“Is a nice night, no?” said Roma, tapping Harris’s shoulder from behind. “So nice it make me stupid. I got the mayor here, and I come to sit with you, you fat cetriolo.”
Harris’s countenance lightened for the first time all evening. He turned around with his now properly lit cigar. “You’d better pay attention, goombah. Walker’s been as dry as my guy Newman since about September. Watch and see he doesn’t put your Italian behind in jail for serving what passes for booze here.”
“Nah,” said Roma. “He ain’t got religion on the subject. He just take the pledge to please his lady friend. Is a, how you say, ‘personal’ thing.”
Giovanni Roma had been born and brought up in Saugatuck, Connecticut, but from an occupational affectation he now spoke English with less facility and a thicker accent than his immigrant parents. He’d come to New York fifteen years ago, at the age of twenty-seven, when local scandal forced him off the family fishing boat. Gianni liked to chase the ragazzi, but after a year of waiting tables in the city, he had allowed a well-known older actor to chase and catch him. The price of temporary surrender was the stake he used to start Malocchio. For six years the restaurant had only just stayed afloat on the stream of newspaper guys and ballplayers that David Fine coaxed through the door, but things started to bubble once Harris designated the restaurant as his home with a mention in Bandbox every month.
“So when you go to London?” he asked Harris.
“End of the month.” With Jimmy Gordon on his tail, the editor wondered how he’d even find the breathing space to sail over for his annual tour of the men’s shops along Savile Row. A report on them always accompanied Bandbox’s piece on whatever sartorial rule had just been repealed by the Prince of Wales, but Harris made the trip mostly to enjoy evenings with Fine and Spilkes in the woody hotel bars that satisfied his longings for the antique.
“Before that we’ve got the editorial retreat up in Dutchess,” he said to Roma. “You’re going to do the food for me, remember?”
The restaurateur made a put-upon face and nodded, while David Fine complained: “I always catch cold up there. Why can’t we avoid all those Herkimer Jerkimers and do it down here? Rent a big hotel suite.”
“I like it there,” said Harris, thinking of his big weekend house, the woods latticed with snow. “Nobody pays attention if we stay in town.”
“You got to give me plenty notice,” said Gianni.
Harris and Roma and Fine made a tiptop male trio, combining more comfortably than most much closer friends might have. Their libidinal variety helped: Roma remained as devoted to young men as Harris did to Betty Divine and the lost ideal of full-bosomed womanhood; Fine, at bottom, was more indifferent to sex than any man the other two knew. Together, the three sailed along in insult-hurling harmony, their self-display and jockeyings for a small measure of repute undisturbed by the slightest undercurrent of sexual competition.
The restaurant owner and the editor-in-chief also had the unspoken fellow feeling that arises between two men each aware that the other is keeping secrets. Roma had a whole thrilling store of them, legally perilous and never far from his mind. Harris’s skeletons, older and less dangerous, were still potentially unsettling: he did not, for instance, wish Jimmy Gordon or the GME board to know all the details of how, for a brief period a half-dozen years ago while he was between jobs, his editorial skills had been applied to the production of a line of postcards in decidedly questionable taste.
“So, brutto,” said Roma, trying to stoke the guttering conversation, “whatsa matter you? You don’ look too good.”
Harris would have liked being able to tell Gianni about Jimmy Gordon’s photographic salvo, but the restaurant owner didn’t discourage Jimmy from eating here, and no doubt nurtured the hope of a gossip-column item about the wayward protégé crossing paths, and swords, with his old boss at Malocchio. So Harris just shrugged and said, “It’s nothing. I’m only wondering when this lunatic Lindstrom is going to show up and do his hour of ‘work.’ Standing still for a camera.”
Gianni regarded his fingernails and affected a lack of interest in the cocaine-crazed cover model. When the need arose, he could be discreet. A few months ago he’d removed a Maxfield Parrish painting of Ganymede from a stretch of wall near the kitchen, lest the place start looking too much like the Jewel. Now he eyed Walker, and decided that Harris was right: he had more than one reason to stay in the mayor’s good graces. “ ’Scusi,” he said, getting up from the table to pay Hizzoner a little attention.
