Jack and Susan in 1953 Read online

  Susan nodded vigorously. “Oh yes, I have every intention—”

  “—Well, since we are going to be married, maybe you should tell me why you’re so interested in our going to Cuba.”

  Susan put her hand over her mouth, and glanced about the restaurant as if making sure she could speak freely. There weren’t more than half a dozen other couples in the place, plus the owner’s loud, fat family at an enormous round table in the corner, and the slender gypsy violinist sitting alone with a plate of spaghetti in another corner. No one was paying attention to them. “Are you all here?” Susan asked. “I mean, you’re sober enough to hear what I have to say, aren’t you?”

  “Yes of course I am,” he said, trying not to be offended.

  “Please don’t be hurt,” she said, “but this is important. You were wrong about Rodolfo—”

  Jack was right. All of this Cuba business did have something to do with Rodolfo García-Cifuentes. While it may have been true that Susan wasn’t going to marry the Cuban, Rodolfo was still in the picture. That was annoying.

  “Wrong how?”

  “He does exist, no matter what you may think, and he’s exactly who he says he is. My uncle’s letter of introduction was genuine, although I think my uncle made a mistake in writing it. In general, you were right about Rodolfo.”

  “Right how?”

  “That he was up to no good. He asked me to marry him—”

  “So I heard,” said Jack dryly, holding up his broken arm. “If you’ll remember, I was there.”

  “Oh yes, the window business.” She smiled as if at the memory of a charming drawing room escapade. Then her face darkened. “He asked me to marry him because he thought I was an heiress.”

  Jack blinked. Though Susan had never confided to him the details of her trust fund, he had a pretty good idea of what her bank statements and savings books looked like. Solvent, but not impressive. Beautiful, but no heiress.

  “Why would he think that?” said Jack. “You’ve never really made any secret about…” He trailed off diplomatically.

  “About the fact that I have to work for a living? No, I’ve certainly never denied that, but the fact is, I am an heiress. Or I will be, when my uncle dies.”

  Jack looked at her sharply. One eye was a fiancé’s, the other eye that of a financial analyst. “I didn’t know this,” he said.

  “No, neither did I. I don’t think I was supposed to, but someone let it slip. I wrote my uncle recently, and he confirmed it. He also said…”

  “Said what?” Jack prompted when Susan hesitated.

  “—He also said that someone was trying to kill him.”

  Jack didn’t drink any more wine that evening. Susan saw him back to his apartment, and there was an awkward moment when it was apparent that out of politeness and happiness, despite his fatigue, he wanted to ask her to stay the night. It was equally obvious that she, out of circumspection and dignity, should refuse the invitation.

  All that was a bit odd, of course, since it was to Jack that Susan had lost her virginity six years before. What Susan remembered most about that first experience was that it hurt—not because of what Jack did to her, or any roughness on his part, but because they did it in the bottom of a small boat tethered to the dock of the boat house used by the Harvard rowing team one rainy spring night.

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE 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.

  “No,” replied Susan out of the corner of her mouth, which was smiling at some further inanity of the woman in white fox and diamonds. “As a single woman, I did not run away. I don’t intend to start now, just because I’m married.”

  “I was only thinking of you,” said Jack under his breath.

  “I’m not the one who threw myself out of a twenty-third story window,” Susan pointed out.

  “And I’m not the one who accepted first-class boat tickets from my fiancé and then went off with another man entirely,” returned Jack.

  Suddenly the music started up, and to show everyone that they didn’t care what was known or suspected about them, Jack and Susan danced through the night.

  Rodolfo had taught Susan the cha-cha, and now she taught it to Jack.

  The Andrea Doria was to dock in Havana about one o’clock on Thursday afternoon. The morning dawned fair, and Jack and Susan breakfasted, endured what they hoped would be the last of a series of wearisome honeymoon jokes, visited Woolf in the hold, and returned to their cabins to pack. Leaving their bags to be taken ashore by the steward, they went up on deck and watched for Cuba to come into view.

  Already many tiny fishing boats were visible. The fishermen waved to Jack and Susan, and Jack and Susan waved dutifully back.

  A number of passengers crowded on deck, scanning the fishing boats in hope of seeing the great bearded man in the wide hat, scribbling on a pad. The great bearded man never waved back to the tourists who screamed at him, but as the captain pointed out, it was an honor just to see so great a writer at work.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Jack, noticing that Susan looked pensive.

  “My uncle.”

  “I wish you’d saved that telegram.”

  “I told you what was in it,” said Susan. “Someone’s been trying t
o kill him. He thought the poison and the gunshot were just accidents—that sort of thing is evidently fairly common around here. Food going bad. Clumsy servants dropping firearms. But the exploding Jeep evidently convinced him that someone was trying to kill him.”

  “Why did you burn the telegram?”

  “I didn’t want it around. I didn’t want there to be any possibility of Rodolfo coming across it.”

  “Was Rodolfo in the habit of prowling about your apartment, reading your telegraphic correspondence?” asked Jack dryly.

  “No,” said Susan, “but better safe than sorry. I suppose I was overly cautious.”

  “But the telegram didn’t implicate Rodolfo, did it?” said Jack.

  Susan shook her head, and pointed toward the south. The island had just come into view, a nubby line of brown floating on the blue water. “No, but he did speak of Rodolfo’s family—”

  “But anything specific?”

  “No. My uncle is a great one for hints and for dramatizing things. I don’t even know if any of this is true—it’s not clear yet that he actually is in danger. And there’s certainly no motive that he can make out. I have the only motive, he says, because I’m the one who’s going to inherit everything.”

  “In the meantime,” said Jack, “do you think he can find me a job?”

  In another hour the ship had docked. Susan and Jack stayed out of the way of the crush on the deck, not only because they didn’t want to be mangled in the crowd, but also to avoid the final barrage of honeymoon jokes.

  The afternoon was hot and bright. Jack and Susan wore light clothing and wide-brimmed hats and sunglasses, and kept in the shade as much as possible. Susan scanned the crowd on the dock below looking for her uncle, whom she’d telegraphed of her arrival.

  “I don’t see him,” she said.

  The gangplank was lowered, secured, and the passengers began to debark. The Andrea Doria was to be in Havana for two days, but all the passengers seemed to be taking the opportunity of going ashore immediately. Susan still searched for her uncle in the quayside crowd. “He’s fat and he always wears white. He has a white moustache, blue eyes, and carries a cane and usually he has about three little boys along with him to run errands—at least that’s what I remember from ten years ago. And people like my uncle don’t tend to change much—they just get more so.”