My Mistake (9 page)

Tom swipes a U.S. Olympic Team sweatshirt and sweatpants for me. The outfit allows me to go with him into the locker rooms and staging areas for the events being held at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City. The young men there are often half dressed or naked. They look like Phidian sculptures brought to life and forward to the twentieth century. As with the caliber of their performance in the events they compete in, the physical appearance of these guys puts to eternal rest my fantasies of ever having been or being a good athlete. Except for one sport—tennis—which to this day I believe I could have excelled in, if only I had started lessons early enough, instead of trying to pick the game up in my late twenties. I have the slightly bowed, slightly short legs of many a tennis pro, very quick reflexes, and nothing else but such fantasies.

Tom finishes sixth in the decathlon. Do you have any idea how good and complete an athlete you have to be to do that? As I'm watching him achieve personal bests in many of the ten events, I remember when my brother—my late brother—and a few friends and cousins played not only basketball but touch football the day before his wedding, in Princeton, at my sister-in-law's family's house. I threw the ball as a “kickoff,” and Tom caught it and ran it back like a phantom. He seemed to disappear when you tried to tag him and scored a touchdown. Without a word, we all realized that there was no point in continuing.

Mike had insisted on playing on the line in that game, worried about his knee.

I get back from the Olympics, hang around doing nothing, answer an ad in the
Times
for an editorial assistant at Prentice Hall. Somehow that company, largely a producer of textbooks, had come to publish the bestseller
Up the Down Staircase,
and the executives there decided that they could expand into trade-book publishing, competing against Simon & Schuster and Viking and Random House and all the rest. It couldn't, but when I'm interviewed for the job, they think they're going to go great guns.

I get the job and have to reverse-commute, from the Upper West Side, where I've been sharing an apartment with a friend from Swarthmore while teaching at Collegiate, to Englewood, New Jersey, every day in a car pool. I sit in a cubicle with less idea of what I'm doing there than I had when J. Hillis Miller talked about Derrida and de Man in graduate school. The guy I'm working for takes me into the city at around noon from time to time to have a publishing lunch. He talks to agents and writers, but I have no idea what kind of progress is being made, what kind of business is being done. It seems absurd to travel for an hour to get to lunch, have lunch for an hour and a half, and drive an hour back from lunch, but that's Englewood for you. Publishing, I learn later, is a little like the garment industry: You have to be geographically well placed, in New York, for schmoozing convenience.

Sometimes I'm given a book proposal to read and report on. I write the report. Nothing happens.

One of my first cousins is Janet Bingham. She is the daughter of Aunt Jane McPhedran, the one who asked in Quakerese that departing dinner guests not “ooze.” Janet's husband, Robert Bingham, is an editor at
The New Yorker.
He calls me one day, six months into my Prentice Hall cryptojob, and asks if I'd like to try for a Fact Checker position at the magazine. Someone has left and he is close enough to my family to remember that I'm emotionally and occupationally adrift. My mother, an Original Subscriber, is in her quiet way clearly pleased about this possibility.

I try. I get the job. Even though I have this family connection to the place, I like to believe that I get it on my own merits, even if they are principally sartorial: After my interview, as I walk out of the office, I see that the man who interviewed me—Leo Hofeller, the executive editor—has written on top of my résumé “
Well-groomed!
” His desk was covered with yellow-highlighted racing forms. He was wearing a gray pin-striped suit and wing-tip cordovans. His gray hair was combed back; it looked wing-tipped, too.

Before that interview, I sat waiting in the nineteenth-floor lobby, near a huge, round, and mystifying brazier-like table. A rodential miniature poodle with off-white fur wandered out of an office and into the waiting area. A tall, bald, distinguished-looking man wearing glasses came down the stairs behind me from the twentieth floor, saw the dog, approached it, got very close, and loomed forward over it. This sent the dog into a paroxysm of angry barking. The man turned around, looked at me, put his fingers to his lips, and quickly made his way down the hall. A few seconds later, a little woman with curly hair ducked out of the same office nearby, agitated, and said, “Goldie, Goldie—what's wrong?” She looked at me. “What happened?” she said. I shrugged my shoulders.

The man turned out to be Roger Angell, the small woman Lillian Ross—a staff writer and William Shawn's mistress.

