Bandbox (19 page)

“Porca la luna!”
Gianni cried. How could Joe have been so careless?

Waldo, fluffing his coat, just yawned, wondering who was going to get him a cab.

“Guests typically sit in the sub-stalls, sir.”

The term was sufficiently unfamiliar, and its delivery by Ian Hopkins—a young physics tutor at St. John’s College, Cambridge—so sincerely pleasant, that for a moment Harris didn’t realize he and his colleagues were being ushered into the cheap seats. Not that the house was packed. The college chapel stood perhaps one-tenth full for Sunday evensong.

“It’s even worse, I’m afraid, at morning prayer,” said Hopkins. “Ever since the abolition of compulsory chapel.”

Besides Harris and Mr. Hopkins, the front row of the first substall contained only Spilkes and Fine. Lord had been allowed to go off and visit his family in Surrey, Paulie to nip down to Dover and see his skiers off to the Olympics.

Weeks before sailing, in preparation for Fine’s piece on English college dining, Harris had asked Hazel to locate an Oxford or Cambridge subscriber, and she’d come up with Mr. Hopkins, a dapper young man with nothing of the absentminded don about him. After ten minutes in his company, Harris felt quite comfortable with this “fellow-with-a-capital-F,” as Fine had just described him in his notes. Even so, the editor-in-chief was concentrating on the choir, filled as it was with so many potential readers. Hopkins was a rarity, willing to wait two months for each issue of
Bandbox
to make its slow swim across the ocean. But what about transatlantic airmail? thought Harris. It would soon be a fact; once he got home he should tell Burn to look into the possibilities.

Harris had remembered to pack his earplugs—Lord having warned him against early-morning birdsong in the college courtyards—and
right now, while the choir soared through the “Magnificat” and on into “Hail, Gladdening Light,” he gave a fond thought to them, lying unused in his overnight bag. It could have been worse: at least the audience was being treated to the “men’s voices” and not some squad of prepubescent altar boys like Ernest Lough.

“Nice job,” said Harris, getting up while the last note of “O Worship the King” still hung in the upper reaches of the stained-glass chapel.

“Yes,” said Mr. Hopkins. “It was, rather, wasn’t it?”

Once outside, the young tutor led the
Bandbox
party toward the dining hall. Smells from the college bakehouse, detectable along the way, seemed promising, but after Mr. Hopkins settled his guests at the half-full Fellows’ table, the meal they were served proved a great disappointment, or—if looked at with David Fine’s satiric purpose—something close to perfection. The meat had the same shade of gray as a pair of dress trousers they’d seen in Poole’s, and the vegetables were worse.

“What’s your guess?” Harris whispered to Fine. “Brussels sprouts?”

Fine expressed amazement over what appeared on his plate. “It makes you wonder who won the war. Four years bogged down in France. You’d think they’d have learned
something
.”

Mr. Hopkins leaned across the table and said, apologetically: “Mr. Harris, I can arrange for something else to be sent round to your rooms. I happen to know there’s still some quite good shepherd’s pie back in the kitchen.”

“Excellent, kid,” said Harris, who searched his mind for some suitable thanks he could make. “I’ll send you a tie,” he said, taking inspiration from the neckwear visible under Mr. Hopkins’ unfastened academic gown. “That thing you’ve got on makes you look like you’re working for some dragon-slayer.”

As soon as the port was uncorked, Mr. Hopkins introduced Harris
to the Master, who was wearing the same crested college tie. Having only half-attended to the words of his most junior Fellow, the St. John’s head man persisted in thinking that the visiting American was a manufacturer, not a magazine editor. “Ah,” he said, topping up Harris’s glass, “over here to sink some money into the place? You think Hopkins over there can figure out the formula for launching your man Lindbergh all the way to the moon?”

The Master and the editor-in-chief had nothing more in common than their high authority and a shared enthusiasm for port, but with Spilkes and Mr. Hopkins operating more or less as translators, the two managed a cordial hour in each other’s company. The old don spouted some Latin motto about temperance, and Harris assured him that he’d said a mouthful. Before the hour was up, each man was inebriated two or three steps beyond anything that had been achieved at Simpson’s the other night.

