[Dorothy Parker 04] - Death Rides the Midnight Owl

by Agata Stanford

  “So, you agree with the socialists and the communists—the ‘Reds’—to a certain degree, about Labor, anyway?” asked Mr. Benchley.

  “It is so, yes,” nodded Lamberto, and I could see he was choosing his words carefully by the way his arched brows raised and quivered and the fire that flashed in his brown eyes when he had found his way. “But in America, we free to speak da prop-o-ganda, no? We have right to say we want or not want. Is de American way, no? I am for dis. I believe. Socialists and da communists, dey want to make union, committee—offish—”

  “Offic-i-als,” corrected Lianella.

  “Si, yes, offic-i-als,” repeated her husband. “No offic-i-al, no union should tell me or worker what to do. Corr-upt!” he said, rolling his r’s. “Like Mussolini, he start good man, help worker, and den, he all power. He make corr-upt!”

  “Ahhh, yes, corruption,” nodded Mr. Benchley. “Complete power corrupts completely.”

  “Dat is so. Dat what happen when men dey organize, make offic-i-als in charge.”

  Lianella cut in: “We do not make bombs, no! No violent—vi-o-lence. We pacifico—pacifists. We do not believe in war. Rich men, powerful men make war to make profit on poor worker, take land, more land, more power . . . .”

  Lianella blushed, pushing damp tendrils of hair from her forehead, and looked shyly down at her plate. I admired her fervent little speech, her heartfelt convictions, and the few, very convincing words she’d chosen to make her point. We all sat quietly for a moment. The silence must have been too much for her to bear; embarrassed by her outburst, unsure of what her guests must have been thinking, she leaped from her chair and proceeded to clear the table. I stood to help her, but her gentle hand on my shoulder told me to stay.

  “Cara,” said Lamberto, “café?”

  “Si, si,” she said, and carried out the task.

  Lamberto said, “When Giusto working, maka da mony, maybe he feel diff-er-rent. Maybe he don’t. We see,” he ended, with the singularly Italian pull of the face and lift of a shoulder. Mr. Benchley and I understood him to say, “Only time will tell.”

  Papa Corelli spoke now in pretty good English and with a confidential whisper: “I went to Union Square last night to wait with others, my friends, to hear the fate of the men. Must be four, five thousand people there. The police, they with machine guns on the roof of building on the east side, and after midnight, the people in the office of the Red newspaper—”

  “The Daily Worker? They have their offices on the Square,” said Mr. Benchley.

  “Yes, yes, The Daily Worker. A man put a big sign out window say, Sacco murdered! And all the people, all thousands—the words took breath away! People cry and moan together, and when the new sign they show, Vanzetti murdered! it got real bad, the people crying. All the people—the Reds, the socialists, the Italians—all the good American people of all parties, they mourn.”

  In a few minutes we were sipping espresso and devouring luscious pastries from La Luna Bakery down the street, baked by Lamberto at dawn this morning.

  Right off the boat and eager to see the streets paved with gold

  Looking toward a better future

  Little Italy

  The neighborhood

  A room with a view

  “Pic-shov” laborers laying down streetcar tracks

  Anarchists on the march, 1914

  Aftermath of anarchist bombing of Wall Street

  Wall Street bombing

  Fat Cat Capitalist

  The Red Scare

  Labor

  Suspicion

  Sacco's and Vanzetti's New York funeral

  Martyred

  Chapter Six

  After leaving the Maggioranis’ apartment, I took a chance that Loretta, my hairdresser, could fit me in for a wash and set at La Belle Coiffure that afternoon. The shop was just a few blocks away from the Algonquin on Madison Avenue. Mr. Benchley dropped me off and then sailed on in the taxi to his offices at Life. We planned to meet up again for cocktails before dinner.

  As I approached the salon I spied a familiar sight, only, I couldn’t for the life of me place where I’d seen it before. I stopped in my tracks to stare, and then it dawned on me: the beret. In a city where the usual summer attire gracing the head of the cosmopolitan male is a straw boater, a beret, albeit of linen fabric, lent an air of the continental. And that it was perched at a rakish angle atop a rather tall fellow of some distinction standing at the entrance to a haberdasher’s made him stand out in the crowd of pedestrians moving at a brisk New York clip. I recognized the man. He was a fellow passenger on the Midnight Owl. Small world, isn’t it?

