So Little Time (38 page)

“All right,” Jeffrey said.

Jesse pulled at the front of his blue double-breasted coat, then he opened the door of his dressing room and looked at himself in the mirror and put on a broad-brimmed, black felt hat, and then he picked up a Malacca cane.

“There's just one thing,” he said. “If you can possibly do it, Jeffrey, just as a favor, let us not speak again about the war.”

“You mean it worries you, too?” Jeffrey asked.

“You wouldn't understand,” Jesse said, and he stared ahead of him, as though he saw something that Jeffrey did not see. “Please, Jeffrey, not about the war.”

Downstairs at the Rockwell was not what it had been once, because the face of the Rockwell had been lifted, like the faces of so many other New York hotels. At the Rockwell there had once been a grillroom in the basement, frequented by men only, combining the atmosphere of a chophouse and a German rathskeller. There had been a bar at one end, and shelves with steins of all sizes along the walls, a quiet place off Broadway where you could talk business—but now it was renovated. In the last few years there had been a good deal of advertising of what the management had called “downstairs at the Rockwell.” “Meet me,” little cards read, “downstairs at the Rockwell after dark.” If you went downstairs at the Rockwell after dark, you would run a very good chance, according to the management, of rubbing elbows unexpectedly with celebrities, who, according to the management, looked upon the Rockwell, downstairs, as a second home. There was something that they liked—the management did not know what, unless it was the cuisine and the ample cocktail glasses and the general atmosphere of good-fellowship.

Downstairs at the Rockwell was air-conditioned now, and the walls had been brightened up with light plywood and the bar was intimate and continental with high stools all along it, so that no one needed to stand to have a drink. There was a table as you went in which always had some dead pheasants on it and pieces of Virginia ham and cheeses, guarded by a man with a chef's cap, named Louie. The tables had red-and-white-checked cloths and soft music was piped into the air from the ventilators. Also, ladies now came downstairs at the Rockwell. It was the cocktail hour and there were lots of girls and boys on the stools at the bar talking with animation. Jesse handed his hat and cane to the coatroom girl.

“Hello, Jenny, dear,” he said.

“Good evening,” she answered, “good evening, Mr. Fineman.”

Jules, the headwaiter, saw Jesse right away.

“Good evening, Mr. Fineman, sir,” Jules said. “How's the indigestion?”

You could see that it pleased Jesse to have Jules inquire because it meant that Jesse was a Celebrity.

“Just milk toast, tonight, Jules,” Jesse said, “at a table in back where there's not too much noise.”

It was impossible to find a table where there was not too much noise.

“Good evening, Mr. Wilson, sir,” Jules said, “and how is Mr. Wilson?”

The music always made Jeffrey nervous because it came from everywhere at once and yet from nowhere. The refrain of “In the Good Old Summertime” was wafted through the room and some of the boys and girls at the bar were singing it.

“I like it here,” Jesse said, “because I can just sit still and I don't have to think.”

But Jeffrey knew that this was not the only reason why Jesse liked it. Jesse had a superstition about going to the old places when a play was opening, and besides he liked it because everyone knew him.

“It's Fineman,” he heard someone say, “Fineman, the producer.”

Jesse must have heard it too, and he frowned carefully.

“Jules,” he said to the headwaiter, “remember, no publicity. I wish I could go some place where everyone doesn't know me.”

“Then why do you come here?” Jeffrey asked him.

“I don't know,” Jesse said, “habit, loyalty. I feel very strongly about loyalty.”

“Since when has this come over you?” Jeffrey asked.

Jesse looked hurt.

“Don't ask it that way, Jeffrey,” he said. “I want you to think about the first act. It may be the interpretation, but I'm still not satisfied with the timing. The timing is but very dreadful.”

“If you use the word ‘but' that way again,” Jeffrey said, “I won't be able to stand it.”

“I pick up the new words and phrases,” Jesse answered. “I know it is but terrible.”

