Jack and Susan in 1913 (7 page)

She momentarily considered putting the bills into an envelope addressed, “Mr. Jay Austin, General Delivery, Chicago, Illinois,” but then realized how foolhardy a move that would be. Instead, she simply wrote out a receipt:

Susan wasn't quite sure that the form was regular, having had no experience whatever in taking out loans, but it
seemed
quite proper to her.

The next morning, Susan hobbled downstairs with Tripod on a leash and walked around the corner to a branch office of the Bank of New York. She opened a savings account with four hundred and fifty dollars, hoping that she would never be forced to touch another penny of Jay Austin's money and further, that someday she'd be able to replace the missing fifty dollars. On the way home she dropped the envelope containing the one-sided loan agreement into a postal box. Even if she didn't consider it really hers, Susan felt better knowing that she had such a comfortable sum in an interest-bearing account.

That evening, about seven o'clock, Hosmer Collamore stopped by Susan's room to bring Tripod some scraps of meat he'd picked up at the butcher's, and to tell Susan about Ida's triumphs before the camera.

“We're doing this splendid drawing-room drama,” said Hosmer, “and Ida is a secretary who stays up all night in order to help her sister finish a ball gown. The next day at work she falls asleep at her desk after everyone else has gone home and when she wakes up she overhears a group of ruffians planning a bank robbery. She calls her boss, but before he can inform the police the ruffians capture him and so it's up to Ida—and her boss's rich and handsome son—to foil the bank robbery, only the boss's son is shot trying to protect Ida from the gang's bullets. She is then kidnapped and taken to a farmhouse in New Jersey, where her purity and innocence convinces the old man who's guarding her to allow her to escape. She returns to New York and there's a breathless rescue on the top of a building, and the boss's son calls out for her in his delirium and his life won't be saved unless he marries her, so he does.”

“What happens to the ruffians?” asked Susan, who saw several holes in the story.

“Oh, Ida throws them off the top of the building. It's a two-reeler. In twenty-eight minutes you can tell a lot more story than you can in just fourteen.”

“I guess you can,” said Susan uncertainly.

“Cosmic is in the forefront,” said Hosmer proudly, “because we're hardly doing one-reelers anymore. People want more for their nickels. They're tired of pictures ending just minutes after they've begun. They want real life, and they want
stars
.”

“Like Ida?”

“Yes,” Hosmer agreed anxiously. “Ida will be the greatest of them all. Wouldn't you like to visit the studio and see her at work, Suss?”

“Please call me Susan, Hosmer.”

“At the studio they call me Colley,” said Hosmer, “and everybody seems to have a nickname there. But won't you visit us? And watch Ida be shot?”

“I'd love to come sometime,” said Susan, “but…” She raised her skirt, revealing a little bit of her plaster cast.

“But you get around very well with your crutches. Please do come tomorrow. I've invited Mr. Beaumont as well, and I'm sure that he wouldn't mind escorting you, if you're—”

“Mr. Beaumont?”

“Yes, he's—”

“I know very well who he is. But why did you invite him, Hosmer? He is not—from what I can tell—a very friendly person.”

“He's been quite pleasant to me,” said Hosmer, surprised. “He's offered me cigars—even though I don't smoke. And last evening he asked if I wouldn't go with him to the theater. And I went. We saw the new Irish play,
Peg o' My Heart
. He asked about you, in fact.”

“About me?”

“He asked who lived in the room above him, is what I mean to say.”

“I fail to see what business it is of his.”

“He asked your story, your history—not snooping-like, but casual,” Hosmer hastened to add.

“And what did you tell him?”

“Told him you'd been splendid in
He and She
and other things, and about how you'd broken your leg—saving the life of the Russian consul. He seemed very impressed by that.”

“What do you know about
him
?”

“He's an inventor, he says. Can't make much money at it, by the look of his clothes.” Here Hosmer preened just a little, taking pride in what sartorial elegance a man
might
achieve on limited means.

“Where does he come from?”

“Upstate,” he said. “Elmira.”

“And why did he come here?”

“To be nearer the people who pay money for inventions, I suppose. He may be poor now, but in a few years, if he's able to invent something that will make people happier than they are now, well, then, I suppose he could make himself very rich. Just as you could be very rich once you're able to go back on the stage,” he added with a little of the deliberate flattery of old—
of old
being the time before he'd transferred his affections to Ida Conquest.

“And just as Ida will become very rich as the Cosmic star,” said Susan with a smile, having more confidence in Ida's dramatic future than in her own. Hosmer readily agreed to this assessment.

Having finally said yes to Hosmer's invitation to visit his studio, and to do so in the company of Mr. Beaumont, Susan was up and about early the next morning. Somehow Tripod seemed to understand that he was about to be left home alone, and he became quite distressed. He fawned and wheedled, and when this didn't work, he barked threateningly. When this also failed, he climbed on to a chair and gazed forlornly out the window, appearing to suggest that he would throw himself out if Susan did not take him along on her expedition. Susan dragged the chair away from the window, and Tripod skulked into the bedroom.

