Bandbox (8 page)

After a long pause, Harris asked: “Did I ever tell you my old man used to cut hair?”

“No kidding,” said Nicos, with a disappointed sigh. He’d heard about old man Haldeweiss’s vocation at least a dozen times.

Other facts of Harris’s life were conveyed with less regularity and truth during Nicos’s office visits, but the barber had a good memory, and he’d learned to sort the more reliable pieces of autobiography
into something like a chronological whole, the way he kept track of his margin purchases and all the mortgages he’d assumed over in Queens.

He could tell you how Harris had come to New York in the mid-nineties, after ten years on the Newburgh
Messenger;
how once on Park Row he’d done everything from the police beat at the
Recorder
to chasing down society items for Ward McAllister on the
World
. Theatre, books, City Hall: it had been a tiptop education for a writer and an even better one for an editor, which is what Harris really needed to be from the start, since he was prone to blowups with the editors he wrote
for
.

If his life at the papers had been a prolonged shouting match, his life at home had been—Nicos knew all this, too—perpetual silence. Harris would flee the company of his frosty wife, a Quaker schoolteacher, for long, late-night association with his fellow reporters as well as the ad men, who kept the papers alive with their rate cards and column inches. All the oysters and beer he’d shared with them thirty years ago now allowed him to speak Andrew Burn’s language—Oldcastle’s, too.

Harris had switched over to magazines, and editing, around 1907, learning to ride each new publisher’s hobbyhorse. Several years after the switch, at bellicose
Collier’s
, he got his writers to beat the drum for American intervention in the Great War, editing a couple of pieces by TR himself, whose steel trap of a smile sometimes still flashed in his anxiety dreams. A few years later, at
Cosmopolitan
, he’d pretended the war didn’t exist, since Hearst opposed it and felt sure it would end if his outlets ignored it.

Even as an editor, Harris had gotten into more than anyone’s share of battles. His career at
Cosmopolitan
came to an end over an article about some Broadway composer whose name he couldn’t remember today. He’d been sold on the guy by some writer, and so he went into Ray Long asking for plenty of space. “This fella is the next Berlin,”
he’d insisted. “He’s not even the next Irving,” replied Long, handing him back the writer’s copy. Loud words and clenched fists followed. Ten minutes later Harris was out on the sidewalk.

He knew then that his only real hope in this business was an editor-in-chief’s job, but at that moment, a half-dozen years ago, every top man had been firmly nailed to his masthead. And so, for a couple of years, already past fifty and finally divorced, Harris trudged through a dank professional wilderness—peddling pseudonymous pieces to old pals; toiling as a freelance adsmith for a half-dozen hatters and cigar-makers; even turning out that lucrative line of “French” postcards from an office down on Pearl Street. Only Fine and Houlihan knew the whole story of this last venture; even Betty still euphemized it as “that time you were between things.” But Harris never disowned the enterprise. He kept two of its most shining pictorial productions—the unclad “Yvette” and the
déshabillée
“Claudine,” actually two Irish sisters from Canarsie—framed on a wall to the left of his desk.

Right now, Nicos, finishing up the back of Harris’s neck, took a fond glance at Yvette and listened for any sign that his customer might be approaching a mood for some two-sided conversation. Since getting off the phone with Betty, Harris had kept unusually silent. In fact, he was dwelling, however inwardly, on the triumphant climax of his personal epic—the advent of Betty and
Bandbox
. He had met the bubbling antithesis of his first wife through an old thespian warhorse whose musical he’d been nice to, ages before, in the pages of the
World
. That 1906 production had also employed a too-short chorine named Betty Divine. Seventeen years later, the ancient actress’s gratitude toward Harris, and her kindness toward Betty, led both of them to this Duse’s dressing room for another opening night. And two weeks after that, Betty, fully briefed on Joe Harris’s career, by Joe Harris himself, brought him to dinner with Hi Oldcastle.

Harris’s sense that he owed Betty his big job and late success had never bothered him until now. It had actually been a part of the
pride he took in his smart, doll-like paramour. But he could never quite believe the pride she took in
him
, his first wife having cauterized certain precincts of his ego. He was unable to shake the idea, which had draped him all this past weekend, that if he lost
Bandbox
, he might lose Betty, too.

