Jack and Susan in 1953 Read online

  Very late Monday afternoon, Jack’s boss came in and instructed Jack that he was to go to Boston for a few days on business. An ex-governor of Massachusetts had just died, and the governor’s family was kicking up a row about the investments that had been made in his name by Jack’s predecessor in the firm—a man who had been fired for making bad investments. Jack couldn’t refuse, though he did point out that he had just fallen out a window and couldn’t be expected to be at his best.

  “Miss Mather has invited me to her home on Saturday night,” said Jack’s boss. “She said we were to expect an important announcement. I’m very happy for you and Miss Mather. It is a coup. But it was an expected coup, my boy.”

  Suddenly, getting out of town for a few days didn’t seem such a bad idea.

  Why was it that when something particularly awful was happening in one’s life, one’s body was never in top condition? How could Jack think about being in love with S.B. and getting married to E.M. when he had trouble raising his arm to shoulder height?

  Woolf’s farewell to Jack at the expensive kennel on Second Avenue was a reproachful snarl. The snarl was contemptuously repeated when Jack promised that he would be back for Woolf on Friday at the latest.

  Jack took the train to Boston on Monday night. He met with the ex-governor’s children early on Tuesday morning, and with difficulty persuaded them that his firm was not a band of incorporated thieves, and that the investments—though peculiar, and not of the usual sort—were basically sound. Some of their inherited holdings even gave promise of surprisingly energetic rises if the Shah of Iran could remain on the throne for a few years. With many long-distance calls to his home office, and daily meetings with the governor’s family—meetings that were complicated by the fact that since leaving office, the governor had been married three times, and that his third wife was younger than the children of his first marriage—Jack passed the time in Boston.

  Jack Beaumont was a hard worker, and always dedicated himself to the task at hand. Now he was straightening out the tangled strands of the lives of a dozen people he had never met—and didn’t particularly like now that he had—while his own life threatened to crash down around his head on Saturday night.

  It was one thing that he should marry imprudently—if marrying a woman whose net worth was written with nine figures on the left side of the decimal could ever be called imprudent—and quite another for Susan Bright to do something of the same sort.

  Jack ate alone in the evening, and he went to movies at the University Theater. He saw Lili twice, because when he squinted his eyes, Leslie Caron reminded him of Susan. He closed his eyes altogether when Zsa Zsa Gabor came on as the aerialist, because she reminded him much too much of Libby Mather.

  Jack finished up his work in Boston late on Thursday night. He took the early morning train back to New York on Friday arriving in time to have a bad lunch around the corner from his apartment. He went into work for a few hours, made his report on the pacification of the heirs, then fetched Woolf from the kennel.

  As punishment for abandonment, Woolf pretended not to remember who Jack was. Jack took Woolf home, mixed a Rob Roy for himself, and got on the telephone.

  Neither Libby nor Susan was at home—or at least neither of them answered.

  Feeling very sorry for himself—and very much alone—Jack made the dinner he always made (and only made) when he was depressed: an entire plateful of hot dogs covered with mayonnaise.

  Woolf shared Jack’s enthusiasm for the menu.

  After dinner, Jack sat on his couch and watched television. He kept the telephone in his lap, and at every commercial break he called Susan and Libby. No one ever answered.

  Jack fell asleep about midnight, with a reconciled dog already dozing with his weary head on Jack’s lap.

  Susan wasn’t home on Saturday either.

  Jack wondered if she might not simply have packed up and moved away. To Cuba, maybe.

  Libby was at home, but wouldn’t talk to him; she was too busy, she said. But Libby called him five times to tell him that she loved him even though she hadn’t time to speak five words to him. She had missed him dreadfully, she said—but that was only after Jack informed her that he’d spent the week in Boston.

  She asked him to come over to her apartment as soon after five as possible.

  “Bring your clothes,” she instructed him, “you can change here.”

  “What about my dog?” he asked. “I left him for four days. If I go away all evening, he’ll think I’ve abandoned him again. He’s already eaten my telephone directories.”

