The Sea Star (23 page)

     
“Yes,” he said, misunderstanding her. “You don’t need me at the moment. The Sea Star is out of trouble. In any case, I’ll write to you regularly.”

     
“And when will you deign to see me again? When you decide to build another hotel here?”

     
Her sharp tone caught him off guard. “What the devil’s wrong with you? You knew I couldn’t stay here indefinitely.”

     
“I’m wearing your betrothal ring,” she said, white with rage, “I’ve shared your bed. How can you say you’re leaving as casually as if you were discussing room rates? Have you no intention of setting a wedding date?”

     
“Ah, a wedding date.” He tossed his cigarette over the rail and watched its arcing light until it hit the ground.

     
“Well?” she demanded. “When
are
we getting married?”

     
“Susanna, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t thought of a wedding date. The hotel opening has been monopolizing my thoughts. Why don’t we wait until—”

     
“Until when?” she said evenly, though her eyes stung with angry tears. “Until March or April, when our child is born?”

     
“Our what?”

     
“Our child.” Her voice was hard. “The child conceived while you were biding your time here, waiting until it convenienced you to leave.”

     
He stared at her silently, his face very still. Then: “Are you sure? Have you seen a doctor?”

     
“No,” she said, “but I’m sure.”

     
Susanna tried to but couldn’t interpret the conflicting emotions that blazed in his eyes.

     
“My God, I’m speechless!” he said, so suddenly that she jumped. “I can’t begin to tell you what I’m feeling right now. A child! I can hardly believe it.”

     
He took her in his arms. She was stiffly unsubmissive. He was aware of the anger he had aroused in her. “Susanna, forgive me,” he said sincerely. “I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry. What a bloody fool I’ve been. We must marry at once—here or in New York, wherever you choose.”

     
She had been yearning to hear those words for longer than she cared to remember, but by no means was she ready to forgive him. “If you’re marrying me just to give the child a name, you needn’t bother,” she said coldly. “I can manage very well without your charity.”

     
He stared at her fiercely, his mouth curving downward in that stern look she knew so well. Then his mouth came down on hers, so passionately, so possessively, that had he taken her right there, she would have had neither the strength nor the will to resist him. She could feel his vibrant excitement as he pressed her close to his body. She could feel his desire, no less tumultuous than her own. When at last he raised his head, her senses were reeling. His arms held her fast, his hand pressed her head to his hammering heart.

     
“That’s not why I’m marrying you,” he said hoarsely, “just to give my child a name.”

     
“Then why?” she asked, breathless.

     
“Because I love you, Susanna. You’re in my blood, my heart, my very soul. If ever I lost you, I wouldn’t want to live. Haven’t you known that all along, you little sea-witch?”

     
She wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry. Her heart ached with love for him.

     
“Yes I’ve known it,” she said, barely able to contain her joy. “There was never a single moment when I doubted it.”

     
Events moved so quickly after that night that Susanna had hardly a moment to catch her breath. Jay didn’t leave Atlantic City the next morning. He moved out of the Brighton, took a suite at the Excelsior, and made arrangements to marry Susanna the following week. Jay’s sisters and their families were abroad, so only Ford, Augusta, and Dallas would be attending the ceremony at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension. This meager guest list had been insisted on by the bride’s outraged mother.

     
“What?” Augusta gasped, when Jay told her of the coming child. “You compromised my daughter? Have you no conscience, no sense of honor?” And when Jay quietly admitted he had wronged Susanna but that he intended to marry her, Augusta said severely, “You most assuredly will marry her—as quickly as possible and with no publicity. You’ll not broadcast the wedding date for the world to take note of. I’m extremely angry with you, sir. If your marriage isn’t a happy one, if Susanna has even the smallest complaint, you’ll have to answer to me, I give you my promise.”

     
To
Augusta
, Jay was appropriately respectful and contrite. Later, in private with Susanna, he vented his frustration in no uncertain terms.

     
“That viper-tongued harpy!” he said as they strolled on the deserted Boardwalk. “I’d like to wring her neck.”

     
“I told you not to tell her,” Susanna said glumly.

     
“I had to tell her. Can you imagine her reaction if I said nothing, and then a child appears five months after the wedding?”

     
Susanna shuddered at the thought, but still she said, “I don’t care. You shouldn’t have told her.”

     
“I know I was wrong to take advantage of you,” Jay raged on, “but she’s got the devil of a nerve censuring my actions when her own life has been far from simon-pure.”

     
“What do you mean?” Susanna stopped in her tracks and halted Jay’s stride with a hand on his arm. “Did Ford find out something about her past?”

     
“Ford,” Jay echoed scornfully. “Since Ford married the Lily Maid of Astolat, she doesn’t even
have
a past. No, Susanna, I hired an investigator and found out what your mother was doing all those years.”

     
“Tell me!” she said at once, but she didn’t want to know. Whatever misdeeds
Augusta
may have committed, Susanna, in her present condition, felt unqualified to pass judgment.

