Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  Allen Case had gone so white that Becky put an arm around his shoulders. She wished she could tell him that he needn’t worry. She knew what photograph Harris was really excited over. The boss just needed something to crow about while he deployed the actual object of his glee on its delicate mission.

  Spilkes had come into the corridor to give Lord and Harris “a well-deserved pat on the back.” Becky edged past them toward Hazel’s desk. The boss’s secretary had already left, but Becky was able to confirm her hopeful surmise about Harris’s elation when she saw Chip Brzezinski at Hazel’s OUT box. He was carefully undoing the string on a manila envelope that was boldly addressed, in Harris’s own hand, to JIMMY GORDON, CUTAWAY, 18TH FLOOR. Standing silently behind Chip, she, too, could read the bold strokes Harris had applied, from the fattest of his fountain pens, to the back of the incriminating Composograph: WOULD MAKE A GREAT SOUVENIR FOR JOANNA, MELVIN AND MICHAEL. Jimmy Gordon’s wife and two boys out in Garden City. The boys were actually Mortimer and Monroe, but Jimmy would get the point.

  Becky reached around Chip to pick up a rubber stamp from Hazel’s desk.

  “Oh!” he said, stuffing the picture back inside its envelope. “It’s, uh, already marked,” he told Becky.

  “I know it is,” she said, before she pressed the OUTGOING stamp against Chip’s ever more sizable forehead. “So are you.”

  9

  John Shepard had been traveling for twelve hours. After hitchhiking from Greencastle to Indianapolis, he had boarded an eastbound train. For most of the eight hours since, John had sat up straight in his cane seat while the train made stops in Anderson and Muncie and Union City and—rather to John’s amazement—sped through big towns like McCordsville and Versailles without a halt.

  “Another piece of pie, hon?”

  “Thanks, but I’d better not,” John told the waitress. Here in the Hotel Cleveland it was a quarter to three in the morning, and his stomach was too excited to hold anything more. His first sight of Cleveland’s Public Square had so astonished him that for a moment he thought he might somehow already be at his final destination, New York City. The almost-finished Terminal Tower, still sheathed in scaffolding, was the tallest building John had ever seen. He had stood there at 2:30 A.M., counting its fifty-two stories. Through the window of the hotel’s all-night coffee shop, he could see vast new excavations and steel skeletons all over the square, some of them flooded with electric light, although right now the world seemed to be inhabited by no one besides himself and the waitress putting away the apple pie.

  Five hours remained until the first Limited left for New York. John looked across the coffee shop’s big tiled floor and spotted the door to the men’s washroom, no doubt a much cleaner jake than the one he’d visited on the train out of Indy. He imagined he must be needing a shave about now, though a manly stroking of his chin revealed, to his disappointment, no great growth since he’d last used a razor, so many hours ago in an entirely different state of the Union. Maybe he’d let any new whiskers go until he reached New York.

  The train he’d be taking there was no Twentieth Century—it carried no barber, let alone a stock ticker—but there would be a valet to take care of his coat, and there would be stationery. The brochure he’d picked up along with his ticket promised all that, and John had hours ago decided that once he got hold of this writing paper he would use it to compose an explanation of his sudden flight. The Cleveland Limited letterhead would impress his mother, but be less brutal than the one-two punch of “New York, N.Y.,” which by tomorrow—no, this—evening would be heading all John Shepard’s communications to the world he had left behind.

  He bet the seats on the Cleveland—New York run would be upholstered, and that his traveling companions would be a better class of person than the Hoosier salesmen he’d had to hear all night telling those awful stories about the unimaginable things they’d lately gotten girls from Fort Wayne and Gary to do. Recalling those men, John guessed they thought they were pretty smooth. But you wouldn’t find Stuart Newman, who had ten times their experience with girls ten times as pretty, offering such loud confidences in what John’s mother would call “language.” He imagined Newman as he must be right now, asleep in some New York tower even taller than the one being built for the terminal here. The columnist’s silk robe would be draped over a leather armchair, while he lay under the blankets in patterned pajamas covering a torso newly toned by an hour of boxing at the New York Athletic Club, probably with some fellow writer or young company president.

