Bandbox (20 page)

Newman could hear Rosemary’s voice, about five days ago at the Plaza: “You know, every great stick man I’ve been acquainted with has been even
better
on booze. Honey, I’d love to have known you before you went off the sauce.”

He looked down into the cup’s two inches of amber liquid—as terrifying as a monsoon, as inviting as a warm bath.

A moment passed.

“Another, pal?”

So great was the shock to his system, he didn’t realize, until hearing the waiter’s voice, that he’d already downed the liquor in two gulps.

“Yes, please,” he said, at which point he felt unaccountably normal.

An hour and fifteen minutes went by before he returned to the Press Club.

“You just made it,” said Fitz, pointing to the dais, where Coolidge was now rising to speak. Fitz was less peeved than slyly proud—hadn’t he told the guys from Salt Lake and Houston what a Lothario his highly paid magazine buddy was?

The president cleared his throat.

“He looks better in his redskin headdress,” whispered Fitz, an ardent Democrat. Newman smiled.

Those in the audience anticipating some genial after-dinner fare were soon disabused and dozing. The president began his remarks by droning through statistics about the Press Club’s new headquarters: the library’s five thousand books; the property’s ten-million-dollar valuation; its 270 feet of frontage on F Street.

“Christ,” said Fitz. “He’s like some general-store owner counting up the cereal boxes.”

But the president went on to launch a lyric paean to modernity and money:

“The construction has transformed your Press Club into a great business institution. It is possible to see in this spacious building, so magnificently equipped, a symbol of the development of the whole United States. The old, the outworn, the poorly adapted has been discarded to make place for the new.…”

“Jesus,” hissed Fitz. “He
does
want to run again. I’d almost swear it.” He craned forward, wondering if Coolidge had picked this moment, with the whole of the nation’s press before him, to retract last summer’s retirement announcement.

Newman, meanwhile, could feel a thoroughgoing change in his own body politic. The three Bushmills doubles had finally effected a revolution. The Wets had returned to power on a flood tide of scotch, repealing Newman’s two years of Prohibition. He sat quietly, but smiled broadly, wondering if Fitz had noticed the shift in administrations.

But his pal was still leaning into Coolidge’s speech, listening for whatever newsflash might be lurking amidst the inventory and the bromides. The president, however, soon began a severe nasal scolding: “The constant criticism of all things that have to do with our country, with the administration of its public affairs, with the operation of its commercial enterprises, with the conduct of its social life, and the attempt to foment class distinctions and jealousies, weaken and disintegrate the necessary spirit of patriotism.”

Newman nodded vigorously. Fitz whispered “Class, my ass” to the man from Salt Lake.

“In no small degree,” continued Coolidge, without looking up at his audience, “you are the keepers of the public conscience.”

“Or, in my case,” said Newman, rather loudly—as he thought of his own magazine and how much, he was surprised to realize, he loved his job—“the arbiter of the necktie!” He reached over and good-naturedly tugged the Windsor knot beneath Fitz’s throat. His friend looked confused.

“The spirit of mankind,” pronounced the president, “is more and more asserting itself, more and more demanding that the affairs of government and society be conducted in accordance with the laws of truth. The people who neglect that precept are bound for a moral explosion.”

Newman, whose insides and brain were now popping like one long glorious Fourth of July, found himself astonished by the Chief Executive’s eloquence. How had he for so long missed the Periclean wisdom in this dour little Yankee they took so for granted? The man
was Lincoln; he was Jefferson; he was the two of them rolled into one. As the speech concluded, Newman applauded more lustily than anyone in the huge room.

“Thanks, I’ll take two,” he said, when the waiter came around with a box of Havana cigars from the president’s recent trip to Cuba.

The Associated Press man began offering a sort of benediction, during which Fitz, who knew the drill, said “On your feet” to his tablemates. They were close enough to the dais to be part of the group allowed to approach Coolidge, who along with the club president had begun conducting a quick receiving line.

Newman was hustled along between the man from Salt Lake and the fellow from Houston. He felt part of the crowd, a sensation he hadn’t had for years—and with it came another old, once-familiar feeling. He was like a rubber tree that had just been tapped; loose-limbed, unburdened. Yes, he was a
tree
! And his leaves were on fire! He was brilliantly aflame—experiencing the “explosion” which Coolidge, that Solon, that sage, had prophesied a minute ago!

