Jack and Susan in 1913

by Michael McDowell

  Jack was silent under this barrage. She wasn’t firing blanks. Jack’s only comfort was that this speech was obviously rehearsed, which meant that she’d been thinking about him. Not with any generosity, it was true, but at least he’d been on her mind.

  “The only things I have to thank you for, Jack Beaumont, or whatever your name is—”

  “My name really is Jack Beaumont, I promise.”

  She ignored the interruption. “—the only things I have to thank you for are severe humiliation, a broken leg, and the loss of my career on the stage.”

  “Are you going to marry Hosmer?” Jack asked suddenly.

  Susan stared at him. “Weren’t you listening to me?”

  “Of course. But are you going to marry Hosmer? I saw him showing you a ring.”

  Susan spoke very deliberately. Outside, the sun spilled across fields of spring wheat. “Whether I marry, when I marry, and whom I marry are none of your business.”

  “But it is my business,” Jack protested, “because you said you’d marry me.”

  Susan shook her head in apparent disbelief. “I agreed to come in here to talk to you for the sole reason that I intend for this to be the last time that I ever speak to you in this life. If there is a heaven, if there is a hell, if there is something in between, and we, by chance, meet in any of those places, you’re welcome to renew your suit. But not here, in New York, or Kansas, and particularly not in California. Let me try to put this simply, Mr. Beaumont—I never want to speak to you again. I would also like never to see you again, hear of you again or see your name in print except perhaps with a black border around it. Also, since you’re evidently such a rich financier, I’d like my five hundred dollars back.”

  “It’s not your five hundred dollars,” said Jack. “I gave it to you in the first place.”

  “Jay Austin gave it to me,” returned Susan coldly. “And as Jay Austin doesn’t exist and apparently never did exist, the money is very much mine. So I want it back.”

  Susan didn’t believe Jack when he told her that he’d been fired and disinherited, and that what remained of that five hundred dollars was his only means in the world. Why should she believe anything he said? When he claimed that his plans for the camera improvement had been stolen, she wanted to know if the lies would ever stop. She went back into the rear car, and warned him that if he tried to talk to her again, she’d throw Tripod in his direction.

  The train twisted through the mountains of Colorado, where the night was as black as the occasional tunnel. Jack stared morosely out of the window at nothing and was positively rude to the two forward young women who came to the rear of the car to praise with giggles his useless bravery against the moving-picture thieves.

  What was he to do now? Here he was, on a train headed for Los Angeles, a place where he knew no one, a place where he had no hope of finding a job, a place he knew nothing whatever about except that oranges grew there and the sun set rather than rose over the ocean. Susan Bright, whom he loved, was no more than twenty feet away from him, but he had no more hope of obtaining her hand than he had of stepping outside, picking up the train, and turning it around heading back east.

  “Pretty bleak,” he said aloud to himself.

  “I beg your pardon?” said a voice at his side.

  He turned, and saw Hosmer Collamore smiling down at him. “May I sit?” the cameraman asked.

  Jack nodded. Already, at the other end of the car, the porter was making up berths. It was past nine o’clock. Jack hadn’t eaten anything all day.

  “I meant to visit you earlier,” said Hosmer, “but what with one thing and another…”

  “Sorry I spoiled your scenes,” Jack apologized. “When I didn’t see you in the crowd outside, I should have put two and two together and figured that you were inside filming the whole thing.”

  “Mr. Fane thought we might as well use the trip for profit, and get some footage on the way out. No particular story yet, but there’s always room for a train robbery somewhere. And I’ve been hopping out at every stop, filming the little towns and some of the countryside. Come in handy and save us some time, expense, and travel someday. Anyway, I don’t think you spoiled it. We can always write you in as a character, and then you get killed in the next scene—we’ll try to find somebody as tall as you to act as double—and Ida can weep bitter tears. Ida has it in her contract that she gets to weep in every picture.”

  “How are Mr. Perks and Mr. Westermeade?” Jack asked, a little uncomfortably.