Jeffrey did not answer. He was wondering what peculiar ability it was that Jesse possessed that others did not have. It had something to do with instinct, rather than education, an instinct that made him very sure of what people wanted, and with it was a strange sort of sensitiveness that was almost taste. Yet, at the same time Jeffrey could understand why Madge and everyone like her thought Jesse was terrible. Madge always said that Jesse had used him for years and clung to him when Jeffrey really knew that he would be better off without Jesse. It did no good to remind Madge that he had always worked with Jesse. Madge would tell him that there were other producers who were gentlemen, all of whom wanted to work with Jeffrey, and she would name them. She often said that he had outgrown Jesse Fineman long ago.

Jeffrey thought of it as Jesse began talking again about his indigestion. When he was a boy, a college boy, at the College of the City of New York, it seemed that Jesse always had a cast-iron stomach, and when Jesse had done publicity he still could eat but anything. It was the same when Jesse went into the Burns office. It was only when Mr. Burns made him a stage manager that Jesse began to think about his stomach. He first thought about it when the shows went on the road and the cast kept complaining to him about hotel accommodations. Then when the Old Man made him his assistant and he had to read plays, Jesse first began to notice that burning sensation. He thought when he got married to a nice girl and settled down his stomach would be better, but when he married Lottie Lacey, who was a singer from Alabama, Jesse's stomach not only had that burning sensation, but he had occasional cramps, and when Lottie went to Reno, Jesse had his appendix out, but it was just the same with his second marriage and his third marriage. It was the life he led, and that was what the doctors said, the emotional wear and tear and the nervous strain. They had X-rayed his gall bladder. They had made him stand in front of a fluoroscope and drink barium, which tasted like a bad malted-milk shake. There was nothing wrong with him, but still he had indigestion, and now since the fall of France it was getting very much worse. That was why he did not want Jeffrey to talk about the war.

“I'm not talking about the war,” Jeffrey said.

“I did not say you were, Jeffrey,” Jesse answered. “I'm merely asking you not to.”

Everything that Madge had said was true, but still he liked Jesse Fineman, perhaps out of habit. The place where they were sitting, downstairs at the Rockwell, was but terrible. The play that Jesse had bought and was going to try in Boston was but terrible, and so was the music that kept echoing all around them. And yet, Jesse was the one who understood that gift of Jeffrey's long before he himself knew of it. Jesse had seen that Jeffrey knew how to take a play apart and put it together again, that he had a sense of dramatic construction. It was curious, since Jesse himself was completely lacking in that sense.

“Jeffrey,” Jesse said, “I've been meaning to ask you—What do you hear from Alf?”

“I had a letter from him the other day,” Jeffrey said. “Alf's in San Bernardino—San Bernardino, California.”

“You should be ruthless with him,” Jesse said. “Is he after money?”

Jeffrey did not answer.

“Has he got a job?” Jesse asked.

“Alf gets tired of them,” Jeffrey said. “You know Alf.”

“That's why I say you should be ruthless with him,” Jesse said.

The music was flowing all around them. Now that Alf's name was mentioned, Jeffrey realized that he would not have been there now if it had not been for Alf. Jeffrey remembered the suit that Alf had worn, belted in the back, a plum-colored suit with a yellow foulard tie.

“He sold me my first car,” Jesse said. “That was 1919—November 1919.”

Jeffrey was listening to the music, a tune from “The Red Mill,” so old that it was hardly decent to resurrect it. It had been old even before Jeffrey was grown up.… “In old New York, in old New York, the peach crop's always fine.”

“I remember the date exactly,” Jesse said again, and Jeffrey remembered too.

It was the month after Jeffrey had come to New York and had taken a job in the City Room, down on Newspaper Row. “In old New York, in old New York, the peach crop's always fine.” Alf always took a song, no matter what it was, and worked the thing to death. It was early November 1919, just after Jeffrey had learned that he had received ten thousand dollars from his grandfather's estate. The estate had been divided between himself and Ethel, and Alf had been left out. “In old New York, in old New York, the peach crop's always fine.”

“I wish to God,” Jeffrey said, “they'd turn that music off.”

“It's interesting,” he heard Jesse say, “the effect. Now Jeffrey, in the first act, with the curtain. It's a thought—perhaps there should be music offstage.”