Mr. Hopkins made sure Harris was safely up the ancient staircase leading to his set of guest rooms before finally bidding him good night. Harris clapped him on the shoulder and promised he wouldn’t forget about that tie once they all got back to New York.

He opened the door slowly, finding the light switch and checking for mice before he stepped into the room. Someone had lit a log fire for him, and when the draft sent a few sparks sailing in his direction, he looked nervously at the ancient wooden beams overhead.

He had begun searching for the earplugs in his valise when he heard a knock at the door. It was the college porter, carrying, sure enough, a dish of shepherd’s pie covered with a green baize cloth, atop which sat a small envelope. Betty had managed to find him even here, with the news—tossed unread into the fire—that
NEWMAN FELL OFF WAGON AND ONTO COOLIDGE—SERIOUS
.

Over the past few weeks, in conversation with Becky Walter, Newman had played down the extent to which he’d been at Rosemary LaRoche’s glandular beck and call. He had also sanitized his enforced adventures. Rosemary had so worn him out that, once or twice, while descending in the elevator from her rooms at the Plaza, he’d thought longingly of the broom closet where he’d once passed out in that same hotel. Being trapped there in the clutches of drink now seemed less of an ordeal than being pinned, by her fiery red talons, to Rosemary’s four-poster.

Out in Hollywood, the studio kept putting off the start of production on her next film, the follow-up to “that limp little stinker” she’d be promoting with the
Bandbox
cover. Each day that she remained in New York, the star would summon Newman to her lair, where he’d sneeze from the flowers and nervously peel the fruit sent up in competitive quantities by her admirers. On each visit Newman would actually attempt to interview the actress, a task he never managed to accomplish or even really commence before she cranked him up for a long-duration round of lovemaking. He performed with a combination of physical technique and emotional absence that left Rosemary more delighted than a rise in the market. Newman once had the idea of getting his interview in the course of some postcoital conversation; the star played along for a few minutes, until she tossed his pad across the room and challenged him to a game of Hide the Pencil, which she won in a burst of anatomical creativity. “Yep,” he could still hear her saying. “That’s why they call it a goose chase.”

Newman was determined to go through with a trip to Washington, where he’d made plans to interview a couple of young congressmen
and female reporters for “The Bachelor’s Life.” He would stay with Fitz O’Neal, an old college pal who covered the capital for the Philadelphia
Bulletin
and had a little gingerbread house in Foggy Bottom. Together he and Fitz had each spent two years at Lehigh, which they liked to think equaled a whole college degree between them. Fitz had suggested he come down the first weekend in February, when the new National Press Club building would open, with Coolidge himself in attendance.

“You know,” said Fitz, as he and Newman got ready to set out on Saturday night, “you could bring a girl. It’s not like the Gridiron.”

“Nah,” said Newman, as lightheartedly as he could manage. “I’ve had enough dames for a while.”

“Jeez, Stu, how many things can a guy swear off?” Fitz had never understood his pal’s inability to manage anything between stone-cold sobriety and falling-down drunkenness, but he’d always envied his excesses with women, and been grateful for the overflow.

The new Press Club building had risen at the corner of Fourteenth and F streets. The club itself occupied the top two of the structure’s fourteen floors; tiny out-of-town news bureaus tenanted most of the offices below. As the elevator ascended to the banquet, Fitz pointed to the indicator needle and sang: “I hang my hat, rain or shine, felt or straw, on number nine.”

Newman, too, was beginning to feel a song in his heart. As the car rose, he could sense himself being released from Rosemary’s gravitational pull. Normally indifferent to politics, he found himself eager to watch a different game in a different city. Fitz ushered him into the noisy, predinner festivities—thanks to Coolidge’s impending arrival, there wouldn’t be a hint of hooch.

“Is that Dawes?” he asked.

“Nah,” said Fitz, who explained that the businessman-turned-vice-president hadn’t been out of the doghouse since his first day in office, when he’d decided, after taking the oath, to give the assembled
senators a little lecture on productivity, specifically theirs. As the Senate’s new presiding officer, he said they could quickly increase it by overhauling the body’s 125-year-old customs and procedures. “Honest,” said Fitz, “he finished himself off worse than Andy Johnson did getting sworn in dead drunk back in ’65.”

