Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  But there was no need to mount a search. The copyeditor, who always took the back stairs to avoid Mrs. Zimmerman’s concerned clucking over how thin he looked, was coming into the corridor from the other end.

  “Mr. Harris,” Nan called out.

  He turned around. “Case!” he cried, catching sight of the ventriloquial vegetarian.

  Allen cautiously advanced toward this gaggle of his colleagues. Within a few seconds he was within the boss’s bearlike clutch. Harris squeezed the fellow’s left shoulder, discovering it to be as un-fleshed as a ball bearing. “Jesus, kid,” he said, removing his hand and sniffing the air. “You really are sick. You smell like you fell into a vat of cough syrup.”

  Allen shoved his right hand further into his pocket, trying to pull in any eucalyptus leaf that might be showing. He avoided Nan’s suspicious glance.

  “Not that I’d ever figure you for a malingerer, kid, not like these others. Come on,” he said, once more putting Allen into his maw. “I’ve got something for you to do.”

  The two of them walked off looking like the number 10, and Allen could hear everyone behind starting to scatter. He took no pleasure in this strange new approval from Harris, but he did turn around long enough to take in the defeated expression on Gardiner Arinopoulos’s carnivorous face.

  “Hazel!” shouted Harris, now barreling forward in the direction of his long-gone secretary. “Go out and get some—what’s your pleasure, kid? Lima beans? A bunch of bananas?” Ignoring Hazel’s absence, he propelled Case into his office.

  Within another few seconds, the corridor contained only Arinopoulos—recently so in favor, now so out of it—and John Shepard, who had a feeling he remembered from home, when a pickup basketball game would end as quickly as it began, with a fistfight, the asphalt swept clean of life and sound. Was this how the smooth, inevitable-looking magazine he relished each month came into existence? He had no idea what to make of the chaos he’d just witnessed, and no idea what to do next. He knew only that he never wanted to leave.

  19

  By 6:00 the floor appeared deserted, nearly everyone having gone home to primp for the party, or out to line their stomachs against the evening’s impending alcoholic assault. Nan O’Grady was surprised when Norman Merrill entered Harris’s office a moment after she went in to drop off a piece of copy.

  The artist carried a large illustration, which he planned to leave for Harris’s early-morning inspection. Nan asked him to flip up the bristol board’s protective filmy paper and give her a look. Merrill obliged, revealing a gorgeous piece of pen-and-ink whimsy, in which a matinee-idol bull bore down upon a demurely frightened, eyelash-fluttering bear.

  Nan shook her head in admiration. “Goodness, Mr. Merrill, it’s better than Beardsley.”

  The artist’s face went pink with pride. “Hazel passed my desk about an hour ago, and pronounced it ‘the berries.’ ”

  “Well,” said Nan, “here’s what the berries will be garnishing.”

  Merrill read the first paragraph of copy that she handed him:

  Inside his broker’s office, the little merchant becomes a matador. He has come to buy on margin, to dye his cape in red ink and flash it at the bull—the great bull market he will no longer fear.

  “Eerie,” said Merrill.

  “Isn’t it?” said Nan. “I can’t tell it from the real Roebling.”

  “Is Allen around?” asked Merrill. “I should pay him my compliments.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Nan. “He worked on this until about three. Then he put it on my desk and said he was going straight home.”

  “It’s too bad he’s not the sort to reward himself with this affair at Mr. Oldcastle’s tonight.”

  “No, he’s not,” said Nan. “But what about yourself, Mr. Merrill? You deserve a bash for producing this illo.”

  The artist managed a sweet, tired smile. “I’ll have to leave that to you young people. I’ll be lucky to make it home to Woodside before my eyes shut.”

  Nan looked at Harris’s clock. “I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind the company. I’ve got just time enough to get there and then back into the city. And to try fixing myself up in between.” She rolled her eyes to indicate a losing battle.

  “I’m sure you’ll be a vision,” said Merrill, who gave her his arm for the descent into Grand Central. After several minutes’ strap-hanging under the East River and into Queens, the two of them were walking down narrow little Forty-first Drive in Woodside.

  “You must stop in and say hello to my mother,” declared Merrill once they reached his stoop. “She gets so little company. It would be a grand treat for her. Just for a moment?”

