Bandbox (39 page)

The editor-in-chief strode off toward Shep: “After this, City Hall’s going to feel like a comedown!”

The young man assured him that wouldn’t be the case; he was looking forward to shopping for a new suit before his parents got to town tomorrow.

“And after that you’ll need a place to live,” said Harris, putting an arm around the kid’s shoulder. “Even
we
can’t afford to keep you at
the Commodore forever! Find some place you can afford on a fact-checker’s salary.”

“You mean—?” Shep looked even more delighted than Daisy, who was overhearing this news.

Ten minutes before, in the coatcheck room, Hazel had given Shep an astonishingly continental kiss. She now saw the countess’s old reflexes kicking in. “Down, girl,” she warned Daisy. “You’ve quit the field.”

It was at this moment the moosehead appeared through Malocchio’s front window. Allen Case stood outside, struggling to hold it. Noticing both creatures, Betty steered Joe just the right number of degrees that he wouldn’t see his old trophy, which caused little enough stir among the partygoers who did see it, since most of them were far enough gone on Gianni’s olive oil to assume they’d spotted some dead variant of a pink elephant.

After setting the taxidermy down in the vestibule, Allen ventured into the restaurant. He worked his way through the crowd to Mr. Merrill, who noticed that he was wearing a backpack.

“Are you going away?” the illustrator asked. His alarm was shared by Nan, who had approached to see what was going on.

Allen nodded. He had finally found his dream job. During the recent spate of wires between the San Rafael Valley and New York, it had developed that Mr. Isidore Mazzaferro, concerned by the ranch’s sudden understaffing (two cowboys having quit on the day of the arrests), needed an assistant. There was a tiny cabin on the nature preserve that Allen could have all to himself.

“Mr. M-Merrill, will you take the m-moose?”

“Yes,” the illustrator at last assured him—if Allen promised to sit here long enough to eat a plate of steamed Italian vegetables. By the time this antipasto arrived, arrangements were being made for Shep to take over the copyeditor’s apartment on Cornelia Street.

Two tables away, Cuddles Houlihan reached into his pants pocket for a pneumatic-mail cylinder, which he plunked down next to his plate. “You know,” he said to Becky, “Hannelore should have sifted Siegfried into one of these. It’d be a good way of staying in circulation.”

“Why on earth have you got that with you?” Becky asked.

“Well, it didn’t hit me on the head, but after reading what’s inside I could probably use a cold compress anyway. Here, tell me what you think.”

Becky opened the tube and unrolled a note composed in Harris’s big hand. “I NEED A NEW MANAGING EDITOR. CONSIDER YOURSELF PROMOTED.”

Cuddles watched her reading. “I don’t know if I can say yes. Doesn’t the job require a house in Connecticut, plus a wife and children?”

Becky poured herself more olive oil and took a breath. “No children,” she said evenly. “At least not for a while.”

Cuddles’ expression dissolved into something like the one with which he’d watched Nazimova three months ago at the Palace. “I do have a cat,” he said, his voice trembling. “But he’s down to one life.”

Becky looked him in the eye. “That’s all I have, too. You’d better handle it with care, Mr. Houlihan.”

Cuddles gulped. “Let’s get out of here and go over to Manking. There’s a bottle of sake with our names on it.”

The two of them waited half a minute, until the noise reached a new peak that would allow them to slip away unnoticed.

They nearly succeeded, but at the restaurant’s front door they came up against the unexpected arrival of Paul Montgomery.

“Hello!” he said, sweeping past.

Without removing his hat, and in imitation of an already-famous
gesture, Paulie jumped onto the lone empty table at the outer rim of the party. Motioning to one of the waiters for an empty glass, he raised it high above his head and called out, with the full measure of his sincerity, to the now-absolutely-quiet crowd: “Hey, you guys! What do we do for an encore?”

Thomas Mallon’s books include the novels
Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman
, and
Aurora 7
, as well as a collection of essays,
In Fact
. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar
, and
GQ
. He has been the recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, and in 1998 he received the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. He lives in Washington, D.C.