BROADWAY BEAT
BY WES FINNEY
There was even a thumbnail picture of him in the upper left-hand corner, hair slicked down and teeth bared in a confident smile. The text managed to work in a labor angle here and there—a paragraph on Actors’ Equity, say, or the stagehands’ union—but mostly he played it straight, in the manner of two or three real Broadway-and-nightclub columnists. “Heard about the new thrush at the Copa?” he would ask the labor leaders; then he’d give them her name, with a sly note about her bust and hip measurements and a folksy note about the state from which she “hailed,” and he’d wind it up like this: “She’s got the whole town talking, and turning up in droves. Their verdict, in which this department wholly concurs: the lady has class.” No reader could have guessed that Wes Finney’s shoes needed repair, that he got no complimentary tickets to anything and never went out except to take in a movie or to crouch over a liverwurst sandwich at the Automat. He wrote the column on his own time and got extra money for it—the figure I heard was fifty dollars a month. So it was a mutually satisfactory deal: for that small sum Kramm held his whipping boy in absolute bondage; for that small torture Finney could paste clippings in a scrapbook, with all the contamination of The Labor Leader sheared away into the wastebasket of his furnished room, and whisper himself to sleep with dreams of ultimate freedom.
Anyway, this was the man who could make Sobel apologize for the grammar of his news stories, and it was a sad thing to watch. Of course, it couldn’t go on forever, and one day it stopped.
Finney had called Sobel over to explain about split infinitives, and Sobel was wrinkling his brow in an effort to understand. Neither of them noticed that Kramm was standing in the doorway of his office a few feet away, listening, and looking at the wet end of his cigar as if it tasted terrible.
“Finney,” he said. “You wanna be an English teacher, get a job in the high school.”
Startled, Finney stuck a pencil behind his ear without noticing that another pencil was already there, and both pencils clattered to the floor. “Well, I—” he said. “Just thought I’d—”
“Finney, this does not interest me. Pick up your pencils and listen to me, please. For your information, Mr. Sobel is not supposed to be a literary Englishman. He is supposed to be a literate American, and this I believe he is. Do I make myself clear?”
And the look on Sobel’s face as he walked back to his own desk was that of a man released from prison.
From that moment on he began to relax; or almost from that moment—what seemed to clinch the transformation was O’Leary’s hat.
O’Leary was a recent City College graduate and one of the best men on the staff (he has since done very well; you’ll often see his byline in one of the evening papers), and the hat he wore that winter was of the waterproof cloth kind that is sold in raincoat shops. There was nothing very dashing about it—in fact its floppiness made O’Leary’s face look too thin—but Sobel must secretly have admired it as a symbol of journalism, or of nonconformity, for one morning he showed up in an identical one, brand new. It looked even worse on him than on O’Leary, particularly when worn with his lumpy brown overcoat, but he seemed to cherish it. He developed a whole new set of mannerisms to go with the hat: cocking it back, with a flip of the index finger as he settled down to make his morning phone calls (“This is Leon Sobel, of The Labor Leader . . .”), tugging it smartly forward as he left the office on a reporting assignment, twirling it onto a peg when he came back to write his story. At the end of the day, when he’d dropped the last of his copy into Finney’s wire basket, he would shape the hat into a careless slant over one eyebrow, swing the overcoat around his shoulders and stride out with a loose salute of farewell, and I used to picture him studying his reflection in the black subway windows all the way home to the Bronx.
He seemed determined to love his work. He even brought in a snapshot of his family—a tired, abjectly smiling woman and two small sons—and fastened it to his desktop with cellophane tape. Nobody else ever left anything more personal than a book of matches in the office overnight.
One afternoon toward the end of February, Finney summoned me to his oily desk. “McCabe,” he said. “Wanna do a column for us?”
“What kind of a column?”
“Labor gossip,” he said. “Straight union items with a gossip or a chatter angle—little humor, personalities, stuff like that. Mr. Kramm thinks we need it, and I told him you’d be the best man for the job.”
I can’t deny that I was flattered (we are all conditioned by our surroundings, after all), but I was also suspicious. “Do I get a byline?”
He began to blink nervously. “Oh, no, no byline,” he said. “Mr. Kramm wants this to be anonymous. See, the guys’ll give you any items they turn up, and you’ll just collect ’em and put ’em in shape. It’s just something you can do on office time, part of your regular job. See what I mean?”
I saw what he meant. “Part of my regular salary too,” I said. “Right?”
“That’s right.”
“No thanks,” I told him, and then, feeling generous, I suggested that he try O’Leary.
“Nah, I already asked him,” Finney said. “He don’t wanna do it either. Nobody does.”
I should have guessed, of course, that he’d been working down the list of everyone in the office. And to judge from the lateness of the day, I must have been close to the tail end.
Sobel fell in step with me as we left the building after work that night. He was wearing his overcoat cloak-style, the sleeves dangling, and holding his cloth hat in place as he hopped nimbly to avoid the furrows of dirty slush on the sidewalk. “Letcha in on a little secret, McCabe,” he said. “I’m doin’ a column for the paper. It’s all arranged.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Any money in it?”