But as soon as she opened the hallway door, out the dog ran, barking and happy—as if he assumed that she had been playing a joke on him all the while. When she closed the door behind her, however, Tripod began a ferocious barking, and from the thumps against the door, Susan knew that he was repeatedly flinging himself against the wooden panels.

She went down the stairs, slowly and clumsily maneuvering with both crutches beneath her left arm.

Mr. Beaumont was waiting outside his door, ready to go.

“The dog alerted me,” he explained, not as sourly as she'd expected.

“Mr. Beaumont,” said Susan, “I fear I'm going to be such an impediment—”

“Nonsense,” he said with a shrug, and a little more than five minutes later they were down three more flights of stairs, standing at the front door.

She smiled at him tentatively. “Perhaps we simply got off on the wrong footing—”

He smiled, and blushed more deeply than even Hosmer Collamore did at the extremity of his embarrassment. “Yes, of course—” he began, then tugged at his collar as to allow a little of the blood that suffused his face to spill back down into his body. He really was quite handsome, Susan decided, and in contrast to the thinning of his hair, his beard was quite lush and covered a great expanse of cheek and chin. There was even a certain endearing clumsiness in his movements that she hadn't noticed before. When he tried to help her out the front door, he succeeded only in getting one of her crutches caught, and then—in releasing it—kicking it down into the street.

“Let's call a cab,” said Susan, “or else we'll be all day getting down there. I have the money here,” she added quickly, to spare him the embarrassment of thinking that perhaps he could ill afford such extravagance. She had already figured out the probable tariff: thirty cents for the first half-mile, ten cents for each quarter-mile after that. A trip of approximately three miles, doubtless with some waiting time, came to one dollar and thirty cents plus a ten-cent gratuity to the driver. Which is to say, forty percent of her weekly allowance to herself—an extravagance indeed. Would there be any time, Susan wondered, when she wouldn't have to labor over such melancholy calculations?

Jack Beaumont thought for a moment about Susan's decision to pay for the cab, then nodded. He loped around the corner to Columbus Avenue in search of a vehicle that was free. Susan did not allow herself to be disappointed that Mr. Beaumont did not insist on paying himself. She was certain that he was as financially strapped as she.

The day was bright for February. It was also warm for February, and all the snow that had lingered for weeks had melted. Everything was quite dirty with soot from the coal fires that burned throughout the city, but it had been so long since Susan had gone on an excursion for pleasure that she was not disposed to find fault with anything that the sky above or the ground beneath had to offer her today.

A few minutes later a cab swung around the corner and came to a stop in front of the Fenwick. Mr. Beaumont climbed out to help Susan inside. This was no easy task, owing to an inconvenient combination of the height of the cab door, the weight of Susan's cast, and the length of her skirt. But at last it was accomplished when Mr. Beaumont simply put his strong hands about her waist and lifted her inside, then climbed in behind her. He picked up the speaker tube and instructed the driver to take them to number 27 West Twenty-seventh Street.

On the way Susan tried not to think of the extravagance of this cab, but turned in the seat so that she could peer out the back flap of the closed compartment, which Mr. Beaumont gallantly held open for her. It seemed as if she had never seen a crowd before, so entranced was she by the sheer numbers of people on the streets. She had never considered Seventh Avenue to be particularly splendid, but today she thought there was no street in the world to match it. At least she held that opinion until the cab turned on Forty-fourth Street, and then continued on down Fifth Avenue. For
nothing
was more splendid than that.

“You've been hiding away in that room too long,” Mr. Beaumont said, a trifle hesitantly, as if afraid that he might have made too personal a remark.

“Sometimes I think I'm going mad up there,” Susan admitted, still gazing out the back flap. “That's why you hear me pacing so. That's why I sometimes find myself doing a tarantella at eight in the morning—”

“—with a three-legged dog for a partner?” Mr. Beaumont said with a laugh, then blushed again.

“I'm entirely mad,” said Susan. “And I do thank you for allowing me to come along today. I'm not sure—in fact, I know I wouldn't have ventured so far away from home—”

She broke off, for that admission made her sound like such a timid creature! The fact was that her hibernation had nothing to do with fear or an unwillingness to exert herself. Now she felt as if for the past several weeks she had been a pathetic, trapped creature, imprisoned not by a broken leg but by depression and a lack of self-confidence. The thought made her ashamed, even though she knew that one couldn't be strong
all
the time.

She felt happy today, and seeing so many people all about who quite demonstrably
got by
in life suggested to Susan that she would be able to get by as well. But what was she to do with herself? And where was her life to go? The question wasn't one that was going to melt like January snow.

S
USAN'S EXPECTATIONS concerning the appearance of the Cosmic Film Company were not fulfilled. She'd assumed, rather laughably, she guessed, that moving pictures were made in a theater. But the building at 27 West Twenty-seventh Street was much more like a factory, plain and brick. It did not possess posters outside the entrance, only a small placard announcing that on the third, fourth, and fifth floors were located the premises of the Cosmic Film Company. No marble foyer with gilt and mirrors and crimson carpeting greeted them inside, but only a grimy granite entranceway and a growling elevator, the door to which Mr. Beaumont held open for her.