Bandbox (17 page)

This particular reminiscence had to be edited, not because it came at the end of the evening, but because neither Harris nor Montgomery could bring himself to mention that the raincoat question had been addressed to Jimmy Gordon, the story’s editor and Paulie’s original patron. As soon as Jimmy threatened, like Banquo’s ghost, to invade the evening, Harris banished the thought of him and summoned the old carver back to their table to receive an enormous tip. With his rival now safely out of mind, Harris watched two skinny boys—New Year’s babes to the carver’s Father Time—bus the dishes. He fell into a memory of his own first job, washing plates at a hofbrau back in Newburgh when he was less than these kids’ age and nearly as thin.

Once out in the cold air, Harris surprised everyone by dismissing the driver and announcing that they would walk back to the Berkeley. The mood of self-connoisseurship was fully upon him now, and he wanted to prolong it. As the group strolled home, it fell to Spilkes, the least drunk of the four, to remember which side of the street the cars here drove on. He heard Harris’s voice, thickened with claret and the late hour, telling Montgomery and Fine, as if
they’d never before heard the story: “ ‘Give me six months,’ I said to him. And he said: ‘Take a year.’ And do you know how long it took me to turn things around?”

Paulie offered a well-educated guess: “One business quarter?”

“One business quarter!” said Harris.

At moments like this, Spilkes felt a genuine tenderness toward his boss, whose shrewdness was forever being trumped by his childlike lack of guile. Before they reached the hotel, amidst his war stories and some ominously irregular footwork, Harris declared, without abashment and to no one in particular: “God, I love my life.”

Inside the Berkeley lobby, Spilkes gathered up and distributed everyone’s messages. Getting into the lift, Harris flipped through the three or four for him, smiling at what he recognized as another wire from Betty. He gave the little yellow envelope a kiss, but true to his word put it into his pocket unread.

“And so to bed!” he exclaimed, getting out of the elevator, shielded from Betty’s telegraphed news that
PALMER CRIBBED STORY
.

Whenever the boss and his lieutenants went to London, a slow-paced delinquency settled over the fourteenth floor of the Graybar, the sort of civilized languor Harris missed from his beloved 1890s. The employees, who came in late if at all, played golf with mailing tubes and pin cushions; bet sports pools; made margin purchases over the telephone; necked in the Fashion Department’s capacious closets.

But the morning of Thursday, February 2, was different. The
news that Theophilus Palmer’s prize-winning story was, in fact, plagiarized had broken in the previous afternoon’s papers, and even those shooting rubber bands into their wastebaskets now had eyes peeled and ears cocked in the direction of Sidney Bruck’s tightly closed door. Would he decide to emerge, head held high, or wait for aggrieved authority to come knocking with his punishment for having chosen Palmer? Who that authority might be, in the absence of Harris and Spilkes, remained unclear, though it had been the subject of much speculation around Mrs. Washington’s coffee wagon.

According to the production schedule, Nan O’Grady and Allen Case were supposed to begin copyediting Mr. Palmer’s story today. But now, in her unexpected idleness, Nan toyed with the temptation to go knock on Sidney’s door and ask whether, in light of what she’d been hearing, she should prepare another piece of fiction as a substitute. No, it would be more delicious to wait until Sidney was forced to come to her. So she took off her shoes, adjusted her chair, and leaned back, happy to read a novel until he came calling. The Copy Department was, in any case, deserted; even Allen, normally conscientious, had been coming in later each morning. He’d told her he was making the rounds of freighter companies, trying to book a passage back to Australia for the koala, but she feared he was actually continuing to case that awful animal warehouse. She and Mr. Merrill had pleaded with him not to go near it, warning him to think about the dangerous types who could be running it, but the message failed to penetrate some fundamental part of his logic, which held that all humans were sufficiently dangerous to render moot any differences of degree.

Outside Harris’s office, Hazel and Daisy kept their own watch on Sidney’s door while trying to decide which movie to attend this afternoon,
Buck Privates
or
The Student Prince
.

“So what’s up with the judge?” asked Hazel, while turning a page of the
Daily News
.

The question left Daisy flustered, and uncharacteristically discreet. “I have him smoking Dr. Blosser’s Cigarettes,” was all she could let herself say right now. “The medicinal herbs are good for the sinuses. He’s constantly congested, from tension.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Hazel, who’d heard the rumors about Francis X. Gilfoyle, but pretended to be more absorbed by the list of movie showtimes.

