Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  28

  Joe Harris sat, overcoat buttoned, under a tartan blanket, on an enclosed portion of the ship’s upper deck, not far from the second of its four great funnels. He sipped his lobster cocktail and finished a six-month-old issue of Punch, imagining what he could do with that moribund franchise.

  For more than three years, between the time Bandbox had really hit its stride and the moment Jimmy left, Harris had more than once thought of his magazine as a big liner just like this, sleek and punctual, sliding into subscribers’ mailboxes the way the ship docked to the pleasure of all awaiting her arrival. The boiler room below might be a sweaty, even chaotic, affair—Jimmy shoveling ideas so fast that half his coals spilled onto the ground instead of going into the furnace—but none of that showed on deck, where everything was bridge games and balloons.

  On this actual ship he gave his travel companions more freedom of movement than they had in the London hotel—Spilkes signed up for rhumba lessons and lectures on the Boer War; Fine played billiards and haunted the kitchens—though Harris insisted on their unanimous assembly for dinner. He shunned any invitation to the captain’s table, preferring each night to be the captain of his own.

  Through the glass enclosure he could now see Paul Montgomery standing alone out on the deck, staring at the freezing February sea. Poor guy, thought Harris, imagining how Paulie must be thinking of his old man, still lying full fathom five in the vasty deep.

  Whereas, in fact, Paulie was thinking about Billy Durant, the Jersey manufacturer who’d given up making motorcars to concentrate on stock deals. The rusted jalopy and the solid-gold stock ticker: the story he’d be starting work on once they got home. Might, Paulie wondered, a book come out of it? He really needed to talk to Harold Ober. But wait: Ober was in a bad odor with Harris over Roebling’s bulls-and-bears fiasco. Better not approach him just now. Maybe Stanwick would have some good advice about getting a deal through some other agent?

  Writing a book would be personal insurance against whatever fall the magazine could be getting ready to take. Throughout this whole trip he’d wanted, hopelessly, to talk with somebody about how far off his game the Big Guy seemed. Those advertising numbers: Would they be even worse on their return home? Would Jimmy Gordon be lapping up ever more press and subscribers? Paulie still wished he’d been able to spend more time with Jimmy at Oldcastle’s party, just to get a feel for what sort of welcome might await him on the eighteenth floor.

  He gazed out at a tiny whitecap. Once he was back on dry land, wouldn’t it be time to jump ship?

  And yet, for now, they were still on the bounding main. He should be spending some time with the chief, he decided, so he turned around to send Harris a big smile through the glass.

  Alas, Fine had just sat down in the deck chair to the editor’s left.

  Well, that still left the one on his right, to which Paulie now beat a path.

  “Colder than a witch’s!” he cried, clapping his gloved hands. “Boy, that looks great.” He pointed to Harris’s cocktail and took off his coat.

  Fine was reading aloud from the mimeographed summary of shipboard and international news. Grand Duchess Anastasia had arrived in New York three days ago, and Fine had a brainstorm: “How about a two-page cartoon spread on ‘Famous People You Only Thought Were Dead’? You know, a ninety-year-old John Wilkes Booth playing Lear in Kokomo? Woodrow Wilson, recovered from the stroke, grab-assing some girls on the Riviera?”

  It wasn’t the world’s worst idea, but once Harris thought of how good Cuddles used to be at executing this sort of thing, he had to banish the proposal.

  “Nah. Ignore her,” he said, meaning Anastasia. “The Commies may turn out to be the coming thing. We shouldn’t keep pissing them off.” He paused for a minute. “What do we really know about those guys? Do they include any regular Joes?” He meant potential readers.

  “I could go on campus,” said Paulie, whose thoughts of defection from the magazine couldn’t drown out the siren call of a potential assignment. “Attend a few of the young guys’ meetings, interview some of the big Bolsheviks behind the lecterns.”

  Fine sank into silence. Harris closed his eyes, imagining their arrival in New York on Monday. He would spend that night at his place in Murray Hill and hold off seeing Betty until the following morning, Valentine’s Day. He’d burst into her office with two armfuls of flowers and chocolate.

