Bandbox (7 page)

But as Saturday had worn on, with Cuddles sleeping through three showings of
The Wreck of the Hesperus
at Proctor’s Eighty-sixth Street, and Kitty Sark, his unfed cat, greeting his homecoming with howls from beneath the coffee table, this strategy began to look less inspired. On Sunday, Cuddles managed to rouse himself from the couch only long enough to serve the creature some anchovy-topped
kibble: “I’d say you’re six down, three to go, sport.” KS showed no sign of appreciating this jauntily dire
bon appétit
.

Today, sleep was the only nourishment Cuddles himself craved, but his current helping of it was interrupted by a sharp poke in the ribs. The sight that met his opening eyes was not the Palace’s celestial ceiling fixtures but Becky Walter in a purple cloche hat. Too startled to give her the “look,” Cuddles managed to murmur: “You can’t be my Gibson girl without a brim.”

“This style affords greater warmth,” she said, mimicking the fashion boilerplate that had so often passed between their desks. “And greater peripheral vision,” she added, as severely as she could.

“How’d you find me?”

“You may not have noticed, but you’re not cutting too wide a swath these days. After Takeshi told me you’d already drunk and run, BRYant 4300 sounded like the number to ring.” Beatrice, at the Palace box office, had confirmed Cuddles’ presence in one of the two seats she always kept for him in row G, center right.

“Why’d you bother with the edit meeting at all?” asked Becky, taking off her coat to sit down beside him.

“I’ve been asking myself the very same thing,” answered Cuddles.

“You’re tight.”

“You’re right.”

“Shaddup already,”
said a voice from row H. The play-on music for Miss Patricola had already announced the second half, and the popular violin-playing songstress was entering to strong applause from regulars wondering whether she would begin her return to the Palace with “Me No Speaka Good English” or “Lovin’ Sam (The Sheik of Alabam’).”

“Listen to me,” Becky whispered to Cuddles. “You’ve got one last—”

He pointed in the direction of Miss Patricola’s violin, whose E string had begun wailing toward a first comic crescendo. “I’m seeing a distinguished
afterlife for Kitty Sark,” he said to Becky. “As top-of-the-line catgut. Worthy of a Stradivarius. Delighting the masses and the longhairs both. It’ll be a far better world than the one he’s known with me.”

Becky shook her head, trying to figure out why she even bothered. “At least I didn’t bring Case with me,” she declared, realizing that Cuddles’ catgut fantasy would have further strained the copy-editor’s nerves. What poor creatures laid off from the circus for the winter, she now wondered, had done the opening animal act here this afternoon? She looked down at her program: oh, Fink’s Mules. She’d seen them once, years ago, with her father and mother, in Buffalo. An act benign enough for even Case, though not for the poor colored sap who had to get kicked by the supposedly high-IQ livestock.

Miss Patricola surrendered the stage to two aging precursors of Gallagher and Shean.

—I said goodbye to the train and jumped on my girl
,

one informed the other, prompting Cuddles to mutter, “Jesus, this routine has hair on it.”

Becky hissed: “Exactly what are you accomplishing here?”

“I
was
—more or less—waiting for Dr. Julian Siegel, official dentist to the National Vaudeville Association. But then you put your attractive backside into the seat I’d saved for him.”

“Oh, really?” asked Becky. “When was he ‘more or less’ supposed to meet you?”

“Anytime this month. He’s been pitching himself as a subject. Maybe Fine could write the piece, what do you think? ‘This Guy’s Act Is Like Pullin’ Teeth!’ ”

“Tell me, are you going to put this story on Harris’s desk before or after he fires you?”

Cuddles hesitated a moment before responding. “After, I think. It’ll make him miss me.”

Becky closed her eyes, trying to decide how to stanch the flow
of quips and get him to concentrate. It was time to reach for the strongest tourniquet she had.

“Aloysius?”
she asked.

Cuddles’ given name had ages ago been replaced with this backformation from an adjective offered, at a supper party, by Mrs. Theodore Dreiser to her husband: “Mr. Houlihan seems such a
cuddly
man.” Months, sometimes years, now passed between utterances of “Aloysius,” but Becky had waited a moment too long to shock Cuddles with the sound of his real moniker. The wheezing comic duo were gone; the houselights were down; and the afternoon’s main attraction had stepped, all alone, into the next-to-closing spotlight.