  “Of course,” said Nan.

  Before Merrill’s key could complete its turn in the lock, the front door opened from behind, revealing a tiny, stooped, ancient woman—who was already lit up with sociability.

  “Come in!” she cried. “The boy’s been here for some time! He’s down the basement.”

  Merrill shot Nan a puzzled look. “Let me investigate,” he said, wondering what intruder had conned himself past his mother’s failing eyesight. “Mama, stay here with Miss O’Grady for a moment.”

  “Perhaps you could bring up some Vine-Glo, dear,” said Mrs. Merrill. “It will be a nice treat for the four of us.” A law-abiding soul who missed having spirits in the house, Mrs. Merrill had become devoted to these bricks of grape concentrate sold with the “warning” that two months in a dark, cool place would turn them into wine.

  “Mr. Merrill,” said Nan, “I think I should go down there with you.” She and the illustrator settled the old lady in one of the front parlor’s wicker chairs and headed, with quickness and caution, to the cellar.

  Before they got fully down the wooden steps, they caught sight of two creatures hunched together near the coal furnace at the basement’s far end.

  “Now, Canberra,” said the young man with his back to Nan and Merrill, “this door to the fire will be safely locked at all times. But you mustn’t think of touching it, because it gets very hot.”

  The koala looked up, understandingly, into its companion’s eyes and actually retracted one of its paws into its pouch. At last hearing the creak of the steps, Allen turned around.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he saw Mr. Merrill standing in front of Nan. “I brought her here this morning. I couldn’t think of anyplace else. My landlady’s even threatening Sugar these days. She’d never understand.”

  Merrill nodded, before saying, with great delicacy, “But I’m afraid my mother—”

  “She thinks it’s a monkey!” said Allen, smiling more heartily than Nan had ever seen. “I told her there was an organ-grinder a block from the Graybar who’d just made a fortune in RCA stock and decided to abandon the poor creature who’d helped him earn a living for over ten years.”

  Merrill looked doubtful.

  “It won’t be for long,” said Allen. “Canberra will be fine here until I can figure something out. I’ve gotten hold of more than enough eucalyptus, and as basements go, this one gets quite a lot of daylight.”

  Nan had been busy at the Vine-Glo apparatus. She now handed the illustrator a bucket of its runoff. “Mr. Merrill, why don’t you take this upstairs and leave me with Allen for a minute or two?”

  Once the artist departed with the beverage, she began speaking, as gently as she could, to this young man she’d been trying to supervise for the past year.

  “Allen, this is quixotic. With a capital Q. And I don’t add that as a matter of proper usage.”

  “I know,” he said, finding it easier to look at the koala than his boss. “But if you could see what went on this morning, down on Wall Street with Arinopoulos!”

  Nan listened to a soft but insistent recitation of the day’s predawn events. Prior to seeing the bull, Allen assured her, Canberra had been dozing peacefully, thinking of her four brothers and sisters back in Queensland. But then “she was suddenly terrified. She’d never seen a ding
o that big or that black, let alone wearing such a contraption on its head.”

  Nan was used to her colleague’s animal fantasies, the dozens of weird creatures and habitats he could imagine himself into. But right now he seemed alarmingly separated from himself. “Allen, how much Vine-Glo have you had?”

  “Two cups. It’s very good!”

  Nan rolled her eyes and looked unsuccessfully for a place to sit down. What was she going to do with this boy—or, for that matter, with herself? All day, ever since Spilkes had confided the latest ad figures to her, she’d been wondering if the magazine—such a showy, unsinkable success these past few years—might actually, having hit the iceberg Jimmy Gordon, be on its way to the bottom.

  She looked at the koala, who maintained her adoring gaze upon Allen. The sight of such devotion acted as a reminder: before she could change her dress and get back on the subway, she had to walk her mother’s Pomeranian.

  “Allen,” she sighed, looking at the watch that hung from her neck. “Couldn’t you just get a dog?”

  He looked at her, hurt; surely she knew his mission was bigger than that.

