Mood Indigo

by Ed Ifkovic

  His words were clipped, world-weary, very British: “Edna, love, I never ask anyone to leave my home.” A thin smile. “In a moment I’ll disappear and return in my red satin dressing gown and begin a recitation of homiletic bedtime stories.”

  I laughed. “‘Twas the night before Christmas…”

  He finished. “And all through my house…” He smirked. “Design for living in Manhattan?”

  After New Year’s, he’d be headed to Cleveland with Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt for tryouts of his new play, Design for Living, a new risqué comedy about a questionable—if engaging—ménage a trois.

  Watching the drama in the room, Irving Berlin nudged Noel’s elbow, made a tsk tsk sound, sat at the piano, and began a jazz-baby rendition of a song I didn’t recognize, a mournful, down-and-out dirge that made Noel smile. “Someone is reading my mind,” he said to Irving. “That’s always dangerous.”

  But a few chords into the song, Belinda began humming loudly and, stopping abruptly, Berlin dropped his hands into his lap. He stared straight ahead, unhappy. Noel leaned over his shoulder. “Might I request the Mozart Requiem?”

  There was a commotion at the front door. A raised voice, alarmed. A phony high-pitched laugh. Someone groaned.

  “Oh, Christ,” Tommy’s voice boomed out.

  The room went quiet.

  Chapter Two

  “Act two, scene one.” Noel rolled his eyes.

  Two men strode into the room, one of them already speaking loudly. As we all watched, our conversations stopped. Both were dressed in black-tie formal long cutaway jackets with white silk scarves, traces of light snow melting on their collars. Feathered fedoras held to their chests. They paused, as if uncertain of their welcome, and Noel breathed in, catching my eye. “Dramatis personae. The villains enter. The catastrophe. Are you ready for this, Edna?”

  “Did you invite him?”

  “Of course not.” He paused. “Well, Buzzy Collins, yes. He’s invited everywhere. It’s almost an unwritten law in Manhattan society. But not Cyrus.”

  Buzzy Collins approached Noel, a nervous grin on his face. “Noel, we’ve just come from the Christmas concert at St. John the Divine, so far uptown I thought we were in Connecticut.” He glanced back at the entrance where Cyrus Meerdom was slowly unwrapping the white scarf he’d worn over his tuxedo.

  A smallish, round man with a cherubic face and a bulbous beet-red nose under a beetle-domed forehead, Buzzy demanded that everyone know him—everyone who possessed money and social position. He seemed to be connected to everyone in the Social Register—his mother was a distant Vanderbilt cousin, once a famous hostess—so he was invited everywhere, though no one understood how he fit into the social fabric of Manhattan, let alone the insular theatrical world of Schubert Alley.

  “I hope you don’t mind me bringing Cyrus. He tagged along and…”

  Noel snapped, “Of course I mind, Buzzy. I choose who walks around my home.”

  Stunned, Buzzy shuffled away and lifted a glass of wine from someone standing near him, apologized, then downed it. “Good stuff.” He spoke to himself. “Though I’ve had better.”

  Last spring Cyrus had passed on financing Noel’s Words and Music, not unusual for a producer, especially in precarious times, but Cyrus made the mistake of commenting to Walter Winchell that Noel’s snappy dialogue and rarefied characters smacked of empty posturing typical of an English dandy. Noel’s words, he’d noted, were like sweetened plum pudding with the pits in the mix. Noel never forgave the barb, given Winchell’s gleeful trumpeting of the remark in his column, and Noel purposely cut Cyrus at functions, at one point describing the small, officious man as a pus-filled canker sore. No love lost—and the rich stuff of Broadway gossip. And yet here was Cyrus standing in Noel’s entrance with a smug look that said paradoxically—I wonder why this effete Britisher Noel Coward has dared crash my lovely party?

  At that moment Belinda, tucked into Dougie’s side, let out a harsh laugh. Slack-jawed, she never took her eyes off Cyrus. Every head turned to look. Hiccoughing now, she muttered something into Dougie’s side, tittered a bit, then dipped her head into her chest.

