Jack and Susan in 1933

by Michael McDowell

  “Because I want to make sure she goes home. If we simply left now, she’d drag Harmon into the bedroom, undress him, undress herself, crawl in beside him, and when he woke up, say, ‘Darling, you were wonderful last night. And yes, yes, I will marry you, anytime you say.’”

  “She doesn’t seem quite that type,” said Jack.

  “She is,” said Barbara definitively. “Here she is,” Barbara whispered. “I hope she wasn’t listening outside the door. She’s that type, too.”

  “I’m ready,” said Susan Bright, drawing her coat over her shoulders.

  “It was an immense pleasure,” said Barbara with gaping insincerity.

  “I assure you,” returned Susan, “that it was every bit as much a pleasure for me. I wonder if we’ll be seeing any more of each other in this coming year. I shouldn’t wonder if we were.”

  Barbara said nothing, but smiled her cold, polite smile, which even Jack had to admit was fairly ghastly in the light of dawn.

  Susan pulled down the blanket just enough to uncover Harmon’s brow and eyes. Holding her coat closed at the throat, she leaned down and kissed his fore-head. His eyes fluttered open, struggled to focus, gave up the struggle, and closed again. Susan pulled the blanket back over his head.

  Jack’s Lincoln LeBaron roadster was parked around the corner. It was a powerful car with a twelve-cylinder engine and was capable of a hundred and fifty horsepower. It cost a great deal more than the annual salaries of most men in New York. Jack himself couldn’t have afforded the thirty-five-hundred-dollar price tag, but the car was yet another bankruptcy spoil given the firm of Rhinelander, Rhinelander, and Dodge in payment for services rendered. And as Harmon Dodge already had four automobiles, this one came to Jack. Jack was not ashamed to take the gift, for he had done all the work on the case and felt it was his due. He was enormously proud of the machine, and even if he had had his choice, he would have picked the same viridian the body was painted and the same black leather upholstery. The only thing he would have had different were the tiny initials on the dashboard cubbyhole. Instead of RBW—whatever poor bankrupt that was, he would have put JAB—John Austin Beaumont. But such a small matter was hardly enough to damage the enjoyment he felt in the car—after all, the letters were very small and hardly likely to be noticed.

  “Who is RBW?” asked Susan Bright as soon as he’d come round to the other side. “Isn’t your name Beaumont?”

  “The former owner of the car,” said Jack, his enjoyment in the automobile damaged. He really would have preferred that this young woman, who was obviously impressed with money, since she was doing so much to snag Harmon, think that he had bought the car outright. But at least she could still think that he had paid for it, even if he’d purchased it second-hand.

  The morning was cold, and a drizzle sometime during the night had left the sidewalks and streets slick with a thin layer of ice. The car was cold, and the automatic starter, which had originally added over a hundred dollars to the price of the automobile, wouldn’t automatically start. Susan huddled in her coat, and blew on her hands to warm them. She did not make polite conversation, though Jack reflected that perhaps she had had enough of Beaumont politeness in her exchanges with Barbara. As he repeatedly pressed the starter, Jack glanced sidewise at Susan and hardened his heart against her black hair, her translucent skin, her coat that was really too thin and not proper protection against January cold in New York.

  “Your lipstick is the color of calves liver,” he remarked entirely without thinking. Or, rather, that was exactly what he was thinking, but he hadn’t considered that it might be the wrong thing to say aloud.

  “And your hair is the color of rotting hay,” returned Susan with perfect equanimity. “And you have all the politeness of your beautiful and well-bred wife.” She opened the door of the car and stepped smartly out. She headed for the green and black Terminal taxi that was parked ahead of Jack.

  She had her hand on the back door of the taxi at the very moment the automatic starter caught and the powerful roadster engine burst into frantic life. Unfortunately, Jack had neglected to shift into neutral, and the car leapt forward four feet into the rear of the taxi, smashing both of the cab’s rear lights and knocking Susan to the ground with the impact of the collision.

