“I don’t know where it came from,” he said. “Honest injun.”
Becky had heard this song before, but Cuddles, in his usual near-murmur, persisted through a complicated alibi. “I was at the Palace all afternoon, talking to Doc Cook and Morris, seeing if we could work up some new angle—‘Elevator Boys Tell of Vaude Stars’ Ups and Downs’—something like that, anyway. But I only came away with a sick feeling. Do you know they’ve put an electric piano in the lobby? The Palace—having to lure people in off the streets! They’ve started keeping the doors open so the passing parade will hear the music and come in from the sidewalk. Jesus, Becky, they’re going to be booking radio acts before the year is out.”
After a dozen fat blots on his copybook, Cuddles’ turf had been reduced by Harris to little more than the ever-shrinking vaudeville beat. But as she lifted the snow from his eye and repacked it into a linen handkerchief, Becky doubted her old boss’s alibi. She could hear him fleshing out this tale of his afternoon with just enough specifics to make it seem real. She wondered if Cuddles hadn’t really been to Manking, their old Times Square Chinese restaurant, a place so inauthentically awful it couldn’t even transliterate the name of the city whose cuisine it claimed to be serving. Two of the waiters were actually Japanese and kept a bottle of sake around for Mista Hoorihan and his young lady friend when they arrived for those dozens of three-hour lunches during which Cuddles gave her the lowdown on the magazine business and life, and, as their first year together turned into the second, gave her, more and more intently, the look.
“Ouch,” cried Cuddles, upon Becky’s reapplication of the snowpack. His small protest raised in her the same tender feelings she used to experience when, past three o’clock, she would try to get up from the booth at Manking, and he’d say, “Don’t go,” lest he have to return to the office and Jehoshaphat Harris’s increasingly baleful stare.
After two years turned into three and then four, Cuddles finally arranged her promotion as the best thing for them both. Since then, Becky had felt like a creature released into the wild, sometimes wondering whether it wouldn’t be easier to continue suffering Cuddles’ overage calf love than to hunt down stories to feed the bulldog—namely, Harris.
“Do you know that Oh, Kay! closes this weekend?” asked Cuddles, who knew he was going to steal Becky’s linen handkerchief once its anti-inflammatory work was done. “You call yourself our Broadway correspondent, and I’ll bet you’ve never seen it. Why don’t you let me get two comps for tomorrow night?”
Becky, now mopping up the inside of the windowsill, didn’t answer.
“I suppose you’ve got plans with the monk,” said Cuddles.
Becky turned and frowned, and started to say “medievalist,” the proper title of her boyfriend, a Columbia Ph.D. candidate with a job at the Cloisters. But she had corrected Cuddles on this matter a dozen times before and had recently pledged herself to the avoidance of any further banter about Daniel.
“Why don’t you concentrate on not getting canned?” she replied.
“I suppose I’d better look at this,” he said, nodding at the pneumatic canister that had arrived on his desk sometime after the vodka bottle. He opened it up, looked at the photograph, and groaned at the message in Jimmy Gordon’s big handwriting. He handed the picture to Becky.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Why you? Why doesn’t he make Spilkes handle this?”
Norman Spilkes, the managing editor who used to work for AT&T, had brought a certain smooth efficiency to the month-by-month running of Harris’s great makeover.
“ ’Phat’s deepest reflexes are twitching,” said Cuddles, who now comprehended the origin of the vodka bottle. “During yesteryear’s crises I was his right-hand man. Comrade Stoli was always on the left.”
Becky noticed that, despite the snowpack, Cuddles’ shiner was turning into a deep purple bull’s-eye against his small, boyish features and still prematurely gray hair. The strategy of his little mustache, grown long ago in an effort to look older, now seemed telltale and obvious; it made the forty-six-year-old Aloysius Houlihan a living spectre of his endearing, quenched youth. The slight limp, which had kept him out of the war, now also seemed a faded adolescent charm, like a stammer; fewer and fewer people knew that this by-now-consummate New Yorker had acquired it when a wheel on his parents’ wagon had accidentally rolled over him during a pilgrimage between Salt Lake City and some Utah holy site. Cuddles had been raised a strict Mormon in the 1890s, grandson of an upstate Irishman who’d joined the westward trek of Brigham Young.
