Nothing but a Smile (6 page)

Reenie Rooney.

Her real first name was Maureen, which made marginal sense, he thought—as the youngest in a large “black Irish” brood, her siblings had called her Reenie for short. The part that struck him as screwy was the part where her siblings, whose last names, conceivably, were all
also
Rooney, didn't seem to fathom what hers was, in total. Maybe by the time she got to school and her name took on its full ridiculous bloom,
Reenie
had stuck. Still, he thought, she's trying to impress major clients with a name that sounds like a jump-rope chant?

And though she claimed to be underqualified, he was suitably impressed with her former place of employment—the StevensGross
Studio, home to several top-notch commercial illustrators. Impressed, that is, until she told him she'd only really answered phones and processed invoices, ordered supplies, and performed other such clerical duties. No actual design, illustration, or art direction experience.

He told her not to worry. Though he privately suspected her new position at LD&M had a lot to do with wartime job vacancies, he assured her they must have all seen something special in her portfolio—in her spec work, that is, even if she'd done nothing that had actually been produced.

Those perfectly arched eyebrows made a dive-bombing maneuver again and she practically gnawed loose a fingernail. “I never really … put one together?
Yet,
I mean. A portfolio. Even with just spec work. And it wasn't any ‘all' that hired me—just Mr. Deininger. And now, lately, he's been real … well,
insistent.”

As much as he loved the looks of this long, lovely gal, right about here, Wink was hoping she would say the boss was cracking down, expecting her to produce, to show something for herself, though as near as he could figure, she'd just barely started. Wink wouldn't want to see her fired, of course, but it seemed more likely that his own movement up to something more suitable, given his experience, might come all the sooner if this creative director Deininger was getting “insistent” about winning results.

But that wasn't what she meant. “He's convinced I'm easy just because I used to—well, he figured it out that I used to also sometimes pose for Mr. Elvgren. You know who I mean? At Stevens-Gross?”

Of course he knew who Gil Elvgren was. Besides having rapidly become America's most beloved and classiest painter of calendar pinups, he'd taught a couple night courses right down the street at the American Academy of Art, back in 1940, and Wink had been lucky enough to get in. He'd been in awe of Elvgren,
even more so after studying with him, and he wondered if the guy ever heard that he, one of his many students, of course, had made a little splash for himself in the army publications. Or if the man would even remember his name if he did happen across it.

“I wasn't nude or anything. I wasn't even wearing the dresses and undies he put me in. Later, I mean. He did all the clothes or no clothes later. What I mean is, I was in my
office outfits,
for Pete's sake. Dressed for work. And I was just trying to help out, you know? In between all my other work. Step on an apple crate here, lean against this stepladder there … They had professional models most of the time, but a lot of us girls on the office side, we'd help out, you know? Pitch in? Just so's he could get a snapshot, something to work from. So now Mr. D. keeps coming around, thinking … Well, is what I did really so awful? I mean, is that supposed to make me a tramp?”

Even if she were a tramp, he thought, the girl had a right to say no when she wanted and not be pestered all day.

“No,” he said. “It doesn't make you a tramp. It makes Deininger a jerk.”

She seemed to be hesitating, unsure she wanted to hear his response to something.

“He said something else,” she said finally.

“Which was what?”

“He said you're ready to take over my job if I'm going to be … ‘uncooperative.' He says you're overqualified for it, except I got one qualification you don't.”

“He said that?”

“Ain't it awful? Like he's talking about my privates or something!”

The bad coffee suddenly tasted even worse, and he wondered now if he'd been hired just to make the girl fear for her job.