  “You have a dog?”

  “Yes,” said Jack.

  “Bring him. You might as well, the rest of the world is coming.”

  Jack arrived at Libby’s apartment at a quarter after five. When the elevator doors opened, Jack thought he was in the wrong place. He stepped back into the elevator. The elevator man shook his head. “This is it,” he said with a shrug.

  Gone was the Middle East. Banished were the spangled pillows. Fled were the brass filigree lamps, and the hanging materials, and all the atmosphere of a caravansary.

  The apartment was flooded with light. Again, it was possible to see just how enormous it was. Windows seemed to be everywhere, and French doors led out onto terraces that surrounded the place. It seemed as if a tawdrily decorated shoebox had exploded into Buckingham Palace.

  Caterers and decorators and temporary servants thronged the place. The decorators were still putting finishing touches on the vaguely eighteenth-century English style that was fairly comfortable looking. The caterers were setting up tables for the evening. The servants were gazing at everything with a conniving interest that suggested that they were deciding now what could be easily carted away at the end of the evening. Jack could count more than two dozen persons who had been hired—at outrageous expense he was sure—to construct the festivities around the announcement of an engagement he was about to quash.

  Libby was nowhere to be seen and Woolf tugged valiantly at his leash and barked ferociously at the decorators—two grimly smiling young men who wore matching diamond rings on the littlest fingers of their right hands.

  Jack asked one of the decorators where Libby was.

  “Miss Mather is in her boudoir, I believe,” said the decorator, moving away from Woolf’s slathering advances.

  “She is ensconced with the representative from Tiffany’s,” remarked his companion in the same lilting accent.

  Jack headed in the direction, he hoped, of Libby’s bedroom. A servant he recognized as a regular member of the household staff pointed a confirming finger down the hallway that led to Libby’s bedroom.

  Libby’s bedroom, with its own private terrace, would have enjoyed a splendid view of the East River, had it not been for the buildings in between. Big, soft, and cluttered, it was decorated in blue and yellow. Libby sat at a large vanity that was covered with bottles and jars and the contents of cast-aside handbags. She was staring at herself in the mirror.

  Her hair was rolled in small steel curlers, and she was wrapped tightly in a blue kimono. A black-haired gentleman wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a red tie stood behind her, and was wedging a moderately sized diamond tiara down among the curlers.

  “In honor of the coronation next month,” said Libby to Jack in the mirror without preamble. Then she saw Woolf, panting happily. “Is that what you meant when you said a dog?”

  “He’s friendly,” said Jack. “His name is Woolf.”

  “Go home, Woolf,” said Libby amiably. “Are you late, or are you early?”

  “I’m on time,” said Jack. “But on time for what?”

  “To help me plan,” said Libby.

  “We’d get a much better idea of the effect of the tiara,” said the man with the red tie, “if we could take a few of the curlers out.”

  “The curlers come out in half an hour,” she told the Tiffany man. “Find some champagne. Go to the kitchen, will you please, and tell somebod
y we need a bottle of champagne.”

  The man stared at Libby in the mirror as if she’d just asked him to scrub the bathroom floor. Representatives of Tiffany’s did not make champagne runs to the kitchen. Not even for clients as rich and as spendthrift as Elizabeth St. John Mather.

  “Miss Mather…” he said with forced politeness.

  “Yes?”

  His hair was dyed, Jack decided. Jack reflected that if he married Libby, a lot of his life would be occupied by men with dyed hair who wore red ties. It was a depressing thought.

  “Miss Mather, I believe the tiara will look splendid.”

  “I think so too,” said Libby briskly. “Put it on my bill.”

  The man smiled faintly, nodded to Jack, picked up his case, and departed.

  “Do you think his hair was dyed?” Libby asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Jack. “Libby, I need to talk to you about tonight.”

  “Fine,” said Libby. “We’ll talk about tonight tomorrow. I can’t think of anything right now except this party. Is it a madhouse out there?” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the rest of the apartment.

