Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  Still, Harris was nagged by the feeling he’d forgotten to take care of something before setting sail. And yet what could it be? He’d settled Stanwick’s contract for the coming year; had had a drink, at Burn’s insistence, with the Hickey-Freeman executive; had even signed the industry letter to the Postmaster General protesting higher rates for printed matter. Damned if he could think of anything he’d missed; besides, if there really had been a loose end, Spilkes would have remembered to tie it up. They wouldn’t be gone long, in any case. If you added up the voyage out and the one back, they’d be spending more time on the water than over here. In the mere several days they had, Richard Lord would buy up the clothes; Fine would compose a send-up of college dining; and Montgomery would write about having a bespoke suit made on Savile Row. He’d also interview some English skiers departing for the Winter Olympics in France.

  Spilkes was along to make sure everybody did what they were supposed to be doing. And yet, at 5:30, down in the Berkeley bar, the managing editor was the only one missing. Lord might be excused from the nightly bonhomie, but for Spilkes it remained mandatory. Harris looked at his watch, scowled at Fine and Montgomery, and ordered a single-malt.

  “Say what you will about this country,” he pronounced. “A man can still order a drink here without committing a crime.” This was his annual toast to John Bull, made as he sliced into a small wheel of cheese atop the table.

  “Don’t use a knife on that,” said Fine. “Stilton takes a scooper. Let me get the waiter.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Harris. “It’s cheese, not pistachio ice cream.”

  Fine, who hated having his gastronomic pedagogy cut short, frowned at the boss. “Just be glad we’re not eating dinner here. I had a gander at the kitchen, and it makes Gianni’s look like a surgical table. You know, I’m still not completely recov—”

  “What’s the matter with Gianni, anyway?” asked Paul Montgomery. “Does anybody really know?”

  Harris and Fine both had their theories and fears, mostly centered on Gianni’s sordid nightlife, but neither one said anything. Paulie did not reside in Harris’s innermost circle, and thus it wasn’t really his place to talk about Malocchio’s owner. Letting him ask about Gianni would be like letting him ask about Betty; it was too weirdly intimate and, even worse, might create some expectation of reciprocity. Harris had no interest in the wives and children of his staff, and no record of ever asking about either. Did Montgomery even have a wife, let alone some towheaded Paulie Jr.?

  The editor’s momentary effort to recall this information was suddenly swamped by a wave of nostalgia for Cuddles and Jimmy Gordon, who both used to make this trip. God, would he have to invite Sidney Bruck next year, just to replenish the ranks? An awful thought. But what alternative existed? Newman was ineligible for obvious reasons, and you couldn’t ask Burn: he’d be too close to having a home-court advantage when the conversation turned competitive.

  Paulie never pressed his inquiry into Gianni’s distraction. In truth, he was more worried about Joe being off his game. Maybe the magazine really was as shaky as it had begun to seem through most of January? Paulie had taken to wondering if his bridge to Jimmy Gordon was burnt or merely singed. He hadn’t had enough time to test it at the Oldcastle party, but all the way across the Atlantic he’d been trying to decide whether he should have gone over to Jimmy last spring, right at Cutaway’s start-up.

  Spilkes, ten minutes late, entered the hotel bar.

  “Where have you been?” asked Harris.

  “The National Gallery,” said the managing editor, sitting down. “Sorry.”

  Harris looked at him as if he’d said he’d been held up at a convention of lepidopterists. On his four trips to this city, the editor-in-chief had never seen the inside of St. Paul’s, or the Tower of London, or even a theatre, let alone the National Gallery. Spilkes, by contrast, had an almost touching devotion to the professed Bandbox ideal of well-roundedness and self-improvement—a sound mind in a sound body in a good suit—and he always squeezed visits to a museum or monument into those moments he was allowed outside Harris’s clubland cocoon of hotel bars and hired cars. David Fine had once, on his own, wandered up to Scotland for a couple of days, claiming to be giving thought to a story about haggis. When he got back, Harris told him never to do it again.

  Who needed Scotland? Right here in London they were all, more than ever, lairds to his king. Every long dinner stretched their waistbands and reaffirmed their fealty. Tonight, once the car had covered the distance between the Berkeley and the Strand, they settled down to eat at Simpson’s. Harris declined the table beneath a plaque paying tribute to Dickens, apparently once as much a regular here as Cohan in the Oak Room; he preferred a spot by the open fire, where they could smell the chops and mutton saddles while eating a long, haphazard meal that included, along with the slowly sizzling viands, some hare soup, pudding, cheese, and trifle. Trifle of what? Harris always wanted to ask the waiter, but every year he stopped himself, lest Fine override the server with his own long lecture on the subject.

  Finished eating, they loosened belts and braces and continued to sit beside what now seemed a campfire. Montgomery and Fine quietly argued over whether Dempsey and Tunney would fight a third time, Paulie taking Dempsey at his word that they wouldn’t, Fine taking Dempsey’s pledge no more seriously than he did Tunney’s book-learning and pretensions to poetry. The argument might have ended in a draw had Paulie not thrown in the towel and proclaimed Fine “probably—no, absolutely—right.” Spilkes predicted that the Fed would soon rein in the market, and Harris told him he was wrong, that Mellon would keep the party going. When the four of them had exhausted these topics, they embraced nostalgia, that traveler’s refuge, retelling the stories of how each had come to join the others: the fateful lunch at Malocchio when Fine talked to Harris about Christy Mathewson and the 1912 cabernet; the first piece Montgomery wrote for the magazine, so full of similes Harris was moved to ask whether it was a story or a reversible raincoat.

  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.

  22

  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 anyt
hing 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.