Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  “Amazing what they can do with electricity these days,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Cuddles!” It was the clearest long-distance connection she’d ever been on.

  “Ah, those crystal-clear sibilants. Norman must have pulled a few strings with his old pals at AT&T. Got our lines routed under nothing but widows’ porches from Midtown to Malibu. Pretty quiet, no? So how are you? It’s almost quitting time here.”

  “You sound—” said Becky, hesitantly.

  “Sober?”

  “I didn’t want to use the word.”

  “It’s the war footing we’re on. Concentrates the mind. ‘Don’t give up the Shep’—that’s our slogan. He’s the Rosetta corncob at this point.”

  “I’ve seen the papers.” The Los Angeles Examiner had picked up the story, and even run news of Gianni’s conviction in a sidebar summary of Bandbox’s woes. “Any more news?”

  “Yeah, actually,” said Cuddles. “From a surprising source.”

  “What is it? Who from?” Becky was surprised by the avidity of her own questions.

  “It’ll take too long to tell on the horn. ’Phat says we’ve got to act like we’re down to the budget’s last nickel. I’ll wait and give it to you in person. When I get there.”

  “When you get here?”

  “Book yourself another week in that pleasure palace.”

  “Cuddles.” She tried, with a stern tone, to snuff whatever desperate romantic gesture he might be planning.

  “This is business,” he informed her. “I won’t even stay on the same floor.”

  “On what basis am I supposed to extend my stay here? I’m done with Blanche and Dorothy, and I struck out completely with that hateful LaRoche.”

  “Well, I guess she’s not a lez.”

  “She thinks I’m a lez.”

  “If you are, you’re lez majesté.”

  “Lez change the subject.”

  “Lez misbehave. No, scratch that. We have business. Expect me by the nineteenth at the latest.”

  Becky sighed. “That’s a long way to travel just to read my Blanche-and-Dorothy piece. Which may actually be good. Oh, gosh, Cuddles, it’s got to be good.”

  “We can edit out by the pool.”

  “Will you stop? Listen, I’m happy to hear your voice, even with the practical joke. And I will see you by the nineteenth. At the latest. Since that’s when I’ll be back in the office.”

  “No. You’ve got to stay put.”

  “You’re beginning to exasperate me, Mr. H. I’m going to say toodle-oo now.”

  “No, you’re going to find Shep. Next week. With me. Stay where you are, because you’re already getting warm.”

  He went on to reveal just enough to make Becky realize he wasn’t kidding, that he’d be coming out on a train headed in the opposite direction from the one Oldcastle’s travel agent was still booking her on. In the end, she could only say okay.

  After he’d hung up, she stared out her window of the Roosevelt into the blazing sun. And then she went downstairs to extend her reservation. Cuddles’ word had always been his bond. Sometimes the bond turned out to be Confederate—worth only its weight in sentiment—but she couldn’t say no to whatever long shot he was trying to play, not when for so many months she’d been urging him to play any shot at all.

  Three thousand miles away, Cuddles, too, was staring out the window, not into the sun, which in New York had gone down, but at the steel shell of the Chanin Building, now risen past the top of the Commodore Hotel and visible from even the Graybar. Its rapid ascent seemed a reminder to make haste, and after another moment Cuddles got himself down to Grand Central to make his reservations for Los Angeles. He’d take the Twentieth Century to Chicago and, from there, a Chief to L.A. His departure from here a couple of days from now would occasion no collegial sendoff; he was determined to keep absolutely mum about what he’d learned.

  Which was this: Max had told him, when he asked what Rothstein tended to do with bystanders who’d stumbled into his more delicate business affairs, about several places where the gang kept people on ice before returning them to New York or sending them to a more permanent nowhere. He’d mentioned a farmhouse in New England and a ranch in California—“There’s corpses under the copse, stiffs beneath the sand”—while Cuddles tried to seem no more than moderately interested, withholding what he’d learned from the judge about their little pitcher and his possibly big ears. If he sent Max down the wrong path in search of Shep, that would truly be the end of Harris & Houlihan. But if his secrecy led to a surprise heroic payoff in the eyes of BW? Well, then, Shep really might be the Rosetta cob.

