Jack and Susan in 1933 (2 page)

“What was her name?” asked Jack, leaning forward. “I couldn't hear the announcer.”

“Susan Bright,” said Harmon with mystical reverence.

“Wonder what it really is,” said Barbara. “Natasha Rambova's real name was Winifred Shaunessy.”

“Susan Bright's her real name,” said Harmon. “I asked.”

Jack and Barbara exchanged glances which clearly said,
So. They've already met.
And attached the further opinion,
This one could be trouble
.

As the short, myopic, boiled-shirt accompanist began his piano introduction, the Villa Vanity gradually quieted. It wasn't a respectful silence, Jack thought, but a weary one. No one wanted to think about the New Year. The only predictions that anyone was making was that 1933 was going to be worse than 1932. Hoover was out, Roosevelt would be coming in. But what could one man do? In a strange way, it was like the end of the world. Certainly it was the end of the world that all these revelers had known, and all these revelers knew it. So they listened to the singer because they wouldn't then have to talk about themselves and remember their unhappiness.

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its
many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our
ears;
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary;
Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more,
Many days you have lingered around my cabin
door;
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

Her voice was sweet and melancholy. She had control over it. She didn't press against the lyric. The simple Foster words, however, were bitterly ironic considering that hard times had indeed come again—and with a vengeance.

“I imagine her parents were married, don't you, Jack?” said Barbara.

“Shhh!” said Harmon, not even looking around.

There's a pale, drooping maiden who toils her
life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Tho' her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all
the day,
Oh! Hard times, come again no more.

“I'll bet her father plucked chickens in an Iowa grocery store. In fact,” Barbara went on, “I'd stake any amount of money on it.”

“She's from Boston,” said Harmon. “Her father failed in the Crash.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Barbara, “she
would
have an interesting past, wouldn't she? Interesting pasts are always so…so…so
uninteresting
. People think that having an interesting past makes up for every other deficiency of character and intellect and social position and fortune.”

Susan Bright smiled at Harmon. Jack saw that. Jack also saw that his wife smiled back a sickly sweet smile as if the signal had been meant for her. Barbara was always doing things like that.

'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary;
Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more,
Many days you have lingered around my cabin
door;
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

Jack ordered another drink. Barbara's boa fell into that one, too. The fallen ash of Harmon's cigar ignited the pile of confetti on the table. Barbara calmly poured Jack's Rob Roy over the flames, which only served to ignite the tablecloth. After the waiter had put out the fire, Jack ordered another drink. Susan Bright sang more songs: “The White Dove,” “My Kahlua Rose,” and “If You Were the Only Girl in the World (And I Were the Only Boy).” She ended her set with “Love for Sale.” Barbara murmured, “How vastly appropriate…”

At one o'clock the curtain was lowered.

“Can we go now?” asked Barbara. “Harmon, you're stinking already.”

“Let's go back to my place,” said Harmon, enunciating his syllables clearly but with obvious effort.

“No,” said Barbara.

“I had some champagne—some
real
champagne— smuggled down from Montreal.”

“For a little while,” said Barbara. “Only a little while. Then Jack and I will tuck you into bed.”

“No,” said Harmon, getting up from his chair unsteadily, “Susan will do that.”

“P
ERSONALLY,” SIGHED JACK
as he leaned against the wall next to the elevator, “I'd like to investigate the rumor that there's no place like home.”

The elevator doors opened, and Barbara stepped neatly inside. “We must see that Harmon gets home safely,” said Barbara, and smiled the coldest and politest of polite, cold smiles at Susan Bright as the young singer stepped in alongside her.

Barbara Beaumont had a way of looking at you without focusing her eyes, as if you weren't quite worth the trouble of setting the optical muscles into operation. “And besides,” she went on, grabbing Harmon's coat sleeve and dragging him into the elevator, “some poor soul spent his entire New Year's Eve smuggling a case of champagne down from Montreal.”

“Braving snow and blizzard and a stint in a federal penitentiary,” said Jack, coming in last.

The elevator doors closed, and suddenly Jack was overwhelmed with a close atmosphere of wet fur, alcoholic breath, cigar smoke, and Barbara's sickly sweet perfume Miracle, probably called that, Jack surmised, because it was a miracle that no one in the elevator was asphyxiated.

“George,” said Harmon, clapping a hand on the shoulder of the middle-aged black man in a too-tight red jacket who was operating the elevator, “this is Miss Bright.”

“How de do?” said George politely, turning his head only enough that he could see her out of the corner of his eye.

“Hello,” returned Susan Bright with a discomfort that made Barbara smile.

“George,” Harmon went on, “you are to let Miss Bright up to my floor anytime she pleases. Do you understand?”

“Sure do, Mr. Dodge,” said George. Miss Bright's discomfort increased dramatically, as did Barbara Beaumont's smile. “Here your floor, Mr. Dodge. And Happy New Year to you all.”

“Thank you, George,” said Jack, slipping a two-dollar bill into George's hand. George deserved the tip, in Jack's estimation. When Jack wasn't around, George guided Harmon from the front door of the apartment building to the elevator, slid him down tenderly to the floor of the gold cage, lifted him up again when the cage had reached the twenty-third floor, and saw him to the door of his bedroom.

Harmon Dodge owned one of the topmost floors of an apartment building on Park Avenue. A few years before, it would have been unattainable by a mere partner in a law firm, but hard times had come to the owners of fine apartments, and Harmon had accepted the place in lieu of payment for his handling of a particularly involved bankruptcy case. Actually, in lieu of payment for
Jack's
handling of the case.

