Jack and Susan in 1933 (3 page)

“What has that to do with anything?” said Harmon in genuine curiosity, meeting Susan at the sofa.

“It means simply,” said Barbara, “that if you invited Miss Bright here to meet your friends, then you thought she was a little more than a cheap nightclub pickup.”

“Barbara!” cried Jack.

Barbara smiled and held out her glass for more champagne. Jack poured, but as he poured, he was watching Susan Bright to see how she would respond to this insult. A cheap nightclub pickup would break a bottle over Barbara's head. A woman of a middle-class upbringing would get up and telephone for a taxi. A lady of true gentility would have pitched Barbara out the open window.

“Barbara is exactly right,” said Susan Bright with perfect dignity. “As I do consider myself somewhat better than a cheap nightclub pickup, I refused to go out with Harmon until he treated me accordingly.”

Exactly right
, thought Jack. If this singer could stand up to Barbara, then Harmon might be in for real trouble. She was very pretty when she leaned against a piano, and now she turned out to be clever as well. It was a potent and dangerous combination.

“Let's dance,” said Harmon suddenly, keeling over in the direction of the Amrad radio. (The company had gone bankrupt the year before, and Harmon had come away with the Aria, the Serenata, and the Symphony models. He'd kept the Serenata, put the Aria in Audrey's room, and had the Symphony delivered to George the elevator man's Harlem home.) But as the radio was twenty feet away, and Harmon's outstretched arm came nowhere near the dial, Jack got up and tried to find a station playing dance music.

“'NXQ,” suggested Susan. “Ted Lewis is broadcasting live from Chez Firehouse tonight.”

It was easy to find the station, as Ted Lewis's tonsilly tenor crooned “Dip Your Brush in Sunshine.” Harmon got slowly to his feet, discreetly assisted by Susan Bright. He draped his arms over her shoulders, and the two moved slowly across the living room floor.

Jack watched Harmon and Susan for a few moments as he opened the second bottle of champagne. Then he watched Barbara watching them. He wondered what his wife was thinking. Harmon was, for better or worse, their best friend. It had always been the hope of Harmon's father and Barbara's father that Harmon and Barbara should marry. And Harmon and Barbara had known each other quite forever, and once had even been engaged. But they'd known each other too well and too long, and Barbara wasn't the sort to want something she could have and that was good for her at the same time, and had broken the engagement. This satisfied Harmon as well, for he had established at a young age his abiding passion for young women of a certain type utterly distant from Barbara. After the broken engagement, the two were the greatest friends possible, and attained a kind of jocular intimacy. Harmon had been best man at the wedding. At the reception he'd broken a hundred-year-old punchbowl. Jack, though, wondered what Barbara thought as she watched Harmon Dodge dancing with the nightclub chanteuse.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said, coming to refill her glass.

“I'm certain she dyes,” said Barbara in a whisper. “No one's hair is truly that black.”

Barbara sipped her champagne, watching Susan Bright over the rim of her glass. Jack perched himself on the arm of her chair and put his arm around his wife.

“Don't sit there,” said Barbara. “When you perch like that, you invariably tip over and spill your drink, usually on me. Why don't you ask me to dance?”

“Because I always step on your feet,” said Jack.

“Yes, but at least my dress is safe.” She reached over and turned out the lamp on the table beside her. Now the room was lighted only by the soft glow of the lights in the open cocktail cabinet, by the yellow dial of the radio, by the cold waxing moon shining through the windows at the end of the room, and by the softly glowing lights of the East Side.

Barbara rose, took Jack's champagne glass and set it safely aside. Then she placed her head against his shoulder—for Jack was quite tall, and Barbara only of medium height—and Jack put his arms about her. Holding his breath against a too-strong infusion of Miracle perfume, he brushed his lips against her cheek. “New Year's,” he whispered. “Truce?” Meaning, of course, not a truce between them, but between Barbara and Susan Bright.

Barbara considered this. “Till the champagne gives out,” she conceded.

The couples danced slowly in the darkened living room. Ted Lewis crooned on, assisted by the Boswell Sisters and a surprise appearance (some time after four A.M.) by Ethel Waters. Every song somehow sounded sad. The two couples continued to dance, pour more champagne, look out of the windows, lean against the radio, pick the leaves from the dead plants in the solaria, and became more and more melancholy thinking of the year that lay ahead, and the dismal hope that was so meager and groundless that it was no hope at all, that things would get better and not worse. When Jack inadvertently knocked over the last bottle, Audrey made a psychic appearance with a fourth bottle, uncorked it, poured four more glasses, and then crept back to bed, preserving them all for another while.

“An invaluable woman,” Harmon remarked to Jack and Barbara over Susan Bright's bare white shoulder, “and if she didn't have asthma, and weighed half as much, and weren't in love with George, then I would have probably married her by now.” Then he pulled back and looked tenderly at Susan, who didn't have asthma, weighed just about half as much as Audrey, and almost certainly wasn't in love with the gentleman who drove the penthouse elevator.

“Is everybody happy?”
Ted Lewis called out on the radio.

“No!” cried Jack and Barbara, Harmon and Susan.

And then the first sun of the new year rose bleakly over the East River, spilling orange light over their drawn faces.

“I
WANT A MORNINGCAP,”
said Barbara with her face turned away from the rising, unflattering sun, “and then I want to go home. Jack, pour something sharp into a glass and don't tell me what it is, would you?”

