Excerpt
Wherever he went that night people in-sisted on confiding in him. Perhaps some fear of his fellow-men gleamed in the young man’s intense blue eyes that made them want to reassure him that they, too, were unarmed. Perhaps his eager haste suggested a mission of love, so circumstance must conspire mischievously with people to delay him.
It began when he stepped confidently into a taxi at Fourth and Bank, gave the address on East End Avenue, suddenly felt in his change pocket, then in his wallet with an expression of acute cha-grin, impatiently crumpled his hat under his arm and stepped out on the street again.
Frowning he considered Umberto’s Grotto lettered in white on a blue canopy tilted up to street level like a tea-pot snout. He dashed down the stairs but the man he sought had just left. While he hesitated in the doorway his taxi escaped and pudgy Umberto clutched his lapel to lament how grievous had been the mistake of listening to relatives, adding a garden and Muzak, and how much happier he, being a simple man of simple tastes, would be if only his worthless wife and children could have fallen in the East River. A man should never marry, said Umberto, and would gladly have revealed more, gen-erously offering a glass of Chianti and a toast “Salut e figli masci!” but Frederick pleaded that his emergency would permit him to waste no time.
Perhaps he could find Murray in those spots fur-ther east, suggested Umberto following him up the steps and making a wide gesture toward the lights beyond Sheridan Square. Pulling his topcoat around his neck, Frederick hurried out into the chilly March rain. He had lived long in the neighbor-hood but everything looked strange and new tonight, a little ter-rifying to a man just emerged from seven years’ burial in the dead ages. Tonight the work was completed and it was as if he had just returned from a long voyage and must grope eagerly but a little uncertainly for the old familiar landmarks. Each block to-ward the bright lights seemed a century’s step through a tunnel of darkness toward Lyle—and life. Names of bars mentioned by Murray flickered vaguely through his memory, and he stepped tentatively into one called the Florida.
It surprised him that everyone knew Murray. Everyone knew Murray Cahill and his nocturnal habits far better than did the man who had shared his apartment for years. This was Murray’s world. In the Florida Tavern a long-nosed girl with sleek head, chin sliding into a gaunt length of black sweater and slacks, looked up at mention of the name. Her long feet in ballet slippers hooked over the rungs of the bar stool.
“Try the America’s bar two blocks over and up,” she suggested. “He goes there first. How about sticking around here for a while? Have a drink. I gotta talk to somebody. No? Okay, okay.”
Hurrying across the street the misty golden lights made faces blur as in a dream, shine brightly for a second, then fade into a half-smile, a moustache, harlequin spectacles, wide red lips. Little dark streets waited for footsteps, invited shadows to creep back to forgotten ages; cats’ eyes peered up from cellar windows, watched from sloping roofs for some signal from the hidden moon. Frederick felt like the banquet guest in the fairy-tale who took the wrong overshoes and stepped out into another age. He wondered if his disguise was adequate, if his toga showed. He wondered if the day would ever come when he would cease being the stranger, the solitary wanderer, the observer without passport or knowledge of the language. Like a shy but curious nursery child in adult won-derland, he peered into the Americas whose blue neon sign cast a warning green shadow on each new arrival. The bar was long and narrow with a juke-box glowing like hell-fire in the back, bellow-ing demon songs to the damned. No Murray in sight.
“Murray ought to be in the Barrel about now,” said the waiter. “He doesn’t get in here till around two as a rule.”
“Have a drink,” said a man at the bar, a bald fat man in a plaid shirt. “I think I’m being stood up but I’m waiting to make sure. She said she’d be here, but that’s the way she is. This isn’t the first time. You look like an intelligent guy, I’d like to ask you a ques-tion. Now I’m a married man. My wife—here, take a seat.”
“I’m sorry, I’m late,” Frederick apologized and hastened into the street again, darting in and out of the cafés of Rubberleg Square, so-called for the high percentage of weak-kneed pedes-trians. Rough bar, fancy bar, bars with doormen, bars with saw-dust floors—Murray was bound to be in one of them, but which? Frederick was astonished at the variety at first, and then at their inevitable sameness.
Wherever he went he found advertising men all weeping into their Bourbon of happy days when they were star reporters on the Providence Journal. They yearned to tell him their dreams and disappointments. Sometimes they were with petulant wives, who, if from the South, had been the prettiest girls in Tallahassee; if from the Middle West their folks had the biggest house in Evansville. Sometimes these men, happier by far when cub re-porters than now with their twenty thousand a year, were not with wives but with stylists, camera ladies, women’s-angle-women from their offices, all emotionally fulfilled by making fat salaries, wearing Delman shoes and Daché hats, and above all being out with The Office and talking shop. These were the women who had won the war, the spoils were theirs; these were the women who had found a swansdown paycheck warmer in bed than naked Cupid. Wherever he went Frederick found the new race of men and women, the victors who had won by default, who had sold a pint of Type O for the merest goldmine. Wherever he went his sobriety induced warm overtures from total strangers unable to make friends by day.
Hopefully looking around the bar of the Barrel, most regal of the neighborhood bistros, he was pounced upon by a man from the k.g.r. Advertising Agency whose tears over good old newspaper days were mingled with belligerent pride in cigarette campaigns.
