The Long Skeleton

by Frances

  “People get killed because of the kind of people they are?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Maybe. In the old days, it was because they got out of line. What kind of woman was Mandy? Bright as they come. Ambitious. Had whatever it is it takes. Voice. Looks. Get people talking and keep them talking. Always could do that. What’s the matter with your drink?”

  “Nothing,” Bill said, and sipped to prove it. “Would she have found out something and passed it on to Barnes? Asked him to check into it further?”

  “What?”

  “Obviously,” Bill said, “I don’t know.”

  “Why would she? If she wanted something checked into, what would be the matter with Tony Gray? That’s what they pay him for.”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “Is that what they pay Gray for?”

  “He’s what they call a writer,” Fergus said. “What they call a writer. On Mandy’s show he went around and talked to people press agents wanted to get on. Made notes. Passed them along to Mandy. Worked out a rough script. Not that she used a script. The rest of the time, he’s one of the guys who watches the news tickers. Roughs out five, fifteen minutes of newscast—whatever the period is—hands it along to Ben or somebody to rewrite. Then it comes along to me, or somebody, to read.”

  “What’ll he do now? Now that Miss Towne’s dead. Work for—what’s her name—Miss Casey?”

  “I don’t know. Take a vice president to decide an important thing like that. More damn vice presidents.”

  “And you? Will you announce for Miss Casey? If she does take over the show?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Fergus said. “Nobody’s passed the word.”

  “Who is Carl?”

  “Carl? What about Carl?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “You mentioned somebody named Carl. Poor old Carl. Poor old Russ.”

  “And poor old Fergus. Whyn’t you finish it? The middle-aged musketeers, one for all and all for Mandy. Till death do us part. Carl Cunningham. The one who was going to set the world on fire. Dead, for all I know. Like Russ. Like our fair lady.” He finished his drink. “Or,” he said, “did you think they made that up for the play? Called her that twenty years ago.”

  Weigand nodded, and lighted a cigarette and sipped his drink. And waited.

  “More than twenty years ago,” Fergus said. “Twenty-five, almost. A quarter of a century. Longer when you think of it that way, isn’t it?” Bill nodded his head. “I was city editor,” Fergus said. “Going places. We were all going places. You know how it is? I was going places and Russ was going places and poor old Carl. And along comes our fair lady.”

  It was not especially clear. It merited an encouraging “um-mm,” and got one.

  “Not that she did anything,” Fergus said. “Except—” He paused, and finished his drink and looked at the empty glass. “Guess not,” he said to the glass. “Got to be sober by two. Friday—” He stopped again. “Keep forgetting,” he said. “No more Mandy. No more people next door. The hell—” He lifted his glass and the waiter saw it, and went toward the bar. “You know how a light bulb burns out?”

  Weigand by no means followed. He merely waited.

  “Burning along even and steady when you turn it off one night,” he said. “Turn it on the next day and the poor old filaments can’t take it. See what I mean? Too much current for the poor old filaments. Just an instant first—brighter than it ever was, then. You know? Dazzle you, it’s so bright. And then—phut. And you screw another bulb in and so what?”

  The waiter brought another drink. But Fergus merely nodded, to show he saw, and did not reach for it.

  “City editor,” Fergus said. “Told you that, didn’t I? And Russ was the top man on the staff, and he’d been a war correspondent when he wasn’t much more than a kid and Carl was our Washington man, lambasting the hell out of Roosevelt. The old man didn’t like Roosevelt. Carl did, but what the hell? He worked there. Some of the stories he sent along—wow! All of us going places, we thought. Getting along in the forties, all three of us. Funny thing about the forties.” He stopped and looked at Weigand.

  “Is it?” Bill said. “What, Mr. Fergus?”