  “Bearing up. But I wouldn’t advise you to visit ’em just now. Wait till the swelling goes down, then buy ’em a box of cigars. Then it’ll be right as roses again. Except it doesn’t really matter, since we won’t ever be seeing you again once we get to California.”

  Jack looked at Hosmer sharply. “Who’s ‘we’? What are you saying?”

  “Why are you on this train?” Hosmer returned, as quickly.

  “I came after Susan.”

  “Suss don’t want you coming after her.”

  “She can speak for herself.”

  “Yes, she can,” agreed Hosmer. “But so can her husband.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “HER HUSBAND!”

  “We’re engaged,” said Hosmer complacently. “And when I am her husband, I will have every right to speak for Suss. And right now, as the man to whom she has given her consent, I think I can say I don’t like it very much that you came all the way across the country in pursuit of her when it is pretty clear that she doesn’t want to be pursued by you. We don’t need you running about, making trouble for us. And if you still don’t believe it, ask Suss.”

  “I like that idea,” said Jack, getting up instantly, and stretching one long leg over Hosmer’s in order to get to the aisle.

  “Oh, no,” said Hosmer, “ask her tomorrow, when we get into Los Angeles.”

  “I’ll ask her now.”

  “Porter’s already made up the berths, and Suss is lying there in a cotton nightdress and sweet repose, dreaming of me and our wedding night. Ask her tomorrow at the station, and then you may take leave of her and me forever. I was pleased and proud to be your friend on West Sixtieth Street, Jack Beaumont, but it’s time for you to move along, and you know it as well as I know it, ’cause one and two make three, three’s a crowd, and two can live as cheap as one. So if I were you, I’d dig in my pocket at the station tomorrow, and pull out the money needed for a ticket, and I’d hop on the next train back to New York, ’cause there’s nothing for you in California but an aching heart and a burning head.”

  With that advice, Hosmer Collamore got up and returned to the other car, leaving Jack Beaumont sitting all alone, his head throbbing.

  The train reached Los Angeles near the end of the following day. The trip across the country had taken three nights and three days. Bedraggled, weary from too little sleep, soot-begrimed and dusty, frayed and short-tempered, the two dozen members of Mr. Fane’s organization who had elected to make the move from one side of the continent to the other, staggered off the stuffy railway car into the warm California sunshine.

  “It smells the way heaven is gonna smell,” said Miss Songar, who had spent the tedious hours reading a testament handed to her in St. Louis by a member of the Salvation Army. The scent of orange blossoms overcame even the machinery stench of a railway station. Massive mounds of red and yellow flowers boiled out of tubs at the doors of the station.

  “Makes me feel even grubbier than I did,” complained Ida Conquest. “Just look at my feathers.”

  Jack slipped out with the passengers in the other car, and rushed forward in hope of helping Susan with her bags. Susan had prepared for this contingency and taken Tripod off his leash. The dog leapt at Jack. Jack had also come prepared, and had in his hand another biscuit soaked in the sleeping draught he’d obtained from the St. Louis veterinarian. Too smart to be tricked more than once, Tripod jumped past the biscuit, worked his wagging head up under the cuff of Jack’s right t
rouser leg, and sank his teeth into Jack’s ankle.

  Jack yelled in pain. Susan slowly came forward, and disengaged her pet. “Tripod speaks for me, Mr. Beaumont,” Susan said in a wintry voice. “California, I’m told, has many felicities—its climate, its natural scenery, its healthful air—but it will always be dear to me as the place where I managed to rid myself of you.”

  Jack bent down and ruefully examined the bloody marks of Tripod’s teeth. “Are you really engaged to Hosmer?”

  Susan smiled a grim smile. “I am,” she said. “I most definitely am.”

  The Cosmic Film Company was booked for the night in a hotel on South Orange Street near the train station. In the morning, they would travel out to the quiet suburb of Hollywood. Jack discovered this from speaking quietly to Miss Nethersole, who had conceived a tendre for Jack, and now thought she might have a chance with him if Susan Bright was out of the way.

