“Get away from that God damn piano,” yelled Tom. “Beggin’ your pardon, Miss. Eddie, you lug you, get away from that t’ing, it’s out of order.”
“You go to hell,” said Eddie. “Beg your most humble pardon, Lady, I have some rights here.” The nickel he had dropped had set the motor humming, and in a minute the place was filled with the strains of “Dinah, is there anyone finah?”
“Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the wrong record,” said the cop, in real pain. “I wanted ‘Mother Machree.’ ”
• • •
A special delivery letter which arrived at the home of Gloria Wandrous the next morning:
Dear Gloria—I see that you have not changed one whit your deplorable habit of breaking appointments; or did you not realize that we had an appointment today? I came, at great inconvenience, to New York today, hoping to see you on the matter which we are both anxious to settle. I brought with me the amount you specified, which is a large sum to be carrying about on one’s person, especially in times like these.
Please try to be at home tomorrow (Monday) between
12
noon and one p.m., when I shall attempt to reach you by long distance telephone. If not, I shall try again at the same hour on Tuesday.
If you realized what inconvenience it costs me to come to New York you would be more considerate.
Hastily,
J. E. R.
Gloria read this letter late Monday afternoon, when she went home after spending the night with Liggett. “
Poor
dear,” she said, upon reading the letter. “If I realized what inconvenience, meeyah!”
Eddie Brunner was one of the plain Californians. He was one of those young men whose height and frame make them look awkward unless they are wearing practical yachting clothes, or a $150 tailcoat. He did not gain much presence from his height, which was six feet two. When he talked standing up he made a gesture, always the same gesture; he put out his hands in the position of holding an imaginary basketball, about to shoot an imaginary foul. He could not talk with animation unless he stood up, but he did not often talk with animation. Like all Californians he made a substantive clause of every statement he made: “It’s going to rain today, is what I think . . . Herbert Hoover isn’t going to be our next President, is my guess . . . I only have two bucks, is all.”
In his two years in New York he had had four good months, or make it five. At Stanford he was what is known as well liked, which tells a different story from popular. Popular men and women in college make a business of being popular. Well-liked people do things without getting disliked for them. Eddie Brunner drew funny pictures. He had a bigger vogue away from Stanford than at it, because the collegiate magazines republished his drawings. He had taken the work of several earlier collegiate comic artists—notably Taylor, of Dartmouth—and fashioned a distinctive comic type. He drew little men with googly eyes whose heads and bodies looked as though they had been pressed squat. He had a rebus signature: a capital B and a line drawing of a runner. It was a tiny signature. It had to be because the men Eddie drew were so small. In college he drew no women if he could help it; with his technique women would have to have fat legs and squat little bodies. Occasionally he did a female head as illustration for He-She gags, most of which he wrote himself.
The
Stanford Chaparral
, as a result of Eddie’s drawings, had a high unofficial rating among college humorous monthlies during the three years Eddie contributed to it. He did nothing in freshman year; he was just barely staying in college, what with his honest laziness, his fondness for certain phonograph records, and a girl.
When he got out of college, with the class of ’29, he was secretly envied by a good many classmates. Even the wealthy ones envied him. He had something; back East they knew about Eddie. Hadn’t his drawings been in
Judge
and
College Humor
time after time? Eddie’s father, a lucky sot who had made the fourth of a series of minor fortunes in miniature golf courses, had become bored with the golf courses and in the nick of time had converted them, wherever the zoning laws would permit, into drive-in car-service eateries, which were doing fabulous business in Eddie’s last year in college. Brunner the elder was never so happy as when accompanying a party of “sportsmen” and newspaper writers to a big fight back East. Jack Dempsey was a great friend of his. He himself was an alumnus of the University of Kansas, but he gave huge football parties at Stanford and then at the St. Francis after the games. These did not embarrass Eddie, as Eddie had not joined his father’s fraternity, and when the old gent came down to Stanford he called at his own fraternity and otherwise busied himself so that Eddie could follow his own plans. Eddie had for his father the distant tolerance that sometimes compensates for a lack of any other feeling, or, better yet, is a substitute for the contempt Eddie sometimes was in danger of feeling.
Eddie accepted his father’s generosity with polite thanks, knowing that Brunner père spent every week in tips at least as much as the $50 allowance he gave his son in senior year. Eddie spent his allowance on collectors’ items among old Gennett records, and on his girl. Almost regularly every six months Eddie fell in love with a new girl, and he would be in love with her until some extra-amatory crisis, such as a midyear examination, would occur. That would take his mind off the girl, and he would resume his routine existence to find that he had been thoughtless about breaking dates, and he would have to get a new girl. With a good second-hand Packard phaeton and a seeming inability to get too much to drink, his instinctive good manners and what the girls called his dry sense of humor, he could have just about his choice of the second-flight Stanford girls.
