White Collar Girl

by Renée Rosen

  “Holy crap!” Mr. Ellsworth pulled off his glasses as if his lenses were not to be trusted. “He’s eating his goddamn notes.”

  “C’mon, now, Marty,” Mr. Copeland said, shaking his head. “Get ahold of yourself, for God’s sake.”

  Marty’s eyes bulged as he shoved more wads of paper in his mouth. I’d never seen anything like it. Tears ran down his cheeks as he chewed and crammed the notes into his mouth.

  “Marty, relax,” Mr. Ellsworth said. “Let’s talk about this.”

  Mr. Ellsworth took a step toward Marty, who groaned and flung his coffee cup at him. An arc of brown liquid seemed suspended in the air for a beat before it sloshed down, barely missing Mr. Copeland and Mr. Ellsworth. The two men kept coming, and that’s when Marty really lost control. I shrieked as he threw his dictionary and his stapler, followed by the Rolodex and a radio. People ducked, taking cover under their desks, but I stood transfixed. Mr. Copeland and Mr. Ellsworth tried to rush him while Marty hurled telephone books and tape dispensers, paperweights, his chair, the trash can and anything else within reach. My pulse jumped each time Marty went for a new piece of ammo. When he hefted up the typewriter and hurled it at Mr. Copeland, Walter and Randy grabbed him from behind. I let out a loud gasp. Watching my journalistic hero kicking and screaming made my heart drop to my stomach.

  It took four of them to restrain Marty, and eventually they had him on the ground, on his stomach, clawing and yelping like a wild animal. Walter was planted on his rear end, pinning down his arms while Randy had him by the legs. Peter and Henry were down on all fours, trying to make eye contact with him and get him to calm down, but Marty only screamed and cried, spitting out bits of chewed-up paper.

  Ten minutes later the ambulance arrived. Mrs. Angelo, Gabby, M and I were all huddled in a cluster, and I winced when the medic knocked Marty out with an injection to the hip, driving a two-inch needle straight through his trousers. Within moments the fight had drained out of him, but my heart still hammered as I watched them strap Marty Sinclair onto a gurney and wheel him out of the city room.

  “Okay, everyone.” Mr. Ellsworth cupped his hands, yelling into them like a megaphone. “Get back to work. The show’s over.”

  Chapter 2

  • • •

  After work that night M, Gabby and some of the others were going for drinks at Boul Mich over on Grand and Michigan Avenue. No one extended an invitation to me, but Benny shot me a glance as he reached for his hat. “Aren’t you coming with?”

  I was in no hurry to head home, so I grabbed my handbag, tucked a stack of newspapers under my arm for later reading and went to join them. After all, drinking was an industry tradition. I’d grown up knowing that. My mother kept a list tacked up on the kitchen wall with telephone numbers for Radio Grill, Riccardo’s, Twin Anchors, Mister Kelly’s and my father’s other favorite bars, along with the numbers for the doctor and the fire department.

  By the time Benny and I arrived at Boul Mich, everyone else was huddled together at the bar, talking with Red Maupin, the bartender. Their ashtrays were already full and the nut bowls nearly empty.

  Mr. Ellsworth was telling everyone about when he first met Marty Sinclair. “There was nothing that guy wouldn’t do to get a story. . . . He’d never let a little thing like ethics get in the way of him and a byline. . . .”

  People listened, nodding as Mr. Ellsworth spoke. I could tell everyone was still bewildered over what had happened.

  “Let’s face it,” said Henry, speaking to the group. “The guy was between a rock and a hard place. He tried to take on the Mob, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Henrotin Hospital’s probably the safest place for him right now,” said Peter.

  The others agreed.

  Earlier that day, after Marty had been carted off and things had quieted down, I’d taken a few minutes to pull Marty’s story from the morgue. Apparently his source was a gangster, an underling to Anthony “Big Tony” Pilaggi, a lieutenant in the Chicago Outfit. Six months ago Pilaggi had been on trial for murder and got off after his mistress testified that he was with her at the time of the murder. There was some bad blood between Marty’s source and Big Tony, something to do with promises made and broken, so apparently he had gone to Marty and told him that Big Tony’s mistress fabricated the alibi. He knew this for a fact, because Pilaggi’s mistress had been with him the night of the murder. Marty reported the story, but had refused to reveal his source, so the information couldn’t be used in a court of law. That’s why he was under so much pressure now.