“Yeah,” was all Newman said.

Fitz hoped he hadn’t been tactless. But his buddy was busy enjoying the scene, whose overwhelming maleness was diluted by only a handful of women correspondents and wives. Released from Rosemary’s Circean spell, Newman was delighted to observe the strut of these duded-up news jockeys from Duluth and Tulsa and Mobile, each swollen with his significance as a transmitter of tidings from the world’s new center. He and Fitz had just been seated between some young fellows from Salt Lake and Houston; if one of them proved to be single, Newman might already be on the way toward having his column.

“Sir,” said a waiter tapping his shoulder. “A note for you. Sent from across the street.”

“Hey,” said the Salt Lake correspondent. “That handwriting looks like a dame’s. Go get her and bring her back here!”

The newsman had just been told, during Fitz’s introduction of his pal, about Newman’s legendary cocksmanship; the Houston reporter, who read
Bandbox
each month, was already enviously aware of it. Both men, along with Fitz, now good-naturedly thumped their knives on the white tablecloth in a drumbeat of lustful encouragement. They were having too good a time to notice that Newman had gone quite white.

He rose from his chair, faking the jaunty discretion of a gentleman. “I’ll just have a quick look to see what this is about.”

A few minutes later he was across the street inside a dark chophouse. A new plaque inside its door advertised the place’s pride in having inherited its brass rail from the old Ebbitt House, which had
been torn down to make way for the Press Club’s new building. This polished relic was about the only sign of light amidst the chophouse’s wooden booths. Newman put his foot on it in a kind of steadying link to the past, and ordered a glass of ice water.

Maybe the note was just a practical joke, her way of saying, Enjoy your weekend off, but don’t think Mama isn’t watching. There was, after all, no sign of her actual presence that he could detect when he dared to turn his head and look at the row of booths. In fact, the only female he could see in here had red hair, not blond, cut so that two sharp triangles of it thrust downward from an especially low-drawn cloche hat. Not like Rosemary at all, except that—

It was Rosemary. As soon as he realized it, the temperature of Newman’s stomach fell to that of the ice water. He now remembered the half-dozen wigs he’d seen in the trunks at the Plaza.

“I was wondering how long it would take you,” said Rosemary, once he’d gathered the courage to approach her booth. She was not smiling.

“How did you find me?” asked Newman, like a fugitive returned to the chain gang.

“I’ve got a press agent, sweetheart. They’re better at finding stuff out than all those reporters you’re sitting with across the street. You want to learn how to uncover secrets? Take a job helping people to
keep
them. Anyway,
everybody
knows where you are, lamb chop. They’ve got those line-up sheets of story assignments posted on every wall of that rag you work at.”

Newman noticed that she had no food in front of her, only an ice-filled tumbler.

“Do you want to come back to the Press Club with me? They’re sitting down to dinner.” It was all he could think to say.

Rosemary snorted. “Honey, I’m a lot bigger than fucking Coolidge. I don’t appear nowhere for free.”

In a terrifying shift of mood, she got up and came around to his side of the booth. She smashed her lips against his and shoved her left hand into his right pants pocket—from which she extracted the key to Fitz’s house. He feared another game on the order of Hide the Pencil, but Rosemary had something else in mind.

“A simple exchange,” she said, putting his key into her purse and handing him one to her room at the Willard.

“Okay,” said Newman, with what he supposed passed for gallantry in this situation. “But why do you need the key to Fitz’s?”

“You’ll get it back if you’re good,” said Rosemary. “Don’t stay out too late with the boys. And think about bringing one of them home with you. Just a suggestion.”

With one last tug on the cloche hat, she was gone, leaving Newman to feel like the fallen, hopelessly enslaved girl in some novel by Crane or Frank Norris. There was nothing he could do: lose this cover story and Harris would can him for sure. Besides that, he was just plain afraid of Rosemary, whose reprisals would more likely target his anatomy than his job. He continued to sit in the booth, making a circular assessment of his predicament, until the waiter came over with a large coffee cup.

The crockery was camouflage. Newman could tell from the aroma that the mug was full of Bushmills.

“Compliments of the lady,” said the waiter.