  Her telegrams had stopped altogether, the shore-to-ship variety remaining somehow beyond her, and their little spell apart had done them good, thought Harris. Maybe he’d be less dependent when he got back, less in need of making those dozen daily phone calls, which he knew were an object of sport to his staff.

  The ship continued west at twenty-five knots, and the lobster cocktail had begun its work. The editor-in-chief was now at least one half-sheet to the wind.

  Maybe, he thought, last month’s clouds had really lifted.

  “We could put the younger guys, the students, into red sweaters.”

  He realized Paulie was still talking about Communists.

  “Right,” he murmured. “Red sweaters.”

  Closing his eyes, he tried concentrating on blue skies.

  29

  Mrs. von Erhard gave Chip Brzezinski a dirty look. He was walking past her with a newspaper he’d bought somewhere else this morning. Hannelore kept track of her Midtown competitors no less carefully than Oldcastle and Nast kept an eye on each other’s magazines, and she guessed that the Wood Chipper had gotten his Daily News from Kid Herman, the onetime lightweight contender who sold papers at Forty-second and Broadway.

  Chip gave Hannelore a tip of his hat—another loan from the Fashion Department. She ignored him and muttered something to Siegfried, who gently urged her to cheer up. The same events that had left Chip unable to postpone buying the paper on his walk from Ninth Avenue to the office had raised the von Erhards’ own sales this Monday morning, February 13. None of the Oldcastle and Nast employees could stand sitting down for work without reading the latest on the swirl of plagiarism, narcotics-selling, and public drunkenness that now threatened to engulf Bandbox.

  Theophilus Palmer’s real identity remained a secret. Today’s papers could still say only that he was “missing”—same as Waldo Lindstrom. The police were warning the model not to skip bail, but the gossip columns were rife with speculation that Lindstrom had already made a deal with the DA and was being sequestered by the cops themselves. His absence, for whatever reason, suggested further legal peril for Giovanni Roma, though it was conceded that the restaurateur’s moral health would now improve without Lindstrom around to lure him into further unprintable acts.

  Patrick Boylan, a spokesman for Commissioner Warren, said that payoffs were not part of the way the New York Police Department did business, but even so, in light of the newspaper rumors, investigators would “be asking Mr. Harris some questions upon his return from the so-called Mother Country.”

  Mentions of Stuart Newman’s unfortunate evening in the nation’s capital continued to contain more misinformation than the column inches about Gianni or Mr. Palmer, thanks mostly to Fitz O’Neal, who for Newman’s sake had fabricated as favorable an explanation as he could. There was “a woman involved,” Fitz told his colleagues in the press. The code of a gentleman prevented him from saying more, but people had to understand that Newman was not himself—was, frankly, in despair over a romantic disappointment.

  Newman had, in fact, spent three nights in a Washington jail, charged only with being drunk and disorderly (“B’BOX SCRIBE: D&D IN D. OF C.”), though he was thought to be the first man ever to have assaulted a President of the United States by accident. His current whereabouts remained, like Lindstrom’s and Mr. Palmer’s, unknown.

  Harris’s demise seemed to be approaching so fast that Chip worried there might not be time for him to contribute to it. He also feared that the whole remaining staff of Bandbox would soon be lined up at Jimmy Gordon’s door asking for jobs.

  Half the
magazine’s offices remained empty on this last morning of Harris’s absence. Outside Fine’s door, baskets of fancy comestibles, sent over from purveyors hoping for a write-up or mention, were now piled waist high. A frozen brisket, dispatched by an over-excited butcher who’d gotten wind of the Williamsburg versus Williamsburg piece, had been carted to the icebox by Hazel once she’d noticed the dripping. The grooming products in front of Newman’s office—an array of shaving brushes, nail clippers, and tooth powder—seemed curiously forlorn, as if keeping vigil against his uncertain return. Cuddles’ entryway was blocked by hopeful books, tickets, and sheet music, though in his case the space looked much as it did on days when he was present.

  As a contract writer, Max Stanwick did not have an office of his own. He’d been using Paul Montgomery’s for the past couple of weeks, waiting out a dry period. Until the right new lurid subject came along, he’d decided to do some work on Boop-Boop-a-Dead, his new novel. At the moment, however, his attentions were taken up with Daisy, who reported Arnold Rothstein’s pleasure with Max’s profile, which had finally reached newsstands. “He thought it dignified. Or so I’ve heard,” said Daisy, who was more interested in finding out the meaning of some dire-sounding slang—“jelly” and “onse”—that the latest group of messengers had been using in front of the judge last night.

