Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  “She’s five-five, a hundred and thirty. Busty,” said the reporter arguing the Smith girl’s case.

  “The rev’s temptress is thirty years old, half the geezer’s age,” came the opposing point of view. “And she’s Catholic.”

  “The Smithie’s father’s a broker. They’re Social Register. Up in Northampton they’ve got Boy Scouts dragging a pond, for Christ’s sake.”

  It was a tough call for Gauvreau; Becky looked at the clock and decided there was no time to wait for him to make it. She pushed Cuddles along toward their final destination here. The Graphic had no foreign desk to block their way, but the two of them did have to pass the health-foods editor and the columnist who analyzed readers’ handwriting before they reached the Photo Department.

  “Mr. Wender, please,” said Becky.

  “Hey, Jerry!” shouted a boy at the department’s first desk. “You gotta goil here!”

  “Becks!” cried a slender fellow who, as he came running, looked not much older than the boy who’d summoned him. “Watch out for my hands,” he said, managing to keep Becky free from inkstains while he gave her a hug. Cuddles, bewildered about his business here, made a jealous pout.

  Jerry Wender, Becky explained, was a townie she used to date in Aurora, New York, when she was going to Wells. “He’s the Composograph man,” she announced. Jerry swelled with professional pride: the Graphic’s notorious composite photographs, their fakery disclaimed in four-point type under the caption, were the tabloid’s major draw.

  “My masterpiece,” said Jerry, rushing back to his desk to fetch a print. “At least until now.”

  The photo he brought out depicted Daddy Browning and Peaches Heenan, the city’s most famous, if recently estranged, sugar daddy and gold digger. The once-happy couple were wearing what looked like harem outfits and awaiting the suggestive à trois attentions of a dancing girl.

  “Too hot for Emile to run,” said Jerry.

  Cuddles and Becky nodded in unfeigned admiration, before she broke the silence to ask: “Jerry, you said something about this being your masterpiece ‘until now’?”

  “You bet, Becks!” He dashed back to his desk for a just-dried print that he triumphantly placed between her gloved hands.

  What she saw in the picture was, she knew, monstrously false, and yet it had the appearance of absolute, Hogarthian truth. In short, it was better than she had dared to hope. The 1926 Christmas-party photograph of Jimmy Gordon that she had located at Bandbox on Saturday morning had been wondrously transformed in the forty-eight hours since she’d given it to Jerry with her confidential instructions. In the original photo, taken of Jimmy while he conversed with Richard Lord, the subject’s facial expression had appeared argumentative. But now, Jimmy’s head, seamlessly attached to someone else’s body—and put beside a burlesque queen, whose hand rested in that body’s lap—appeared to be expressing a sort of lubricious ecstasy.

  “Oh, Jerry!” cried Becky, her face flushed not just from the air out on Broadway but a new hopefulness as well. “What do I owe you?”

  “Nothin’, kid,” said Jerry. “Old times.” He ran back for two extra prints of the picture.

  Cuddles was too impressed by Jerry’s latest work to notice, let alone begrudge, the kiss Becky now planted smack on her old boyfriend’s lips.

  “Okay,” she said, wheeling around. “Let’s go.” Rolling up the photographs, Becky pushed Cuddles back into the Graphic’s newsroom. They dodged the staff’s mandatory late-afternoon calisthenics on their rush to the elevator.

  “Going down!” she cried.

  “Could happen yet,” said Cuddles.

  8

  “It’s the scissors,” said Harris, on the phone to Betty for the eleventh time that day. “Dmitri’s in the office cutting my hair. I can’t tell him to stop.”

  It amazed him that Betty could hear the shears but misapprehend at least one crucial word in each paragraph he spoke to her. Actually, it amazed him that she could hear anything at all with Mukluk yapping at her feet all the time, here in the Graybar and at home in the Warwick.

  “Order up an early supper,” he suggested. “I’m too jumpy for the Crillon.” He’d been explaining the morning’s fracas before Dmitri’s scissors went into overdrive.

  Dmitri, whose real name, never remembered by Harris, was Nicos, beavered away until his most important client got off the phone. Now the barber could give him the kind of stock tip he came in here with every two weeks. Today it was on a new company with a line of hair relaxants for Negro women.

