Jack and Susan in 1933 (9 page)

More everything that Barbara Beaumont thought she was.

A gold digger.

Susan lay in the steaming perfumed water in the bathroom that was decorated in gray and aqua, and massaged the soles of her feet. They were tender and cut in several places from the rocks in the unpaved road.

When she felt clean and warm again, she drained the bath and wrapped herself in a quilted silk kimono. She put on furred slippers and wandered through the hallways in the Quarry. Behind three doors she detected snoring—but she had no idea which was Harmon, which was Jack Beaumont, and which was Audrey.

She went down some stairs and pushed open a recalcitrant door. She found herself in a narrow unlighted hallway. She pushed open another sticking door and found herself in a kitchen. Behind a third, gleaming steel door she found a larder with refrigerator. She cut a slice of cheese and poured a glass of milk. She ate the cheese and drank the milk while standing at the corner of the great table in the middle of the kitchen, which was large enough and had the equipment to feed all the guests at the Waldorf-Astoria. When she was done she swept up the crumbs and washed the glass. She wandered out of the kitchen and found the living room. The modern furniture here was better suited for filling in a swamp than for accommodating the human anatomy. She wandered on and found a kind of library with a few books.

God's Little Acre
was one of them, and the other was something called
The New Eugenics,
and the plain brown wrapper it had come in was still wadded on the floor.
The New Eugenics
contained advice to married couples on delicate subjects. It had cost $2.98 and had been ordered from the back of a periodical not known for the delicacy of its subject matter.

Susan pulled open the curtains over the French windows. Outside was a black garden. She saw a switch on the wall and flipped it experimentally.

The black garden was suddenly flooded with moonlight. It was a sedate, formal expanse of clipped yews, ivy-colored brick, and gravel paths.

This is a mistake,
said Susan, opening the French doors and stepping out into the frigid winter night. She closed the door carefully behind her, and then, folding her arms for warmth across her breast, wandered along the symmetrical garden paths. The yews were clipped and black and solid and looked as if they'd been molded of something that was not twigs and leaves. An owl hooted from somewhere close, and it seemed a sound almost as artificial as the yews and the cold moonlight that flooded the regular gravel paths.

Seven hundred and fifty thousand men were out of work in New York City alone.

There was a civil war in Spain.

Banks had failed, and perfectly honest and hardworking people didn't have enough to eat, and the winds blew hard and dry across the farms of the Midwest, and the red dust covered everything.

Those were the things that Susan should be thinking about. All those
other
unhappy people.

Except she shouldn't be unhappy, should she? Walking in a moonlit garden behind her own mansion that overlooked the Hudson. On the contrary, she should be very happy. For Susan Bright Dodge there'd be no more Sunday-morning shampoos and home-done manicures. No more evenings spent mending runs in silk stockings and rips in shabby gloves. No more cheap little hats and scuffed shoes. No more dollar table d'hôtes in gritty little cafeterias in the west forties. No more leaning on a piano in her only decent dress, singing to the inebriated and the blasé. She'd be a socialite, and she'd live the life of the socialite. Shopping, luncheon, shopping, tea, shopping, cocktail party, dressing, dinner,
fun
. And then she'd go to bed and lie awake till dawn—about twenty minutes—where she'd think about the fact that she didn't love her husband.

Harmon Dodge was charming, handsome, and rich. She was genuinely fond of him, and Susan was determined to pay for her keep. She'd poke Harmon into shape. She'd teach him responsibility. She'd make sure he didn't get drunk
every
night. She'd be much more careful about his money than he was. She wouldn't love him, but she'd act as if she did. If she had gotten security, comfort, freedom from fretfulness, then Harmon Dodge had gotten something that money only rarely buys—a good wife.

She went back inside, turned out the artificial moonlight, and went in search of the doors behind which she could hear snoring. She opened one and found Audrey in her curlers. She opened another and found her husband. She rolled him over, slipped off the kimono, and crawled in beside him. Harmon yelped when he felt her cold flesh against his, but he did not wake up. Susan did not go to sleep.

