Bandbox (13 page)

The koala pulled on him as they descended into the Wall Street subway station. Allen looked down and could have sworn the animal was smiling.

“Here,” he said, tucking a box of Smith Brothers into the marsupial’s pouch. “T-take the pack.”

Joe Harris looked again at the typescript in front of him. “What
is
this crap?” he muttered.

Christ
, thought the editor, torn between disappointment and disbelief. It was like something written by Vachel Lindsay’s drunken brother-in-law.

“Hazel! Get me Harold Ober at the Reynolds Agency.”

Always excited to get to the office, Harris had been looking forward to today as extra-special. Following his arrival at 7:30, almost three hours ago, he had waited for the Reynolds messenger to deliver this draft of the essay he’d commissioned, for a small fortune, from Henry Roebling, the thirty-year-old, big-game-hunting literary sensation, a writer so virile and hairy-chested, he looked, when his shirt was open, like something he might have just shot. In life, Roebling always had an aviatrix or girl reporter ready to kill herself over him; on the page, he boiled his sporting and amorous adventures down to a prose so spare it sometimes seemed he was being paid by the word for what he left out.

Harold Ober had promised that his client would produce a literary meditation, lean and manly, on the age’s great bull market, an essay that, once published, would have the highbrows swooning and Jimmy Gordon sweating. Both
Bandbox
and
Cutaway
had been after Roebling for months, vying to be the first to entice him away from hardcovers and into magazines. What the messenger had finally arrived here with—this lunatic verbal discharge typed with the red part of the ribbon—was supposed to be Harris’s first real burst of return fire at Jimmy. Now all he could do was look desperately at the booming, chanted, underlined letters.

“Mr. Ober’s on the line,” called Hazel, who managed as always to sound loud and bored at the same time.

Harris took the call.

The agent sighed through the wires. “I’m afraid he’s not at the top of his game, is he?”

“Unless his game is incomprehensibility,” responded Harris, more in sorrow than anger. “He’s up for a gold medal in that department.”

“Yes,” said Ober, almost in a whisper.

That damned Yankee taciturnity, thought Harris. Ober was the same as Perkins: the two of them, agent and editor, baby-sitting a whole nursery of temperamental boy geniuses and never murmuring a word of impatience toward them. But this morning Harris thought he could sense, coming from Ober, a measure of apology, even anguish. He was sure the little squiffy sound he heard was one of the agent’s bushy eyebrows colliding with the mouthpiece of the phone. Ober must be tapping its candlestick in frustration against his forehead; Harris did the same thing a half-dozen times a day.

“I’m going to be indiscreet here,” said the agent. “The fellow’s having a rough time. He’s up in the Maine woods with only a satchel full of peyote for companionship. I’m afraid he was thrown over by a rodeo queen after his last trek through Mexico—not the sort of disappointment he’s accustomed to. I’m willing to waive the kill fee.”

“Let me get back to you,” said Harris, still gentle with shock.

For the past month he’d been imagining an afternoon visit from Roebling, during which they would tinker manfully with a couple of participles and periods before toasting the success of the piece. Now he could only think, forlornly, of the moose he’d killed over Christmas week: its huge horned head lay on the floor of his office closet, covered with a tarpaulin, mounted to a plaque and awaiting placement on a wall. Harris had planned on putting it behind the couch prior to Roebling’s arrival, surprising the writer with this evidence that he’d sold his prose to another woods-wise man of letters. Roebling need never know the moose had met its maker when Harris hit it with his Packard on a slippery road in Dutchess County. The car’s front grille had been bashed to bits, and the one guy he and Betty could find to tow them, after a two-mile trek toward the lights of Poughkeepsie, would only do the job if they also let his underemployed cousin do some taxidermy on the moose. Fine, said Harris, who had forgotten all about the thing by the time it was shipped to
New York. The stuffing job wasn’t the greatest—Harris had been able to make out the Packard logo pressed into the animal’s neckline, like a brand, before painting it over with bourbon—and he feared derision from the rest of the masthead if he put the creature on the wall too far in advance of Roebling’s arrival. So for the past few weeks he’d kept it in the closet, while he grew daily more eager for the editing session he would have with the celebrated young writer, just the two of them,
mano a mano
, under the buck he’d bagged.

