Bandbox (2 page)

“And what’s the problem with Stanwick, Miss O’Grady? Some
people in his piece saying ‘who’ instead of ‘whom’? They’re
gangsters
, Irish.”

Nan, who until two years ago had edited lady novelists at Scribner’s, and who had taken this better-paying job to help support the mother she lived with out in Woodside, forced her lower lip to stiffen. The tear in her left eye sank backwards without spilling. She glared at her boss. “It’s not a question of subject versus object, Mr. Harris. It’s a question of … 
schvantz
.” She pronounced it with the lilting precision of a lieder singer.

“Whose schvantz?”
Harris wanted to know.

“Mr. Rothstein’s, apparently.”

Harris hesitated for only a second. “Well, keep it in!”

Nan, her lower lip now fully retracted, held her ground. “I assure you that it’s in no known style book, and I
guarantee
you that within a week of publication, a half-dozen of your precious advertisers will have protested its use in—”

“More
schvantzes
all around!” cried Harris, suddenly on his feet. “And the balls to go with them! This is a
men’s
magazine! Out! And close the door behind you!”

After Harris watched a trio of departing forms—Hazel’s among them—through the frosted glass of his door, he allowed himself to sit back down and light a cigar. He looked out the fourteenth-floor windows of his corner office to the vertical world aborning all around him. The Bowery Savings Bank loomed in the southeast, and a few streets over, close to the river, he could see the absurd new towers of Tudor City, in whose tiny apartments his aging pals had taken to stashing their chorines and tootsies. Directly across Lexington Avenue, and also one block south, squares of earth were roped off for the great excavations now sprouting the Chrysler and Chanin buildings.

It all made Harris dizzy. From his long-ago days on the
Newburgh
Messenger
until this past fall, when Oldcastle had moved the company a few blocks up from its old quarters and into the gleaming new Graybar, Harris had always climbed a single flight of stairs to reach his job. Now every morning and evening his stomach endured the fast jumps and drops of the Graybar’s elevator, the trip made worse if he happened to be sharing the car with Jimmy Gordon, who’d be on his way to and from the Graybar’s fanciest floor—reserved by Condé Nast even before the building went up, thus exciting Oldcastle’s competitive relocation.

Harris took a gulp of the countess’s hooch and opened up the
Evening Graphic
to a cartoon panel above the “Aviation News” column, a few square inches he liked to settle into for a moment or two each evening as the clouds began turning pink outside his skyscraping aerie. Tonight—January 13, 1928—“New York’s Gas Lit Life” featured the sketch of a buxom “stagestruck damsel,” a young Lillian Russell type, auditioning for a well-fed theatrical manager. Little more than her parasol and bloomers shielded her ample virtues.

Harris sighed, recalling the days of his youth, the long-ago eighties and nineties, an era before big trenchermen had ever heard of exercise and before bosoms had deflated to the pitiful boyish protuberances on modern girls like Hazel Snow. He closed his eyes and, for a few seconds, took himself back to summer nights alive with the tootlings of oompah bands instead of the discordant, mystifying notes of jazz; to the orating politician’s thrilling cry for free silver instead of Everyman’s current pursuit of ubiquitous easy money.

Harris was sixty years old and, in truth, as much a throwback to the age of McKinley as the old
Bandbox
had been. But in order to sustain his reanimating magic, he had to keep current with all the flat chests and blues singers and tennis champions driving this frantic new age into which he’d outlived himself. If only he could bring himself to leave the game, gracefully conclude his career by editing
Knife and Fork
, Oldcastle’s food magazine, for a couple of years. All
he’d have to do for each month’s cover was find a good-looking pork chop or strawberry cake, neither of which, unlike Waldo Lindstrom, would have a cocaine habit.

But the setting sun chose this moment to catch a silver cigarette case near the edge of Harris’s desk. The case’s inscription—
JEHOSHAPHAT HARRIS, EDITOR OF THE YEAR, 1927
—glinted upwards into his still-clear, still-avid eyes, reminding him of his greatest moment. It had come only last year, from the Gotham Magazine Editors Association, whose GME Awards—the Gimmes, to those in the trade—still stirred Harris’s competitive juices to an almost indecent degree for a man of his age and at-last-recognized achievements.