  Walter banged his pipe against the ashtray on the bar, cutting into my thoughts. “If Marty gave up his source,” he said, “they probably could have put Big Tony away for life.”

  “Yeah, and Marty would be six feet under right now,” said Randy.

  “Why Marty?” asked Benny.

  “C’mon, think about it,” said Peter, giving Benny a light clip on the ear. “Marty’s source, whoever the hell the guy is—and let’s not get started on that guessing game. Could be any one of a hundred lugs out there gunning for Big Tony. But one thing we know is that whoever it was would have been a marked man for ratting out Big Tony. The source wouldn’t have been too happy with Marty about that, either. And then you got Big Tony, who would have put a hit on Marty for opening up the murder case again.”

  “I still thought he’d cave,” said Walter.

  “You’re crazy,” said Randy. “And if you ask me, Marty was crazy for dredging up Big Tony’s murder case again in the first place.”

  “Yeah,” said Henry. “But you know Marty. He’s fearless when it comes to chasing down a scoop.”

  “The real shame is that he tried to do a good thing,” said Benny. “Marty just wanted to get to the truth and expose the real story, and look where it got him.”

  There was a lull in the conversation, and I pondered what Benny said. On one hand, as a reporter you have a responsibility to reveal the truth. But on the other hand, in doing so, you could wind up in jail, or worse—dead. If I’d been in Marty’s shoes, I didn’t know what I would have done.

  “How long do you think he’ll be in the hospital?” asked M.

  “Do you think they’re going to give him electric shock treatment?” asked Gabby. “I had a cousin once who had a nervous breakdown and they gave her electric shock. She was never quite right after that. She couldn’t remember to do things like turn off the stove or the faucet in the bathtub.”

  “I wonder if he’ll come back to work,” said Peter.

  Walter was ready with another wager. He bet five bucks that Marty wouldn’t. Henry said he would.

  Mr. Ellsworth snapped and told them to knock it off. “Marty Sinclair’s one of the best goddamned reporters I’ve ever worked with. Even with a bolt of electricity shooting through his skull, he could still write circles around any of you.” He looked at Walter as he said this.

  That resulted in another lull in the conversation, but thanks to Randy, I still had that Winston cigarette jingle playing inside my head. I couldn’t shake it, the words and melody looping through my mind.

  Gradually the guys started talking again, changing the subject, going on about other things, more comfortable topics. It was almost seven thirty, and by then Benny, M, Gabby and some of the others had already left. No one was talking to me, so I finished my drink, collected my newspapers and said my good-byes. The men didn’t break from their conversation when I was leaving.

  “See you all in the morning,” I said anyway, speaking to the air.

  It was only Peter who looked over and said, “Ehhhx-cellent.”

  • • •

  I still lived at home with my parents in Old Town, and on a salary of sixty dollars a week it would be a while before I could afford a place of my own.

  I took a shortcut and came up the back way, slipping through the fence. I walked up the pathway, aware of my mother’s missing flower beds. Normally by now her tulips and crocuses would be in bloom. But it had been two years
since she’d planted any flowers. She’d lost her passion for gardening and had let her flowers perish after her son died. Since then my father had built the fallout shelter where the flower beds once stood. I drew closer and saw the shelter handle poking up from the grass. It was attached to something that looked like a garbage can lid. I’d been down in the shelter only once, and that was to help my father load it up with canned goods and powdered milk. It was dank and musty, but it could sleep three adults and even had a toilet. If the Russians were coming, my father would be ready.

  I went around the pathway to the front of the house. The porch lights were on, guiding my way up the stairs. I was warm, perspiring from the walk home, and I noticed that the ink from the newspapers tucked beneath my arm had bled onto my jacket. I was hoping I hadn’t ruined it as I fished inside my handbag for the keys. Our house was an old Victorian Painted Lady, pale blue and gray with a dusty rose trim. It looked like a dollhouse, but there was a stark contrast between the outside and the inside.