  It was too hot to linger on the street, so I buzzed in through the door and begged the receptionist to see about a wash and set with Loretta, if she was free. I took a seat and picked up a magazine. The fans were spinning currents of cool air from the refrigerated-air conditioner, to my great relief. I was thinking that next week I would go out to Aleck’s island on Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, if I could convince Mr. Benchley or any one of our friends to join me in hiring a car. Three or four days on Neshobe Island are about all the rest I can bear, but the thought of remaining in the city in the summer was even less inviting. I was flipping through a movie magazine when I was beckoned by a wave of Shalimar and a familiar drawl that brought a smile to my face. I looked up to see a welcome sight, my dear friend, Tallulah Bankhead, standing before me in a wrapper, her nails dripping red paint.

  “Lamb returned from the slaughter?” she asked.

  “It certainly wasn’t a picnic.”

  “I see you haven’t lost your head to the damn executioner. Are you here to do something about it? The hair, I mean. You look like Nazimova.”

  “Thanks! That bad, huh? Well, if Loretta can take me—”

  “She’s just finishing up with someone. You’d never guess who is getting her black roots bleached.”

  “Not Twenty Questions, not now.”

  “But you’re good at games. Oh, all right, I’m impatient to tell you, anyway. Hermione Mellon. Right off the boat from England.”

  “I met her on the train home from Boston,” I said.

  “Well, she’s a peppy thing, ain’t she?”

  “If that’s the right word for it—”

  “She’s just enthusiastic.

  “Is that why she can’t shut up?”

  “Really, Dottie, you are a viper, you know that? But it’s true, she is a chatty thing. It can’t have been easy, though, the emotional and physical toll of a breakdown. That’s what I heard, anyway. In a sanatorium for years. The memory loss . . . . Imagine not remembering your childhood?”

  “A pleasure.”

  “Somehow the doctors put her all back together again!”

  “Yes, like Humpty Dumpty would have wished,” I replied, thinking that Tallulah was being just a little too nice. In ordinary circumstances someone like Hermione Mellon would have sent her reeling dizzily out of the room for a breath of fresh air.

  “The manicurist, the masseuse, and your hairdresser, Loretta, have been giving her the works for more than three hours.”

  “I could give her the works in under thirty seconds, but I’d need brass knuckles.”

  “The whole damn place is running around fixing her up.”

  “Did she come undone?”

  “They sent a boy out to fetch her coffee and petit-fours. While her mask hardened I stole a couple. Who knew when I’d have a chance to eat again?”

  “I don’t get it. What’s all the fuss about? A little nervous breakdown, for cry’noutloud, and everybody treats you like royalty.”

  “I figure by the way Loretta ordered me to go wait in the corner—after she’d made me put the cakes back—that she thinks Hermione, being rich, will send her other rich clientele. If that’s going to be the case, she’ll raise the price of a finger-wave to two dollars!”

  “Why is she coming to our little beauty shop instead of some highfalutin’ establishment? Doesn’t she have a
lady’s maid or something?”

  “She likes it here; I heard her tell Loretta. It’s ‘less pretentious.’”

  “Than what?”

  “I think she said Henri’s—that salon on Fifth? That’s what I heard—‘less pretentious’—and oh!—she invited me to her summer home on Long Island this weekend,” drawled on my friend, like an antebellum heroine without the hoopskirt and corkscrew curls. “They say it’s grand!” she gushed. “Can you believe Roger built her a mansion on the North Shore? They say it’s a palace, and he named it Last Call, ain’t that a laugh? They say it’s bigger than Swope’s place,” she finished, figuratively batting her eyes coyly behind a fluttering lace-trimmed fan.

  “They say, do they?”

  “They certainly do!”

  “I didn’t know you knew the Mellons.”

  “Well, I didn’t know them, just heard the usual talk about them. But now that I’ve met Hermione, I can see she is quite a—uh—nice girl—if a little chatty.”