“Mr. Stuart Newman,” said Fitz, presenting him, the next in line, to the President of the United States.

“Mr. Newman,” said Coolidge.

“Fucking well spoken, Cal!” cried Stuart, who grabbed the president’s hand, and then his lapels, before falling face first into his stuffed shirt.

Joe Harris sat, overcoat buttoned, under a tartan blanket, on an enclosed portion of the ship’s upper deck, not far from the second of its
four great funnels. He sipped his lobster cocktail and finished a six-month-old issue of
Punch
, imagining what he could do with
that
moribund franchise.

For more than three years, between the time
Bandbox
had really hit its stride and the moment Jimmy left, Harris had more than once thought of his magazine as a big liner just like this, sleek and punctual, sliding into subscribers’ mailboxes the way the ship docked to the pleasure of all awaiting her arrival. The boiler room below might be a sweaty, even chaotic, affair—Jimmy shoveling ideas so fast that half his coals spilled onto the ground instead of going into the furnace—but none of that showed on deck, where everything was bridge games and balloons.

On this actual ship he gave his travel companions more freedom of movement than they had in the London hotel—Spilkes signed up for rhumba lessons and lectures on the Boer War; Fine played billiards and haunted the kitchens—though Harris insisted on their unanimous assembly for dinner. He shunned any invitation to the captain’s table, preferring each night to be the captain of his own.

Through the glass enclosure he could now see Paul Montgomery standing alone out on the deck, staring at the freezing February sea. Poor guy, thought Harris, imagining how Paulie must be thinking of his old man, still lying full fathom five in the vasty deep.

Whereas, in fact, Paulie was thinking about Billy Durant, the Jersey manufacturer who’d given up making motorcars to concentrate on stock deals. The rusted jalopy and the solid-gold stock ticker: the story he’d be starting work on once they got home. Might, Paulie wondered, a book come out of it? He really needed to talk to Harold Ober. But wait: Ober was in a bad odor with Harris over Roebling’s bulls-and-bears fiasco. Better not approach him just now. Maybe Stanwick would have some good advice about getting a deal through some other agent?

Writing a book would be personal insurance against whatever fall
the magazine could be getting ready to take. Throughout this whole trip he’d wanted, hopelessly, to talk with
somebody
about how far off his game the Big Guy seemed. Those advertising numbers: Would they be even worse on their return home? Would Jimmy Gordon be lapping up ever more press and subscribers? Paulie still wished he’d been able to spend more time with Jimmy at Oldcastle’s party, just to get a feel for what sort of welcome might await him on the eighteenth floor.

He gazed out at a tiny whitecap. Once he was back on dry land, wouldn’t it be time to jump ship?

And yet, for now, they were still on the bounding main. He should be spending some time with the chief, he decided, so he turned around to send Harris a big smile through the glass.

Alas, Fine had just sat down in the deck chair to the editor’s left.

Well, that still left the one on his right, to which Paulie now beat a path.

“Colder than a witch’s!” he cried, clapping his gloved hands. “Boy, that looks great.” He pointed to Harris’s cocktail and took off his coat.

Fine was reading aloud from the mimeographed summary of shipboard and international news. Grand Duchess Anastasia had arrived in New York three days ago, and Fine had a brainstorm: “How about a two-page cartoon spread on ‘Famous People You Only Thought Were Dead’? You know, a ninety-year-old John Wilkes Booth playing
Lear
in Kokomo? Woodrow Wilson, recovered from the stroke, grab-assing some girls on the Riviera?”

It wasn’t the world’s worst idea, but once Harris thought of how good Cuddles used to be at executing this sort of thing, he had to banish the proposal.

“Nah. Ignore her,” he said, meaning Anastasia. “The Commies may turn out to be the coming thing. We shouldn’t keep pissing them off.” He paused for a minute. “What do we really know about those guys? Do they include any regular Joes?” He meant potential readers.

“I could go on campus,” said Paulie, whose thoughts of defection from the magazine couldn’t drown out the siren call of a potential assignment. “Attend a few of the young guys’ meetings, interview some of the big Bolsheviks behind the lecterns.”