Nervous again at this thought, he decided to get back to business. He reached for the unopened envelope full of Gardiner Arinopoulos’s just-developed, just-delivered pictures, the ones the photographer had managed to take after hotfooting it out of here this morning with that freaky animal and dope addict. Harris would concentrate on the material, be resolute, decisive. He vacated his swivel chair before Nicos could even remove the bib, now covered with his gray and black hair. “No, thanks,” he said, deflecting the whisk broom from his own shoulders; Mukluk would only be shedding all over him in a couple of hours’ time.

“Hazel!” cried Harris, pulling Nicos through the open door. “Give Dmitri ten bucks.” He shook hands with the barber, whose payment interrupted Hazel’s attention to
True Story
. Harris was always too afraid to tell her that if she spent half as much time doing Oldcastle business as she did reading Macfadden’s magazines, he might give her a raise. As it was, he gave her a raise whenever she asked.

Down the long hallway, just this side of Mrs. Zimmerman’s desk, the countess was conversing with Max Stanwick, who had stayed around after the morning’s chaos to bang an Underwood in somebody’s vacant office. The two of them waved to Harris before he went back behind his frosted glass.

“As I was saying, Mr. Stanwick,” breathed Daisy DiDonna, four inches from Stanwick’s face. “I just adored your piece.”

Max, who had just seen the third proof of his article on Arnold Rothstein, felt an instant, tumescent gratitude. “I thank you. And I thank you again for correcting my underestimation of Mr. Big’s shoe size.”

“Not at all,” declared the countess, coming even closer, causing Max to wonder why he had spent the day banging the Underwood instead of Daisy. He knew, of course. Now living over in Brooklyn Heights with a wife and two little girls, he was reformed to the point of uxoriousness. But he had to remind himself of all this as Daisy blinked her lashes rather more than was necessary. For her part, Daisy had just begun to wonder why she had ever bothered unshoeing Rothstein when she could have been—could be even now—massaging Max’s intrepid and no doubt equally large feet.

But then she recalled the new determination she’d begun feeling Friday night, and managed to retract her face a full two inches from Max’s. No, no more lost, or even short-term, causes. She had to begin thinking of a future beyond her cramped little room on Beekman Place.

She didn’t relax her smile, but she straightened her spine.

“I have such pleasant memories of the evening I spent in Mr. Rothstein’s company,” she told Max. “Perhaps especially of my ride with Mr. Diamond—Edward, that is, not Legs—who was kind enough to take me home.”

Max wondered where this was going.

“But, silly me,” continued Daisy. “I promised to send him a copy of my book and then misplaced the address he gave me. I don’t suppose that
you …
”

Max smiled. So Daisy must be lovelorn; or just having a slow month. Well, if the old trouper in front of him could handle Rothstein himself, she could handle any of Mr. Big’s lieutenants. But didn’t she deserve somebody nicer than Eddie Diamond? “Sure,” said Max, extracting a pen and small piece of paper from his breast pocket. “But, Countess, I can do better than that.
This
is a name worthy of an accomplished, wellborn gal like yourself.” He wrote out the address of a recently widowed judge, one of Rothstein’s most dependable possessions on the city bench, and handed it to Daisy.

Recognizing the name, she closed in on Max’s face and purred, from an inch and a half away: “Wait right here.” She went racing, on her tiny high heels, down the corridor and around the corner, returning half a minute later with a copy of
My Antonio
from her diminishing stash. “Could I have been more
rude
?” she said, while inscribing it. “I just realized I’ve never given
you
one of these.”

Max regarded the frontispiece of this volume, widely known around the office as
Going Down for the Count
, and thanked her: “It will be a thrill to crawl between your covers, Countess.”

Daisy rapped his knuckles and laughed a brave little laugh, tucking the judge’s name and address into the top of her stocking while, with her free hand, she waved goodbye. Max, running late, rushed past the reception desk—“Gotta zoom zestily, Mrs. Z”—and boarded the elevator just as Cuddles and Becky were getting off it.

They were in an even greater hurry, but their double-timing down the corridor was stopped by a low-voiced greeting from Stuart Newman’s office: “Becky?”

Politeness overtook urgency, and she halted Cuddles at the open door with a tug on his elbow. The two of them entered Newman’s space, where a half-dozen bottles of cologne, all of them open, stood on the desk.

“Sorry about the stink,” he said, woozily. “Harris has me doing this comparative thing on men’s fragrances. I guess I reek.”

What he reeked of most was implausibility. Becky knew from the more lucid moments of this morning’s meeting that Stuart, in between “Bachelor’s Life” columns, was supposed to be at work on something quite different from men’s cologne. “What happened to your piece on Shipwreck Kelly?” she asked.

