Jack and Susan in 1913 (5 page)

“Won't you come in, Ida?”

There is only one course to take with people like Ida Conquest, and that is to treat them with absolute civility and courtesy, no matter how much you'd like to fly at them with a fistful of sharp objects.

Susan would not ask how Ida, who preferred her masculine company to be moneyed and well-placed even before they were handsome, had come to be with Hosmer. Susan had at first supposed that the two had simply met outside her door, but Hosmer's gloating smile said plainly enough that he had succeeded scraping acquaintance with the Aeroplane Girl.

“Won't you take a chair?” Susan said politely to her guests.

“Thank you. I'll stand by the window,” Ida said, in a manner suggesting that being splashed with cold rainwater was preferable to possible contamination by Susan's upholstery.

“Ida has agreed to appear in several Cosmic Film productions,” said Hosmer giddily.

Susan glanced sharply at Ida. Ida turned away, perhaps to conceal a blush. When she turned back, she amended, “Under the
most
favorable terms of course.”

Acting in moving pictures was considered a come-down for stage actors; it was thought of as nothing but a caricature of
real
acting. Gentlemen and ladies of the stage who had lost their voices through accident or disease were excused, but an actor who left the legitimate boards for the grimy moving-picture factories relinquished not only self-respect but the sympathy of other thespians. Better to hack along in a third-rate touring company on the Omaha-Kansas City-Peoria circuit than to prostitute oneself in front of a grinding camera, an opinion Susan had often heard Ida express.

“
He and She
closed,” said Ida.

“So I read.”

“And Mr. Fane pursued me with stupendous offers.”

“Junius Fane is president of the Cosmic Film Company,” explained Hosmer.

“Mr. Fane thinks that my face and talents are ideally suited for moving pictures,” said Ida. “Mr. Fane promises me also that I will be very rich. I am to be known as the ‘Cosmic Star.'”

“Ida's photograph will appear in the next number of the
Clipper
,” said Hosmer, referring to New York's preeminent sporting and theatrical paper. It was read principally by gentlemen smoking cigars in barbershops, and gentlemen smoking cigars at the races.

Susan was amused not only by Ida's meretricious change of opinion on the subject of the moving pictures, but also on Hosmer's evident infatuation with the new Cosmic Star. It had been obvious to Susan in recent weeks that Hosmer had been forming an attachment to her, and she'd rather dreaded the time when she would have to call a halt to
that
. But now she could see that her place in Mr. Collamore's shallow affections had been usurped by Ida Conquest.

“Ida takes wonderfully,” said Hosmer.

“Takes?”

“She looks splendid on celluloid, I mean. That's what I mean by ‘she takes wonderfully.'”

“Will the Cosmic Star take tea?” Susan asked.

“Yes,” replied Ida. “I will.”

Slap clunk
went Susan to her little cubbyhole of a kitchen where a tiny gas flame could warm a pan of water after perhaps a quarter of an hour of diligent effort.

The good tea was on the top shelf, out of harm's way, and Susan couldn't very well reach it.

“Tripod,” she called.

Pad pad pad tap
came Tripod to the kitchen. Susan snapped her fingers and the dog leapt into her arms. Susan held the dog aloft and Tripod snagged the small canister in his teeth.

Ida and Hosmer remained just long enough to be served their tea, though not to drink it.

“It's terrible to think you won't never find work again,” Ida said. “Not on the stage anyhow. And not anywhere else where people will have to look at your gimp leg. What
will
you do, do you think, Suss?”

Suss rhymed with caboose, and Susan hated it when anyone called her by that detestable nickname. Glancing at Hosmer, she realized with a sinking feeling that he would probably call her by that repulsive syllable forever after.

“I'll manage,” said Susan brightly. “I've gotten along pretty well up till today, and I don't foresee that tomorrow will be much different.”

Oh, but tomorrow looked fairly bleak when Susan closed the door on the Cosmic Star and her worshipful astronomer. Because tomorrow the rent came due, and Susan was short thirty-seven cents. Thirty-seven cents was very little when it was a surplus, but when you lacked that sum, it could seem to be a very great deal of money indeed.

Even supposing that—in this extremity—she took to her crutches and went out on the street and begged in the name of her broken leg and her dog's infirmity and got the thirty-seven cents to make up the difference, what would happen after that?

Firewood, and even cheap tea, and the electricity that burned feebly inside the tiny glass globes in the wall sconces—these weren't things that came to West Sixtieth Street without payment.

Susan knew what happened to young women in 1913 who found themselves without work, without income, without relatives to apply to for assistance. The timid applied for charity, but were turned away because their clothes were too fine. So they pawned their clothes, and then were too ashamed to be seen on the street. The industrious and honest took in sewing and ruined their eyes. All these got by on less food than formerly, and on no pleasure at all. The brazen and the forward (and, probably, more intelligent) young women became—what was that dreadful phrase?—
nymphs du pave
. But women who made their living on the streets at the very least could dress warmly and have enough to eat. There was a great deal to be said for not starving or freezing to death. Perhaps there would come a time when the unfortunate and the destitute were not simply swept into the gutters of the city streets, when provision was made for the homeless, for those unable to find work, for the permanently invalided. But that time was not now, and Susan knew that without assistance, she
would
sink.

She found herself oddly curious about which path she would take in her downward descent and spent most of the night restlessly pacing the room.

Slap clunk. Slap clunk. Slap clunk. Slap clunk
.

Bed to the window, and window back to the bed.

Slap clunk. Slap clunk. Slap clunk.

Stirring up the embers in the dying fire. How much did embers go for these days?