  “Yes,” said Jack.

  “It’s been like that all week. Since everything else was going to be confused this week, I thought I might as well have the apartment redecorated while I was at it, and I was looking at Town & Country and I saw an article about Princess Elizabeth’s coronation, and I thought, ‘I won’t do it Marie Antoinette, I’ll do it Queen Elizabeth,’ so I called up the two Henrys, and I said—” She had been regarding Jack in the mirror all the while she spoke, but suddenly she leaped up and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. “You were gone! You were gone! And I missed you so much!”

  One of the steel curlers gouged his neck.

  “Libby, you didn’t even know I was gone till I told you on the phone this morning.”

  “I didn’t see you,” she said, logically enough, “and I missed you. What does it matter whether you were in Boston or right here in New York? If I didn’t get to see you every minute of the day, I missed you.”

  Jack pried himself loose from Libby.

  He had never figured out why women said things like that, when they obviously didn’t mean them. Libby did a thousand things during the day that would have been spoiled for her if Jack had been around. Libby had one set of female friends with whom she lunched, another set with whom she shopped, another set with whom she gossiped over cocktails, another set who called her early the next morning before she was even out of bed and told vicious stories about all the others. Libby had very little use for a man, except perhaps very late at night, when all her female friends had gone home to their husbands.

  Perhaps she did love Jack—probably she did care for him a bit—but Jack also knew that Libby would chafe if she had to see him for more than a few hours every day. So why did she say those things?

  None of that mattered, Jack suddenly realized. Not when he didn’t intend to marry her. Not when he intended to marry Susan Bright, if Susan would give up that Cuban who had no connections that would stand up to scrutiny. If Susan would—

  “I talked to Susan this afternoon,” said Libby, as if she divined his thoughts. She slumped languidly down on the vanity seat again, and once more she talked not to Jack but to his reflection in her mirror. “She’ll be here tonight,” said Libby, pushing Woolf away.

  “Libby—”

  “With that man,” Libby went on. The way she looked Jack in the eye made Jack think that Libby knew something, and that she was trying to tell him that she knew something, and that Jack had better listen closely while she told him.

  “Rodolfo?” asked Jack.

  “Yes,” said Libby quietly, her voice now slow and soft. “That interesting, handsome Cuban. He took her to dinner at the Cuban consul’s home last Saturday night, and she enjoyed herself immensely. This week he took her to the theater twice. They saw The Seven Year Itch and hated it. They saw Picnic and loved it. Last night he took her to dinner to La Caravelle—and he proposed to her over coffee.”

  Libby smiled, dropped her eyes, and overturned a small box of face powder on Woolf’s head. The dog howled away into a corner, shaking and sneezing.

  “And,” demanded Jack. “And?”

  “What else does a girl do when the man she loves proposes marriage?” shrugged Libby. “She did what I did. She accepted.”

  Libby raised her eyes again, and looked into Jack’s. “What was it you wanted to say to me about tonight?”

  Jack blinked.

  Woolf had jumped up onto the middle of Libby’s enormous blue and yellow canopied bed, and was sneezing continuously.

  Jack said, “Nothing, Libby. It wasn’t important. It’ll wait till tomorrow.”

  “And now please find me some champagne,” Libby said, smiling as Judith must have smiled, emerging from the tent with the head of Holofernes. “It’s almost time for my curlers to come out.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE NEWS OF HER inheritance—though it might be many years distant—came as a distinct shock to Susan.

  Her first thought—even before the Cuban consul’s wife had finished speaking to her at the window overlooking Sixty-sixth Street—was, She’s a silly old woman, and she’s making up gossip she never even heard.

  But the consul’s wife was not a silly old woman. She was intelligent and good-hearted. She was fat, but mere bulk wouldn’t impugn her reliability.

