Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  23

  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.

  Having split the last sardine with Kitty Sark, he was now dozing off. His whole life had dozed off. No one would figure him for a seeker of El Dorado, but the churning forward movement of his father’s wagon was still somewhere inside him, a muffled hum, background noise for this afternoon’s couchbound dream, wherein Cuddles steered a team of horses through some cacti and falling rocks, toward a green-and-gold valley he’d just spotted below.

  An hour passed before he woke. The sight of a Palace bill on the coffee table kept him confused for a second. No, he thought, looking up at the ceiling and failing to see any rosettes. He wasn’t there, and he wasn’t in El Dorado, either. He was just here on the couch, hors de combat and out of sardines.

  The radio was softly playing “My Pretty Girl,” and Kitty Sark’s eyes looked wide with alarm. It took Cuddles a moment to realize why: his own eyes were moist with tears.

  Surrender had brought him about as much peace as sobriety seemed to be bringing Newman. Another year like the last and he’d be ready for a jar inside Hubert’s Museum of freaks over on Forty-second Street. No amount of chaste resignation was going to change the fact that he loved Becky Walter. The yearning for her had lived inside him almost since Coolidge started taking up space in the White House; she remained the possibility of love in the age of Mammon. LET’S PUT THE CUPID BACK IN CUPIDITY, he’d written across the last Valentine he’d sent her. Even now, still, he had to find a way of winning her. What was left of his instincts told him he couldn’t make that happen by wearing his sad, barely jingling cap and bells. It was time to suit up and enter the lists in Joe and Jimmy’s noisy, pointless tournament, because that was where, though she only half knew it, Becky wanted to be playing herself.

  And if he could find a way to offer himself as an allied lover-in-arms?

  A surge of something like hopefulness ran through him, but he groaned when he realized where all these King Arthur images were coming from: that prattling she used to feel obliged to do about Daniel-the-medievalist’s work.

  Even so, he was going to get off the couch.

  “All right,” he said to Kitty Sark, swinging his feet to the floor. “Make way for the Renaissance.”

  He stubbed his toe on the coffee table, but the cat, encouragingly, brushed his leg.

  24

  “I still think ‘Harris Tweed’ would have been a good story,” said Spilkes to his boss.

  “Nah,” said Harris, who had vetoed the idea of a feature on his having a bespoke suit made. “Let it be about Montgomery. I like staying behind the scenes.” Actually, he loved being present on the pages of his own magazine, in the occasional “editor’s letter” or short endorsement of some gadget. But any tailoring story would have to include measurements and at least sketches of the customer, and Harris did not like to acknowledge the much-increased girth that had come with his late-life success.

  Looking at Spilkes, who was wearing a just-acquired black bowler, hard as a construction helmet, he had to give his m.e. points for getting into the spirit of the thing; when it came to fashion, Harris himself did no more than was needed to preserve the formula by which Bandbox’s clothes-consciousness floated its journalism. Today’s accommodation of the former had Harris and his companions at Henry Poole & Co., 37 Savile Row, where Paulie, who would soon be no sylph either, could begin chronicling the creation of a three-piece suit.

  On the outside, lacking any window display, Poole’s looked resolutely dull, more like a men’s shop in Newburgh than New York. Inside, however, skylights drew down the morning sun onto dozens of bolts of cloth that had been unrolling themselves for a line of patrons stretching back beyond Lord Melbourne and forward past Edward VII. Now there, thought Harris, fingering a heavy houndstooth pattern, was a man who looked like a king—the opposite of the current feckless Heir, almost as skinny as that bark-eating copyboy back home.

  “Is it true he once wore a sweater under his dinner jacket?” Harris asked one of the ancient, soft-voiced tailors. “The Prince of Wales, I mean.”

  “I’m afraid that’s false, sir. But he has done quite a lot to ‘boost,’ if you’ll pardon the expression, the Fair Isle Shetland sweaters made up in Scotland.”

  “He ever come in here himself?”

  “We go to the palace, sir.”

  “Buckingham?”

  “St. James’.”

  “I guess old George and Mary finally gave him the heave-ho.”

  Attempting to refract, if not change, the subject, the tailor informed Harris that “Sir Godfrey Thomas, the prince’s secretary, makes all the arrangements for our visits.”