  Cyrus was frozen in that entryway, a look of surprise in his face. Doubtless he’d not expected to see Belinda at the party. With his index finger he drummed his lips, a silent tap tap tap, his stare unblinking. Then, tugging at the scarf in his hand, he looked over his shoulder, as if to escape, but finally, probably remembering how rich he was, he strutted into the center of the room. His eyes locked on Belinda. Eyes darting wildly here and there, Dougie cleared his throat, but faltered. Withering under the severity of Cyrus’ look, Belinda turned away, bending her body and shielding herself behind Dougie.

  Conscious of the room watching him, Cyrus ran his tongue into the corner of his mouth. “Harlot,” he hissed.

  Yet I noticed something in his eyes that belied his cruel attack: puppy-dog longing, hurt. Almost immediately, he seemed to regret what he’d said, breathing in and closing his eyes.

  The explosive word stunned the room. Helpless, Dougie glanced from Cyrus to Belinda, who was still hiccoughing, and he seemed confused. “Cyrus, I think…” He took a step forward, wobbled on his heels, and gripped the edge of a chair.

  Tommy Stuyvesant walked toward Cyrus. Nodding back at Belinda, a look that took in a nail-biting Dougie, he spoke into the awful silence. “Cyrus, perhaps you shouldn’t be here.”

  Cyrus spoke over his words. “Hail, hail the gang’s all here. What the hell do you care?”

  A grumpy sound from Noel as he moved closer. “Gentlemen—”

  He got no further. Tommy held up his hand. “Cyrus, you know how the game is played. Old men like you and me.” A dismissive glance back at Belinda. “Pretty little things are like butterflies on flowers. They flit…”

  Cyrus thundered, “This got nothing to do with you, Tommy. You stole her from my show. The day my revue closed, you swooped in and signed her. Unfair. I had plans. I took her from that Hell’s Kitchen slag heap. You stole her from my…”

  “Bed?” Tommy interrupted. “Really? I hope that’s not what you were planning. Don’t be absurd. A decoration at a table in a nightclub.”

  Emboldened, Dougie lunged forward. “This has nothing to do with both of you. Belinda and I are in love.” A squeaky voice, breaking.

  The simple romantic declaration sounded preposterous—a throwaway line from an old melodrama. Rudolph Valentino in flowing desert robes, wide-eyed into the camera. But it was said with such innocence that someone—a suave Leslie Howard, I realized, watching the antics with a glint in his eye—laughed outright.

  “She loves your money,” Cyrus said.

  Dougie teetered, his hand bunched into a fist. He took another small step, rocked backward. For a second he closed his eyes, then snapped them open. “Goddamn it to hell.”

  Cyrus’ eyes swept the room. “Is there a richer man in this room? Sign up for auditions. Anyone? A cattle call for a Broadway revue. All that glitters is not…”

  Tommy inched closer to Dougie. He whispered something to him, but then his eyes swept to a frightened Belinda. The smile still plastered on his face, he watched her. Something shifted in the man—his breezy tone metamorphosed into a low rumble, darkness that belied his genial pose. “She can’t help herself. None of these girls can.”

  Belinda threw back her head defiantly, teetered a bit, and brushed past Tommy. She stood in front of Cyrus, her face crimson. Then, after a quick glance back at Dougie, she threw out her hand.

  A slap in his face.

  He reeled, stunned, his mouth agape.

  Silence in the room.

  Wind off the East River, cold, cold.

  “Well,” Noel began slowly, “it’s…” He snapped his fingers. “Perhaps a new and dreadful comedy of manners. Americans at play. Death by desertion. Design for Dying.”


  No one laughed.

  Cyrus wrapped his white scarf around his neck, swiveled around, and headed to the door. As he rushed out, he mumbled over his shoulder, “Merry Christmas, you lost souls.”

  Again, the silence in the room was dark and heavy. No one moved. Irving Berlin began to pick quietly at the piano keys, a staccato ping ping ping that went on until his wife tapped him on the shoulder.

  Moss Hart was in the hallway, calling for a cab.

  I whispered, “Give me a lift uptown?”

  He grinned. “Get your coat, Edna.”

  I said my quiet good-bye to Noel and avoided everyone else, though I nodded at Leslie Howard—he was staring at me as I apologized to Noel—and Noel reminded me that he’d pick me up the following afternoon for dinner at Neysa McMain’s.

  “Unfortunately,” he whispered, “this will be our only topic of conversation.”

