Bandbox (15 page)

“Our own Daddy and Peaches,” said Cuddles to Becky, pointing to the judge and countess.

“It seems like yesterday we were here for the Christmas party.”

“I think it
was
yesterday,” said Cuddles. “There’s still a live poinsettia in one of the bathrooms. Redder than the judge.”

“At least there aren’t any of those horrible waitresses prancing
around,” said Becky, recalling the leggy elves and underclad Santa girls who’d served at the Christmas party, a typical Harris touch. “Tits the season!” Cuddles had exclaimed that night while clinking glasses with David Fine, who joined them now—to Becky’s relief, since she still was waiting for her boyfriend to arrive from a function at the Cloisters. She would prefer not being alone with Cuddles when he did.

The food columnist drew Cuddles’ and Becky’s attention to Herbert Bayard Swope, the tall, redheaded editor of the
World
, whom Paul Montgomery was chatting up about his father. The elder Montgomery’s death on the
Lusitania
—Siegfried and Hannelore had just paid Paul their usual tribute of a grave nod—was bound to interest the old war correspondent.

“Paulie’s life is one big hedged bet,” said Fine, a little enviously, since he himself was conscious of having put every chip he had on Harris.

“Max! Max!” they all heard Daisy cry. Max Stanwick was trying to reach one of the buffet tables, which fat Percy Hammond and big Heywood Broun were plundering like an old French farmhouse behind the lines. The crime writer gave up and allowed Daisy to show him what he’d accomplished for her and the judge. Max clinked his screwdriver against her highball.

Gilfoyle, despite the constriction of his dated duds, was no flat tire, and he fizzed with compliments for
Flaming Zeppelin
and
Ticker Rape
, the two novels Stanwick had managed to write since Jimmy Gordon hired him to report for
Bandbox
.

Daisy wanted to show off the judge to whomever else she could squeeze onto the terrace. But she had trouble catching the eye of either Richard Lord or the Wood Chipper, who were circumnavigating the salon in opposite directions—Lord in an admiring inventory of Elsie de Wolfe’s decoration; Chip to overhear as many conversations as efficiently as he could. Daisy finally had to settle for summoning
John Shepard, who stood with Hazel behind the piano player as he banged out “Ukulele Lady.”

Since his arrival here tonight, John had been uneasy about his baggy Oxford pants, hardly the right thing for a palace like this, but all he had until his trunk got to New York. Excusing himself from Hazel, he answered Daisy’s excited wave by threading his way out to the terrace. En route he passed Burton Rascoe, who was taking notes for his newspaper column and watching Sidney Bruck introduce the contest winner to Andrew Burn. The publisher seemed unimpressed to the point of coldness. Mr. Palmer’s winning story might be a forthright celebration of class over mass, but it undermined its own message by being a story at all. If Bruck wanted to limit the offerings of fiction in
Bandbox
, Burn wished to eliminate them altogether.

Despite their differing perspectives, the four men, as well as John, were soon unanimously distracted by the nearby sight and drunken sound of Waldo Lindstrom singing “There’s Yes, Yes in Your Eyes” to a waiter he was making blush all the way to his patent-leather hair. Giovanni Roma, already contemptuous of the party’s catering—these guinea hens from Longchamps—could now fume over this spectacle, too, until Lindstrom, failing to make headway with the waiter, began to display an alarming interest in the Afghan hound leashed to an actress from the
Follies
.

“What have you got, kid?”

Having reached the countess, John showed his glass of near-beer to this man on her right who’d asked the question. “It’s swell!” he said. In fact, this third glass of it had put him on his way toward very mild, happy inebriation—and a loquacity that required no prompting. “This place is more ritzed up than O.O. McIntyre’s, I’ll bet!”

The man he was talking to nodded, then said in a smoky growl: “You’ve been checkin’ out the chintz, shinin’ an eye on the chinoiserie.”

John’s jaw dropped, and his glass of beer nearly dropped with it.

He realized this was Max Stanwick speaking to him, and suddenly all he could think to say himself was: “I, I don’t know what to pay attention to first!”

The famous novelist-reporter leaned down to clasp John’s shoulder and offer some advice about the business of observation: “You know what to listen for when you’re someplace like this?”

John shook his head no.

“Everything,”
whispered Max.