  After a moment, with his eyes loosely focused on some crumbs of pie crust toward the edge of his plate, John realized that, inside his revery, it was now he, John Shepard, sleeping high atop New York, dreaming of a girl across town who could not sleep, so busy was she, looking at his picture in a silver frame beside her bed.

  Worried that the waitress might close up if he appeared idle, John took a sip of his cooling coffee and opened up his magazine. Seeing the ad for Interwoven Socks, he curled his own toes with satisfaction. He had in his suitcase one pair of that very product, purchased this afternoon in Indianapolis. What he’d really wanted from the window of Lazarus’s Department Store was a Kuppenheimer trench coat, but he could hardly afford one of those and had settled on the socks as a bon voyage present to himself. An excellent choice! he now decided, noticing the ad copy at the bottom of the page. Stepping forth in his ribbed Interwoven argyles, our “Bandbox” man is ready for any place his feet may carry him to.…

  10

  Stuart Newman reached through a hole in his union suit to scratch his stomach. He opened his eyes. Had he left the water running? No, the steady slurp of sound making itself heard above the radiator’s clanging aubade was static from the radio, which he must have left on past the announcer’s sign-off, before falling asleep here on the couch.

  He rose and went into the bathroom, noticing as he pulled on the light that the circles under his eyes were darker than the last time he’d looked. He still hadn’t had a drink, but he could no longer deny it: sobriety was killing him. The effort to stave off surrender, to substitute the inhalation of setting lotion and cologne for the ingestion of bathtub gin, had exhausted his willpower and body. The other day he’d asked his masseur, three times, to slap on more witch hazel, and had sensed, over his shoulder, between hand chops, the look the guy was giving him.

  Would he really, Newman wondered, be any worse off going around half-hammered, like Houlihan? Harris displayed only slightly more contempt toward Cuddles than himself, and Houlihan still enjoyed the tender ministrations of Becky Walter. Alas, when it came to booze, Newman knew he could do nothing by halves; once the sniffing of witch hazel gave way to the first sip of beer, he’d be a goner.

  Newman had the smallest apartment in this old pile at the southwest corner of Gramercy Park. When the bishop who’d once owned it passed on, the building had done the familiar real estate divide into a half-dozen flats, including Newman’s on the first floor at the back. With two fingers he now cracked open the kitchen blinds. Frost clung to the window, but the sunlight coming through it was strong enough to make him wince. Should he try to summon enough vitality to go out? Perhaps even attempt to sit in the park? Every renter got a key to that gated, cherished space, but Newman had received two keys from his widowed landlady, a few days after his arrival; the second one, he gathered, would open up her apartment.

  Were he to go out and sit on one of the benches, what facts might he finally face, before they and the cold got the better of him? That he had just turned thirty-five, with less money and fewer prospects than he had had at thirty? That, these days, the elaborate courting rituals and male/female psychology that filled his column barely figured in his own romantic life—which consisted, more and more, of just picking up secretaries from Metropolitan Life as they walked past the statue of Roscoe Conkling in nearby Madison Square? The cushions of Newman’s couch hid so many of their hairpins, powder puffs, and gumdrops that several times, after falling asleep
there, he had dreamed he was clerking in a five-and-ten.

  The telephone rang.

  “Valentino,” said the unmistakable voice of his boss. “Be in the Oak Room of the Plaza at two o’clock sharp. After my charm has thoroughly aroused LaRoche, I’ll introduce her to you, the man who’ll be explaining her to our supposedly discerning readers. Two o’clock.”

  Before Newman could say yes, Harris left the line. Newman groped for his father’s pocket watch amidst a spillage of coins on the bedroom dresser and discovered to his relief that it was indeed only 7:20; he could now safely assume that Harris had called here not after failing to find him in his office, but from sheer lustful exuberance over the prospect of lunch with Rosemary LaRoche.