  Susan’s second thought was, How much does he have? Her uncle owned a great deal of land in Cuba, and grew a great deal of sugarcane and tobacco; he lived in a big house and had lots of servants. All that may have been true, but it didn’t necessarily mean a great deal of wealth by New York standards. On the other hand, her uncle might be very wealthy indeed. Or his estate might be so encumbered with debt that anything he might leave Susan would be eaten up by taxes and legal fees.

  Her third thought was, I don’t want him to die.

  Susan could be described as an orphan. Susan was an only child, and both her parents had died seven years before, and neither of them had been members of large families. Therefore she had few relatives, and she didn’t like to think of their dying. She’d gotten along on her own for years now, but the knowledge that she had an uncle on her father’s side in Cuba, and another uncle on her mother’s side in San Francisco, had been a sort of comfort; even though she wrote them only on their birthdays and major holidays, and even though she’d seen neither of them in more than ten years.

  Knowing herself to be James Bright’s only surviving relative, she wasn’t totally surprised to think that he would leave his fortune to her.

  The thought of that possible inheritance succeeded, for the rest of the evening, in driving out of her mind the thought that Jack Beaumont was engaged—or almost engaged—to be married to Libby Mather.

  Libby moved in so many circles of friends and acquaintances that it was impossible to tell exactly who anyone was at one of her parties. Susan could assign only a few of the guests to one or another of the contingents she knew to be present. There were executives of Libby’s margarine company. There were the executives and subalterns of the firms that provided her lawyers, accountants, and whatever other professionals someone as rich as Elizabeth St. John Mather required. There were friends from school and their husbands; the remnants of New York café society that Libby had been a part of two years ago (and would be still if she hadn’t managed to alienate most of them, one by one). There were a few famous musicians; a few actors and actresses; a former Miss America who was now making a living pointing at the insides of household appliances on television; a former governor who was going to run again if his heart, his wife, and his accountant allowed him; and a gorgeous young woman whose photograph had appeared on the front page of the New York Post the morning after her unexpected acquittal. About seventy-five persons fell into one or another of these categories, but about twenty-five more didn’t seem to belong to any particular group at all. Susan—and possibly
Libby herself—had no idea why they were there.

  A small jazz combo played on a tiny triangular stage that had been installed in a corner of the living room. The dining room table was loaded with food, and more food was set out in the library. Two bars had been set up inside the apartment, and, taking advantage of the exceptional warmth of the evening, a third had been set up out on the living room terrace.

  Libby wore a gown from the apex of fashion—in Paris, at any rate. A bodice of red-and-white spangled lace flared out into a skirt built up of layers of red-and-white tulle. When Libby was still, the dress looked marvelous in the way that a new and outré fashion always does. But the skirt was so wide and so stiff that Libby had to move through doors sideways, and that made dramatic entrances impossible.

  Libby touched her long white gloves to the back of Susan’s hand. “Pretty dress,” she said. “So pretty.”

  Libby somehow gave the impression when she said “pretty” that what she really meant was that it looked to her as if Susan had constructed her dress herself out of old dimity flour sacks.

  Susan’s dress, in considerable contrast to Libby’s, was simple. A swath of ivory silk crossed her breast diagonally. The long wrap-around skirt was of the same material, fringed in silver. It gave Susan a silhouette as narrow and classical as Libby’s was wide and modish. It had set her back three hundred hard-earned dollars. She wore white gloves so short they seemed barely to reach her wrist, and a tiny white sequined rocker hat that was like a smudge of white paint on her intensely black hair.

  “Hello,” said Libby to Rodolfo. “I’m so glad you could come.”

  Rodolfo bowed, lightly touching the fingers of Libby’s gloved hand to his lips.

  “Susan,” said Libby immediately, “I really must talk to you. Privately, do you mind?” she said to Rodolfo. “And then I’d like to have a word or two with you.”

  Susan glanced back at Rodolfo as Libby led her away. What could Libby possibly have to say to him? She hadn’t even called him by name. And if she was making a point of her indifference to him, why should she…