Brought in as a Human Wedge so some paunchy 4-F hot-to-trot goldbrick could put the make on sweet little Reenie Rooney.
Nice place, this home front …

After work and after picking up the new glass, when he stopped by the hotel to get his things and check out, he stopped at the newsstand downstairs and scanned some of the girlie mags and considered splurging. Payday would arrive soon, and some things were sort of necessities, in a way … He got as far as picking up a copy of
At Ease
and scanning the cover—the photo of Ann Sheridan in a red, white, and blue bathing suit, the description of articles about “the Oomph Girl” and “Manhood Misery: Tojo's Secret Shame!” and one that made him wonder how much he'd missed while away, something on how the bosom was “back in style.” Flipping through, he saw there was a photo essay on a new synthetic rubber the government was developing—they didn't seem to mean rubber as in
rubbers
—but the pictures showed them supposedly testing it with cheerleaders bouncing on a piece of it stretched like a trampoline.
Hmm,
he thought.
Very informative.

But then he remembered he'd be taking it into his little room just down the short hall from a respectable woman—his war buddy's very good wife—and he also flashed on that lovely Reenie, with her pinup looks and her leggy ways and the sob story she'd laid out for him about that creep Deininger making it tough for her, and before he knew it, he'd soured on the idea of the magazine. Some other time, maybe.

That evening, after replacing the glass, he tried to stay out of Sal's hair, slipping out to get something vaguely meat-ish on a
bun and stroll up to Wacker before she felt compelled to make him dinner again. When he returned, she came out into the hall to give him fresh towels and a set of keys and to say how glad she was he'd decided to stay a little longer.

Her apartment door was half open, and it struck him that the basic background in those shots of the brunette she had shown him the night before—the kitchen and table—reminded him a lot of Sal and Chesty's kitchen. Of course, a lot of kitchens looked like that all over Chicago.

Kidding around, but also half serious, he asked to see the girlies again.

She looked puzzled. “The what?”

“That roll of film you processed that you were showing me. The girlie shots. Whatever they were.”

She scowled, but was smirking, too, giving him a little shove with his stack of fresh towels. “No! You lecher! Jeez, those are personal property. I mean,
someone's
personal property.”

“So they haven't picked them up yet? Oh boy!” He rubbed his palms together evilly and made a broad, comical Groucho lunge toward the stairs, like he was rushing down to the darkroom, and she poked him again.

But now he was completely kidding. Because the second the idea about her kitchen had crossed his mind, he'd pretty much dismissed it. No way were they shot in her apartment. And anyway, how would he really get more details out of the tiny contact sheet? It wasn't like he could tiptoe down to the darkroom and give himself a crash course in working an enlarger and developing prints … Forget it.

And he wasn't looking to get his jollies, which was clearly what she thought he was up to. But he left it at that and said good night.

The next day, she got two notices from camera supply wholesalers, saying they were forwarding unpaid invoices to a collection agency; a phone call from Mia, wondering how she was coming with her ration stamp “situation;” and a brilliant idea. The brilliant idea, unlike the rest of these things, came from her gran-pop, her father's dad. Gran-pop Dean's photo hung high over the register, way up among the boxes of flash powder that hadn't been used practically since the time of tintypes. Gran-pop was dour looking, with a dour-looking mustache and dour-looking eyes, all of which drooped, but his frame was inspired. It was a cameo frame, Victorian and ornately scrolled and very, very oval.

It was how she'd fix the roll of girl-in-the-kitchen shots— salvage it, that is, rather than going back and reshooting, fussing with all those issues of perspective and building cartoonish prop stoves out of cardboard and all the rest. She had to be practical. And really, when exactly was she supposed to do all that now? With
him
there in the evenings, right down the hall, she could hardly restage the elaborate setup in her apartment. And during the day, even with tumbleweeds practically blowing through the shop, she still had to be available for the possibility of a lone customer wandering in inexplicably—she couldn't very well flounce downstairs with her flyaway skirt, black wig, and painted-on nylons anytime she heard the shop bell tinkle.

Back in the darkroom, she tried a print using a cardboard cameo frame to mask it as an oval, cutting away most of the extraneous
“busyness,” as he'd called it. At the same time, she did a soft “dodging” trick she'd learned from her pop—a wad of cheesecloth on a pair of forceps, wiggled, during the exposure, over the center, casting the edges she wished to obscure in further shadow.

It looked pretty good. The oval made a nice frame.