S
HE AND HARMON
remained about a week at the Quarry. The mansion was lonely and empty during the day. Harmon tended to sleep late. Breakfast and late afternoon tea were indistinguishable for him. Susan didn't mind. She learned the layout of the house. She walked in the dead gardens, and protected herself better against the cold than on the first night spent at her new country home. She called a garage in Catskill and had the owner send over someone who could give her a few driving lessons. This turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl whose eyes widened in lust when she saw the four expensive automobiles in the Quarry garages. Susan learned to make a slow circuit of the driveway, and once she even went so far as to the edge of the cliff where she, Harmon, and the idiot Jack had nearly plunged to their deaths. In the evenings, Susan and Harmon drove up to Albany, a place that—owing to the presence of the state legislature—sported as many speakeasies as Manhattan. Unsurprisingly, Harmon knew every one of them. Susan didn't care to go to speakeasies, no matter how posh. She didn't like to hear the crooners and the songbirds, no matter how splendid their voices or their repertoire. The congealed food, the poisoned liquor, the vile blue smoke, the spurious bonhomie of overweight politicians, and the grating laughter of their young female companions made Susan think of the lonely yew garden bathed in its unnatural moonlight as a place of some genuine charm. Sometimes, when she and Harmon returned to the Quarry as early as four or five in the morning, Susan walked there, and now thought of it as one of the nicer realities of her new life as the wife of Harmon Dodge.

On the night before their return to New York, Susan was glad she had learned to drive. For Harmon got so drunk at a place called the Café d'Esprit that Susan was afraid to ride with him. She drove, very slowly and very carefully, and they didn't get home till seven in the morning, but they got there alive.

Now she'd been in New York City for more than a month, and was getting used to married life in
this
place. In New York, Harmon slept only till one in the afternoon. He was dressed by three, and usually by three-fifteen he'd found a taxi that would take him the two blocks to his offices. There at the office, he'd find out how much money Jack Beaumont had made for him and what sorts of bankrupted merchandise Jack Beaumont had snagged, and would sort through the periodicals and $2.98 books that came to the offices in plain paper wrappers. Then he'd wander off to a club, pour a number of measured draughts of junipered poison down his throat, telephone Susan, and tell her where to meet him for dinner. Invariably, Susan dressed, showed up at the restaurant without any particular hope of finding Harmon there, didn't find him there, instituted a search for him by telephone, eventually found him, picked him up, brought him back to the designated restaurant, consumed a rather bad dinner, resorted afterward to one of the nightclubs she found increasingly depressing, was mumblingly introduced to half a dozen people Harmon called by the wrong names entirely, smiled and looked about, and listened to the singers and imagined what their dreary lives were like.

Just as invariably, Harmon was charming. Full of liveliness, full of compliments, and he seemed genuinely to love her. Not on the same scale as he loved alcohol, nightclubs, and the general tenor of his life—but more than just about anything else. Though there wasn't, Susan had to admit, much more in Harmon's life.

He had plenty of money—rather more than Susan expected, and that made her uneasy. She was a sensible, upright young woman, and it had seemed to her a lesser evil to have married for security than for wealth. Now she was the wife of a man who could be considered rich. He gave her a generous account at the bank, which in turn established accounts at the shops and salons on Fifth Avenue. She shopped and bought smart hats, and smart little suits, and highly polished endearing little shoes. Her old clothes she gave away. But when her wardrobe was filled, she stopped shopping. Harmon gave her a check to replenish her account, and when she informed him that it didn't need replenishing, he looked surprised. “Well, clean out that old money, girl, and make room for some new,” he said. So Harmon's girl bought an expensive new piano, and she bought out Schirmer's catalogue of sheet music, and she hired her old nearsighted accompanist to come by every afternoon for a couple of hours so that she could sing. (She frightfully overpaid Mr. Moon, but this was a very real pleasure that Harmon's money brought her. Mr. Moon had a Mrs. Moon and three young Misses Moon, named Miriam, Marjorie, and Marian, all of whom had a predisposition for regular food on the table.) Susan's voice didn't sound right at first, in a room that wasn't filled with tobacco smoke and the fumes of alcohol, but she adjusted. No more tired and blasé faces turned wearily toward her anymore either, just Audrey, sagging over a little straight chair placed in the doorway, and George the elevator man, standing in the open doors of his machine when he wasn't required on other floors.

