Free Jack and Susan in 1933 by Michael McDowell Page A

was decorated in gray and aqua, and massaged the soles of her feet. They were tender and cut in several places from the rocks in the unpaved road.
    When she felt clean and warm again, she drained the bath and wrapped herself in a quilted silk kimono. She put on furred slippers and wandered through the hallways in the Quarry. Behind three doors she detected snoring—but she had no idea which was Harmon, which was Jack Beaumont, and which was Audrey.
    She went down some stairs and pushed open a recalcitrant door. She found herself in a narrow unlighted hallway. She pushed open another sticking door and found herself in a kitchen. Behind a third, gleaming steel door she found a larder with refrigerator. She cut a slice of cheese and poured a glass of milk. She ate the cheese and drank the milk while standing at the corner of the great table in the middle of the kitchen, which was large enough and had the equipment to feed all the guests at the Waldorf-Astoria. When she was done she swept up the crumbs and washed the glass. She wandered out of the kitchen and found the living room. The modern furniture here was better suited for filling in a swamp than for accommodating the human anatomy. She wandered on and found a kind of library with a few books.
    God’s Little Acre was one of them, and the other was something called The New Eugenics, and the plain brown wrapper it had come in was still wadded on the floor. The New Eugenics contained advice to married couples on delicate subjects. It had cost $2.98 and had been ordered from the back of a periodical not known for the delicacy of its subject matter.
    Susan pulled open the curtains over the French windows. Outside was a black garden. She saw a switch on the wall and flipped it experimentally.
    The black garden was suddenly flooded with moonlight. It was a sedate, formal expanse of clipped yews, ivy-colored brick, and gravel paths.
    This is a mistake, said Susan, opening the French doors and stepping out into the frigid winter night. She closed the door carefully behind her, and then, folding her arms for warmth across her breast, wandered along the symmetrical garden paths. The yews were clipped and black and solid and looked as if they’d been molded of something that was not twigs and leaves. An owl hooted from somewhere close, and it seemed a sound almost as artificial as the yews and the cold moonlight that flooded the regular gravel paths.
    Seven hundred and fifty thousand men were out of work in New York City alone.
    There was a civil war in Spain.
    Banks had failed, and perfectly honest and hardworking people didn’t have enough to eat, and the winds blew hard and dry across the farms of the Midwest, and the red dust covered everything.
    Those were the things that Susan should be thinking about. All those other unhappy people.
    Except she shouldn’t be unhappy, should she? Walking in a moonlit garden behind her own mansion that overlooked the Hudson. On the contrary, she should be very happy. For Susan Bright Dodge there’d be no more Sunday-morning shampoos and home-done manicures. No more evenings spent mending runs in silk stockings and rips in shabby gloves. No more cheap little hats and scuffed shoes. No more dollar table d’hôtes in gritty little cafeterias in the west forties. No more leaning on a piano in her only decent dress, singing to the inebriated and the blasé. She’d be a socialite, and she’d live the life of the socialite. Shopping, luncheon, shopping, tea, shopping, cocktail party, dressing, dinner, fun . And then she’d go to bed and lie awake till dawn—about twenty minutes—where she’d think about the fact that she didn’t love her husband.
    Harmon Dodge was charming, handsome, and rich. She was genuinely fond of him, and Susan was determined to pay for her keep. She’d poke Harmon into shape. She’d teach him responsibility. She’d make sure he didn’t get drunk every