Jack and Susan in 1953 (15 page)

The fat man's family wept to hear it.

Jack had tried several times to get hold of Libby, but after her visit to him the previous Sunday morning, he'd neither seen her nor heard from her. The servants in her home took his calls, said merely that Miss Mather was out, that they didn't know what time she'd return, and that they'd give her the message that he'd called.

Libby never called back.

Susan Bright never answered her telephone at all.

If he'd had a telephone in his room, he would have dialed Libby and Susan incessantly, but the only telephone for the use of patients was a pay phone down the hall. It was frequently in use, and the nurses seldom allowed him to leave his bed. Besides, he was always running out of nickels, since there was always some servant around Libby's place to answer. Also, it was a tricky physical matter for a man with a broken arm to operate a telephone.

Jack felt hopeless, cut off.

But it wasn't quite true that nobody visited Jack; Maddy, his secretary, came. She brought work. He tried to put her off.

“I can't do any work,” he said. “I fell out of a window.”

“You've used that excuse before,” said his secretary darkly. Maddy, a bottle blonde who had worn leopard prints long before they came into fashion the previous winter, was a bitter person. If Maddy took any joy in life, Jack wasn't sure what form it took, and he wasn't even sure he wanted to find out. She had eyes the color of new steel, and skin the color of boiled chicken, and her hair was the color of corn in the ad for Nucoa margarine. Maddy gave new dimension to the concept of tightness in dress. Her job, before coming to Jack's firm, had been as a receptionist at an advertising agency whose principal client was a manufacturer of ladies' foundation wear. In her tenure there, she'd gotten a lot of free samples. Maddy always looked trussed-up beneath her clothes. She had also been one of the first women in Manhattan—and perhaps the world—to have created a wardrobe made entirely from synthetic fabrics: rayon, nylon, Dacron, Orlon, and Fibrolane. All of Maddy's clothes seemed to
whine
whenever she sat down. Though Maddy looked as if she should be a manicurist and she was frequently extremely impertinent, she could take an astonishing two hundred words a minute in dictation, and was very efficient.

“Maddy,” pleaded Jack, “write my letters for me. Pretend I'm giving you dictation, then just type them up and send them off.”

“I have to have your signature,” said Maddy reproachfully, as if he'd just asked her to find him a gun with which to assassinate the mayor. Maddy's voice was high-pitched and breathless, which wasn't surprising considering the tightness of her underpinnings.

“Forge my signature,” said Jack. “You have for years anyway.”

Maddy wasn't having any of it. Maddy visited him every morning, made Jack look over the previous day's correspondence, took down his dictation, and then made him sign the letters he'd dictated the day before.

“Maddy,” Jack asked on Thursday as he was mechanically signing a sheaf of documents with no memory of having dictated them, “have there been any messages for me at the office?”

Maddy was perched on a little aluminum chair, with her head bent down between her knees, brushing out her peroxided locks. Maddy was a fabulous secretary in her way, but her habits of personal grooming knew neither appropriate season nor place.

“I bring you all your messages,” said Maddy, with sullen rebuke, and still bent over.

“I mean have there been any personal messages?”

“I bring you
all
your messages,” she repeated, lifting her head, and staring at him. She held her hairbrush aloft as if threatening to hurl it at him if he asked another question.

“Well,” said Jack, chancing the injury, which would have been slight compared to what he'd already suffered, “have there been any people to call up and say, ‘Is Jack there?' and when you say no, they don't leave a message, they just say they'll call back later? Has there been a
woman
calling up? Has there—”

Maddy was growing exasperated. She put away her brush and pulled a mirror and a box of Lady Esther face powder out of her alligator bag—it was more like a small trunk—and began critically to examine her face.

Jack rambled on for a few moments. “—been anybody who maybe called up and asked what hospital I was in, or—”

“No,” said Maddy, patting the sides of her face with the powder puff, so that the room was instantly suffused with the scent of Lady Esther. It was different in odor but not in intensity from the smoke of the deceased fat man's cigar.

“No,” she repeated, “no one's called. No one's left a message. No one wants to know how you are or where you are and whether you're going to live or die. Mr. Estess says to tell you that you have five more days of sick leave but then they turn into vacation days and you only have two of those, so you'd better get well quick.”

Mr. Estess was director of personnel. Mr. Estess, for some reason, was interested in Maddy. Maddy tolerated Mr. Estess because Mr. Estess provided gossip and on frequent occasions juggled his books to give her an extra sick or vacation day.

