Bandbox (21 page)

As a contract writer, Max Stanwick did not have an office of his own. He’d been using Paul Montgomery’s for the past couple of weeks, waiting out a dry period. Until the right new lurid subject came along, he’d decided to do some work on
Boop-Boop-a-Dead
, his new novel. At the moment, however, his attentions were taken up with Daisy, who reported Arnold Rothstein’s pleasure with Max’s profile, which had finally reached newsstands. “He thought it dignified. Or so I’ve heard,” said Daisy, who was more interested in
finding out the meaning of some dire-sounding slang—“jelly” and “onse”—that the latest group of messengers had been using in front of the judge last night.

Back in the Art Department, Norman Merrill was deriving nostalgic satisfaction from a couple of illustrations he’d begun preparing just in case Waldo Lindstrom really had gone on the lam and would be unavailable for the next shoot.

“I’m sure the poor creature will be all right,” said Merrill, soothingly, while he inked a jut into his pencilled man’s perfect jaw. He was speaking not about Lindstrom, but of Canberra, the koala, who was due to leave tomorrow on an epic journey, through the Panama Canal and across the South Pacific, to a natural habitat in her native land.

Allen Case, knowing this was all for the best, still couldn’t find a reply.

“Of course, Mother and I will miss her terribly,” said Merrill, “but you’ve done the right thing. You’ve been heroic, really.”

It was, from Allen’s point of view, a paltry accomplishment. That whole evil warehouse, full of suffering animals, remained just as it was, protected, he now realized—in light of recent events involving Giovanni Roma, that hateful trafficker in veal calves—by bribes paid to the police. Despite the success with Canberra, whose passage was being financed by some of Mrs. Merrill’s Spanish-American War bonds, Gardiner Arinopoulos continued to flourish: you could see a lemur on the lawn in a picture he’d shot for this month’s
House & Garden
.

No product or perquisite languished outside Harris’s door. Hazel made a point of taking them home for herself during each night of his trip, just as she intended to take the brisket with her this evening. Right now she was idling through the list of words in an ad for the Enunciphone Company, whose phonograph records promised to cure the listener of embarrassment over mispronunciation:
Nothing
reveals your culture—or lack of it—so surely
. Well, she wasn’t so sure of that: the great big purple hickey on the neck of the approaching Wood Chipper, a giant love bite from some all-night hash-slinger, told you more about
his
culture than any inability to say “table d’hôte.” But to make conversation, she showed him the ad when he reached her desk.

He wouldn’t take the bait. She could tell he no more knew whether “canapés” was can-o-peas or ca-napes than she was sure, even after hearing about that treaty since the ninth grade, whether it was Ver-sigh or Ver-sails. But Chip wouldn’t risk pronouncing a single one of the words. It was a sorry era (erra? ear-a?) they lived in, thought Hazel, everybody so scared of being found out or suckered or just of falling behind. It exhausted you after a while. Shouldn’t a girl be able to find a decent husband without knowing, for sure, how to pronounce “pianist”? And yet, before Chip arrived, hadn’t she been thinking of ordering these records for herself?

“Hey,” she called to Allen Case, who was coming down the hall. “Help us out. How do you pronounce p-i-q-u-a-n-t? And what’s it mean?”

Allen proceeded with caution. Hazel had always seemed only slightly less dangerous than the Wood Chipper.

“A p-p-pungent flavor or taste,” said Allen. “Pleasantly so. L-l-like eucalyptus.”

Hazel asked him to repeat the definition, so that she could write it down. While she did so, Chip began fingering the stack of unopened mail on her desk.

“Keep your mitts off that,” ordered Hazel, however uninterested she herself might be in reading the letters, most of which were reader questions about the right hair tonic or shoelace to use.

“Thanks, Allen,” she said.

The copyeditor could now complete his errand for Nan: getting one of the buckram cases that the editor-in-chief kept on the floor of
his closet. Twice a year Harris had the Copy Department arrange the binding of
Bandbox
’s latest six issues for his personal shelves.

“Be my guest,” said Hazel, after Allen explained his presence here. “It’s unlocked.”

She slit open a letter, if only to justify keeping Chip away from the pile of envelopes. While she read its contents, he pretended to busy himself reading Harris’s copy of
Time
.

