Three-Martini Lunch (4 page)

“Publishing is a pretty friendly business to . . . all types,” Mr. Hightower confided. “But even so, some circles are friendlier than others and with the ones that aren't, you'll want to play your cards right.”

“Oh,” I said softly, my stomach still a bit uneasy from the surprise of it. Knee-jerk decorum compelled me to say
thank you
but I was having trouble getting the words to come out. “Oh, I see,” was all I could seem to muster. I stared down at the envelopes in my hands.

“Now, if you take one of those letters—maybe the one written in the name of ‘Collins' would be better in this instance—over to Torchon and Lyle, where I used to be a senior editor, well, then my name should open some doors for you,” Mr. Hightower instructed. “Got that? Torchon and Lyle—they're in the book, of course. And be sure to ask if you can see Miss Everett, on the fifth floor. She's in charge of hiring all the secretaries and the readers, and she's liable to look out for anyone I'd recommend.”

•   •   •

A
s it turned out, graduation day was the last time I saw Mr. Hightower. Once my parents had joined our conversation, he shook their hands and
complimented them for having raised such a studious, hardworking daughter with such lofty ambitions. “Let me assure you, you've done a wonderful job, Mr. and Mrs. Katz.” He didn't say another word about the two letters of introduction and I was nearly convinced I'd hallucinated the whole conversation until I got home later that evening and pulled both envelopes out of my purse.

I won't bore you with the details of the summer I spent working as a clerk at the five-and-dime to save up for the Greyhound ticket that eventually took me the distance from Fort Wayne to New York. A few months after graduation, I found myself sitting in Miss Everett's office at Torchon & Lyle. I watched as she lit a cigarette, unfolded a sheaf of typewritten paper and held it away from her face, almost at arm's length, and proceeded to move her eyes over it with a careful, clinical sort of interest. I'd handed her my résumé, and one of the letters. Despite Mr. Hightower's enigmatic admonishments, I'd decided I would only use one of them.

“
Eden Katz.
How exotic.
Katz
 . . . that's not German, is it?”

“Oh. Well . . . my grandparents came over from Vienna.” There was a long pause. “Before both wars,” I added. “I suppose it was sometime around 1910.”

“I see. And you say Horatio is a . . . friend? . . . mentor? . . . of yours?” she asked. There was a cool lilt in everything Miss Everett said, a lilt that in my mind seemed somehow linked to the ash-blond tint of her poodle-cut hair. I later found out the tint came from a bottle and the lilt had been achieved by indirectly memorizing lines from Ingrid Bergman pictures.

“Horatio?” I repeated, peering around the office. I was having trouble concentrating. My head was still spinning with the euphoric realization that I had finally made it through the doors of a publishing house, and my knees were still quivering from the elevator ride up to the fifth floor.

Her lips moved to form a thin, stabbing sort of smile. “Horatio Hightower? The man who was kind enough to write this letter for you?”

I began to put two and two together as I recalled the name stenciled on
Mr. Hightower's briefcase in gold lettering. Mr. H. I. Hightower.
Aha! So that's what the first
H
stood for.
“Oh!” I said aloud. “Oh yes, of course—Mr. Hightower! He taught a seminar on popular literature at my college, you see, and he has been very encouraging ever since I told him about my interest in publishing. He's a wonderful professor.” Miss Everett gave me a look. There was something vaguely dubious in it, something that puzzled me.

“Can you type?”

“Why, yes . . . I think I was up to eighty words per minute the last time someone timed me.”

“Take shorthand?”

“Yes; my mother made me take a summer course.”

“That was very prudent of her,” Miss Everett said. She smiled that same thin-lipped stabbing smile and the word
implacable
sprang into my head and floated up invisibly between us. There was an oscillating fan sitting upon the bookshelf behind her. Every time the fan pivoted in Miss Everett's direction, the papers on her desk fluttered under their paperweights but not a single curl of ash-blond hair wavered from the confines of her carefully pinned-up hairdo. I suspected a rather large quantity of Aqua Net had been involved in their arrangement. She discreetly exhaled a breath of smoke from her cigarette and, with a gesture that struck me as very familiar and well practiced, delicately fished a stray filament of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. Then she leaned back in her swiveling chair and regarded me with an air of cold calculation. Her silence seemed to carry on forever, but I'm sure in reality it was only seconds before a loud rap sounded at the door and a young girl rushed in with a slip of paper in her hand and a pencil tucked over her ear.

