BUtterfield 8

by John O'Hara

  “Yessa,” said the Negro. The elevator rose two stories and stopped. They got out and were standing then right in front of a steel door, painted red, and with a tiny door cut out in the middle. Jimmy rang the bell and a face appeared in the tiny door.

  “Yes, sir,” said the face. “What was the name again?”

  “You’re new or you’d know me,” said Jimmy.

  “Yes, sir, and what was the name again?”

  “Malloy, for Christ’s sake.”

  “And what was the address, Mr. Malloy?”

  “Oh, nuts. Tell Luke Mr. Malloy is here.”

  There was a sound of chains and locks, and the door was opened. The waiter stood behind the door. “Have to be careful who we let in, sir. You know how it is.”

  It was a room with a high ceiling, a fairly long bar on one side, and in the corner on the other side was a food bar, filled with really good free lunch and with obviously expensive kitchen equipment behind the bar. Jimmy steered Isabel to the bar.

  “Hello, Luke,” he said.

  “Howdy do, sir,” said Luke, a huge man with a misleading pleasant face, not unlike Babe Ruth’s.

  “Have a whiskey sour, darling. Luke mixes the best whiskey sours you’ve ever had.”

  “I think I want a Planter’s punch—all right, a whiskey sour.”

  “Yours, sir?”

  “Scotch and soda, please.”

  Isabel looked around. The usual old rascal looking into a schooner of beer and the usual phony club license hung above the bar mirror. Many bottles, including a bottle of Rock and Rye, another specialty of Luke’s, stood on the back bar. Except for the number and variety of the bottles, and the cleanliness of the bar, it was just like any number (up to 20,000) of speakeasies near to and far from Times Square. Then Isabel saw one little article that disturbed her: an “illuminated” calendar, with a pocket for letters or bills or something, with a picture of a voluptuous dame with nothing on above the waist. The calendar still had not only all the months intact, but also a top sheet with “1931” on it. And across the front of the pocket was the invitation. “When in Chicago Visit D’Agostino’s Italian Cooking Steaks Chops At Your Service Private Dining Rooms,” and the address and the telephone numbers, three of them.

  By the time she had studied the calendar and understood the significance of it—what with Jimmy’s advance description of the speakeasy—their drinks were served, and she began to lose the feeling that the people in the speakeasy were staring at her back. She looked around, and no one was staring at her. The place was less than half full. At one table there was a party of seven, four men and three women. One of the women was outstandingly pretty, was not a whore, was not the kind of blonde that is cast for gangster’s moll in the movies, and was not anything but a very good-looking girl, with a very nice shy smile. Isabel could imagine knowing her, and then she suddenly realized why. “Jimmy,” she said, “that girl looks like Caroline English.”

  He turned. “Yes, she does.”

  “But the other people, I’ve seen much worse at Coney Island, or even better places than that. You wouldn’t invent a story just to make an ordinary little place seem attractive, would you?”

  “In the first place, no, and in the second place, no. In the first place I couldn’t be bothered. In the second place I wouldn’t have to. People like you make me mad, I mean people like you, people whose families have money and send them to good schools and belong to country clubs and have good cars—the upper crust, the swells. You come to a place like this and you expect to see a Warner Brothers movie, one of those gangster pictures full of old worn-out comedians and heavies that haven’t had a job since the two-reel Keystone Comedies. You expect to see shooting the minute you go slumming—”

  “I beg your pardon, but why are you talking about you people, you people, your kind of people, people like you. You belong to a country club, you went to good schools and your family at least had money—”

  “I want to tell you something about myself that will help to explain a lot of things about me. You might as well hear it now. First of all, I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I probably could play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick. Now it’s taken me a little time to find this out, but I have at last discovered that there are not two kinds of Irishmen. There’s only one kind. I’ve studied enough pictures and known enough Irishmen personally to find that out.”

  “What do you mean, studied enough pictures?”

  “I mean this, I’ve looked at dozens of pictures of the best Irish families at the Dublin Horse Show and places like that, and I’ve put my finger over their clothes and pretended I was looking at a Knights of Columbus picnic—and by God you can’t tell the difference.”

  “Well, why should you? They’re all Irish.”

  “Ah, that’s exactly my point. Or at least we’re getting to it. So, a while ago you say I look like James Cagney—”

  “Not look like him. Remind me of him.”

  “Well, there’s a faint resemblance, I happen to know, because I have a brother who looks enough like Cagney to be his brother. Well, Cagney is a Mick, without any pretense of being anything else, and he is America’s ideal gangster. America, being a non-Irish, anti-Catholic country, has its own idea of what a real gangster looks like, and along comes a young Mick who looks like my brother, and he fills the bill. He is the typical gangster.”