“In old New York, in old New York, the peach crop's always fine.” It was exactly what Alf had been singing that day when he called on Jeffrey at the City Room of the old sheet.

24

Well, Hardly That

The City Editor at that time was Lew Brown, for whom Jeffrey had always retained a great respect and liking. The boys in the City Room and the boys at Police Headquarters called Lew Brown a fish-eyed, stuck-up bastard, and they always said they weren't going to stay there sweating their hearts out for any son-of-a-bitch who talked like a college professor, but they were afraid of Lew Brown. There wasn't any loafing, and there wasn't any sitting around chewing the fat in Lew Brown's City Room. As far as anyone could tell, he never seemed to get around anywhere, but he knew the city inside out. Lew Brown was a Harvard man, which was something of a handicap, and he wore a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watchchain. He had been through Law School and he always said that law was a great foundation for newspaper work. When he finally got fired—they were hiring them and firing them very quickly in those days—he ran the Washington Bureau for another paper, and ended up, in the uncertain days of the Roosevelt administration when everybody sought avidly for news behind the news, as a syndicated columnist with an income of fifty thousand a year. He was a very able man.

He hired Jeffrey because Jeffrey was a Harvard man himself and back from the war with previous newspaper experience. He first sent Jeffrey to help Art Swasey on the waterfront and two weeks later he pulled Jeffrey back to the office to work on rewrite, which was not a bad idea, because Jeffrey wrote clean copy fast.

Jeffrey was doing rewrite at half-past six that evening when one of the copy boys told him that a guy was outside in the waiting room asking for him. Jeffrey could remember the yellow sheet of paper in his machine and the sounds of the other typewriters and the ringing of the telephones in the booths. The night shift was just beginning to come in and his job was very nearly over.

“He's a big guy,” the copy boy said. “He says he's your brother.”

The news surprised Jeffrey very much, for no one back at home had known where Alf was, when Jeffrey had been there last. Jeffrey had not seen Alf for so long that his ideas of what Alf was like had lost their definition. Although he was busy at the moment, he got up right away and walked to the uncomfortable cubicle that was known as “the waiting room.” The waiting room was just off the elevators lighted by a single globe on the ceiling and without much ventilation. It was furnished as uncomfortably as possible, presumably to discourage anyone's waiting there. It was presided over by a sour unhappy girl with whom Alf was chatting when Jeffrey came in.

“Listen, loveliness,” he heard Alf saying, “this is a hell of a dump for you and me to be in, loveliness.”

The sour girl did not look so sour as Alf was speaking.

“Loveliness,” Alf was saying, “put down that
True Love Story Magazine
. You don't need it. I'm here now. ‘All I want is a little bit of love, just a little bit of love from you.'”

You could see that she was a nice girl, and not used to being addressed in such a manner, but still she did not wholly mind it.

For the first time in his life Jeffrey was able to look at Alf as though he were a stranger. He could see that Alf was noisy and that his clothes were in bad taste, and perhaps Alf experienced a similar feeling of unfamiliarity and was particularly boisterous because of it.

“Hi, kid,” Alf said. “Well, by God, if it isn't the kid.” He took Jeffrey by both shoulders and shook him. “This is my kid brother, loveliness. Mike and Ike, do we look alike?”

Jeffrey wished that Alf would not make so much noise, and he hoped that they did not look alike, but still, something made him laugh. “Don't mind him,” Alf said. “He's slow, loveliness. Why didn't you look me up, kid? This is a hell of a note, making me come here.”

“How could I?” Jeffrey asked. “I didn't know where you were.”

Alf gave Jeffrey's shoulders another shake.

“It's the same old kid,” Alf said. “God damn it, aren't you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” Jeff said, “of course I'm glad.”

“Well, act glad,” Alf said. “I didn't put a tack in your pants, kid. Get your hat and let's get out of here.”

“I'm sorry, Alf,” Jeffrey said, “I'm busy, but I'll be through in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes,” Alf shouted, “I park myself here for another twenty minutes? Listen kid, a man like me can't wear his pants off on these chairs.”

But Jeffrey knew that Alf would wait, and he was back in twenty minutes.