by Ed Ifkovic
Neysa laughed. “Edna, you could be describing my husband.”
I grumbled, “Frankly, I could be describing most men I’ve met.
“Except me, of course.” Noel grinned. “By the way, where is that handsome soul?”
Neysa had married a striking man, over six feet tall, lithe, athletic, dripping with masculinity, a chiseled face, a man everyone happily called “Handsome Jack.” He called himself that, unfortunately, though I found him to be a kind, gentle man. A witty man, as well. A nice combination. Neysa insisted she married him so she could look at him and experience hot anger when other women or men held his look too long. They smiled a lot at each other. A sudden marriage, surprising those of us who knew her. With absolutely no planning, she sailed to France on her honeymoon, accompanied by five other men, some said seven, including the rotund and chatty Aleck Woollcott. Unfortunately, she left Handsome Jack back in New York. The reason? He would have spoiled her good time.
“I like Dougie, but he lacks wit,” I went on. “The only real deadly sin.”
“No,” Noel insisted, “that’s boredom.”
Neysa walked out of the studio, and we followed. A smear of rose pastel crayon graced her cheek, and she rubbed it with the back of her hand.
She was wearing a smeared painter’s smock, broken shoes, and her fair hair, so beloved of her admirers, was a squirrel’s nest of twists and turns. For a moment she dropped into a side chair, an overstuffed Victorian piece she insisted she’d dragged from the street. Mismatched tables, frayed Orientals on the floor, gaudy bric-a-brac, garish lamps that faced each other across a dumpy sofa. Sloping bookshelves. She threw her hands in the air, a gesture that suggested—Hey, my life, happy here, do I care what you think? Though she adored Noel, she also cultivated me, largely because I’d used her as the model for the free-spirited artist Dallas O’Mara in my celebrated So Big back in 1924. Her comment at the time: “Edna gives me the immortality my simple drawings refuse to do.”
She loved the way I’d described her in my novel—a woman who could say nothing, pleasantly.
“I’m afraid Belinda might be a schemer,” she announced now, standing up and moving us to the dining table. “But I really don’t know her.” She pointed at the food. “Eat.”
A surprisingly good cook, though no one ever saw her in her kitchen, she served a honey-glazed ham smothered in slices of fresh pineapple. Thick slices fanned out on a turkey platter. Boiled potatoes loaded with butter and parsley, so shiny they could be objects for a still life. Carrots so emphatically orange I feared she’d dyed them. “Eat,” she said again.
“Belinda may be a passing fancy,” Noel said as he forked a slice of ham onto his plate. “Dougie’s first infatuation.” He rolled his eyes. “Arriving twenty years too late.”
“Thirty-five is no time for puberty,” I said, and Noel nodded.
Noel clicked his tongue. “We’ll have to deal with the pain afterwards. When she moves on.”
“Dougie in tears.” Neysa smiled broadly. “Worthy of a painting. Michelangelo’s David weeps.”
Noel agreed. “The beautiful boy is sad—a poem.”
I shuddered. “Perhaps I should leave the two of you alone to exchange mash notes.”
Noel reached over and touched my wrist, “Edna, dear, you have to admit that my party was an unwritten act from your Royal Family. All that upper-crust Sturm und Drang.”
I smiled back. “Perhaps.”
Noel quipped, “The three not-so-wise men. Tommy Stuyvesant, Cyrus Meerdom, and our feckless Dougie. Lord. Or, maybe, that old children’s fable—rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub.”
“Tub,” Neysa echoed. She jumped up. “That reminds me. New wine, fresh, delightful.”
Neysa brewed bootleg wine in her bathtub, jugs and jugs of it. Prohibition hooch, celebrated. Red wine, hard whiskey, brandy. Her homemade scotch flavored with prune juice and grain alcohol. Her makeshift distillery was notorious—and coveted. Sometimes, stopping in, I was overpowered by the raw whiff of tannic acid or burnt creosote.
“Now that Roosevelt is elected President,” she shivered, “my Republican heart quakes. Frankly, my Midwestern upbringing is branded in my soul. I’m sorry—his campaign pledge to repeat Prohibition next year will end this…this bliss.” She pointed to the bottle she cradled in her arms. She poured goblets of dark red wine for us. “Drink up. FDR is breathing down my neck.” She bit her tongue. “At least when the country is Wet again, I’ll finally be able to take a bath.”
