Jack and Susan in 1933 (17 page)

“He thought a lot of you,” said Susan, “and told me he would have tripled your pay rather than let you go.” This seemed peculiar to Jack, but somehow he didn't doubt Susan's consolation to the bereaved Bolshevik.

“Oh, he
was
vicious, wasn't he?” moaned Richard Grace. “And what are we to do without him? Until the revolution, of course,” he added, with lip-service loyalty to the cause.

Inside, Jack said to Susan, “It's not the sort of news I ought to break to Barbara over the phone.”

“No,” Susan agreed. “You go on to New York. I'll speak to the police, and make what arrangements I can before you return.”

“Thank you,” said Jack, and he meant it.

It was not a pleasant drive from Albany to Manhattan, and not just because it poured rain all the way and made the trip slower than it was usually. What made the journey miserable was thinking of how Barbara loved her father.
Had
loved her father. Barbara went into hysterics when she chipped a nail. How would she react to this melancholy, unexpected news?

“He's dead?” she asked quietly. Afterward, her lips didn't quite close. Barbara always closed her lips when she finished speaking. Still, by any stretch, this didn't qualify as hysterics.

“He went over the cliff—on the road from the house down to Harmon and Susan's place.”

Barbara looked at him. She still hadn't closed her lips, and she hadn't said anything else.

“Grace wasn't driving. Your father was. He must simply have lost control.”

“Did he drown?” asked Barbara curiously. As if she might have asked,
Did he have eggs for breakfast?

“Ah, I'm not sure,” said Jack. “I came straight down here as soon as—” He broke off, not knowing how to continue. “When I left, the police hadn't even come, and they hadn't recovered the—ah—they hadn't pulled the car out or—”

“Then you're not even sure he's dead.”

“Great Christ in heaven, Barbara! Susan saw the car go through the railing and over the cliff. The water is two hundred feet down. I don't know if he'd drowned, or if he died when the car hit the water, or if he died of fright halfway down—but let me assure you, your father is very definitely dead.”

“Call and make sure,” said Barbara.
Numbly
. That was the word for it, Jack decided. She was numb. And she was right. He really ought to have made sure Marcellus was dead before he'd come down to Manhattan with the news. It just had never occurred to him that—

He went into the next room and telephoned the Cliffs. Grace Grace answered and put Susan on the line. “He is dead, isn't he?”

That's a very peculiar question.

“Barbara just wanted to make sure. When I left we didn't actually know. We just assumed—”

They pulled the car from the water. Marcellus is dead. Please tell Barbara I'm very sorry. I talked to the police, told them what I knew. Well, some of what I knew. Evidently, it was fairly general knowledge around here that Marcellus spent a good deal of time down at the Quarry, which surprised me, but it also meant they didn't even ask why he was going down there. And they regard it simply as an accident.

“What else would it be?” asked Jack, wondering. He felt like looking over his shoulder for a portly Swedish actor made up to look Oriental, to say,
It might be murder, Mr. Beaumont. In fact, it
was
murder.

But Susan said nothing to what else it might have been.

He was taken to Albany, and they're waiting for Barbara's advice on further arrangements. Bromer Brothers. The number in Albany is Circle 5022. And if I can do anything for you here…

“No, no, no, I'm sure we'll be coming right up,” said Jack. “Have you called Harmon?”

I couldn't find him, but I left messages with both Audrey and Miss Rudge.

Jack suddenly remembered, hotly, the blonde, in the bedroom in the west forties, and he said quickly, “Let me see if I can find him.”

Thank you.

“Thank you, Susan. I should probably get back to—”

I understand. Barbara. Good-bye, Jack.

Jack hung up the telephone. The door of the closet he was privileged to call his study opened and Barbara stood there, all in black.

“Do I keep it on or do I take it off?” she asked.

“Keep it on,” said Jack.

The trip north again was no less mysterious so far as Jack's understanding of his wife's feelings went. Barbara didn't ask questions, she didn't lament, she didn't weep. She carefully removed her hat, leaned her head back against the seat, and slept or pretended to sleep.

It wasn't raining, and that was a blessing, but it was night. The sky was black. His yellow headlights picked out a hundred and fifty miles of narrow black road, and once in a while another pair of yellow head-lamps blinded him temporarily. Barbara's breath was slow and regular beside him. Twice she sighed, long sighs. But Barbara always sighed in her dreams, and perhaps she was dreaming now. Jack wondered if he ought to tell her why her father had been driving without benefit of chauffeur.

He was angry and upset, Barbara.

Why was he upset?

Susan said something that distressed him.