Harris got up and opened the closet, pulling back the tarp to look into the glassy golf balls the mechanic’s cousin had used for the eyes. He thought the moose looked disappointed, too.

“Lemme introduce ya.”

At the sound of Hazel’s voice, Harris rushed to shut the closet.

“It’s a bad time!” he admonished her.

She turned to the blond boy beside her and smiled. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard him say that.”

John Shepard smiled back, nervously. Miss Snow was perhaps a year or two older than himself, but within the two minutes of their acquaintance, during which he’d explained the amazing events at Malocchio that had led to his presence here this morning, she had already invited him to tonight’s party in the publisher’s penthouse.

“You’ll like the mailroom,” said Harris, who had no memory of the young man in front of him. “It’s a good place to start,” he continued, giving John the short spiel he imparted to any new hire that Hazel or the girl from Personnel ushered in here.

Hazel tsked, quite loudly. “Think,” she said. “Veal
piccata
.”

“Oh, right,” said Harris, unexcited by the ensuing flash of recognition.

John Shepard, trying not to stare over Harris’s shoulder at the pictures of Yvette and Claudine, experienced his first moment of disappointment since stepping out of Grand Central last night.

“Come on,” said Hazel, tugging him out of her boss’s office. “You won’t learn anything here.”

She guided John down the hall, past a secretary who looked up from her comptometer to cry: “He’s a cute little thing!”

“Let’s see who’s around,” said Hazel, ignoring the girl, as well as John’s mortification.

Sidney Bruck’s door was the first they passed. It was open, a sign that he was getting ready to take a call from somebody with a big name. Now, alas, thanks to Hazel, he had to entertain this rustic-looking boy. With a certain disbelief Sidney soon heard himself asking the fellow about “school.” Upon learning that he attended—or “used to go to”—Indiana University, Sidney’s interest managed to diminish even further. Having himself graduated a few years ago from Brown, where he wrote for the campus magazine with his friends Sid Perelman and Nathanael West, Sidney could now only glance at his watch and ask John Shepard: “Exactly what are you doing here?”

John hesitated between telling the tale of last night at Malocchio—too long—and some brief remark like “I’ve come to try my luck in New York,” which would make him sound too much like Dick Whittington.

“He’s here to look around,” said Hazel to Sidney. “So you be nice to him. I’ve got to run.”

Startled that she would desert him so quickly after coming to his rescue, John gave her a pleading look.

“I’ve got a shopping date,” said Hazel.

John looked at Sidney Bruck’s watch, which was out on its owner’s desk. “But it’s not lunch hour, is it?”

Hazel waved toodle-oo and took off in search of the right lipstick to sport to tonight’s party in Oldcastle’s penthouse.

Left alone with Mr. Bruck, his own desperation equal to the
young editor’s annoyance, John had no choice but to begin imparting his long story of how the
Cleveland Limited
and Mr. Giovanni Roma and the veal
piccata
had led to his being here. He had reached the part about his onboard haircut when Bruck began easing him toward the door and, it turned out, into the path of Paul Montgomery, who’d been drawn to Sidney’s office by the sound of John’s voice.

“Hey!” he shouted, clapping John’s back. “It’s our next editor-in-chief!”

As soon as Paulie had gotten the look of admiration he craved, he called down the corridor for Cuddles Houlihan and Becky Walter to come meet this fine young visitor they all had. And once the two of them had been introduced, John decided he’d better express interest in some aspect of this office he’d succeeded in overcrowding.

“Mr. Bruck, what are those?” he asked, pointing to a tall stack of manila envelopes.

“Rejects,” said Sidney. “From our just-concluded fiction contest. Perhaps Mr. Houlihan can enlighten you.”

Cuddles dragged on his cigarette. “I was the first line of defense,” he explained, exhaling.