  “Better than you’ve ever been before,” Fergus said. “And—what next? Maybe you get still better—maybe I get to be managing editor. Executive editor. Maybe—maybe not. But, you don’t stay right there. You know it by then. Every now and then you think about it. But you say, What the hell? Another day coming. And then you say, I’ll never be any better than I am right now and if I’m going to break out of it, now’s the time.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, he smiled. The smile lighted his face. It went out—like a light bulb burned out. “About then,” Fergus said, “a lot of newspapermen go into publicity. On the idea of making it while the making’s good.” He drank, but not thirstily. “Not,” he said, “that there was so much to make in the ’thirties.”

  “About Miss Towne?” Weigand said. “And the rest of you? This—Carl, you say?”

  “Carl Cunningham,” Fergus said. “About Mandy. Maybe she was the extra current. That the poor old filaments couldn’t take. Or—the air blast from a bellows on a log that’s just glowing along, minding its own business. And then flares up. And burns out. Only—not at first.”

  At first, Amanda Towne was a girl from a small-town paper, looking for a job on a big-town paper—pretty, but not much prettier than others; bright, but not so bright as all that. A girl who talked like Arkansas, and wore new clothes she had bought in Chicago, and who sat in the applicant’s not especially comfortable chair at the end of a city editor’s desk in November of 1934 and said she wanted a job. At a time when they were not taking any new people on. A girl who sat through interruptions—telephones ringing, the “got-a-new-lead-coming-up-Jim,” the “here’s-the-dummy-for-the-makeover-Jim.”

  And all the time, James Fergus, in his forties and going places, could feel her there. It was as if she gave off heat. Not that that was right; that it was anything he could then (or could now) put a word to, a word that was adequate, that explained. It was not because she was a pretty girl; pretty girls were no novelty to James Fergus in those days, or to Carl Cunningham or Russell Barnes. You took pretty girls, when available, or left them alone. Not that that did not enter into it, but that was later. At first—

  “If I had to explain it now,” James Fergus, in his sixties, having a drink he didn’t need too early in the day, “I’d say she was radio-active. That we were Geiger counters and when she was around we clicked faster and faster. We, and a lot of others. Men and women. But mostly Carl and Russ and me.”

  That was after, for no reason of real need, James Fergus, city editor, had told a girl from Arkansas (with only small-city experience, and not much of that) that they’d give her a try on the Chicago Press-Bulletin. It was some time after.

  “Oh,” Fergus told Bill Weigand, “she turned out to be good at the job. Wrote ’em too long at first, as kids do—every story the greatest story ever. Too long, and she choked up sometimes. Most of them do, particularly most girls. But she got good fast and, boy, could she interview! People who said ‘no comment’ to everybody else would talk their heads off for her—and, plenty of times, say a lot of things they wished afterward they hadn’t said. But there wasn’t ever any real come-back on any of her stuff. Now and then somebody’d feel he’d been taken advantage of somehow, but he never knew quite how and couldn’t ever prove anything. I don’t know that I ever saw anybody get to be a pro so fast. But it wasn’t that.”

  He was silent at the table across from Bill Weigand for what seemed a long time. “I keep saying what it wasn’t about her,” he said, then. “Not what it was, because I don’t know what it was. All I know is, it got all of us and made us—dissatisfied. I guess that’s it. Made us feel—dull, as if we were half alive. Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to say about her. She was more alive than anybody else. In those days, anyway. What good’s this to you? It was a quarter of a century ago. Not t
he Mandy who—who died the other night. A long time after the rest of us had.”

  “I want,” Bill said, “to find out what she was like. What she was all about. I told you that.”

  The bond between the four of them—the middle-aged “musketeers” and the “fair lady”—had grown slowly. Carl Cunningham came back from Washington in the spring after Amanda Towne was hired on the Press-Bulletin staff. By that time, Fergus and Barnes and the girl were much together—having lunch together, sometimes having long dinners—and long talk—and walking to nowhere in particular on spring evenings. Cunningham became one of the group, made it a group of four.

  It was only that for the first year, and no competition for Amanda. “Actually, there never got to be.” And not, at first, any “dissatisfaction.” The men were older—Cunningham, the youngest of them, was twenty years older than Amanda Towne—and there was a good deal in it of telling a child how a trade ran, and how the world ran. “Remember,” Fergus said, “we were all pretty good at the trade. Then.”