“Jeez,” said Hazel, surprisingly engrossed. “Do you remember that kid from Indiana? The one who came to the office that day—maybe a month ago? This letter’s from his mother.”

Everyone had long since forgotten about John Shepard, though the Wood Chipper was the only person on the masthead who’d
deliberately
dropped him from his mind, after failing to get any dope on the Hoosier brat that might interest Jimmy Gordon. But he made himself listen to Hazel now, as she read from Mrs. Thelma Shepard’s urgent appeal to Jehoshaphat Harris:

“He’s such a sweet kid,” said Hazel. “What do you think’s happened?”

Chip took the letter and examined the headlong flow of Mrs. Shepard’s
ink. “He probably got white-slaved to South America. Where they chopped his head off.”

“You’re a heartless crumbum,” said Hazel.

“Oh, relax, Snow,” said the Wood Chipper. “He probably just ran away.”

“He’d
already
run away,” said Hazel. “That’s how he came to New York. He told me.”

A cry—“Oh, n-n-no!”—came from Harris’s office.

Hazel leapt to her feet, imagining that Allen Case had somehow found John Shepard’s body on the floor of the boss’s closet. She dashed into the office.

“Oh, God,” she said, sighing with relief. “I’m never going to read another one of Stanwick’s goddamned books. You can take that home with you, Allen. He’ll never miss it.”

“I w-will,” said Allen, looking into the huge, sad eyes of the stuffed moosehead. Newly appalled, he staggered out of the office under this huge piece of taxidermy. Once he left, Chip came in, still holding the letter.

“Give me that,” said Hazel, who grabbed it and put it face up on Harris’s empty blotter.

“What do you expect
him
to do?” asked Chip.

“I expect him to go to the police with it,” said Hazel. “He can file a missing-persons report and pay his overdue bribes. All in one trip.”

On the morning of Valentine’s Day, the skies were dark, plump with impending rain and thunder. Despite some red Cupid silhouettes pasted to the walls, the atmosphere on the Graybar Building’s fourteenth floor was less amorous than it had been for most of the past two weeks. Clothes that had cushioned trysts inside the Fashion Department’s closets had been hung back up. The girls had returned to their typewriters, the young men to their layout tables. Even last week’s indoor-golf equipment had been restored to its proper shelves and purposes. Keyboards clicked; razors trimmed photographs; fresh proofs ejected themselves from the pneumatic mail tubes—even though Harris probably wouldn’t be in for another hour. On their first day back from England, custom dictated that Spilkes, Fine, and Montgomery first make a series of late, individual entrances. After they’d each served up a couple of anecdotes about the boss’s behavior abroad, it would be all right for Harris himself to sail down the main corridor.

At 10:05, it was still only Nan O’Grady, Norman Merrill, and Allen Case getting off the elevator.

“Nope,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, with a reassuring smile. “He’s not here yet.”

“I knew it,” said Nan, still clutching some of the
bon voyage
streamers she and her companions had flung toward the caged little koala, who’d departed from a dock at the end of West Forty-fourth Street.

“Jesus,” said Chip Brzezinski, noticing the colored ribbons. “What’d you do? Go down to the pier and welcome them home?”

“That’s stupid even for you,” said Nan, who with the possible exception
of Hazel was less of an apple-polisher than anyone at the magazine.

“Hey, O’Grady,” cried Hazel. “Come look at somethin’.” Nan tucked the streamers into her pocket and approached Harris’s office. Hazel, who was chatting with Daisy, pointed through the open door to the boss’s desk: “Tell me what you think.”

Nan went in and read the letter from John Shepard’s mother.

Hazel called to her. “You remember him, don’t you?”

“He came up to me at Oldcastle’s,” said Nan. “He asked whether I thought Stuart would be offended if he introduced himself.”

“I
know
he spoke to the judge,” said Daisy. “But all I can recall for sure is that the poor thing had never really kissed a girl.”

“Did he tell you that?” asked Nan.

“No, but I remember noticing how he ate one of the shrimp. You could—”

“Please,” said Nan. “I’ll use my imagination.” She turned to Hazel. “Are you showing that letter to everybody?”