  Moss and I stood outside and waited for the taxi. Neither of us spoke for a while, me shivering in the frigid cold, my face pelted with ice pellets blown off the river. I pulled my scarf around my face. Yet after the dry heat of the apartment, the chill was oddly welcome. Moss stood in front of me, his face scrunched up. “Cocoon,” he whispered.

  I leaned into him. “What?”

  “Cocoon.” He pointed back to the apartment.

  From where we stood we could look up at the brightly illuminated windows of Noel’s apartment. A hidden-away enclave, this Beekman Place, a run of townhouses high on a river bluff called Cannon Point. Once derelict brownstones, cattle yards, fat-rendering plants, the neighborhood had undergone reinvention. The Campanile, with its Venetian Gothic façades. Noel Coward and Greta Garbo and Katherine Cornell could watch the snow fall on the East River against the backdrop of the Queensboro Bridge.

  A shock of yellow, sharp against the dark night and the dark brick. Shadowy figures moved by the window. Even from the quiet street I could hear the piano. A rendition of “Silent Night,” somber and majestic. All is calm. All is bright. The street was deserted, no passing cars, no one walking. The wind whistled off the East River.

  Moss mumbled, “A rarefied world, Edna. A privileged desert, there.” He pointed toward the apartment. In the dark I could see his bushy eyebrows twitch. “The games the rich play in a time of despair. Foolish, foolish. The bonfire of the vanities.”

  “Belinda and Dougie do bring out…”

  He held up his hand. “I’m not talking about that petty scene.” A pause. “Maybe I am—a little. It’s just that…” A helpless shrug. “I’m as bad as the rest.” From his pocket he extracted a solid gold cigarette case, flashed it before me. It glinted under the streetlight. “Privilege.”

  A taxi’s headlights gleamed through the falling snow.

  “What are you talking about, Moss?”

  He got quiet after I gave the cabbie my East Fifty-sixth Street address, but then Moss tapped the man on the shoulder. “First, a detour.”

  The cabbie glanced back. A shaggy Irish driver with red curly hair under a slough boy cap, an unlit cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth, he narrowed his eyes at Moss. “Yeah?”

  Quietly, Moss directed him downtown, away from the upscale neighborhood, until the cabbie pulled onto East Tenth Street and idled at a light. “What now, boss?”

  For a second Moss said nothing, though he nodded at me, but finally he told the driver, “Just drive down the street. Slowly.” He turned to me. “Edna, crack your window.”

  “Moss, it’s December. It’s snowing. It’s…”

  He reached over my lap and rolled down my window, though only a few inches. I shivered from the cold.

  “Look.”

  I did. A deserted street at that late hour, mostly boarded-up business fronts, some covered with planks of wood. A pawn shop. A tobacco shop. Sagging brick tenements with zigzag fire escapes. A failed avenue, this bleak filthy street, with flickering streetlights that did nothing but exaggerate the sense of abandonment.

  “Look.” Moss said again, pointing.

  A broken sidewalk littered with soggy cardboard boxes, garbage spilling out. Worse, upended apple crates, lopsided and ice-frozen. A chop suey joint on the corner. A brown rat slithered out of a trash barrel. At the end of the block, deep inside an alleyway, shadowy men bunched up, huddled, turned away from the street. Another block: a roaring fire in a barrel, its brilliant flames and cinders sparkling the sky. Bent over it, arms folded, a group of men. As we drove by, the cabbie clicked his tongue. We slowed—the spectral men peered at us, indifferent, blank expressions covering their faces. I shuddered. A dim-watt light in a storefront cast a purplish haze on the sidewalk. An old man, crouched down on the sidewalk, his feet planted over a subway grate that billowed up dark smoke, raised his fist against us. I turned away. The sudden shriek of tomcats at war.

  “Lord, Moss.”

  “Cocoon,” he said. “‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’”

  I closed my eyes, saw shafts of red and blue.

  “Day after day.” I choked up. “Apples for oblivion.”

  A wispy smile as Moss nudged the cabbie to head uptown. “A dose of reality before bedtime.”

  I said nothing.

  When we pulled in front of the Lombardy, the doorman rushing out to open my door, I sat there, unmoving. When I faced Moss, I felt my eyes tear up. “Day after day,” I repeated.