Fine sank into silence. Harris closed his eyes, imagining their arrival in New York on Monday. He would spend that night at his place in Murray Hill and hold off seeing Betty until the following morning, Valentine’s Day. He’d burst into her office with two armfuls of flowers and chocolate.

Her telegrams had stopped altogether, the shore-to-ship variety remaining somehow beyond her, and their little spell apart had done them good, thought Harris. Maybe he’d be less dependent when he got back, less in need of making those dozen daily phone calls, which he knew were an object of sport to his staff.

The ship continued west at twenty-five knots, and the lobster cocktail had begun its work. The editor-in-chief was now at least one half-sheet to the wind.

Maybe, he thought, last month’s clouds had really lifted.

“We could put the younger guys, the students, into red sweaters.”

He realized Paulie was still talking about Communists.

“Right,” he murmured. “Red sweaters.”

Closing his eyes, he tried concentrating on blue skies.

Mrs. von Erhard gave Chip Brzezinski a dirty look. He was walking past her with a newspaper he’d bought somewhere else this morning. Hannelore kept track of her Midtown competitors no less
carefully than Oldcastle and Nast kept an eye on each other’s magazines, and she guessed that the Wood Chipper had gotten his
Daily News
from Kid Herman, the onetime lightweight contender who sold papers at Forty-second and Broadway.

Chip gave Hannelore a tip of his hat—another loan from the Fashion Department. She ignored him and muttered something to Siegfried, who gently urged her to cheer up. The same events that had left Chip unable to postpone buying the paper on his walk from Ninth Avenue to the office had raised the von Erhards’ own sales this Monday morning, February 13. None of the Oldcastle and Nast employees could stand sitting down for work without reading the latest on the swirl of plagiarism, narcotics-selling, and public drunkenness that now threatened to engulf
Bandbox
.

Theophilus Palmer’s real identity remained a secret. Today’s papers could still say only that he was “missing”—same as Waldo Lindstrom. The police were warning the model not to skip bail, but the gossip columns were rife with speculation that Lindstrom had already made a deal with the DA and was being sequestered by the cops themselves. His absence, for whatever reason, suggested further legal peril for Giovanni Roma, though it was conceded that the restaurateur’s moral health would now improve without Lindstrom around to lure him into further unprintable acts.

Patrick Boylan, a spokesman for Commissioner Warren, said that payoffs were not part of the way the New York Police Department did business, but even so, in light of the newspaper rumors, investigators would “be asking Mr. Harris some questions upon his return from the so-called Mother Country.”

Mentions of Stuart Newman’s unfortunate evening in the nation’s capital continued to contain more misinformation than the column inches about Gianni or Mr. Palmer, thanks mostly to Fitz O’Neal, who for Newman’s sake had fabricated as favorable an explanation as he could. There was “a woman involved,” Fitz told his colleagues
in the press. The code of a gentleman prevented him from saying more, but people had to understand that Newman was not himself—was, frankly, in despair over a romantic disappointment.

Newman had, in fact, spent three nights in a Washington jail, charged only with being drunk and disorderly (“
B’BOX SCRIBE: D&D IN D. OF C
.”), though he was thought to be the first man ever to have assaulted a President of the United States by accident. His current whereabouts remained, like Lindstrom’s and Mr. Palmer’s, unknown.

Harris’s demise seemed to be approaching so fast that Chip worried there might not be time for him to contribute to it. He also feared that the whole remaining staff of
Bandbox
would soon be lined up at Jimmy Gordon’s door asking for jobs.

Half the magazine’s offices remained empty on this last morning of Harris’s absence. Outside Fine’s door, baskets of fancy comestibles, sent over from purveyors hoping for a write-up or mention, were now piled waist high. A frozen brisket, dispatched by an over-excited butcher who’d gotten wind of the Williamsburg versus Williamsburg piece, had been carted to the icebox by Hazel once she’d noticed the dripping. The grooming products in front of Newman’s office—an array of shaving brushes, nail clippers, and tooth powder—seemed curiously forlorn, as if keeping vigil against his uncertain return. Cuddles’ entryway was blocked by hopeful books, tickets, and sheet music, though in his case the space looked much as it did on days when he was present.