  After starting back up the cellar steps, she turned around with a plea: “Promise me you won’t try to walk that thing.” She pointed to the koala. “Two brothers named Healy live down the block and you’ll be in for the pasting of your life if they see you outside with that crea—”

  “With Canberra,” he corrected.

  “With Canberra,” she said, beginning a fast ascent, and feeling the need for something a lot stronger than Vine-Glo.

  20

  Hiram Oldcastle’s penthouse at Park and Eighty-sixth occupied three floors and twenty-two rooms, nearly all with exceptional views, but an hour into the Bandbox party, the largest single cluster of guests could be found in a tiny space between a secondary pantry and the servants’ dining room.

  One of these guests was Hazel Snow, who while bending down to adjust her Holeproof Hosiery became the first to hear the rumble that signaled the light was about to blink. “Here we go,” she said to Hannelore von Erhard, who stood next to her in such a short party dress she’d had to powder her knees, just like girls twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter.

  “Ja,” said Hannelore, with some reverence. “Siegfried, achtung.”

  Like everyone else in the group—even Mrs. Zimmerman, who left off smelling one of the huge flower arrangements from Armstrong & Brown—Siegfried now focused his eyes on the dumbwaiter. Its doors opened to reveal a shaking, clinking array of glasses—another four dozen old-fashioneds, sidecars, and vodka tonics—a crystalline miracle that the guests greeted as if it were Floyd Collins, come up at last, rescued from his cave.

  If class versus mass remained the magazine’s ongoing conundrum, tonight’s party resolved those forces into the kind of giddy blend one was seeing more and more often on the city’s social scene. Before the night was out, New York’s big-domed literary mandarins—like John Farrar, poet-editor of The Bookman, over there with Paul Rosenfeld, saturnine music critic of the Dial—would be disporting themselves with everyone from Bandbox’s fashion assistants to its typists. This evening’s shindig was so crowded and democratic that the owner of its venue couldn’t stand to be there: Oldcastle was finishing up a holiday at his ranch in New Mexico.

  The fiction contest’s winning story had been printed up on thick, creamy paper and put between bright red covers. Swirling stacks of the production rose, mostly untouched, from a glass-topped table in the main salon. Nan O’Grady was one of the few guests who decided to have a look, since she’d soon be copyediting the story for the April issue. “Fair But for Fortune” was just eight pages long, and Nan managed to read it through in three sips of her whiskey sour. On page seven the tale’s heroine chose to go off with the sarcastic young industrialist instead of the working-class yeoman, and on page eight the author, one Theophilus A. Palmer, made it clear that this was a happy ending, one the reader was supposed to like instead of lump.

  It was, Nan supposed, an audacious twist. There was certainly no mistaking what its appeal had been to Sidney Bruck, who’d much prefer being at Oldcastle’s ranch than inside this semi-hoi-polloi mob scene. Sidney couldn’t even work his ticket tonight: having picked the winner, he was obligated to work Mr. Palmer’s ticket instead. Nan could see her colleague on the other side of the immense room, introducing the new sensation to Horace Liveright. Watching young Mr. Palmer shake hands with the most important publisher at the party, Nan thought it odd that this tall, pompous winner looked more like a man discharging an obligation than collecting his big break.

  She rolled her eyes and looked around, circumspectly, for the handsome figure of Stuart Newman, of whom there was yet no sign. She settled for gazing at Jeffrey Holmesdale, the blond, aristocratic-looking assistant to Alexander Woollcott, who was, someone said, tied up tonight, forty blocks downtown, reviewing a play. Nan took another sip of her drink and allowed herself a few seconds to imagine the willowy Mr. Holmesdale, more lovely than a Reynolds painting, as her very own. Well, there was no use barking up that tree; it probably belonged to the Fashion boys’ part of the forest.

  Daisy, of course, could confirm such a fact, but it would look too desperate even asking, Nan decided. Besides, the countess right now appeared caught up in calculating her own destiny. She could be seen, through the salon’s doors, standing with her date on the apartment’s glass-enclosed, heated terrace. From this distance, and by contrast with Francis X. Gilfoyle—whose gin-blossomed face was further flushed by a tight collar—one might assume Daisy still to be in the second or third blush of youth. She was beaming, lost for a moment in the thought of how Francis was even nicer than Sergei, the old Russian maître d’ who’d given her all the vodka she still sold, a couple of bottles at a time, to Harris.