     
Jay’s anger faded as he took note of the apprehension in Susanna’s eyes.

     
“Do you really want to know?” His hard tone gentled. “It’s not a pretty story.”

     
“Tell me,” she said staunchly. “I’m not a child, Jay.”

     
He eyed her closely, trying to gauge the extent of her resolve. “So you’ve already told me. But perhaps tonight isn’t the best time to unearth ghosts from the past.”

     
“It’s as good a time as any,” she maintained, though she wished with all her heart that she’d left well enough alone.

     
“Let’s sit down.” Jay led her to a bench facing the ocean and spread his handkerchief on the damp wooden slats. When they were seated, he said, “I don’t know what your father told you, but I assume from what you’ve said that you think your mother left him. The truth is, your father turned her out.”

     
Susanna was shocked. “But he always said she abandoned us.”

     
“That may have been the way he perceived it, Susanna. You see, there was another man, an actor by the name of Sean Kelly. Your mother and he were lovers.”

     
“She had a lover?” Susanna gasped. “Oh, how despicable.”

     
Jay paused a moment, then said, “To be fair to your mother, I must tell you that she probably had cause to take a lover. You see, your father....” He paused again, then went on. “Your father, on occasion, used to beat your mother.”

     
“I don’t believe you!”

     
“Susanna, it’s true. My investigator was very thorough. There was a violent side to your father that few people were aware of. Those who knew about it kept quiet, perhaps in fear that your father would turn his violence on them. Your mother never spoke about his abuse of her. I daresay she was ashamed, and felt somehow to blame for it. In any case, when your father found out Augusta was carrying Kelly’s child, he banished her from the house.”

     
“A child?” Susanna stared at him numbly, trying to assimilate this disturbing information and the even more appalling revelation about her father.

     
“Your mother and Kelly went to New York,” Jay said. “He had the lead role in a play that opened to great acclaim and he became quite the matinee idol. Then, as your mother’s pregnancy progressed, he began to look around for greener pastures.”

     
Susanna remained silent. It was too much to absorb. Her father had been a wife-beater. And her mother....she didn’t know what to think about her mother.

     
“Your mother found out Kelly was seeing another woman,” Jay went on. “She intended to confront her, to demand that she give him up. One afternoon, she started out on foot to Union Square, where the woman lived. It had been snowing all day, but Augusta wasn’t deterred. It was the day of the great blizzard of ‘88. The snow was so heavy and the winds so intense that your mother fainted along the way and might have frozen to death if two teamsters hadn’t seen her lying in the street. They brought her to a nearby house. The people who took her in made her as comfortable as they could, but that night, she went into premature labor, and the child was stillborn.”

     
“Oh, no!” Tears sprang to Susanna’s eyes. Unconsciously, her hand went to the place where she harbored her own precious burden. What would she do if she ever lost it? She knew for a certainty she couldn’t bear it.

     
“What did she do afterward?” she asked, aching.

     
“After she recovered, she returned to the flat she shared with Kelly. When she told him she’d lost the child, it was the perfect excuse for him to be rid of her.”

     
Susanna felt a wave of compassion for the woman she had resented for so long. How afraid
Augusta
must have been, and how wretchedly lonely. To Susanna, who had basked all those years in blissful ignorance, such a desolate existence was beyond comprehension.

     
“Jay, you said her life hadn’t been simon-pure. But knowing what happened, how can you fault her? She must have loved that man. And look how despicably he treated her.”

     
“I’m not finished,” Jay said.

     
“There’s more?” She swallowed hard.

     
“Your mother had nowhere to go after Kelly booted her out. A woman she’d met backstage at the theater offered to lodge her until she got her bearings.”

     
“And then?” Susanna asked, surmising the answer. She’d read Stephen Crane’s
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
. She knew what happened to abandoned young women alone in
New York
.

     
Jay rose in his restless way and looked down at her somberly. “You’re right, you know,” he said. “No one can fault your mother for what she did. There’s no one alive who hasn’t done something he regrets. Why don’t we leave it at that?”

     
But Susanna wouldn’t be put off. Having learned this much, she would know it all.

     
“Tell me everything,” she said.

     
Reluctantly, Jay said, “The woman who lodged your mother operated a house of assignation.”

     
“Do you mean a brothel?” Susanna asked grimly.

     
“Not exactly. It was a place where couples went when they wanted... to be alone. It was rather like a hotel,” he explained with a trace of irony. “And your mother, the wife of an innkeeper, had the perfect credentials for working there.”

     
“What did she do there?” Susanna had never heard of such an establishment.

     
“At first, very little. She was still weak from her ordeal, so the proprietress—her name was Johnson, I believe—simply sheltered your mother for the first month or so. As Augusta grew stronger, she became something of a general factotum, keeping records, making appointments, and the like. In any case, she wasn’t there long.”

     
“Where did she go?”

     
“One of the clients, an older man, took a fancy to your mother and set her up in her own flat near Washington Square.”