“I'm sorry to interrupt, but Mr. Pierce said I was to deliver this phone message to you immediately.” The girl held out the slip of paper. Miss Everett rose from her chair and snatched the paper away from the girl with a frown.

She eyed the message. “Of course he found a way out of that lunch.” She read from the note in a high, mimicking voice.
“‘Would you mind terribly going in his stead?'
Hmph. Little surprise. I should've planned for it from the start.” She touched a hand to her shellacked curls and then looked at me as though she had forgotten I was in the room. “Tell me, dear, have you gone to lunch with many writers?” she asked. There wasn't much question in it; she already knew the answer.

I shook my head.

“Well, don't if you can help it. Most of them are either fools or madmen.”

I took this as an attempt at humor, and forced a little laugh. I watched as she pulled her gloves on and gathered up her purse. As Miss Everett neared the open door, she stopped. She turned and gave me one last icy evaluation.

“Mabel,” Miss Everett said, still staring at me, and I realized she was addressing the girl with a pencil tucked over her ear.

“Yes, Miss Everett,” the girl said.

“Show Miss Katz to Personnel. We'll have her start as Mr
.
Frederick's new secretary.” Then a second idea appeared to occur to her and she snapped to attention. “No! Wait. Isn't
Mr. Turner
also looking for a new girl right now?” Mabel nodded hesitantly. A curious expression appeared on Miss Everett's face. Finally, she said, “Yes, that'll be better for you, dear. Let's have you start there.” She carefully fixed a hat over her hairdo and departed without another word.

R
i
sing in front of the entrance to the Torchon & Lyle building on Fifty-eighth Street was a large phoenix cast in copper. For being stationary, it nonetheless implied a great deal of motion; its wings stretched wide as if to take flight, its neck arched to strike downward at a serpent or some such creature with its beak, and one talon lifted free into the air while the other still touched the ash heap from which it perpetually rose. I've been told that since my time at Torchon & Lyle the company swallowed up many of its smaller competitors until the whole outfit was so big it was forced to relocate slightly uptown to a more modern and muted-looking glass skyscraper where there is no mythical phoenix poised to take flight out in front. This is one of the more tragic outcomes of progress. The old building was all limestone and brass with that giant terrifying phoenix you had to step around to enter the revolving door. Somehow I wouldn't want it any other way.

Most of the phoenix had turned the milky green color of pale jade, save
for one spot on the first knuckle of the phoenix's lifted talon. In contrast to the rest of the statue this one spot gleamed with a well-polished brilliance, and eventually I discovered an old office superstition was responsible for it. The superstition went that if you touched the statue's talon before entering the revolving brass door in the morning, then you were protected from being fired for the rest of the day.

No one could tell me how this superstition got started, but the logic made sense somehow. After all, the phoenix was Torchon & Lyle's colophon. A silhouette of it rode the lower spine of every book the publisher printed. It appeared again in the middle bottom of every book's title page. I must say, even in miniature silhouette the Torchon & Lyle phoenix was a beautiful, powerful-looking creature, with flames burning brightly from the tips of its wings like stray feathers licking up in the wind, so you can imagine the statue version was that much more impressive, standing as it did fifteen feet tall. Though I didn't know about the superstition on my first day, when I saw the people walking ahead of me pause to give the statue a strange abbreviated rub, I found myself standing at the base of the phoenix reaching up to touch its talon.

“Oh!” a girl next to me said. “You already know about the phoenix!”

“I'm not sure I do. What about it?” I asked.

“That it's good luck,” the girl said. She explained about the superstition while I nodded.

I looked more closely at the girl. Her face was scrubbed clean and, except for a swipe of very red lipstick, she could've just as easily been taken for a high schooler as a secretary. She wore her hair in a ponytail that fell in a straight line and was the color of wheat. The heavy weight of it caused it to swing subtly as she talked and moved her head, shimmering slightly with every perky tremor. “Whose secretary are you going to be?” she asked.

“Mr. Turner's,” I said.