  “Our own Daddy and Peaches,” said Cuddles to Becky, pointing to the judge and countess.

  “It seems like yesterday we were here for the Christmas party.”

  “I think it was yesterday,” said Cuddles. “There’s still a live poinsettia in one of the bathrooms. Redder than the judge.”

  “At least there aren’t any of those horrible waitresses prancing around,” said Becky, recalling the leggy elves and underclad Santa girls who’d served at the Christmas party, a typical Harris touch. “Tits the season!” Cuddles had exclaimed that night while clinking glasses with David Fine, who joined them now—to Becky’s relief, since she still was waiting for her boyfriend to arrive from a function at the Cloisters. She would prefer not being alone with Cuddles when he did.

  The food columnist drew Cuddles’ and Becky’s attention to Herbert Bayard Swope, the tall, redheaded editor of the World, whom Paul Montgomery was chatting up about his father. The elder Montgomery’s death on the Lusitania—Siegfried and Hannelore had just paid Paul their usual tribute of a grave nod—was bound to interest the old war correspondent.

  “Paulie’s life is one big hedged bet,” said Fine, a little enviously, since he himself was conscious of having put every chip he had on Harris.

  “Max! Max!” they all heard Daisy cry. Max Stanwick was trying to reach one of the buffet tables, which fat Percy Hammond and big Heywood Broun were plundering like an old French farmhouse behind the lines. The crime writer gave up and allowed Daisy to show him what he’d accomplished for her and the judge. Max clinked his screwdriver against her highball.

  Gilfoyle, despite the constriction of his dated duds, was no flat tire, and he fizzed with compliments for Flaming Zeppelin and Ticker Rape, the two novels Stanwick had managed to write since Jimmy Gordon hired him to report for Bandbox.

  Daisy wanted to show off the judge to whomever else she could squeeze onto the terrace. But she had trouble catching the eye of either Richard Lord or the Wood Chipper, who were circumnavigating the salon in opposite directions—Lord in an admiring inventory of Elsie de Wolfe’s decoration; Chip to overhear as many conversations as efficiently as he could. Daisy finally had to settle for sum
moning John Shepard, who stood with Hazel behind the piano player as he banged out “Ukulele Lady.”

  Since his arrival here tonight, John had been uneasy about his baggy Oxford pants, hardly the right thing for a palace like this, but all he had until his trunk got to New York. Excusing himself from Hazel, he answered Daisy’s excited wave by threading his way out to the terrace. En route he passed Burton Rascoe, who was taking notes for his newspaper column and watching Sidney Bruck introduce the contest winner to Andrew Burn. The publisher seemed unimpressed to the point of coldness. Mr. Palmer’s winning story might be a forthright celebration of class over mass, but it undermined its own message by being a story at all. If Bruck wanted to limit the offerings of fiction in Bandbox, Burn wished to eliminate them altogether.

  Despite their differing perspectives, the four men, as well as John, were soon unanimously distracted by the nearby sight and drunken sound of Waldo Lindstrom singing “There’s Yes, Yes in Your Eyes” to a waiter he was making blush all the way to his patent-leather hair. Giovanni Roma, already contemptuous of the party’s catering—these guinea hens from Longchamps—could now fume over this spectacle, too, until Lindstrom, failing to make headway with the waiter, began to display an alarming interest in the Afghan hound leashed to an actress from the Follies.

  “What have you got, kid?”

  Having reached the countess, John showed his glass of near-beer to this man on her right who’d asked the question. “It’s swell!” he said. In fact, this third glass of it had put him on his way toward very mild, happy inebriation—and a loquacity that required no prompting. “This place is more ritzed up than O.O. McIntyre’s, I’ll bet!”

  The man he was talking to nodded, then said in a smoky growl: “You’ve been checkin’ out the chintz, shinin’ an eye on the chinoiserie.”

  John’s jaw dropped, and his glass of beer nearly dropped with it.

  He realized this was Max Stanwick speaking to him, and suddenly all he could think to say himself was: “I, I don’t know what to pay attention to first!”