  “Oh God, not this this morning,” Jack groaned, and crawled out of his car.

  “Very well then,” said Susan, picking herself from the sidewalk, “if you don’t want me to take a taxi, I will walk home.”

  “No!” cried Jack.

  “Mister,” said the taxi driver, getting slowly out from behind the wheel, “this is not my taxi. This is my brother’s taxi. My brother gets out of prison tomorrow. Do you know why my brother was in prison? He got sent to prison for mauling a guy who rammed his taxi from behind. Tried to stick the guy’s head in his glove box. So just tell me, what’s your address? My brother’ll be coming in on the Elmira bus tomorrow. He’ll want to meet you.”

  Susan waved ironically to Jack as she turned the corner. Evidently, she really did intend to walk home, even though the wind was high and sharp and her coat so thin.

  Barbara emerged from the wide double doors of Harmon’s building. “Can’t you do anything right?” she asked.

  “There was an accident,” Jack tried to explain. Jack was actually thinking, I wish I were wearing different clothes. A boiled shirt with champagne stains, trousers that were too tight in the crotch, opera pumps not meant for negotiating icy streets, and an overcoat with a torn lining that kept bunching up beneath his armpit. It was barely dawn, he had just smashed up the back of a taxi owned by a convicted criminal, and his wife had found a perfectly admirable excuse to be bored with him for the rest of the week.

  “You’d better go after her,” Barbara sighed. “If you don’t, she’ll catch pneumonia, which will only make her more interesting. Harmon will propose at the side of her hospital bed.”

  “Hey,” said the driver of the mutilated taxi.

  “Hey yourself,” said Barbara. “I’ll take care of you. Go on, Jack, go pick up that girl.”

  Jack obediently climbed back into the roadster, backed up carefully, and turned out into the street. Just when he was almost free of the space, however, his tires skidded on a patch of ice. He fishtailed his right fender against the rear door of the taxi, crumpling the door and mangling the handle.

  “My brother will kill you, your wife, and your damn girlfriend!” Jack heard the driver scream as he drove on. He did have complete confidence that Barbara would handle the man and his complaints.

  Jack turned uptown on Sixth, and drove slowly, looking for Susan. He was also thinking about the damage that must have been done to his rear fender and the grille. The car had been a Christmas bonus, and already…

  It wasn’t hard to find Susan. On the very early morning of New Year’s Day 1933 there were few people about. With her black coat wrapped tightly about her, she walked quickly along the west side of Sixth Avenue, going north, hugging the sides of buildings against the driving wind. Jack pressed the horn several times. Once she glanced around, but recognizing the automobile, she forged ahead even more quickly, and turned the corner onto Fifty-eighth Street.

  Jack was determined not to lose her. Though the street signal clanged warningly, the metal finger about to change from Go to Stop, Jack did not hesitate to turn left across three lanes of the street—and luckily there was no traffic in the oncoming lanes. However, so sudden was the turn and so icy the street that the roadster skidded to the right and the back of the car bumped up over the curb. A lamppost embedded itself a couple of inches deep in the passenger door.

  “Damn,” said Jack, entirely giving over the modest mental calculation he had been making of the cost of repairs to the new automobile.

  He pressed on the accelerator and tried to disengage himself from the lamppost, but that wouldn’t do. Susan, who was doubtless laughing, moved farther on up the street toward Seventh Avenue. Jack threw the car into reverse, stepped
on the accelerator, and spun back out into Sixth Avenue—though there now was traffic coming south—a large black Studebaker President, being carefully driven by a woman in a fur coat whose husband, in crushed top hat, was slumped on the front seat beside her. Jack was able to make out this much detail because the President smashed into the rear of his roadster, caught on the bumper, and shoved him halfway down Fifty-eighth Street. Jack finally succeeded in getting the car into forward again, and then he turned sharply left and slammed on the accelerator in an attempt to get free of the Studebaker. This, rather to his surprise, worked, and he spun onto Sixth Avenue with no more damage to the roadster than smashing one of its headlights (which hadn’t been broken when he hit the taxi) against the side of a parked milk truck. Crashing the same red light at Fifty-eighth Street again, he turned a sharp left and sped on toward Seventh. He caught sight of Susan on the other side of the avenue, headed along Fifty-eighth Street toward Broadway. A quick glance to the right and left on Seventh showed no more than two taxis, a beer truck, and a chauffeured limousine in his path. He weaved the roadster across, his thumb on the horn, and continued along Fifty-eighth Street.