“So,” said Harris to Fine. “Have you got any advice at all?”
The food columnist, impatient to be recognized by one of the RCA big shots—maybe even asked for an autograph, or offered a stock tip—managed only to look at Harris and say, “Sleep on it?”
“Sleep on it?” cried his boss, pushing away the grappa. “It’s Friday. I can’t sleep on this for three nights. Even Houlihan would know better than to tell me that. Sleep on it, for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re assuming Houlihan knows the day of the week,” said Fine.
Disgusted, the editor got up—there was never a check to settle here—and walked outside to wait on the hack line. The handsome doorman’s umbrella only half-protected Harris and another customer from the ice-cold drizzle. The editor wished he’d brought along that copy of the Daily News to hold over his head.
Death, he thought, recalling the electrified Ruth Snyder. It was today’s essential thrill, the way every drama now had to end. The music played so fast you couldn’t follow it, but every listener wanted it to play faster still, until the phonograph exploded.
Before Harris could proceed too far with his gloomy reflections, Giovanni Roma came out the front door with two cannoli in a small cardboard box. “Here, bambino,” he said, handing them to the editor. “Take them to La Divina. Go. Walk. It do you good.”
Harris gave him a quizzical look.
“Let a smile be your umbrella,” said Gianni, pushing his best customer off into the freezing night.
At that moment, up in the Warwick Hotel, Betty Divine was finishing the evening papers, a form of literature she still secretly preferred to magazines, though she’d started working in the latter twenty years ago, in the ad department at Collier’s for Condé Nast himself, just before he’d begun to buy and run his own publications. Betty had been one of the few girls ever to say no to Nast, who always kept up a professorial look and manner until he pounced upon the latest little secretary in the back of a taxicab. Two decades ago, Betty, in just such a circumstance, had unmanned him by saying, quite calmly, as his tongue darted into her ear, “I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you.”
She’d come east from St. Louis at eighteen, in 1902, and taken some little parts in musicals. She’d never been stagestruck, just realistic about what lay available to a girl as quick and cute as herself. What she’d never be, however, was tall, so she’d soon left the stage and gone to work in magazines. When Nast bought Vogue, sometime after being thwarted in the taxicab, he had brought her over and switched her from business to editorial. And she’d been happy there for a long time, until seven years ago, when Hi Oldcastle, pretty sure she could understand this new class of career girl now in the city, lured her away with an offer to edit Pinafore.
Not long after that she’d met Joe. He’d been crazy about her from the start. Immediately, and continually, he’d asked her to marry him. She always said no, having tried that years ago with a dull, bullying lawyer who’d put her off both matrimony and excessively good looks. The arrangement she’d imposed on Joe was much nicer: weekends up in Dutchess County, and two or three nights of togetherness here during the week, listening to the radio or eating a late supper, trying to figure out their mutual boss’s latest whim. Joe spent the other nights out of her hair, either late at Malocchio or over at his own place in Murray Hill.
That had been her own neighborhood until just a few months ago, when, determined to keep a bit of control, she’d taken this more glamorous
set of rooms at the Warwick. She let Joe help out with the rent—not because she needed him to, but as a signal that she expected to be treated right. That Hearst kept an apartment for Marion Davies on these same premises was a fact lost on neither of them.
“Hearst can’t marry Davies,” Joe would say from time to time, never quite giving up the hope of something more for himself and Betty. “He’s already married.”
“So was I,” Betty would reply.
And so had Harris been, years ago, to a schoolteacher who’d made him so miserable he took tremendous care not to press his luck with Betty, who at forty-four remained as cute as Mabel Normand and more sensible than Andrew Mellon. Joe might be shrewd, but he was also excitable, and he depended on Betty to rip up the letters he shouldn’t mail or turn off the motor he was in no condition to have started on the way home.
