“What makes you think I want to marry Marcellus?”
“Marcellus is very rich. Much richer than Harmon. And he’s evidently so bewitched by you that he’s willing to go through with such a preposterous proceeding.”
“He may be,” said Susan. “But I’m not.”
She picked up the photographs again and, without looking at them, ripped them into quarters.
“I have no intention of divorcing Harmon.”
“But what about the cloak check girl? What was her name?”
“Dorothy. Dorothy Rudge. I must say I was surprised to see the photograph of Dorothy in bed with Harmon. I can’t imagine what Dorothy’s girlfriend, Henrietta, would say if she saw it. Henrietta is very jealous of Dorothy. Henrietta once threatened to slit my throat if I made any advances on Dorothy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Obviously you don’t,” returned Susan. “You’re a lawyer. Lawyers know nothing about life. They know nothing of what poor girls will do, and what they won’t do, and what they want, and what they don’t want. I’m not a poor girl anymore, but I remember what it was like. What I don’t want is to be married to Marcellus Rhinelander, and what I do want is to remain married to Harmon Dodge.”
“But you don’t love him!”
“You don’t know that. Though, in truth, I don’t. Or rather, I love Harmon as much as Harmon loves me. Harmon is a convenience for me. He provides me money, and security, a splendid house, and he’s a handsome, charming companion on public occasions. I’d like to point out, however, that he gets just as much in return. He’s no longer badgered by mothers of your set who are desperate for a provident match for their impecunious, buck-toothed daughters. He’s nearly thirty, and a bachelor of that age is suspect, I think you know what I mean. That’s no longer a concern for him. If he needs me to be at his side at a dinner of state, or when he makes a speech, or at a regatta, or some such nonsense, I will act the decorative, affectionate article. These cloakroom girls and these dimestore honeys no longer badger him for marriage. They’ll now have to do with new gowns and new flats and dinners in the sorts of restaurants where married people never go—at least not with each other. Harmon has what he wants. I have what I want. Why should either of us desire a divorce?”
It was a more complicated matter than Jack had thought. But it all made a kind of melancholy sense. In its way, he supposed, it was no worse than the arrangements he’d made with Barbara.
“But what about Marcellus?”
“I like him very much. He’s not as dreadful as you probably think he is. It was very foolish of him to fall in love with me. It was even more foolish of me not to realize that he was doing it. I did not ask him to hire Mr. MacIsaac, and it will be very embarrassing and inconvenient for me to have to acknowledge Harmon’s infidelities. I’m afraid my heart really isn’t broken in the least, and I’m going to be hard put to produce tears and hysterical recriminations at the proper time.”
Jack didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“You might say,” Susan suggested, “that you don’t think it would be a very good idea to tell Barbara what has happened. This is already a situation of some difficulty to a number of people, and I’m not sure that Barbara would be of material assistance in making these rough places plain.”
“I think that’s probably true,” said Jack. “But what about Marcellus?”
“I’m going to tell him that Mr. MacIsaac should be paid and dismissed. I will tell him that I’m not going to marry him, but that our friendship will continue exactly as before. And I hope that I will be able to tell him that you will remain absolutely discreet on this subject. May I tell him that?”
“Yes,” said Jack fervently.
“Good,” said Susan.
“I’m glad I was wrong about you,” he said, initiating an entirely new round of blushes.
“But you weren’t wrong,” said Susan. “You were right from the beginning, and so was Barbara, for that matter. I am a gold digger, and I married Harmon for his money.”
To that, there was nothing a very uncomfortable Jack could reply.
“How did you get into that apartment when they were in bed together?” Jack asked Mr. MacIsaac in the hallway.
“Professional secret,” replied the detective with a wink of his shiny black eye.
“Destroy the negatives,” said Jack.
“Sure I will,” said Mr. MacIsaac and Jack somehow knew that he wouldn’t.
“If you haven’t yet been paid, then I’ll be happy—”
“I’m as free and clear as that lovely young lady in there soon will be.”
“Yes,” said Jack, thinking it not appropriate to divulge anything at all to Mr. MacIsaac. “Good day, then.”
“If you need me,” said Mr. MacIsaac with a shiny smile, “I’ve my old number, and my old office, but my camera and my caution is spanking new for you and for whoever else, Mr. Beaumont.”
“Thank you,” said Jack.
Mr. MacIsaac slipped out the front door and was gone. Jack could hear the voices of Susan and Marcellus in the study. His quick and distressed, hers low and soothing. Jack went into the dining room and looked at the prints on the wall. Steel engravings of Roman excesses—gladiatorial combats between Christian children and Ethiopian warriors, a patrician family suffocated by an avalanche of rose petals, infants hurled from the city ramparts and caught on the spears of invading Visigoths. It was no wonder his digestion was so poor in this house.
The study doors were flung open, and Susan Dodge hurried out. She threw him one glance, and then was out the front door.
“Stop her!” cried Marcellus, hurrying after.
Jack didn’t know what he should do or say. But he felt that he should be stopping not Susan but his father-in-law. “Ah, Marcellus,” he said, then realized it was the first time he had ever called the man by his Christian name.
“You idiot,” said Marcellus, turning on Jack in a fury. “What nonsense did you talk to her?”
