Jack and Susan in 1913 (14 page)

Jack was breathless. “No cold meat tonight,” he blurted. “No bottled beer. No sliced bread. Tonight I'm taking you to a restaurant. But first we're going to the theater—no nickelodeon, either. And I am paying.”

In another moment, and without explanation or a word from Susan, he was gone, leaving her to dress. She went into the bedroom, and looked with despair at her wardrobe. It had not been added to for many months now. At last she chose a long woolen skirt with enormous black and white checks, a simple white silk blouse (her best), and a six-inch wide red lacquered belt. She stood against the hallway door and looked at herself in the reflection of the sitting-room windows—a faulty mirror at best—and then tried to see how she looked when she walked.

Not pitiful any more, just a bit awkward. She wasn't so awkward when she used only one of her crutches, but no woman ever looked
really
fashionable with a broken leg.

Damn
Jay Austin.

Then she thought again. No, don't damn him. Because it might just be Mr. Austin's five hundred dollars that would allow the man she loved to have enough self-respect to propose to her.

The play they saw was the second night's performance of Charles Frohman's
The Sunshine Girl
, with Vernon and Irene Castle. Susan was enchanted, not only with the dancing and the music, which were heavenly, but with Irene Castle herself—an almost boyish figure, with her hair cut boyishly short, wearing no jewelry and the slightest of slight pastel frocks. She made every other woman in New York look heavy and overdressed. Once she got her cast off, Susan knew what she was going to do with her wardrobe. By the intermission, she had decided what she was going to do with her hair.

After the theater, Susan expected that Jack would take her to one of the small restaurants in the area, but instead they climbed into a
second
cab and headed south from Forty-second Street. They got out on Sixth Avenue, just below Twenty-eighth Street and Susan was astonished to find that the awning above the door bore the name Mouquin's in flowing script. It was a place she'd only heard about, but she knew it was the oldest and best French restaurant in the city.

Jack had found a suit of clothes that did not look as if they'd been patched to death, but Susan was nervous about his passing muster in such a sophisticated and well heeled a crowd as would most certainly be found in such a place as this. So she was actually glad, as the waiter led them to a table, that those who stared, stared not at Jack's worn suit, but rather at her crutch and the strange bulge the cast made beneath her skirt.

They were certainly not being mistaken for out-of-town Mellons or Huntingtons.

But once they were seated, and the waiter had hidden Susan's crutch behind a potted palm and, incidentally, quite out of her reach, Susan was astonished to find that Jack had no difficulty in deciphering the menu. And to his evident amazement, neither did she—though she had only a few remnants of high school French left at her command.

Susan had consommé printanier, roast teal duck, chicory salad, and crème en mousse. Jack had oysters, pilaf of chicken à la Creole, haricots verts à l'Anglaise, barbe de Capucin salad, and charlotte russe. The bill came to more than eighteen dollars, an amount greater than Susan generally spent on food over the period of three weeks.

It was a wonderful sensation, to be in the midst of such fashion and elegance, and to feel almost as if she and Jack truly belonged there. Even if the money Jack was spending
was
borrowed, even if at the end of the evening they would have to return to cheap lodgings on West Sixtieth Street, even if it might be a very long time before they were able to reproduce the extravagance of these happy hours, when they two, struck with poverty, lived as the rich perpetually lived, Susan was deliriously happy.

Jack had saved his good news for dinner, and Susan pretended to be full of wonder at Hosmer's generosity. She did not think that Jack saw that her surprise was feigned, for she was, after all, an actress. They toasted the cameraman's perspicacity with champagne. They further toasted Hosmer's uncle who had lent Hosmer the money for this obviously wise investment. They toasted Mr. Fane's sound aesthetic and business judgment in purchasing so many scenarios from the Young Lady in High Society. Jack would have ordered another bottle of champagne with full expectation of finding other persons worthy of commemoration, but Susan declined.

They went home in a
third
taxi, and tonight, Jack kissed Susan in her sitting room.

But he did not ask her to marry him.

H
E WAS SHY AND reticent, that was all. He was hiding behind that great brown beard, hiding beneath that old hat the brim of which always shadowed his face, hiding inside the old wardrobe she helped to keep together with a clumsy needle. Maybe there would come a time when it would be enough for a woman simply to write well. Susan wished it were now, for she was little better with a needle than she was with the directions in
Mrs. Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook
.

Within Susan grew the certainty that Jack would not ask her to marry him till he was assured of her affection. That meant she should simply say, “Jack Beaumont, I am hopelessly in love with you.”

She couldn't. Something in her upbringing prevented her. She knew that she loved Jack, she was sure that Jack loved her, but she could not force herself to be the first to say those words aloud.

But Susan had a plan.