“Soft,” said Cuddles. “She speaks.”

It was the great Nazimova. She had been playing the theatre, off and on, for almost as long as Taylor Holmes, inserting a cash-filled week at the Palace into her more stately schedule of Strindberg and Ibsen. With the first syllables from her throat, she reclaimed the house, stunning everyone from stagehands to Fink’s most ornery mule into rapt silence. Her offering today was “India,” a twenty-five-minute playlet in which she became a purple-saried young matron of the subcontinent, angrily mourning the baby trampled to death during a parade the local rajah had scared up for some visiting English prince. Assisted by two actors who might as well have been props, Nazimova proceeded, in less than half an hour, to make moving pictures seem a Coney Island contrivance, and their recent voice an unsynchronized joke. By the time she was through, everyone in the audience wanted to don a bedsheet and spin cotton with Gandhi, or just go out and pop the snoot of the first limey they found crossing Forty-seventh Street.

Cuddles was actually wiping a tear when the lights came up. “You know,” he said, sniffling, “you could have brought Case. She really didn’t blame the elephant.”

The Watson Sisters, Kitty and Fanny, had the thankless task of following Nazimova and closing the show. Midway through the girls’ duet, Cuddles leaned over to Becky and asked: “How about a late, late lunch at Manking? The boys looked like they were getting ready to do something special with a yak when I dropped in this morning.”

“No,” she replied. “You’re coming with me.” The moment the curtain dropped, she began propelling him, by his elbow, up the aisle. She was grateful for the help provided by the orchestra’s peppy recessional march, a surviving feature of the Palace’s shaky but still-in-place policy of only two shows a day. At almost any other vaude house, Fink’s Mules would already be back on stage.

Becky hustled Cuddles past the lobby’s electric piano and out the door, into air that over the weekend had gone from frigid to merely brisk. “Get that cab,” she commanded.

“What for?”

“It’ll be the most legitimate item on your expense sheet this month,” she promised, pulling him into the backseat and directing the driver to Broadway and Sixty-fifth.

Alarmed by the apparent specificity of her plan, Cuddles started to squirm. He looked out the taxi’s rear window and muttered: “I’d thought I might go and find Dr. Siegel, the molar jockey. His office is the other way.” The cab was already clattering toward its destination, and Becky remained resolutely silent until it stopped, at her order, in front of the Macfadden Building.

Cuddles looked up and made a grim deduction. “You made an appointment for me in Personnel.”

No serious editor wanted to work here. In the world of print, Bernarr Macfadden, the frizzily pompadoured czar of Macfadden Publications—crazy with crusading belief in exercise, eugenics, free love, and cole slaw; just as ululant against booze, tobacco, and
censorship—made Joe Harris look more buttoned-up than Coolidge. But Becky said nothing as she maneuvered Cuddles through the lobby and into an elevator car.

He pointed to the white-gloved operator and feigned calm: “So where’s the indoor aviator taking us?”

The car rose to the floor for
Physical Culture
, at which two muscle-men got off and three got on. It continued upward past
True Romances
, the magazine at which Becky sometimes feared
she
would wind up, should Joe Harris lose his war with Jimmy Gordon. Finally, the elevator stopped at the floor for the New York
Evening Graphic
. Becky tugged Cuddles forward.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith,” he whispered. “The Ninth Circle itself.”

For the past four years the
Graphic
had been Macfadden’s tabloid orgy of tub-thumping and titillation. Electric fans blew a sickly sweet smell toward Cuddles and Becky as they advanced, like Hansel and Gretel, onto the floor where it was produced. The
Graphic
had not entirely recovered from its experiment with perfumed ink, and even now persisted in publishing itself each night on pink newsprint. At the far end of the newsroom—a term even the most loyal employee here used only loosely—Cuddles could recognize Emile Gauvreau, the respectable, constantly agonized managing editor Macfadden had hired to run the rag. Limping back and forth between two desks, tugging on his black forelock, Gauvreau was trying to decide which story to lead with tonight. Would the
Graphic
’s distinctive vertiginous headline, each letter a skinny skyscraper unto itself, go to a missing Smith College co-ed or to the sixty-year-old Episcopal rector with marriage on his mind?

“She’s five-five, a hundred and thirty. Busty,” said the reporter arguing the Smith girl’s case.