“Everything,” said John, lest he forget. He looked at Stanwick and nodded several times. He was still nodding when he at last turned to greet the countess and the judge, who drew him into a cozy foursome with themselves and Max.

A few feet away, at the same moment, Cuddles and Becky took note of Jimmy Gordon’s entry into the salon. The triplex might be packed with editors from Hearst and Nast and all the other rival companies—even Frank Crowninshield’s bobbing gray head was visible—but Jimmy’s showing up did seem a bit much in the provocation department.

“Where’s our boss?” said Becky to Cuddles.

“Relax,” he replied. “ ’Phat’ll love this.”

They watched Jimmy make his way across the room to shake hands with Spilkes and Andrew Burn. He backslapped both, and gave them a little razzing about the ad figures. “Nice to see you,” he told Theophilus Palmer, who seemed to smile for the first time tonight.

Paul Montgomery, first standing on tiptoe to make sure the coast was clear, took hold of the Wood Chipper’s elbow and propelled him toward Jimmy, as if doing the younger man a favor—making it okay for Chip to greet his former benefactor, since it was being done under the supervision of a current Harris star—i.e., Montgomery himself. Chip scowled during the brief forward march, unable to believe Paulie was so dumb as to think he hadn’t been seeing Jimmy Gordon on a regular basis these past six months.

Of course, Chip was really protective coloring for Montgomery himself, who greeted Jimmy with a big handshake and jaunty question: “Everything copacetic at the competition?”

Becky and Cuddles recoiled from this scene, even if it was a good fifteen feet away, and threw themselves into the party’s new, speeded-up phase of intoxication, which began with the arrival of three more cocktail carts—an angelus of Rob Roys, gin rickeys, and Presbyterians—as well as the piano player’s rendition of “Let’s Misbehave.”

“They’re playing our song,” said Cuddles.

“They’re playing your song,” said Becky.

“You still seem to be singing solo.”

“He’ll be here,” she replied. “Nothing wrong with working late hours. You should try it sometime.”

“I’ll bet he wears long underwear, too.”

“Keep it up and I’ll bet you get an old-fashioned in your lap.”

“Excellent. You’re an old-fashioned girl.”

They were interrupted by the approach of Stuart Newman, whose right hand loosely held his date’s, and whose left, more desperately, clutched a cream soda. The girl, with her peekaboo hat and Florida suntan, contrasted rather sharply with Stuart’s openly haggard appearance. Becky was about to ask him how his first interview with Rosemary LaRoche had gone, but—as always these days—there wasn’t enough time to gather the thought or complete the question. The party’s center of gravity was shifting, suddenly, away from the terrace and into the salon, where Joe Harris had taken up position to perform the main business of the evening: introducing Mr. Theophilus A. Palmer to his public.

Harris stood with Betty on one side and, on his other,
Bandbox
’s sponsored contestant in the upcoming Bunion Derby, a massively promoted cross-country footrace that would begin in Los Angeles on March 4. “The next of these affairs had better be for you,” said Harris, clearing his throat for a toast. The raw-boned, sandy-haired
runner, a cousin of one of the ad salesmen, was much more Harris’s sort of fellow than this vinegar-puss Palmer, whose story he’d read only an hour ago.

An excellent judge of fiction, the editor-in-chief was stewing about how this sour, pretentious story had passed muster with sour, pretentious Sidney—at whom he now glanced, skeptically. He shot an even stronger look at Houlihan, toward whom he felt newly furious. Cuddles was a better judge of fiction than either Sidney or himself, and in his not-so-long-ago heyday would have done a fine job with this contest, no doubt eliminating Mr. Palmer in the first round. At almost every editorial meeting, Harris liked to remind his staffers that the
Bandbox
reader had terrible values, which he expected them to cater to. And yet, Palmer’s story of money trumping love left Harris’s own sentimental heart quite cold. At this moment he wished they’d never announced the latest competition, which they’d done a few months ago, after he’d let Spilkes talk him out of running a story they’d received in the mail from Ernest Hemingway’s thirteen-year-old brother Leicester in Oak Park, Illinois. NEW FICTION BY HEMINGWAY could have been the perfectly legal cover line. “We’re better than that,” Spilkes had said, and it was true. But what was the point of being any good at all if Theophilus A. Palmer was what you got instead of fun?