“Oh, in that case you'd better rub it twice.” She reached for my hand and put it back on the shiny spot on the phoenix's talon. “He's famous for being awfully strict with his girls.

“I'm Judy,” she said when I had finished rubbing the talon to her satisfaction. We shook hands. “I'm on three,” she continued as we proceeded into the building and stepped into an elevator. “Come and find me at lunchtime; I'll give you the tour!”

“Won't they have already given me the tour?” I asked.

“Not if you're Mr. Turner's girl. He's always in early and he's dreadfully serious. He'll want you to get to work right away and the other girls on that floor will steer clear for a few weeks—just until it's safe. Don't take it personally.” The elevator ticked off the third floor with a cheerful ding and the doors slid open. “See you at twelve-thirty!” With that, Judy stepped out and merged into a stream of girls scurrying about, tugging off gloves and unpinning hats and removing the stiff vinyl dustcovers from a row of typewriters.

When the elevator chimed its announcement of the fifth floor, I stepped off and reported to the same personnel office where I had ended up at my previous visit. In short order, I was told Mr. Turner was located on the sixth floor and I was to occupy a desk right outside his office. I oughtn't bother to knock and introduce myself, the other girls in the typing pool told me; he didn't like to be disturbed and would call for me when he had need of me. I went up to six, did as instructed, and spent the morning arranging and rearranging the contents of my new desk.

With several hours surrendered to the art of aimless sorting, my stomach had begun to launch into a minor soliloquy of grumblings. The clock on the wall showed twelve-twenty before I got my first glimpse of Mr. Turner himself. He was a tall, stiff-jawed man with wire-rimmed glasses and pepper-gray hair. He came out of his office with a stack of manuscripts in one arm and a pile of correspondence in the other. He
carried an air of cold, calculated precision about him that put me in mind of a Swiss watch.

“Miss Katz,” he said, and my spine straightened, surprised to hear him speak my name so forcefully when we had not yet been introduced. “All of these need to go back to from whence they came. Very short and concise notes of declination will do just fine.” He transferred the stack of manuscripts onto my desktop with an efficient grace. “And these,” he continued, holding out the pile of correspondence, “want for a reply. I'll dictate my responses later this afternoon.” He paused and glanced at me over the rim of his glasses. “You do take dictation, don't you?”

“Oh yes,” I said. Mr. Turner had a curious effect on people. It was clear he was rigid and uncompromising, but seconds after meeting him I found I desperately wanted to win his approval.

“Fine. Let me make one thing clear: I don't know you, and I didn't pick you to be my secretary. Miss Everett did,” he said, crisply pronouncing her name
Miss Ev-er-ett
, with equal emphasis on each syllable. “You have her to thank for that. But she knows better than to send me dunces, so that must mean you must've impressed her somehow. As for my expectations, I don't enjoy excuses, and I expect you to prioritize my assignments before anything else you might receive from the typing pool. You'll find I run a very tight ship here. I'm sorry to say you won't be able to take any long lunches or indulge in any afternoon shopping trips on account of my being asleep at the wheel. The bar is certainly
not
open in
my
office. However, I will tell you this: If you understand this business is all about working very hard and spending long hours doing it, we'll get along just fine. Got that?”

I nodded.

“All right.” He glanced at his watch. “You have one hour for lunch, so you'd better get to it. I expect to start that dictation precisely at one-thirty.” He turned and strode back into his office, shutting the door behind him with the same air of forceful efficiency with which he'd emerged.
I stood up from my desk and, feeling a bit wobbly-kneed, gathered my things.

When the elevator doors slid open on three, I found Judy standing there waiting for me.

“There you are! Twelve-thirty on the nose,” she said, holding up her wrist as if to prove it. “Well, if there's one thing I can say about Mr. Turner, it's that you sure can set your watch by him!” She motioned for me to step off the elevator. “C'mon. I'm sure he reminded you: We don't have all day. We'll start the tour here and I'll give you the skinny on who does what.” Clutched in her left hand was a white paper bag marked with two small grease spots. She unrolled the top and reached into it. “Speaking of skinny, you
are
, awfully . . . Here's something to fatten you up.” She handed me a pastrami on rye and kept what looked like turkey for herself. Just peering at the paper wrapper rendered translucent by all that oily meat and mayonnaise gave me indigestion. I would've much rather had the turkey, but I accepted the sandwich gratefully.

