Jack and Susan in 1953 (13 page)

“What do you have to show me?” Susan asked.

Rodolfo was leading her down a mostly empty corridor. No guests here, only servants rushing back and forth with trays.

He tried the knob of one of the doors, but it opened onto a closet.

“No,” he muttered, “not the third door, the fourth.”

They went in through the next door in the corridor and found themselves in a small bedroom. It was evidently an unoccupied maid's room. Its only furnishings were a dresser, a couple of straight-backed chairs, a rush rug, and near the window an iron bedstead. On the bed was a red blanket, and on it lay a large dog, peacefully shredding a Manhattan telephone book.

“Woolf?” said Susan.

Woolf leaped to his feet and began barking, showering the blanket with bits of torn paper.

“What is that dog doing here?” Rodolfo demanded with displeasure.

“He's a good dog,” said Susan. She sat down on the bed and, taking off her gloves, caressed Woolf and tried to keep him from licking her three-hundred-dollar dress. She glanced out the window and saw that the terrace of Libby's penthouse began not more than three or four feet away. She could hear the murmur of conversation and the clink of the bartender's bottles. “What did you want to show me?”

“Mía amante,”
said Rodolfo.

“Please,” said Susan uncomfortably, “let's speak in English. Do you mind?”

“I love you,” he said simply, and convincingly. “And I want you to marry me.
Will
you marry me?”

Susan smiled briefly—at Woolf. She couldn't think what to say. “Why are you proposing to me in a maid's room?”

“Because I could not wait. Tonight I saw how happy they were—”

“They?”

“Miss Mather and Mr. Beaumont—and I could not wait. Please, Susan. Please say—”

Susan held up her hand. “Let me think.”

“No!” Rodolfo cried, kneeling at her feet. He spoke in a rapid voice that tumbled headlong in Spanish and English. “
No es posible
to let you think—
porque
you might say no to me. I could not bear that. I love you, Susan. With my
corazón
—all my heart. There is nothing else to say. You have to marry me because I love you the way I do.”

Susan was astonished. She'd known Rodolfo for months, but if he'd been courting her every evening, she would still not have been prepared for the passion of this outburst.

He covered her hand with kisses.

He rubbed his forehead against her knee, and he wept, spilling salty tears on her dress.

A slight movement out of the corner of her eye caused her to turn her head, even while Rodolfo still knelt before her with bowed head. She leaned slightly back and looked out the window.

There was Jack, on the balcony a few feet away, leaning forward over the parapet and gesticulating wildly.

“I have to talk to you!” he hissed. She didn't actually hear him, but those were the words his lips formed:
“I have to talk to you!”

Rodolfo looked up into Susan's face. Rodolfo's voice was choked when he spoke. Out of the corner of her eye Susan could still see Jack's frenzied gyrations.

“Say it,” Rodolfo whispered. “Say you will marry me. Say you will be my wife and love me the way I love you. Say you will allow me to care for you. Say you will be mine forever from this day forward. Say anything to me so long as you do not say to me, no. Say—”

“No!”

But it wasn't Susan who said no. That was someone behind her.

It was Jack, poking his head and shoulders through the window.

Susan whirled around, and Rodolfo was on his feet, brushing away his manly tears and stalking forward.

Susan could see that Jack was actually trying to climb in through the window. He'd evidently leaned out over the balcony—twenty-three floors above the street—and caught at the window ledge.

And now he was pulling himself through.

“Don't say yes!” Jack cried. “Don't marry him!”

“You—” began Rodolfo, with clenched fists.

“Don't!” cried Susan in alarm, fearful that Rodolfo would somehow cause Jack to lose his grip and fall to his death.

But then the unexpected happened. Woolf bounded from the bed right at the window and at Jack.

Surprised at this sudden movement, Jack's mouth flew open and his fingers lost their grip on the windowsill.

Jack Beaumont spilled through the air, straight down.

Then there was just Woolf, on his hind legs, panting happily in the window, waiting for more hors d'oeuvres.

J
ACK'S FALL WAS broken by an awning of the apartment terrace two floors below Libby's. Jack's collision with the awning knocked the breath out of him. He slid down the slanted coarse striped fabric and was nearly pitched out into the air again, had he not, at the last moment, caught at the scalloped edge of the awning. It tore off with a loud ripping noise, but Jack swung 'round and managed to drop to the stone floor of the terrace.

“Thank G—” he whispered, but didn't finish the involuntary thanksgiving because when he fell, he landed on his head.

Susan stared down out the window of the maid's room. She didn't scream. She brushed Rodolfo out of the way and rushed to find Libby, who was surrounded by people in the middle of the living room.

“Who lives in the apartment with the striped awning a few floors below you?” Susan demanded, jerking on Libby's arm.

“A perfectly awful couple,” replied Libby. “Truly ghastly—actually, they're right here,” she interrupted herself, tapping the shoulders of a man who looked like a banker and a woman who was holding on to him very tightly as if afraid he was going to run away with one of the maids.

The banker and his wife turned. The banker stared at Susan as if he thought she were about to ask for a cash loan, without collateral, of a hundred thousand dollars. The wife stared as if she thought Susan were having an affair with her husband and was about to demand his release from the bonds of marriage on account of youth and love. Libby looked at Susan as if she believed both these things at once and wasn't a bit surprised at it.