“The rev’s temptress is thirty years old, half the geezer’s age,” came the opposing point of view. “And she’s Catholic.”

“The Smithie’s father’s a broker. They’re Social Register. Up in Northampton they’ve got Boy Scouts
dragging a pond
, for Christ’s sake.”

It was a tough call for Gauvreau; Becky looked at the clock and decided there was no time to wait for him to make it. She pushed Cuddles along toward their final destination here. The
Graphic
had no foreign desk to block their way, but the two of them did have to pass the health-foods editor and the columnist who analyzed readers’ handwriting before they reached the Photo Department.

“Mr. Wender, please,” said Becky.

“Hey, Jerry!” shouted a boy at the department’s first desk. “You gotta goil here!”

“Becks!” cried a slender fellow who, as he came running, looked not much older than the boy who’d summoned him. “Watch out for my hands,” he said, managing to keep Becky free from inkstains while he gave her a hug. Cuddles, bewildered about his business here, made a jealous pout.

Jerry Wender, Becky explained, was a townie she used to date in Aurora, New York, when she was going to Wells. “He’s the Composograph man,” she announced. Jerry swelled with professional pride: the
Graphic
’s notorious composite photographs, their fakery disclaimed in four-point type under the caption, were the tabloid’s major draw.

“My masterpiece,” said Jerry, rushing back to his desk to fetch a print. “At least until now.”

The photo he brought out depicted Daddy Browning and Peaches Heenan, the city’s most famous, if recently estranged, sugar daddy and gold digger. The once-happy couple were wearing what looked like harem outfits and awaiting the suggestive
à trois
attentions of a dancing girl.

“Too hot for Emile to run,” said Jerry.

Cuddles and Becky nodded in unfeigned admiration, before she
broke the silence to ask: “Jerry, you said something about this being your masterpiece ‘until now’?”

“You bet, Becks!” He dashed back to his desk for a just-dried print that he triumphantly placed between her gloved hands.

What she saw in the picture was, she knew, monstrously false, and yet it had the appearance of absolute, Hogarthian truth. In short, it was better than she had dared to hope. The 1926 Christmas-party photograph of Jimmy Gordon that she had located at
Bandbox
on Saturday morning had been wondrously transformed in the forty-eight hours since she’d given it to Jerry with her confidential instructions. In the original photo, taken of Jimmy while he conversed with Richard Lord, the subject’s facial expression had appeared argumentative. But now, Jimmy’s head, seamlessly attached to someone else’s body—and put beside a burlesque queen, whose hand rested in that body’s lap—appeared to be expressing a sort of lubricious ecstasy.

“Oh, Jerry!” cried Becky, her face flushed not just from the air out on Broadway but a new hopefulness as well. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothin’, kid,” said Jerry. “Old times.” He ran back for two extra prints of the picture.

Cuddles was too impressed by Jerry’s latest work to notice, let alone begrudge, the kiss Becky now planted smack on her old boyfriend’s lips.

“Okay,” she said, wheeling around. “Let’s go.” Rolling up the photographs, Becky pushed Cuddles back into the
Graphic
’s newsroom. They dodged the staff’s mandatory late-afternoon calisthenics on their rush to the elevator.

“Going down!” she cried.

“Could happen yet,” said Cuddles.

“It’s the scissors,” said Harris, on the phone to Betty for the eleventh time that day. “Dmitri’s in the office cutting my hair. I can’t tell him to stop.”

It amazed him that Betty could hear the shears but misapprehend at least one crucial word in each paragraph he spoke to her. Actually, it amazed him that she could hear
anything
at all with Mukluk yapping at her feet all the time, here in the Graybar and at home in the Warwick.

“Order up an early supper,” he suggested. “I’m too jumpy for the Crillon.” He’d been explaining the morning’s fracas before Dmitri’s scissors went into overdrive.

Dmitri, whose real name, never remembered by Harris, was Nicos, beavered away until his most important client got off the phone. Now the barber could give him the kind of stock tip he came in here with every two weeks. Today it was on a new company with a line of hair relaxants for Negro women.

“I tell you, Mr. Harris,” said the barber, replacing the receiver for his customer. “It make these girls’ heads look not even Italian. You’d think they was Roumanian or Polish.
Long
, straight hair I’m talking about. Down to their shoulders if they want.”