Jack and Susan in 1933 (8 page)

The frigid night air acted as a very large fist to Harmon Dodge's gut, and an indistinguishable mass of brandy, pineapple surprise, embalmed chicken, and champagne churned up over his tie, the gravel of the driveway, the passenger window of the roadster, and Jack's slippered feet. Susan crawled into the backseat from the other side.

The car seemed colder than the night itself, for there is nothing colder than stiff frozen leather at your back. The driveway was dark. The narrow little unpaved road that led from the Cliffs to the Quarry was darker still, overhung with the branches of century-old evergreens. The sign marking the turn to Harmon Dodge's ancestral home (ancestral indicating that it had belonged to Harmon's father for the last six weeks of the old man's life, though he never actually lived in it) had been knocked over by the Communist insurgent who had tried to visit Marcellus Rhinelander's chauffeur earlier that day. Jack drove half an hour trying to find the turnoff. He peered over the steering wheel and wiped away the fog of his breath which instantly turned to patterned ice on the windshield. Harmon snored in the seat next to him, and periodically had to be pushed upright so that he did not fall over into Jack's lap. Susan's teeth chattered in the back.

“Where's the damned turnoff?” demanded Jack.

“You know this place better than I,” Susan pointed out. “I was there only once, this afternoon.”

“There used to be a sign,” said Jack. “And this car reeks to high heaven.”

He waited for Susan to say “But it still smells better than your wife's perfume.”

But she didn't. Instead, she said, “I'd like to apologize for my behavior. It was wrong of me to insult Barbara in her own home.”

“It's her father's home, actually,” said Jack.

“Nevertheless, it was very wrong of me. But I was very tired, and also, I suppose, I felt as if I needed to stand up a little for Harmon's sake. I didn't want Mr. Rhinelander to think that his law partner had married someone who had been—merely—a speakeasy chanteuse. Because I will be a good wife to Harmon, you know.”

Jack glanced over at his superior, snoring through an open mouth.

“He could use one,” Jack admitted. “And—ah—don't worry about Barbara. She's been looking for an equal adversary for a while.”

“I have no intention of maintaining constant warfare against your wife.”

“Which means you don't intend on seeing us anymore?”

Susan laughed, a gay, pleasant little laugh. Jack tilted his head a little so that he could catch a glimpse of Susan in the rearview mirror. Susan smiled. Jack smiled back. The roadster ran into a ditch. Harmon pitched forward, cracking his head on the windshield.

“Sorry,” said Jack, opening the door. He started to get out.

Susan screamed, “No!”

Jack put one foot outside the door, but it didn't touch ground. It just pushed right on down through the air. The air was very cold, but sweat came out on Jack's high noble brow as if the sun had been beating straight down upon it for hours. He carefully pulled his foot back in and then peered out the open door into blackness.

“It's not a ditch,” Susan said, pushing well over against the opposite side of the roadster. “It's evidently some sort of cliff.” Quickly, she kicked off her shoes, tossed aside her hat, and crawled out the window.

Jack sat still in his seat, drawing the door carefully closed. The car was tilted forward and toward the left. Jack surmised that the left wheel had gone over the edge of some precipice.

“I can see the river!” Susan shouted from outside the car and somewhere behind. “It's about two hundred feet directly below us.” She pulled open the passenger door, and her husband fell out upon the ground.

Inside, Jack felt the car tilt distinctly forward and to the left. The windshield was fogged, but there was nothing outside to see except the two-hundred-foot drop to the Hudson.

Outside, Susan dragged her husband in a direction that was apparently away from the cliff.

“Ah,” said Jack diffidently, “can you tell anything more about our situation?”

Susan leaned in the open passenger door. “The car is about to plunge over the cliff, so far as I can make out.” She gave Jack a hand, and with a tug that showed more strength than he would have surmised resided in her small and elegant frame, Susan pulled him across the drive stick and nearly out the door.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You're not free yet,” said Susan, and as if to prove the truth of her assertion, the car began to roll forward. Jack had unwisely dragged the gears into neutral.

Susan jerked him to safety just as the roadster plunged over the cliff.

Jack's feet dangled in cold, insubstantial air. A few seconds later there was a crash, a noise like that of a small iceberg breaking free of a glacier, and then a rude gurgling.

“That roadster was worth twelve hundred dollars,” said Susan, dragging Jack from the lip of the cliff and certain death.

“It didn't cost Harmon a penny,” Jack pointed out. His trousers had evidently been torn badly, for he could feel cold stones rasping into his flesh. “I have two broken ribs,” he said with sudden remembrance. With that remembrance, pain flooded back into that badly bruised area between his neck and his abdomen. He began to wish that he had been inside the roadster when it broke through the frozen waters of this fashionable length of the Hudson River. The novel sensation of drowning in freezing water might have taken his mind off the entirely too familiar discomfort he felt now in his unmended rib cage.

“If you have two broken ribs, then you ought not be driving,” said Susan. Harmon was still fast asleep, still snoring on the cold ground. “In particular, you ought not be driving off cliffs,” she added with undisguised annoyance in her voice.

SUSAN

I
T WAS COLD.
She was sweating, and despite the salt in her perspiration, it froze like tears in a cheap romantic print.

It was dark. Clouds covered the stars and the moon. She could see a single light burning in a house, but that house was maybe a couple of miles away on the other side of the Hudson River.

The road was frozen and hard beneath her feet, and she had stupidly not kicked her shoes out the window of the roadster, but onto the floor of the vehicle. Her shoes were wet and soggy now on the bed of the Hudson River, and did her no good at all.