Earlier tonight, when he’d telephoned, she’d said fine, don’t worry about dinner—go off to Malocchio if there’s something you need to discuss with David. She’d ordered up from the hotel kitchen, and now, awaiting Joe’s late arrival, she listened to the Chicago Civic Opera on WJZ and finished making her way through a stack of take-home work: the latest photos of Marie of Roumania; the results of a Pinafore poll asking: “Is it ever proper to visit your fiancé’s mother sans chapeau?”
Betty had the radio up so loud that her white Eskimo puppy, Mukluk, was cowering by the door. His mistress’s one real vanity involved her hardness of hearing. Only the moment’s emergency had permitted her confession of it to Condé Nast, years ago in that taxicab. When she and Joe went to see Ina Claire’s comeback performance next month, she would allow herself, once the houselights went down, the use of her little silver ear trumpet. But amidst the glare and noise of a party, she always covered up her difficulty by nodding yes or no, even as she misheard a name, misunderstood a story, or missed somebody’s point. And yet, Betty again and again realized—perhaps the greatest truth she had grasped about life—that all these misapprehensions, in the end, never made the slightest difference.
She knew a serenity that Joe would never attain. When he came through the door tonight, worries as thick upon him as his cologne, Mukluk would give him a wide berth, and she would massage his shoulders, imparting the same wise counsel she did during the dozen or so phone calls he made to her, from one floor of the Graybar Building to another, every day that they worked there. She was glad she’d been out this afternoon, having her light brown bob attended to by Sydney over at the Saks salon, when Joe’s latest crisis broke. She’d gotten back to the office in time for only that last call, when he’d announced his need to take David Fine to Giovanni Roma’s awful restaurant.
“It’s all right, baby,” she said, soothing Mukluk, who had raced under the couch upon Mary Garden’s ejaculation of an E-sharp seven hundred miles away in Chicago. “You’ll see.”
4
At this same hour, despite Betty’s belief in the essential rightness of things, three of Joe Harris’s staffers found themselves coming to their own nervous crossroads:
Down on Cornelia Street, Allen Case already lay in bed under his blanket. As the wind slid in over the warped windowsill, he gave unspoken thanks to whatever lamb had provided the wool now keeping him warm. A young man with so little self-love he had difficulty masturbating, Allen lay with his eyes open, distracted from his woe only by the munchings of Sugar, his rabbit, and Freddy, his Siamese.
Keeping him awake were thoughts about the last piece of copy Nan O’Grady had put on his desk before the office closed, after they’d finished with Max Stanwick’s piece on Arnold Rothstein.
The spots on this ocelot’s coat are no match for the polka-dot vitality of our “Bandbox” gentleman’s tie.…
The caption as yet lacked a picture, but Allen knew the words were intended to run beneath whatever photo Waldo Lindstrom had failed to pose for this afternoon. Richard Lord and the fashion editors wanted Copy to be ready for an image they still hoped to jam in before the March issue closed. The photographer who’d been stood up, Gardiner Arinopoulos, had already, before Thanksgiving, shot a model wrapped in a python that matched his snakeskin tie. This illo of 1928’s so-far-most-gruesome fashion craze had not, Allen could tell, been taken at the Bronx Zoo, and when Nan informed him that Arinopoulos had shot it at a garage somewhere in Queens, his stomach had dropped. Who was keeping these exotic animals, and how were they living?
Allen feared he would soon reach the point he always reached wherever he worked, the one beyond which he could not go. At the American, for instance, he had accepted having to surround with inverted commas the cruel phrase “no pets,” when editing real estate ads. But there had come the week when he had to work on a two-part article celebrating the role of cowhide in the making of baseballs. The pieces were so happy and triumphal—one had to imagine The Jungle as produced by George M. Cohan—that Allen’s conscience and abdomen had been forced to give notice.