  It was dark when I entered the foyer except for the wedge of light coming from the living room, running a triangle across the hardwood floor. I smelled Lucky Strikes in the air and that faint stale scent that comes from a house filled with books. My parents were voracious readers and had long since run out of space on their shelves, so now the overflow was stacked on tables and on the floor in the hallway, teetering in piles that stood here and there, crooked spines three and four feet high.

  In the distance I heard the tap, tap, clack, clack coming from my father’s typewriter in his office at the back of the house, off the kitchen. As I expected, my mother was in her chair in the living room. She had a book in her hand; another one spread facedown, hanging over the lace-doilied arm of her recliner. Dust motes swam in the light above her shoulder.

  “You’re home,” she said, using her index finger to mark her place in the book. “How was it?” She reached for her glass, leaving a circle on the table that was already so blemished with water rings she no longer bothered with a coaster. She raised her nose toward the ceiling. “Do you smell that?”

  “CeeCee,” my father called out from his office. “Something’s burning.”

  She sprang out of her chair and sprinted through the swing door into the kitchen with me following closely behind. My mother wasn’t much of a cook, especially when she got absorbed in a book, so it was no surprise that three of the four pots on the stove top were spitting and hissing, smoking away.

  “Oh, would you look at this?” She shook her head, swatting at the smoke with a potholder.

  “Did you hear me out there?” my father called again from behind his closed door. “Something’s burning.”

  “I know, Hank. I know.”

  I went to the window and opened it all the way. My father’s typewriter got going again.

  My parents made for an interesting couple. The two of them were writers. Up until the time Eliot was killed, my father worked at the Daily News. Before that he’d been at the City News Bureau and then the Tribune for a brief stint. He knew Mr. Ellsworth and Mr. Copeland and some of the others, including Marty Sinclair. Even though my father had been a hard-core newsman, he made no secret about wanting to be a novelist.

  After we lost Eliot, my father resigned from the paper to focus on his own writing. When the money got tight he wrote magazine pieces to keep the household afloat. Thankfully, my mother’s family had money, and I was aware of the checks that arrived every now and then and how my mother would get on the telephone, the cord coiled about her wrist. “Yes, we got it. It arrived today. . . . Yes, thank you. . . . What? No, he’s not here. You just missed him,” she’d say, looking at my father, who’d be looking everywhere else. “Yes, I’ll be sure and tell him you said so. . . .”

  My father never did get along with my mother’s parents. And the fact that he wasn’t Jewish was the least of their problems with him. Hank Walsh was a rebel and an Irishman from Chicago to boot. Their CeeCee was a nice Jewish girl from the Upper West Side who was supposed to settle down in New York with a nice Jewish boy. They should have known better than to expect such obedience from their daughter.

  While my mother tended to the stove, I made room at the kitchen table, moving a stack of books to the far end, where she used to sit back in the days when she bothered setting the table for dinner. I got down three plates and three glasses and a handful of silverware. I told my mother about lunch with M and Gabby and how we were labeled sob sisters. I was saving up the Marty Sinclair story for my father. That would give us something to talk about.

  “Sob sisters, sheesh.” My mother shook her head. “Sounds like not much has changed since the days I was in the business.”

  “Do you ever miss it? Do you ever regret leaving the City News Bureau?”

  “Oh, heavens no,” she said, waving a dish towel above the stove, still trying to clear the rising smoke pooling up near the light fixture. “It was fun, exciting and all, but I never really wanted to be a reporter.”

  “But you were good,” I said. I’d read her clips. They were impressive. “I think you would have been a really great journalist. You had an eye for detail. You knew how to turn a phrase.”

  “Well, honey, that’s because I’m a poet.”

  Her voice was tinged with pride, and I was surprised by her choice of tense. She hadn’t composed a poem since Eliot’s death. Now she was prone to spending an entire day in her reclining chair, reading, while letting the housework go to hell and occasionally dinner, too.