“I didn’t talk nonsense!”
“You convinced her not to marry me!”
“I didn’t have to,” Jack protested.
“I love her.”
“She doesn’t love you,” said Jack, blushing. It wasn’t the sort of conversation one usually had with one’s father-in-law or, for that matter, with the senior partner of the law firm that employed you.
“Are you saying she loves that drunk? That moral toad? That inexcusable excuse for a husband?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” said Jack with reluctant truth. “I think what she’s saying is—”
“I don’t care what she said to you!” cried Marcellus. “Anybody would say anything to you. You’re an idiot!”
“I don’t think—”
“Nobody but an idiot would have married Barbara,” snapped Barbara’s father, and flung himself out the door.
Jack sighed. He wished he’d remained in New York, not lied to Harmon and said he was in court, not lied to Barbara and said he was visiting a client in Montauk. He wished he’d done anything but take that tedious drive up the Hudson, look at embarrassing photographs, listen to uncomfortable truths about private matters, and be called an idiot by his father-in-law. Probably he wouldn’t even get dinner. Or worse, Grace Grace would serve up one of her embalmed fowl.
He heard car engines outside. He stepped out the front door onto the porch. Susan’s car was halfway down the driveway. It disappeared round a curve.
Richard Grace, in his weekday uniform, stood beside the open door of the touring car. Marcellus Rhinelander swiped the keys from the chauffeur’s hand, jumped behind the wheel, and slammed the door. A moment later the touring car revved into life and lurched off with a spray of gravel onto the greening lawn.
Richard Grace kicked his way through the gravel toward Jack. “He hasn’t driven in ten years. The old idiot. He wants to marry her. Only decent idea he’s ever had. I hope he drives off a cliff.”
“I suppose you’d better,” said Richard Grace. “The old idiot.”
The situation, already complicated, was now in danger of becoming even more difficult. Susan would be returning to the Quarry. Marcellus would follow her there and try to convince her to divorce Harmon and marry him. If Barbara was upset about having Susan the wife of their best friend, Jack could only imagine how she would take the news that Susan was to divorce her best friend in order to marry her father. He contemplated the battle of Argonne.
Jack sighed. He climbed into his Ford sedan, the utterly ordinary automobile that had replaced the splendid vehicle he had wrecked on New Year’s Day. He reached into his pocket for the key. He couldn’t reach it, owing to the Ford’s dimensions and the length of his legs. He got out of the Ford and pulled the key from his pocket. He got back into the Ford and started the engine. He set off in pursuit of his best friend’s wife and his father-in-law.
He found only Susan.
Her car was parked against a wall of slate that had been exposed when the road was cut along the side of the mountain. Susan herself stood at the lip of the cliff overlooking the Hudson. A low fence of weathered poles had been broken through there. Jack pulled up behind her car and got out.
“He was following me,” Susan said as Jack crossed the road toward her. “He was driving fast, trying to catch up. I saw him in the mirror. He crashed through the railing. So I stopped and backed up.”
Jack held on to the broken railing and peered over the edge of the cliff. Two hundred feet below, there was no sign of the touring car or its driver.
Nothing but the dark blue water that flowed on toward the less fashionable side of Manhattan Island.
“There’s no chance that he”—she faltered; Jack had never heard her falter before—“no chance he survived, is there?”
“Absolutely not,” said Jack. And he knew neither what to think, or do, or say.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THEY WALKED SILENTLY down the narrow road to the Quarry, and from there, Jack telephoned the police. “There’s been an accident,” he said, feeling rather lame. It was the sort of thing stupid people in tedious films said ten minutes before Warner Oland showed up to say This was no accident.
Susan drove Jack back up to the Cliffs. She went slowly, and they looked carefully on both sides of the road all the way, as if in hope they’d simply overlooked Marcellus Rhinelander’s automobile—but on one side was the sheer rise of hewn slate, and on the other side was the sheer drop to the Hudson River. There was nowhere, certainly, for a large car to have been overlooked, even supposing it to have been hidden on purpose.
“You’ve been very good,” said Susan in a tone she might have used with a child.
“Thank you. This is a very difficult situation.”
“Not you,” she said. “Scotty and Zelda.” She indicated over her shoulder. The two terriers sat at either end of the rear seat. Jack hadn’t even known they were there.
“Harmon told me they’d died,” said Jack, thinking they were so quiet and still that perhaps they had died and been stuffed. They didn’t even make a move to get out of the automobile when both doors were opened. Only when Susan said, “All right now. But be very quiet. This is a house of mourning,” did the dogs soberly climb down from the seat and walk sedately across the gravel path at Susan’s heels. This surprised Jack, as he’d remembered Barbara’s call to the kennel, asking for the most ill-behaved, rambunctious, impossible pair of canines on the premises.
Richard Grace and his wife stood on the steps of the Cliffs, waiting for them. Louise had telephoned them with the news already, it appeared. Both servants were weeping.
“He was a vicious old capitalist,” sobbed Richard Grace, “and as such he ought not to have been out driving alone, he ought to have had me to take him, and I would have, and he couldn’t have beaten me away from my duty to him.”
“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 underst
and. 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.
Jack and Susan in 1933 Page 11