  Back in the Art Department, Norman Merrill was deriving nostalgic satisfaction from a couple of illustrations he’d begun preparing just in case Waldo Lindstrom really had gone on the lam and would be unavailable for the next shoot.

  “I’m sure the poor creature will be all right,” said Merrill, soothingly, while he inked a jut into his pencilled man’s perfect jaw. He was speaking not about Lindstrom, but of Canberra, the koala, who was due to leave tomorrow on an epic journey, through the Panama Canal and across the South Pacific, to a natural habitat in her native land.

  Allen Case, knowing this was all for the best, still couldn’t find a reply.

  “Of course, Mother and I will miss her terribly,” said Merrill, “but you’ve done the right thing. You’ve been heroic, really.”

  It was, from Allen’s point of view, a paltry accomplishment. That whole evil warehouse, full of suffering animals, remained just as it was, protected, he now realized—in light of recent events involving Giovanni Roma, that hateful trafficker in veal calves—by bribes paid to the police. Despite the success with Canberra, whose passage was being financed by some of Mrs. Merrill’s Spanish-American War bonds, Gardiner Arinopoulos continued to flourish: you could see a lemur on the lawn in a picture he’d shot for this month’s House & Garden.

  No product or perquisite languished outside Harris’s door. Hazel made a point of taking them home for herself during each night of his trip, just as she intended to take the brisket with her this evening. Right now she was idling through the list of words in an ad for the Enunciphone Company, whose phonograph records promised to cure the listener of embarrassment over mispronunciation: Nothing reveals your culture—or lack of it—so surely. Well, she wasn’t so sure of that: the great big purple hickey on the neck of the approaching Wood Chipper, a giant love bite from some all-night hash-slinger, told you more about his culture than any inability to say “table d’hôte.” But to make conversation, she showed him the ad when he reached her desk.

  He wouldn’t take the bait. She could tell he no more knew whether “canapés” was can-o-peas or ca-napes than she was sure, even after hearing about that treaty since the ninth grade, whether it was Ver-sigh or Ver-sails. But Chip wouldn’t risk pronouncing a single one of the words. It was a sorry era (erra? ear-a?) they lived in, thought Hazel, everybody so scared of being found out or suckered or just of falling behind. It exhausted you after a while. Shouldn’t a girl be able to find a decent husband without knowing, for sure, how to pronounce “pianist”? And yet, before Chip arrived, hadn’t she been thinking of ordering these records for herself?

  “Hey,” she called to Allen Case, who was coming down the hall. “Help us out. How do you pronounce p-i-q-u-a-n-t? And what’s it mean?”

  Allen proceeded with caution. Hazel had always seemed only slightly less dangerous than the Wood Chipper.

  “A p-p-pungent flavor or taste,” said Allen. “Pleasantly so. L-l-like eucalyptus.”

  Hazel asked him to repeat the definition, so that she could write it down. While she did so, Chip began fingering the stack of unopened mail on her desk.

  “Keep your mitts off that,” ordered Hazel, however uninterested she herself might be in reading the letters, most of which were reader questions about the right hair tonic or shoelace to use.

  “Thanks, Allen,” she said.

  The copyeditor could now complete his errand for Nan: getting one of the buckram cases that the editor-in-chief kept on the floor of his closet. Twice a year Harris had the Copy Department arrange the binding of Bandbox’s latest six issues for his personal shelves.

  “Be my guest,” said Hazel, after Allen explained his presence here. “It’s unlocked.”

  She slit open a letter, if only to justify keeping Chip away from the pile of envelopes. While she read its contents, he pretended to busy himself reading Harris’s copy of Time.

  “Jeez,” said Hazel, surprisingly engrossed. “Do you remember that kid from Indiana? The one who came to the office that day—maybe a month ago? This letter’s from his mother.”