“I’m going to get some actual ice,” said Becky, who on her way out of the room inserted the thrill killers’ photo back into the canister: better to take it with her, lest Cuddles attend to it in ill-considered haste. She made her way through the fourteenth floor’s warren of offices, most of which had their doors open, toward the distant icebox. The little chains on the overhead lights had been pulled on during the past half-hour, but their illumination couldn’t really bleach the dark blue twilight that was pouring through the windows and giving the floor a peaceful, almost eternal feeling, so at odds with the nerve-wracked perishability of the product produced on it.
When Becky passed the open office of darkly handsome Stuart Newman, author of “The Bachelor’s Life” column, she gave a thin smile and picked up her pace. Melancholy and priapic, Newman had dated almost every girl at Bandbox and nearly half the ones at Pinafore. He was the sort of man women liked to think they could change—could make, in his case, less brooding and less of a sex hound. Newman liked Becky—everyone did—though his most deeply buried, unrealized affection was probably for the crisply mannered Nan O’Grady, whose paper cuffs seemed to ward him off the way a surgeon’s gloves guarded against germs. A girl who might, deep down, dislike him as much as he disliked himself didn’t come along every day, and if Newman gave himself half a chance, he might yet get almost serious about her.
But Newman’s biggest problem lay in his already being reformed, in one respect. A once-serious drinker, prone to blackouts and brawls that threatened to leave his Olympian face looking like a palooka’s, he had two years ago gone off the sauce. Newman was now the only entirely sober man at the magazine, and abstinence of any kind made Harris nervous. Newman gave his boss the creeps whenever he went in to get next month’s column idea approved and asked for ginger ale once Harris invited him to pull up a chair. The editor-in-chief’s discomfort would soon kill the conversation, and the two of them would just sit there, listening to the fizz in Newman’s Canada Dry until Harris threw him out.
Newman’s dark side gave him a certain good sense when it came to office politics, but Becky, passing his door, decided that she couldn’t let this tempest out of its pneumatic teapot without putting Cuddles at risk. For all she knew, solving this sordid little problem was his last chance to save his job. So she continued down the corridor, past the Copy Department, wherein Nan and Allen Case were beavering over Max Stanwick’s galleys.
“In graf six,” Allen inquired in his soft stutter. “Rothstein’s sh-shoe size has been changed?”
“The countess adjusted it upwards from eleven to thirteen.” Nan rolled her eyes.
“S-source?” asked Case.
“Personal knowledge,” answered Nan. No one would think of questioning Daisy DiDonna on such a matter; if she said Rothstein trod the earth in thirteens, it was because she had, on at least one night, unlaced them herself. Stanwick’s piece made no direct reference to the size of the gangster’s now-sanctioned schvantz, but the astute reader had only to travel up Rothstein’s socks and garters to make an inference from his footwear.
Now beyond Copy’s door, Becky didn’t see Allen Case, who had just made the shoe-schvantz connection, blush to the top of his already receding hairline. Painfully shy, painfully thin, and astronomically farsighted, Allen was even more a fish out of water here than his supervisor, Nan. The formative influence upon his life had been a photograph he’d seen at twelve years old of a horse
lying dead on the Somme battlefield. Since then he had been a passionate vegetarian and reader of Shavian pamphlets. Each morning, after saying goodbye to his pet bunny rabbit, Sugar, Allen left his room on Cornelia Street, shutting his eyes until he got past the pork butcher that lay between his apartment house and the subway. He carried with him a lunch of dried fruit and zwieback toast, in addition to his flawless grammar.
Nan wouldn’t allow the office hearties to tease him about his lack of a girlfriend or his thinning, unbrilliantined hair. She protected him, not just out of kindness, but because he wrote like a dream. Allen could not only activate a writer’s verbs and resolder his infinitives; he could also, when a piece came in a few lines under, create sentences in the voice and style of whichever scribe’s prose had just crossed his desk. It amazed Nan to see him perform these ventriloquial feats, to become Stuart Newman or Max Stanwick or David Fine, just as completely as he entered the souls of horses on the street and cats in the pet-shop windows. In the course of a lunchtime walk with him, Allen would endow the poor creatures with anthropomorphic names and life stories that seemed less charming than eerily real.