The idea was that the allowance was to continue and he would come to New York and stay until he got a job. So with his records and some Bristol board and the rest of his equipment packed in a seaman’s chest, and enough hand luggage to carry his clothes, Eddie and two cronies drove to New York.
His father had arranged with his secretary about the allowance, and so it came regularly. With the cronies he took an apartment in a good building in Greenwich Village, and each of the friends furnished a bedroom and divided the cost of furnishing the common living-room. They bought a bar, a quantity of gin, installed a larger electric icebox and began doing the town. One of Eddie’s roommates played pretty fair trombone, the other played a good imitative piano, and Eddie himself was fair on a tenor banjo with ukulele stringing. Eddie also purchased a slightly used mellophone, hoping to duplicate the performance of Dudley—in the Weems record of “Travelin’ Blues,” which Eddie regarded as about as good a swing number as ever was pressed into a disc. He never learned to play the mellophone, but sometimes on Saturday and Sunday nights the three friends would have a jam session, the three of them playing and drinking gin and ginger ale and playing, complimenting each other on breaks and licks or making pained faces when one or the other would play very corny. One night their doorbell rang and a young man who looked as though he were permanently drunk asked if he could come in and sit down. He brought with him a beautiful little Jewess. Eddie was a little hesitant about letting them in until the drunk said he only wanted to sit and listen.
“Well!” shouted the roommates. “Sit you down, have a drink. Have two drinks. What would you like to hear?”
“ ‘Ding Dong Daddy,’ ” said the stranger. “My name is Malloy. This is Miss Green. Miss Green lives upstairs. She’s my girl.”
“That’s all right,” they said. “Sit down, fellow, and we’ll render one for you.” They played, and when they finished Miss Green and Malloy looked at each other and nodded.
“I have drums,” said Malloy.
“Where? Upstairs?” said Eddie.
“Oh, no. Miss Green and I don’t live together that much, do we, Sylvia?”
“Not that much. Almost but not quite,” said Sylvia.
“Where are they, the percussions?” said Eddie.
“At home in Pennsylvania, where I come from,” said Malloy. “But I’ll get them next week. Now do you mind if Sylvia plays?”
The boy with the trombone offered her his trombone. Eddie handed up the banjo.
“No,” said Malloy. “Piano.”
“Oh, pi
an
o. That means I mix drinks,” said the boy at the piano.
“Yes, I guess it does after you hear Sylvia,” said Malloy.
“As good as that?” said the trombone player.
“Go ahead, Sylvia,” said Malloy.
“I ought to have another drink first.”
“Give her another drink,” said Eddie. “Here, have mine.”
She gulped his drink and took off her rings and handed them to Malloy. “Don’t forget where they came from,” she said. “
And
a cigarette.” Malloy lit a cigarette for her and she took two long drags.
“She better be good,” said one roommate to the other.
Then with her two tiny hands she hit three chords, all in the bass, one, two, three. “Jee-zuzz!” yelled the Californians, and got up and stood behind her.
She played for an hour. While she played one thing the Californians would be making lists for her to play when she got finished. At the end of the hour she wanted to stop and they would not let her. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do my impressions. My first impression is Vincent Lopez playing ‘Nola.’ ”
“All right, you can quit,” said Eddie.
“None too soon,” she said. “Where is the little girls’ room, quick?”
“What does she do? Who is she? What does she do for a living?” the Californians wanted to know.
“She’s a comparison shopper at Macy’s,” said Malloy.
“What is that?”
“A comparison
shopper
,” said Malloy. “She goes around the other stores finding out if they’re underselling Macy’s, that’s all.”
“But she ought to—How did
you
ever get to know her?” said the piano player.
“Listen, I don’t like your tone, see? She’s my girl, and I am a very tough guy.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re so tough. Big, but not so tough, is my guess.”
“No, not so tough, but plenty tough enough for you,” said Malloy, and got up and swung at the piano player. The trombone player grabbed Malloy’s arms. The piano player had caught the blow on his upraised forearm.
“I’m for letting them fight,” said Eddie, but he took hold of Malloy. “Listen, fellow, you’re one to three here and we’d just give you a shellacking and throw you downstairs if we had to. But we wouldn’t have to. My friend here is a fighter.”
“Make them shake hands,” said the trombone player.
“What for?” said Eddie. “Why should they shake hands?”
“Let him go,” said the piano player.
“All right, let him go,” said Eddie to the trombone player. They let him go and Malloy went in after the piano player and stopped suddenly and fell and sat on the floor.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” said the trombone player.
“Why not?” said the piano player.
“Why not? He asked for it,” said Eddie.
“Well, he’s plastered,” said the trombone player.
“He’ll be all right. I’m afraid,” said the piano player. He went over and bent down and spoke to Malloy. “How you coming, K.O.?”