  Late Friday afternoon, joining half the staff inside ’Phat’s office to toast the absent, just-convicted Gianni at a wake that felt more mick than mama mia, Cuddles had gone back to his best source. Whisking Daisy aside—who ever was more whiskable?—Cuddles asked if any of those “messengers” had ever said anything about a New England farmhouse or a California ranch. Maybe the judge himself had been threatened with a sojourn at one of them?

  No, Daisy had said, after a bit of cogitation. But one of the messengers, an especially well-built man, had recently arrived at Beekman Place with a new tan, which, he told Daisy, had been soaked up in California. He’d also mentioned horses.

  Cuddles had then asked her if she could arrange to see this fellow again, quickly. On Sunday she managed that, while the judge was visiting ninety-one-year-old Ma Gilfoyle at the Little Sisters of Mercy home in Jackson Heights.

  And this morning Daisy had come into Cuddles’ office, practically purring: “Go west, young man.”

  “You’re two generations late,” he’d replied. But Daisy’s tryst with the tanned specimen of Rothstein’s muscle-squad had produced amazingly precise directions to a sort of half-working, half-dude ranch in the San Rafael Valley. Cuddles had to wonder why Daisy had wasted her war years on the late Count DiDonna, when she could have been Uncle Sam’s own Mata Hari. But he just thanked her, and figured that her Sunday-afternoon assignation had been its own reward.

  Until she’d shyly added a request. “I won’t ask what this is about,” she whispered, blowing her perfumed breath toward Cuddles, “but if what I told you is useful, well—could you see if there might be something in it for the judge? A way to get the dogs called off?”

  47

  Five days later, Daisy still had the judge on her mind and in her sights. “I don’t care if he is out of fashion. Don’t you think he looks distinguished up there in his high hat?”

  “Like a regular judge,” said Nan, stamping her feet as she tried to keep warm on the sidewalk near Sixty-fourth Street, on the other side of Fifth Avenue from the St. Patrick’s Day parade reviewing stand. Francis X. Gilfoyle stood with a dozen other officeholders and Tammany chiefs, all of them come to watch Acting Mayor McKee ride past on his white charger while Walker continued his vacation in Miami.

  The Rainbow Division marched by to full-throated cheers. Nan saw Daisy make a fast, expert appraisal of the best-looking physiques in the ranks, but once the long line of shaving-bowl helmets had passed, the countess’s eyes returned to Gilfoyle. She really did seem to cherish her corrupt, kindly jurist, thought Nan.

  “A man can change,” said Daisy, tugging on her colleague’s sleeve. “No matter what pressures he’s under. You do believe that, don’t you?”

  She meant for the remark to encourage Nan’s pursuit of Newman. Its truth had been demonstrated by her own romance: Daisy had the judge eating well and drinking less. If he’d been wearing today’s green carnation when she’d met him two months ago, the flower would have entered into a Christmasy combination with his nose. By now the judge’s prominent proboscis was barely pink, and even that hue came mostly from the noontime cold that was freezing the high-school trumpeters’ lips.

  Nan was too shy to talk about Stuart, so she tried shifting the subject of reformation to Cuddles Houlihan: “A man can relapse, too.” Cuddles had been absent since Wedne
sday, assumed by everyone to be home in mid-bender.

  “He seemed so sharp when I talked to him Monday afternoon,” said Daisy, who went no further in expressing her bafflement, though she wondered what he could have done with the information she’d imparted. Lost his nerve and started drinking? The thought made her sad, but only for a moment. Daisy loved all parades, especially this one, whose crush of observers, prone to impulsive kisses, made it one more piece of the mistletoe under which she lived her life.

  Nan was the one truly worried. She had carried another pot roast and another pie down to Stuart’s Wednesday night, and been there when the first of the telegrams had come—from Needles, California. Stuart had called her the following afternoon, when he got home early from Catholic World and found two more wires: one from Albuquerque and another from Dodge City. The Chief was making its way east with Rosemary LaRoche, who’d deserted the set of Wyoming Wilderness for another crack at the columnist.

