Jimmy Gordon’s expression had turned cool and faraway. Revenge, he was thinking, would come slowly. He’d take a year or two off, maybe finish his dissertation on The Faerie Queene, and then return to town atop the masthead of some start-up. Coming back would be even more exciting than coming up had been. But for now he could feel only contempt. He rose from his seat, nodded to Oldcastle, and followed Joe out to the bank of elevators.
The two men waited for their two cars, one heading up, the other going down. Jimmy began to pace, a sulking Achilles without a tent, whereas Harris, realizing that he had a tale he’d be telling his men for years to come around the London campfire, allowed the sentimental broth of his nature to bubble up. His eyes glistened with tears.
“I once told you,” he called out to Jimmy, “that I think of you as a bastard son.”
Jimmy returned to the elevator’s call button and punched it again. It didn’t matter that he still liked Joe and always would. “The Bastard never gets to be the Heir,” he said, showing Harris his back.
“Right,” said the older man, genuinely hurt. “He becomes the Pretender.”
Jimmy Gordon had a desk to clean out, and Joe Harris, to his astonishment, still had a magazine to run. He went back down to fourteen and discovered that everyone, at 2:30, remained out to lunch. Hazel had already sent around a memo about an evening celebration at Malocchio, and the staff, delighted to know they still had jobs, had decided to desert them for the afternoon.
Harris slumped into his big chair, in which he would soon fall asleep under the congratulatory regard of Yvette and Claudine—but not before he took one of his huge-barreled fountain pens and wrote a note, which he inserted into the pneumatic tube that would take it to Cuddles Houlihan.
59
Mrs. von Erhard always stayed late in the Graybar on Friday nights—doing the books and straightening the merchandise. Tonight she also had a training session to conduct. “The Life Savers,” she said firmly, “must never be too close to the edge. If they fall, they turn into, what do you say, smithereens, inside their little paper tubes.”
The Wood Chipper rolled up the French cuffs of his unpaid-for shirt and gave a grunt that Hannelore took as a sign of understanding. “It will be so nice to have a man around the place again,” she said, squeezing Chip’s right bicep. “I am so glad I asked if you could use the work.” Word from the Biltmore had traveled fast, prompting Mrs. von Erhard to make her offer of employment just before lunchtime, when she saw Chip rushing to get his few belongings out of the building.
What alternative did he have? None, Chip thought once again, as he picked up Siegfried—so much lighter than he’d been last time—and wiped the portion of the counter near the till. If he didn’t earn some money in the next week, his creditors would be after more than this shirt on his back. And if anybody from Bandbox or Cutaway had one word to say to him when they slapped down two cents for their morning paper, he’d shove a roll of Hannelore’s precious Life Savers, and maybe a spoonful of Siegfried himself, down their throats.
Gianni Roma was due to report to prison on Monday morning, and tonight’s hastily arranged celebration at his establishment would double as a kind of penal bon voyage, but at 8:00, with the dining room already full, Gianni was still back in the kitchen with the actual guest of honor.
“Listen,” Harris was saying to his old pal. “Four months up in Fishkill is not that long a stretch. Those veal steaks in the freezer will still be plenty good when you get out.”
Fear had replaced most of Gianni’s recent resentment. He just nodded.
“Tell him about my idea,” Harris urged David Fine, who was over near the stove.
“I’m going to come up every week and eat in the dining hall with you,” Fine promised. “I’ve already got permission, for a column on prison food. I haven’t got the title yet—something with ‘Stir.’ I’ll write it, but we’ll put it in your voice and under your byline.”
Agreement to such a thing by Fine, the most territorial of writers, was a matter of such unexpected generosity that Gianni’s apprehension began to melt with his anger. He at last agreed to join the celebrants.
“That’s better!” said Harris, plunging them into the party’s roar.
Betty watched Joe walk around each of the tables, rewarding everyone with compliments, dispensing proposals and permissions like doubloons from a purse. She knew that he had always felt his power more by saying yes than saying no—a tendency much rarer than its opposite on the echelon he still, thank God, inhabited.
Nan and Stuart had arrived actually holding hands, and Harris now stood between them. “We need everybody’s talents. You hear me? We’ll have more pages, but we’ll soon have more competition. Miss O’Grady, how about doing a little muckraking for us? You’ve certainly shown a talent for it.” With Rosemary now safely on the newsstands, Nan had at last let the story of the movie star’s grand-maternity be known to a few. Harris continued his pitch: “We’ve got at least a temporary opening in the investigations line.” Max Stanwick,more shaken by the recent threats than he’d realized, had decided, despite the sizzling success of the Shep saga, to take six months off and write a magazine mystery called Kill Fee.
“No, Mr. Harris,” said Nan. “Thank you, but I’m happy where I am.”
“All right, then. That leaves you, Newman. You know, I hear rumors about you and her. So once you get ready to leave that seminary you’re in, I’ve got a new column idea for you—a whole new rubric.” He paused for effect. “ ‘The Husband’s Life.’ Could be very popular with our slightly older readers. Think about it.”
“Uh, I am,” stammered Stuart, squeezing Nan’s hand.
Her face went as red as her hair.
Gardiner Arinopoulos came in to take a picture of each table, as if this were a wedding. Harris backslapped his way into every shot. He dragged Andrew Burn away from a comptometer in Gianni’s little office near the spice closet, though the publisher protested that he couldn’t bring himself to wait until Monday to see what the rates on the new ad card would come out to once the readership inherited from Jimmy got factored in.
Forgiveness was thicker on the air than marinara. Harris had called Connecticut and gotten Spilkes to come down for the party. After all, as things turned out, the victory had been much more complete for the former m.e.’s caution. Harris was even ready to forget about the fiction contest and pardon Sidney Bruck, who’d finally arrived, his Shelleyan hair tousled by the night’s breezes.