Susan became a familiar face at the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue, and she read the books that everybody was reading
: Mutiny on the Bounty
, though she didn't like the sea;
Life Begins at Forty
, even though she was only twenty-seven;
Rip Tide
, though a full novel in verse somehow made her nauseated; Vicki Baum's
And Life Goes On
, though sometimes it seemed it didn't. She even read the advice on delicate matters in Harmon's copy of
The New Eugenics
and discovered that she had already learned from Harmon more than the writer of this book ever knew on the subject.

She had her hair styled at a cost that would have supported her for a week three months ago. Her face was bathed in mud. Her arms were massaged with sliced vegetables. A girl with red hair who was supporting her legless father and three younger brothers made disparaging comments about her cuticles and painted her toenails a pale lavender. All but her head was locked in a box that was filled with steam that could have cooked a lobster.

She engaged a man to teach her to drive. He was twice as old as her first instructor, three times as expensive, and about half as knowledgeable. In her new violet Chevrolet Master DeLuxe Town Sedan—formerly the property of the owner of the largest bakery in Manhattan, sadly bankrupt—Susan drove along the quiet streets of Queens. She saw drawn-faced women on their stoops, men lounging on street corners wearier with inaction than they would have been after ten hours of hard labor, children who seemed either too thin or too fat. When she'd passed her driver's test, she put her car in the garage and made no more journeys across the bridge to Queens.

She had met many of Harmon's acquaintances, but none of their wives visited Susan. Harmon said, “You're in luck, girl, so far as I can make out. I certainly would rather spend the day with Audrey, and George, and Mr. Moon than with that sort of gaggle. Enjoy it now, because it's only a matter of time before they start trooping over here like Franco's boys marching on the Bolshies.” Susan knew that no one visited the penthouse in the afternoons because she was perceived as a gold digger who had struck a mother lode in snagging Harmon Dodge. She also knew Harmon was right—it was only a matter of time before she was accepted in the society in which her husband moved. The women would tire of slighting the wife of such a charming man as Harmon, they'd find out somehow or other that she came from a good family and that her father had been a member of Theodore Roosevelt's cabinet, and there would be some other upstart so loathsome Susan would look like royalty next to her. Susan made no efforts toward speeding up this inevitable acceptance, for like the trains in Italy, these things worked on their own schedule. She didn't really care for the women of café society. They were similar to Barbara Beaumont, who was, in her way, a paradigm of the New York debutante. Barbara had come out in 1927 and she hadn't been home since.

So it seemed fitting, in the course of things, that Barbara Beaumont should be Susan's first afternoon visitor. If Barbara Beaumont wasn't the best-dressed woman in the city, she was at least the most dressed. She wore a blue wool overcoat with horizontal stripes in red and yellow, a pillbox hat with a fez attachment, and yellow suede swagger boots. It was the sort of outfit that would have made the pope in full canonicals look drab by comparison. George followed her in, with a kind of box or cage with a brass handle. It shook and rattled and growled in his hand. Whatever was inside was alive, and it wanted to get out. Susan eyed it with some suspicion.

“I am the most loathsome woman in the universe,” said Barbara Beaumont. “I woke up in the middle of the night last night—the sun hadn't been up more than an hour or two—and I said to myself, ‘Wedding present.' I had no idea what it meant, however, but then I was looking in the hall closet for something and I came across a pair of Harmon's trousers—he left them there on Christmas Eve for some reason—and I remembered that he had gotten married.”