Newman appeared to have forgotten his assignment to write about the flagpole sitter. “Could I talk to you, soon, about Rosemary LaRoche? He’s got me on
that
now, too.” The screen siren, admired hotly from afar by Harris, had agreed to be
Bandbox
’s first female
cover subject, a stunt the editor-in-chief hoped to spring on newsstand customers before Jimmy Gordon thought of doing something similar. “I don’t know anything about the movies,” Newman confessed, in his little-boy’s voice.

“Sure,” said Becky, deciding not to be annoyed that Harris had given this prime Hollywood subject to someone else. You couldn’t reasonably expect him to have another woman writing about
that
woman, when the whole point of the article would be to have the slavering male scribe whip up the excited male readers—a bit like Boy Scouts in a shared tent, if she could believe the tales her little brother used to harrow her with.

“First thing tomorrow morning, if you like,” she told Stuart, tugging Cuddles back into the corridor.

“What’s with the field hand’s workload?” asked Houlihan, once they were over the threshold. “Is ’Phat trying to drive this guy back to the sauce?”

“I think he’s trying to keep him
off
it. If it’s not too late already,” Becky replied, considering the open cologne bottles and Newman’s rheumy eyes. “But there’s no time for that now.” They had arrived at Hazel’s desk. Becky asked if she might borrow an envelope. Hazel shrugged from behind
True Story:
“Be my guest.”

“Now, listen,” Becky told Cuddles. “You keep the third copy.” She put one print of the photo into his hand and sealed up the other two for Harris. They would leave it for him, without explanation, like a foundling in a basket. Becky wouldn’t dream of owning up to the authorship of this fraud she was perpetrating (if Daniel even knew she’d set
foot
in the
Graphic
’s offices!); and Cuddles’ battered sense of chivalry would never let him take credit for what any girl—let alone herself—had done to pull his chestnuts out of the fire.

“Slide it under the door,” suggested Hazel, without looking up. “Half of what’s incoming doesn’t exactly make it over the finish line. He’s more likely to notice if he trips over it.”

“Thanks.” Becky motioned Cuddles back to his office. She then went to her own, and waited to see what would happen. She thrummed her fingers on the desktop and tried to look at the pile of press agents’ letters that had arrived in the few hours she’d been gone, but she was too nervous to concentrate on their braying superlatives.

“W-w-would you like some r-r-raisins?” asked Allen Case, who, still grateful for her solicitude this morning, was now at her door.

“No, thanks, Allen. Have I missed much?”

Case was about to tell her something, but the first syllables of whatever it was remained locked on his palate while Harris came loudly bounding out of his office, sporting a smile even fresher than his haircut. Becky got up to join the copyeditor at her doorway.

“Mr. Lord!” cried Harris, summoning the art director into the hall, so that everyone could hear their conversation. He detested solitude when he was happy; any upturn in fortune demanded an audience.

“I don’t want a month to go by without more animal pictures from Arinopoulos! That stuff he shot at lunchtime is unbelievable. What do you call the thing nuzzling Lindstrom’s behind? A cheetah? A ferret? Whatever it is, it makes the coat look grand! Tell him we want rhinos, pterodactyls, whatever. Get the critters what they like to eat and keep ’em shiny with that spray. More snakes! More of everything!”

Allen Case had gone so white that Becky put an arm around his shoulders. She wished she could tell him that he needn’t worry. She knew what photograph Harris was
really
excited over. The boss just needed something to crow about while he deployed the actual object of his glee on its delicate mission.

Spilkes had come into the corridor to give Lord and Harris “a well-deserved pat on the back.” Becky edged past them toward Hazel’s desk. The boss’s secretary had already left, but Becky was able to
confirm her hopeful surmise about Harris’s elation when she saw Chip Brzezinski at Hazel’s
OUT
box. He was carefully undoing the string on a manila envelope that was boldly addressed, in Harris’s own hand, to
JIMMY GORDON,
CUTAWAY
, 18TH FLOOR
. Standing silently behind Chip, she, too, could read the bold strokes Harris had applied, from the fattest of his fountain pens, to the back of the incriminating Composograph: WOULD MAKE A GREAT SOUVENIR FOR JOANNA, MELVIN AND MICHAEL. Jimmy Gordon’s wife and two boys out in Garden City. The boys were actually Mortimer and Monroe, but Jimmy would get the point.