  “I tell you, Mr. Harris,” said the barber, replacing the receiver for his customer. “It make these girls’ heads look not even Italian. You’d think they was Roumanian or Polish. Long, straight hair I’m talking about. Down to their shoulders if they want.”

  After a long pause, Harris asked: “Did I ever tell you my old man used to cut hair?”

  “No kidding,” said Nicos, with a disappointed sigh. He’d heard about old man Haldeweiss’s vocation at least a dozen times.

  Other facts of Harris’s life were conveyed with less regularity and truth during Nicos’s office visits, but the barber had a good memory, and he’d learned to sort the more reliable pieces of autobiography into something like a chronological whole, the way he kept track of his margin purchases and all the mortgages he’d assumed over in Queens.

  He could tell you how Harris had come to New York in the mid-nineties, after ten years on the Newburgh Messenger; how once on Park Row he’d done everything from the police beat at the Recorder to chasing down society items for Ward McAllister on the World. Theatre, books, City Hall: it had been a tiptop education for a writer and an even better one for an editor, which is what Harris really needed to be from the start, since he was prone to blowups with the editors he wrote for.

  If his life at the papers had been a prolonged shouting match, his life at home had been—Nicos knew all this, too—perpetual silence. Harris would flee the company of his frosty wife, a Quaker schoolteacher, for long, late-night association with his fellow reporters as well as the ad men, who kept the papers alive with their rate cards and column inches. All the oysters and beer he’d shared with them thirty years ago now allowed him to speak Andrew Burn’s language—Oldcastle’s, too.

  Harris had switched over to magazines, and editing, around 1907, learning to ride each new publisher’s hobbyhorse. Several years after the switch, at bellicose Collier’s, he got his writers to beat the drum for American intervention in the Great War, editing a couple of pieces by TR himself, whose steel trap of a smile sometimes still flashed in his anxiety dreams. A few years later, at Cosmopolitan, he’d pretended the war didn’t exist, since Hearst opposed it and felt sure it would end if his outlets ignored it.

  Even as an editor, Harris had gotten into more than anyone’s share of battles. His career at Cosmopolitan came to an end over an article about some Broadway composer whose name he couldn’t remember today. He’d been sold on the guy by some writer, and so he went into Ray Long asking for plenty of space. “This fella is the next Berlin,” he’d insisted. “He’s not even the next Irving,” replied Long, handing him back the writer’s copy. Loud words and clenched fists followed. Ten minutes later Harris was out on the sidewalk.

  He knew then that his only real hope in this business was an editor-in-chief’s job, but at that moment, a half-dozen years ago, every top man had been firmly nailed to his masthead. And so, for a couple of years, already past fifty and finally divorced, Harris trudged through a dank professional wilderness—peddling pseudonymous pieces to old pals; toiling as a freelance adsmith for a half-dozen hatters and cigar-makers; even turning out that lucrative line of “French” postcards from an office down on Pearl Street. Only Fine and Houlihan knew the whole story of this last venture; even Betty still euphemized it as “that time you were between things.” But Harris never disowned the enterprise. He kept two of its most shining pictorial productions—the unclad “Yvette” and the déshabillée “Claudine
,” actually two Irish sisters from Canarsie—framed on a wall to the left of his desk.

  Right now, Nicos, finishing up the back of Harris’s neck, took a fond glance at Yvette and listened for any sign that his customer might be approaching a mood for some two-sided conversation. Since getting off the phone with Betty, Harris had kept unusually silent. In fact, he was dwelling, however inwardly, on the triumphant climax of his personal epic—the advent of Betty and Bandbox. He had met the bubbling antithesis of his first wife through an old thespian warhorse whose musical he’d been nice to, ages before, in the pages of the World. That 1906 production had also employed a too-short chorine named Betty Divine. Seventeen years later, the ancient actress’s gratitude toward Harris, and her kindness toward Betty, led both of them to this Duse’s dressing room for another opening night. And two weeks after that, Betty, fully briefed on Joe Harris’s career, by Joe Harris himself, brought him to dinner with Hi Oldcastle.