“There’s just an awful amount of pressure in his job,” said the countess. “Messengers knocking at the door in the middle of whatever quiet dinner I’ve prepared. They pounce on the poor dear just after he’s put his feet up on my hassock.” She did not make clear that these messengers weren’t exactly municipal employees. They brought news and reminders not from the judge’s docket manager but from Eddie Diamond and Arnold Rothstein. Gilfoyle had succeeded in getting the Juniper project foreman out on bail, but was now expected to make the DA kick the charges entirely, for a supposed lack of what was actually overwhelming evidence. After a month in the judge’s gentlemanly company, Daisy still didn’t know exactly what Rothstein “had” on him, though she suspected it was gambling debts. The whole business had her worried and cross; the other morning she’d startled one of the fact-checkers (her last initiate) with a stern lecture against the horse-racing bet he was calling in to his bookie.

Giving up on the possibility of further revelations, Hazel changed the subject from the judge to Stuart Newman, and whether or not, given the much-discussed clutches of Miss LaRoche, he’d actually make it to Washington for a column he was supposed to write. Prediction from Daisy in a matter like this had considerable authority, but before the countess could speak, what everybody had been waiting for suddenly transpired: Andrew Burn was marching over the linoleum toward the office of Sidney Bruck.

He pushed open the door—and left it open.

“How bloody stupid can you be?” The short Scotsman, his bald
pate red with agitation, somehow managed to bellow and burr at the same time.

“Who are you to interfere with the fiction pages?” replied Sidney, at half the volume but with equal indignation. He attempted to begin a lecture on the “church-and-state separation” of a magazine’s business and editorial sides—a dynamic nearly as uneasy as “class versus mass”—but was cut short by Burn, who now stood only inches from his face: “I’m running this show until Harris gets back, buddy boy. I’m His Eminence and His Majesty all rolled into one.”

Sidney could not bring himself to ask whether Harris already knew about the fiasco, but he winced, expecting Burn now to convey a transatlantic thrashing. When nothing more was uttered, Sidney could only ask, weakly: “How was I supposed to know the story wasn’t original?”

“If Winchell and Rascoe could figure it out,
you
bloody well should have! Maybe you don’t know how much trouble this magazine is in. A lot more than you think, buddy boy. Your portly boss sees a set of figures once a quarter. I get arithmetic every day, and the digits aren’t dancing, Mr. Bruck. They’re dropping, dropping, dropping. So don’t tell me I’m not supposed to put out fires set by little piss-pants boys like you, playing with somebody else’s matches!”

The publisher at last closed Sidney’s door, shutting the two of them inside his small office.

Chip Brzezinski, who’d been listening from the closest safe position on the corridor, felt thrilled by Burn’s tirade. It contained genuine news that he could drop at Jimmy Gordon’s grateful feet. Once the door shut, he raced to the stairs at the back of the Art Department, hotfooting them two at a time up to eighteen, flying past Jimmy’s secretary and straight into the office of
Cutaway
’s editor-in-chief.

Jimmy Gordon sat behind his desk, chatting calmly with Mr. Theophilus Palmer.

Chip came to a halt, breathing but not speaking through his open mouth. He struggled not to say “I don’t get it.”

“Did you two not meet at the party?” asked Jimmy, nonchalant as could be. “Brzezinski, say hello to Pierce Coleman. An old graduate-school pal of mine.”

Chip wasn’t exactly sure what graduate school was, though he knew it had something to do with Jimmy’s “Fairy Queen,” which he felt pretty sure was a book.

“How could you plan this?” he finally asked.

“Because,” said Jimmy, “I understand Sidney and just what appeals to that slender nose he’s got stuck in the air.”

“American literature of the late nineteenth century,” explained Coleman, “is now a ‘field.’
My
field, as it happens. I found, in an issue of
Cosmopolitan
from 1887, exactly the sort of story Jimmy assured me Mr. Bruck would like. I updated the clothes and some of the slang and, more crucially, left generous chunks of it unchanged, before submitting it as the work of one Theophilus A. Palmer.”

“And succeeding admirably,” said Jimmy. “You, however,” he said, looking at the Wood Chipper, “have so far only failed.”

Chip moved his eyes from Jimmy to Mr. Coleman’s beautiful alpaca coat, probably the reward he’d gotten for his sleight of hand. He’d likely fed Winchell and Rascoe the story himself, not in person but in a little note from Pierce Coleman, scholar-detective. The expertise involved in such an exploit put Chip only further into the shade; what he’d just overheard from Burn now seemed very small potatoes.