  My mother cautiously lifted the lid, peering inside the pot to see what had survived. I watched her, thinking how much better she was with a pen than with a spoon. Back in the days when she wrote, her poetry was brilliant and finely wrought. She taught in the writing department at Columbia College. A woman ahead of her time, she was known for her daring, risqué prose about sex, drugs and rebellion. Running around Greenwich Village as a teenager exposed her to a wild, untamed world, and her pen had captured and committed those experiences to paper. On a bookshelf in the other room were four volumes of poetry with her name embossed in gold on the spines. Three were published by Doubleday and the most recent one by Scribner. She was exacting about her words, and I’m not sure if my father was jealous or in awe. Maybe a little of both.

  My mother liked to shock, and she reached and strained for every word. She was a perfectionist when it came to her work. I could remember finding her hunched over her writing desk, her head down, her face lined with angst because she couldn’t articulate a nuance, couldn’t pinpoint the essence. The very word she needed didn’t exist, hadn’t been conceived, and the inferior ones at her disposal would not cooperate.

  “It’s killing me,” she had said one day.

  “Why do you write if it’s so painful?” I’d asked. I was young. I didn’t get why she did it.

  She had looked at me, her cheeks flushed. “Because I have to. I can’t not write.” She brushed a few stray hairs off her face with the back of her hand. “Even if no one ever published another word or paid me another dime for my poems, I’d still have to write them.”

  So why not now? But I knew why she’d stopped writing. Even if she didn’t understand it herself, I knew. It was obvious to me that she was too afraid to write for fear that everything she’d been suppressing about Eliot’s death would come rushing to the surface. And that terrified her. My brother’s death had put my mother and her poetry on pause. She read everything she could get her hands on but hadn’t written a word since Eliot died.

  My father was the opposite. All he did was write. His writing and the need to write were ego-driven. He sought the kind of celebrated success his friend Hemingway had found. My father had written one novel, which had been published after he returned from covering World War II. It sold only about a hundred copies, and he’d been struggling ever since to write another one.

  Hemingway had read my father’s first book but hadn’t liked it. I, however, thought it was exceptional. Among the Trees was an alleg
ory about a boy raised in a forest by a family of trees. My father made the fatal mistake of showing Hemingway the first draft of his second book. Evidently Ernest had shredded it. Amazingly enough the two men remained friends after that. Even more surprising, my father, undeterred, started working on a third novel, although he hadn’t let anyone else read it—not even my mother.

  Their current struggles aside, my parents were very much regarded as an intellectual, literary couple. I remember Eliot and me sitting at the top of the stairs, eavesdropping during their many dinner parties. Everyone who was anyone had sat at our dining room table: Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir, Saul Bellow, Ben Hecht and Studs Terkel. Then there were the poets like Carl Sandburg, Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro. Given that crowd, was it any surprise that my parents’ dinner parties often turned into drunken bashes that lasted till the wee hours? My brother and I would wake up the next morning to get ourselves ready for school, stepping over the empty whiskey bottles and an occasional guest on our way to the kitchen.

  But that was years ago, and so much had changed since then. What happens to people after life takes its shots at them is heartbreaking.

  The smoke cleared from the kitchen. My mother put a cigarette in her mouth and bent over to light it off the burner as my father came out of his office to fix himself a fresh drink. He was tall and lean with a jutting Adam’s apple and a crew cut. People said he looked like that actor whose name I could never remember, who always played the daft friend of the leading man. My brother and I both took after my mother. She was a dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty, and everyone said she was far too pretty for my father. I do believe that Hemingway had a thing for her, though she hadn’t returned his affections. She was more taken with Fitzgerald. Or with his talent, I should say. As far as I knew, she’d never met him, but oh how she loved his writing. For the longest time I thought I was named after Jordan Baker, who wasn’t an admirable or likable character. But my mother assured me that I was named after her favorite uncle. When I complained that people thought I was a boy, my mother said she’d done that on purpose. She wanted me to have a powerful name, one that would open doors for me, not hold me back.