  A church bell tolled in the neighborhood, and I waited as the chime struck twelve.

  “Midnight,” Moss said. “If I don’t see you, Edna, have a merry Christmas.”

  I smiled at him. “We two Jews of Orient are.”

  He grasped my hand, squeezed it, then shooed me out of the cab. I leaned back in say goodnight. In a soft, buttery voice Moss whispered, “O little town of Gotham, how still we see thee die.”

  Chapter Three

  “The slap heard up and down Schubert Alley.”

  Neysa McMein insisted she would not feed us until we told her all about that awful scene at Noel Coward’s party.

  “I didn’t know people slapped each other anymore.”

  Noel had come by cab to pick me up at four, and we’d arrived at West Sixty-seventh, just off Central Park, in front of the stylish Hotel des Artistes building where Neysa had her art studio and living quarters.

  “I’ve been on the phone with Ellin Berlin, who babbled about the brouhaha. But Ellin can go on and on and yet leaves out the juicy, scandalous details.” Neysa grinned widely. “That’s why you two are here.” She hugged Noel. “Edna, was it really scandalous? I can’t believe I missed the party. Noel, are you responsible?”

  Noel leaned in, his voice confidential. “It was all Edna’s fault, Neysa. She brings out the worst in men.”

  I shook my head back and forth, laughing. “It takes a lot of practice.”

  Neysa stood in the doorway of the room she used as her artist’s studio, her hands fluttering around her face. Although she expected us, she seemed flustered by our arrival. That wasn’t unusual—Neysa’s chaotic Bohemian apartment attracted drifters and wanderers and ne’er-do-wells, as well as business titans and show people. She reveled in it—demanded it. I once walked in to hear a priest singing Irish tunes in a schoolboy treble while she matter-of-factly painted. Another time I found Cole Porter playing the grand piano—“Neysa’s studio is the real Tin Pan Alley, Edna”—while she covered herself in pastel chalk. An eclectic crowd, she always insisted, was the best cure for Manhattan winter doldrums. Or, indeed, summer’s fierce heat. Now, though she pointed toward a small dining room table already covered with dishes, she deserted us, walking back into her cluttered studio and tinkering with some pastel crayons. She dabbed at the artist board on her easel, considered it, then wiped it off. Neysa loved to work at her drawings while entertaining—and, incidentally, while drinking.

  I peered over her shoulder. One more of her famili
ar American girl covers for McCall’s. Or was it the Saturday Evening Post? Or Coronet? As a successful magazine illustrator, she produced endless romantic renderings of the all-American girl, a look that populated so much of the American imagination during these depressed years. Fair-haired, bright-eyed, cherubic—with a dash of coy maiden.

  She looked back at me, then at Noel. “I fear Belinda Ross will be the death of poor Dougie.” A comment thrown over her shoulder. “Tell me I’m wrong, Beauty.”

  This last endearing appellation was addressed not to me, to be sure, but to Noel—her own recent—and, in some quarters, derided—nickname for Noel, a reflection of their close friendship. A “deeply superficial” bond, to hear Noel describe it. When he was in America, he spent long hours sitting in her studio, watching her draw her pastel portraits, a cigarette locked into his long ivory holder, his eyes staring at the tall beautiful woman with the bushel-basket tawny hair, green eyes, and the wide, generous mouth. A face many men in the city declared the most beautiful since Helen launched those thousand misguided ships. She loved them all—or so she said more than once—as she snuggled with her Persian cat, Fifi, and tugged at the shapeless, untidy smock she lounged around in, a drizzle of chalk dust on her shoulders.

  “For once, the man has to explore the romantic world,” Noel commented.

  Neysa shrugged. “With that rigid chin, that sunshine blond hair, and those Anglo-Saxon blue eyes, he could sit for Leyendecker.”

  I interrupted. “What I don’t understand is everyone’s fascination with Dougie Maddox. Yes, he is good-looking, but…”

  Noel tittered. “Darling, Edna. My dear. It’s the…the unknowing in his eyes. The wonder at a new world. Like a Greek statue with an imperfection.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “Admittedly a flatterer, and charming, if I can judge by the attention he gives me, but what you call wonder in his eye is, for me at least, embarrassing naïveté.”