Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  40

  “Thanks, Betty, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Hanging up the phone, Becky could scarcely believe that today—February 20th, another awful Monday in this raw, endless winter—she had just agreed to browse the Pinafore dress racks for outfits she could take with her to sunny southern California. Late Friday afternoon Harris had stunned her with an assignment: go out to Hollywood and report on Blanche Sweet and Dorothy Gish, two nice-girl actresses now struggling to get racy vehicles, The Green Hat and The Constant Nymph, past the Hays Office and into production. The decency czar would soon be in Washington to testify about all the money he’d once scooped up for the GOP—in Liberty Bonds, no less—from a big oil man who’d later gotten some choice Teapot Dome leases. Becky felt shaky on the politics but understood Harris wanted her to keep the focus on two pretty girls caught in the hypocrisies of flesh and finance. The as-yet-unreported, unwritten piece was already on a lineup sheet with the title “Temptations and Teapots.”

  She crossed the corridor to Cuddles’ office carrying a plant she hoped he would water while she was gone. Relying on him for this task wouldn’t win her any commendation from the Botanists’ League, but maybe Cuddles would see the request as a sign of confidence.

  “Would you mind?” she asked.

  Cuddles stroked his chin, considering. “It’ll be risky. But okay. I’ll borrow one of Kitty Sark’s two remaining lives for it.”

  Harris made a sudden entrance. “You all ready, kid?” he asked Becky. “Come into my office for a pop at five o’clock. We’ll see you off.”

  She smiled, not quite believing how, after a cocktail, she’d be escorted downstairs to Grand Central for the 6:00 P.M. departure of the Twentieth Century Limited, just the way it happened for Paulie and Max and David Fine.

  “Betty’s lending me some things to wear,” she told the boss.

  “Have her pick out some schoolgirl stuff,” Harris replied.

  Becky blanched. What was this salacious fantasy? Just when she’d been thinking so well of him for the shot at something big!

  “To wear in front of Rosemary LaRoche,” he explained. “So she won’t think of you as vampy competition—devastating though you may be, Miss Walter.” Seeing her puzzled look, Harris elaborated: “I’m sending you out there with two assignments. You’re the new writer on our Rosemary cover story. I’d say congratulations, but I’m still not sure she’ll agree to go through with it. Actually, I’m not sure I’d say congratulations even then—seeing as how in order to get the story you’ll have to be in the same room with that tramp.”

  Becky, flustered but determined not to blush, said, “I’m not sure—” and then stopped, uncertain of what to add.

  Cuddles finished her sentence: “ ‘That I could live without this opportunity.’ ” He looked straight at her. “Say thank you, Gracie.”

  “Thank you,” said Becky to Harris. “But what’s happened to Newman?”

  “He’s announced he’s taking a leave of absence. Not that he could be bothered to tell me personally, of course. I’ve been informed of it through Miss O’Grady, who’s apparently trying to keep him off a cot at the Salvation Army. She says LaRoche is the last thing he could handle at this point. By the way, he’s the last teetotaler I ever let work at this place.”

  “Which means,” said Cuddles, “that Miss Walter will be in your office at five for that pop.”

  “Good,” said Harris, who now gave Becky the only real marching order she was going to get. “It won’t be our usual angle on a Duse. A girl reporter can’t be the stand-in for the reader’s desire. But maybe the idea of two beautiful girls together will get something going in him.” He tapped her on the behind with a file folder.

  Please don’t say anything more, thought Becky, who remembered the persistent rumor that—undisplayed, in a drawer in his office—there were pictures of Yvette and Claudine à deux.

  “They’re putting you at the Roosevelt?” asked Harris. “Good. We’ll wire you contacts and locations once you’re out there. Meanwhile,I’ll be trying to soothe LaRoche’s feathers through some back channels at Paramount.” He paused, and turned his gaze toward Houlihan. “The truth is, I’d have preferred a somewhat rougher approach to her. But with Stanwick taken up by other obligations, we’ll have to go this route.” It seemed clear that Cuddles would now be responsible for any failure with Rosemary as well as on the Shepard story.

  Harris’s abrupt departure brought Becky’s worries to the surface. She wanted to talk things over with Cuddles, but he’d turned toward his typewriter.