The apartment consisted of a massive living room with views of the East River, a large dining room on the opposite side of the apartment, an adjoining kitchen and maid's room, a large bedroom overlooking Park Avenue, and a gentleman's study where the gentleman stockpiled smuggled liquor. There were windows all round, and at each corner of the apartment was a small tiled solarium containing the dead flowers of the previous occupants of the penthouse.

Barbara had procured Harmon a live-in maid, and had scoured the employment agencies for just the right combination of efficiency, appearance, and demeanor. The right combination, in Barbara's estimation, turned out to be a two-hundred-pound black woman with asthma who wouldn't do anything but dust and cook breakfast. Barbara's reasoning behind this unlikely choice (when so many qualified women were available and wanting the work) was that a two-hundred-pound black woman with asthma was just about the only female in all of New York whom Harmon would not try to wheedle into matrimony. As Audrey could cook breakfast, and dusted now and then, and even sometimes consented to iron his shirts, Harmon realized the intelligence of Barbara's choice.

Audrey, her wheezing visage sullen beneath a glinting crown of bob pins, shuffled out of her bedroom in a ratty red housecoat, and fetched three bottles of champagne on a silver tray. Then, setting out four champagne glasses from an ebony and glass cocktail cabinet (another spoil of bankruptcy), the maid shuffled off to bed, pausing only to remark to Susan, “Keep him away from the windows, miss, 'cause he do have a tendency to fall out…”

Susan Blight's lower lip dropped a little, as if it took her a moment to understand the implication of this injunction. “Does she expect me to stay the night?” Susan asked Barbara in a low, surprised voice.

Barbara Beaumont laughed gaily, a gay laugh that might have meant any number of things, such as
Don't bother to play the innocent with us, Miss Bright
or
Whose lower limb are you attempting to manipulate?
Jack, as he unwrapped the first bottle of champagne, thought Susan Bright's confusion looked very real. It wasn't, of course, he was sure of that, for Miss Bright didn't actually blush. Jack himself blushed at anything—at the very thought of blushing, in fact—and even now could feel the blood rushing up through his neck and into his face. So if Miss Bright weren't blushing, then she wasn't ingenuous, and it was quite apparent to Jack that she was merely as good an actress as she was a singer. Here was Harmon, slouched on the sofa with his head thrown over the back, not quite comatose yet but on his way, and here was Miss Bright next to him, doing her best to look uncomfortable, probably in hope that Jack and Barbara would get the hell out of there so that she could get Harmon into bed before he was quite unconscious. Yet it was a good act, for Susan really did look uncomfortable.

“Thank you,” she said quietly as Jack handed her a glass of champagne.

“Harmon, sit up,” said Barbara briskly. “You're making a spectacle of yourself, which is not new to us but which is evidently making your friend extremely uncomfortable as you invited her up here and she was probably under some absurd notion that you intended to remain conscious for a few minutes, at least until we could toast the New Year properly, that is, with real champagne.”

“Happy New Year,” said Harmon, raising his head slowly from the back of the sofa, and taking the glass of champagne from Jack.

“To prosperity,” said Jack, raising his glass.

“To solvency,” said Susan Bright, raising hers with a small gesture suggesting a sincere skepticism.

“And may the coming year,” said Barbara as if she were already bored with the proceedings, “be not quite so boring as the last. If the whole country, and us especially, are to be so confoundedly miserable and poor, let us at least have a year that is not so unremittingly dreary.”

They drank.

Susan Bright's eyes shifted round the room. “I'm not so certain,” she remarked with a little hesitant deference, “that you should think of yourself as ‘confoundedly miserable and poor.' There are a great many people in New York who couldn't afford this champagne, or this penthouse, or—”

“Or what?” said Barbara with her menacing smile.

“There are people who can't afford anything,” interrupted Jack. It was too late in the evening for a fight, and he knew that his wife would fight to the death with anyone who denied her the luxury of feeling miserable and poor.

“I suppose,” said Barbara with her tiger-lying-in-wait smile, “that you were of a prominent family crashed in 'twenty-nine.”

Susan Bright blinked. “Yes,” she said.

“The Brights of Boston,” said Harmon, sitting forward with his empty glass held out for a refill.

“I'm sure you were as high then as you are low now,” said Barbara sympathetically.

Susan Bright looked as if she did not know what to say. A gold digger she was, but Jack wasn't certain that she deserved this.

“Excuse me please,” the singer said, getting up and leaving the living room.

“A little tact,” said Jack gently to his wife.

“Me? Me?” cried his wife, taking the bottle of champagne from Jack's hands. “I'm the soul of tactfulness.”

“I know your tact,” said Harmon, getting up and going up to the window. He fumbled with the latch. “I've seen it chip the furniture.” He pushed open the window and thrust his face into the frigid night air.

“Don't you dare fall out,” said Barbara. “For then we'd have to take that woman home, and she dresses as if she lived on Staten Island.”

“She's a very nice girl,” said Harmon, turning back from the window. There was a hint of clearheadedness in his voice, though he was looking at the second champagne bottle as if it might be a convenient way to smooth out this emerging lump of sobriety. “And I don't know how many times I've gone to the Villa Vanity to hear her sing, and I don't know how many nights I've gone to her dressing room to ask her to have dinner with me, and I don't know what I've spent on flowers, and I certainly don't know why she finally agreed to go out with me tonight.”

“Because you'd never invited me to meet your friends,” said Susan Bright from the doorway.