What did she say?

No.

No what?

No, Susan said to your father, I won't divorce Harmon and marry you and become Barbara's stepmother.

On the whole, Jack decided, it would be best if that particular dialogue could be avoided in the difficult days that were ahead of them.

It was dawn when they arrived at the Cliffs. The sun was rising over the hills on the opposite shore of the Hudson. “Barbara…” Jack said softly.

“I'm awake,” she said, her eyes open and lucidly staring at the two black wreaths on the doors of the Cliffs.

Jack slept a few hours. He wakened to the sound of soft voices downstairs. He knew somehow that they had been speaking for some time. He showered quickly, climbed into a soft black wool suit, and unsteadily went downstairs. Sudden death, long drives through the rain and the night, uncomfortable sleeps at unfamiliar times, can make one unsteady. Especially sudden death.

Barbara was sturdily receiving visitors in the great hallway. She wore a different black dress from the one she'd worn in the car on the way up. This one was smarter, more becoming. She wore a half-veil, her eyes wide and black behind it, as if encircled with kohl. Beneath the veil her lips were the shade of red that rose fanciers are pleased to call black. As Jack came further down the stairs, he caught sight—through the double doors of the sitting room—of a corner of dark wood raised upon a trestle.

He came down and stood beside Barbara. “I've taken care of everything,” she said. “Father is in the sitting room. I'm afraid it wasn't possible to keep the casket open.”

Jack shook hands with a cadaverous man in a blue suit who Jack knew in his soul was a shyster lawyer, and tried to make sense of the soft words the shyster lawyer's wife was saying to him in condolence.

Jack shook other hands, listened to other mumbled words, and finally made his way into the sitting room. The coffin was placed in the embrasure of a wide window that looked out over the Hudson and was surrounded by wicker baskets of flowers that stank of refrigeration.

“Those baskets are so peculiar,” said Susan, standing suddenly beside him. “Why does a basket that's six feet high need a handle?”

“For the evil giant's young daughters, of course,” said Harmon, appearing on his other side. “That's obviously whom these baskets were made for. Old Jackie, I really am very sorry.”

“I couldn't find you in New York,” said Jack.

“Susan's messages found me,” said Harmon, “and I took the first train up. Didn't trust myself to drive, even though I never heard anything that shoved me so quick to sobriety. Poor old Marcellus,” he said, glancing at the coffin and shaking his head. “Missed seeing Repeal by a matter of days.”

“Barbara seems to be bearing up,” said Susan, on the other side of Jack again.

Jack looked at her sharply, fearing irony or sarcasm in her voice. She returned his gaze steadily. “I'm glad,” she said. “Barbara, for all her faults, is a strong woman, and I was certain she'd come through at a time like this.”

“Barbara is strong,” Jack agreed, and smiled a smile of thanks.

He startled when the telephone rang on the small table beside him. Everyone in the room turned and looked at Jack as if he'd just done something to precipitate this mundane intrusion. While Jack hesitated, trying to break down the blush that seemed an admission of that accusation, Harmon answered the phone quietly. He spoke a moment, then handed the receiver to Jack.

“It's for you. Someone named MacIsaac.”

Susan glanced at Jack worriedly as he took the receiver.

“MacIsaac,” Jack said, “I can't talk to you now.” He listened, though, for a couple of minutes. His face paled. Harmon and Susan moved politely away. At the end of the conversation Jack said, “Thank you, MacIsaac,” and hung up.

“Didn't we once hire a fellow named MacIsaac?” Harmon asked. “Toady sort of fellow? Made you think you could get warts just to look at him?” He took a glass of sherry from a tray Grace Grace was taking about the room.

Jack nodded. He looked at Susan. “He called to say that the police had examined Marcellus's car. Someone had tampered with the brakes. Marcellus didn't die accidentally, he was murdered.”

Though Jack had spoken softly, Grace Grace had evidently heard him. For she dropped the tray, the glasses shattered, and the odor of the fine sherry mingled with that of the refrigerated blooms in the giant's baskets.

E
VENTUALLY, THOSE WHO
had come to pay their condolences departed with mumbled words, and slightly bowed heads, and airs of
something's not quite right here
. Jack had said nothing, and neither had Susan or Harmon. Maybe it was just the way Grace Grace had dropped a tray with seven sherry glasses on it, and what everyone had heard of Marcellus's commerce with Harmon's new young wife, or just the brooding irregularity of a closed coffin. But however all these respectful guests divined it, they all left with the impression that there was something untoward in the circumstances of Marcellus Rhinelander's accident.