  Harris wondered for a moment, as he did with almost every male name that came his way, whether there might be a story in this Sir Godfrey, but his rumination was cut short by the sight of Richard Lord emerging from one of the shop’s anterooms with a dozen brightly colored dressing gowns.

  “I sleep raw myself,” said Harris to the tailor.

  “I see, sir.”

  Spilkes, who’d been standing on the edges of this colloquy, decided it might be a good moment to break away and join David Fine across the room.

  Before he could move, however, the tailor, in an even-lower-than-usual whisper, said, “Sir?” to the managing editor, who he could see was actually trying to learn some things this morning. “If I may be bold,” he continued, making a gentle nod in the direction of Spilkes’s upper torso: “It’s best not to wear soft-fronted dress shirts outside the privacy of one’s home.”

  Spilkes thanked the man before heading over to Fine.

  “Get a load of these,” said the food writer, pointing to some framed royal warrants on the wall. “Even the Mikado’s put his seal on this operation. And take a
look over here,” he added, propelling Spilkes toward a huge antique ledger, kept on display for ceremonial purposes. “I wonder what the salesmen here pull in. Do you think they ever take clients to lunch?”

  If Spilkes liked information for its usefulness, its onward-and-upward applicability, Fine loved it as a simple possession, something to be avidly hoarded and compulsively shown off, like a collector’s snuff boxes. “Did you know,” he asked Spilkes, imparting a fact he had acquired minutes before, “that you can make one and a half suits with the material it takes to make a single kilt?”

  “No kilts!” cried Harris, from several feet away, mistaking Fine’s piece of tutelage for a story idea he was trying out on the m.e. Anxieties about losing his butch edge to Jimmy Gordon and Cutaway came rushing back. In fact, whenever he was inside a male clothier’s, he could feel the old pansy Bandbox on the verge of reappearing, like some maiden aunt you thought was dead arriving for a visit.

  Paul Montgomery chose this moment to emerge from another anteroom, clad in a dark blue woolen work-in-progress. Trying to take notes while he shuffled forward in the unhemmed pants, he looked at the tubular bolts of cloth and decided they would become “the organ pipes in this cathedral of clothes,” once he started writing his piece. He’d been trying to win over the tailor all morning, to turn him into the sort of devoted character who always said a moist-eyed goodbye to Paulie in the last paragraph, but the man had offered only the dullest response to his blandishments, nothing but a dozen “quite rights” and “very well, sirs.”

  “It looks good,” said Harris, who thought it would look even better in brown; but at least it was strong and solid, not one of those flimsy spun-sugar summer suits he’d seen Lord shopping for yesterday.

  “Gentlemen!” he cried. “Let’s wrap it up!” If the driver was on time, they could still get a good lunch table at Kettner’s, a decent enough spot, though Harris could already feel a homesick craving for the security of his table at Malocchio.

  25

  “Can’t you turn that down?” cried Gianni Roma through the bars of his holding cell. “It’s enough like an igloo in here already.”

  The cop had his radio tuned to WEAF, which this morning featured the Eskimo Banjo Orchestra.

  “At least they’re just rubbin’ noses,” said the officer, otherwise ignoring the prisoner’s request.

  Gianni decided it was better not to try defending his masculinity. He knew, in fact, that it was best not to say anything at all. When he’d asked his cellmate—this poor, terrified shipping clerk—what he’d done, and the clerk said “Nothing,” Gianni had realized, sickeningly, that it was true. The guy had probably been picked up off the street to fill some vice cop’s quota.

  He wished he could say the same for himself. He’d been arrested last night while closing up the restaurant. At first he’d figured the rookie officer didn’t know the proper drill for settling the monthly trumped-up violation of the sumptuary laws, and that he’d be unhanded once he could make it over to the cash-register drawer. But as the young cop hustled him out onto Fiftieth Street, he was informed of the actual charge: selling narcotics to Waldo Lindstrom.

  It was a lie; he had never sold drugs to Waldo. He’d given them to him for free, or at least not for money, and only for the last two weeks, since the night of the party at Oldcastle’s, when he’d realized that’s what it would take to get him—between the model’s huge roster of other engagements—into bed. What, Gianni now wondered, had gone wrong? Had he purchased the drugs (from a connection of his bootlegging brother-in-law) with marked bills? Had he been set up? If your own bootlegger could be a stool pigeon, there was even less honor left in the world than he’d thought.

