fell in love with you.”

Susan made no reply.

“He'd often proposed marriage,” Marcellus Rhinelander went on after taking a judicious sip of his port. “But somehow, it never worked out.” Marcellus Rhinelander smiled a smile that Susan had seen his daughter smile. “Sometimes Harmon woke up in the morning and couldn't even remember the girl's name. Sometimes the girl found someone who was richer. Sometimes Barbara and Jack were able to…to lend a helping hand against an improvident alliance.”

“I should thank them then,” said Susan, “for keeping Harmon safe till I came along.”

Marcellus Rhinelander looked at her sharply for a moment. “Perhaps you should,” he said softly. “I suppose you've heard—somehow or other—that I had always intended for Harmon to marry Barbara? Perhaps even Barbara herself mentioned it to you. Did she?”

“Relentlessly.”

“Jack is a very good fellow. An able lawyer, I think. Barbara loves him. I love him. But I think that on the whole, I would have preferred Harmon as a son-in-law.”

Susan didn't understand why he was telling her this. Whether or not it was truth, Susan knew he meant it to
sound
like truth. Perhaps he wanted her to be truthful and candid in return. His next question confirmed her suspicion. “Why did you marry Harmon?” he asked with the sort of smile and tilt of his head that was supposed to indicate:
Oh, it's late in the evening, and we've both had a little too much to drink, and I'm a little world-weary tonight, so why don't we unbosom the hearts of our hearts to each other, you and I?
Or something very like that.

“Why did I marry Harmon?” Susan asked, just to give herself that second or two she needed to decide how she should respond.

“Yes,” said Marcellus Rhinelander gently, “why did you marry Harmon?”

Susan's decision how to answer the question was not based on how much she'd drunk, her current high level of world-weariness, or the lateness of the evening, but purely on how much she detested Marcellus Rhinelander. She decided, in short, to tell him the honest truth, hoping he'd be so appalled he'd never speak to her again.

“It's quite simple really,” Susan said. “I married Harmon because he had a great deal of money and I didn't have any.”

Marcellus Rhinelander choked on his port, and he stared at her over the rim of his glass as he took more as soon as he could.

“I can go into it in more detail if you wish,” Susan said.

“Please do.”

“I was tired of having no money for anything beyond shelter and the dress I wore when I was leaning against a piano singing. My only meal was the food I ate in the club where I sang. I was born in a family that was richer than Harmon is now, that was probably richer than you are now. And eventually—when all that money melted away—I learned to get by on two dollars a week. When I didn't have two dollars, I still got by. And when I had three dollars, I sent one of them to my sister, who's in school in Massachusetts, and I still got by on two dollars a week.”

Susan paused, to give Marcellus Rhinelander the opportunity to speak.

“Go on,” was all he said.

“I might have found a man to…to keep me—isn't that the way the French talk about it? I don't think the moral question would have bothered me very much. I'm afraid that wickedness and moral turpitude mean less to me than that two-dollar-a-week business. But having a gentleman—whether married or single—provide for you is not a permanent solution to the problem. It's the sort of arrangement that could end at any moment, and when it does end, it always ends suddenly and inconveniently, and you're older and not as beautiful as you were, and then you might as well put a gun into your mouth. I've always worried about the future—it's a real fault, I think—but marriage seemed to me the only solution to my problem.”

Susan paused.

Marcellus Rhinelander still stared.

“Might I have a drop of that port?” Susan asked.

He went around and poured her a glass. He refilled his. He didn't return to the fireplace. He sat down in a deep chair and turned away the shade of the lamp next to him.

Susan took his place at the mantel.

“Should I go on, or am I boring you?”

“Not at all,” he replied quickly. “Please do. Please do go on.”

“I was singing in cafés. One after another. Pretty dreary business, being part of a floor show. First comes the Spanish dancer with the wobbly knees and the petticoats that haven't been laundered in three months. Then the crooner, who has a crooner's voice and a crooner's mannerisms, and wants to be carried back to old Virginny, and everybody in the audience is all for it. Then comes the colored man who's painted his face
really
black and tells jokes about washerwomen and their alligator-bait offspring, and when he goes off to change his clothes—because he's going to be sweeping up the place when everybody goes home—that's when I come on, and I sing about love, and cigarettes in the dark, and I sing about crying when I'm happy, and I sing about laughing even though I'm sad, and I look out at the audience, and I see Harmon Dodge, who's handsome and charming and rich, and just like all the boys who used to take me out and beg me to marry them, only I didn't because I didn't love them, and I didn't need to marry them because I had money myself. Only now I didn't have any money, and I thought maybe I could get Harmon to ask me, because if he did, then I'd accept.”

“And Harmon did ask…” said Marcellus Rhinelander.

“And I accepted,” said Susan. “I told you it was simple.”

Marcellus Rhinelander leaned forward out of the shadows of the wing chair, reaching for the humidor. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Certainly not,” said Susan.

She was silent as he did his business with picking the cigar, cutting the end, igniting the long wooden match, twirling the cigar so that it lighted evenly. He leaned back into the shadows.