“Delicious,” Noel commented. “Tastes like illegality, my favorite diversion.”
Neysa spooned some potatoes onto her plate. “I still don’t understand what happened last night, Beauty.”
I answered her. “Two old coots—one older and cootier than the other—suffer from late-life romantic dizziness, misreading an ambitious girl’s slavish attention as her love for their wrinkles.”
Noel brightened. “Money is an aphrodisiac.” Then he added, “Dougie actually loves her.”
“All the pity for him, then. Love doesn’t conquer all.”
Noel chuckled. “Ah, but the skirmishes in the field are delightful.”
The phone rang and Neysa said loudly into the receiver, making certain we overheard, “Yes, about time. Noel and Edna tell me nothing I need to know. Edna masks her adoration for Dougie with cynicism, and Noel talks like Mary Pickford getting her first blond ringlets.”
She sat back at the table, her eyes gleaming, her hands folded into her lap.
“Yes?” asked Noel.
She ran her tongue over her lips. “Buzzy Collins is on his way up. I told him earlier to stop in. Demanded it.” She caught my eye, noticed my disapproval. “Buzzy is a busybody, as we all know. But I cultivate busybodies.” Her voice giddy. “My favorite little gnome come a-calling.” She winked at Noel. He bowed toward her.
Buzzy seemed startled to see Noel and me at the table. He fumbled with the buttons on his fur-lined Chesterfield overcoat, his small pudgy fingers seemingly unable to loosen the buttons. Finally, he tossed the coat onto a divan but seemed to forget the feathered fedora gracing his round head. A vaudeville fall guy, I thought, the country bumpkin dressed up for a square dance at the Grange Hall. No—that was wrong. The dilettantish born-to-wealth layabout who always finagled an invitation to a cotillion, but never felt welcome there.
“Am I being ambushed?” His jittery first words, a glance that swept from me to Noel but landed finally on Neysa.
She laughed. “Of course, Buzzy. The town crier of the fading 400. The legendary and long-gone the Mrs. Astor’s ghost quakes when you stroll by.”
Buzzy walked to the sideboard and poured himself a glass of wine, toasted us. “Last night, right? Gunfight at the Nothing’s-Really-OK Corral.”
Noel laughed. “That’s how you describe my Christmas party?”
“Hey, gang, I only arrived for the shootout.”
Neysa rubbed her smudged face. A trace of peach pastel covered her fingertips. “Why would you drag along that hang-dog-faced Cyrus, dear Buzzy? You had to know Dougie would be there. He’s Noel’s current party favor.” Then she mimicked one of Noel’s favorite expressions—“Lots of fun!”
Noel frowned at her but his eyes twinkled. “Neysa, darling, you make me seem…without depth.”
She raised her eyebrows but ignored him, addressing Buzzy. “Admit that you did it on purpose. You’re a rabble-rouser.”
Buzzy took a sip of the wine, rolled his tongue across his lips. “Not a bad batch, Neysa. You perfect your distillery talents at the penultimate moment the Feds take away your reason to live.” He breathed in. “My old friend Cyrus is more sinned against than sinning, my friends.”
Noel mumbled to me, “It’s time for an old-fashioned Puritan apologia. The witch-burner begging for understanding.”
Buzzy fretted. “I mean it. Cyrus is a
friend of mine.”
I laughed out loud. “Dear Cyrus, you’ve come with an agenda.”
“Damn right,” he snarled, then seemed to regret his snarky tone. He softened his voice. “You know, everyone is talking about it today. Winchell alluded to it in his column this morning. Talk about burning the midnight oil.”
Noel looked puzzled. “A spy in the house of Coward?”
“A coward at the party of Coward,” Buzzy said. “Someone obviously rushed from your party to the Daily Mirror newsroom to catch Winchell arriving from his favorite brothel and drunkenly typing his column.”
“What did he say?” asked Neysa anxiously.
Buzzy paused. “‘Broadway moneybags bested by beauty.’”
“Why does the Daily Mirror believe alliteration is an art form?” I wondered out loud.
Noel eyed me. “News hacks are horses’—ah…hindquarters.”
Neysa chortled and pointed a happy finger at Noel.
