Jack and Susan in 1933 by Michael McDowell Read Free Book Online

with an air that suggested she’d thought about an appropriate comparison for some time. “And this apartment really is a little too small for two persons at the best of times, but when one of them is claiming to be ill—”
    â€œBarbara, I broke two ribs—”
    â€œâ€”it is entirely too small, and therefore I’ve decided that we should spend a few weeks in the country with Father.”
    Jack didn’t say anything. Usually when Barbara spent this much time working up to a proposal of some course of action, the idea was harebrained. Jack tended to object to it as a matter of course. But this one sounded pleasant. Jack liked Barbara’s father. Jack liked the country, and he liked Barbara’s father’s mansion. Jack disliked their short, hard bed in New York, and he liked the long, soft bed in their bedroom at the Cliffs. Jack disliked the way that windows rattled in the January wind in New York, and he hated the blasting dry heat of New York radiators. He liked the coziness of country winters and the crackling heat of enormous stone fireplaces.
    â€œHarmon will be there,” said Barbara, rather as if Jack had objected to yet another of her odious schemes. Harmon had the Dodge mansion, which was called the Quarry, and was situated only a few hundred yards downriver from the Cliffs. “The office will be closed for a few weeks, and we’ll all be jolly and cozy, and Daddy will ask why we haven’t any children, and you’ll make up some excuse the way you always do.”
    Jack didn’t know why he and Barbara didn’t have children. It wasn’t a bad idea, though as far as the possible offspring were concerned, Jack as a father was probably a slightly more pleasant proposition than Barbara as a mother.
    â€œYes,” said Jack, “that would probably be a very good idea.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    M ARCELLUS RHINELANDER sent the touring car down to New York to fetch his daughter and Jack back to the Cliffs. The Rhinelander driver was a thin, middle-aged man named Richard Grace who was a Communist. Rhinelander kept Grace on, not despite his political beliefs, but precisely because of them. It delighted the old man to throw his capitalistic wealth into Grace’s face at every turn. Grace kept the job because he took a kind of grim pleasure in seeing at first hand what terrible ravages unearned wealth made on the character and the social system, and also because the pay was very good. Richard Grace had a wife named Grace, who was cook to Marcellus Rhinelander and had no political beliefs whatever.
    Grace (the driver, not the cook) disliked Barbara on account of her being Barbara, and disliked Jack on account of his being yet another of the privileged classes who would be swept away in the coming Socialist revolution. Grace saw it his duty, in the time before the revolution, to make Jack’s life as miserable as possible. This was accomplished amply in the drive from New York to Albany. Grace, who was a very good chauffeur, did not now drive like one, but bumped into every hole, took every possible detour over gravel, made unnecessary and very sudden stops, and accelerated afterward so quickly that Jack yearned for a nation of entirely public transportation.
    The trip took seven hours. Jack sweated in a cocoon of four lap blankets, which did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the bumps and batterings. Barbara lounged in the opposite corner, alternately smoking cigarettes (which filled the closed compartment with smoke) and yelling at Grace (who couldn’t hear her through the glass partition anyway).
    â€œAre you certain it was only two broken ribs?” Marcellus Rhinelander asked Jack as he staggered up the low steps to the front of the mansion. “You look rather worse. Barbara, are you two children keeping something from me? Some wasting disease, perhaps?” Marcellus Rhinelander was hale and sixty, red in the face, white in the hair,