  “When you get to know her you’ll want to rip her heart out,” I said.

  “Don’t you like her?”

  “Gee, did I say that? Does a dog like fleas?”

  “That’s too bad. You really ought to give the gal a chance.”

  “Don’t be an Airedale—I really don’t give a shit.”

  “Funny, I heard Hermione use that slang. It must be all the rage in England. ‘Don’t be an Airedale!’ Soooo clever!”

  “Oh, all the rage, God help me!”

  “You are . . . irritable, Dottie!

  “I don’t suffer fools.”

  “You met her husband?”

  “Yes, I met him a few years ago, at a dinner party as a matter of fact, long before he married Hermione. Bit of a bore.”

  “What’s he like now, I wonder?”

  “Married,” I said, knowing full well what Tallulah was getting at.

  “Silly, just wanted to know if he was as—how to describe her?”

  “Idiotic?”

  “No!”

  “Imbecilic?”

  “Dottie!”

  “Moronic? As asinine as his wife? How could anyone know; he rarely has a chance to speak. Why do you think he stutters?”

  “That so?”

  “They had a drawing-room in my Pullman on my return from Boston. They invited me and Bobby in for a nightcap.”

  “On the train? The Mellons? Those rich people rubbing elbows with the plebes?”

  “Thank you very much, Tallulah, for including me among the rabble who stormed the Bastille!”

  “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean you and Bobby! No, I mean, I would have thought they’d have had a motorcar meet them at port.”

  “Yes, that’s right, I said as much, but Roger said the car broke down on its way up from New York and the chauffeur was having it repaired in some garage in Connecticut.”

  That’s when the object of gossip appeared, looking refreshed and glamorous, her blonde hair a shade lighter than when we’d met on the train. I moved to where she couldn’t see me hiding in the little lounging area, separated by a wall of lattice, as she breezed by on her way out of the door.

  And then Tallulah’s hairdresser, followed by mine, peeked around the partition to beckon us for the usual ministrations. We agreed to catch up at luncheon tomorrow.

  Mr. Benchley drove onto the long driveway of Last Call to a wave of orchestral music; we could hear the party before we could see the house from the drive. And let me say that after three hours in the car with my friends, I was ready to trade them in for new ones. Perhaps, after a mint julep and swim in the pool, I might reconsider.

  Mr. Benchley’s straining tenor was a sad substitute for the absence of a car radio, I discovered, after we and Tallulah and Edmund Wilson had set off in the snazzy yellow Mercedes Benz Sports Touring car on loan to Mr. Benchley by the owner of the Mercedes dealership on the East Side, whom he’d befriended to each man’s advantage. Actually, they had an arrangement. Loaning such a beauty for an outing to the Island, for a weekend at the Morgans’ or the Swopes’, to be admired as it glided up the driveway, might ignite a flame of envy in a rich partygoer and result in a sale for the dealership on Monday morning. Mr. Benchley kept a stash of the man’s business cards handy to be doled out to the rich and needy. So we were off in style with our friends.

  Bunny Wilson, for whom we felt sorry, had been hanging around the Gonk with no particular place to go, as most of the gang had scattered out of the city for the duration of the heatwave. Some were cooling off in the Adirondacks or, as ordered by Aleck, on his Island in Vermont. Frank Case, the Gonk’s owner and manager, begged that we take Bunny away someplace as he had been brooding and sleeping on one of the lobby sofas. The lobby was cooled by refrigerated air, and Bunny’s apartment was stifling hot, he’d been complaining. It wouldn’t have been so bad but that the writer and critic insisted on sleeping until noon, sprawled and snoring on a sofa just a few feet away from the front desk. This was a sight and sound not quite in keeping with the character of the residence that Frank wished to maintain. Had Bunny Wilson chosen a couch farther away, say in the corner, or the one near the Oak Room, the management might have been more tolerant. After all, the Algonquin did cater to artists, didn’t it? (To me, more specifically, was what Frank really meant.)