Irritated, color rose in Buzzy’s neck. “You know, Cyrus and I have known each other from grammar school. Both at Boston Latin ages ago. I was best man at his wedding. I’m five days short of sixty. He’s three days over sixty.”
Neysa looked perplexed. “I can’t follow that math.”
He blurted out, “All I’m saying is that he’s a good man who discovered Belinda Ross—he made her famous—and stupidly got infatuated with the pretty girl. Sick with her—sick. Everyone seems to. Tommy Stuyvesant did. She has a way about her, that girl. Girls like her do that. The way she leans into you, coy-like, you know…” His words trailed off.
“Old men crumble,” Noel said.
“And then there’s Dougie,” Neysa said.
Buzzy went on. “I know you’re all members of the Dougie Maddox Adoration Society, but I never understood why. He’s a vain, empty pretty-boy.”
I interrupted. “I’m not a member of that club, sir. Neysa and Noel have exclusive access to that shrine.”
Neysa leaned into Buzzy. “Edna condemns because he is too good-looking.”
I insisted, “I have to repeat—a nice enough man, but one of hundreds of run-about swells in this jaded town.”
Noel smiled at me. “Edna, darling, you’re lying to me. I can always tell. Blood seeps out of your eye sockets.”
“No matter. Dougie is hopelessly drunk with her,” Neysa summed up. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, for years you’d see Lady Maud and devoted son at restaurants, at museums, mother and son. You saw one—you saw the other. Arm in arm. Even last year at the Waldorf-Astoria Charity Ball. Sitting together in the Italian tea garden at the Ritz-Carlton, or Dougie sitting in the Hispano-Suiza while Lady Maud had a dress fitting at Hattie Carnegie’s. Lady Maud demanded he be at her side, living in that creaky mansion on Fifth Avenue. His devotion was total and a little frightening. He moved the family money around while she nodded at him, a beatific smile on her face.”
Noel broke in. “My fault, I admit. Last spring I introduced him to theater. A casual invitation to a rehearsal party. Dinner with Helen Morgan. She sang a torch song at him over dessert, and he melted like an Eskimo pie on an August afternoon.”
“Satan, you.” Neysa twisted in her chair. “And there was Belinda Ross in the wings, dollar signs tattooed on her heart. Dougie topples. All fall down.”
“And Mommy takes to her bed with a migraine,” I added.
“I know a bit about her past,” Buzzy confided, in a rush to talk. “And it’s not pretty.”
Neysa poured him more wine and blew him a kiss. “That’s why you’re here, Buzzy. It’s not that we like your company. That you already know. Tell us.” She wagged a finger at him, and he smiled back at her.
“A taxi girl,” he said, simply. “Maybe. That’s one rumor going around. Ten-cents-a-dance girl at the Orpheum Dance Palace on Forty-sixth and Broadway. Sailors and dock wallopers from the Chelsea Piers. Yeah, good singer, great legs. A stardust face that men moon over. C’mon, folks, Belinda Ross didn’t come out of nowhere. She’d probably still be huffing it away with sentimental songs at her brother’s derelict theatre in Hell’s Kitchen if Cyrus hadn’t taken her away.”
“What about that?” I asked. “How did Cyrus…?”
Buzzy’s cheeks puffed out. “Her brother, most likely, a shifty ambitious theater clown. Somehow he got Cyrus to venture off Broadway into that hovel called the Paradise, and there was Belinda, hands cupped under her chin, a twinkle in her eye, and an indecorous hand on Cyrus’ wrist. End of story.”
I sat back and considered. “No, there will be more acts in this play.”
“A comedy?” Noel wondered.
I shook my head. “Not on your life. A tragicomedy at best.”
For a while we sat in silence, watching one another. Finally, clearing his throat, Noel remarked, “A pretty girl with ice in her veins is the martini you crave only when the bar is closed for the night.”
Neysa applauded.
The buzzer rang, and Neysa laughed. “Ah, I love my own theatrical timing. I should collaborate with George Kaufman. A comedy of manners—poor manners. Now—speaking of final acts.”
Buzzy eyed her, not friendly. “Neysa, you’re a beautiful schemer.”
“Thank you, Buzzy. You finally noticed?”