“Money?” He winked. “I’ll tell y’ about that part. Let’s get a cuppa coffee.” He led me into the tiled and steaming brilliance of the Automat, and when we were settled at a damp corner table he explained everything. “Finney says no money, see? So I said okay. He says no byline either. I said okay.” He winked again. “Playin’ it smart.”
“How do you mean?”
“How do I mean?” He always repeated your question like that, savoring it, holding his black eyebrows high while he made you wait for the answer. “Listen, I got this Finney figured out. He don’t decide these things. You think he decides anything around that place? You better wise up, McCabe. Mr. Kramm makes the decisions. And Mr. Kramm is an intelligent man, don’t kid yourself.” Nodding, he raised his coffee cup, but his lips recoiled from the heat of it, puckered, and blew into the steam before they began to sip with gingerly impatience.
“Well,” I said, “okay, but I’d check with Kramm before you start counting on anything.”
“Check?” He put his cup down with a clatter. “What’s to check? Listen, Mr. Kramm wants a column, right? You think he cares if I get a byline or not? Or the money, either—you think if I write a good column he’s gonna quibble over payin’ me for it? Ya crazy. Finney’s the one, don’tcha see? He don’t wanna gimme a break because he’s worried about losing his own column. Get it? So all right. I check with nobody until I got that column written.” He prodded his chest with a stiff thumb. “On my own time. Then I take it to Mr. Kramm and we talk business. You leave it to me.” He settled down comfortably, elbows on the table, both hands cradling the cup just short of drinking position while he blew into the steam.
“Well,” I said. “I hope you’re right. Be nice if it does work out that way.”
“Ah, it may not,” he conceded, pulling his mouth into a grimace of speculation and tilting his head to one side. “You know. It’s a gamble.” But he was only saying that out of politeness, to minimize my envy. He could afford to express doubt because he felt none, and I could tell he was already planning the way he’d tell his wife about it.
The next morning Finney came around to each of our desks with instructions that we
were to give Sobel any gossip or chatter items we might turn up; the column was scheduled to begin in the next issue. Later I saw him in conference with Sobel, briefing him on how the column was to be written, and I noticed that Finney did all the talking: Sobel just sat there making thin, contemptuous jets of cigarette smoke.
We had just put an issue to press, so the deadline for the column was two weeks away. Not many items turned up at first—it was hard enough getting news out of the unions we covered, let alone “chatter.” Whenever someone did hand him a note, Sobel would frown over it, add a scribble of his own and drop it in a desk drawer; once or twice I saw him drop one in the wastebasket. I only remember one of the several pieces I gave him: the business agent of a steamfitters’ local I covered had yelled at me through a closed door that he couldn’t be bothered that day because his wife had just had twins. But Sobel didn’t want it. “So, the guy’s got twins,” he said. “So what?”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “You getting much other stuff?”
He shrugged. “Some. I’m not worried. I’ll tellya one thing, though—I’m not using a lotta this crap. This chatter. Who the hell’s gonna read it? You can’t have a whole column fulla crap like that. Gotta be something to hold it together. Am I right?”
Another time (the column was all he talked about now) he chuckled affectionately and said, “My wife says I’m just as bad now as when I was working on my books. Write, write, write. She don’t care, though,” he added. “She’s really getting excited about this thing. She’s telling everybody—the neighbors, everybody. Her brother come over Sunday, starts asking me how the job’s going—you know, in a wise-guy kinda way? I just kept quiet, but my wife pipes up: ‘Leon’s doing a column for the paper now’—and she tells him all about it. Boy, you oughta seen his face.”
Every morning he brought in the work he had done the night before, a wad of handwritten papers, and used his lunch hour to type it out and revise it while he chewed a sandwich at his desk. And he was the last one to go home every night; we’d leave him there hammering his typewriter in a trance of concentration. Finney kept bothering him—“How you coming on that feature, Sobel?”—but he always parried the question with squinted eyes and a truculent lift of the chin. “Whaddya worried about? You’ll get it.” And he would wink at me.
On the morning of the deadline he came to work with a little patch of toilet paper on his cheek; he had cut himself shaving in his nervousness, but otherwise he looked as confident as ever. There were no calls to make that morning—on deadline days we all stayed in to work on copy and proofs—so the first thing he did was to spread out the finished manuscript for a final reading. His absorption was so complete that he didn’t look up until Finney was standing at his elbow. “You wanna gimme that feature, Sobel?”
Sobel grabbed up the papers and shielded them with an arrogant forearm. He looked steadily at Finney and said, with a firmness that he must have been rehearsing for two weeks: “I’m showing this to Mr. Kramm. Not you.”
Finney’s whole face began to twitch in a fit of nerves. “Nah, nah, Mr. Kramm don’t need to see it,” he said. “Anyway, he’s not in yet. C’mon, lemme have it.”
“You’re wasting your time, Finney,” Sobel said. “I’m waiting for Mr. Kramm.”
