Free Jack and Susan in 1933 by Michael McDowell

hadn’t tried yet. While Audrey was pulling off Harmon’s clothes, Susan telephoned the Cliffs. Grace Grace answered, and Susan was giving her a message to relay to Barbara and Marcellus Rhinelander, when Barbara herself suddenly jumped into the conversation.
    What happened?
    â€œVery little,” said Susan, ignoring the rancor in Barbara’s voice. “Your husband drove Harm’s new car off a cliff.”
    You weren’t in it?
    â€œNo,” returned Susan. “In fact, it was I who saved the lives of both Harmon and your husband.”
    Much obliged, I’m sure.
    â€œYou’re quite welcome. But Mr. Beaumont asked me to let you know he’d be staying the night here, and would much appreciate being picked up here in the morning. He seems to be in considerable pain.”
    I hope you don’t look at this as an opportunity to work your wiles on my husband. You may have sunk your poisoned talons into Harmon’s poor unresisting flesh, but I’d advise you to leave Jack quite alone. He has no intention of being unfaithful to me.
    Susan stared at the receiver, as if not quite sure what she was hearing. She looked at Audrey, who was pulling off Harmon’s trousers. “Audrey,” Susan said, speaking distinctly and not too distantly from the telephone, “don’t bother putting those drugs into Mr. Beaumont’s drink. I won’t be seducing him tonight.” Then she spoke directly to Barbara again.
    â€œDo join us for breakfast tomorrow, Barbara,” Susan said sweetly. “I miss you already.”
    Then she rang off, and wondered if she should bother keeping Audrey from removing her husband’s undershorts. She didn’t, reflecting that Audrey wouldn’t be doing it now if she hadn’t done it many times before.
    Susan helped Audrey pull a pair of pajamas onto Harmon, who with the dragging and the lifting and the twisting attendant on this procedure, woke up to the extent that he could call out for a taxi to bring him more brandy.
    â€œThere’s a taxi strike on, Harm,” Susan replied. “Go to sleep. Prohibition ends tomorrow.”
    With that happy thought, Harmon turned over and snored loudly into a goose-down pillow with a large D embroidered on the lace hem.
    â€œMiz Dodge?” said Audrey. “Something I can get you?”
    A new life , thought Susan. “Nothing, Audrey. Thank you,” she said.
    Audrey wandered back to bed.
    Susan didn’t even know where Audrey’s bedroom was in this mansion. It had twenty-three rooms, a detached guesthouse, half a dozen outbuildings, two gazebos, a medium-size swimming pool with a diving tower, an English garden with roses, a French garden with yews, and an American forest garden with rhododendrons and lilacs. She’d been there for only a few hours that afternoon and had wandered about the place, thinking it cold, thinking it depressingly modern, thinking it—most oddly of all— hers .
    There had been no covers on the furniture, which suggested that Harmon had visited the place frequently. Once a month, perhaps. Moving in a crowd where your social position was determined by the size of your hangover, Harmon was the first name in the register. So perhaps he had used the place as a cushioned room in which to recover from his heavy debauches. More likely, Susan thought, he had brought young women up here—young women who hadn’t required the trip to Niagara Falls before they’d crossed the threshold. That thought made her cringe with shame—not with the thought of how Harmon and the young ladies had passed their time at the Quarry. But at the thought that she, Susan, who had required the trip to Niagara Falls, was not more virtuous, but less virtuous than all those others. More conniving, more mercenary, more—
    More everything that Barbara Beaumont thought she was.
    A gold digger.
    Susan lay in the steaming perfumed water in the bathroom that