  “Well, I don’t see what you prove by that. I think—”

  “I didn’t prove anything yet. Here’s the big point. You know about the Society of the Cincinnati? You’ve heard about them?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, if I’m not mistaken I could be a member of that Society. Anyway I could be a Son of the Revolution. Which is nice to know sometimes, but for the present purpose I only mention it to show that I’m pretty God damn American, and therefore my brothers and sisters are, and yet we’re not American. We’re Micks, we’re non-assimilable, we Micks. We’ve been here, at least some of my family, since before the Revolution—and we produce the perfect gangster type! At least it’s you American Americans’ idea of a perfect gangster type, and I suppose you’re right. Yes, I guess you are. The first real gangsters in this country were Irish. The Mollie Maguires. Anyway, do you see what I mean by all this non-assimilable stuff?”

  “Yes. I suppose I do.”

  “All right. Let me go on just a few sticks more. I show a sociological fact, I prove a sociological fact in one respect at least. I suppose I could walk through Grand Central at the same time President Hoover was arriving on a train, and the Secret Service boys wouldn’t collar me on sight as a public enemy. That’s because I dress the way I do, and I dress the way I do because I happen to prefer these clothes to Broadway clothes or Babbitt clothes. Also, I have nice manners because my mother was a lady and manners were important to her, also to my father in a curious way, but when I was learning manners I was at an age when my mother had greater influence on me than my father, so she gets whatever credit is due me for my manners. Sober.

  “Well, I am often taken for a Yale man, by Yale men. That pleases me a little, because I like Yale best of all the colleges. There’s another explanation for it, unfortunately. There was a football player at Yale in 1922 and around that time who looks like me and has a name something like mine. That’s not important.”

  “No, except that it takes away from your point about producing public enemies, your family. You can’t look like a gangster and a typical Yale man.”

  “That’s true. I have an answer for that. Let me see. Oh, yes. The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people. I’m not making that up as a smart answer. It’s true. In fact, I just thought of something funny.”

  “What?”

  “Most men who think I’m a Yale man went to Princeton themselves.”

&nb
sp; “Oh, come on,” she said. “You just said—”

  “All right. I know. Well, that’s not important and I’m only confusing the issue. What I want to say, what I started out to explain was why I said ‘you people, you members of the upper crust,’ and so on, implying that I am not a member of it. Well, I’m not a member of it, and now I never will be. If there was any chance of it it disappeared—let me see—two years ago.”

  “Why two years ago? You can’t say that. What happened?”

  “I starved. Two years ago I went for two days one time without a thing to eat or drink except water, and part of the time without a cigarette. I was living within two blocks of this place, and I didn’t have a job, didn’t have any prospect of one, I couldn’t write to my family, because I’d written a bad check a while before that and I was in very bad at home. I couldn’t borrow from anybody, because I owed everybody money. I’d borrowed from practically everybody I knew even slightly. A dollar here, ten dollars there. I stayed in for two days because I couldn’t face the people on the street. Then the nigger woman that cleaned up and made the beds in this place where I lived, she knew what was happening, and the third morning she came to work she brought me a chicken sandwich. I’ll never forget it. It was on rye bread, and home-cooked chicken, not flat and white, but chunky and more tan than white. It was wrapped in newspaper. She came in and said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Malloy. I brought you a chicken sandwich if you like it.’ That’s all. She didn’t say why she brought it, and then she went out and bought me a container of coffee and pinched a couple of cigarettes—Camels, and I smoke Luckies—from one of the other rooms. She was swell. She knew.”

  “I should think she was swell enough for you to call her a colored woman instead of a nigger.”

  “Oh, balls!”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Just a Mick.”

  “See? The first thing you can think of to insult me with. Go on, beat it. Waiter, will you open the door for this lady, please?”

  “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “Oh, I guess so. How much, Luke?”

  “That’ll be one-twenty,” said Luke, showing, by showing nothing on his face, that he strongly disapproved the whole thing.

  Exits like the one Isabel wanted to make are somewhat less difficult to make since the repeal of Prohibition. In those days you had to wait for the waiter to peer through the small door, see that everything was all right, open at least two locks, and hold the door open for you. The most successful flouncing out in indignation is done through swinging doors.

  He had to ring for the elevator and wait for it in silence, they had to ride down together in silence, and find a taxi with a driver in it. There were plenty of taxis, but the hackmen were having their usual argument among themselves over the Tacna-Arica award and a fare was apparently the last thing in the world that interested them. However, a cruising taxi appeared and Isabel and Jimmy got in.

  “Home?” said Jimmy.

  “Yes, please,” said Isabel.

  Jimmy began to sing: “. . . How’s your uncle? I haven’t any uncle. I hope he’s fine and dandy too.”

  Silence.

  “Four years ago this time do you know what was going on?”

  “No.”

  “The Snyder-Gray trial.”

  Silence.

  “Remember it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What was Mr. Snyder’s first name?”

  “Whose?”

  “Mister Sny-der’s.”

  “It wasn’t Mister Snyder. It was Ruth Snyder. Ruth Snyder, and Judd Gray.”

  “There was a Mr. Snyder, though. Ah, yes, there was a Mr. Snyder. It was he, dear Isabel, it was he who was assassinated. What was his first name?”

  “Oh, how should I know? What do I care what his first name was?”

  “Why are you sore at me?”