  “Will you be coming in for that farewell cocktail?” she asked.

  “It’s a pretty busy day,” he answered.

  Becky looked at his Underwood, which rather to her amazement contained the draft of a tribute to Eddie Foy, who’d died the other day.

  Cuddles leaned into the roller and made an elaborate erasure, whisking off the shavings and hoping that his sweet, smart Becky would just go and make things easier. However much he hungered for her presence, he right now needed her absence even more: he’d never come up with a new plan for winning her if he kept looking for her face across the corridor. This California assignment had been his doing; he’d actually sent a memo to Harris’s IN basket Friday morning, headed “AT THE RISK OF SCARING YOU AGAIN,” and signed off “Thinking like an editor.”

  “Our own little Adela Rogers St. Johns,” he said now, still not turning around. “Well, write if you get work. Which is to say, if you get past Rosemary’s Dobermans.”

  “Okay,” said Becky, confused, now that it had arrived, over this new distance she’d so long been hoping he’d put between them. “See you.” She reached over to touch his shoulder, but found herself unable to complete the gesture.

  Walking back to her own office she felt almost as lost as the Shepard boy. In Hollywood? By herself? She’d never been anywhere but upstate or here, and all of a sudden the fourteenth floor, this greased pole of fads and one-upsmanship, seemed snug and eternal, like Main Street in Aurora, each office a familiar shop. She looked down the hall toward David Fine’s. Between now and St. Patrick’s Day, while he covered the Golden Gloves at the Garden, it would be full of autographed towels and blood-flecked ring cards. He was doing a column on what fighters eat during three weeks of elimination bouts, and Becky could already imagine the illo: a picture of Fine himself holding a small fork in the padded maw of a boxing glove, the way he’d worn a chef’s toque and red suspenders when he did the piece on firehouse cooking.

  Enough. She needed to be organized, not sentimental. She picked up the corrected proof of her squib on Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia and walked it to Copy.

  “How is Stuart?” she asked Nan O’Grady.

  “Coming along,” said Nan, a bit uncertainly. “But not ready to be back here.” She was blushing, afraid for it to appear she was giving chase to the fallen glamour boy. “I really don’t know that much,” she added, especially worried she’d look foolish to Becky, so dewy and so nice, a kind of abstract competition that left her feeling devoid of any real hope in the matter of Stuart.

  “They’ve given me Rosemary LaRoche,” said Becky, anything but boastful.

  “Really?” asked Nan. “I think I’m pleased for you.”

  They both laughed. “You know,” said Becky, “Paulie’s the one who should be doing this. But I guess he’s really sick. They’re saying it’s something serious he picked up aboard ship.”

  “So I hear,” said Nan, tucking a pencil behind her ear. “Sounds a little odd, though, doesn’t it? I’d think the northern latitudes in the middle of winter would be pretty germ-free. But who am I not to take him at his word? Listen, Becky, I can ask Stuart if he has any notes to give you.” She had thrown away the movie magazines when straightening up his apartment down in Gramercy Park, but could recall seeing some scratchings about Rosemary not far from where they’d found the mess of pages that Allen had turned into “Billing and Cooing: Making Laws and
Making Love on Capitol Hill.”

  “Thanks,” said Becky.

  Nan, beset by a new collapse of confidence and another surge of blushing, rushed off to the fact-checking department with the encyclopedia proof.

  Left alone in silence with Allen Case, Becky began to experience the odd sense of invisibility that’s sometimes the first stage of homesickness: the feeling that one’s already departed the place one’s actually still standing in. She wished Allen would say something, but he was never a sure bet for conversation, especially not now, hunched over proofs of what Becky assumed to be the column he’d salvaged from Stuart’s visit to Washington. She lingered a moment, scanning Allen’s little bulletin board, bare but for two wheat-germ coupons and what appeared to be a very new snapshot of a koala bear boarding a ship.

  Allen’s own mind was on two letters inside his drawer, the first a carbon copy of what he’d sent, in the voice of Gardiner Arinopoulos, to a Mr. Boldoni, who according to the bills he’d seen ran the animal warehouse in Queens:

  The zebra shoot went very, VERY well, and I must NOW proceed with plans for late-spring work for Vanity Fair. And yet, so busy am I with other matters besides, I MUST ask you to allow Mr. Allen Case, my assistant, to BROWSE the creatures for me, and to select what HE deems suitable for my VF assignment. PLEASE reply to HIM at the Graybar Building.