Muttering, avoiding Sobel’s triumphant eyes, Finney went back to his own desk, where he was reading proof on BROADWAY BEAT.
My own job that morning was at the layout table, pasting up the dummy for the first section. I was standing there, working with the unwieldly page forms and the paste-clogged scissors, when Sobel sidled up behind me, looking anxious. “You wanna read it, McCabe?” he asked. “Before I turn it in?” And he handed me the manuscript.
The first thing that hit me was that he had clipped a photograph to the top of page 1, a small portrait of himself in his cloth hat. The next thing was his title:
SOBEL SPEAKING
BY LEON SOBEL
I can’t remember the exact words of the opening paragraph, but it went something like this:
This is the “debut” of a new department in The Labor Leader and, moreover, it is also “something new” for your correspondent, who has never handled a column before. However, he is far from being a novice with the written word, on the contrary he is an “ink-stained veteran” of many battles on the field of ideas, to be exact nine books have emanated from his pen.
Naturally in those tomes his task was somewhat different than that which it will be in this column, and yet he hopes that this column will also strive as they did to penetrate the basic human mystery, in other words, to tell the truth.
When I looked up I saw he had picked open the razor cut on his cheek and it was bleeding freely. “Well,” I said, “for one thing, I wouldn’t give it to him with your picture that way—I mean, don’t you think it might be better to let him read it first, and then—”
“Okay,” he said, blotting at his face with a wadded gray handkerchief. “Okay, I’ll take the picture off. G’ahead, read the rest.”
But there wasn’t time to read the rest. Kramm had come in, Finney had spoken to him, and now he was standing in the door of his office, champing crossly on a dead cigar. “You wanted to see me, Sobel?” he called.
“Just a second,” Sobel said. He straightened the pages of SOBEL SPEAKING and detached the photograph, which he jammed into his hip pocket as he started for the door. Halfway there he remembered to take off his hat, and threw it unsuccessfully at the hat stand. Then he disappeared behind the partition, and we all settled down to listen.
It wasn’t long before Kramm’s reaction came through. “No, Sobel. No, no, no! What is this? What are you tryna put over on me here?”
Outside, Finney winced comically and clapped the side of his head, giggling, and O’Leary had to glare at him until he stopped.
We heard Sobel’s voice, a blurred sentence or two of protest, and then Kramm came through again: “‘Basic human mystery’—this is gossip? This is chatter? You can’t follow instructions? Wait a minute—Finney! Finney!”
Finney loped to the door, delighted to be of service, and we heard him making clear, righteous replies to Kramm’s interrogation: Yes, he had told Sobel what kind of a column was wanted; yes, he had specified that there was to be no byline; yes, Sobel had been provided with ample gossip material. All we heard from Sobel was something indistinct, said in a very tight, flat voice. Kramm made a guttural reply, and even though we couldn’t make out the words we knew it was all over. Then they came out, Finney wearing the foolish smile you sometimes see in the crowds that gape at street accidents, Sobel as expressionless as death.
He picked his hat off the floor and his coat off the stand, put them on, and came over to me. “So long, McCabe,” he said. “Take it easy.”
Shaking hands with him, I felt my face jump into Finney’s idiot smile, and I asked a stupid question. “You leaving?”
He nodded. Then he shook hands with O’Leary—“So long, kid”—and hesitated, uncertain whether to shake hands with the rest of the staff. He settled for a little wave of the forefinger, and walked out to the street.
Finney lost no time in giving us all the inside story in an eager whisper: “The guy’s crazy! He says to Kramm, ‘You take this column or I quit’—just like that. Kramm just looks at him and says, ‘Quit? Get outa here, you’re fired.’ I mean, what else could he say?”
Turning away, I saw that the snapshot of Sobel’s wife and sons still lay taped to his desk. I stripped it off and took it out to the sidewalk. “Hey, Sobel!” I yelled. He was a block away, very small, walking toward the subway. I started to run after him, nearly breaking my neck on the frozen slush. “Hey Sobel!” But he didn’t hear me.
Back at the office I found his address in the Bronx telephone directory, put the picture in an envelope and dropped it in the mail, and I wish that were the end of the story.
But that afternoon I called up the editor of a hardware trade journal I had worked on before the war, who said h
e had no vacancies on his staff but might soon, and would be willing to interview Sobel if he wanted to drop in. It was a foolish idea: the wages there were even lower than on the Leader, and besides, it was a place for very young men whose fathers wanted them to learn the hardware business—Sobel would probably have been ruled out the minute he opened his mouth. But it seemed better than nothing, and as soon as I was out of the office that night I went to a phone booth and looked up Sobel’s name again.
A woman’s voice answered, but it wasn’t the high, faint voice I’d expected. It was low and melodlious—that was the first of my several surprises.
“Mrs. Sobel?” I asked, absurdly smiling into the mouthpiece. “Is Leon there?”
She started to say, “Just a minute,” but changed it to “Who’s calling, please? I’d rather not disturb him right now.”
The Collected Stories Page 10