  Newman rummaged under yesterday’s World and socks, until he found the copy of Motion Picture he’d bought yesterday afternoon. Its long article about Rosemary LaRoche mentioned that she had been born Lucille Monahan in Hutchinson, Kansas. In any print profile, the star’s actual name was always a permissible revelation (it encouraged a ticket buyer’s own fantasies of re-invention), and even Stuart, unaccustomed as he was to following the movies, already knew that the central, terrible event of LaRoche’s life was her divorce from Howard Kenyon, filmdom’s favorite pirate and swordsman. According to Motion Picture, the “grueling demands of a shared art” had “sundered the pulchritudinous pair,” leaving Miss LaRoche to live alone in a modest new house in the Hollywood Hills. And yet, however bleak her romantic life, her professional outlook was brighter than ever: a sultry low voice assured her smooth transition to talkies.

  But some of the magazine’s facts didn’t quite add up. Did a “Parisian music master”—just passing through Hutchinson?—really give her the proficiency in French that would one day deepen her performance as the soubrette in Chanson? Could she really be just twenty-three? Newman could swear he’d seen her take a pie in the face in some two-reeler more than a decade ago.

  Becky would know more, he thought, closing his puffy, ringed eyes.

  11

  “Mr. Brzezinski to see you, sir.”

  Use of the Wood Chipper’s last name—let alone with an honorific—was sufficiently rare to make Jimmy Gordon wonder for a second who might be at his door.

  “Let him in.”

  Once past the threshold, Chip noticed the phony Composograph on Jimmy’s desk. But he also could see that it was off to the side; Cutaway’s editor was absorbed by a single sheet of paper, full of numbers and lines, right in front of him.

  “Pour yourself some coffee,” said Jimmy.

  “I think I know what happened,” said Chip, pointing nervously to the photo.

  Jimmy Gordon waved his hand. “Not interested. You know, that’s one difference between me and old Joe. I’m always interested in what somebody’ll do next for me.”

  Chip stared at Jimmy and waited to hear what that might be. In some respects, he was looking at an older version of himself. At forty, Jimmy Gordon tended toward stockiness and, like Chip, had begun to bald. But the overall roughness, which the Wood Chipper came by naturally, was a matter of affectation in Jimmy, who was, in fact, the son of a judge. He’d gone to Princeton and stayed on two years past graduation to start a doctorate in English literature, even beginning a thesis on The Faerie Queene, whose title brought hoots of laughter from the tough-guy writers he now took out for steaks at Keen’s. He’d quit the university upon realizing—as he explained years later to Joe Harris—that “there are no winners in philology.” Leaving New Jersey for Chicago, he’d gone to work in 1914 for Colonel McCormick, editing a couple of correspondents posted to Mexico to cover the revolution. NO EVIDENCE OF ATROCITIES, one of them cabled home two weeks into Jimmy’s tenure. YOU DISAPPOINT ME, he cabled back, knowing then he’d found his calling.

  He would later put in several years at muckraking McClure’s, but even there it was really carnage Jimmy craved, not crusades. Harris had found him at that declining journal, and decided he was just the man to put some thick slices of red meat between the gently rustling pages of the old Bandbox. Freed from uplift, Jimmy soon brought in bull after bull to bust up the china shop Oldcastle had given Joe. For almost four years they’d shared delight in the breakage and the noise, until Jimmy decided, inevitably, that the shop was too small for the two of them.

  “For what it’s worth,” said the Wood Chipper, “I did bring you this.” He handed Jimmy a galley he’d nicked from the Bandbox Copy Department: the Rothstein profile by Jimmy’s onetime prize bull, Max Stanwick.

  Jimmy swapped the sheet of figures on his desk for the galley. “Take a look,” he told Chip. “These numbers ought to scare Joe more than Leopold diddling Loeb.”

  Having left school at twelve, Chip found the decimal-dappled columns hard to comprehend, but the two lines on a graph near the bottom were more scrutable. Cutaway’s trended up; Bandbox’s headed in the other direction.

  Chip raised his eyes to see that Jimmy was muttering some of the best lines in Max’s piece: the brutish bons mots from “Fats” Walsh, Rothstein’s bodyguard, and the subject’s own description of a Rubens he’d won in a card game as “a dirty picture of a fat naked woman.” He chuckled when he came to Joe Harris’s annotation of that line: Can we get an illo of this gal?

  “So what’s the old man up to?” Jimmy asked his informant.