Jack poured dark rum into a glass and handed it to his wife, who was looking intently at a wall. Not because the wall held any intrinsic interest for her, but if she pressed closely enough to it, no one could see how drawn and tired her face was. At this point in the proceedings, Jack thought he wouldn't mind staring at a wall for a few hours or so, until Everything and Everyone went away, or the Depression was cured, or something else equally improbable came to pass.

Harmon had genially passed out on the sofa, with his legs thrown across Susan's lap. Susan's head lolled on the back of the sofa, her eyes were gently closed, and she softly sang a song that Jack didn't know. She looked up only when Audrey came sleepily out of her bedroom and tossed a blanket over Harmon's head.

“Pardon me,” said Audrey as she fumbled in Susan's lap to pull off Harmon's shoes.

Susan obligingly raised Harmon's feet, and asked, “Won't he suffocate with the blanket over his head?”

“Hasn't yet,” replied Audrey, heading back for her room. “And Happy New Year, y'all.”

“Happy New Year,” returned Jack.

“Happy New Year,” returned Susan.

“I'll have another morningcap,” said Barbara, still staring at the wall, though she'd moved down to a new patch.

“Miss Bright?” asked Jack. Susan now sat with Harmon's unshod feet in her lap. The blanket over his head muffled his rhythmic snore.

“No thank you,” said Susan. “I really should be getting home soon.”

“Oh,” said Barbara, turning suddenly away from the wall, but ducking immediately into a cool shadow. “Oh, please do let Jack drive you.”

Jack turned, with Barbara's glass in one hand and the bottle of rum in the other.

“Ah, yes of course,” he said uncertainly, not sure what Barbara wanted out of this.

“No, of course
not
,” said Susan. “If you are half as tired as I am, you'll want to go directly home yourselves. I can easily call a taxi.”

“No, no, we insist,” said Barbara. “You live on Staten Island, don't you?”

“No,” returned Susan with a crinkled brow. “What made you think that? I live on Seventy-first Street, near the Hudson.”

“Oh yes,” said Barbara in a tone that suggested she had heard of the river that bordered the unfashionable side of the island. “Yes, yes,” she mused, “the Hudson is a very pretty river, I believe, and we were at a party once—do you remember, Jack, though it was ever so long ago—at an apartment building on that side of the park. You could see the Hudson from the maid's room's terrace.”

“Actually,” said Jack, in deference to honesty, “you know the Hudson quite well, darling. Your father's house is on it.”

“Oh yes,” said Barbara with apparent delight at the discovery. “They would be the same river, wouldn't they? Having the same name and all. I just never connected them before. At my father's house,” she explained to Susan, “the Hudson is quite grand, and you can sail along it for many miles and see nothing but one splendid estate after another. And here, of course, it is quite narrow and dirty, I believe, and it is certainly not anything special to live along it, so I never quite made the connection that
your
Hudson and
my
Hudson were at all the same thing.”

“I understand how you might have made such a mistake,” said Susan dryly. “The similarity of names—
Hudson
and
Hudson
—must have been very confusing. Still, there's no reason that you have to see me home.”

“Oh,
I
won't,” said Barbara, “but my husband most certainly will. Jack, call me a taxi, and then I want you to get Miss Bright directly home.”

A look passed between Barbara and Jack, a look that said,
This is not
pro forma
politeness, Jack
.
Take the woman home
. This glance was not lost on Susan Bright, Jack saw, and she no longer protested. Perhaps she wants to know what's coming, thought Jack. Jack wanted to know too.

“Excuse me for a moment,” said Susan, getting up carefully and arranging Harmon's feet on the couch. “And then I'll be ready to go.” She disappeared down the little corridor that led to the bathroom.

“Tell me what this one's about,” said Jack to his wife. “It's six A.M. on New Year's morning, and I don't have enough mind to figure it out myself. And why are you grinning?”

“I'm grinning, darling, because we just prevented that dreadful young woman from going to bed with Harmon, who obviously would have awakened this morning with a proposal of marriage on his lips, which, it is perfectly obvious, is exactly what that dreadful young woman wanted out of this night.”

“That part I understand,” said Jack, who was actually wondering whether he wanted a morningcap of rum, too, or whether he simply wanted to crawl under the blanket with his boss and go to sleep until 19
4
3, when things would almost certainly be vastly different. “But why should I have to drive all the way cross town to take her home?”

“Because I want to make sure she
goes
home. If we simply left now, she'd drag Harmon into the bedroom, undress him, undress herself, crawl in beside him, and when he woke up, say, ‘Darling, you were wonderful last night. And yes, yes, I will marry you, anytime you say.'”

“She doesn't seem
quite
that type,” said Jack.

“She is,” said Barbara definitively. “Here she is,” Barbara whispered. “I hope she wasn't listening outside the door. She's that type, too.”

“I'm ready,” said Susan Bright, drawing her coat over her shoulders.

“It was an immense pleasure,” said Barbara with gaping insincerity.

“I assure you,” returned Susan, “that it was every bit as much a pleasure for me. I wonder if we'll be seeing any more of each other in this coming year. I shouldn't wonder if we were.”

Barbara said nothing, but smiled her cold, polite smile, which even Jack had to admit was fairly ghastly in the light of dawn.

Susan pulled down the blanket just enough to uncover Harmon's brow and eyes. Holding her coat closed at the throat, she leaned down and kissed his fore-head. His eyes fluttered open, struggled to focus, gave up the struggle, and closed again. Susan pulled the blanket back over his head.