  And so, in our open touring car, Bunny slept most of the way in the seat next to Mr. Benchley, who drove while singing through the entire score of The Desert Song. (His rendition of the soldiers’ wives singing “Why Did We Marry Soldiers?” was warbled in a creepy falsetto that smacked of latent depravity, if you really want to know.) Then there ensued an argument when Tallulah, in the backseat with me, began spewing forth a dirge-like interpretation of “Stout Hearted Men,” which she was sure was from The Desert Song, only we all insisted it was from The Student Prince, which led to Mr. Benchley’s whining that she’d upset the whole lineup leading into his big finale. Undeterred and determined, she kept on singing—if that’s what you’d call it. It sounded more like a sluggish ship’s horn blasting on a foggy night in the North Atlantic, bringing to mind the Titanic and the coming death of innocence. All of this sent Woodrow into a disturbing series of whines and howls, which in turn evoked a most unpleasant reminder of my brother Harold’s earliest violin recital when he was twelve. Woodrow had provided, since we had crossed the Queensboro Bridge, an even tempo of yips and yaps, a metronome for Mr. Benchley to keep his “rhythmic integrity”—at least that’s what he said to the dog during his three-minute intermission between the musical acts. By the time we had reached Long Island, both man and dog were well into the second-act score of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Tallulah had settled in to hum the bass section.

  The sun was setting; the sky was as brashly painted as the cheeks of a Parisian whore when we turned onto the winding driveway of Last Call, the Mellons’ estate, poised grandly on a peninsula jutting out into the sound. So it was with my great relief that the brassy notes of a big orchestra playing the hit song, “The Muscat Ramble,” greeted our arrival and put a death blow to what promised to be a bowdlerization of the Gershwin Brothers’ musical, Oh Kay!

  Tallulah was raring to go, and after shaking Bunny awake, we made our way along the car-lined driveway toward the floodlit entrance of the mansion.

  All I can say to describe the fabulous monstrosity into which we entered was that, should the Hippodrome burn to the ground, the grand entry hall of Last Call offered enough space to house a three-ring circus. The semicircular hall’s ceiling was vaulted and soared some thirty or more feet in the air, atop which sat, like a sultan’s hat, a duomo, the likes of which one might see during a Roman tour of sixteenth-century churches. Half a dozen crystal chandeliers floated down from the heights where a trompe l’oeil masterpiece depicting Neptune and his undersea kingdom promised a stiff neck if you wanted to take it all in. This explained why several youngsters were flat on their backs staring up at the sight. Then again, perhaps they were just passed out from too mu
ch fun. The blues and aqua greens washed down pale along the walls like sea-foam to the marble floor, which was polished to a high sheen and brought to mind the wet sands of blushing Bermuda beaches. What the heck, it was gorgeous, for all its ostentation. Museum quality all around, starting from the carved-wood busty mermaid balustrades grounding the floating twin stairways that curved up to the second landing and arriving at a depiction of the harpoon-clutching god himself, whose bearded head appeared dead center at the apex. Of course, this was all meant to be taken seriously, but anyone with a modicum of humor would see it for what it was: New Money gone awry. Oh, well, a little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika, I always say.

  The stairs were littered with guests leaning, lounging, and generally posing for the visual benefit of others who were leaning, lounging, and posing in similar attire. The women were drifting about in a variety of soft, sheer, and sleeveless pastel-colored frocks and close-fitting bejeweled or embroidered caps; the men were attired in summer flannels or linen suits with silk shirts peeking out from under their coats. We were met by butlers and footmen directing the flow of guests about the house and waiters offering champagne in crystal flutes and presenting delectable canapés on silver trays.

  Walking to the left, we followed the source of “The Varsity Drag,” passing through a long room—a sort of solarium or drawing-room filled with flowers and potted trees and exotics and lined with French doors that opened onto an expansive stone patio.

  I have to admit that when arriving at such places, at such high-flying gatherings, I never really know what to expect, and that sparks the air I breathe. So, as we hurried toward the source of the music, toward the beating heart of the party beyond the doors, suddenly, and as eagerly as that proverbial moth first glimpsing that seductive flame, I felt a thrill of excitement rush through me and, like that foolish moth, forgot to consider the dangers.