  Harris’s sense that he owed Betty his big job and late success had never bothered him until now. It had actually been a part of the pride he took in his smart, doll-like paramour. But he could never quite believe the pride she took in him, his first wife having cauterized certain precincts of his ego. He was unable to shake the idea, which had draped him all this past weekend, that if he lost Bandbox, he might lose Betty, too.

  Nervous again at this thought, he decided to get back to business. He reached for the unopened envelope full of Gardiner Arinopoulos’s just-developed, just-delivered pictures, the ones the photographer had managed to take after hotfooting it out of here this morning with that freaky animal and dope addict. Harris would concentrate on the material, be resolute, decisive. He vacated his swivel chair before Nicos could even remove the bib, now covered with his gray and black hair. “No, thanks,” he said, deflecting the whisk broom from his own shoulders; Mukluk would only be shedding all over him in a couple of hours’ time.

  “Hazel!” cried Harris, pulling Nicos through the open door. “Give Dmitri ten bucks.” He shook hands with the barber, whose payment interrupted Hazel’s attention to True Story. Harris was always too afraid to tell her that if she spent half as much time doing Oldcastle business as she did reading Macfadden’s magazines, he might give her a raise. As it was, he gave her a raise whenever she asked.

  Down the long hallway, just this side of Mrs. Zimmerman’s desk, the countess was conversing with Max Stanwick, who had stayed around after the morning’s chaos to bang an Underwood in somebody’s vacant office. The two of them waved to Harris before he went back behind his frosted glass.

  “As I was saying, Mr. Stanwick,” breathed Daisy DiDonna, four inches from Stanwick’s face. “I just adored your piece.”

  Max, who had just seen the third proof of his article on Arnold Rothstein, felt an instant, tumescent gratitude. “I thank you. And I thank you again for correcting my underestimation of Mr. Big’s shoe size.”

  “Not at all,” declared the countess, coming even closer, causing Max to wonder why he had spent the day banging the Underwood instead of Daisy. He knew, of course. Now living over in Brooklyn Heights with a wife and two little girls, he was reformed to the point of uxoriousness. But he had to remind himself of all this as Daisy blinked her lashes rather more than was necessary. For her part, Daisy had just begun to wonder why she had ever bothered unshoeing Rothstein when she could have been—could be even now—massaging Max’s intrepid and no doubt equally large feet.

  But then she recalled the new determination she’d begun feeling Friday night, and managed to retract her face a full two inches from Max’s. No, no more lost, or even short-term, causes. She had to begin thinking of a future beyond her cramped little room on Beekman Place.

  She didn’t relax her smile, but she straightened her spine.

  “I have such pleasant memories of the evening I spent in Mr. Rothstein’s company,” she told Max. “Perhaps especially of my ride with Mr. Diamond—Edward, that is, not Legs—who was kind enough to take me home.”

  Max wondered where this was going.

  “But, silly me,” continued Daisy. “I promised to send him a copy of my book and then misplaced the address he gave me. I don’t suppose that you …”

  Max smiled. So Daisy must be lovelorn; or just having a slow month. Well, if the old trouper in front of him could handle Rothstein himself, she could handle any of Mr. Big’s lieutenants. But didn’t she deserve somebody nicer than Eddie Diamond? “Sure,” said Max, extracting a pen and small piece of paper from his breast pocket. “But, Countess, I can do better than that. This is a name worthy of an accomplished, wellborn gal like yourself.” He wrote out the address of a recently widowed judge, one of Rothstein’s most dependable possessions on the city bench, and handed it to Daisy.

  Recognizing the name, she closed in on Max’s face and purred, from an inch and a half away: “Wait right here.” She went racing, on her tiny high heels, down the corridor and around the corner, returning half a minute later with a copy of My Antonio from her diminishing stash. “Could I have been more rude?” she said, while inscribing it. “I just realized I’ve never given you one of these.”

  Max regarded the frontispiece of this volume, widely known around the office as Going Down for the Count, and thanked her: “It will be a thrill to crawl between your covers, Countess.”