“So what have you come up here about?” Jimmy asked.

“Uh, it can wait,” said Chip, slinking away. His energies were so depleted that he rode the elevator back down to fourteen, where even Mrs. Zimmerman realized she’d be better off not asking if anything was wrong. Once back in the checkers’ bull pen, he threw his
IN
basket onto the floor, even though Becky Walter was right nearby looking something up in the Dun & Bradstreet book.

“Gee,” she said, “I wouldn’t have expected you to feel so bad for Sidney.”

Chip ignored her, which was fine by Becky. Unlike most of the deadbeats around here, she had work to do, a little what-to-buy piece on
Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia
, “the reference library that never gets out of date.” Endorsed by Thomas Edison himself, this thirteen-volume production seemed the perfect embodiment of their whole frantic era. Every few months
Nelson’s
sent subscribers printed “updates”: all the newest developments in Refrigeration, Automobiles, Ultraviolet Glass, and Soviet Russia. The modernized articles then took their alphabetical place inside one of the encyclopedia’s ring binders; the obsolete entries were extracted and thrown away. Even the Mayans and James Madison were subject to revision, depending on new finds by archaeologists, new judgments by historians.

This huge mutating enterprise, which at the moment took up much of her small office, perplexed and amused Becky, who couldn’t quite summon the disdain she supposed she ought to be feeling for it. Yes, she should be wishing she were at Daniel’s place, tucked into his window seat, reading one of his old, foxed editions of Malory instead. But the wish wasn’t there.

Was she more a girl of her time than she liked to admit? Didn’t she right now miss the customary noise and bustle of the fully staffed
Bandbox
? And hadn’t she enjoyed her adventure with the Composograph a few weeks ago—relished its zany, flickering triumph? She might not suffer from the present age’s worst nervous maladies, but could she deny the pleasure she took in being around those who did? As she snapped open one of the
Nelson’s
ring binders to insert the latest on Iberia and Immunology, she wondered whether Stuart Newman would make it in this morning to give her the latest
installment—awful but stimulating—of life with Rosemary. And she thought, with an actual sigh, about Cuddles, who for the duration of Harris’s trip was choosing outright absence over on-site idleness.

Having earlier this week seen both
The Student Prince
and
Buck Privates
—the latter twice, out of a peculiar, better-left-unexplored case he had on ZaSu Pitts—Cuddles was spending the day at home in Brooklyn, sharing a tin of sardines with Kitty Sark and catching up on what the papers had to say about the missing Smith College co-ed: the state planned to search the pond one last time, using submarine lights.

He also noticed the little calamity that Mr. Palmer had created for Joe Harris.

’Phat’s troubles did seem to be mounting, and while Cuddles retained a soft spot for the boss, he wondered just what use there was, to the world at large, in saving Harris from Jimmy. True, the two men weren’t much alike—Jimmy lacking ’Phat’s sweet, chewy center—and their magazines, for all that they followed the same formula, weren’t indistinct. Jimmy couldn’t keep
Cutaway
from hectoring its readers: every other page was a pronouncement about the best and worst of this or that, a list of rules the
au courant
reader had damned well better learn if he didn’t know them already. If Joe made readers feel that they were getting away with something, that they’d acquired a worldly-wise rich uncle, Jimmy made them feel as if they’d been drafted. But even so: the war between the two men and
magazines was still a matter of novelty jousting with novelty—in a time when novelty itself had lost its newness.

How he had once loved the game. Cuddles now thought back to the days when each issue of
Puck
, with its deeply watercolored covers and irreverent news from every precinct of the brand-new century, landed on the newsstand like the circus coming to town.
TRUTH JUSTICE BREVITY WIT
promised the motto atop special numbers on the tango or “The News in Rime.” His own colors had begun to fade years ago, but as he considered things now, he realized it was only inside the hall of mirrors set up by
Cutaway
’s birth, last spring, that he had ground to a stop. An inner, final admission of the hopelessness of his feelings for Becky had come at the same time. (He’d given her, the month Jimmy Gordon’s first issue came out, a book of Millay’s poems, with the inscription,
“My candle burns at neither end.”
) Since then, except for his reflexive mooning glances and the occasional crack about Daniel, he’d tried to call it quits, tried to free the two of them from this unattaching attachment that left her embarrassed and him miserable.