Harmon was still convinced that he was on Fifty-second Street and kept calling for a taxi. He would have fallen on his face if Susan hadn't kept a firm arm around his shoulder.

Her other arm was around the shoulder of Jack, who had only one slipper, and complained incessantly of the pain in his chest. “It's like breathing knives. Cold steel. I feel like a sword swallower. I used to have a nightmare that I swallowed a razor blade. It felt just like this. Have you ever broken your ribs? Don't.”

Susan had no idea that she was headed in the right direction on the narrow, lightless road. But she had chosen downhill, because going uphill, supporting two large men, would have been impossible.

“Can't you shut up for a minute?” she asked Jack. “This is my honeymoon.”

“Taxi!” Harmon shouted.

“Do you have any idea where we're going?” the husband of that dreadful woman Barbara wanted to know.

“I don't know
why
I allowed myself to get into a car with you,” said Susan. “Considering what our last meeting was. You nearly killed me
again
. And I daresay that if you had figured out a way of sending me over the cliff without involving yourself, you would have availed yourself of it.”

“People with broken ribs don't plot murder,” he returned. “Only suicide.”

“Taxi!” screamed Harmon, and lurched forward. He fell flat on his face. Susan let go of Jack and hurried to help her husband up. Harmon, with the prescience of the habitual drunkard, had dropped directly down on the overturned sign that pointed the way to the Quarry.

Harmon stood in front of the portico of the Quarry and stared up at the neo-Georgian mansion, as if wondering how he had gotten there without benefit of taxi. Susan banged on the door, rousing Audrey, who had come up from New York while Susan and Harmon were in Niagara Falls. The black woman seemed not a bit surprised to find Susan shivering shoeless, Harmon rolling drunk, and Mr. Beaumont complaining of the cold steel cutlery that he had ingested. With Audrey's help, Susan got Jack into one of the bedrooms upstairs. He didn't want to sleep; he wanted to take a hot bath, to melt those icy knives in his breast, and to wash out the muddy pebbles that had been ground into his calves and feet.

“Would you mind calling Barbara and telling her I've had a little accident?” he asked Susan. She replied that it would be a pleasure.

Susan remembered seeing a telephone in Harmon's bedroom—it was hardly hers yet, as she hadn't even slept there once. She wandered along opening doors but couldn't seem to find it again. Presently, however, Harmon appeared, with Audrey pushing him from behind, and fell through one of the doors she hadn't tried yet. While Audrey was pulling off Harmon's clothes, Susan telephoned the Cliffs. Grace Grace answered, and Susan was giving her a message to relay to Barbara and Marcellus Rhinelander, when Barbara herself suddenly jumped into the conversation.

What happened?

“Very little,” said Susan, ignoring the rancor in Barbara's voice. “Your husband drove Harm's new car off a cliff.”

You weren't in it?

“No,” returned Susan. “In fact, it was I who saved the lives of both Harmon and your husband.”

Much obliged, I'm sure.

“You're quite welcome. But Mr. Beaumont asked me to let you know he'd be staying the night here, and would much appreciate being picked up here in the morning. He seems to be in considerable pain.”

I hope you don't look at this as an opportunity to work your wiles on my husband. You may have sunk your poisoned talons into Harmon's poor unresisting flesh, but I'd advise you to leave Jack quite alone. He has no intention of being unfaithful to me.

Susan stared at the receiver, as if not quite sure what she was hearing. She looked at Audrey, who was pulling off Harmon's trousers. “Audrey,” Susan said, speaking distinctly and not too distantly from the telephone, “don't bother putting those drugs into Mr. Beaumont's drink. I won't be seducing him tonight.” Then she spoke directly to Barbara again.

“Do join us for breakfast tomorrow, Barbara,” Susan said sweetly. “I miss you already.”

Then she rang off, and wondered if she should bother keeping Audrey from removing her husband's undershorts. She didn't, reflecting that Audrey wouldn't be doing it now if she hadn't done it many times before.

Susan helped Audrey pull a pair of pajamas onto Harmon, who with the dragging and the lifting and the twisting attendant on this procedure, woke up to the extent that he could call out for a taxi to bring him more brandy.

“There's a taxi strike on, Harm,” Susan replied. “Go to sleep. Prohibition ends tomorrow.”

With that happy thought, Harmon turned over and snored loudly into a goose-down pillow with a large D embroidered on the lace hem.

“Miz Dodge?” said Audrey. “Something I can get you?”

A new life
, thought Susan. “Nothing, Audrey. Thank you,” she said.

Audrey wandered back to bed.

Susan didn't even know where Audrey's bedroom was in this mansion. It had twenty-three rooms, a detached guesthouse, half a dozen outbuildings, two gazebos, a medium-size swimming pool with a diving tower, an English garden with roses, a French garden with yews, and an American forest garden with rhododendrons and lilacs. She'd been there for only a few hours that afternoon and had wandered about the place, thinking it cold, thinking it depressingly modern, thinking it—most oddly of all—
hers
.

There had been no covers on the furniture, which suggested that Harmon had visited the place frequently. Once a month, perhaps. Moving in a crowd where your social position was determined by the size of your hangover, Harmon was the first name in the register. So perhaps he had used the place as a cushioned room in which to recover from his heavy debauches. More likely, Susan thought, he had brought young women up here—young women who hadn't required the trip to Niagara Falls before they'd crossed the threshold. That thought made her cringe with shame—not with the thought of how Harmon and the young ladies had passed their time at the Quarry. But at the thought that she, Susan, who
had
required the trip to Niagara Falls, was not more virtuous, but less virtuous than all those others. More conniving, more mercenary, more—