  “Because you humiliated me in public, calling the waiter and asking him to take me to the door, barking at me and saying perfectly vile, vile things.”

  “Humiliated you in public,” he said. “Humiliated you in public. And you don’t remember Mr. Snyder’s first name.”

  “If you’re going to talk, talk sense. Not that I care whether you talk or not.”

  “I’m talking a lot of sense. You’re sore at me because I humiliated you in public. What the hell does that amount to? Humiliated in public. What about the man that Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray knocked off? I’d say he was humiliated in public, plenty. Every newspaper in the country carried his name for days, column after column of humiliation, all kinds of humiliation. And yet you don’t even remember his name. Humiliation my eye.”

  “It isn’t the same thing.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s exactly the same thing. If I got out of the taxi now would that be humiliating you publicly?”

  “Oh, don’t. It’s so unnecessary.”

  “Please answer my question.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. Does that answer it?”

  “Yes. Driver! Pull over, please, over to the curb, you dope. Here.” He gave the driver a dollar and took off his hat. “Good-by, Isabel,” he said.

  “You’re being silly. You know you’re being silly, don’t you?”

  “Not at all. I just remembered I was supposed to be covering a sermon this morning and I haven’t put in at the office all day.”

  “Good heavens, Jimmy! Will you call me?”

  “In an hour.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  • • •

  Liggett took a late afternoon train back to town. He almost enjoyed the ride. It had been a strain, being with the girls. Not so much with Emily; for the time being she was out of this, and she would only be in it if something slipped. So she was not a strain. Not that he expected anything to slip; but there was always the possibility that that fool girl might still be asleep in the apartment, or that she had left something behind, and he wanted to have plenty of time for a thorough search before Emily and the kids got back. Whatever got over him, he asked himself, that he should take that girl to his apartment? He’d never done that before, not even when Emily and the girls were away for the summer, or in Europe. Well . . .

  Europe. This had been a tough winter. The things that were supposed to happen this last winter, hadn’t happened. He was beginning to think that the things that were promised to happen were not going to happen, either. Privately, secretly, he did not delude himself as to his own importance in his own economic scheme; he was the New York branch manager for the heavy-tool manufacturing plant his grandfather had founded as a tap and reamer plant. Liggett could read a blueprint; he could, with a certain amount of concentration, pass upon estimates with sufficient intelligence to see the difference between cost and eventual purchase price, which was a not inconsiderable part of his job, since one of his best customers was the City of New York. He also had to deal with large utility corporations and he had to have at least a working knowledge of the accounting and valuation systems of these corporations, which make a practice of carrying, say, a $5, 000 pneumatic drill outfit as a $5,000 capital investment ten years after the purchase, allowing nothing for depreciation. He had to know the right man to see among all his prospective customers—which did not by any means always turn out to be the purchasing agent. He did not know how to use a slide rule, but he knew enough to call it a slip-stick. He could not use a transit, but among engineers he could talk about “running the gun.” Instead of handwriting he always used the Reinhard style of lettering, the slanting style of printing which is the first thing engineers learn. He would disclaim any real knowledge of engineering, frankly and sometimes a little sadly, but this had a disarming effect upon real engineers: they would think here is a guy who is just like a kid the way he wants to be an engineer and he might have made a good one. The superficial touches which
he affected—the lettering, the slang, the knowing the local engineering gossip like who was the $75-a-week man who did the real work on a certain immense job—all these things made him a good fellow among engineers, who certainly are no less sentimental than any other group of men. They liked him, and they did little things for him which they would not have done for another engineer; he was a non-competing brother.

  A crew man, he always had something to talk about to M. I. T. men. He would talk about the spirit of the M. I. T. navy, taking its beatings year after year. His own father had gone to Lehigh, so he always had a word of Lehigh engineers. He would recognize Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi keys a mile away. He was even known to remark, in the presence of non-Yale men, that he wished he had at least gone to Sheff and learned something. He never made the mistake of saying of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi men, as he once said to a man he did not like: “I never saw a Phi Beta Kappa wear a wrist watch.”

  The “personal-use clause” which required Yale men to sign statements that they hoped their mothers dropped dead this minute if these football tickets that they were applying for were to be used by someone else—that was a gift from the gods to Liggett. He would apply for his tickets, sign the pledge that went with the tickets—and then when some properly placed Tammany man came to him for a pair for the Harvard game, Liggett would explain about the pledge but he would turn over the tickets. Liggett did not think it entirely necessary to justify this violation of his word of honor, but he had two justifications ready: the first was that he did not approve of the pledge; the second, that he had got boils on his ass year after year for Yale, four years of rowing without missing a race, and he felt that made him a better judge of what to do with one of the few benefits he derived from being an old “Y” man than some clerk in the Athletic Association office. On at least one occasion those tickets made the difference between getting an equipment contract and not getting it. And so, looking at it one way, he was a valuable man to the firm. The plant no longer belonged to the Liggett family, but he was a director, as a teaser for any lingering good will that his father and grandfather might have left. He voted his own and his sister’s stock, but he voted the way he was told by the attorney for his father’s estate, who was also a director.