  In a separate taxi Jack followed the company to the hotel and hovered about the entrance till everyone from Cosmic had been inside for a quarter of an hour. Then he went in, approached the desk, glanced at the register, and saw that Susan was in room 506.

  “Do you have something on the fifth floor?” Jack asked. The desk clerk looked at Jack suspiciously and shook his head no.

  “The fourth floor then?”

  Again the clerk shook his head.

  “Is room 606 available?” asked Jack, with a sudden thought.

  The clerk hesitated. Jack pushed a dollar bill across the desk.

  “Yes sir,” said the clerk.

  Jack could see no tactical advantage in being in the room directly over Susan’s, but he had a sentimental memory of West Sixtieth Street, where Susan’s bedroom had been directly over his. Perhaps, he thought with the illogic of a desperate man, she would discover that he had asked particularly for this room, would make that connection herself, would be overcome by her old love for Jack, renounce Hosmer forever, and throw her arms around Jack in the hotel elevator. Jack realized his hope was improbable, but not as improbable as the scenarios Susan wrote for Junius Fane.

  Also improbably, Jack was not wholly convinced that Susan was engaged to Hosmer. His only evidence was Hosmer’s assertion, Susan’s confirmation, and the ring that Susan was now wearing on the fourth finger of her left hand. To Jack, these things did not constitute total proof.

  At eight o’clock, Jack stood at his window and was astonished by the sunset. He leaned out of the window to gaze over the flatness of Los Angeles, and discovered that a dozen or so other hotel guests were also leaning out of their windows—including, directly below him, Susan Bright. He looked straight down at the top of her head. Apparently sensing his gaze, she craned her head upward. Jack smiled down at her.

  “Just as it was in New York,” he called down the few feet separating them. “Except that now I’m on top of you.”

  Susan grimaced, and wordlessly pulled her head inside. A moment later, her window slammed shut in its sash.

  At dinner that evening, the Cosmic Film Company took over a private room off the main hotel dining room. For another dollar’s bribe, Jack secured a table just beside the curtain that separated the two dining rooms. By moving his table a few feet, sitting sideways in his chair, and holding back the edge of the curtain with his foot, Jack was able to hear all and see a little of what was going on inside.

  After dessert had been served, Junius Fane stood and made a speech to the company.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow we will take another train to our new home in Hollywood. A very small, very quiet town, that will not be small and quiet for long. Four years ago, our friendly competitor, the Centaur Company of New Jersey, moved out here to escape the ravages of the Motion Picture Patents Company—that unscrupulous combine that has repeatedly attempted to strangle our livelihoods in total contempt of the Constitution of the United States and the beliefs which we all hold dear, that American men and women were born to compete fairly, and get rich off the sweat of their own brows, and not the brows of others.” Fane, who tended to get hot when he talked of the Patents Trust, paused a moment to recover himself and regain the track of his remarks. “Since the arrival of the Centaur Company, others have followed, and I predict that before long, Hollywood will be a more glamorous name than Fort Lee. We will be happy here. Here we, and our children, and our children’s children shall be blessed, and we shall prosper. When God made the earth, he finished his good work, and then tilted the planet a little, so that all the greatest of his splendors spilled down into California. In New York a millionaire’s ransom would not pay for the flowers that grow in ditches here. J. P. Morgan has not such a breakfast table as we may have here simply by walking on to the street and plucking oranges off the trees and lemons from the vines. I’m told that every house comes with an avocado patch, so that there will be no danger of starving or freezing to death.”

  The members of the company glanced at one another. Any talk of freezing or starving was not an encouraging augury of their future success.

  Fane went on: “We will be able to shoot entirely out of doors, three hundred days of the year. Clouds, I’m told, are allowed only on the weekend, for the better promotion of the moving-picture industry.

  For exteriors, there are city parks in abundance, and bucolia in the form of farms. We have beaches and the sea, we have mountains and snow, we have desert and torrential rivers. And, on top of all this, the Mexican border is only a few hours away, in case the Patents Trust send out any of their hooligans. Ladies and gentlemen,” the director concluded expansively, “we have fallen into a soft crib.”