Slap clunk. Slap clunk.

Staring out the window at the darkened city.

Tripod growled in his sleep, warning away imaginary enemies.

Destitution was no phantasm of the mind.

Slap clunk.

H
AVING SLEPT FOR little more than an hour, Susan awoke with a start, sitting up in bed with eyes wide and staring. She worked to dispel a nightmare in which her landlady knocked at the door and demanded the monthly twelve-dollar rent. In her black dream, Susan came up thirty-seven cents short of the sum required.

But it was no dream.

Feverish with anxiety, Susan rose from bed and tried to perform her daily routine. Washing, dressing, laying out a butcher's bone for Tripod. But nothing seemed to go right. She'd go to the bureau, and a few moments later end up at the window, with no memory of why she was supposed to have gone to the bureau.

Slap clunk. Slap clunk.

Tripod, too, was eager to go out. It was Susan's custom simply to open the hall door, and let the dog maneuver his way down—it was no easy task for a three-legged dog to descend four flights of steep stairs. At the front door, he'd wait for someone coming in or going out to open the door for him. He'd be gone for about a quarter of an hour. On returning, he'd wait patiently outside until, again, someone came in or went out. Four flights going up was even more difficult, and poor Tripod would be winded and weak by the time he scratched at Susan's door again.

Susan reflected that not all dogs were as intelligent as Tripod. In fact, in her experience, she had known some dogs that were downright stupid.

But this morning, the tenth of February, with the rent due, Susan was distracted, and Tripod had to whine at the door to get her attention.

“Oh, Tripod, I apologize!” Susan cried, and hurried to the door to let the dog out. She pulled the door open and Tripod hurried out into the hallway. But before Susan even got the door all the way closed she heard the dog growl, then bark—and then a ferocious tearing of cloth.

“Get down! Get down!” a masculine voice cried out.

Susan peered out into the hallway. There near the stairs was Tripod, tearing away at the trouser cuff of a tall, bearded man who was backed up against the wall. Susan had never seen the man before.

“Tripod! Stop! Stop that right now.”

The cuff in the dog's teeth remained attached by a thread. Tripod gave one last tug, and it sheared away. Satisfied, the dog began his hobbling, sliding descent down the stairs.

“I
am
sorry,” said Susan to the man. He was about her age, though the beard made it hard to tell for sure.

“Your dog?” he asked in a not particularly friendly tone of voice.

“Yes. Tripod
is
excitable. He didn't bite you, did he? Please come inside and let me—”

“Do you know what time it is?” the man asked suddenly—and ferociously.

“Half-past seven? I heard bells a little while—”

“It is a quarter past
six
in the morning,” he said, stepping inside the room. “And you live in these apartments?”

“Yes…”

“Madam, your husband has the heaviest tread of any known mortal. I did not so much mind that he kept me up until four-thirty this morning while he paced the room. But when he got up again only half an hour ago, I thought that I
must
speak to him. So if you would kindly—” He nodded his head toward the bedchamber in back.

“I'm not married—” She saw a flicker of surprise cross the bearded man's features, and she hastened to add, “That was me. I. And I'm sorry that—”

“That was your tread?”

She lifted the hem of her robe to reveal her cast. “I suppose you're the new tenant—directly below me?”

“Yes,” he replied, “and though probably I have no right to ask you to give up walking, I
beg
you to walk either all night, or else all morning—but not both.”

“Of course,” said Susan quickly. “Mr.—”

“Beaumont,” said the gentleman. “My name is Jack Beaumont.”

“Mr. Beaumont, please let me repair your cuff. Tripod is sometimes—”

“—rambunctious,” said Mr. Beaumont.

Susan noticed, in the greater light afforded by the apartment windows, that Mr. Beaumont's clothing was far from brand-new and quite threadbare. It was clean, but worn carelessly. Perhaps he'd just thrown on whatever came to hand when he'd decided to mount the stairs for his complaint, and what came to hand was not the best his wardrobe had to offer.

“Please don't think about it,” said Jack Beaumont, and with that he simply walked out the door.

She listened to his heavy tread as he made his way down the stairs.

Mrs. McCalken, the landlady of the Fenwick, was a generously proportioned woman of indeterminate middle age. She had pitted skin, a red nose, a fat neck, and half a dozen teeth of assorted sizes and colors. She was pleasant in such a way as to make you wish that she were more standoffish. She generally made the rounds of the building twice on rent day, first at noontime, and then again in the evening, so as to be sure to catch all her tenants in.

Which is to say that Susan had approximately five hours in which to scrape up thirty-seven cents.

She decided to do what all young women in her position did when faced with a shortage of funds.

She'd pawn all her jewels.

All her jewels consisted of a gold bracelet that had belonged to her grandmother, and a diamond ring with a stone so small it ceased to sparkle if so much as a mote of soot fell on to it.

As she dressed to go out, Tripod scratched at the door. The dog, still bearing the woolen trophy of Jack Beaumont's trouser cuff in his mouth, trotted in and Susan rather impatiently snatched the fabric from those grinning, self-satisfied jaws.

“Just for that, you won't go out with me,” said Susan, excited by the prospect of a trip downtown.
She's been visiting First Avenue
was euphemistic green-room tattle—for on lower First Avenue was a cluster of pawnshops. She'd been out so little lately that she was happy for even so melancholy an errand as this.

But Tripod looked so forlorn as she was pulling on her cape that Susan relented. “All right, you can go too.”

The animal struggled out from underneath the table where he'd crept, and flung himself through the air at Susan in his happiness.