Susan took a breath, and in the course of that breath she wondered how to begin. It wasn't, she decided, the sort of situation that required—or needed—a whole lot of leading up to, so Susan plunged right in: “Libby's fiancé just fell out the window of the maid's room and he landed on your terrace.”

Libby screamed. Not once, but three times. She spilled her drink onto the wide bosom of the banker's wife and probably would have slipped down to the floor in the extremity of her emotion had not her skirts kept her upright.

The banker took Susan and Rodolfo down to his apartment by way of the elevator. While the banker turned on lights and the elevator man telephoned for an ambulance, Susan and Rodolfo rushed through toward the terrace doors. They pushed them open and went out. They heard the traffic from the street below them, and the confused murmur of Libby's party from above. Jack lay unconscious on the concrete. His left arm was bent crazily beneath his body.

Susan looked up through the ragged awning. Woolf was leaning precariously out of the maid's room window, barking happily into the night.

Rodolfo said to Susan softly, “You never answered my question…”

With an entirely new set of bruises, Jack lay propped up in the hospital bed. His left arm, in a plaster cast, was caught up in a sling, and a wide white bandage was wrapped around his head. It was Sunday morning. Jack had been taken to Roosevelt Hospital on the West Side, an institution that had come to specialize in what were known as “Saturday night accidents.” It was said that the news photographer Weegee was an habitué of Roosevelt's emergency room.

Libby stalked around his bed, complaining. On top of everything else that had happened, she was unhappy about the necessity of going over to the West Side to visit Jack. Libby visited Florida more often than she did the west side of Manhattan.

“After that I couldn't, I just
couldn't
make the announcement. How could I say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce my engagement to Mr. John Beaumont, Esq. I'm sorry Mr. Beaumont isn't here to receive your congratulations, but he just jumped out of the window.' How do you suppose that would have sounded? I mean, as it is, your little escapade got into the papers today. Did you see Walter Winchell?”

“The nurses showed it to me,” said Jack faintly. “Winchell didn't imply that it was a suicide.”

“When a man jumps—”

“Falls—”

“—
falls
out of a twenty-third story window on the night of his supposed engagement,” said Libby severely, “people talk. People have a
right
to talk when something like that happens. And what am I supposed to do with that dog? The caterers called to complain today. That dog got into the caviar, and it upset the ice sculpture and now there is a water stain to end all water stains on the new carpets I just got last week. When Henry and Henry saw that carpet they just about jumped out the window after you. What am I supposed to do with that dog?”

“Take him to a kennel. There's one on Second Avenue I used for him last week. But you have to take his papers with you or they won't accept him. The papers are on the top of my dresser, I think.”

“I'm not going to do all that. I'm just going to let him loose,” said Libby.

“Please don't do that. Just take him to the kennel. Please, Libby. I'm in pain…”

“
I'm
the one who's in pain,” returned Libby sharply. “I'm the one who
really
wanted to die last night, after what happened happened.” She continued to stalk and fume. “Do you know who saved me last night?” she demanded suddenly.

“Saved
you
? I was the one who nearly fell to his death.”

She paid no attention. “Rodolfo, that's who. He was a gem. He got you into the ambulance, came right back up, and saved my life. He and Susan both. I love those two. What a happy couple they'll make. He loves her like”—Libby paused for a comparison, and then found one that appeared, in her mind at least, to apply directly to Jack—“Rodolfo loves Susan the way a man
ought
to love the woman he's going to marry. Anyway he and Susan were wonderful. Rodolfo calmed everyone down—he has a fine speaking voice, and not one person laughed at his accent. I guess everybody's so used to Cuban accents now with Ricky and Lucy—and Susan dealt with the caterers. I was prostrate, Jack, I can't tell you how prostrate I was. With humiliation. Thank goodness my mother and father are not alive. My mother would have died from humiliation, and my father would have gone downstairs and tossed you off that terrace, that's what he would have done. I bet if I had asked Rodolfo to toss you off the balcony, he would have done it.”

“I bet he would have,” Jack agreed.

Libby continued to fret in silence.

Jack watched her. She was wearing an outfit he'd never seen before. A bright red jersey dress with narrow mink cuffs, a large gold safety pin over her left breast, short red gloves and a narrow bracelet of rubies. Jack supposed it was an
ensemble
she reserved for high dudgeon days.

Jack was not completely sorry for the fall. It hurt, of course, and it hurt still, but it had given him a reprieve. He wasn't engaged to Libby.

Of course whether he was or not would make little difference if Susan Bright had become engaged to Rodolfo García-Cifuentes. If Susan married Rodolfo, he thought, then he might just as well go on and marry Libby, reflecting that some forms of suicide are less painful than others.

“I'm
not
giving another party,” said Libby definitely. “No, I'm not, so don't ask me. I'm simply going to have the engagement announced in Sunday's
Times
. Something nice and discreet, with just my picture. Luckily for us, Jack, the
Times
has a policy against printing stories about prospective bridegrooms leaping to their deaths out of twenty-third-story windows.”