  The second letter, Mr. Boldoni’s answer, had arrived only this morning:

  Mr. Case—

  I heard from G. Arin-etc. I’m not running a zoo with visiting hours here. But you can come out a week from Friday, around three. By the way, the llama died.

  B. Boldoni

  Who could he bring with him that Friday? An honest cop? Maybe the one friend he’d made at the American, a reporter he might convince to write an exposé? If only there were someone here who could help. But Fine would just be interested in whether the wombat went with string beans, and Stanwick in seeing if the ferret could take the lemur in a dark alley.

  Giving up on the possibility of a chat, Becky began her exit of the Copy room.

  “I’m on my way to California,” she said, waving goodbye. “I’ll see you in a few weeks, Allen.”

  He finally looked up. “B-b-bon voyage.”

  41

  Somewhere between Eighth Avenue and Fifth, Max Stanwick sat in the back of a cab reading the paper, which informed him that Mayor Walker had gone down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The item prompted nostalgic envy in Max, who long ago, during an ideal bachelor summer in the Quarter, had begun and failed to complete a novel called Jambalicepick. Did he still have the unfinished manuscript somewhere? The book’s premise had been pretty good, if he remembered right, maybe better than what underlay the disappearance of Hoosier Boy. He was beginning to have doubts about this story.

  After two hours at the Post Office, rooting around General Delivery, he’d found the trunk—stored under “J” instead of “S” by some Hungarian civil servant with a third-grade education. He’d given the guy a second fifty bucks to bust the lock, and had found inside a bunch of schoolbooks and enough clothes for a whole term at college—just where the first address label had indicated the kid was going, before he pasted it over with “GENERAL DELIVERY NEW YORK CITY.” Seems Shep had had exactly the hasty change of heart—Gamma Gamma greenfields for gaudy gritty Gotham—that his ma and pa had chewed Max’s ear off about this past weekend on the phone.

  For a third fifty bucks the Hungarian put the trunk back in the wrong place. Boylan’s cops wouldn’t find it if they decided to take an interest and compete with Harris’s vigilante ’vestigation.

  Well, thought Max, he might as well get on with it, and do his bit to keep Bandbox from turning up as dead as Siegfried at the newsstand. He had no desire to wind up working for Macfadden at True (sic) Detective, although he’d go there before he went to work for Jimmy Gordon. Loyalty counted for a lot with Max, and while you could argue Jimmy’d been the one who brought him to the dance, the way Jimmy had bolted from Joe seemed shamelessly shabby. Besides, thought Max, Joe’s the one who signs my checks: I take the king’s shilling, I am the king’s Shep-finder.

  Once the cab stopped, Max looked up at the Sherry-Netherland. It was almost brand new, too new for any history of stolen jewels and blood-soaked towels, of embezzlers and adulterers who’d hurled themselves and one another out the windows. Every hotel, in Max’s eyes, was an historic four-walled crime spree, but this one stood like some gleaming electric chair that had yet to be fouled with its first fried follicle. If the place was ever going to sizzle, it needed time to soak up slime, suck in secrets.

  He took the elevator to the twentieth floor and turned the knob of room 2008. Open. He shook his head over the inhabitant’s sheer stupidity—the inhabitant being Waldo Lindstrom, who lay naked on a sofa, eating an ice cream sundae and listening to the French lesson being broadcast over WNYC.

  “I didn’t figure you for the self-improving type,” said Max.

  Waldo, calmly recognizing this person from the Graybar Building, took a moment to recall what facts he knew about him. Deciding there was nothing to be gained in this instance by remaining naked, he got up and put on a long terry-cloth robe with a fighter’s hood. So bored he could use the company, he indicated a chair where Max should feel free to sit down. “I can get them to send up a second spoon,” he said, nodding toward the sundae and not bothering to stifle a yawn.