  Finally he caught up with Susan, just before she was about to turn onto Broadway. He slowed the car, rolled down the right-hand window, leaned across the seat, and called to her.

  “Miss Bright!”

  She turned, as with dread.

  “Please go away,” she said.

  “Let me drive you home,” said Jack politely.

  “In that? Let me point out, Mr. Beaumont, that you are driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Even-numbered streets go east.”

  She then turned north on Broadway.

  Jack hurriedly turned the corner, just as a Terminal taxi took the same corner toward him. The taxi blew its horn, and Jack frantically blew his. Much to Jack’s satisfaction, there was no collision and no further damage to his roadster from the Terminal taxi. Right behind that vehicle there was a Yellow Cab, and the Yellow Cab blind-plowed into the back of Jack’s roadster. Jack heard two of his tires explode, and he felt the wheel lock in his hands. The car jumped the Broadway curb and made a quasi-hop through the air.

  Through the windshield Jack caught sight of Susan Bright directly in front of his roadster. Her face bore an expression that said quite clearly, I might have known … Jack pulled the hand brake, but even before Jack’s brain had had the leisure to remember that brakes don’t take against the air, Susan’s face had disappeared beneath the nose of the roadster, and the roadster itself had crashed into the facade of an insurance building.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” Jack called breathily as he attempted to peer over the top of the steering wheel. He couldn’t get up because the impact of the crash had jammed the steering wheel quite deeply against his stomach.

  “I am most certainly not all right,” said Susan Bright, slowly rising from a crouch in front of the car. She had taken refuge in a small recessed doorway in the facade of the insurance building. That refuge had saved her life. The car had smashed on either side of the narrow recess, and she was pinned there now. “Back up, would you please, Mr. Beaumont?” she said in a voice of half growing anger and half fading terror.

  “If I could, I would,” said Jack as he carefully picked a shard of windshield glass from his neck. “But I’m afraid I can’t move. This wheel’s embedded in my stomach. Also,” he said after a moment, “the door won’t open. Perhaps,” he suggested, “since I don’t seem to be able to help you, you should climb over the hood.”

  “The hood is covered with broken glass,” Susan returned. “And besides, it’s smoking. Is this one of those automobiles that blows up?” she asked in a tone of voice suggesting that she wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it was.

  “I don’t know,” said Jack. “That’s one of the things they don’t tell you when you get a car from a bankrupt. Why don’t you just open the door and go inside the building, and that way you’ll be out of danger if there’s an explosion.”

  “It’s locked,” she said after a moment’s experimentation. Jack wasn’t surprised to hear it. It was, all things considered, that sort of morning—and it was only New Year’s Day.

  “Are you stuck?” asked a little boy on the sidewalk, peering up at Jack.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Jack returned. “Would you mind going for help?”

  “To my ma?” asked the little boy. “My ma don’t know nothing about cars.”

  “Not to your mother,” said Jack. “To the police.”

  “Ma says for me to leave the police alone.”

  “In other circumstances,” said Jack, “I’d agree with your mother, but these are special circumstances.”

  The little boy hesitated.

  “If I could reach into my pocket, I’d give you a dollar,” said Jack, “but I can’t move. Miss Bright, do you have a dollar for this little boy?”

  Four quarters flew over the smoking hood of the car. The little boy gathered them up and ran off. Jack had no great confidence that the police would come before he either froze, perished from some as yet undetected internal injury, or burned to death in a gasoline blaze (if the automobile turned out to be of the sort that exploded).