  By 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, Nan had felt like some New Woman angel, determined to defend her fallen, fallible man from this Lilith. Before she left the Graybar that day, she began her chancy counterattack with a telephone call to Helen Hatfield in Emporia, Kansas. After the failure of Helen’s novel, The Wheat and the Chaff—which had been tightened up by Nan at Scribner’s—the author had quit New York and gone back to her home town, to work for William Allen White on the Emporia Gazette. But she would do anything for Nan, including the very odd favor her old copyeditor was now asking.

  All day Friday, with a utopian air swirling around the city—the ticker running thirty-three minutes behind on buy orders; a conference of diplomats in Paris close to outlawing war, at least on paper—Nan had chewed her nails and waited. But no word came from Helen.

  Now, on Saturday, Nan clapped her gloves against the cold and let her glance stray southward, down Fifth Avenue, toward the hotel where that bottle-blond succubus would probably soon check in.

  On Sunday, sure enough, as soon as she called Stuart, Nan found out that there had been additional telegrams from Toledo and Albany and, finally, the Plaza. The last wire informed Stuart that Rosemary would give herself one night to freshen up and him one night to hesitate. If he wasn’t at her room by Monday at 8:00 P.M., she’d be at his place by 8:30.

  After sharing this dire news, Stuart expected Nan to invite him out to Woodside on Monday night for a hideout and a homecooked meal. Instead she urged him to stay home and meet Rosemary’s assault head-on. “Until you do, she’ll just keep after you,” said Nan.

  “But,” Stuart asked, despairingly, “what if she brings liquor?”

  “Be strong” was all Nan would add to her advice.

  All Sunday evening, she forced herself to wait. She sat by the radio, listening to Madame Schumann-Heink and rereading what the papers had to say about the wedding of Nancy Ann Miller, an American girl, to the Maharajah of Indore. All the details about the 25,000 spectators and sacrificial tree bark helped get Nan to Monday morning, when at the office a telegram finally arrived from Helen in Emporia.

  CAN SEND BIRTH CERT. IN MAIL; YOU SHD. HAVE END OF WEEK. MEANWHILE INFO. BELOW. CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT IT’S FOR BUT HERE ’TIS. MISS YOUR TOUCH WITH SEMI-COLON …

  Bless her heart: the telegram must have cost Helen more than she’d gotten in royalties for The Wheat and the Chaff, while the information on its second page was worth above rubies to Nan, who whispered “Jesus, Mary, Joseph” by way of thanksgiving.

  Nan double-timed it from Copy to Fashion, where Richard Lord was trying several pairs of socks on Bonus Corer, the new main model. When Nan casually asked if either of them knew what might have happened to Waldo Lindstrom now that Gianni’s trial was over, Lord said that the cops had been warning Waldo not to leave the city just yet—something he couldn’t do anyway, now that his rich producer was out of the picture. According to Bonus, Waldo was such damaged goods that Cutaway wouldn’t touch him either. He’d been reduced to looking for work at Physical Culture.

  Armed with this knowledge and too restless to settle for telephoning,Nan flew uptown to the Macfadden Building. She arrived during the mandatory afternoon calisthenics, which on the floor for PC were conducted a rigorous notch above the other magazines’ performance level. Nan was hoping only to come away with a temporary, post—Sherry-Netherland address for Waldo—something the models booker might have in her notebook—but there he was himself, behind a pillar, hiding from the exercise.

  “I guess there’s no action for me here,” he explained to Nan, once she said hello. “I might have a shot at some forearms portfolio they’re doing, but that’s it.” He made a rueful little snigger. “Might as well be a damned hand model.”

  Apparently, Waldo’s physique, so beautiful in a Kuppenheimer suit, lacked the heft and muscle required by Macfadden’s anatomical monthly. If truth be told, Nan could see that Bandbox’s former cover boy, sitting next to her in just a T-shirt, was beginning to sag a little.

  “That’s terrible,” she said. “Waldo, would you consider coming around to see Stuart Newman this evening? At his apartment?”

  Nan explained, with a complete lack of truthfulness, that Stuart, reduced to freelancing by a scandal similar to Waldo’s, was thinking of writing an article about Waldo’s plight. Would he consider being interviewed?