“Just wait till you see what I’ve done with Hazelnut,” the k.g.r. man boasted, detaining Frederick by the lapel. “Just a woman’s hand holding a flaming match and the line, ‘Let Me Give You a Light.’ Just that one line, mind you, but it sings. Hazelnut knows it. k.g.r. knows it. They’ve got to admit it. ‘Let Me Give You a Light.’ And the match playing like a searchlight over a pack of Hazelnut Cigarettes up in the sky. It’s good, damn it, if I do say so myself.”
“Excellent,” Frederick said, wary as he always was with genial men, not wishing to rebuff them but dreading their intrusion.
The k.g.r. man removed his right hand from the lapel, loos-ened his hold on the highball glass, readjusted his foot on the rail, and swaying briefly at the loss of support transferred his grip to Frederick’s reluctant hand. He smile engagingly.
“Hi fella. I like you. You’re all right. You know what it’s all about. Got a poker face but I can tell you catch. Jack, give this guy a drink. Here, fella, sit down here. I had a girl but she blew. Where’d Dodo go Jack?”
“Thanks, I won’t have any more,” Frederick said, and in an effort to discourage further intimacy turned to the bartender with a stern, almost accusing voice. “Where’s Murray?”
Suddenly he felt foolish. It seemed to him that customers and bartender looked up suspiciously at his haughty tone. It seemed to him they must guess at once that he was a stranger to these places, queasily dismayed by the revellers clustering around the little red piano lustily singing old songs and spilling their drinks on the colored pianist; the smell of ancient tombs and crumbling ruins must be about him; Latin footnotes and ravellings of doc-tors’ theses must be swarming in pursuit of him like hungry moths. Prudently he said no more when the bartender, ignoring his previous protest, placed a drink before him.
“Murray’s hat’s still checked,” said the bartender coldly. “He’ll be back.”
He knows, thought Frederick, that Murray’s roommate does-n’t belong, plays no part in the neighborhood’s midnight antics; he recognizes a discreet, sober man certain never to drink except within his means, to resent amiable offers of treats and therefore not to reciprocate; here is a man unlikely to create the mirage of gaiety that impels customers to magnificent gestures; here is a man who would remember that tomorrow was Rent Day when it was his turn to buy a drink, a man who would not admit the compulsions of bar room etiquette. Here is a man who ought to get out and make room for the genuine members; maybe he speaks a dozen languages but he doesn’t speak ours. “Nor under-stand,” Frederick admitted, listening to the strange phrases fly back and forth around him.
“The Detroit Free Press? . . . Good God, old man, then you knew Jack Huberman? . . . You did? . . . Well, I was on the Post-Dispatch by that time, then I went to Ivy Lee . . .” “What—you were with Ivy Lee? . . . I left there for J. Walter Thompson. . . what? . . . no! no! . . . Have a drink! . . . You were? . . . No! No! . . .You were? . . . Have a drink . . .”
He turned to thank the k.g.r. man but the latter had found a more congenial attachment at the other end of the bar, another old newspaper man now in public relations. Hazelnut campaign was forgotten in the joyful exchange of old encounters with Huey Long, Ford; intimate anecdotes of front-page names; fond reminiscences of the great hearts of Hearst, Howard, Munsey, Patterson, McCormick. Frederick listened, meditating on the cu-rious way newspaper men, despite their apprenticeship in reali-ties, end up convinced by their own romantic inventions, respectful of the celebrities their own lies created, teary over sob-stories they had made up themselves, doffing their plumes rever-ently to whatever powers had kept them down. The public relations man, a stout little chap named Mooney with a trim moustache, spoke sardonically of the prostitution of his journalis-tic genius, but as he heard himself sneer at the first-water phonies whose reputations he preserved, stuffed, and mounted, he was moved to awe at his own power and its fabulous possibilities. He might be engaged in the world’s most degrading occupation but at least he was better at it than anyone else. He called to two ladies in a booth to affirm this, both of them high in the business world—one in Gimbel’s or Altman’s department store, the other in real estate. The ladies paused in the midst of their comparison of income-tax to declare that Mooney was certainly the best there was, and they only wished they had his accounts.
Mooney gratefully shook their hands and even went to the trouble to explain that he was the soul of honesty, refusing to touch certain large sums that clients had placed at his disposal into which he could have dipped without the big saps knowing the difference, but which, in his ridiculous honesty, he never even considered touching, unless, of course, it was absolutely necessary, and in view of how much money the particular clients had a person need really feel no compunction about rewarding his hon-esty with a little extra dividend, what the hell, we’re all in busi-ness, we know what time it is. The k.g.r. man lurched up to receive equal attention, jostled Public Relations aside to lean across the table and recount his Hazelnut inspiration, was so overwhelmed by their polite attention that he ordered more drinks to add to the regiment of glasses before them, drinks con-sumed, drinks started, and the drinks Public Relations had or-dered; he invited them to dance, to sit at the bar, to go up to the Blue Angel where Arturo knew he was a person of consequence, to visit his home in Greenwich any time, any hour of day or night. The two men hovered over the table, vying with each other for the approval of these splendid influential women who were not flibbertigibbets but real guys, pals, people. They patted the pals on the back, dropped cigarette ashes and an occasional cinder down their bosoms, waved their drinks at perilous angles over their heads, shouted with resounding laughter over every word even before it had been said, were generously happy in the pleasure their company was surely giving. Frederick watched the innocent scene in the bar mirror, and speculated on how long this fine new friendship would last, and what would happen if the ladies really should appear sometime in the dead of night in Greenwich. One of the ladies waved to him, and he bowed grate-fully, since he knew few people. Probably one of his students at the League.