  Max declined both the seat and the snack. He pointed to the radio’s wire-mesh speaker, from which the words bouton, brique, and brouillard were being defined, in a fast alliterative succession he had to admire. “Sounds like maybe you’re planning a trip? Fluffing up your fluency in Frog?”

  “How’d you find me?” asked Waldo, still not terribly curious.

  On Saturday night a vice cop Max knew had sent him up to Seventh Avenue and 126th Street, to a rough bar where Waldo, tired of sitting in champagne baths drawn by panting pansy plutocrats, was known to seek out his own, more strenuous pleasures. Sure enough, once Max festooned the place with fifties, somebody told him Waldo had been stashed at the Sherry-Netherland by a play producer who’d be taking him off to Haiti once his latest revue closed down. Without even asking, Max had also learned about a ten-year-old son, fathered when Waldo was thirteen, back in Kansas—or, as Max still called it, Sinflower State, which had followed McCormick’s Grim Reaper when his bibliography went on a binge of rural inspiration.

  He mentioned none of this purchased information to Waldo. “I know you’re earning your freight here. Has the guy on WNYC taught you the French for ‘It hurts sitting down’?”

  “If only it hurt a little more,” sighed Waldo, as he sucked some whipped cream off the spoon. “So you found me. Why, and so what?”

  “I’m not even looking for you,” said Max.

  “I know. You’re looking for that kid from Iowa.”

  “Close enough. You sound interested.”

  “I can read, you know,” said Waldo. “I look at the papers same as everybody else.”

  “And what do you know about the kid outside of what’s in them? You were there at Oldcastle’s party that night. Did you drag him off somewhere with you? Maybe up to that place on 126th?”

  “Him?!” cried Waldo, laughing so hard he spit a pistachio nut.

  “Or maybe you passed him off to one of your buddies. One of them got a taste for jam?”

  Max watched Waldo lick the back of his spoon and remembered why he’d abandoned Banana Split, a novel with undercurrents of homosexual sadism, even before his publisher had to tell him it was beyond the pale. He could see that Waldo’s face was handsome enough to move thirty thousand Arrow collars with a single photograph, but too blank and lazy to hide even a small lie, let alone one as big as knowing anything about Shep’s disappearance or demise. Waldo had room in his mind for nothing more than a handful of French words and the good sense to keep his head face down in the pillow until Flit Ziegfeld could ship him off to Port-au-Prince.

  This was o
ne row Max could stop hoeing.

  “Anything you want me to tell Gianni?” he asked, while straightening his hat.

  “Tell him he owes me,” said Waldo.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because by the time I’m supposed to testify against him, I’m gonna be down in the Caribbean.”

  “So sensationally selfless!” scoffed Max. “Knowing that if you do testify, the guys who actually sold Gianni the drugs might beat you beyond even your tastes. For causing all these difficulties.” Max looked at this degenerate Adonis while a dribble of vanilla ice cream slid down Waldo’s square jaw. He thought about how much he’d like to drop a nickel on him, call his buddy down at vice to have them come here and pick him up. But then Waldo would be around to rat Gianni, who had torn up at least a hundred restaurant checks for Max.

  “Give my best to the boys down in Haiti,” was all Max said as he made for the door, hoping Waldo would wind up a shrunken head.

  42

  Inside her purse Becky had a Garden-of-Allah napkin and a Garden-of-Allah matchbox, the first for Daniel, who’d tease her about them, the second for Cuddles, who’d love the items. She’d done the souvenir gathering in the nervous moments prior to Blanche Sweet’s arrival and her own mortifying first words: “I loved you in The Ragamuffin!” Blanche, hitting thirty-three, would surely have appreciated mention of a movie she’d made more recently than a dozen years ago.

  But the actress gave no sign of being annoyed. For twenty minutes her conversation had been jolly as could be. Though born to showbiz, Blanche liked straying from the topic at hand to talk about her feckless, funny husband, Mickey, with whom she’d had a swell time for years, though by Blanche’s cheerful admission they probably had Reno in their future. Mickey was show-business, too, of course—a director—and the way Blanche spoke about him made Becky picture Cuddles standing beside a camera with a megaphone. In fact, the star’s breezy, confidential manner soon inspired Becky to impart her own worries over how the real Cuddles was getting on back at the office in this time of crisis.