“Um all right. You the one that hit me?” said Malloy, gently caressing his jawbone.
“Yes. Here, take my hand. Get up before your girl gets back.”
“Who? Oh, Sylvia. Where is she?”
“She’s still in the can.”
Malloy got up slowly but unassisted. He sat in a deep chair and accepted a drink. “I think I could take you, sober.”
“No. No. Get that idea out of your head,” said the piano player.
“Don’t be patronizing,” said Malloy.
“He can afford to be patronizing,” said Eddie. “My friend is one of the best amateur lightweights on the Coast. Do you know where the Coast is?”
“Aw, why don’t you guys cut it out. Leave him alone,” said the trombone player.
Sylvia appeared. “Did you think I got stuck? I couldn’t find the bathroom light. Why, Jimmy, what’s the matter?”
“I walked into a punch.”
“Who? Who hit him? You? You big wall-eyed son of a bitch?”
“No, not me,” said the trombone player.
“Then who did?
You!
I can tell, you sorehead, because I showed you how to play piano you had to assert your superiority some way, so you take a sock at a drunk. Come on, Jimmy, let’s get out of here. I told you I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”
“Wait a second, Baby. Don’t get the wrong idea. It was my fault.”
“Stop being a God damn gentleman. It ill becomes you. Come on, or I’ll go alone and I won’t let you in, either.”
“I’ll go, but I was in the wrong and I want to say so. I apologize to you, Whatever Your Name Is—”
“Brunner.”
“And you, and you, and thank you for being—Anyway, I apologize.”
“All right.”
“But I still think I could take you.”
“Oh, now wait a minute, listen here,” said the piano player. “If you want to settle this right now I’ll go outside, or right here—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Eddie. “You’re as bad as he is. Good night. Good night.” When the door closed he turned on the piano player. “He was all right at the end. He apologized, and you can’t blame him for wanting to think he could lick you.”
“A wrong guy. If I ever see him again I’ll punch his face in for him.”
“Maybe. Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy if he was sober. He had to walk on a loose rug to take that haymaker at you, remember. I don’t want to hear any more about it. The hell with it.”
“Ah, you give me a pain in the ass.”
“You took the very words right out of my mouth. All you tough guys,” said Eddie.
“Gee, but that little Mocky could play that piano,” said the trombone player.
That was the first of two meetings between Eddie Brunner and Jimmy Malloy. Eddie’s life went on as usual for a while. He did a few drawings and sold none. His stuff was too good for a syndicate manager to take a chance on it; too subtle. But it was not the type of thing that belonged in
The
New Yorker
, the only other market he could think of at the time. So the three friends would have their jam sessions, and some nights when they did not play they would sit and talk. The names they would talk: Bix Beiderbeck, Frankie Trumbauer, Miff Mole, Steve Brown, Bob MacDonough, Henry Busse, Mike Pingatore, Ross Gorman and Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong and Arthur Shutt, Roy Bargy and Eddie Gilligan, Harry MacDonald and Eddie Lang and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Fletcher Henderson, Rudy Wiedoeft and Isham Jones, Rube Bloom and Hoagy Carmichael, Sonny Greer and Fats Waller, Husk O’Hare and Duilio Sherbo, and other names like Mannie Kline and Louis Prima, Jenney and Morehouse, Venuti, Signorelli and Cress, Peewee Russell and Larry Binion; and some were for this one and some for that one, and all the names meant something as big as Wallenstein and Flonzaley and Ganz do to some people.
Early in October of that year Eddie got a telegram from his mother:
PAPA DIED OF A STROKE THIS MORNING FUNERAL SATURDAY PLEASE COME
. Eddie counted the words. He knew his mother; she probably thought the indefinite article did not cost anything in a telegram. He overdrew at the bank and cashed a check large enough to take him home, cashed it in an uptown speakeasy where he was known. He went home, and his maternal uncle told him how his father had died; in the middle, or the beginning maybe, of a party in a Hollywood hotel, surrounded by unknown Hollywood characters. They kept that from Eddie’s mother, who had been such a sad, stupid little woman for so many years that she could have taken it without shock. All she said, over and over again, as they made plans for the funeral was: “I don’t know, Roy always said he wanted to be buried with the Shrine band. He wanted them to play some march, but I can’t think of the name of it.” They told her not to worry about it; they couldn’t have the Shrine band for a funeral, so don’t keep worrying about it. After the services she said she noticed that Mr. Farragut was at the funeral. “That just showed, you know,” she said. “I think Roy could have got in the Burlingame Club if he’d of tried just once more, or why would Mr. Farragut be here today?” Mr. Farragut was the man Mr. Brunner always had blamed for blackballing him from membership in the only organization he might have joined that he did not join.