“Yeah. If people like you and Becky know, then Himself may feel shamed into doing something.”

“He wouldn’t be shamed by us?” asked the countess, wounded that Hazel didn’t credit her with the same moral persuasiveness.

“No, not by us,” said Hazel, untroubled by her own exclusion.

“I’ll needle him about it,” promised Nan.

Daisy went back to reading a newspaper story on John Nicholas Brown, born America’s richest baby in 1900 thanks to the death of his father while Nicky himself was still in the womb. Now a young man of extreme eligibility, Brown was combining in Daisy’s mind this morning with the lost John Shepard, and the two were stirring up memories of her own rich young count, the lovely, wheezing Antonio. Despite her sympathy for Mrs. Shepard out there in Indiana, Daisy knew how important it was for these sensitive boys to be pried from their mamas. She wondered for a moment whether John
hadn’t taken the extreme measure of disappearance to elude an overzealous maternal grasp.

“Could you take a look at this?”

The Wood Chipper had once again come up to Nan, before she could start back to her own desk. He handed her a brief fashion piece—two badly typed pages about the advisability of a short man’s wearing a low, narrowly pointed collar. Nan took less than thirty seconds to make her way through the text’s shaky grammar and ask Chip why he’d produced this effusion.

“Just trying to pitch in,” he answered. “I figure we need all hands on deck with everything that’s going on here.”

Nan narrowed her eyes, knowing his motives had to be as mixed as his metaphors.

Chip looked away, hoping she wouldn’t guess that the squib was something he’d worked up for Jimmy Gordon. This was going to be his week, he felt sure. At least one of the crises facing
Bandbox
should provide him a chance to be so useful to Jimmy that Chip Brzezinski would finally be invited aboard
Cutaway
. He would hit the ground running with this little piece of copy on collars.

“Maybe I should show it to Case,” he muttered, when Nan failed to say anything more.

“Don’t,” she responded. “He’d be able to make it sound even more like you.”

Norman Spilkes, still wearing his overcoat, came suddenly into view. He made a fast approach to Hazel’s desk. “Is he in?” the m.e. asked.

Hazel shook her head no.

“How was your trip?” asked Nan.

“I learned to rhumba,” Spilkes answered, before noticing the Wood Chipper. “I’ll tell you more later.”

Once left alone with Hazel, he tried again: “Has he
called
?”

“Nope,” she answered.

Spilkes wondered when he’d be able to tell Harris about yet another problem that Andrew Burn had just imparted in the elevator: Wanamaker’s was shifting three-quarters of its menswear ads from
Bandbox
to
Cutaway
.

A couple of the catastrophes that Spilkes had become acquainted with since arriving home last night seemed soluble enough. First, put an end to the fiction contests: treat the fiasco of the current one as a big boy-are-we-embarrassed joke, and hold it in reserve against Sidney, a weapon to be deployed once he again got too big for his fancy flannel britches. Second, realize that the solution to Newman’s problem was even easier: fire him. But there was nothing easily done about all these numbers. Jimmy’s magazine had made it past the dangers of infancy. It was now another mouth for the economy to feed, and even in this boom there were only so many readers and advertisers to go around.
Cutaway
needed to be strangled in its playpen, but the tot seemed well on its way to committing parricide before that could be accomplished.

Hazel’s voice halted Spilkes’s dark train of thought. “If you find him before I do,” she said, “give him these.” She handed the managing editor two powder-blue slips of paper—one message asking Harris to report to the police commissioner’s office “as soon as possible,” and another requesting that he visit Hiram Oldcastle “IMMEDIATELY.”

“Mukluk!” cried Betty Divine. “That’s too loud even for me!”

The dog had begun barking once he smelled the familiar aroma of Joe Harris’s shaving lather. Harris himself was still outside the
closed door to Betty’s office, giving a box of candy to her secretary and smiling at the two girls in matching jumpers on their way to be photographed for
Pinafore
. If his English journey had been a men-only interlude, he now found himself the only male inside another single-sex paradise. There could scarcely be a more charming place to spend Valentine’s Day than Betty’s magazine. From one end of the eleventh floor to the other, girls were untying candy-box ribbons, opening envelopes, and plucking eyebrows in anticipation of their evening dinner dates.