  The only thing he knew for sure was that if his pals were here in New York instead of over in Europe he’d have been sprung inside of an hour, and they’d all have gone back to Malocchio to drink the expensive gin and have a laugh on the cops.

  A sudden commotion made Gianni open his eyes. Waldo was being brought in, handcuffed to one cop and prodded by another. From the ensuing back-and-forth between the model and the booking officer, Gianni quickly gathered that the object of his desire had been arrested on a lower West Side pier.

  “While sunning myself,” said Waldo.

  “Before dawn?” asked the arresting officer, who seemed glad to open the cuffs and detach himself. A young man whom they were both calling Waldo’s “tanning partner” had managed to escape, but Waldo had spent the last few hours in the paddy wagon, almost ruining the vicuna overcoat he’d nicked from the Bandbox Fashion Department. Right now Gianni watched the second cop complete a last frisk; he pulled a thick money clip out of Waldo’s coat—and pocketed it for himself.

  “There goes my bail,” said Gianni, as soon as Waldo joined him and the frightened shipping clerk inside the holding cell.

  “It was worth it,” said Waldo, faking a swoon over the just-completed search.

  “I think you’d better get serious,” said Gianni, who had noticed the steady disappearance of his own Italian accent in the long hours since his arrest.

  “There’s no chance I can bail you,” said Waldo. “Not even if I still had the money clip. I might have to testify against you.” Gianni looked at him in disbelief, but only for a moment, choosing to banish the thought of such treachery by concentrating on the arrival of a man he recognized as the fixer in this little drama that had ensnared him. Wearing a homburg—and dandruff so abundant he reminded Gianni of the platters of nonpareils he set out with his guests’ coffee—the man approached the cell.

  “I can set you up with an excellent bondsman and the finest attorney,” he promised.

  Gianni rather doubted it. The finest attorney, now being pointed out, was a palsied septuagenarian leaning on a cane. But Gianni didn’t see what alternative he had. He nodded to the fixer and went to sit, head in hands, on the bench at the back of his cell. On the other side of the wall he could hear what sounded like someone getting the third degree. The shipping clerk shuddered, until Waldo said, with disgust: “Oh, please, I’ve paid to be slapped harder than that.”

  The remark left Gianni feeling jealous, but there was no time right now to explore his emotions toward Waldo. The cop listening to the radio was calling for both of them: “Okay, Gina and Ingemary! Upstairs!”

  The bondsman had done his work in a matter of minutes; the lawyer was already splitting his fee with the arresting officer. Satisfied with his take, Gianni’s new attorney tottered over to the cell and told his client, in a heavy Greek accent, that everything would now be fine.

  “Is there any chance,” asked Gianni, “that we could get this case to come before Judge Gilfoyle?” He had met Daisy’s new boyfriend at Oldcastle’s party, where he’d heard from Max that the guy had a seat at Rothstein’s table over at Lindy’s.

  The decrepit barrister shrugged. “He’s a very busy man.”

  Being handcuffed to Waldo, however indifferent the young man seemed to their enforced proximity, would be Gianni’s only pleasant memory of this experience. The two of them, linked at the wrist, were brought upstairs to stand before a visibly drunk judge who slurred his way through the cut-and-dried arraignment. Amidst his lawyer’s continuing assurances that everything was all right, Gianni kept looking nervously around. A bailiff chatted up a prostitute; a numbers runner with a receding hairline loudly protested that he could prove himself a juvenile; and the court reporter, who took down nothing, read last night’s Graphic.

  Gianni wondered what this morning’s papers were saying about his arrest, and as soon as he and Waldo, unshackled from each other, emerged into the day’s still-early light, he got his answer. A blind item in one of the gossip columns was asking:

  Which prominent Gotham mag editor appears to have skipped a fiscal “civic obligation,” stirring up dire consequences for a midtown spaghetti-slinger with more of a strut—or is that a swish?—than Mussolini?

  Gianni, who knew about the vice-squad payoffs necessitated by Wa
ldo’s unfortunate past, groaned. Now it was clear. Once Joe had missed his monthly payment, the cops had started watching Waldo. And once they made their arrest, Jimmy Gordon—who along with Cuddles and himself and no one else, not even Spilkes, knew about the payoffs—had tipped the papers.

  “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.

  26

  “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.