  Daisy rapped his knuckles and laughed a brave little laugh, tucking the judge’s name and address into the top of her stocking while, with her free hand, she waved goodbye. Max, running late, rushed past the reception desk—“Gotta zoom zestily, Mrs. Z”—and boarded the elevator just as Cuddles and Becky were getting off it.

  They were in an even greater hurry, but their double-timing down the corridor was stopped by a low-voiced greeting from Stuart Newman’s office: “Becky?”

  Politeness overtook urgency, and she halted Cuddles at the open door with a tug on his elbow. The two of them entered Newman’s space, where a half-dozen bottles of cologne, all of them open, stood on the desk.

  “Sorry about the stink,” he said, woozily. “Harris has me doing this comparative thing on men’s fragrances. I guess I reek.”

  What he reeked of most was implausibility. Becky knew from the more lucid moments of this morning’s meeting that Stuart, in between “Bachelor’s Life” columns, was supposed to be at work on something quite different from men’s cologne. “What happened to your piece on Shipwreck Kelly?” she asked.

  Newman appeared to have forgotten his assignment to write about the flagpole sitter. “Could I talk to you, soon, about Rosemary LaRoche? He’s got me on that now, too.” The screen siren, admired hotly from afar by Harris, had agreed to be Bandbox’s first female cover subject, a stunt the editor-in-chief hoped to spring on newsstand customers before Jimmy Gordon thought of doing something similar. “I don’t know anything about the movies,” Newman confessed, in his little-boy’s voice.

  “Sure,” said Becky, deciding not to be annoyed that Harris had given this prime Hollywood subject to someone else. You couldn’t reasonably expect him to have another woman writing about that woman, when the whole point of the article would be to have the slavering male scribe whip up the excited male readers—a bit like Boy Scouts in a shared tent, if she could believe the tales her little brother used to harrow her with.

  “First thing tomorrow morning, if you like,” she told Stuart, tugging Cuddles back into the corridor.

  “What’s with the field hand’s workload?” asked Houlihan, once they were over the threshold. “Is ’Phat trying to drive this guy back to the sauce?”

  “I think he’s trying to keep him off it. If it’s not too late already,” Becky replied, considering the open cologne bottles and Newman’s rheumy eyes. “But there’s no time for that now.” They had arrived at Hazel’s desk. Becky asked if she might borrow an envelope. Hazel shrugged from behind True Story: “Be my guest.”

  “Now, listen,” Becky told Cuddles. “You keep the third copy.” She put one print of the photo int
o his hand and sealed up the other two for Harris. They would leave it for him, without explanation, like a foundling in a basket. Becky wouldn’t dream of owning up to the authorship of this fraud she was perpetrating (if Daniel even knew she’d set foot in the Graphic’s offices!); and Cuddles’ battered sense of chivalry would never let him take credit for what any girl—let alone herself—had done to pull his chestnuts out of the fire.

  “Slide it under the door,” suggested Hazel, without looking up. “Half of what’s incoming doesn’t exactly make it over the finish line. He’s more likely to notice if he trips over it.”

  “Thanks.” Becky motioned Cuddles back to his office. She then went to her own, and waited to see what would happen. She thrummed her fingers on the desktop and tried to look at the pile of press agents’ letters that had arrived in the few hours she’d been gone, but she was too nervous to concentrate on their braying superlatives.

  “W-w-would you like some r-r-raisins?” asked Allen Case, who, still grateful for her solicitude this morning, was now at her door.

  “No, thanks, Allen. Have I missed much?”

  Case was about to tell her something, but the first syllables of whatever it was remained locked on his palate while Harris came loudly bounding out of his office, sporting a smile even fresher than his haircut. Becky got up to join the copyeditor at her doorway.

  “Mr. Lord!” cried Harris, summoning the art director into the hall, so that everyone could hear their conversation. He detested solitude when he was happy; any upturn in fortune demanded an audience.

  “I don’t want a month to go by without more animal pictures from Arinopoulos! That stuff he shot at lunchtime is unbelievable. What do you call the thing nuzzling Lindstrom’s behind? A cheetah? A ferret? Whatever it is, it makes the coat look grand! Tell him we want rhinos, pterodactyls, whatever. Get the critters what they like to eat and keep ’em shiny with that spray. More snakes! More of everything!”