Finally at the icebox, Becky chipped off what remained of the morning block, while she eyed the countess in the Research Department’s bull pen. Its lack of privacy hardly bothered Daisy DiDonna, herself a rite de passage for the boys at the magazine just as surely as Newman was for the girls. Becky put Daisy’s age at forty-five, though you’d never guess it from her still-nifty figure and too-tight dresses. Born Daisy Glazer, she’d been a young divorcée at the start of the war; by its end she was the Countess DiDonna, having gone off to Italy and married the seventeen-year-old Count Antonio DiDonna, a delicate asthmatic half her age. When he died in 1920, Daisy got the title; the count’s mother got the villa, as well as several injunctions against Daisy, who made a little splash, upon her return stateside, with My Antonio, a steamily lyrical memoir excerpted in Vanity Fair back in ’24.
She had met Harris in an elevator that year, not long after he’d taken over Bandbox. She handed him one of her vellum calling cards, put her face the four inches she always deemed the appropriate distance to be kept from any male visage, and said hello with the sweet suggestive breathiness that could de-ice a windshield on even a night like this. He had hired her on the spot, though she couldn’t write (My Antonio had been ghosted by one of Nan O’Grady’s lady novelists at Scribner’s) and had appalling gaps in the common knowledge required by anyone in the Research Department, which is where Harris put her. Only two months ago, when checking a story about how Governor Smith could be expected to try for the presidential “brass ring” in ’28, Daisy had called the White House to make sure each new chief executive was indeed given this piece of commemorative jewelry. But on matters like which tomato belonged to which Tammany sachem, which Black Sox ballplayer still had his money, and what size shoes were under the bed in Arnold Rothstein’s apartment at 912 Fifth Avenue, Daisy was unbeatable.
“What have you got there?” asked Chip Brzezinski.
“Jeepers!” cried Becky, wheeling around so fast she sprayed some flakes of ice onto his shirt. “You scared me.” When she saw him looking through the clear tube with something like recognition, she quickly added, “Nothing,” and walked away, chilled with the realization that Chip Brzezinski, another of the magazine’s fact-checkers, knew about this photo. She double-timed it back to Cuddles’ office, worrying all the way about Brzezinski, who was known as the Wood Chipper, because of his smart mouth and reputed sexual prowess. A tough Chicago kid who’d hauled papers and ice and been knocked around by his old man way past what was normal, the already-balding Chip lived over on Ninth Avenue and mostly dated dance-hall hostesses and cashiers instead of the nice girls here and at Pinafore. No woman thought she could reform Chip, though his initiation period with Daisy had lasted longer than was customary, at Daisy’s request.
Since Jimmy left, Chip had been moaning about his general underappreciation and blocked ascent. For a while he’d been given little fashion squibs to report and write, but now he was back to full-time fact-checking. He made no secret of how he would love to leave this place for Cutaway. So what’s stopping you? was the retort everyone from Hazel Snow up to Spilkes made when he started whining. Becky, darting past Nan’s door and then Stuart’s, now felt pretty sure she knew what was stopping him, at least for the moment: Jimmy Gordon was keeping Brzezinski here as a spy. When he delivered, he would get his reward: a job halfway up the Cutaway masthead.
“Here,” she said, allowing her hand with the cup of ice to precede the rest of her into Cuddles’ office. But he didn’t hear her; he was gone again—not out cold, just fast asleep. Putting down the ice, but holding on to the canister, Becky shook her head in silent sorrow over this man who knew more about music and books and politics than anyone else on the floor; who had given Puck and Judge most of their sparkle during the ten years he’d worked at each; who’d been Harris’s first hire; and who these days, having lost all clout and ambition, lay snoozing with his head atop a pile of the form rejection letters he had recently managed to stencil. Cuddles now affixed a combination of Bartleby and Coolidge to whatever submissions he received each day and returned unread: “I do not choose to run your piece in 1928.”
At a loss, thinking about how Cuddles was now up against both Harris’s wrath and the horrid little wiles of the Wood Chipper, Becky looked out the window and considered just tossing Leopold and Loeb the fourteen floors down to Lexington Avenue. It was no more than they’d deserved in the first place.