No, this was not going to be Jimmy Gordon’s year. In fact, so long as there was anything he could do about it, Jimmy Gordon’s year would forever fall somewhere on the calendar between yesterday and never. Harris threw the
Graphic
into his leather wastebasket and grabbed the photograph of Leopold and Loeb. Beneath Jimmy’s taunt he underlined his own inscription, the brief directive he had scrawled before dispatching the wrong cylinder through the pneumatic tube to Houlihan:
Take care of this
.

He at last succeeded in sending the picture on its way. Once he heard the cylinder’s distant thunk, he rose from his chair and put on his hat.

Loyalty was Becky Walter’s strong suit. No longer secretary to Cuddles Houlihan, she nonetheless darted into his office once she heard him coming to with a low moan. Taking note of his already-rising
shiner, Becky opened the window and scooped up a handful of snow from the fourteenth-floor ledge. “Here,” she said, gently pressing it against Cuddles’ eye. The city was in the sixth day of a terrible cold snap, and a rush of air through the open window furthered his revival.

Becky noted how, with his remaining open eye, Cuddles had begun giving her “the look,” that moony, lovesick one, which, even at half-strength, bothered her. For her first four years out of Wells College—until six months ago, when Joe Harris gave her a staff writer’s slot, covering movie stars, and even a few on Broadway—Becky had been Cuddles’ Girl Friday and the object of his gentlemanly but still quite evident affections. It was proving as difficult to graduate from this latter role as it had been to climb two notches up the masthead. So, seeing the Cyclops version of the look, she turned her head away, a small movement that brought her gaze to the vodka bottle lying on Cuddles’ blotter. She frowned.

“I don’t know where it came from,” he said. “Honest injun.”

Becky had heard this song before, but Cuddles, in his usual near-murmur, persisted through a complicated alibi. “I was at the Palace all afternoon, talking to Doc Cook and Morris, seeing if we could work up some new angle—‘Elevator Boys Tell of Vaude Stars’ Ups and Downs’—something like that, anyway. But I only came away with a sick feeling. Do you know they’ve put an electric piano in the lobby? The
Palace
—having to lure people in off the streets! They’ve started keeping the doors open so the passing parade will hear the music and come in from the sidewalk. Jesus, Becky, they’re going to be booking radio acts before the year is out.”

After a dozen fat blots on his copybook, Cuddles’ turf had been reduced by Harris to little more than the ever-shrinking vaudeville beat. But as she lifted the snow from his eye and repacked it into a linen handkerchief, Becky doubted her old boss’s alibi. She could hear him fleshing out this tale of his afternoon with just enough
specifics to make it seem real. She wondered if Cuddles hadn’t really been to Manking, their old Times Square Chinese restaurant, a place so inauthentically awful it couldn’t even transliterate the name of the city whose cuisine it claimed to be serving. Two of the waiters were actually Japanese and kept a bottle of sake around for Mista Hoorihan and his young lady friend when they arrived for those dozens of three-hour lunches during which Cuddles gave her the lowdown on the magazine business and life, and, as their first year together turned into the second, gave her, more and more intently, the look.

“Ouch,” cried Cuddles, upon Becky’s reapplication of the snowpack. His small protest raised in her the same tender feelings she used to experience when, past three o’clock, she would try to get up from the booth at Manking, and he’d say, “Don’t go,” lest he have to return to the office and Jehoshaphat Harris’s increasingly baleful stare.

After two years turned into three and then four, Cuddles finally arranged her promotion as the best thing for them both. Since then, Becky had felt like a creature released into the wild, sometimes wondering whether it wouldn’t be easier to continue suffering Cuddles’ overage calf love than to hunt down stories to feed the bulldog—namely, Harris.

“Do you know that
Oh, Kay!
closes this weekend?” asked Cuddles, who knew he was going to steal Becky’s linen handkerchief once its anti-inflammatory work was done. “You call yourself our Broadway correspondent, and I’ll bet you’ve never seen it. Why don’t you let me get two comps for tomorrow night?”

Becky, now mopping up the inside of the windowsill, didn’t answer.

“I suppose you’ve got plans with the monk,” said Cuddles.

Becky turned and frowned, and started to say “medievalist,” the proper title of her boyfriend, a Columbia Ph.D. candidate with a job
at the Cloisters. But she had corrected Cuddles on this matter a dozen times before and had recently pledged herself to the avoidance of any further banter about Daniel.