Up until now, he’d been managing pretty well at Bandbox, even if it wasn’t easy having to blue-pencil, say, a piece of David Fine’s on the chateaubriand at Durgin Park. But there was something truly ominous about these animal shoots Arinopoulos was doing. Would they prove the by-now-familiar last straw? Tonight, while cutting up the Daily News for Sugar’s cage, the only electrocution Allen could think of was Topsy the Elephant’s, at Coney Island all those years ago. They’d put her down for quite reasonably trampling to death some humans. Drifting off to sleep at last, Allen thought, rather hopelessly, that if these poor things being abused by Arinopoulos could only acquire language—something he used effortlessly but to such little purpose—they’d almost certainly rise up and organize and break free.
Daisy DiDonna rose from the couch to close the window. She was never cold, not even on a night like this, but she had to do something about the smell making its way ten blocks up the East River, all the way to her little patch of Beekman Place. The slaughterhouse was even worse for Daisy’s friend Gladys, who had a little place practically on top of it, in the first-opened building of Tudor City. There the architect, despite the river view, had put in windows the size of a medicine cabinet, because of the aromas. But at least Gladys had somebody paying for her place, even if her fancy man had gone home to his wife in Douglaston tonight, leaving Gladys to have supper with Daisy in a chop-suey dance joint.
Daisy needed to find someone steady—at least as steady as Mr. Douglaston. Since her long-ago divorce, she had never been with anyone for more than the six months she’d spent with Antonio DiDonna, whom Joe Harris now sometimes referred to as The Long Count. Daisy’s standard and motto—“Always be faithful, but always be looking”—by now made for a pretty worn-out coat of arms, and she wondered if she shouldn’t put more effort into the long-term cultivation of whomever she was with, perhaps even forgoing the initiations she loved to provide for the greenhorn boys just hired by Oldcastle Publications.
She sighed, remembering her own first job, typing away inside the Flatiron Building in 1903, the year it opened. Outside at lunchtime, on the sidewalks, men would come from blocks around to gawk at the girls, when the downdrafts created by the building’s peculiar shape blew their long skirts up over their thighs. Every gust brought another show, and another half-dozen men.
It had been Daisy’s misfortune to waste her own legs’ best days in the era of ankle-length dresses. Now, when her stems lacked the supreme tautness they’d once had, skirts had risen right to the knees. She needed the next gust of wind to send her somebody truly well-heeled—and to blow her eyes shut against whatever farm-fresh boy she could see over his shoulder.
She might be forty-four, but she still deserved an ardent, permanence-minded suitor. The way she saw things, she had earned one, by the serious attention she paid to every advertisement for combating corns, halitosis, bad pronunciation, superfluous hair, and wrinkles. Except for a few of the latter, Daisy had none of the above. She had always been her own mechanic, keeping herself in top-notch form, and she was beginni
ng to think she merited a bit more from those who got to drive her well-tended chassis—however much she enjoyed having it taken for a spin.
Right now she was dismayed to find herself still in her leopard-print slip. She liked to sleep in the nude, and not yet being down to that meant some part of her secretly wished the phone would ring and that it would be the Wood Chipper, calling from some Automat, as he still sometimes did when he’d struck out with everyone else. Was this all she had to look forward to?
These days you could live above your means even on Beekman Place. The block, slaughterhouse smells and all, was getting fancier by the month, as yet another wave of stockbrokers displaced the unsuccessful sculptors and out-of-work actresses. Daisy herself was down to the last of her My Antonio money and knew she couldn’t make it on what Joe Harris paid her. Where would the rest come from?
She glanced at the kitchen calendar. Friday the thirteenth didn’t faze her in the least—Daisy was too lucky to be superstitious—but the number did set her to thinking. She remembered how it had come up this afternoon relative to Mr. Rothstein’s shoes. She had seen him unshod only once, the single evening she had been up to 912 Fifth Avenue. She couldn’t remember exactly which recent unpromising escort had brought her there, but those feet weren’t something you forgot. She’d massaged them—and nothing more—for a solid half-hour, until the man became more occupied with business than with her. No matter; Eddie Diamond had driven her home and been a perfect gent. Daisy looked back on the evening, which had taken place only weeks ago, with a certain wistfulness. And she allowed herself, for just a minute, to consider how nice it would be if her whole long future might somehow be found in that tiny piece of her past.
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