Jack and Susan in 1953 (20 page)

Despite that and three other experiences with him, Susan now decided that she wanted to wait. Just in case.

Just in case what?
she asked herself, but it was a question she couldn't answer except to repeat,
just in case
. If there ever came a time, Susan reflected ruefully, when a woman didn't have to worry about pregnancy every time she was in a room alone with a man, if the pleasure of making love were not always attended by the possibility of trouble and humiliation in only nine months' time,
then
you were going to see a few changes. It might even be that women would pursue men with the ardor with which they were now pursued. But until that time, women were going to pull back, shake off the embrace, readjust their straps—and ride home alone in a taxi.

“Tell me about your uncle,” said Jack, barely able to keep his eyes open. “Who's trying to kill him?”

“Tomorrow,” said Susan. “I'll tell you everything tomorrow.”

Susan stood with her hand on the door as Jack, unmindful of anything but the desire to go to sleep, was already pulling off his shirt. Woolf looked from one to the other, as if wondering whether he was to go with Susan or stay with Jack.

“Take care of Jack,” Susan said to the dog softly, and then was gone.

Susan could hardly sleep that night for excitement and nervous pleasure. When she'd thought through her happiness a few dozen times, she began to turn over in her mind the question of whether she should have stayed the night in Jack's apartment. After an hour or so of serious meditation on the topic, she concluded that she would be spending the rest of her life with this man, and that one night more or less wouldn't make any difference. There was also the notion that he would respect her more for having gone home alone in a taxi. Of course, a pleasure denied was a pleasure that could never be recouped, so despite all the arguments in favor of not sleeping with Jack before the wedding, she was now sorry that she hadn't. Despite her certainty that Jack had been fast asleep by the time she reached the lobby of his building, it was still possible that before morning he might meet someone else and fall madly in love with her. She herself might contract a rare disease and die in bed before morning. Some large, unforeseeable obstacle might place itself in their path just as they were walking down the aisle—certainly the last weeks had been a series of misadventures, and perhaps their bad luck wasn't over yet. She thought about all that for another hour. Then, as dawn filled the small air shaft outside her windows, Susan worried for a while about her uncle, who felt himself to be in mortal danger.

She'd just fallen asleep when the telephone rang. It was Jack. “I couldn't sleep,” he said. “Well, I guess I did for a while, but I dreamed of you. Are you still going to marry me?”

“Um-hmmm,” she murmured, trying to pry open her eyes.

“When?” he asked.

She peered at the clock. It was a few minutes before seven.

“Ten o'clock?” she suggested.

Ten o'clock wasn't possible, of course; there were certain formalities. So they went together to get blood tests at a little public health office over on Ninth Avenue, where for three-quarters of an hour they obliviously shared a waiting room lined with prostitutes and men with social diseases.

Jack got the license that afternoon. After the waiting period, they would be able to get married on Wednesday.

“But the boat sails tomorrow,” Susan protested. They were walking arm-in-arm through Washington Square Park, he still a bit hung over and she pale from not enough sleep, but happiness still showed through.

“What boat?”

“The
Andrea Doria
,” she replied. “We have first-class tickets.”

Jack stopped in his tracks and stared at her. “Did you—”

“Rodolfo bought them—part of his plan to pressure me into marrying him. I see no reason not to use them.”

“I see half a dozen reasons at least. One, they're not ours. Two, Rodolfo can claim them stolen. Three, he might have canceled them. Four, he and Libby might show up on the boat. Five, he—”

She interrupted him hastily. “Rodolfo proposed to me, I said yes, and then a week later he runs off and marries someone else. These tickets are merely recompense for alienation of affection—inadequate recompense, at that. Besides, now that you have no job, how did you intend to pay for this little Caribbean jaunt you're taking me on? Libby lost you that job, so it's only fair that her new husband pay for the honeymoon you can no longer afford. Isn't that logical?”

“No, it's not logical. Because we don't know for sure it was Libby that Rodolfo married.”

“Did you read the
Times
this morning?”

Jack shook his head.

“‘Señor and Mrs. Rodolfo García-Cifuentes, the former Elizabeth St. John Mather, departed this morning for an extended honeymoon vacation in Cuba and the other Caribbean islands.'”

“They flew?”

“Evidently,” said Susan. “And I called the Italian Line. The tickets are still good. And if the license is in order, the captain will marry us. Now, what were objections five and six?”

“I can't remember five,” said Jack. “Six was: What do we do with Woolf? Last time I left him, he forgot who I was after three days.”

“There's no quarantine on dogs to Cuba. I checked.”

“Then tomorrow it is,” said Jack. “On the
Andrea Doria
.”