She stayed up all one night, scribbling and typewriting. She sat bundled, for beside her the window was wide open in the hope that the noise of the machine would be spilled out into the night rather than disturbing Jack below.

At six o'clock the next morning, she knocked excitedly at Jack's door. He came blearily to her summons in a threadbare green silk dressing gown with the initials JAB on the pocket.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. “It's so early.”

“Nothing's wrong,” said Susan, thrusting a thick, sealed envelope at him. “But I'd like you to take this to Mr. Fane this morning first thing and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss you. It's just another story, but this time I don't want you to read it.”

“You've always told me my reading your work brought you good luck.”

“You do bring me luck,” she replied. “But I don't need luck on this one. This one is special. Now go back to bed, and please knock on my door when you come back from the studio.”

Hearing Jack's distinctive tread on the stairs a few hours later, Susan threw down the Macy's spring and summer catalogue—in which she'd been dreaming of Bozart rugs, McCray refrigerators and Apollo player pianos—thrust Tripod into the bedroom and firmly shut the door. She moved quickly to the hallway door, pulled it open, and said, “Well, did he buy it?”

“He did.”

“Did you read it?”

“I did not, of course. And hello to you too, Miss Bright.”

“Hello, Mr. Beaumont,” she returned with an apologetic laugh.

“You have no intention of telling me what all this is about, do you?”

“None whatever. Did you see Ida?”

“She sends her love.”

“I'm sure,” said Susan, with a doubtful glance.

“She pretended not to remember me,” Jack admitted.

“Ida doesn't remember anyone below a certain established income,” said Susan easing herself into her chair. “I don't know what she sees in Hosmer.”

Jack had dropped into a chair himself, and now glanced idly at the bedroom door. It would repeatedly shudder, for with silent hysteria Tripod was throwing himself against it on the other side in an effort to get out and at Jack. “There is a certain type of woman,” he said, “who likes to think of herself as an idol. Miss Conquest is one, I believe. Hosmer is a worshipper at her shrine. Isis doesn't kick away her priests.”

He reached into his pocket and brought out a small white envelope. He leaned up out of his chair to offer it to Susan, and she leaned over to take it.

She glanced inside.

“There's forty,” she said with surprise.

“I bargained for higher wages for the Young Lady. I told Mr. Fane that the price of orchids on Fifth Avenue had just gone up.”

“I don't know about the price of orchids,” said Susan, “but carbon paper is now fifty cents a box.”

Susan's cast came off two weeks later.

Jack took Susan back to Bellevue, and waited while the doctor attended her. Distressed by the appearance of her skin, which was white and slack and flaked, she reflected that long skirts would at least hide
that
temporary deformity. She suffered a few moments of panic when she tried to walk again, without the cast, and nearly fell. She was certain that her infirmity was permanent, but the doctor—catching her—assured her that it was only that she was unaccustomed to not carrying the weight of the cast. In time, she'd readjust, and if she exercised properly, there was no reason she would not walk perfectly normally. She would have to use her crutch for a while, but in time she'd be able to do without it.

Susan determined to walk the limp out of her gait, and with the warm weather of spring, this was a pleasurable recuperation. Despite the inconvenience of the four flights of stairs, the crutch, and Tripod's leash, Susan tried to spend an hour every morning in Central Park with Tripod, who threw himself at every other dog he encountered. By experimentation he discovered that his tapered wooden leg could be used as a weapon, and he perfected a sort of sideways offensive lunge that was as effective as it was peculiar-looking.

In the afternoon, she occasionally went out—sometimes with Jack—and did errands. One of her favorite things to do was to look in shop windows to select the things she would buy when she had saved a truly secure amount of money. She'd been in financial straits for so long that she still feared all her good fortune might end, and she would slip down that rough hill again. The hundred dollars of security she now possessed in the bank was going to stay there. No new wardrobe just yet.

And then there was the matter of Jack. Susan couldn't seriously make herself believe that he was inching toward a proposal of marriage. In fact, if anything, he seemed to be inching away.

They still saw each other a lot, that was true, but he now seemed troubled in her presence. He would seem to grow discomfited by some casual remark she'd make in all innocence, particularly if she'd make any mention of money. He took to absenting himself at odd times and with unconvincing explanations. She couldn't determine any real pattern in this new behavior, and she didn't think it was anything as simple as, for instance,
He's afraid of getting married
or
He believes that his camera project will be a failure
or
He's down to his last dollar and thirty-five cents
.

Perhaps someday men and women would sit across from each other, look each other in the eye, and say what was on their minds—whether that something was love, money, religion, politics, or even sexual desire. Susan suspected she wouldn't see it in her lifetime. Jack's trouble was locked up in his breast and brain and the key was hidden under his tongue.