“Yes,” said Sidney, stimulated by a chance to inflict humiliation. “As preliminary screener, Mr. Houlihan managed to read through the contents of, I believe, four of those envelopes before higher authorities turned the remaining six hundred and ninety-three over to me.” Sidney decided to favor the boy with the wisdom of an old pro twenty-eight years of age. “Mr. Shepard, what one really looks for in magazine fiction is
less
of it. Today, too many short stories crowd too many publications, prompting too many of the wrong people to buy the publication at the newsstand.”

John looked at Sidney, wondering who the wrong people might be, hoping he wasn’t one of them.

“It’s a question of ‘mass versus class,’ ” explained Sidney. “If one
attracts a less-well-off reader, as magazine fiction tends to do, then editorial values plummet—along with the quality of advertisers. Mr. Harris runs a fiction contest because he likes contests. What he doesn’t realize is that selecting one story from six hundred and ninety-seven submissions amounts to achieving just about the right ratio. If this magazine ran six pieces of fiction each year instead of twenty-four, we’d be drawing more of the right people to our party.”

“I’m invited to the party tonight!” John exclaimed.

“Really?” said Sidney, who had not expected his figure of speech to produce this disagreeable piece of news. “Well, then, you, along with everyone else, will get to meet our lucky winner.”

“Is Mr. Newman around?” asked John, so excited by this insider stuff he couldn’t stop jumping from topic to topic.

“You might see him this evening,” said Becky. “He doesn’t seem to be in yet today.”

“Getting ready for a hazardous assignment,” said Cuddles. Newman had returned from the Plaza yesterday afternoon with evidence of his introduction to Rosemary LaRoche—an inch-long scratch mark on his cheek, her over-avid
au revoir
.

“Come on, John,” said Becky, eager to get the boy away from Sidney Bruck as well as Cuddles, who might fill his ears with God-knows-what indiscretions. “Let me show you some of the other departments.”

Just past Sidney’s threshold, they were met by the magazine’s most convivial researcher, drawn here, it would seem, by the scent of a newborn. Daisy was already tottering atop the party shoes she’d picked to wear this evening.
“Hello,”
she said to John, sweetly breathing into his unlined face, before remembering that her tutorial days were over, put paid to by the miraculous advent of Judge Francis X. Gilfoyle, who at the end of last night had not even demanded a kiss outside her Beekman Place doorway. Daisy retracted her visage from the new boy’s, albeit with her own sort of tactile
apology, a light rubbing of the young man’s bicep. Before John could finish gulping, the whole claque, which Sidney Bruck was attempting to expel from his territory, fell suddenly silent—frozen by the fast, heavy approach of Jehoshaphat Harris.

He had Spilkes and Arinopoulos behind him. As he neared the cluster of employees blocking his path, he brandished the photographer’s just-developed print.

It showed a lone bull, looking cold and confused, cocking its head at a statue of George Washington, as if to ask whether it was really necessary to cross the Delaware at such an hour on such a chilly morning.

“I’ve got a print-order meeting in two days!” cried Harris. “I’m supposed to be showing Oldcastle six pages of
wit
and
style
on the stock market. And what have I got? Some cockeyed, red-inked rant for a text and a bull with no bear for a picture! What are you all going to do about it?”

The question hung over the now-quiet hallway. Spilkes at last broke the silence with a soothing managerial pronouncement: “There’s still time,” he said.

Arinopoulos glared at the m.e. Did this commuting factotum have any idea how long it took to set up and execute one of these shoots?

Becky tried to position herself more directly between Harris and Cuddles. “Don’t rise, Aloysius,” she whispered, fearing he’d make some movement or quip that would thrust him into the boss’s awareness.

Harris’s eyes remained downcast upon the photographic fiasco in his hand. Finally, he asked: “Can we get Merrill to do an illo instead?”

“Of course,” said Spilkes, in the all’s-well-that-ends-well voice he tended to use in every phase of a crisis.

“Well,” sighed Harris, his love of strategy and narrow escape kicking in. “I suppose that will take care of the visuals.” He paused. “But there’s only one thing to do about the words. Miss O’Grady!”

His roar drew Nan out of the Copy Department.

“Where’s what’s-his-name?” he asked. “The guy who looks like Harold Lloyd. The one who’s always eating raisins.”