I tell the head of trade publishing at Prentice Hall that I'm going to leave. And like Carl Andrews a couple of years earlier, he gets angry. “You promised us at least two years,” he says. “This is the trouble with young people today—they think they can just walk away from their obligations and break their promises. No sense of responsibility. You don't seem to have awareness of what giving your word means, and . . . and I . . . and”—here he starts to smile in spite of himself—“and if I were you, I'd do exactly the same thing!”

We part on good terms.

 

Twenty-seven to twenty-eight

 

The Checkers at
The New Yorker
sit in a room about fifty by twenty feet, on the nineteenth floor of an old office building at 28 West 44th Street, which bears, near its entrance, a historical plaque about the magazine.
The New Yorker
occupies the sixteenth and seventeenth floors (Advertising) and the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth (Editorial). The editorial offices consist of some regular shabby rectangles off the long lunchmeat-linoleum halls and also many odd-shaped warrens. The aptronymic Mr. Knapp's office is under the stairs leading from the nineteenth floor to the twentieth. Adrienne Foulke, the head of the Copy Desk (and a well-known translator of books from the Italian), works in a small bay off the office where the other two copy editors sit. Mary-Alice Rogers, one of two collators, who take all the changes from various proofs and put them onto one proof, sits in a dog-leg alcove, at the back of which is Edward Stringham, friend of the Beat poets and master collator. You ask Mary-Alice how she is doing—proofs festoon her desk at all times—and she says, “Here I am, swotting away.” The head of the typing pool works in a kind of glass cage within the typists' office. Roger Angell's office is a magisterial one on the twentieth floor.

What you do as a Checker is read a piece and underline the facts in it, and then check those facts against written sources, if possible, or on the phone—if, say, the facts emerged in an interview and couldn't be checked otherwise. The work is done, or should have been done, always in the spirit of trying to prove the writer right rather than wrong. In many cases, if two reliable sources are in conflict, tie goes to the writer. When the facts are right, you usually check them off with lines like this: / . So a checked galley column looks like it has cilia growing out of some of its sentences. Some Checkers use cilia that go like this, as already shown: / . Some others: \ . It may have to do with handedness. The underlining is also often individualized.

There's no Checking manual. You learn by doing, and by apprenticing to Phil Perl, the head of the department and a character, and by starting with minor content, like brief book reviews. Some Checkers use just a black pencil, some use red for factual land mines, some blue for assertions that lie in the DMZ between fact and opinion—like this very sentence, maybe. Some use more than one color, so that heavily factual paragraphs look like orderly battlefields or OCD action paintings. If you find an error, you cross out the offending word—“epinephrine,” say—draw a line out to the ample margin, and indicate the insertion of “norepinephrine.”

If you're certain that something is mistaken but the writer insists on keeping it, or if you absolutely cannot verify an asserted fact, you write “on author” in the margin. Sometimes the writer may try to persuade you to check something off instead of on-authoring it, but you resist doing so, because if a letter comes in pointing to an error, you want to be able to dig up from the stored files the proof with “on author” on it so that you can exonerate yourself.

Too many fact checkers, at
The New Yorker
and elsewhere, become proprietary about the pieces they check, and turn the process into a contest. I try never to complain about being overridden by writers and editors; after having suggested a correction that isn't taken, I just on-author facts I believe strongly not to be facts and let the letter-writing chips fall where they may.

Fred Keefe is the person who takes care of such letters. He works in a small office off a small office off a small office and is very thin, gray, and wraith-like, and has a reedy, quiet voice. Despite this ultra-mild demeanor, most of the Checkers tremble when Fred walks into our smoky den with a piece of paper in his hand. “Uh-oh, it's Fred,” Phil Perl says. If it's about something I checked, I retrieve the galleys or revisions of galleys or page proofs and point to “on author” and, pridefully, don't much mind where the chips fall after that. Though sometimes a writer claims that I or other Checkers didn't insist strongly enough or didn't make clear enough that an error was made. Hah!, I say to myself—I told you it was norepinephrine, not epinephrine, and here are the galleys to prove it. I still have to be right.

A word about Fred Keefe, office man of mild mystery. The elegant sportswriter Herbert Warren Wind (the last name also being an aptronym)—who resembles Geoffrey Rush and always wears a penguin-looking vest—and Fred are good friends, to the point of raising homoerotic suspicions at the office. But then someone tells me that Mr. Wind makes passes at women. Who knows about these things?