“Why don’t you concentrate on not getting canned?” she replied.

“I suppose I’d better look at this,” he said, nodding at the pneumatic canister that had arrived on his desk sometime after the vodka bottle. He opened it up, looked at the photograph, and groaned at the message in Jimmy Gordon’s big handwriting. He handed the picture to Becky.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Why you? Why doesn’t he make Spilkes handle this?”

Norman Spilkes, the managing editor who used to work for AT&T, had brought a certain smooth efficiency to the month-by-month running of Harris’s great makeover.

“ ’Phat’s deepest reflexes are twitching,” said Cuddles, who now comprehended the origin of the vodka bottle. “During yesteryear’s crises I was his right-hand man. Comrade Stoli was always on the left.”

Becky noticed that, despite the snowpack, Cuddles’ shiner was turning into a deep purple bull’s-eye against his small, boyish features and still prematurely gray hair. The strategy of his little mustache, grown long ago in an effort to look older, now seemed telltale and obvious; it made the forty-six-year-old Aloysius Houlihan a living spectre of his endearing, quenched youth. The slight limp, which had kept him out of the war, now also seemed a faded adolescent charm, like a stammer; fewer and fewer people knew that this by-now-consummate New Yorker had acquired it when a wheel on his parents’ wagon had accidentally rolled over him during a pilgrimage between Salt Lake City and some Utah holy site. Cuddles had been raised a strict Mormon in the 1890s, grandson of an upstate Irishman who’d joined the westward trek of Brigham Young.

“I’m going to get some actual ice,” said Becky, who on her way out of the room inserted the thrill killers’ photo back into the canister: better to take it with her, lest Cuddles attend to it in ill-considered haste. She made her way through the fourteenth floor’s warren of offices, most of which had their doors open, toward the distant icebox. The little chains on the overhead lights had been pulled on during the past half-hour, but their illumination couldn’t really bleach the dark blue twilight that was pouring through the windows and giving the floor a peaceful, almost eternal feeling, so at odds with the nerve-wracked perishability of the product produced on it.

When Becky passed the open office of darkly handsome Stuart Newman, author of “The Bachelor’s Life” column, she gave a thin smile and picked up her pace. Melancholy and priapic, Newman had dated almost every girl at
Bandbox
and nearly half the ones at
Pinafore
. He was the sort of man women liked to think they could change—could make, in his case, less brooding and less of a sex hound. Newman liked Becky—everyone did—though his most deeply buried, unrealized affection was probably for the crisply mannered Nan O’Grady, whose paper cuffs seemed to ward him off the way a surgeon’s gloves guarded against germs. A girl who might, deep down, dislike him as much as he disliked himself didn’t come along every day, and if Newman gave himself half a chance, he might yet get almost serious about her.

But Newman’s biggest problem lay in his already
being
reformed, in one respect. A once-serious drinker, prone to blackouts and brawls that threatened to leave his Olympian face looking like a palooka’s, he had two years ago gone off the sauce. Newman was now the only entirely sober man at the magazine, and abstinence of any kind made Harris nervous. Newman gave his boss the creeps whenever he went in to get next month’s column idea approved and asked for ginger ale once Harris invited him to pull up a chair. The editor-in-chief’s
discomfort would soon kill the conversation, and the two of them would just sit there, listening to the fizz in Newman’s Canada Dry until Harris threw him out.

Newman’s dark side gave him a certain good sense when it came to office politics, but Becky, passing his door, decided that she couldn’t let this tempest out of its pneumatic teapot without putting Cuddles at risk. For all she knew, solving this sordid little problem was his last chance to save his job. So she continued down the corridor, past the Copy Department, wherein Nan and Allen Case were beavering over Max Stanwick’s galleys.

“In graf six,” Allen inquired in his soft stutter. “Rothstein’s sh-shoe size has been changed?”

“The countess adjusted it upwards from eleven to thirteen.” Nan rolled her eyes.

“S-source?” asked Case.

“Personal knowledge,” answered Nan. No one would think of questioning Daisy DiDonna on such a matter; if she said Rothstein trod the earth in thirteens, it was because she had, on at least one night, unlaced them herself. Stanwick’s piece made no direct reference to the size of the gangster’s now-sanctioned
schvantz
, but the astute reader had only to travel up Rothstein’s socks and garters to make an inference from his footwear.