  More like uncles they were, that first summer—that summer of 1935. Uncles showing a pretty niece a city, telling her about a trade. Not always all of them together. Not all of them were often free together. And there were other things, other girls. And there was, then, no jealousy, no competition. Fergus repeated that. No competition, at any rate, of the usual kind—one girl and three men after her. They had not been after her—not then, not in that sense. It had been easy that first summer, when it was she who was learning, and no uneasiness about themselves had developed yet. It had been companionable and relaxed, and had meant nothing except what each moment of it meant.

  The change had come gradually; there was no easy way to put a finger on the moment the change had come—to hold an instant between thumb and forefinger and show it and say, “This was it. This was when it changed.” It was a long time ago; and the change had been subtle.

  “We were talking mostly about her,” James Fergus told Weigand, at a table, in a little restaurant off Madison. “About—oh, where she had been, where she was going, how to get there. ‘This is the way you do it, my girl’—that was what it came to. Then—we were telling her about ourselves. Where we had been. Where we were going. And—where were we going? That was it. Carl and I were having a drink some place—it must have been sometime in the fall. The fall of ’thirty-five, I guess. Waiting for her—for Russ. Carl—”

  Carl Cunningham was a tall man; a tall, thin man with black hair, which often needed pushing back, and black eyes. He had moments when, suddenly, he was abrupt. He set his glass down on the bar harder than he needed to. He turned, leaning down a little on the bar, and looked at Fergus and said, “Where’s it getting us, Jim?”

  Once Jim Fergus had discovered that “it” was indeterminate: that “it” meant everything—the question seemed only one of those things men say when there is a sudden darkness over the mind, and usually when they have been drinking for some time. But Carl Cunningham had not been drinking for any time at all; he seldom drank much. “We’re not getting any younger,” Carl said, and that, too, was the worn remark everybody makes, when the shadow crosses the mind. “So what the hell?” Fergus said, which was another of the worn things to say. “Who is?” Fergus said. “Even our fair lady—”

  “What’s she got to do with it?” Carl Cunningham said—and said it so quickly, with such abruptness, that for the first time Fergus knew the girl did have something to do with it. He had said, “Finish your drink, Carl. Don’t cry into it.” Carl started, Fergus thought, to get angry, but instead grinned and said, “The old reliable. Always trust good old Jim.” Then he stared at his drink and said, suddenly, “Maybe she has, at that. She’s—she’s so damned young. It’s—disturbing to—” He let it trail off, gave up trying to phrase it. “One of these days,” he said, “I’m going to get out of this rat race and set up shop.”

  “Half of them,” Fergus told Bill Weigand, “were always going to ‘set up shop.’ Chuck the business, write what they wanted to. Novels and stories, mostly. It never hit me. I was always on the other side. Desk man. Telling others what to write. But—Carl was one of them. Mostly, nothing comes of it. But the next spring—”

  There was no reason, by the next spring, that James Fergus should have been surprised when Carl Cunningham quit his job—although he was offered more money to stay on, and in the ’thirties there were few offers of more money. Fergus was feeling it himself, by then—feeling the restlessness, the uneasiness; feeling that if he was ever going to get anywhere he had better be about it. But he was surprised, all the same. And Russell Barnes was surprised.

  Amanda Towne wasn’t. One could tell she wasn’t. She nodded, as if she had known all along that this would happen. She said that it was Carl’s life, and that probably he was right, and she said, “He’s different from the rest of us.”

  Neither of the men had noticed that, particularly. Or thought, at any rate, more of it than that men differ from one another. The three of them were having lunch, and Carl had been gone a week—gone back to Arkansas, where he had come from, and found some out-of-the-way place to live, where living wouldn’t cost too much—had, in short, set up shop.

  “He’s talked to me a lot about a novel he wants to write,” she told them, seeing lack of comprehension in their faces. “It might be—might be something. Anyway, I think it might.”