When I first meet Mr. Wind, however, he looks me up and down—really looks—and says, “And what sport did
you
play in college?” I tell him that I played soccer and was captain of the Swarthmore varsity soccer team when I was a senior. I don't tell him that I helmed the team to that 2–10 record. (We had lost our two British players, Ian and the heavy-smoking Adam, and also a Ghanaian who was said to be the son of Ghana's police chief. He had come to Swarthmore in part to play soccer, only to discover that he was allergic to grass. Or so he said.)

Whether or not Fred and Herb are an item,
The New Yorker,
like most small, intense workplaces, produces many romances and more than a few marriages. A Checking Department colleague marries Richard Harris, one of the magazine's most important literary journalists. Pat Crow, an editor, marries someone who works in
The
New Yorker
's library, where back issues are meticulously indexed and clipped out and pasted into medieval-looking black binders alphabetized by authors' last names. Daniel Menaker eventually marries Katherine Bouton, an OKer (you'll see), who walked into the magazine's offices because she was passing by, told the receptionist she was looking for a design job, and was informed that the Production Department was all men but that she might talk to Mrs. Walden, the head of the typing pool—called, of course, Walden Pond. She is married to someone else at the time, but that doesn't keep Daniel Menaker from saying to her, as he walks behind her into 25 West 43rd Street (she is wearing hot pants; yes, hot pants), “That's Kathy Black. I'd know those legs anywhere.”

Many of these connections break. More than a few are less than licit. Daniel Menaker and Katherine Bouton: thirty-three years and counting.

One writer, the aforementioned Lillian Ross, sometimes seems to play games with the Checkers. Just after I start my job, I check a Talk of the Town story that Lillian has written about a professor. One sentence has him wearing a yellow sweater (or something along those lines), and on the phone he tells me it was blue. When I call Lillian about this, she says, “Oh, you got that, huh?” Now, either she got it wrong and was making believe she had made the mistake on purpose or she really did make the mistake on purpose. To check on the Checkers. Either way, unpleasant.

So here I am in a tobacco-smoke miasma—with wrecking balls smashing into the walls of Stern's department store across the street, in that cult described five years earlier by Tom Wolfe, the leader of which is a small, demonically manipulative, and (I believe) self-loathing—but in some very important ways brilliant—man with a quiet voice and a nearly floor-length overcoat. The glamour of the place has yet to impress itself on me, although the Checker sitting across the aisle from me often gets phone calls from someone who, when I answer for the absent desk occupant, ends up saying, “Just tell him Twuman [
sic
] called.”

I write notes, corrections, questions in the margins of endless galleys of pieces about staple crops—soy, alfalfa (by backgammon whiz and William Shawn crony E. J. Kahn)—or of Henry Spottiswoode Fenimore Cooper's Annals of Space, or of Pauline Kael's review of
The French Connection.
“Sources disagree on the amount of alfalfa produced in America last year,” I might write in the margin of a Kahn piece. “The USDA says seven million tons, while the Alfalfa Farmers of America says more like ten million.” Or, for Cooper: “The tool used to tighten bolts on board the space shuttle is, according to NASA, a ratchet wrench, not a monkey wrench.” For Kael, it might be “The movie's press release says there are eighty-six different New York locations used in ‘The French Connection,' not seventy-five, but, then, it is a press release.”

You enclose each note in a quadrangle or circle of its own, while the suggested changes, like “norepinephrine,” above, or “Gustav Klimt” or “seventy-three per cent,” float unenclosed and vulnerable to the editor's
X.
You circle periods and put circumflexes above the commas, as copy editors do. And make sure “per cent” is two words, because it's from the Latin “
per centum,
” according to Miss Gould, the mad stylist who reads
everything
but fiction and poetry, for adherence to house style, and who has recently circled “with James, Jr. at the wheel” because it lacks the comma after “Jr.” Above her corrective second comma in the margin, she writes, in its own circle, “Have we totally lost our
minds?
” (Miss Gould turns myopic and deaf in later years and hunches over proofs looking like a zealous Cistercian, and once, when she glances up to see the boyish reporter Anna Husarska standing in her doorway, says, “Are you a man?”)