Harris at last raised his glass and came to life with a graceful joke about what might happen if the cross-country contestant and the short-story writer started playing each other’s game. He did a less graceful job comparing the Palmer story’s abrupt opening to Betty’s choice of a plunging neckline for tonight’s outfit. He’d pay for this last remark—if Betty had heard it—back at the Warwick. But for the moment Harris had the whole room with him. Whenever the center of attention, he blazed up warm and crackling, his deep voice a reliable bellows for his whole personality. Harris might look like a
character actor, but in his world he was a star, and on occasions like these he had star power. With his glass aloft, he paid amusing, ribbing tribute to the other writers in the room besides Mr. Palmer, and he concluded by observing how “when it comes to fiction or nonfiction, this once mere fashion magazine is the one that figured out how ‘prose makes the man.’ ” At which point he began staring at Jimmy Gordon, that thief of his own potent formula.

Jimmy smiled back and raised his glass along with everyone else. He knew that in another minute, in full view and earshot of everybody, Harris, unable to help himself, would come over and start something, a bit of repartee that would soon turn sufficiently loud and nasty to land both of them in Burton Rascoe’s column.

As the applause died and Harris shook Mr. Palmer’s boneless hand, the editor-in-chief never took his eye off Jimmy. His rage gathering, he issued, from the corner of his mouth, a summons to Stuart Newman, now only a few feet away. Was there any chance, he wanted to know, that Rosemary LaRoche might surprise them with a grand entrance, upstaging the night’s honoree? No? Too bad. It would be worth spoiling the surprise of the first female cover just to wipe the smile off Jimmy’s face.

At this same moment, Jimmy Gordon was making a sidelong query of his own, to Chip Brzezinski. “Find out who little Skippy in the Oxfords is.” He nodded in the direction of John Shepard. “I smell a rat, or at least a gimmick.” Chip had been trying all day to get the lowdown on this kid’s supposedly spontaneous arrival in New York. Newly motivated, he went out to the terrace to investigate further.

Meanwhile, Andrew Burn tried presenting a Hickey-Freeman executive to Harris, who was too busy fuming to spare a word for this important advertiser. He was now fully furious—over yesterday morning’s numbers; this sobersides of a contest winner; the apparent lack of vodka on the nearest drinks cart. He made do with a martini,
and downed half of it before marching toward the terrace door with the first idea he came up with for alleviating his misery: he was going to fire Cuddles.

Seeing Harris pad across the Savonnerie carpet, as a dozen partygoers quickly cleared a path, Becky realized that the boss was up to something dire. She knew she must not allow his motive to meet its opportunity. So she pushed Cuddles into the nearest gaggle of guests, and then on through the next one and the next, until the two of them exited the enclosed part of the terrace and went out onto a stretch of it that was unprotected from the January air.

“You’ll thank me for this,” she said, shivering.

“I probably won’t,” he answered. “But it still counts.”

It was too dark out here to see whether he was giving her the “look,” but when he took off his coat and put it, along with his arm, over her shoulders, Becky realized she was too cold and too lit to protest—or even to mind.

Back inside, without Cuddles to bear down upon, Harris had been left with no real destination but Jimmy Gordon, who extended his hand to his former boss.

“Jimmy,” said Jehoshaphat Harris. “You must be dog-tired from following in our footsteps.”

Jimmy, saying nothing, sat down in an antique French chair, forcing Harris to lean over and pay him court.

“It’s a little early for you to start playing Sun King,” said the older man.

“You’re off by one Roman numeral, Joe.” Jimmy tapped the arms of the chair. “This is Louis the Fifteenth. One-five. The exact percentage our ads are up and yours are down.”

“Yeah,” said Harris. “I hear you’re going to do a fashion piece on the correct rubber gloves to wear when you break into an old friend’s place and rob him blind.”

“If I do,” said Jimmy, “you can be sure I’ll get Stanwick to write it.”

Monitoring the conversation, Spilkes decided to summon help from Gianni Roma and David Fine. Like a delegation from the League of Nations, the three men approached Harris and urged him to call it a night, at least here at Oldcastle’s.

“Come on, Joe,” said Fine. “Let’s go to a speako. I’ve got all these paid-up memberships going to waste.” He extracted a half-dozen cards for the “Pen and Pencil,” “Artists and Writers,” and the like. His suggestion proved indirectly effective: once Betty saw the cards come out of Fine’s wallet, she decided to intervene herself. “Joe, you’re boiled enough. Let’s go. Home.”