  “I really am very sorry about this inconvenience,” he called out to Susan, who leaned against the locked door of the insurance building with her arms crossed over her breast, both for warmth and to indicate a certain general displeasure with the progress of 1933.

  “I really don’t believe you are,” Susan called back testily. “I really do believe that you and your wife would do just about anything to keep me away from Mr. Dodge. Including trying to crush me against the side of a building with your automobile.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Jack, picking out a large shard of glass that looked as if it were going to come loose from the windshield soon anyway.

  “Is it?” said a young woman in a green coat, who had appeared out of nowhere at the side of the wrecked car. “Is it?” she asked again with a wary eye on Jack. “I have seen accidents, in the country and in the city, and this don’t look like any accident I have ever seen.”

  “Nevertheless,” Jack said to the woman in green, “it is an accident. I was only attempting to take this young lady home.”

  “He said,” called Susan from the recessed doorway, “that if I saw his friend again, he’d have me killed for good.”

  “I thought it was something like that,” said the young woman in the green coat. “It always is. Are you all right in there?”

  “Yes, she’s all right,” said Jack. “She’s perfectly fine, and no one tried to kill her. I, on the other hand, have this steering wheel stuck in my stomach, and I am not fine. And, Miss Bright, if and when the police arrive, I would appreciate your not trying to maintain that this was a murder attempt.”

  “If I had a gun,” said the young woman in the green coat to Jack, “I’d shoot you right here and now.”

  “If I had a gun,” Susan said, “I’d give it to you.”

  A small crowd gathered—a few well-dressed drunken revelers on their way to home and hangovers, a few delivery men, a few children whose parents were home abed, a few men and women lucky enough to have work but not lucky enough to have a holiday, a few indigents on their way from one cold stoop to another. The crowd seemed sympathetic to Susan’s plight, and indifferent to Jack’s. Those who did not look on this accident as an attempted murder were inclined to look on it as a failed seduction. Jack’s only ally was a particularly drunken man in a broken top hat who kept calling out, “Marry the girl, and then she’ll do whatever you want.” Eventually, the police arrived, and tossed the drunken man’s cape over the hood of the car to Susan. She wrapped it around her tightly, and thanked the policeman. Soon a truck from a garage arrived. A chain was attached to the already smashed bumper of Jack’s car, which was pulled free from the facade of the insurance building.

  Four policemen instantly supported Susan away from the rece
ssed doorway, and ignored Jack’s cries. When the automobile was pulled free of the building, the front portion of the car dropped heavily to the ground, and the steering wheel jammed even more tightly into Jack’s abdomen.

  Jack felt one of his ribs crack.

  “Ohh—” he started to groan.

  Then another one went as well.

  “So tell me exactly what you said to her,” said Barbara impatiently.

  “Said to whom?” moaned Jack. Formerly no bed had been long enough for Jack’s legs. Now no bed could be too soft for his ribs. Bandages were wrapped tightly around his chest. He felt he had to struggle for every breath. Beneath his neck was what could be described only as a wide, tender bruise. It was the only thing he wanted to think about.

  “To her,” sighed Barbara. “To that chanteuse. To Susan …”

  Jack remembered Susan—with no particular fondness. She only made him think of his two broken ribs, the circle of pain that used to be his chest, and oh yes, his viridian roadster. Perhaps his ribs would repair themselves. His automobile wouldn’t. “Call Harmon,” Jack pleaded.

  “Harmon?” echoed Barbara, pacing with a cigarette whose smoke—Jack predicted—was going to make it even more difficult for him to breathe. “Harmon won’t say anything about the girl. Pardon me, the chit. Harmon knows what I feel about that sort.”

  “No,” whispered Jack, deciding that in his life up to this point he had been entirely profligate with his breath. Surely he could get along just as well on only half as many in-and exhalations. “Have him send over some of his good brandy.”

  “I hate brandy!” Barbara fumed. “And what has brandy to do with what you said to that girl?”

  “The brandy is for me,” said Jack weakly. “It might help to ease the pain.”