The editors had said nothing about a particular format; the shots needing to be rectangular. Maybe it was a risky choice.

But she had to admit, they did look better. Wink had been right about all the extra stuff in the background—the spice rack above the stove, the line of the dinette table jutting across one corner. In the oval of the cameo frame, the girl was the star.

She
was the star.

Then she had another idea. Something about the thought of her new houseguest being right down the hall and her not being able to carry on in her apartment at night made her think of a keyhole.

It was even better.

Wink seemed impressed.

She just gave him a quick flash of the shots, not much more than a quick shuffle through the five by eights, before closing them back up in a manila envelope, but she could tell that his grin was more at her cleverness than at the naughty flash of leg.

The keyhole mask she'd cut from mat board actually blocked out even more than the extraneous elements in the kitchen, it even blocked out parts of the girl. But somehow, that seemed to make it more exciting, like the viewpoint of a Peeping Tom, getting a look at something off-limits.

“Brother!” he said. “I'd say the skills of the darkroom tech surpass the skills of the photographer!”

She shrugged. “It's hard to work all that stuff and work the camera and take the pose.”

He looked at her curiously in the dim safelight. “What are you saying?”

“I'm just saying … I would imagine. I assume, like you say, it's an amateur, and so …”

“You're going to give them the regular shots, too, right? Without any cropping? These here today are better by far, artistically, professionally—no question. But I mean, in case it's just a guy who wants some record of his wife. Or a gal who wants her guy not to forget her while he's off fighting … Hey, that's probably what it is, actually, now that I think of it.”

At this point, she remembered a plausible explanation she'd dreamed up for him the other day, and she tried it on him now: she told him the negatives had appeared in the drop slot with only a last name, so she wasn't sure yet what they were for. And, of course, the customer would only be returning to pick them up during store hours, when Wink was away.

He seemed to buy it.

“Brother ….,” he said again. “Clearly I miss all the good stuff around here. Nothing nearly as exciting happens at
my
place of work.”

He hadn't seen Sal's friend Reenie for two days. He'd begun to think she'd either given up and quit, or surprised herself with hidden talent and come up with a winning campaign. Or she'd given up in a more depressing way, relenting to that wolf at the helm.

And he wasn't sure at first if the latter weren't true when he finally spotted her while strolling by the supply room. He'd taken to swinging by LD&M's well-stocked supply room every chance he got—not only to pilfer sketch pads to sneak back to the little apartment over the camera shop to work on his left-hand drawing, but mostly because the sight of the stockroom reminded him, even in his most harried moments of frustration working in the production studio, that at least he hadn't had to take that other job, as a stock boy. Being King of the Craft Knife was at least better than that.

It was the raven hair that tipped him off. She was in there, standing behind a metal rack of sketch pads. He started in, grinning, thinking he'd see if she could sneak away for another coffee, when he heard another voice, male, whispering low, and her eyes flashed Wink's way with a look of distress.

So he went on ahead in, scuffling his feet, whistling “Paper Doll.” Deininger was in there all right, standing awfully close, leaning in. In fact, she was pressed up against the wall, and he seemed to be blocking her exit, speaking privately to her somewhere around the neck, roughly her clavicle.

Across from them in the tight space, there was a high shelf of glue pots. Wink made a move for them, stretching and lurching, groaning dramatically with the effort, and pulled back and elbowed the guy sharply in the back of the head.

“Oh, gee!” Wink said. “I'm sorry, boss! I didn't see you there, sir. Gee, I guess I didn't expect to see you here in the supply room having a private meeting with a junior art director, sir. Guess you better go get some ice on that or have someone look at it, maybe?”

There was a
harrumph
or something from the creative director. Wink stole a glance at Reenie, who looked alarmed, but also a little like she wanted to laugh.

Carrying the glue pot, which he didn't need, Wink started to shuffle out ahead of them, lingering in the hall, waiting for the guy to beat it. But Deininger did not appear. Wink turned to go back in, when the door closed quietly.