Dougie Maddox, accompanied by another young man, shuffled into the apartment. Neysa half-rose from her seat, motioning him into the room, but Dougie, his eyes locking with Buzzy’s, seemed at a loss. He backed up, colliding into his friend who whispered something in his ear. Then, eyes narrowing, Dougie stared vacantly at Neysa. “You said you were my friend.”
Dougie looked haggard, as if he’d wasted the night away in an all-night dance club or at Tony Soma’s notorious speakeasy, and now, late afternoon, emerged from his rumpled bed. Sadly, he was still dressed in the black cutaway formal suit he’d worn to Noel’s party, but it was shabby now, unbuttoned, a collar flipped up against the side of his neck. His hair, usually so oiled and pampered and slicked back, was a frizzy chestnut ball.
His friend stepped around him and half-bowed, a snap-brim hat held against his chest. “I’m Corey Boynton.” A pause, deliberate. “Dougie’s old classmate from Yale. A thousand years ago.” He faltered. “Friends for years. I…we…Dougie has rooms at the Stanhope Club, as you may know. Across from mine.” Nervously he stared at Dougie. “I discovered him this morning in the lobby, sleeping like a baby in a chair.” He waited for someone to say something, but when no one did he went on, a barely suppressed titter. “I took him out for air. He mentioned your invite…” He stopped, waved his hand helplessly in the air.
In his four-button brown spats and crisp Arrow shirt collar, Corey was a dapper young man, cultivated spit and polish. A chin so closely shaved it appeared to be polished. A head shorter than Dougie, a bit thick in the waist, he watched us, his cheeks becoming bright red. With his ginger hair and a wildly freckled face, he struck me as a jokester—but the look in his eyes suggested a man always calculating the odds.
“Welcome,” Neysa mumbled, but she was staring at Dougie.
“I don’t want to be here,” he whined.
“Then you should leave,” I said sharply.
He looked down at me, a sliver of a smile on his face. “Edna, I didn’t realize you’d be here.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” A heartbeat. “You must think me a lout.”
“Dougie, what I think…”
Noel broke in. “Dougie, sit down. Coffee. For God’s sake, look at you.”
Dougie’s voice rose and cracked at the end. “I don’t know what happened last night. And why Belinda is mad at me. What did I do?”
“Dougie, sit.”
He shook his head. “Him.” His voice thundered as he pointed a shaky finger at Buzzy. “Him. You made that happen. It was a goddamn birthday party”—he smiled
stupidly at Noel—and Belinda and I were happy, dancing, laughing. Belinda told me she was happy to be at Noel’s.” His voice broke. “Happy.” He dropped his voice. “Yeah, happy.”
Noel stood up. “Come, sit. Mr. Boynton, you, too. Coffee. Coffee cures social embarrassment.”
Corey Boynton stared into his face. “So does silence.”
Noel’s smile brightened as his hands fluttered around his head. “Good for you, Mr. Boynton.” A pointed finger. “Bravo.”
Corey didn’t know how to read Noel’s exaggerated hand movements—was he being made fun of?—so he sighed and looked away.
Neysa was curious. “Dougie, you moved out of Lady Maud’s home?”
He waited a second. “Sort of. I—my rooms at the Stanhope are…”
“Quiet,” Corey finished. “And mommy-free.”
“I want people to leave Belinda alone,” Doggie said loudly. “Leave us alone.”
Neysa, the troublemaker. “The slap, Dougie. People don’t slap people at Noel’s decorous parties. They flirt and grope and gossip—and weep for their sins. But the slap. What did Belinda say afterwards?”
His eyes were narrow slits. “She said Cyrus got what he deserved, calling her a name like that.”
“My, my,” Neysa chuckled. “High noon at midnight.”
Dougie scratched his cheek, appeared to lose his train of thought. “Then she said it was my fault. I brought her to a place where people wanted to hurt her.”
“It was a birthday party,” I interjected. “Sort of a Christmas party. It was…”
Dougie stared into my face. “It was a trap, Edna.” He swiveled around. “Just like this invitation, Neysa. You—all of you are game players.” His voice trembled. “I never used to know people who played games.”
Buzzy spoke up. “The whole world plays games, Dougie boy.”
Dougie sputtered, “Yeah, well, you’re trying to break a girl’s heart.”
Noel started to walk toward Dougie, but the young man held up his hand, traffic-cop style. “I gotta go away from here. It’s too damn hot in here. Do you people ever open windows?”
