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

and a vivid blue in the eye.
    â€œI’ll be all right,” Jack tried to whisper in a seizure of racking cough that was one part cigarette smoke and one part a blast of frigid air that suddenly blew up off the frozen Hudson River especially for him.
    â€œGrace,” Jack’s father-in-law said with a smile of suppressed glee, “just after you left, you had a visitor here. One of your Communist friends claiming to be your brother. I told him you’d died trying to put together an anarchist bomb.”
    Grace glowered at his employer. “If I put together a bomb,” he said darkly, “ I won’t be the one to die.”
    â€œ And ,” said Rhinelander with a relish less well disguised, “I took the liberty of telephoning your friend’s description to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Marcellus turned on his heel and roundly thumped Jack on the back with the length of his ebony cane. “That’ll show the scarlet scoundrels!”

    The Cliffs was a large neo-colonial mansion built in 1893. It had more rooms than any proper colonial mansion, and those rooms had larger dimensions, and higher ceilings, and quainter wallpaper than the originals. The house had a splendid view, from most rooms, of the Hudson—and, on the other side of the Hudson, of half a dozen more neo-colonial mansions. (In this, the reaches of the Hudson just south of Albany were rather like Park Avenue.) The Cliffs got its name not from a promontory over the river, but from an escarpment pitched high above a slate quarry to the south. Jack and Barbara were installed in a suite at the opposite end of the second floor from Marcellus Rhinelander’s rooms. The old man played the piano loudly at night with more enthusiasm than precision. As he played, he drunkenly sang tenor arias from the worst of Verdi’s operas. To Jack’s knowledge, no one had ever mentioned this peculiarity in Marcellus Rhinelander. For all he knew, it might not be the old man at all, but the ghost of an Indian tenor who had been buried on ground the house now occupied.
    Outside the windows, the limbs of the trees were slickly black and sheeted with ice. It was a hard winter. Inside, one of the servants had built a fire in Jack’s bedroom, and Jack, thinking that nothing could be worse than an ebony cane across his back, pushed one of a pair of green velvet Recamiers before the blaze. The Recamier, Jack discovered, was like a chaise longue with all the comfort taken out of it and replaced with angles that had nothing to do with the human body. Jack wrapped himself in a red velvet smoking jacket and reflected that a layer of velvet over bandages made a very fine cushion indeed, better than half a dozen thick woolen lap robes. Grace Grace brought Jack tea and threw another log onto the fire. She said it was a pleasure to see him and ventured the opinion that perhaps it wasn’t going to be such a dull winter after all.
    As if on cue, they heard the noise of a fast car pulling up with a sudden stop on the icy gravel directly beneath the windows of the bedroom.
    Grace, who was fat and wore a red star on her black uniform to show her husband’s sympathy with the Russian workers, went to the window and looked out.
    â€œNo!” she cried happily. “Not a dull winter at all. For here’s Mr. Harmon and his new wife!”
    Jack, fearing and expecting the worst, hopped up from the Recamier and leapt to the window beside Grace Grace. A few seconds before this would have seemed an impossible action. He looked down.
    As he was sauntering around the car, Harmon looked up, saw Jack’s face in the window, and waved. Jack did not wave back. Harmon opened the door of the snappy yellow roadster. Susan Bright stepped out.
    Not Susan Bright, of course.
    Susan Dodge.

    â€œFind Barbara,” cried Jack, pushing Grace away from the window. Or, rather, putting his arms against her shoulders and making a pushing