  “Sure,” said Waldo, guessing that a little piece of Newman might be in this for Miss O’Grady.

  A measure of Waldo’s career straits could be found in the punctuality of his arrival at Newman’s place that evening. He was startled to see Nan standing in front of the closed apartment door, listening to a din from inside. Bursts of female yelling rolled over the occasional male murmur. There was a crash of china, too. Nan looked to be doing everything she could to restrain herself from intervening; so great was her concentration that Waldo had to tap her on the shoulder.

  “Oh!” she cried, wheeling around. “Thank you for coming, Waldo.

  I guess we’re ready now.” She took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

  “Take a powder!” yelled the woman inside.

  Nan decided just to turn the knob. Once the door was open she motioned to Waldo and the two of them entered.

  Stuart Newman sat slumped on the couch behind a half-empty tumbler of whiskey. His tie was off, and smears of lipstick covered the left side of his face. Standing over him, in a black slip, Rosemary LaRoche pursued a spirited line of questioning about his manhood, at one point driving her shiny little fist into his ribs.

  Nan said nothing, just closed her eyes and prayed for the exact exclamation that, a second later, emanated from Waldo Lindstrom: “Termites and Topeka! Mama!”

  Startled by some distant familiarity in the cry, Rosemary drew away from Stuart to look at the equally handsome but much further dissipated man across the room.

  Recognition dawned.

  “What’s the lousy idea?” she screamed. “Get outta here, you little bastard!”

  For Stuart’s enlightenment, Nan took Helen Hatfield’s telegram from her purse.

  “ ‘WALDO LINDSTROM,’ ” she read. “ ‘BORN COLDWATER, KANSAS, JANUARY 10, 1905, TO ROSE ROCK, FOURTEEN YEARS OF AGE. FATHER UNKNOWN.’ ” After a pause—to give poor, dazed Stuart a chance to grasp the situation’s essentials—Nan declared: “I thought a little family reunion might be nice. Considering how far you’ve traveled, Miss Rock.”

  The penny had dropped ten days ago, when Waldo testified at Gianni’s trial and used that oddly local termites expression. Nan had recognized it, from Stuart’s hash of notes, as belonging to Rosemary; it was then that she’d been able to put her finger on a physical resemblance that had nagged at her from the moment Waldo ambled up to the witness stand. He, Nan wildly surmised, had been the principal event of what Stuart’s notes called Rosemary’s “Lost Years—1904–06.”

  The thirty-seven-year-old film star managed to throw on her fur coat over her black slip. She had already reached the door by the time Waldo could extract a Brownie snapshot from his wal
let and call out to her, with considerable sincerity: “Don’t you want to see your grandson? He’s real big for eight.”

  48

  The road wasn’t exactly unpaved, but so many stones and branches lay across the broken asphalt it might as well have been. The Ford Becky had hired took another sharp bounce and Cuddles issued a low moan before once more focusing on Balto: The Hero Dog. Unique among automobile passengers, he claimed that he could fend off car sickness by reading. But when the car jumped another bad rut, he put his book on the floor and murmured: “I don’t think this rattletrap is going to make it.”

  Becky, who’d learned to drive at college, dismissed the idea: “Will Rogers says Henry Ford could make a farm pay. We’ll get there.” She patted the steering wheel.

  “The rattletrap I was referring to,” said Cuddles, “is myself. And I would rather sit through two hours of Fink’s Mules than twenty minutes of Rogers.”

  “Relax,” Becky ordered. She glanced again at the map Cuddles had drawn from Daisy’s information, then gunned the engine, pushing them a little further into the San Rafael Valley.

  “You know,” said Cuddles, “Spilkes and Burn would tell you our means of transport isn’t in keeping with the Oldcastle image.”

  “That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

  Once at their destination, she and Cuddles would be trying to pass themselves off as geologists with the state’s Department of Public Safety, charged with spot-checking land formations within fifty miles of the St. Francis Dam, which had collapsed last Monday night only hours after Cuddles called the Roosevelt. Four hundred had died, and a small army of typhoid inoculators was now on the move. The California papers were shrill with cries for investigation.