  Jack paid little attention to Fane’s speech. He was much more interested in the activities of Susan and Hosmer, who were seated at a table in the corner of the room with Miss Nethersole and Mr. Perks—one of the gentlemen whose teeth Jack had loosened by the side of the railroad track. Several times Susan had inclined her head in Hosmer’s direction, and had spoken directly into his ear. Jack’s blood boiled up into his face.

  As the company party broke up, Jack hurried away to the smoking room and sent an anonymous message to Hosmer that a gentleman wished to speak to him on a matter of some urgency. As he waited for the cameraman’s appearance, Jack watched a game of billiards in progress, imagining a Méliès transformation of every billiard ball into Hosmer Collamore’s head.

  “Just as I thought,” Hosmer said, with a smug smile. “I knew it was going to be you—I don’t know anybody else in Los Angeles. I thought you were going to turn right around and go back to New York. But here you are, still bothering me and Suss.”

  “I have to ask you a question,” said Jack.

  “It’s not polite to invite a gentleman into a gentlemen’s smoking room without also inviting him to partake of spirits and tobacco,” said Hosmer. “And as you are the politest fellow I know—when you aren’t knocking bandits on the chin—I’ll have a glass of brandy and a thirty-five-cent Havana.”

  Jack went to the bar and brought back two glasses of brandy and a twenty-five-cent cigar for Hosmer.

  “I have just one question for you,” Jack repeated.

  “‘Fire when ready,’ as the conspirator said to the executioner, who turned out to be his brother.”

  “Are you really engaged to Susan?”

  Hosmer grinned. “Suss is beside herself, contemplating our conjugal felicity. As am I.”

  Jack swallowed off his brandy, got up, went to the bar to get another, bought the bottle while he was at it, came back, sat down, poured a glassful, drank it, poured another glassful, refilled Hosmer’s glass, and said, “I think you’re just saying this because Susan asked you to because she knew it would upset me. Hosmer, you can now tell me the truth.”

  “I have told you the truth, and so has Suss. Who will you believe? Will you believe the preacher who marries us? Will you believe the clerk at the honeymoon hotel who watches me sign in as Mr. and Mrs. Hosmer T. Collamore? Will you believe five hundred angels blowing on trumpets and singing
, ‘Love, love, love’? Jealousy has blinded your eyes and closed your ears and put a torch to your mind—that’s what jealousy has done to you, my friend. I would suggest that you go east again, forget Suss, and marry some real young lady in high society—one who doesn’t really care what you tell her your name is.”

  Jack filled his glass again. Hosmer held his out, but Jack ignored the gesture. He put the bottle down on the opposite side of the chair.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Hosmer. “You can go with me to city hall tomorrow and watch me apply for a license to be married. It’s Suss who is pressing for this wedding, by the way,” he added with a leer that made Jack want to smash some heavy object against his yellow teeth. “In fact, she can’t wait, and I’m not sure that we will wait.”

  “What does that mean?” Jack demanded.

  “Means she’s asked me to her room. Means she wants to plan the honeymoon. You know what I mean, don’t you? Plan it out. Set the details. Rehearse.”

  “Get out,” said Jack quietly, “before I push that empty glass down your throat.”

  Smiling, Hosmer rose and sauntered out of the gentlemen’s smoking room, leaving Jack alone with his bottle of brandy and the gentlemen playing billiards.

  Jack returned to his room with the bottle. He sat down at the window with his glass and stared out at the multitudinous stars of the sky and the lights of Los Angeles, which were few and far between. The air of the sprawling city was fragrant and sweet; Jack’s heart was hard and black. He thought of throwing himself out the window just for the satisfaction of knowing that Susan and Hosmer would see him on his way to his death. That would spoil their little tryst. He would even leave a note, blaming Susan for everything. Then she’d regret terminating the engagement. But what if, as he’d suggested to Hosmer, the whole thing were a lie just invented by the two of them to irritate him? The engagement to be married, the illicit meeting in Susan’s room? Then suicide was probably not a good idea.