3
“And you’re letting Houlihan take care of this?” asked David Fine. He took a sip of grappa, his and Harris’s after-dinner usual here at Malocchio.
“Could it really wind up on a bus?” asked the editor-in-chief.
“Are you kidding?” answered his food columnist and confidant. “Are you the only guy in New York who hasn’t seen this?” He reached under the table for the Daily News, whose front page roared with the image of Ruth Snyder at the instant of her electrocution in Sing Sing. Late last night the paper’s photographer had strapped a camera under his pants leg, raising it at just the moment the screws pulled the switch. “You think the guy who took this picture is going to get a summons? Forget about it—he’s going to get a prize.”
Harris cringed at this sight of the blindfolded, husband-killing cutie, who’d been the subject of two Bandbox pieces by Max Stanwick: if the kiddies could buy a picture of Ruth’s sizzling flesh on their way to school, Leopold and Loeb ought to be riding the side of a private bus any morning now. Noticing for the first time that it was Friday the thirteenth, Harris realized he was jumping one more watershed in the age of You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet. He’d only managed to get Jolson himself onto the pages of Bandbox—in blackface and white tie—a month after The Jazz Singer opened last fall, which was really a month too late. Talking pictures were one more thing he now had to understand and keep track of. To Harris, it seemed more like the age of You’ve Heard Too Much Already.
Fine lacked anything more to say. The two men put the newspaper aside and returned to their grappa as the restaurant violinist launched into “Sometimes I’m Happy.” Had David Fine composed the lyrics for this new tune, he would have made its next line “But more often I’m not.” It was Fine, chronically certain of his underappreciation by others, who usually got his reassurance and perspective from Joe Harris.
He had grown up in Philadelphia and come to New York in 1898 to cover baseball and the horses for the Brooklyn Eagle. Two decades later, fleeing a misguided engagement to a jockey’s daughter, the thirty-seven-year-old bachelor enlisted in the army and wound up winning a Bronze Star at Belleau Wood. Overseas, Fine had cultivated a taste for wine and food, subjects the Eagle had no desire to see him write about once he returned to America. So he went to work as the sommelier for Giovanni Roma at the then-brand-new Malocchio.
It was here that he’d met Joe Harris in ’23, when the editor was just as
suming control of both Bandbox and his regular corner table. Fine had, in more or less the same breath, said something to Joe about Christy Mathewson’s fastball and a 1912 cabernet, and the editor had decided he was a man of parts. Within a month, Fine was writing “The Groaning Board”—his column about food and drink and anything else on his disappointment-prone mind. Bandbox staffers called the column “Fine Whines,” but Fine’s cranky, suspicious voice became immediately popular with readers, who liked the humor, intentional and otherwise, in almost everything he wrote. Harris felt sure Fine would eventually bring in a GME; he’d already attracted enough new subscribers that the editor was happy to put up with his constant complaints about being poorly paid; cheated by a cabdriver; snubbed by his landlady; stood up by a date. Now forty-eight, Fine lived alone in Brooklyn and occasionally went out with one of the secretaries at the magazine, but his real romance was with his expense account, upon which Harris instructed the bookkeeper to put no significant limits, even when Fine failed to write a single word about some foreign clime he’d just spent two weeks eating his way through.
“So you haven’t told me,” he now implored Harris, who was sneaking another look at Ruth Snyder. “ ‘Williamsburg versus Williamsburg’?”
“Yeah,” said Harris. “Do it. It’s good.” The editor knew that it would be more than good, that a Fine column comparing the Brooklyn neighborhood and the Virginia home of William and Mary—popovers versus blintzes; college titles beside Yiddish nicknames; burgesses competing with rabbis—would be a hit with readers and maybe even the GME committee. “Spend whatever it takes,” said Harris. “And take as long as you have to.”
He began the slow process of lighting his cigar. Looking through the flame as it bobbed up and down a half-dozen times, he noticed some RCA executives and then Mayor Walker and then Horace Liveright, the party-giving publisher, all at tables less prominent than his own. His berth was reimbursement for the business Bandbox had been bringing Malocchio these past five years. Harris might have stolen Giovanni Roma’s sommelier, but he’d made 50,000 New York readers eager to get into this place the magazine kept pronouncing the essence of dining in style.
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