  Chip had hoped to be here today with a tale of Harris’s desperation over the picture his own old man had sent from Joliet. That scheme having fizzled, he could offer Jimmy only an account of yesterday’s chaos in the Fashion Department: the swing at Lindstrom’s kisser, the bite out of the basketballer’s can; Harris’s bellowed pox on everyone involved—and his equally loud contentment once Arinopoulos’s pictures came back. Jimmy Gordon smiled at the story’s opening, and laughed out loud over its close, making the Wood Chipper realize that his patron, albeit in full battle dress, still liked his old boss.

  “I guess you always hurt the one you love,” said Chip, remembering something from that last year he’d spent in school.

  “The word is kill, not hurt, Mr. Brzezinski.”

  The Wood Chipper nodded and made ready to leave.

  “Let’s go over to the Commodore,” said Jimmy. “I’ll buy you breakfast and tell you what you’re going to do for me next.”

  12

  “So what was that thing? Some kind of zebra?”

  “An OCELOT, Mr. Harris,” answered Gardiner Arinopoulos.

  “Right. Spots,” said Harris. “Anyway, the pictures are excellent. Now, how was Lindstrom? Cooperative?”

  “MUCH better once he’d had his LUNCH. Your pal Roma sent over two silver tins of magnificent STUFF.”

  “Yeah,” said Harris, who avoided thinking too deeply about the efforts Malocchio’s owner had been making to get into Waldo Lindstrom’s trousers ever since Harris had brought the model to the restaurant, for the first and last time, about six months ago. “He’s, uh, an admirer of his artistry, I suppose. As I am of yours. Now I’ll tell you what I’d like next. We’ve got to do some more neckwear soon. How about decking some ostriches out in ties and ascots?”

  “A FINE idea,” said Arinopoulos.

  “See what we’ve got back there.”

  “A PLEASURE,” declared the flamboyant photographer, already on his feet. Arinopoulos had much invested in his image as a great lover and artist, though his success with women and pictures tended to be as random as the accented syllables in his loud, rushed conversation.

  “Don’t forget your pith helmet,” said Harris, handing Arinopoulos what was actually an Australian army slouch hat.

  The editor-in-chief’s afternoons usually got washed away by late lunches at Malocchio, but he made up for that by putting in a full day every morning. Now, at 8:00 A.M., Harris had already been at his desk for over an hour; and he felt fine.

  Leopold and Loeb lay in pieces in the wastebasket, while the photograph with the showgirl’s hand in Jimmy Gordon’s lap lay face up on the blotter. Harris assumed it
had been taken at some joint they’d all gone to after a sales conference, and that Houlihan had recalled it was lying around here on the premises. Well, fine, though one useful flicker of activity wasn’t going to absolve Cuddles of the past two years of lovesick goldbricking.

  He was about to dial Betty when Hazel’s voice sawed through the closed door. “Go on in,” she told the arrivals. “He ain’t busy.”

  Andrew Burn and Norman Spilkes entered the office.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Harris. “It was such a beautiful morning, too.”

  “No, no,” said Spilkes, his mirthless smile coming and going as fast as a salute. “Everything’s fine. Or certainly will be.”

  “You need to see this,” said Burn, who never soft-pedaled. “Some numbers from GME.”

  Each quarter the Gotham Magazine Editors gathered up and distributed advertising and circulation figures throughout the industry. Spilkes was all in favor of this efficient innovation, but the GME had now begun making graphic, invidious comparisons, and when Andrew Burn handed Harris the same sheet of numbers Jimmy Gordon had just seen, the editor-in-chief could only grumble: “Why can’t they stick to giving awards?”

  He put on his glasses. Harris could read the figures with only a little more skill than Chip Brzezinski, but he felt the meaning of the graph like the point of a sword.

  “There’s nothing to panic over here,” said Spilkes. “But as a precaution, just to keep from losing our edge, I’ve commissioned a little market research. We’ll be getting together some groups of subscribers and asking them to discuss whatever they like or don’t like about the magazine. It’s what we did at the phone company a couple of years back. We talked to customer clusters in Fairfield County and New Hav—”

  “ ‘Customer clusters’?” asked Harris. “And what precisely did you find out?”