“I can't believe this,” said Jack. “I can't believe that
nobody
has come to visit me.”

“Nobody's asked about you either,” said Maddy, rummaging in her purse. She came up with a small bottle of Mum Mist spray deodorant and Jack fervently hoped she wasn't going to apply it in his presence. Maddy regarded it for a few moments, and then dropped it back inside her bag. “Would you like me to call up somebody for you?” Maddy asked vaguely, with some remote semblance of polite concern.

“My fiancée hasn't even called,” said Jack miserably.

“The one whose apartment you jumped out of the window from?” said Maddy.

“I didn't jump out the window because of her. I jumped—wait a minute. I didn't jump at all, Maddy. I fell. It was not a suicide attempt. It was a stupid accident, and I'm lucky to be alive. I just wish somebody cared. Libby hasn't called?”

“Her lawyer called. This morning.”

“I thought you said
nobody
called.”

“I didn't count him because he didn't leave a message. People who don't leave messages don't count.”

“What did he want?” demanded Jack impatiently.

Maddy, still peering at herself in the mirror, asked, “Is one side of my face darker than the other, Mr. Beaumont?”

“What did Libby's lawyer say?”

“Nothing!”
Maddy screamed back. “He didn't say anything! He said, ‘Is Mr. Beaumont there?' I said, ‘Mr. Beaumont is in the hospital.' He said, ‘Do you think he's still going to be there on Sunday?' And I said, ‘I'm not his doctor so I wouldn't know.' He said, ‘Thank you.' I said, ‘You're welcome.' He said, ‘Good-bye.' I said, ‘Good-bye.' Satisfied?”

“Why would Libby's lawyer want to know if I'm still going to be in the hospital on Sunday?”

“Maybe he wasn't a lawyer at all. Maybe he was a thief who wants to break into your apartment on Sunday morning and doesn't want to get caught.”

Jack considered Maddy's suggestion and rejected it. He felt sure that the man on the telephone had indeed been Libby's lawyer, wanting to know whether Jack was going to be out of the hospital by Sunday or not. But
why
?

Jack begged the doctor to tell him when he'd be able to leave.

The doctor examined him, consulted his record, thought for a moment, and then replied, “Your arm has begun to heal, and as long as you keep it in that cast, you'll be fine. Your head is as right as it's ever going to be, and you appear to have gotten a little rest. I think there should be no problem if I let you out”—he thought for a moment—“say on Sunday morning. In time to see if Juliet's going to die.”

“Juliet?”

“‘The Heart of Juliet Jones,'” said the doctor in surprise, staring at the bandages on Jack's head, as if he'd suddenly decided that perhaps Jack wasn't fully recovered after all. “She thought she just had the mumps, but this morning Dr. Chet Davis told Juliet's sister the truth.”

When Maddy came the next morning she looked as if she'd finally laced herself in too tightly. Her steel blue eyes wandered a little, and beneath the layers of powder and paint her face seemed more pallid than usual.

She wasn't even carrying her alligator bag.

“Good morning, Mr. Beaumont,” she said in a tentative, breathy whisper, and seated herself on the edge of the aluminum chair. Her pink rayon skirt whined in protest. “How do you feel?”

“Pretty terrible, to tell the truth. You didn't bring another briefcase-load of work for me to look at?”

She shook her head.

“You didn't bring the letters I dictated to you yesterday?”

She shook her head again. The rayon skirt—and Maddy inside of it—slid backward on the chair.

She looked forlorn. Jack was worried. Maybe someone in her family had died.

“No messages for me?”

“Just one,” she said hesitantly.

“From…”

“From Mr. Estess,” she said, with a sudden eagerness to get this over with, whatever it was.

“Yes?” Jack prompted.

“You're fired.”

S
USAN BRIGHT WAS calmer after she had asked Rodolfo to take her to dinner. Calmer, but much more angry. Angry with Libby for the smug satisfaction she'd shown Susan at the door of Jack's apartment. Angry with Jack for leading her on the way he had—interrupting a proposal of marriage by flinging yourself in through a window argued a certain continued interest in the lady concerned. Angry with herself for letting Libby get the best of her, and for ever believing that Jack Beaumont would turn out to be something other than what he was today and always had been—a total cad.

She fairly vibrated with animosity toward Jack as she passed Sixty-sixth Street on the Madison Avenue bus on her way to work.