Between bites, Judy gave an otherwise steady monologue as she took me around. Torchon & Lyle's offices took up the better part of seven floors of the twenty-four-storey high-rise. “We're the second-biggest publishing house in New York,” Judy announced proudly. I learned where to make coffee and how to make it in a specific fashion so that nobody would complain. She told me which of the other secretaries you could trust to help you out of a jam if you botched a task, and which of them offered to send out for the lunch order but then pocketed your extra change. Judy also repeated details about each of the editors—not so much what authors they'd edited and what they'd published but rather personal details that would help me handle myself.
Alcoholic . . .
she said, pointing to one editor's office . . .
works better in the afternoons, best not to approach him in the mornings if you see his hand shaking
 . . .
Shrewish wife . . .
she said of another,
we've all got to pretend like we don't know he sleeps in his office most nights.
She rolled her eyes as we passed another.
Editor-in-chief's nephew . . .
she said, thumbing towards another office,
rarely in and practically useless but be careful what you say in front of him; it all gets back to the Big Cheese.
When she got to Miss Everett's office, she stopped.

“And I take it you've already met Miss Everett,” she said, and paused. There was a cautious note in her voice, and I found myself thinking of the phoenix and how Judy had instructed me to rub its talon twice. I waited for Judy to go on but she didn't.

“Yes; Miss Everett was the one who hired me,” I finally said. It was an unnecessary statement, but I couldn't think of anything better and the silence of Judy's pause was beginning to unnerve me. She glanced at me and smiled stiffly.

“Well, something about you must've caught her attention if she chose you to be Mr. Turner's girl,” she said. Like a dummy, I mistook her warning for a compliment. I shrugged and smiled and felt my cheeks color.

“Perhaps she likes her girls to be ambitious. I told her I wanted to become an editor,” I confessed.

“Oh! You
told
her that? That's awfully bold!” It seemed there was more Judy wanted to say on this subject, but she took a quick glance at her watch and flinched.

“Golly! Time flies. Better be getting back to your desk or Mr. Turner will have your head. He's a stickler, but I'm sure you know that already. I'll walk you back to the elevator.” As we walked, I thanked her for her hospitality. “Don't mention it!” she said, waving my gratitude off. A ding sounded and the elevator doors opened. Judy gave my arm a friendly squeeze. “You'll see—it's really swell here. Once you figure out who to steer clear of, it'll all be cake.” The red lipstick she was wearing earlier in the day had now been mostly rubbed off by the bread of the sandwich she'd been eating. I stared at the freckled apples of her cheeks and sincere blue saucers of her eyes. We smiled at each other as the doors slid shut.

I was still smiling when the elevator stopped on four, and a rather rotund, red-faced man in a plaid sports jacket stepped on.

“Well, don't you look jolly!” he said, noting my expression. As he spoke, a strangely sweet yet rank, overripe scent filled the elevator. I realized with a shock he must've been drinking during the lunch hour, and not in moderation. He leaned towards me in a mock confidential manner, the alcohol causing his features to slide into an ugly leer. “Oh, don't pull a serious face on my account! I like a girl who knows how to have a good time.” He winked and then suddenly declared, “You're new. Whose girl are you?”

“I work for Mr. Turner.”

“Ah. Well, he's no fun. Not compared to Yours Truly. I see I'll have to come visit you on six more often just to save you from that sourpuss.”

We were alone, and an uncomfortable silence filled the elevator as he continued to regard me. I forced a smile. When another ding announced we had reached the sixth floor, I felt myself exhale.

“Oh, but where are my manners! And I call myself a gentleman,” he called after me as I stepped through the elevator doors. He gave a little bow in my direction, swaying a little as though the elevator car were really a small boat pitching upon a rolling wave. “Harvey Frederick. Pleasure to meet you!”

Before I had a chance to acknowledge his introduction, the elevator doors slid shut. I recalled on the day of my hiring Miss Everett had mentioned a “Mr. Frederick.” And to think everyone seemed to pity me for having been assigned to Mr. Turner! Surely working for Mr. Frederick could be far worse. Perhaps Miss Everett had done me a great favor, and a surge of gratitude passed over me as I made my way back to my desk.