  “I suppose,” Fergus told Bill Weigand across the table, “all she’d done was listen. She could always listen—listen in a way that made you feel you had something special to say, were saying something special. That’s what always made her such a good interviewer, of course. There was something—something positive about the way she listened. She’d listened to Carl, I suppose—listened and been young, and made him feel young—young and ready for anything.”

  Fergus was drinking very slowly, now. He seemed half at the table, half in the Chicago of almost a quarter of a century before.

  “Made him think he was more than he was, had more than he had,” Fergus said. “At least, it seems to have turned out that way. I watched magazines and book announcements for a year or two—he quit writing back after the first few weeks—and I never saw any deathless prose by Carl. Poor old Carl. Tried to live up to that ‘difference’ she saw in him and—well, there you are.”

  “You think she wanted that?”

  Fergus said, “Hell no.” He didn’t blame the girl. Not about Carl or anything else. He didn’t suppose Carl did. It was just one of those things.

  “He was in love with her?”

  “Maybe. It didn’t show. I did gather—maybe from something she said later—that he had asked her to go with him and she’d said no, or not then, or something. Anyway, she married Russ the next fall. I was off the sheet by then. Going on to bigger and better things. She’d been listening to me, by then.”

  Only that—listening, saying perhaps he was right, saying that she supposed newspaper work did, often, come slow and tedious circle, back to the rim of a copy desk—or to supervision of the clipping files, the “morgue.”

  “The poor old guy who ran the morgue had been a managing editor in his time,” Fergus told Weigand. “We had a couple more, and a chief correspondent for Europe, the whole damn continent, on our rim. But everybody knows that when he gets into it. Only—”

  Only, that summer—the summer of 1936—he had got an offer from the Continental Broadcasting Corporation. It was the first such offer he had got—offers of jobs which paid better, had potentially brighter futures. Maybe he had finally got around to being ready. Maybe—maybe it was the same way it had been with Carl Cunningham. “Being listened to. Getting—stimulated.”

  The job was assistant chief of the news department for Continental, in the Chicago area. It paid three times what he had been getting. He had just taken the job over when Barnes and Amanda Towne got married. That had surprised him, too. And—

  “No,” he said, in answer to a question Bill Weigand had not asked. “I wasn’t in
love with her. As a matter of fact, I was having a round with—” He shrugged. “No,” he said again. “Anyway, I don’t think so. Didn’t think so then. They only lasted about a year.”

  “They?”

  “Mandy and poor old Russ. She was—I guess she was too much for him. Too young. I don’t mean the obvious thing, although that might have been part of it. I mean just—well, living in a world full of expectancy. Trying to keep up. Trying too hard. He left the sheet after they split up and—he wasn’t ever as good again. Oh, he was all right. He had a lot of jobs before this last one. But—the momentum wasn’t there any more. You know what I mean?”

  “You don’t know what happened to Cunningham?”

  “No.”

  “To yourself?”

  “You can see, can’t you? Oh, there are always shuffles going on in the business. This one up and that one down, when somebody gets a bright idea. Not out—just somewhere else. Not as good as the place you were before. At least, it was that way with me. I got her her first radio job while I still had what it took—part time, news of interest to women. That was around ’thirty-eight, ’thirty-nine. She stayed on the paper for two or three years and then CBC made her a real offer. Contract and a half-hour spot. Not me—I’d been shuffled a bit by then. But I did get her her start.”

  “She appreciated that?”

  “Yes. Mentioned it every now and then. Brought me along east when they moved her east. The Chicago office figured they could get along without me.”

  “Now?”

  “What do you mean, now?”

  “Her—not being around. Will it affect you?”

  “It might. But no, I doubt it. Maybe it will even work out better—not so much pressure. She’d—got a little hard to please, our fair lady had, the last few years. Kept trying to get what she called a lift in it. Thought I didn’t have this lift. As God knows I haven’t, any more. But now—now I imagine things will just jog along for a while. Five minutes newscast here, fifteen minutes there. Where it doesn’t matter too much. Nobody to make a point of ‘lift.’”