T
HE ITALIAN LINE ship
Andrea Doria
had been commissioned six months before and had made its maiden voyage from Leghorn to Southampton and Bremen. Its second voyage had been to New York, and then a return to Leghorn via Le Havre, Lisbon, and Nice. Its third voyage was to New York again, and it was on the first leg of the return journey, via the Caribbean, that Rodolfo García-Cifuentes had bought tickets for two single A-deck cabins.

The Italian Line had a policy in regard to unmarried couples traveling together. They couldn't be allowed accommodation in a single cabin, but they could obtain rooms next to one another with a connecting door that was tightly secured by the steward. However, with Latin enlightenment the gentleman of the twosome was always given a key, “in case of emergencies.”

On boarding, Susan explained to the purser that the name on the ticket, “Rodolfo G. Cifuentes” was simply an egregious misspelling of “John Beaumont.” The purser was skeptical at first, but a little added thickness to his wallet convinced him that such a mistake made by misunderstandings between secretaries in the Italian Line office and Mr. Beaumont's was the kind of thing that happened all the time.

Jack tried to use the key to open the door between their cabins, but couldn't get it to turn in the lock.

He went out into the corridor, knocked on Susan's door, and asked if she minded coming over and trying the key. She had a knack with such things, he remembered.

“Who are the candy and flowers and champagne for?” she asked, as she turned the key in the lock and pulled open the door.

“You,” he said, following her into her own cabin, where she had been in the midst of unpacking the clothes she thought she'd wear on the leisurely two-day voyage.

“Well, then,” she said, briskly snapping shut a suitcase, “open the champagne!”

They gazed out the porthole of her cabin and toasted the Statue of Liberty as the
Andrea Doria
sailed past her.

Rodolfo had been generous in obtaining first-class cabins, but even so Jack was too tall for them. He sat at one end of Susan's tiny sofa with his head pressed against the lampshade on the small end table and his feet stretched almost to the doorway to his room. Susan sat on the other end of the couch, her legs drawn up beneath her and her head resting on Jack's shoulder. Jack's legs went to sleep.

“I wanted to stay at your apartment last night,” said Susan quietly.

“I wanted you to stay,” said Jack.

They were quiet for a few moments, and Jack felt the arm inside his cast go to sleep. The confined cabin smelled of flowers and the sea.

“We're getting married tomorrow,” said Susan quietly, “and we should probably wait.” She reached over past him, putting her elbow against his breastbone as she did so, and took a sip from her champagne glass. She sank back into place, relieving the pressure on his chest. “But I don't want to wait.”

“I don't either,” said Jack.

“Nothing can happen between tonight and tomorrow, can it?” said Susan. “To keep us from getting married, I mean? So it doesn't matter if we wait till tomorrow or not, does it?”

Jack shook his head. “Nothing can happen that will prevent me from marrying you tomorrow.”

She reached across him once more, put down her glass, and turned out the light.

“Then let's not wait.”

Jack and Susan weren't the most alert or most cheerful bride and groom that ever got married on shipboard. They'd had no sleep the night before, the ship was sailing through rougher waters than were ever suggested by the smiling advertisements for the Italian Line, and Jack wasn't even sure he'd recovered from Sunday's binge.

If they didn't exactly feel married when they returned to the cabin late Wednesday morning, they certainly did when a general announcement was made at luncheon. Half a dozen bottles of champagne were delivered to their table in congratulations, half a dozen jovial husbands stopped to offer facetious condolences to Jack, half a dozen wives smiled with genuine good feeling on Susan, and the purser himself came to unlock the connecting door that had, in fact, stood wide open all the night before.

The sea calmed down as they steamed south, and for the rest of the afternoon, Jack and Susan drank champagne, ate ravenously, and confined themselves to their now officially enlarged cabin. There, in astounding detail, they recounted every thought, feeling, misapprehension, fear, and yearning they'd experienced since running into each other at Charles' French Restaurant in Greenwich Village. They shuddered at how nearly they'd come to marrying others, and they wondered again and again at the strange fate that had brought them together—and nearly kept them apart. They were, in short, deliriously happy with each other, with life, and with every single thing that had led up to these two wonderful days they were spending in the tiny first-class cabins of the
Andrea Doria.

That evening Jack and Susan Beaumont were seated at the captain's table in honor of their wedding aboard ship. A lady seated across from them, in diamonds and a white fox fur, said to Jack, “Didn't I read about you in Walter Winchell? Aren't you supposed to be dead?”

The way that her husband reacted, with a harrumphing cough, and a vague, “My dear, this newly wedded couple have no interest in Mr. Winchell, I'm sure…” suggested to the newly married couple that their story was known in more detail than they had suspected.

“Let's get out of here,” said Jack in a low voice, swallowing his coffee in one long gulp.