  Everyone had long since forgotten about John Shepard, though the Wood Chipper was the only person on the masthead who’d deliberately dropped him from his mind, after failing to get any dope on the Hoosier brat that might interest Jimmy Gordon. But he made himself listen to Hazel now, as she read from Mrs. Thelma Shepard’s urgent appeal to Jehoshaphat Harris:

  … the last we’ve heard from him was a letter he wrote on Wednesday, January 18, at suppertime, from the YMCA on Park Avenue. How excited he was to have seen your offices! He was even more thrilled to be going to a party, that very night, at your kind invitation. His letter to me was postmarked at 6:30 P.M. from the post office at Grand Central Terminal. We have telephoned the YMCA, as well as my husband’s cousin in Brooklyn, the only person John knew in New York prior to his arrival. You can imagine how heartsick we are. If there is anything at all that you might be able to tell us …

  “He’s such a sweet kid,” said Hazel. “What do you think’s happened?”

  Chip took the letter and examined the headlong flow of Mrs. Shepard’s ink. “He probably got white-slaved to South America. Where they chopped his head off.”

  “You’re a heartless crumbum,” said Hazel.

  “Oh, relax, Snow,” said the Wood Chipper. “He probably just ran away.”

  “He’d already run away,” said Hazel. “That’s how he came to New York. He told me.”

  A cry—“Oh, n-n-no!”—came from Harris’s office.

  Hazel leapt to her feet, imagining that Allen Case had somehow found John Shepard’s body on the floor of the boss’s closet. She dashed into the office.

  “Oh, God,” she said, sighing with relief. “I’m never going to read another one of Stanwick’s goddamned books. You can take that home with you, Allen. He’ll never miss it.”

  “I w-will,” said Allen, looking into the huge, sad eyes of the stuffed moosehead. Newly appalled, he staggered out of the office under this huge piece of taxidermy. Once he left, Chip came in, still holding the letter.

  “Give me that,” said Hazel, who grabbed it and put it face up on Harris’s empty blotter.

  “What do you expect him to do?” asked Chip.

  “I expect him to go to the police with it,” said Hazel. “He can file a missing-persons report and pay his overdue bribes. All in one trip.”

  30

  On the morning of Valentine’s Day, the skies were dark, plump with impending rain and thunder. Despite some red Cupid silhouettes pasted to the walls, the atmosphere on the Graybar Building’s fourteenth floor was less amorous than it had been for most of the past two weeks. Clothes that h
ad cushioned trysts inside the Fashion Department’s closets had been hung back up. The girls had returned to their typewriters, the young men to their layout tables. Even last week’s indoor-golf equipment had been restored to its proper shelves and purposes. Keyboards clicked; razors trimmed photographs; fresh proofs ejected themselves from the pneumatic mail tubes—even though Harris probably wouldn’t be in for another hour. On their first day back from England, custom dictated that Spilkes, Fine, and Montgomery first make a series of late, individual entrances. After they’d each served up a couple of anecdotes about the boss’s behavior abroad, it would be all right for Harris himself to sail down the main corridor.

  At 10:05, it was still only Nan O’Grady, Norman Merrill, and Allen Case getting off the elevator.

  “Nope,” said Mrs. Zimmerman, with a reassuring smile. “He’s not here yet.”

  “I knew it,” said Nan, still clutching some of the bon voyage streamers she and her companions had flung toward the caged little koala, who’d departed from a dock at the end of West Forty-fourth Street.

  “Jesus,” said Chip Brzezinski, noticing the colored ribbons. “What’d you do? Go down to the pier and welcome them home?”

  “That’s stupid even for you,” said Nan, who with the possible exception of Hazel was less of an apple-polisher than anyone at the magazine.

  “Hey, O’Grady,” cried Hazel. “Come look at somethin’.” Nan tucked the streamers into her pocket and approached Harris’s office. Hazel, who was chatting with Daisy, pointed through the open door to the boss’s desk: “Tell me what you think.”

  Nan went in and read the letter from John Shepard’s mother.

  Hazel called to her. “You remember him, don’t you?”

  “He came up to me at Oldcastle’s,” said Nan. “He asked whether I thought Stuart would be offended if he introduced himself.”

  “I know he spoke to the judge,” said Daisy. “But all I can recall for sure is that the poor thing had never really kissed a girl.”