“I just made the deal with Mencken’s agent,” said Sidney, explaining the reason, beyond fashionableness, that he was so late. “For a four-thousand-word essay on love in America.” Landing the piece was the triumph of his still-young career as an editor.
“I’ve got the title!” cried Harris, banging Sidney between the shoulder blades. “ ‘Mencken Whoopee!’ ”
Sidney managed a weak smile and took a seat by Richard Lord, the person least likely to spill anything on him.
Two of the tables joined in loud in-absentia toasts to the magazine’s Bunion Derby contestant, who’d telephoned from Ohio, through which he was running only a few miles behind Andy Payne, the Cherokee Wonder. With the way things had been going, who could say he wouldn’t pull ahead?
A few minutes later, a waiter came over to announce that there was a messenger at the door. Judge Gilfoyle and Daisy went a little white from force of habit until they realized the messenger was for Harris: a boy from the Graybar’s mailroom bearing an especially important telegram.
“It’s from Coolidge!” shouted the boss, once it was handed to him.
The crowd quieted down long enough for him to read the president’s entire commentary upon the successful rescue of John Shepard: COMMENDABLE.
“Four syllables,” said Fine. “He’s starting to run off at the mouth.”
Burn instantly twitched with a desire to shove the wire in front of some tightwad savings bankers who might be impressed enough by it to try a first ad in Bandbox. But Har
ris, with a dozen waves of sentiment crashing over him, only wondered if Coolidge, so soon after losing his own young son, hadn’t been genuinely touched by word of this lost-and-found boy. “Here,” he said, handing the telegram to Newman. “A souvenir.”
The editor-in-chief strode off toward Shep: “After this, City Hall’s going to feel like a comedown!”
The young man assured him that wouldn’t be the case; he was looking forward to shopping for a new suit before his parents got to town tomorrow.
“And after that you’ll need a place to live,” said Harris, putting an arm around the kid’s shoulder. “Even we can’t afford to keep you at the Commodore forever! Find some place you can afford on a fact-checker’s salary.”
“You mean—?” Shep looked even more delighted than Daisy, who was overhearing this news.
Ten minutes before, in the coatcheck room, Hazel had given Shep an astonishingly continental kiss. She now saw the countess’s old reflexes kicking in. “Down, girl,” she warned Daisy. “You’ve quit the field.”
It was at this moment the moosehead appeared through Malocchio’s front window. Allen Case stood outside, struggling to hold it. Noticing both creatures, Betty steered Joe just the right number of degrees that he wouldn’t see his old trophy, which caused little enough stir among the partygoers who did see it, since most of them were far enough gone on Gianni’s olive oil to assume they’d spotted some dead variant of a pink elephant.
After setting the taxidermy down in the vestibule, Allen ventured into the restaurant. He worked his way through the crowd to Mr. Merrill, who noticed that he was wearing a backpack.
“Are you going away?” the illustrator asked. His alarm was shared by Nan, who had approached to see what was going on.
Allen nodded. He had finally found his dream job. During the recent spate of wires between the San Rafael Valley and New York, it had developed that Mr. Isidore Mazzaferro, concerned by the ranch’s sudden understaffing (two cowboys having quit on the day of the arrests), needed an assistant. There was a tiny cabin on the nature preserve that Allen could have all to himself.
“Mr. M-Merrill, will you take the m-moose?”
“Yes,” the illustrator at last assured him—if Allen promised to sit here long enough to eat a plate of steamed Italian vegetables. By the time this antipasto arrived, arrangements were being made for Shep to take over the copyeditor’s apartment on Cornelia Street.
Two tables away, Cuddles Houlihan reached into his pants pocket for a pneumatic-mail cylinder, which he plunked down next to his plate. “You know,” he said to Becky, “Hannelore should have sifted Siegfried into one of these. It’d be a good way of staying in circulation.”
“Why on earth have you got that with you?” Becky asked.
“Well, it didn’t hit me on the head, but after reading what’s inside I could probably use a cold compress anyway. Here, tell me what you think.”
Becky opened the tube and unrolled a note composed in Harris’s big hand. “I NEED A NEW MANAGING EDITOR. CONSIDER YOURSELF PROMOTED.”
Cuddles watched her reading. “I don’t know if I can say yes. Doesn’t the job require a house in Connecticut, plus a wife and children?”
Becky poured herself more olive oil and took a breath. “No children,” she said evenly. “At least not for a while.”
Cuddles’ expression dissolved into something like the one with which he’d watched Nazimova three months ago at the Palace. “I do have a cat,” he said, his voice trembling. “But he’s down to one life.”
Becky looked him in the eye. “That’s all I have, too. You’d better handle it with care, Mr. Houlihan.”
Cuddles gulped. “Let’s get out of here and go over to Manking. There’s a bottle of sake with our names on it.”
The two of them waited half a minute, until the noise reached a new peak that would allow them to slip away unnoticed.
They nearly succeeded, but at the restaurant’s front door they came up against the unexpected arrival of Paul Montgomery.
“Hello!” he said, sweeping past.
Without removing his hat, and in imitation of an already-famous gesture, Paulie jumped onto the lone empty table at the outer rim of the party. Motioning to one of the waiters for an empty glass, he raised it high above his head and called out, with the full measure of his sincerity, to the now-absolutely-quiet crowd: “Hey, you guys! What do we do for an encore?”
About the Author
Thomas Mallon’s books include the novels Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Aurora 7, as well as a collection of essays, In Fact. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and GQ. He has been the recipient of Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, and in 1998 he received the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Bandbox Page 30